As an avatar of her age, Marilyn both reflected and created trends in beauty, sensuality, femininity, and fashion. Her life needs to be explored in terms of those trends, not just in terms of its chronology, which has been my focus thus far. Marilyn’s life constantly spills over a central narrative path into byways with their own chronologies and meanings, as she takes on pseudonyms, wears disguises, pursues many interests, and lives separate lives at the same time. The standard chronological framework of biography doesn’t encompass Marilyn’s life.
To avoid confusing the reader, I focus on the events of the time frame I have covered in Part Two—from her 1946 entry into the Hollywood studio system to her 1954 flight from it to New York—although I occasionally go beyond it. During these years Norma Jeane concentrated on creating Marilyn Monroe, her sexualized self-confident alter ego. But other “alters” also emerged: the first was the “sex kitten” Marilyn, the pinup girl who roamed the streets of Hollywood and ingratiated herself with producers. That Marilyn segued into the comic Marilyn, whom I call Lorelei Lee, the persona who joked with ease and was joyous and playful. There was also a glamorous Marilyn, who combined the sculptured quality of the glamour queens of the 1930s like Marlene Dietrich with the more open eroticism of 1940s beauty queens like Rita Hayworth and their sisters on the burlesque and striptease stage.
By the 1950s, however, the word “glamour” was taking on additional meanings, as photographers of partially clothed and nude women hijacked the word to apply to their photographs. At the same time it retained its original meaning as connected to the mystery of elite status or foreign intrigue. Sensitive to nuances, Marilyn created herself in terms of both definitions, to become the “glamour girl” for her age.1
Sometimes Marilyn spiced the characters she played with the open sexuality of Jean Harlow, who electrified the nation in 1929 by wearing no underwear, flaunting her body, and bleaching her hair white blonde, a color that indicated perverse desire.2 Harlow’s antics (plus those of Mae West) brought the strict Production Code of 1934 into being, and its prohibition of open sexuality in films resulted in the appearance of the “fast-talking dames,” who radiated desire and mocked it by engaging in flirtatious and swift repartee with men, rather than in open sex. The Production Board monitored their behavior. Marilyn saw their films in her moviegoing as a child; they were the actresses in the “Promised Land” of her childhood; they helped to enable her to challenge the Production Board. When fan magazine writers said they hadn’t seen anyone quite like Marilyn since Jean Harlow, they were speaking truth.
With these statements as guidelines for what follows, I turn to discrete areas of Marilyn’s life. These areas include her relationship to her times, her varying looks, her concepts of gender, the books she read, and her compulsive sexuality. Throughout, I point to the ways in which Marilyn mixed elements from high culture and low, from the legitimate stage, for example, as well as from burlesque and striptease, which were very popular forms of theater in the 1940s and ’50s. The complexities of Marilyn, her paradoxical nature, are important in understanding her great popularity in her own day—and ever since. I end my entr’acte by analyzing some famous photographs taken of her in which her dramatic, trickster side is in evidence.
As a historian, I have been impressed throughout my work on Marilyn by her deep historical imagination. She knew the history of Hollywood, and it fascinated her. She had lived it; she had been part of it. She had spent her childhood reading the movie magazines, going to movies, visiting the studios, and imaging herself as a Hollywood star. When she came to create herself as Marilyn Monroe, those images were in her mind. It’s not surprising that, in later years, she often said that the photos Richard Avedon took of her in 1958 as the great sirens of Hollywood—Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich—were her favorite photographs.
When Simone Signore was friendly with her during the filming of Let’s Make Love, Marilyn told Simone that she preferred these photographs to any of the films she had made. That was undoubtedly an overstatement, but it pointed to Marilyn’s love of history and her creation of herself in history’s terms.
Post–World War Two prosperity in the United States produced a new well-to-do class in cities and suburbs, whose members flocked to elite forms of dance and theater such as ballet and opera. They validated the elegant ballerina and the high-fashion model as beauty ideals. They formed a fan base for Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy, the major exemplars of this look. Hepburn was a ballerina turned actress, tall and thin, with a straight body, who often modeled high-fashion clothing in her films. Jackie Kennedy was another elegant type. She was dressed by some of the world’s most famous designers; she brought an aristocratic elegance to her White House world. Her stepcousin and friend, Gore Vidal, said she would have made a wonderful actress.3
At the same time, a populuxe style, based on a populist version of luxury, swept the nation, and Marilyn was its symbol. “Americans reveled in a kind of innocent hedonism,” wrote Thomas Hine. That innocence was reflected in the decoration of household items—from refrigerators to automobiles—in garish colors, often with a curved shape coming to a point. The colors reflected postwar joy and the popularity of Technicolor and Walt Disney’s animated films, shot in glowing colors. The curved shape coming to a point derived from the design of the jet fighter airplane, the new symbol of American power. The most representative product of populuxe was the automobile, which grew ever larger in size. The typical brightly colored model, sometimes in two tones, was trimmed in shiny chrome, with fins on its back sides adapted from airplane wings and shark fins, and bumps on the fenders that served no purpose. They were called Dagmars, after the big-breasted TV performer.4
By elite standards populuxe was vulgar, but it captured the nation’s fancy. Through its version of reality as an amusing fairy tale, it helped the nation cope with its paranoia in the 1950s about the Cold War, the atom bomb, and the totalitarian Communist Soviet Union. When Marilyn radiated glamour and joy, as in the Seven Year Itch photo, she was a symbol of frivolity and fun to the world.
In-demand architect Morris Lapidus created an architecture of joy, based on Coney Island buildings and futurist designs in Hollywood films. Lapidus designed hotels, like the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, with undulating lines. His free-form decorations, looking like squiggles or space ships, were called “woggles.” Architect Wayne McAllister used the “googie” kidney bean shape of Southern California drive-in restaurants in his Las Vegas Sands Hotel, home to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Woogles, googies, and lines coming to points drew on the female body in this era when women emphasized their curves, wore pointy spike heels, and corseted their breasts so that they would jut out in torpedo points.5
This was parody architecture. It incorporated the comic extravagance beloved by Americans, who have often dealt with racial, ethnic, and sexual fears through the mirth of the comedian, while validating themselves and their nation through monumental size: ergo Cinemascope, the huge automobiles of the 1950s, the return of skyscrapers, and the fixation with large breasts. Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns picked up populuxe in their work, which resonated to the forms and features in comic strips, a classic American art that validated and extended the populuxe style. Marilyn became a favorite subject of pop artists, as in Andy Warhol’s famous lithograph of multiple Marilyns. In the spring of 1956, Time magazine described her as “an adolescent daydream, like the ones served up in the comic strips. The cut of the face is Betty Boop, but the shape and the expressions are Daisy Mae.”6 Betty Boop, who looked like Clara Bow, drew from the 1920s flapper, a sexualized adolescent. Daisy Mae, hopelessly in love with L’il Abner, dated from the 1930s and was more mature and voluptuous, wearing a polka-dot peasant blouse that fulsomely displayed her cleavage.
Marilyn’s comic Lorelei Lee expressed these American themes and figures, but she also had roots in Western theatrical traditions. The female comic figure dated from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, from Columbina, the female companion to Harlequin, Pierrot, and the other zanni (clowns) of the Commedia. Playful, shrewd servants, they mocked their superiors. Over time, Columbina became the soubrette, the saucy servant girl of the nineteenth-century stage. All these figures were tricksters, mocking their betters, indulging in childish jokes, deflating conventions.
