This article is also published at Immortal Marilyn

Grit and Glamour: Marilyn and Eve Arnold

“I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.”

The pioneering photo-journalist, Eve Arnold, died on January 4^th, 2012, at a London nursing home, three months short of her centenary.

She was born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, the seventh of nine children. Her father, William Cohen, was a Rabbi. He and his wife, Bessie, had come to America to escape anti-semitic persecution in Russia. Though well-educated, he could only find work as a pedlar, and Eve grew up in poverty.

She had planned to study medicine. But while Eve was working as a bookkeeper for a New York estate agent during World War II, a boyfriend gave her a Rolleicord camera. In 1943, she answered a newspaper ad asking for an ‘amateur photographer’, and became manager of America’s first automated film processing plant, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Apart from a six-week course at the New School for Social Research, taught by Alexey Brodovitch, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, who taught her the basics of style and composition, along with unsparing critiques from the likes of Richard Avedon, Eve had no formal training and spent the rest of her life ‘learning by doing’. 

Her first assignment was in 1950, covering fashion shows that took place daily in Harlem’s deconsecrated churches. ‘She found her way backstage to try to take more discreet pictures, hoping that the people working there would be too busy to notice her,’ Brigitte Lardinois wrote in Eve Arnold’s People (2009.) ‘This was a very novel way of photographing fashion; in those days fashion was all about posing in a studio, in a carefully controlled environment, while Eve was pursuing an exercise in pure photo reportage.’

'At the Metropolitan Opera', Brooklyn, 1950

America was still heavily segregated in 1950, and mainstream magazines seldom featured black people. However, Eve’s photos were syndicated throughout Europe. Unhappy with the snide captioning in Britain’s Picture Post, she vowed that all her pictures should henceforth speak for themselves.

In 1951, she approached Magnum Photos, the co-operative established four years previously by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. At around the same time, Inge Morath joined Magnum’s Paris office. Together, they became the agency’s first female photo-journalists.

‘Eve called Magnum a family – where “you love them all but you don’t necessarily like them all”’, Lardinois wrote. ‘Bresson taught her how to tell a story in a single definitive image…From Inge Morath she learned how to introduce lightness into her photographs; Ernst Haas taught her about colour; and Erich Hartmann taught her technical restraint and discipline. She discussed storylines with Burt Glinn and Dennis Stock. And she credits Elliott Erwitt with showing her how humour works in photography.’

‘I met Eve Arnold at the beginning of my career,’ Erwitt recalled. ‘At that time, married and with a young son, Eve was essentially a home-maker – a Long Island housewife and mother living in the village of Port Jefferson baking very good cookies.’ Erwitt added that for Eve, photography ‘may have been a way to overcome the tedium of domesticity.’

Arnold later complained of being constantly offered second-rate, ‘women’s page’ assignments. ‘Magnum was a macho culture when Eve started there,’ Mary Panzer, former curator of Washington’s National Portrait Gallery, told the Los Angeles Times.

Eve had married Arnold Arnold, an industrial engineer, in 1948. It was he who, in 1951, suggested that Eve cover the thousands of black southerners who had travelled north to work long, low-paid hours harvesting crops, and slept in crowded, ramshackle camps in Suffolk County, Long Island.

‘If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given,’ Eve wrote later. ‘It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.’

'Bar Girl, Havana, Cuba', 1954

Photographer Mary McCartney admires Eve’s portrait of a melancholy prostitute leaning on the bar of a Havana brothel in 1954. ‘You get a sense of her vulnerability – you feel that her life has been difficult, but that Eve is not judging her,’ McCartney observed.

However, Eve failed to win over at least one tough-minded critic. When her photos of the first five minutes of a baby’s life were published in Life magazine in 1954, Eve’s mother, Bessie, asked, ‘What’s to admire?’

Marlene Dietrich, 1952

Meeting Marilyn

Eve had her first experience of working with a movie star when she photographed Marlene Dietrich during a recording session, for Esquire, the upmarket men’s magazine. Some time later, Eve met Marilyn at a party given by John Huston at Manhattan’s 21 Club. ‘Marilyn asked – with that mixture of naïveté and self-promotion that was uniquely hers – “If you could do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you could do with me?”’ Arnold has recalled.

‘At this time, she was a starlet and still relatively unknown,’ Eve continued. ‘She had just appeared in a small part in The Asphalt Jungle.’ That movie, directed by Huston, was released in 1950. (It may well be the case that Eve first met Marilyn shortly after, as they were introduced to each other by photographer Sam Shaw, Marilyn’s friend since 1951. However, the Dietrich story was published in 1952, by which time Marilyn was becoming a household name.)

'East of Eden' premiere, New York, 1955

East of Eden, 1955

Eve’s earliest photos of Marilyn were taken at the premiere of East of Eden at New York’s Astor Theatre in March 1955. One shows her being interviewed by a female reporter for NBC. Over the previous five months, Monroe had separated from her husband, Joe DiMaggio, abandoned her film contract and moved to New York, where she established a production company with photographer Milton Greene.

The premiere was a benefit for the Actor’s Studio, and Marilyn was present as a ‘celebrity usherette’. ‘Although she was to me consistently beautiful,’ wrote super-fan James Haspiel, who was outside her hotel when she left for the theatre, ‘there were few moments, this being one of them, when Marilyn looked so outrageously gorgeous that it was actually hard to look at her…She went onto the premiere, and the word quickly spread throughout Times Square that “Marilyn Monroe is over at the Astor Theatre!” Soon people in the thousands picked up that information along Broadway.’

Flying to Chicago

‘Bringing Art to the Masses’

In early August of 1955, Marilyn – a lifelong insomniac – telephoned Eve in the dead of night. She was flying out next morning to Bement, Illinois, a town where her idol, Abraham Lincoln, had stayed in 1858, during a famed series of debates with Senator Stephen Douglas.

‘I’m going to bring art to the masses,’ Marilyn said. She wrote a speech about Lincoln on the plane to Chicago, and rehearsed it with her hairdresser, Peter Leonardi, and Eve, who remarked, ‘As she whispered the words of the talk about “our late, beloved President,” it sounded like Eisenhower, not Lincoln, had just died.’

After a stopover in Chicago, they were driven to Champaign, and then taken by automobile cavalcade with the governor’s own motorcycle escort to Bement. The local media was alerted and chaos ensued.

By the time they reached Bement, Marilyn was exhausted. After a short rest, she was ready to face her public: she judged a group of bearded men in a Lincoln lookalike contest, admired the few pieces of art on display at Bryant Cottage, and finally, gave her speech.

Marilyn's Lincoln speech

Another round of interviews followed. Eve’s photographs of this eccentric junket are touching and funny. A demure, elegant Marilyn greeted each well-wisher, young and old, rich and poor, with unaffected warmth.

‘She would watch the person photographing her – even if it was just a small-town newsman,’ Eve observed. ‘She had learned that frequently the national press picks up from local wire services and she would perform at her best for all. With me she started to let down just to get a break, but if she sensed that I wanted more from her, she gave it in good measure.’

Ulysses at Long Island

Eve arranged to meet Marilyn again shortly after the jaunt to Bement, but on the appointed day, she left her camera at home. However, informal snapshots exist from that day, when Marilyn and her poet friend, Norman Rosten, walked along the beach near Eve’s home in Miller Place, Long Island. (Arnold dated this event back to 1952, but Marilyn didn’t meet Rosten until 1955.)

The vision of MM in a bathing suit soon drew onlookers. She played softball with Eve’s young son, Francis, and went for a swim with Rosten. ‘As she started to swim, her crowd of admirers followed suit and surrounded her,’ Eve wrote later. ‘For a moment it looked as though they would drown her, they were so tightly packed around her.’

Happily, Marilyn was rescued.  They met again soon after, as MM was visiting the Rostens over Labor Day weekend (traditionally the first in September.) To avoid another circus, Eve took Monroe to an abandoned children’s playground near Mount Sinai, Long Island.

Marilyn brought along three bathing suits, and a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  ‘I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time),’ Eve remembered. ‘She kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it–but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.’

The resulting pictures have graced endless book and magazine covers (especially if the topic is summer reading.)

It was almost 5 pm – ‘the magic hour’, when the day is at its most golden. They drove on to deserted marshland. ‘The timing for the marshes was just right,’ Eve noted, ‘the light soft and shadowless and ranging from pale yellow through deep saffron.’

Marilyn changed into a one-piece with a leopard-skin print. ‘The idea of the leopard in the bulrushes appealed to her sense of comedy,’ Eve remarked. ‘She was intrepid. She stood in (the swamp), sat in it, lay in it until the light started to go and I called a halt. She climbed out, covered in mud, but she was exhilarated – and giggling.’

With Sir Laurence Olivier, 1956

Back to Work, 1956

In February 1956, Lois Smith – Marilyn’s New York publicist – invited Eve to a press conference at the Plaza Hotel. Marilyn was to announce her latest film project, The Sleeping Prince. Her co-star, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Sir Terence Rattigan, author of the original script, had flown in from London to meet her.

At Smith’s request, Eve arrived early and visited a nervous Marilyn in her dressing room. ‘Marilyn had always had difficulty before actually tackling a problem,’ Eve commented. ‘Once she started something, she would be totally committed: it was the business of propelling herself into the actual situation that she had to grapple with…So she would vacillate, the minutes passing…”’

For Olivier and Rattigan, sitting outside the dressing room, this was the first of many long waits for Marilyn. ‘At eleven in the morning she wore a black velvet gown with straps the width of spaghetti strips,’ Eve wrote. ‘She looked lovely, her white flesh and blonde hair contrasting with the darkness of her clothes. When I complimented her on the way she looked, she winked at me in the mirror and said, “Just watch me.”’

Eve didn’t usually enjoy press conferences. The hotel was ‘so jammed as to make it almost impossible to work.’ But her unusual status as one of the few women in her profession had some advantages. ‘The newsmen were unfailingly courteous,’ she explained. ‘Invariably a path would be made for me.’

The meeting got off to a slow start, with a stiff, awkward Olivier taking most of the reporters’ questions. But when Marilyn removed her coat, the strap of her dress snapped – and all hell broke loose, with photographers scrambling for pictures of the star en deshabilée.

Though Marilyn denied it, Eve believed the ‘accident’ was, in fact, deliberate. ‘Suddenly the atmosphere changed,’ she wrote. ‘(Monroe) had made it fun: laughter was heard, a safety pin was offered and the press conference was hers. It had gone from a ponderous, humdrum, expected situation to an event – with a little help from her.’

