The orphaned core of Paul Newman

'Success is what determines the difference between vision and irresponsibility. If I had to define “Newman” in the dictionary, I’d say: “One who tries too hard.”' —Paul Newman

After he made “Winning,” in 1969, a movie about a race-car driver, for which he was paid 1.1 million dollars, Paul Newman took up auto racing, and he got very good at it. He is in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest person to win a professionally sanctioned race—the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona. He was seventy. He attributed his success as a driver, too, to persistence. Although Paul Newman made it onto Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” a point of pride. But socially he was, in many respects, a square. He once described himself as “an emotional Republican.” His insecurity goes all the way back to childhood. “I got no emotional support from anyone,” he said. He distrusted his mother and believed that his father thought he was a loser. (His father died in 1950, before Newman had had any professional recognition.) He told Stern that, as a teen-ager, he was a “lightweight.” “I wasn’t naturally anything,” he said. “I wasn’t a lover. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a leader.” He became involved in theatre at Kenyon College, which he attended after being discharged from the Navy, but he claimed that he “never enjoyed acting, never enjoyed going out there and doing it. . . I never regarded my performances as real successes; they were just something that was done, nothing more important than someone working hard and getting an A in political science.” He said essentially the same thing about his early acting career in New York: “I never had a sense of talent because I was always a follower, following someone else with stuff that I basically interpreted and did not really create.” 

Newman got into acting, he claimed, to avoid having to take over the family business. “I was running away from something. I wasn’t running towards.” Newman attributed some of his success as an actor to luck—the death of James Dean in a car crash opened up some big roles for him—and the rest to perseverance. He thought that performing came much more easily to other people—for example, to his wife. Acting is like sex, she once said. You should do it, not talk about it. “I was a failure as an adulterer,” Newman told Stern. It’s not clear what counts as a success in that field. The affair with Joanne made him wretched, and it lasted in secret for five years. Only an extra-marital affair is known, with a minor Hollywood actress turned journalist named Nancy Bacon. It supposedly began while he was making “Butch Cassidy,” seems to have gone on for a year, and got into the tabloids. You won’t find it mentioned in the book, and the funny thing is that Newman still admits he was unfaithful to Jackie at the Actors Studio (before hooking up with Joanne Woodward). 

The movie camera loved Paul Newman as it has loved few other leading men, and he made a career out of underacting—just as the actor he was often compared to starting out, Marlon Brando, made a career out of overacting. Newman was part of the generation of male Hollywood stars who replaced Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant—a generation that included Redford, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, and Sidney Poitier. Along with a fresh crop of screenwriters, directors, and producers, they built the New Hollywood on the ruins of the old studio system. At the Actors Studio, students workshopped scenes, which were then critiqued by Strasberg or by the director Elia Kazan. Newman said that, after getting ripped apart for one of his performances, he mostly observed. He discovered, he said, that he was “primarily a cerebral actor.” He had to calculate, not emote, because he felt blocked off from his own emotions. He believed that he did not have an inner well of feeling to draw on. What this meant, though, was that he was an Adlerian. 

Due to his Method training, Newman needed to understand a character in order to play him. That was the Method that worked for him. Many actors in the New Hollywood were trained by Adler or by Strasberg: Karl Malden, Julie Harris, Warren Beatty, Montgomery Clift, Patricia Neal, Eli Wallach, Rod Steiger, Cloris Leachman... And Brando, though he trained with Adler, dropped in on Actors Studio workshops. It’s hard to credit Newman’s claim that when he entered the Actors Studio he realized that he was emotionally “anesthetized.” He felt passion (for Joanne); he felt guilt (about Jackie); he felt rejection (by his parents). “There is a line of sadness that permeates so much of his early adulthood,” David Rosenthal said. “This is a guy who is not comfortable in his own skin, and who was very obsessive about things that went wrong.” Even so, Newman himself seemed to believe there were limits on how much he could truly reveal to other people. As he says in the book, whether audiences believed he was Hud or Fast Eddie or Butch Cassidy, that was all just “The damage for me has come when I’ve realized what people were clamoring for was not me. It was characters invented by writers. It was the wit and ability of the authors, the wit and ability of the people who did the exploitation and selling, that had the appeal. What the public was demanding in no way resembled the decoration, let alone the orphan. Do people think that I’m William Faulkner’s Ben Quick? Or Butch Cassidy? Or Frank Galvin in The Verdict? Or any of the other parts I’ve played? It's just a shell that’s photographed onscreen, chased by the fans and garnering all the glory. While whoever is really inside me, the orphaned core, stays unexplored, uncomfortable and unknown.”

“Smiling for the cameras is a smile that doesn’t come from anywhere except a command; there’s no mirth in it. When Joanne and I have been at Cannes, for example, walking up this flight of stairs with a 15-foot-wide red carpet and having that music from Star Wars or whatever the hell it is at decibels that fry your eardrums. Between the bathroom and the breakfast room, every day when you come down from your shower, you could start your day with the f-cking fanfares and flashbulbs going off. The dichotomy is that it is a dream and a nightmare at the same time. When Joanne and I went to Paris to shoot a few scenes of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge there were photographers at the airport, and Joanne said to me: “Don’t be a jerk. Pose for them and then they’ll leave us alone.” So you agree to stand there and smile for a minute or two, hold your wife’s arm, etc. and you tell them, “I’ll see you, goodbye.” Then you walk to your car and about two-thirds of them follow and do exactly what you thought you were getting away from. They honor nothing, and they even chase the car. We pull up to the Ritz, and the same bunch of photographers are there. What was the advantage of my posing at the airport? I’m now in an absolute fury and I head into the hotel manager’s office and say, “You’ve got to give us some way to get in and out of here. I need a back door that we can use in the morning.” Especially because once I actually get away from the Ritz, I can put on a baseball cap and no one will know me; Joanne and I can go wherever we want. By now I’m using foul language with the Ritz staff: “You make those f-cking guys leave us alone!” They finally showed us an old service elevator that had a sort of French-doors-type window that you can get out of that lands you in a backstreet behind the hotel. We were game. So Joanne and I get up the next day, ready to escape, and we noticed there wasn’t a single photographer in sight at the entrance. So after my terrible outburst, I felt like such a schmuck.

