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Celebrities for Ever: The Most Remembered Legends and Immortal Icons

By James Gavinn

Contributors: J.D. Lacroix, Valerie Constand, Soshanna Rosenstein and Josephine Leblanc.

 

Photo: Suzanne Somers

Icon' -- like 'diva,' 'legend' and 'genius' -- has become a bastardized term, a cliché applied by hack publicists to everyone from faded disco queens to Suzanne Somers. In a cultural sense, what does 'icon' really mean? Consider the differences between Marilyn Monroe and Meryl Streep, Elvis Presley and Elton John. An icon is not just a star but the blueprint for scores of imitators. Icons touch, dazzle and mystify each new generation, very often for tragic reasons. How compelling it is to watch people dance closer to the flame than most of us would ever dare; to take what we covet -- fame, beauty, riches -- and disdain it or destroy it. Some, like Monroe (1926-1962), let it destroy them.  Still the most mythologized icon the screen has ever known, Monroe was a child-woman who seemed barely aware of her power to seduce the camera, let alone the world. Accounts of her stormy childhood -- the orphanages, the rape, the suicide attempt -- gave enormous pathos to her dumb-blonde film persona. The fact that Cinderella died at the ball is a terror and a relief; it tells us that the glory we lack might have cost us dearly. Those early exits leave tantalizing questions about what could have been, should have been. Jean Harlow (1911-1937), the original platinum-blonde sex goddess of early talkies, was felled by uremic poisoning.

Photo: Meryl Streep

Photo: Elton John

Photo, left: Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926), who had the most incandescent sexuality anyone had seen on film, died of peritonitis at his peak. Now he's sealed on film in utmost splendor. He achieved what we all crave: he never grew old. Greta Garbo, born in 1905, lived to almost 85. But the Swedish mystery woman of early cinema vanished from film after the release of a disappointing comedy, Two-Faced Woman, in 1941. For the next fifty years she reappeared in flashes on the streets of Manhattan, face so shrouded that one never really knew if it was she. Garbo sightings became legendary. "When she died," writes David Thomson in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, "there was plentiful evidence of how ordinary and how dull the real woman had been." Would Garbo be nearly as iconic if she had shown up to reminisce with Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson? Such was the command of Elvis Presley (1935-1977) that long after he died, his most obsessive fans swore he lived on. Had he faked his death? Where was he hiding? Wasn't that Elvis who just pulled out of the gas station? That's how icons can inhabit our fantasies.

Photo: Marx Brothers

In the history of comic teams, none can match the wild antics of the movies' favorite brothers -- Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. For the Marx Brothers no topic was taboo, no person sacred, and they made fun of everybody and everything. As youngsters the brothers began in vaudeville. A list of Marx Brothers movies reads like a greatest hits list of Hollywood comedies. "The Cocoanuts," "A Day At The Races," "Animal Crackers," "Duck Soup," "Horse Feathers," "A Night At The Opera," and "A Night In Casablanca" all show the wacky brothers in all their humorous glory. Their pranks are timeless, and continue to enchant viewers of all ages.

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