Madonna men ousted from NAIA tourney
Rio Grande, the No. 5 national seed, scored a pair of goals in each half to earn the victory while improving to 18-2 overall and securing a spot in the Sweet 16.
The Crusaders were dealt a blow when all-conference defender Franco Giorgi went down just minutes into the match and missed the balance of the contest with a lower body injury.
Rio Grande got on the board in the 10th minute when Joel Thiessen finished off a rebound of a Rafael Maccauro shot for a 1-0 lead.
The nation's leading scorer, Richard Isberner, then made it 2-0 with his 28th goal of the season in the 25th minute to stake the home side to a 2-0 lead at intermission.
Madonna had a chance to get on the board in the 55th minute when freshman Ryan Williams struck a hard shot in on Jack Marchant, but the Red Storm goalkeeper just knocked the ball over the bar to keep MU off the board.
The Red Storm added two more goals for a 4-0 lead before freshman Nick Atwood (Livonia Stevenson) broke up the shutout with his first career goal in the 81st minute after finishing off a lead pass from junior striker Dane Laird (Farmington Harrison).
“I am really proud of how the team kept competing all game,” MU coach Eric Scott said. “Derek (Rosiek) and Cayle (Lackten) really stepped up when Franco (Giorgi) went down. This was Derek's best game in a Madonna uniform. I thought Dane (Laird) was fantastic today, especially in our goal sequence.''
Junior goalkeeper Adrian Motta (Livonia Churchill) made 10 saves for the Crusaders, who closed the season with a 7-9-5 overall record after advancing to the program's third NAIA tournament since 2007.
MU bids good-bye to just one senior, defender Andrew Kidder (Macomb Lutheran North).
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for our only senior,'' Scott said. “I've had the privilege of coaching him the last four years and I am incredibly indebted to Drew for coming with me two years ago when we started here.''
How Norma Jeane morphed into the blonde bombshell
In the just released film “My Week With Marilyn,” Michelle Williams plays the character of Marilyn Monroe.
Excellent as she is, though, she’s only the latest.
The best, and very first, to play the part was Monroe herself.
“It was an act,” Williams says of the star’s persona.
“And it’s a testament to her acting that she could create it, and then switch it on and off, depending on whether she wanted to turn heads or disappear into a crowd. … It was as if she could rearrange herself molecularly.”
“You take off all that makeup and her face is a clean slate,” says David Wills, author of the terrific new Monroe art book, “Metamorphosis” (It Books, $40).
“It’s almost as if she painted on this creation, every day, the way an artist starts with a blank canvas.”
Except that the canvas Marilyn Monroe — or, rather, Norma Jeane Mortenson — started with wasn’t pristine. It was a little tattered, a little smudged. And the picture she painted on it changed, depending on who she was drawing it for.
For Marilyn Monroe, identity was always fluid.
She was born in California in 1926 to Gladys Monroe Baker, who spliced film at one of the studios; the single mother put down Norma Jeane Mortenson as the baby’s name on the (misspelled) birth certificate, then later baptized her as Norma Jeane Baker.
The father? Well, it was neither Mr. Baker nor Mr. Mortensen, two of Gladys’ ex-husbands; privately Gladys admitted it was some handsome man with a moustache. When she got older, Norma Jeane fantasized it was Clark Gable, and pinned his picture to her wall.
It had already started. Who do I want to be? Who do you want me to be right now?
Eventually, Gladys Baker’s flightiness deepened into mental illness; her daughter was passed from relative to foster parent to orphanage back to relative. Later, Monroe said she remembered that her mother trying to smother her when she was a baby and that someone had raped her when she was a child.
It would explain many things to come, but besotted biographer Norman Mailer later dismissed those traumas as probable fictions. Because, if Monroe really were a rape victim, she couldn’t be the uncomplicated “sweet angel of sex” Mailer wanted her to be, “forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender.”
And everything about Monroe is always about her being what we want her to be.
She finally escaped the orphanage by marrying a dull local boy named Jim Dougherty; her new incarnation, that of a 16-year-old housewife, was her least successful role. (She once served peas and carrots for breakfast because she liked the colors.)
But then, in 1943, Dougherty joined the Merchant Marine and his wife got a defense-plant job. An Army photographer snapped her in the parachute factory, grinning, her hair a mass of curls. Say, he told her, she sure looked swell. Had she ever considered modeling or something?
She had.
Undefined identity
Professionally, modeling became the perfect career for Norma Jeane; psychologically, she couldn’t have picked a worse one.
She’d never had much confidence; now she was going to be judged ruthlessly. She’d had no father figure in her life; now she had to compete for male attention. She’d never had a strong sense of herself; now she had to be a chameleon.
But as the pictures in “Metamorphosis” prove, she was eerily good at it, trying on personalities as easily as clothes. Soon she caught the attention of Hollywood.
And soon the newly single woman had to change again.
She had her teeth fixed, and her nose bobbed. The reddish-blonde Shirley Temple curls were replaced by a nearly Harlow-platinum bob. She even got a new name. Another new identity. But it remained a very narrowly defined one — the childish, sexy fortune-hunter.
Of course, it wasn’t true.
Although she played calculating cuties well, when she got a proposal from her first agent, a rich older man with a bad heart — a gold digger’s dream! — she turned him down. Although she was certainly uneducated, she wasn’t stupid, and read voraciously; her later marriage to Arthur Miller wasn’t just a love affair but an enrollment in grad school.