Marilyn was trained in acting by theater people from Germany, in many cases Jewish, who had fled Hitler for Hollywood. Natasha Lytess came from the German stage, where Commedia dell’Arte clowns appeared in expressionist drama, including that of Max Reinhardt, in whose troupe she performed. Absurd characters, they mocked the horrors of World War One and the dictators that followed, with their brutal fascist and Nazi worlds. The clowns upheld the naivete and wisdom of the fool, existing in an innocent, make-believe world, the land of fairy tales and of the circus, the special habitat of the clown. Max Pallenberg, who perhaps was Natasha’s father, was famed as a clown; Fritzi Massary, who perhaps was her mother, played soubrette roles before becoming a diva. She was famed for her sexy and ironic delivery, which influenced Marlene Dietrich.7
Even if Pallenberg and Massary weren’t Natasha’s parents, she would have known them from her years with Reinhardt’s troupe. Natasha had played clowns in Reinhardt’s theater; she was expert in their techniques when she coached Marilyn in “dumb-blonde” roles like Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Perfer Blondes. Moreover, Michael Chekhov, Marilyn’s drama teacher in Hollywood, was known for his portrayal of clowns, as well as of dramatic characters. And he sent Marilyn to study with famed mime Lotte Goslar, who mostly played clowns in her solo stage performances. These actors and teachers passed the European comic tradition on to Marilyn.
In creating her comic character, Marilyn also drew from traditions of the American musical hall and comedy theater, which both incorporated European traditions and expanded on them. Thus she can’t be understood without examining the women of burlesque and striptease, as well as the “dumb blondes” of stage and screen and the “fast-talking dames” of 1930s films. To begin with, burlesque was an old English stage tradition. It was brought to the United States in the 1860s by the British Blondes, a group of female performers who displayed their legs in tights, did topical reviews, and had women play many of the male roles in their productions. Bawdy, powerful women were typical of burlesque, playing opposite comic men they overshadowed—or in early burlesque, playing the male roles themselves. (Vaudeville, dating from the 1880s, was a cleaned-up version of burlesque.)
By 1929 the audiences for burlesque (and vaudeville) began to decline, due to the popularity of Hollywood films. Striptease was then invented to reinvigorate burlesque by adding nudity to its bawdy sexuality. The stripping women—uniquely American—exhibited curvy bodies, bringing big breasts into vogue, but they also parodied themselves and their inept male partners, as had been typical of the burlesque women. Think of the zany Marx brothers and the other inept grotesque men of the American comic tradition—Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Kops, Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges. These comic men were often partnered with beautiful women who ran circles around them. The impotent man, like the unintelligent female beauty, was a comic type in American entertainment. But stripteasers, in particular, could also be soubrettes, descendants of the saucy servant girls of the nineteenth-century stage. As such, they turned cartwheels and talked baby talk. They were as much comic as erotic.8
Moralists closed down many burlesque houses in the 1930s, but the striptease artists moved upscale to Broadway revues and nightclubs like Ciro’s in Hollywood, as elite audiences took a fancy to them. Yet, whether performed in dives or nightclubs, the strip was always a tease, the nudity was mostly a “flash,” and the bumps, grinds, and shimmies of the stripping women mocked the sex act while mimicking it. Total nudity was rare on the early striptease stage.
Gypsy Rose Lee, who some say invented striptease, called her act a “burlesque of burlesque.” She invented the “literary stripper,” who read passages from high-culture texts and parodied them. Captivating audiences with her wit, Gypsy took off few clothes, while she challenged the myth that sexy women can’t be rational or well read. Lili St. Cyr, whose popularity dated from the 1950s, was as important as Gypsy in the development of striptease, but she was different. She took off her clothes and did much more than a flash; her naked body, which she displayed on stage with impunity, looked like a Greek statue, representing high-class glamour as well as low-class comedy. She didn’t speak on stage. She survived a complaint lodged against her as obscene; brought to trial, her act was ruled aesthetic, not pornographic. Other strippers had animals in their acts to parody male “animality”: Blaze Starr used a panther. Sally Rand invented the fan dance, in which she manipulated large fans to conceal her nude body and make her “flash” dramatic. Marilyn realized the innovative nature of striptease women in drawing from them to create her alter egos Marilyn Monroe and Lorelei Lee.9
Striptease and burlesque also influenced Marilyn’s movements and costumes directly. Choreographer Jack Cole haunted burlesque houses to find interesting material. He put modified bumps and grinds into Marilyn’s production numbers—dampening them down for the Production Board. Billy Travilla found inspiration in the elaborate costumes that stripteasers often wore when they came on stage, before they removed their costumes piece by piece. As a child growing up in Glendale, not far from downtown Los Angeles, on the way to school he had walked by burlesque houses where striptease artists were performing. Becoming friendly with the artists, he had designed costumes for them.10
Female “dumb-blonde” comics also influenced Marilyn. They can be traced to the 1900s vaudeville theater, when male-female duos were introduced—as comedy teams, as trapeze artists, as dancers—dominated by the men. The women in the pairs didn’t talk; they were “dumb.” In 1910 Harriette Lee of Ryan and Lee modified the formula by talking baby talk and serving as the butt of her partner Ben Ryan’s jokes. Called a female dumbbell, she was a smash hit and was widely imitated. By the 1920s the dumbbell of the 1910s had transitioned into a dark-haired flapper, called a “Dumb Dora.”11
Anita Loos combined “Dumb Dora” with the blonde to create the classic “dumb blonde” in her 1925 novella Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Dark-haired and witty, Loos participated in intellectual New York circles, but she also was friends with Broadway chorus girls. She knew they bedded wealthy men, expecting expensive presents or even marriage in return. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Loos positioned her chorus girls—Lorelei Lee and Dorothy—in the guise of the traditional fool, a historical character to be found in Shakespeare’s plays, who was wise under a mask of stupidity. Loos also made fun of the myth that the chorus girls were “gold diggers” who used their bodies to fleece men. In fact, that’s what they did, but Loos implicitly emphasized that the men deserved what they got.12
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. Well-known 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 finger-nail 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.
The Marilyn who taught men to be tender was a figure that assuaged male anxieties in the 1950s. Soldiers returning from the war were plagued with stress disorders, and men in general felt confined by the cult of domesticity and the pressure to conform to corporate life. Fears of impotence and homosexuality were rife, especially after Alfred Kinsey concluded in his 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that forty percent of men had had a homosexual experience and that homosexual latency threatened many more. “In an era of a prevailing fear of male homosexual ‘perversion,’ “Jessamyn Neuhaus wrote, “strong erections in the marital bed were very important.” The tender and sexual Marilyn, often partnered with ordinary men in her films, allowed all men to feel masculine and able to respond sexually to women.31
In one guise Marilyn glorified heterosexuality. She was renowned for saying “I love living in a man’s world, so long as I am a woman in it.” By 1953 Hugh Hefner chose her as his first Playmate in the first issue of Playboy; in 1956 Time magazine called her “an adolescent daydream.” Norman Mailer’s description of her sexuality in his biography of her focused on male problems with sexual performance.
