The Ripped and the Righteous

By FRANK BRUNI
It is Jack LaLanne you can thank, or curse, for all the gyms: in exurban strip malls, suburban manses, downtown hotels. The health club he opened in Oakland, Calif., in 1936 was one of their seeds and templates, an endorphin emporium that pointed the way.

With “The Jack LaLanne Show,” he also had a hand in the spread — a contagion, really — of television programs exhorting viewers to rise up from their La-Z-Boys and of infomercials hawking workout equipment. An army of spandex missionaries was unleashed.

But that’s not the whole of his legacy, or the most interesting (some might say insidious) part.

That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These, too, are his doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul.

“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”

The message that perspiration is a gateway to, and reflection of, higher virtues is captured in health club slogans like ones used by the Equinox chain over recent years: “Results aren’t always measured in pounds and inches.” “My body. My biography.” “It’s not fitness. It’s life.” The same idea is encoded in the language of personal improvement. A “new you” usually means a trimmer, tauter version, not someone who has learned to speak Mandarin or picked up woodworking skills.

And the pectoral is political. The current president and his predecessor have made ostentatious points of their commitments to fitness routines. Whatever the differences in their ideologies, intellects and work habits, George W. Bush and Barack Obama both let voters know that they carve out time almost daily for cardio or weights or both. And while that devotion could be seen as evidence of distraction (Bush) or vanity (Bush and Obama), each politician safely counted on a sunnier takeaway. In this country, at this time, steadiness of exercise signals sturdiness of temperament, and physical leanness connotes mental toughness.

Bill Clinton worked out less diligently, which was freighted with its own meaning: waistline as weather vane. Americans monitored his fluctuating physique as they wondered how well he was keeping all of his appetites in check.

Some conflation of the physical and the moral spans virtually all of human history. It’s present in the writings of the ancient Greeks, for whom athleticism was much more than mere sport. Christians long ago designated sloth one of the seven deadly sins, though they meant a dearth of industry more than a deficit of treadmill time.

And the philosophy that one form of self-control begets another — that careful maintenance of the body yields more than corporal benefits — has countless historical precedents. In the early 19th century, the American preacher Sylvester Graham advocated sparse, vegetarian-style eating as a hedge against impure thoughts, particularly sexual ones. He was nutritionist and moralist both.

In his own way, Mr. LaLanne was also a moralist, proselytizing about diet and exercise. To go back and look at his language is to be struck by its religious flavor.

He once compared himself to Billy Graham, saying that while Mr. Graham (no relation to Sylvester) was “for the hereafter,” he was “for the here and now.” He called what he was doing a crusade, adding, “To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America.”

And he admitted that exercise wasn’t always pleasurable or diverting. You did it because it was right and good and true — because it would better you. The Protestant work ethic pulsed through every one of his jumping jacks.

For Mr. LaLanne, proper physical stewardship involved not ascetic denial so much as activity, activity, activity. You must run! Or at least pump your fists up and down as you walk fast, preferably on an incline! Don’t forgo hammer curls! The true believer has a self-punishing — and often solitary — regimen. And he or she achieves inner peace only because of it.

Or so his disciples assert. “The physical is just sort of the vehicle to live with more intention, more mindfulness, more focus,” says Amanda Rose Walsh, a personal trainer in Manhattan. She tells her clients as much: “In order to have a healthy mind and soul and spirit, you have to start with the physical. You start with the body to get to deeper levels.”

And if you don’t succeed? To be unfit is to be unfit: a villain of the culture, indeed.

Listen to the way doughy contestants are introduced (and how they talk about themselves) on TV weight-loss shows, which promise redemption through rigorous calisthenics. Saddlebag thighs and love handles are woven together with career frustrations and domestic strife — all of them the wages of sloppy living. Moving past these humiliations and rejoining polite society are contingent on serious gym time.

Look at the title of the best known of these shows, “The Biggest Loser.” Is that mirthful wordplay or a pointed double entendre, referring not just to the eventual champion but also to the poor fatsos still wallowing in shame?

There’s a bullying strain to the modern fitness ethos, a blurred line between cheerleading and hectoring. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that kind of intimidation — in addition to the social and economic realities of diet and exercise — helps explain the paradox that for all the newfangled aerobic machines and reduced-rate January gym memberships, Americans aren’t noticeably haler and healthier.

When exercise comes wrapped in value judgments, does it wind up entangled in an anxiety that threatens the very resolve to get fit? As Mr. LaLanne was siring new methods for shaping up, he was fathering something else, too: a potent, and in some cases immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt.

Ugandan Gay Rights Activist Is Beaten to Death

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NAIROBI, Kenya — An outspoken Ugandan gay activist whose picture recently appeared in an anti-gay newspaper under the headline “Hang Them” was beaten to death in his home, Ugandan police said on Thursday.

David Kato, the activist, was one of the most visible defenders of gay rights in a country so homophobic that government leaders have proposed to execute gay people. Mr. Kato and other gay people in Uganda had recently warned that their lives were endangered, and four months ago a local paper called Rolling Stone published a list of gay people, and Mr. Kato’s face was on the front page.

He was attacked in his home Wednesday afternoon and beaten in the head with a hammer, said Judith Nabakooba, a police spokeswoman. But police officials said they don’t believe this was a hate crime.

“It looks like theft, as some things were stolen,” Mrs. Nabakooba said.

Gay activists disagreed and said Mr. Kato was singled out for his outspoken defense of gay rights. “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S. Evangelicals in 2009,” said Val Kalende, the chairperson of one of Uganda’s gay rights groups, in a statement. “The Ugandan government and the so-called U.S. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!”

Mrs. Kalende was referring to visits in March 2009 by a group of American evangelicals who held anti-gay rallies and church leaders who authored the anti-gay bill, which is still pending, attended those meetings and said that they had worked with the Americans on their bill.

After growing international pressure, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, indicated that the bill would be scrapped but that hasn’t happened yet and it remains a simmering issue in Parliament. The Americans involved later said they had no intention of stoking such a reaction.

Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men can face death by stoning. In Kenya, gay people can be sentenced to years in prison.

