Here's a comment from a male.
Maybe the world can tolerate an aging Fred Astaire, but the world can also tolerate an aging Lauren Bacall or an aging Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. But they're the rare exceptions. Hollywood sucks in, chews up, and spits out hundreds of young and beautiful performers every year who are never seen on the silver screen again after a single appearance. The whole place is young-and-beautiful crazy, and it's not limited to women.
Ann wrote:
In my opinion, the real Marilyn Monroe was a truly talented woman and a really fine singer and actress. Even so, she and Anna Nicole Smith came to the same end. The world can tolerate an aging Fred Astaire, Mick Jagger or Harrison Ford just fine, but could it have tolerated an old-looking Marilyn Monroe? I think not. And my guess is that Marilyn didn't think it could. So this talented, humorous and charming woman had nowhere to go but to her grave at thirty-six.
Ann is of the opinion (or guess, as she puts it) that Marilyn Monroe committed suicide at age thirty-six because she didn't have anywhere else to go. What Ann doesn't bring up is that Marilyn was, from the start of her Hollywood career, completely unconvinced of her own place in that world, and she was so unsure of her own talent that she was often unable to watch her own movies before the critical reviews came out. She was insecure to the point of needing applause and the approval of strangers on a daily - if not momentary - basis. It wasn't fear of the inevitable loss of her youth and looks and "sizzle" that pursued her like a banshee, it was fear of the loss of the adoration of "her public."
And in the last years of her life, she was so strung out on booze and drugs that she was unable to work. The last movie she tried to appear in was going to be a remake of a Cary Grant vehicle from about 1940 co-starring Dean Martin, but Marilyn was absent from the set more often than she was there, and when she was there she missed her marks and forgot her lines so often that the footage was unusable. Just about the only interesting footage of her that came out of that disaster (the picture was canceled about a month into the shooting schedule) was an extended nude swimming scene. I've never seen the whole thing, just quick excerpts of it, but those who have seen it say that she looked as good then as she had when she'd posed for Playboy almost two decades earlier. Truly, she had nothing to worry about in the looks department, and her acting skills were top-shelf.
Marilyn was indeed a wonderfully talented woman whose abilities were often ignored for the sake of showing off her sex appeal. You can see her near the top of her game in the movie "River of No Return" with Robert Mitchum. When you see the long shots on the river raft, know that because the new Technicolor cameras showed facial details even at that distance, she had to do her own stunts, many of which were quite dangerous. And she held her own in the scenes with the intense and powerful Mitchum.
Paris Hilton was first famous for being heir to the Hilton hotel fortune. Then she became famous as the Hilton heir who partied hard, made "private" porn videos, and liked to show off her most private parts in the most public places. Her accomplishments pale beside those of Marilyn Monroe. No way Paris could go toe-to-toe with Robert Mitchum, much less Sanjaya or even any of the Backstreet Boys. If not for her nearly inexhaustible fortune, we might never have known her name or seen her blank stare pouting at the camera.
But we have to remember that Paris is like Marilyn in one vital respect - her self-image is wrapped up in how people perceive her and not in anything she has accomplished in her life. As long as we the public pay attention to her antics, she'll keep showing off. But when the attention grows thin, she'll do something else to regain the spotlight, because she thinks that without it she isn't worthy as a person. It's a trap many performers fall into, not just vapor-minded celebrities with more money than all of us put together.
So don't be angry with Paris. Judging from the comments in this thread (yes, I know, it's dangerous to generalize with so little data), I would put forth the premise that the ladies in our L&C fan community are far better adjusted to reality than Paris Hilton or Nicole Ritchie. We all like feedback and we all feel bereft without it, and negative feedback can sting, but it doesn't drive us to suicide or greater episodes of self-promotion or self-delusion. We can take comfort in the knowledge that when our looks go (mine never really got close enough to shake hands with), we'll still have our writing and our feedback to keep us warm at night.
