Marilyn Monroe at the Brooklyn Museum

If you share Ayn Rand’s admiration for Marilyn Monroe, you may enjoy this reflective article about a showing of Monroe photographs at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. It begins:

Daryl F. Zanuck, the movie mogul who controlled 20th Century Fox, once observed, ?I didn?t discover Marilyn Monroe. Nobody did. Marilyn Monroe discovered herself.?

She was indeed a self-creation. It is difficult to see the later Marilyn in the photos of the fresh-faced Norma Jeane Baker on the beach (photographer unknown, 1945) taken when she was only 19. By the end of her career ? in the photos of ?The Last Sitting? (1962) taken by Bert Stern ? she looks tired, perhaps drugged and obviously in pain. Just look at the eyes.

They were taken only two days before she died.

After her death, Marilyn became a tabula rasa for thinkers like Ayn Rand, who wrote, ?Anyone who has resented the good for being the good and given voice to it is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.?

See the full article for more information.