by Lois Banner
The “fast-talking dames,” fictive cousins to the “dumb blondes,” first appeared in the early 1930s. They were the product of Production Code prohibitions joined with the popularity of 1920s urban gangsters, who trafficked in illegal liquor and partnered with tough “gun molls.” With open sexuality forbidden in films, a comic style based on sexy wordplay between hesitant men and forceful women appeared. It was called “screwball comedy.” Even sex symbol Jean Harlow moved from steamy sexuality into the “screwball” mode, in which women talked fast, displaying power in their voices and gestures. In movies like How to Marry a Millionaire and Some Like It Hot, Marilyn played a soft-voiced variation on screwball, using her double-entendre comic lines to confound the men who longed for her body.
Mae West, who dominated Hollywood in the early 1930s with her Diamond Lil character, modeled on female impersonators Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy, both represented the “fast-talking dames” and parodied them. She wore six-inch platform shoes, had a staccato voice that oozed sex, and presented a masklike face, marcelled hair that looked like a helmet, and swaying hips. Marilyn was often compared to her, although Mae never varied her character in her films and Marilyn did.13
Mae West and the fast-talking dames dominated female style in films in the 1930s, but the dumb blonde still existed, represented especially by Marie Wilson. Wilson isn’t well known today, but she was very popular from the 1930s through the 1950s. She had a childlike look, a fey personality, and a zany intellectualism, as she quoted from books and got them mixed up. She was a hit as the dumb blonde in Ken Murray’s Blackouts, a variety revue, in the 1940s. Monroe borrowed directly from Wilson. The difference lies in three features. Wilson had a typical tinny “dumb-blonde voice—high-pitched, nasal, slightly harsh.” Marilyn talked softly, with childlike inflections. Marilyn was deeply sensual and often vulnerable. Marie was much more wooden. And Marie walked normally, while Marilyn sometimes swayed her hips as she walked, as Mae West had.14
When Marilyn turned herself into an outré dumb blonde, with hip-swinging walk, puckered mouth, half-lidded eyes, childlike voice, and skin-tight dresses, she parodied herself. None of Marilyn’s imitators—neither Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, nor Sheree North—matched the subtlety of her parody of sensuous femininity. Eve Arnold called her “a practitioner of camp.” Camp is associated with gender crossing, especially with transvestite men who exaggerate femininity. But women who exaggerate femininity can also be included. Marilyn often did so. She sometimes played herself straight; as a feisty young woman in Clash by Night, for example. Yet she was a trickster who liked masquerades. After her hip-swinging cameo in Love Happy in 1949, Groucho Marx described her as combining Theda Bara, Mae West, and Little Bo-Peep. Marilyn liked that description. She told W. J. Weatherby, “I learned a few tricks from [Mae West]—that impression of laughing at, or mocking, her own sexuality.”15
Yet Marilyn often went beyond camp when she played her blonde clown. Joshua Logan, who directed her in Bus Stop (1956), compared her to Chaplin in being able to portray comedy on the edge between laughter and sadness, which was characteristic of great clowns. Indeed, by 1956 Marilyn could register happiness and sadness in her eyes almost simultaneously. She drew deep into her interior self to do so, but as Johnny Hyde had recommended, she had studied the silent film stars, especially Chaplin, who used their faces, eyes, and bodies to express emotion. John Strasberg, who knew Marilyn from her days with his family and the Actors Studio, told me that Marilyn had consciously incorporated Chaplin’s Little Tramp in the “clown” she created.16
In all of her personas—the comic Marilyn, the dramatic Marilyn, the glamorous Marilyn—Marilyn combined the “high arts” of photography, drama, and literature with the “low arts” of burlesque, striptease, and the pinup. She moved among them, dividing and uniting them to create varying looks, personas, and meanings.
