Despite the grandeur of its funereal appetites, Hollywood is always graceless and uneasy inside its mourning clothes. Its undertakers are suntanned. Its dead lie listening to Muzak in poets' nooks. Its grief requires CinemaScope—so big, so awful, so thrilled with guilt. When Marilyn Monroe was buried last week in Los Angeles, Hollywood's heavy embrace was forcefully restrained, but there was little mercy in its absence. Here and there, film stars nudged past the line of true mourners to bear their terrible tributes into print. At the mortuary, Marilyn's coiffeur set her bone-white hair in the Marienbad manner while her studio makeup man (another somber volunteer) worked over her. In the words of one mourner, they made her look "like a child in slumber."
The Glory of Blame. Away from her small circle, taste ran to still deeper reaches of the macabre. Newspapers approached the frontiers of necrophilia with old cheesecake photos of her, then turned sly cameras to the inside of her coffin, the shambles of her home, the sad wealth of her sleeping-pill collection. Using a hidden camera, one photographer stole a shot of her toes as she was placed in a steel drawer at the morgue. Reporters took grave delight in noting that her temporary address was Crypt 33, where a cold description of "the fabulous figure" could be read on tags tied to her toes.
Eager as the world's press was to help Hollywood to the glory of blame ("Sodom!" cried Libération from Paris), it could not match Hollywood's own enthusiasm for its role as the guilty one.
Grips and bit-players who a month ago talked of taking ads in the Hollywood Reporter to scold Marilyn for costing them their jobs in Something's Got to Give suddenly realized that the something was Marilyn. They joined bigger stars and gossip columnists in an orgy of self-incrimination—a morbid way of boasting that to have helped kill her was, after all, proof of having known her intimately. "In a way we're all guilty," Hedda Hopper concluded. "We built her up to the skies, we loved her, but left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most."
The Price of the Image. But guilt became a bitter pout when Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn's second husband once removed, arrived in town to bar Hollywood from the funeral. His quiet, classic plea for privacy extended even to Mrs. Pat Lawford, sister of President Kennedy and one of Marilyn's last close friends. When Marilyn's attorney complained that DiMaggio was keeping all her friends away, DiMaggio coldly answered: "If it weren't for those friends, she would still be alive." Only Peter Lawford publicly complained ("I'm shocked"), but Marilyn's movie friends, smarting from exclusion, made their voices heard in the mounting chorus of vague epitaphs.