"WHO'S THE BLONDE? Who's the blonde? The blonde?" A swarm of men-lust or dollar signs in their eyes-clamors to know at a 1950 screening of The Asphalt Jungle, featuring the newly minted Marilyn Monroe. As Joyce Carol Oates writes the scene in her 2000 novel Blonde (a film adaptation by Andrew Dominik arrives this fall, starring Ana de Armas), that word hangs in the air: a metonym for Monroe's experience of being harangued, adored, and frayed to the very cortex, a hazard of preserving her self-described "pillow-case white."
This story is from the October 2022 edition of Vanity Fair US.
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This story is from the October 2022 edition of Vanity Fair US.
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