Many films of the silent era are now lost, but only one of them starred Greta Garbo. In 1993, a nine-minute reel from The Divine Woman (1928) was found at Moscow’s Gosfilmofond archive.

Philip J. Riley, a former musician, has published a series of books about vintage monster films, including another lost silent gem, London After Midnight (1927), starring Lon Chaney, also novelised.

Following the Chaney vehicle, Riley has reprinted Gladys Unger’s The Divine Woman with a short introduction, shedding new light on a long-forgotten story.

In 1928, MGM’s production chief, Irving Thalberg, commissioned Unger – author of the 1925 play, Starlight, on which Dorothy Farnum’s screenplay was based – to write a tie-in ‘novelette’ to accompany The Divine Woman’s cinematic release.

The story is loosely based on the early life of Sarah Bernhardt, the fabled actress who dominated the Parisian theatre during the later 19^th century.  Known as ‘the divine Sarah’, she died in 1923. Bernhardt was known for embellishment, so if the plot is mostly fantasy, this may not be a grave concern.

Perhaps more than any other movie star, Greta Garbo inspired not merely lust, or envy, but awe. She too was often described as ‘divine’.

Born in Stockholm in 1905, and ‘discovered’ by the Swedish film-maker, Mauritz Stiller, Garbo made her Hollywood debut at twenty, and quickly became the world’s most feted star. She played alongside her real-life lover, John Gilbert, in Flesh and the Devil (1927.)

Garbo’s austere beauty and melancholic persona were far removed from the flappers of the day – and yet, she captured the imagination. Her innate shyness only enhanced her mystique.

The narrative can be divided into three distinct episodes. In the first, the young Marah is brought from the provincial farm (where she was raised by her adoptive family), to Paris by a theatrical producer, Monsieur Carre, who introduces Marah to her real mother, the courtesan Rosine.

Next, the rejected daughter finds herself on the streets of Paris, where she falls in love with Lucien, a soldier.  She goes to work for Madame Pigonnier, an elderly seamstress. After hearing that he is to be dispatched to Africa, Lucien deserts the army and goes into hiding with Marah.

In the final chapters, Lucien is arrested. Alone again, Marah is drawn to the stage and quickly becomes the most popular actress in Paris. But she is privately unhappy and longs for Lucien’s return, though he feels that she has betrayed him.

This melodramatic storyline is typical of Garbo’s early films. However, The Divine Woman was directed by Victor Sjöström, edited by Conrad A. Nervig, and featured another Swede, Lars Hanson, as Lucien. This would have been very agreeable to Garbo, who was lonely in Hollywood. (Just four years earlier, Hanson had appeared in The Saga of Gösta Berling, Garbo’s breakthrough film with Stiller.)

A year after The Divine Woman, Garbo starred in Love, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Unlike many silent stars (including John Gilbert), Garbo made a successful transition to sound in Anna Christie (1930.)

She became MGM’s highest-paid star, and was able to pick and choose her later roles: from historical figures like Sweden’s Queen Christina (1933) to literary heroines like Camille (1936.) In 1939’s Ninotchka, she played a rare comedic role to further acclaim.

In 1941, aged just 36, Garbo retired from the screen. Several comeback projects were mooted but never materialised. She later moved to New York and was dubbed the world’s most famous recluse, though she travelled quite widely.

Garbo had lasting relationships with both men and women, but never married and preferred to live alone. She died in 1990, aged 84, at a New York hospital. Her entire estate – amounting to about $32 million – was left to her niece, Gray Reisfield.

Five years later, after a convoluted legal battle, Garbo’s ashes were interred near Stockholm.

‘It is my hope to reconstruct this film using photographs, set stills and silent film titles,’ Philip C. Riley writes in his introduction to the book. The film in its entirety may have differed from Gladys Unger’s story to some degree, as Irving Thalberg had final approval. (For example, we know that the name of Garbo’s character, Marah, was later changed to Marianne.)

I had hoped for a more detailed commentary, and a greater number of pictures. Nonetheless, this book will certainly be of interest to Garbo fans, as well as those with an interest in silent movies and the romantic fiction of the era.

