EXTRA: 85 years since 'massacre,' yet I just want to watch Marilyn Monroe

It has been 85 years since the violent outburst in a garage at 2121 N. Clark St. that we now think of as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Yet all I can think of on this Friday is Marilyn Monroe.

Yes, the curvaceous beauty to whom all Hollywood glamour for all time invariably gets compared.

A PART OF me wants to pull out my copy of “Some Like It Hot” and pop it in the DVD player.

Let’s not forget that the film starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon was set largely on board a passenger train and in Miami Beach. But it started in Chicago with their two musician characters inadvertently witnessing the grisly killings.

Hence, they have to get out of town before they’re killed off. So naturally, they dress up as women, get hired by an all-girl band (Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators) and wind up encountering Sugar (played by Monroe).

Yes, it’s total nonsense. Just the other day I stumbled across a Monroe documentary that said much of the humor of the film was in the preposterous notion that Monroe’s character would not be immediately able to tell that “Josephine” and “Daphne” were really men.

BUT IT DOES put a humorous touch to that ugly day. It certainly comes across as more entertaining than the 1967 film “The St. Valentine’s Day” massacre, which was a slightly-fictionalized take on what supposedly happened.

But one that got bogged down in so much factual matter that it becomes dreary at times. It gives evidence to the old cliché, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

That film certainly did.

When it comes to the latter film, what I most note is that it gave us Jason Robards as Capone – some nine years prior to giving us the award-winning performance as the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee in “All the President’s Men.”

HE WENT FROM playing a man who later got busted by the Internal Revenue Service to being the man who helped take down a political hack of a president.

Interesting material. Although I’d still rather watch Monroe – who showed us her humor as well as her curves.

The real thing!

Even if it’s not, strictly speaking, a historic moment film. Although if there is a moment in Chicago history that I’d like to see someone try to make a film out of, it is the Chicago fire of October 1871.

I realize that 1937’s “In Old Chicago” starring Don Ameche already gave us one take. Yet I wonder what could be done now, with the additional knowledge we now have that acquits the reputation of the O’Leary family and with the visual technology that could make the burning down of nearly an entire city a true spectacle to watch.

COME TO THINK of it, I think I’d still rather see the interaction of Curtis and Lemmon in “Some Like It Hot.” It has its humorous moments.

And it also gave us what might well be the funniest ending line of a film (by comedian Joe E. Brown) ever when Lemmon’s “Daphne” character finally whips off his wig and reveals he’s a man.

“Well, nobody’s perfect!”

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Marilyn gets tagged. Is Picasso next?

At this rate, Marilyn Monroe is going to be one heavily tattoo-ed ‘ho’ by the time her Chicago stint is complete next summer.

By that, I’m being facetious, since Marilyn’s earthly remains remain untouched – to the best of my knowledge.

WHAT I’M REFERRING to is the 26-foot-tall statue of Marilyn recreating her iconic moment (subway breeze blowing her dress above her waist from "The Seven-Year Itch") that stands in Pioneer Court just off Michigan Avenue.

The statue clearly lets us see what color undies Marilyn was wearing and provides the juvenile pig of the male species something to gawk at as we cross the Chicago River.

And now, at least for the time being, we can see the so-called tattoo on her right calf near her ankle. It’s actually nothing more than graffiti, where someone felt compelled to tell us that Pi$tola and Ariel love each other, along with a whole lot of other scrawls that don’t mean a thing to anyone of any sense.

No word yet on how the artist who designed the statue, or the realty group that controls Pioneer Court, will react to this situation. I’d like to think it’s just a matter of someone digging out the flesh-colored (at least flesh-colored if you’re white and blonde) paint and going over the graffiti.

OR ELSE IT becomes the open invitation to everybody to start scrawling over the one-time Norma Jean DiMaggio’s form in every conceivable way. Marilyn the sexpot will become the tattoo-ed lady from the freak show.

Just how long would it be before someone tried to climb the statue in the middle of the night, and try to leave his (or her) mark in the statue’s ample cleavage?

Actually, this is one moment when I wish Joe DiMaggio were still alive. For the one-time New York Yankees star was so jealous of his wife of nine months’ memory that I can’t help but think he’d already be plotting some sort of revenge.

A Louisville Slugger seems to me to be the perfect rebuttal to whomever the nitwit was who decided that graffiti was needed here.

ACTUALLY, IT REMINDS me of an incident about two decades ago when an activist group came up with some posters to put up on Chicago Transit Authority elevated train platforms.

Those posters tried to express tolerance for all, and depicted multiple images of people kissing. Some of those couples were inter-racial, while others were homosexual.

The activists held a big press conference one day to announce their message. The next morning, every single poster had been defiled with black paint. Some put obscene words or phrases on the posters, while others blacked out the couples.

By afternoon, every single poster had been taken down by CTA officials on the grounds that they weren’t going to leave graffiti in place. Because the activist group had a limited budget, there were no replacement posters to put back up.

THE ONE MONTH-LONG statement turned into a single day.

Which means that Marilyn’s tattoos have already lasted longer. They were done sometime late Friday or early Saturday, and reported to police Saturday afternoon.

They remained in place on Sunday while officials tried to figure out what to do.

