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    Jay Kanter, Agent for Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 97

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    Later a studio executive, he was among the last of the power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century.Jay Kanter, whose long career as an agent to the stars — including Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly — and later as an influential studio executive made him one of the last of the generation of power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the late 20th century, died on Aug. 6 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 97.His son Adam Kanter confirmed his death.An acolyte of the superagent Lew Wasserman, Mr. Kanter was renowned as much for the career he led as for the stories people told about him.He was a junior agent at MCA, Mr. Wasserman’s agency, in 1948 when he was asked to retrieve Mr. Brando from the train station.Mr. Kanter took Mr. Brando to his aunt’s house, and the next morning to a meeting with the director Fred Zinnemann, who wanted to cast Mr. Brando in his next movie, “The Men.” Apparently Mr. Kanter made a good impression, because when he suggested that they proceed to MCA to meet some of its agents, he recalled, Mr. Brando replied: “I don’t have to meet anybody. You’re my agent.”Mr. Brando’s Hollywood career was on the verge of stardom. And now, so was Mr. Kanter’s.“Suddenly I was getting all these calls from these heads of studios,” he recalled in a 2017 interview, and within a few years he represented a long line of A-list talent.The Kanter-Brando story became a bit of Hollywood lore, so much so that it provided the inspiration for a 1989 sitcom, “The Famous Teddy Z,” about a Hollywood star who picks out a mailroom clerk (played by Jon Cryer) as his agent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      25 Biggest Oscar Snubs of All Time

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      Every year since the Academy Awards were invented, somebody has been overlooked, ignored, passed over, disregarded or brushed off. You know what they say about beauty and beholders.But perceived Oscar omissions — snubs, as we have come to call them — have grown into a frenzied annual conversation, with people left off the nomination list, or nominated but denied a statuette, sometimes receiving as much attention, or more, as those who win.These are the 25 true snubs and unjust losses that Times film critics, columnists, writers and editors still can’t get over. Read more →‘Do the Right Thing’ for Best Picture (1990)Actual winner: “Driving Miss Daisy”Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in the Brooklyn-set drama.Universal PicturesSome people hated this movie. Others, more ominously, feared it, or claimed to. News articles and reviews imagined riots sprouting in its wake (they never came), seeing in the character of Mookie — who, in a fit of righteous fury, smashes a pizzeria window in the film’s famous climax — confirmation of Lee’s insidious intent. Did academy voters have similar misgivings? Lee, who was shut out of the directing category, did receive a nomination for his screenplay, suggesting at least one branch of the organization had his back. (Danny Aiello was also nominated for supporting actor.) But it’s hard to look at the eventual best picture winner, “Driving Miss Daisy” — a film in which Morgan Freeman plays Hoke Colburn, the patient chauffeur of a bigoted, elderly white woman — and not see a statement of preference. In 1990, it was the Hoke Colburns of the world, not the Mookies, who were welcome on the academy’s biggest stage. REGGIE UGWU, pop culture reporterWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marie Irvine, Makeup Artist to Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 99

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      Late in Ms. Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine was her go-to makeup artist in New York City. Earlier this month, she became a TikTok sensation.Marie Irvine was 99 years old when a chapter in her long-ago career became a TikTok sensation. During a crucial period late in Marilyn Monroe’s life, Ms. Irvine had been her makeup artist in New York City. When a TikTok star learned her story, it blew up the internet.In 1958, Life magazine commissioned Richard Avedon to reimagine Ms. Monroe as the screen and stage sirens Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Theda Bara, Jean Harlow and Lillian Russell. It was Ms. Irvine who assisted with her makeup — turning her into Ms. Russell’s candy-box pinup, and Ms. Dietrich’s steamy Lola Lola from the film “The Blue Angel.”It ran in the Dec. 22 issue of the magazine, with a piece written by Ms. Monroe’s husband at the time, the playwright Arthur Miller, with the headline, “My Wife Marilyn.” He described the photos “as a kind of history of our mass fantasy, so far as seductresses are concerned.”And when Ms. Monroe, having been sewn into her skintight sequined gown, sang a breathless “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at a Democratic fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden in May of 1962, it was Ms. Irvine who prepared her beforehand in Ms. Monroe’s apartment on East 57th Street, and then rushed to the Garden later with the star’s drop earrings, because she had left them behind.Erin Parsons, a 45-year-old makeup artist and TikTok star with a passion for vintage makeup and Ms. Monroe, had read of Ms. Irvine’s small part in these iconic moments, and she tracked her down to learn more. And when she posted about her search on Jan. 8, her video went viral.More than a million people have viewed it, and it has accrued more than 1,600 comments. One woman was particularly moved by the $125 fee Ms. Irvine had charged for her services on the night of the Garden event, the equivalent of more than $1,200 today. (Ms. Parsons had a photo of the bill, an artifact which sold at auction for $1,152, and showed it in her video.)