Garbo Forever website

The Divine Woman on Flickr

Garbo by David Robinson

Greta Garbo Signature Collection on DVD

BearManor Media

This year marks the 5oth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Of the many books that will be published about the legendary star in coming months, Michelle Morgan‘s fully revised and updated biography, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, will surely rank among the finest. You can read my review over at For Books’ Sake.

Nina Mae McKinney, who made her screen début in King Vidor’s Hallelujah! (1929) – one of the first Hollywood films to feature an all-black cast – was hailed by MGM’s Irving Thalberg as ‘the greatest acting discovery of the age’.

A vivacious beauty, Nina Mae had more in common with ‘It Girl’ Clara Bow or glamorous comedienne Carole Lombard than with the enigmatic Greta Garbo, to whom she was compared.

But like many other black actresses of her generation, McKinney was reduced to playing bit parts and never fulfilled her initial promise. Her subsequent career included roles in ‘race movies’ (films made outside Hollywood, for black audiences) and cabaret success in Europe.

The British film historian, Stephen Bourne, who has previously written about other black female stars of the early twentieth century – including Ethel Waters and Butterfly McQueen – has now investigated the life and work of Nina Mae McKinney in his latest book, The Black Garbo.

She was born in Lancaster, South Carolina in 1912. Her parents were among many black Southerners who migrated to New York, while the young Nina Mae was raised by her great-aunt. She came to the Big Apple as a teenager, and before long had joined the chorus line of a hit Broadway show.

It was there that she was spotted by King Vidor, the Texan-born director of silent classics like The Big Parade and The Crowd. ‘She was third from right in the chorus,’ Vidor said of Nina. ‘She was beautiful and talented and glowing with personality.’

16 year-old McKinney was a last-minute replacement for singer Honey Brown in Vidor’s first sound picture, Hallelujah! She played Chick, ‘a dancer and streetwise hussy of ill-repute,’ who seduces the sharecropper hero, Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes.)

As Chick in 'Hallelujah!' (1929)

Hallelujah! was considered so risky that MGM insisted Vidor invest his own salary in its production. Although marred by racial stereotyping, it was praised by critic Richard Watts Jr as ‘one of the great motion pictures’, and has more recently been selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Langston Hughes, poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in his short story, The Moon: ‘the first coloured movie star I fell in love with was Nina Mae McKinney, who was showing herself off in a picture called Hallelujah…(She)was so beautiful she made my heart ache.’

With Jean Harlow in 'Reckless' (1935)

In William Wellman’s 1931 film, Safe in Hell (aka The Lost Lady), Nina Mae took the role of a waitress who befriends a runaway prostitute (played by Dorothy McKaill).  In 1935, she played a singer in Reckless, a star vehicle for Jean Harlow. However, most of Nina Mae’s scenes were cut.

It has been observed that Harlow’s tough, sexy persona was strikingly similar to Nina’s in Hallelujah! But as Bourne admits, ‘No one would have called Jean Harlow the “white Nina Mae McKinney”.’

Like other black American stars, including Josephine Baker and Adelaide Hall, Nina Mae eventually tired of constantly facing discrimination, and tried her luck in Europe. In 1933, Charles B. Cochran – London’s answer to Florenz Ziegfeld – cast Nina Mae in a West End revue, and she followed this with a series of successful variety tours and even featured in some of the first BBC television specials.

Fayard Nicholas, who starred with Nina Mae in a short Vitaphone film, The Black Network, told Stephen Bourne in 1990, ‘She had the talent. She could sing, dance and wisecrack with the best of them, but she came along too early and there was no place for her.’

In an interview for the Sunday Dispatch, Nina Mae gave a hint of the prejudice she had encountered in New York. ‘Sometimes I’ve gone into a restaurant, and they say they’re full up. But I can see empty tables. It makes you feel’ – both hands touched her heart – ‘awful bad.’

In Alexander Korda's 'Sanders of the River' (1935)

Britain’s top film producer, Alexander Korda, cast her opposite Paul Robeson in Sanders of the River (1935.) Robeson later disowned the film, which ‘glorified the British Empire and colonialism.’ His near-naked appearance was humiliating, and Nina Mae didn’t fare much better. She was criticised for her jarring American accent and heavy make-up, unsuited to the character of an African tribal wife.