But Uganda seems to be on the front lines of this battle. Conservative Christian groups which espouse anti-gay beliefs have made great headway in this country and wield a lot of influence. Uganda’s first lady is a born-again Christian and has even proposed a virginity census. At the same time, American organizations that defend gay rights have also poured money into Uganda to help the small and besieged gay community fight back.


Josh Kron contributed reporting from Juba, Sudan

Coyote on Beacon Hill!

Travis Andersen Boston Globe

A coyote was shot and killed yesterday morning near Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill, after police determined it was suffering from a painful skin condition and may have presented a threat to public safety, authorities said.

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Yahoo! Buzz ShareThis .Boston police first spotted the roughly 25-pound female coyote on the Boston Common near Frog Pond and called Massachusetts Environmental Police for assistance at about 10 a.m., said Environmental Police Lieutenant Gary Duncan.

Boston officers pursued the animal and had it cornered in an alley near 38 Pinckney St., Duncan said, when environmental police arrived on the scene.

Duncan said the coyote had mange, a condition marked by rawness from heavy scratching, on its left side. Based on that, he said, officers decided there was a danger it might attack a person or a pet.

“We had no complaints, but if we had let her out we thought that this could happen, and we just weren’t going to allow it, [to protect] public safety.’’

The coyote was shot once with a service weapon, according to Duncan.

Chris Hayward, 40, who lives on Pinckney Street, said that when he saw a “caravan’’ of police vehicles on the street, he thought a certain neighborhood resident who commutes frequently to Washington, D.C., had returned.

“I said, is [US Senator John] Kerry in town, or what?’’

Hayward seemed shocked to discover what had attracted the police attention.

“Oh, geez,’’ he said. “What the [heck’s] a coyote doing around here? How bizarre is that?’’

While Hayward and other residents were surprised that a coyote had ventured into their urban neighborhood, coyote sightings in the city are not uncommon, according to Duncan, a 31-year veteran of the environmental unit.

“It’s all over, believe it or not,’’ he said, adding that in the past few months, environmental police have responded to sightings near schools and other locales in neighborhoods including East Boston and South Boston.

A few years ago, he said, authorities had to euthanize a coyote that had been attacking dogs on Carson Beach.

But in most cases, Duncan said, euthanasia is not necessary, unless the animal is injured or sick.

Authorities usually advise callers not to go near a coyote and the animal will eventually return from where it came, which Duncan said could be “anyplace.’’

He said the number reported coyote sightings have increased in recent years.

“I think it’s just that people are nervous because it’s a wild animal,’’ Duncan said. The presence of coyotes was documented in the state by 1957, according to the Massachusetts Audubon Society. They are adaptable and can survive in the forests and fields of rural Massachusetts as well as the suburbs of Boston, according to the society’s website.

Last February, a severely injured coyote was tranquilized and then euthanized after it was spotted limping through the streets of Dorchester.

In June, Brookline resident Paul Snover told the Globe he had seen several coyotes in and around his neighborhood in the preceding year. “That was the scariest one, at 8 a.m., while the sun was up, where Cushing [Road] meets with Milton [Road],’’ Snover said. “It was stalking my cat.’’

Yesterday on Pinckney Street, a young couple also expressed concern for their pets.

Neighborhood resident Frank Biscardi, 21, said he was walking his husky, Balto, in the morning when he saw the police on Pinckney.

“Thank God we weren’t out here with the little dog,’’ he said, referring to a Jack Russell terrier named Brooklyn that belongs to him and his girlfriend, Colleen Daniels, 22.

“Oh, my God,’’ said Daniels. “I just can’t believe it.’’

Pet owners may also find it hard to believe that coyotes would stake out their homes, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike.

But it can happen, according to Duncan.

“They can watch your house, and if you put your pet out at 6 o’clock every day and they want that pet, they’d be there at 6 o’clock to grab that pet,’’ he said. “They’re a creature of habit.’’

Travis Andersen can be reached at tandersen@globe.com.

Darkness on the Edge of the Universe

By BRIAN GREENE NY TIMES
IN a great many fields, researchers would give their eyeteeth to have a direct glimpse of the past. Instead, they generally have to piece together remote conditions using remnants like weathered fossils, decaying parchments or mummified remains. Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, is different. It is the one arena in which we can actually witness history.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing — literally — ancient times.

During the past decade, as observations of such ancient starlight have provided deep insight into the universe’s past, they have also, surprisingly, provided deep insight into the nature of the future. And the future that the data suggest is particularly disquieting — because of something called dark energy.

This story of discovery begins a century ago with Albert Einstein, who realized that space is not an immutable stage on which events play out, as Isaac Newton had envisioned. Instead, through his general theory of relativity, Einstein found that space, and time too, can bend, twist and warp, responding much as a trampoline does to a jumping child. In fact, so malleable is space that, according to the math, the size of the universe necessarily changes over time: the fabric of space must expand or contract — it can’t stay put.

For Einstein, this was an unacceptable conclusion. He’d spent 10 grueling years developing the general theory of relativity, seeking a better understanding of gravity, but to him the notion of an expanding or contracting cosmos seemed blatantly erroneous. It flew in the face of the prevailing wisdom that, over the largest of scales, the universe was fixed and unchanging.

Einstein responded swiftly. He modified the equations of general relativity so that the mathematics would yield an unchanging cosmos. A static situation, like a stalemate in a tug of war, requires equal but opposite forces that cancel each other. Across large distances, the force that shapes the cosmos is the attractive pull of gravity. And so, Einstein reasoned, a counterbalancing force would need to provide a repulsive push. But what force could that be?

Remarkably, he found that a simple modification of general relativity’s equations entailed something that would have, well, blown Newton’s mind: antigravity — a gravitational force that pushes instead of pulls. Ordinary matter, like the Earth or Sun, can generate only attractive gravity, but the math revealed that a more exotic source — an energy that uniformly fills space, much as steam fills a sauna, only invisibly — would generate gravity’s repulsive version. Einstein called this space-filling energy the cosmological constant, and he found that by finely adjusting its value, the repulsive gravity it produced would precisely cancel the usual attractive gravity coming from stars and galaxies, yielding a static cosmos. He breathed a sigh of relief.

A dozen years later, however, Einstein rued the day he introduced the cosmological constant. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that distant galaxies are all rushing away from us. And the best explanation for this cosmic exodus came directly from general relativity: much as poppy seeds in a muffin that’s baking move apart as the dough swells, galaxies move apart as the space in which they’re embedded expands. Hubble’s observations thus established that there was no need for a cosmological constant; the universe is not static.

