Vanity Fair's Necrophilia Continues

Latest Issue Features Double Dead Babe Twin Spin

Graydon:

You have to stop. You know that, don't you? You're running a magazine--a real magazine, a topical magazine, here in the present, on the prime material plane. You need to remember that. Please. Come back to us.

Look, I can see where you are coming from. I like magazines. I'm not talented enough to run one. No one would be foolish enough to give me one to run. But I like them. That's why I am a magazine historian. It's what I blog about, mostly.

Since the advent of radio, magazines have been a secondary medium. They are additive, largely an impulse buy. It is from the point that they became such that magazines started to sprout as a form. The form claws for attention. It sells sensation. It sells unique. It sells something in-depth that you can't get anywhere else.

Or you can just stick Marilyn Monroe on the cover. It isn't the oldest trick in the book, but it is one of the most used. When you've clearly got nothing, go blondie

Although Marilyn Monroe was kind of hit or miss as an actress, she was magazine dynamite. I don't know what she charged, but she probably had a newsstand sales bump worth the price. There was never anything "exclusive" about her. Pony up and she's there.

A now familiar magazine was launched on the flimsy premise of having naked pictures of her. This perhaps marked the nadir of her career as a movie star and the start of a career as a frequently used rag hag. From the mid 1950s on, there probably wasn't a month that went by wherein Marilyn Monroe's image failed to appear on the cover of a monthly somewhere. Then she died.

It's not as if she was a musician or a writer. Other than a handful of movies and a breathless rendition of "Happy Birthday", she hasn't left us much to remember her by. Certainly her career as a cover model was over. Beyond a certain half-life, there is no demonstrable draw in splattering your cover with pictures of dead women--no matter how nifty they may have looked in life or how famous they may have been. That goes double for naked pictures of dead women.

To illustrate this, let us say that instead of Marilyn Monroe, Playboy had been launched featuring pictures of Marie Prevost. (I'm not saying that there are any such pictures of Marie Prevost. And you could substitute Clara Bow if you like.*) Marie Prevost had something of the same career orbit as Marilyn Monroe, complete with the tragic ending. (One frequently reported falsehood was that her body had been partially eaten by her dog.) By the time Playboy was launched, she would have only been dead 16 years. Needless to say, Playboy would have flopped on its face.

That's sort of what's going on with Vanity Fair here. The theme of dead women on the cover has been a real head scratcher. It could be argued that Marilyn Monroe is 'iconic', but the real question is 'as what?' and 'how does this help me sell magazines today?'

Where is Marilyn Monroe now? An occasional retrospective on Turner Classic Movies. In boxed sets in the online catalogs of mail order merchants. In the files of magazine collectors. On pieces of chintz art found in non-franchised restaurants and downscale bars. That, Graydon, is it. At best, she's a nostalgia act. Not to clue you in, but Madonna at this point is a nostalgia act--and she's alive. The draw Marilyn Monroe is going to have for your average person under 50 is not worth measuring.

As with the Grace Kelly and Liz Taylor cover spreads, you have to wonder if the editor is indulging himself or if he is actually trolling for a specific demographic. I'm at a loss. Vanity Fair is otherwise a fine magazine.

And this issue didn't need any help as far as grabbing passing newsstand eyeballs was concerned. If one really needed a reason to pick it up, this issue features a snippet  from the snog diaries of a sitting President. The current sitting President, at that. There's your cover, Graydon. And as everyone from Marvel Comics to the Rolling Stone will tell you, Obama sells magazines. Even better, he's pretty much free.

Worse, you blew the Marilyn Monroe cover. A tight face shot is not the way to display her. Your actual cover is on page 131 or 136. You might have to photshop out some of the airbrush, but that's what you have an art staff for.

(By the way, I've seen these pictures before. Talk about no big deal.)

Since no one around you seems willing to tell you this, allow me: Graydon, the whole dead women thing has to come to an end. You're creeping me out. 

***

*Clara Bow was alive at the time Playboy was launched, but her fame had largely subsided. No one was likely to come forward with naked pictures her, in any case.

Marie Prevost, by contrast, made more movies than either Monroe or Bow, had quite a magazine cover portfolio and slept with much more interesting men.

There is a current trend in Neo-Pulps that has emerged, the lifetime commerative. To my knowledge, the trend is new and no such edition featuring Marilyn Monroe was done at the time of her death. The trend seems to have started with Princess Diana. A Dick Clark retrospective is currently cluttering the Target check-out near you.