Marilyn Monroe had been featured in previous films, but 1953's Niagara—directed by Henry Hathaway—turned her into an instant icon. It was here that her lasting screen image was firmly established; the platinum blonde locks, the pouty red mouth, the va-va-voom walk that makes you imagine timpani hits with each sashay of her hips. Niagara is a rare Technicolor noir—passing up black and white chiaroscuro for vivid three-strip hyperrealism—and Monroe is its dead-sexy femme fatale, slinking her way through a melodramatic plot that crosses honeymoon camp with murder and mental illness. In February 1953 rumours circulated that Niagara was not doing as well at the box office as it had been hoped. Meanwhile, Marilyn attended the Photoplay Awards dinner, dressed in the gold gown briefly glimpsed in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When she got up to receive her award, the audience yelled and shouted, while Jerry Lewis stood on a table to whistle. On 24 February, Marilyn appeared on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s radio show, performing a short skit entitled ‘So Who Needs Friends’, before picking up another award, this time for the Redbook award for Best Young Box Office Personality.
Although Norma Jeane tried her hand at cooking – baking bread every other day and experimenting on her new relatives – her lack of skills soon became very apparent: she put salt in Jim’s coffee by mistake, and famously cooked carrots and peas just because she liked the colour. Neither Jim nor Norma Jeane knew how to react in an argument, and she once went tearing out of the house in her nightclothes after a fight, only to be followed by a stranger in the street. On another occasion Norma Jeane furiously hit Jim over the head with a trashcan, after he’d criticized the fact that she’d mistakenly fed him raw fish; he was forced to walk the streets until she had calmed down.
Marilyn didn’t make many friends on the set of Monkey Business (1952), and gave off the aura of a lost child who just couldn’t quite fit in. As Cornthwaite remembered: ‘Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant were both professionals and there was no overt behaviour towards Marilyn, but they didn’t particularly welcome her – she had a different level of professionalism. But what held it all together was Howard Hawks because he had such power.’ But not even Hawks could completely control Marilyn’s behaviour on set. She was extremely stubborn, which was her greatest strength but could also be her weakness. ‘Perhaps she couldn’t help her behaviour,’ wonders Bob Cornthwaite. ‘She was so disturbed emotionally and psychologically and just couldn’t help it.’
In May 1961, Marilyn declared to columnist Earl Wilson, ‘I like my freedom; I like to play the field.’ Marilyn lost weight, cut her hair short and bought a wardrobe full of new clothes. ‘I’m very glad to be free again; this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time,’ she told Hedda Hopper. She also upped her social life, too: meeting poet and idol Carl Sandburg; travelling to Palm Springs (where she spent time with Sinatra); then dashing to Las Vegas to see him perform with Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr at the Sands Hotel. Marilyn became something of a mascot for the ‘Rat Pack’, as Sinatra’s posse were labelled. She spent time with Dean Martin and his wife in Newport Harbor; discussed making a film with Sinatra; and surprised herself by happily settling into life in Los Angeles. ‘I’ve never had such a good time ever in Hollywood,’ she confided to Louella Parsons.
