60 Minutes Special: A Living For The Dead

Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Elvis are dead and now, so is Michael Jackson. But as Steve Kroft reports, they are very much alive when it comes to earning money for their estates.

Visit the 60 Minutes website here to watch the story.

New Marilyn Monroe Book Out Soon: "All Is Vanity"

MARILYN AND JUDY'S LAST PRESS AGENT SAYS, “IT’S ALL TRUE”

“There I was - standing outside the yellow police “Do Not Cross” tape.” Dawn was breaking over the Hollywood hills. How was I going to handle this pack of hungry reporters? “Mr. Selsman, can you tell us what happened?” “Mike, how did she die?” “Was it suicide?” “What time was the body discovered?” “Michael, was anyone with her?”

I was in front of the most famous bungalow at that moment in the world, 12305 5th Helena Drive, in Brentwood. It was the last house Marilyn Monroe ever lived in. And I am, by attrition, her last press agent. Her body had been wheeled, lifeless, covered with a sheet, into a coroner’s van. “Mr. Selsman, Mr. Selsman,” I could hear the reporters’ questions echoing in my ears, the flash bulbs going off. I remembered back to the first time I ever met Marilyn Monroe.”

New World Digital Publishing is pleased to announce the publication of Michael Selsman's "All is Vanity," a never-before-told look at Hollywood through the eyes of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland's last press agent. Selsman represented such mega-stars as all three Fondas, Jimmy Stewart, James Mason, Rock Hudson, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Sellers, Cary Grant, and many others. Michael also produced several Hollywood films, and was a producer and executive at Twentieth Century-Fox, MGM, Universal, and Paramount Pictures.

"All is Vanity" is a must read for anyone who loves the glamour days of old Hollywood and those that lived in it.

Price $14.99 plus shipping and handling. For wholesale orders, please contact cmavromatis@nwdigitalinc.com directly or purchase from Ingram Publishing Services.

Marilyn Monroe on The Misfits Set

Just a simple shot of Marilyn on the set of The Misfits, her final completed film. We can only imagine what she was contemplating when this shot was taken.

Marilyn Monroe Art Created with Paintball Guns & Paint

An Andy Warhol styled Marilyn Monroe portrait has been created by Colombian pop artist Bon Yurt and friends using but paintball guns and paint.

Two words: "How cool!"

View this YouTube video clip to see the artwork being created.

www.bonyurt.com

Monroe & Fitzgerald Will Be on West End in Marilyn & Ella

Bonnie Greer's Marilyn & Ella, a musical play about pop culture icons Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, which originally premiered at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 2008, is to make its West End debut in three Sunday performances at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, Nov. 15, 22 and 29.

The play is directed by Colin McFarlane, and features Suzie Kennedy as Monroe. It is produced by 4th Wall Entertainment and Neil Eckersley and Paul Spicer for Speckulation Entertainment.

According to press materials, Marilyn Monroe quit Hollywood for New York at the height of her fame in 1955 in search of something more real. During this time she immersed herself in the underground jazz bars of New York and for the very first time got to hear Ella Fitzgerald perform live. Monroe was reportedly blown away and promptly called the owner of her favorite L.A. club, Mocambo, and told him that she would sit in the front row of his club every night for a week if he lifted the color ban and allowed Fitzgerald to sing in his nightclub. He agreed, the ban was lifted, and the rest is history. Fitzgerald was later quoted as saying, "I owe Marilyn a debt."

Greer's play explores how Fitzgerald, one of the greatest music artists of the 20th century came to worship Monroe, the most beautiful woman in the world, not for her external looks but for the individual inside that few in the wider world ever caught a glimpse of. Interspersed with hits of the era, including "I Got Rhythm," "My Funny Valentine," "Every Time We Say Goodbye," "Mack the Knife" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."

Suzie Kennedy has performed all over the world, in films, music videos, documentaries and TV commercials. She has also recently appeared in an Italian film, "lo e Marilyn", about her heroine. The part of Ella Fitzgerald is still to be cast.

Bonnie Greer is a playwright, author and critic. She has been a regular contributor to TV's "Newsnight Review" and "Question Time". Her latest novel "Entropy" was published in March 2009.

Director Colin McFarlane has appeared as actor in numerous theatre, TV and film roles including Commissioner Loeb in "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight". He is also a prolific voiceover artist and is currently the voice of ITV's new Saturday night entertainment show "The Cube".

