THE MONROE DOCTRINE WEAK MINISERIES POSITS THE LATE ACTRESS AS A VICTIM, BUT WAS SHE REALLY?

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

Early in his career, the late ``Saturday Night Live'' and National Lampoon writer Michael O'Donoghue created a fairly misogynist, ``Perils- of-Pauline''-type comic strip about a young naked woman who routinely suffered all manner of abuse and humiliation. Escape from one particularly gruesome fate just meant landing in a far worse predicament.

That, essentially, is what CBS' Marilyn Monroe miniseries ``Blonde'' feels like, despite its tony origins as a Pulitzer-nominated novel by literary giant Joyce Carol Oates - a dark and pretentious rumination on the limits of one woman's central nervous system as she's violated in every fashion imaginable. To add insult to injury, the film opens with a caveat roundly expected to be ignored: It is, it admits up front, ``a work of fiction.''

And therefore, despite the ``truth-in-fiction'' rubric the movie wags in our faces, it is utterly valueless. Monroe has long been posited as a feminist icon/martyr, so there's little that a TV movie - even a four-hour one - can add to the Monroe Doctrine, so ``Blonde'' tries to invent a few things, maybe stretch a few others.

Prodded by Oates, the filmmakers expand on some rumors: There are a couple of scenes in which she engages, unsure but pliant, in three-way sex with the doper sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson (here simply called ``Eddie G''). (Oates uses a lot of coy, ``literarily mythological'' monikers, such as ``the Ex-Athlete,'' ``the Studio'' and ``Playwright.'') So why not include a scene where she runs off and joins a circus? Oh, that's right - it's not sexy or mean enough.

In the pantheon of pop-culture icons, only Elvis Presley has invited more high-brow ruminations than Monroe. In addition to Oates' recent addition to the canon, of course, Marilyn's last husband, playwright Arthur Miller, essayed his star-crossed ex in his play ``After the Fall.'' But really, that was as much about Miller as it was Monroe - his stand-in, Quentin, berates his wife after a suicide attempt, making himself the focus of attention: ``I'm all the evil in the world, aren't I? A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!''

Nick Tosches, in his great biography on Dean Martin, sums up Oates' 700-plus-page book in two sentences: ``Her sexiness was only desperation. It had been in her eyes for years: death like a Valentine.'' And naturally, Norman Mailer, too, appointed himself to perform a decade-late autopsy on Monroe: ``She is in the deepest need of a cure. Her illness is made up of all that oncoming accumulation of ills she has postponed from the past, all that sexual congress with men she has not loved, and all those unfinished hours with men she has loved, all the lies she has told, all the lies told about her, all unavenged humiliations sleeping like unfed scorpions in the unsettled flesh. Worse! - all unfinished family insanity, plus her own abused nerves.''

So Oates is getting to the party pretty darn late; there aren't a lot of bones left to pick through. But what's left isn't pretty, and in adapting ``Blonde'' the miniseries, director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Joyce Eliason focus morbidly, as did Oates, on the pervasive darkness in the life of Norma Jeane Baker. Successes are edited out - her triumphant films receive but a mention or a brief scene - and whenever Marilyn meets a man, she's usually getting mistreated by their second scene together.

We see Marilyn manhandled by her mother (whose big advice to her is ``die at the right time''). We witness an intimation of sexual foreboding from a foster parent and her being subsequently forced into an early marriage. We see her strapped to a gurney for an abortion, her acceding to perform sexual favors for two powerful producers, her drunkenly submitting to three-way sex, her being struck by a husband, her chemical abuse and hints of her ultimate meltdown. We hear character after character insult her, often addressing the camera, directly and portentously. ``This broad's a tramp; she's a bottle-blonde, a cow; she don't wear underwear,'' isn't atypical.

We endure all this and we wonder - what did Norma Jeane ever do to any of us that we'd want to depict or watch depicted all of this sordid squalor in such excruciating detail? Is she still being punished by the prudes of the world for awakening America to the potential of its sexual desire? Can the message in her life of long-suffering really be distilled to: Sex isn't sexy? (And don't we all know better?)

Do megastars of today wonder how the Hollywood of the future will depict them? Isn't obscurity starting to look pretty darn good?