It would make my life a lot easier if whenever someone stopped me on the street and asked, “Ooh, let me take your picture,” I said OK. But that would draw another 12 people over, and that would draw some more people, and you stand there signing autographs while politely asking them about their mother and father. If I could do that, it would be terrific. I’d feel a lot better at the end of the day.I wish I could, but I can’t. But I also wish I could ski. And I wish I could play tennis well. I wish I could do lots of things, but I can’t—and that doesn’t make me a bad person. Here are two stories that illustrate what I’m talking about.

I had strongly supported Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign, and in the early part of his presidency I was appointed one of the U.S. representatives to the U.N.’s disarmament conference. One afternoon I was visiting the White House with some acquaintances of mine from the National Security Council. I was walking down a hallway when I literally bumped into the President. “Why don’t you come up with me to the Oval Office?” Carter asked. I followed him upstairs, and let me tell you, what transpired was pretty uncomfortable. I’m not very at ease around people with power, never have been. But while I wanted to know why he’d recently decided not to address the U.N. himself on this issue, each time I raised the subject, all the President wanted to know was one thing: how movies were made.

Flash forward to around 1982. By then, I was deeply involved in car racing, truly loving that it was a world away from the film business and Hollywood. I had flown out to the track in Brainerd, Minn., for a Trans Am race, one of my first professional competitions. It was still a novelty that a movie actor was racing, so not unexpectedly there were photographers everywhere. As we were all finally just about ready to begin, the track marshals began clearing everybody away from the cars and racers. But just as it was getting down to “Gentlemen, start your engines,” there was one photographer who just kept clicking off shots of me, retreating for a minute, then darting back on the track like a bird. This is when a driver really wants to center himself, and here’s this photographer sticking his camera almost up my nose, clicking, running off, darting back on, and finally disappearing. After the race was over and I was done being interviewed and everyone was packing up, I spotted the photographer and said, “I really want to ask you something. Why was it that you wanted to shoot me so badly that you had to keep coming back and irritate me, invade my space, and just do one more thing to make your presence felt?” “You really want to know?” the photographer answered. “Yes, I really want to know.” “Okay,” he said. “Because I thought I might get the last picture of you alive.” —Excerpted from "The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man", compiled and edited by David Rosenthal. Copyright © 2022 by Joanne Woodward Newman.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: Classic Romance for History, Truth on Screen

Paul Newman is considered to be one of the great sex symbols of all time, but in his posthumous memoir, the actor admitted that women didn't always think so highly of him. In the mid-'80s, the legendary actor began compiling an oral history about his life and career, conducting interviews with friends, family, and himself. Those long-last recordings were eventually recovered and compiled in a new book, The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man: A Memoir, due out later this month (October, 27). Newman examines his relationship to his own sex-symbol status and his feeling that, despite being viewed as a heartthrob by women everywhere thanks to films like The Long Hot Summer, Cool Hand Luke, The Hustler, and The Sting he didn't actually feel sexy until he met his wife, Joanne Woodward. He explained to Stewart Stern: “Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature. We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.” The Oscar winner goes on to explain how insecure he was growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, especially when it came to girls. Newman was small as an adolescent so he had to get permission to play on the high school football team, an experience that shook his self-esteem. His confidence was low by then, especially around girls. 

"I felt like a goodman freak," he admitted. “Girls thought I was a joke. A happy buffoon,” he said. But everything changed once he met Joanne Woodward. He explained, “I went from being not much of a sexual threat to something else entirely.” Newman and Woodward first met in 1953 when they were both understudies in the Broadway play Picnic. The blue-eyed star was married at the time to his first wife, Jackie Witte, with whom he had three young kids, Scott, Susan, and Stephanie. But he was unable to deny his attraction to Woodward and the pair began a tumultuous affair that he describes as "brutal in my detachment from my family." Eventually, he would divorce Witte in 1958 and quickly wed Woodward. In the memoir, he describes returning to their new Beverly Hills home one night to discover that she had fixed up a room off the master bedroom with a double bed she bought from a thrift shop and a fresh coat of paint. “'I call it the Fuck Hut,' she said proudly. It had been done with such affection and delight. Even if my kids came over, we'd go into the Fuck Hut several nights a week and just be intimate there,” Newman wrote. The couple would go on to have three daughters of their own, Nell, Melissa, and Clea, and move to Westport, Connecticut. 

But while their romance was one for the history books, Newman and Woodward still faced plenty of ups and downs in their relationship, often due to the actor's heavy drinking. He recalls in the book, “Joanne and I still drive each other crazy in different ways. But all the misdemeanors and difficulties have kind of evened themselves out over the years.” Their daughter Clea also told the outlet that it's true her parents “fought and it could be dramatic, but they also fought really hard to stay together. They didn't walk. There were times it was pretty close but they worked hard at it. Ultimately they came together.” She added that this memoir gives her late father the opportunity to let others see him how he saw himself. Now 92, Woodward, who has Alzheimer's, lives quietly at home on the property they long shared. But their love story comes alive once again in the new book. As well as the actor's humor, his intellect and his drive to do good in the world, especially with his philanthropic work, launching a network of camps for seriously ill children, which he considered his greatest legacy. Source: vanityfair.com

Perhaps to compensate for being uncoordinated for the school sports teams, Paul Newman developed a growing interest in theater. At Malvern Elementary School, Paul played the role of the organ grinder in a class play. Partially to offset his natural reticence, he hammed it up, singing in mock Italian. He later admitted, “I made up in volume what I lacked in tone.” But if you are going to mark his big theatrical debut, it was at the age of seven, as the court jester in The Travails of Robin Hood. His uncle Joe even had written a song for him, but Paul felt unnerved, a sensation he would continue to feel throughout his professional career. Luckily, discomfort onstage wasn’t reason enough to end a budding theatrical career—in fact, it may have been a motivating force. Paul Newman rarely backed down from a challenge. At the age of 11, his mother enrolled Paul in the Curtain Pullers, a children’s program at the Cleveland Play House. Famous alumni of the program include Joel Grey (who later went on to star in Cabaret on stage and screen), Eleanor Parker (famous screen actress who appeared in The Sound of Music), and Jack Weston (Dirty Dancing). 