Marilyn was deliverance, a very Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant, and tender that even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin. Marilyn suggested that sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her. Take me, said her smile. “I’m easy. I’m happy. I’m an angel of sex, you bet.”32
Marilyn was savvy about men. “Sometimes I watch adult men,” Marilyn told George Barris. “They act like little boys who have never grown up.” In a conversation with Susan Strasberg about men, Susan said, “I had thought all creative, artistic men were more sensitive, different, until I’d once heard Clifford Odets say, ‘I loved Fay Wray, but God forgive me, I left her because she had no tits.’” Marilyn replied, “Men, they’re all the same … they can’t help it.” She knew; she had the world’s most beautiful tits. Norman Rosten commented, “Marilyn understood the carnal male syndrome,” the power of their penis over them, the sexual response to women they sometimes can’t control and their desire for an ever-ready woman who seems responsive to every touch, immediately orgasmic.33
Marilyn could also be an avenging angel, like the burlesque stars in their “upside-down world of powerful women and powerless men.” That theme is evident in the Seven Year Itch photo. It’s an undertone in How to Marry a Millionaire. It’s there full force in the production numbers in There’s No Business Like Show Business. These numbers were choreographed by Jack Cole, with his camp sensitivity. More than any of her films, however, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes displays Marilyn’s power, as Lorelei and Dorothy triumph over a host of men.
Marilyn most fully illuminates the complex relations between gender, class, and sexuality in her “Diamond’s Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The lyrics of the song Marilyn sings in that number are cynical about love. The reason to have affairs with wealthy men, the lyrics state, is so that the women involved can get the money from them to pay their rent, buy food, and become secure as they age. But the lyrics caution that such men often drop women once they have sex with them, having sampled their wares. Thus women should be cynical and get diamonds from these men, since their money can suddenly be lost in stock market crashes.
Early in the “Diamonds” number, Marilyn playfully opens and closes a fan, using it to tap the shoulders of the male dancers dressed in upper-class ties and tails who dance around her. They add to the riffs on sex and class in the number. The fan invokes the fan dancers of burlesque, but when Marilyn sings an operatic trill, her fan also references eighteenth-century aristocratic women who used fans to flirt. The female ballet dancers wear light pink tutus, with dark veils over their faces, and they swirl around Marilyn, waltzing with the men. Dressed in shocking pink, Marilyn stands out from the ballerinas. She has a narrower skirt and a pouf of fabric on her backside. She is both elegant and sexual, an object of desire and a woman who controls men.
Yet, the scene takes place against a vivid red background, lighted by chandeliers with women tied to them, implying that the action is happening in a brothel, with the bound women suggesting an orgy. Wearing sadomasochistic black leather, they evoke Bettie Page, the innocent girl with black hair and white skin who starred in the day’s underground sadomasochist films. (Page’s biographer calls her the “Dark Angel in the world of bondage and leather” and “the teasing girl-next-door, who is the kitten with a whip.”)34 The reference to Page was an ironic, hidden commentary on the part of Jack Cole, who intended it to add another level to the complexities of gender, sex, and class in the musical number and in the film.
Some may find it surprising to think of Marilyn as a rebel, since she is often identified as quintessentially feminine and not very smart, qualities not usually associated with rebellion. Yet she held radical views on sex, class, and race. She identified with Lorelei Lee’s statement in the lyrics of a song from Gentlemen that she was “the little girl from Little Rock” who “came from the wrong side of the tracks.” She often declared her solidarity with working-class people, the nation’s dispossessed. She made friends with the salesladies at Jax; with Amy and Milton Greene’s housekeeper, Kitty Owens; and with the makeup artists, hairstylists, and grips on her films. In How to Marry a Millionaire Monroe is one of three “gold-digging” women trying to snag a wealthy man, but the moral of the film is that ordinary men, who work at construction jobs and eat in diners, are preferable to wealthy men and their upper-class ways. In that film Betty Grable ends up with a forest ranger and Monroe with a man being pursued by IRS agents for tax evasion. Lauren Bacall’s construction worker boyfriend, whom she rejects as too poor, turns out to be a millionaire, although he prefers to live like a laborer.
In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn is hilarious as a television model selling a toothpaste promoted by ridiculous copy and called Dazzledent, a product of a Madison Avenue that has gone mad. In this guise she implicitly critiques the materialist fantasies that underpin capitalist consumption. Marilyn’s statement “I don’t want to be wealthy; I just want to be wonderful” reverberates through her star text. In her films she is a working-class working woman, usually a showgirl or a model. She sometimes gets the millionaires in her films, but sometimes she doesn’t. She allowed Hollywood to commercialize her body, selling her “as one might sell a refrigerator or a car,” but she rebelled against it in the end. Her nude calendar photos sold in the millions of copies and the image was affixed to everything from playing cards to serving trays and sold in souvenir shops, but she made no money from it because she had signed the rights away to Tom Kelley. “I don’t look at myself as a commodity,” she stated, “but I’m sure a lot of people have.”35 She was caught in a bind of her own making. She had done what was required of her to become a superstar, but she had also become an object, ratifying capitalism’s connection between sexuality and sales.
Marilyn has also been interpreted as a symbol of whiteness, especially in the work of Richard Dyer. In this interpretation she represents the White Goddess of the Western imagination, a transhistorical figure posed against the presumed animal nature of black people. That theme, made epic in the 1933 film King Kong, resonates in The Creature from the Black Lagoon. As in King Kong, the dark creature abducts a white woman and takes her to his lair before he is tracked down and captured.36
Little hard evidence supports the racist interpretation of Marilyn, although it might have originated in a racist dynamic powerful in the movie business—an industry based on the profit motive, which catered to the nation’s prejudices. The parade of blonde Marilyn clones that followed her as dumb-blonde bombshells in 1950s films as the Civil Rights movement expanded gives it some credence. On the other hand, producers copied each other, and they may have been trying to replicate Fox’s success with the sexy Marilyn at a time that the industry thought it could reenergize itself through emphasizing sexy women. Racism was strong in the film business, but it was declining by the mid-1950s as the Civil Rights movement gained the moral high ground.37
Marilyn didn’t participate in the Civil Rights protest, but she supported it. The egalitarian attitudes of the Bolenders toward race, her first foster parents, influenced her. She dated a black man during her early years in Hollywood, and she identified with the hero of Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson, a young Nigerian man who is destroyed by British colonialism. To her he represented innocence killed by the “bad guys.” She stated that it was “‘them’ against ‘us’ everywhere.” She also had a fan base among blacks. Black newspapers advertised her movies and chronicled her career, comparing her to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. They wrote about her friendships with Sammy Davis Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald.
When I interviewed Larry Grant, an African-American man who had been one of her guards during her performances at military bases in Korea in 1954, I asked him if Marilyn represented a racist white woman to blacks. My question confused him, as if it were irrelevant to him. She was a beautiful woman, he said, and she was kind to me when I served as her guard. There were men of color everywhere she performed in Korea, he said, and they all loved her.38
In June 1955, escorted by Joe DiMaggio, she attended a benefit for Sammy Davis Jr. at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The audience was composed primarily of African-Americans. Joe and Marilyn entered the auditorium separately, at different times. The audience went wild, giving each of them a standing ovation. James Baldwin was a fan of Marilyn. He recognized the childhood abuse visited on her and called her a “slave” of the Hollywood system. Many blacks responded to her version of her childhood and saw her as a victim of the system as much as they.39
In her book on whiteness in Hollywood films, British scholar Diane Negra identifies a category of actors and movie characters she calls “white ethnics.” She includes poor whites in that category. Given Marilyn’s background, she fits in this grouping. By the 1950s Eastern Europeans, Jews, and Mediterranean peoples were moving into the middle class, and older definitions of them as nonwhite were breaking down. From this perspective Marilyn could be viewed as an emblem of ethnic cohesion, a bridge between minorities, especially given her marriages to Joe DiMaggio, a symbol of Italian-American social mobility, and to Arthur Miller, who was Jewish. When she married him in 1956, she converted to Judaism. She identified with Jews as a dispossessed group.40
Marilyn’s politics were to the left, in keeping with the politics of many of her foster parents and her identification with the working class. In My Story Marilyn states that she read Lincoln Steffens’s autobiography on the set of All About Eve and liked his discussion of oppression and resistance. When Joe Mankiewicz heard she was reading Steffens, he told her she could get into trouble if studio executives found out. Harry Brand cautioned her: “We don’t want anyone investigating our Marilyn.” She hid the book under the bed in her apartment and read it at night by the light of a flashlight. She was observed reading other radical literature on the sets of her films.41
In 1949 writer Norma Barzman and her husband, screenwriter Ben Barzman, both members of the Communist Party, had scheduled a meeting of Communist sympathizers at their house in the Hollywood Hills to discuss how to respond to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attack on freedom of speech. As they waited for their guests, a young blonde woman in a convertible drove up their driveway and waved them over to speak to her.
