Actress Kim Cattrall presents a new BBC Radio 2 documentary Marilyn! Available on i-Player until August 12, the 60-minutes programme features interviews with Lawrence Schiller, George Barris and Buddy Greco.

Also, BBC World Service has uploaded a 10-minute programme, Witness: The Death of Marilyn Monroe.

Dave Garroway in 1955

An excerpt from David Garroway’s 1955 radio interview with Marilyn – in which she confessed that she wanted to retire to Brooklyn – has been broadcast on NBC.

 I have posted two tributes to Marilyn on my personal website:

Fifty Years Ago… an extract from my novel, The Mmm Girl, in which a young Marilyn visits the grave of her beloved Aunt Ana

The Smart Dumb Blonde - my review of the recent BBC radio documentary, presented by Maureen Dowd

Tonight at 8pm (GMT) on BBC Radio 4, Maureen Dowd will present a programme about Marilyn, The Smart Dumb Blonde. As a taster, you can also listen to a recent discussion of MM on Woman’s Hour, featuring Dr Lois Banner and Dame Ann Leslie.

“Pulitzer prize winning journalist Maureen Dowd argues that the so-called ‘dumb blonde’ of 1950s Hollywood was in fact smarter than she seemed. Marilyn Monroe and her ilk aspired to be brilliant in conversation as well as on camera; they wanted to pose with books as well as blonde hair; they understood the value of their sexual currency and they had enough sense to take advantage of their assets.

In this programme, Maureen Dowd brings together some of her most eminent friends and colleagues (amongst them, Harvey Weinstein and Mike Nichols) to travel back to a time when glamour and brains were not mutually exclusive. With the help of archive, film and music and some brilliant personal anecdotes, they’ll debate why the figureheads of the 50s believed in education as a mark of status and success.

Jump forward to today and American popular culture and politics has lost the drive which Marilyn’s era possessed. Maureen Dowd argues that aspirations and originality are no longer valued; instead we live in a cookie-cutter world of reality tv, banal cinema and inane politicians. And, despite the seeming triumph of feminism, some of the world’s most powerful and desirable women – from Sarah Palin to Kim Kardashian – are leading this trend. In the words of John Hamm, ‘stupidity is certainly celebrated’.”

Photo by Fraser Penney

Michelle Morgan’s truly definitive, fully updated Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed is officially published in the UK today (though it entered the Top 20 at WH Smith two weeks ago.) Michelle writes about the experience in her column for the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, while an interview with John Griff on BBC Radio Northampton is available on i-Player for 6 more days. (Michelle’s spot is 15 minutes in.)

Alan Young, left, with Marilyn in 1946

In December 1946, Marilyn – who had changed her name just a few months before – appeared on a Rose Bowl float in Los Angeles, promoting the Alan Young Radio Show. The Northumberland-born actor and broadcaster dated Monroe twice, as he first told the Saracota Herald-Tribune in 1953.

Alan Young, now 92, is best known as Wilbur Post in the 1960s TV sitcom, Mister Ed. He spoke fondly about Marilyn to biographer Michelle Morgan, and his memories featured in her 2007 book, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed.

A new interview with Young is published today in Scotland’s Daily Record:

 “I dated her when she was very young, about 17 (actually, she was 20). I had just come out to California.

I have a picture on my wall with Marilyn Monroe where I’m playing the bagpipes and she is blowing the chanter.

I went out with her twice and she was such a lovely young lady. I met her again several years later but I didn’t know who she was from her name.

Someone said to me, ‘How long have you known Marilyn Monroe?’ I said I knew her as Norma Jean Dougherty. She did some publicity shots with me.

She was exactly the same person – so naive and really sweet. That’s why she landed in so much trouble later on because she trusted everybody. That was a real shame.”’

At the Rose Bowl Parade, 1946

Sarasota Herald Tribune, 1953

Elliot Erwitt – who worked with Eve Arnold at Magnum, and also photographed Marilyn – remembers Arnold, and the friendship that developed between these two remarkable women, in a BBC interview.

The English-born actor, Peter Lawford, was one of the last people to speak to Marilyn on the night she died. A new radio documentary, Brother-in-Lawford, about his glamorous life and tragic decline, airs tomorrow at 10pm on BBC Radio 2 – narrated by Buddy Greco, with input from Lawford’s son, Christopher, reports the Daily Express.

‘“Marilyn taught me to dance the twist but it didn’t feel amazing at six years of age – only when I told people later,” says Christopher.

Indeed his father introduced Marilyn Monroe to JFK and brought her to Kennedy’s 45th birthday party to sing her infamous rendition of happy Birthday.’

Sarah Churchwell (author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) talks to NPR about My Week With Marilyn. (Photo collage by The Marilynette Lounge)

“Michelle Williams’ performance is really quite extraordinary. And as you could hear even in the clip that you played there, she gets the voice unbelievably well. And she also gets Monroe’s in trademark mannerisms. But she resists the temptation to fall into the stereotype of the breathy whisper. She lets her speak like a human being and yet, it sounds and looks like Marilyn. So, that part I think they do really well.

Overall, however, the problem is, is what they’ve chosen to do is to film a story that is only very broadly based in fact. And a lot of its claims, I think most people who know about Marilyn’s life and work are pretty skeptical of the claims of the author of this book to have had some kind of a fling with her.

I mean, look, the basic facts of it are perfectly true. He was the third assistant director on “The Prince and the Showgirl,” which was made in 1956. He certainly met Marilyn and worked with her…(But) he does claim that she told him all kinds of intimate details, which coincidentally appear in virtually every biography of her.

