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Marilyn Takes Us Back to ‘Cinematic’ New York

Marilyn is featured in Christian Blauvelt’s new guidebook with a difference, Cinematic Cities: New York – The Big Apple on the Big Screen. Published by TCM, the book features the subway grate on 52nd and Lexington where Marilyn filmed her iconic ‘skirt-blowing scene’ for The Seven Year Itch in 1954. The exclusive Sutton Place South apartment building where she resides in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) is also mentioned, although the exterior is only briefly seen and the movie was actually shot in Hollywood.

Of course, Marilyn would rent her own apartment at Sutton Place South for several months in 1956, until her marriage to Arthur Miller. Another cast member, William Powell, also had a prior cinematic link to Sutton Place, as footage from his 1936 comedy classic My Man Godfrey suggests the mansion where he works as a butler was also in the area (as it has a stunning view of the nearby Queensboro Bridge.)

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Marilyn on Reelz: ‘It Happened Here’

It Happened Here is a documentary series on the US Reelz channel, charting key locations in the lives of legendary icons. The most recent episode focuses on Marilyn, visiting Zuma Beach, California (where she posed for some of her earliest photo shoots); The Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood (formerly the Villa Nova Restaurant, where she and Joe DiMaggio first dated); and the subway grate on Lexington and 52nd, NYC, where she filmed The Seven Year Itch. Guests include authors Lois Banner, Elizabeth Winder, and reality TV star Trisha Paytas. While it’s an interesting premise, fans tell me the show is marred by sensationalism and unfounded insinuations (which is unfortunately no big surprise, as Reelz previously aired a National Enquirer documentary on Marilyn.)

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Marilyn in New York, and an Historic Injustice

Canadian-American musician Meghan Remy aka U.S. Girls is about to release her sixth studio album. In an interview for The Ringer, Meghan takes Lindsay Zoladz on a sightseeing tour of New York, including the subway grate on Lexington and 52nd Street where Marilyn shot an iconic movie scene, while her marriage fell apart.

“The night that iconic photo of Marilyn Monroe was taken—you know the one: stilettos on a subway grate, billowing white dress—Monroe and her husband Joe DiMaggio got into a screaming match. The fight was partially about the photo itself: While shooting The Seven Year Itch, the studio had savvily leaked Monroe’s whereabouts to the press, and by the time Billy Wilder was ready to roll camera on what would become the most notorious scene in the movie, several thousand onlookers had shown up to watch. (They were almost all men, but I hardly need to tell you that.) DiMaggio was there, and he wasn’t too keen on what he took to be his wife’s public exhibitionism. When she showed up to set the next morning, Monroe’s hairdresser applied foundation to hide fresh bruises. She filed for divorce from DiMaggio before The Seven Year Itch wrapped.

‘We’re constantly presented with this smiling Marilyn,’ says Meg Remy, the singer and eccentric creative mastermind behind the band U.S. Girls. ‘But for some reason, when you have all the information, it just feels so heavy.’

I should mention that Remy is speaking into a headset, as she drives a rented, 15-seat van deftly through the streets of Manhattan. In anticipation of the release of U.S. Girls’ new album In a Poem Unlimited—the most ambitious and, as it happens, best album of Remy’s decade-long career—her label suggested a listening party for fans and members of the press. Remy asked around enough to learn what a listening party was, and, ever the DIY-minded eccentric, then decided it just wasn’t her style. What she came up with instead was this: a van tour of ‘sites of injustices in New York City,’ written and narrated by Remy herself, while we listen to the new album in the background.”

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Marilyn in New York: From Subway Grate to Sutton Place

Over at the Village Voice, Molly Fitzpatrick looks at New York’s many iconic movie locations with blogger Nick Carr (Scouting New York) and Sarah Louise Lilley, a guide for TCM’s On Location tours.

“At times, there was an almost virtual reality–like quality to the experience, when Lilley’s commentary and film clips, cued up to play on overhead monitors when we passed the real-life locations within them, transformed the present-day city seen from the bus windows into a long-lost version of itself … Had Lilley not pointed it out, the subway grate at 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue where Marilyn Monroe famously posed in The Seven Year Itch could have been any one of the city’s thousands and thousands more just like it, unglamorously trod on every day by locals and visitors alike.

Sutton Place, as seen in ‘How to Marry a Millionaire’

Both Lilley and Silverman cited Sutton Place Park as their favorite movie landmark on the tour, a tiny, peaceful lookout onto the East River with a stunning view of the Queensboro Bridge … Sutton Place is the swanky, townhouse-lined neighborhood that lies just south of the bridge. ‘The history of New York and the history of film is beautifully interwoven there,’ Lilley says. In the early-twentieth century, the same stretch of East River waterfront was home to not only luxurious apartments with views to match, but poverty-stricken tenements and the gangs who inhabited them, as depicted onscreen in 1937’s Dead End. By 1953, Sutton Place had become the must-have address for the trio of enterprising husband-seekers — Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall — in How to Marry a Millionaire.”

The interior of the Sutton Place South building was recreated in Hollywood – but Marilyn would rent an apartment there in 1956.

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TCM in New York

 TCM are running bus tours of New York’s most famous movie locations on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, reports Newsday. Among the landmarks to be visited en route is the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan, where the immortal ‘subway scene’ from The Seven Year Itch was filmed in 1954.

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‘Smash’ Episode 7: The Workshop

This week’s episode focuses on the tension between Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) and her Broadway diva of a mother (Bernadette Peters):

‘WHAT WAS AWESOME: We get to see the workshop of “Marilyn” almost in its entirety which, frankly, is flippin’ fantastic. It’s a joy to see these numbers we’ve seen unveiled bit by bit strung together into a show, even if that show is deliberately not ready for a full audience just yet. This is a musical I’d see in a heartbeat, and Megan Hilty just kills it. Tonight’s new number, “Lexington and 52nd,” is a wonderful and dark DiMaggio number about how forgotten he feels when Monroe’s in the spotlight, and Will Chase growls through it with rage and charm. I love it when Smash gives us brand new music without the whole HEY LOOK, THIS IS NEW AND SWELL fanfare of marketing. it’s just slipped right in there amidst the workshop, and it’s flat-out cool.’  CinemaBlend