I was surprised – and flattered – to find my 2004 novella, Wicked Baby, listed in the bibliography to this book which accompanied the 2010 exhibition at London’s Mayor Gallery, Christine Keeler: My Life in Pictures.

The catalogue includes photographs of Keeler – the iconic model at the centre of 1963′s Profumo Affair – and some of the art she has inspired, edited by James Birch, with essays by Barry Miles and Jean-Jacques Lebel.

Dear Readers,

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

2011 has been a year of change for me. I’ve been writing lots of non-fiction (as you’ve probably noticed), and have also made progress on my third novel.

2012 promises to be eventful – I’ll be turning 40 in June. Watch this space…

Tara Hanks

PS Here’s a few of my favourite books, movies and music released this year. The future may be uncertain, but great art never dies.  

Best of 2011 

Fiction

Breathtaking thriller, with neo-gothic style, in-depth characterisation and cutting-edge narrative.

Astonishing, visionary – a road trip across America in 1968 with an enigmatic heroine, and many unforgettable characters.

Riveting journey into the mind of a holy warrior, and one of the most famous women who ever lived – Joan of Arc.

Non-Fiction

Original and insightful look at the private world of Marilyn Monroe.

Roxy Freeman’s enchanting memoir of a nomadic childhood.

Music

Lush, orchestral pop from Sweden’s Lykke Li.

Dreamy ballad from Lizzie Grant aka Lana Del Rey.

Movies

A radical retelling of Wuthering Heights is long overdue, and Andrea Arnold’s work here is surely worthy of Emily Brontё’s uncompromising vision.

And goodbye to…

Amy Winehouse 1983-2011

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.

Marilyn Monroe’s final two years, as a patient of the psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson – who saw her daily in the month before she died – have long been the subject of intense speculation. One of Greenson’s students, Lucy Freeman, published a study of their relationship, Why Norma Jean Killed Marilyn Monroe, while Luciano Mecacci’s Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis begins with an essay on the subject.

Unfortunately, most commentators seem too mesmerised by Marilyn’s legend to assess her psyche fairly. Perhaps the most accurate analysis of the Greenson-Monroe dynamic can be found in Lisa Appignanesi’s 2008 book, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors.

Michel Schneider’s novel about Monroe and her analyst – Marilyn’s Last Sessions – comes recommended by Appignanesi herself, and also Andrew O’Hagan, author of 2010’s light, witty The Life and Thoughts of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe. 

Schneider’s previous work ranges from academic studies of the psychoanalytic process to a novel exploring Marcel Proust’s relationship with his mother. Marilyn’s Last Sessions was first published in France in 2006, and was awarded the Prix Interallié. It has now been translated by Will Hobson, and is published by Canongate.

Marilyn’s Last Sessions was inspired by alleged tapes made by Monroe for Greenson. The Los Angeles detective, John Miner, claimed that Greenson played the tapes for him while he was investigating her death in 1962. The tapes have never been found, and Greenson’s archive at UCLA is not available to the public.

However, Miner transcribed the tapes – from memory – decades later, and excerpts appear in Matthew Smith’s 2003 book, Victim: The Secret Tapes of Marilyn Monroe. A complete transcript, as dictated by Miner, was published in the Los Angeles Times in 2005.

In Miner’s transcript, the actress talks freely about orgasms, enemas, and flings with other celebrities. Among some dedicated fans, the accuracy of the transcript is in considerable doubt. The criticisms of Miner are outlined in ‘Songs Marilyn Never Sang’, an article by Melinda Mason.

Nonetheless, these disputed transcripts feature in Marilyn’s Last Sessions. In addition to the gossipy subject matter, Monroe’s tone and syntax, in these transcripts, bear little resemblance to quotes from published interviews, or even her private journal entries collected in last year’s Fragments.

While Schneider’s reliance on the Miner transcripts may be questionable, he also uses a wide range of less controversial sources – including the diary of photographer Andre de Dienes, and the memoirs of journalist W.J. Weatherby.

Unfortunately, Schneider’s tendency to copy, or rewrite, long passages from other books is somewhat exasperating (especially if you’ve read them before, as many Monroe fans will have done.) A long letter from Marilyn to Greenson, first published in Donald Spoto’s Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (1992), is included here – all four pages of it. As I read, I often wished Schneider had been bolder in pursuing his imaginative vision. But perhaps the spurious nature of the Miner transcripts made him more inhibited elsewhere.

More interestingly, Schneider has also researched the lesser-known (outside analytic circles) life and work of Dr Greenson. His decision to allow Marilyn access to his home and family – effectively ‘adopting’ a woman who, in her mid-thirties, was emotionally adrift – was unorthodox, and finally disastrous.

