Mischanneling Marilyn
Between them, Lindsay Lohan (21) and Bert Stern (79) have inhabited planet Earth for a century, but all those years have not produced an iota of the good judgment it would have taken for them not to recreate “Marilyn Monroe’s Last Sitting” for New York Magazine this week.
Grave-robbing is rife in the celebrity world, but the desperation of a troubled young woman and an aging once-talented photographer plumbs new depths of exploitation. Lohan has none of Marilyn’s magic, and Stern is parodying the artist he was 46 years ago.
My revulsion is not objective. As someone who spent a week in 1955 working with Marilyn and the gifted Ed Feingersh, both of whom died in their thirties, as he created classic photographs of her, I am prejudiced in the extreme.
But for anyone who wants to get a sense of what Marilyn Monroe was really like, there is the YouTube presentation of some of Feingersh’s pictures here and, for the truly patient, the story of how they were taken here.
Marilyn was no Lindsay Lohan.
Cross-posted from my blog.
Don’t sell Lohan short. She was able to carry a movie when she was 11 or something and then again at around 18. Clearly she’s a gifted screen romantic comedy performer. I think in fact, troubled tho she obviously is, she’s also quite talented and a real screen presence. I hope she gets a chance to fully realize her talent.
That said, the NY mag shoot was the worst sort of exploitation of a young woman desperately in need of a leg up to revive her already flagging career. In fact, I’m stunned by what a piece of trash the magazine has become under Adam Moss. When he was ass’t ed at the NYT mag he was the first call every time an EIC slot opened in a national mag, and he turned every job down until NY mag which, under his leadership, has become a slightly more erudite version of the Bravo TV network–the worst kind of effete gossip, tales of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, really just awful dreck dressed up in enough trappings of intelligence to convince the wives of people making more than $300K a year that reading it is somehow different from watching E!. The horror, the horror.