The Winnipeg Free Press was kind enough to interview me regarding my Playboy Marilyn Monroe essay. Marilyn, Hefner's dedication to classic cinema, Bob Dylan and Rabbit Angstrom are discussed and more. Here's Randall King's introduction and the interview that follows:

Fifty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe is once again on the cover of Playboy magazine for the December issue.

That is appropriate, given that Marilyn put Playboy on the publishing map in December 1953, by serving as the magazine's cover model and its first centrefold. The story goes that Monroe posed for the photograph for $50 before she became one of the most popular movie stars in the world. It had shown up on common nudie calendars before Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner employed it to launch his fledgling magazine.

This month's pictorial, "The Nude Marilyn," includes appreciations by film critic Roger Ebert and novelist John Updike, but is anchored by an article by Los Angeles film critic Kim Morgan, better known in these parts as Mrs. Guy Maddin.

The tone of Morgan's piece is elegiac but also somehow fiercely loyal to Monroe as a woman and an artist….

FP: Congratulations on sharing editorial space with Roger Ebert and John Updike. That is respectable company you're keeping.

KM: Thanks. It's wonderful having the cover story and to share space with legendary Roger, who has become a friend, and Updike, a brilliant novelist and critic as well. Rabbit Angstrom is iconic. That's a big bunny.

FP: The tone of your piece was almost protective, loyal, calling out those who took a more condescending attitude to Marilyn Monroe. Where does this loyalty come from?

KM: I wouldn't say that I was being simply protective, though I do feel loyal towards her. I think there's more complexity to how one approaches Marilyn, whether they know it or not, which is why she remains powerful to this day. And I mentioned Candle in the Wind briefly, a well-meaning song, in opposition to the song that runs through my piece, Bob Dylan's She Belongs to Me, even though Dylan didn't write it for MM. But to me, that song feels like Marilyn in all her beauty, complications, mystery and art. 'She's an artist.' Marilyn was an artist.

Read more online at Winnipeg Free Press.

 

Here's a link to the article online. Thanks again to Randall King. 

The December edition of Playboy is currently available on newsstands.

I'm honored to have written an essay on the genius Marilyn Monroe for Playboy Magazine's cover story. My essay "The Nude Marilyn" (it's really not about her being nude necessarily — it's a lot more than that) along with Roger Ebert's "A Sense of Control" and John Updike's "A Broken Venus" are not available for online reading (though Playboy offers a peek of MM here) so pick up a copy of the print edition on newsstands now.

As Updike wrote, "like a broken marble Venus, she defies time."