Rare footage of Marilyn is hard to find: and colour film, all the more so. This 1953 home movie of Marilyn at an airport, during filming of River of No Return in Canada, accompanied by co-star Robert Mitchum, was posted to YouTube today by user SGTG77.

Marilyn had sprained her ankle after filming a dangerous canoe scene. However, her friend Shelley Winters claimed she exaggerated the injury as revenge against tyrannical director Otto Preminger.

Screen caps by Yvon Molostoff

 Joe and Marilyn, by celebrity biographer C. David Heymann, was due to be published by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on April 30th. However, several online bookstores have now moved that date forward – some as far as 2020!

Heymann passed away in May 2012. According to his New York Times obituary, he was no stranger to controversy. Was Joe and Marilyn completed, I wonder, and will it ever see the light of day?

Marilyn: My Secret is a new play, opening at the Macha Theatre in West Hollywood and running until April 21st.

The drama focuses on Marilyn’s rumoured sexual escapades (mostly unproven.) James Spada, author of the 1982 book, Monroe: Her Life in Pictures, has reviewed Marilyn: My Secret for Broadway World.

“The play, co-written by its producer/director Odalys Nanin and Willard Manus, is a short (eighty minutes) and mostly enjoyable two acts that take place in Marilyn’s Brentwood home after her death in 1962. (We’re seeing Marilyn reminisce in heaven, apparently.) The writers have done their research about Monroe, but several times they succumb to the understandable temptation to run with the most sensationalistic assertions about the woman - twenty abortions, a baby at 14, a long and meaningful lesbian relationship with a drama coach, flings with Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, and the most celebrated stripper of the late forties, Lili St. Cyr, who teaches Marilyn how to be sexy. None of these rumors has come close to being proved…

[Kelly Mullis] gives us a multi-layered sexy symbol, conveying Marilyn’s highs and lows, her sweetness and her guile, with equal sympathy. She sings a number of Marilyn’s songs, using her own voice, and it’s close enough…

This is a multi-media show, with the stage backdrop being a screen that frequently shows us clips and photos of the real Marilyn, as well as one Photoshopped image of Marilyn with JFK, something else that will displease some.”

 

 

In Bert Stern: Original Madman, Shannah Laumeister’s 2011 documentary about the photographer, Stern discusses his infamous ‘last sitting’ with Marilyn. He spoke to Time magazine recently, and you can watch a clip from the film at Nowness.

“After I set up the studio [at the Bel-Air] the front desk rang ‘Miss Monroe is here’ I decided to go down and meet her. I met her [for the first time] on the pathway to the suite. She was alone wearing a scarf and green slacks and a sweater. She had no make up on. I said ‘You’re beautiful,’ and she said, ‘What a nice thing to say.’

[In the suite] she looked at what was there and asked about makeup. I said I didn’t think we needed any makeup, but how about a little eyeliner? She picked up one of the scarves, which was chiffon, you could see through it. She looked [at it] and said, ‘Do you want to do nudes?’ So it was her idea.”

However, in his 1982 book, The Last Sitting, Stern detailed a more complex version of events:

“She lowered the scarf, looked at me and said, ‘You want to do nudes?’

She’d seen right through it.

‘Uh, well I – I guess so!’ Who, me? ‘It’d probably be a nice idea, wouldn’t it? But it wouldn’t be exactly nude. You’d have the scarf.’

‘Well, how much would you see through it?’

‘That depends on how I light it,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. And then, ‘Just a second. George?’

George Masters [hairdresser] came in. She said, ‘George, what do you think about these scarves and doing nudes?’

I held my breath.

‘Oh…what a divine idea!’ said George.

Thank God. If he had said, ‘Oh, no, how gauche,’ the whole thing would have been off in a second. Gone.

She was that vulnerable.”

As the shoot began, Marilyn made it clear exactly how much she wanted to reveal:

“Marilyn walked onto the set in her bare feet, a glass of champagne in one hand and an orange striped scarf tied around her bare bosom. She still had her green slacks on.

‘I’m not going to take off my pants,’ she declared.

‘Just roll them down, then,’ I said.”

It was not until late in the evening that Marilyn finally stripped:

“It was late, close to dawn, when I finally got all her clothes off…’You know, for this one you’ve really got to take your pants off,’ I said.

I expected her to call for George, who by now was falling asleep in the other room. But she just said, ‘Okay.’ We’d already gone so far in the pictures; what was there to be shy about? She stepped into the archway between the rooms and, holding the scarf around her like a towel, wriggled out of her slacks. And then she walked back out onto the white paper.

I started to shoot. This was the way I’d wanted her all along. Her beautiful body shone through the harlequin scarf in a tantalising, abstract hide-and-seek.

Until she dropped it. And I shot it. Just for myself.

One glimpse, one stolen frame.

We were finished.”

The same text has been used in all subsequent editions of the book. While I don’t believe that Marilyn was duped into posing naked, it was something that came about gradually (and with a lot of coaxing from Bert.)

Marilyn later vetoed many of Stern’s photos, though after she died, he published them anyway.