Had Einstein only trusted the original mathematics of general relativity, he would have made one of the most spectacular predictions of all time — that the universe is expanding — more than a decade before it was discovered. Instead, he was left to lick his wounds, summarily removing the cosmological constant from the equations of general relativity and, according to one of his trusted colleagues, calling it his greatest blunder.

But the story of the cosmological constant was far from over.

Fast forward to the 1990s, when we find two teams of astronomers undertaking painstakingly precise observations of distant supernovae — exploding stars so brilliant they can be seen clear across the cosmos — to determine how the expansion rate of space has changed over the history of the universe. These researchers anticipated that the gravitational attraction of matter dotting the night’s sky would slow the expansion, much as Earth’s gravity slows the speed of a ball tossed upward. By bearing witness to distant supernovae, cosmic beacons that trace the universe’s expansion rate at various moments in the past, the teams sought to make this quantitative. Shockingly, however, when the data were analyzed, the teams found that the expansion rate has not been slowing down. It’s been speeding up.

It’s as if that tossed ball shot away from your hand, racing upward faster and faster. You’d conclude that something must be driving the ball away. Similarly, the astronomers concluded that something in space must be pushing galaxies apart ever more quickly. And after scrutinizing the situation, they have found that the push is most likely the repulsive gravity produced by a cosmological constant.

When Einstein introduced the cosmological constant, he envisioned its value being finely adjusted to exactly balance ordinary attractive gravity. But for other values the cosmological constant’s repulsive gravity can beat out attractive gravity, and yield the observed accelerated spatial expansion, spot on. Were Einstein still with us, his discovery that repulsive gravity lies within nature’s repertoire would have likely garnered him another Nobel prize.

As remarkable as it is that even one of Einstein’s “bad” ideas has proven prophetic, many puzzles still surround the cosmological constant: If there is a diffuse, invisible energy permeating space, where did it come from? Is this dark energy (to use modern parlance) a permanent fixture of space, or might its strength change over time? Perhaps most perplexing of all is a question of quantitative detail. The most refined attempts to calculate the amount of dark energy suffusing space miss the measured value by a gargantuan factor of 10123 (that is, a 1 followed by 124 zeroes) — the single greatest mismatch between theory and observation in the history of science.

THESE are vital questions that rank among today’s deepest mysteries. But standing beside them is an unassailable conclusion, one that’s particularly unnerving. If the dark energy doesn’t degrade over time, then the accelerated expansion of space will continue unabated, dragging away distant galaxies ever farther and ever faster. A hundred billion years from now, any galaxy that’s not resident in our neighborhood will have been swept away by swelling space for so long that it will be racing from us at faster than the speed of light. (Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there’s no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)

Light emitted by such galaxies will therefore fight a losing battle to traverse the rapidly widening gulf that separates us. The light will never reach Earth and so the galaxies will slip permanently beyond our capacity to see, regardless of how powerful our telescopes may become.

Because of this, when future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. The past will have drifted beyond the cliffs of space. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness.

If astronomers in the far future have records handed down from our era, attesting to an expanding cosmos filled with galaxies, they will face a peculiar choice: Should they believe “primitive” knowledge that speaks of a cosmos very much at odds with what anyone has seen for billions and billions of years? Or should they focus on their own observations and valiantly seek explanations for an island universe containing a small cluster of galaxies floating within an unchanging sea of darkness — a conception of the cosmos that we know definitively to be wrong?

And what if future astronomers have no such records, perhaps because on their planet scientific acumen developed long after the deep night sky faded to black? For them, the notion of an expanding universe teeming with galaxies would be a wholly theoretical construct, bereft of empirical evidence.

We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that with sufficient hard work and dedication, there’s no barrier to how fully we can both grasp reality and confirm our understanding. But by gazing far into space we’ve captured a handful of starkly informative photons, a cosmic telegram billions of years in transit. And the message, echoing across the ages, is clear. Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.


Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.”

Can Our DNA Electromagnetically 'Teleport' Itself? One Researcher Thinks So

Clay Dillow
DNA Teleportation Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier describes a phenomenon in which DNA emits electromagnetic signals of its own construction, "ghost DNA" that can be mistaken by enzymes as the real deal and replicated in another place. Essentially, it's DNA teleportation. Montagnier, et al.
A Nobel prize winning scientist who shared the 2008 prize for medicine for his role in establishing the link between HIV and AIDS has stirred up a good deal of both interest and skepticism with his latest experimental results, which more or less show that DNA can teleport itself to distant cells via electromagnetic signals. If his results prove correct, they would shake up the foundations upon which modern chemistry rests. But plenty of Montagnier’s peers are far from convinced.

The full details of Montagnier’s experiments are not yet known, as his paper has not yet been accepted for publication. But he and his research partners have made a summary of his findings available. Essentially, they took two test tubes – one containing a fragment of DNA about 100 bases long, another containing pure water – and isolated them in a chamber that muted the earth’s natural electromagnetic field to keep it from muddying the results. The test tubes were housed within a copper coil emanating a weak electromagnetic field.

Several hours later, the contents of both test tubes were put through polymerase chain reactions to identify any remnants of DNA – a process that subjected the contents to enzymes that would make copies of any DNA fragments they found. According to Montagnier, the DNA was recovered from both tubes even though the second should have only contained water.

Montagnier and his team say this suggests DNA emits its own electromagnetic signals that imprint the DNA’s structure on other molecules (like water). Ostensibly this means DNA can project itself from one cell to the next, where copies could be made – something like quantum teleportation of genetic material, a notion that is spooky on multiple levels.

Naturally, there is plenty of skepticism to go around regarding these findings, ranging from outright dismissal to measured doubt. Indeed, it’s a pretty radical notion: DNA replicating itself through “ghost imprints” rather than the usual cellular processes. More details will emerge when the paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal, as it is likely to be. The findings will then have to be repeated in multiple independent studies to be considered valid, something that will take some time. In the meantime, expect these findings to draw equal parts intrigue and skeptical scrutiny.