To book tickets, contact the box office on 0844 412 4658, or visit http://www.marilynandella.com/.

My Interview With The Irish Independent News: Some Like It Hotter

I was contacted recently by Caitriona Palmer regarding an interview on Marilyn Monroe (of course) and the recently published book "The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe" by Randy Taraborrelli. Palmer writes for the Irish Independent News.

I've not read the book by Taraborrelli (though I've already read several reviews and have heard from many others that it leaves much to be desired) and therefore really couldn't comment on any of the questions specific to the book. However, as always, I was happy to chat about Marilyn and the impact I believe she's had on popular culture across the world. The entire article is posted below, and can be found online here.

She has been dead for nearly 50 years but the spectre of Marilyn Monroe continues to haunt bookshelves and best- seller lists across America. Ever since she died of a drug overdose in 1962, the iconic actress has been immortalised in pop culture mythology as America's ultimate -- but most tragic -- beauty.

Since her lonely death at the age of 36, hundreds of books and articles have been penned about her life and loves. Scores of documentaries have dissected every detail of her three failed marriages and her chronic dependency on drugs. And an entire memorabilia empire worth millions of dollars has risen in her wake.

And yet, despite this deluge of information, the public still wants more.

A new book heralded as yet another "definitive biography" about the enigmatic actress has just hit bookshelves in America, promising readers "explosive" new details about Monroe's life, particularly her alleged affair with slain president John F Kennedy.

Written by celebrity biographer J Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe claims to uncover new details about Monroe's tortured relationship with her mentally ill mother and her troubled childhood and adolescence.

The book also alleges that celebrated singer Frank Sinatra -- who enjoyed an on-off romance with the Some Like It Hot actress in the early 1960s -- could have saved Monroe's life had he not thrown her out of his house less than two weeks before her death amid fears she might die in his company.

This week, Taraborrelli's book was ranked eleventh on the New York Time's prestigious bestseller list.

However, some of America's most prominent book critics expressed disappointment with the biography, pointing out that Taraborrelli had failed -- despite his claims -- to reveal any previously hidden gems about Monroe's life.

"One reads doggedly through more than 500 pages of text and appendices hoping for some flash of insight, something to justify all the hours Taraborrelli spent cobbling this together, but not once does such a moment arrive," wrote veteran Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley in one withering attack.

"Someone who knows nothing about Monroe's life and legend will find the essential facts here, but no pleasure is to be derived from Taraborrelli's recital of them."

But to millions of people across the world, it scarcely matters what salacious details each new book on Monroe brings. For those who celebrate the actress as the enduring epitome of feminine beauty, sexuality and vulnerability, her legacy has lost none of its appeal.

"Marilyn set the standard for beauty in the 1950s and early 1960s, and she still sets the standard today. We often hear about starlets and celebrities being compared to Marilyn. Her look and style are imitated in red-carpet fashions and photoshoots," Scott Fortner, a recognised expert on Marilyn Monroe and one of the world's leading collectors of Monroe memorabilia, told the Weekend Review.

"It's amazing to think that this superstar from 50 years ago still reigns as one of the most beautiful women in history."

Taraborrelli, who in the past has written biographies about Madonna, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor, based his research on extensive interviews with many close associates of Monroe, including some of the secret service agents assigned to protect JFK in the 1960s. In addition, he accessed previously unseen files, including unpublished interviews and notes from 1950s reporters.

For a public with a seemingly insatiable appetite for salacious details about the starlet's life, the book offers alleged details about Monroe's relationship with JFK.

In previous biographies it was said that Monroe and the late president enjoyed an intimate and lengthy affair that spanned several months but according to Taraborrelli, "what Marilyn really shared with JFK was either one or two nights of probable passion".

In one of the book's more revealing passages, Taraborrelli writes how the president asked Monroe for her telephone number at a dinner party thrown by his sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and her Hollywood actor husband, Peter Lawford, in New York in February 1962.

According to Taraborrelli, JFK called Marilyn the very next day and invited her to meet him at the home of Bing Crosby in Palm Springs a month later.

At that meeting in Palm Springs, "there was no question in my mind that Marilyn and the President were together. They were having a good time. She'd had a lot to drink. It was obvious they were intimate and that they were staying there together for the night," said Philip Watson, a Los Angeles executive interviewed by Taraborrelli.

A secret service agent assigned to protect Kennedy that weekend confirmed the liaison to Taraborrelli but denied that the affair continued after Palm Springs.

