The Marilyn moment: Monroe at 100

As we celebrate the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, let’s start by examining something I’ll call the ‘Marilyn moment’. That’s the one that makes you set aside everything else – and with Marilyn, there is so much else – and laser-focus on what matters: the acting.

Here’s an example: the Marilyn moment that happened in the 1970s for the late Verna Bloom, then a member of the Actors Studio in New York. It was the day she worked on a scene from 1959’s Some Like It Hot, in the role of Sugar Kane, the band singer Monroe had played in Billy Wilder’s movie to unforgettable effect. Joe (played by Tony Curtis in the film) is masquerading as Junior, the heir to Shell Oil, and he has invited Sugar aboard a borrowed and temporarily empty yacht. In the film, Sugar stops at the sight of a big swordfish mounted over the bar: “What a beautiful fish!… What is it?”

Joe/Junior, as smooth at lying as he is clueless about every last aspect of oceans and yachts, says, “It’s a member of the herring family.” Sugar takes this in. Eyes locked on the trophy, she points in wonderment, then looks at her hands as her fingers make a jar-sized circle, and says slowly, “A herring! Isn’t it amazing how they get those big fish into those little glass jars?”

Verna Bloom went over that moment again and again. It’s a line that could, if you wanted, be delivered as the chatterbox patter of a dizzy dame, and it might still be funny. But Bloom understood that Marilyn was doing something else. Her Sugar focuses intently on the fish, and its size, and its sword, and her mental jar-calculations. Sugar wants to grasp the feat of engineering needed to make that whole jar thing happen. Monroe, as she engages in this moment of deep thought, isn’t inviting the viewer to think Sugar is dumb. Not at all; the way she plays this brings up how much Sugar likes Junior. She trusts him. If Junior says it’s a herring, there must be a reason this herring can fit in a jar.

Bloom, a talented actress in her own right, didn’t want to imitate Marilyn. But she did want to access the honesty and sweetness that made Monroe’s Sugar so funny, and so sympathetic. Scene work at the Actors Studio is hard. Bloom found this one even harder than usual. Screenwriter Jay Cocks, Bloom’s husband until her death, told me, “In the end, Verna did the scene in her own way – but, she felt, unsatisfactorily. It gave her a new and vast respect for Marilyn’s comedic gifts and acting chops.”

The cultural prominence of ‘old’ movies may be shrinking, but Marilyn’s face is still one of the world’s most famous. People barely out of their teens, who have never seen a movie made before the Harry Potter series, can identify her. That has, paradoxically, hurt the way her talent is assessed, not helped. There’s so much baggage with Monroe. Not just the misfortunes, or the mistakes that Marilyn herself made over time – she was, like all of us, doing her best – but the weight of rumours, stereotypes, conspiracy theories, all of it magnified by the sad fact of her early death. Such crazy and ever-changing fame can put people off. They roll their eyes and claim they’d rather leave her to gossip shows, obsessives, influencers and rich people angling for the red carpet at the Met Gala. But avoiding the Marilyn industry is one thing; avoiding her films is needless self-denial. The world doesn’t offer us much pleasure right now, and there are few things in cinema more joyous than discovering just how good Marilyn could be.

I always liked Marilyn, my favourite of her films being How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), one of the best ‘three girls on the make’ movies. In some ways this is also the quintessential Monroe vehicle. She brings her superb timing and line delivery to the role of a beauty in search of a rich man. She has the smallest of the three main parts (the other two being Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall), but she’s the most memorable. Most important of all, Marilyn’s Pola is a little naive, but she’s not dumb. What may seem like Pola’s brain fog is caused by her being “blind as a bat”, and too insecure to wear glasses. Even as a kid, I knew that getting a huge laugh on a single syllable – “Oh” – when Pola is told she’s reading a book upside down was the mark of a true gift. Later on, I realised that after Marilyn Monroe, as after her idol Jean Harlow, no one ever played a blonde in a comedy – dumb or otherwise – in quite the same way again.

Yet I too had my own Marilyn moment. The fact is, sometimes you need one to knock you out of that ‘not her again’ slump that can result from too many encores of ‘Candle in the Wind’. The film was All About Eve, and goodness knows I had seen it many times before. In 1950, Monroe landed two breakout roles. Critics praised her as Angela, Louis Calhern’s “sweet kid” mistress in The Asphalt Jungle. And in All About Eve, Monroe was Claudia Casswell, critic Addison DeWitt’s (George Sanders) arm candy for Margo Channing’s (Bette Davis) “fasten your seatbelts” party.

