CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Marilyn Monroe and the World Cup

Milton H. Greene, Marilyn Monroe ‘Ballerina’ sitting, 1954. Photo: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery.

If any, it was baseball that was Marilyn Monroe’s game. In 1954, she married the recently retired, New York Yankees great Joe DiMaggio. She attended games with Joe and was once photographed standing at home plate with a baseball bat on her shoulder. In truth, she knew little about the game and didn’t care about sports – “I’ll leave those things to the men,” she said.

Maybe she chose DiMaggio for his grace – he didn’t run so much run as glide toward flyballs in center field; or maybe his steadiness – in 1941 he set a record for getting hits in 56 consecutive games. But whatever the reason, she picked wrong. After showing up uninvited on the location set of The Seven Year Itch on East 58th Street in Manhattan, he grew incensed watching take after take of the famous subway grate scene and onlookers ogling his wife.  Did he think he married Eve Arden? The marriage was over before it barely started.

I went to see Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the morning after the much-anticipated World Cup football game between England and Argentina. I’m not a big sports fan, and have no attachment to the English squad, but after weeks of public build-up, discussion and expectation, the debacle in Dallas was deflating. I was ready to think about something else and MM seemed an undemanding choice. Little did I guess the exhibition would describe another kind of catastrophe — one more personally affecting than the one that befell English football.

Choosing sides in the World Cup

Though I wanted to be a good ex-pat and root for the American team to win the World Cup, that was impossible. A victory (unlikely though it was) meant a team visit to the White House and Trump crowing that the U.S. was the “hottest” country in the world. And if that wasn’t enough to turn me off the American team, supporters in stadiums chanting “U S A! U S A!” were. They might have been attending a MAGA rally. Trump’s successful overturning of the red card against the American star Folarin Balogun was the clincher.  I couldn’t root for a team helped by the cheater-in-chief

England was the natural place to land. I live in Norwich, U.K. and know lots of people who are big supporters of the English squad. It’s nice to fit in. But that too proved difficult. Could I forget English captain Harry Kane’s golf game with Trump? Would he have said about Hitler what he said about the president: “His golf is pretty good to be honest with you.”

Then there’s the matter of the St. George’s Cross, unfurled on playing fields, waved by fans, and painted on faces and bared (mostly male) torsos. In recent years, the red and white banner has become a sign of British chauvinism, racism and xenophobia. A few journalists have said the proudly multi-cultural English club has reclaimed the banner from the far right. But that’s overly optimistic. A few weeks ago, my wife Harriet and I visited the town of Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk. St. George banners and pennants flew from poles at homes and businesses, and atop the light posts on the high street. Unsurprisingly, the town votes mostly Reform UK or the even further right Great-Yarmouth First Party, an offshoot of Restore Britain, led by Rupert Lowe, Nigel Farage’s rebel angel. Among the policies they support are mass deportation of “illegal migrants,” restoration of the death penalty, strengthening Britain’s “Christian heritage,” and banning halal and kosher meat. UK football fans have no business carrying the St. George Cross unless they want to be associated with that.

And finally, there’s the national anthem sung before English games. It has the same melody as the American contrafactum, “My Country Tis of Thee”:

God save our gracious King! Long live our noble King! God save the King! Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the King.

God save our gracious King! Long live our noble King! God save the King! Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the King.

Many Brits don’t know the words. When I asked Harriet if she did, she replied “of course!” and sang: “God save our dah-dah king, dah dah dah, dah, dah-dah, God save our King.” But there on the football field in Atlanta, was the English squad, singing every word. You’d think the nation would long ago have retired the song. Imperial nostalgia has for generations crippled the country. It lay behind the Suez debacle in 1956, the elections of Margaret Thatcher, John Major,........

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