Television - Andrew Billen picks over the remains of two 20th-century icons
Marilyn Monroe, who died aged 36, would have been 72 this year. Janis Joplin, dead at 29, would be 57. And still we cannot get enough of them. Not of their work, which has dated as rapidly as most of "classical" pop culture, but of their deaths. "People who die young get their lives read backwards," counselled a contributor to BBC2's Reputations on Joplin, which at least heeded the warning.
On the other hand, ITV's ghoulish portrait of Monroe went in for the kill - or could that just be, after all, her accidental death or suicide? The first of a new strand of Saturday night documentaries under the heading The Final Day (11pm), its title implied that it was going to be more post-mortem than biography. Monroe's last 24 hours - staked out by X-File type datelines such as "8am, Saturday, 4 August 1962, Los Angeles" - turned out, however, to be simply the pegs on which the well-wrung facts of her life were hung out to dry.
The producer-director Peter Jamieson wasted far too much time, for example, establishing that Monroe was, you'll never guess, glamorous. Despite the best efforts of no dimmer an eminence than Norman Mailer ("She had the most adorable persona of any movie star ever . . ."), the only new insight offered here came from John Kennedy's hairdresser, a whale of a teasy-weasy named Mickey Song, who tended to her hair the night of the president's birthday party and told us that, although it was beautiful, "it could have been conditioned a little more". She was one of the most attainable sex goddesses ever, spending much of her early career on the casting couch. Henry Weinstein, the producer of her last film, presciently called Something's Got to Give, and one of those legions who now claim to have turned her down, maintained that sex was important to her only as a means of connecting: "I don't think she enjoyed it herself."
Her final Saturday was a dull one: meetings with her press agent, sessions with her therapist. As the hour of her death in the early hours of Sunday got nearer, the programme replaced the factual dullness with speculative sensation. "I think somebody done her in," her masseur Ralph Roberts opined, but had no more idea than anyone else who that somebody might be, although those perennial usual suspects, the Kennedys, got a name-check. But if it was murder, then how was the barbiturate overdose applied? Contrary to rumour, the autopsy revealed no needle mark on her body. So the crockumentary skulked off under the crossfire of competing theories, the most unpleasant of which claimed that a poisoned enema, used as a sex aid, was, as 'twere, the smoking gun.
For men, Monroe was the century's ultimate sex symbol. Joplin, the ugly duckling whose stage gyrations proclaimed that plain girls liked sex too, was an important symbol of sexuality for women. In the last in another gripping series of Reputations (Tuesday, 9pm), she was quoted by the rock journalist David Dalton as saying that she wanted to be a star like Marilyn Monroe, as eerily predictive a statement as the article in Rolling Stone that called her the Judy Garland of rock.
The strength of Jenny Abbot's series is that her directors are expected to have a theory about their subjects, rather than simply present a guided tour. Thus Anthony Eden's dodgy gall bladder got the blame for Suez, and Christopher Morris's film placed the blame for Joplin's death on her home town. The blues might have taken the girl out of Port Arthur, Texas, but it failed to take Port Arthur, a deeply conventional southern oil town, out of the girl. The air there stank of rotten eggs and, metaphorically, rotten eggs were what the frat boys threw at the spotty, overweight, pro-black and generally alarming ("she wore men's shirts outside her pants") Joplin.
At the time, she just said "Fuck you!"; but when she returned for a tenth anniversary high-school reunion shortly before her death, it became clear from her upset response to reporters' faux-concerned questions that subsequent fame had not compensated her for the absence of a prom-night date. Deep down, Joplin wanted the approval of Port Arthur. She was an inveterate letter-writer to her parents and, after her first brush with amphetamine addiction, she returned home to them to recuperate and to prepare to marry. Had the fiance to whom she sent home-made pralines ever posted her an engagement ring in return, she might be leading a life of domestic tedium to this day.
The woman who on stage made love to 25,000 people a night went to bed for the very last time alone, which is probably true of Monroe, too. But, unlike the Monroe documentary's rumours of a "dark figure coming and going", Reputations hardly bothered to discuss the gossip that Joplin may have had company. Perhaps in consequence, by averting its eyes from her death, the film got very much closer to its subject's life than ITV's documentary did. "The mystery that surround Marilyn's last day may never be resolved, but her image lives on," The Final Day concluded - if you could call that a conclusion.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
Scars of Sweet Paradise: the life and times of Janis Joplin, by Alice Echols, is published by Virago (£18.99)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
