Happy Anniversary, Howard Hawks! Marilyn Monroe: Another World's Blonde

Marilyn Monroe - 'Monkey Business' Premiere (Rare footage). "Monkey Business" (1952) is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey Business.

Marilyn seemed at ease on screen in the comedy 'Monkey Business,' her third movie of 1952, but did not get on with the director, Howard Hawks. Physically impressive (like Huston) Hawks was “six-feet-three, broad shouldered, slim-hipped, soft-spoken, confident in manner, conservative in dress, and utterly distinguished overall.” Born in Indiana, the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer, Hawks was educated at Exeter and graduated from Cornell in 1917 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps in World War I, and after the war built airplanes and a racing car that won the Indianapolis 500.

In 1922 he came to Hollywood, where screenwriter Niven Busch found him impressively distant and formidably frigid: “He gave me his reptilian glare. The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners. He was like that with everyone – women, men, whatever. He was remote; he came from outer space. He wore beautiful clothes. He spoke slowly in a deep voice. He looked at you with these frozen eyes.” Marilyn has the decorative but unrewarding role of Charles Coburn’s secretary. In one scene the seventy-five-year-old Coburn “had to chase and squirt Marilyn with a siphon of soda, a moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later explained,was only his indecision about where on Marilyn’s... um... ample proportions to squirt the soda.”

Despite her small part, Marilyn also caused trouble on this picture and forced Hawks to shoot around her when she failed to show up. The problem, as everyone later discovered, was her infected appendix, which she had removed, in late April 1952, as soon as her work was completed. No doctor performing an appendectomy would excise her reproductive organs. The formidable Hawks, mistaking her pain and fear for stupidity, was even more critical than Fritz Lang. Hawks considered Marilyn ‘so goddamn dumb’ that she was wary and afraid of him.

Still, Hawks admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that ‘the camera liked her.’ Cary Grant, like Celeste Holm and many other colleagues, was surprised by her meteoric rise to fame the following year: “I had no idea she would become a big star. If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn’t apparent at the time. She seemed very shy and quiet. There was something sad about her.” To the other actors Marilyn could seem ordinary, unresponsive and apparently “dumb,” but on camera she seemed to glow.

By 1953, against almost impossible odds, Marilyn had achieved the stardom she longed for. Yet her celebrity intensified her insecurity and unhappiness. The novelist Daphne Merkin wrote that Marilyn’s “desperation was implacable in the face of fame, fortune and the love of celebrated men. . . There is never sufficient explanation for the commotion of her soul” – though the reasons can, in fact, be found. Her wretched background, together with the pressures of life as a movie star, created her mental and emotional chaos. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff described it as “an aura of blank remoteness, of being in another world.”

As Howard Hawks remarked, “there wasn’t a real thing about her. Everything was completely unreal.” In Marilyn’s last two films of 1953 she played her typical and most popular incarnation: the gold-digger with a heart of gold. In 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' – based on the book and musical comedy by Anita Loos and directed by Howard Hawks – a dumb blonde and a showgirl, both well endowed, sail to Paris to find rich husbands.

In one scene of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' Marilyn wears a top hat, long black gloves, transparent black stockings, high heels and a gaudy sequined costume cut like a bathing suit. In another, wearing a strapless, floor-length, pink satin gown, with long-sleeved gloves, she steals the show by singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The best lines in the film – “Those girls couldn’t drown. Something about them tells me they couldn’t sink” – were cut by the censor.

'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' had been a 1925 book by the fabulous Anita Loos, which spawned a long-running Broadway adaptation. Hawks was ostensibly making a film version of the play, but the play didn’t have much of a workable plot, so he was rewriting it extensively with Charles Lederer, and the rewrite entailed discarding a fair number of the famous songs from the stage version—a decision which somewhat calls into question the logic of making a movie version of the show in the first place. And if the whole point of the thing seemed to be a justification for 90 minutes worth of breast jokes, Hawks seemed blithely unaware of the sex appeal of his two stars. In one of the strangest things anyone has ever said, Hawks said of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell “I never thought of either of them as having any sex.” They just weren’t his type.

Marilyn made a freeflowing tape for her psychiatrist, with “extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm – in very blunt language.” Emphasizing the crucial paradox in her life, she bitterly said, “I just don’t get out of sex what I hear other women do. Maybe I’m a sexless sex goddess.” It’s sadly ironic that Marilyn herself did not live to see the sexual revolution and suffered greatly for being its symbol. She’d experienced intense sexual pleasure with Jim Dougherty and with Fred Karger in the mid-1940s; but by the 1950s, under the stress of promiscuous sex and stardom, she’d become frigid.

The photographer André de Dienes said that “Marilyn is not sexy at all. She has very little feeling toward sex. She is not sensuous.” The make-up man George Masters frankly called her “an ice-cold cookie, as frigid as forty below zero, and about as passionate as a calculating machine.” The costume designer Billy Travilla, who knew her in the early 1950s, was more sympathetic and felt the need to protect her, but was also disappointed by her inability to respond: “Her lips would tremble. Those lips! And a man can’t fight it. You don’t want that baby to cry. I think she wanted to love, but she could only love herself. She was totally narcissistic.” -"The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller & Marilyn Monroe" (2009) by Jeffrey Meyers