"The Delicate Delinquent": Essential Jerry Lewis

“I’ll face the unknown, I’ll build a world of my own,” sings Sydney Pythias (Jerry Lewis) in The Delicate Delinquent (1957). This film, the first that Jerry Lewis made withouth Dean Martin, is an important, although largely neglected film in the Jerry Lewis canon—Leonard Maltin called it “an agreeable blend of sentiment and slapstick”—yet an appreciation of it does speak directly to what Gerald Mast called “The Problem of Jerry Lewis,” that is, “whether he should be taken seriously.” For The Delicate Delinquent, Lewis hired Don McGuire, a writer who had just directed his first film Johnny Concho (1956), starring Frank Sinatra. Lacking the stylistic influence of a strong director like Frank Tashlin or Norman Taurog, The Delicate Delinquent inevitably reveals much of its aspiring auteur, Jerry Lewis. In the story, a nebbishy apprentice janitor (Jerry Lewis) is mistaken for a young hoodlum by the cops, and a do-good patrolman (Darren McGavin) decides to take him under his wing and reform him. Jerry resists McGavin’s help at first, but pretty soon he wants to become a cop. 

The slim plot serves as a pretext for the redemptive value of niceness that would constitute an essential aspect of the Lewisian vision in later films. As Dana Polan noted in Being And Nuttiness: Jerry Lewis and the French (1984): “There are two Jerry Lewises—the Id (short for Idiot but also suggesting the roots of comic idiocy in a primal unreason) and Jerry Lewis the Serious Man.” One of the reasons Lewis’s films were not so well regarded in North America is because The Idiot is simultaneously silly and sentimental—although, for the French, Lewis’s life and films “appear to combine the contradictory sides of America.” At the same time as Lewis’s Sydney is The Idiot, he is also an idiot savant, the wisest character in the film. Even as Sydney is silly enough to become involved in the scientist’s crackpot plan to evacuate all of Earth’s frogs in tiny spaceships with little toilets, he frequently drops pearls of moral wisdom, like a Shakespearean fool. For example, despite his tongue-tied embarrassment in the presence of his neighbor Patricia (Mary Webster), Sydney’s love interest, he articulately explains his shyness to her by observing, “You got to find out what you are before you can know what you want to be.”

Sydney confesses to Damon: “When I was a boy, I was jerky. And now, now I’m a man. And I’m empty.” In other words, Sydney is grown physically but not psychically. Damon says in defense of Sydney as a police candidate to the captain (Horace McMahon), “He’s honest, he’s got guts, and he’s a decent human being.” And as the film moves toward its climax, Sydney becomes “something,” now capable of standing up to Monk (Robert Ivers): when the cops scuffle with the boys in the alley, Sydney is shown exchanging punches blow for blow. A close-up at the end of the fight shows a dribble of blood at the side of Sydney’s mouth, his red badge of masculine courage. And Sydney’s conception of this better life (“There’s an awful lot of nice people in the world, Monk, and I just wanna be one of them”) marks him as the type of homo americanus that William H. Whyte Jr. had defined in the bestseller “The Organization Man” (1956).

The last scene shows Sydney in his new police uniform, embracing a suddenly proud Patricia, who describes him as “tall and handsome” and “respectable.” The Delicate Delinquent overlays the generic codes of the newly emergent family genre in postwar American cinema on the similarly emerging auteur Jerry Lewis, belonging to what Richard Staehling describes as “the fantasy sociology of the 1950s.” Raymond Durgnat cites two main themes in Lewis’s films, both of which are fully apparent in The Delicate Delinquent: “Jerry’s desperate attempts to live up to his own ideals of ‘benevolent toughness,’ and his equally desperate search to find, be worthy of, and be accepted by a loving world.” Perhaps these two versions of youth in the 1950s, the delicate and the delinquent, represent what Scott Bukatman sees as the juvenile and virile sides of Jerry Lewis’s personality, respectively.

Within the larger generic landscape, The Delicate Delinquent occupies a contradictory position. It is a movie in the venerable tradition of the postwar social problem film such as Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Pinky (1949), filtered through Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause (both 1955) which present juvenile delinquency as a social problem. On the other hand, it is a comedy. Treating serious issues with humor is always a difficult aesthetic balancing act, so given its confusing mixture of tones it is no surprise that contemporary reviews of The Delicate Delinquent described the film as confusing, “neither fish nor fowl.” The film is Lewis’s attempt at making socially conscious comedy in the tradition of Charles Chaplin. At the conclusion of his musical number “By Myself,” Sydney moves two garbage cans from one side of the door to the other, a visual metaphor for the burden of his woes in the world. And when Monk confesses the truth about Artie’s gunshot wound in the climax, he explains that there “ain’t no reason for Sydney not to climb out of the garbage.” From scene to scene, The Delicate Delinquent veers between slapstick and social significance, just as Lewis lurches from stupid to smart. Where one scene is funny, the next is serious. The film’s very tone and style pull in two different directions, mirroring the tension within Sydney.

Beginning with shots of a city street complete with expressionist shadows and pools of water on the pavement, the film starts as film noir. Along with these images, jazzy percussion rises in volume on the soundtrack, the staccato rhythms connoting bohemianism, urban culture, and decadence. But when the delinquents begin to appear, their actions are expressionistic, stylized, like the gangster choreography of “The Girl Hunt Ballet” in The Band Wagon (1953). When three of the youths confront three others in the alley, they take out their weapons sequentially—first chain, then knife, then brass knuckles—with dramatic flair and in perfect time with nondiegetic musical accents. I wouldn’t agree that The Delicate Delinquent is “a minor work of American neorealism, a forgotten cousin of On the Waterfront (1954) or Marty (1955).” Lewis’s character challenges the typical representation of masculinity—here, delinquent adolescent masculinity—suggesting it is less monolithic than performative. 

Just as Sydney—as he himself tells Patricia—is a torn man, a nobody who wants to be a somebody, so Lewis is torn between the comic and the social critic in The Delicate Delinquent. Gerald Mast argues in The Comic Mind (1973) that his problem with Lewis is that he “contrives gags—many of them good ones. But the gags do not flow from any personal center.” But such a criticism is true only if we measure Lewis’s characters by realist criteria. Lewis’s films might more accurately be called “incoherent texts” by Robin Wood in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (1999). For Wood, in certain fragmented films the fragmentation “becomes a structuring principle, resulting in works that reveal themselves as perfectly coherent once one has mastered their rules.” Jerry Lewis’s films, with all their inconsistencies of narrative, mise-en-scène, and style, speak to the difficulties of maintaining the kind of masculine ego ideal typically constructed by Hollywood movies and reveal it as constructed, rather than natural. Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema (1968), argues there is no “essential unity” to Jerry Lewis's personality. But as The Delicate Delinquent demonstrates, it is precisely this disunity (lack of unity) that is fundamental to Lewis’s vision—at war with itself—which is fully representative of Lewis’s cinema, built as it is on a number of tensions between auteur and genre. It is these tensions that reveal the ongoing attempt by “Jerry Lewis” to negotiate his place in “the world,” the Symbolic Order. Because of and not despite these tensions, The Delicate Delinquent emerges as an essential Jerry Lewis film.

