Norma Jean and the Duke

by David Benjamin

“You have to be a man first before you’re a gentleman.”
—John Wayne, McClintock (1963)

MADISON, Wis.—A couple of women recently scolded me for broaching the question—sensitively, I thought—of whether, how and when a guy should compliment a gal on her appearance. In the news that very week, coincidentally, a wave of protest by women forced the relocation of a statue in Palm Springs.

The statue depicts Marilyn Monroe in a famous scene from Billy Wilder’s 1955 film, The Seven-Year Itch, in which a gust of wind from a Manhattan subway grate lifts and flutters the skirt of Marilyn’s exquisite white summer dress, exposing her legs and—briefly—her undies. Objections to the “Forever Marilyn” statue centered on its “sexist overtones” and its prurient objectification of women.

As a sort of mental exercise, I conflated my apparently misogynist faux pas with the Palm Springs controversy and ended up almost overwhelmed by ironies and ambiguities.

Foremost among my ironies is that the notion of somehow erasing from the public and historic consciousness the image of Marilyn in that billowing skirt is inconceivable. This scene, in a movie otherwise dated and overrated, is a symbolic freeze-frame of Marilyn Monroe’s impact on film and the broader American culture. It will live beyond the prudes who have taken offense at a glimpse of Marilyn’s wonderful legs and lollipop panties. More important is the uninhibited pleasure of that scene, in which Marilyn luxuriates in the cool wind wafting up her skirt and celebrates for herself and every moviegoer her liberation from the middle-class hypocrisy of ladylike modesty.

Objectification? In those days there wasn’t a person on earth over the age of six who was not subjectively aware of Marilyn Monroe. She was a brand more familiar than Standard Oil or Revlon. She was a role model, a smalltown Norma Jean who lived the American dream, became world-famous and suffered all the trials of her meteoric rise. Hollywood typecast her as a sexpot but she transcended that diminishment by proving herself richly talented and versatile. With equal aplomb, she could play the ingenue or the vamp. She could sing, she could dance, she could charm and she could intimidate. She was a deft comedienne and a haunting tragedienne.

When I think about how we lost her when she was still so young, I wonder if it was her stereotype—as a sex goddess—that killed her. The term that comes to mind is “all woman.” But was she all woman? Is anyone so deeply immersed in one’s sex that no conflicting qualities contaminate the homogenized whole.

If Marilyn is our “all woman” archetype, then her Hollywood “all man” counterpart would has to be … who else? John Wayne. In a scene almost as iconic as Marilyn’s flying skirt, Wayne, at the end of McClintock (1963), bends his domineering wife, Maureen O’Hara (in her undies), over his lap and spanks her. If ever there was a hundred-percent manly man …
… except for that walk.

In The Birdcage (1996), when Nathan Lane, as the flamingly gay Albert, perfectly mimics the Duke’s distinctive gait, it suddenly dawns on Albert’s partner Armand (Robin Williams) that John Wayne walked more like a girl than a gunslinger through more than a hundred rampantly macho movies.

If the Duke wasn’t all man, was Marilyn all woman? Or do we need to recalculate?

The current example that comes unavoidably, unfortunately to mind is the most insistently virile president in U.S. history, Donald Trump. Didn’t he weep manly tears when his podiatrist told him his feet were irreparably deformed and he would never live his dream of romping through the swamp and fighting Victor Charlie? Didn’t Stormy Daniels throw herself at his feet begging for the Best Sex of Her Life? Didn’t he drag Willie Brown from the flaming wreckage of a helicopter crash? Didn’t he catch the assassin’s bullet in his teeth, spit it out and lead a million-strong crowd in a spontaneous sing-along of “My Way”?

But then, in the seclusion of his gilded boudoir, doesn’t he also tint his pallor with chemical tan and brush a touch of mascara on his lashes? He moisturizes. He dyes his hair Marilyn-blonde, fluffs it up and sprays it into place with Herbal Essence. And he’s afraid to go out in the rain. Besides that, if he ever actually tried to spank Melania, would he even survive?

How much of a man is he, really? How much am I, or any man?

When I asked myself how seriously I’ve ever identified myself as male, I was stumped. Although I’ve never thought of myself as a woman, I recognize down deep a “feminine side” as definite and demonstrable as John Wayne’s girly walk. I’ve knitted. I sew. I cook and do dishes. I memorize poems. I write poems (although not well). I even moisturize.

Another movie comes to mind, Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man, filmed in 1964 about the struggles of a black man to make a living, create a family and achieve dignity in the Jim Crow South. The movie’s title evokes the signs carried by black workers in the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. They all read simply, “I AM A MAN”. The idea expressed by the strikers, articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and dramatized in Roemer’s film, was not about masculinity but humanity. These men—and their wives, mothers, sisters—had been deemed by America’s white ruling class, throughout history, as less than human.

I was born male but never thought much about it after that. I’m relieved that I never had to cope with gender ambivalence as I was growing up. But I know that if I regarded myself—proudly or shamefully—as “nothing but a man,” I would be reducing myself beyond recognition. It didn’t take genius for me, as I was growing up among too many adult males who drank too much and too many women who worked too hard, to figure that just being a man wasn’t enough.

It’s ironic that we tend to associate bigness with strident masculinity like that of Donald Trump. But a person unwilling to recognize a feminine side or to subjugate gender identity to the humbling, unifying androgyny of the human family is smaller than he—or she—looks.

With all that in mind, I tried to calculate in percentages how much of me is a man, how much partakes beneath my surface and in my sensibilities of the feminine and what share is genderless and simply, empathetically human.

I came up with three interesting numbers. When I recalculated, I got a different answer. So, I kept trying. The number kept changing until I realized that two plus two, in calculating the nebulous vagaries of gender and human identity, is never going to come out to exactly four—or even close.

The women who scolded me for my reflections on feminine beauty seized the opportunity to become, temporarily, a hundred-percent female. They used the moment, cathartically, to represent their sisterhood, styling me rhetorically as the symbol of a toxically macho community who objectify women and justify sexual violence. I’m sure their retorts were fun and I suspect that—at least with Ann—it didn’t last. It couldn’t last.

Some men, convinced by a lifetime of mothering and privilege, can afford to be permanently disagreeable. Women don’t have the option. Just as even the manliest men reveal their secret softness in how they walk or fuss with their hair, women have to now and then spit on the floor and punch the ceiling. But, soon enough, as a matter of survival, they go back to swallowing their anger and patiently navigating a human storm fomented, mostly, by men.

As Tammy sings, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.”