Lauren Bacall, who acted with Monroe in 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire, remembered her fondly, saying Marilyn was “very sweet—no meanness at all,” but that her self-involvement was total. Marilyn’s makeup man (who had done his job even for her funeral) used to say that poor Marilyn was simply terrified of going on the set, filled with nervousness caused by low self-esteem. Her lateness was chronic. Playing scenes with Marilyn was unnerving; Monroe never looked into her partner’s eyes but always at the center of their forehead. This kept her eyes more open for the camera. Bacall stressed that none of this was because of any meanness on Monroe’s part. It was at this time that Marilyn was madly in love with Joe DiMaggio and used to say that all she really wanted was to fly with Joe to San Francisco and have spaghetti with him. However, Bacall said, Marilyn definitely “knew what to do when the cameras started.”
Seven years after her death, when I talked to George Cukor, who had directed her in Let’s Make Love (1960) and in the unfinished last film, Something’s Gotta Give, he concurred with Hawks. “Marilyn Monroe had no confidence in herself,” he said. “She found it very difficult to concentrate, and she really didn’t think she was as good as she was. She’d worry about all kinds of things, and she would do the very difficult things very well. Sometimes she was very distracted and couldn’t sustain it, and you had to do it in bits and pieces; sometimes she was in such a state of nerves that you’d have to shoot individual lines. But such was her magic that you’d put them all together and they seemed as though she spoke them all at one time. She was a real movie personality—a real movie queen. She had the way all these great picture personalities have. Their brains are uncensored. They could imagine all kinds of things and there was really nothing immoral about it. Quite different—and, I thought, much more subtle than it is now.”
Ironically, the picture that made Monroe a sex symbol, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was intended by Hawks as “a complete caricature, a travesty on sex—it didn’t have normal sex.” In a 1967 interview I did with Hawks for the BBC, he said, “Their sex was a sort of a symbol, an obvious thing, which all you can do is really make fun of and enjoy, you know, and watch them perform. You don’t try to make reality. Monroe never was any good playing the reality. She always played in a sort of a fairy tale. And when she did that she was great—something happened. But as far as doing a real story with her, I don’t believe that she’s ever done a good picture that was a real story. They were all more or less of a fairy tale quality. Kind of a musical-comedy sort of a thing.”
Marilyn Monroe as Cherie, the saloon chanteuse/good-time girl in Joshua Logan’s production of the beautifully written William Inge stage comedy-drama Bus Stop (1956), one of Marilyn’s more complex roles and among her best performances. She would die under mysterious circumstances only six years after the picture’s release.
Hawks had told me that when he knew her on those early pictures, Marilyn wasn’t “very sexy in real life.” He said, “Monroe couldn’t get anybody to take her out—nobody. A funny little agent about five-feet-two used to cart her around. But they both [Monroe and monogamous housewife Russell] were sex symbols to the motion picture public …” Hawks also said that while Russell peaked in one or two takes, Marilyn continued to improve through repetition: “With Monroe, the more you kept going, the better she got.”
All of Hawks’ work with Marilyn was, of course, a couple of years before she fell in thrall to Strasberg and the Actors Studio. Miller explained it to me this way: “She only knew one way to do a role—for real. She was trying, for example, at the Actors Studio, to formularize her approach: She didn’t want to squander her energies. I’m not convinced it helped her at all. But that was her aim—to make it even more real. I was against the whole methodology. But that’s not to say that she wouldn’t have thought it helped her. And I think she probably did think so.”
Miller commented at one point that there is one “universal truth” on the subject of Monroe, demonstrated by most books or articles written by people who never knew her, and by a number who did: “Whatever is said about her is probably not true. They use it for their own purposes.”
In his autobiography, Miller speaks of the deterioration of their relationship, fueled by Monroe’s paranoia, her increasing dependence on drugs, and therefore her irrationality at times, her exaggerated mistrust of everyone. Miller wrote for her the original screenplay of what would, as it turned out, be her final completed picture, The Misfits (1961), quite purposely a non—“fairy tale” piece. During the four years the film took to write, produce and finish, their marriage fell apart. I said to Arthur that it seemed as though he and Monroe had, concerning that project, a terrible misunderstanding which pulled them away from one another. He responded: “Well, we were out of range of each other before the shooting started.” I asked if he thought she had understood what was going on in his mind—a role that could define her most sensitive and poetic nature—or if she had at one point, and then lost that understanding. He answered, “I think she understood it, but she was rejecting the whole thing anyway.” Why? I asked. “I wish I knew,” Arthur said. “This occurred at the far end of a long life that she had—it’s a short life, but for her long. If it hadn’t been The Misfits, it’d have been something else. She was already in bad trouble.”
The fact is that Marilyn was in bad trouble from the day she was born as Norma Jean Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in the city of angels and movies, a poor bastard angel child who rose to be queen of a town and a way of life that nevertheless held her in contempt. That she died a martyr to pictures at the same time as the original studio star system—through which she had risen—finally collapsed and went also to its death seems too obviously symbolic not to note. Indeed, the coincidence of the two passing together is why I chose to end this long book about movie stars with Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller toward the end of their marriage, while preparing The Misfits.
