Location: Currently Lincoln, Nebraska. Originally West Palm Beach, Florida.
Favorite Marilyn film: This is a hard one. My favorite performance of hers is The Prince and the Showgirl, but my favorite Marilyn film in general is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s an absolute classic! Most fantastic costumes: check! Most awesome broad as a co-star: check! Most fey dance number of all time: Check!
What do you and Marilyn have in common? I ‘discovered’ Marilyn at a young age and was blown away by her beauty but I didn’t really connect with her until later in my young adulthood. I really couldn’t see any parallels between myself and a woman that beautiful and glamorous. I was extremely shy and, in high school and college, was quite overweight. However, I’ve always had a love of the arts and of learning and reading, as did Marilyn. I studied English Literature and vocal performance in college and have been a dedicated poet since high school. About 10 years ago, I began my weight-loss journey, losing 80 lbs slowly over the course of 3 years. It was about this time that I started hearing comparisons to Marilyn Monroe. At first, I thought it was absurd! How could I look anything like this Hollywood icon? However, it was during a production of ‘Wonderful Town’ that I finally saw the resemblance for myself. I was cast as Eileen Sherwood, who is described in the script as a ‘blonde bombshell’ At the time, my hair was dyed red . . . and had been since the age of 13. Ironically, my natural shade is blonde. So, I needed a blonde wig. Since the show is set in the 30′s, we needed a short curly one. During early dress rehearsals, my director stopped one of my musical numbers and said . . . “This is reading way too much like Marilyn Monroe. Change the makeup or the dress or something!” We tried, but nothing worked, because the problem was my face. Oops! Not long after that, I was cast in a (truly awful) production in which I played Marilyn Monroe. It was at this point that I started heavily researching her life. I read every book I could get my hands on and just fell in love with the deeply flawed, yet beautiful woman she was. I found out that, just like me, she was a shy poet. She suffered from almost crippling insecurity, but rose above it. She even suffered from a similar health malady. Though I grew up in a 2 parent household (who both love and support me very much), there are other mirrors between us as children. She taught me, in the form of a cautionary tale, how to deal with past abuse. She taught me how to be strong, because as intriguing of a woman as she was, I do not want my life to further mirror hers. History tends to whitewash our past icons, but I believe it is so very important to understand the mistakes that were made in the past so that we can learn from them and not repeat them in our own lives.
Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller or JFK: None of the above. Can I say that? Marilyn was used, mistreated and misunderstood by every single man in her life. From childhood, she was taught through experience that the only thing she had to offer men (and the world at large) was her body. Sadly, she battled this insecurity throughout her life. The duality of this, the “innocent sex symbol” is what made her so captivating on screen and also solidified her mystique, even 50 years after her death. What she might have been had she had strong loving men in her life, it’s hard to say, but it would have been monumental. As it is, she managed to completely construct her own legend with her bare hands, and that, in and of itself, is a remarkable achievement. DiMaggio wanted a housewife. He fell for the sex-symbol and then resented her for it. Miller wanted a perfect, childlike muse (one only needs to watch ‘The Misfits’ to see his inaccurate views of his own wife) and was likewise resentful of the troubled woman who desperately needed someone to believe in her and tell her she was worth every sleepless night. And Kennedy? He wanted a conquest. Another notch on his bedpost. The ultimate power-play by the leader of the free world. And not a single one of them understood her duality or deserved the chance to try.
What has Marilyn taught you? In a very positive way, Marilyn taught me how to shine. In talking with fellow cast-mates about the challenge of “being” Marilyn on stage, I shared this story with them. Being fat in your formative years does something to you, mentally. You have to learn how to survive, because the world hates you. My natural survival mechanism was “Don’t draw attention to yourself!” and that’s how I learned to navigate my world . . . as a wallflower. In the full-length version of my poem, ‘Kill Switch’, I have a line that says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you made a lousy wallflower. I should know! I’m the absolute best! I can hide in plain sight, vanish in the center of a room like a Baggins at a party. You never mastered that parlor trick.” However, when I lost the weight and consequently started playing the ingenue instead of ensemble, I had to force myself into the spotlight, as it were. I read the volume of essays, “All the Available Light” in which it says that Marilyn “absorbed all the available light”. It was very true. She did. And it was a monster of a standard to even come close to. But stepping outside of “Kendra” for a while, being this gorgeous creature who could command the turn of every head in the room, eventually began to bleed into my everyday life. I began to believe that I could be the leading lady, and to carry myself as if I were. Eventually, I looked into the mirror and was able to see, not the ghost of the fat girl, but the woman I had at long last become. I owe much of that confidence to Marilyn Monroe. I just wish she was still with us, to thank.
‘To me, Marilyn is… so many things. She is beautiful. She is sad. She is a muse. She is a child. She is a cautionary tale. She is Icarus, soaring so high that it hurts our eyes to look at her, silhouetted against the sun, and suddenly she is falling. She falls again and again, each time we tell her story, we hope to stop the plummet, but we never can. She is loss.‘
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