Nina Mae travelled as far as Australia to perform, though bouts of illness also hindered her career. But by 1938, she had returned to the US permanently. In the first of her ‘race movies’, Gang Smashers, she played a glamorous undercover detective. Her name was still famous enough to ensure billing over the title. Stephen Bourne considers the film ‘as good as any Hollywood crime drama.’

Throughout the 1930s, Nina Mae was romantically involved with her manager, Jimmy Monroe. They were married in 1940, but within a year they had divorced. Monroe went on to marry Billie Holiday, another ill-fated union.

When Lena Horne was signed to MGM in 1942, it must have seemed that black actresses were finally overcoming racism. But in fact, little progress was made. Nina Mae played Merle Oberon’s maid in Dark Waters (1944), a gothic melodrama. Her penultimate film role, in Elia Kazan’s race drama, Pinky (1949), she played Rozelia, ‘a razor-toting whore from the shantytown’.   Bourne notes that she was now overweight, and her looks were fading fast.

During the 1950s, Nina Mae attempted to revive her nightclub career. She became something of a regular feature in ‘Where Are They Now?’ items published in magazines like Ebony, Jet and Hue. Rumours spread that she was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and by 1960 she was seriously ill. When Nina Mae died in 1967, aged 54, her death certificate described her as ‘widowed’ and a ‘domestic servant’.

Bourne’s tale of ‘a star who should not have been forgotten’ is brief, and poignant. He takes a respectful approach to McKinney’s life and work, with references to leading black film historians such as Donald Bogle. This attention to detail helps to put Nina Mae back in her rightful place alongside other pioneering African-American stars of the entertainment world.

The Black Garbo: Nina Mae McKinney by Stephen Bourne is available now in paperback and on Kindle.

Watch Nina Mae McKinney on Youtube

Mary Ann Anderson was a friend and business manager to the actress and film director, Ida Lupino, for over a decade. She has also contributed to two books on the star, and has now written a biography, Ida Lupino: Beyond the Camera, featuring rare photos, press clippings, and transcribed interviews.

Born in London in 1918, Ida was the daughter of the writer and music hall star, Stanley Lupino. She made her screen début aged 13, and flew to Hollywood soon after, stealing the show in Rouben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936) and The Light That Failed (1939).

Early in her career, columnist Hedda Hopper advised her: ‘If you want to become a real actress, the first thing is to let your eyebrows grow, get your hair back to its natural shade, and scrub all that goo off your face. Otherwise, you’ll be just another starlet who fell by the wayside.’

Lupino’s first marriage, to actor Louis Hayward, collapsed amid the trauma he suffered while serving in the air force during World War II.

Her acting career was at its peak when she starred with Humphrey Bogart in They Drive By Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941). She also won the New York Critics Circle award for Best Actress in The Hard Way (1941); starred with John Garfield in Out of the Fog, Edward G. Robinson in The Sea Wolf (both 1941); with Jean Gabin in Moontide (1942); and as the novelist Emily Brontё in Devotion (1946).

She excelled at playing ‘hard-boiled’ characters. Of her role in High Sierra, one critic wrote, ‘Ida Lupino gives us the best moll I have ever seen’. In the preface to this book, Ida admitted, ‘I loved playing, sexy warm dames who are tough in life, who do not let life affect them, very much myself!’

Ida became an ambulance driver during World War II, and her efforts were showcased alongside other stars in Hollywood Canteen (1944). She went on to further success in Roadhouse (1948).

But her story doesn’t end there. While suspended from her studio contract after turning down a role, Ida became interested in directing. She and her second husband, Collier Young, formed an independent production company, Filmakers.

After the director of their first project, Not Wanted (1949), fell ill, Ida replaced him and went on to become Hollywood’s only female film director at the time. Not Wanted, the tale of an unwed mother’s plight, was followed by three more highly realistic films focussing on ‘women’s issues’: Never Fear (1949), which she directed from a wheelchair after an accident on the set; Outrage (1950), with Mala Powers as a rape victim; and Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951.)

She directed and also starred in On Dangerous Ground (1952), followed by The Bigamist and The Hitch Hiker (both 1953), which the critic John Krewson described as ‘Lupino’s best film and the only true Noir directed by a woman.’ She co-wrote, and acted in Beware My Lovely (1952) and Private Hell 36 (1954.) The writer Richard Koszarski commented, ‘Her films display the obsessions and consistencies of a true Auteur.’

