Naomi Judd, Marilyn, and Being Well in America
Pills and ECT don’t seem to help depression and being treated like a commodity hardly helps
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The other night I watched an affecting documentary about the last days of Marilyn Monroe. It went into detail about her relationships with Jack and Bobby Kennedy: the President and Attorney General of the United States. Much as Jack Kennedy had one of his crew call Frank Sinatra and tell him he wouldn’t be staying in the house Sinatra had built for him in Palm Springs because Sinatra’s “mob connections” didn’t look good, apparently Peter Lawford or some other Kennedy flunky told Marilyn that she was no longer wanted in either man’s life because being with her was too politically risky. Neither of them apparently had the guts to tell her in person that she’d never be seeing or speaking to either man again.
Maybe we could call this the 1962 version of ghosting.
The documentary indicated that this callous rejection led Marilyn into a spiral of depression, pills, and alcohol that ultimately resulted in her death.
Bruce and I aren’t doing Elton John’s famous song, but all the same, it’s hard to forget that he told the truth when he sang, “all the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude.”
Marilyn Monroe was 36 when she died. A full eleven years older than the official expiration date of the generic “young starlet.” She had a long run by Hollywood standards.
So I had been thinking about Marilyn’s soft-voiced, childlike waif persona and how that was considered the ideal woman of the 50s and early 60s, and how her softness morphed into the sexually compliant flaming bra chick of the late 60s and early 70s.
And on and on ever since, always an image, never reality . . .
They pushed an endless series of pills on Marilyn to make her perform, to keep her thin, to wake her up, to put her to sleep. Pills to numb her pain and mask the trauma she suffered as a child shunted from foster home to foster home, abandoned by both mother and father.
It was little different to the way livestock are handled in industrial food environments.