"What we knew was that JFK and Marilyn had sex at Bing Crosby's, and that's it. We didn't think it was a big deal. He had sex with a lot of women. She was just one of many and it wasn't that noteworthy," the agent said.

"If there was more to it between them, they somehow managed to keep it from us -- and I don't think you can keep something like that from the secret service." But the affair was set to have terrible consequences. By this stage, Monroe was deeply unstable. Addicted to a cartload of potentially deadly narcotics, she had taken to injecting herself with barbiturates, a cocktail she laughingly referred to as her "vitamin shots".

Obsessed with her weight, she was relying on colonic irrigation for weight loss, often enduring multiple enemas in order to fit into a favourite dress

Drugged and unresponsive in the mornings, her make-up artist Allan Snyder would begin applying her make-up while she lay groggily in bed. "There was no other way," he said in the book. "It would take her so long to get up."

While the President filed his tryst with Monroe as "another notch -- albeit an impressive one -- on his bed stand" says Taraborrelli, the actress sunk further into a deep depression.

Seventeen days after the Palm Springs weekend, Monroe was found semi naked and "almost dead" in a drug-induced coma in her Brentwood home in Los Angeles.

A close associate of Monroe told Taraborrelli exactly what had gone wrong. "JFK. That's what was wrong. She'd just been jilted by the president of the United States. It was Kennedy. That's why. Kennedy."

Four months later, she was dead. Her housekeeper found Monroe lifeless and prone on her bed clutching her telephone in her right hand. Over 15 pill bottles stood on her night stand.

Over time, despite the ruling of death by drug overdose, countless conspiracy theories would abound about whether her death was suicide or murder.

Since that day, Monroe has been regularly listed as one of the top 10 earning celebrities who are no longer alive, earning more in death than during her life.

For Fortner, who has been collecting Monroe memorabilia all his life -- and who now owns, among others, the silk cape she wore to James Dean's East of Eden premiere in 1955 -- the actress's rags-to-riches struggle remains her enduring legacy.

Her touching vulnerability and tragic demise may explain, says Fortner, why so many people continue to be fascinated by Monroe and why they still line up to buy books about her life.

"She continues to hold such a fascination in the hearts and minds of the public worldwide because people are intrigued with the Marilyn Monroe legend," said Fortner.

"She had a difficult childhood, and worked hard to become an actress. She was the biggest star of her lifetime. Her life ended tragically and too soon, and the mystery surrounding her death is still discussed and often hotly debated.

"We all want to know the truth, but probably never will. It keeps us interested."

Dr Thomas Noguchi: LA Coroner Confidential

Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate: Dr Thomas Noguchi, Hollywood's coroner to the stars, tells all about the dark age of Hollywood homicide.

By John Preston
Telegraph.co.uk

As you talk to Thomas Noguchi, it’s hard not to glance down at his hands. He has long, delicate fingers and as he talks he folds them together. When he closes his eyes, it looks as if he is in prayer. And what a strange, often terrible, story these hands have to tell. Perhaps none stranger than what happened on the morning of Sunday, August 4 1962 when Noguchi, then a junior medical examiner, reported for work at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.

As soon as he arrived, he was told that the Chief Medical Examiner wanted him to perform an autopsy on a young woman. She had been found eight hours earlier in a small house in Brentwood – the victim, it appeared, of a drugs overdose. There was, Noguchi was warned, a good deal of press interest in the case. He was, he says, rather taken aback by the request. In prominent cases, the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Theodore Curphey, invariably conducted the autopsy himself. But for reasons that still puzzle him, this did not happen. When Noguchi looked at the police report, he saw that the dead woman was 5ft 4in tall and weighed just over 10 stone. Various bottles of pills, including an empty bottle of the sleeping pill Nembutal, had been found close to her body. Her name meant nothing to him. It was only after he had read the report that someone told him that she was better known as Marilyn Monroe. ‘Even then,’ says Noguchi, ‘I didn’t think for a moment he meant the movie star. I just assumed it was someone else who had the same name.’ But when he walked into the autopsy room and lifted up the sheet that had been placed over the naked body, any doubts were swept away. When he’s asked how Marilyn Monroe looked in death, Noguchi, who has a fondness for poetry, quotes the Latin poet, Petrarch: ‘It’s folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face.’ At the time, though, it’s safe to assume that Petrarch was not uppermost on his mind. ‘Of course, I felt pressure, but I remember thinking very clearly that I must make sure I was not distracted by who she was.’

