Scott's World -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Forty years ago this week Marilyn Monroe made headlines nationwide and in many foreign countries. Television and radio carried accounts of her death on Aug. 5, 1962, in her modest home in Brentwood, an upscale Los Angeles suburb.

Mystery surrounded the circumstances of her death at age 36. She was found nude by her housekeeper, lying on her bed with a telephone in her hand. Today she would be 76.

Doctors and the L.A. County Coroner explained she was the victim of an accidental overdose of prescribed medicines.

A cynical public wanted to believe Marilyn committed suicide in a fit of depression over her love affairs with President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy.

So much for Camelot.

To this day, mystification surrounds Hollywood's most vibrant and celebrated glamour girl, along with the rich memory of Marilyn's beauty, charm, charisma and unsurpassed sex appeal.

Yet only four decades after her death there were no stories in local newspapers, nor heed paid by radio or television to the anniversary of one of the best-known, most-publicized and photographed women of the 20th century.

So much for fame.

Few people are alive today who knew Marilyn Monroe. Most of the world's population was not yet born at the time of her death. Yet she lives on in the surprisingly few movies in which she starred (11) and her appearances in 19 other films, mostly in bit parts.

But her performances in "The Misfits," "Let's Make Love," "Some Like It Hot," "Bus Stop," "The Seven Year Itch," "How to Marry a Millionaire" and "Niagara" from 1953-1962 established her as Hollywood's solitary queen.

She was never a great actress, box-office champion nor grand dame of the industry.

Marilyn was much more than America's sweetheart.

The dazzling, shapely blonde with large, wounded blue eyes and compelling vulnerability was the personification of the ideal American woman, a desirable icon the world over. Marilyn embodied every single female virtue and fault in distressingly delicate and precise components. Every man who loved and respected women was aware of her extraordinary femininity. Women saw themselves in Marilyn incarnate.

All people resonated to Marilyn Monroe, the young woman they read about or saw in photographs more so than in movie roles, which were merely extensions of herself no matter the character she played.

Unlike today's young actresses, Marilyn avoided TV appearances as performer or interviewee. When seen on the tube, most memorably singing "Happy Birthday" to Kennedy at a Madison Square Garden party, her appearance was a special event.

On the other hand young, skinny look-alike actresses with ironed blonde hair these days invade the nation's living rooms almost nightly to discuss intimate details of their romances and to reveal their navels and tattoos.

Marilyn was beloved for herself, not her performances or public confessions.

She was mistress of the near impossible: creating an aura of compassionate innocence when she was no such thing. Her perpetual wide-eyed dignified rectitude was her greatest acting achievement.

She was an incurable flirt who seldom looked at men without sending a signal that if they played their cards right they might have a chance with her.

This alluring message was second nature to Marilyn, a secret game that delighted her, to say nothing of the fortunate recipients of her titillating but distant invitation.

Marilyn wore provocative clothes in her screen roles but dressed conservatively off-screen, though seldom hiding her obvious and delightful curves from admirers. Her appearance anywhere immediately charged the atmosphere, whether at a small cocktail party or the Academy Awards.

She effortlessly radiated energy with crackling electricity, seemingly without intent or even awareness. Few women in the public eye before or since have projected such astonishing phosphorescence.

Julia Roberts, today's America's Sweetheart, while talented and likable is as remote from the womanly wonder of Monroe as Mother Bloor.

The story of Marilyn's life reads like a Dickens novel; it is one of poverty, desertion, foster homes, abuse and humiliation.

There were dark times in her youth -- street walking, deprivation and desperation, failure and rejection.

But there was illumination too and eventual triumph, ending in tragedy.

Little Norma Jean Mortensen dreamed of becoming a movie star -- by hook or crook. And she attained her goal by employing both, often overcoming demeaning circumstances.

No writer could produce a screenplay that would do justice to Marilyn's saga from poverty and hardship to emergence as a golden specimen of transcendent womanhood for the ages.

Her life was rife with secrets, shame and disappointment; still she never lost her resolve while maintaining her vulnerability.

Beneath all the fuss and feathers, the glamour and sex goddess status, Marilyn Monroe was a woman of character and quality who found her way in the world on her own terms to become an everlasting legend.