After Filmakers folded, Ida appeared in Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), and directed episodes of some of the most popular television shows of the time, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. In 1966, Columbia hired her to direct The Trouble With Angels, starring Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior of a girls’ boarding school.

Ida’s last major acting roles were as Steve McQueen’s mother in Junior Bonner (1972) and in an episode of the cult TV series, Charlie’s Angels. After her third marriage, to actor Howard Duff, ended acrimoniously, Ida faced financial problems before enjoying a revival when, in 1992, Louis Antonelli of The Director’s Guild restored her masterpiece, The Hitch Hiker.  

Though she has been hailed as a feminist icon, Ida lived and worked in a more conservative era. ‘Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn’t very feminine,’ she said, wryly. ‘I retained every feminine trait while directing. Men prefer it that way.’ (Her film crews nicknamed her ‘Mother’.)

‘I have a very bad temper,’ she told Mary Ann Anderson. ‘I try to control it but there’s a little devil that comes out in me sometimes.’ Nonetheless, Anderson was able to gain her trust. Since Ida’s death in 1995, she has been celebrated in a TV documentary, an (unauthorised) biography, and numerous academic studies of the films she directed and starred in.

To capture Ida Lupino’s long and varied career in one short volume is not an easy task. Some topics are covered in more detail than others, and the structure is a little untidy. Nonetheless, Anderson’s personal insights are a valuable addition to the body of information available on one of the finest actresses of wartime Hollywood, and a pioneer in female-led, realist film-making.

Published by BearManor Media, Ida Lupino: Beyond the Camera is now available in paperback or on Kindle.

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Ida Lupino

Milton Greene, 1953

A brunette and a blonde, born four years apart and raised in Depression era America: both found fame in post-war Hollywood, where their mythic beauty inspired directors, lovers and poets. 

Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on Christmas Eve, 1922, youngest of seven children. Her father was a sharecropper in Grabtown, North Carolina. ‘Ours was a neighbourly and self-sufficient society,’ Ava recalled. A tomboy who loved to run barefoot, her early memories were idyllic. But the economic ravages of the 1930s eventually forced the Gardners to move away.

Her father died soon after, and her mother made ends meet by opening a boarding house. ‘I hated their eyes as they looked at me,’ Ava said of their (mostly male) lodgers. ‘They never touched me, but they tried to flirt, and even though I was only thirteen years old, I instinctively knew what was going on.’

Ava struggled to come to terms with her father’s death, and life in the city of Newport News, Virginia. ‘When you are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,’ she wrote, ‘and you have to go to school every day in the same little green coat that Mama bought in a cheap sale, and the one skirt and the same sweater that you wash every night and smooth out to dry, you know you are poor.’

Norma Jeane Mortenson, born in 1926, spent her early life in foster care. In her 1954 memoir, My Story, she claimed that a boarder in one of her many homes had molested her. She was about seven years old when it occurred.

When Norma Jeane entered high school, ‘I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided,’ she remembered. But as puberty dawned, Norma Jeane found herself the centre of attention. She would marry the ‘boy next door’, Jim Dougherty, in 1942, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. ’Maybe I looked like a woman,’ she said later, ‘but I was still a kid.’

Photo by Larry Tarr, 1940

An Education

Ava’s destiny changed forever during a trip to New York, visiting her eldest sister, Beatrice (known as ‘Bappie’), who was dating photographer Larry Tarr. His portrait of a fresh-faced Ava, hair tied in a bonnet, led to a screen test and, eventually, a contract with MGM.

Norma Jeane’s life was also transformed by a photograph, taken by David Conover while she was working at a munitions plant in 1945. Within a year she had left her husband, bleached her hair blonde, and signed with Twentieth Century-Fox as ‘Marilyn Monroe’.

Both starlets would serve a long apprenticeship, posing for endless ‘cheesecake’ shots while waiting for their big break.  Not long after her arrival, Ava was wooed by MGM’s hottest young star, Mickey Rooney. They married in 1942, but divorced a year later.

Despite his wholesome image, Rooney was a renowned womaniser. Marilyn Monroe had a small role in one of his films, and knew him from the Hollywood party circuit. He later claimed they had an affair, his stories growing with each telling.

