I am taking the Ava Gardner book, Love Is Nothing, back to the library, having had it on my desk for three weeks straight and not having read a page of it.

I may take it out and try again… but probably not.

Marilyn Monroe is this month’s Vanity Fair cover girl. She is there to market the release of the new book Fragments, a compilation of the icon’s poems, dreams and journal scribblings (Marilyn honey, wherever you are, I hope you’re okay with this).

I have been reading the Fragments excerpts. They are very affecting, as I expected they would be. But as I close the magazine’s pages I find myself wondering when we’re going to see, say, Lena on Vanity Fair’s cover, or Dorothy, in remembrance and celebration of their cinematic achievement and pop culture status. I don’t mean to be churlish about Marilyn—or Ava. They were singular women.

But so were Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. They were stunningly beautiful, trailblazing American women, and their twentieth century success stories were extraordinary, and extraordinarily double-edged, for what each was able to achieve in her lifetime and what each could not.

Between them they could have written libraries about the dark side of Hollywood dreams, as well as the dangers of scaling the rarified heights of Goddess-dom.

Perhaps they did.

Don’t dark dreams matter?