Greenson began writing his 1967 book, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, while treating Monroe. At the time of her death, Marilyn was reading Captain Newman, M.D., Leo Rosten’s novel based on Greenson’s wartime experiences. It was filmed with Gregory Peck in 1963. One of Greenson’s last essays, ‘The Screen of Transference: Roles and True Identity’ (1976), featured a thinly-veiled portrait of Monroe, whom he described as an archetypal ‘screen character patient’.

‘Transference’, originally a Freudian term, can be defined as the re-enactment of repressed childhood emotions, directed towards another person. Greenson, it would seem, tried to become the ‘good father’ Marilyn never had. Early on in her treatment, she was said to have told friends that Greenson was her ‘saviour’.

By 1962, the relationship had become more complex. Greenson persuaded Marilyn to buy a home nearby, and her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, was suggested by him. It seems likely that Greenson was experiencing ‘counter-transference’, the redirection of a therapist’s feelings towards a patient. Some of Monroe’s friends felt that he was trying to control her mind.

Schneider characterises Monroe’s relationship with Greenson as ‘a loveless love’. Though non-sexual, it was the last significant relationship she would have. In a fictional encounter, Joe Mankiewicz (who directed Marilyn in one of her first films, All About Eve), says, ‘You play with women, Dr Greenson, the way other people play backgammon or poker, and yet you think of yourself as a chess player.’

Schneider also writes about Marilyn’s brief friendship with Truman Capote, who based the character of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on her. ‘Marilyn was always late,’ Schneider writes in Capote’s style, ‘like everyone who has appeared at the wrong moment in their parents’ lives, all the unexpected souls.’

‘How many hours have I spent in waiting rooms, front offices and foyers since starting out?’ the infamously tardy Marilyn wonders, while Greenson says of actors, ‘They become children whose time is spent waiting – between movies, between scenes, between takes.’

Greenson, a frustrated actor, ‘wanted his case histories to be like movies he’d directed’, according to his colleague, Dr Milton Wexler (who treated Marilyn when Greenson was away.) ‘He didn’t practice the talking cure,’ Wexler says of Greenson. ‘His was a cure by drama, tragedy. He was a violent soul…’

Though Greenson acknowledges that ‘all their sessions had been like acts in a play,’ he is unsure of its meaning. ‘The curtain had fallen, and the enigma of (MM’s) self was intact.’ He realises that she ‘revealed herself only to mask herself again.’ Greenson, in the novel, is haunted by the memory of Marilyn and devastated by his failure to rescue her.

Schneider also explores the popularity of psychoanalysis within the narcissistic atmosphere of Hollywood. ‘It’s not analysis that gets everywhere,’ Greenson believes, ‘it’s the movies that take over everything.’ It was ‘a marriage of intellect and artifice’ that ‘came to an end when Hollywood itself did.’ Monroe’s decline coincided with the demise of the studio system which she had grown to distrust.

As if to prove this point, Schneider’s novel inspired a documentary in 2008. Marilyn: The Last Sessions is even murkier than its source, with Schneider’s fiction presented as fact, and featuring pornographic footage of Arline Hunter, a glamour model who gained fleeting fame for her resemblance to Monroe.

Perhaps the subject of psychoanalysis is too close to Schneider’s heart. He acknowledges its contradictions but offers no critique. While key psychoanalytic figures like Wexler, and Anna Freud, are covered, they were peripheral figures in the Monroe story. Her physician, Dr Hyman Engelberg, and lawyer Milton Rudin – both affiliated to Greenson – are barely mentioned, and neither is Eunice Murray, who was with Marilyn on the night she died.

Schneider writes well about the two backdrops to Marilyn’s later life, New York (‘city of words’) and her native Los Angeles, a ‘city of images’. Monroe once compared herself to ‘a superstructure with no foundation’. While New York offers her a sense of belonging, L.A. – the city of her birth – only reminds her of the void within, and she recedes into its dazzling light.

While some of Schneider’s inventions seem contrived – an encounter between Marilyn and Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, for example – others are more successful. For example, Schneider uses Marilyn’s conversation with W.J. Weatherby about Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night – a classic novel about marriage, and mental illness – to explore the hypothetical possibility of her starring in its screen adaptation by Henry Weinstein, a friend of Greenson, who produced her last, incomplete movie, Something’s Got to Give.

Poignantly, Schneider attributes the mysterious gift of a stuffed tiger – which, rumour has it, was sent to Monroe on the day she died – to Greenson himself. This is not true – photographs from 1961 show that it was a toy for her pet dog – but Schneider’s exploration of this innocuous subject of many a conspiracy theory makes a dramatic impact.