“We stan a queen that knows what her skills were worth!” the commenter wrote. “I bow down.”Ms. Irvine circa 1967. She helped transform Marilyn Monroe into stars like Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow for Richard Avedon’s famous Life magazine shoot in 1958.Courtesy Horan family, via Charlotte BentleyMs. Irvine died a week after Ms. Parsons’ post, on Jan. 15, at a care facility in Sarasota, Fla. Her daughter, Jane Bentley Sullivan, announced her death.Ms. Irvine was not the architect of Ms. Monroe’s signature look. Her sleepy, bedroom gaze, articulated by the swoop of her liquid eyeliner; her bright red moue; and that beauty mark were the star’s own creations, conceived with her longtime West Coast-based makeup artist, Whitey Snyder. Her fans and fetishists, from Norman Mailer to Ms. Parsons’ audience, knew that she used a secret blend of three shades of lipstick and a gloss made with Vaseline. Mr. Mailer spends a page describing it in his 1973 biography, “Marilyn.”Ms. Irvine met Ms. Monroe because she was an on-call makeup artist to Mr. Avedon in the 1950s, and he hired Ms. Irvine to help with the Life magazine project. It took three months to complete, largely because of Ms. Monroe’s erratic schedule.“We could shoot it only when Marilyn felt like it,” Ms. Irvine told an interviewer in 2014. “Sometimes it was in the middle of the night with a short notice. One time it was such a short notice, that I couldn’t find a babysitter so Marilyn said, ‘Bring your baby to the set.’”(That was Ms. Sullivan, who was 9 months old at the time.)“So it was like a family atmosphere,” Ms. Irvine added. “She told me how much she wanted a baby.”Ms. Irvine was self-effacing and discreet. Her earliest clients were society figures, like Thelma Foy, the daughter of Walter Chrysler, the automobile magnate, a swan who often appeared in Vogue and on an annual list of the 10 best-dressed women in the United States. When Ms. Foy became ill with leukemia, Ms. Irvine’s role shifted from preparing her for photo shoots to helping her hide the ravages of cancer. Ms. Foy died of the disease in 1957, in her early 50s.Marie Irvine was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County, the only child of William and Theresa (Brendlin) Irvine. She attended a one-room schoolhouse through grade school. She moved to New York City in her late teens and trained to be a secretary at the Katharine Gibbs School — otherwise known as Katie Gibbs to generations of white-gloved young women — but found the prospect of secretarial work too boring.She found a job at Elizabeth Arden, at the flagship salon with the distinctive red door at 691 Fifth Avenue that served the ladies of the carriage trade, where she became a beauty adviser and color specialist for the company.Toward the end of World War II, Ms. Irvine met a naval officer at Delmonico’s restaurant when he was on leave; they married in 1947. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Sullivan, Ms. Irvine is survived by a son, who requested anonymity for himself and his father, whose name he shares, and two grandchildren. Ms. Irvine’s husband died in 1994.When her daughter was born in 1957, Ms. Irvine left Elizabeth Arden and became a freelance makeup artist, working for photographers like Mr. Avedon, Irving Penn, John Rawlings and Harold Krieger. She did commercial work, too, notably coating the actors who played the Jolly Green Giant, the mascot created to sell canned vegetables, in layers of green greasepaint.In the late ’60s, Ms. Irvine and her family moved from Queens to Essex County, N.J. Her husband, general counsel for a security firm, did not want his wife to continue working, so she retired — and learned to drive at 44.Once she left the fashion world behind, she rarely spoke of it.Ms. Parsons, the TikTok star, had many questions for Ms. Irvine that she was unable to answer before her death. She hoped the former makeup artist could illuminate the histories of the sort of esoterica that transfix Monroe obsessives: For instance, did Robert Champion, a hairdresser who was at the Garden when Ms. Monroe sang, really touch up her makeup and blot her lips with a tissue (an artifact that belongs to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum in Orlando, Fla.)? Did Ms. Irvine recognize a gold lipstick tube that once belonged to Ms. Monroe that Ms. Parsons had won at auction for $15,625?Ms. Irvine was pleased she’d had her own moment of fame, though she wished, as she told her daughter, that the attention came when she had more energy to pursue it.“I told her that the important thing was that it had happened at all,” Ms. Sullivan said. “She was an original and one of a kind laboring in obscurity to create many beautiful images with the pioneering photographers of the 20th century. After all, how many 99-year-olds who attended one-room schoolhouses go on to be TikTok stars?” More