Between Engagements

During the late 1950s, she chronicled the lives of working-class Italians in New Jersey. A particularly charming shot of some children in a truck was used in an advertisement for Standard Oil.

In 1959, Arnold worked on a film set for the first time, photographing Joan Crawford, who had criticised Monroe’s scanty attire at an awards ceremony just a few years before. Nobody was more surprised than Eve when Crawford stripped off for the camera.

As the Sixties began, Eve photographed the new First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, reading to her young daughter. She travelled to Virginia to document the emerging Civil Rights movement.

Back in Hollywood, a new Monroe movie was in the works. The Misfits had been written by husband Arthur Miller as a ‘valentine’ to Marilyn. John Huston was to direct, and her co-stars would include Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

With Montgomery Clift

The Misfits, 1960

‘I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve been dancing for six months (on Let’s Make Love), I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?’

These words evoke Marilyn’s mood when Eve Arnold arrived in Nevada. It was midway through the shoot, and Monroe had just returned from a week’s rest in a Los Angeles hospital, during which time filming had been halted.

Exclusive rights to all still photos on and off the set were granted to Magnum. Inge Morath, Elliott Erwitt and others had already visited the set.  Eve intended to spend just two weeks on location, but because of her rapport with Marilyn, she stayed for two months.

With Clark Gable

‘Being a woman helped me to understand her moods and responses,’ Eve said. ‘Also, my being another woman avoided the male-female byplay that my male colleagues tell me is necessary in their sessions to produce intimate pictures.’

‘As always where close contact was essential to the personal kind of pictures I wanted to make, I worked without an assistant,’ Eve recounted. ‘Lugging gear, loading film, reading exposures were tasks I could have been relieved of, but an extra person might have unbalanced the precarious equilibrium between us.’

Of all the on-set photographers, Eve was the only one admitted to Marilyn’s inner circle. Towards the end of filming, Eve arranged a party for Marilyn and her entourage, whom she described as her ‘family’.

‘Every once in a while she would realise that it was a relationship based on a weekly paycheck and would be concerned lest they became paid courtiers,’ Eve wrote. ‘But they never did. They were fierce in their dedication to her.’

Goddess in the Studio

As production came to an end and the crew returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn suggested a publicity photo session to a hesitant Eve. She admitted, ‘I dislike studio photography and the contrived images that usually stem from this genre, but Marilyn loved posing.’

On the other hand, the benefits were that ‘a studio session is an autonomous situation – it provides the greatest chance for control. One can plan one’s own lighting, work to one’s own time clock, shoot and reshoot, change the subject’s hair style, add or subtract clothing.’

As an old friend, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder applied her foundation, Marilyn looked around and said, ‘Whitey, remember our first photo session? There was just you and me – but we had hope then.’

Monroe revisited her pin-up days in a bikini, toyed with a feather boa, and reclined in a satin slip. Perhaps the most memorable sequence showed her nude beneath the sheets – a scenario she would recreate in two later sessions (Kirkland, Stern), to very different results.

For Marilyn, Arnold believed, ‘Being photographed was being caressed and appreciated in a very safe way. She had loved the day and kept repeating that these were the best circumstances under which she had ever worked.’

With Eve in 1960

Unretouched Woman

Soon after Marilyn left for her Manhattan apartment, Clark Gable died of a heart attack. Days later, the Millers’ separation was announced. When Eve visited Marilyn at home, gangs of reporters were camped outside the building.

Marilyn was deeply upset by Gable’s death. She had idolised him as a child, and throughout the ordeal of The Misfits, he treated her with kindness and respect. Monroe also recommended Eve to Gable, and she was the only photographer to record the filming of their bedroom scene.

Marilyn confided to Eve that as a little girl, moving between foster homes, she would dream that Gable was her father. ‘This tale she told while sitting with a set of proof sheets and a red grease pencil in front of her, editing pictures of herself playing a love scene with Clark Gable. She looked pensive for a moment, sighed and came up with another of her “can you imagine” sentences: “Can you imagine what being kissed by him meant to me?”’

Monroe had full approval on all the pictures of her taken during the Misfits shoot. Over the next week, she and Eve worked through the many negatives and contact sheets. Lee Jones, Eve’s editor at Magnum, thought the actress was ‘putting us through as many hoops as she could get us to jump. I, who knew her better and had fairly extensive dealings with movie actors, simply took it as what it was – pure Marilyn. She was distracted, wary, as though waiting for a telephone call that never came.’

As their work continued, Eve demonstrated to Marilyn the process of editing a photo feature. ‘She was quick and perceptive,’ Eve commented, ‘would listen when I explained why a certain picture or situation was necessary, and would concur if she was convinced. If not, we would battle until one or the other backed down.’

‘As the days passed,’ Eve remembered, ‘it was evident that Marilyn was enjoying herself.’ She even offered Eve a chance to take more photos, which she declined. ‘I wanted to photograph her at some future time on some happier occasion – a new film, a new man…who could guess what surprises might be in store for her?’

With 'Mr Kenneth', 1961

The Last Goodbye

In July 1961, Marilyn was admitted to New York’s Polyclinic Hospital for gallbladder surgery. It would take her many months to recuperate from this serious operation. Nonetheless, as she left the hospital in a wheelchair, Marilyn was mobbed by the paparazzi.

Nonetheless, Marilyn arranged a photo-shoot with Eve at her home later that day. It was a favour to Kenneth Battelle, ‘hairdresser to the stars’, who was to be featured in Good Housekeeping magazine.

‘She looked fresh and rested, and she and Kenneth played up for the camera, she teasing him about his showing the more photogenic side of his face,’ Eve observed. ‘We did just one roll of film. It was a simple photo and I did not want to tire her.’

As Eve left, she was approached by a gaggle of reporters, asking what it was like to photograph Marilyn.

In May of 1962, Eve was once again contacted by Marilyn, who was preparing to sing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Eve had only just returned home, and declined the opportunity to cover what turned out to be a memorable moment.

Three months later, Marilyn died. In a 1987 documentary, Eve and Marilyn, Arnold spoke of her deep regret at having missed her final opportunity to work with Monroe.

Appreciating Marilyn

The publication of Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation in 1987 confirmed Eve Arnold’s status as one the star’s finest photographers. Her accompanying text shows personal insight into Marilyn’s exceptional, and sometimes overlooked skills as a model.

‘Over the years I found myself in the privileged position of photographing someone who I had first thought had a gift for the still camera and who turned out had a genius for it,’ Eve wrote. ‘I never knew anyone who came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have – unconsciously – judged other subjects.’

Most actors are uncomfortable before the still camera, Arnold noted, but with Marilyn the opposite was true. ‘She didn’t have to learn lines as she did for her movies,’ Eve commented. ‘She could let her imagination range freely without concern for consistency or continuity, she could be a different Marilyn for each photographer or each frame of film.’

Whereas in her film roles, Marilyn was often typecast as a ‘dumb blonde’, as a model ‘she could call the shots, dictate the pace, be in control.’ Even in her early ‘cheesecake’ poses, or with more experienced photographers like Eve’s old mentor, Richard Avedon, Monroe’s joyful, innocent persona transcended cliché.

‘No matter how the photographer tried to use her in terms of his own personality and style,’ Eve remarked, ‘it is always she who imposes herself to have the final look.’

Marilyn’s approach – honed by years of experience – was extremely subtle. ‘She had learned the trick of moving infinitesimally to stay in range,’ Eve explained, ‘so that the photographer need not refocus but could easily follow movements that were endlessly changing.’

But although Monroe knew the tricks of her trade, she was never calculating. ‘It didn’t always work, and sometimes she would tire and it was though her radar had failed,’ Eve acknowledged. ‘But when it did work, it was magic. With her it was never a formula; it was her will, her improvisation. She captured the imagination and heightened the atmosphere.’

Arnold, also self-taught, related to Marilyn’s intuitive style. ‘We were both gamblers,’ she reflected. ‘We both trusted ourselves and each other to carry us through.’

‘Our quid pro quo relationship, based on mutual advantage, developed into a friendship,’ Eve wrote. ‘The bond between us was photography. She liked my pictures and was canny enough to realise that they were a fresh approach for presenting her – a looser, more intimate look than the posed studio portraits she was used to in Hollywood.’

But working with Marilyn presented unusual challenges. ‘A camera anywhere near her would bring out a mob,’ Arnold remembered, adding, ‘The idea of the candid shot was impossible with her. She always knew – as though, wherever she was, whether in a dressing room, resting on a plane or walking in the desert, her own built-in mechanism sensed the camera and responded before the first click was heard.’

Though sympathetic, Arnold resisted becoming a ‘mother figure’ to Marilyn. Those who did, like Paula Strasberg, were often accused of exploiting her. ‘She would exhaust herself – she never held back, she never learned to save herself.’

Nonetheless, Monroe was at her most creative when being photographed. ‘If it is true, as some has said of her, that all her life she pursued a search for a missing person – herself –‘ Arnold mused, ‘then perhaps Marilyn, a creature of myth and illusion, found herself not in the fleeting film image, but in the photograph, which would seem to give her concrete proof of her being.’

In Retrospect

In late 1962, Arnold moved to London to be near her son, Frank, who had enrolled at an English boarding school. They arrived just as the coldest winter in a century began. ‘We were not used to the gloom,’ Eve admitted. ‘We were accustomed to overheated rooms and changing seasons that brightened the year…The endless grey and chill days of England seemed like a punishment and added to our sadness at the sudden changes in our lives.’

One of the last assignments she completed before leaving the US was a profile of Malcolm X and the Black Muslims. Though Life considered the subject matter too controversial, the photos were published in Esquire, and syndicated worldwide.

Malcolm X, 1961

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Arnold worked frequently on stories for the Sunday Times colour supplement. Eve’s editor, Harold Evans, agreed that her time on any project should not exceed six months per year, so that she could spend time with her son.

‘By then Eve was established as a key member of the magazine team alongside Snowdon and Don McCullin,’ recalled her art director, Michael Rand. ‘Immensely versatile, her input was a surprising mix of grit and glamour and that was her strength.’

At the height of the Cold War, Eve made two long trips to the USSR in 1965 and ’66, and her wealth of pictures spanned thirty features. Then in 1969-70, she made a documentary, Behind the Veil, exploring the daily lives of women in the Middle East.

In the mid-1970s, Eve befriended the teenage Beeban Kidron, who became her assistant for a time. ‘Before she went on trips Eve would fill notebook after notebook with research and thoughts about the place she was going,’ Kidron (now an acclaimed film director) told Brigitte Lardinois in 2009. ‘Her return would be a whirlwind of developing, sorting and printing – never jet-lagged, she would often work into the night.’