Whatever persona Marilyn took on, her look wasn’t easy to achieve. She had to deal with problems in her body and face that Emmeline Snively had noted in 1946. Even cinematographer Leon Shamroy, who enthused over her screen impact when he shot her first screen test for Fox, was critical of her appearance in later interviews. “When you analyze Marilyn,” he told reporter Ezra Goodman, “she is not good looking. She has a bad posture, bad nose, and her figure is too obvious. She has a bad profile.” Early pinup photographers of her had covered up the deficiencies with lighting, positioning, and camera angles, and later photographers did the same. Indeed, Marilyn rarely allowed herself to be photographed in profile, and she kept control over all proof sheets produced of her. If she didn’t like a proof, she would cross it out.17
The perfectionist Marilyn, who lacked self-confidence and wanted to be flawless, spent hours at the makeup table striving to attain perfect beauty. The plastic surgery done on her in 1950 to remove the bump on her nose and to give her chin more definition hadn’t completely worked. Part of the bump remained, and she covered it with makeup that took a long time to get right. Whitey Snyder, her personal makeup artist, spent a long time giving her weak chin definition and trying to correct her lack of facial symmetry, which can be seen in her photos. She had freckles on her skin and hair on the sides of her face that she also concealed with makeup. She had dark hair on her arms, which she often concealed with body makeup. She put on fake fingernails to cover up the ragged edges of the ones she had bitten.18
In the 1950s women wore heavy makeup—a result of the return to femininity after World War Two and the power of advertising to create a demand for cosmetics. Marilyn led the trend. To make her lips larger and more lustrous, she applied four layers of lipstick and drew her lip line outside its natural shape. She put Vaseline on her lips to make them look wet. It was part of what Billy Travilla called her “fuck-me” look, especially when she held her lips in an O, as she sometimes did. She darkened the mole on the right side of her face near her lips to draw attention to them. She used eyebrow pencil to darken her eyebrows and make them heavy and straight, although she sometimes plucked them into a peak. She often wore false eyelashes. Whitey Snyder said that she knew makeup techniques that she kept secret even from him; one was to put white makeup on her eyelids to make her eyes seem larger. It could take as long as three hours to get her makeup right. Finding a flaw, she might take off the makeup and start over again.19
Marilyn had white skin, and she didn’t tan. In an era that extolled tans as a symbol of leisure and sports, Marilyn went against the grain by adopting a pale look and warning against the dangers of exposure to the damaging rays of the sun, which can cause wrinkles and premature aging. She used special creams and often went for facials to Elizabeth Arden’s in New York and Madame Renna’s in Beverly Hills. To intrigue her fans, in her early movie career Marilyn changed her shade of blonde for each film. “Some girls prefer to change hats,” she said. “I just prefer to change my hair color.” She was ash blonde in The Asphalt Jungle, golden blonde in All About Eve, silver blonde in As Young as You Feel, amber blonde in Let’s Make It Legal, and smoky blonde in Love Nest. Fox hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff, who created many star coiffeurs, stated that he redesigned Marilyn’s hair for each of her films. Gladys Rasmussen, her personal hairdresser, said that Marilyn asked her for a different hairstyle every time she went on the town.20
Her hair remained difficult. She had its kinkiness straightened and then she had it re-permed into soft curls. The color had to be touched up every five days or so. Her widow’s peak gave her problems, because its roots didn’t take dye well. The lock of hair that often falls casually over her eye in photos was teased into place to hide those roots. Even the tousled hairdo she sometimes wears began with a styling before she messed it up.21 After about 1949 there are no photos of her with her natural kinky brown hair. Sometimes her dark roots show, but not often. Being blonde had become central to who she was. In the spring of 1955 she changed her name legally to Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn usually looked glamorous at public events. In Fox wardrobe closets she
found satin and sequined dresses designed by studio designers like Jean Louis and Oleg Cassini. She liked dresses that were strapless or with a low V-neckline, and she wore them with dangling diamond earrings to draw attention to her bust and face. Rita Hayworth had originated this look, but Marilyn made it her own. She often stated that she didn’t wear jewelry, but she mostly meant necklaces. Even then she wore pearls, a standard fashion accessory, because they have a luster that softens the face.22 As she moved into her elegant phase in the mid-1950s, she often wore black. In 1954 she said that she loved to wear clinging black dresses and black gloves up to her shoulder. It was a look that combined elegance with eroticism. The long gloves, sometimes worn in the 1890s and adopted by striptease artists in the 1930s, could take time to get off. With typical Marilyn aplomb she told the press, “I like to be really dressed up or really undressed. I don’t bother with anything in between.”23
A trend toward voluptuousness appeared in fashionable women’s dress in 1947 with Dior’s “New Look,” which was based on the bell shape of women’s fashions in the Victorian era. With its nipped-in waist, large bust, and full skirt, it was also meant to be sexy. Eroticism in high fashion increased a year later when a pencil-thin skirt was joined to the full skirt as an acceptable alternative silhouette for women. Marilyn seized on the tight skirt. When How to Marry a Millionaire was in preproduction, Billy Travilla put all three actresses in the film—Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn—into full skirts, but Marilyn complained so loudly that he re-dressed her in tight skirts. Wellknown designers like Ceil Chapman made tight dresses with low-cut V-necklines for her.
