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Lohan's Marilyn evokes JFK promise-filled era

BY YONA ZELDIS McDONOUGH | Yona Zeldis McDonough is editor of "All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader" and author of the novels "The Four Temperaments" and "In Dahlia's Wake."

February 24, 2008

Her blond, chin-length hair is artfully tousled; her eyeliner a long, sinuous arc; her lashes as thick as fur. She wears only a pink chiffon scarf, which covers her most strategic areas and is gripped - barely, as if she might at any instant let it drop - between her teeth. "She" is Hollywood bad girl Lindsay Lohan, cast in a weird, half-camp, half-earnest sendup of another, albeit more famous Hollywood bad girl: Marilyn Monroe.

Dressed - or more aptly, undressed - in this scanty get-up, Lohan graces the cover of the Feb. 25 issue of New York Magazine. Inside, eight more photographs by Bert Stern attempt to recreate - in some cases, right down to the props - images he shot more than 40 years ago. Here's Lohan with the pink scarf again; her breasts are visible through the sheer material, and a wispy pair of panties covers her below. There's Lohan pressing a pair of silk roses against her chest, Lohan stretching a rope of diamonds against her frosted lips; Lohan with her breasts fully exposed while her head and shoulders are swathed in net.

Although only 21, Li Lo was not, as the saying goes, born yesterday. With such films as "The Parent Trap," "Mean Girls" and "Freaky Friday" behind her, she has struggled, sometimes mightily, to make the leap from precocious child star to adult actress. She's made some spectacularly poor choices, bounced in and out of rehab, been dogged by the tabloids, and received a stern letter from director Garry Marshall, reprimanding her "disruptive and undedicated" behavior on the set of his 2006 film, " Georgia Rule." In the Bert Stern series, Lohan looks older than 21; is it because she has lived so much of her young life in the rapacious gaze of the public? Or is it something else?

The idea for shooting Lohan as Monroe came, according the New York Magazine article accompanying the photo spread, from Stern himself. Stern claims his interest in Lohan stems from the fact that "she had a lot more depth to her" than one might suspect from watching her movies.

But such a rationale seems just a tad disingenuous. Why Lohan, why Monroe, and why now? Consider the timing: The resonant strains of the 1960s seem to be echoing through the zeitgeist. Barack Obama is being hailed as a latter-day John F. Kennedy (who just happens to have been linked romantically to Monroe); key members of the Kennedy clan have offered their public endorsement. The legacies of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson have been a prominent topic of dispute in the Democratic primary. Fidel Castro, whose ascendancy coincided with Kennedy's, is in the news again, this time for surrendering his stronghold on Cuba's leadership.

Is the Lohan-Monroe spread yet another of these parallels? If so, what are these pictures telling us? Are we to understand Lohan's artifice as ironic, a kind of sly, tongue-in-cheek parody of Monroe and all that she represented? Or are the New York Magazine pictures hopeful and, in some goofy way, optimistic, as if the idealistic dreams of that long-ago decade can be re-created along with the studio lighting and the hair?

Monroe was 36 when she embarked on the three-day shoot, commissioned by Vogue, with Stern. Her hold on her titillating, sex-kitten allure was by then slipping; she'd recently been fired from her last movie, "Something's Got to Give," and was navigating the shoals of two messy divorces. She had already endured miscarriages, clinical depression, repeated suicide attempts and a brief stay in a psychiatric facility.

Of the 2,700 photos Stern took, only eight made it into the magazine. In most of the pictures, Monroe, clearly inebriated, seems to be trying just a little too hard to capture her earlier joie de vivre. Her body, an object of fetishistic delight to so many, seems strangely diminished, the skin freckled and slightly sun-damaged, the breasts small and shockingly ordinary. Was this the love goddess the world had come to worship? Looking at these photographs, and only these photographs, we are hard pressed to imagine why. Stern had no scruples about publishing the pictures after Monroe's death, though she hated them and defaced many of the negatives with a hairpin.

Monroe was among the most photographed individuals of the 20th century; she posed for anyone and everyone, from world-famous image-makers to ardent fans wielding their Brownies. Of her early career in modeling, she said, "I loved to pose. I was amazed how the pictures usually made me look better than I was in real life." She could appear, by turns, smoldering, innocent, joyful or pensive. Although her expressions changed, there remained an openness that carried through from mood to mood, frame to frame.

In a little known portrait taken by the Bronx-born photographer Garry Winogand on the set of "The Seven Year Itch," Monroe wears a white terry robe belted at the waist, her frank, expectant smile is directed at someone or something just beyond the scope of the picture. In this relaxed, radiant incarnation, she looks as if she just might ooze peach nectar if you bit her. It is photos like this one that make the Stern series, with its forced, teeth-clenching kind of sensuality, all the more anomalous, as if Monroe was gasping to recapture what in the past had been as natural as taking a deep breath.

Of course today, it's impossible to view the Stern photos without seeing them through the sober scrim of history. Within six weeks of the famous "last sitting," Monroe was found dead in her Brentwood, Calif., home, apparently the result of a barbiturate overdose. A little more than a year later, Kennedy was gunned down as he rode in an open car through the streets of Dallas, blood and brain matter splattering the pink Chanel suit worn by his horrified widow. Stern's series is impossible, by now, to separate from all that followed it. We read in Monroe's slitted eyes and open lips a kind of swan song, or even, perhaps, a memento mori.

So there is something unsettling, even creepy, about watching Lindsay, not just playing Marilyn, but playing this Marilyn, the one whose life was spinning quietly but inexorably of control. Hollywood, like politics, is a brutal arena. Whether the lavish pictures of Lohan's ripe young flesh are paying fealty to Monroe's legacy, or giving it a sharp poke in the eye, is an open question.

Lohan's story - like Obama's and indeed the entire nation's as it approaches another election - is very much a work in progress. Although Lohan was arrested twice for driving under the influence, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor drunken driving and cocaine charges, served 84 minutes in jail and checked into rehab, she insists that her life is back on track. "I've learned so much. I wasn't taking time to feel my feelings," she said in a recent Harper's Bazaar interview (accompanied by photos in which she is fully dressed in very expensive designer duds and photographed with superheroes).

Still, the celebrity magazines are quick to seize upon any slips. Lindsay seen knocking back the champagne, they gleefully report. Lindsay flirts with three guys in a single night. When New York magazine interviewer Amanda Fortini asked Lohan - who said it was "an honor" to impersonate Marilyn - whether she thought she might be in danger of a fate like Monroe's, she bristled, saying, "I sure as hell wouldn't let it happen to me."

Bravado? Or denial? In either case, we can only hope - and pray - that Lohan is right.