” • “I am a humble herdsman, not a soldier,” said Paris.... “But I promise to consider fairly your claim to the apple. Now you are at liberty to put on your clothes and helmet again. Is Aphrodite ready?” • Aphrodite sidled up to him, and Paris blushed because she came so close that they were almost touching. • ”Look carefully, please, pass nothing over.... By the way, as soon as I saw you, I said to myself: ‘Upon my word, there goes the handsomest young man in Phrygia! Why does he waste himself here in the wilderness herding stupid cattle?’ Well, why do you, Paris? Why not move into a city and lead a civilized life? What have you to lose by marrying someone like Helen of Sparta, who is as beautiful as I am, and no less passionate? ... I suggest now that you tour Greece with my son Eros as your guide. Once you reach Sparta, he and I will see that Helen falls head over heels in love with you. ” • “Would you swear to that?” Paris asked excitedly. • Aphrodite uttered a solemn oath, and Paris, without a second thought, awarded her the golden apple.

—Robert GRAVES, THE GREEK MYTHS, VOLUME

The Sex Siren

Norma Jean Mortensen, the future Marilyn Monroe, spent part of her childhood in Los Angeles orphanages. Her days were filled with chores and no play. At school, she kept to herself, smiled rarely, and dreamed a lot. One day when she was thirteen, as she was dressing for school, she noticed that the white blouse the orphanage provided for her was torn, so she had to borrow a sweater from a younger girl in the house. The sweater was several sizes too small. That day, suddenly, boys seemed to gather around her wherever she went (she was extremely well-developed for her age). She wrote in her diary, “They stared at my sweater as if it were a gold mine.”

The revelation was simple but startling. Previously ignored and even ridiculed by the other students, Norma Jean now sensed a way to gain attention, maybe even power, for she was wildly ambitious. She started to smile more, wear makeup, dress differently And soon she noticed something equally startling: without her having to say or do anything, boys fell passionately in love with her. “My admirers all said the same thing in different ways,” she wrote. “It was my fault, their wanting to kiss me and hug me. Some said it was the way I looked at them—with eyes full of passion. Others said it was my voice that lured them on. Still others said I gave off vibrations that floored them.”

A few years later Marilyn was trying to make it in the film business. Producers would tell her the same thing: she was attractive enough in person, but her face wasn’t pretty enough for the movies. She was getting work as an extra, and when she was on-screen—even if only for a few seconds—the men in the audience would go wild, and the theaters would erupt in catcalls. But nobody saw any star quality in this. One day in 1949, only twenty-three at the time and her career at a standstill, Monroe met someone at a diner who told her that a producer casting a new Groucho Marx movie, Love Happy, was looking for an actress for the part of a blond bombshell who could walk by Groucho in a way that would, in his words, “arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears.” Talking her way into an audition, she improvised this walk. “It’s Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one,” said Groucho after watching her saunter by. “We shoot the scene tomorrow morning.” And so Marilyn created her infamous walk, a walk that was hardly natural but offered a strange mix of innocence and sex.

Over the next few years, Marilyn taught herself through trial and error how to heighten the effect she had on men. Her voice had always been attractive—it was the voice of a little girl. But on film it had limitations until someone finally taught her to lower it, giving it the deep, breathy tones that became her seductive trademark, a mix of the little girl and the vixen.