Candle in the wind

Hollywood killed Marilyn Monroe at the age of 36. I think about it a surprising amount.

Let the record show that tonight as a pretty big earthquake shook my entire apartment for a minute too long, I was blasting Candle In The Wind by Elton John. I am 37 and Hollywood has not killed me.

Last Christmas, I was experiencing a bereftness I’ve never met before. A loneliness only familiar to those who have unknowingly lived in the desert forever, stumbled upon an oasis, and then forgotten in the blinding heat of the desert how to return to that oasis. I was stuck in the desert. And I decided that the only thing for it was to go even deeper into arid terroitory. So I went to the Negev. I left Hollywood and I arrived in the Gaza envelope on Christmas morning in a bulletproof vest and a helmet. I decided there was nothing left for me to do. Having experienced the heady highs and treacherous lows of the beast of Los Angeles I went to a war.

As I was leaving to LAX, I was in an uber listening to my Spotify and for some reason Candle In The Wind came on. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is my favorite Elton John album. I received a limited edition yellow vinyl version of it from his label during an anniversary some years ago, and treasure that record dearly. But honestly Candle In The Wind never gripped me like it did that evening upon which I was about to embark on this literal war path. It caught me unaware. It was a time in which I felt this barren emptiness, like there was no more saliva in my cheeks. A thief had taken joy from my grip. I was surrounded by travelling loved ones flying home to loved ones, and I was swallowing my aches in my dry mouth and braving a journey to externalize my sorrow. These piano chords came in like old friends, and Elton’s soulful husky voice breaking through over pattering drums and the relief of a choir of backing vocals, and I wept. I wept the whole way to Israel, listening to Candle In The Wind.

I think because I am a child of the ‘80s and I grew up in the UK, one of my formative memories is the death of Princess Diana. I remember the morning. The smell of toast wafting in from the kitchen. The silence of shock and/or grief in the house. The strange quiet. What’s wrong everyone? Diana is dead. The Princess was killed by the paparazzi. And Elton John came on the scene with a new version of Candle In The Wind, to perform at the funeral. “Goodbye England’s rose…” he sang. I was unmoved. I am still unsure why. Diana’s death was seismic and the public mourning excessive, and I felt a discomfort between the candid emotional outburst of strangers that contrasted with the grace and discretion of Diana and the rest of the royal family. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t feel the sadness everyone felt. And there was this song in the charts for weeks reminding us we had to be sad, and I didn’t want to be sad. It was the summer of 1997 and I was ready for the Spice Girls to come back. No more tears.

It would be years before I knew that Elton’s 1997 Candle In The Wind was a reworked version of a previous song that began “Goodbye Norma Jeane…”. A song about Marilyn Monroe.

Elton changed the lyrics of Candle In The Wind to fit Diana, and while I appreciate that the metaphor also applies to her life, as it does to so many famous tortured icons, when I learned that it was originally written for Marilyn Monroe – that funny, gorgeous woman I used to laugh at in Some Like It Hot - I always thought it was a sin that she had to share the melody with another woman. It should have been for Marilyn. Doesn’t she deserve a song that refers to her and her alone?

Even Elton’s songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, who penned the original lyrics, said that the song could have been about any number of people who died before their time: Kurt Cobain, Virginia Wolf, Montgomery Clift. It made me mad. Why can’t Marilyn Monroe have her own story, her own legacy, her own ballad. And what a ballad. I love the way the guitar line moves over the chorus as if swaying against the pressure of an incoming storm.

“It seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind/Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.”

A candle in the wind is such an exact impression. The will it takes to keep burning amid the forces of nature.

I cry every time I hear Candle In The Wind. I listen to it now as comfort. And I think about Norma Jeane, with the crawlers coming out of the woodwork to whisper bad ideas into her brain that would lead her to a path of self-destruction, as she shone bright for people the world over, battling alone, immortalized by tragedy, misunderstood eternally, loved throughout the ages, exposed globally in a perfect glamorous image and yet never truly seen. To have the gaze of the universe upon you but to be unknown is a lifelong prison sentence; one which she cut short with a bottle of barbiturates on a summer evening. August 4, 1962. The light extinguished before it was time. How much brighter and longer she could have beamed. If only she had found the will to survive. To be not what happened to her, but what she did with the demons within her.

“Goodbye Norma Jeane, even though I never knew you at all.”

Did anyone?