The woman, they realized, was Marilyn Monroe. She told them that two policemen at the end of the street were watching their house. They were stopping everyone driving onto the street and questioning them. She had been driving up the road to a friend’s house, and she had been stopped. She spoke to Norma and Ben in her blend of metaphor and reality. “I’m glad I stopped in on you guys. I’m real glad there’s people like you trying to figure out ways of not getting pushed around. I don’t care what you are. I’m glad that somebody’s minding the store.”42
As usual she identified with the exploited. Within a few years, she would become a dedicated leftist, supporting even the Communist struggle against capitalist imperialism. In the spring of 1960 she wrote to Lester Markel, a friend of hers who was a New York Times editor, supporting Castro in Cuba. By the year she died, she had subscriptions to The Nation and I.F. Stone’s Weekly, both radical publications. In February 1962, she visited the members of the “Hollywood Twenty” who were living in Mexico City. She talked about her support for the Civil Rights struggle, while praising the Communist leaders of China for bringing equality to a hierarchical society.43
Marilyn strove to develop the intellectual skills that would enable her to understand the world around her. She’d missed early chances to develop them, since she’d spent a lot of her time in school fantasizing about being a star. Everyone who knew her well verified her intelligence and her ability to understand the books she read. Paradoxically, the classic “dumb-blonde” figure always read ponderous books—and got them mixed up. That was a characteristic of the type from Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on. The perfectionist Marilyn strove for accuracy in portraying her blonde figure, but her drive for knowledge was real. “Did you know you were born under the same sign as Rosalind Russell, Judy Garland, and Rosemary Clooney?” she was asked. She replied, “I know nothing of these people. I was born under the same sign as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen Victoria, and Walt Whitman.”44
In her 1947 Photoplay article “How to Be a Star,” which featured Marilyn, author Fredda Dudley stated that learning was essential to Hollywood success, since all good acting was based on intelligence and knowledge. She advised aspiring actors to read important plays and biographies of great actors and to attend college for a year or two. Marilyn met literate people in Hollywood, including Natasha Lytess, Johnny Hyde, Elia Kazan, Sam Shaw, and Michael Chekhov. They taught her about art and literature and suggested books to read. Photographers such as Andre de Dienes and Bruno Bernard, who had a Ph.D. in criminal psychology from the University of Kiel in Germany, had done the same.45
As early as 1948 Clarice Evans, Marilyn’s Studio Club roommate, was impressed by the number of books she owned. When Philippe Halsman photographed her at her apartment in 1952, he counted two hundred books on her bookshelves. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was on the nightstand by her bed. Sidney Skolsky, who went to bookstores with her, noted that she bought books on self-improvement and psychology, the latest plays, books of poetry, and everything on Abraham Lincoln. In conversation she referred to the books she had read: she talked to Jane Russell for hours about philosophers. Russell reported that Plato, Saint Paul, and the Book of Revelations were among her favorites. Marilyn had a large collection of art books given to her by a writer named Bob Russell, a secret friend of hers.46
She wasn’t always a diligent reader, but she got the gist of a book. When she browsed the shelves in Pickwick’s bookstore, she’d find an interesting paragraph in a book, memorize it, and then go on to find another book. Elia Kazan recommended Emerson to her, and Michael Chekhov recommended Rudolph Steiner. When she met Edith Sitwell in Hollywood in 1954, they discussed Steiner and his eurythymic dancing. Sitwell had attended a Steiner dance group in London, and she described those dances to Marilyn as attempts to connect with Mother Earth.47
After she became a star, Marilyn consulted experts in fields that interested her, including religion, literature, and, interestingly, the stock market. Meeting her early in her Hollywood years, actor Cameron Mitchell had assumed she was an airhead who carried large volumes around with her without knowing what was in them. Then they engaged in a discussion of Freud, and she demonstrated an in-depth knowledge of his theories. Mitchell’s opinion of her changed. In later years, when Lee Strasberg wanted an opinion of a new movie or play, Marilyn was someone he consulted.48
In her reading Marilyn liked romantic writers who dealt with ethical and spiritual issues and had a broad sweep. The German expatriates in Hollywood read Dostoyevsky and Rainer Maria Rilke. Following their lead, Marilyn didn’t read fluffy fiction; she read the heavyweights—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac. Poets were her favorites: Whitman, Keats, Shelley, Yeats. They appealed to her poetic imagination, as she aestheticized reality. She liked the poetic novelist Thomas Wolfe. When reporter William Bruce interviewed her, he mentioned that he had heard she was a fan of Wolfe. In response, she plied him with questions about Wolfe’s work, even his obscure novels. “I am a great fan of Thomas Wolfe,” she told Hedda Hopper. She said to journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, “If you want your ear talked off, mention novelist Thomas Wolfe to me. I’ve practically memorized his books.” She even read his collected letters to his mother.49
Many of the authors she liked—Wolfe, Whitman, and Dostoyevsky—created sweeping landscapes and had broad imaginations. Her favorite book was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which young intellectuals in Hollywood and New York were reading. Like Dostoyevsky, Rilke adored Russia, with its vast reaches of unpopulated territory. He felt that “aloneness” was important to artistic production and personal satisfaction. His central theme was the need for the artist to examine the interior self in order to find an aesthetic vision to provide motivation. He’d given up on Christianity and although he hadn’t found a system to replace it, he counseled young writers to regard the process of writing as akin to sex, replete with passion and daring. Such internal exploration was similar to what Stanislavsky was recommending to actors. In his way Rilke was a rebel who advised his readers to disregard convention and live free lives. Influenced by Swedish feminist Ellen Key, he wanted women and men to become more like each other.50
Whitman and Wolfe also penned their work on broad canvases. Whitman wrote about the “Body Electric” in his famed poem “I Sing the Body Electric” from Leaves of Grass. It’s sensual and lusty, with a love for the physicality and spirituality of both men and women. In Whitman’s imagination, they leap over gender boundaries as they do a dizzying dance in his poem, although in the end the male is active and the woman exudes a “divine nimbus.” Wolfe’s work encompassed the history of the United States, as his heroes moved from the South to New York, leaving a decaying agricultural society for a decadent urban environment.
Wolfe, Whitman, and Rilke all criticized the prevailing materialism of capitalist societies and sympathized with workers and peasants, but none was a political radical. Rather, they were vitalists, advising individuals to cultivate an electric energy to empower themselves and their nations. Wolfe and Rilke were influenced by Nietzsche, who called for supermen to rejuvenate the world and hoped for a new ecstatic Dionysianism for both individuals and for the theater, which he viewed as a place of transformation for both actors and audiences.
