When I was about ten I saw The Seven Year Itch in color at my sister's house.  My parents' TV was black and white.  I grew up thinking of Star Trek and Gilligan's Island in terms of black and white.  To see anything in color on television in the 1970s was, for me, a strange visual experience.  TVs in those days lacked the precision color of today's models.  Images seemed garish, the colors too red, too green, too blue.  Black and white looked more real to me.
     When I saw five Marilyn Monroe movies in one week on my sister's set, I felt a confirmation of my interest in the actress, which had mainly come before from seeing photographs of her.  She'd been dead only about ten years by then--the first wave of Marilyn publications was in its heyday.  I looked at the pictures in the public library's copy of Norman Mailer's biography, Marilyn.  The big book was kept in a special adults only section, not locked up.  It was simply a matter of sliding a glass door aside and taking the book out.  I'd find an uninhabited area of the library to look at the pictures, only a few of which are nudes, barely justifying its status in the forbidden section.  Her face fascinated me, as it still does.  The arched eyebrows, the cute mouth and slightly upturned nose, her widow's peak.  Her features were pointy, making her resemble a mischievous elf.  I still maintain that she was the prettiest woman who's ever existed; a subjective view, I know, but it's mine and I stand by it.
     WGN, the cable station out of Chicago, showed movies in prime time weeknights, and that week they committed to a Marilyn Monroe theme.  In those early days of cable TV, there were about six or seven channels available.  That may seem a poor selection of TV entertainment, but actually it wasn't.  A limited number of channels, of anything, focuses the mind in its decision-making processes.  How many times have I, and you, gone through channel after channel, tens, dozens, hundreds, unable to settle on anything?  An old friend of mine in the 1990s had a TV he found on a curb.  He was able to get one channel on it, enabling him to see the occasional movie, the news, the TV shows on that channel.  He said, "When you have one channel to watch, that's what's on television, and if I feel like watching TV, that's the channel I watch."  He didn't watch TV much, but when he did, he enjoyed the experience.
     Seeing and hearing Marilyn forty years ago in one of her great comedies, The Seven Year Itch, was for me, color TV or not, one of the great film viewing experiences of my life.  There were ads, but I was well-used to that.  The wide screen Cinemascope film was panned and scanned, depriving the viewer of the full image, but I didn't know about such things when I was ten.  Marilyn was funny and beautiful, filled with vitality and almost artlessly sexy.  One of the other films I saw that week, Niagara, showed a different Marilyn--the only femme fatale villainess she ever played.  Also in lush color (garish on my sister's color TV), Niagara deals with adultery, a murder plot gone haywire, and a man who has nothing left to live for except revenge.
     Marilyn was a good, and at times, great actress.  She had natural ability.  The camera lens loved her.  She managed to convince millions of people that her breathy, high-voiced, pouting sexpot persona constituted her real personality.  She was actually nothing like her movie personas, except that she used pieces of herself from deep inside to convey certain truths in many of her characters.  It's interesting to hear her speak in her natural voice, possible through listening to interviews with her, especially when she can go on at length.  Her voice was lower than what the viewer of her movies usually hears.  She had a Scandinavian woman's way of ending her sentences, her voice tending to go up at the end.  Hearing the real Marilyn voice should correct any perception of her as a dim-witted blonde (her natural hair color, incidentally, was reddish-brown).
     The fifty-third anniversary of her death just passed.  Much has been made about the mysteries surrounding her demise.  I've read much about these matters, but I tend to focus on her life, rather than on some of her unfortunate connections in the last year of her life.  That an evil old man like J. Edgar Hoover saw fit to have FBI agents spy on her activities says more about her goodness, in my view, than it does about anything questionable in her life.  John Lennon, too, was regarded by Hoover as a dangerous person.  John Lennon, for God's sake!
     Watch a Marilyn Monroe movie sometime.

                                                                              Vic Neptune