As Frank Krutnik put it his critical analysis Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000), “American film and television reviewers routinely vilified his work before he even directed his first film.” There is indeed a smorgasbord of vilification laid out for Mr. Jerry Lewis, notwithstanding an important fact that Jean-Pierre Coursodon once emphasized: "Lewis was the only Hollywood comedian to rise from mere performer to “total filmmaker” during the sound era. The uniqueness of this achievement alone deserved sympathetic attention rather than the hostility or indifference it met with." Frank Krutnik identifies the Martin-Lewis split in 1956 as the origin of the sentimental dimension of the Lewis persona, and Lewis’s solo films, beginning with The Delicate Delinquent, do evince a pronounced sentimentality. Lewis himself has said, “At heart I really belong to the old school which believed that screen comedy is essentially a combination of situation, sadness and gracious humility.” As Krutnik astutely notes, some of the Martin and Lewis films feature a put-upon Jerry who commands our sympathy. Over the years, critics have sometimes found Lewis’s comic routines curiously disheartening, suggesting an implicit understanding of how humor can serve as a displacement for feelings that are more akin to hostility and despair. 

In his review of The Stooge for the New York Times in October 1953, Bosley Crowther described the film as “oddly depressing.” In 1961, in the Los Angeles Mirror, Al Capp described how he accidentally wandered into a movie theater showing The Ladies Man and he couldn’t stand the film, explaining: “It was painful: I felt it had been somehow indecent of me to peek at a grown man making an embarrassing, unentertaining fool of himself.” “It may well leave you in a state of depression,” read the Newsweek review of Hardly Working (1981), while the critic for Time magazine wrote of Lewis’s performance in the same film that “the only emotion he arouses is pity.” One of Jerry Lewis’s earliest forays into professional entertainment was with something known in the biz as a “dummy act,” in which he performed “outrageous mimes to phonographic records.” According to John Philip Sousa: “The phonograph is an extension and amplification of the voice that may well have diminished individual vocal activity.” Lewis’s dummy act looks like a significant example of the Sousa doctrine: the performer appears as an automaton whose movements and behavior are determined by the prerecorded status of the phonograph record. 

In You’re Never Too Young (1955), Jerry's character lipsynchs to a record by Dean Martin: in this ventriloquist act, an act of condensation, Dean is the voice, Jerry the dummy. This determinism is nowhere clearer than in the inevitable breakdown of phonographic technology as the record player winds down or the record skips or the wrong record is played. In The Patsy (1964), the staff of a dead comedian decide that they should use their combined talents to create a new star; their new “patsy” (Jerry) will be, in other words, programmed. Frank Krutnik describes one of the scenes when their big-hearted ex-bellboy patsy performs their material: “Stumbling onto the stage, he knocks the microphone off its stand and then proceeds to decimate the polished routines that have been taught to him. Stanley presents a spectacle of maladjustment.” Even the dummy act, perhaps a metaphor for this entire performance of middle-management ventriloquism, goes awry. Perhaps the performer of this dummy act is no dummy but a dialogic subject possessed of a new kind of self.

Jerry Lewis’s speech is characterized by free association, syncopated rhythms, and more than slightly Tourettic set of neologistically extended lines—a speech both smoothly improvised and stutteringly stuck. Like a ventriloquist, Lewis has multiple voices—his Donald Duck–like squawk, his high-pitched nasal drone, and the sober voice of the “adult Jerry Lewis.” Moved to laugh or not, we can see something startling and suggestive, even profound in some of his films. “Jerry” frequently seems intemperate and therefore asocial, even mortifying. He is strident, dysfunctional, uncoordinated, inarticulate, hyperactive (while at the same time paralyzed, as Scott Bukatman noted). Ed Sikov suggested that Lewis served postwar U.S. culture as “a jester in a court of sexual panic.” According to Andrew Sarris, “Martin and Lewis at their best had a marvelous tension between them. The great thing about them was their incomparable incompatibility, the persistent sexual hostility.” The appeal of Martin and Lewis was not a result of their closeness and cohesion but of the differences between them.

Jerry Lewis said, speaking to Cahiers du Cinéma in 1966: “One can talk about society, but in fact absolutely everyone is excluded.” In The Nutty Professor (1963) Julius Kelp says to Stella Purdy, “Whatever you see [in Buddy Love] is very well buried. Perhaps he chooses to keep the inner man locked up so no one steps on him.” A principal concern in the film, then, is the disentangling of the appealing, positive excitement but also the hurtful dominance that Buddy Love represents. One logic dictates that Kelp would learn positive excitement, confidence, and assertiveness from the “unleashing” of the Buddy Love within him, while retaining his gentle, kind demeanor to counter the hurtful dominance. But the film contradicts its own narrative trajectory. In the scene where Buddy Love transforms into Kelp in front of the college faculty and students, he says that the lesson he learned was to be himself—his insecure, submissive, but gentle self. —Sources: Shtick Meets Teenpic in The Delicate Delinquent (2000) by Barry Keith Grant and The Inner Man: Transformations of Masculinity in The Nutty Professor (2000) by Peter Lehman & Susan Hunt

Rose Marie, Jerry Lewis, Lou Reed

A new study in Evolutionary Psychological Science found that men were more likely to think of an opposite-sex friend as “a member of the opposite sex to whom I am attracted and would pursue given the opportunity” while women were more likely to think of them as simply “a friend of the opposite sex.” New research from the University of Guelph and Nipissing University shows that people who help others are more desirable to the opposite sex, have more sexual partners and more frequent sex. The study was published recently in the British Journal of Psychology. "This study is the first to show that altruism may translate into real mating success in Western populations, that altruists have more mates than non-altruists," said Pat Barclay, a psychology professor who worked on the study with lead author Prof. Steven Arnocky from Nipissing. Arnocky added: "It appears that altruism evolved in our species, in part, because it serves as a signal of other underlying desirable qualities, which helps individuals reproduce." However, "it's a more effective signal for men than for women," Barclay said. The study found that while altruism is a desirable quality among both genders, it affects men's lifetime dating and sex partners more than women's. "Also, given the importance we place on attractiveness, resources and intelligence, it would be worthwhile to explore how individuals 'trade-off' altruism against other desirable qualities," Arnocky said. Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Rose Marie "left them laughing" (and applauding) for nine decades, having traversed through every 20th century entertainment medium that ever was, as a singer and brilliant comedienne. With "The Dick Van Dyke Show," she was part of the cast of one of the most iconic television shows of the 1960s and what's more, she played a lady TV writer who held her own with the boys, thus, planting the seed in the minds of viewers, that girls could grow up to have interesting and creative jobs too! She professes to still go over her act in her head, since at age 94, she isn't booking tours anymore...

