Lo sguardo del pubblico e la fama

Lo sguardo del pubblico e la fama treats celebrity not as a simple reward for performance but as a relationship built through images: photographs circulate, audiences respond, and the star is expected to remain available to those who feel they know her. For Norma Jeane Baker(Marilyn Monroe), public attention can offer recognition and a means of reaching others, yet it also makes her body and private identity vulnerable to appropriation. The camera preserves her image, but preservation does not mean control over what that image becomes.

Making a Public Image

The process begins before stardom. In December 1944, Buchanan Glazer was serving aboard the Liberty when he encountered a photograph of his wife in Stars and Stripes. The magazine showed her working at the Radio Plane Aircraft factory in Burbank, California, and presented her as a proud participant in the wartime effort. To the sailors who seized the magazine and teased him, she was at once a pin-up and an unexpectedly familiar person: Glazer insisted that the woman in the picture was his wife, despite the misspelled surname in its caption. The photograph made private marriage suddenly public, converting a laboring woman into an image to be examined, claimed, and passed around.

A second circulation followed when Sidney Haring recognized Norma Jeane in a suggestive Pageant photograph that students had marked for one another. Haring’s recognition contrasts with the strangers’ consumption of the image: he knew her from Van Nuys High School, yet the photograph had recast her in a sexualized pose. In the early years of her career, Otto öse helped make her visible in magazines and introduced her to I.E. Shinn and The Studio. Her first film appearance offered almost the reverse of publicity’s promise. Although she had a contract and was cast in a comedy with June Haver, most of her four minutes of posing were cut; in the released film, Marilyn Monroe appeared as a tiny, distant figure in a rowboat, too far away for even herself to recognize.

The Camera as Mirror and Instrument

The photographic session with Otto öse shows how exposure could feel to Norma Jeane like self-recognition even as it placed her under another person’s control. She responded to the camera almost instinctively, as if its lens were a mirror in which she could see herself more intensely than in a human relationship. Otto arranged her poses and directed her body with slight touches. In one image she stood upright like a figurehead, while another placed her reclining on red velvet, smaller and more vulnerable within the photographer’s view. The change in composition shifts the apparent power of the image: the upright figure seems to offer an invitation, while the reclining woman appears exposed to an unseen observer.

That transformation has consequences beyond the studio. The nude photograph Otto made was eventually published on the front page of Hollywood Tatler under a headline asking whether the model was Marilyn Monroe. A reporter had traced the photograph to a calendar contract signed in 1949 under the name Mona Monroe; the image had appeared in a 1950 erotic calendar among anonymous nude models. Its later identification collided with Hollywood’s demand that contracted actresses protect a carefully managed moral image. The Studio’s public Marilyn and the earlier, anonymous model were treated as competing identities, although the photograph’s sale and circulation had already separated the image from the person who posed for it. Norma Jeane had sold the rights for fifty dollars when she urgently needed money; later, she could object to republication but could not reclaim ownership of the negative or its rights.

Fame as Intimacy and Obligation

As Marilyn Monroe became famous, the public’s response acquired the form of personal devotion. Flowers, telegrams, gifts, and letters crowded her dressing room. During her first rush of fame, she read the letters and cried over them, responding personally to some with help from her assistants. The writers included people in hospitals, disabled correspondents, older admirers, and strangers who signed themselves with romantic or wounded names. Their affection resembled the intimate language Norma Jeane herself had once directed toward film stars. The difference was that she now occupied the distant screen from which such longing had once been sent.

She understood this attention as a responsibility as well as a source of excitement. Marilyn signed hundreds of publicity photographs, in poses drawn from her screen roles, with the diligence of the young worker who had once completed exhausting shifts at the factory. In this view, celebrity labor extends beyond acting: the star must answer letters, supply images, and sustain the sense that audiences’ devotion reaches a person. Yet the expectation of intimacy remains one-sided. Her fans can feel close to Marilyn without knowing Norma Jeane, and the image that seems to invite affection can also become a warrant for trespass.

The longing for a different kind of recognition runs through the public spectacle. When she entered her dressing room to read the mail, Norma Jeane repeatedly hoped that a letter might come from her absent father, who she imagined was following her career. None came. Her name and photographs, by contrast, became nearly impossible to avoid: they appeared in newspapers, magazines, posters, and advertisements, while her father remained silent. The widening distance between ubiquitous celebrity and absent personal acknowledgment makes fame an imperfect answer to abandonment. Public visibility can multiply without producing the particular recognition she wants.

Looking, Exposure, and the Limits of Control

The premiere audience and the crowd at the subway-grate filming show how publicity draws spectators into physical space. At Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the return of the now-famous actress to a cinema she had visited as a lonely child makes her career appear like a scene staged for an audience. She receives the public’s adoration, but the figure they celebrate is also a constructed screen presence. When she later looks down from a sixth-floor window, a small group of admirers waits below with cameras and autograph albums. They raise their arms and equipment toward her; from that distance and in the dark, what the cameras can actually record is uncertain. What matters is the act of looking and the belief that a fragment of her image can be captured and kept.

The filming of the subway-grate scene makes the gendered pressure of that gaze explicit. In New York, men pressed against police barriers for hours while the scene was shot, and the Ex-Atleta watched among them. The final version was instead filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, and none of the New York footage made the finished film. On screen, the Girl Upstairs’s skirt flutters and she laughs while trying to hold it down; the released scene is brief and playful, with no view of her underwear. The contrast is between the prolonged public spectacle around the filming and the controlled, comic image that survives in the movie. The audience’s anticipation is not the scene itself, and the finished image does not disclose everything that took place around its production.

Norma Jeane’s experience watching The Seven Year Itch adds a further complication. She feels pride in the comic performance and recognizes that audiences can laugh at the foolishness of the world rather than simply consume her as a sexual image. But a man seated near her watches the screen while furtively intruding on her presence in the darkened theater. She moves away, recovering some of the pleasure of seeing her work while confronting how the public image can shape a stranger’s conduct toward the person beside him. The scene connects cinematic looking to everyday boundary violations without making the two identical: comedy gives her artistic agency, but it cannot guarantee safety from the audience.

Recognition, Memory, and What Fame Forgets

The concept’s central tension is that being seen can feel like proof of existence while still failing to preserve the self. During a visit to her mother, Norma Jeane wonders whether moments without a camera or a witness are lost, as if life’s value depends on being recorded. Photography promises a lasting trace, but the nude-image scandal shows that a preserved image can outlive the subject’s consent and acquire meanings she cannot govern. The camera is both a possible witness and an instrument through which others claim access to her.

Her visit to an orphanage brings the desire to be seen into a different relation. She enjoys distributing Easter baskets to the children and is particularly moved by the girls, who resemble the hurt child she once was. She later sends two hundred dollars for clothes and books for one girl, though she never learns whether the money reached that purpose and eventually forgets the check. By contrast, she keeps a five-hundred-dollar check intended for Edith Mittelstadt in her purse while trying to learn what became of her former caregiver. The contrast gives fame’s forgetfulness a personal cost: an actress may be surrounded by records, admirers, and press attention, yet still lose track of the acts of care that matter to her.

The public gaze therefore produces neither simple empowerment nor simple erasure. It can turn Norma Jeane’s work into a source of pride, connect her with audiences, and give her a platform to perform comic reversals of earlier humiliations. It can also detach photographs from their maker, confuse a screen role with a private person, and make looking feel like possession. The recurring gap between the image and the woman behind it is not a problem celebrity resolves. It is the condition fame repeatedly creates: Marilyn Monroe becomes more visible as Norma Jeane’s need to be recognized on her own terms remains unsettled.