By the way, in the final shot that Stern mentioned, Marilyn looks distressed – as if dropping the scarf was an accident, not something designed to titillate. Judge for yourself here.

Photo by David Hoyt Hastie

Fifty years after her death, Marilyn makes the front cover of US scandal sheet, the National Examiner. Their ‘new’ story is that she was murdered by mafioso, including Frank ‘The German’ Schweihs, at the order of the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy. (This seems somewhat unlikely, as Joe had recently suffered a  debilitating stroke and was then incapable of speech.)

The mobster’s daughter, Nora Schweihs, denied this long-standing rumour last year on the axed reality show, Chicago Mob Wives. She is now writing a book, Marilyn Monroe: Murder Cover-Up, and says dramatically, ‘My father didn’t take his secrets to the grave, he gave them to me!’

This conspiracy theory was, in fact, first mooted in Milo Speriglio and Adela Gregory‘s 1992 book, Crypt 33, now available on Kindle.

The Empty Glass, J.I. Baker’s thriller about Marilyn’s death, has been acquired by Winkler Films, reports Deadline. I haven’t read the novel yet, but it has had some good reviews. However, I’m a bit wary about conspiracy theories being propagated on the big screen (even in a semi-fictional context.)

“The paranoid thriller is narrated by the young coroner who is among the first on the scene at Monroe’s bungalow when the actress is reported dead, and how his quest for the truth about her death puts his own life at risk. ‘The Empty Glass reads like a Billy Wilder screenplay,’ said David Winkler. ‘It’s got suspense, action and dramatic plot turns that will appeal to great directors, and rich dialogue that will attract great actors. We knew immediately that nobody could adapt the book better than the author himself, Jim Baker.’

‘When I was writing The Empty Glass, I very much had Goodfellas in mind structurally, so the fact that Winkler Films has optioned the book makes it feel like it’s come full-circle. I’m thrilled to be writing the adaptation my first time out of the gate for such esteemed producers,’ said Baker. Irwin Winkler produced Goodfellas and is currently in production of The Wolf Of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.”

Having reviewed Marilyn’s Men by Jane Ellen Wayne recently, blogger xoxoxoe (aka Elizabeth Periale) takes an in-depth look at Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the controversial biography by Anthony Summers, over at Cannonball Read IV. Read her review in full here. And to check out her other MM-related articles, click here.

“Marilyn’s life is usually presented as an inexorable, inevitable, and pathetic progression towards her death. Death is waiting for us all, but we wouldn’t be able to function if we didn’t have hopes and dreams for our present and future. For all of her talk about death, Marilyn did, too…Summers gets a little too sidetracked in Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe with the Kennedys and their amorous and political complications. Poor Marilyn gets lost in the middle of the book in the Kennedy glare. The last few chapters present a Rashomon-like account of her final hours. It’s well-researched, but full of so many conflicting statements by people who claimed to be ‘on the scene’ that it is depressing and dizzying to read.”

Meanwhile over at Videogum, we learn that Goddess was once mooted to be adapted for the big screen with David Lynch as director…

“David Lynch, who had experienced previous success with the acclaimed The Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet (1986), was hired by a Warner Bros. executive to direct a film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the best-selling book Goddess. Lynch recalls being ‘sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story.’ Lynch’s agent, Tony Krantz suggested the director work with his friend and writer Mark Frost. He worked on Goddess screenplay with Lynch. Even though this project was dropped by Warner Brothers, Lynch and Frost became good friends…”

Marilyn’s Men: The Private Life of Marilyn Monroe, a scandalous 1992 book by Jane Ellen Wayne, gets a less-than-glowing review on the Cannonball Read 4 blog.

“Yet another recap of the actress’s life, focusing on her busted love affairs and not offering much real insight. It’s chock-full of sleazy unsubstantiated details and gossip added for prurient interest…Wayne relies on quotes from Robert Slatzer, who gained fame with his claims of a supposed 1952 secret marriage to Marilyn that supposedly took place in Mexico, at the height of her romance with Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio…Slatzer’s credibility is not helped by other quotes by him that Wayne includes as facts, including basic facts of Marilyn’s early life, which he seems to get very wrong.”

In an interview with the Miami New Times, photographer Larry Schiller talked about working with Marilyn:

“On the set of Let’s Make Love, you were photographing her in her dressing room and she asked you, ‘How often do you lie?’ Why do you think she was an insecure person?
Compare Marilyn Monroe to a great comedian or a great actress like Ana Magnani or Bette Davis. I think everybody is insecure in some way; otherwise they wouldn’t be a great talent because they are trying to express themselves and prove themselves to themselves and to the world, and I think Marilyn had a lot of demons in her life. A lot of demons. One of the demons that haunted her tremendously was the insanity in her own family — her mother being in a mental institution, her father attempting suicide, and she herself in pain. I think that inside there were demons we never knew about and dealt with. That’s number one.

