Lasting Lessons We Can Learn From Marilyn Monroe

“She was even more gorgeous without any makeup on, sitting around in a beat-up terrycloth bathrobe she had,” Giorgio told me. “I used to make her pancakes with caviar and sour cream.”

She could be difficult to dress because “she wanted everything to look like a slip and be skintight.” He had to reinforce every seam to control her curves.

Giorgio and Marilyn were so close that DiMaggio was jealous of him. But no need. “We just shared sillies together,” he said.

The silly Marilyn in a tattered bathrobe was the real Norma Jeane Mortenson, who would have turned 100 on June 1 this year — a milestone that has fueled new books, products and exhibits, including “Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait” at the National Portrait Gallery in London and “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

Marilyn will be everywhere this summer, as she always has been. We simply cannot stop looking at her and wondering “what if?”

What if she had not died of an overdose of barbiturates on August 4, 1962, at age 36? What if she hadn’t put so much of her currency in her ability to seduce men?

What if she had accepted that her intelligence was equal to her beauty?

Author Lois Cahall’s new novel, Maybe Marilyn, reimagines Marilyn’s ending and makes her a survivor, not a victim.

Marilyn has fascinated Cahall for decades — because she tried to break out of the bombshell stereotype, but she also needed it.

Sexual allure was the one stability in her life, the way she believed she could maintain the upper hand in relationships. 

“We all have a bit of Marilyn in us. She’s a mirror image of everything that mothers and daughters revere yet also despise about their very selves: failure, success, beauty queen, powerhouse…” Cahall explains.

And Marilyn’s not here to provide the rest of her story.

“Marilyn was the most glamorous, vulnerable, complex star, and whenever someone dies too young — Diana, JFK Jr., Carolyn Bessette — there is so much that was left undone,” says Cahall. “Biographers have long claimed that there is a world of devoted fans who hunger to bring their idol back to life. Their hunger has never waned.”

One of Marilyn’s great fans in 1955 was a 14-year-old boy named Peter Mangone, who skipped school in the Bronx to wait for Marilyn outside the Gladstone Hotel. Armed with his brother’s eight-millimeter movie camera, he waited until the star waltzed out with Nardiello and photographer Milton Greene. Marilyn spotted the young Peter, smiled, winked and waved for him to follow along.

The five-minute film Mangone shot was in a box in his father’s attic for almost 50 years. His brother discovered it while cleaning out the house. By then, Mangone was 63 and the owner of a hair studio in Palm Beach.

He told The New York Times in 2003: “Once you saw her, once your eyes fixed into her, she was burnt into your head. I haven't been able to look at another woman the same way since.”

Also featured in that movie is a young, dapper George Nardiello, walking alongside a cashmere-clad goddess. When Giorgio saw the footage, he literally gasped. “After all these years, my God! I was once a baby!”

His friendship with Marilyn eventually waned. She went back to Hollywood and became more dependent on drugs.

“If you were right for her emotionally or professionally, she would be all over you. If not, it was goodbye,” he said.

“She did want to be known as an actress, mostly, I think, to show up the people back in Hollywood who didn’t respect her.”

But most of all, “she wanted to be loved and adored for who she was, not told every five minutes that she was gorgeous. She wanted to be herself.”

Giorgio died in 2004. Peter Mangone died in 2012. His film lives on, as does his subject — her image burned into our psyches, forever beautiful, vulnerable and young.