Norma Jeane Baker, 1941; Candy Darling, mid 1950s

I stole the title of this column from the art dealer José Freire, who ran a gallery called Fiction/Nonfiction in New York in the early 1990s. The typographical decision to simultaneously connect and separate these two conflicting words has always struck me as particularly satisfying; I like the idea that there is often only just a thin slash that distinguishes the truth from a lie, only a listing barricade that protects reality from invention. If I were a different kind of writer, I would use this moment to address what it means to live in a world made increasingly chaotic by the collapsing distance between obfuscation and candor, but the truth is that I really don’t mind when people are casually dishonest with me about their lives. I’ve lied about who I am before, and you probably have too; I think that sometimes deceit is just a shortcut toward authenticity, a way of dreaming or window shopping that helps us separate who we actually are from who we might eventually become.

Self-invention and the deployment of persona are not specifically American traits, but they are among our specialties. Built into the pathos of our national consciousness is a long history of liars and frauds who have thrived under the cult of individualism – a parade of hucksters and charlatans who have exploited a vulnerability to what we colloquially refer to as “the long con.” The United States is an insulated space of performance and pretending, a place fixated on narratives of becoming, and one where the lies we tell ourselves about our violence are as beloved as those we claim demonstrate our wholesomeness. It makes a lot of sense to me that Hollywood is here; we’ve never cared to untangle our mythologies from the real.

Marilyn Monroe comes up in my work a lot, not because I consider myself some kind of mega-fan, but rather because I think she’s such a particularly American contrivance. I suppose part of what I like about her as a subject is the enormous fandom that continues to accumulate around the specter of her image, as though the combination of her platinum artificiality and her peculiar brand of sadness still manages to tell us something familiar about ourselves. It’s a prismatic quality in Monroe’s persona that ensures the stamina of her symbolic value; variously invoked as a damaged child, the locus of 1950s postwar sexuality, and a woman who had everything but love, the actress can’t help but telegraph both surplus and lack, glamour and doom, fantasy and dread. That we continue to remodel and recommodify her contradictions even after death is a kind of necrophilia; it doesn’t matter if we’d rather think it’s love.

A lot of time has been spent trying to disambiguate Monroe the person from Monroe the product, both because we are too emotionally invested in the details of the conflict to accept resolution, and because she herself was accused of an inability to discern the facts of her life from the fictions that were built around her. Maybe we get closest to understanding who Monroe actually was in the many self-portraits she made during the course of her career, loose sketches with titles like Waiting - Wondering - / Woman, and Myself Exercising, and Lonely that each vibrate with the spirit of an archeological excavation. My favorite of these images is a single frame from a strip of photobooth pictures that was clipped free from its sequence and modified by a fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane Baker. Using a pencil, the teenager recontoured her hair, exaggerated the outline of her lips, and applied a dark fringe of spikey mascara around her eyes; it is a series of interventions that, viewed in retrospect, seem to amplify the artifice that would later become her metonymy. Dated 1941, the image coincides with what Monroe identified as the discovery of her “magic friend,” a term she coined to describe the disembodied twin that suddenly materialized in the mirror when she learned the power of glamour, a word that, etymologically, was itself haunted by notions of magic and performance. There is something uncanny about the picture, indicating as it does the spooky liminal space between an earthbound girl and a woman subsumed by her own image, but I think she looks happy enough in it, as if she’s dreaming about who she might become, testing the boundaries of wish fulfillment, seeing what would happen if what roiled around inside of her finally came up for air. I guess she was probably wondering when her life would start. When we are young, it’s easy to hope that whatever it is that we are waiting for will eventually come to find us.

The actress and Warhol staple Candy Darling was roughly the same age as this annotated version of Baker when she mused about dreaming for a 1960 school assignment. “Practically everyone has a little hope,” she wrote, “from the teenage girl who wishes on the first star of the evening, to the starlet who wishes for fame and success, to the poor tortured creature who in a last plea for mercy cries out in anguish for death.” Still bound to the mismatched identity of its author at the time of its writing, the quote is sweet and heartbreaking, the purity of belief it gestures toward made all the more devasting by our knowledge of what Darling would get and what she would be denied. I think the quote seems to wish on the same star as Baker’s picture, the two of them as locked together in a fantasy of becoming as they are in the tragedy of premature death.

Though as an actress Darling emulated the cool remove of stars like Kim Novak, Greta Garbo, and Joan Bennett, Monroe certainly figured in the pantheon of cinematic luminaries that she studied. Reading Cynthia Carr’s recent biography of Darling, I thought frequently of Monroe, mostly because there seemed to be a similar tragedy shared by these two women who so badly wanted to believe that they could escape loneliness through the portal of fame, as though the adoration lavished by an anonymous public might be big enough to stand in for the missing love of a parent or a partner or a friend. Flipping through the illustrations in Carr’s book, I found a group of photobooth images from the mid 1950s that show an adolescent Darling, still then dressing as a boy but beginning to telegraph some of the feline glamour that would come to define her legacy. In the first image on the strip, Darling has taken a pencil to the surface of the paper and recontoured her hair into a flipped bouffant, the shadow of a boy’s haircut suddenly turned into the glossy swish of an Alice band.

As much as these images depict something mutually inchoate, their subjects also seem to occupy dramatically different positions; if the photograph of Baker describes a witchy invocation that joins longing with becoming, the photograph of Darling seems to more accurately gesture at something like correction. What seems true in both images is their authors’ shared belief that a person can wish themself into a different life. I read in Carr’s book that a lot of people believe it was the indiscriminate prescription of an unstudied hormone that caused the cancer that killed Candy Darling, as though finally coming into her body initiated her death sentence. Indiscriminate prescriptions killed Marilyn Monroe too, though I think all she wanted to do was to escape.

The premature demise of a female star offers a particular cultural conundrum, straddling as she does the distance between sex and death, between material desire and formlessness, between permanence and obsolescence. Edgar Morin said that it’s burdensome for a star to be a body at all, that it’s much easier to disappear into the picture in a flash of light and heat than it is to have to come down to Earth and walk among the mortals. I often think that our stars become more vulnerable when they die because death annihilates both agency and the flimsy rules of consent, because once they’re dead, we are free to dream them into any circumstance imaginable without feeling like violators. In spite of all the devotion they paid to the idea that we can, all of us, change how the world sees us with the careful cultivation of a self-generated persona, Monroe and Darling can represent anything we want them to now.

Last week I looked at Peter Hujar’s picture of Darling in her casket, enlarging the image to its maximum on my screen to try to find if there was anything of her person still lurking behind the cadaverous shell. I’ve looked at Monroe’s post-mortem pictures as well, I’ve scanned the surface of her face and recorded the details, though I can never identify exactly what it is that I’m looking for. I guess it’s a cruelty that I often visit upon the dead strangers, and it doesn’t seem to matter that I never find anything that seems to indicate something more true than what I already know. Part of why I don’t mind liars is that there’s always the chance that they’ll accidentally reveal who they really are, that they’ll momentarily drop the performance, forget their lines, expose whatever it is that’s lurking beneath the theater of being a person in the world. Maybe part of what I like about the two photobooth pictures is that they tell both the truth and the lie; fiction/nonfiction drifting across each other once again.

Alissa Bennett is a writer and has been a director at Gladstone Gallery since 2018. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, Ursula, and Vogue. Bennett is currently completing a script about the life of Edith Wharton.

Image credit: fair use