RIP Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022)

Jerry Lee Lewis, whose hammering boogie-woogie piano, unleashed-tomcat voice, and unapologetic bad-boy persona made him an architect of rock & roll and an early rival of Elvis Presley, has died. Lewis’ publicist confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, but a cause of death was not immediately available; he was 87. Lewis died at his home in Desoto County, Mississippi, with his seventh wife, Judith Coghlan, by his side. Lewis’ two 1957 singles, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” were some of rock’s earliest and most primal hits: howling, whooping, libidinous performances that announced, as defiantly as any other records of the period, that a new style of music had arrived and would take zero prisoners. “I had created rock & roll before they ever thought about having rock & roll,” Lewis told Rolling Stone in 2014. “When Elvis come out, he was rockabilly. When I come out with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,’ that was rock & roll. That’s when the name ‘rock & roll’ was put in front.” 

“He’s the best rock & roll pianist ever,” Elton John said in 2007. “I couldn’t play like him because he’s too fast.” Born Sept. 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, Lewis grew up poor (his father Elmo worked as a carpenter, when he worked at all). Around the house, young Jerry Lee was exposed to cowboy music, blues 78s, and swing records, and he sneaked into local clubs to hear the likes of Ray Charles and B.B. King. Although he was proficient at drums, Lewis began playing piano at age eight — Lewis’ father mortgaged their farm to buy him one, and an older cousin taught him the boogie-woogie style soon after — and he gave his first public performance at 15 in the parking lot of a car dealership. He once said that the first song he learned to play was “Silent Night” — but, as he told Rolling Stone, “I played it rock & roll style.” After high school (where he landed his lifelong nickname, the Killer), Lewis attended Bible school in Waxahachie, Texas. But in an early sign of his struggles between the secular and the sacred, Lewis performed the gospel song “My God Is Real” at a school function — also in a “rock & roll style.” 

In May 1958, Jerry Lee was presented in Uk as some kind of serious threat, an example of the Southern American at his virulent worst. Even the British government took a hand in the affair, sending officers from the Home Office to inspect Jerry Lee’s and Myra’s passports and immigration status. The headlines screamed: 'Baby Snatcher, go home. We Hate Jerry Lee Lewis, shout ex-fans!' The British tabloids ripped Lewis to shreds, and his career "took a nosedive right into the concrete," as told to music journalist Alan Light. Columnists called for his arrest and deportation and for an investigation by the child welfare office. Even Parliament weighed in. Sir Frank Medlicott, of the constituency of Norfolk Central in the House of Commons, questioned why a man of such nefariousness was granted a permit to work in England. Young women announced they were going home to smash his records. At a show in Tooting, South London, fans chanted “We Hate Jerry!” and cried “Cradle Robber!” from the audience. 

Myra Gale Brown later covered their marriage in the 1982 book Great Balls of Fire, which was adapted into a 1989 film starring Dennis Quaid as Lewis and Winona Ryder as Myra. "They were looking for a place to stick the knife into rock & roll. And Jerry gave it to them—well, I did, I opened my mouth. That's exactly what it was," Myra told Alan Light. Journalist Alan Light recounted in a story published in Medium's Cuepoint in 2014 that Jerry Lee Lewis and ex-wife Myra (now Williams) "were playful and affectionate" during the photo shoot for the Rolling Stone story. Light wrote that the duo were "joking and giggling, poking and swatting each other, Jerry Lee even sneaking a kiss at one point..." Dick Clark had already written Jerry Lee off. And it was only beginning. Sam Phillips seemed unsure how to respond, at least publicly, to the attacks on their marquee star. He knew the threat was serious, potentially career-ending. “Jerry Lee can’t be managed,” concluded Phillips. “People ask me what effect England had on me, and mostly the effect was on Sam Phillips and distribution,” Jerry Lee says now. “He just was not puttin’ my records out there.”

