Word: marilyns
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...great performer, for starters. More than Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep, Madonna is the modern movie star because she has created her own roles: boy toy, Marilyn Monroe avatar, Penthouse pinup, sly feminist, scandal magnet. With docile avidity, the world has eyed this procession of Madonnas, each one an incendiary variation on the last. The gag is that despite some fine screen work, she has never quite made it in Hollywood, a failure of the moguls, who haven't figured out how to channel her charisma. She is not one to wait for other people to do her a favor...
...fond, wet rendition of Happy Birthday. But in the family scenes, among many others, one gets the sense of an actress playing, so coolly, with a moviegoer's expectations. Watch the star at the grave of her mother, who died when Madonna was five. Dolled up in modified Marilyn, she kneels and kisses the tombstone. Then she says she wants to be buried next to her mother and stretches out, comfy, on the ground. What's going on here? Is this a cemetery or a campsite? Spontaneous emotion or a piece of avant-garde performance art for the mass audience...
...family into real time, which is intolerant of the bright and ideal. The fracture set a pattern of sharp contradiction: the "brief shining moment" would give way to long, sordid aftermaths. Greek tragedy ("the curse of the Kennedys") would degenerate into sleazy checkout-counter revelations ("Jack and Bobby and Marilyn"). The serious lawmaker in Ted Kennedy would turn now and then into a drunken, overage, frat-house boor, the statesman into a party animal, the romance of the Kennedys into a smelly, toxic mess. The family patriarch, the oldest surviving Kennedy male, would revert to fat, sloppy baby...
Still gnawing at the community's conscience are the many missed signals of the danger that was lurking in Robert. "The Dreesmans were very private people who didn't inflict their problems on friends," says Midge Andreasen, wife of a state-supreme-court justice and a close friend of Marilyn's. "Some of us knew about the black hole of hatred in Robert. We should have involved ourselves more with the family...
...years ago, a train strike derailed Marilyn Manassee's plans to tour the Spanish countryside. Then, this winter, just when she was ready to try again, the Persian Gulf war came along, and she delayed putting her money down. "It was not fear of terrorism as much as uneasiness," says the retired music teacher from Denver. "It was the idea of spending this much money and having to look over my shoulder to see if it was safe." With the war over, Manassee is finally set to take her long-postponed trip. "I have been dreaming about this," she says...