Marilyn Monroe 1926-1962
The ‘honeymoon album‘ gifted to Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio by Japan’s baseball league after their 1954 visit has been sold for $12,000 at Heritage Auctions. It is also the subject of an article in US weekly Closer (not to be confused with the UK magazine of the same name.) It’s dated March 4 with Vanna White on the cover, and can also be ordered here.
Audrey Wollen (the artist and feminist scholar best-known for her Sad Girl Theory) takes an in-depth look at the numerous images of Marilyn reading – taken by various photographers at different stages of her career, and ranging from silly to serious – and how they have shaped public perceptions, in an article for Affidavit.
“In 1999, Christie’s auctioned off nearly 400 books from Marilyn’s personal library, a roster of classics ranging from Proust to Hemingway, which publicly solidified her intellectual identity and provided hard evidence against all those who claimed the plentitude of reading photographs were staged. But staged, of course, they were. They are hardly a homogenous document of fact; taken across decades, their only consistent element is the subject (Monroe), the act (reading), and the light, the aura that emits from the promise, the flattened proof, that beauty is real. Some call this being photogenic. Feminist accounts of Marilyn Monroe often take great trouble to declare the photographs’ candid status as a way to defend her ability to think, as if to pose with a book is to admit one cannot read it. But it is the slipperiness of their authenticity that make these photographs so mesmerizing.”
A Douglas Kirkland retrospective, including photographs from his 1961 shoot with Marilyn, will open at the Palos Verdes Art Centre next month.
Angie Dickinson began her career in television before making her movie breakthrough opposite John Wayne and Dean Martin in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959.) Early in her career, she dyed her hair honey blonde instead of platinum to avoid the comparisons to Marilyn Monroe which dogged many of her peers.
In his memoir, baseball player Yogi Berra recalled taking Angie out to dinner one night, and she was the centre of attention – until Marilyn arrived. After roles in classic films like Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and Point Blank (1967), she found further success in the 1970s TV series Police Woman, and made a big-screen comeback in Dressed to Kill (1980). She also appeared in Captain Newman, M.D., the 1963 movie based on the wartime experiences of Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Her most recent screen role was in a 2009 TV movie, Mending Fences.
Angie was a friend of the Rat Pack and later married songwriter Burt Bacharach; but while her name was linked with some of the same men as Marilyn, she has lived to tell her side of the story. Now 87, Angie has shared her memories of Hollywood’s Golden Age in a new interview for CBS.
“She admitted to correspondent Mo Rocca that she enjoyed being a sex symbol very much but ‘I wouldn’t want to be known only as a sex symbol. I wanted to be known as an actress, equally or, even more so. Like Marilyn Monroe. She was known as the greatest – rightly rightly so – sex symbol of all time, Boy, try to do Shakespeare after that!’
Dickinson was always more down to Earth, rough-and-tumble than Marilyn, willing to go mano-a-mano with a tough guy like Lee Marvin in Point Blank.
Rocca asked, ‘Do you consider yourself more of a broad, a dame, or a gal?’
‘Oh, all of the above!’
In 1960, she co-starred with the Rat Pack in Ocean’s 11. She ended up dating Frank Sinatra. ‘We got very close to getting married in 1964,’ she said.
But Sinatra’s late-night lifestyle wasn’t for her. ‘And he said, “You know, I’m not going to marry an actress.” And I said, “Well, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”‘
‘And I actually didn’t want to marry him. So, I didn’t want him to ask me to marry him. ‘Cause I didn’t wanna say no to Frank Sinatra!’
There have long been rumors that Dickinson and President John F. Kennedy had an affair, rumors she’s consistently denied. ‘There was no reason or no grounds for thinking that I was seeing him, and I wasn’t,’ she said.
‘Then can I just ask: did he ever put the moves on you?’
‘No!'”
Beverley Owen, the first actress to play Marilyn Munster in TV’s The Munsters, has died aged 81. Born in Iowa, Beverley studied with the prestigious acting teacher Sanford Meisner and completed a degree at the University of Michigan before landing a role in the classic sitcom in 1964.