Unfortunately, Marilyn’s Last Sessions is more impressive as a novel of ideas than one of action or character. Schneider’s dialogue is, at times, laughably stilted, and his portraits of Monroe and Greenson seem distant and vague. An encounter with photographer George Barris has Marilyn agreeing to let him a write a book about her within seconds of their meeting. They did, in fact, make plans – but only after several days. And director John Huston, whose wish to cast Marilyn as a patient in his bio-pic of Freud was thwarted by Greenson – is written off as a Hollywood philistine.

One scene, which shows a distraught Marilyn stroking the wallpaper in Greenson’s office, and feeling comforted, brings a rare flash of concrete detail to the story. Wexler draws the intriguing conclusion that it was not her absent father that Monroe sought, but her lost, sick mother. Though Greenson refuses to accept it, perhaps he did replace Gladys Baker – both as a nurturing presence, and a neurotic influence in Marilyn’s life.

Sarah Churchwell (author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) argues in ‘Death and the Maiden’, a review for the New Statesman, that Schneider’s novel ultimately fails because he is asking the wrong questions.  ‘The novel accepts the false premise of almost every book about Marilyn by asking whether she committed suicide or was murdered,’ Churchwell observes. ‘The endless, pointless debate about Marilyn’s death depends on an excluded middle that some of us like to call “accident”.’

While Schneider does offer some valuable insight into Monroe’s fatal liaison with Greenson, he – perhaps unwittingly – falls into the trap that so many authors do, of patronising, and thereby exploiting Marilyn. ‘The great battle of Marilyn’s life wasn’t her struggle against drugs, alcohol, depression or loneliness,’ Churchwell remarks, ‘all of which are the usual suspects that writers keep lining up to identify. It was her quest for respect, which we still refuse to grant her.’

Related Posts 

Marilyn: The Last Sessions

Did Hollywood Kill Marilyn Monroe?

Maf the Dog, and Marilyn

Further Reading

Marilyn Monroe on the Couch

Michel Schneider’s Top 10 Books About Marilyn Monroe

Watch Marilyn: The Last Sessions on Youtube

‘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

My profile of the great Victorian novelist, Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot, who was born on this day in 1819, is published at For Books’ Sake

My tribute to Shelagh Delaney, ‘the first working-class woman playwright’, who died recently, is published today at For Books’ Sake

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

Last November, Morris Engleberg – former lawyer and executor of Joe DiMaggio’s estate – objected to a new biography of the baseball legend, or more precisely, its cover – a photo of DiMaggio with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, taken by John Vachon in 1953.

‘It’s in poor taste with anybody who knows anything about Joe DiMaggio,’ Engleberg told the Yale Daily News. ‘It’s a cheap shot to sell books. I have no objection to what they use inside the book, but a cover of Joe and Marilyn is a cheap shot,’ Engelberg added. ‘There’s no class. It’s a lack of respect and just shows that the author has no knowledge of the real Joe DiMaggio.’

Professor Daniel J. Kevles – who specialises in intellectual property law – conceded, ‘I can understand [his] point because inside the book, the photo is simply Joe and Marilyn as just another feature or element in Joe’s life. One among many. To put it on the cover is to imply that Joe’s life was defined by his marriage to Marilyn.’

However, that photo only heightened interest in Jerome Charyn’s Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, published in early 2011. It is part of Yale’s ‘Icons of America’ series, which includes works by film critic Molly Haskell on Gone With the Wind, and Gore Vidal’s take on the founding fathers, Inventing a Nation.

Jerome Charyn has published over fifty books in a variety of genres. His most recent works include Marilyn: The Last Goddess, an introduction to Monroe’s life and movies, published in 2008.

The Player

‘How can I ever explain the old Yankee Stadium to anyone who hasn’t grown up in the Bronx?’ Charyn asks. By recalling his youth as a baseball fan in DiMaggio’s heyday, he brings a personal touch to The Long Vigil.

Born in 1914, Joseph Paul DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children born into an Italian immigrant family. His father was a fisherman at San Francisco Bay, and Joe ‘taught himself to bat with a broken oar’.

DiMaggio was one of those rare sportsmen who inspired devotion from his fans. Unlike Babe Ruth, who preceded him, Joe was deeply reserved. Young fans like Jerome, who waited for DiMaggio outside the stadium, were seldom granted so much as a wave.

Joe’s quiet dignity captured the mood of 1930s America, near the end of the Great Depression and on the brink of war. Married with a baby son, he was reluctant to enlist. His discomfort in the military was, in many ways, a dry run for the humiliating aimlessness of retirement.