In addition to poets and writers like Rilke and Wolfe, Marilyn was also attracted to Sigmund Freud, whose theories dominated intellectual and popular thought after World War Two. His belief that a primitive id, seething with base urges, underlay human personality and was controlled only with difficulty by a rational ego made sense after the brutality of the war. His ideas drew from the pessimism about mankind that was a strain in the thinking of Dostoyevsky, Rilke, and Wolfe, although he put forth a specific plan for individuals to come to terms with their neuroses through the process of psychoanalysis. By the time of World War Two, psychoanalysts dominated the psychiatric services offered by the military, and they emerged from the war to fill a majority of posts in clinics and hospitals as well as in the profession of social work.51
Articles in newspapers and magazines praised Freudian psychoanalysts as potential saviors of individuals and the nation, while many Hollywood people underwent psychoanalysis. Prominent European psychoanalysts, fleeing Hitler, had arrived in the United States. Terms such as “libido,” “ego,” and the “unconscious,” taken from Freud’s work, entered the vocabulary. Time celebrated Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as comparable in importance to the Enlightenment’s discounting of religion in favor of rationality, which had formed a cornerstone of the modern worldview.52
For Marilyn, always worried about going insane like her mother, Freud’s ideas offered a way to achieve a balanced mind that might keep her from the incarcerations, continuous baths, and electric shock treatments her mother had endured. There was a messianic quality to Freud, who seemed like a secular prophet. Although she continued to explore mystical alternatives and converted to Arthur Miller’s Judaism, she called Freudianism “her religion.”
Psychoanalysis became a way of life for her, as she consulted therapists even before she left Hollywood for New York. In New York and after she returned to Hollywood in 1961 she entered into a voyage of discovery with them, exploring childhood memories, trying to figure out who she was. As was her way, she went to the top of the Freudian networks, choosing therapists who were close to Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, whom Freud had analyzed himself. She finally consulted Anna Freud herself when she was in London, filming The Prince and the Showgirl. She saw Anna for daily sessions over the course of a week.
She told Anna that she had read Sigmund Freud’s “dream of nudity” in his Interpretation of Dreams in 1947, when she was twenty-one, and that it had impressed her. Freud interpreted the dream of being nude in a public situation, as well as the drive toward nudity itself, as the product of some sort of sexual exposure in early childhood.53 In Marilyn’s case, playing sex games with a young boy, being subjected to Ida Bolender’s attack on masturbation, or being molested by an elderly actor fit this pattern. When Anna and Marilyn played a game of marbles, Marilyn launched the balls one by one toward Anna. Anna concluded from that action and other statements by Marilyn that she desired to have sex with her and that she was afraid of men. The analysis seems overblown, but we don’t know what else happened in their interactions.54
Marilyn’s free-love attitudes, her belief in the beauty of the naked body, and her attitude toward sex as part of friendship continued through her years in Hollywood—and beyond. She continued to justify her displays of her body in reformist terms, claiming that they were a protest against the resurgent Puritanism of the 1950s and its repressive attitudes about sex. Susan Strasberg called Marilyn a hippie, and to Eunice Murray, her companion and housekeeper in 1962, she seemed like a “flower child,” a forerunner of the movement for free relationships and living close to nature that would soon appear.
She was incensed when a number of states banned a book of nude photographs by Bruno Bernard as pornographic. She detested the Production Board and its rulings and continued to challenge it directly and subtly, as she did in the photo shoot for The Seven Year Itch. “She has a genius for falling into poses which flirt with the Johnston office regulations,” Jack Wade wrote in Modern Screen, referring to Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, which ran the Production Board. “I love to do things the censors won’t pass,” Marilyn stated. She parodied her desires and drives. At a party in New York people played a game in which they composed epitaphs for their tombstones. Marilyn punned the word “lay” to describe both sex and a minstrel song: “Here lies Marilyn. No lies. Only lays.”55
As she constructed her sexy persona, she dispensed with wearing underwear. She told many people, as she had told Jim Dougherty, that she had stopped wearing it to avoid bulges in her skin-tight clothing. It’s probable that she copied the behavior from Jean Harlow, who was known for not wearing underwear.
Marilyn had a drive to expose her body. She told her psychiatrist Marianne Kris that the drive was sometimes overwhelming when she was in public. In 1956 Sidney Skolsky stated that Marilyn wore panties and bras—mostly black in color—much more frequently than she admitted. But when she took her clothes off to try on clothing in dressing rooms, she usually was wearing no undergarments. On a visit to Atlantic City with Joe DiMaggio to see Skinny D’Amato, Joe’s friend who ran the 500 Club, she went shopping for clothes with Skinny’s wife, Bettyjane, who hardly knew her. When she took off her clothing in the dressing room to try on clothing she’d selected, she wasn’t wearing underwear. When the salesladies objected, she bought all the clothes she’d tried on. Bettyjane was shocked.56
Roy Craft, the Fox publicity agent assigned to Marilyn, tried to never let her out of his sight because of her “striptease” inclinations. “She wears no panties,” he said, and “when she sees a photographer on the lot, she lifts her skirt and falls into a cheesecake pose.” He worried about “bottomless” photos. When Joe Schenck heard about this, he gave Marilyn two dozen panties monogrammed with the initials MM.
Sometimes prudish and sometimes outrageous, Marilyn rationalized her sexual behavior through free-love ideas. She shocked the nation, according to journalists, with statements like “Sex is part of life, it’s part of nature—and I’d rather go along with nature.” She told her friend Henry Rosenfeld she believed that sex brought people together and enhanced friendships. When she and Joe DiMaggio reconnected after she separated from Arthur Miller in 1960, she was thrilled that Joe finally agreed to an open relationship, in which they would be special friends to each other but would have sexual liaisons with other people with impunity. She had been wanting that concession from him for a long time.57
Marilyn considered fidelity and children essential elements of a loving marriage, one that was working. She never nested with DiMaggio, but she did so for a number of years with Arthur Miller. He was persuaded by her views on nudity and nature that she was in the vanguard of a new sexual rebellion that would undermine the Puritanism he now viewed as a central part of the anticommunist movement. Liberating people from conservative views on sex might inspire them to become more liberated in their political views in general.