But then, having shown us all that, ``Blonde'' the miniseries loses its nerve and cops out just as things get interesting, as Monroe gets involved with Bobby and Jack Kennedy. (Oates' book explores those relationships like a prim but no less cynical James Ellroy.) At one point, Marilyn turns to the camera and, by way of explanation of something or other, blankly intones: ``Earthquakes, fires, the air smothering us - some of us were born here, and some of us will die here. It's a pact we made with the devil.'' Huh? The final title card informs us that she never had a child, a horrible bid for insincere poignancy given that any kid she might have had clearly would have ended up as miserable as she.

Australian Poppy Montgomery has the unenviable dual task of trying to emulate Monroe and sort out all this misery. She does as well as she probably can under the circumstances (and very occasionally actually looks like Monroe), but ``Blonde'' misses a key point - Monroe was an active participant in her life.

``Blonde'' repeatedly underscores the passiveness and victimization of a little girl lost - she's simply swept along by a white-water current of events, the subject of a lifelong fraternity hazing - but clearly, Monroe could dish it out; otherwise, how else could she have made so many enemies? Not long after she achieved stardom, she submitted to the studio a list of directors she would work with - essentially the A-list of the '50s, and don't think of asking her to work with a hack. This is not the act of some subservient, timid creature quivering at the sight of all the big, bad men surrounding her.

Why people even continue to care today about Monroe is at least as interesting as the dreary particulars of her tragic life. Hers was one of those early premature deaths by show-biz excess. The recurring message of all those deaths is grim - boy, if wealth and fame and massive acceptance of your artistic expression and ubiquitous access to sex with highly desirable partners can't instill in you the will to live, what chance do the rest of us have? - yet banally comforting for the banal among us: Money and fame can't buy happiness, etc.

But drug abuse and destructive behavior have become old hat. Today, it's more surprising that Keith Richards is still alive than when a young musician overdoses or is felled in an angry hail of bullets. Jim Belushi's lousy career suggests what might have become of brother John. River Phoenix made more films than James Dean, including a couple of generational statements (``Running on Empty'' and ``My Own Private Idaho''), and he showed the same sort of promise, but his death didn't turn him into a cult hero. Today, when Robert Downey Jr. is arrested yet again, it merely inspires another round of punch lines from the late-night TV hosts.

Yet her story somehow remains unique. Marilyn entered the public consciousness at a time before the Oprah-fication of celebrity, before getting in touch with our feelings and our unhappy childhoods was mandatory, before even an entertaining middle-brow comic like Drew Carey could admit to being molested as a kid. She buried her past as best she could, which obviously wasn't well enough, and she eternally (and rightly) fretted about being perceived as a joke. Which, it seems, projects such as ``Blonde'' are intent, however backhandedly, on doing.

If you want to get a glimpse into the real Monroe, you'll have to wait until next month, when American Movie Classics presents ``Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days,'' offering rare footage from her final, aborted project, the presciently titled ``Something's Got to Give.''

Narrated by James Coburn, it shows just how temperamental and ethereal and demanding Monroe could be - she skipped most of the first month of shooting, the production was a week behind before she had worked two days and she still insisted on abandoning the film to go serenade Jack Kennedy on his birthday.

Footage of Marilyn flubbing lines - but also tilting charismatically at dramatic windmills (it's clear, from the hope-for-the-best assemblage of footage a la ``Town & Country,'' that the film would've been a dud) - gives the viewer a surprisingly intimate look at the woman surrounded by demons, both imagined and very, very real.

``BLONDE''

What: Biopic miniseries about Marilyn Monroe.

The stars: Poppy Montgomery, Patricia Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Griffin Dunne, Titus Welliver, Ann-Margret, Kirstie Alley, Patrick Dempsey, Eric Bogosian, Skye McCole Bartusiak.

Where: CBS (Channel 2).

When: 9 tonight and Wednesday.

Our rating: Two stars.

``MARILYN MONROE: THE FINAL DAYS''

What: Documentary about the starlet's ill-fated last movie and death.

The stars: Narrated by James Coburn. ``Something's Got to Give'' features Monroe, Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse.

Where: American Movie Classics.

When: 8 p.m. June 1.

Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo: Titus Welliver is Joe DiMaggio to Poppy Montgomery's Marilyn Monroe, here and below, in the CBS miniseries ``Blonde,'' airing tonight and Wednesday.