WAIT FOR YOUR LAUGH tells the story of the longest active career in entertainment, but it also looks at what it was like to be a female performer in the 20th century (she has opinions on the casting couch mentality), to work through periods of extreme personal heartbreak and it also casts an eye on how Rose Marie and her fellow nonagenarians Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner and Peter Marshall, still have the drive to create today. The film contains amazing behind-the-scenes color footage from Rose Marie's personal collection, chronicling what went on backstage on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and other sets.

Far more than just sassy Sally Rogers on "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and the top center square on "Hollywood Squares," Rose Marie worked in every facet of showbiz. She was "the darling of the airwaves" at the age of four and went on to work in vaudeville, Vegas, Broadway, movies, television, theatre, concert halls and nightclubs. Along the way she was known as "the kid" by the mob. Though unlikely to reach nearly as broad an audience, this film will be warmly received by the TCM crowd. Sounding a bit like that network's late, beloved host Robert Osborne, narrator Peter Marshall (host of long-running game show The Hollywood Squares) begins with what will be news to most viewers younger than, say, 75: Before Shirley Temple was even born, Rose Marie was a comparable child-star sensation, touring the country singing with a grown-up voice under the moniker Baby Rose Marie. Belting tunes out in a style like that of "Last of the Red Hot Mamas" Sophie Tucker, she was a hit on the radio, with listeners demanding to see her in person to prove she was actually a child. It didn't hurt that she was adorable, with bobbed dark hair and easy poise.

As far as her personal life goes, Wise is most interested in her apparently blissful marriage to Bobby Guy, a stout trumpeter who was a standout in Bing Crosby's band. Vintage film and photos of the two capture a truly charming couple, but Guy contracted an unexplained blood disease and died in 1964. Even today, Rose Marie weeps when she tells the story. Her friends include the best show business has to offer: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Johnny Mercer, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Margaret Whiting and Bing Crosby to name a few!! Unbeknownst to fans, the woman always looking for a man was actually married for almost 20 years to the love of her life, Bobby Guy, one of the best trumpeters in the business. His untimely passing and its impact on "the one who makes you laugh" is recounted by her friends Peter Marshall, Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, and Tim Conway. Source: www.broadwayworld.com

Morey Amsterdam, Rose Marie's costar in The Dick Van Dyke Show, phoned Jerry Lewis to inform about Bobby Guy's doctor prognosis. Rose Marie got on the phone and Lewis was very supporting, not trusting the diagnosis of cancer of the liver given to his husband. Lewis sent his personal doctor Marvin Levy to the hospital in Santa Monica Boulevard and asked Rose Marie if she needed money. Jerry said: 'If you need money and don't tell me, I'll never talk to you again.' Rose Marie, appreciating his kind gesture, started to cry and thanked her friend. Dr. Levy examined Rose Marie's husband and made arrangements to move him to Cedars Sinai hospital, where Jerry Lewis called and visited Bobby frequently. Dr. Levy figured it was an overpowering blood infection. Lewis kept in touch daily with Dr. Levy and asked him to get in touch with all the specialists in the country, offering to pay for all the bills. Finally, Levy operated Bobby Guy, removing his spleen, but he couldn't save him. 

"Jerry Lewis was an angel to me. Loved him & will never forget what he did for me during one of the worst times in my life. RIP, Love Roe," tweeted Rose Marie when Jerry Lewis died. "A lot of people only saw the ego & harshness that he used as a defense to push people away due to his fears," replied one of her followers. "I hear people talk ill of Jerry. I don't care what anyone says to me. I will never forget his kindness and thoughtfulness at the most horrible time of my life. I will be grateful to him forever. He is truly one of my special angels," she had written previously in her memoir Hold the Roses (2003).

"I’d never been what you’d call a ladies’ man—all the more so since I had married at 18," Jerry Lewis wrote in his autobiography. Esther Calonico had been married to singer/band leader Jimmy DiPalma (Jimmy Palmer) in the early 1940s. Esther entered into a singing career using the stage name Patti Palmer. A fledgling comedian (Jerry Lewis), who was working the East Coast Vaudeville circuit with his "record mime" act, met the divorcee Patti in 1944; and after a short romance, they got married. In September 1980, thirty-six years after they first met in Detroit, Patti filed for divorce in California Superior Court, asking for $450,000 a year in alimony, custody of and support for sixteen-year-old Joseph, and half of their community property. These demands would have been hard enough for Jerry to meet, but he was also facing a mid-October trial date in Los Angeles Federal Court stemming from bankruptcy. His entire life’s earnings were in jeopardy. His checking account just contained $140,000. 

Patti claimed she had written her book I Laffed Till I Cried to help support herself. But there was clearly a measure of revenge involved; the book may even have begun after Patti heard the news that Jerry and SanDee had adopted a baby girl. Jerry never said a word about the book in public. And Patti determinedly tried to maintain an air of dignity. Publishers Weekly reviewed I Laffed Till I Cried in 1993, calling it "this shapeless script, presumably a history of Patti's marriage to Jerry Lewis, provides too few details of the story promised." In 1983 Patti Lewis was forced to put the Bel Air house on the market. Asking $7.5 million for a house in less than pristine condition, she had to wait nearly three years before she sold it, afterward buying a smaller home in nearby Westwood and filling it with the mementoes she and Jerry had accumulated on St. Cloud Drive. Patti Lewis lives now in an assisted living facility, and has occasional visits from family members. 

Americans had never seen a grown man behave this way before. Jerry Lewis created a number of comic masterpieces, most notably The Nutty Professor and The Patsy. Even his worst films have their moments of redeeming comic brilliance. No wonder then that Jerry has influenced the very shape of modern comedy. Comedians from Robin Williams to Woody Allen to that vile epigone Jim Carrey have drawn inspiration from the free-form id-driven comic style Lewis created. By his late 20s, despite a nasty split with Martin, Lewis was the most popular entertainer in America. Twenty years later, he was a ridiculed has-been. Lewis accused Martin of being aloof. Dean Martin saw Jerry Lewis sometimes as a hostile guy with a big temper. But Lewis was a brilliant talent, an immense humanitarian, a difficult boss/interview, and a quixotic sort of genius, as often inspired as insipid, as often tender as caustic. The scrim of individual identity keeps the essential Jerry at an impassable distance. —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