An Outrage Even Snow Can’t Cool

By PETER APPLEBOME NY TIMES
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.
In those long, bone-chilling New England winters that inspired Robert Frost, it must have seemed a clear choice, both as reality and metaphor.
These days, not so much.
Once the world seemed to stop on a snowy day in the suburbs, exurbs and beyond. The children were stuck at home. The paper didn’t arrive. The plow trucks came when they came — for the public roads, not for your driveway, which you and neighborhood kids did yourselves.

There wasn’t much on TV, just the soap operas that rattled along in inscrutable flirtations and intrigues and the weather-centric local and national news with weathermen standing in front of clunky-looking maps. It was inconvenient, but mostly a welcome inconvenience, a holiday from the routine.

Some places, particularly in Connecticut, had quite huge snow totals on Wednesday. But absent the blizzards or lesser storms that knock out power, now it’s always game on. Maybe the train is running late, but for all the hysteria in New York City about the snowstorm in December, the ’burbs mostly know how to do snow. The town plows run all night, and the for-hire plow guys show up in time for you to get to the station. In December, our hilly streets were plowed, and people were out running errands by noon.

And with the 24-hour shout-athon of cable and talk radio, the eternal IV drip of the online world, there’s no need to miss a moment of the positioning in the macroculture either. “With ‘Blood Libel’ the 2012 Campaign Has Begun.” “Pol Wishes There Was ‘One More Gun.’ ” “Feud Between Joe Scarborough and Glenn Beck Erupts.” “Limbaugh: Loughner Has Democrats’ ‘Full Support.’ ” It doesn’t need to be news to be news.

It’s not that Wednesday’s storm, in which about a foot of snow fell in northern Westchester County, didn’t affect people’s lives. In our little world of stone walls, open space and hilly streets, one that Frost would have recognized, a winter snowscape remains as pure a visual representation of ancestral Americana as you can find. On snowy days, people, uncharacteristically, wave when they drive by. The park is full of children sledding. A neighbor and I, who seldom stop to speak, wandered into the street, snow shovels in hand, to compare notes on storms and shoveling, past and present. Frost, who wasn’t the cheeriest of characters, would have felt at home.

AND it’s not all bad that reality, certainly the horrific images from Arizona, refuses to vanish for a day. “Things personally are O.K.,” a friend e-mailed on Tuesday, apologizing for leaving town early to get ahead of the snow. “Not so sure about this country.” Who could be?

It would be nice if Jared L. Loughner’s life had a simple narrative, but unlike fixing the Sanitation Department, it usually doesn’t work that way. So you had left and right battling over his story, as always, as if on Planet Fire and Planet Ice. Maybe there’s a way for a sane, nuanced conversation about guns, about the over-the-top political and media culture of grievance, retribution and rebellion, about a middle ground between Mr. Loughner as random, unexplainable, angry nut and Mr. Loughner as a direct spawn of the language of the right, but, well, that will have to wait until the next blizzard in Tucson.

On a hot night in Nashville last summer, I walked past a parked car with a man inside smoking a cigarette, the engine off, the radio on. An angry voice was ranting about the “ground zero mosque,” a place that the driver probably had never been near, but that nonetheless was this moment’s prime ballast in talk radio’s constant stew of outrage. So he listened in the dark as the voice crackled in the night.

It’s January in Westchester, not August in Nashville, but however peaceful and eternal the Frostian snowscape outside, that crackle is always with us these days. The anger never goes away. Snowmageddon makes for good tabloid fodder, but getting the sanitation trucks and plows right, as they did this time in New York City, is one thing. Fixing what ails us in our seething, angry, gridlocked, stuck-in-place culture is something else.

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. “From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire,” the poet concluded. That taste out there now isn’t desire, but even on a cold, peaceful day, one part fire, one part ice, it feels as if he got it right.


E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

Andrej Pejic, Fashion's New Gender Bender
by Isabel Wilkinson Daily Beast
The new face of Marc Jacobs has Cindy Crawford's bone structure and Kate Moss' body—but Andrej Pejic is a 19-year-old Serbian boy. Isabel Wilkinson on the fashion industry's androgynous new trend.

Damon Baker, a 19-year-old British photographer, went into a dark karaoke bar in Covent Garden last summer. In the back of the smoky club, he saw a woman with high cheekbones, long platinum blond hair, and wide-set blue eyes. She was, as he puts it, “the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life.” They started flirting. Only a few minutes into their conversation did Baker realize: She was a he.

And that he wasn’t just anybody. He was Andrej Pejic, a 19-year-old male model who has taken the fashion industry by storm. He has Cindy Crawford’s face and Kate Moss’ body—give or take a few parts. He debuted in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Paris show year, and since then has appeared in three consecutive spreads in French Vogue, Italian Vogue, and Turkish Vogue. Last week, he was unveiled as the face of Marc Jacobs’ spring 2011 campaign and will appear in Gaultier’s spring ads alongside his female doppelganger—the supermodel Karolina Kurkova. According to sources, he is on the top of every casting agent’s list for the men’s shows, which begin in Paris next week.

Pejic is part of fashion’s new “femiman” trend, the latest in a new crop of gender-bending models who have risen to prominence in the past few seasons. The most famous is Lea T, Riccardo Tisci’s transsexual assistant at Givenchy, whom he cast as the face of his Fall/Winter campaign. Fashion has embraced the gender-bending model—but Pejic stands for something larger, and is not just the face of a passing trend or a controversial ad campaign. He’s the leader of a new gender fluidity in fashion, in which traditional male and female attitudes are starting to matter less. It’s a message that is being slowly adapted industry-wide—and is resonating with consumers.

Pejic and his family fled Bosnia for Serbia when he was 2 months old. He remembers the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia as a child. At age 8, his family left for Australia, where they settled in Broadmeadows, a rough neighborhood in the suburbs of Melbourne. Pejic says he knew he looked like a girl from the minute he “came out of the womb and looked in a mirror.” His transition to Australia was a difficult one, as he was forced to learn English and integrate with students who weren’t like him. But Pejic insists that for all his physical differences, he was never bullied by his peers—and instead felt only the he was the subject of “curiosity and attention.” “A lot of macho guys did think of me as a girl,” he says of his high school years. “Though I can’t really say that it was ever a bad thing. All I’ll say is…a lot of free drinks!”
In many ways, his career has been just that: capitalizing on curiosity. In 2009, Pejic found his way to Chadwick Models in Melbourne, where he was interviewed and instantly signed. “I knew at the time we had someone potentially very big on our hands,” says Matthew Anderson, manager of Chadwick’s Melbourne office. Even in telling the story of Pejic, Anderson sets it against the backdrop of the global economic crisis—a kid who happened to be in the right place at the right time. He says that Pejic came to the agency in the middle of the meltdown, a time when fashion advertisers wanted “strong men” to convey a message of financial security. “In times of economic prosperity, clients can afford to use people that are using people that a little more interesting,” Anderson says. “We had this really interesting boy on our hands. So we thought let him finish high school first.”