When she lived alone, Marilyn often went naked in her home or threw a white terry-cloth robe over her nude body. Her bare skin pleased her. She said, “If you have a beautiful body, why not show it?” According to James Bacon, she lost all her insecurities when “she was flaunting that magnificent body.” Photographer Anthony Beauchamp noticed her transformation after she put on her skimpy yellow bikini for their photo shoot in 1950. Being uncovered seemed to release her “sparkling personality.” As soon as she discarded her clothes, she became animated; she talked with a delightfully unconscious sense of humor, and with almost flamboyant self-assurance. Both Lucille Ryman and Natasha Lytess remarked on her love of going nude. Jean Negulesco maintained that the only way Marilyn felt truly comfortable was nude.58
She sometimes exposed herself when posing for male photographers or in costume fittings with male designers—but this action could work against her. Milton Greene and Billy Travilla were both nonplussed when she showed off a breast to greet them on first meeting them. “Wait a minute!” Milton said.59 In the early 1950s she sat for George Hurrell, who had created the glamour look of the 1930s. Unlike most photographers who shot Marilyn, he wasn’t impressed by her. When she came out of the dressing room, she let the robe she was wearing fall “all of a sudden,” he said, revealing her nude body beneath it. It was exactly what Harlow had done when he had photographed her in the early 1930s. He wondered if Marilyn had copied Harlow or had thought the action up herself. He implied that she was a bad copy of the original.60
One day she and Susan Strasberg came across a copy of the Kama Sutra on the bookshelves in the Strasbergs’ apartment in New York. Marilyn exclaimed, “Oh! My goodness! This is the classic dirty book!” Then she added, “Only it’s not dirty because it’s oriental and they’re very classy about this sort of thing, not puritanical, like Americans. It’s got hundreds of drawings of all the positions of how to do it, make love, that is.” Like children playing a game, Marilyn and Susan acted out the positions, fully clothed. Finding it difficult to twist into the more complicated ones, Marilyn joked, “The highest number I ever got to is sixty-nine.” Susan asked her what she meant, and Marilyn replied, “Never mind.” Susan was only seventeen years old. She commented, “Marilyn acted as if sex were natural, nothing to be ashamed of, as if it was actually fun.”61
But there is an ugliness to some of Marilyn’s behavior with nudity—a way in which it seems compulsive, not rebellious or free. There was the episode in Warrensburg, New York, when she went there in July 1949 with Adele Whiteley Fletcher of Photoplay and took off her clothes in front of a Warrensburg resident in the public bathroom. The first time she visited Robert Mitchum at his home in Hollywood she walked to the fireplace and lifted up her skirt to warm herself. Even the rebellious Mitchum was shocked, since she wasn’t wearing underpants.62 Such exhibitionism may have been meant to seduce or simply show off, but as she grew older its compulsive edge showed. Marilyn gave nude interviews to journalists, and in public she wore the black mink coat Joe had given her for Christmas in 1953 with nothing on underneath it. Holding it closed to cover herself, she would suddenly flash it open to give a glimpse of her body to friends and sometimes strangers. Dan St. Jacques, a New York policeman, often encountered her in 1955 at Rikers coffee shop, on Fifty-seventh Street, near Times Square, as she took a break on one of her nighttime walks in Midtown. One night she asked him to escort her home. Then she leaned over him, and he realized that she had nothing on under the coat.63
When she posed for photographers, she sometimes exposed her genitals. In the fall of 1955, photographer Eve Arnold arrived at Marilyn’s apartment in New York to show her the proof sheets from photos that Arnold had taken of her. A reporter was waiting in the living room to interview Marilyn. Marilyn asked the reporter if she could comb her hair. The reporter said yes, and Marilyn began combing her pubic hair. The reporter fled.64 Marilyn the prankster may have done this to play a crude joke. Yet it reflects the schisms in her persona. She was an abused child whose early sexualization led her to inappropriate behavior as an adult.
Reporter Julia Paul chastised Marilyn publicly for that behavior. “She is giving photographers whim wham poses. Asked to raise her skirt a little higher for cheesecake art, time and time again she has embarrassed the lensmen by forgetting that she doesn’t have any lingerie on,” Paul stated. “Marilyn is simply going too far.”65 These incidents of exposing herself were episodic. Reporters normally didn’t mention them. Indeed, when Marilyn pulled her dress high in an interview with Jon Whitcomb for Cosmopolitan magazine, the paragraphs he wrote about her exposure of her genitals were excised from the published article. This behavior reflected only a part of a complex individual who was in the public eye, and interviewers and photographers tried to overlook it. Her innocent look offset it, as did the comic character she created who spoofed femininity and sex.
Once she married Arthur Miller, the news media became fixated on her relationship with his children and on her struggle to have children of her own. Her miscarriages became national news. Once again the nation was focusing on her body, this time in a new way. In an article in Photoplay, Dorothy Manning articulated an attitude toward Marilyn that influenced her: “The final step on this road to becoming known as a woman and an actress first and a sex symbol second, will be when she becomes a mother.”66 She had articulated her desire for a child in the unpublished ending to her autobiography. It was slowly becoming a fixation for her by 1956, when she married Miller.
Three photographs taken of Marilyn between her move to New York in December 1954 and her journey to Hollywood to do Bus Stop in the spring of 1956 illuminate her complexities. The first photograph is from the “ballerina sitting,” taken in December 1954 by Milton Greene. Eve Arnold took the second photo in September 1955. Marilyn sat for the third photo in February 1956 for the British photographer Cecil Beaton. I call it the “Japanese photo” because she is posed against a wall hanging with a Japanese figure on it. All these photos tell dramatic stories. They relate to Marilyn’s drive for elegance, her desire during her New York years to become a denizen of high culture. But steeped in irony and satire, they also parody that drive, showing Marilyn as a paradoxical being, not someone to be slotted into one category.
Most fashion photographers—including eminent photographers like Greene and Beaton—were gentle, unlike tough Hollywood producers and directors. Often involved with the feminized world of fashion, they weren’t macho. Some were homosexual, but many weren’t. Marilyn didn’t have to remember lines for them or watch for key lights or marks on the floor. Producers weren’t there enforcing time constraints. Marilyn had a lot of control in these situations. She was so good at posing that she often set the pace, and the photographer followed her lead. She influenced them in other ways. As Marilyn told W. J. Weatherby, “I’ve sometimes tried to charm critics, give the impression that I’m really attracted to them, and it works. With journalists and photographers generally. Experienced as they are, they’re not beyond being wooed.”67
Her energy as a model was huge. Richard Avedon, who photographed her for Harper’s Bazaar in 1954 and on a number of occasions in later years, stated that “she gave more to the still camera than any actress—any woman—I’ve ever photographed.” Sometimes their sittings would go on all night, Avedon said. He would be exhausted and Marilyn, with endless energy, would say, “Let’s try one more time.” Obsessed with looking perfect, she would pore over the contact photos, looking for an “honest picture.”68
Greene took the ballerina photo in his spacious Lexington Avenue studio, which contained the many props he had collected over the years. In the photo, Marilyn perches on a chair in front of what appears to be a barre—the dancer’s practice rod—holding what appears to be a long tutu (the classic ballerina dress) in front of her. Her breasts are popping out of a strapless top, her feet are bare, her fingernails and toenails are red, and her hair is tousled.
Her appearance burlesques the hauteur of the ballerina, a 1950s icon of sleek female elegance who had become the ideal of young girls throughout the nation, who flocked to ballet classes. Dating from the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, the ballerina still slicked back her hair, usually dark in color; stuffed her feet into toe shoes; had little body fat; held her body straight as a rod; and rarely smiled. In the photos Marilyn seems to humanize and mock the ballerina, looking like the sensual woman that a ballerina could never be. Looking sad in several of the ballerina photos, Marilyn draws on the classic clown, combining comedy with tragedy to resemble Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The white garment that Marilyn holds in front of her wasn’t actually a tutu; it was a petticoat removed from an Anne Klein dress that Amy Greene had given her. When the dress turned out to be too small for Marilyn, Milton Greene had her hold the petticoat over her body. Thus another interesting incongruity was added to the photo.69
The second photo I have chosen to show Marilyn as a trickster was taken in September 1955, by Eve Arnold. Marilyn is slithering through the tall grass and mud of a marsh, wearing a leopard-skin bathing suit. One immediately thinks of Moses in the bulrushes, the abandoned child found by the pharaoh’s daughter in the biblical tale. Arnold shot the photo on a deserted playground near her house on Long Island. She and Marilyn arrived there just at five o’clock, a time photographers call the “magic hour,” when the light turns golden as the sun begins to set. In the photo Marilyn seems to be a primeval creature, an Eve for the ages, hardly a comic woman or a “fast-talking” blonde. Yet Arnold remembered that the idea of a “leopard in the bulrushes” appealed to Marilyn’s tremendous sense of fun.