His famous 1956 jam session with Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins was turned into a Broadway musical, Million Dollar Quartet, in 2010. At the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, director Ethan Coen premiered Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, his documentary on the icon. In recent years, Lewis — still living in Nesbit, by then with his seventh wife, Coghlan, whom he married in March 2012 — had corralled some of his manic ways, thanks to his daughter and manager, Phoebe Lewis. Source: rollingstone.com

Paul Newman and Sweet Bird of Youth: Dark Depiction Of The American Dream

Geraldine Page, who plays boozy, bitter, has-been movie star Alexandra Del Lago, originally crafted the role on Broadway in Elia Kazan's 1959-60 stage production. And she could hardly have asked for better screen chemistry than with her co-star Paul Newman as the good-looking and naively ambitious gigolo, Chance Wayne. (Kazan's original stage cast also included Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn, and Bruce Dern. Sherwood and Torn likewise reprise their roles here.) For the pretty blonde ingénue, Shirley Knight shines as Chance's ex-girlfriend, appropriately named Heavenly, Boss Finley's daughter. Years ago, Finley ran Chance out of town with a one-way ticket and the temptations of the American Dream: "This is America. Today you're nobody, tomorrow you're somebody." He's none too pleased when Chance rolls back into his hometown in a big-fin Cadillac with vodka-soaked "Princess" Del Lago sprawled in the backseat. 

It seems that when Chance headed out to New York and Hollywood with plans to become a matinee idol, he didn't know that he'd left Heavenly pregnant. Her father strongarmed an illegal abortion and has been nursing his revenge fantasies ever since. Holed up in a hotel room with Alexandra, bare-chested Chance connives to trade sexual favors (Alexandra's "only dependable distraction") for her connections in the movie business. Both are pathetic, pill-popping dreamers and desperate manipulators, both fatally damaged and discarded. Still, Tennessee Williams' gift is that we can sympathize with his monsters. Chance aims to reconcile with his one lost love, Heavenly, unaware of what happened to her since he last saw her. 

Flashbacks to their "sweet bird" days reveal that Chance once had the potential for a real relationship and a life better than a flamed-out hustler. But, as Heavenly tells her vindictive father, when Chance left to follow his dream the right doors never opened, so he went through the wrong ones. "Each of us has his own private hell to go to," Alexandra says, and Chance finds his—delivered by Boss Finley's vigilante gang of enforcer thugs led by Rip Torn. This film interpretation awkwardly abuts Williams' meditations on the inescapability of our past with dramatic jest that Brooks transferred well from stage to screen. On the other hand, everyone we see Actors Studio'ing through the material does a toothsome job of it. Newman's Broadway-honed surefootedness in the role (one of his long list of finely turned losers and misfits) never falters. Shirley Knight was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and powerhouse Geraldine Page really should have taken home her nominated Best Actress Oscar that night. (She did get the Golden Globe.) Her phone call soliloquy with Walter Winchell remains a plum audition piece for female actors "of a certain age." Also noteworthy are Madeleine Sherwood as Boss' vengeful mistress and Mildred Dunnock as Aunt Nonnie, who gets the last word.

In “The Glass Menagerie,” (1944) the American Dream for white Americans is portrayed as a pursuit of individual happiness though in the end the Wingfield clan fails to reach their goal. Paul Newman directed The Glass Menagerie film adaptation in 1987, starring Joanne Woodward and Karen Allen as Amanda and Laura Wingfield. In Arthur Miller's “The Death of a Salesman” (1949) the American Dream of Willy Loman's misconceived notion that superficial qualities like personal attraction and popularity among his peers will assure success for his family falls flat. Playwrights Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lorraine Hansberry coming from different backgrounds reveal their own interpretation of the American Dream. Sweet Bird of Youth was actually written in 1956 and was a combination of two plays, The Pink Bedroom and Chance and the Princess. 

Williams's main characters are individuals who are in search of their identity. Mental anguish to a great extent and physical violence to a certain level had been a central part of his plays. Though critics argued that his drinking and drug taking combined with his fear of going insane could be the rationale behind the inclusion of violence in his themes, he could also be reflecting the milieu of the times. As Williams said: “What surprises me is the degree to which both critics and audience have accepted this barrage of violence. I think I was surprised, most of all, by the acceptance and praise of Suddenly Last Summer. I thought I would be critically tarred and feathered and ridden on a fence rail out of New York theatre, with no future haven except in translation for theatres abroad, who might mistakenly construe my work as a castigation of American morals, not understanding that I write about violence in American life only because I am not so well acquainted with the society of other countries.” 

