[On the early
morning of August
5th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her LA home, in a
moment that quickly became as mythic as
everything else about young Norma Jean Mortenson. So this week I’ll remember
the iconic and singular Marilyn through posts on her life, career, and legacy
as well as her tragic death.]
On three ways in
which Elton John’s iconic song captures key elements of Monroe’s identity and
legacy.
Perhaps the most
interesting thread in John’s
1973 song is its consistent acknowledgment that the speaker didn’t and doesn’t
know the woman to whom he’s paying tribute. That starts with the song’s opening
two lines, “Goodbye Norma Jean/Though I never knew you at all” (repeated at the
start of the last verse); is again highlighted in the chorus’s “I would have
liked to have known you/But I was just a kid”; and is more subtly but most strikingly
captured in the title phrase: “It seems to me you lived your life/Like a candle
in the wind.” This is the central image around which the entire song is built,
but even here “seems” is the closest the speaker and we can get—in truth,
neither Elton John, lyricist Bernie Taupin, nor any of the rest of us have any
idea how Monroe lived her life. Doesn’t mean we can’t pay tribute to a public
figure, but the emphasis there is on the “public” part, and “Candle”
compellingly recognizes that fact.
Moreover, “Candle”
isn’t just about the gap between Monroe’s public and private selves—it’s also,
and perhaps even more centrally, about the destructive quality of such public
images. The first verse’s final lines, “They set you on the treadmill/And they made
you change your name,” establishes that theme (although my understanding is
Monroe chose her own stage name, with the last name paying tribute to her
mother as I noted Tuesday). And the entire second verse develops the theme in
full: “Loneliness was tough/The toughest role
you ever played/Hollywood created a superstar/And pain was the price you
paid/Even when you died/Oh the press still hounded you/All the papers had to
say/Was that Marilyn was found in the nude.” As I noted Monday, the conspiracy
theories about Monroe’s death were just beginning to gain steam in the same
year “Candle” was released (thanks to Norman Mailer’s sensationalized “biography”),
but John and Taupin here clearly already engage with the limited and
destructive ways that in death, as in life, Monroe was so consistently defined.
Those would
already be a couple pretty nuanced layers to a tribute song, but in the last
four lines of its third and final verse, “Candle” goes one important step
further still. There, John sings, “Goodbye Norma Jean/From the young man in the
22nd row/Who sees you as something more than sexual/More than just
our Marilyn Monroe.” While these lines continue some of those other threads,
they also add a different and much more personal theme—the idea that there
could be genuine connection despite those public gaps and destructions, that an
artist and an audience can indeed reach a level of understanding despite those
inevitable limits. And in so doing, John and Taupin nonetheless (or rather, crucially
at the same time) seek to keep Monroe’s—or rather, Norma Jean’s—individuality and
autonomy, recognizing that she was and is not just “ours,” that her legacy, as her
life, are ultimately her own. If this series started with Monroe’s death, it
certainly should end with that vital perspective on her life.
Annual
birthday series starts this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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