And as for the sexiness — well, that was undeniable. But when “scandalous” old photos turned up of her posing nude on crushed red satin, she looked about as pornographic as a caramel in a candy box. (Her honesty and humor — “Didn’t you have anything on, Miss Monroe?” “Yes, the radio” — helped a lot, too.)
She had her critics — Joan Crawford declared it “a disgrace to the industry” that the young star appeared in public without a girdle — but there was a sweetness about Monroe that people responded to.
“Her life wasn’t easy, but there’s something so easy about her on screen, so loving,” says Williams. “I watch her, and I just feel joy. I feel like I’m in a car, and the top is down and the breeze is just blowing through my hair, forever.”
But there was still another character that Marilyn embodied — and although she couldn’t play it in real life, she lived it, brilliantly, through her movies. Because what really made Monroe so appealing was that the love she projected on-screen wasn’t carnal at all.
Motherhood denied
It was maternal.
This is not the usual reading of Marilyn Monroe. The accepted interpretation is that she was a sexy contradiction, the overripe figure and underage voice combining to inspire a thousand taboo daydreams.
“My body turned all these people on, like turning on an electric light,” she complained once. “There was so rarely anything human in it.”
But look at her real appeal again. The womanly curves are those of a new mother. That breathy voice is that of someone whispering a lullaby. The Marilyn Monroe that connected with audiences wanted to take them to bed, all right. But mostly just to tuck them in.
“She yearned to be a mother more than anything,” Williams says. “When she had to go into surgery once, she taped a note to her stomach: ‘Be careful, I want to have children.’ She yearned to be taken seriously as an actress, too, but her other great dream was to have a family, to try to heal the wound of her childhood.”
It never happened.
Reportedly, illegal abortions during her starlet years had left her badly scarred; later, books would write of miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. But there were no stories at the time. Not only were stars more circumspect, but sexuality still equaled fertility; a love goddess who couldn’t reproduce was a cruel joke.
So, not being able to give birth, she lavished affection on friends, on animals, on Miller’s children from his first marriage. “There’s this book ‘Fragments’ of her scribblings, her drawings,” says Williams. “She wrote these long engaging letters to Miller’s children, big hugs of letters, where she pretended to be the family dog.”
That warmth came out on-screen, too. Think of “The Prince and the Showgirl,” in which her character relates more readily to the prince’s son. Or “Some Like It Hot,” as — tricked into thinking Tony Curtis doesn’t like women — she serves up a tea-and-sympathy act. Or her tenderness — on and off set — to poor, damaged Monty Clift in “The Misfits.”
She was still sexy, of course, although only a few co-stars were masculine enough to complement her. Robert Mitchum, in the otherwise mediocre “River of No Return.” Yves Montand, perhaps, in the not-great “Let’s Make Love.” And, yes, Clark Gable in “The Misfits” — the last movie that either legend would complete.
But in the majority of her movies — it’s the entire point of “The Seven Year Itch” — the men “just go powerless in her presence,” Williams observes. Regressed into stammering 14-year-olds, they stand there, dumbstruck by the sexy lady waltzing right out of their dreams.
Her soft, welcoming image stands in even sharper relief when you compare her to today’s actresses. They stride around now like teenage athletes, fresh from the gym, winnowed down to sinew, but Monroe was a womanly beauty, curvy as a Cadillac, her plush figure pushing against the seams of her dresses.
“I thought that was actually the most appealing thing,” says Williams (who needed a little padding to pass for the actress on-screen). “That gentle roundness to her stomach — it’s soft, yielding, maternal. It speaks to a kind of possibilityÂÂ…”
But by the end of the ’50s, Marilyn had run out of possibilities.
Tragic end
She began her life in mystery. She ended it that way, too.
Even where the end began is difficult to say. A chronic insomniac, she dosed herself with alcohol and pills for years; the real reason she was often late to sets was that she simply couldn’t be woken up. She always worried she’d end up like her mother, institutionalized; there were stories of cold nights standing by the open window of her New York apartment, staring down at the street, the draperies fluttering like shrouds.
By the early ’60s, things were getting worse. Her marriage to Miller was over. The film he had written for her, “The Misfits,” had given her a love scene with Gable, at least — an odd thing, considering the role he’d once played in her fantasy life.
But then Gable died, shortly after filming, and people blamed her for his fatal heart attack, saying that her lateness had driven him to perform too many of his own stunts.
And then in 1962, a few weeks into a new film, “Something’s Got to Give,” her longtime studio fired her for missing work.
She was found dead less than three months later, nude in her bed, reaching for the phone. She was 36. The papers said it was an overdose. They did not say why there was no trace of pills in her stomach. People talked about the Kennedys, and a rumored affair. But no one could decide whether it was Jack, or Bobby, or both — and the talk of murder and cover-ups never grew louder than whispers.
The funeral was small, and private. Her second husband, Joe DiMaggio — who had never understood her, and had never stopped loving her — just stood there quietly and wept. For the next 20 years, he had long-stemmed red roses regularly delivered to her crypt.
And, slowly, she passed into iconography — the stuff of Andy Warhol silkscreens and Madonna videos and cheap impersonations that reduce her to blond hair, a bosom and a baby-doll voice.
But she contained far more than that, and she always will. And sometimes we can catch glimpses of her other selves in her movies, bright and ever-changing, the silver light refracting through them like diamonds.