Happy Birthday to JFK, born May 29, 1917.
“A half-century ago, on a spring night in New York City, 35-year-old Marilyn Monroe — literally sewn into a sparkling, jaw-droppingly tight dress — stood in a spotlight on a dark stage. She took a breath, began to sing — and 15,000 men and women who filled the old Madison Square Garden that night knew, simply knew, that they were seeing and hearing something that they would never, ever forget.
The song, of course, was “Happy Birthday,” and Marilyn’s breathy, intimate rendition — sung, as if the two of them were utterly alone, to President John F. Kennedy — has been celebrated, analyzed and lovingly parodied countless times in the five decades since that indelible prformance. But beyond the buzz that Marilyn’s “Happy Birthday” generated — including, of course, tossing fuel on the already smoldering rumors about an affair between the movie star and the president — the moment, captured from above by photographer Bill Ray in his iconic picture of Monroe, played a key role in the legends that eventually grew around both the actress and JFK. Marilyn, after all, died less than three months later; Kennedy was assassinated the following fall. For stargazers and dusty old historians, alike, the night that Marilyn sang to JFK remains an uncanny, once-in-a-lifetime collision of sex, politics, power and pop culture.”
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