She's never far from view. But all this month and into January, The Gene Siskel Film Center will be hosting a special series of Marilyn's greatest hits: the most popular movies, in mostly new 35 mm prints, of that grandly gorgeous, supremely titillating star. Called "Merry Marilyn!" and including her great comedies "Some Like it Hot" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," plus "Bus Stop," "The Misfits" and six other classics or semiclassics, the series reveals again, the world's most adorable sex symbol and lets us gaze at that glorious blond hair and ponder those dark and tangled roots.

She was the golden girl, the movies' all-time top blond and the prime fantasy playmate for most adult moviegoing males during her prime career years (1953-1961).

She was also, from another angle, a tragic victim of a sexist society: a sweet girl from an unhappy working-class background, born June 1, 1926 as Norma Jean Mortenson (or Baker), who was boosted to world fame by her incredibly photogenic charms, then caught up in a dangerous whirligig of celebrity, drugs, dangerous liaisons and political intrigue.

But she was also a woman behind a mask, a smart entertainer who created an image, playful but false, and manipulated it brilliantly for her public. Asked once by a breathless fan, "Are you really Marilyn Monroe? I can't believe it!" she replied, very revealingly, "Well, I can't believe it too. I guess I am. Everyone says I am." And when the one-time Norma Jean Baker referred to "Marilyn Monroe," it was almost always in the third person.

There was a motive for the fantasy. Like William Thackeray's guileful "Vanity Fair" schemer Becky Sharp, Marilyn epitomized the lower-class girl using beauty to rise in society. But her own bombshell's progress beggars Becky's.

At first the teen bride of an airplane factory worker (James Dougherty), she eventually became wife to both a national baseball idol (Joe DiMaggio) and a world-renowned playwright (Arthur Miller) and also the reputed bedmate of many celebrities, male and female, including a revered American president, John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy. Finally, she was the victim of a suspicious sleeping pill "suicide" that some still say was murder.

But Marilyn always seemed something she wasn't, and that's a testament to her acting skills, offscreen and on. In her '50s heyday, that acting was often ridiculed, it still surprises some to know that her big dream was to play Shakespeare on screen, or to learn that she was the favorite film actress of French philosopher/novelist, Jean-Paul Sartre, writer of "Being and Nothingness" and "No Exit." Indeed, Marilyn wound up as the most famous actress in any media of the 20th Century, even though her first big burst of fame came not from movies, but as a pinup girl: nude on a satiny red background, in the hit calendar called "Golden Dreams" that later became the first gatefold in the first 1953 issue of Playboy magazine.

It was also the year of her big movie breakthrough: the triple whammy of the sexy thriller "Niagara" (Dec. 17 & 21 on the Siskel series), where she writhed on a bed and drove her husband (Joseph Cotten) to murder; of the Manhattan comedy (a sort of chaste "Sex and the City" precursor) "How to Marry a Millionaire" (Jan. 2, 4), where she shares gaudy digs with '40s champ pinups Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, and of her great star vehicle "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (Tuesday), where she and buxom chum Jane Russell prowl a luxury liner and Paris, leaving erotic havoc in their wake.

That trio of '53 movies won Marilyn, appropriately, a "World Film Favorite" Golden Globe. Established as America's disrobed darling, she swept into her other star movies: the heart of the rest of the Siskel series. In "The Seven Year Itch," (Dec. 26, 29), she played the girl upstairs, the sexual fantasy of summer vacation hubby-on-his-own Tom Ewell (in a role director Billy Wilder wanted for the young Walter Matthau), not only inhabiting Ewell's dreams, sometimes scored to Rachmaninoff, but ours as well. It's in "Itch" (and, even more, in its publicity photos) that she stands above a subway grate and her white skirt whips up in the wind, in one of the movies' eternal images.

"Bus Stop" (Dec. 26, 28), from the William Inge play, has her playing threadbare showgirl Cherie; also a creature of dreams, she croons "That Old Black Magic" and dazzles Don Murray, the young cowboy who ropes and kidnaps her.

The magic hits its peak in "Some Like It Hot" (Jan. 2, 5), still her shining hour, despite tales of her epic line-memory wipeouts on set. Here, Marilyn is Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, featured chanteuse of Sweet Sue's Society Syncopators. (Sugar's signature tune is "Runnin' Wild") As she intoxicates two male musicians in drag (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), who are fleeing the Chicago mob disguised as lady musicians -- director-writer Wilder plays with many levels of sex and movie fantasy, while letting Marilyn realize hers to the full.

Finally, there's a picture so famous for its troubled back story that it's often underrated: "The Misfits" (Dec. 10, 15), the film written for her by husband Miller. In it, she plays Roslyn Tauber, Miller's dream of her as a sort of angel of sex: his idealized vision of what MM's golden girl would be like set down in a real contemporary Reno, Nev., background. But, whatever the turmoil, it matters little now; in the film, Miller's sorrows are sublimated and Marilyn still shines alongside the film's two other stars at twilight, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

We usually see these movies now on TV or DVD player. But the big screen is where Marilyn really belongs, in glorious Technicolor and stereophonic sound. Her life was often a mess, but on screen she comes beautifully together. More than Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Grable or the other Hollywood blonds she eclipsed, and more than imitators like Jayne Mansfield, she radiates that overwhelming star quality that "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" director Howard Hawks described so well: "The camera loves her."

That's why changing times and sexual politics haven't dimmed Marilyn's luster. Her '50s admirers celebrated the golden girl. Later generations could follow suit or focus on the other woman (or women) beneath the mask: either the broken-home victim, the sexual adventurer or the factory girl on the rise.

Paul Rudnick wrote that Marilyn was "very much like Coca Cola and Levis; she was something wonderfully and irresistibly American." But what was most American about her was that desire to better herself and rise above her roots. So she sold what the audience wanted to buy and then, as she became more famous and powerful, tried to give it even better. And if, to sustain her role, she needed to pop pills, have affairs, fake orgasms (with Miller, according to prosecutor Miner) or drive an entire movie set crazy while she made Wilder direct over and over again a "Some Like It Hot" scene with the tiny speech "Where's that bourbon?" -- then that was glory's price and the blond's due.

Hers was the ultimate American tragedy-of-success story. That's why we never get tired of rehearing it and probably never will -- and why we'll never get tired of watching Norma Jean/Marilyn, and the golden girl she created, on the big screen.

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