King Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Breathless

Elvis had just returned from doing military service in Germany and was back in Hollywood working on his next movie, GI Blues. While overseas Elvis had met and fallen for Priscilla Beaulieu but fidelity was never the superstar's strong suit. He was also officially dating 22-year-old starlet Anita Wood at the same time. The King was even visited by the actual princesses Margrethe of Denmark, and Margaretha of Sweden on set that summer, but it was an alleged encounter with the reigning queen of the silver screen that remains speculated about to this day. According to Hollywood agent Byron Raphael, it all started when Elvis' representatives at the William Morris Agency were keen to send him and Marilyn on some high-profile public dates for publicity – but she said no. Byron said that he had kept the details secret for fifty years, but finally told Playboy and then the New York Post all the details in 2006: "He was very embarrassed but I think she turned him down because she felt it was too public, but Presley didn't give up and secretly set up a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. The agent claimed that when it was all over, Elvis called a cab for Marilyn. "A few days later when I mentioned Marilyn to Elvis, he said, 'She's a nice gal, but she's too much for me.'" Elvis was certainly very attracted to the sexually confident Ann-Margret, with whom Elvis had a long affair after starring together in Viva Las Vegas. Marilyn, conversely, was drawn to older, powerful men, like Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, and President John F Kennedy. —King Elvis: The Untold Stories Of Elvis Presley (2022) by Nicholas Spielberg 

A Rip-off with Genius: Marilyn's  mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn’t take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack—as if she died between wolf calls. She seemed to have become a camp siren; her comedy was self-satire—conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnambulism; Garbo was often a little out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of the time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn’t wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe’s slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. For Norman Mailer, she was “a proud, inviolate artist, a sex angel,” and he suggests that “one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.” 

Arthur Miller had split her mystique into The Misfits and After the Fall, and since each was only a side of her, neither was believable. Marilyn Monroe might have “grown” as an actress but she would have died as a star. The pity is that she didn’t get more of the entertaining roles that were in her range; she might have been right for Sweet Charity or for Lord Love a Duck or Born Yesterday or a remake of the Harlow comedy Bombshell. She might have had a triumph in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and she probably could have toned down for Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment and maybe even Bonnie and Clyde. In his caping for Marilyn, Norman Mailer is supremely cruel to Arthur Miller, who was left devastated after her death. “Instead of jetting from New York to the funeral to get my picture taken, I decided to stay home and let the public mourners finish the mockering ritual. I loved her so much. Not that everyone there will be false, but enough. Many of them there destroyed her, ladies and gentlemen. Now you stand there weeping and gawking at this lovely girl who you at last killed.” —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2016) 

What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the young hood with his loose random grace and the impervious American girl seem so remote. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it. The heroine, who has literary interests, quotes Wild Palms, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” But that’s just an attitude she likes at that moment; at the end she demonstrates that it’s false. Michel states the truth for them both: “I’d choose nothing.” The European critic, Louis Marcorelles, describes their world as “total immorality, lived skin-deep.” And possibly because we Americans are used to live among just such people, the film may not, at first, seem quite so startling as it is. And that’s what’s frightening about Breathless: not only are the characters familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values. 

Despite the unrest and anarchy in the moral atmosphere, Michel is as romantic as Pépé Le Moko and as true to love (and his death scene is just as operatic and satisfying). He’s honest and likable, though socially classifiable as a psychopath; she’s a psychopath, too, but the non-classifiable sort—socially acceptable but a sad, affectless doll. Patricia seems to be playing at existence, at a career, at “love”; she’s “trying them on.” But she doesn’t want to be bothered; when her lover becomes an inconvenience, she turns him in to the police. Shot down and dying, the young man gallantly tries to amuse her, and then looks up at her and remarks—without judgment or reproach, but rather, descriptively, as a grudging compliment: “You really are a bitch.” 

And in her flat, little-girl voice, she says, “I don’t know what the word means.” If she does know, she doesn’t care to see how it applies to her, and it wouldn’t bother her much anyway. The codes of love and loyalty depend on stronger emotions than her idle attachment to this lover—one among many. They depend on emotions, and she is innocent of them. An updated version of the betraying blondes who destroyed so many movie gangsters, she is innocent even of guilt. As Jean Seberg plays her—and that’s exquisitely—Patricia is the most terrifyingly simple muse-goddess-bitch of modern movies. Next to her, the scheming Barbara Stanwyck of Double Indemnity is as archaic as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. Godard's film was dedicated to Monogram Pictures—who were, of course, the producers of cheap American gangster-chase movies. Breathless was made for $90,000. —Deeper Into Movies: Film Writings (1969-1972) by Pauline Kael