Sweet Bird of Youth can be rightly said that the play is about loss of innocence and perception of responsibility. 1950s America was about power, sex and money, where all three were equally important for the disillusioned youth as portrayed in the literature of that era. By the end of the play, the readers realize that the great American Dream as a goal has lost its importance in a world which tries to achieve it through questionable means. Williams also quotes the Aristotelian idea that violence is purged by its poetic representation on the stage. The play is set in St. Cloud, Florida. Chance Wayne works as a waiter in Boss Finley's club. There he meets Finley's daughter, Heavenly, and he falls in love with her. Chance tries to seek Finley's consent to date Heavenly. Finley does not like the idea so he manipulates Chance into leaving the town by enticing him with the promises of achieving the American Dream. Chance pursues an acting career but fails to make it in Hollywood; instead he ends up as a drifter and a gigolo.

Chance comes back with an ageing actress, Princess Kosmonopolis to St. Cloud to help her escape negative publicity of a movie role. But Chance realizes that Heavenly is pregnant with his baby. In spite of knowing the severity of the punishment that awaits him, Chance decides to stay back in St. Cloud and face the consequences of his behaviour. The two main characters, Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago represent the citizens in quest of realizing the great American Dream. But unfortunately they are blind in their quest to achieve their goals. Goaded by Boss Finley, the crooked father of the girl he loves, Chance Wayne dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. He does not comprehend Finley's scheme to try to get him out of Heavenly's life. Chance Wayne tries to use his sexual favours to Del Lago to be promoted as an actor in Hollywood. 

Alexandra Del Lago is a fading star who attempts to hide after what she thinks was a disastrous performance in a movie. She relies on drugs and drinking to get her through trying times. She relies on Chance as his devotion for her temporarily makes her feel younger. She represents individuals who are unstable and insecure at the helm of success. At the end of the play, she offers to help Chance to get away from an impending punishment for his role in ruining Heavenly. Chance decides to stay back and be punished by Finley's men in spite of knowing that the punishment is castration (in the film it was changed to disfigurement). Time has the power to change the priorities of Chance Wayne's American Dream into matured redemption. In truth, Chance and Heavenly's love for each other emerges constant, pure and strengthened, notwithstanding their trying times. Moreover, by the end of the play, Chance, Heavenly and Del Lago realize that standing for what they believe as right is more important than pursue the American Dream through unscrupulous means. In the New York Times Brooks Atkinson called the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth “one of Williams’s finest dramas” and declared that it was “brilliantly acted.” 

Walter Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune called it “a succession of fuses deliberately—and for the most part magnificently—lighted.” The New York Mirror took special notice of Paul Newman’s intensity when it noted, “His disintegration, when he finally faces up to reality, has genuine emotional impact. Newman, as well as the audience, was moved by the concluding passages of the film. There were tears in his eyes as well as in those of the audience.” They might have been tears of emotional exhaustion as much as genuine emotion. Newman may have been especially nervous, because he and Joanne were expecting once again, and this time things were going well. It had been a little over a year since her miscarriage in London. Now she was ensconced at their New York apartment on West Eleventh Street waiting for the baby to come. Newman had found the meaning of true love in Joanne and—feeling loved for the first time—projected that mythical quality of being redeemed by love in Chance Wayne. —"The Flight: Depiction Of The American Dream In Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird Of Youth" - International Organization of Scientific Research (IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science -Volume 8, 2013)

Paul Newman didn't use those magnetic blue eyes promiscuously, as jeepers-creepers peepers. He hooded them, slit them, closed them tightly in pain. When open, they were sky blue with a milky haze. You could get lost in them; you could also see that he was sometimes lost behind them. Trim, smooth, chiseled, pretty, Newman was physically our most wide-open movie star, yet on one level he was also our most unfathomable. We feared for him onscreen, and he got battered (or even killed) unexpectedly—as the impulsive-country-boy Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun, and most famously, as the title character in Cool Hand Luke, a heavy-handed Christ-behind-bars picture. He senses the hell he's bringing on himself and acts out anyway, as if he's daring the universe to punish him. I don't know if his penchant for smart-ass renegade roles had its roots in his difficult relationship with his father, evidently a cold and disapproving man, but he had a knack as the prodigal son. Newman was ambivalent about his prettiness, but his voice—gruff and increasingly gravelly—balanced out his looks somewhat. He was mesmerizing in wounded Adonis parts (as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), but he was better with a shot of self-satire. 