Many years later, Ava told her maid, Mearene Jordan, ‘Reenie, he’s still the biggest liar in the world. Poor Mickey, he cannot tell the truth, he never could. But he’s cute.’

Ava was courted for many years by the eccentric businessman, Howard Hughes, who would also make a play for Marilyn. However, Hughes was ultimately rejected by both women (perhaps because neither was particularly impressed by his wealth and power, and they may have resented his controlling attitude towards women.)

In 1945, Ava married again, to bandleader Artie Shaw. It was to be another short-lived romance, as Shaw constantly criticised Ava for what he saw as her intellectual failings. ‘If I could ever be born again, an education is what I’d want,’ she reflected. ‘My life would have been so different if I’d had one. You don’t know what it’s like to be as young as I was then and know you’re uneducated, to be afraid to talk to people because you’re afraid even the questions you ask will be stupid.’

Two years later, Marilyn had a similarly unequal romance with another musician, Fred Karger. She described him as ‘my first love’. But he mocked her lack of education, telling her, ‘Your mind is inert. You never think about life.’ He also refused to marry her, saying that it wouldn’t be right for his daughter to be raised by ‘a woman like you’.

Both women would study for a time at UCLA. Marilyn was a voracious reader all her life, and Ava later discovered that her IQ was considerably higher than her ex-husband might have thought.

'Pandora and the Flying Dutchman' (1951)

Their Names Up in Lights

Ava’s first few years at MGM were uneventful, as she was largely eclipsed by the studio’s reigning pin-up, Lana Turner. Her name appeared on a marquee for the first time when she starred in the now-forgotten Ghosts on the Loose. ‘I’ve got to say it was a thrill,’ she recalled. ‘Then it wore off, and I’ve never had that feeling again. Ever.’

Her big break came in 1946, when she played the vampish Kitty Collins in Robert Siodmak’s classic ‘film noir’, The Killers. It was based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, and her co-star was a newcomer to the screen, Burt Lancaster.

‘She became at once the principal sex symbol for the movies’ new dark age,’ wrote biographer Lee Server. ‘Audiences responded to her style, an impudent, provocative blend of sweater girl and spider woman…’

Monroe also savoured her own marquee moment in the low-budget musical, Ladies of the Chorus (1948.) She was overlooked by MGM, who had their own sexy blonde – Lana Turner – but was signed to a seven-year contract by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1951.

A year later, Marilyn won the lead in Niagara, as a ‘femme fatale’ not unlike Gardner in The Killers. However, by then America had entered a more staid phase, and most of her subsequent roles were comedic.

From the outset, Ava rebelled against MGM’s strict regime. She was a party girl who liked to play the field. ‘Booze was an essential part of the social scene,’ she admitted, though in later years her drinking would spiral out of control. One of her rumoured lovers was a young John F. Kennedy, later – and notoriously – linked to Monroe.

Despite her wilful exterior, Ava lacked confidence in her acting skills. She felt unsupported by MGM, who seemed more interested in promoting her physical attributes. When the veteran stage actor, Charles Laughton, coached her on the set of The Bribe (1949), she remarked, ‘He was the only one in all my film years who took the time and went out of his way to try and make an actress out of me.’

Keenly aware of her lack of formal training, Marilyn took classes at the Actor’s Lab and with the actor Michael Chekhov. As early as 1948, she hired a personal coach, Natasha Lytess. Much to the annoyance of her directors, she insisted that Lytess advise her on the set.

Monroe also worked with Charles Laughton, in O. Henry’s Full House (1952), and told journalist W.J. Weatherby, ‘I was overawed at first, but he was very nice to me. He accepted me as an equal.’

In the paranoid, ‘red-baiting’ atmosphere of post-war Hollywood, Ava was too outspoken for her own good. ‘The atmosphere at Metro was stifling, killing,’ Ava recalled. ‘When I appeared for Henry Wallace (a Progressive Party candidate)when he ran for president, Mr Mayer called me in and told me I had to stop.’

In 1950, when director Joseph L. Mankiewicz found Marilyn reading the autobiography of radical journalist Lincoln Steffens on the set of All About Eve, he told her off.  Needless to say, she took no notice.

With Frank Sinatra

When Love Goes Wrong

‘Some women fall for writers, some for sailors, some for fighters,’ Ava wrote. ‘I’ve always loved musicians. I’m absolutely intoxicated with them. All I have to do is stand in front of a bandstand and I’m in love with the whole band.’

