My life with MARILYN

I may miss other holiday films, but I definitely won't miss My Week With Marilyn, starring gorgeous Michelle Williams, and focused on a week in the life of a young man determined to make his mark in filmdom in 1957.

And the "Marilyn" in question, on the off-chance that you haven't seen the avalanche of ads for this week's opening, is Marilyn Monroe.

Why such passionate determination? Because in ways that may seem frivolous and foolish, Marilyn Monroe changed my life. And since she's been the subject of so many biographies, something like 300 and counting, she's obviously a source of fascination to the multitudes.

In the mid-1950s, when we all presumably liked Ike, lived cautiously, and had a penchant for the prim - think Mamie Eisenhower and Pat Nixon - along came Marilyn to deliver her siren wake-up call.

She was part kitten, part firecracker. Cameras loved her. She loved them back.

Sure, we had Katharine Hepburn, who was sexy in her way. Grace Kelly was beautiful, but coolly so. And Liz Taylor was - well, Liz Taylor, the magnificent.

But MM had it all . . . the face, the body, and yes, that hair. And not the color she was born with.

How I wanted that whole package.

I was traveling through that seemingly endless, twisted tunnel of adolescence, struggling to feel secure even as blemishes arrived, along with bras that seemed to work against nature, and experiments with terrible lipstick choices that left me feeling grotesque instead of gorgeous.

And then there was the matter of my hair.

In baby and childhood pictures, it was naturally blond. While my sister got the curls I envied, I got the gift of flaxen hair, the kind that looks kissed by the summer sun.

But Mother Nature took back what she gave at the very time when I really needed some favors. That golden gift was turning to something lackluster, boring, dull, on the brink of the dread mousy brown. And "dirty blond" just doesn't do it either when you want to shine.

I blush to admit that I raged at the fates - being blond seemed more important than being smart or charming or witty. I wanted that blond hair that I was certain would change my life forever, and get me past the terrible, deforming insecurities of being 16.

I wanted what Marilyn Monroe had.

Fat chance. Back in the rule-bound 1950s, one didn't bleach hair. Especially not in high school. That was something only cheap, wanton girls did, the kind who broke the ironclad rules about when to allow a kiss goodnight and other liberties. . . .

Besides, the awful McCarthy era, the mid-20th-century American witch hunt for communists, had left us all a little nervous. Looking over our shoulders. Standing out was somehow too bold.

So I graduated from high school with my not-quite-brown hair, feverishly trying to lighten it with lemon juice. I smelled like lemons for months, and still the results were disappointing.

So during the summer of 1956, between high school and college, I finally got my courage up, asked my parents' permission to let me bleach my hair. Yes, asked. Back then, that's how it worked.

Reluctantly, they gave it. And I headed for the basement beauty shop where my own mother, a former natural blonde herself, disappeared for several hours every month and came home looking blonder.

The owner had been alerted. Nothing drastic. Nothing dramatic. Just a little chemical help.

Little by little, the wizard of blondness lightened my hair.

At first, I was terrified. Then a bit emboldened. Then more and more delighted.

Being blond made me happy. And even all these decades later, I'd be hard-put to shovel into words just why it did.

That was also the summer I stopped starving myself so I could start college thinner. If Marilyn could have some flesh on her bones, well then, I could too. And yes, for a few brief years, the height of the Marilyn era, it was OK to be "zaftig."

Still, Marilyn Monroe, who made being blond, buxom, and sexy her signature, did it at what turned out to be great emotional cost to herself.

But she empowered me.

I arrived as a blond college freshman, and stayed that way.

Through college, through marriage, through babies, through grandmotherhood.

The man I met at 20 on a blind date confided that he preferred blondes. He proved it when he proposed several months later. And for our wedding day in 1960, I asked only one thing of that original hairdresser: make my hair the same blond as Marilyn's.

So was my life better because of Marilyn Monroe?

Yes. No. Maybe.

In the course of our growing old together, my husband has clearly shown that much more than the blond hair has mattered in our marriage.

He has stood by me not just through the usual travails of life, but also through dark roots, gray hairs arriving in wild profusion, and blond mishaps and misadventures.

I don't know exactly what I was looking for way back when blond seemed to be the answer to all of life's slings and arrows. I'm all grown up now, and I know it's not. Those "gotchas" still come.

But I still credit Marilyn Monroe for taking a vulnerable teenager from a black-and-white world all the way to Technicolor.

And what a journey it's been.