With this viewing, I only had eyes for Miss Casswell from the moment she comes up the staircase with Addison. Margo swoops over to be distinctly, unmistakably unwelcoming. Miss Casswell never acknowledges the rudeness, indeed seems not to notice it. But like Sugar and Pola, she’s not dumb. Look at Marilyn’s face: Miss Casswell is hungry. She’s drinking in Margo and thinking about how she is going to attain all this – the duplex, the money, the adulation. A close watch of Miss Casswell (I recommend it, it’s fun) makes clear that she sees this rather fusty party as a field trip, her course of study being How to Get What You’re After. See how her eyes size up Eve (Ann Baxter) when they’re introduced. Notice what happens when Addison sends Miss Casswell – “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art” – over to butter up producer Max Fabian. As the critic takes her wrap, she stands straighter, throws her shoulders back, and begins to sashay like the showgirl she is. Marilyn’s part in All About Eve is often described as a cameo (scene-stealer would be more accurate) but she has carefully, thoroughly worked out her character.

In Monroe’s lifetime, it could seem as though critics were incapable of finding a Marilyn moment or even just giving the woman a break. Part of this was genre snobbery. Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio where Monroe was under contract for much of her career, tended to stifle her desire for better, or at any rate more ‘serious’ parts. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck wanted Marilyn to keep doing what he thought she did best: being funny in those blonde roles. The studio liked to assign her musical numbers, where Marilyn’s popular (if at times underrated) singing could add revenue from record sales. The best result of this stubborn Fox preference must be Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). That Howard Hawks masterpiece doesn’t need me or anyone else to sell it – even if this very magazine complained at the time that the movie was “compromised by the casting of Marilyn Monroe”. From the 21st-century vantage point, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ is a high point not merely for the film, or for Monroe’s career, but for the entire history of the Hollywood musical.

This critic maintains, though, that ‘When Love Goes Wrong’ is a sharper example of Monroe’s ability to act a song, not just sing it. Monroe’s chemistry with Jane Russell was more potent than she had with many a male co-star. Lorelei (Monroe) and Dorothy (Russell), broke and temporarily homeless, plop themselves and their luggage down at a sidewalk Paris café. They start the song as a duet of consolation, until a couple of little boys wander up from the street. Lorelei brightens. She can’t help it. It’s male attention, and as Lorelei goes into her best stage moves, visibly reacting to Dorothy’s encouragement, those steps and shimmies are somehow less about sex (there are kids in the audience, after all) and more about sheer joy in performing. As the girls wave goodbye from the sunroof of a Parisian taxi, Monroe’s expression as Lorelei is pure happiness. No angle is being worked.

Unfortunately, talent like that (not to mention massive box office) can make producers overly optimistic about the material they expect you to redeem. I’m almost irrationally fond of There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), conceived as a tribute to Irving Berlin, but there’s no denying it’s mostly a testament to how well Marilyn could sell a turkey. Reviews weren’t kind. Still, at least one viewer appreciated Monroe’s best number, ‘After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It’. That was Irving Berlin, who said, “If it had been sung that way in 1920 when I wrote it, it would have been a hit song… It took Marilyn’s interpretation to make me see how sexy it was. Even I didn’t know how sexy it was.”

Marilyn, clad in a skintight beaded costume that’s the next best thing to naked, also gives off a strong tinge of melancholy. Her character struts around the nightclub set, making sexy gestures toward the men, but that’s a chilly smile she’s flashing at them, and it turns off as quickly as on. At times, Monroe’s expression verges on angry. “I know you” is the exit line she growls to the punters – and it’s not a compliment. She’s giving the hostile flip side of ‘When Love Goes Wrong’, a sex-bomb performer who’s tired of the whole charade. ‘Heat Wave’, unfairly tagged as tasteless at the time, shows much more desire to please the crowd. There is a sense that the star is having a not-at-all private joke.

She probably was. “She burlesqued it,” Robert Mitchum said about Monroe’s attitude toward “being a sex goddess”, because “she thought it was very, very funny”. He saw himself how she could do that in River of No Return, the 1954 western he made with Monroe. With a bunch of moves that are nothing if not burlesque, she performs ‘I’m Gonna File My Claim’ in a tent for some mighty seedy-looking men. One of director Otto Preminger’s shots covers Monroe’s crotch with the crown of someone’s cowboy hat, and I don’t believe for a minute she didn’t realise it. She knew the camera as well as anyone who ever stepped in front of one.

