Rant #2,946: Candle In the Wind

With all that explained to you yesterday about what is happening in my life, I completely forgot that yesterday, August 5, was the 60th anniversary of the death of one of the major Hollywood icons of all time.
 
I just have to say “MM” and you know who I am talking about.
 
Marilyn Monroe died 60 years ago yesterday, under still mysterious circumstances.
 
Did she die of a self-inflicted drug overdose, or was her death forced upon her by forces that sat at the very top of our government?
 
Was she rubbed out by the Mafia, or some foreign power, as she simply knew too much about what was happening at the time?
 
Or was she simply some wayward person who had suffered mentally for years, and this was the last chapter of her life, like it is for so many who can’t cope?
 
We probably will never know the real reason she died that summer day, but Monroe has almost had a second life in death, and like Elvis Presley, she lives on as one of the icons of a past generation.
 
I know to some younger people, she and Elvis are almost comic book characters, nothing but Hollywood creations, but they were real people coming from humble beginnings who lit up the sky like a comet, and plummeted to earth almost in the same breath.
 
Monroe was special to so many people—yes, certainly men, but many women, too—for different reasons, of course.
 
For men, she represented the ultimate sex symbol, the ultimate testament to womanhood in an era where the topic was somewhat repressed and not too often spoken about.
 
For women, she was the ultimate human soap opera, a beautiful woman who had one crisis after another—marriage, divorce, miscarriage, mental illness—that fit the axiom “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
 
And yes, the two observations certainly crossed over from male to female, creating perhaps the greatest, most ultimate sex symbol Hollywood has ever had a hand in creating … and her power lives on 60 years after her death.
 
And it lives on for me, too.
 
Here is what I had to say about Monroe and her untimely passing in Rant #2,206 dated August 21, 2018:
 
“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 cells 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 cells to flash on the wall.
 
Generally, popular cartoon characters cells 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' 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.”
 
So as I personally look back at her life, and death, now that she has been gone for 60 years, she was part of my childhood, too, in a strange way.
 
As I said, I could not have possibly contemplated the passing of Monroe tor its true meaning way back when, but my memory has allowed me to look back and not only process what her passing meant to that era, but I can also look back at my own maturation through the untimely deaths of George Reeves, Monroe, and ultimately, JFK and RFK and Martin Luther King Jr.
 
However horrible those deaths were, they have imprinted memories on my brain that will never leave me.
 
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.