Arnold did, indeed, give Marilyn a different look, as she had requested when they met at the party for John Huston in New York in 1952. It’s not the same as Marlene Dietrich without makeup on a deserted soundstage—Arnold’s photo that initially impressed Marilyn—but it does show her in a new light. As Arnold described it, Marilyn was in control, setting the style and pace. Arnold followed, “just praying that my reflexes would be fast enough to accommodate to Marilyn’s antics.” The result was a brilliant photograph.70
The third photograph I have chosen to illustrate Marilyn as a trickster was taken in early February 1956 by British photographer Cecil Beaton in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel. Beaton had created the concept of glamour photography in the 1920s, and he had worked for Vogue and then for Harper’s Bazaar ever since. The official photographer for the British royal family, he was a legend in his own time.
He took a number of photos of Marilyn, all focusing on her natural look. They are effective, although not extraordinary. One is different. What I call the “Japanese photo” shows her lying on a bed on which a Japanese wall hanging has been draped. That photo, among the best taken of her, has multiple meanings. Vogue editor Diana Vreeland interpreted the figure in the wall hanging as linking Marilyn to the geisha girl. “Marilyn Monroe!” Vreeland exclaimed. “She was a geisha. She was born to pleasure, spent her whole life giving it.”71
The figure in the hanging may be a geisha. More important, it is an onnagata, the actor in Japanese Kabuki theater. In that theater, which dates to the sixteenth century, men play all the roles, female as well as male. Thousands of wall hangings of onnagata were made and sold during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is one of them, identifiable by the costume and the hairstyle. First appearing in Kyoto, which was known for its aesthetic culture and its places of pleasure, the onnagata became models for feminine beauty in Japan: their mannerisms, hairstyles, and makeup set the mode. In turning themselves into women, the Kabuki players were perfectionists. Putting on Kabuki makeup took several hours; it was a ritual through which an onnagata transformed his inner self into a woman.72 Marilyn also used the process of applying makeup to transform herself from an ordinary woman into Marilyn Monroe.
There’s an optical illusion at play in the photo that also connects her to the Kabuki performer. When the photo is turned on its right side, her arm seems to extend from the body of the actor, so that the arm and hand of the onnagata seems to be placed on her breast, not her own arm and hand. Thus in the photo Marilyn and the Kabuki actor become one individual, both masculine and feminine, with the Japanese figure asserting dominance over Marilyn.
Beaton, who dressed like a gentleman and spoke with an upper-class accent, was homosexual. A trickster at heart, he often introduced homosexual themes into his photos. Sometimes his subjects knew what he was doing, and sometimes they didn’t. In his photos men sometimes look like women, and women like men. Sometimes he put himself into his photos, often as a figure reflected in a mirror. The wall hanging with the onnagata on it was a perfect prop to use in photographing Marilyn, with her hidden bisexuality. Truman Capote and Beaton were close friends, and Capote was a gossip. Beaton knew a lot about Marilyn. The onnagata figure represents Beaton himself.73
Beaton included the photo in his book The Face of the World, with a description of Marilyn alongside it. The description captures Marilyn’s complexities. She is “narcissistic,” “unkempt,” and a “hypnotized nymphomaniac,” Beaton writes. She is also “as spectacular as the silvery shower of a Vesuvius fountain” and “an undulating basilisk.” “Her performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West.” She is quintessentially American. She conjures up “two straws in a single soda, juke boxes, running nylons, and drive-in movies for necking. She is a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby, and a Minsky [burlesque] artist.”74
The ballerina photo, the Eve photo, and the Japanese photo—these three portraits show Marilyn as a beautiful blonde, both aesthetic and dramatic; as a clown satirizing cultural icons; as a resonant and joyous symbol of the nation; and as a cross-gendered individual mocking her position as the world’s heterosexual sex queen.
NOTES
1. For the new use of the word “glamour” and the confusion over it among photographers, see “Round Table on Glamor,” Infinity, October 1959.
2. On the stigma against bleached blonde hair, see Barnaby Conrad, The Blonde: A Celebration of the Golden Era from Harlow to Monroe (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1979).
3. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1995), 284.
4. Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 11–12; Charles Phoenix, Southern California in the 1950s (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2001); Christopher Finch, Highways to Heaven: The Auto Biography of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 212.
5. Martina Duttman and Friederike Schneider, eds., Morris Lapidus: Architect of the American Dream (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1992); Chris Nichols, The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007).
6. “To Aristophanes and Back,” Time, May 14, 1956.
7. Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 236.
8. Rowland Barber, The Night They Raided Minsky’s: A Fanciful Expedition to the Lost Atlantis of Show Business (New York: Avon, 1960), 199.
9. Gypsy Rose Lee, cited by Louella Parsons, New York Examiner, May 28, 1944, in Gypsy Rose Lee Papers, in NYPL.
10. Loney, Unsung Genius, 211.
11. On the history of the “dumb blonde,” see Shirley Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams in American Vaudeville, 1865–1932 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984); Nils T. Granlund, Blondes, Brunettes, and Bullets (New York: David McKay, 1957).
12. Gary Carey, Anita Loos: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
13. For comparisons to West, see Curtis Johns, “You’ve Gotta Stop Kicking This Kid Around,” Movie Fan, December 1951; “Earl Wilson Reports on Conversation with Cary Grant,” July 2, 1952; Hal Boyle, “Curves Still Paying Off,” August 31, 1952, AP wire service, in SE; and Earl Wilson, “On and Off,” 1954, unsourced clipping, in NYPL. Cary Grant was in several Mae West films and was a star of Monkey Business. Cecil Beaton, The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places (New York: John Day, 1959), 183.
14. On Marie Wilson I have used the AMPAS clipping collection. Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (New York: Seaview, 1982), 62.
15. Philip Scheuer, “Billy Wilder Tells Plans for Marilyn,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1958; Helen Lawrenson, “Inside Women,” Cavalier, March 1960. “Beulah, Peel Me a Grape,” Show Magazine, February 1955. Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 148.
16. LB, interview with John Strasberg, June 11, 2007; Carroll Baker, Baby Doll: An Autobiography (New York: Arbor House, 1983), 145–47.
17. Goodman, The Fifty Year Decline, 235.
18. Jim Henaghan, “Marilyn Monroe, Loveable Fake,” Motion Picture, November 1953: “Marilyn didn’t think she was beautiful”; AV, interview with Billy Travilla, in Villani, “Hold a Good Thought for Me”; Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 117; MZ, interview with Whitey Snyder, in Zolotow—UT; LB, interview with James Haspiel, May 2009.
19. MZ, interview with Whitey Snyder, in Zolotow—UT.
20. Austin Daily Herald, Austin, Minnesota, in SE; Crown, Marilyn at Fox, 69; Guilaroff, Crowning Glory: Reflections on Hollywood’s Major Confidant (Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1996), 150–52; MZ, interview with Gladys Rasmussen, in Zolotow—UT.
21. MZ, interview with Gladys Rasmussen, in Zolotow—UT; Simone Signoret, Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 286.
