I say this, and add that I am much more impressed by the literary measure of Abbott’s writings on prison than by his overall analyses of foreign affairs and revolution. One is for me the meat and bones—the other is the soup he has not had. Yet I do not sneer. He has forged his revolutionary ideas out of the pain and damage done to his flesh and nerves by a life in prison. It is possible that he would be as much a revolutionary or more after ten years of freedom. Or an altogether different kind of man. I hope we have the opportunity to find out. As I am writing these words, it looks like Abbott will be released on parole this summer. It is certainly the time for him to get out. There is a point past which any prisoner can get nothing more from prison, not even the preservation of his will, and Abbott, I think, has reached these years. Whereas, if he gets out, we may yet have a new writer of the largest stature among us, for he has forged himself in a cauldron and still has half of the world to discover. There is never, when we speak of possible greatness in young writers, more than one chance in a hundred that we are right, but this one chance in Abbott is so vivid that it reaffirms the very idea of literature itself as a human expression that will survive all obstacles. I love Jack Abbott for surviving and for having learned to write as well as he does.
Marilyn Monroe’s Sexiest Tapes and Discs
(1982)
UNACCOUNTABLY AND INCREDIBLY, Marilyn Monroe has emerged from the detritus of the insignificant, the burial ground of old movies. She is more vivid on the screen than others. She has more energy, more humor, more commitment to the part and to the playing—she plays the roles, she gives off the happiness that she is acting, and that is indispensable for any cheap entertainment.
She had intelligence—an artist’s intelligence—and her taste by the end of her career was close to superb. She must have had a profound sense of what was whole in people and false, for her own characterizations were sound—she knew how to enter a scene with the full aura of the character she played, and so was able to suggest everything that had occurred on just the other side of the scene, the breeze she had smelled, the doorsill on which she stubbed her toe, the errant whimsy of a forbidden thought to be concealed, and five distractions appropriate to the character trailing like streamers. Even early she must have seen life as some sort of divine soup of situations where every aroma spoke of the primacy of mood.
She emerges even as we look at her movies today.
On Tape and Disc
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
With Jane Russell, MM, Charles Coburn, Elliott Reid, Tommy Noonan. Directed by Howard Hawks. (Magnetic Video cassette, color, 91 min., $59.95)
Never again in her career will she look so sexually perfect as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She will look more subtle in future years, more adorable, certainly lovelier, more sensitive, more luminous, more tender, more of a heroine, less of a slut—but never again will she seem so close to a detumescent body ready to roll right over the edge of the world and drop your body down a chute of pillows and honey.
She dances with all the grace she is ever going to need when doing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, all the grace and all the pizzazz—she is a musical comedy star with panache! “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend!” What a surprise! And she sings so well Darryl Zanuck (head of Twentieth Century–Fox) will first believe her voice was dubbed.
She is a wonder in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She comes into the movie looking like a winner and leaves as one. If she had her first acting lesson not six years before, and had never been near to working on a New York stage, it has no significance before her grasp of cinema. She inhabits the frame even when she is not on. Just as she had once preempted the art of the still photographer and painted herself into the lens, now she preempts the director. In this picture, and in Some Like It Hot, to a lesser degree in The Seven Year Itch or Bus Stop or The Misfits, it is as if she has been the secret director.
She must have been the first embodiment of Camp, for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a perfect picture in the way early Sean Connery–James Bond movies were perfect. In such classics of Camp, which would arrive ten years and more after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, no actor was ever serious for an instant, nor any situation ever remotely believable—the art was to sustain nonexistence, counterexistence, as if to suggest that life cannot be comprehended by a direct look—we are not only in life but to the absurd side of it, attached to something else as well—something mysterious and of the essence of detachment. So in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she is a sexual delight, but she is also the opposite of that, a particularly cool voice which seems to say, “Gentlemen: Ask yourself what really I am, for I pretend to be sexual and that may be more interesting than sex itself. Do you think I have come to you from another place?” She could even be a visitor who has studied the habits of humans—the unhappy suspicion crosses our head that if she were a saint or a demon we would never know.