River of No Return was a big hit, showing Marilyn could carry a western. Monroe had more versatility across genres than she perhaps gets credit for; she did thrillers, romances, costume pictures. But she didn’t get Oscar-bait biopics, or much in the way of literary adaptations. Part of that was undoubtedly due to disdain for the type of actor Marilyn was – the persistent notion that a performance can’t be Great Art if you’re having too good a time watching it. Then too, there was the constant presence of Natasha Lytess, the Berlin-born acting coach whose unwelcome presence (to directors, that is) was for a long while written into Marilyn’s contracts. Would a ‘real’ actress need such a person? Later, when Marilyn put her Hollywood career on hold to study at the Actors Studio in New York, even that was seen by many as a lightweight trying to acquire respectability.

Bus Stop (1956) and The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), both adapted from plays, were made after Marilyn’s crucial Strasberg studies. The Prince and the Showgirl turned out stuffy and lacking the lightness of touch it needed. Yet it is undeniable proof of what Monroe did that others could not, in that she is terrific. Director and lead actor Laurence Olivier, whose name meant ‘great acting’ for much of his life, is not. You can feel his condescension toward his co-star, much of which stemmed from his well-known disdain for the Method acting that confronted him daily in the person of Paula Strasberg. With Lytess gone, Monroe insisted Strasberg must coach her through every scene, every line. Joshua Logan coped better with Strasberg’s presence during Bus Stop. Logan’s stage credentials were as distinguished in their way as Olivier’s were in his milieu, and he later called Marilyn “the most talented motion picture actress of her day”. Her performance as Chérie, with its delicate vulnerability and moments of profound sadness, is certainly one of the best Logan ever directed in a film.

One film that shows a different side to her abilities does have a book source: Don’t Bother to Knock from 1952, based on Mischief by thriller writer Charlotte Armstrong. Monroe was cast against type for once, as the deeply disturbed Nell, hired as a hotel babysitter by an unsuspecting couple. Monroe nails SO much of what trauma and dissociation look like, as well as Nell’s des- perate yearning for connection, directed at the person of Richard Widmark’s Jed. The moment when Nell almost gives in to the urge to kill her young charge is terrifying. 

While there’s nothing else quite like Nell in Monroe’s career, Rose in Niagara (1953) could be called the other villain in Monroe’s filmography. Or is she? The script (by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard Breen) seems to position Rose as a femme fatale. She’s tired of husband George (Joseph Cotten) and wants to trade him in for a younger, hotter model, Ted (Richard Allen). And who can blame her? If manipulation and self-pity had a son, George would be it. His behaviour is mostly guilt-tripping and textbook isolation tactics. No wonder that when he walks in, Rose pretends to be asleep, rolling over in bed with an expression of relief and triumph. Rose says she wants to purchase bus tickets. When she’s hit all over again with George’s paranoid jealousy, you don’t just feel her anger, you feel the intensity of her boredom. Rose is suffocating in a horrendous marriage, and Marilyn plays her actions as a kind of rebellion – she wants to be young, she wants to enjoy her own beauty. And doesn’t Rose’s fate show that the instinct to get away was right? I can never see Rose as entirely unsympathetic, and I don’t believe Monroe did, either.

In fact, I’m hoping that one result of watching Marilyn Monroe in the BFI’s retrospective, film by film on a big screen, will be to dispel any notion that she was unaware of even the small effects she produced. You know the drill: Marilyn walked on set and she was gorgeous and magic, etc. This is probably true in terms of her star quality, almost always an either-you-got-it-or-you-don’t proposition. But star quality is not acting. Beauty is not acting, nor is “flesh impact”, as Billy Wilder called it. (Wilder said, rather absurdly I think, but it’s quoted all the time, that Monroe, along with Jean Harlow, Clara Bow and Rita Hayworth, had “flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it.” Wilder argued this was fabulously rare, rather than a predictable result of having really good skin.) Monroe’s phenomenal beauty was part of her toolkit. If we take that as a given, there’s more time to consider her particular acting choices and, yes, her artistry. With the first 100 years behind us, there’s plenty of time to find all of those Marilyn moments.