As Birds of Prey (and the Fabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn) hits big screens worldwide, Insider‘s Kirsten Acuna gives some insight into leading lady Margot Robbie’s Marilyn moment (to the tune of Normani and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘Diamonds‘.)
“During the film, Harley is seen dressed as Marilyn Monroe’s character from 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The big change here is that Quinn has an updated version of the gown with pants instead.
Costume designer Erin Benach told Insider they almost did a completely different outfit for Quinn here.
‘It wasn’t even really on the page or decided amongst us that it would be the same Marilyn outfit,’ said Benach. ‘There were talks of it being something totally different and new, like way more Harley.’
The idea to transform the iconic look and update it came to Benach while in a research library.
‘I remember the moment where I just went, “Oh my God, the best idea is just to take the exact Marilyn outfit and put her in pants. Turn it into pants,”‘ said Benach. ‘It was just a light bulb moment. It hit and I told [director] Cathy [Yan] and Cathy was like, “Brilliant. Done. Do it.”‘
Marilyn’s getaway to St. Petersburg, Florida with ex-husband Joe DiMaggio on March 22, 1961 – following her divorce from Arthur Miller and a traumatic hospital stay – is covered by Bill DeYoung in a fascinating piece for St. Pete Catalyst.
“Leaning back on a beach recliner under a blue-and-white striped cabana for two, the most-photographed woman in the world smiled shyly at the gathered gaggle of photographers – the newswire paparazzi and the Brownie-toting locals.
‘Her skin is white – almost chalky – and her hair is platinum-gold,’ the daily newspaper would report the next morning. ‘She’s trimmer than the girl in the movies. And she’s beautiful. She’s really beautiful.
The paper was the St. Petersburg Times, and the woman under glass was none other than Marilyn Monroe … It was DiMaggio who suggested a relaxing week at the beach. The retired Yankee slugger was working as batting coach for the team during spring training in St. Petersburg.
At the Tides, they took separate top-floor suites.
Local residents were allowed limited access to the hotel’s two pools, snack bar and beachfront. Membership in the Bath Club wasn’t exclusive – anyone who paid the annual dues could use the facility.
‘It was all about her – I don’t think I even knew who Joe DiMaggio was at the time,’ says Karen DeYoung, 12 years old in March of 1961. She and her family were Bath Club regulars.
‘Everybody was talking about it, as we were hanging out by the pool,’ she recalls, ‘so of course we had to go down and check it out. We were giggling and nonchalantly walking in front of their cabana, trying to get a glimpse of them.’
DeYoung, senior national security correspondent for the Washington Post, has never forgotten what happened next.
‘It was at that point that DiMaggio called out “Hey kid,” and handed me a dollar, or a couple dollars, and said “Go get us some hot dogs.” So I did.’
She ran to the poolside snack bar and dutifully returned, handing a steaming pair of franks to the bare-chested sports icon and the movie star with the chalky-white skin.”
“They took frequent walks on the beach, holding hands and posing for news photographers. Monroe accompanied her ex to Huggins Field, the Yankees’ training site adjacent to Crescent Lake downtown. A photographer from Sports Illustrated snapped her gazing adoringly as he swatted a few balls. Together, they watched spring training games from the press box at Al Lang Field.”
“During their eight-day stay, DiMaggio and Monroe dined often in the Tides’ on-site restaurant, and at the Wine Cellar, about a mile north on Gulf Boulevard. The Wine Cellar was a favorite haunt for visiting Yankee players.
Mike Porter was 20 years old, a student at St. Petersburg Junior College, working on the valet team at the Wine Cellar. He remembers when the Tides’ official ‘limo,’ a four-door DeSoto with a wooden rack on the roof, dropped Joe and Marilyn at the restaurant’s front door.
‘He was sitting in the front seat, she was in back,’ Porter recalls. ‘I reached in to help her get out. She was very pale, and very frail. She looked at me and didn’t say anything.'”
“They were promptly seated at a dark corner table. ‘The manager came out about 45 minutes later and said “Hey, the guests are bothering them so much they can’t eat their meal – would you take my car and drive them back to the Tides?”‘ Porter explains. ‘I said sure.’