‘For the first time in many years I am completely free to do exactly as I please. And this new freedom has made me happier. I want to look for a home to buy here; I think I’ll settle in Beverly Hills.’ This was backed up by make-up artist ‘Whitey’ Snyder, who commented, ‘Since her divorce from Arthur Miller she’s been in her best condition for a long time. She’s happy! I’m amazed at how well she is.’ A difficult relationship was the one she had with Frank Sinatra, which went off the boil one day when Marilyn started retelling him about her childhood. ‘Oh not that again,’ he exclaimed. Marilyn was not pleased by his rebuttal of her woes, and shortly afterwards she surprised friends by refusing to give him copies of photos from a recent boat trip. ‘I’ve already given him enough,’ she told them. Marilyn was a warm-hearted person to people she liked, but she could also be something of a ‘monster’, as she admitted to reporter W. J. Weatherby in June 1961. —"Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed - New edition revised and expanded" (2012) by Michelle Morgan
The difficulty some people have discerning Monroe's intelligence as an actress seems rooted in the ideology of a repressive era, when superfeminine women weren't supposed to be smart. They often fail to see past the sexist cliches she used as armor, satirically and otherwise, fail to notice that she was also positing a utopian view of sex, one that was relatively guilt free and blissfully pleasure oriented. Marilyn Monroe wanted to get away from her movie stardom. She managed it for a while, though not without a cadre of protective men. Hedda Rosten viewed After the Fall as “a betrayal of Marilyn.” Arthur Miller reverted to his puritanical view of sex. “It isn’t my love you want any more,” he tells Maggie (Marilyn): “It’s my destruction!” In 1951, Miller had guessed that Marilyn Monroe posed a threat to his existence; in 1964, he knew it. In a curious way, it is precisely American society’s Puritan roots that account for Marilyn’s enduring appeal. In the middle of all that, the vivid image of Marilyn Monroe sends out a contrary message; its power is in proportion to the depth of our own fears. As a symbol, she promises us that sex can be innocent, without danger. That, indeed, may not be the truth, but it continues to be what we wish. And that is why Marilyn remains, even now, the symbol of our secret desires. —"Marilyn Monroe" (2010) by Barbara Leaming
Marilyn's Miss Lois Laurel character from Howard Hawks' Monkey Business seems somehow inspired by comedian Marie Wilson who in turn was reminiscent of the zany Gracie Allen. Unlike Allen, Marie Wilson was a knockout--with high cheekbones, a wide slash of a mouth and a figure that wouldn't quit. Lois Laurel is a slinky blonde, who has little or no competence as a secretary. "Show business has been very good to me and I'm not complaining," admitted Marie Wilson, "but some day I just wish someone would offer me a different kind of role. My closest friends admit that whenever they tell someone they know me they have to convince them that I'm really not dumb. To tell you the truth I think people are disappointed that I'm not."
Hal Wallis used the production of My Friend Irma (1949) to launch Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis' film careers. It was a cinch that Martin would be cast as Jane’s romantic interest. More difficult to cast was Martin’s partner, Jerry Lewis, whose spastic slapstick style didn’t really fit any character from the original radio show—in fact, Lewis’ stage persona was truly unique. The radio series of My Friend Irma did have another male lead—Irma’s con-artist boyfriend, Al—and Jerry got it into his head that he could fill the role. Lewis ended up begging Wallis to cast him as Al—a part which was totally against his established stage persona: a kind of a simple minded, chaos causing kid brother to Martin. Wallis eventually did have the director, the veteran George Marshall, test Jerry for Al. There were nine screen tests and acting lessons but Wallis remained unsure. He asked Cy Howard to create a new character, a sidekick for Dean with plenty of physical business and verbal foolishness cut from the cloth of Lewis’s stage persona.
Lewis apparently put an ultimatum to Wallis—he plays Al or else he wouldn’t do the film. Wallis didn’t take the bait and told Lewis that Dean would make his film debut and Jerry wouldn’t. The enormously popular “My Friend Irma” radio show, created by Cy Howard, to which Wallis had bought screen rights, was a situation comedy about a daffy working girl (Marie Wilson's Irma), her best friend Jane, and their misadventures in postwar Manhattan. Wilson delighted people with her dumb misapprehensions and foolish assumptions. Wallis thought that surely the same people who went for Wilson’s dumb blonde act would go for Jerry's. “Marie and I did the test scene,” Lewis recalled, “She was cute, she was bubbly—but she was 32 years old to my 22, ten years that really made a difference. And I, having never acted before, was trying hard to pretend to be someone (a sharpie) I profoundly was not.” So Lewis's character was rewritten for the film version as Seymour, Martin's sidekick, who is almost as big of a dumbbell as Irma. Al has a scheme to make the Martin character into a star and moves the boys into Irma and Jane’s apartment to plan their future.
“Jerry Lewis is such a nice guy,” Marie Wilson told a columnist. “He won’t steal a scene behind your back. Steals it right in front of you. But I love the boy.” Lewis was also fascinated by the filmmaking process and was constantly shadowing director George Marshall. In retrospect, it’s an interesting battle for Lewis to have fought. He was, after all, to play Seymour, or roles like it, throughout the flush of his career. Yet he began that era refusing to make a film in exactly the guise that had already brought him stage fame. He would never again shun the character so fully, though he would spend years trying to find nuances in it—primarily a level of pathos. Still, this moment of hesitation reveals just how ambivalent Lewis was about his public face.
