Happy Anniversary, Marilyn Monroe! (new biography by Carl Rollyson)

When Marilyn remained focused, she created an extraordinary range of performances: from the introvert in Bus Stop to the extrovert in The Prince and the Showgirl. Watch just those two films, and you will see why she is a great actress. Each performance is a de novo creation built through a vocabulary of gesture and movement that is inimitable. In her major roles, Marilyn Monroe did not repeat herself.

Primarily because of the skirt-blowing scene, she was treated as having shown more of herself than ever before. The filming of this celebrated scene at 2:30 a.m. on September 10, 1954, in New York City, attracted a crowd variously estimated to have been between one thousand and four thousand people, who watched Monroe’s skirt fly up fifteen times as the scene was rehearsed. DiMaggio had arrived two days earlier and drew the attention of some fans and the press. Amid shouts of “higher” and “hurrah” as the wind-blowing machine puffed his wife’s skirt over her head, DiMaggio retreated in silent anger.

Monroe herself seemed taken aback at the spectacle Billy Wilder had made of her. She is reported to have asked him if he was going to show the more lurid shots to his male cronies. Around 4:00 a.m., Monroe returned to her hotel room. DiMaggio arrived somewhat later. Evidently they quarreled over her night’s work, for “some shouting and scuffling was overheard by other hotel residents nearby, followed by hysterical weeping.” The next day DiMaggio departed for California, and Monroe remained heavily sedated.

When she arrived on the set of The Seven Year Itch, her bruises had to be covered with makeup. Given Monroe’s superb command of Hollywood publicity, it came as a shock a few months later when she announced that she was leaving Twentieth Century-Fox and moving to New York. Almost immediately, however, her move was suspected to be a publicity ploy, and few people seemed to appreciate that she had become so saturated with her own stardom that she felt stymied. Although Monroe would indulge in various kinds of publicity maneuvers for the rest of her career, never again would her life be quite as public as it has been during The Seven Year Itch and her divorce from DiMaggio.

Marilyn celebrating her birthday, 1962 1st June, on the set of Something’s Gotta Give

By the time Something’s Got to Give went into full production on April 23, 1962, the actress was facing a lifetime of failed enthusiasms. Although both Dr. Greenson and Mrs. Murray (acting now as the actress’s housekeeper) believed she was making significant progress, she felt profoundly ambivalent about going back to work. She had not been able to cope well with her buried paranoia, feelings of persecution, frustration, and rage. Before the shooting date, she consulted Nunnally Johnson, who was writing the script, a remake of a 1940 comedy, My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Johnson had worked on How to Marry a Millionaire and We’re Not Married. Her first words to him, “Have you been trapped into this too?” were a fair indication of her distrust of the studio and of her suspicion of any project it might propose. When Cukor began to revise the script, his actions were tantamount to challenging Monroe’s hard won convictions, for this was a script she could believe in.

The revisions were an attack upon her—especially since, according to Johnson, Cukor had similarly sabotaged her performance in Let’s Make Love. And the studio wanted to get a picture out of Monroe as soon as possible, figuring that her reign as sex symbol was about to expire. Walter Bernstein, the last of six writers to work on Something’s Got To Give, recalls that the studio catered to Monroe’s every whim. Once her artistic vision of the film was violated, she reacted like a politician or a general, making sure her power remained intact. “Sometimes she would refer to herself in the third person, like Caesar. ‘Remember you’ve got Marilyn Monroe,’ she said to Bernstein when she wanted to wear a bikini in one scene. Such comments reveal how difficult it was for the actress to jettison her screen personality. -"Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (Revised and Updated)" (2014) by Carl Rollyson