Ernest Hemingway paid tribute to Joe in his 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea. ‘But I must have the confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel,’ says the fisherman. Referring to DiMaggio’s struggle with injury, Charyn crowns him ‘our suffering hero.’

Like Marilyn, Joe seemed to epitomize the American Dream: a poor boy who had achieved greatness through natural talent. As with Marilyn, Joe’s humble origins were both praised and mocked.

He was routinely described as a ‘Dago’ and a ‘Wop’. His own parents were among the millions of immigrants classified as ‘enemy aliens’ by the government after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour.

However, Joe’s experience of prejudice was slight in comparison to the many black baseball players who were excluded from the mainstream.

Though Jackie Robinson is renowned as the first black player to join the Major League (in 1947), Joshua Gibson dominated the Negro Leagues from the late 1930s. As Charyn relates, Gibson’s career ended all too soon. After suffering a brain tumour in 1943, he died, aged 35, four years later.

In his final months, Gibson was confined to a wheelchair and could often be heard muttering to himself, ‘Hey, Joe DiMaggio, it’s me, you know me. Why don’t you answer me?’

Even if he had been there to listen, it’s unlikely that the uncommunicative DiMaggio could have reassured Gibson. Charyn describes Joe as ‘a narrow man’, for whom life without baseball was unthinkable.

DiMaggio spent much of his free time as a ‘magnificent hermit’ at Toots Shor’s Restaurant on 51^st St West.

The Demon Lover

Marilyn met Joe in early 1952, on a ‘blind date’ arranged by a mutual friend in Los Angeles. DiMaggio, newly retired, was attempting a second career as a television pundit. Monroe – who, at 25, was twelve years his junior – was on the brink of stardom.

Unimpressed by sportsmen, Marilyn had expected DiMaggio to be ‘flashy’. She was surprised to find him rather introspective, like herself. Though not a conventionally handsome man, Joe was smartly dressed and, Marilyn noted, physically imposing.

His attraction to Monroe was more than sexual. ‘Everyone talks about how beautiful Marilyn Monroe was – and she was,’ Joe told a friend, years later. ‘But people don’t remember my first wife, Dorothy Arnold. She was just as beautiful. I used to run around a lot when I was married to her.’

Hollywood pounced on the budding romance, but DiMaggio was reticent from the start. ‘America’s mythic couple’, as Charyn terms them, were rarely seen in public. They married in March 1954, while Marilyn was on suspension from her studio.

If Joe ever hoped to settle down, he was soon disappointed. Marilyn accompanied him on a visit to Japan, where they were mobbed. She then accepted an invitation to entertain U.S. troops in Korea, and left her hapless husband behind.

Monroe revelled in the crowd’s adulation. ‘You never heard such cheering!’ she told Joe. ‘Yes I have,’ he replied. ‘And they can boo as loud as they cheer.’

While some biographers see this exchange as proof of Monroe’s immaturity, Charyn interprets it differently. ‘Marilyn’s words are a rueful reminder of what the Jolter had lost,’ he reflects. ‘But they’re also Marilyn’s subtle war cry, her coming-of-age in regard to Joe.’

The marriage lasted just nine months, but Joe couldn’t let her go. He dated a string of beauty queens, including one winner of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest. But none of these relationships ran the distance.

In 1961, Joe rescued Marilyn from a psychiatric hospital. They took a break together in Florida, and rumours of a reunion were rife until Monroe died in 1962.

DiMaggio claimed Marilyn’s body and organized her funeral. For twenty years, he sent a dozen red roses to her grave three times weekly. He also bore grudges against those whom he felt he had hurt her – Frank Sinatra, Robert Kennedy.

Charyn subscribes to the theory that Marilyn and Joe were due to remarry, though the evidence is far from conclusive. However, he does not believe Morris Engleberg’s claim that DiMaggio’s dying words were ‘Now I’ll get to see Marilyn’.

‘He was the only man worthy of her,’ Charyn states. Their marriage, troubled from the outset, had collapsed amid neglect on Marilyn’s part, and perhaps violence on Joe’s. Nonetheless, Joe never betrayed his wife: after her death, he turned down countless offers to speak about their relationship.

Personal papers, auctioned after Joe’s death, show that he never stopped missing Marilyn, and had tried his best to change – even seeing a psychiatrist. ‘It was a twentieth-century romance, foolish and full of heartbreak,’ Charyn concludes. ‘We remember the way he mourned her while he unraveled.’

Charyn is perceptive about Monroe’s talent, but his characterization of her is closely modeled on that of fellow New York scribes, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates. He compares Marilyn to the ‘femme fatale’, Rose Loomis, a role she played in the 1953 thriller, Niagara.