In 1949, Frank Sinatra was unhappily married, with three young children. His career was in a slump. When the news of his affair with Ava broke in 1950, the couple were condemned by Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and the Catholic Legion of Decency.

However, there were happier moments. Before their wedding, Ava insisted on meeting Frank’s parents and helped to heal a family rift. ‘It was all so welcoming,’ she recalled, ‘a great warm Italian household with no holding back.’ Marilyn also grew close to her lovers’ families, staying in touch long after her romances ended.

They married a year later, but their relationship was always stormy. They drank heavily, and fought constantly. At one point, Sinatra attempted suicide.  Ava’s jealousy was ignited in early 1954 when Frank considered making a film with Marilyn Monroe.

Ava divorced Frank in 1957, but they remained close for the rest of her life. Ironically, the end of their marriage coincided with a revival in Sinatra’s career. His arranger, Nelson Riddle, is reported to have said, ‘It was Ava who taught him how to sing a torch song.’

‘Our love was deep and true,’ she explained, ‘even though the fact that we couldn’t live with each other any more than we couldn’t live without each other sometimes made it hard to understand.’

With Grace Kelly in 'Mogambo', 1953

One Touch of Venus

In 1951, Ava was controversially cast as the ‘mulatto’, Julie LaVerne, in the epic musical, Show Boat . After training for months, Ava was disappointed to learn that her voice would be dubbed. ‘Now, I can sing,’ she commented. ‘I do not expect to be taken for Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald, or Lena Horne, but I can carry a tune well enough for the likes of Artie Shaw to feel safe offering to put me in front of his orchestra.’

Ava and Marilyn were raised during the Golden Age of Hollywood, when movies offered an escape from hard times. In later life, they would both star alongside one of the greatest stars of that era, Clark Gable. Ava appeared with him in The Hucksters (1947), Lone Star (1953), and Mogambo (1953), a remake of Gable’s 1932 hit, Red Dust.

Directed by John Ford, Mogambo was filmed in Africa, and earned Ava an Oscar nomination in a role originated by the original ‘blonde bombshell’, Jean Harlow (often compared to Marilyn Monroe.)

By the late 1950s, Marilyn and Ava had worked with some of Hollywood’s most prestigious directors. The Barefoot Contessa (1954) was inspired by the life of another screen goddess – Rita Hayworth. But Ava was Joe Mankiewicz’s first choice for the lead.

‘Getting along with Joe Mankiewicz was problematical at times,’ she remembered. ‘I respected him enormously, but though he was clearly the cerebral type, I don’t think he ever really understood me or my insecurity about my work.’

Nonetheless, Ava had a powerful ally in cameraman Jack Cardiff, who had previously photographed her in the whimsical English fantasy, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951).  (Cardiff would subsequently work his magic on Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). She gave him a signed photo of herself, writing, ‘Dear Jack, if only I could be the way you have created me.’)

Ava’s most demanding film was, perhaps, Bhowani Junction (1956). Filmed in Pakistan, it explored the turmoil of Britain’s recent withdrawal from colonial rule. Ava played an Anglo-Indian nurse, and enacted a grueling rape scene. ‘No film scene had ever affected me so deeply before,’ she admitted, ‘had left me with such a nightmare sense of terror, and no scene would ever do again.’

She credited her performance to George Cukor’s direction. ‘I liked George enormously,’ she said. ‘He was attentive to detail, he really cared, and he knew how to pull the kind of performance he wanted out of me.’

Cukor was famed as a ‘woman’s director’, and he made two films with Marilyn Monroe: a forgettable musical, Let’s Make Love (1960), and the ill-fated Something’s Got to Give.  While Cukor praised Monroe’s ‘unerring touch with comedy,’ he admitted to having ‘no real communication with her at all.’

With Richard Burton in 'The Night of the Iguana' (1964)

Kiss Hollywood Goodbye

In December 1954, Marilyn Monroe left Hollywood for a less regimented life in New York. A year later, Ava Gardner moved to Spain. ‘If I hadn’t cared for Hollywood in its heyday,’ she remarked, ‘it certainly had less attractions for me now that things seemed to be falling apart.’