First of all, Noguchi did what he always did. He took out his magnifying glass and examined every inch of the dead woman’s body. ‘When you are a coroner, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim.’ He was looking, principally, for needle marks in case she had been injected with drugs. Also, of course, for marks indicating physical violence. Noguchi found no needle marks, but just above Monroe’s left hip, he did find a dark reddish-blue bruise. Judging by its colour, the bruise was fresh rather than old. Under the External Examination section of his autopsy report, Noguchi noted: ‘The unembalmed body is that of a 36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female… the scalp is covered with bleach blonde hair… a slight ecchymotic area is noted on the left hip and left side of lower back.’ He then began the internal examination. It was this that has given future generations of conspiracy theorists sufficient room in which to exercise their imaginations. In Monroe’s stomach, Noguchi found no visual evidence of any pills. Nor was there any sign of the yellow dye with which Nembutal capsules were coated – and which might have been expected to stain her stomach lining. All he found was what he describes as ‘a milky substance – there were no food particles or anything like that’. Along with samples of blood, the internal organs were sent off for toxicology tests. Several hours after he had completed the autopsy, Noguchi received the toxicology report. The tests on the blood showed 8.0 mg per cent of chloral hydrate – another sleeping pill – while the liver tests revealed 13.0 mg per cent of pentobarbital (or Nembutal). Both of these were well above the fatal dose. However, Noguchi admits he made a mistake at this point. The toxicology tests had only been performed on the blood and the liver – not on the other internal organs. He should, he feels now, have insisted that all the organs were examined. ‘I am sure that this could have cleared up a lot of the subsequent controversy, but I didn’t follow through as I should have.’ As a junior member of staff, he says, he didn’t want to risk displeasing anyone. At a press conference later that day, his boss, Dr Curphey, announced that Monroe had committed suicide. Noguchi did not disagree with his conclusion. None the less, he was sufficiently troubled by the oversight to go back to the toxicology lab a few weeks later and ask if they could test the other organs that he’d sent over. But when he did, he was told that the organs had already been disposed of as the case had been marked as closed. ‘I think that was a great shame,’ he says, speaking very deliberately. ‘Not suspicious. I’m not saying that; it was a perfectly normal procedure. But still a shame.’ Noguchi’s autopsy was widely derided when it was published. The journalist Anthony Scaduto called it ‘one of the weirdest autopsy reports ever confected’, while Norman Mailer in his 1973 book, Marilyn: A Novel Biography, openly questioned Noguchi's motives. ‘The word was out to keep this thing a suicide, not to make it a murder… If you’re the coroner and you feel the official mood is to find evidence of a suicide, you wouldn’t want to come in with murder.’ Almost 60 years on, Noguchi, now 82, sits in his salmon pink mock Tudor house in Los Angeles and all this talk of his having come under pressure makes him wave his hands dismissively. He believes now – as he believed then – that Monroe’s death was suicide. As for the purportedly suspicious aspects to her death, he carefully picks them off one by one.

There was, he says, nothing strange about the fact that no pills were found in Monroe’s stomach. A habitual pill user – which she was – would have had no problem digesting both the Nembutal and the chloral hydrate. As a result, he wouldn’t have expected to have found them in her stomach – they would have been pumped straight through into the intestine.

What’s more, anyone familiar with Nembutal would know that the yellow dye on the pills doesn’t run when it is swallowed. As for the bruise on her hip, the cause of that remains a mystery – albeit one that may well have a perfectly innocent explanation.

And what about Dr Curphey’s insistence that Noguchi perform the autopsy? ‘That is something I still don’t understand,’ he admits. ‘I have thought about it a lot over the years. Maybe he just thought that I would do a good job.’ But for all that, it’s plain that Noguchi has a weirdly ambivalent attitude towards Monroe’s death. On two occasions, he’s called for the case to be reopened – a bit odd for someone who insists there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding it. Perhaps he just misses the attention that the case – along with several other almost equally high-profile ones – brought him.

After Monroe’s death, Noguchi went on to become the Chief Medical Examiner for Los Angeles – a position he held from 1967 to 1982. He was also the inspiration for the hit television series Quincy. As the Chief Medical Examiner, Noguchi was to prove a controversial figure, frequently accused of being a keen – even slavish – publicity hound. In 1983 he published a biography, Coroner to the Stars. But what no one – not even his many detractors – can deny is that during his time at the top, Noguchi presided over a kind of Dark Age of Hollywood homicide.