As Jerry gained greater control over his career, he would increasingly refer to his character in the third person—“The Kid,” “The Nine-Year-Old,” “The Idiot”—and would reveal in public a sober, sententious demeanor that didn’t so much erase the infantile image as weirdly underscore it. The sight of him out of character was received as an affront. Indeed, it wasn’t until he began doing his muscular dystrophy telethons in 1965 that the public swallowed him in the role of a grown-up. By then, of course, his film career was effectively over, and it was too late for him to re-create himself for the screen. Indeed, with the pain in his neck so severe and his dependency on Percodan, Norodin, and Valium increasing, he was barely under control. “He did not act himself,” said ex-wife Patti. “He was irritable and impatient. At times, the kids, who used to be excited about making signs to welcome him home, fled when he pulled into the driveway.”
In December 1965 Paramount released Boeing Boeing to disheartening notices in the press; though almost every reviewer praised Jerry for his relative restraint as Tony Curtis’s straight man, it didn’t matter—nobody was watching. In February 1966, when Cahiers du cinéma published a special issue devoted to Jerry’s work, he was already in production on his first film for Twentieth Century–Fox. Way… Way Out, written by William Bowers (nominated for two writing Oscars), who’d been producing screenplays since the 1940s. Gordon Douglas, a personal favorite of Frank Sinatra, was the director. For Tony Curtis, the shooting of Boeing Boeing was quite uncomfortable, due to Jerry's mania at dealing with some scenes. Surprisingly, Jerry's Lewis character Robert is also the one who articulates the feminist response in the film, namely “what do the girls get out of this set up?” The script goes a long way towards mitigating the sexism overload by making everyone fallible and annoying, including the stewardesses (if they were perfect, you’d rightly feel sorry for them), and considering this is 1965, by eliminating all of the implied sex completely.
“I’ve got to feed my family,” Jerry told a reporter explaining why he always kept himself so busy. “I’ve had to keep going. I’ve got to make product.” His latest product—dubbed The Big Mouth in classic Lewis fashion—took him to film at Mission Bay, near San Diego. The Big Mouth was the only film that Jerry both wrote and directed while at Columbia, yet in ways it seems less like a Jerry Lewis film than anything else he ever did. For one thing, it parodies a specific movie genre, the spy film, and has a linear (if shoddily assembled) plot. For another, Jerry’s chief character, Gerald Clamson, is not too comic—and not, like Christopher Pride in Three on a Couch or Willard the chauffeur in The Family Jewels, because he’s the starting-off point for a series of comic characters, but because in comparison he’s mildly debilitated in contrast to almost every other protagonist in a typical Jerry Lewis production. Susan Bay reads her lines as if they were random strings of words. Indeed, given Jerry’s own torpor in the vaguely comic role of Gerald Clamson, the film takes on an almost documentary air: Watching the two costars working together at a hotel in San Diego and calling each other “Gerry” and “Suzie,” you get the voyeuristic sense that you’re watching filmed rehearsals.
Janet Leigh, playing the female lead as Jerry’s romantic interest in Three on a Couch (1966), is a psychiatrist specialized in the romantic traumas of young women. Much had changed since the days when Janet was making silly movies in Jerry’s Pacific Palisades backyard: She and Tony Curtis had divorced in 1962, she’d married stockbroker Bob Brandt later that very year and she’d been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her famous role in Psycho. Socially, she hadn’t seen much of Jerry since she and Curtis had felt choked out of his circle. In fact, she’d become close with Dean and Jeanne Martin. Janet was particularly impressed at how Jerry had evolved as a filmmaker. “He had matured and grown so,” she recalled. “He was one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. I’m not saying the best director, but he’s definitely at the top. It was the first time I’d ever seen an instant replay used on the set. And it was wonderful—you didn’t get the full scope, but you could see if the scene worked or not, so you would know whether to do it again.”