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      6 Highlights of Maria Callas’s Opera Career at La Scala

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      The soprano appeared in more than two dozen productions at the house in Milan as she rose to become opera’s leading lady. Here are six highlights.No opera house has been more instrumental to the enduring myth of Maria Callas than the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Her more than two dozen productions at La Scala mirrored the peaks and troughs of her life and marked her finest years as an opera singer.It was near the start of her La Scala years that Callas underwent a physical transformation, losing some 80 pounds and becoming a global celebrity; and it was toward the end of that period that she left her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini for the wealthy magnate Aristotle Onassis, who then married someone else (Jacqueline Kennedy).Callas’s many performances at La Scala “have passed into legend,” said Neil Fisher, executive culture and books editor, The Times and Sunday Times in London. “If La Scala is a temple to opera, then Maria Callas is one of the goddesses.”Callas during a rehearsal for Cherubini’s “Medea” with the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers at La Scala in 1961. “Medea” was her final show at La Scala.Associated PressLa Scala’s reputation, in turn, is “almost inseparable” from her, Mr. Fisher added: “Postwar, the glamour of opera, and also its mystique, swirls around this character of Maria Callas.”Why does a soprano who died in 1977 remain the single most celebrated opera singer of all time?Because she made opera “about the story and the drama and the narrative,” said the American soprano Lisette Oropesa. “It wasn’t just about the beauty of the voice: She used her voice to tell a story.”Crucially, Ms. Oropesa noted, Callas became the story herself — a “hot-topic, controversial figure” — after her life became mixed up with those of Onassis and Kennedy. As a result, “people to this day cannot stop talking about her,” Ms. Oropesa added. She’s “a legend.”Callas appearing as Violetta in “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, in a 1955 production at La Scala. The character is widely considered one of her three finest roles.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesFollowing is an overview of some of Callas’s career highlights at La Scala.“Aida” (Verdi): April 12, 1950Callas’s very first performance onstage at La Scala was as a substitute for the much-adored Renata Tebaldi, who was unwell. It was, by all accounts, a tepid debut. A skin condition had given the 26-year-old soprano facial blemishes that she awkwardly covered with veils. In “Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography,” by Anne Edwards, the director Franco Zeffirelli (who would go on to work with Callas) recalled “this overweight Greek lady, peeping out from behind her trailing chiffon,” with an “unevenness” in her voice. Her two remaining performances of “Aida” went much better, but this inaugural “Aida” was a blow to the young prodigy’s self-confidence.“I Vespri Siciliani” (Verdi):Dec. 7, 1951This was the first time that Callas was headlining a La Scala production — kicking off the opera house’s season, in fact — and it was a triumph. She was understandably nervous at the start. “The miraculous throat of Maria Meneghini Callas did not have to fear the demand of the opera,” the music reviewer Franco Abbiati wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera (according to the biography “Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb,” by David Bret). Mr. Abbiati lauded the “phosphorescent beauty” of her tones, and “her technical agility, which is more than rare — it is unique.”“Lucia di Lammermoor” (Donizetti): Jan. 18, 1954This was Callas’s first time with the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan at the baton, and she didn’t disappoint. In the famous “mad scene” — where Lucia stabs her new husband on her wedding night — Callas appeared barehanded, in a nightgown and messy hair, on a dimly lit staircase; she had turned down the dagger and fake blood that are usually used to portray the murder. Yet her performance was so realistic that mesmerized audience members jumped up mid-performance, clapping and cheering, and tossed red carnations onstage that Callas touched as if they were gobs of blood. In Opera News, the critic Cynthia Jolly hailed “Callas’s supremacy amongst present-day sopranos,” and “a heart-rending poignancy of timbre which is quite unforgettable,” according to the Bret biography.