Paul Newman seemed more interested in character roles at first. He didn’t see himself as the romantic leading man, despite the fact that even as a child, he was extraordinarily good looking. As his mother commented to a reporter in 1959, “Paul was such a beautiful little boy. In a way, it was a shame to waste so much beauty on a boy.” But there was also a tension within the household about Paul’s growing participation in theater. Paul remembers that his mother was supportive of his work on stage, but his father considered it stargazing and definitely not the life he envisioned for his younger son. After his Navy training, he was assigned to the war in the Pacific, stationed at Eniwetok, Guam, Okinawa, and Saipan. Newman’s luck was in full force in May 1945 when his crew was ordered to practice landings on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill. But his pilot developed an earache, and so another crew was sent in their place. A few days later, two kamikaze pilots attacked the Bunker Hill, killing nearly 400 sailors, including every member of Newman’s squadron. “When you miss something like that because your pilot happened to have an earache, wow!” He was about 50 miles away from Hiroshima, on the aircraft carrier Hollandia, when, on August 7, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped. 

Newman admitted that he didn’t fully understand the ramifications of the bombing. As an adult, however, Paul Newman became an outspoken activist against nuclear proliferation. He was honorably discharged from the Navy on January 21, 1946, just five days before his 21st birthday. He received five honors for his war experience: a Navy Combat Action Ribbon, the American Area Campaign Medal, the Asian Pacific Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. He had also suffered his first real heartbreak. He had been “very attached,” as he described it, to a young woman in his hometown from Ohio. Midway through his time in service, she dumped him. Of course, one wonders how her life would have been different had she married the young ex-marine from Shaker Heights. Paul Newman returned home and applied to Kenyon College. At Ohio University, he explained, he had been “much more interested in the ladies, than I was in my studies.” Despite his frustration with the frenetic pace of repertory theater, Paul took a job with the Woodstock Players, a repertory company located in Woodstock, Illinois. 

In Wisconsin, Newman had met Jacqueline (Jackie) Emily Witte, an aspiring actress. She followed him to Woodstock and, on December 27, 1949, became the first Mrs. Paul Newman. Paul was 24; Jackie was only 19. She hadn’t yet finished college and thought she was pregnant. Art Newman Jr. was his brother’s best man. But repertory work wouldn’t make anyone wealthy. The couple settled in rented rooms and a shared bathroom (for $10 a month). As the winter season of the company ended, Paul took a job at a local farm, stacking corn in the field. He was looking for another summer stock job when he got a call that would change his life: his father was dying. Jackie, who was pregnant, and Paul immediately left for Cleveland. On Thursday, May 11, 1950, Art Sr. died. The funeral was held the following Sunday, Mother’s Day. Paul, as expected, joined the family business. It was the least he could do to make up for what he felt was the huge disappointment he had been in his father’s eyes. 

As Newman sadly explained many years later: “One of the great anguishes of my life is that he didn’t see my success. He thought I was a ne’er-do-well.” Later on, he was blunt about his decision making: “I was going to Yale as a safety net.” Paul spoke honestly about his ambition. “I had no stars in my eyes or aspirations to be a Broadway actor, but I did want to be in some part of the theater, and a master’s degree always protects you. You can teach at Kenyon, which I would have loved to have done.” 

In 1990, in an interview with the New York Times about their joint movie Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Joanne Woodward explained: “Very often you have to work with someone you don’t know, and part of truth on screen is having the truth of a relationship and being comfortable with someone. It’s very hard to manufacture. If you’ve never met someone and you have to be intimate with them, and I don’t just mean sexual intimacy but comfortable touching somebody or interrupting their sentences, and that’s built in if you are married to somebody. All the history you would have to work on is all just there.” —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy

"Blonde" is not Marilyn Monroe (reviews)

"Biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe should be sought not in Blonde, which is not intended as a historical document, but in biographies of the subject." -Joyce Carol Oates (in the preface of Blonde, published in 2000 by Fourth State Publishers)

Donald R. McGovern: During the ten years that I have researched Marilyn’s life, reading books, watching documentaries, I have read and watched enough fiction and biographical distortion of that remarkable woman to last me a life-time. One of the publications that I read―or I should more accurately admit, attempted to read―was Blonde, the novel. Admittedly, after reading and grimacing through approximately sixty-five percent of that grating and grotesque book, I stopped. I considered putting a match to it, but, despite my revulsion, I put it in a more than appropriate place: a garbage can. I have not uncovered any reason at all for me to expose myself to Blonde, to force myself to endure what one reviewer called a ”fundamental failure” and what a majority of the movie’s assessments dismissed as a jumble, a shamble of exploitive, misogynist garbage, a movie that “should never have been made.” So, I have not watched Blonde: I never will. Why was such a movie produced? Who is to blame for such a uniformly disliked and criticized movie about a beloved actress who died sixty years ago? 