Named after Marilyn Monroe (who had died two years before), Marilyn Munster was a cousin to the ghoulish Munster clan. Although a beauty by conventional standards (Beverley donned a blonde wig for the part), she is an object of pity among her oddball relatives, who consider her hopelessly plain. Nonetheless, Marilyn adores them and seems unaware of their strangeness.
Unfortunately, the show was not a happy experience for Beverley, who was pushed into it as part of her studio contract. She also desperately missed her fiance in New York. She was let go after fourteen episodes and replaced by Pat Priest. Later that year, Beverley married the writer and producer Jon Stone, and they had two daughters before divorcing in 1974.
Beverley gained a master’s degree in Early American Studies in 1989. She remained close to actor Fred Gwynne (who played Herman Munster) and attended a 25th anniversary celebration of the show.
Filmmaker Stanley Donen has died aged 94. He co-directed and choreographed classic musicals such as On the Town (1949) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly, and made three films with Audrey Hepburn. The second of Donen’s five wives, Marion Marshall, had appeared alongside a young Marilyn Monroe in A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950.) He also dated Judy Holliday and Elizabeth Taylor, and is survived by his partner of thirty years, the writer and director Elaine May.
Donen never worked with Marilyn, but in a 1999 interview (posted on the Film Talk website), Donen revealed he had rejected a project which Marilyn later filmed with George Cukor, before choosing Indiscreet, a sophisticated romantic comedy starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, which as columnist Louella Parsons had reported in 1956, was originally slated for Clark Gable and either Marilyn or Jayne Mansfield.
“Norman Krasna gave me a script he had written, which was eventually made with Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand [Let’s Make Love, 1960], but I didn’t like it. He then said, ‘You know, I did a play in New York which was a flop [Kind Sir, directed by Joshua Logan in 1952 and starring Charles Boyer and Mary Martin], but why don’t you read it? Maybe you’ll like it.’ I read it, and I was very impressed. I told him, “God, this would make a wonderful movie.’ ‘You think so? Every studio in town has turned it down,’ he said. ‘You know what, you own it, if you can get it made, I’ll write the screenplay.’ So I got it made, I got Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and we made Indiscreet [1958]. That was the real beginning of me being a producer, I liked putting it together.”
Chris Cabin has reviewed Criterion’s new 4K restoration of Some Like It Hot (available on DVD and Blu-Ray) for Slant.
“Sugar Kane’s willingness to indulge in the perverse proclivities of the rich is more grounded here than that of Monroe’s Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but then, Some Like It Hot is a more ambiguous affair than Howard Hawks’s extravagantly ludicrous musical … Money, more than gender or even sexual attraction, is the ultimate aphrodisiac here, and if this deeply cynical belief is slightly upended by the film’s ending, as in The Apartment, the idea is never entirely dispelled by the narrative.
By the end of Some Like It Hot, Sugar Kane is singing ‘I’m Through with Love,’ but it’s a song she’s been singing all along, gossiping with Josephine about all the lousy musicians who’ve romanced her and then bilked her for all she’s worth. The lead singer of the Sweet Sues doesn’t show up until a solid 30 minutes into the film, but make no mistake, Monroe’s importance in this picture is second only to Wilder’s. A notorious presence on the set, the actress flubbed her lines, arrived late, and tested the saintly patience of her director and co-stars, but on the big screen, Monroe holds the audience in her gaze without a flicker of hesitation.”
The celebrated English singer Kate Bush has just shared the unreleased video for her 1991 single, ‘Rocket Man’, with fans, the NME reports ( a bootleg version was previously available.) A cover of Elton John’s 1972 hit, she chose to cover his tribute to Marilyn, ‘Candle in the Wind’, for the B-side. Both tracks were recorded by Kate for the all-star album, Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. They will now be reissued as part of her new compilation, The Other Sides, due for release in March.
What’s doubly interesting about the ‘Rocket Man’ video is that during the chorus, it appears to reference Marilyn’s performance of ‘Running Wild’ in Some Like It Hot (complete with black dress, backing band and even a ukulele!)
Thanks to Fraser Penney
Following last year’s Disney buyout, 20th Century Fox was officially dissolved this month, as Peter Bart reports for Deadline. While Marilyn’s feelings for her home studio were mixed at best, it’s a bittersweet moment in movie history.