“La Traviata” (Verdi): May 28, 1955The character of Violetta in “La Traviata” is widely considered one of Callas’s three finest roles — along with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma.” And the May 1955 staging by the director Luchino Visconti is, in turn, considered her finest “Traviata.” It was “a revolutionary production” that was “renowned for its realism, the intimacy and the gorgeousness of the setting, the painterly qualities,” said Mr. Fisher of The Times. It also “encapsulated so much” of the Maria Callas that audiences have come to know and revere. Set in La Belle Epoque, with ornate décor and costumes, the show triggered another audience frenzy on opening night. People cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which a tearful Callas picked up as she took a solo bow. The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini later confessed that he, too, had wept in the pit. Yet Callas’s monopolizing of attention in her solo bow was too much for the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who quit the show that night.“Anna Bolena” (Donizetti):April 14, 1957This was another Visconti spectacular, and another triumph. Callas played Anne Boleyn, a doomed wife of Henry VIII, in a somewhat lesser-known Donizetti opera. Queenlike, she appeared in a dark blue gown and enormous jewels at the top of a grand staircase, surrounded by royal portraits. Musically, she gave it her all, triggering 24 minutes of applause (according to the Edwards biography), a La Scala record.Yet offstage, in Milan, her star was starting to fade, after she had refused to perform a fifth time with the La Scala opera company on a tour in Edinburgh (she was only contractually obligated to four performances, and was feeling unwell). Protesters awaited her as she headed to the “Anna Bolena” premiere, the Edwards biography reported, and she was accompanied inside by armed police officers. When she got home on the last night of the show, there were obscenities scribbled with animal excrement on her front door and windows.“Medea” (Cherubini): May 29, 1962By the time of her final performances at La Scala, Callas was divorced and in a relationship with Onassis. Her voice was still dazzling audiences worldwide. Just 10 days before this performance of “Medea,” she had sung two arias from the opera “Carmen” at a celebration of President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday (where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday”).Yet as she was performing “Medea” that night, a sinus infection led Callas’s voice to waver in parts, though she sang all the way to the end, and still managed to draw some press acclaim.Long after her passing, Lord Harewood, a Callas supporter and onetime director of the Royal Opera House, recalled in an Evening Standard article that was excerpted in the Bret biography that it was “evident that her voice had deteriorated markedly,” and attributed it to her “being at sea with Onassis in his boat” and attending “too many parties.”“You felt that this wonderful career was coming to an end,” he was quoted as saying in the Bret biography. “But I thought that she still had great power, a tremendous grandeur about everything she did. In spite of everything, she never lost that.” More

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      Douglas Kirkland, Who Took Portraits of Movie Stars, Dies at 88

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      His many memorable shots included one of his earliest assignments and probably his most famous: Marilyn Monroe in bed, wrapped in a silk sheet.Douglas Kirkland, a photojournalist and portraitist whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe wrapped in a silk sheet and Coco Chanel at work in her Paris atelier, died on Oct. 2 at his home in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.Francoise (Kemmel-Coulter) Kirkland, his wife and manager, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.For more than 60 years, Mr. Kirkland was a leading celebrity photographer, first for Look and Life magazines and then as a freelancer for various magazines, Hollywood studios and advertising agencies. Courteous and exuberant — he was no annoying paparazzo — Mr. Kirkland was welcomed into stars’ homes and hotel rooms and onto movie sets.The tall, dashing Mr. Kirkland “had this magical quality,” said Karen Mullarkey, who worked with Mr. Kirkland as director of photography at New York and Newsweek magazines. “He had this way of making people comfortable — he was so enthusiastic.” For an issue of New York, she recalled, she brought the model Kathy Ireland a bunch of peonies, and as he photographed Ms. Ireland, Ms. Mullarkey heard him saying: “Caress them! Kiss them! They’re your boyfriend!”“I am new with this magazine,” Mr. Kirkland recalled telling Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was assigned to shoot for Look. “Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”Douglas KirklandIn 1961, a year after joining Look, Mr. Kirkland had two dramatic encounters. For the first, he accompanied Jack Hamilton, a reporter, to Las Vegas for an interview with Elizabeth Taylor, then one of the biggest stars in the world. When the three met, Ms. Taylor said that she would talk but not sit for pictures.After the interview, Mr. Kirkland recalled to the website Vintage News Daily in 2021, he tried to persuade her to pose for him. He held her hand and said: “I am new with this magazine. Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”“I did not let go of her hand; she wore jungle gardenia perfume which I could smell later on,” he continued. “She thought for a while and said, ‘Come back tomorrow at 8 p.m.’”Mr. Kirkland perched himself on a balcony to photograph Marilyn Monroe.Douglas KirklandHiding everything but her face in the sheet and hugging the pillow, she was, it seemed, directing herself.Douglas KirklandThe result — a picture of Ms. Taylor in a yellow jacket, wearing spectacular diamond earrings — appeared on the cover of Look’s Aug. 15, 1961, issue.Later that year, Look sent Mr. Kirkland to Los Angeles to photograph Ms. Monroe. They met at her house, where she told him what she wanted for the shoot: a white silk sheet, Frank Sinatra records and Dom Perignon Champagne.When they met at a studio four days later, she slipped out of a robe and got into a bed, swaddled herself in a sheet and posed for Mr. Kirkland, who for part of the shoot perched himself in a balcony above her. She was, it seemed, directing, herself, with what looked like joy. She hugged the pillow, hid everything but her face in the sheet and turned her back to the camera.“I had everything technically right,” Mr. Kirkland said in an interview with “CBS This Morning” in 2012. “My Hasselblad — click, click, click — but it was Marilyn Monroe who really created these images.”Ann-Margret in Las Vegas in 1971.Douglas KirklandHe recalled that shoot in the 2020 documentary “That Click: The Legendary Photography of Douglas Kirkland,” directed by Luca Severi: “What the pillow represents is what she would like to be doing to a man, and I could have been in there and been the pillow. But I chose to keep taking pictures, because that’s how Douglas Kirkland really, bottom line, is.”Look used only one of the Monroe pictures, inside the magazine, but Mr. Kirkland collected many of them in a 2012 book, “With Marilyn: An Evening/1961.” His other books of photographs include “Light Years: 3 Decades Photography Among the Stars” (1989), “Icons” (1993) and “Legends” (1999).At Look and Life, and then as an on-set photographer, Mr. Kirkland shot pictures during the production of more than 100 films, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Rain Man” and several Baz Luhrmann films, starting with “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001. Mr. Luhrmann said in “That Click” that Mr. Kirkland’s photography “captures the romance of cinema.”Sophia Loren in Rome in 1972.Douglas KirklandHis career started at a time when his subjects were accessible to journalists, and it continued into a time when stars and their handlers exerted greater power over the media. “In the ’60s, there was an idea of letting the camera be revealing of truth,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “Today, it’s more like ‘Entertainment Tonight.’”Douglas Morley Kirkland was born on Aug. 16, 1934, in Toronto and raised from age 3 in Fort Erie, Ontario. His father, Morley, owned a shop where he made men’s made-to-measure clothing, and his mother, Evelyn (Reid) Kirkland, kept the books in the store.He took his first picture with a Brownie camera as a young child: his family standing at the front door of their home on Christmas Day. By 14, he was photographing weddings. After high school, he studied at the New York Institute of Photography and then returned to Canada, where he worked for two local newspapers, and then moved to Richmond, Va., to work as a commercial photographer.In 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with the designer Coco Chanel in Paris.Douglas KirklandWhile there, he wrote three letters to the influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, seeking a job. In 1957, Mr. Penn hired him as his assistant.“I was paid $50 a week, and even in those days in New York it was not too simple,” he said in an interview with the American Society of Media Photographers in 2017. “But I was with Penn and I was quickly learning.”In 1960 he joined Look. He stayed there until the magazine folded in 1971, when he was hired by Life, where he remained until it stopped weekly publication the next year. For the rest of his career he was a freelancer, working for Time, Paris Match, Sports Illustrated, Town & Country and other magazines.He received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Presidents Award in 2011 for his photographic work on film sets. The next year, he was commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a series of official portraits of the Oscar nominees in the four acting categories, among them George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.One of them, Michelle Williams, had been nominated for playing Ms. Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” In the documentary “That Click,” she said that being photographed by the same man who had photographed Ms. Monroe a half-century earlier had been a moving experience.“Never could I have imagined this sort of circumstance,” she said.Mr. Kirkland with examples of his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Kirkland is survived by his son, Mark, and his daughters, Karen Kirkland and Lisa Kirkland Gadway, from his marriage to Marian Perry, which ended in divorce; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.In August 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with Coco Chanel in Paris for Look. At first she was wary of him, permitting him to shoot only the outfits she had designed but not her. But after he showed her his first set of prints, she backed off, letting him observe her at work — always in a hat and usually surrounded by her staff. On his last day there, she suggested that they take a ride to the Palace of Versailles. He took one last picture of her, walking alone in the palace’s gardens.“It was chilly and had started to rain, even though it was August, so I gave her my raincoat,” Mr. Kirkland told The Guardian in 2015. “She put it over her shoulders and it looked almost like a fashionable cape. She said that she often liked to go there because it gave her an opportunity to get lost in time while being surrounded by the magnitude of old French culture.” More