In any case, it is the first picture which enables us to speak of her as a great comedian, which is to say she bears an exquisitely light relation to the dramatic thunders of triumph, woe, greed and calculation: she is also a first artist of the put-on—she dramatizes one cardinal peculiarity of existence in this century—the lie, when well embodied, seems to offer more purchase upon existence than the truth.
There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)
With Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, MM, Dan Dailey, Johnnie Ray, Mitzi Gaynor. Directed by Walter Lang. (Magnetic Video cassette, color, 117 min., $59.95)
The script is patently inferior to Heller in Pink Tights (a vehicle Marilyn declined), and instead of playing with Frank Sinatra (in Pink Tights), she has Donald O’Connor for a leading man. When she wears high heels, O’Connor looks six inches shorter. Worse, Ethel Merman is in the movie. Marilyn can hardly sing in competition with Merman. Dan Dailey, an old pro from the days of A Ticket to Tomahawk (which Marilyn appeared in briefly), is used to dancing at his best and hamming at his utmost in atrocious scripts. There is also Johnnie Ray, at the top of his vogue. She feels like an amateur among veterans. She is out of practice and had not made a movie in eight months, indeed, is only making this one as part of an arrangement to get The Seven Year Itch.
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
With MM, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts. Directed by Billy Wilder. (RCA SelectaVision disc, CED, color, 105 min., $19.95; Magnetic Video cassette, color, 105 min., $59.95)
Marilyn is plump, close to fat, her flesh is bursting out of every strap, her thighs look heavy, her upper arms give a hint that she will yet be massively fat if she ever grows old, she has a belly which protrudes like no big movie star’s belly in many a year, and yet she is the living bouncing embodiment of pulchritude. It is her swan song to being a sexual object. She proves once again that she is as good as the actors she works with, and she and Tom Ewell do a comic march through the movie. As “The Girl Upstairs,” a TV model in New York for the summer from Colorado, she creates one last American innocent, a pristine artifact of the mid-Eisenhower years, an American girl who believes in the products she sells in TV commercials—she is as simple and healthy as the whole middle of the country, and there to be plucked.
Bus Stop (1956)
With MM, Don Murray, Arthur O’Connell, Betty Field, Eileen Heckert. Directed by Joshua Logan. (Magnetic Video cassette, color, 96 min., $59.95)
Discarding preliminary sketches for her costume, she chose ratty clothes and looked for ripped stockings out of wardrobe with crude stitches, she purchased a sad small-town southern glamour by these funky clothes (a perfect piece of objectification), and brought to life some physical trappings of the biography she was to play, Cherie!, and thereby began to create a comic role so sad, so raunchy, so dazzling in its obliviousness to its own poverty of talent, that some would consider it her greatest movie. For certain, it is the only picture she ever made where she was ready to present a character independent of herself, even down to accent—it is not Monroe’s voice we hear but the blank tones of a dumb southern dr
awl, she communicates continents of basic ignorance in each gap of the vowels, and her eyes roll and dart to the corners, as restless yet as lifeless as agitated marbles each time she talks about the promiscuities of her past. She has the blank schizoid fever of poor southern white trash, she is blank before moral dilemmas, blank before provocation, blank before dread—she suggests all the death that has already been visited upon the character in the mechanical, hard-remembered way she clicks the switch for her red spotlight during a song and dance. So Bus Stop becomes a vehicle for Monroe, but the rest of the movie suffers, the crowd scenes might as well have been done by a unit director from MGM, and much of the atmosphere established by supporting actors has the hyped-up hokey sound of bit parts in a stock company too long on the road.