During his early years in Syracuse, Lou Reed's mannerisms came from his idols Dion, James Dean, Jerry Lewis, and Lenny Bruce. 'Who else but Lou Reed,' Lester Bangs wrote for Creem magazine in 1975, 'would look like a bizarre crossbread of Jerry Lewis and a monkey on cantharides?' Born Lewis Allan Reed on March 2, 1942, at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, Lou Reed's problems began with his complicated and antagonistic relationship towards his parents, Sidney Joseph and Toby Reed. Sidney was a smart ambitious accountant, and Toby a housewife whose beauty was remarked upon by all who knew her. She had been chosen “Queen of the Stenographers” at one of the many local beauty pageants in New York at that time. Her photo ran in the Brooklyn Eagle, and she was crowned queen at the Stenographers Ball held at the Manhattan Center. Sidney Reed was an opinionated man who despised organized religion. He was something of a loner, and the family did not have many close friends. And when Sidney Reed was offered the job of treasurer at Cellu-Craft, a Long Island firm that, in the true spirit of The Graduate, manufactured plastics, it seemed as if the Reeds were finally getting their shot at the American dream. So in 1952, the Reed family moved to Freeport, Long Island. The Reeds’ home was an undistinguished three-bedroom ranch-style house at 35 Oakfield Avenue. Reed’s gay posturing in his parents’ and others’ presence was a defiant, conscious provocation, and, along with his mood swings and general recalcitrance, it elicited a crushing response. 

Allan Hyman described Reed’s affect during and immediately after the electroshock treatments. “When I saw him during the holidays, he was very withdrawn,” he said. “He was never a friendly, outgoing type, but he was totally hostile and more sarcastic than ever. He was dark. He had always had this rebellious side to him, but that was kind of comical. It was fun. Now he had a nasty edge to him that he had never had before. Very cynical.” Lou Reed's first girlfriend Shelley Albin said about his sexuality: "I think by nature he was more driven to women because of his relationship with his mother. That’s what he thought was normal. It was comfortable.” Reed, Shelley said, was “a romantic. He could be very sweet. He’s probably the only person who ever literally gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day. But he wasn’t happy unless he made somebody more miserable than he was. Misery made for his best work, whether it came from me or somebody else. He wasn’t anybody I wanted to live with and put up with. It wasn’t worth it. It was too much grief.” As for his reputation as a sexual player, that, too, was something of an image. “I got the impression that he never really had a girlfriend in high school,” she said. “I think he put on an aura later of being a ladies’ man. Hardly at all. That didn’t fit with the guy I met. He didn’t do as much in college as he pretended later. I met him after he’d been at college for a year. He was awkward. Boys I went out with in high school were smoother.” 

What drew her to Reed was his sensibility. “I liked his brain,” Shelley said. “We could talk for hours and hours, days and days. We connected. He was an incredible romantic. So we connected on that level. It was very much a creative-mind thing. I was crazy about him. He was a great kisser and well coordinated. His appeal was of a very sexy boy/man. Lou was very insecure, and he needed a nurturer. Like many men are, Lou was basically looking for a replacement for his mother with a little sex thrown in.”  Lou's deep, passionate love of doo-wop and that kind of adolescent swept-away-on-the-wings-of-love, it was a very essential emotion for him. But he definitely enjoyed getting under particularly his father's skin—he was acting out almost in performative terms. There was an incredible level of fear of abandonment and terror and that's what motivated his violence—coming out of a kind of desperation, it was less about hostility than about a kind of self-hatred and fear. As Lester Bangs wrote: "I never met a hero I didn´t like. But then, I never met a hero. But then, maybe I wasn´t looking for one."

At the time of its release, the box set Between Thought and Expression (1992) did not make much of an impression, either commercially or critically. Before the release of the box set, Reed had delivered a book of his lyrics, titled Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. Published by Hyperion in 1991, perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is its dedication: “For Sid, Toby, Bunny / And most of all / For Sylvia.” Including his family in a book devoted to his most prized vision of himself—that is, as a writer—suggests an ongoing effort on Reed’s part to come to terms with his upbringing and his past. Bill Bentley, who handled Reed’s publicity at Sire, accompanied him to a book signing for Between Thought and Expression at Book Soup in Los Angeles. “Lou built a real toughness around himself,” Bentley said. “He would be polite, sign everything. He could be rude but he wasn’t a hard person. At that signing, one lady said, ‘My sister had cancer, and Magic and Loss really got me through it.’ Lou would never show a whole lot. But afterwards he went into a private room in the back of the store, and just sat down, fell into Sylvia’s arms, and started to weep. That image has always stuck with me. He’d been so touched by what people said. These were his words: 'I’ll never forget that.' I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘That’s a Lou Reed that very few people have ever seen.’ I would always think of that when another side of him would come out. It made me really appreciate the depth of his feeling for other people. Lou Reed was no fool.” —Sources: "Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story" (2014) by Steve Bockris and Fresh Air Podcast (NPR Music) by Terry Gross

Jerry Lewis: “I do comedic shtick, but the French call it Art." In The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (1979), film historian Gerald Mast explained: "Where American critics and audiences see Jerry Lewis as banal, for the European critic, Lewis's comic strength is the comically accurate depiction of the American mentality, its brash overzealousness." During the disastrous production of the Broadway show “Hellzapoppin” (1976) wich teamed unsucessfully Jerry Lewis with Lynn Redgrave, several backstagers were witnesses of how often Jerry Lewis displayed symptoms of profound exhaustion and grief, being seen while weeping openly at least fifty times offstage. The “Hellzapoppin” stage play was modeled on the 1941 film version directed by H.C. Potter, following the story written by the comedy team of John Olsen & Harold Johnson about a millionaire pretending to be poor so a girl will love him for himself. Kevin Kelly wrote in the Boston Globe in 1977, “The evening’s beckoning, wide open, gap tooth smile finally is revealed as a mock tic paralyzed in place,” commenting on the disconnection of Jerry Lewis from his audience. As Victor Hugo pondered in his novel The Man Who Laughs (1889) of Gwynplaine whose mouth has been mutilated into a perpetual grin, “What a weight for the shoulders of a man, an everlasting laugh!” —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

Marilyn Monroe & The Kennedys

With the recent release of the long sought-after JFK documents, there’s been a renewed interest in all things related to the 35th president. Few things of the Kennedy era are more recognizable than the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she serenaded him with her sultry “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” The dress has remained out of the public’s view for most of the time since that night in 1962. That all changed last year when Orlando-based Ripley’s Entertainment purchased the dress and other items from the birthday gala. The dress sold for a whopping $4.8 million – with the auction fees, it clocked in at over $5 million, making it the most expensive dress ever sold. The Jean Louis-designed, champagne-colored dress has over 2,500 crystals and 6,000 rhinestones hand-sewn on it. “This is the most famous item of clothing in 20th-century culture,” says Ripley's VP of Exhibits and Archives, Edward Meyer, who is responsible for acquiring items for Ripley’s for nearly four decades, including the dress. “It has the significance of Marilyn, of JFK, and of American politics.” Ripley’s Orlando Odditorium will also screen Marilyn Monroe films on select Saturdays throughout December. The exhibit is scheduled to remain in Orlando through the end of the year. Source: www.orlandoweekly.com