They waited for the economy to recover, and for Pejic to graduate, before sending him to Paris in the middle of 2010. Not long after, Pejic was booked to walk in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Fall show, where he wore a pair of revealing navy blue hot pants. He was spotted by French’s Vogue’s then-editor, Carine Roitfeld, who promptly booked him for a spread in her magazine. Since then, Pejic has appeared in a slew of editorials, from Italian Vogue to the transgender magazine Candy. His slate is filling up quickly for the upcoming season, but according to Arnaud V., his booker at the New Madison agency in Paris, “some designers are a little scared to go for this image of very androgynous. Some people aren’t ready for him yet.”

Pejic makes an effort to return to regularly visit his parents in Australia, where his mother is a teacher and his father works in tourism. “I would love to bring my mum to see me in shows and travel Europe with me because she has done so, so much for me,” he says. Pejic says he’d like to study law, medicine, or economics at university one day, and also wants to “do a movie and then retire.”

Pejic declined to answer a question asking whether he identified as LGBTQ—and, when asked if he has a boyfriend or a girlfriend, responded: “I have Paris and I have dessert wine.” When he dresses himself, Pejic occasionally chooses to wear heels and makeup. “I like to dress up but I’m not so concerned with looking very sexy, it’s really more the art of dressing,” he says. He has not had any kind of surgery—but wouldn’t rule it out. “I’ve never had any operations,” he says. “I’m not opposed to any plastic surgery, but until now I haven’t had any.” When asked by a Serbian news station if she has a granddaughter or a grandson, Pejic’s grandmother simply laughs: “I have both!”

If this is Pejic’s moment, it’s certainly well-timed. The fashion industry is warming to gender neutrality, and transsexual models and spreads are finding their way into the mainstream. Last month, The New York Times said that “2010 will be remembered as the year of the transsexual.” For Pejic’s part, this translates to steady work. For one thing, he can be cast in editorials and ads as either a woman or a man. But his treatment in print is often a case of art-without-a-frame. Marc Jacobs’ recent campaign featured him in men’s clothes, but Pejic usually appears in women’s apparel—sometimes, without any evidence that he’s really a guy. Often, he’s fully disguised as a woman, and the statement eludes the reader. So what’s the point?

“We were trying to show the nudity of the sexes, that a man could look like a woman and a woman could look like a man,” says Turkish Vogue’s editor in chief, Seda Dominic, who chose him for a spread. “The line between the sexes is becoming more and more blurred. Fashion is all about providing people with choices. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman.”

Pejic is being revered by the fashion industry, but it’s clear that something about him is sticking with the general public, as well. He’s developed a large online following, and there are a number of fan sites dedicated to him. A three-month-old blog called Fuck Yeah Andrej Pejic is run by Carla Mendoza, a 17-year-old who follows Pejic’s exploits in Tokyo and Paris from her home in Canada. “Andrej knows people are not quite comfortable in what he does and he still does it,” says Mendoza. “He affects my perspective of how I think of myself, and my self-esteem, by the way he deals with criticisms in his work. I’m a woman. But because of him, he inspires me to be more feminine myself. If a guy can be more beautiful, I can be more beautiful too.”

According to Elias Bailey, who runs a similar blog called Fuck Yeah Men With Long Hair, Pejic’s surge in popularity sends a hopeful message that beauty is moving beyond gender classifications. “I don’t see him as merely a boy who looks kind of like a girl, but as someone whose physical sex is truly of no consequence to his beauty,” he says. “I really do hope that this trend signals a real shift in the way that people think about androgyny. For those of us who are androgynous and ordinary people, not models or rock stars, it’d be nice if people started being more tolerant of us.”

On Train, a Fight Between Silent and Merely Quiet
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
MATAWAN, N.J. — Last Monday morning, Robert Arbeeny and two friends boarded a train bound for Manhattan and began chatting about the holidays.

“Excuse me,” said the woman sitting across from them, raising her reading glasses, and then her voice. “This is the quiet car.”

Mr. Arbeeny apologized and began whispering, which caused further agitation. The woman put down her book and summoned a conductor.

“They are not supposed to be talking,” she said, wagging her index finger at the group.

The conductor tried stepping quietly between both parties.

“They do have a right to talk,” he said in a soft voice, “they just have to speak in a very quiet manner.”

As other passengers began looking on, the woman shot back: “What kind of sense does that make! Why would you allow them to have a sustained conversation in a quiet car, and why are you taking their side over mine!”

Similar scenes have been playing out since last Monday, when New Jersey Transit expanded its so-called quiet commute program — with the first and last cars designated as quiet during weekday peak-hour trains — on many of its highly traveled lines.

As a result, a yearning for quiet has sparked an inevitable war of very loud words. The quiet cars have now become some of the noisiest, as passengers trying to read or sleep are constantly hushing and shushing others.

Caught in the cross-fire are the conductors, who are acting as referees, trying to explain the new rules to passengers on both sides of the “quiet” platform. All conductors have been told to issue business cards to noisy passengers in much the same way that soccer referees issue yellow or red conduct cards to unruly players. The cards show a hand with an extended index finger placed over a pair of bright red lips, with the words “Quiet Commute” written underneath.

The rules for the quiet cars ask riders to refrain from cellphone use, disable the sound on laptops and other devices, and maintain low volume on headphones.

New Jersey Transit’s literature concerning the quiet cars, which has been available on trains for the past week, states that “conversations should be conducted in subdued voices,” but many riders are demanding complete silence.