Some Like It Hot (1959)
With MM, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, Pat O’Brien, Joe E. Brown. Directed by Billy Wilder. (VidAmerica cassette, B&W, 120 min., rental only)
That figure of immaculate tenderness, utter bewilderment, and goofy dipsomaniacal sweetness which is Sugar Kane in Some Like It Hot is Marilyn Monroe’s greatest creation, in her greatest movie. She takes an improbable farce and somehow offers some indefinable sense of promise to every absurd logic in the dumb scheme of things until the movie becomes that rarest of modern art objects, an affirmation—the viewer is more attracted to the idea of life by the end of two hours. For all of Wilder’s skill, and the director may never have been better, for all of first-rate performances by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, and an exhibition of late-mastery by Joe E. Brown, it would have been no more than a very funny movie, no more, and gone from the mind so soon as it was over, if not for Monroe. She brought so good and rare an evocation it seemed to fit into the very disposition of things, much as if God—having put a few just men on earth in order to hold the universe together—was now also binding the cosmos with a few dim-witted angels as well.
The Misfits (1961)
With Clark Gable, MM, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter. Directed by John Huston. (Magnetic Video cassette, B&W, 124 min., $59.95)
A young divorcee, Roslyn Taber (Marilyn), begins to live in the desert outside Reno with a middle-aged cowboy, Gay Langland, played by Gable, while two other cowboys, Eli Wallach and Monty Clift, begin to find her attractive, flirt with her, and apparently wait for her relation to Langland to end. After a time, the men go out to hunt for mustangs to trap and sell. It is one of the few ways left to earn a living that is “better than wages.” Roslyn accompanies them, but is horrified at the cruelty of the capture and the pointless misery of the purpose. If these mustangs were once sold as riding horses for children, now they are canned as dogmeat. So Monroe has a war with Gable which is resolved (1) by his capture of the last mustang as a gesture to himself, plus (2) setting the horse free as a gesture to her. The film ends in such gestures. They drive off together to face a world in which there will be fewer and fewer ways to make a living better than wages.
The point is that The Misfits is a movie, particularly in its first half, that moves on no more powerful hydraulic of plot than the suggestion of one nuance laid like a feather over another—so it is closer to the nature of most emotional relations than other pictures. But its virtue is also its vulnerability. We see Roslyn and Langland come together, sleep together, set up home together, we feel the other two cowboys perching themselves on the edge of this relation, but no emotional facts are given, no setting of category or foundation, for the plot is never bolted down. We do not know exactly how Roslyn comes to feel for each man, nor how much she feels. The picture is even less precise than biography. Unlike other movies, we have no blueprint to the emotional line of her heart. Instead she seems to shimmer on the screen with many possibilities of reality. When she holds Monty Clift’s head on her lap after he has been wounded in the rodeo, we do not know whether she is maternal or stirring for him, or both—nor is she likely to know what she feels. In life, how would she?
So the movie is different in tone than others, and she is altogether different from other actresses, even different from her performances of the past. She is not sensual here but sensuous, and by a meaning of the word which can go to the root—she seems to possess no clear outline on screen. She is not so much a woman as a mood, a cloud of drifting senses in the form of Marilyn Monroe—no, never has she been more luminous.
For Taping from TV
Ladies of the Chorus (1948)
With Adele Jergens, MM, Rand Brooks, Nana Bryant. Directed by Phil Karlson. (B&W, 61 min.)