An Outfielder’s Sky

‘It’s never the need of money that people do things for,’ DiMaggio told Morris Engleberg. ‘It’s the want of money.’ A shrewd businessman, Joe became the face of Mr. Coffee and a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank.

However, some commentators felt that Joe’s financial pursuits tarnished his sporting legacy. Engleberg negotiated a bat-signing deal in 1993 that, in Charyn’s words, ‘robbed DiMaggio of that relentless grace he had on the field.’

But Joe’s obsession with money wasn’t a simple case of greed. Charyn suggests that DiMaggio’s enterprises may have helped to mask his essential loneliness and lack of purpose. Born into poverty, he was afraid of returning.

Not all of Joe’s projects were profit-based. He raised $4,000,000 for the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, which opened in 1992 in his new hometown of Hollywood, Florida.

Sadly, DiMaggio’s relationship with his son, Joe Jr, foundered. Marilyn had been especially close to him as a boy, and they had spoken on the night of her death. ‘She might have provided the glue to reconcile father and son,’ Charyn speculates. ‘Without her Joe was a lone wolf in the wasteland of wherever he happened to be.’

In 2001 – two years after Joe DiMaggio’s death, aged 85 – Richard Ben Cramer published The Hero’s Life, a highly critical biography that chipped away at the reputation of ‘baseball’s first saint’. Charyn declares his intent to restore Joe’s image, with some success – though, as there is little source material here that can’t be found elsewhere, it is largely a matter of interpretation. A wholly revisionist study of DiMaggio has yet to appear.

The ‘long vigil’ of the title refers to the intense focus which Joe gave to his passions: first baseball, then Marilyn. But it also reflects his place in American lore. ‘There was a lament for DiMaggio long before he died,’ Charyn observes, recalling Simon and Garfunkel’s lyric from ‘Mrs Robinson’:

‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson,
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away…’

Keeler is a touring play about 1963’s Profumo Affair, when a young model and showgirl, Christine Keeler, was revealed to have been involved with both Britain’s Minister for War, John Profumo, and a Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov.

The scandal ultimately led to Profumo’s resignation, and contributed to the collapse of Macmillan’s government in 1964. It also triggered a series of trials which saw Keeler convicted of perjury and her mentor, Dr Stephen Ward, commit suicide.

Today, the Profumo Affair is considered a pivotal moment in modern English politics, when the ‘age of deference’ was supplanted by a more candid, cynical outlook.

In a voiceover introducing the play, Christine (Alice Coulthard) describes herself as ‘that naked bird on a chair’, recalling the iconic photo taken by Lewis Morley at the height of the outcry.

Written by Gill Adams, Keeler is based on The Truth at Last, Christine’s autobiography, published in 2001. The play is produced and directed by Paul Nicholas, who also stars as Ward. It was first staged in 2007 at the Gatehouse in Highgate, North London. At around the same time, a short-lived musical about the scandal opened in Greenwich.

After a two-year stint as ‘fun-time girl’ Maisie Wylde on the ITV soap, Emmerdale, Coulthard has reprised her role as Keeler.  She exudes a vivacious, naïve charm. However, Adams’ script largely avoids the more contentious aspects of the story, giving only a superficial view of Christine. Though her experiences are sometimes harrowing, their impact is not always clear.

Paul Nicholas – best-known for his role in the 1980s sitcom, Just Good Friends – is quite convincing as Ward, a middle-aged lothario and social climber. Ward’s unconsummated relationship with Keeler is the most interesting part of the story. But the play focuses more on his Svengali-like power over Christine than the wider political stakes.

The supporting characters are presented as stereotypes – the randy politician, Soviet spy and violent drug dealer, all lovers of Keeler – while Justine Michelle Cain (The Inbetweeners) plays Christine’s brassy, blonde friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, comedically.

The set includes a screen behind which vintage newsreels are played, and the more lurid scenes enacted, while the programme includes a timeline relating the Profumo Affair to other events, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the launch of Private Eye.

Showgirls plucked from Murray’s Cabaret Club, where Christine first met Stephen, provide a kind of mute chorus, and their burlesque routines are both titillating and eerie. There are sex scenes and even a little nudity, but the effect is tawdry rather than erotic (which is entirely appropriate.)

Many of the audience at the matinee I attended were old enough to remember the affair, enjoying its kitschy nostalgia while chuckling ruefully at its quaint moral hypocrisy. For anyone who has seen the 1989 film, Scandal, though, it’s hard not to judge Keeler as its shadow, another retelling with a few minor tweaks.

Related posts: Crimes and Immoralities 

Read my own take on the Profumo Affair, Wicked Baby