What I saw so briefly in my glimpse of Marilyn at the very peak of her stardom (and the start of my career)—that fervent, still remarkably naive look of all-consuming passion for learning about her craft and art—haunts me still. She is the most touching, strangely innocent—despite all the emphasis on sex—sacrifice to the twentieth-century art of cinematic mythology, with real people as gods and goddesses. While Lillian Gish had been film’s first hearth goddess, Marilyn was the last love goddess of the screen, the final Venus or Aphrodite. The minute she was gone, we started to miss her and that sense of loss has grown, never to be replaced. In death, of course, she triumphed at last, her spirit being imperishable, and keenly to be felt in the images she left behind to mark her brief visit among us.
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, June 1, 1926, Los Angeles, CA; died August 5, 1962, Los Angeles, CA.
Selected features (with director):
1950: The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston); All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
1951: As Young as You Feel (Harmon Jones)
1952: Clash by Night (Fritz Lang); Monkey Business (Howard Hawks); Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker); We’re Not Married (Edmund Goulding)
1953: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks); How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco); Niagara (Henry Hathaway)
1954: River of No Return (Otto Preminger); There’s No Business Like Show Business (Walter Long)
1955: The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder)
1956: Bus Stop (Joshua Logan)
1957: The Prince and the Showgirl (Laurence Olivier)
1959: Some Like It Hot (Wilder)
1960: Let’s Make Love (George Cukor)
1961: The Misfits (Huston)
Acknowledgments
My primary thanks go to all the actors and actresses in this book, for their times with me, and all their invaluable achievements. For their encouragement, guidance, and suggestions throughout the five years I worked on it: Victoria Wilson (my brilliant editor at Knopf), Sherry Arden (my deeply insightful literary agent), Iris Chester (my tr
usty longtime assistant, who typed every single handwritten page many times over, made numerous very useful suggestions and proofread all galleys twice); Meghan McElheny (my invaluable New York assistant, who went beyond the call of duty organizing photos and captions); and Louise Stratten (who listened and reacted most helpfully to numerous chapters when I read them first to her). For all their time and effort with the illustrations: at Photofest, Ron Mandelbaum and Tom Toth; at The Kobal Collection, Lauretta Dives. For diligent and most helpful copyediting and proofreading, John Morrone, Andy Goldwasser and Dann Baker, and for great work in the same area, Anne Fratto. For their spoken and unspoken cheering section: Anna Bogdanovich (my dear sister); Antonia Bogdanovich, Sashy Bogdanovich (my loving daughters); Cybill Shepherd, Henry Jaglom, Zack Norman, Jeff Freilich and William Peiffer (my friends).
Almost all the previously existing material herein has been heavily revised or greatly amended and expanded. Parts—some lengthy, some very short—of the Introduction and the chapters on Bogart, Cagney, Cassavetes, Clift, Dietrich, Grant, Hepburn, Karloff, Lemmon, Lewis, Martin, Mineo, Phoenix, Sinatra, Stewart and Wayne first appeared in different form—between 1962 and 2001—either in Esquire, New York, Premiere, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times or the New York Observer. The original Esquire portions also were printed in my collection, Pieces of Time (Arbor House, NY, 1973 and 1985 editions; published under the title Picture Shows in England, Allen & Unwin, London, 1974). In a shorter form, the Gish chapter was first published as a limited edition chapbook titled A Moment with Miss Gish (Santa Teresa Press, Santa Barbara, CA, 1995).
A small part of the Adler chapter appeared, in different form, in Who the Devil Made It (Knopf, NY, 1997; Ballantine, NY, 1998), as did a few small sections of the Cassavetes and Sinatra chapters in Movie of the Week (Ballantine, NY, 1999).
Portions of the Q&A sections in the Lewis chapter, as well as some of Arthur Miller’s comments in the Monroe chapter, were first published in German translation, as entire issues of the Sunday magazine supplement for Germany’s daily newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung (2000–02); no part of these conversations have appeared before in English. I am especially grateful to Mr. Miller for his time and candor.
My sincere thanks go to the editors and publishers of all these periodicals and books for their warm interest, patronage, advice and help.
P.B.