Six years after Monroe’s death came the murder of her alleged lover, Robert F Kennedy. The moment when Noguchi heard the words ‘Kennedy’s been shot!’ left him, he says, more shaken than at any other time in his career.

But this time he was more experienced, more determined not to get anything wrong. ‘I knew that all kinds of mistakes had been made with the autopsy on John F Kennedy and I wanted to make sure everything was absolutely right.’

At 8.30pm on June 5 1968, 22 hours after Kennedy had been shot, the phone rang in his office. When Noguchi picked it up, he was told, ‘Senator Kennedy’s brain waves have gone flat.’ The first question Noguchi asked when he was shown Kennedy’s body was, ‘Where are the hair shavings?’ The surgeons who had operated on Kennedy had partially shaved his head and Noguchi knew, or suspected, these hair shavings could contain critical evidence.

When he came to start the autopsy, he did something he had never done before: he asked for Kennedy’s face to be covered with a towel. ‘I had such admiration for him, such hope that he would become President, that I did not want to be influenced by my feelings.’

Noguchi discovered that one bullet had passed through Kennedy’s right armpit, another – which he recovered – had lodged in his spinal column, while a third – the one that killed him – had penetrated his skull just to the left of his right ear and subsequently shattered.

A day after he’d done the autopsy, Noguchi was called by a criminalist at the LAPD who said that soot had been found in the hair shavings. ‘I really sat up in my chair when I heard that. This was a very important discovery because all the witnesses had reported that the gunman [Sirhan Sirhan] had been at least a yard away from Kennedy when he shot him. But soot meant that a gun had been discharged from a much closer range.’

To the surprise of his colleagues, Noguchi asked if he could be provided with seven pigs’ ears. Once these had been fetched from a local butcher, he took them to the Police Academy for ballistics tests. The patterns of soot on the pigs’ ears suggested that the shot that killed Kennedy had been fired from just three inches away. Either all the witnesses had been wrong, or else there had been more than one gunman.

Even now, Noguchi is unsure what really happened. His professional instinct, he says, tells him that Sirhan Sirhan carried out the assassination on his own. ‘Based on the available information, I’m certain there was just one gunman, but I’m also aware that, like theories of the universe, things keep changing.’

Less than a year later, on August 9 1969, Noguchi was called to 10050 Cielo Drive, an isolated house in Bel Air, where three bodies had been found. Among them was that of the actress Sharon Tate. One man, Voyteck Frykowski, had been stabbed 51 times, clubbed with a blunt instrument 13 times and shot twice. ‘I have never seen such savagery applied to one person.’ On the bottom of the front door, scrawled in blood, Noguchi found the single word, ‘Pig’.

The LAPD were convinced that this was a drugs-related murder, possibly executed by the Mafia. Noguchi, however, wasn’t so sure. ‘My experience with Mafia killings was that they are done very quickly – the killers don’t hang around. But in this case, they must have been in the house for about two hours. Also, the repeated stabbings to the bodies, even after death, suggested that the murderers may well have been high on amphetamines. I wondered if some pseudo-religious group had been responsible. I also thought it was possible they might strike again.’

The next day, a married couple, Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, were found dead in the Los Feliz district of LA. They too had been stabbed repeatedly. Written in blood on the fridge door were the words, ‘Helter Skelter’.

Despite the similarities, the LAPD refused to believe that the murders were related. Together with a psychiatrist, Dr Frederick Hacker, Noguchi was convinced they were.

On August 16 Charles Manson was arrested as part of an investigation into a stolen car ring. Subsequently released, he was then rearrested in mid-October following the discovery of evidence linking him and his ‘family’ of dope-addled acolytes to both sets of killings.

Over the next few years, Noguchi performed autopsies on Janis Joplin (heroin overdose, 1970), Natalie Wood (drowned, 1981), William Holden (fell over while drunk, 1981) and John Belushi (heroin overdose, 1982).

Today, Noguchi pads around his office in his stockinged feet, a small bespectacled man with grey eyes and trousers hitched high up his waist. All around the walls are framed certificates testifying to his eminence as a coroner. But having spent so long in the presence of death, he has no intention of submitting to it until the last possible moment. ‘I intend to live to 100,’ he says.

As to what – if anything – comes afterwards, Noguchi is keeping his options open. ‘For someone who originally comes from Japan, it is not difficult to believe in a departed person living somewhere else. It’s a comforting thought anyway.’ But is it a comforting thought that you actually believe in, or just hope for?

