Rant #2,206: Candle In the Wind

More than 50 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe still captivates us.

She stands for purity, nautiness, sexuality and a different era, one that probably most of us alive today weren't even around in.

She was a popular actress in her life, but in death, she became an absolute icon.

I am sure that some younger people can't even believe that this woman existed, but she did. She was flesh and blood, like we all are, but she was also a figment of the Hollywood imagination machine that existed back then.

No electronic social media back then, but she still was noticed, seemingly every move she made was magnified, and her death remains something of a mystery to this day.

Add this all up, and you have a bull market for anything she touched, and certainly anything she actually put on her body and wore.

So with that in mind, several dresses that Monroe wore during her height of popularity have been put up for auction in what seems like the umpteenth auction of Monroe memorabilia that has been held over the past 30 or more years or so.

Reports are that the items will be shown in Beverly Hills for now, and an auction will follow in October.

In addition to several handwritten notes, there are many dresses that the actress wore on the screen during her career that are up for auction this time, dresses she wore in movies such as "How To Marry a Millionaire" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."

And yes, that iconic white dress from "The Seven Year Itch," the one that when she walked over the grate in the ground billowed up around her, will be part of this auction.

And bring your checkbook, because you can bet that these dresses and other memorabilia will fetch hefty prices, at least in the high six figures and some, like that white dress, might even push the seven figure mark.

What is it about Marilyn Monroe that makes her such a popular figure?

Well, she is a tragic figure, and people revel in other's tragedies.

There sill remains mysteries about her death--did she commit suicide or was she rubbed out because she knew too much about, among others, the Kennedy brothers?

She represents a different time in history, a time when Victorian ways were still prevalent, yet she kind of skirted those ways with her sexuality, kind of predating the almost total shucking of past ways that we experienced in the late 1960s, or a few years after her death.

And let's be honest about it, she was a beautiful woman. Yes, she had plastic surgery to correct some flaws, but generally, many thought of her as the perfect woman, and few would argue that, even today.

She had a sexuality that really crossed over, and although men adored her, women kind of admired her.

She had an appeal that is hard to put a steady finger on, but you add it all up, and you got Marilyn Monroe.

In my house, Marilyn Monroe was the IT girl.

My father absolutely adored her, and at an early age, I knew the name, if not really who she was or why my father loved her.

It is amazing that looking back so many years ago, I can still remember very, very clearly when I had heard that she had died.

She died on August 5, 1962, so I was a little more than five years old when she passed.

It was the middle of the summer, my family and I lived in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, New York, in a somewhat notorious area where two other women--Alice Crimmins and Kitty Genovese--became nationally known figures because of horrid misdeeds involving them, literally nearby or right around the corner from where we lived.

Anyway, I was five years old, and just getting to live my life. The Kennedy assassination was still many months away, but my very first memory that I had was George Reeves' death when I was about two years old.

I mean, how could Superman die?

But during the summertime of 1962, I was busy as a bee in the house that particular day.

I was in my room, the room I shared with my little sister, who was two years old at the time, and evidently, it must have been late morning when I heard about Marilyn.

I was playing with my Kenner Give A Show Projector in my darkened room, which was basically a flashlight with a slit that you could put cels of pre-made photos, and it would flash on the wall or anything you wanted to flash it on.

There were even some blank ones that came in each package of the toy, with crayons, so you could literally make your own cels to flash on the wall.

Generally, popular cartoon characters cels came with the toy, and I guess I was flashing them in my room. I remember being absolutely fascinated with this toy, and played with it so much that I think my parents bought me another one because I had completely burnt out the first one.

Anyway, I was playing with the toy in my darkened room when I heard what had happened. My mother used to have the radio on all the time, and I did not know what station it was on at the time, but it used to blare through the house. You would have to be stone deaf to not hear the radio.

Well, the announcer or DJ or newsman came on and said the Marilyn Monroe had died.

I heard this, became as scared as I had ever been at that time in my life, shut the projector off, and put the light on in my room.

I guess I knew that my father loved Monroe, and became scared when the announcer said that she had died.

That was one of the most seminal moments of my young life. I had experienced George Reeves's death, but I was too little to really understand what "death" was, even though I did wonder how Superman could die.

But I was a bit older in 1962, and when I heard that Monroe died, well, I guess I "got it" a bit more than a couple of years earlier.

And looking back at the whole thing, I guess that is why I became absolutely fascinated, transfixed to the TV for days, when JFK was assassinated.

Again, I was older then than I was during the Reeves and Monroe deaths, and "got" the whole thing even better than I did when I was younger.

By the time of the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, I guess I was fully engaged, with the Reeves, Monroe and JFK deaths fully setting me up for these other tragedies.

Whatever the case, like seemingly the rest of civilization, my father, to this day, looks at Monroe as the ideal.

And you know what? He is joined my millions of others in that appraisal.