“One of the bright spots in Ladies of Chorus (1948) is Miss Monroe’s singing,” wrote critic Tibor Krekes. “She is pretty and, with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise”—hardly a rave, but nevertheless a gratifying first review that did not alter Harry Cohn’s decision. His major star was Rita Hayworth, just as Fox had Betty Grable and MGM had Lana Turner; none of them was listening to Harry Lipton or Lucille Ryman when they spoke of a potentially sensational new movie star named Marilyn Monroe with unusual qualities. “Under Marilyn’s baby-doll, kitten exterior, she was tough and shrewd and calculating,” was Lucille’s assessment. ‘Hollywood will never forgive me—not for leaving, not for fighting the system—but for winning, which I’m going to do,’ Marilyn told Susan Strasberg. 

At a New Year’s Eve party given by producer Sam Spiegel, in 1948, Marilyn had been introduced to Johnny Hyde, executive vice-president of the William Morris Agency and one of Hollywood’s most powerful representatives. Hyde was besotted and prevailed on Marilyn to accompany him on a short vacation to Palm Springs, where he spoke of her career prospects. Johnny Hyde was desperately in love. Despite Johnny Hyde’s strong recommendation of her to MGM, production chief Dore Schary did not offer a deal for more work. His excuse was that the studio had Lana Turner under contract and therefore no need of a rival blonde; to colleagues like Lucille Ryman Carroll, he expressed a quaint moral outrage at the Hyde-Monroe affair. Ladies of the Chorus was already a forgotten second feature, and The Asphalt Jungle, despite some critical acclaim, was too bleak to win much popular favor.

When not studying with her drama coach Natasha Lytess, Marilyn posed for pinups in evening gowns or swimsuits, scoured the trade dailies and was seen in the movie colony’s dinner-party circuit with Johnny, with whom life became increasingly difficult as his health became ever more fragile. Despite this, he refused to limit himself, escorting Marilyn to an endless round of social and corporate events, presenting her proudly as valuable and available talent. More poignantly, Johnny also wanted Marilyn known around town as his fiancée, the desirable young woman he still hoped to marry. Fearful of displeasing or alienating her, Johnny acted the nervous, benighted lover, taking action perilous in his condition: he was often breathless and in pain after trying to satisfy what he presumed were her sexual needs. Johnny Hyde had no opportunity to resolve with Marilyn the tension that underlay his unrequited love, and she had no chance to express her gratitude. “I don’t know that any man ever loved me so much,” she said in 1955. “Every guy I’d known seemed to want only one thing from me. Johnny wanted to marry me, but I just couldn’t do it. Even when he was angry with me for refusing, I knew he never stopped loving me, never stopped working for me.”

A passionate love affair between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy has been assumed for so long that it has achieved as solid a place in public awareness as almost any other event in the man’s presidency. All that can be known for certain is that on four occasions between October 1961 and August 1962, the president and the actress met, and that during one of those meetings they telephoned one of Marilyn’s friends from a bedroom; soon after, Marilyn confided this one sexual encounter to her closest confidants, making clear that it was the extent of their involvement. In October 1961, after a photography session for a magazine, Marilyn asked Allan Snyder to deliver her to a party at Patricia and Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house. The occasion was a dinner party honoring President Kennedy, and among the other guests were several blond movie stars—Kim Novak, Janet Leigh and Angie Dickinson, for all of whom the president had a keen appreciation. All contrary allegations notwithstanding, this was the first meeting between Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy; hearsay about any earlier introduction simply cannot be substantiated. The schedules of Monroe and Kennedy since his January 1961 inauguration reveal wide geographic distances between them. That October night, Marilyn was driven back to her apartment by one of the Lawfords’ staff.

The second encounter occurred during February 1962, when Marilyn was again invited to a dinner party for the president, this time at the Manhattan home of Fifi Fell, the wealthy socialite widow of a famous industrialist. She was escorted to the Fell residence by Milton Ebbins. The third meeting occurred on Saturday, March 24, 1962, when both the president and Marilyn were houseguests of Bing Crosby in Palm Springs. On that occasion, she telephoned Ralph Roberts from the bedroom she was sharing with Kennedy. “She asked me about the solus muscle,” according to Roberts, “which she knew something about from the book The Thinking Body, and she had obviously been talking about this with the president, who was known to have all sorts of ailments, muscle and back trouble.” That night in March was the only time of her “affair” with JFK. “A great many people thought, after that weekend, that there was more to it. But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that,” said Roberts. Accounts of a more enduring affair with John Kennedy, stretching anywhere from a year to a decade, owe to fanciful supermarket journalists and tales told by those eager for quick cash or quicker notoriety: those who fail to check the facts of history and are thus easily dispatched as reliable sources.

“Marilyn liked [President Kennedy] the man as well as the office,” according to Sidney Skolsky, among the first friends to be informed of the March tryst; he added that she also enjoyed the fantasy that this experience carried—“the little orphan waif indulging in free love with the leader of the free world.” And as she soon after told Earl Wilson, Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts, she found John Kennedy amusing, pleasant, interesting and enjoyable company, not to say immensely flattering. As for Mrs. Kennedy, as Skolsky added, “Marilyn did not regard her with envy or animosity.”  The posthumous revelations of Kennedy’s philandering revealed the impossibility, for obvious reasons, of pursuing any serious romance with one woman. The exaggeration of his “affair” with Marilyn is part of the myth of King Arthur’s Camelot. There was a need to believe in the tradition of courtly intrigues and infidelities—Lancelot and Guinevere, Charles II and Nell Gwynn, Edward VII and Lily Langtry. But in this case there was but one rendezvous between the attractive, princely president and the reigning movie queen; to follow the Arthurian simile: the mists of Avalon are easily dispersed by shining reality’s clear light onto the scene. It is important to establish definitively the truth of this matter not only for the sake of historical accuracy but also because of a far more damaging rumor that began after Marilyn Monroe’s death. 

The unfounded and scurrilous accounts of a concomitant or subsequent sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy, has been even more persistent than that of the presidential liaison. It has also led to the completely groundless assertion of a link between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn’s death—a connection so outrageous as to be hilarious were it not also injurious to the man’s reputation. The rumors of an affair with Robert Kennedy are based on the simple fact that he met Marilyn Monroe four times, as their schedules during 1961 and 1962 reveal, complementing the testimony of Edwin Guthman, Kennedy’s closest associate during this time. But Robert Kennedy probably never shared a bed with Marilyn Monroe. Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and journalist, was Special Assistant for Public Information in the Kennedy administration as well as senior press officer for the Justice Department. The travel logs of the attorney general’s schedule for 1961–62 (preserved in the John F. Kennedy Library and in the National Archives) support the detailed accounts provided by Guthman. These, collectively, attest to the fact that Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe enjoyed a socially polite relationship—four meetings and several phone calls over a period of less than ten months. But their respective whereabouts during this time made anything else impossible—even had they both been inclined to a dalliance, which is itself far from the truth on both counts.