Monroe was chatty, Porter remembers, while DiMaggio didn’t say much. The two talked about possibly renting a car. They asked him if he had a car of his own.
A day or so later, Porter was summoned to the Tides, poolside, on official business: ‘I came and picked her up and I took her to get her hair done,’ he says. ‘She was delightful; she called me Mike. I didn’t make any reference to who she was – I knew she’d had enough of that at the restaurant.’
Porter had no interest in Monroe’s personal or marital issues. ‘Other than the fact that she looked great in a bathing suit,’ he says, ‘I wasn’t into that stuff.’
Hotel management arranged for the golden couple to sunbathe in privacy, on a secluded rooftop deck over the lobby. Remembers Bath Club ‘cabana boy’ John Messmore: ‘They were hounded all the time, so Mr. Dross, the hotel manager, said to them “Why don’t I just give you the key?”‘
Messmore, 17 at the time, was dispatched to the sundeck to take a lunch order. ‘And when Joe saw me, he thought I was there to get an autograph,’ Messmore explains. ‘And that was exactly the opposite of what he wanted. So he wasn’t a lot of smiles.’
‘But Marilyn, I remember she had on a white terrycloth robe, and a kind of white terrycloth wrap thing on her head. And she ordered an avocado, and an iced tea with two lemons, for lunch. And I cannot remember what Joe ordered, I was so enamored with Marilyn Monroe.’
Even their secluded rooftop nest wasn’t totally private. Boys lined up to toss baseballs to DiMaggio, who’d sign them and toss them back down.
‘I do remember her peeking out of the door of her room,’ Messmore says, ‘and looking both ways when I was walking down the hallway, like she had heard a noise or something. And that’s how I knew which room she was in.'”
“On March 31, the Times published a United Press International photo taken the previous afternoon. In another beach cabana, Monroe and DiMaggio were smiling broadly. She was wearing a shoulderless, midriff-bearing top and black shorts.
St. Petersburg Times – Friday, March 31, 1961. SUNCOAST SUN GILDS A LILY. Marilyn Monroe arrived on the Suncoast just a week ago today, pale and drawn from a recent illness. Taking her sunglasses off for a cameraman for the first time, Marilyn looks healthy and happy as she poses in a cabana at The Tides, North Redington Beach with her ex-husband, former baseball great, Joe DiMaggio. Both are reported to be leaving the Suncoast area Saturday.
On April 1, nine days after their arrival, the couple flew out of Tampa International Airport.”
Marilyn and Gene Kelly on the set of Let’s Make Love (1960)
Gene Kelly – the legendary dancer, choreographer and actor/director – will be honoured with a statue in London’s Leicester Square. Patricia Ward Kelly, who became his third wife in 1990 until his death six years later, has shared some of Kelly’s memories with Metro.
Kelly was a friend of Marilyn from her early years in Hollywood. His first wife Betsy Blair recalled seeing Marilyn with director Nick Ray during a 1951 party in their home, and Marilyn would meet Milton Greene for the first time in the same house, two years later. Kelly also had a cameo role in Marilyn’s penultimate movie, Let’s Make Love, and was considering a role in her upcoming film project, What a Way to Go!, when Marilyn passed away. (He took the part, and Shirley MacLaine replaced Marilyn.)
Ironically, Patricia’s story of Marilyn making hot dogs for Gene Kelly recalls a scene in The Seven Year Itch (1955), when Sonny Tufts asks Tom Ewell who the blonde in the kitchen might be, and Ewell retorts, ‘Maybe it’s Marilyn Monroe!’
“These were in the years before I met him, but his house, the front door was never locked and people would just come in at any hour of the day or night. There was one experience where the writer James Agee, and a famous director came in with a young woman in the middle of the night. Gene realised the men had quite a bit to drink, so he thought that he should rustle up some food for them. He went into the kitchen with this young woman to see what was in the fridge and found some hot dogs. He had her boiling hot dogs – which coincidentally was the first meal I had with him. He turned to this young woman and said, ‘What’s your name?’ She said, ‘Marilyn’. And it was Marilyn Monroe.”