In The Long Hot Summer, he was Ben Quick, an enigmatic stud-muffin who brazens his way into a prominent Southern clan led by Orson Welles' patriarch. It was on that film when everybody could see that Newman and Joanne Woodward had a deep relationship. Woodward played Clara Varner, the brainy, rigid, somewhat repressed young woman who finally surrenders to him. As different as they are onscreen, their chemistry is palpable. In real life, he adored her eccentric ways and valued her advices greatly. His Oscar came for The Hustler sequel, The Color of Money, and unlike Tom Cruise, Newman was sly and funny; his self-containment was a marvel. But the showboat of that film was director Martin Scorsese, doing his rock-'n-roll whip-pan thing, and the movie has none of its predecessor's brilliant poignancy. In his late career, Newman tested himself in character parts, although he didn't have the greatest acting range. Great actors and great artists don't have to be role models in life to inspire you with their work. But when they are, like Newman was, they give a special kind of joy. Paul Newman's real character is found in his lack of self-centeredness, in the way it radiated out off-screen. Source: nymag.com

Paul Newman's possible romances: Marilyn Monroe, Lita Milan, Nancy Bacon

Paul Newman may have been a better actor than many moviegoers realized. Self-assured in his talents the Oscar winner was not. A sexual ace with the ladies? Hardly. Newman grappled with alcoholism, too, and the man who famously played fun-loving Butch Cassidy could turn into a moody drunk before passing out. After he became a social activist in the 1960s and ’70s he considered getting into politics, but thought his drinking might become an issue. Says who? Newman himself, in “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” a memoir by an actor who could convincingly play a charismatic but self-destructive outsider because he knew the breed all too well. Just watch “The Hustler,” “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Verdict” or “Nobody’s Fool.” Newman began working on a memoir in 1986 with screenwriter Stewart Stern. After several years of effort that included recorded interviews with relatives, friends and colleagues, their project began to drift. Newman’s daughters Melissa and Clea decided to turn that raw material into a book punctuated by first-person accounts by others, including Newman’s first wife Jackie Witte as well as his second and soul-mate, actress Joanne Woodward. 

The result is a painfully frank reflection on a life filed with self-doubt. Newman grew up in a dysfunctional household in Shaker Heights, Ohio, his parents marrying when their first son Arthur was conceived out of wedlock. Paul soon followed, not making the marriage any happier. His heavy-drinking father was emotionally distant while his mother might beat him one moment and hug him the next. His mother draws the most criticism in his memoir, followed closely by Newman himself. She became a symbol of his bottled-up emotions and low self-esteem, and success did little to wash away those feelings. When he became a star, his mother sent him clips of negative reviews. After one slight too many —what he considered an insult aimed at Joanne Woodward — Newman didn’t speak to her for 15 years. 

The blue-eyed future sex symbol recalls being terribly shy as a teenager, a short and skinny kid smitten with girls but more comfortable playing a laugh-getting buffoon. In college a date once told him, “I like going out with you because you’re so harmless.” An unfocused student, he mainly chased girls and drank alcohol. A stint in the U.S. Navy flying as a radioman gunner during World War II put some meat on Newman’s bones and forced some maturity on him. What’s an insecure showoff to do? “Acting gave me a sanctuary where I was able to create emotions without being penalized for having them,” Newman writes. Good looks, charm and an air of confidence provided an effective cover. He went from understudy in the 1953 Broadway production of “Picnic” to featured roles, then to starring in the movies. It sounds so meta: the professional faker faking it so professionally.