A harrowing trip in 1973 made Eve ill for months afterward. Devastated by the poverty and racism she had witnessed, she told the BBC’s John Tusa, ‘I came back from four months in South Africa, absolutely shattered. And my GP sent me to a heart man, and I went, and he prescribed something, I came back, and still it went on for months. And he said the only way I can describe it, is that you are suffering from a broken heart. It was such an emotional reaction. But it was a hellish time for everybody in South Africa.’

'Horse Training for the Militia,' Inner Mongolia, China,1979

In 1979, aged 67, Eve embarked on another ambitious project. Published as In China, her best-selling book ‘captured a vast nation on the brink of momentous change.’ Her other books include Unretouched Woman (1976); The Great British (1991); a memoir, In Retrospect (1995); and Film Journal (2001).

During the 1990s, Eve – then in her eighties – became a ‘very active’ vice-president of Magnum Photos. In 2003, she was made an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II (whom she had photographed in the late 1960s.)

‘Photographs are not made in a vacuum,’ Arnold wrote in 1987. ‘The person before the lens is inseparable from the process.’ Perhaps it was Eve’s compassion, as well as her unflinching eye, that made her such an outstanding photographer, of Marilyn Monroe and many others.

Eve Arnold in 2001

Sources

Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation, Eve Arnold, 1987

Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend, James Haspiel, 1991

Eve Arnold’s People, Brigitte Lardinois, 2009

Eve Arnold at Magnum Photos

‘Eve Arnold Dies at 99′, Los Angeles Times, January 2012

‘Obituary: Eve Arnold’, Daily Telegraph, January 2012

‘At Least Eve Arnold had the Chance to Break the Mould’, The Observer, January 2012

Eve and Marilyn, Documentary, 1987

‘Eve Arnold Interview With John Tusa’, BBC Radio 3

This article is also published at Immortal Marilyn

Films Marilyn Wanted: Guys and Dolls

Born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1880 to a family of newspapermen, Damon Runyon found fame as a baseball columnist, and later for his humorous short stories chronicling the vibrant street life of New York. His eccentric characters – gamblers, hustlers and crooks – and unique style, mixing formal speech with slang – inspired a new literary idiom, the ‘Runyonesque’.

In 1950, four years after Runyon’s death, Guys and Dolls opened on Broadway. Based on two of Runyon’s short stories – ‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown’ and ‘Blood Pressure’ – the play was scripted by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling, with music by Frank Loesser.

A box office hit, Guys and Dolls was selected as the winner of 1951’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. However, due to Abe Burrows’ troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the award was withdrawn.

Despite the controversy, producer Samuel Goldwyn acquired the film rights to Guys and Dolls.  The screenplay was written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who would also direct. Uncredited assistance came from another Hollywood scribe, Ben Hecht.

Gene Kelly was an early front-runner for the lead role as charming gambler Sky Masterson, but MGM would not release him. Goldwyn sought out the screen’s hottest young actor, Marlon Brando, instead. Jean Simmons was cast as Brando’s unlikely love interest, prudish missionary Sarah Brown.

After securing America’s favourite crooner, Frank Sinatra, as hustler Nathan Detroit, Goldwyn set his sights on the world’s reigning sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, for the part of Sinatra’s showgirl fiancée, Miss Adelaide. With so much talent involved, Guys and Dolls could hardly fail – or could it? 

All About Mankiewicz

Marilyn had previously worked with Mankiewicz in 1950, when as a relative unknown, she played the small role but pivotal of Claudia Caswell, a shallow starlet, in his Oscar-winning theatrical satire, All About Eve.

‘There was a breathlessness and sort of glued-on innocence about her that I found appealing – and she had done a good job for John Huston in The Asphalt Jungle,’ Mankiewicz said later. Comparing the two directors, Marilyn noted, ‘Mr Mankiewicz was a different sort of director than Mr Huston. He wasn’t as exciting, and he was more talkative. But he was intelligent and sensitive.’

Monroe’s ‘difficult’ reputation dates back to All About Eve. Actor Gregory Ratoff predicted that she would soon be a great star, to which actress Celeste Holm retorted, ‘Why? Because she has kept us all waiting for an hour?’ In her 1987 biography, The Marilyn Scandal, Sandra Shevey wrote, ‘Their antipathy made Marilyn nervous, and when she became nervous she blew her lines.’

Shevey also hinted that Marilyn’s habitual lateness was exacerbated by the studio’s habit of diverting her from the set to photo shoots for their publicity department. ‘Whilst she should have been allowed to spend the time conceptualising the role and running through her lines, the PR people had booked her into a gallery shoot allowing her but the briefest warm-up time on the set.’

Mankiewicz told one of Monroe’s earliest biographers, Fred Lawrence Guiles, that he had once found her reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. ‘I’d have been less taken aback to come upon Herr Rilke studying a Marilyn Monroe calendar,’ Mankiewicz quipped.

Though he invited her to join the rest of the crew, Marilyn rarely socialised. ‘I thought of her, then, as the loneliest person I had ever known,’ he told Guiles.

In her 1954 memoir, My Story, co-written with Ben Hecht, Marilyn recalled an incident when Mankiewicz had found her reading a book by the left-wing journalist, Lincoln Steffens. To her surprise, he warned her against being seen reading ‘radical’ literature. ‘I thought this was a very personal attitude on Mr Mankiewicz’s part,’ she wrote, ‘and, that genius though he was, of a sort, he was badly frightened by the Front Office or something.’

A Runyonesque Tale

By late 1953, Marilyn was the toast of Hollywood, with a slew of hit movies to her credit, such as the musical comedy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Nonetheless, Marilyn was temporarily suspended from Twentieth Century-Fox after turning down her latest assignment, The Girl in Pink Tights. She disliked the script, and was unhappy that her co-star, Frank Sinatra, was to be paid considerably more than her contract salary.

In January 1954, Marilyn married her longtime beau, the retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio. During his sporting heyday, Joe had often featured in Damon Runyon’s column.  He later described Runyon as ‘the only (writer) who didn’t rip me.’

Joe spent much of his free time at Toots Shors’ Bar in New York, a hangout that could have been the setting for one of Runyon’s stories.

Having made her peace with the studio, Marilyn started work on a new musical, There’s No Business Like Show Business, in the spring. Another of Marilyn’s recordings, ‘I’m Gonna File My Claim’ (from her newly-released Western, River of No Return) became a chart-topper that summer.

Before flying to New York to film The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn had discussed the possibility of starring in Guys and Dolls over dinner with Sam Goldwyn.  (‘It’s like making an appointment with God,’ she said later.) Charles Feldman, who had acquired The Seven Year Itch for Monroe, hoped that, after years of chasing the star, winning the role of Miss Adelaide on her behalf might persuade her to hire him as her official agent.

After checking into New York’s St Regis Hotel during filming of The Seven Year Itch in September, Marilyn had ordered Feldman’s colleague, Hugh French, to set up a meeting with Joe Mankiewicz.  When she discovered that Mankiewicz was in Los Angeles, she called him there.

According to another Monroe biographer, Barbara Leaming, the ‘meeting’ did not go well:

‘You see, I’ve become a star,’ Marilyn proudly told Mankiewicz.

The director was unimpressed. He talked to her, she thought, as if she were a piece of trash. ‘Put on some more clothes, Marilyn, and stop moving your ass so much,’ he replied.

Despite the insult, Marilyn struggled to win him over. Finally, Mankiewicz cut off the conversation with the news that the part of Miss Adelaide had already been cast. Refusing to give up, Marilyn instructed Feldman to keep after Goldwyn and get her the role.

Mankiewicz’s words were a brutal reminder of why Marilyn hated Hollywood.

Under the twin pressures of Monroe’s soaring career and Joe’s extreme jealousy, the DiMaggio marriage was troubled from the start. Joe finally lost control after seeing Marilyn film her famous ‘skirt-blowing scene’ in The Seven Year Itch on location in New York, with hundreds of men looking on.

Among the witnesses to Joe’s humiliation was the influential columnist, Walter Winchell, who knew Marilyn from the Hollywood scene. Winchell had also been a friend of Damon Runyon.

What Might Have Been

In October, a desperate Joe – encouraged by his pal, Frank Sinatra – followed Marilyn to a Los Angeles apartment block where, he believed, she was meeting her lover. However, the two men – along with two private detectives – burst into the wrong apartment. The occupant, one Florence Kotz, went on to sue both Sinatra and DiMaggio in 1957.

The so-called ‘Wrong Door Raid’, another Runyonesque episode, was no laughing matter for its real-life players.

After separating from Joe and completing The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn walked out on her studio and moved permanently to New York.  She also dispensed with Feldman’s services in favour of a new partnership with photographer Milton Greene. But though she was technically in breach of her contract with Fox, Marilyn’s popularity was undimmed.

The stage actress, Vivian Blaine – who had played Miss Adelaide on Broadway – reprised her role in the big-screen version of Guys and Dolls, released in November 1955. The casting of Brando, a non-singer, had been controversial, while lyricist Frank Loesser thought Sinatra was the wrong choice for Nathan Detroit.

Nonetheless, Guys and Dolls – which had cost $5 million to make – became America’s highest-grossing film of 1956. Like many movies of the fifties (including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire), Guys and Dolls concludes with a double wedding. Even bombshells like Monroe could be tamed by marriage – or so Hollywood liked to tell us.

Seen today, Guys and Dolls is still impressive but rather static – perhaps because it was a stage adaptation rather than an original screenplay. Ironically, Brando’s big number – ‘Luck be a Lady Tonight’ – has since been overshadowed by Sinatra’s cover. The film’s true highlight comes when supporting actor Stubby Kaye sings ‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat’.

Throughout 1955, Marilyn studied with Lee Strasberg at the prestigious Actor’s Studio. She also had a brief affair with the most famous ‘Method actor’ of all, Marlon Brando. They remained close friends until her death.

In 1956, Marilyn would marry the Pulitzer-winning playwright, Arthur Miller. At the time, Miller was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Defying her Hollywood bosses, Monroe stood by her husband, and the charges were finally dropped in 1958.

Sandra Warner, a chorus girl in Guys and Dolls, went on to play one of Monroe’s all-girl band in Some Like it Hot (1959.) Marilyn was pregnant during filming, and Sandra took her place in some publicity shots.

Following the breakdown of her third marriage in 1960, Marilyn had a year-long, on-off relationship with Frank Sinatra. This led to a permanent rift between Sinatra and his old friend, Joe DiMaggio, who hoped to reconcile with Monroe.