Why would sentient human beings involve themselves in such hubris, arrogance and hatefulness? Were they so blinded by what they could fictionalize and film about Marilyn Monroe that they failed to ask themselves if they should? And, too, why would they produce such a rank dishonest movie and then assert, as if gripped by delusion, that what they had produced was actually meant to be a love letter to Marilyn Monroe, meant to be a panegyric? Who is to blame for creating a movie that one reviewer called “a morbid, leering and tasteless abasement”? I expect that Ana de Armas more than likely rendered a fair approximation of the planet’s most famous blonde, or any other actress for that matter, would ever be able to render, not only due to the impossibility of duplicating that which cannot be duplicated, but primarily because Ana was not provided with a character, a person to render who even remotely resembles the real Marilyn Monroe. I don’t blame Ana de Armas. I blame Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote the diabolically ridiculous novel, and Andrew Dominik, who wrote and directed this diabolically ridiculous movie, who has now directed a total of four whole movies, a man who has dismissed Marilyn’s cinematic career, and by extension, the work of the men and women who produced her movies. Dominik has reduced Marilyn’s films to being “cultural artifacts” meaning that her films and her performances are merely examples of the era during which they were produced and are devoid of any meaning otherwise. 

According to one reviewer, Dominik must believe that Marilyn’s “performances were shaped by her agonies and somehow happened by chance, by fate, or because she’s a mystical, magical sex bomb. That’s grotesque, and it’s wrong.” The artisans involved in producing Marilyn’s movies just happened to be some of the best that worked in Hollywood during its Golden Age. Additionally, many of her films were guided by the artistic visions of directors now considered to be all time greats: John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle and The Misfits), Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot), Howard Hawks (Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Henry Hathaway (Niagara), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve), Joshua Logan (Bus Stop), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night) and Sir Lawrence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl). The first three men combined directed 105 feature films, were nominated for 148 awards, including Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Billy Wilder is considered by some cinema experts the greatest screenwriter of all time, with 25 screenplays on a lengthy resume, including Some Like It Hot, a movie that many cinephiles and cinema experts consider to be the greatest comedy ever made. 

For those authors to be reduced to producers and creators of mere “cultural artifacts,” it indicates and exemplifies the unfounded arrogance of Andrew Dominik, not to mention his narcissism. One reviewer noted that Dominik “is a scumbag”; but then the reviewer added: “He’s also a blowhard.” Another reviewer humorously suggested that Dominik should “jump up and down” and “let us hear ‘em clank together,” Dominik’s brass testicles I have concluded. I have not uncovered any reason at all for me to expose myself to Blonde, to force myself to endure what one reviewer called a ”fundamental failure,” and what a majority of the movie’s assessments dismissed as a jumble, a shamble of exploitive, misogynist garbage, indeed a movie that “should never have been made.” Unholywood and its resident practitioners have frequently engaged in biographical revisionism while retreating behind a shroud of artistic or poetic license, a cloaking device they employ like the curtain concealing Oz; but Blonde just might be the most egregious example of playing fast and loose with the facts and therefore fast and loose with the truth appertaining to a person’s life, in this case, the life of Marilyn Monroe. Virtually nothing in the Blonde novel and therefore nothing in the Blonde movie is factual or truthful.

Blonde is a fictional, ghastly, grotesque and self-indulgent semi-pornographic excursion into exploitation by both the novelist Oates and the film’s director Dominik. Evidently Dominik additionally adapted and transmogrified an already hideous version and vision of Marilyn Monroe into an even more hideous version that more appropriately reflected his own myopic and puny, narrow-eyed vision of who and what Marilyn was and also what her life meant. Both the novelist and the director obviously―proven by the many salvos fired during their pathetic campaign―loathe Marilyn Monroe and each took deadly aim at her heart. What is the movie Blonde actually about? What is its purpose? Unquestionably it is simpler to stipulate what the movie is not about: it is not about Marilyn Monroe, it is not about her life. As Ann Hornaday, in her review for the Washington Post asserted: “Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel is a morbid, leering and tasteless abasement. Reductive, ghoulish and surpassingly boring, Blonde might have invented a new cinematic genre: necro-fiction.” In an interview with Christina Newland, Dominik briefly discussed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in reductive and chauvinistic terms. I hasten to report that New German Cinema auteur, Rainer Fassbinder considered Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to be one of the top ten movies ever made, not just among musicals but movies ever made. High praise, indeed. On Fassbinder’s top ten movie list, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Howard Hawks resides in the sixth slot. Dominik's clueless comments explain every choice he made regarding his depiction of a woman that he obviously does not understand and for whom he feels no affinity, sympathy or empathy.

Quite frankly, the movie’s purpose is simply this: distastefulness. “I’m not concerned with being tasteful,” Dominik admitted. That is certainly self-evident. And he was not concerned at all about the facts or the truth about Marilyn. Certainly, that is also self-evident. “It’s all fiction anyway, in my opinion,” he announced, meaning that everything about the blonde movie star and the events appertaining to what Dominik called her mysterious life, are actually fictional, made-up, created by Hollywood’s fame machine. Blonde is an accurate and truthful depiction of fictional events that actually never happened, a fictional life never lived by his real woman subject. Is that an oxymoron or a paradox or an oxymoronic paradox or simply just meaningless Orwellian doublespeak? During an interview, Dominik admitted: “OK, she wrested control away from the men at the studio, because, you know, women are just as powerful as men. But that’s really looking at it through a lens that’s not so interesting to me.” What Dominik found interesting was a view from Marilyn’s cervix as a speculum entered her vagina and a view from inside the toilet bowl while she vomited. 

In favor of the preceding disgusting and disrespectful scenes, Dominik egregiously ignored Marilyn’s cinematic career and what one reviewer noted was her “transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace.” Blonde intentionally ignores Marilyn’s rare gifts, her dedication to the craft of acting and her constant reach for improvement, not only in her craft but her everyday life as well. But more importantly, perhaps, Blonde ignores Marilyn’s fundamental humanity and her shrewdness in order to create a perpetual victim, which she most certainly was not. Marilyn Monroe was kind and generous and according to everyone who actually knew her, she had a wonderful and devilish sense of humor. According to Robert Mitchum, Marilyn was generous to a fault and a witty, naturally funny girl; but evidently, Blonde does not contain a single shred of humor. As Farrah Nehme Smith wrote: “I’d prefer to think that was some kind of grim joke, but Blonde is anti-joke, in the sense of antimatter or an antihistamine.” So true, and I think that is downright pathetic. 