With her MGM contract at an end, Ava was a free agent. She starred with Gregory Peck in the apocalyptic drama, On The Beach (1959.) She struck up a friendship with novelist Ernest Hemingway, having appeared in three adaptations of his work; The Killers, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Sun Also Rises (1957).

‘Of all the parts I’ve played, Cynthia was probably the first one I understood and felt comfortable with, the first role I truly wanted to play,’ Ava said of her character in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. ‘This girl wasn’t a tramp or a bitch or a real smart cookie. She was a good average girl with normal impulses…’

Though briefly considered for Ava’s role in The Sun Also Rises, Marilyn disliked Hemingway’s macho persona. ‘People tell me he loves shooting animals and killing fish,’ she said to W.J. Weatherby. ‘I think a writer – an artist – should set an example. He shouldn’t add to all the killing in the world. He should add to the love.’

It seems unlikely that Marilyn would have shared Ava’s fascination with bullfighting (and bullfighters.) Her deep sensitivity to nature inspired husband Arthur Miller to write The Misfits. Directed by John Huston, it would be the last film she completed.

Encouraged by Miller’s friend, Norman Rosten, Marilyn began writing poems and fragments of prose. She also got to know the poet Carl Sandburg, whose biography of Abraham Lincoln she had long admired.

While living in Spain, Ava befriended Robert Graves (author of The White Goddess.) He wrote several poems in her honour, which delighted her more than any Hollywood statuette.

After her marriage to Miller ended, Marilyn had an on-off romance with Ava’s ex-husband, Frank Sinatra. Her final years were dogged by severe depression and addiction to sleeping pills. She died of an overdose in 1962, aged just 36.

Two years later, Ava starred in the first of three films made with John Huston, The Night of the Iguana. In 1966, she played Sarah, wife of Abraham, in The Bible: In the Beginning. She was briefly involved with her co-star, George C. Scott, and later claimed that he beat her up.

By 1968, Ava had moved to London. Her later roles included a cameo as actress Lily Langtry in Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), and a disaster movie, Earthquake (1973.) She continued working in television until 1986.

On January 25, 1990, Ava Gardner died of pneumonia. She was 67, and had been suffering from emphysema and an auto-immune disease (possibly Lupus.) Her body was flown from England to North Carolina, where she was buried next to her brothers and their parents. The town of Smithfield now has an Ava Gardner Museum.

Man Ray, 1950

An Eternal Muse

When a new play by Arthur Miller, After the Fall, opened on Broadway in 1964, many were outraged by its depiction of a troubled star, seemingly based on Marilyn – including the novelist, James Baldwin, who asked Ava to join him in picketing the theatre.

Ava has been portrayed as a character in several movies and television series – notably by Marcia Gay Harden in TV’s Sinatra (1992), and Kate Beckinsale in Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes bio-pic, The Aviator (2004).

At first glance, Ava seemed more self-assured than Marilyn ever was. Unlike Marilyn, she had enjoyed a stable, loving upbringing. But she too had known poverty, and suffered from nagging self-doubt. Both were lauded for their beauty, but their talents were undervalued. Each tried to escape – Marilyn through drugs, and Ava with alcohol.

As cinematic icons, they are light and dark – different sides of the same spectrum.

It isn’t clear if Ava and Marilyn ever met, or what they thought of each other. However, the author Joyce Carol Oates imagined a meeting between the two screen sirens in her 2000 novel, Blonde. Their opposing qualities of innocence and cynicism are amplified in the febrile atmosphere of Oates’ fiction.

In a chapter entitled ‘Rat Beauty’ (contrasting Ava with MM, whose childhood nickname was ‘Mouse’), Oates creates a monologue in Gardner’s voice:

“Monroe wanted to be an artist. She was one of the few I’d ever met who took all that crap seriously. That’s what killed her, not the other. She wanted to be acknowledged as a great actress and yet she wanted to be like a child and obviously you can’t have both.

You have to choose which you want the most.

Me, I chose neither.”

Ava Gardner 1922-1990

Bibliography

My Story by Marilyn Monroe, 1954.

Conversations With Marilyn by W.J. Weatherby, 1976.

Ava – My Story by Ava Gardner, 1990.

Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words by George Barris, 1996.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, 2000.

Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing by Lee Server, 2006.

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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