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Jane Fonda Remembers Marilyn

In a CNN interview with Piers Morgan last week, Jane Fonda recalled meeting Marilyn:

“I was very, very drawn to her. To me, she was like a golden child. She radiated light and vulnerability. And I think that she was attracted to me as — she used to gravitate a little bit to me at parties, because she knew that I was not very secure, either. And she was fragile. I was very touched by her.

Michael Jackson, also, someone who was fragile. You know, both of them had these beyond famous iconic images. And yet in their innermost selves, they were very, very vulnerable, damaged people. And it was the tension between those two things, perhaps, that made them so brilliant in their — each in their own way.”

The daughter of actor Henry Fonda, Jane was eleven years younger than Marilyn. In her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, Jane explained how she decided to train at the Actor’s Studio after meeting Marilyn and the Strasbergs on the set of Some Like it Hot.

 

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Hefner: ‘I Never Met Marilyn’

One of MM’s many ‘Playboy’ covers (1997)

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has clarified one of the most common misconceptions about MM to his fiancee, Crystal Harris, while in conversation with chat show host Piers Morgan on CNN.

“PIERS: What do you guys talk about?
CRYSTAL: Everything. I ask him… I want to know everything about Hef. I ask him all these questions. I’m not a jealous person. I want to know, like, ‘Did you know Marilyn Monroe? Did you sleep with her? Did you do this?’

PIERS: Well, actually, that’s a damned good question. Did you know Marilyn Monroe?

Hugh: She was actually in my brother’s acting class in New York. But the reality is that I never met her. I talked to her once on the phone, but I never met her. She was gone, sadly, before I came out here.

PIERS: How much of Playboy, do you think, is down to you, personally?
Hugh: Well, I certainly didn’t do it alone. But it is certainly very personal. The whole notion of Playboy came from my own dreams, my childhood, adolescent dreams.”

Marilyn graced the first Playboy cover – and centrespread – back in 1953. It is often said that Hefner ‘discovered’ Monroe. But she was already a world-famous star with her handprints immortalised in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. And she never formally posed for the magazine – the nude centrespread was a calendar pose taken by Tom Kelley in 1949.

However, it could be said that Hefner owes his career to Marilyn, at least in part. Many of the celebrated Playboy cover girls – including Pamela Anderson – have imitated Monroe’s style.

More than twenty years ago, Hefner compounded public confusion by buying the burial plot next to Marilyn’s at Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles. I wonder how his wife-to-be feels about that?