“I think the whole concept of quiet cars is ridiculous,” said Mr. Arbeeny, 44, of Manalapan, N.J. “People are going to talk, it’s human nature. Many passengers, like the woman who told me to be quiet, are misinterpreting the new rules, and it is having the reverse effect in the quiet cars, creating tension instead of quiet.”

Patrick F. Reilly, the chairman of the United Transportation Union Local 60, which represents New Jersey Transit’s conductors, said Wednesday that the sounds of angry silence in the quiet cars would surely dissipate as passengers settled into more chat-free routines.

“Like anything else that’s new, this will take some time to get used to,” Mr. Reilly said. “Give it some time.”

By Thursday, that time had not yet arrived.

Annemarie Whitney, a 30-year-old accountant from Manalapan who works in Brooklyn, was sitting in a quiet car watching as fellow passengers angrily stared down a man talking on his cellphone. A nearby conductor who was made aware of the situation by several passengers reached into his pocket for a quiet card, but the man hung up before it could be delivered.

“Cellphones are one thing, but people are getting the wrong impression about these cars,” Ms. Whitney said. “They are quiet cars, not silent cars. Subdued and silent are two different words, and as long as there are misconceptions out here, there are going to be disputes.”

And bizarre requests.

On Friday, one passenger asked a conductor if he could disable the automated announcements, which inform riders of impending stops, as well as the conductor’s work radio, which he needed to stay in contact with the train’s engineer. “It’s unnecessary noise,” the passenger said.

The conductor gave the passenger the silent treatment, moving away from him and whispering to no one in particular, “Why don’t I just get this guy a pair of pajamas and a pillow.”

Dan Stessel, a spokesman for New Jersey Transit, said that he had not received any customer complaints and that “the overall response across the board, as it relates to quiet commuting, has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Quiet cars were introduced in September as part of a three-month pilot program on 29 express trains running between Trenton and Manhattan. (Amtrak began using quiet cars in 1999.) The quiet cars are now on all New Jersey Transit weekday trains arriving in New York between 6 and 10 a.m. and departing New York between 4 and 8 p.m.

“Many people have had the same commuting patterns for years, and this does require some adaptation on their part in terms of behavior and possibly shifting around to other areas of the train,” Mr. Stessel added. “Two weeks after we started this project in September, everybody was with the program.”

Steven Heite, a 48-year-old brokerage professional from Matawan who works in Manhattan and occasionally rides in the quiet cars, said New Jersey Transit should not have the authority to dictate such behavior.

“Legislating behavior policy to people who pay monthly ticket fees and often deal with train delays is not a very good idea,” Mr. Heite said. “These are not rowdy train-riders returning from ballgames, but hard-working professionals trying to earn a living.

“That being said,” he added, “if a particular car is too loud or intrusive, you can always move to another car.”

A Makeover for the Starbucks Mermaid

By STEVEN HELLER NY TIMES
Logomania has been in the air since the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, announced another redesign of the Starbucks logo last week.

In March, on its 40th anniversary, the Starbucks name will be entirely removed from its logo, leaving only a stylized illustration of the green mermaid, which Mr. Schultz calls “the siren.” The decision set off a wave of criticism from designers, much like the Gap logo fiasco last year. Gap unveiled a new logo so bland that the company was bombarded with complaints and scrapped it.

Why does such a small change create such alarm?

Fear of change may have something to do with it. Trademarks and logos are so integrally linked to our daily lives that any tinkering with the familiar is suspect — and to be avoided.

And altering the symbolic public face of a corporation is often accompanied both by unreasonable expectations of success and by superstitious resistance.

Paul Rand, a graphic designer who designed the I.B.M., ABC, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse logos, which have been in use for decades, said logos and trademarks were like good-luck charms or rabbits’ feet. In his book “Design, Form and Chaos” (Yale University Press, 1993), he writes, “There are as many reasons for designing a new logo, or updating an old one, as there are opinions.”

He added, “The belief that a new or updated design will, like a talisman, magically turn around any business is not uncommon.”

A redesigned logo may imply a new or improved product, but, as Rand said, “this boost is temporary unless the company lives up to these dreams.”

So when Mr. Schultz introduced the new logo in an online video, he did something chief executives don’t usually do: He explained the symbolic relevance of the change, hoping that his own confidence in the new format would persuade critics.

The new mermaid mark “embraces and respects our heritage,” Mr. Schultz said. But “the world has changed and Starbucks has changed.”

By allowing the siren to “come out of the circle,” he said, the company is thinking “beyond coffee.” He used sincere brand-speak, the jargon commonly used by designers selling their designs to executives like Mr. Schultz.

“If in the business of communications, ‘image is king,’ the essence of this image, the logo, is the jewel in its crown,” Paul Rand argued.

This means that not only is the logo valuable, it also should be crystalline and recognizable. The lone Starbucks siren is familiar, but is it good design? The new minimalist form is crisper, but without the circle of type, the mermaid appears naked.

Is it hubris to believe that a slick version of the mermaid, in green, can sell coffee? The rock star known as Prince replaced his name with a symbol. Maybe Starbucks is the rock star of coffees.

Behind-the-Scenes Power Politics: The Making of a Mayor

By GERRY SHIH NY TIMES
On Sunday afternoon, former Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. made an urgent call to Rose Pak, his longtime political ally and the powerful head of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. Word had trickled out that San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors had narrowed the list of interim candidates to replace Mayor Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor-elect.

But the contenders — Sheriff Michael Hennessey, former Mayor Art Agnos and Aaron Peskin, the chairman of the city’s Democratic Party — were deemed too liberal by Ms. Pak, Mr. Brown and Mr. Newsom, who are more moderate.

With momentum fizzling around Ms. Pak’s favored candidate, David Chiu, the board president, Ms. Pak and Mr. Brown decided to pool their efforts on behalf of another Asian-American official: Edwin M. Lee.

Over the next 48 hours, Ms. Pak, Mr. Brown and the Newsom administration engaged in an extraordinary political power play, forging a consensus on the Board of Supervisors, outflanking the board’s progressive wing and persuading Mr. Lee to agree to become San Francisco’s first Asian-American mayor, even though he had told officials for months that he had no interest in the job.

“This was something incredibly orchestrated, and we got played,” Supervisor John Avalos, a progressive, said in an interview. “I’m still trying to figure out what happened. I don’t know what the game was about, except that it was to muscle someone into office.”