New York, NY
2004
Illustrations
Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) (Photofest)
Edward Everett Horton, Katharine Hepburn and Jean Dixon in Holiday (1938) (Photofest)
Signe Hasso and others in Heaven Can Wait (1943) (Photofest)
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake as hoboes in Sullivan’s Travels (1941) (Photofest)
Lillian Gish in Orphans of the Storm (1922) (Photofest)
Gish during the climactic sequence of Way Down East (1920) (Photofest)
Gish with John Gilbert in La Bohème (1926) (Photofest)
Humphrey Bogart as “Mad Dog” Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) (Photofest)
Bogart with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1943) (Photofest)
Bogart and Lauren Bacall at the conclusion of Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944) (Photofest)
Bogart as detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) (Photofest)
Bogart with Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) (Photofest)
Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946) (Photofest)
Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront (1954) (Photofest)
Brando with Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (Photofest)
Brando as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar (1953) (The Kobal Collection)
Brando and Karl Malden in One-Eyed Jacks (1961) (Photofest)
Stella Adler with Luther Adler and Clifford Odets (Corbis)
Adler as the aging mother in the Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! (Photofest)
Adler with John Payne in Love on Toast (1938) (Photofest)
Montgomery Clift as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity (1953) (Photofest)
Clift and John Wayne in the finale of Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) (The Kobal Collection)
Clift with Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) (Photofest)
Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) (Photofest)
Grant with Irene Dunne and Asta in The Awful Truth (1937) (Photofest)
Grant with Rita Hayworth in Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939) (Photofest)
Grant with Marilyn Monroe in Monkey Business (1952) (Photofest)
Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946) (Photofest)
Grant and Deborah Kerr in Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957) (Photofest)
Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday in It Should Happen to You (1954) Photofest)
Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce (1963) (Photofest)
Lemmon with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot (1959) (Photofest)
Lemmon in Blake Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses (1962) (Photofest)
Jerry Lewis as a bartender in Hardly Working (1981) (Photofest)
Lewis with Frank Tashlin on The Disorderly Orderly (1964) (Photofest)
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in The Caddy (1953) (Photofest)
Lewis setting up a shot for The Ladies’ Man (1961) (Jerry Lewis Collection)
Lewis as The Bellboy (1960) (Photofest)
Lewis and Stella Stevens in The Nutty Professor (1963) (Photofest)
Dean Martin in the opening sequence of Artists and Models (1955) The Kobal Collection)
Martin in Some Came Running (1958) (Photofest)
Martin and John Wayne in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) (Photofest)
Martin and Lewis with Anita Ekberg and Pat Crowley in Hollywood or Bust (1956) (The Kobal Collection)
Sal Mineo as Dov Landau in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) (Photofest)
Mineo with Mark Rydell, John Cassavetes and James Whitmore in Crime in the Streets (1956) (The Kobal Collection)
Mineo with James Dean and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) (Photofest)
James Stewart as Junior Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) (Photofest)
Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939) (Photofest)
Stewart and Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) (Photofest)
Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958) (Photofest)
Stewart with Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner (1940) (Photofest)
Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954) (The Kobal Collection)
John Wayne as Tom Dunston in Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) (Photofest)
Wayne and James Stewart in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) (Photofest)
Wayne, as Sheriff John T. Chance, and Angie Dickinson as Feathers in Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) (Photofest)
Wayne as Sean and Maureen O’Hara as Mary Kate in Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) (Photofest)
Wayne with giraffe and cast on location for Hawks’ Hatari! (1962) (Photofest)
Wayne in Ford’s epic The Searchers (1956) (The Kobal Collection)
Henry Fonda as Sheriff Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946) (Photofest)
Fonda in Mister Roberts (1955) (Photofest)
Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) (Photofest)
Fonda as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) (Photofest)
Fonda as the square ale-heir scientist in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) (Photofest)
Boris Karloff as The Monster during the making of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (Photofest)
Karloff in Hawks’ original Scarface (1932) (Photofest)
Karloff with Wallace Ford in John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934) (Photofest)
Karloff with P.B. rehearsing a scene for Targets (1968) (
Photofest)
John Cassavetes directing Husbands (1970) (Photofest)
Cassavetes with Lee Marvin as a member of The Dirty Dozen (1967) (Photofest)
Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk during shooting of A Woman Under the Influence (1974) (Photofest)
Rowlands and Cassavetes in Opening Night (1977) (Photofest)
Cassavetes photographs a scene with Ben Gazzara for Husbands (1970) (Photofest)
Cassavetes and Rowlands as brother and sister in Love Streams (1984) (Photofest)
Charlie Chaplin and six-year-old Jackie Coogan in The Kid (1921) (Photofest)
Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill in City Lights (1931) (The Kobal Collection)
Chaplin as the Little Tramp in The Gold Rush (1925) (Photofest)
Chaplin and his last wife, Oona O’Neill, in 1972 (Photofest)
James Cagney with Jean Harlow in The Public Enemy (1931) (Photofest)
Cagney in the prison mess hall in White Heat (1949) (Photofest)
Cagney with Gladys George in Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) (Photofest)
Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) (Photofest)
Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) (Photofest)
Dietrich with Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) (Photofest)
Dietrich with von Sternberg in the early thirties (The Kobal Collection)
Dietrich with GIs near the front lines during World War II (Photofest)
Dietrich and Cary Grant in Blonde Venus (1932) (Photofest)
Dietrich as Tanya the Gypsy in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) (Photofest)
Anthony Perkins as Jean Simmons’ boyfriend in The Actress (1953) (Photofest)
Perkins as Eugene Gant (with Jo Van Fleet) in the stage production of Look Homeward, Angel (1957) (Photofest)
Perkins as Norman Bates with Martin Balsam in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) (Photofest)
Perkins as Joseph K. in Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962) (Photofest)
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