So, there’s nothing in these books specifically about Marilyn that he couldn’t had found out. And more importantly, he waited some 40 years after the fact to publish them, which does make one think, you know, having read all of these biographies, that he capitalized on her fame and her familiarity and wrote a couple of books claiming a little bit more than happened.”

 

Listen to this KPCC interview with photographer Bert Stern at the launch of his new, deluxe book for Taschen at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, where the 1962 session was shot.

Larry Schiller, who also photographed Monroe in the months before she died, also speaks.

From 'James and Marilyn' blog on Tumblr

Colin Clark’s two memoirs have been reissued in a single volume to tie in with today’s movie release. In a review for the Daily Mail, Tom Cox says that the first part (The Prince, the Showgirl and Me) as ‘delightfully gossipy’, but argues that My Week With Marilyn ‘has none of the same charm, and reads like a childish dream sequence about the Monroe legend in its most reductive form.’

If you prefer the listening cure, My Week With Marilyn has also been serialised on BBC Radio 4 this week.

Marilyn appeared on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s radio show in 1952. (The episode is included on The Marilyn Monroe Anthology.) MM is shown above with the comedy duo at the Redbook awards, later that day.

For several years now, Jerry (now 85) has claimed that he and Marilyn had an affair. He brings up the subject yet again in GQ (US version, August issue), as Liz Smith reports:

‘Here’s one Lewis tale for lovers of history, scandal, and sex-with-the-famous. Jerry insists thatMarilyn Monroe never ever had that fabled affair with President John F. Kennedy. He is adamant. Lewis says she didn’t do it with JFK because … she did it with him, Jerry. He doesn’t quite explain the logic of what could have stopped MM from, you, know, making love to the president and to him as well? (Did Jerry think he’d spoiled her for all other men?)

Lewis also declares that the greatest sex-symbol used sex “to make an emotional connection.” It was more than just sex for her.

However, when asked by GQ’s writer “what was it like?” with Monroe, Jerry says: “It was … long. I was crippled for a month. And here I thought Marlene Dietrich was great!” ‘

Lewis, a presenter at 1952′s Photoplay Awards, famously jumped on a table and whistled when Marilyn walked up to the podium.

At around this time, MM is said to have told reporters that, unlike many other women, she found Lewis more attractive than Martin (her co-star in the unfinished Something’s Got to Give, ten years later.)

However, that comment doesn’t really prove anything – and I’m always a bit wary of anyone who claims to have had an affair with Marilyn near the end of her life, especially during the so-called ‘Kennedy years’.

What do you think?

In mid-October, Farrar Straus & Giroux will bring out a book called Fragments – purported to be a work of Marilyn Monroe’s writings, poems, notes, letters from her personal archive. Isabel Keating did the audio voice of Marilyn for the Macmillan Audio version of this sure-to-be-hot book.

She did the recording of the material on the anniversary of Marilyn’s death and says: “During the sessions, a small group of us realized the fact and a collective shiver was felt and a tear was shed … Whatever anyone thinks about the book itself, even the jottings of this famous woman evoke her spirit, her mind. They show her as a woman searching and hoping to amplify her experience. She wanted to improve herself and was reaching and searching. I found the work so smart – and so fragile.”

Liz Smith on WowOwow today

Isabel Keating is an acclaimed stage actress, having played Judy Garland (Marilyn Monroe’s friend and one of her favourite singers) in the much-praised 2003 Broadway production, The Boy From Oz.

Photo by Rupert Hartley

Broadcaster and journalist Mariella Frostrup has told the Radio Times that after presenting the BBC Radio 2 series Blonde on Blonde in 2009 (profiling three iconic blondes, Doris Day, Diana Dors and Marilyn Monroe), made her realise how little the ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype has progressed over the years. (Unfortunately, Blonde on Blonde is not currently available on BBC i-Player. It was an interesting series, despite some factual errors. If it is repeated anytime I will mention it here.)

The broadcaster, 47, said she “would have thought twice” about going blonde at 16, when her father’s death left her grey, if she had “known then what my shade of choice suggested to the world”.

“Few women may be born blonde but that hasn’t stopped it becoming a noun. In blonde world whether you’re a brain surgeon, a lapdancer or an oligarch’s wife, it’s all the same. Blonde is the description – anything else merely informs us of the variety. Pinch me if I’m living in the 21st century.”

Of famous blondes like Monroe, Frostrup commented:

“Beneath the make-up and beyond the studio publicist’s spin a sorrier bunch of women you couldn’t stumble across… like so much else in their lives their most celebrated asset, their platinum locks, were fake. Perhaps it was the shadow of that deception, one of the many required to qualify as screen sirens, that saw so many of their dreams end in tragedy.”

According to Frostrup: “Being blonde means never saying you don’t understand unless you want to be predictable. Being blonde means always trying to tell the blonde joke first.” She added: “Our roots are often only skin deep and, despite assumptions to the contrary, proven side effects don’t include brain impairment.”

She cited Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton and the pop singer Lady Gaga as examples of women who combine blonde with brains. And she quoted Dolly Parton, who famously said: “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb – and I’m not blonde either.”

It’s not the first time Frostrup has spoken out about sexism and ‘blonde prejudice’. ”Men are hideously predictable,” she told the Radio Times back in 1998. “They all want blondes with big breasts. Men expect a sweet, cute blonde and get me. They have a problem with women who are bright and good-looking. Women, on the other hand, would welcome the combination in men, given the opportunity.”