While Marilyn was working on her last film for Fox in 1962, Joe Mankiewicz was directing Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. It is now believed that the heavy costs incurred on Mankiewicz’s production influenced Fox executives’ decision to fire Marilyn in June.

A week before her death that August, Marilyn was a guest at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge. They had considered making another film together, based on the Broadway musical adaptation of Betty Smith’s best-selling novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

But in conversation with the lyricist Jule Styne, Marilyn discussed making the film with Gene Kelly in Sinatra’s intended role. She and Sinatra had clashed at Lake Tahoe, and Joe later blamed Frank and his circle for Monroe’s demise.

Writing in 2010, veteran columnist Liz Smith stated that Sinatra had loved Marilyn deeply, and was devastated by her death.

Mankiewicz viewed Monroe’s death more cynically. ‘She died at the right time,’ he told Sandra Shevey. ‘She was old, fat and unloved.’ None of these accusations were true, but Mankiewicz’s words echo the bitter contempt that Marilyn faced throughout her career.

He also rejected the notion that Monroe was destroyed by Hollywood, characterising her as ‘a suicide in her head since she was five years old.’ When Sandra Shevey suggested that Marilyn deserved better than she got, Mankiewicz responded angrily: ‘She got everything her illiterate little heart could desire. Where did she get her ideas from – her mother?’

Ever-Lovin’ Adelaide

In 1955, Vivian Blaine was 33 – almost five years older than Marilyn – while Miss Adelaide, her character in Guys and Dolls, had been engaged to Nathan Detroit for fourteen years.

In some ways, it’s hard to imagine the fresh-faced ingenue of The Seven Year Itch as world-weary Miss Adelaide. And though in reality, Marilyn’s love life was in turmoil, her public image was not that of a scorned lover, but everyman’s fantasy.

And she didn’t possess the jaded, streetwise attitude that Vivian Blaine had in spades.

However, Marilyn’s departure from Hollywood transformed her career. When she returned to the big screen in Bus Stop (1956), her trademark glamour was shaded with a more mature, fragile appeal. ‘Adelaide’s Lament’ might have been especially poignant if Marilyn had sung it.

Certainly, Monroe could easily have pulled off Adelaide’s purring rendition of ‘Pet Me Poppa’ or the burlesque choreography of ‘Take Back Your Mink’. The all-pink aesthetic of this latter number is reminiscent of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. While Vivian Blaine was an accomplished singer, dancer and comedienne, she lacked Monroe’s red-hot sensuality.

Had Guys and Dolls been made a few years later (after her triumph as downtrodden Sugar Kane in Some Like it Hot), Monroe might have made a perfect Adelaide. But in 1955, the timing was off. Ultimately, Marilyn’s loss was Vivian’s gain.

Bibliography

My Story by Marilyn Monroe, 1954.

Guys and Dolls and Other Stories by Damon Runyon, 1956.

Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Lawrence Guiles , 1984.

The Marilyn Scandal: Her True Life Revealed by Those Who Knew Her by Sandra Shevey, 1987.

Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming, 1999.

‘This is a fairy tale’, was the original tagline – later replaced by ‘this is a true story.’

My Week With Marilyn is an Anglo-American confection, based on Colin Clark’s memoirs of filming with Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe on The Prince and the Showgirl (1956).

Clark’s first volume, written in diary form, was published in 1995. Such was the success of his ‘delightfully gossipy’ account, that he wrote a sequel, My Week With Marilyn. This concerned a brief period when he did not keep a diary.

Both books have now been reissued. Writing for the Daily Mail, Tom Cox notes that the latter part ‘has none of the same charm, and reads like a childish dream sequence about the Monroe legend in its most reductive form.’

Nonetheless, a BBC documentary – The Prince, the Showgirl and Me – was broadcast in 2004, two years after Clark died.

Colin Clark was born in 1932, son of the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark. His older brother, Alan, was a junior minister during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. But Alan Clark is less celebrated for his achievements in government than for his own diaries, which caused a scandal on publication in 1993.

Colin was 23 when – largely through his parents’ friendship with the Oliviers – he nabbed the job of third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl. Though he later claimed to have become quite intimate with Marilyn at this time, the truth is murkier.

Actress Vera Day, who played Marilyn’s showgirl pal Betty in the film, recently admitted that she did not remember Clark, while Monroe’s biographer, Michelle Morgan, who has researched this period in depth, found that the dates in Clark’s book did not match.

When plans to bring My Week With Marilyn to the big screen were first announced, Scarlett Johansson was tipped for the lead.

But the role finally went to Michelle Williams, who first found fame on television as bad girl Jen in the teen drama, Dawson’s Creek. Since then, she has gained critical praise through a series of demanding roles in films like Shutter Island, Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine and Meek’s Cutoff.

Like a growing number of child actors, Michelle became legally emancipated from her parents before her sixteenth birthday. In 2005 she starred alongside Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. They had a daughter, Matilda Rose, together.

In 2008, a year after splitting from Williams, Ledger was found dead from an overdose of prescription pills.

My Week With Marilyn is adapted by Adrian Hodges and directed by Simon Curtis. Best known for his work in theatre, and television dramas like David Copperfield, Cranford and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Curtis is a newcomer to cinema.

The film begins, and ends, with performances by Williams of two Monroe standards: ‘Heat Wave’ and ‘That Old Black Magic’.  But I preferred the more informal scene when, as Marilyn, she practices ‘I Found a Dream’, a ditty from The Prince and the Showgirl, in the bath.

The costumes and set from The Prince and the Showgirl are artfully recreated. Monroe’s severe stage fright was presumably the cause of her chronic tardiness and fluffing of lines, while her devotion to the Method style of acting infuriated that knight of the theatre, Olivier.

As her professional relationship with Olivier begins to crumble, Marilyn’s marriage to Arthur Miller also hits the rocks. It is only a few weeks since their wedding, but when Marilyn finds Arthur’s diary, she discovers he already has misgivings.

Monroe’s vulnerability is clear. However, the strength that made her a star is seldom shown in the script. As the lost week dawns, Colin takes her to see the sights – Windsor Castle, Eton, even a frolic in the Thames (which as most English readers will know, is cold and dirty – and distinctly unromantic.)

A supposed miscarriage and breakdown aren’t as affecting as the earlier rift with Miller. But despite the often implausible script, its leading lady brings warmth and dignity to her portrait of Marilyn.

As critic Roger Moore writes in the Detroit Free Press, ‘Michelle Williams doesn’t so much impersonate Marilyn Monroe as suggest her.’

Unfortunately, the other characters in this real-life drama are not so subtly drawn. Eddie Redmayne labours fruitlessly to make Colin heroic, while Sir Kenneth Branagh’s casting as Olivier is all too predictable.

Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh (played by Julia Ormond) suffered a nervous collapse during the shoot. Had this detail been included in the story, his impatience with Marilyn might have been easier to forgive.

Dame Judi Dench plays Dame Sybil Thorndike – who was fond of Marilyn – rather too cloyingly. And to anyone who has heard of Marilyn’s business partner, Milton Greene, Dominic Cooper’s thuggish persona is all wrong.

Much of the humour in Clark’s book came from his youthful, immature putdowns of his peers. In Curtis’s hands, though, these caricatures are rendered without a hint of irony.

Surprisingly, Marilyn’s dramatic coach, Paula Strasberg – as played by Zoe Wanamaker – comes across rather well. Though Paula was often ridiculed for her pretensions, she directed Marilyn with greater skill than Olivier could muster.

Michelle Williams’ performance has led to Oscar predictions. She shines despite a plodding script and uninspired direction. The question of whether Monroe’s charisma can ever be wholly recaptured on screen remains moot.

However, despite its deep flaws, My Week With Marilyn is a vast improvement on previous efforts, such as Norma Jean and Marilyn and Blonde. Until now, the best Marilyn-inspired performances have occurred in offbeat fantasies like Insignificance and Mister Lonely.

Because of Williams, My Week With Marilyn transmits a sense of reality, even if the backdrop is little more than amplified fan-fiction.

Related Posts

Mister Lonely

An American Affair

Wuthering Heights – the classic novel by Emily Brontё, published in 1848 – was first filmed by William Wyler in the sunny hills of California nearly a century later. The French-born actress, Juliet Binoche, starred in a 1992 remake. There have been several TV adaptations, and non-English versions from Luis Bunuel and Jacques Rivette.

However, Wuthering Heights has not moved from page to screen as readily as the novels of Jane Austen, or Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre. Firstly there is Emily Brontё’s highly complex, ironic narrative style; secondly, the bleak, wild setting and conflicted characters. The love story of Cathy and Heathcliff is a doomed one, without a happy ending.

Andrea Arnold is the British director of two feature films – Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009), both awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes – as well as an Oscar-winning short, Wasp (2005.)

Wuthering Heights (2011) was filmed on the Yorkshire moors, using a hand-held camera. Several of the cast – including James Howson, who plays the older Heathcliff – are non-professionals.

Much of the press coverage has focused on the casting of a black actor as Heathcliff. This is not merely an attempt to court controversy, but a result of Arnold’s search for authenticity.

Heathcliff’s true origins are never revealed, but his appearance clearly sets him apart when he arrives in a remote, rural community. Arnold shows the young Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) fleeing in terror when his new family try to baptise him.

His bond with Catherine Earnshaw is forged in childhood. They are siblings in spirit, if not in blood, and spend hours on the moors in feral, yet innocent play. The young Cathy, played with vigour by Shannon Beer, is indeed ‘a wild, wick slip’ of a girl.

However, Cathy’s brother Hindley (Lee Shaw) despises Heathcliff. When their father dies, Hindley becomes head of the household. He treats Heathcliff as a slave, and calls him ‘nigger’. After a savage beating, Cathy licks the blood from Heathcliff’s back.

Wuthering Heights is a working farm, staffed by a sadistic religious zealot, Joseph (Steve Evets) and the level-headed, conciliatory housekeeper, Nelly Dean (Simone Jackson.) When Cathy and Heathcliff wander into the more genteel setting of Thrushcross Grange, the seeds of rupture are sown.

Cathy falls under the spell of the Lintons, and drifts apart from wretched, brutalised Heathcliff. When he hears her tell Nelly that ‘it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now’, he run away. Cathy’s declaration of love – ‘he’s more myself than I am’ – goes unheard.

On his return, Heathcliff finds Cathy married to Edgar Linton, and living at Thrushcross Grange. The older Cathy is played by Kaya Scodelario (best known as Effy in the TV series, Skins.) Cathy’s increasing fragility is made painfully clear. Heathcliff’s jealousy drives her to madness, while his thirst for revenge engulfs him.