22. Patty Fox, Star Style: Hollywood Legends as Fashion Icons (Santa Monica, Calif.: Angel City, 1995), 86–97.
23. Movieland, January 1954.
24. Edith Head, AP interview, 1950, in SE; Shelley Winters, Shelley: Also Known as Shirley, 117.
25. Adele Balkan, oral interview, oral interview collection AMPAS.
26. Marilyn Monroe, “Am I Too Daring?” Modern Screen, July 1952.
27. Riese and Hitchens, The Unabridged Marilyn, 255. As a graduate student in New York on a limited budget, I bought clothes at Jax. They weren’t hugely expensive.
28. Andrew Tobias, Fire and Ice: The Story of Charles Revlon—the Man Who Built the Revlon Empire (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 119.
29. Elaine Rounds, “Thirty Years of Hollywood Lip Lines,” Motion Picture, February 1954; Eve Arnold, Marilyn: An Appreciation, 17. Henry Brandon, ed., Conversations with Henry Brandon, 185; Lydia Lane, Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1960.
30. Brandon French, On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties (New York: Ungar, 1978).
31. Jessamyn Neuhaus, “The Importance of Being Orgasmic: Sexuality, Gender, and Marital Sex Manuals in the United States 1920–1963,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (October 2000): 447–73.
32. Norman Mailer, Marilyn: A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1973), 15. Mailer’s comparison between sex technique and playing a violin is taken from Havelock Ellis, “The Art of Love” in Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York: Putnam, 1933).
33. Barris, Marilyn in Her Own Words, 32; Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 217.
34. Richard Foster, The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About the Queen of the Pinups (New York: Kensington, 1997), 55; JK, interview with Jack Cole, in Kobal, People Will Talk, 593.
35. Wagenknecht, ed., Marilyn Monroe, 5; Pete Martin, Will Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe? (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 32.
36. Richard Dyer first connected Marilyn to “whiteness” in White (New York: Routledge, 1997). For a fuller discussion of this issue, see my essay “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Cinema Journal (Summer 2008): 4–29.
37. On the “parade of blondes” as an emblem of racism, see Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and Movies in the 1950s (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 12–15.
38. Rosten, Marilyn: An Untold Story; Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn. For the reporting on Marilyn in African-American newspapers, I read through such newspapers on www.proquest.com including the Chicago Defender, Los Angeles Sentinel, and New York Amsterdam Times. LB, interview with Larry Grant, October 15, 2009.
39. LB, interview with Jay Kanter, October 3, 2007; Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 121.
40. Diane Negra, Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Jonathan Freedman, “Miller, Monroe, and the Remaking of Jewish Masculinity,” in Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 135–52.
41. Monroe, My Story, 118–21. See Hildegard Knef, The Gift Horse: Report on a Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 254.
42. Norma Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York: Nation Books, 2003), 96–99.
43. According to Frederick Vanderbilt Field, the Hollywood Twenty was a term derived from the original Hollywood Ten, who had moved to Mexico after serving jail terms, expanded to include ten others convicted of having ties to communism. Not all of the second group had worked in the film industry, but they had joined the initial group in Mexico.
44. Summers, Goddess, 30.
45. Bacon, Hollywood Is a Four Letter Town, 143–44.
46. The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Christie’s, 1999), 346; Skolsky, Don’t Get Me Wrong, 44; MZ, interview with Jane Russell, in Zolotow—UT; Shaw, The Joy of Marilyn, 66.
47. “Marilyn Monroe’s Secret Tragedy,” Screen Stories, February 1961. Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: The Autobiography, in Wagenknecht, ed., Marilyn Monroe, 56 (excerpt from original); Max Lerner, “What Marilyn Reads,” New York Post, October 27, 1954. She told Lerner she was reading Steiner.
48. Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 79; MZ, interview with Cameron Mitchell, in Zolotow—UT; AS, interview with Peggy Fleury, in AS.
49. Max Lerner, “What Marilyn Reads,” New York Post, October 27, 1954. William Bruce, “Meet the New Marilyn,” Movieland, December 1954; clippings from March 7, 1952, March 13, 1954, in SE; “Marilyn Doesn’t Believe in Hiding Things,” Screenland, August 1952. On Rilke’s influence on Marilyn, see also Belmont, “Interview with Marilyn Monroe,” in Marilyn Monroe and the Camera, 19; AV, interview with Rupert Allan, in Villani, “Hold a Good Thought,” 25.
50. On Rilke, I have used Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (La-Verne, Tenn: BN Publishing, 2010); Volker Dürr, Rainer Maria Rilke: The Poet’s Trajectory (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On Wolfe, I have used Leo Gurko, Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic Ego (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973); and Robert Taylor Ensign, Lean Down Your Ear Upon the Earth, and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).
51. See Nathan G. Hale Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Janet Walker, Couching Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
52. “The Explorer,” Time, April 23, 1956.
53. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 188–89.
54. On Marilyn’s therapy with Anna Freud, see Detlef Berthelsen, La Famille Freud au jour le jour: Souvenirs de Paula Fichtl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 154–60.
55. Eunice Murray and Rose Shade, Marilyn: The Last Months (New York: Pyramid Books, 1975), 39; Jack Wade, “Too Hot to Handle,” Modern Screen, March 1952; James Goode, The Story of the Misfits (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 180.
56. Negulesco, Things I Did, 220; Miller, Timebends, 366; Bernard, Requiem for Marilyn, 24; Van Meter, The Last Good Time, 134.
57. Marilyn Monroe, “What’s Wrong with Sex Appeal?” Movieland, 1952; Sir, October 1956.
58. Bacon, Hollywood Is a Four Letter Town, 148.
59. Mailer, interview with Milton Greene, in Mailer—UT; AS, interview with Billy Travilla, in AS. Once, when she was in her apartment giving telephone interviews, she stripped in the presence of publicist Joe Wolhandler and asked him why he had never made a pass at her.
60. JK, interview with George Hurrell, in Kobal, People Will Talk, 266.
61. Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 55–57; Roberts, in “Mimosa.”
62. Gavin Lambert, ed. On Cukor (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 275–80; AS, interview with Robert Mitchum, in AS.
63. Engelberg and Schneider, DiMaggio, 259; Shaw, The Joy of Marilyn; Wilson, Show Business Laid Bare, 67.
64. Arnold, Marilyn Monroe, 48.
65. Julia Paul, “Too Much Fire,” Motion Picture, March 1953; Morton Miller, “My Moments with Marilyn: P.S. Arthur Was There, Too,” Esquire, June 1959.
66. Dorothy Manning, “The Woman and the Legend,” Photoplay, September 1957.
67. Patricia Vettel-Becker, Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 168.
68. Richard Avedon, May 28, 1958, in SE.
69. Greene and Greene, But That’s Another Story, 164.
70. Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe, 43.
71. Diana Vreeland, with Christopher Hemphill, Allure (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 142; Joe Hyams “Interview with Marilyn Monroe,” American Weekly, December 11, 1960.
72. Samuel L. Leiter, “From Gay to Gei: The Onnagata and the Creation of Kabuki’s Female Characters,” in Leiter, ed., A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 211–29. I am grateful to Jonathan Reynolds, a professor of art history at the University of Southern California and an expert in Japanese art and design, for identifying the wall hanging for me.
73. Peter Conrad, “Beaton in Brilliantia,” in Terence Pepper, Beaton Portraits (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004) 58–75.
74. Cecil Beaton, The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places (New York: John Day, 1957), 183–84.
Written by Lois Banner in "Marilyn - The Passion and the Paradox", Bloomsbury, New York, USA, 2012, excerts chapter 8. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.