Authentic Brands Group (ABG), the licensing company who acquired Marilyn’s estate in 2012, have authorised an adaptation of Keith Badman’s book, The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe, Deadline reports. This project was first announced in 2019 (see here) as a serial drama for BBC television. It’s not stated whether the Beeb is still involved, but Final Years will be co-produced by 101 Studios and the UK’s Seven Seas Films, with a screenplay by Dan Sefton (whose credits include The Good Karma Hospital.) As usual with the film industry, it is likely to be a long process; and with a non-fiction source, it differs from the upcoming Netflix biopic based on Joyce Carol Oates’ controversial novel, Blonde (due for release later this year.) Badman’s biography is worth reading, though not without its flaws – read my review here.
Anne Carson’s verse play, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, baffled New York’s theatregoers in 2019. The script has now been published, though I must admit I was rather underwhelmed. But art critic Audrey Wollen, who wrote a perceptive essay last year about images of Marilyn reading, has contributed an intriguing analysis of the play in the February/March issue of Book Forum.
“As legends, the parallels between Marilyn and Helen are obvious. They are both superlative in their femininity, girl-ness at god level, with beauty that made them special and made them suffer. Marilyn never directly caused any international conflicts (despite that little JFK subplot), but she has still become a cautionary tale, although what exactly we are cautioned about is unclear. (Personal despair? Public sexuality? Tomato, tomato.) And while she eventually identified as a leftist, officially un-American, her image was often wedded to America’s wars. In fact, her entire career is owed to it: She was discovered as a model while working in a factory assembling drones during World War II, smiling wide next to heavy, morbid machinery. Her ‘bombshell’ moniker greased the association, her name slipping between sex, death, and nation. By the time she visited the American troops in Korea in 1954, a hundred thousand soldiers came out to express their desire and, by extension, their allegiance. Like Helen, she was what they were fighting for.
The play ends with language hardening its shell into event again. The kernel of the story that Carson wants to tell is sung early on: ‘Rape is the story of Helen, Persephone, Norma Jeane, Troy. War is the context and God is a boy. . . . Truth is, it’s a disaster to be a girl.’ At the story’s close, an earthquake hits Los Angeles, causing a tsunami to flood the entire city: ‘Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in subterranean caves. We’re more scientific now, we know it’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal.’ The light changes, ‘like morning at midnight,’ and our heroine leaves the hotel for the first time, sailing on a war boat through Hollywood’s sunken ruins. Like Euripides, Carson closes the curtains on the wide, open sea. Another fantasy floats to the surface, another absolution: Norma Jeane escapes, inheriting Helen’s endlessness. The clouds watch from above, in sisterhood.”
Blancpain’s Saint-Valentine 2020 watch (left) and the 1930s original (right)
In November 2019, the Swiss watchmaker Blancpain hosted an exhibition of Marilyn’s personal property, including one of their 1930s designs purchased for $225K at Julien’s Auctions during their 2016 sale of items owned by Monroe, at their Manhattan store (see here.) The platinum and diamond watch is more ostentatious than Marilyn’s other jewellery, and its provenance is unclear though it’s said to have been a gift from either Arthur Miller or Joe DiMaggio. Now Blancpain has used the watch as inspiration for their limited edition Saint-Valentine 2020 model, available now for a cool £30, 140, as Tracey Llewellyn reports for London’s Telegraph.
In what is becoming a fine Aussie tradition, 270 Monroe lookalikes once again took part in the annual Marilyn Jetty Swim in the Brighton Jetty yesterday, in aid of Cancer Council SA, as 7 News Adelaide reports.
Marilyn and Ella Fitzgerald’s fabled encounter has already been recreated in two books for children, Famous Friends and Ella: Queen of Jazz. Now a third has been published, Making Their Voices Heard, with text by Vivian Kirkfield and illustrations by Alleanna Harris. Although the tale of Marilyn helping Ella to secure a nightclub gig is certainly uplifting, the facts are somewhat hazy (more details at Snopes.)