As he loses Cathy, Heathcliff gains Wuthering Heights from Hindley, brought low by drink and gambling debts. Arnold does not cover the latter part of the novel, which sees Heathcliff enacting his vendetta on the next generation.

However, the future portents – the rapping at the window, the haunting of Cathy’s grave – are all present within the film’s imagery. There is no soundtrack, but for the howling wind, traditional folk songs performed unaccompanied, and a closing track, ‘The Enemy’, from Mumford and Sons.

While some might find the film’s raw quality unpalatable, a radical retelling of Wuthering Heights is long overdue, and Andrea Arnold’s work here is surely worthy of Emily Brontё’s uncompromising vision.

Trailer

‘The Enemy’

All photos by Agatha Nitecka

Wuthering Heights is currently showing at selected cinemas and will be released on DVD in March 2012

Further Reading

Interview with Andrea Arnold

Interview with James Howson

Related Posts

Charlotte Brontё’s Corset

Bookish Birthdays: Emily Brontё

Finishing the Picture: Miller, Monroe and The Misfits

Finishing the Picture, Arthur Miller’s last play, opened in Chicago in October 2004, a few months before his death. It was inspired by Miller’s own memories of The Misfits, the movie he wrote for his then-wife, Marilyn Monroe.

The play is based on actual events that took place during the shoot: the fire that halted filming in Reno, causing power to be cut throughout the city – except for in Miller’s hotel suite, where he stayed up all night rewriting scenes from his script. Miller revisits that evening to explain why another ten days passed before work resumed.

The characters are closely related to the main players on the set: Edna Meyers is probably based on May Reis, Monroe’s secretary at the time, though she also resembles another friend, Hedda Rosten.

Phillip Ochsner recalls Frank Taylor, producer of The Misfits, in that he is a newcomer to film. But whereas Ochsner, who has previously worked in the trucking industry, is an outsider, Taylor had been Miller’s editor. Furthermore, Ochsner, unlike Taylor, is a widower, and his budding romance with Edna is, presumably, fictional.

Derek Clemson is a straightforward snapshot of the larger-than-life director, John Huston, while Jerome and Flora Fassinger represent Lee and Paula Strasberg – Monroe’s dramatic coach and guru at the time – broadly parodied by Miller, who considered them shallow and manipulative.

Cameraman Russell Metty is shown here as Terry Case, a hard-headed survivor. Finally, Monroe and Miller appear as troubled actress Kitty and her desperate husband, writer Paul. Though much of the play focuses on Kitty and her desire to ‘finish the picture’, she speaks only one line.

Hollywood Misfits

‘Life isn’t real to movie people,’ Edna tells Ochsner. ‘Not like it is to you.’ This is why, she believes, ‘movie people’, like Kitty, are so insecure.

Flora sees it in loftier terms: ‘If you were of our world you would understand that as the star’s coach it reflects on her that I am stuffed into some room.’ She uses her influence over Kitty to pressurise Ochsner into giving her a bigger hotel suite.

‘Kitty is tough, like every real star I knew,’ says Case. ‘A star is an animal; you control it with love and threats.’ Case’s belief that ‘her glory and her power’ lies in her physical appeal, and not her talent, has led to a fatal rift. The actress has rebelled against the Hollywood system that created her.

But Clemson, Kitty’s director, believes she is ‘a woman of honor’, and Ochsner sees ‘a miracle in her face.’ The burden of responsibility has paralysed Kitty. ‘It’s hard to judge her condition,’ Clemson admits. ‘She always looks like dawn over the Garden of Eden.’

Even psychoanalysis cannot cure her ‘terminal disappointment’. Embellishing Kitty’s plight, Jerome laments, ‘You, darling, are not surrounded by culture or by love but exploitation, by people digging out pieces of your flesh!’

Jerome’s brief visit rouses Kitty, but with his departure, all hope is lost again. His flattery, and extravagant gestures, are insincere. Like his wife, Flora, Jerome is a parasite, his monstrous ego sustained by Kitty’s fame.

To her exasperated director, Kitty’s endless delays are ‘some kind of a power trip.’ But, as Edna perceptively remarks, ‘Maybe one can’t expect people who’ve been kicked around to suddenly behave like people who’ve had love and affection.’

‘It’s not a business,’ Clemson says of film-making. ‘It’s an art pretending to be a business. But it’s never been any different; the artist dies in his work, the businessman carries his work into the world.’ And though Kitty does indeed ‘finish the picture’, there is a lingering sense that she may not survive it.

Love and Other Demons

Beyond art and money, relationships are also explored in Miller’s last play. The Fassingers are united in ambition, if not affection; Kitty and Paul are mutually disenchanted, heading for divorce. It is left to the most unassuming characters, Edna and Ochsner, to find love in a lonely, embittered world.

‘Sentiment turns me off,’ Ochsner declares, yet he longs to be moved. ‘She’s a girl of tremendous sensitivity,’ Edna says of Kitty. ‘Reality has to intervene sooner or later,’ Clemson warns, of the disconnectedness that all the characters share.

Despite her isolation, Kitty is first to notice Edna’s warm feelings for Ochsner. ‘You see through everything,’ Edna wonders.

When Case accuses Kitty of deliberately blowing her lines, Edna defends her: ‘They teach that only emotions count,’ she explains, referring to the ‘Method’ which Kitty studies with the Fassingers. Paul concurs: ‘She’s so busy looking for the emotions that she sometimes forgets the lines.’

‘My Jerome is the only one who I would say – yes, he understands.’ Flora is her husband’s greatest promoter, and she basks in his reflected glory. ’But I am only Jerome’s deputy, I do my best, but I have no illusions that I understand.’

The Fassingers treat any person with influence over Kitty as their natural enemy. ‘He’d dislike anybody who got between him and his wife,’ Flora says of Paul. ‘Now you see why she’s suffering; he’s hard as nails.’ Paul’s advice to Kitty – ‘to stop blaming everyone and look at herself’ – threatens their hold on her, built on suspicion.

‘We each promised to cure each other of his life,’ Paul says of his ruined marriage to Kitty. ‘But we turned out to be exactly who we were.’ The picture will be finished, and their love will die with it. In life, unlike art, there is no certain reconciliation.

Kitty and Paul will soon part, both sadder and wiser. ‘I wonder if there maybe was just too much hope,’ Paul tells Edna. ‘We drank it, we swam it. And for fear of losing it didn’t dare look inside.’

Laying Ghosts to Rest

Despite his considerable achievements, Miller’s public image never fully escaped the shadow of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. He wrote about her in his autobiography, Timebends (1986), and she inspired at least three of his works; The Misfits, After the Fall, and Finishing the Picture.

Roslyn Tabor in The Misfits was a misty-eyed homage to Miller’s then-wife. He celebrated her beauty – and recognised her sadness – but underestimated her strength. Though Miller denied that Maggie in After the Fall (1964) was based on Marilyn, the parallels are obvious. Maggie is a self-destructive singer, and this darker portrait offended some of Monroe’s close friends.

In Finishing the Picture, Miller attempts to solve his ‘Marilyn problem’ by silencing her. As Enoch Brater notes in his introduction to the play (published in Arthur Miller: Plays Six), Kitty is ‘more of a conversation piece than a character’, more a subject than a person.  This could be the fate of any icon, but it suggests that even Miller was finally a stranger to her.

Finishing the Picture had opened to mixed reviews in 2004. Writing for the New York Times, critic Ben Brantley found it ‘refreshingly free of shrill self-justification and self-blame,’ but lacking intimacy: ‘this is largely a presentation of conflicting theories of a star’s personality.’

‘As usual with a new play of mine,’ Miller responded, ‘the critics managed to misunderstand what it’s about…However, I’m far past the time where I give a damn about them or about anything except the work itself.’ By insisting that his play was ‘not a documentary’, Miller defended his own subjectivity (his harsh view of the Fassingers – aka the Strasbergs – being a case in point.)

Marilyn Monroe was Arthur Miller’s dangerous muse. Even mute, as in Finishing the Picture, she dominates the discourse, and by distancing himself from her, Miller only magnifies her presence. Ultimately, the task of ‘humanising’ Marilyn falls to the audience – and in his later work, Miller also began that journey.

Further Reading

The Misfits and After the Fall by Arthur Miller, published in Arthur Miller: Plays Two

The Story of The Misfits by James Goode, 1961

The Misfits: Story of a Shoot by Serge Toubiana/Magnum Photographic Archive

Marilyn Monroe by Eve Arnold

American Blondes: Marilyn and Lana Turner

Marilyn Monroe is sometimes described as the last of Hollywood’s great sex symbols. Early in her career she was dubbed ‘the new Jean Harlow’, and she replaced Betty Grable as glamour queen at Twentieth Century-Fox. But what of Lana Turner, blonde bombshell of the 1940s?

In her stunning pictorial biography, Lana: The Memories, the Myths, the Movies, co-written with Cindy De La Hoz (author of two books on Monroe), Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, states that her mother ‘thought Marilyn Monroe was a fine actress besides being a fascinating personality’. 

Lana was born Julia Jean Turner of Wallace, Idaho in 1921. Like Marilyn, she lost a parent early in life – her father was murdered in 1930. In 1931, she moved to Los Angeles with her mother.

Turner’s ‘discovery’ – while sipping a Coke at the soda fountain outside the Top Hat Café on Sunset Boulevard and after skipping a typing class – is the stuff of legend. She was just sixteen years old. Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, was struck by her youthful good looks, and in 1937 she was signed by MGM under a new name, ‘Lana’.

In They Won’t Forget (1937), Lana played a character loosely based on Mary Phagan, whose murder in 1913 led to the lynching of an innocent man. Lana’s first scene, in which she walked down a street wearing a form-fitting top, led to her being labelled ‘The Sweater Girl’, a name she detested.

This trend was later adopted by Marilyn. She joked about it during a performance for US troops in 1952: ‘You fellows are always talking about sweater girls. I don’t know what the fuss is about. Take away their sweaters and what have they got?’

As her career rocketed during the early 1940s, Lana was managed by Johnny Hyde, ‘a dear friend for years’ according to Cheryl Crane. In 1949, Hyde met Marilyn in Palm Springs, and was instantly smitten. ‘He said that he had discovered Lana Turner and other stars,’ she recalled, ‘and that I had more than Lana and it was a cinch I would go far.’

One of Lana’s early films was Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, America’s most popular young star at the time. In his 1991 autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney claimed that he and Lana had an affair and that she aborted his baby.