Barring another last-minute development, the board is expected to ratify Mr. Lee’s appointment Friday in its final session. The incoming board, to be sworn in on Saturday, is expected to vote to install Mr. Lee next week — the last step needed for him to become interim mayor, until the election in November.

The behind-the-scenes drama was a stark reminder of the enduring power of Ms. Pak and Mr. Brown and their ability to influence city politics at the highest levels, even seven years after Mr. Brown left office.

In separate interviews, Ms. Pak and Mr. Brown described Mr. Lee as a committed liberal Democrat, and they emphasized the importance of the symbolism of an Asian-American mayor.

“This was finally our moment to make the first Chinese mayor of a major city,” Ms. Pak said. “How could you let that slip by?”

Mr. Brown said progressives should be “ashamed” of “subtle biases” in their opposition to Mr. Lee, a former civil rights lawyer who in 1978 led city tenants in the first rent strike against the State Housing Authority.

“To present an opportunity to a person of color, well-credentialed and well-qualified, ought to be one of the tenets of the progressive movement,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s genuine progressivism.”

Progressive supervisors said that they did not question Mr. Lee’s credentials or his politics. A career bureaucrat, Mr. Lee — who was appointed to his current post as city administrator by Mr. Newsom in 2005 — has a reputation among insiders as one of most competent public officials at City Hall. Rather, the progressives bristled at how his candidacy was engineered by Mr. Brown and Ms. Pak, whose bare-knuckled style of politics they have come to resent bitterly.

“I like Ed Lee, and I’ve always been open to him,” Supervisor David Campos said. “If they had given us an opportunity to have the conversation with Ed Lee and consider it, maybe we wouldn’t have had those issues.”

The last-minute push to install Mr. Lee involved political maneuvering, as well as misdirection and some luck, according to people involved in the effort.

For months, a number of supervisors had asked Mr. Lee if he was interested in being interim mayor, but he had always said no.

The critical stumbling block for Mr. Lee, several people said, was his concern about a rule in the city charter that prohibited elected officials from taking appointed positions within a year of leaving office. Mr. Lee, who is putting two daughters through college, was confirmed to a new term as chief administrator in December. He told officials he did not want to risk forfeiting the remainder of his five-year contract as city administrator, worth $1.25 million.

As his anxieties became clear, Mr. Newsom’s staffers asked the office of Dennis Herrera, the city attorney, to begin quietly drafting a charter amendment to allow Mr. Lee to return to the administrator’s post after he served as mayor, according to several City Hall officials. The amendment still needs board approval. On Monday morning, Mr. Chiu, the board president, joined Supervisor Sean Elsbernd and others in pushing Mr. Lee as a candidate among the board members. But Mr. Lee remained deeply ambivalent about the nomination as late as Monday evening.

“I am tremendously reluctant,” Mr. Lee wrote in an e-mail to Ms. Pak as he prepared to leave Hong Kong for the hot springs of Yangmingshan National Park in Taiwan.

“But Newsom would like to take care of as many concerns that I have, including the exemption from work prohibition after serving,” the e-mail continued.

Mr. Lee asked Ms. Pak for guidance, writing: “As you know, I love serving my city. Would this be the best way?”

Ms. Pak was fortunate to connect with Mr. Lee shortly before he boarded his flight to Taiwan — and an area with spotty cellphone service — and urged him to consider becoming the first Chinese mayor of San Francisco. It was only then, less than 24 hours before the board vote, that the Lee camp persuaded its candidate to accept a nomination.

On Tuesday, just hours before the board was to consider nominations and vote for an interim mayor, Mr. Newsom and his allies knew they needed a single vote more to push through Mr. Lee.

Mr. Newsom turned to Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who had initially favored Mr. Lee but had signaled to progressive stalwarts like Chris Daly, Mr. Campos and Mr. Avalos that he would back Mr. Hennessey.

The mayor summoned Mr. Dufty and another supervisor, Michela Alioto-Pier, a supporter of Mr. Lee, to his office shortly before the board meeting.

According to Mr. Dufty, Mr. Newsom urged him to support the “consensus candidate.”

When Mr. Dufty went to the board chamber that evening for what turned into an eight-hour session, he told Mr. Campos that he “felt good about Hennessey,” Mr. Dufty said. That led progressives to nominate their favored candidate, Mr. Hennessey, in an effort to lock up his appointment.

But their plan was thrown into chaos when Mr. Dufty refused to vote for Mr. Hennessey, leaving the sheriff one vote shy of the six he needed to secure the nomination.

Mr. Dufty then called for a recess and met with Supervisor Sophie Maxwell and Steve Kawa, Mr. Newsom’s chief of staff, in Mr. Kawa’s office, with Mr. Newsom on speakerphone. In an interview, Mr. Dufty said he wanted to confirm Mr. Lee’s positions on immigration before voting for him. He denied that he brokered a deal with Mr. Newsom.

“I could just see the waters shifting around Mr. Hennessey,” Mr. Dufty said.

Shortly before 10 p.m., Mr. Dufty emerged from Mr. Newsom’s suite to declare that he was ready to vote for Mr. Lee.

Mr. Daly was enraged. He had spent months working to install someone he hoped would be the first truly progressive mayor in 30 years, and that dream had been blown apart. He sharply criticized Mr. Dufty and vowed revenge on Mr. Chiu, who he had believed would side with the progressives, and who could have provided the sixth vote for Mr. Hennessey.

Mr. Chiu, who was mentioned as a possible candidate for interim district attorney (to fill the position vacated by Kamala Harris, the new state attorney general), announced Thursday that he was taking himself out of the running. Mr. Chiu is expected to run for mayor in the fall.

“I will haunt you,” Mr. Daly told Mr. Chiu on Tuesday night. “After this vote, I will politically haunt you. It’s on, like Donkey Kong.”

Twice, he muttered “30 years,” then slammed his fist against a banister and stormed out of the chamber.

Across town, Ms. Pak gleefully watched the proceedings from a bar at the New Asia Restaurant.

She was in a boastful mood the next day, several hours before she planned to have celebratory drinks with Mr. Brown at the Chinatown Hilton.