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      The Empty Spectacle of Marilyn Monroe’s Fantasy Fetus in ‘Blonde’

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      “Blonde” pretends to imagine how Monroe would have felt about her pregnancies. Instead, it jarringly shoves a C.G.I. fetus into her midcentury mind.In “Blonde,” the director Andrew Dominik’s fever-dream fictionalization of Marilyn Monroe’s life, Monroe (Ana de Armas) gets pregnant in a celestial fantasy sequence. As she swigs champagne on the beach with her two lovers, the stars above them realign into an expanse of wiggly sperm. Cue gestational montage! A clump of cells appears. A pulsating embryo sprouts, resembling a gelatinous crimson shrimp. Soon a beatific, photorealistic fetus is floating in a sparkling peach brine, its fully articulated form dappled in inexplicable rays of light.Monroe is lured into aborting that pregnancy, but when she conceives a second time, her sentient fetus reappears. Now, it’s telepathic. “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?” the fetus asks Monroe. “You’re not the same baby,” she whispers toward her own belly. The fetus replies: “That was me. It’s always me.”Marilyn Monroe’s chatty, regenerating fetus — she calls it “Baby” — has emerged as a scene-stealing sensation. Critics have called it “goofy,” “despicable” and “cruel.” Some have even pegged it as inadvertently propagandistic — this mode of fetal puppetry is a familiar anti-abortion gimmick. But Monroe’s dialogue with her pregnancy, which originated in the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates novel on which the film is based, is also a product of the star’s troubled self-conception, and in that context, the fetus’s corny, sanctimonious message makes a kind of sense. What is jarring is the contemporary look of the fetus: a schlocky, seemingly computer-generated figure that recalls pop-culture fantasy images invented long after Monroe’s death. It’s a rendering so lazy, it suggests a stubborn incuriosity about how Monroe would have actually experienced her pregnancies, even as the film presents them as character-defining events.Pregnancy can inspire profound acts of projection. The fetus, an unseen body inside of a body, suspended between nonexistence and existence, is defined by parental expectation and cultural imagination. It is the personification of a mother’s desires and fears, her sublimated anxieties and internalized judgments. And the Monroe of “Blonde” has plenty of issues to cast onto a prospective baby. Abandoned by her father and abused by her mother in childhood, she has become world famous as an infantilized sex object who calls all of her lovers “Daddy.” Her ventriloquized fetus is voiced by the child actor (Lily Fisher) who plays Monroe as a little girl, when she was still Norma Jeane. When Monroe communicates with her fetus, she is talking, with pity and loathing, to herself.“Blonde” is stubbornly incurious about how Monroe (Ana de Armas) would have actually experienced her pregnancies.NetflixWhat I can’t understand is why the thing looks the way that it does. In putting the fetus on display, Dominik has made a tediously literal attempt to depict Monroe’s interior life. But why would Monroe, in the early 1950s, imagine her fetus in the form of a C.G.I. baby? Why would her visualization of pregnancy resemble the smooth-skinned, preternaturally glowing fetus that appears, 70 years later, in the pregnancy app on my iPhone?The maternal imagination is not, after all, a spontaneous soul connection. It’s a historical construction, one informed by the aesthetics, politics and technology of the time in which the pregnancy occurs. And the magic unborn in “Blonde” is an ahistoric imposition — an image that feels plucked from the narrow imagination of a modern male director. At the time of Monroe’s first pregnancy in the film’s version of her life, fetal imagery was a rudimentary fascination. Photographs published in Life magazine in the 1950s included black-and-white images of a squid-like translucent embryo and skeletal fetal remains. The vision of the fetus in “Blonde” — spectacularly well lit, fused with cosmic imagery, presented as a free-floating independent being — was not developed until after Monroe’s death. It has its roots in a 1965 Life magazine spread, “Drama of Life Before Birth,” by the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.For the magazine, Nilsson produced a series of photos of sperm, embryos and fetuses representing the stages of human gestation. Though the cover subject is advertised as a “Living 18-week-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac,” a note inside clarifies, “This embryo was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb,” a process it “did not survive.” Nilsson was celebrated for capturing “living” fetuses within