“Hollywood endured a big setback this month, and it had nothing to do with the Oscars. A major studio, 20th Century Fox, officially disappeared into the mist, instantly transforming a once robustly competitive industry into a Disney oligopoly. The ultimate cost in jobs could range as high as 10,000, but the real cost will be in opportunity and competitive zeal.
Fox’s history, like MGM’s, has wallowed in melodramatic triumphs and scandals –the corporate intrigues of Warner Bros and its corporate parents (AT&T) or Universal (now a child of Comcast) seem pedestrian compared with Fox’s operatic struggles: Marilyn Monroe’s mysterious demise in the middle of Something’s Got to Give; Elizabeth Taylor’s over-the-top theatrics in Cleopatra; Darryl F. Zanuck’s eight-hour stockholder speeches and stormy battles with his son and successor, Richard (fired in 1971); the eleventh-hour brink-of-disaster deal for Star Wars; the fierce tug of war over Titanic and its overages [overspend].
Given its history, it’s fitting that this is the only studio immortalized in a rock ‘n’ roll classic (‘Twentieth Century Fox’), performed with drugged-out vigor by Jim Morrison and The Doors.
Even Fox’s beginnings are cloudy: It may, or may not, date back to 1915 with the birth of Fox films, but also to 1935 when the mysterious Spyros Skouras orchestrated the first of several mergers. Darryl Zanuck, who felt he was a bigger star than his actors, gave sizzle to the studio with signings of Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Alice Faye and Betty Grable but also gave it gravitas with such well-intentioned movies as Gentleman’s Agreement, The Razor’s Edge and Wilson. Production of The Longest Day in 1962 was the ultimate Zanuck epic — a long, lugubrious account of the D-Day Invasion with just about every star in the world popping up in bit roles (John Wayne and Kirk Douglas among them).
True to studio tradition, it remains unclear how much of the Fox identity may emerge following Disney’s $71.3 billion seizure … If Fox filmmakers feel angst, it is understandable. Disney accounted for 26% of the box office last year and that could rise to 40% this year … Darryl Zanuck is no longer around to bark, and no one seems to be mounting a new Cleopatra, but somewhere on the emptying Fox lot fragments of history still reside.”
A poster of Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch (the image is usually attributed to Sam Shaw) can be glimpsed in this deceptively casual photo of Ivanka Trump’s dorm room at a Connecticut girl’s boarding school, as Ashley Alese Edwards reports for Refinery 29. The eldest daughter of real-estate tycoon and future president Donald Trump, Ivanka now contentiously serves as his personal advisor.
“A January 1998 piece, first reposted by the Instagram account @thankyouatoosa, run by Casey Lewis, profiles a 16-year-old Ivanka in her dorm room at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, which she shared with two other girls. ‘Some people might be surprised I’m a normal teenager,’ Ivanka, who is pictured striking a very ’90s cool-girl pose on a small wooden chair, told the magazine. The 15-by-11 feet room is normal: Her wall is adorned with string lights, photographs of friends and family, and a poster of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic skirt-flying-up photo. ‘There’s a lot of random themes from movies,’ she said.
Although the room seems no different than that of any American teenage girl at the time, one can glean some insights into future Ivanka. Ivanka’s image, much like a magazine spread, is perfectly curated. She grew up with unimaginable wealth, but her public persona (like her dorm) is that of a person who is almost implausibly down-to-earth. She wears immaculate designer clothes, but is never gaudy. She speaks with authority, but maintains a soft tone. She’s an adviser to one of the most powerful men in the world, but still wants to be seen as relatable and approachable by posting smiling selfies, videos of herself playing with her kids, and engaging in PDA with her husband Jared Kushner (who is also an adviser to the president). Much of what Ivanka portrays herself to be is paradoxical; how could a woman who has always been privileged — and by extension, powerful — really be just ‘one of us’?
Ivanka, who grew up shuttling between multiple luxury residences, told Seventeen her unassuming dorm, with its austere furniture and plain, white walls, ‘probably expresses me best.’
She added: ‘It’s an atmosphere I created.’