She also wore strapless dresses—popular in the 1950s—and halter-top dresses. Often used in sundress design, the halter top suggested Southern California leisure while enlarging the look of the breasts. The Production Board, which often fixated on regulating cleavage in this era, didn’t mind halter tops. Billy Travilla used the design for Marilyn’s white dress in the 1954 Seven Year Itch photo shoot. The halter top was usually attached to a full skirt. When worn without stockings or a slip, such a style was titillating to a culture whose dress code for women included a girdle, bra, slip, and nylon stockings. Marilyn was upending those conventions. Moreover, in an era in which the well-dressed woman always wore a hat, Marilyn overturned that convention as well. At most, she wore a beret on her head or a small cap.
But she also sexualized fashions when she played showgirls who wore hourglass corsets, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes, all sexual fetishes that got by the censors, who didn’t seem aware of their meaning. They harked back to the showgirls of the 1890s, when such features were in style. Mae West had reintroduced them into films in the 1930s and Betty Grable, in particular, had continued the tradition. Marilyn wore such clothing, for example, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, There’s No Business Like Show Business, and River of No Return. Once again the Production Board didn’t seem to realize what was going on.
She chose even her shoes for maximum sexual effect. She and Shelley Winters both wore platform shoes in the early 1940s with a bow tied around their ankles: they called them their “fuck-me” shoes. After 1951, when spike heels were invented, Marilyn wore them as often as possible. She made them part of her signature style because men found spike heels sexy (shades of sadomasochism), and they made her legs look longer.24 Marilyn respected Bruno Bernard’s dictate about appearing to have long legs.
Marilyn surprised MGM designer Edith Head with her knowledge of fabrics and fit. Ana Lower, an expert seamstress, had taught her the basics of sewing, and she paid attention to the construction of the clothes in the Fox wardrobe department and consulted with the designers who dressed her for her films. Head found Marilyn a free spirit and thought she should have been dressed like a blithe bohemian, not a raunchy glamour girl. In other words, Head, who never designed for Marilyn, didn’t like Marilyn’s tight clothing. Such clothing, of course, was meant to transform Marilyn from an ordinary girl into a sex icon. Adele Balkan, Billy Travilla’s assistant, stated that Marilyn went into Travilla’s studio looking like a ragamuffin and came out looking like “the sexiest, most elegant lady.”25
As she had as early as junior high, when she created her own style in dress by wearing tight sweaters to attract boys, Marilyn continued to strive for striking effects in her dress. Some Hollywood columnists in her early career accused her of knowing nothing about fashion, but that wasn’t the case. She read the Hollywood fan magazines and fashion magazines like Vogue. In 1952 she answered the attacks on her as badly dressed. She was too buxom, she said, to wear Parisian fashions. Like most women, she didn’t have a boys’ figure, as the Parisian models had. Nor did she have the money to buy expensive clothes, because she spent her salary on acting and singing lessons. But when she bought clothes, she bought good clothes, such as an evening gown designed by Oleg Cassini in red velvet that fit snugly to the knees and then flared out. She owned a similar dress in red silk taffeta with black lace over it that she bought at I. Magnin, a premier department store in Los Angeles. She also owned a black cocktail dress by Ceil Chapman and one by Christian Dior and two tailored suits with cleavage. To give the suits flair, she wore a full-blown red or yellow rose in the cleavage.26
In the summer of 1952, she wore the red dress from Niagara in many of her publicity photos: Dorothy Jeakins had designed it. Henry Hathaway gave it to her when he learned about her small wardrobe. That fall, carrying a wad of money Joe DiMaggio had given her, she bought a number of dresses at Ceil Chapman’s New York boutique. As she entered her elegant phase in late 1954, she turned to Norman Norell and John Moore as her major designers.