Marilyn’s first meeting with Robert Kennedy occurred several weeks before her introduction to the president. “On either October 2 or 3, 1961,” said Guthman: “Kennedy and I were attending a series of meetings with United States attorneys and members of the FBI in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The attorney general and I attended a dinner party at the Lawfords, and around midnight Marilyn decided to go home. But she had drunk too much champagne, and we were worried for her. Bobby and I would not let her drive her car, and we did so together, delivering her safely to her door.” The second meeting between the attorney general and Marilyn occurred on Wednesday evening, February 1, 1962, when he and his entourage dined at the Lawfords en route from Washington to the Far East on a diplomatic journey. “That evening,” according to Guthman, “Marilyn was quite sober—a terrifically nice person, really—fun to talk with, warm and interested in serious issues.” Pat Newcomb, also present at the dinner, remembered that Marilyn really cared about learning. The day before [the dinner party], Marilyn told me, “I want to be in touch, Pat—I want to really know what’s going on in the country. She was especially concerned about civil rights. She had a list of questions prepared. When the press reported that Bobby was talking to her more than anyone else, that’s what they meant. I saw the questions and I knew what they were talking about. She identified with all the people who were denied civil rights.” —Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (ekindle, 2014) by Donald Spoto

Lana Turner & Marilyn Monroe: Magnetic and Disturbing Creations of the Star System

After Lana Turner's first years in the star machine, a personal transformation took place. The lovely young girl became a glamour queen, wise to the world, even cynical. She became the kind of woman whom men most desired, dangerous in a thrilling way, but safe and companionable, too. In Lana Turner the public found what they like best in a movie star: ambivalence, a mysterious mixture of good and bad. Her image was undeniably one of glamour, satin, furs, and diamonds, but it was sitting on a drugstore stool. She was the perfumed boudoir, but also the ice cream parlor. She was glamorous, but also girlish. She was a tigress, but also a kitten. Turner’s childhood was every bit as unstable and deprived as Marilyn Monroe’s, but unlike Monroe, Turner elected not to make it an issue. There was once a myth that you could attend Hollywood High School, get discovered and become a movie star. Lana Turner was the girl who turned that myth into reality. Billy Wilkerson from The Hollywood Reporter, then 47, discovered Lana Turner in early 1937, who had skipped typing class to have a Coke with friends at the nearby Top Hat Malt Shop. That this happened at Schwab's Pharmacy is persistent fiction. 

Wilkerson saw Turner, a self-possessed 16-year-old, and told the cafe manager that he'd like to speak with her. Turner was suspicious, agreeing only reluctantly. A meeting with Turner and her mother was arranged at Wilkerson's office and, just like that, a star was born. By 1938, Lana Turner was making movies with Mervyn LeRoy under a $100-per-week contract ($1,700 today). Mervyn LeRoy actually was a mentor to her: He was a good person, highly respected in the film industry, and he protected and guided the unskilled girl. His decency and experience ensured Lana's future. LeRoy himself directed her early steps through the star machine process. First, her name had to be changed. Turner was okay, but Julia Jean Mildred Frances wasn’t going to cut it on marquees. When LeRoy was lured away from Warner Bros. by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1938, he asked if he could take Lana Turner with him and Jack Warner told him to go ahead. 

Since MGM couldn’t control Lana Turner or her bad publicity—and since the public obviously ate it up and wanted more of her—the studio just let it happen. The combination of her private life's peccadilloes, and her role as a temptress in The Postman Always Rings Twice pushed Turner over the top. It was now 1946. Lana Turner had been a star since 1941. Whenever the movies wanted to invoke a symbol for their own particular brand of sex appeal, it was Lana Turner’s name that was used. She is mentioned in Cairo (1942), Lucky Jordan (1942), Meet the People (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945), and even Tom and Jerry cartoons. In Goldwyn’s Wonder Man (1945), a girl on a park bench justifies her looks by saying, “Some people think I look like Lana Turner.” In Without Reservations (1946), directed by her old mentor, Mervyn LeRoy, for RKO, her name is mentioned so often it’s as if she had stock in the picture. (“Lana Turner?” says a character. “That’s a glandular attraction.”) This popularity made Turner a national treasure during World War II. A young GI wrote to his mother that “somehow it is better to be fighting for Lana Turner than it is to be fighting the Greater Reich.” It was a sentiment even the Germans could understand. President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited her to his annual birthday ball, and when she left early to go dancing elsewhere, he was heard to sigh, “I wish I were going along.” 

Magnetic and disturbing, Lan Turner had become a powerful image. An undercurrent of violence and recklessness (which seemed fatally linked to her sex appeal) became more overt. By now MGM realized fully that Lana Turner was not simply a product of their system. She was “Lana,” a name that despite her popularity never caught on as a name for babies. What sensible mother wanted a “Lana” on her hands? Turner was no role model. This was a part of her movie star development that hadn’t been fully envisioned by the studio bosses. Lana Turner had become a household name, which wasn’t itself unusual for a movie star, but she was a household name associated with questionable offscreen behavior, and a complicated personal life. Audiences wrote in to complain about her “morality.” MGM solved this problem by casting her as a villainess. As a change of pace, she played Milady deWinter in a lavish costume drama based on Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1948). Turner does full justice to the juicy role of a truly evil woman. (“Beware of strange men, dark roads, and lonely places. That woman will destroy you.”) Except for her brief appearance in DuBarry Was a Lady, The Three Musketeers was her first Technicolor film. 

In 1951, Lana Turner was named the most "glamorous woman in the history of international art" and the next year she was excellent in The Bad and the Beautiful. For once, a glamorous movie star is played by one. She understands the role, and she makes it hers. Yet she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, and MGM refused to reconsider her potential. It was the moment for her—if recognized as the actress she might have become, things could have changed. But no. Despite her success in The Bad and the Beautiful, MGM persisted in its plan to make Turner into a musical comedy star and lighten her image. After the Stompanato trial, not only was Lana Turner’s private life in a mess but her professional life was also up for grabs. Time magazine referred to her as a “wanton,” describing her sex life as a men’s room conversation “everywhere from Sunset Boulevard to Fleet Street.” Her love letters to Johnny Stompanato (pitifully childish) were published in the papers. 

