Fashion
Icon or Eyesore? Palm Springs to Move Divisive Marilyn Monroe Statue
A truce has been reached in a battle that pitted admirers of the city’s art museum against fans of a giant outdoor Marilyn Monroe sculpture.
It was a sweltering day in Palm Springs, and a few intrepid tourists braved the unforgiving sun to snap selfies at the stilettoed feet of a colossal Marilyn Monroe, her white dress seeming to billow up in the hot dry wind.
Some of them had heard she was not likely to be standing there much longer.
“That’s why we came today — to take pictures,” said Lauri Hatcher, who used to live in Palm Springs and returns each year. “Because it makes me super sad.”
The statue — a 26-foot tall, 17-ton Monroe in her famous subway grate pose from the 1955 movie “The Seven Year Itch” — had bitterly divided the desert city.
While popular with tourists and selfie takers, drawing tens of thousands of visitors a month, the sculpture also met with fierce opposition and a lawsuit. Some foes saw it as tacky, tasteless and sexist and some objected that it blocked views of the Palm Springs Art Museum and confronted visitors leaving the museum with Monroe’s exposed underwear.
But now the two sides appear to have settled on a truce. The city’s mayor, Jeffrey Bernstein, told the City Council at a meeting late last month that an agreement had been reached “in principle” to relocate the statue, “Forever Marilyn” by the artist Seward Johnson, away from its position on the street in front of the museum to another spot in the adjacent Downtown Park.
The agreement — to be finalized by lawyers within 30 days — promises to bring the drawn-out dispute to a close.