Number two, I have a theory — which is based not on speculation or rumor, but based on what I’ve observed — and that is Marilyn was very secure in front of the still camera because she didn’t have to walk and talk all the time. In front of the moving camera, I think that she became very insecure because she had to have two or three things going on simultaneously. But she went to one of the greatest acting schools in the world, The Actors Studio, and she had one of the greatest acting coaches in the world, Lee Strasberg. She was a fine actress, but the world didn’t accept her as that. They accepted her as the dumb blonde. But I believe that that was a role she was playing all the time. Laurence Olivier played roles, Walter Matthau, all actors. But she played the same role all the time, and they wouldn’t let her out of that role by giving her other screenplays. That made her more insecure.”

Schiller claims to have visited Marilyn at home on the day she died to discuss selling photos of her nude swim to Playboy. He has also said that Bobby Kennedy was in the house when he called.

“You witnessed things many people didn’t, like Robert Kennedy at her home shortly before she died. Do you believe there was a conspiracy to kill Marilyn?
You know you can’t prove a negative — you can’t prove there are no flying saucers. Personally, I spent a lot of time with Bobby Kennedy after that. I was a photographer and I photographed his campaigns. I don’t think the Kennedys were the type of people that would deal with a problem that way. I also don’t believe there was a conspiracy to kill Robert Kennedy, just as I don’t believe there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.”

A series of lurid allegations from celebrity muckraker Darwin Porter’s forthcoming book, Marilyn at Rainbow’s End, are published in this week’s Globe. Most of these rumours are nothing new, and some I find hardly believable. You can read the article here.

Among his claims are that Marilyn had lesbian affairs with Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor; that Marilyn aborted JFK’s lovechild; and that she had an ‘emotional hotel summit’ with first lady Jackie Kennedy days before her death.

As the countdown rolls on to the fiftieth anniversary of Marilyn’s death, the rumour mill has been revived. This item, posted at CBS San Francisco, builds on last year’s story that Marilyn’s hairdresser, George Masters, told his nephew (on tape) that she died at Frank Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe.

The photo above shows Marilyn a week before she died, at Cal-Neva with Sinatra and singer Buddy Greco. However, I don’t believe that she returned to Lake Tahoe on the day of her death. All other accounts place her at home in Los Angeles.

It’s a highly competitive field, but this week’s runaway winner of the Dumbest MM Rumour award is RT.com, with their report on Ludmila Temnova’s documentary, Monroe in the Land of Dostoyevsky.

‘The film tells the tale of Marilyn’s alleged secret visit to the Soviet capital in 1960, when the actress disappeared for nearly two weeks while shooting – ahem – Let’s Make Love.

Temnova’s movie features the sex symbol’s alleged Soviet friend, talking about their relationship. In the film, the man is known as Vladislav Egorov.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, “Egorov” was a Soviet Secret Service agent in the US. He claims to have met Monroe in 1959, at a Soviet Embassy reception dated to Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the States.

In 1960, after Monroe had a jealous fight with her husband Arthur Miller, “Egorov” allegedly invited her to visit Moscow. He recounts how he met her at the airport and took her to a hotel overlooking the Kremlin, before escaping to the countryside.’

Over at Huffington Post, veteran columnist Liz Smith shares her thoughts on the new Vanity Fair spread – and Monroe’s supposed rivalry with Elizabeth Taylor:

‘As it always happens–especially with Marilyn–what Schiller said about the shoot, and Monroe, fifty years ago, has altered considerably. The passage of time has improved his memory.

Initially, in the wake of the photo-shoot, Marilyn cheerfully and casually remarked to Schiller, “Oh, I’ll be so happy to see all those covers with me, instead of Liz!” A remark any actress in 1962 might have made, looking at the reams of publicity Taylor was generating from her Roman love affair with Richard Burton.

But now Schiller piles it on, saying Marilyn told Life magazine that there was to be no mention of Taylor anywhere in the magazine, in the issue in which, she, Monroe, appeared. Absurd. No actor had such power over Life magazine. They would have told her to take her naked tush to Look, and see if she fared better there…

Some other “Marilyn” quotes are dodgy as well. But who’ll be reading anyway? The pictures are lovely.’

Frank Sinatra’s former California home, the Farralone estate, is currently on the market for $12 million.

The property, which recently featured on an episode of TV’s Mad Men, is also rumoured to have been the site where Marilyn had trysts with John F. Kennedy, reports MSNBC.

However, this appears to be unfounded. Monroe stayed at one of Sinatra’s homes in 1961, while he was away on tour. But there is no confirmation of her ever meeting with JFK there.

Sinatra’s friendship with Kennedy is well-known, but it ended abruptly in 1962 when the president chose Bing Crosby’s Palm Springs home (instead of Sinatra’s) for his residence during the Democratic Convention. And it is generally thought that Kennedy probably had his fling with Marilyn at Crosby’s home, not Sinatra’s.

Sinatra had an on-off romance with Marilyn, and was known for his jealous nature. It seems unlikely, then, that Frank would have stood for any dalliances on his turf – even where the President was concerned.

Composer Robin De Raaff’s and librettist Janice Brogt’s new opera, Waiting For Miss Monroe, starring American soprano Laura Aikin, will open at the Netherlands Opera on June 9, reports Arts Journal.

It sounds like an interesting project, but the source material – the supposed ‘secret tapes’ made by Marilyn for her psychiatrist – is dubious to say the least.