‘Mother was livid and adamantly denied it,’ Cheryl Crane noted. ‘I know that it was very important to her to fight this accusation because she even phoned her attorney, which was completely opposed to what she always told me about dealing with false stories being printed about us. She would say not to fight it because it only brings more attention to the issue that you’re trying to refute. If Rooney’s story had been true and she wanted to keep it a secret, it would have been more like her to act as though he didn’t exist. But she never avoided his mention in the years before his book came out.’

Rooney has also claimed an affair with Marilyn Monroe, and even that he invented her name. In the latter case, it is well-known that her name was created in 1946 by Marilyn herself and the Fox talent chief, Ben Lyon. (‘Marilyn’ was inspired by a Broadway star of the 1920s, Marilyn Miller, while ‘Monroe’ was the maiden name of Marilyn’s own mother.)

In 1948, Marilyn was Rooney’s ‘arm candy’ at the premiere of the Billy Wilder movie, The Emperor’s Waltz. It was common at the time for young actors to go on arranged dates for publicity purposes, so this may not indicate a romantic relationship. In 1950, Marilyn would play a small role in The Fireball, in which Rooney starred as a roller-derby champ.

By the late 1940s, Rooney’s film career was in decline. He was photographed with Marilyn in 1952, at a party where Ray Anthony and his band played ‘My Marilyn’, a hit song dedicated to the rising star herself. And Rooney is said to have been dining at the Villa Nova restaurant earlier that year when Marilyn went on her first date with Joe DiMaggio.  

In another breach of good taste, Rooney later described Marilyn as ‘one of the best cocksuckers in Hollywood’. In recent years, he has become – along with James Bacon and Tony Curtis – one of many men who has made a second career by spinning lurid tales about Marilyn. As with Lana, however, there is no real evidence that Marilyn and Mickey were ever anything more than casual acquaintances.

In 1941, Lana starred alongside the ‘King of Hollywood’, Clark Gable, in Honky Tonk, a western which became MGM’s highest grossing movie that year. She and Gable were featured on the cover of Life magazine, and went on to make three more films together.

In many ways, Lana arrived right on time: Jean Harlow – Gable’s favourite leading lady – had passed away in 1937, just before Lana was spotted at the soda fountain. She was one of many starlets who auditioned for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, opposite Gable, in Gone With the Wind.

Gable and Turner were branded ‘The Team that Generates Steam’. The press tried to stir up rumours of a romance between the pair, but it was untrue. On January 16, 1942, while they were filming Somewhere I’ll Find You, Gable’s wife, actress Carole Lombard, died, along with 21 others, in a plane crash while on a bond drive for the war effort.

Gossip spread that Lombard had taken an early flight because she was nervous about leaving Gable ‘alone with Lana Turner’. Lana was ‘terribly hurt’ by this fabrication. ‘Gable was her Saturday matinee idol, later her favourite co-star and a friend,’ said Cheryl Crane, ‘but never her lover off the screen.’

Gable was also one of Marilyn’s childhood idols, and she realised her dream of working with him with The Misfits in 1960.  Sadly, it was to be the last film either star would make. Gable died of a heart attack shortly after filming ended, while Marilyn would never complete another movie.

She was devastated by press reports that Gable’s widow, Kay Spreckles, blamed his collapse on Marilyn’s behaviour during filming. But Kay later reassured Marilyn that she did not hold that view, inviting her to the christening of Gable’s son.

While initially more celebrated for her looks than her acting, Lana proved her critics wrong with a dramatic turn as an alcoholic starlet in Ziegfeld Girl (1941.) Perhaps her best-known performance is as the adulterous Cora Smith in the classic thriller, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946.)

Turner was generally cast in romantic dramas, but Monroe also shone in comedies and musicals. Of all the roles she played, the most similar to Lana’s characters was that of amoral Rose Loomis in the film noir, Niagara (1953.) Like Cora, Rose persuades her lover to murder her husband.

While Niagara was not as compelling as Postman, it looked spectacular and Marilyn’s performance was iconic. In one famous scene, she was filmed taking the longest walk in cinematic history.

‘I’ve never wiggled deliberately in my life,’ Marilyn insisted, ‘but all my life I’ve got in trouble with people who say I do.’

Lana was also famed for her style of walking. ‘She would try to teach it to me, but I never quite got the hang of it,’ Cheryl Crane admitted. ‘It was a manner of twisting the ball of the foot with each step. One unusual feature of hers that had an effect on it was that her left leg was a bit shorter than the right… She also wore high heels, usually four inches, sometimes with platforms. Hers was a rolling, subtle kind of glide, not a hip-swinging Marilyn Monroe walk.’

Though Lana, unlike Marilyn, was not an outstanding singer, she danced superbly and was once nicknamed Hollywood’s ‘Nightclub Queen’. In The Merry Widow (1952), she worked with choreographer Jack Cole. ‘The Waltz musical sequence featured a chorus of beautiful dancers dashing about all in pink,’ Cheryl Crane observed. ‘It appears Cole looked back to his work in these moments the following year in his choreography of Marilyn Monroe’s  “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number’ (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.)

When Lana’s career began, MGM was Hollywood’s most lavish studio. Marilyn, on the other hand, made her name at Fox during the 1950s, when the studio system was in decline. She never enjoyed the protection that stars of Turner’s generation had.

In 1951, Dore Schary replaced Louis B. Mayer as head of MGM. Lana felt unsupported by Schary, and left the studio for good in 1956.

Marilyn had sought an MGM contract as early as 1947, while under the management of Lucille Ryman Carroll, a talent scout for the studio. Ryman had earlier served as a mentor to Lana Turner. But with Lana on their payroll, the studio didn’t need another sexy blonde.

Then in 1950, Johnny Hyde secured a breakthrough role for Marilyn in MGM’s The Asphalt Jungle. All that year, Hyde tried to negotiate with Dore Schary to take on Marilyn permanently. But though Monroe would make two more films for MGM – Right Cross and Hometown Story – Schary wasn’t interested. ‘I did not recognise her star potential,’ he confessed. ‘Darryl F. Zanuck signed Miss Monroe, she became an extraordinary figure in movie history and for years I blushed with embarrassment every time her name was mentioned.’

Marilyn’s 1954 western, River of No Return, was by her own opinion, ‘a grade-Z cowboy movie.’ Director Otto Preminger bullied Monroe, and she reputedly considered him ‘a pompous ass’. In 1958, Lana was offered a role in one of Preminger’s best films, Anatomy of a Murder. After clashing with Preminger over her wardrobe demands, however, Turner rejected the part, and later reflected, ‘God forbid my family should ever be so hungry that I have to work for him.’

From the 1940s onward, Lana was friendly with another glamorous blonde, Betty Grable. ‘At the height of their fame, fans who ran into them would mistake them each other occasionally,’ Cheryl Crane revealed. ‘Mother happily obliged them with a “Betty Grable” autograph.’

Monroe, who was often shy around others, nonetheless bonded with Grable when they starred together in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953.) Marilyn was horrified when, halfway through shooting, she was offered Grable’s old ‘star’ dressing room. But Grable simply told her, ‘Honey, I’ve had it. Go get yours. It’s your turn now.’

Lana’s personal life, like Marilyn’s, was often stormy. And though she adored her daughter, Cheryl Crane, Lana was heartbroken that her chronic endometriosis made her unable to have more children. Marilyn, who also suffered from endometriosis, endured at least two painful miscarriages.

Turner married seven times, and once said of her many failed relationships, ‘I’m so gullible. I’m so damn gullible. And I am so sick of me being gullible.’ In 1957, fresh scandal erupted when Cheryl stabbed Lana’s boyfriend, gangster Johnny Stompanato, to death after she found him beating her mother. It was later ruled as ‘justifiable homicide.’

Marilyn’s death is considered one of Hollywood’s greatest tragedies. While Lana never found lasting love, ultimately she survived. She earned acclaim for her performances in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Peyton Place (1957), Imitation of Life (1959), and Madame X (1966.) Turner’s career continued until the early 1980s, when she acted in TV soap opera Falcon Crest. She died in 1994.

Marilyn and Lana both came from humble backgrounds, and achieved worldwide fame through their beauty and talent. Like so many of America’s sex symbols, they were rarely given the respect they deserved, and their difficult private lives contrasted poignantly with the upfront glamour they projected.

Marilyn’s career began while Lana was in her prime as one of the world’s most talked-about stars, and while the parallels with Jean Harlow have often been cited, it seems likely that Lana Turner was also a significant influence on the young Marilyn Monroe.

Further Reading

Lana: The Myth, the Memories and the Movies by Cheryl Crane, Cindy De La Hoz (Running Press, 2008)

The Marilyn Encyclopedia by Adam Victor (Overlook Press, 1999)

 Wishing Madonna Ciccone a happy 53rd birthday…

Madonna and Malawi: ‘I Am Because We Are’

“People have asked, “Why did you choose Malawi?” I always answer, “I didn’t. Malawi chose me.”

Madonna’s involvement with Africa began when she was approached by a Malawian businesswoman, Victoria Keelan, who told her about the million native children orphaned by AIDS. (Madonna was one of the first celebrities to campaign for victims of the disease during the 1980s.)

On her second visit to the country, in September 2006, Madonna decided to adopt a year-old boy, David Banda, whom she had first met at the Home of Hope orphanage in April. She was concerned by his rapidly declining health. The adoption led to a media storm because the boy’s natural father was still alive. However, he gave his consent and the adoption went ahead.

What was less reported at the time is that Madonna – who was already involved in the Spirituality for Kids initiative – had also founded her own charity, Raising Malawi, with the intention of building a school for girls in the country.

Throughout 2006 and 2007, Madonna produced a documentary, I Am Because We Are, about her work in Malawi. Directed by Nathan Rissman, it received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, New York, in April 2008.

“To say that this film is a labor of love is trivial,” Madonna has stated. “It’s also the journey of a lifetime.”

‘I Am Because We Are’

Orphaned children have a personal resonance for Madonna, who lost her mother to cancer at the age of five. ‘When you lose your parents, you lose your direction,’ she explains.

Edith, mother of Sinode, was dying of AIDS when she met Madonna. She lived in a remote village and was too weak to travel to hospital. Elora, mother of Mavuto, was filmed on her deathbed. ‘I have failed to do what I wanted to do,’ she says, meaning that she is unable to provide for her son. One young man reflects on the loss of his mother, years before: ‘She never had the chance to enjoy the fruits of her labour.’

Older children are left to take care of their siblings. David Banda, Madonna’s adopted son, was one of three infants under the care of a little girl named Wezi at the Home of Hope orphanage. Wezi, born HIV positive, depended on monthly deliveries of antiretroviral drugs from her grandmother. But many families cannot afford these life-saving treatments.