Things just seemed to go his way — “Newman’s luck,” he called it. The irresponsible drinker booted from the Kenyon College football team found a place in college theater. The lazy student managed to graduate and later study drama at Yale. The immature husband and father pivoted to eager adulterer when Woodward made him feel sexy for the first time. However, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man” lacks the keen look at filmmaking that usually punctuates a movie star’s story. While a bumpy, disjointed confessional, it also smolders with introspection as Newman tries to ascertain what he couldn’t see in himself that so many others did. Source: apnews.com

Lita Milan, (co-star of Paul Newman in "The Left-Handed Gun," directed by Arthur Penn, was the daughter of a Polish homemaker and a Hungarian fur salesman in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and originally named Iris Lia Menshell, Lita shot like a rocket into the mid-1950s Hollywood. A wild and lovely woman, she had a smoldering beauty onscreen. "She drew men to her like moths to a flame," said producer Fred Coe. "One of those moths was Paul Newman himself." According to Lita, it was "a passionate affair" with Newman. Afterwards, Lita Milan had brief flings with Steve McQueen while filming Never Love a Stranger and with Steve Cochran in I Mobster.

Lita had been a Las Vegas showgirl and model before getting cast as a spitfire senorita in The Ride Back in 1957. The sultry, even fiery, Lita Milan was cast as Celsa in The Left Handed Gun. Coe felt that in the movie Billy the Kid, Lita's character was created for a diversionary romance, even though Celsa in the film is already married to a goodnatured locksmith (Martin Garralga). In any biographical sketch of Lita Milan, there appears this fact: "She had a passionate affair with Paul Newman during the filming of The Left Handed Gun." She had admitted she had seduced him after a long night of drinking beer.

In his memoir, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal addressed the rumors of a menage a trois between Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman and himself. "I should note here that over the years, I have read and heard about the tryst between me and Paul Newman. Unlike Marlon Brando, whom I hardly knew, Paul has been a friend for close to half a century, proof, in my psychology, that nothing could ever have happened. I liked Paul Newman, but I loved Joanne Woodward." 

It is mainly through Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger that we know of the brief friendship between Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe. Steiger was fascinated by Marilyn and dug most of the secrets of their relationship from assorted insiders from the Actors Studio. From scattered, fragmented accounts revealed over the years, a rather touching story emerged. Supposedly, when she'd flown back to Hollywood from New York, Marilyn was still hoping to play the lead in Picnic, starring opposite Newman. Both allegedly had a meeting at the Chateau Marmont. Newman would later tell Steiger that it was Marilyn's voice more than her body that he "found the most seductive part I've ever known. No one has a voice like hers. It was the perfect voice to sing `Bye, Bye Baby,"' he would recall. Shelley Winters surmised that in Newman, Marilyn "found one of her safe ports. It wasn't sexual. It wasn't that kind of relationship. Marilyn knew that he was committed to Joanne. Until the final day of her life, she had a tender feeling for Paul and always regretted never having appeared in a film with him." While Newman was chatting with Marilyn at the Chateau Marmont, he almost forgot about his publicity photo sessions at Warners with Virginia Mayo and Pier Angeli. "I remember her sitting in the hotel armchair," Newman told Steiger. "She just sat there staring out the window at the blinding sunshine of the day. She'd washed off all that makeup and her hair was a bit matted. She didn't feel the need to talk, huddled in that chair almost like a little girl. It was like she was waiting for some message to invade her mind. She was waiting for some answer. But an answer to what question?"

Robert Kennedy had toyed with the idea of Newman playing him in a movie based on his book, The Enemy Within. "It's about Jimmy Hoffa and the mob," Marilyn explained to Newman. "Bobby wanted me to contact you because he wants you to star in it." "I'd be honored," Newman said. "I'd like to meet with him to discuss it." "That's not possible right now," she said. "Some people could be spying on us, watching our every move. Jerry Wald is negotiating with Bobby for the screen rights. I want to co-star in the movie with you. Jerry has promised to write in a role for me. Bobby has agreed. I want to play a secretary who, arm in arm, works with Bobby to bring Jimmy Hoffa to justice. With me in the picture and with you as Bobby, we can virtually guarantee box office. I want to sink my teeth into a substantial political drama like Sinatra did." She was no doubt referring to Sinatra's appearance in The Manchurian Candidate, an upcoming release she'd seen at a special screening in Las Vegas.