Perhaps there is not a just punishment for writer and director, except maybe being condemned to spend eternity planted upside down in a bucket filled with the fecal equivalent of their cinematic concoction: donkey dung. But then, unlike Dominik’s stupid movie, I don't want to sound ridiculously hyperbolic. Still, I know that Marilyn’s singular quiddity will survive this most recent cinematic debasement, just as it has survived all the senseless debasements heaped upon her during the past six decades. Long after Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Dominik have shuffled off this mortal coil, long after Blonde and its creators have been forgotten, the woman they have treated with utter disregard will remain the planet’s most famous woman, loved and revered by billions. As Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis proclaimed after Marilyn’s death: “she will go on eternally.” Source: marilynfromthe22nrow.com

Armond White: Ignoring how Marilyn Monroe calculated her career and contrived the unique acting style that mesmerized the world, Andrew Dominik resorts to the visual equivalent of psychobabble: Deranged, expressionist distortions, lacking Baz Luhrmann’s silliness or Ken Russell’s ingenuity, that resemble strained pop-music videos. Ana de Armas, a funny presence in the mystery comedy Knives Out and horror comedy Knock, Knock, has certain mercurial flashes. But without Monroe’s ebullience, she winds up doing a superior version of Madonna’s Marilyn impersonation. Here’s the problem: Dominik can’t define stardom when celebrityhood itself is in trouble. Maybe because there are no actors to respect these days. Blonde has been produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B. The main caveat is we never see ambitious Monroe’s work ethic or her joy. We don't have any clue why Monroe was cast by the sexual sophisticate Howard Hawks, the gritty John Huston, the cynical/romantic Billy Wilder, the artful Otto Preminger or the empathetic aesthete George Cukor. 

Even Monroe’s most accomplished acting in Joshua Logan’s 1956 film of Willliam Inge’s Bus Stop and her star-to-star competition with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl are omitted. When the CIA secretly aborts Monroe’s JFK zygote, Blonde climaxes as political porn. Dominik innovates a from-the-inside view of a vaginal curette, because the film’s process is inherently dehumanizing. We shouldn’t have to be thinking about Netflix gaslighting Marilyn Monroe while our government and media are gaslighting us, but Blonde is another example of Millennial distraction by way of decadence. “There is one thing wrong about this film,” Paul Schrader posted on Facebook. “I was thunderstruck by Andrew Dominik’s kaleidoscopic approach, juxtaposing colors, screen formats, camera styles, music, sound effects, and image manipulation. But it’s not Marilyn Monroe. This would have been far better if it was freed from Monroe's history. The criticism applies to the novel as well. Why the gleeful need to jump on Monroe’s cadaver for a romp? Can’t these fabulators trust their own creativeness? Was their need to exploit irresistible? Dominik made an innovative film, but it wasn’t about Marilyn Monroe. His film is now a curiosity. Some critics say Dominik did Marilyn no favors. I think it’s the other way around. Marilyn Monroe did him no favors.” Source: www.nationalreview.com

The US federal government released the FBI papers related to Marilyn Monroe in 2012, in response to a FOIA request by the Associated Press. Timestamps on the documents start around 1955, the year she began dating suspected communist playwright Arthur Miller. By the early 1960s, the FBI made it clear that Marilyn Monroe had no ties with the Communist Party USA. “Subject’s views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Community Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles,” one agent said in a letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. But that didn’t stop the FBI from continuing to investigate Monroe. The most recent documents in the trove are dated 1973, more than a decade after her death from a barbiturate overdose on August 4, 1962. The FBI’s fascination with Monroe, her whereabouts, her relationships, and her political affiliation was nowhere to be seen in Blonde (2022), though documents show the government spared no resources in tracking the icon around North America. “They start following her right after she gets involved with Arthur Miller,” retired UCLA history professor Lois Banner, author of Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, told The Daily Beast. “She’s married to this person they think is proto-communist.”

Much of the trove of documents focuses on Monroe’s trips to Mexico, where she allegedly mingled with members of the American Communist Group in Mexico (ACGM). There, she reportedly spent a lot of time with Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a descendant of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, known for his radical leftist politics. According to the FBI, she arrived in Mexico on February 19, 1962. No longer with Miller, her entry into the country was reportedly arranged by Frank Sinatra. One source “advised that during the course of the visit a mutual infatuation arose between Monroe and Frederick Vanderbilt Field. This situation caused considerable dismay among Miss Monroe’s entourage and also among the ACGM,” the report states. The FBI names Eunice Murray, Monroe’s housekeeper, as a source of this story, though Lois Banner disputes this. “The FBI is not completely trustworthy. They sometimes make things up.” Source: themarilynreport.com

Julie Forrest: There is something so ugly and disturbing about Joyce Carol Oates’s interpretation of Marilyn’s life that if one were to take away the author’s name, one would suspect it was written by a loathsome mysogynist, hell-bent on destroying every last vestige of humanity in Marilyn Monroe, movie-queen, and Norma Jeane Baker, innocent dreamer. Oates’s fangs come out. She reveals to us her secret loathing for Marilyn, sub-consciously played out. Knowing how much Norma Jeane abhorred being written about in her Marilyn persona, Oates revels in ignoring her plea. “I’m always running into people’s unconscious.” Those words, prophetically spoken by Marilyn Monroe, shine quite a light on this fictional pseudo-biography. Oates seems to have run smack into the middle of her own “unconscious” while trying to explore Marilyn’s, and the result is quite ugly. It simply seems to derive from a sense of frustration, typical of a snobbish bookworm, an ugly duckling like Oates envying a powerful sex-symbol (Marilyn) who attracted (besides a loyal public), the likes of Sinatra, DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, or JFK. Oates's take on Marilyn's life lacks cohesion and substance. Oates writes at the beginning that those looking for a true biography should look elsewhere. Fair, but in constructing her alternate reality, Oates should have at least given it a veneer of truth to ground the points she was trying to make. Source: goodreads.com

Arthur Miller in his memoir Timebends: A Life (1987): "To have survived, Marilyn would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes. She was a whirling light to me, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a poetic sensitivity that few retain past adolescence; meanwhile her adult self stood aside observing the game. And ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization. To be with her was like moving out into a kind of sanctifying light from a life where suspicions was common sense. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she was fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted was not to be judged but to win recognition from those blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty."