He smiles. ‘I think more like a hope.’

View this article online here.

New Marilyn Monroe Paintings Cause A Stir During Oscars

Displayed in time for the 2009 Academy Awards, recent paintings of Marilyn Monroe by the artist Ludvic show a new side of the famous movie star with the artists expressive interpretations of her image.

The mesmerizing images are installed at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel & Spa in Hollywood, CA whose clientele especially enjoyed the paintings during the Academy Awards. According to the Dan Shaughnessy, Director of Marketing, “People were literally waiting in line to have their picture taken with Ludvic’s Marilyn. The paintings created a lot of excitement.”

In his Resurrecting Marilyn portrait series, Ludvic — whose works have been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries — interprets Marilyn’s beauty in a wide range of styles and sizes. He has been working on the Marilyn series since the mid-1980’s and has produced numerous sketches and paintings. His two most recent paintings are on display at the Hotel.

When asked why he is painting a series on Marilyn Monroe, the artist replied, “Marilyn communicated the essence of female beauty. She loved the camera and it loved her back. I try to capture the many sides of her beauty and interpret it on my canvases and sketches.”

Ludvic also creates portraits on a commission basis and creates abstract paintings and sculptures. The artist just completed a show at Kouros Gallery, New York, NY, and is creating new works for his upcoming exhibits. For more information you may visit the website at www.Ludvic.com.

Where: The Renaissance Hollywood Hotel & Spa, 1755 N. Highland Avenue, Hollywood, CA

The Marilyn Monroe Television Set

A collector by the name of Michael Bennett-Levy is auctioning his collection of early technology memorabilia at Bonhams in England on September 30, 2009. Included in his collection is a console television from 1954.

Bennett-Levy says about this television: "I used to call this television 'The Meat Safe', until one day a retired television engineer saw it and informed me that it was known as 'The Marilyn Monroe set' in the trade!"

About the unit: A Defiant (Co-op brand) type TR1455/B3 television consolette, with live Plessey chassis, 1954, No. 21097, 14-inch screen with pale green mask, unusual brown and green Bakelite controls including 13-channel select, behind pull-down flap which retreats under the set, in walnut veneered cabinet with incised diamond decoration to front, inset handle, on tapering legs with small castors - 37in. (94cm) high.

To view the auction lot online, click here.

Drama.Queens.Drama. New York Art Show Features Marilyn Monroe

Sarit Chalamish Gallery is pleased to present “Drama. Queens.Drama.”, a solo art show featuring Michael Harris’ unique paintings and collages.

Taking a close look at high-brow celebrity figures, Harris finds iconic women on the edge. His work presents moments of modern tragedy by exploring the rise and fall of our modern day female celebrities, thus taking us on an unsettling journey through celebrity culture. He also illuminates culture’s obsessions with celebrities, the individual Godlike beings, particularly in today’s digital, mediadriven
era.

From Marilyn Monroe, Princess Dianna and Anna Nicole Smith, through Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, to Rihanna, the story unfolds over and over again, part tragic, part humorous. Our culture has mastered the trick: first, idolizing and enhancing these icons, then, in a reverse process, reducing them to being all human again.

It is through those celebrity figures, their star quality and luminosity that we satisfy our craving for a perfect goddess we can admire. Then, in an already-written script, we, as well as the Gods and the media, experience boredom, watch them go on trials, or purely enjoy their crucifixion.

Australian-born Harris, who has been referred to by some as the young Alex Katz, is fascinated by this cyclical phenomenon and uses magazines’ paper clips to recreate bold images of said celebrities on his canvases. He captures these women icons either as individuals or in a dynamic setting, mirroring into our own vulnerability, and our desire for perfection and destruction. Thus, in mortalizing the immortal the artist unmasks his viewers.

September 10-October 4, 2009

Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 6-8 pm

Sarit Chalamish Gallery, 547 West 27th St. (5th floor)

www.chalamishgallery.com

Marilyn Spotting: Lignano Sabbiadoro (Italy)

Laura sent me these photos of Marilyn from Lignano Sabbiadoro, a town and commune in the province of Udine, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of north-eastern Italy. It is one of the main summer resorts in northern Italy.

Thank you Laura!

Bikini Shop:


Clothing Store:


Have you taken photos of Marilyn Monroe during your travels? Would you like to share them with the world on The Marilyn Monroe Collection Blog? Forward to me at Scott@MarilynMonroeCollection.com.