Like many young Hollywood actresses, in regular life Marilyn dressed in casual clothing: T-shirts, capri pants, pedal pushers. In her younger years, when she was broke, she bought blue jeans at army surplus stores, wore them into the ocean, and then let them dry to the shape of her body, producing a tight fit. She was a leader in creating this fashion, a Southern California innovation. She shopped at Jax, the chic Beverly Hills store that specialized in beautifully tailored cotton leisure clothing designed by Jack Hansen, and whose prices weren’t outrageous. In typical Marilyn fashion, she came in to the store to see saleswomen Yuki and Korby, working-class women she identified with.27
Marilyn’s image percolated into both high and low culture, influencing styles in dress and appearance in obvious and subtle ways. The famed 1952 Revlon Fire and Ice advertisement for blood-red lipstick and fingernail polish, a new sexy trend that the company heavily marketed, drew on Marilyn’s style. The dark-haired high-fashion model Dorian Leigh, whose likeness dominates the ad, wears Marilyn’s trademark sequined dress and long dangling earrings. The written copy under the photo might as well be referring to Marilyn when it describes the fire-and-ice woman as with pouty lips, large breasts, and smoldering, sad eyes. Marilyn’s name is placed at the beginning and end of a list of “typical” fire-and-ice women. All are dark-haired: Rossana Podestà, Silvana Mangano, and Linda Darnell. Podestà and Mangano were Italian film stars being featured in American films. Only Marilyn, the ad implies, can hold her own against them.28
Elaine Rounds, beauty editor of Motion Picture, wrote in 1954 that the Marilyn lip line, extending beyond the natural line, had come into vogue for all women. Eve Arnold joked about Marilyn’s influence on high-fashion models. Her pouty mouth so influenced them, according to Arnold, that “going through fashion pictures of the fifties, you find yourself looking at so many open-mouthed models who seem gasping for breath that you wonder whether you’ve wandered into an aquarium.” “The impact of Marilyn has been felt around the world,” wrote Lydia Lane, Los Angeles Times fashion editor. “The color of her hair, her skin-tight clothes, her slightly parted lips. Almost every country has a native version of her. Last year in Turkey, I met Istanbul’s Marilyn Monroe, a singer who confessed she wasn’t too happy about the changes her manager had demanded, but she admitted it had paid off financially.”29
In real life,
Marilyn usually chose tall, dark, and powerful men as partners—all father figures. But in her films from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on, she was often cast against small, unprepossessing men, whose confidence she shores up by praising their gentleness as central to real masculinity. Such redemptive women were everywhere in 1950s films, according to Brandon French, in her classic study of women in 1950s films. In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn describes the Black Lagoon creature in the film she saw with Tom Ewell as only needing “a sense of being loved and needed and wanted” to end his destructive behavior. She tells Tom Ewell’s character that “women prefer gentle men, not great big hulks who strut around like a tiger—giving you that ‘I’m so handsome, you can’t resist me’ look.”30
Many of Monroe’s films contain a tall, dark, and handsome man, but these men are usually partnered with other female characters, not with Marilyn. In Gentlemen Dorothy snags the tall, dark, and handsome private detective who is investigating Lorelei Lee; Marilyn winds up with the effeminate millionaire. The same partnering occurs in How to Marry a Millionaire, in which Betty Grable snags the ranger with matinee idol looks, while Marilyn is left with David Wayne, looking like a schlemiel. In There’s No Business Like Show Business Mitzi Gaynor gets the handsome guy and Marilyn winds up with pallid Donald O’Connor, much shorter than she.
