The making of Marilyn Monroe
As I measured the length and eloquence of Jacqueline Rose’s essay on Marilyn Monroe, I began to hope for that rarity, a detached, scholarly insight into Monroe (LRB, 26 April). I should have noted the first words of special pleading, from Monroe herself: ‘Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control.’ Why do you have to be ‘creative’ to deserve more control? And isn’t it fanciful to claim that Monroe was the one star who got the better of the moguls? Her partnership with Milton Greene was prompted by Greene’s wish to protect her business ineptness (and promote himself). It led to two films: Bus Stop (her best work it seems to me, though not mentioned by Rose) and The Prince and the Showgirl, which is a mess. Nothing else came of Marilyn Monroe Productions. She failed the key test for stars of the 1950s: taking charge of their own careers. Rose may wonder why Elizabeth Taylor got ten times Monroe’s fee for a film. Was it that Taylor followed better advice? Or that she had a box office record (A Place in the Sun, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and an Oscar (BUtterfield 8)? That prize was charitable, but the generosity reflected the industry’s regard for Taylor. She was smart, hardworking, expert, on time and word-perfect since childhood. Richard Burton’s diaries tell how much he learned from her. Who reckons that Monroe could have attempted Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland had challenged and defeated the contract system. Katharine Hepburn contrived her own material as early as The Philadelphia Story. Ingrid Bergman made her bold journey to Italy to make ‘real’ films. Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day and Susan Hayward rode the studio attitudes of the 1950s without breaking down. Kim Novak was shy and limited as an actress, and vulnerable to male estimates that she was merely sexy. But she did The Man with the Golden Arm, Strangers When We Meet and Picnic – not great pictures, but worthwhile. And she was Madeleine and Judy in Vertigo. Does anyone believe Monroe could have done that film, or lived up to Hitchcock’s need to trap anguished actors in his taut frames?
Yet if Monroe could not generate her own projects, then surely it was up to her to seek the best opportunities available? That fits Judy Holliday, who sometimes reminds one of Monroe as the ‘dumb blonde’, Billie Dawn, in Born Yesterday. Holliday was not dumb, though she was neurotic, but in Adam’s Rib and Born Yesterday she found a democratic intelligence within the dumb blonde archetype that surpasses anything ‘Lincolnian’ in Monroe’s career.
There is an even more telling example of what could be done. When Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall had its debut in 1964, directed by Elia Kazan, the role of Maggie (plainly based on Marilyn) was taken by Barbara Loden. Kazan had had an affair with Monroe before her marriage to Joe DiMaggio, and in A Life he spoke fondly of her. But this inspired discoverer of performers did not make a film with or for Monroe, just as Lee Strasberg’s admiration for Marilyn’s reading of Anna Christie never led to a stage production. Had they realised that Monroe’s spasmodic glow (so magnificent in stills) was hardly viable in a complete dramatic context?
On the other hand, Loden wrote, directed and acted in a poignant, independent movie, Wanda, where she plays a fragile unsmart woman involved with a minor criminal. Wanda is a pioneering achievement, showing that an unfulfilled actress could do something for herself. Much the same applies to Gena Rowlands in A Woman under the Influence and her other work with John Cassavetes. Wanda cost only $200,000 but Loden needed six years to raise the money. She took control and responsibility. Monroe left an estate of just over $90,000, which ended up with the family of Lee Strasberg. Control in Hollywood is more frequent, and more complicated, than Rose allows.
David Thomson
San Francisco