As she aged, the pain of these years was seldom mentioned by her, but near the end of her life, she commented, “Whoever started the idea that we [stars] are public property? We give the public performances, glamour, and a dream. But we are all human beings, and we should have moments that are our own. If I were just an ordinary working girl and someone asked me some of the questions I’ve been asked, I’d say, ‘Get lost, Buster!’ But I just take a deep breath and try to answer. I resent stupid questions, but I can’t do anything about the Lana Turner image. I’ve lived with it too long.” Ironically, about the time she was breaking down on movie screens all over America, she was breaking down in real life. Fascinated movie audiences felt they were experiencing her private anguish, reenacted for their benefit. The last years of Turner’s stardom, from 1957 to 1976, illustrate what is left to a female movie queen who is aging and locked into roles that reflect her own life after the system that built her, nourished her, supported her, and defined her, throws her out—and then itself collapses and disappears. Her offscreen life, or what people thought it was, became the only role she was allowed to play.

She was indeed “bigger than life.” At the end of her life, Lana Turner had figured out and accepted the realities of her goldfish bowl life: “When a small-town girl makes a mistake, her family covers up for her. But me, nobody covers up for me.” She realized that this was a price she had to pay for stardom: “We are unconscious of what Hollywood may do to us. At the same time, it is unfair to blame this on Hollywood.” She was always known to be vulnerable: “Why do people want to hurt me? I can’t understand it.” She kept that softness because she was a kind person basically, but she finally worked out her own private rules to live by: “Never look back is my philosophy. What’s past is past, and I can’t let it destroy me.” She never whined to the press about how tough things were when she was young. It was inevitable that a girl with Turner’s looks wasn’t going to stay poor and unknown. She had to end up jeweled and gowned. She wasn’t found down and out in Bellevue. She didn’t kill herself, and she ended up a wealthy legend.

Comparing Turner to other female movie legends—Elizabeth Taylor, for instance—it is clear that where Taylor was spoiled and dependent on men, Turner was spoiled and independent of them. Although totally feminine, Lana Turner was one of the first film stars to openly take the male prerogative for herself. She was less a slave to sex than she was its master. Originally, Metro thought Turner might inherit Joan Crawford’s roles. Like Crawford, Turner had behind her the escapist daydreaming of a lonely and poverty-stricken little girl. But she was smarter than everyone thought she was, because she outlived the star system by making her dream image into a real image. In April 1975, the Town Hall in New York invited her to appear on their stage in person to discuss her career in a series called “Legendary Ladies,” featuring Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Myrna Loy. No one knew exactly what would happen; nobody thought she was a Davis or Crawford. But the evening was a sellout. She was introduced as “star of screen, radio, television, and stage.” A packed audience quivered in anticipation, and when she walked out onto the stage, dressed all in white, she received a prolonged, thunderous standing ovation. 

Once asked what she would like to be remembered for, Lana Turner said, “I just want to be remembered as a sensitive woman who tried to do her job, that’s all… I would like to think that in some small way I have helped preserve the glamour and the beauty and the mystery of the movie industry.” As her career had rocketed during the early 1940s, Lana Turner was managed by Johnny Hyde, ‘a dear friend for years’ according to Lana's daughter Cheryl Crane. In 1949, Hyde met Marilyn in Palm Springs, and was instantly smitten, taking her on as a client. Lana Turner was a significant influence on the young Marilyn Monroe. In her stunning pictorial biography, Lana: The Memories, the Myths, the Movies, co-written with Cindy De La Hoz (author of Marilyn Monroe: Platinum Fox), Lana’s daughter Cheryl Crane states that her mother ‘thought Marilyn Monroe was a fine actress besides being a fascinating personality’. 

Studios ran strings of types successfully, discarding each one in turn as she lost popularity. Anita Page led to Alice Faye who led to Betty Grable who led to June Haver who led to Sheree North who led to Marilyn Monroe. These women were not cookie cutters—each has her own distinctive quality—but they’re all sexy blondes who can sing and dance. Betty Grable didn’t drop out as Fox’s leading musical blonde until 1955, and June Haver had already succeeded as her official replacement. Haver’s own replacement, Sheree North, was being developed at the same time, but, most important of all, a dark horse, an unexpected blond champion, arrived out of left field and claimed Fox’s publicity machine as her own. Her name was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn skyrocketed to spectacular fame, and she was one of the last—if not actually the last—truly big female star to be “built up” by the star machine the old-fashioned way. During the years 1951 to 1953, she began to appear in bit parts, and then moved on to big-budget movies and magazine covers.

Allegedly, Marilyn Monroe came out of nowhere, but that “nowhere” was the usual time of development and growth, in her case a four-year apprenticeship in bit parts and walk-ons. In 1950, Marilyn appeared in Right Cross, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle. In Right Cross she’s sitting in the background of a fancy restaurant/bar, playing a girl Dick Powell has just decided to stand up. It was her two small speaking roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve that caused everyone to notice her. David Thomson adds, “Gossip would not have been slow to provide the means by which she negotiated the executive office.” There is anecdotical evidence of the casting couch during her initial career, due to Marilyn's chronic sense of insecurity. Fox, experienced at grooming successful sexy blond stars, chose to pull Marilyn Monroe out of the ranks and give her everything they had in the buildup, even though some of her directors really didn’t see her as all that unusual. 

Fritz Lang, who directed her in 1952’s Clash by Night, said, “She was a peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty—I wouldn’t say ‘star allure’—but she knew exactly her impact on men.” The stories of Barbara Lawrence and Marilyn Monroe illustrate the vagaries of stardom malfunction. Monroe was unique, but she, too, could have gotten lost in the system as her early movies illustrate. The star machine did its work for both women, but Monroe could bring something to her moments that Lawrence, as talented as she was, could not. The audience knew the difference, and once the machine polished up Monroe and set her up as proper bait, the audience bit and Monroe took it from there. But Monroe had no impact on audiences the way Debbie Reynolds in her “Abba Dabba Honeymoon” number in Two Weeks with Love (1950) did. No one went “oooh” or applauded or left the theatre in awe. I saw and heard a lot of audiences during the years 1948 to 1958, and Marilyn Monroe didn’t reach them the way she touched people after her death. Her still photographs had flesh impact in a way her moving image did not. Her movie image was strangely enlivened by her death, made dimensional by offscreen facts. 