You can’t very well follow the lead of the CTA and demand that Marilyn’s statue be taken away (although there are those of us who would like it if that silly statue were to disappear before its scheduled termination date in the summer of 2012).

WHICH MEANS WE’RE going to have to bring out the flesh-colored paint.

Now I should make one point clear. I don’t believe that who-ever put their mark of graffiti on Marilyn Monroe was trying to make some sort of ideological statement like the unknown person (or people) who vandalized posters about tolerance two decades ago.

That person, I’m sure, thinks they “won” because their ignorance prevailed – the posters disappeared 29 days earlier than they were supposed to.

As for the person who did this particular bit of graffiti on Marilyn, I doubt there’s any ideological statement being made. They most likely were just bored. Either that, or they had the IQ of a cantaloupe and thought that marking up this statue was necessary.

AS THOUGH A gauche piece of art needed to be made any more tacky!

Yes, I’ll confess. I don’t think much of graffiti, and I have a hard time tolerating those people who think that some sort of statement is being made, particularly since it always winds up being someone else’s property that gets used for the alleged statement.

The day these graffiti taggers decide to mark up their own property, or buy the space on a signboard for their scrawls, is the day I will take them more seriously. Although I suppose we should be surprised that we don’t get more of these scrawls out-and-about.

A part of me is always surprised that the Picasso statue at Daley Plaza doesn’t get hit by such vandals. Although maybe now that Marilyn has been hit, perhaps Pablo’s work is next.

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No air?!? Hiding from the humidity. Or will Marilyn’s heat burn their lips?

I happened to be at a government building in the Chicago suburbs this week when one of the local aldermen walked up to me and whispered in my ear that he had a “scoop” for me.

His city is in the process of putting together its budget for the current fiscal year, and he said that one way to save a whole heck of a lot of money would be to totally eliminate the budgetary line item that pays for air conditioning.

“JUST THINK OF how much money we’re spending right now,” he quipped.

Now I say “quipped” because I realize that particular alderman was joking. There’s no way that government building – or any building, for that matter – would have been bearable this week had it not had the air conditioning running.

At that particular moment, I had just entered the suburban City Hall and was soaked with sweat because of the walk from my car parked a half-block away and the building. At that particular moment, temperatures were so high that the heat index was registering just under 100 degrees.

It was hot. And it was humid. A combination that results in a disgusting feel to the air, an uncomfortable feel to the skin and the potential for people to become serious ill if they have some stubborn streak that makes them think of air conditioning as some sort of evil.

IT SEEMS THAT we have learned the Lessons of 1995, when for a couple of weeks that summer temperatures and conditions reached such intense levels that I once heard someone describe the situation by saying that for those weeks, Chicago became Saudi Arabia.

Because I haven’t heard tons of stories of mass fatalities around the Chicago area. Although the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if both Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel had some advance warning that let them know this was the perfect week to schedule trips taking them out of the Midwest (Emanuel in New York, and Quinn in Israel).

Perhaps it means that we’re doing a better job of being aware of the dangers, and that we’re checking up more thoroughly on those individuals in our society who might otherwise be at risk.

In fact, a part of me has thought this week about my mother, who passed away last year just before Thanksgiving. She would have been miserable this week, and I’m sure the heat would have left her feeling weak.

A PART OF me is thankful that she is not suffering from the heat and humidity, or having to endure what all of us coped with this past week.

Personally, I spent as much time as I could indoors – usually as close as I possibly could to a fan. As I write this commentary Friday night, I have a fan blowing about four feet to my right.

It is keeping the air circulating sufficiently that I feel comfortable (although the fan’s built-in thermometer tells me the current temperature in this room is 86 degrees). When one considers that I also have a bottle of water chilled cold about two feet to the left of me that I routinely reach for to take a sip now and then, I can’t complain too much right now.

But I’m well aware of the fact that many people have to do their work outdoors in the brunt of the heat. Heck, the couple of reporter-type assignments I have undertaken that forced me outside left me in a serious need for a change of clothes and a quick shower once I got home.

WHICH MEANS I did my part to contribute to excess water use. Although the alternative would have been to sleep in my sweat and stink.

Then again, I had it better than my brother, Chris, who on his job this week was shifted to a rare week of overnight (9 p.m. to 6 a.m.) shifts.

Some might mistakenly think he escaped the brunt of the heat, since it meant he was asleep in an air conditioned room throughout the days. Yet this was a week so ridiculously hot that even overnight, the heat index was still in the 90s.

When added to the fact that he works in a place that typically is hot, even in mid-winter, there simply was no escaping this heat wave.

BUT THEN I think back to Feb. 1-2 and the nearly two feet of snowfall we got hit with in a 24-hour period. I still recall having to help my brother push his car through the snow when it became stuck in a drift. And I wonder how many people total suffered serious injury because emergency crews had trouble getting to them because of all that snow.

I hate snow even more than I despise the heat.

In fact, there’s only one bit of this heat that I have to admit I find humorous – the fact that this is the first week of that hideous-looking Marilyn Monroe statue on Michigan Avenue. I understand that many people are posing in front of the statue, having their photographs taken while groping or kissing Marilyn’s thighs.

Let those juvenile buffoons kiss her all they want. Maybe it means they’ll burn their lips.

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