their “natural habitat” (women), but he largely photographed the lifeless products of surgical abortions and miscarriages, which he then submerged in aquariums, lit sumptuously, staged to appear as if they were floating amid starry skies, and shot at a remove.Nilsson’s photographic tricks obliterated any trace of an actual woman’s body. The images, published at the height of the space race, were constructed as alien, analogized to galactic exploration and coded as masculine. One image of a 13-week fetus, which looks as if it is nestled inside a nebula, is titled “Spaceman.” Life quotes “a leading Swedish gynecologist” who declares: “This is like the first look at the back side of the moon.”The 1965 Life magazine spread of Lennart Nilsson’s photography has profoundly influenced the pop-cultural life of the fetus. A note accompanying the article said the “embryo was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb,” a process it “did not survive.”Photo 12/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesThe Life feature would profoundly influence the aesthetics of both anti-abortion activists and the director Stanley Kubrick, whose model of the Star Child in his 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was partially based on Nilsson’s shots. In turn, Kubrick’s serene, fiberglass-smooth, omnipotent being would inform decades of imagined pop-culture fetuses, from the wisecracking, doll-eyed fetus of the 1989 rom-com “Look Who’s Talking” to the computer-generated fetal images that drift through pregnancy-tracker apps and animated internet videos purporting to explain “life.”These images have the power to remove the fetus from the realm of a pregnant woman’s visceral experience and expose it as a public visual spectacle. And they yank the mind toward a pernicious modern suggestion: that the idealized fetus exists independent of a woman’s body; that it floats, in the cultural imagination, far above the earthbound woman herself.Now, this vision has been nonsensically ported into the midcentury brain of Marilyn Monroe. That is a suspect choice, given Dominik’s insistence on recreating the iconography of Monroe’s life in obsessive detail. “Blonde” blinks between full color and black-and-white, shuffling aspect ratios and swapping lenses to more closely mirror Monroe’s most famous photographs and scenes, which Dominik then twists to signal Monroe’s perspective on being made an object.In an interview with Decider, Dominik explained that he visualized the fetus in an attempt to access “Norma’s feelings” about her pregnancies. “Baby was real,” he said. “I wanted Baby to be real.” And yet Dominik’s brief glimpse into Monroe’s mind reveals nothing. All that can be found in there is a YouTube womb-cam.In her book “Disembodying Women,” the medical historian Barbara Duden traces the public exposure of the fetus — and its rising cultural supremacy — over the latter half of the 20th century. She calls this process “the skinning of woman.” “Blonde” is also a movie about a woman being flayed by the culture at large. First, by the Hollywood of her own era, which made her into a sex symbol. And now, by the Hollywood of ours, which has claimed to access her mind, only to serve up a recycled stock image of a magic fetus. More

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      ‘The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes’ Review: Gossip Girl

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      This documentary teases a vague conspiracy surrounding Monroe’s death — but mostly rehashes well-circulated facts and rumors.If you call a movie “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes,” your job is to provide at least something worth listening to. This documentary, directed by Emma Cooper in the latest addition to Netflix’s catalog of true-crime (or crime-ish) stories, begins by teasing some sort of conspiracy surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 death from an overdose. But mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.The tapes in question are the interviews that the Irish journalist Anthony Summers recorded while researching Monroe; he published his conclusions in the 1985 book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.” The movie version adds the ostensible perk of hearing the real voices of John Huston, Jane Russell and Billy Wilder, among others, as actors lip-sync to their remembrances — which, again, are mostly footnotes.Summers apparently got more tantalizing intel from the family of Ralph Greenson, who was Monroe’s psychiatrist, and from Fred Otash, a private eye who in the tapes says that Jimmy Hoffa wanted him to dig up dirt on John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Throughout the film, Monroe is said to have been involved with both Kennedy brothers. Fears of Communism and loose talk of nuclear weapons may have had something to do with something. But the insinuations, a greatest-hits of Cold War paranoia, hardly amount to a dispositive case or even a coherent theory.Finally, Summers, who appears continually, presents his ideas surrounding Monroe’s final hours and potential inconsistencies in the timeline. The claims are more of a “hmm” than a bombshell.The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard TapesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More