Blonde on Blonde
Norma Jeane Dougherty was a brunette. When an Army photographer spotted the teen-age war bride on an assembly line, he was charmed by her sweet smile and curvaceous figure. He asked her to pose for some photographs, and he recommended her to a modeling agency in Los Angeles.
The lady who ran the modeling agency suggested that Norma Jeane change her look. "Miss Snively kept insisting I become a blonde," Norma Jeane later recalled. "But I refused. I didn't want to bleach my hair. But she kept telling me, 'Norma Jeane, if you expect to go places, you've got to be a blonde.' "
Eventually she agreed and was sent to a Hollywood salon, where her auburn tresses were bleached a golden blonde. "When I saw myself in the mirror, it just wasn't the real me," she said.
But it did the trick. Norma Jeane became a fixture on magazine covers and cheesecake calendars. She quit her job at the factory, got a divorce from her sailor husband and landed a screen test at 20th Century Fox, where the newly crowned blonde was renamed Marilyn Monroe.
Almost forty years after her death, Monroe remains the archetypal Hollywood star. Her combination of innocence and sex appeal continues to influence the look and self-image of women around the world. But Monroe was hardly the first blonde to light up the silver screen. It's a cinematic tradition that stretches from Jean Harlow and Mae West to Reese Witherspoon in the new comedy "Legally Blonde."
In 1953, Monroe personified a gold-digging platinum bombshell in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." Yet the same story was first adapted as a silent film in 1928. In the early talkie era, both Harlow and West embodied the blonde as sexual predator. Their popularity inspired millions of ordinary women to douse their roots with peroxide and spawned dozens of Depression-era potboilers with the word "blonde" in the title.
The hip-swaying Monroe followed in the footsteps of "sweater girl" Lana Turner and later competed against blonde knock-offs like Mamie Van Doren and Jayne Mansfield. After Marilyn died, wholesome blonde Doris Day inherited Monroe's final project ("Something's Gotta Give," renamed "Move Over, Darling") and became the nation's biggest box-office attraction. Meanwhile, the blonde phenomenon went global, as France's Brigitte Bardot claimed the title of international sex kitten. Julie Christie represented the British empire, while Flower Power USA had Goldie Hawn, Mia Farrow and the briefly blonde Jane Fonda in "Barbarella."
In recent decades, blondes like Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cameron Diaz have been among the hottest actresses in Hollywood (although their coloring is decidedly more natural than Monroe's). Blonde actors like Leonardo DiCaprio have benefited from a softening of the "tall, dark and handsome" standard of maleness. And countless non-blondes like the Italian-American singer Madonna Ciccone have discovered what advertising has been saying for years: Blondes have more fun.
Anthropologists tell us that there are both scientific and cultural bases for our obsession with blondes. Humans are hard-wired to respond favorably to youthfulness and vitality. Light hair (and small features) are characteristic of newborn Caucasians, and the white-controlled media has trumpeted its standard of youthful beauty to the world. Yet blonde idolatry predates the movies. Ancient Roman women lightened their hair to compete with the Nordic girls whom the warriors brought back as captives. Blondes who represented purity were conspicuous in Euro-American folklore from Cinderella to Becky Thatcher. In Renaissance art (and in films like "King of Kings" and "The Last Temptation of Christ"), even the Jewish Jesus was depicted as fair-haired.
Devoutly Catholic film director Alfred Hitchcock was fascinated by the duality of blonde characters, by their capacity to convey both chastity and sexual abandon. His favorite blonde actresses included Grace Kelly (whom he called "a snow-covered volcano"), Kim Novak, Eva-Marie Saint and Tippi Hedren. Hedren, who starred in "The Birds" and "Marnie" learned the hard way that blondes can pay a heavy price for the expectations of others, as the strangely smitten Hitchcock subjected her to psychological abuse on the set of "Marnie" and stopped talking to her before the movie was finished.
Likewise, the deeply insecure Monroe spent her entire life trying to live up to the fantasies of men. Even though she honed her craft at the Actors Studio in New York, the busty blonde remained typecast as a dim-witted sex object. Yet she managed to wed the nation's greatest sports hero (Joe DiMaggio) and its greatest playwright (Arthur Miller) before her dalliance with the leader of the free world (John F. Kennedy) precipitated her still-mysterious death.
Jayne Mansfield was said to be a genius off screen, and slowly but surely, our image of blondes has evolved to include the full range of human character. Granted, dumb-blonde jokes are even more popular than when Judy Holliday starred in "Born Yesterday." But consider that brainy Grace Kelly became the much-loved Queen of Monaco. And the blond attorney who was recently elected senator from New York has not only slept with a president of the United States (like Marilyn Monroe), she may someday run for the office herself.