Leave her to heaven.

The world is never weary of Marilyn Monroe. The first time I saw her was in Niagara, the 1953 noir flick. She was the faithless wife planning to murder her husband, the hapless Joseph Cotton. Jean Peters, the better half of a fellow honeymooning couple unwittingly stumbled on her secret lover and got caught in the web. Marilyn was rivetting. Andy Warhol used the publicity shot from the same film as the basis for his famous Marilyn Diptych, Acrylic and silk screen ink on canvas,1962. The Tate Gallery caption to it reads inter alia: “Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.” http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=15976. Very prophetic, what? (A diptych , by the way, is a painting in two panels. http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=88.) There’s another possibility as well. Maybe, Warhol’s multiple-image, multiple-colour-combo metaphor is a pointer that, even in adulation, Marilyn is no more a person but merely a mass-consumption commodity. I wonder what Warhol, as “an expert in subverting notions of celebrity” (as the Publisher’s Weekly once famously tagged him) had he access to it, would have made of the telltale still from the verboten 16 mm Marilyn Monroe film shot in the 1950s and now consigned forever to a vault by a reverent MM devotee. Would he had blown it up and once again worked his assembly line, multiple exposure magic on it? Interestingly enough, Warhol shot in his Factory with a second-hand 16 mm Bolex camera films such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job that have since become underground classics. http://www.warholprints.com/Bio.Andy.Warhol.html. "They're experimental films; I call them that because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm interested in audience reaction to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions," is how Warhol described his work in 'Nothing to Lose', his interview by G Berg in the May1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinema in English. Sam Ishii-Gonzalès, a teacher of aesthetics and film history at New York University and the Film/Media Studies Program at Hunter College, puts a different interpretation on the most famous Warholism: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/14/blow_job.html. “…for Warhol, this "everyone" are the refuse of American society, and this refuse includes himself,” he argues. So, it is not just “a prophetic statement about the media celebrity accorded to serial killers, Monika Lewinsky, Amy Fisher, etc.” Did Warhol’s "everyone" include his already dead Marilyn(s), his close-to-dying Liz, his Brigitte Bardot (“BB” to her French fans) wrapped in the French tricolour and his Mao (“the ultimate star”) based on the portrait photograph in the Little Red Book?

Playing cards.

I’m in the habit of playing solitaire and other games on my PC. I play them not to kill time but, as I had seen my father do it, to take my mind off the work I’m doing so that my subconscious (or, working mind, to use a Ramesh Balsekar term) has a free hand to spark off the ideas I’m seeking. Come to think of it, playing cards have played quite a role in my childhood. I used to watch my father, a lawyer, working on his next day’s brief in the evening suddenly interrupting his work to play a hand of solitaire before returning to it. And, every Sunday, there would be an afternoon session of my father and his five friends to play bezique non-stop for several hours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezique. They would sit down cross legged on the carpet in the sitting room of our third floor flat in Khetwadi and squabble among themselves like kids. It was all good fun and cups and cups of tea. Again, on a Saturday every couple of months or so, another circle of my father’s friends met to play bridge for tiny stakes. These sessions were held by rotation at every member’s residence, I reckon. My father only hosted a session but never, to the best of my knowledge, attended any meeting held elsewhere. At the Saturday sessions, there used to be light snacks like potato wafers and salted cashew nuts in addition to tea. In retrospect, it is interesting to compare the bezique group with the bridge group. The former was a Pathare Prabhu gang made of people who belonged to our own caste and lived within easy walking distance of our house in areas like Opera House and Thakurdwar. The latter was a motley, cosmopolitan crowd and the ties, I suspect, must have been forged during my father’s working life as a public prosecutor and a presidency magistrate before I was born. The bezique group must have been the outcome of my father’s youth in Navi Wadi and Thakurdwar. The lack of snacks being served to them, I attribute to the huge lunch the reputedly bon vivant Pathare Prabhus would customarily have on Sundays. There, however, used to be a tray of ingredients to make paan, betel leaves, supari, cardamom, cloves and so on. Both the groups continued to meet, if memory serves, till I passed out of high school in 1952. Old age and death spare nobody, not even weekend revellers.

R. I. P. The new rip-off. (‘P’ for ‘Prosperity’, not ‘Peace’.)

True or false? There are crypts and crypts of money waiting to be made after death. Especially if you happen to be a celebrity. Maybe Shri Manoj Night Shyamalan can throw some light on the mystery. Jokes apart, though, Forbes.com has definitive live evidence that death may be "the optimal career move" for some famous folks. Better dead and rich than alive and poor, what? The late and much lamented Elvis Presley, for instance, earned $ 37 million when a funked-up version of A Little Less Conversation was used in a World Cup television ad in June 2002 and reigned for four weeks as the No.1 single in the U.K charts. Charles ('Peanuts') Schultz was a not so close second at $28 million. Other prosperous estates are John Lennon ($20 million), Theodor ('Dr. Seuss') Geisel ($19 million), George Harrison ($17 million) and JRR Tolkien ($12 million) among many more. http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/08/12/0812deadintro.html. (Don’t miss the slide show, The Recently Departed Celebrities Slide Show.) P.S.: Where there’s prosperity, can there be peace of mind? Ask an Indian Idol.

Literature as gossip.

Truman Capote. The Princess Diana ‘revelations’ reminded me of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, peopled by Unspoilt (and Spoilt) Monsters. "All literature is gossip," Capote reportedly told Playboy in December 1976. This is part of what I find endearing about him. He was a taleteller to the core in the best and the worst sense of the word – a raconteur as well as a gossipmonger. In fact, the advance publication of excerpts from his work-in-progress got him in trouble with a lot of his high-society friends because they didn’t like him tattling on them. Coming to the Diana prediction of her own impending death in a road accident planned by ‘X’ in a note to her butler Paul Burrell nine months in advance of the event, why did not that worthy say anything for so long? For snippets of Capote’s writing, visit the starkly designed tribute website: http://www.ansoniadesign.com/capote/. At http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s971385.htm, the new spotlight on the Princess Diana mystery is covered.