Will Marilyn Be Forever In Midlife?

 The other day marked an anniversary. It’s one of those dates like that of the JFK assassination: Had I been a little bit older, I might’ve remembered where I was when news about it flashed across screens and buzzed over radio wires.

Early in the morning of 5 August 1962, Eunice Murray noticed a light under the bedroom door in the house where she worked. She knew that wasn’t a good sign. She called Dr. Ralph Greenson.

Why Dr. Greenson? He was the psychiatrist of the woman who slept in that room. Except, that morning she didn’t wake up:  Some time during the previous night, she ingested a fatal dose of sleeping pills.

Eunice Murray was the woman’s housekeeper. By now, if you didn’t already know, you probably figured that the woman in question was Marilyn Monroe.

So, apart from the anniversary of her death, why am I writing about her? Well, she was 36 years old, which means she would have turned 100 on 1 June.  Nobody seems to think of what she might’ve been like as a centenarian, or even if she had lived to be, say, 70 or 80. At the same time, the images of her are not those of an aborted youth, like those we hold of James Dean or any number of rock stars who died young.  

So was she in midlife when she died? Purely from the standpoint of chronological age, we might say she was on the cusp of it. In terms of her career and fame, however, she wasn’t. It’s generally agreed that her rise to international stardom began in 1953, when she appeared in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Niagara.” So her career as we remember it was less than a decade old when she passed.

This fact is especially striking when you realize that just a few months after “GPB” and “Niagara” were released, she wed Joe Di Maggio, who had just retired from what made him famous. That fact and his age (12 years Marilyn’s senior) would lead most people to agree that he was indeed in midlife, or entering it, just as Marilyn was becoming, well, Marilyn.

Because he remained in the public eye after his playing days ended, people saw him age—well, but age nonetheless. By the time he died in 1998, aged 84, he had become a kind of eminence grise.  

Which brings me back to my earlier question: How do we remember Marilyn Monroe? Did she die on the verge of middle age? Or does she live on in a suspended kind of midlife?

Fame (No, Not The David Bowie Song)

 About 20 years ago, I was talking with a fellow faculty member who, like me, had written about sports for a local newspaper.  Somehow the length of professional athletes’ careers became a topic.  He pointed out that while Joe Di Maggio lived 84 years, we know him for what he did for only 13 of them. I am referring, of course, to his time playing for the Yankees, which was interrupted by World War II. Ironically, his career as a commercial spokesman for various products and businesses, such as the Mr. Coffee and Emigrant Bank, lasted nearly twice as long as his baseball tenure.

Why am I thinking about that now? Well, although I am in—ahem—midlife, I am still a good bit younger than Joe was when he passed. And I have worked in a career even longer than he spent making TV commercials, let alone playing center field. Even so, my time as a university instructor and writer (I still have a hard time calling myself “professor,” even if it comes easily to my students!) constitutes only a fraction of my life. That will be the case even if I continue for another decade or more.

That work won’t make me famous, nor should it. And one of the few things that I’ve done for longer won’t, either (unless you count the readership of this blog as fame): cycling.

It’s funny, though, that being off my bike for most of the past week seems like an eternity.  And I know, intellectually, that I’ll be back in the saddle once my pain subsides.  But it’s still odd, and troubling, not to be doing, however temporarily, something I’ve done just about all of my life.

I wonder whether Joe Di Maggio—or, for that matter, Eddy Merckx, whose professional cycling career spanned as many years as Joe’s with the Yankees—ever thought about how short a segment of their lives so defined them.

Since I have mentioned two famous male athletes, I can’t help but to think that almost all who have been able to live off their exploits on the road, track, court, field, rink or other athletic arena have been men, I wonder how many great female athletes—say, Caitlyn Clark or Simone Biles—will have the same privilege, or will be so thoroughly defined by the relatively brief part of their lives when they could dominate and elevate their sports.