“Now you know,” she told a reporter, “why they say I play politics like a blood sport.”


gshih@baycitizen.org

Marilyn’s Manhattan, Both Public and Private

By PAT RYAN
A GIRL on a balcony: when I look out the rear window of my East 60th Street apartment, I see her as if I were watching an outdoor movie on a misty night. The girl I see is not Juliet but Marilyn, and the movie is “The Seven Year Itch.” A town house whose backyard meets mine appears in that 1955 film, in which Marilyn Monroe played the “delicious” unnamed Girl subletting an apartment for the summer.

Her admirer is a book editor (Tom Ewell) whose wife of seven years has just left Manhattan with their son for a vacation in Maine. After roaming restlessly around his lonely apartment, he moves out to the terrace. Suddenly a tomato plant in an iron pot plummets from the balcony above, just missing him. The Girl leans over the railing in dismay. Hello! Later, over Champagne and potato chips, well, it’s easy to imagine the 1950s romantic but code-cleaned comedy plot.

The ghost of Marilyn Monroe dances provocatively all around my neighborhood. In the George Axelrod play on which the film is based, the apartment is near Gramercy Park; the movie script, by Axelrod and the director Billy Wilder, changes the location to a brownstone in the East 60s, where the rent is “a modest 160 a month.”

Only two scenes were actually filmed in New York, mostly as publicity stunts. The first location was a town house at 164 East 61st Street, and during filming Monroe could be seen, “clad in lingerie,” at a second-story window. “Barricades blocked off the street, between Third and Lexington Avenues, for four hours,” The New York Times reported.

Off the set, one of Monroe’s favorite restaurants, Gino, was right around the corner, at 780 Lexington Avenue (where she dined alone or with her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, and later Arthur Miller, her third husband). After a long run, Gino closed in May. But across Lexington, at 143 East 60th Street, the divey Subway Inn is still serving from 10 a.m. until 4 a.m. daily. Vintage color photographs of Monroe shine in the dark interior, and legend has it that she sometimes used to land here when bar-hopping after work.

The second Manhattan location in “The Seven Year Itch” — for “the shot seen around the world” — was at Lexington and 52nd Street. Thanks to the 20th Century Fox publicity department, the details were released in advance.

Estimates vary, but 2,000 to 5,000 fans and photographers lined up on Sept. 15, 1954, and witnessed the billowing-dress sequence. Monroe, wearing an ecru Travilla halter dress with accordion pleats (and two pairs of white panties, she notes in “Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words,” by George Barris, Citadel Press, 2001), stepped onto a subway grate in front of the Trans-Lux Theater. Klieg lights and cameras hit her; the special-effects man underground started the huge fan; and Wilder shot the scene over and over again as the crowd roared for more.

The Trans-Lux has been gone for decades, but the subway grates on the west side of Lexington Avenue are still available for photo shoots. (The specific grate, alas, is not commemorated with a plaque, but I recommend the sidewalk in front of Le Relais de Venise l’Entrecôte, a bistro at 590 Lexington.)

After Wilder wrapped that scene, a drama that was not part of the film took place on East 55th Street, in Suite 1105 at the St. Regis Hotel, where Monroe and DiMaggio were staying. DiMaggio had been in the raucous crowd that night, persuaded to attend by Walter Winchell, who had sniffed out something he could dish in his gossip column. Presumably even he could not have predicted that the scene on Lexington Avenue would lead to a fight, a bruised Monroe and a divorce. On Oct. 5, 1954, The Daily News headline said it succinctly: “Marilyn Splits With Joe Over Sexy Pictures.”

As planned, a large part of the skirt scene was later reshot, less revealingly, on the Fox lot in Los Angeles; the original location shots were used for the ads. The movie’s premiere was here on June 1, 1955, Monroe’s 29th birthday.

Monroe came to New York in 1954 not only for “The Seven Year Itch” but also for a lifestyle change, the theater and an acting class with Lee Strasberg.

She took a suite at the former Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street near Lexington Avenue. It was convenient to the photographer Milton H. Greene’s studio at 480 Lexington, first for portrait sittings and later for business meetings when Greene became vice president of the new Marilyn Monroe Productions. She also frequently visited Greene and his wife at their apartment on 127 East 78th Street and the psychiatrist recommended by Greene, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, at 155 East 93rd Street. (Later she would visit the psychiatrist Marianne Kris in the same building where Lee and Paula Strasberg lived, the Langham on Central Park West.)

The elegant Waldorf-Astoria was Monroe’s next home. She sublet a suite on the 27th floor and used the hotel stationery for her diary notes and poems, some of which have been reproduced in the 2010 book Fragments, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

The non-Hollywood Marilyn Monroe shed her ermine wrap in favor of a scarf and dark glasses. She read Russian literature, went to the Met (where she admired Rodin’s “Hand of God”) or wandered up to 87th Street to buy cigarettes at the First Avenue Smoke Shop. In jeans and sweatshirt, she strolled around Manhattan like a “female version of Brando,” Donald Spoto writes in “Marilyn Monroe: The Biography” (HarperCollins, 1993). Monroe continued to yearn for a role like Juliet or Grushenka, but directors saw her as Sugar or Lorelei.

On Sept. 29, 1955, she went to the Broadway premiere of Arthur Miller’s “View From the Bridge.” She had met Miller in Hollywood, and at the play he introduced her to his parents. On June 29, 1956, Miller and Monroe were married.

She had been renting an apartment at 2 Sutton Place, not far from 36 Sutton Place (at 55th Street), the classy digs in “How to Marry a Millionaire,” in which she played the myopic, diamond-seeking Pola. After their wedding, Monroe and Miller moved to an apartment on the 13th floor of 444 East 57th Street.

She often took her Maltese terrier, Maf (short for Mafia Honey), for walks to the park on Sutton Place. They would sit on a bench and gaze at the East River, Maf recalls in his ghosted memoirs (“The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe,” by Andrew O’Hagan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), and she would “stare into space and mention names.”

“Men’s names,” the memoir continues.

Miller wrote the final draft of “The Misfits” in the East 57th Street apartment, and it was the couple’s New York home until they divorced in 1961.

Monroe lived in New York off and on until just before her death in 1962. Here she was free from what she saw as the slavery of the Hollywood studio, but she was never Juliet. On the balcony or over the subway, Marilyn Monroe remains fixed in time as The Girl.