Attorney Corey Santos, an expert in Entertainment Law residing in Reno (Nevada)—whose legal career was highlighted by the significant precedent setting case Flamingo Hilton v. Gilbert—has advised entertainers, producers, directors and politicians. Santos assures: "I will not watch that fake film [Blonde]. It seems many have sadly tried to darken the legacy of Marilyn and JFK by focusing on this innuendo as opposed to their achievements. Marilyn Monroe certainly deserves better remembrance. She was an outstanding actor and entertainer. Interestingly, my office in Reno is across the street from the Virginia Street Bridge where Monroe threw her wedding ring into the river in “The Misfits”. While filming here, she stayed at The Mapes hotel which also used to be directly across the street from my office. As to what happened to her there are so many theories. Perhaps when her psychiatrists records are released in the next decade we will get answers. May she rest in peace and her real legacy be remembered."

James DiEugenio: "This story got completely out of control. Blonde is based on a novel! Let me repeat that: A novel! And then the director added even more fiction to the Joyce Carol Oates' novel for one reason: to sensationalize it even more. Sensationalism sells. There are only a few responsible writers in this field: Donald McGovern, Gary Vitacco Robles, Donald Spoto, Nina Boski... I might be missing others, because April McVea wrote a kind of week by week with Marilyn book. That is really valuable for responsible writers. There was never any kind of  "affair" between JFK and Marilyn or RFK and Marilyn. In fact, there is no evidence at all about Bobby and Marilyn. The people that writers like Norman Mailer, Donald Wolfe or Anthony Summers have used to create this mythology are not credible. And this has been demonstrated at length. As John Gilmore said, Norman Mailer started an industry which Gilmore called, "Trash Marilyn for a buck." This is a continuance of that industry. But it also has an appendage; trash the Kennedys for millions. I’d like to suggest that we attempt to separate the JFK conspiracy from the Marilyn Monroe conspiracy. The first is a legitimate attempt to right an historical wrong. The second is meant to sully the Kennedy brothers." Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

Lainey Gossip review of "Blonde": "The film inherits all of the book’s faults, and Dominik only exacerbates and enhances those faults, and adds to them, as cinema allows for visceral storytelling in a way novels can never match. Where the novel at least asks us to consider Norma Jeane’s voice, the film ignores it. Dominik simply isn’t interested in Marilyn Monroe—let alone Norma Jeane—as a person. Blonde is a hollow egg with nothing at its core, just a mélange of scenes that trace Norma’s rise and Marilyn’s downfall. His style emphasizes the nightmarish quality and unreality of the scenes, and the overall effect suggests Marilyn’s deteriorating mental health. Where Blonde fails both its subject, and its audience, is in its total lack of interiority. Oates at least tried to restore Norma’s voice, Dominik doesn’t seem interested in her at all. This is a film that tells us Arthur Miller fell in love with Marilyn after seeing her read a monologue from one of his plays but doesn’t show us that monologue. Marilyn was not just her suffering, she was a whole person, complicated, yes, but also a survivor. With nothing to balance that darkness, Blonde becomes lopsided, until it eventually falls over. Dominik’s Marilyn remains a cipher, despite de Armas’s best efforts to anchor the misery with humanity and not just suffering." Source: laineygossip.com

"Blonde" by Dominik: A Cynical View of the Hollywood Studio System

Farran Smith Nehme—Some thoughts about Blonde: I relished the aspect-ratio shifts and the switching between black-and-white and color. Our memories of Marilyn have just such shifts, from widescreen Technicolor to intimate black-and-white snapshots, and that’s plenty enough justification. Blonde appears bold and creative after years of mustard-and-beige digital. I do love an iris shot. Other things I liked: Lily Fisher, the exquisite child actress who plays young Norma; a scene between a cop (Michael Drayer) and Julianne Nicholson as Norma’s mentally ill mother; Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, balancing his empathy towards Marilyn and his bewilderment about his wife's mood changes; Toby Huss as Marilyn’s faithful makeup man Whitey, a warm and unaffected take on a relationship that I think could have been better developed. Now for the bad news. Dominik claims his film isn’t anti-abortion. He says Marilyn is “seeing her own fears and desires projected onto the world around her… and I think sort of this desire to look at Blonde through this Roe v. Wade lens is everybody else doing the same thing. They’ve got a certain agenda where they feel like the freedoms of women are being compromised, and they look at Blonde and they see a demon, but it’s not really about that.” 

No, this will not do. I can’t accept that an artist and a person of intelligence, and I presume Dominik is both those things, makes these scenes and believes we see an anti-abortion message because “it’s difficult for people to be able to hold two things in their mind at once.” I don’t know his personal politics, but I do know what this movie is saying, and it says it throughout. Exhibit A is the reproachful talking fetus, which reminded me of the Doonesbury strip where a 12-minute-old embryo’s final words are reported as “Repeal Roe v. Wade.” That cartoon was one of six that Garry Trudeau drew to mock 1984’s propaganda short The Silent Scream. Incredibly, Blonde goes one better than the short by giving its fetus character—both times from a pregnancy so early it hasn’t changed Marilyn’s waistline yet—a newborn’s sweet little face. Pregnant Marilyn tells her mother she’s so grateful she wasn’t aborted: “You did the right thing.” Fictional letters to Marilyn from the “daddy” who abandoned her are read over the action, and we’re probably meant to think they exist only in Marilyn’s head. Maybe that’s why the letters’ narrator has the same exact accent and intonation as Paul Roebling, the voice of Sullivan Ballou from Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War.  

