Marilyn Monroe Loved Brooklyn and “Walking Around”
This is probably the only thing I will ever write about Marilyn Monroe. I mean, RIP already, you know? But yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of her death and along with the swooning remembrances (hey there, Maureen Dowd!) came a decades-old—but new to me—revelation that Ms. Monroe wanted nothing more than to call Brooklyn home.
NBC has re-released an old interview with Marilyn, where she tells Dave Garroway that she has “fallen in love with Brooklyn” and that it’s her “favorite place in the world.”
The Daily News reports that the interview took place at a time when “Monroe, then 31-years-old [was] in between her marriages to New York Yankees Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.”
Ah.
So, I get it now. This can best be understood through a baseball analogy. Monroe was rejecting the oppressive nature of her marriage to DiMaggio, the consummate Yankee and alpha male, and was instead turning to Miller, the brilliant Brooklyn playwright and, by extension, embracing the Dodgers, who hadn’t yet been uprooted to LA. If only the Dodgers and Marilyn had stayed in Brooklyn, everything might have been different.
Although, probably not.
When asked by Garroway what it was about the borough that appealed to her, Monroe replied, “Almost everything. I just like walking around. The people and the streets and the atmosphere, I just like it.”
Unfortunately, Monroe never got to live out her dream of retiring to Brooklyn, and instead died tragically of an overdose in her Brentwood home, thus inspiring legions of idiots to believe that tragedy and beauty go hand-in-hand.
There is no real lesson here. Other than that LA is where beautiful things—the Dodgers, Marilyn Monroe—go to die. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
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