Marilyn hardly needed to introduce producer Jerry Wald to Paul. He was well known to both the Newmans. He'd produced two filsm starring Joanne Woodward: No Down Payment and The Sound and the Fury. Wald had also produced Faulkner's The Long, Hot Summer. In a touch of irony, he was about to produce Hemingway 's Adventures of a Young Man, in which he'd cast Paul in a minor role, and also The Stripper, a film in which he'd cast Joanne Woodward as the star. Wald was long familiar with Marilyn as well, having produced her Clash by Night (1952) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Lets Make Love (1960). "Scriptwriters can work wonders," Wald assured Newman. "Besides, Bobby demands that we create a role in the movie for Marilyn. I think Bobby really likes her." Wald later discussed privately with friends why The Enemy Within was never made. The studio, 20th Century Fox, began to receive death threats, no doubt from some shady members of the Jimmy Hoffa Teamsters' Union. Wald claimed that he was warned that if the movie were made, "it'll be your last picture." 

"Both Marilyn and Paul also received death threats," Wald said. "Paul Newman pulled the plug. He was very concerned with those death threats, and was very anxious that no harm come to his family. The final blow came when Newman read the first draft of the script and rejected it as mediocre." Pierre Salinger, the press secretary at the White House, reckoned that "Bobby was furious when Newman rejected the role to play him in The Enemy Within. And Bobby was a guy to hold a grudge." Bobby allegedly sent Newman a note, which was probably short but not sweet. Like so many other projects in Hollywood, the film died a slow death. And Jerry Wald died just one month before Marilyn, on July, 13, 1962, at age 50. On the contray, JFK didn't favor Newman for playing him in another failed project: PT 109. Actually, Jackie Kennedy wanted Warren Beatty in the role of her husband. When Newman, upon hearing the televised news of Marilyn's death, he was paralyzed in shock and shared his grief with his wife. 

Nancy Bacon: "I sneaked a look at Paul as he talked easily with the crew. He appeared vulnerable and boyish in his tan Levi’s and moccasins. Then our eyes met and I found myself waiting, as he seemed to be, for the others to leave. And then they did leave and we were alone. Paul put down his beer and ordered a Scotch, and I had a gin and tonic. It began to get dark and he said maybe we should have something to eat. We went into the dining room, which was like a cavern spotted with wooden tables covered with red and white checkered oilcloth. We sat with some of the people from the picture crew, and word got out that I was a writer down there to do a story on Newman. He looked at me strangely for a moment—but only a moment, then his eyes softened. We sat like strangers in my hotel room for a few minutes, nervous, like children, and then he kissed me and after a while he did something he really didn’t have to do. He fell to his knees and clutched me tightly around the waist, his head pressed against my breasts, and he whispered, ‘Please.’ Like a small boy asking for a dime. He didn’t have to say it because I had made up my mind a long time ago. Maybe by the pool, maybe at dinner, or in the dungeons. I took him by the hand and led him up to my bedroom. He was a most tender and gentle lover and even though the last thing he said to me before he fell asleep was not exactly romantic, ‘Whew! It’s heart attack time, baby!’,  I felt he knew this was not just a casual thing. 

I suppose I was in love with him. I suppose he was in love with me. After the first time he said he loved me, it seemed easier for him to repeat it. But I never said it back to him because I was insecure, of course. How can you be secure with a man when you don’t even know his telephone number? He was making a movie called Hall of Mirrors (the title was later changed to WUSA) with Joanne. When Paul came back to Los Angeles he came to see me and he glowered at me and said, ‘I mustn’t be happy. I’m playing Reinhardt, and Reinhardt is a dark man, a man in a black mood.’ And later I noticed that the red in his eyes dimmed the blue, like in a bad color print. I think it was late spring (1970) when I realized how sordid the affair had become. Why didn’t he call me his girl? Then I knew why. He was really a square. He felt he was sinning—and he was always drunk. Or maybe in his guilt he was looking for death. I realized the affair was straining at the seams now." —Legends and Lipstick: My Scandalous Stories of Hollywood’s Golden Era (2017) by Nancy Bacon 

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