I’d prefer to think that was some kind of grim joke, but Blonde is anti-joke, in the sense of antimatter or an antihistamine. And there’s more, like Disembodied Daddy Sullivan Ballou talking to Marilyn after a miscarriage, offering philosophical thoughts about “the death of an unborn soul” and how its “innocence is unsullied.” What’s most infuriating is that there’s no solid evidence, save hearsay from friends, that Marilyn Monroe even had an abortion. We do know she had three miscarriages, but I guess losing a wanted baby three times—once to a painful ectopic pregnancy that required emergency surgery—isn’t tragic enough. The script also goes out of its freaky way to connect Marilyn’s single on-screen miscarriage to her prior abortion. Her pregnancy loss comes after a chat with the fetus that could have been scripted by Randall Terry: “You won’t hurt me this time, will you? You won’t do what you did last time?” “I didn’t mean to.” “Yes, you meant to. It was your decision.” Do you got that? It was just her personal decision. 

Sure, Mr. Dominik, anything you’re saying here must all be in my head, just like it was in Marilyn’s. How dare anyone make a big deal out of an everyday reincarnated talking fetus with a grudge? This crap alone put me in a “fuck you” frame of mind. Yeah yeah, Blonde isn’t a biopic, it’s based on a fictionalized novel. Yet it’s still reductive as hell. Marilyn’s psychic pain in Blonde is part daddy issues and maternal abandonment, but to a far greater degree, it’s guilt over having an abortion. Really? My response to Dominik’s response is, either he’s lying, or, more possibly, he’s lying. Just my little old opinion. In Blonde many characters are mean to Marilyn. That includes people who were probably kind to her in real life, such as Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr., safely dead at 42 so he can’t see himself jammed into a threesome with Marilyn and Edward G. “Manny” Robinson Jr., who died in 1974 at age 40 due to years of alcoholism. Cass Chaplin Jr and Manny Robinson were deeply troubled guys, but deserving of some sympathy, in my opinion. As conceived by Blonde, both Juniors are affected, sneering gigolos. DiMaggio is shown as a scary abusive husband. How do you explain that Marilyn kept a friendly relationship with DiMaggio throughout her life? It's a mystery for Dominik, I guess.

The actual Cass Chaplin Jr and Edward Manny G Robinson stayed friendly with Marilyn, as did many of her ex-lovers, and they continued to regard her with plenty of affection. But that isn’t a pattern that interests Dominik, any more than he gives a damn about Marilyn’s deep capacity for friendship. It’s a director’s prerogative, even their duty, to jettison or change anything that’s going to qualify what they are trying to say. But this film critic finds it enraging that so many recent sagas of bygone Hollywood turn a decent, even tragic person into a creep because it helps some thesis about how much the studio system sucked. Dominik is far from the only offender; Ryan Murphy, I’m looking at you. I agree with most of reviews that criticize the way the film ignores Monroe’s talent. The only moments when Blonde suggests—quite unintentionally, I believe—that Marilyn Monroe was a unique artist are the Deepfake insertions of Ana de Armas into Marilyn’s movies. Every last one of those scenes proves Monroe had something de Armas can’t actually reproduce. 

De Armas is talented, that’s not the issue. If Monroe’s gifts were easy to replicate, we wouldn’t be obsessed with her sixty years after her death. But Blonde can’t have it both ways, and hammer at how the split between Norma Jeane Baker and Marilyn Monroe is essential to understanding her, then suggest, as it does when Marilyn auditions for Don’t Bother to Knock and performs in Some Like It Hot, that her best work might not have been acting at all. This is a question not of biographical accuracy, but simple consistency. What I haven’t seen discussed as much is the disdain, indeed the contempt that Dominik shows for the entire Hollywood studio system. Nobody’s on the lot to do much of anything except sponge off stars, roughing starlets, and rake in money. Almost nothing they make is worth making for Dominik. Take the scene where Marilyn watches “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” at the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes premiere. In real life, that number was a career peak not only for her, but also for choreographer (and director for the scene) Jack Cole, cinematographer Harry J. Wild, costume designer Travilla, and composer Jule Styne and lyricist Leo Robin. Here, cynically it’s almost blown off as a kitsch joke. 

Or maybe the view of the public is the worst, it’s hard to choose. I became fascinated with the fact that the slavering crowds that surround and oppress Dominik’s Marilyn are all men. By which I mean only men, middle-aged and ugly in their historically correct attire, giving the bizarre impression that 1950s Los Angeles and New York were as gender-segregated as Riyadh. Dominik’s showing what he thinks of the work of Marilyn and the studios—it was pandering to squalid male fantasies. The millions of women who loved Marilyn and sustain her fame to this day, well, for the purposes of Blonde, we don’t exist. Marilyn’s women friends like Shelley Winters, Susan Strasberg and Pat Newcomb, they also don’t exist. Hell, even acting coaches Natasha Lytess and Paula Strasberg don’t exist. Again, this is Dominik’s right as a director, to remove all female support and love from his unidimensional Marilyn character. It’s also a choice that becomes more disturbing the longer the movie goes on. 