Successive Malawian governments ignored the rise of AIDS. Now many children will grow up without parents, the crisis can no longer be denied. At the time of filming, 79% of the population lived on less than a dollar a day, allowing most children just one meal.

Poverty and the prevalence of infectious diseases have led to a revival in superstition. Ritual rape of young girls by their chief, or ‘cleansing death’ as it is described, is not uncommon in some tribal communities. And one young boy, Luka, suffered genital mutilation at the hands of neighbours who believed him possessed. Through her foundation, Madonna was able to arrange for surgery and a new home for Luka.

While it eloquently documents a global tragedy, I Am Because We Are is less convincing in prescribing remedies. It may be disheartening to see slum-dwelling fathers drinking away their meagre earnings, but there is something rather hypocritical in the tut-tutting of government officials who urge these people not to harbour a ‘victim mentality’.

The ‘modern farming techniques’ proposed by Dr Jeffrey Sachs and others seem to veer inexorably towards the advanced capitalism that is currently wreaking havoc in Western economies. Madonna notes that the Malawian people she meets have a ‘sense of community and extended family’ that has been largely eroded in countries like Britain and America.

I Am Because We Are derives its title from ‘Ubuntu’, a philosophy that is integral to African spirituality. Madonna has followed the teachings of the US-based Kabbalah Centre since the late 1990s. Spirituality For Kids (SFK), a Kabbalah inititiative, organizes workshops for children in Malawi and other countries, focusing on personal responsibility. Raising Malawi has worked closely with SFK.

Stylistically, I Am Because We Are is comparable to Madonna’s music documentaries, particularly I’m Going to Tell You a Secret (2005.) The footage at the beginning is grainy, and the captions are handwritten by Madonna. But in her use of both colour and monochrome, Madonna inverts her fomer aesthetic.

I’m Going to Tell You a Secret was largely made in black and white, bringing a sense of naturalism to a pop star’s glamorous life. Whereas the gruelling subject matter of I Am Because We Are is mostly rendered in vibrant colour, befitting ‘the warm heart of Africa’.

The soundtrack was composed by Madonna’s longtime collaborator, Patrick Leonard. An accompanying book of photos by Kristen Ashburn was published in 2009. I Am Because We Are won the VH1 Do Something Docu Style Award in 2010. Readers in the US can view the film for free on Youtube; it is also available internationally on DVD.

Aftermath

Since the release of I Am Because We Are, Madonna has adopted a second Malawian child, Chifundo ‘Mercy’ James. However, her plans to open a girls’ academy in Malawi floundered in 2011 after she discovered that some of her staff were embezzling funds.

Madonna moved quickly to fire those responsible and an investigation is ongoing. She hopes to continue her charity work in Malawi. Media criticism of Madonna’s ‘folly’ has been widespread. But whatever the ultimate fate of her project, I Am Because We Are remains an affecting testament to her sincerity, passion and love of children.

This article marks the 49th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, and is also published at Immortal Marilyn

‘Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.’ Marilyn Monroe, My Story, 1954

When Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, the world’s press pointed the finger at Hollywood.  ‘Marilyn was the victim of the glaring lights, the severe demands, the cracking whips, the cheers and jeers and juggling in the big circus tent of the movies,’ declared Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter.  ‘Hollywood gave birth to her and killed her,’ judged Moscow’s Isvestia.

However, Rome’s Il Tempo took a different view. ‘Who killed her?’ it asked. ‘If we look ourselves in the face, we are forced to answer, “We did!” ‘ 

The question, ‘Did Hollywood kill Marilyn Monroe?’ is a valid one. In this article I will address ‘Hollywood’ as not only the place where Marilyn lived, loved, and worked; but also in the broader sense of her fame, including both the media and the public.

My main sources are Marilyn: The Last Take (Peter Brown and Patte Barham, 1992); Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (Donald Spoto, 1993); and The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe (Keith Badman, 2010.)

The Invention of Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles; her mother, Gladys Baker, worked as a cutter in a Hollywood studio.  A lonely child, Norma Jeane liked to pretend that Clark Gable was her father. ‘Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time,’ she admitted. ‘For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.’

During her early years as an actress, Marilyn forged useful alliances with Hollywood power players, like Joe Schenck and Spyros Skouras at Twentieth Century-Fox. Some have assumed that the ambitious starlet may have traded sexual favours for career advancement, but in fact, the evidence is inconclusive.

However, the studio’s president, Darryl F. Zanuck, was slow to recognise her potential. ‘Nobody discovered her,’ he conceded later. ‘She earned her own way to stardom.’

Having made her start as a pin-up model, Marilyn was insecure in her own talents.  But by 1954, she was ready to try more challenging roles. She left Hollywood to study acting in New York. Though industry insiders predicted the end of her career, Marilyn was able to renegotiate her contract and went on to play some of her finest roles.

Nonetheless, Monroe’s battles with Fox were not forgotten. ‘Nobody ever felt the same about her; she was a traitor,’ said Lee Hanna, a secretary to Zanuck. ‘She deserted us.’

In a conservative era, Marilyn survived scandal: her nude calendar, her mother’s mental illness, her marriage to Arthur Miller. But by 1960, her luck was running out. An adulterous affair with Yves Montand was soon followed by the death of Clark Gable, her co-star in The Misfits.  Throughout 1961, speculation about Monroe’s health was rife.

Something’s Got to Give

With some misgivings, Marilyn returned to Hollywood to prepare for a new comedy, Something’s Got to Give, in late 1961. It would be her last commitment to Twentieth Century-Fox, and she took the role on the advice of her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, ‘for the sake of her emotional health.’

Monroe had not worked for more than a year, and as Greenson’s daughter, Joan, has observed, ‘this thing was hanging over her head.’ The once-booming studio was in dire straits due to the massive costs incurred by the ongoing Cleopatra shoot in Rome, and the turbulent liaison between its married stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, had caused shares in Fox to plummet.

When pre-production began in April 1962, Something’s Got to Give was the only current project on the entire lot. Marilyn was alarmed when her director, George Cukor, failed to show up for her hair and make-up tests. They had worked together two years before on Let’s Make Love, a low point in their careers, and he resented Monroe as ‘a spoiled, pampered superstar.’

Monroe grew still more concerned when Cukor scrapped the original screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, and as shooting began, she was sent new pages of dialogue daily – and sometimes, according to her housekeeper, there would be several deliveries overnight.

Having found Marilyn semi-comatose at home with what biographer Donald Spoto termed a ‘Nembutal hangover’, producer Henry Weinstein became seriously worried about her health. But the new management team at Fox refused to consider postponing the project. ‘Despite this or any other overdose,’ he was told, ‘she’s perfectly fit medically.’ Fox were counting on Monroe to recreate her magic at the box office, but on a tight budget and with still no final script.

A jittery Marilyn flew to Manhattan for talks with her drama coach, Lee Strasberg, and returned with a bad cold which the studio doctor, Lee Siegel, diagnosed as sinusitis. But the studio insisted she continue to perform, and pressed him to give her ‘hot shots’ to mask her true condition. ‘They were only interested in finishing that film, and in finishing it quickly,’ Siegel recalled. ‘Their attitude seemed to be: “Let Marilyn collapse after we finish.”’

After collapsing in her dressing room, Marilyn was ordered to rest. But on May 17, two days after returning to work, she defied studio warnings by flying to New York to sing for President John F. Kennedy at his birthday gala the following day. (Actually, Marilyn should have been given time off because it coincided with the start of her menstrual cycle. She suffered from severe period pain as a result of her chronic endometriosis, and her contract stipulated that she should not be required to work at this time.)

‘I had already decided to fire her if she left Hollywood and appeared at that event,’ admitted lawyer Milton Gould. On her return, Marilyn refused to film scenes with co-star Dean Martin, who had caught a cold. Her last day of filming – on June 1, her 36^th birthday – was a muted affair, with a small party being allowed only after a full day’s work had ended. The champagne and cake would later be charged to her estate. ‘Even on her birthday,’ Joan Greenson reflected, ‘they treated her like a bad child.’

Nonetheless, Marilyn remained popular among the workers on set. ‘There was tremendous support for her from the entire crew – indeed, from all the craftsmen on the lot,’ said special effects expert Paul Worzl. ‘We all knew the score.’

By June 4, Marilyn’s sinusitis had worsened. But though her absence was authorised by the studio, plans were already underway to have her fired as the Board of Directors met in New York. Days later, a lawsuit was filed against Monroe, who had made millions for Fox over the previous decade.

Discrediting Marilyn

‘You know, don’t you, that they fired me because of Elizabeth Taylor?’ Marilyn asked her masseur, Ralph Roberts, on June 9. ‘It’s not her fault; it’s the company’s fault. But they fired me because of Elizabeth Taylor.’ Taylor, unlike Marilyn, was an investor in her movie and could not be replaced.

In the days following her dismissal, a team of Fox publicists launched a campaign against Marilyn. One of the culprits was Harry Brand, who had vigorously promoted Monroe at the start of her career.  But all that changed in 1954, when she refused a mediocre script and was suspended.

‘They set out to destroy her,’ reflected her own former press agent, Rupert Allan, on the events of 1962. ‘The ruthlessness started with Harry Brand. For some forgotten slight, he hated Marilyn. Despised her. He always said ugly, dirty things about Marilyn to me…’

Another publicist, Perry Lieber, told Louella Parsons that, while filming, ‘Monroe was high and didn’t even know where she was.’ During her absences, Lieber claimed that Marilyn was ‘sleeping all day and partying all night.’ In fact, Marilyn rarely socialised while at work. Lieber also described her illness as ‘unspecified’, despite Dr Siegel’s diagnosis of sinusitis.

Director George Cukor was one of the first to speak out against Marilyn. ‘The poor dear has finally gone around the bend,’ he told Hedda Hopper. ‘This is the end of her career.’

Many of the negative comments supposedly made by Marilyn’s co-workers are now thought to have been ‘planted’ by the publicity department. Peter Levathes, then Fox’s head of production, was quoted as saying, ‘Miss Monroe is not just being temperamental; she is mentally ill, perhaps seriously.’ But he later insisted, ‘I never said that, nor did I feel that way.’

However, the studio had already decided to replace Marilyn with actress Lee Remick, also on contract at the time. Remick was photographed with George Cukor in a press release, and was said to have called Marilyn ‘unprofessional.’ ‘I never said any of those things,’ Remick recalled years later. ‘I certainly wasn’t interested in (the role)…Marilyn and I were as different as two actresses can be.’