A bad B movie about a young burlesque star (chaste!) daughter of an older burlesque star (classy) in love with a scion. It came out in 1948, and is the first movie where we can really see her; she sings, dances, acts, even has a catfight with hair pullings, slaps, shrieks, awkward blows reminiscent of girls throwing baseballs—the picture is terrible, but she is not. She is interestingly wooden in the wrong places (like a faint hint of the wave of Camp to come), and she sings and dances with a sweet vitality, even does her best to make one agree it is not absolutely impossible she is in love with Rand Brooks, the scion (who must certainly be the plainest leading man any ambitious ingenue ever was assigned to love), but what is most interesting in the comfort of studying this actress who is to go so far is the odd air of confidence she emits, a narcissism about her own potentialities so great it becomes a perfumed species of sex appeal as if a magnificent girl has just walked into a crowded room and declared, “I’m far and away the most beautiful thing here.” Of course, she is not. Not yet. Her front teeth protrude just a fraction (like Jane Russell’s), her chin points a hint, and her nose is a millimeter too wide and so gives suggestion of a suckling pig’s snout. Yet she is still close to gorgeous in her own way, with a sort of I-smell-good look, I-am-wonderful look. She is like a baby everyone loves—how wise are the tunneled views of one’s own hindsight!
Love Happy (1950)
With Chico, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Ilona Massey, Raymond Burr, Vera-Ellen, MM. Directed by David Miller. (Color, 85 min.)
In Love Happy, with Groucho Marx, Marilyn has a classic moment—the famous undulating movement of her hips is now unveiled for the first time in a movie. It is an uproarious moment in the movie—the wild call of a strange girl’s ass to Groucho Marx—he engorges his cigar in a leer.
“What seems to be the problem?” he inquires.
“Men keep following me all the time.” She exits, Mae West in one swinging pocket, Jean Harlow in the other. It is uproarious, but she may have been desperate. Twice hired, twice fired, and she is approaching the age of twenty-three—Elizabeth Taylor, who is four years younger, is already famous. So she puts everything she knows of provocation, exaggeration, and the nascent art of Camp into the swing—“Take me from behind, I’m yours,” say her undulating hips.
River of No Return (1954)
With Robert Mitchum, MM, Rory Calhoun, Tommy Rettig. Directed by Otto Preminger. (Color, 91 min.)
A “Z cowboy film” is Monroe’s concise description of River of No Return. She is the only woman and, surrounded by strong male actors, is also drenched in scenes with a boy actor and with a director who is famous for grinding actors’ bones in the maw of his legendary rage. It is the most demoralizing movie in which Marilyn ever played a lead, and must be the worst of Preminger’s pictures.
The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)
With MM, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike, Richard Wattis. Directed by Laurence Olivier. (Color, 117 min.)
The irony of The Prince and the Showgirl is that it is better than anyone has a right to expect from the (nightmarish) history of its making, but that is because Monroe is superb—will wonders never cease?
She is also lovely. Milton H. Greene is indeed a genius with makeup. Never will Marilyn exhibit so marvelous a female palette, her colors living in the shades of the English garden. A hue cannot appear on her face without bearing the tone of a flower petal. Her lips are rose, her cheeks have every softened flush. Lavender shadows are l
ost in her hair. Once again she inhabits every frame of the movie.
Of course, Olivier in his turn cannot fail to be excellent. He is too great an actor not to offer some final delineation of a Balkan archduke. If there are a thousand virtuosities in his accent, it is because his virtuosities are always installed within other virtuosities—a consummate house of cards. It is just that he is out there playing by himself. So one can never get to believe he is attracted to Monroe. (Indeed, he is most believable when he snorts, “She has as much comme il faut as a rhinoceros!”) Willynilly, he is therefore emphasizing the high level of contrivance in the plot.
Let’s Make Love (1960)
With MM, Yves Montand, Tony Randall, Frankie Vaughan; cameos by Milton Berle, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly. Directed by George Cukor. (Color, 118 min.)
She never made a movie where she is so ordinary. A sad truth is before us again. Art and sex are no more compatible than they care to be. She is wan in the movie and dull.
Also on Tape
Marilyn Monroe videocassettes which Norman Mailer chose not to review in depth include:
All About Eve (1950)
With Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, MM. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. (Magnetic Video cassette, B&W, 138 min., $79.95)
Clash by Night (1952)
With Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, MM. Directed by Fritz Lang. (Video Communications cassette, B&W, 105 min., $49.95)
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 41
