Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson)

Pete Seeger opens Chapter 11 “Money and Music” in his book The Incompleat Folksinger (Bison Book, 1972) with this reflection.

Who Killed Norma Jean?

     I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, whom I loved very much, died of cancer. This beast came and fastened itself upon her back. It had a hundred hollow claws and fangs which it sunk into her neck and shoulders, into her upper arms and up and down her spine. Its two huge eyes glared at us silently as if to say, ‘You’ll never unfasten me till I have drunk my fill.’ For each fang was hollow and sucked the juices of life from her body till it was left a lifeless shell.
     The vision of hollow claws and fangs has come back to me more than once when I have seen a friend in the clutches of the ‘culture’ industry, which values human beings only for what profit can be sucked from them. This destruction goes on all the time, though it seldom is dramatically visible to the general public.”

Seeger then provides the words and music to “Who Killed Norma Jean?”, a song he played in the first set of his landmark concert at Carnegie Hall, June 8, 1963.

(If you don’t have Spotify, you can also hear the recording at the beginning of this YouTube clip.)

Who killed Norma Jean?
I, said the City, as a civic duty,
I killed Norma Jean.

Who saw her die?
I, said the Night, and a bedroom light,
We saw her die.

Who’ll catch her blood?
I, said the Fan, with my little pan,
I’ll catch her blood.

Who’ll make her shroud?
I, said the Lover, my guilt to cover,
I’ll make her shroud.

Who’ll dig her grave?
The tourist will come and join in the fun,
He’ll dig her grave.

Who’ll be chief mourners?
We who represent, and lose our ten percent.
We’ll be the chief mourners.

Who’ll bear the pall?
We, said the Press, in pain and distress,
We’ll bear the pall.

Who’ll toll the bell?
I, screamed the mother, locked in her tower,
I’ll pull the bell.

Who’ll soon forget?
I, said the Page, beginning to fade,
I’ll be the first to forget.

As Seeger mentions in his introduction to the Carnegie Hall performance, the song was written by Norman Rosten, a close friend of Monroe’s. Seeger writes in his songbook, Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Musical Autobiography, that he first read the poem in Life magazine, and put the tune to it then. He got Rosten’s permission to perform it after that.

In the previous post on “Who Killed Cock Robin?” I linked to some very helpful background notes from the Peggy Seeger recording of that song. They point to the change in tone or theme between that song, and this contemporary successor. Whereas the older, traditional nursery rhyme is about (at least on its face) collective decision making and sharing the responsibilities of memorializing the dead, this song turns more to a meditation, or perhaps more properly an accusation, on society’s collective responsibility in what outwardly appeared to be a self-inflicted death. Rosten and Seeger accomplish this without changing the basic structure of divvying up funeral responsibilities. Even though the roles are the same, the sense of collective guilt or accountability being distributed around is there–perhaps because we have a clearer sense of those “guilty” parties than we ever would to the woodland creatures taking up the duties for Cock Robin.

Seeger quotes Rosten in Where Have All the Flowers Gone:

Norman Rosten and Marilyn Monroe

“It’s difficult to write about Marilyn Monroe now that she is gone. The past tense just doesn’t suit her somehow; she was too acutely alive. I knew her and was fond of her. She was a strange, tormented, endearing girl, full of fun–a bravado fun, as though daring death to strike her down. Well, it did, finally. What can we say who saw her living in that shadowland of loveless Hollywood? She who had such love in her heart–love for people, animals, birds, trees–had to die for lack of it!
   Who to blame? I thought of blame, even though it’s always too late. My poem tried to say it for myself, anyway…for whatever it’s worth for others.”

In anticipating some of the songs we’ll get to where the murder/suicide divide is not so clear, I didn’t really have “Who Killed Norma Jean?” in mind, but more songs like “Louise” or “Tecumseh Valley.” But, if I can foreshadow discussions of those songs a little bit, it is rather clear that while violating our general principle of discussing songs that involve the deliberate infliction of potentially lethal violence, you can see how emotional violence and the unintended consequences of “benign” neglect can reach to the same thematic space. For what it’s worth, questions of whether Monroe’s death was intentional and by whom have not been  resolved with certainty. Her death was listed as a “probable suicide.”

Janis Ian

“Who Killed Norma Jean?” appears not to have had much performance life outside of Pete Seeger’s performances of it. There are doubtless many other songs about Marilyn Monroe which we could explore, but that’s for another day. For this one, we’ll conclude with Janis Ian’s performance of the song on Seeds—Volume 3 of a series of tribute albums to Pete’s music, which was released in 2003. Ian’s performance faithfully renders the song and delivers a kind of complementary truth, which she may have learned at age 11, age 52, or perhaps even at 17.

Next up

In the next post, we’ll listen to the next song Pete sang in that historic Carnegie Hall performance in 1963, and put the question of collective responsibility even more pointedly.