It would appear that Dean Martin agreed. ‘I have the greatest respect for Miss Remick,’ he told reporters, ‘but I signed to do this film with Marilyn Monroe.’ Martin’s subsequent walkout was a major blow to Fox, as his production company had a stake in the film.

Nonetheless, the onslaught continued. On June 11, a telegram signed by the cast and crew of Something’s Got to Give was posted in Variety, sarcastically ‘thanking’ Marilyn ‘for the loss of our livelihoods.’ Monroe, who had always been well-liked by her crew, pleaded, ‘This was none of my doing.’

Once again, this may have been a publicity stunt. ‘We placed no ad,’ recalled assistant director Buck Hall. ‘It came from somewhere else. Believe me, I would have known if the crew placed that ad.’

The Enemy Within

‘I had no idea whether it was a good picture or not,’ Milton Gould has admitted. ‘I was not a moviemaker. My job was to solve money problems.’ George Cukor later described the completed scenes as ‘unusable. Marilyn was acting as if she were underwater.’

About nine hours of footage are believed to exist. A partial reconstruction of the movie was made for a 2001 documentary, Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days. David Bretherton, who processed the daily rushes, has commented, ‘She had never been better, or displayed more perfect timing.’

Back in 1962, Darryl F. Zanuck also liked what he saw. ‘I’ve got a hell of a high regard for her box-office value,’ he told Nunnally Johnson. ‘The treatment of her on this film makes me terribly frightened for the future at Fox.’ Zanuck had been producing films in Europe since 1956, and his own position at the studio was uncertain.

Unsurprisingly, Marilyn was in turmoil. ‘She had never been fired before, so she was devastated,’ recalled Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder, her make-up artist since her earliest days at Fox. ‘She couldn’t understand it.’

Given her fragile state, it is all the more remarkable that Marilyn fought back with such verve. In an interview with Richard Meryman, published in Life magazine that summer, she said of her sacking: ‘Executives can get colds and stay at home and phone in – but the actor? How dare you get a cold or virus! I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection!’

On her supposed lack of discipline, she stated, ‘Often, I’m late because I’m preparing a scene, maybe preparing too much sometimes. But I’ve always felt that even in the slightest scene the people ought to get their money’s worth. And this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best.’

It seemed that Marilyn’s wish to give her best was at odds with the studio system itself. ‘I’m trying to work at an art form, not a manufacturing establishment,’ she explained. ‘I don’t look on myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have…If I’m sounding ‘picked on’, I think I have been.’

Monroe also addressed the pernicious rumours about her mental health. ‘I really resent the way the press has been saying I’m depressed and in a slump, as if I’m finished,’ she told Meryman, adding defiantly, ‘Nothing’s going to sink me.’

Marilyn’s own ‘inner circle’ was divided. Her on-set coach, Paula Strasberg, and Dr Greenson were struggling for first place in Monroe’s sphere of influence. In the days following her dismissal, Greenson spent hours alone with his patient, refusing calls from Zanuck and other powerful allies.

In late June, studio head Peter Levathes visited Marilyn at home for talks, while her publicist, Pat Newcomb, secretly took notes from behind the door. ‘I found, surprisingly, that (MM) was an astute businesswoman in many ways,’ Levathes remembered. ‘She had a kind of renewed interest in the project that was infectious.’

Plans were made for filming to resume in late July, but Monroe’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin – Dr Greenson’s brother-in-law – was uncertain. Rudin is said to have told columnist Earl Wilson that he believed Marilyn ‘is obviously deeply ill, mentally ill. She probably should have been in an institution.’

Levathes disagreed. ‘The woman I negotiated with wasn’t insane,’ he said. ‘Of course there were major problems, the insomnia and the drugs. What impressed me was her genuine enthusiasm for going back to work.’

However, Levathes was to lose his own job days later when, after a board meeting in New York, Zanuck regained control of Twentieth Century-Fox.

Death of a Goddess

The negotiations for Marilyn’s reinstatement continued. She agreed to keep both Strasberg and Greenson off the set, and to make a second film for Fox.  Zanuck replaced Cukor with director Jean Negulesco, and promised to restore Nunnally Johnson’s original script. (And so Marilyn would be reunited with the team behind one of her biggest hits, How to Marry a Millionaire.)

On Thursday, August 2, Marilyn invited ‘Whitey’ Snyder and her wardrobe assistant, Marjorie Plecher, to her home for drinks. ‘She was happy and excited that night, which was the last time I ever saw her,’ Plecher remembered. ‘We were going to begin shooting in a matter of weeks.’

Nonetheless, Marilyn’s health was delicate. She was barely eating, and sleep eluded her. Though she had emerged victorious, the long battle had taken its toll. And there were other worries, too: her dependency on Greenson, whom she saw daily; her tentative reconciliation with ex-husband Joe DiMaggio; and the growing rumours about her friendship with the Kennedy brothers.

On Saturday, August 4, at 10.30 pm, Arthur Jacobs – head of a PR agency which served both Marilyn and her studio – was attending a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, when he was asked to take a call backstage. It was then that he heard Marilyn was dead.

Frank Neill, another Fox publicist, drove to Monroe’s home. He then called Peter Levathes, asking for security guards to be sent there. Over the next five hours, all documents pertaining to the studio were removed.

Sergeant Jack Clemmons was called to the house at 4.30 am, Sunday, August 5. When he asked why there had been such a long delay in alerting the police, Dr Greenson told him, ‘We had to get permission from the studio publicity department before we could call anyone.’

Clemmons replied, ‘That’s not an answer.’

The first reporter to arrive on the scene was James Bacon. Claiming to be from the coroner’s office, he entered her bedroom and saw her body. Before long, more journalists had gathered. A grief-stricken Pat Newcomb called them ‘vultures’.

Marilyn’s funeral was arranged by Joe DiMaggio, and he barred most of her Hollywood friends, including Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford. ‘If it hadn’t been for some of her friends,’ he told Mickey Rudin, ‘she wouldn’t be where she is.’ Publicist John Springer noted, ‘There were a lot of hurt feelings.’

‘It was a lesson in dignity Hollywood had needed for many years,’ author George Miller said of Monroe’s funeral. After the ceremony, however, a crowd of onlookers fought over wreaths left at her crypt.

‘Not a soul in Hollywood has come forward since it was disclosed that there may not be enough money in Miss Monroe’s estate to pay for the care of her mother,’ revealed Inez Melson, Marilyn’s executor. Her estate would not be settled for another eight years.

Monroe’s main beneficiary was Lee Strasberg, according to a will made in 1960, though the actress had spoken to Mickey Rudin of changing her will just months before her death.  After Strasberg died in 1982, his second wife launched a multi-million dollar business licensing Marilyn’s image.

While the press blamed Hollywood for Marilyn’s demise, the movie establishment denied responsibility. ‘It is an awful lot of nonsense, the charge that Hollywood claimed her life,’ said George Cukor. ‘Hollywood, in a sense, created her.’ But Frankie Vaughan, Marilyn’s co-star in Let’s Make Love, felt differently. ‘Hollywood has got to carry the can for this,’ he said frankly.

Amy Greene Andrews, widow of photographer Milton Greene, believes that Marilyn ‘loved her life.’ But what Monroe had not bargained for was the gulf between her image, and her real self.

‘A sex symbol becomes a thing, she told Richard Meryman in 1962, ‘and I hate to be a thing. You’re always running into people’s unconscious. It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.’

On her fame, Marilyn commented, ‘When you’re famous, every weakness is exaggerated. Fame will go by and – so long, fame, I’ve had you! I’ve always known it was fickle.’

Though Elizabeth Taylor would carry the flame for years to come, Monroe was really the last star to embody the glamour of Hollywood in its prime. In some ways, she did become a victim of the studio system in its decline.  But Marilyn was also a harbinger of change, in seeking an identity beyond the gilded crown Hollywood gave her.

Another iconic rebel, Marlon Brando, mused:  ‘Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty … how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere.’

Marilyn: The Last Sessions is a documentary made by Patrick Jeudy in 2008, based on a 2006 novel by Michel Schneider. The author was inspired by a 2005 article in the Los Angeles Times, containing a transcript (from memory) by John Miner, a detective involved in the original investigation into Monroe’s death, of tapes that he claimed were made for her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, shortly before she died in 1962.

The tapes have never been found, but the publication of Miner’s transcripts proved controversial, which reflected the continuing public interest in Marilyn. Some experts on Monroe’s life pointed to factual anomalies in the text, outlined by Melinda Mason in her response, ‘Songs Marilyn Never Sang’.

While Miner’s transcript was a catalyst for Schneider, the material in his novel – and this documentary – are largely unrelated. Schneider has re-imagined the relationship between Monroe and Greenson over the last two years of her life.

In the documentary, Schneider’s text provides a voiced narrative to a 90-minute montage of newsreel and home movies, film scenes and footage of the cities where Marilyn lived. Visually, it is impressive. Scenes from Don’t Bother to Knock are used to illustrate how Marilyn’s character, the disturbed Nell, resembled her own mother, Gladys. And the death scene from Niagara is used to evoke the shadowy rumours about how Monroe’s life ended.

A recorded interview that Marilyn gave to George Belmont for Marie-Claire in 1960 is also played. However its source is never overtly stated, leaving the audience to assume that these are the private tapes allegedly made for Greenson.

A stag film, The Apple-Knockers and the Coke, is included here, but the girl featured is not Monroe. As early as 1970, New York cinemas were marketing the clip as starring MM, but her friend, James Haspiel, has established that the actress was, in fact, Arline Hunter: a former Playboy model who had gained some notoriety for imitating Monroe’s look.

Thorough research would suggest that no blue movie footage attributed to Marilyn has yet been proved genuine, but this does not fit the dramatic agenda of The Last Sessions. It is also stated that in the final months of her life, Monroe had been caught having sex in public by police. Perhaps this is another case of ‘artistic license’, as I have never heard of such an incident.

The heady eroticism that Marilyn projected in her films and photo shoots was an artful illusion, and in reality she was not nearly as promiscuous as Schneider and Jeudy have implied. Furthermore, by emphasising her personal problems and tragic experiences so strongly, the film-makers have done Monroe a disservice. Her determination and quick wit are nowhere to be found in this two-dimensional portrait.

Whatever Marilyn’s inner thoughts may have been, we can only speculate. This makes an intriguing premise for a novel, and I look forward to reading Schneider’s book when it is finally published in English this August. But this approach works less well in the documentary form, and the blurring between fact and fiction ultimately disappoints.

I’ve written a guest post for British Pathé Blog, focussing on archive footage of Marilyn Monroe.