Manohla Dargis: "Once, we created gods and goddesses in our image, idealized visions of our most perfect selves. In time, our gods started to descend, mumbling with Method-actor sincerity about how they wanted to join us on Earth. We welcomed them initially, but after a while we grew to resent them and hold them in contempt. We still love them, but we hate them too, because now the mirror image they hold up is irreparably cracked." As the studio system began its slow collapse during the 1950s, it took a while for Hollywood to grasp what was happening. By the end of the 1960s, most moviemakers realized that “movie star” magic was losing credibility. In 1960, the names on the list, in the order of popularity, were Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Sandra Dee, Jerry Lewis, William Holden, Tony Curtis, and Elvis Presley. With the exception of Presley, who became a movie star because he was a rock music phenomenon, every name on the list was developed by the studio system. By 1970, however, the number of great movie star personalities developed by Hollywood’s star machine begins to wane. Paul Newman, John Wayne, and Jack Lemmon are on the list—but the other seven names reflect change: Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Walter Matthau-two Broadway actors who weren’t traditional handsome leading men-; and Robert Redford, the only new glamour boy in the group. The last two names on the list are Lee Marvin and Elliott Gould. As the old system collapsed, and censorship lessened, films became more and more violent. —"The Star Machine" (2007) by Jeanine Basinger

Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon

Based on new interviews and research, Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon (2018) reveals how Marilyn Monroe's childhood contributed to her struggle with bi-polar disorder, and impacted her career and personal life. Marilyn was a complex woman, bewitching and maddening, brilliant yet flawed. Charles Casillo studies Monroe’s life through the context of her times―in the days before feminism. This biography exposes how―in spite of her fractured psyche―Marilyn managed to transform each celebrated love affair and each tragedy into another step in her journey towards immortality. Just a few of Casillo's revelations: *Despite reports of their bitter rivalry, Elizabeth Taylor secretly called Marilyn when she was fired from her last film to offer moral and financial support. *Film of a rumored nude love scene with Clark Gable was said to have been destroyed―but an exclusive interview reveals that it still exists. *A meticulously detailed account of the events of her last day, revealing how a series of miscommunications and misjudgments contributed to her death. Source: www.amazon.com

A collection of rare pictures of Marilyn Monroe has emerged, including this never-before-seen photograph she sent to Arthur Miller along with the caption 'I know when I'm not there for you.' Margaret Barrett, Director of Entertainment Memorabilia, said: 'It's not the classic, sexy movie star look she's known for, she is in a white shirt with a collar, you can't see any skin but her face. She's completely covered up with a regular dress shirt with buttons and long sleeve with subtle make-up and an odd expression. It's the picture of a regular woman - you rarely see Marilyn like that. You see her as the famous movie star. Maybe it's telling of what Arthur wanted, the regular woman on his desk, not the public perception. She wrote a message on the glass frame to Arthur where she knew he would see it. Who knows what that means? Maybe he felt she wasn't there for him, maybe was he that needy, who can guess?' The auction, which will take place in Dallas next week, also features images of Marilyn entertaining the troops during the Korean War. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Marilyn Monroe’s struggle was to reconcile her two identities: Norma Jean, the apple-cheeked girl next door, and Marilyn Monroe, the droopy-eyed Aphrodite. Marilyn: Intimate Exposures (2011) by Susan Bernard, is a stunning collection of images that track Norma Jean’s transformation into Marilyn. In early, rarely seen glamour photographs by Bruno Bernard, you see a 20-year-old Norma Jean with an eager smile and wide eyes, doing pin-up poses with a very un-pinup expression. Bernard’s photos were used as the covers of the pre-teen pulp series “Teenage Diary Secrets” and Laff magazine (a mix between Mad magazine and Playboy), as well as in print advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Later Bernard photographed her on movie sets, snapping the immortal subway-grate photo from The Seven Year Itch. Voluptuous and soft-voiced, the Marilyn we know exemplified 1950s femininity. Yet she mocked it with her wiggling walk, jiggling breasts, and puckered mouth. There were many Marilyns, not just one. “Marilyn Monroe,” her most famous alter ego, was one among many. As a pin-up model early in her career she posed for her era’s most famous pin-up photo—a nude that became the centerfold for the first issue of Playboy in December 1953. By mid-career she created a new glamour look that combined the allure of the pin-up with the aloof, mature sensuality of a glamour star. —"Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox" (2012) by Lois Banner

In 1954 and 1955, the number one identified health problem in the United States was ‘emotional disease.’ In 1954, 150,000 adults entered mental hospitals and 700,000 mental patients received hospital care (in comparison, physical disorders accounted for only 600,000 patients). That same year, over a billion dollars was spent for the care of people diagnosed as mentally ill. In 1955, the year minor tranquillizers first became available outside of hospitals, 75 per cent of patients were being treated in hospital settings, over half a million people, compared to 150,000 in 1980. And although the wide availability of tranquillizers meant that hospital stays decreased by the late 1950s, there were still over a quarter of a million people employed in the industry, and hospitals continued into the late 1950s to report staff shortages. Over half of the patients in these hospitals were women, the majority married. —"Small Screen, Big Ideas" (2002) by Janet Thumim

As Robert D Putnam identified in his seminal essay, Bowling Alone, lower participation rates in organisations such as unions had reduced person to person contacts and civil interaction. World War II occasioned a massive outpouring of patriotism and collective solidarity. At war’s end those energies were redirected into community life. The two decades following 1945 witnessed one of the most vital periods of community involvement in American history. By the late 1950s, however, this burst of community involvement began to tail off. The Clinton-era was a period of financial deregulation, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark reform passed during the Depression, as well as legislation exempting credit default swaps from regulation. Economically, this period saw the continuation of what's been called the "Great Divergence" which produced stark inequalities in wealth and income. Between 1979 and 2007, household income in the top 1% grew by 275% compared to just 18% growth in the bottom fifth of households. Disruptive technologies changed the workplace and upended the labour market. Between 1990 and 2007, automation and globalisation killed off up to 670,000 US manufacturing jobs alone. The internet and social media, trumpeted initially as the ultimate tool for bringing people together, actually became a forum for cynicism, division and various outlandish conspiracy theories. America became more atomised. The opioid crisis can be traced back to the early 1990s with the over-prescription of powerful painkillers. 

Between 1991 and 2011, painkiller prescriptions tripled. Rather than the compulsive togetherness ascribed to the classic suburbs of the 1950s, when ethnographer M. P. Baumgartner lived in a suburban New Jersey community in the 1980s, she found a culture of atomized isolation and “moral minimalism.” Far from seeking small-town connectedness, suburbanites kept to themselves, asking little of their neighbors and expecting little in return. “The suburb is the last word in privatization, perhaps even its lethal consummation,” argue urbanist architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “and it spells the end of authentic civic life.” As sociologist Robert Sampson states: “Lack of social capital is one of the primary features of socially disorganized communities.” The best evidence available on changing levels of neighborhood connectedness suggests that most Americans are less embedded in their neighborhood than they were a generation ago. Indeed, the decline in neighborhood social capital—community monitoring, socializing, mentoring, and organizing—is one important feature of the inner-city crisis, in addition to purely economic factors. Elijah Anderson, an urban ethnographer who studied the inner-city of Philadelphia, has documented a steady erosion in the “moral cohesion” of low-income neighborhoods. —"Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" (2001) by Robert D. Putnam