Janet praised the bonhomie on Jerry’s set, enjoying the atmosphere so much, in fact, that she led the crew and extras in a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” when Jerry arrived for lunch. Three on a Couch is certainly a more conventionally mature comedy than anything Jerry made at Paramount, with none of the anarchic flavor of his earlier work. One reason that it ends up being among his most satisfying films (aside from having one of the most uniquely organized uses of color cinematography in his body of work—contrasting Chris’s apartment’s panoply of combinations and patterns with the monochromatic psychotherapeutic lights in Elizabeth’s office), is its tendency to find a cosmic relationship between utter chaos and insistent stasis. If Three on a Couch is Lewis’s approximation of the mid-sixties sex comedy, it is also his critique and overcoming of it, his correction of Boeing Boeing. Chris, too, remains a Lewisian innocent – a more mature one for whom sexuality is no longer innocent and who thus must make a conscious choice to maintain his innocence. Source: sensesofcinema.com
The ‘60s sex comedy fused classical threads with high fashion and liberated postwar decadence. You could blame Marilyn Monroe for standing over that subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. You could blame Billy Wilder, who updated Lubitschian naughtiness for audiences of the era of beat poets and jazz. Or you could simply blame the Germans for producing Max Ophüls, the man responsible for the original postmodern love roundelay, 1951’s La Ronde. Marilyn, remarked Jerry Lewis, used sex like he used humor, to make an emotional connection: ‘She needed that contact to be sure it was real.’ In an interview with Larry King in 2003, Jeanne Carmen denied that Jerry Lewis had actually dated Marilyn. Jeanne assured King that Jerry was constantly joking (from her experience, he was a consummate jokester) and that it was also possibly his way of undercutting the role of the Kennedy brothers in relation with Marilyn (hence his quip about how she couldn't have been dating John Kennedy because she was with Jerry!). Probably Marilyn would have benefitted from a few love sessions with Jerry, especially after her divorce from Miller, when she started spiralling down an emotional abyss. A mistake was surrounding herself with the likes of Sinatra or Peter Lawford when Lewis was much more of a friendly listener and lots of fun to boot.
Michael Stern from Bright Lights Film wrote: “Listed in critical ledgers as either a sanctimonious retardate or an inspired genius—or both—Jerry Lewis is clearly and self-consciously extraordinary. But somewhere between the infant-fool and the towering renaissance film-man is the notion of Jerry Lewis the average guy. And central to an understanding of his work is the myth that threads its way through his films with Frank Tashlin in the mid-1950s, and is developed with parabolic dynamism in his first five self-directed films, from The Bellboy through The Patsy. That is the myth of the ordinary man in an extraordinary world—of Jerome Levitch in Hollywood.”
Miguel Marías in The Disappearance of Jerry Lewis, and Some Side-Effects writes: “One of the sad events that marked the sudden decay of the American cinema during the 1960s was first the slow-down, and then the cessation of activity by Jerry Lewis, the ‘total filmmaker.’ His absence went unnoticed by most – his rare partisans hoping for his return, his far more numerous enemies welcoming his defeated silence. It is not so strange that he had to pay the price for such a breach of the unwritten commandments of American filmmaking.” Charlie Largent suggests that “Lewis’s formidable successes and inevitable failures might best be understood through the lens of his acrimonious bust-up with Dean; once that rocket ship fell to earth he simply brushed himself off and replaced the easy-going crooner with the movie-going public. That so many in the audience would react as did Dean didn’t seem to faze him, in Jerry’s mind he probably felt like he gave too much. In some respects, perhaps he did.” Source: www.lolajournal.com
The Columbia executives were beginning to look at Jerry the way their counterparts at Paramount had: With his hands in producing, writing, directing, and acting, they felt he was becoming less and less marketable. Boeing Boeing, Three on a Couch, and Way… Way Out hadn’t clicked with the adult audience to which they were pitched. Jerry was struggling to keep up with his metamorphosis, and his bosses at Columbia and NBC didn’t want him to experiment. They didn’t even want him to direct. When Jerry set to work on his next Columbia film, a marital comedy entitled Hook, Line, and Sinker, he was forced to hire a director, even though he was producing the film. He went and hired George Marshall—the seventy-eight-year-old director of My Friend Irma. Jerry had many champions among the fraternity of French film critics, ranging from converts like François Truffaut to wild-eyed enthusiasts like Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote, “Jerry Lewis is the only American director who has made progressive comedic films,” adding that Jerry “was much better than Chaplin and Keaton.” —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy
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