Born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1880 to a family of newspapermen, Damon Runyon found fame as a baseball columnist, and later for his humorous short stories chronicling the vibrant street life of New York. His eccentric characters – gamblers, hustlers and crooks – and unique style, mixing formal speech with slang – inspired a new literary idiom, the “Runyonesque”.
The 1950s were a time of prosperity in the USA, and conservatism. In Hollywood, some of the greatest American sex symbols found fame – among them a blonde, Marilyn Monroe, and a brunette, Elizabeth Taylor.
In 1948, Marilyn Monroe was twenty-two years old. After two years in the movie business, she had failed to make an impression. Her first contract with Twentieth Century Fox led to a few bit-parts before she was dropped. Undeterred, she took a room at the Studio Club and attended workshops at the Actors’ Lab, while posing for pin-ups on the side.
“In her movies,” Marie Clayton wrote in ‘Unseen Archives’, her 2005 pictorial biography of Marilyn Monroe, “she projected a unique and fascinating persona — a child-woman who was both innocent and full of sexuality, someone men desired, but women found unthreatening. In real life,” Clayton added, “she was a beautiful and complex woman with deep insecurities, who just wanted to be loved.”
The Brothers Karamazov, the last novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was published in 1880. It is a story of three brothers who become implicated in the murder of their corrupt father, also named Fyodor.
In 1953, Marilyn Monroe was the unofficial queen of Hollywood. Her last three movies had made her the most bankable of actresses, and she achieved her childhood dream of having her hand and footprints immortalised in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
Jeanne Eagles – 1920s.
“Jeanne Eagels was the Marilyn Monroe of the 1920s: beautiful, blonde, talented, vulnerable and mercurial – and a complete and utter mess. Indeed, Marilyn was a model of emotional stability compared to Jeanne,” author Eve Golden wrote, in ‘Golden Images’ (2000.) Both actresses died young, and their lives have become mythical. But beyond the legend, what do these two women really have in common?