I’m a little less enamored of de Armas' performance than some other critics, though. The script pushes de Armas into playing the same notes over and over: wistful sadness, fear, insecurity; insecurity, fear, wistful sadness. She does get about seven minutes of screen time being happy with Arthur Miller, and it’s glorious. Then it’s over, and de Armas will mix in notes of drug-addled stupor, which recur until the end. Her Marilyn is obviously the product of intense study and effort. It’s a shame that work was put into a character that’s as repetitive as a music box. Please, I can’t even with the JFK blowjob. I have my limits. I know Norman Mailer is dead, but he has a lot to answer for, as well as a long list of Kennedys' professional haters. You may also have noticed that I haven’t brought up Blonde, the Joyce Carol Oates novel. That’s because I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. Obviously something disturbing in it spoke to Dominik. I don’t know what that was, and I don't want to guess. As Martin Amis said about Gore Vidal, life is too short. As Vidal said, the saddest words in English are Joyce Carol Oates. On a thematic basis, I don’t get why this film exists. It’s like an artfully shot Billie Holiday movie from someone who’s tone-deaf and believes the Harrison Act was a great idea. Source: selfstyledsiren.substack.com

"Blonde" by Dominik, "Blonde" by Oates

Andrew Dominik: I wasn’t that interested in Oates's Blonde when I first read it. But there was a story I was interested in telling, which is about how childhood drama shapes an adult’s perception of the world, and I could sort of see that within Blonde. My original idea was to do that for a serial killer, but when I read Blonde I thought, well, I could do this with an actress and it should be slightly more sympathetic. There’s over a thousand books written about Marilyn, and I haven’t read a thousand, but I’ve read all of the big hits. I’ve read all the biographies of all the other people that were in her life too so I’m aware of what they think happened in most of the situations in her life. 

And I’m aware of how that’s different to the book Blonde. I did all that research and I used very little of it in the movie. Blonde the book was pretty much the bible for the film. I know the ways in which this film is different from what people agree it happened. Not that everyone’s sure. So it’s all fiction anyway, in my opinion. Zanuck [studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck] never liked her, never knew what to do with her, so she very much did self-actualize, which we don’t show in the film. OK, she wrested control away from the men at the studio, because, you know, women are just as powerful as men. But that’s really looking at it through a lens that’s not so interesting to me. I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in the images. I’m more interested in what her emotional life was like. Marilyn represents a kind of rescue fantasy. And the film is no different. The film is a rescue fantasy. We feel we have a special intimacy with her. That’s the attraction to Marilyn, that feeling that we’re the only ones who understand her. That we could have saved her somehow. And maybe the flipside of that is a punishment fantasy, or a sexual fantasy. But it’s just a movie about Marilyn Monroe. And there are going to be more movies about Marilyn Monroe. Source: deadline.com

There is zero historical evidence of any of these vicious misdeeds we see in Blonde (specially those related to Zanuck's sexual assault, DiMaggio's abuse, or JFK taking sexual advantage of Marilyn Monroe) actually happening, which makes the non-stop grief seem needlessly punishing, both for her and us. Not to mention uncomfortably exploitative. There’s so much anguish, we eventually become numb to it over the nearly three-hour film. We come to know her only as a victim, not a fleshed-out person. Is that take enlightening? Not at all. Entertaining? Not really. Where Dominik struggles with Blonde is the specific dissection of the female mind. While perhaps not purposefully misogynistic, the Freudian nature of Norma Jeane’s desires feels ripped from a film student’s essay. A narrow script and chaotic filmmaking reduce an American Icon to an empty image of darkened glamour. Dominik simply doubles down on his myopic vision of a woman who, perhaps more than we’ll ever know, contained multitudes. Heed the Motion Picture Association’s advice. Most audiences (if they know something about the real Marilyn Monroe) will not enjoy this film, if they make it to the end. Source: www.austinchronicle.com 

"A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. Happiness so acute it was like broken glass in Norma Jeane's mouth. Her waxy-pale skin gave off waves of heat like pavement in summer sun and her eyes!-flirty, slip-sliding and dilated." 

"Norma Jeane stared memorizing what she saw; she was a camera taking snapshots; one day she might be lost and have to find her way back to this place she'd never seen before until this moment, but with Gladys such moments were urgent, highly charged and mysterious, to make your pulse beat hard as with a drug. Familiar, too, was the airless heat of the apartment, for Gladys didn't believe in leaving windows open even a crack while she was away, the pungent odor of coffee grounds, cigarette ashes, scotch, perfume, and that mysterious acrid chemical odor Gladys emitted. Yet these smells were comforting to Norma Jeane for they meant home. There were fields of fire, canyons of fire, fireballs like comets within a few miles of Santa Monica. Sparks, borne by the wind like malicious seeds, erupted into flame in the residential communities of Thousand Oaks, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Topanga. Gladys snorted: "Sometimes, Norma Jeane, you sound like such a fool. Like the rest of them." Gladys was committed to the California State Psychiatric Hospital, where her official diagnosis was: "Acute chronic paranoid schizophrenia with alcoholic and drug-induced neurological impairment." 

"Norma Jeane's rage stoked a madness of ambition to revenge herself upon the world by conquering it-however any "world" is "conquered" by an individual who was female, parentless, isolated, and seemingly a solitary insect amid a teeming mass of insects. 'Yet I will make you all love me,' was then Norma Jeane's threat. Norma Jean was recognized now in Hollywood as Marilyn Monroe, she was altogether a new bleached-blonde woman, a successful icon of the American dream." 

"But Marilyn would let pasta boil to a mush if you didn't watch her and she was always dropping things in the kitchen. She couldn't do a risotto, her mind was always drifting off. She tasted something, she didn't know what she was tasting. 'Is it too salty? Does it need salt?' She thought onions and garlic were the same thing! She thought olive oil was the same as melted margarine! She leaved tissues caked with makeup in the bathroom, there were ugly splotches of makeup in the sink, blond hairs in combs and hairbrushes; and scum in the bathtub. God damn. Sometimes she even forgot to flush the toilet. Almost, it seemed it was ordinary life baffled her. And, that wistful little-girl look in her face, "Daddy, how hard it is to figure what people mean when probably they don't mean anything?" Joe would shake his head, not knowing what the hell to say. He'd dated actresses, models and party girls, and he'd have sworn he knew that personality type, but Marilyn was something else. And sometimes she scared Joe to death. Like if an actual doll opened its blue glass eyes and you're expecting baby talk but she says something so weird, and possibly so deep, you can't grasp it."  —"Blonde" (2000) by Joyce Carol Oates.