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The Sandusky Roots of Sugar Kane

Sugar Kane, as played by Marilyn in Some Like It Hot, is actually Sugar Kowalczyk from Sandusky, Ohio – as Matt Westerhold notes in a piece for the Sandusky Register about his hometown’s movie connections.

“I enjoy it when Sandusky is the center of attention, and always get geeked when I hear mention of our city on TV shows and films. I loved it the first time, and ever since, when I heard Marilyn Monroe in the movie Some Like It Hot, say, ‘Imagine me, a smalltown girl from Sandusky, Ohio, (marrying the heir to the Shell Oil Co.).'” 

He’s got the gist of it, but here’s the exact dialogue from the scene in which, after singing ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ in a Florida hotel, Sugar receives a bouquet from her admirer and eagerly shares the news with her best pals, Daphne and Josephine…

SUGAR: Josephine, just imagine. Me, Sugar Kowalczyk from Sandusky, Ohio, on a millionaire’s yacht. lf my mother could only see me now.

DAPHNE: l hope my mother never finds out.

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Marilyn: The Pretty Funny Girl

In a blog post for the 25 Years Later site, J.C. Hotchkiss looks back at Marilyn’s comedic roles in Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot.

“The ‘dumb blonde’ has more depth than you would first think. As someone who has played this ingénue of a character, the ‘ditzy’ blonde needs to know herself. She needs to know the jokes but is NOT the joke. She needs to command the scene, but not be so childlike that the audience stops rooting for her and gets annoyed with her immaturity. Marilyn navigated this fine line throughout her career …

Marilyn fought for a long time to be taken seriously in the acting arena in which she desperately wanted to excel and to be a true actress, not just a pretty face.  I believe all these performance showcase that brilliance … To me, she was more than just a beauty. In fact, the internal struggles she was fighting throughout her life made these performances even that much more poignant …

Marilyn was a trendsetter without even trying to be. She just wanted to make people happy, sometimes at the detriment of her own well-being. At least we have her bright smile and contagious laughter on celluloid whenever we need to laugh and remember just how funny and beautiful she was; to remind us of who Marilyn Monroe was and the legacy she wanted us to remember. “

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Wednesdays With Marilyn in Palm Springs

The Palm Springs Cultural Centre is hosting a summer season of Marilyn’s movies each Wednesday at 7 pm, with Niagara on July 10; followed by Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on July 17, How to Marry a Millionaire on July 24, and Some Like It Hot on July 31. On Wednesdays at 7 through August, catch The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Let’s Make Love and Monkey Business. And finally, the retrospective winds up in September with Don’t Bother to Knock and The Misfits.

Thanks to Eric at Marilyn Remembered
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Marilyn: the Pencil Skirt’s Best Friend

No history of the pencil skirt is complete without reference to Marilyn, as Rosalind Jana writes for Australian Vogue.

“The pencil skirt became a defining garment of the 1950s and early 1960s. It could be luxuriously smart, as seen in lime green on Grace Kelly in Rear Window. It could exude sex appeal, as demonstrated by Sophia Loren who paired it with strappy tops and tightly tailored jackets. It could be chic in black on Audrey Hepburn. For Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most famous wearer of the pencil skirt, it came to define an entire aesthetic: one predicated on a particularly voluptuous projection of femininity, complete with tight sweaters, crisp white shirts and an overarching emphasis on her hourglass figure. Like the hobble-skirt, it required a very particular way of walking—see Monroe’s famous wiggle epitomised in Some Like It Hot, her wide-eyed character Sugar Kane sashaying provocatively in the skin-tight skirt.”

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Hollywood’s Formosa Cafe Reopens

The Formosa Cafe, a Chinese-themed bar and restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard where the Some Like It Hot cast and crew dined between takes on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, has been fully restored and is now back in business, as Pat Saperstein reports for Variety.

“The restored Formosa re-opened Friday with an impressive $2.4 million restoration by the 1933 Group, which brought classic spots like North Hollywood’s Idle Hour and the Highland Park Bowl back to life. The complete reconstruction included the historic front room and streetcar as well as a new lounge area and the rooftop patio.

At a pre-opening event, documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong showed off a new display of historic lobby cards and movie stills featuring Chinese and Chinese American actors that he curated for the Formosa.

The Formosa was nearly torn down several times, with countless remodels. The last revamp was one of the most misguided, when the vintage Chinese decor was put into storage and everything was painted grey. The 1933 Group’s Bobby Green got involved soon after that, when Vince Jung, the grandson of longtime owner Lem Quon, ended up losing the bar.

In the past, the Formosa wasn’t known for its Americanized Cantonese food, but that is likely to change with the entirely new menu from chef David Kuo of Mar Vista’s Taiwanese restaurant Little Fatty. ‘We wanted to make it more appetizing by today’s standards, but not stray too far away,’ Green explains, ‘We tried David’s food, it was so good and homey, perfect bar food.’

Green says an archivist and architect were hired to determine that the streetcar was the oldest surviving Red Car, dating to 1902. The false ceiling from the streetcar was removed to reveal colored glass windows along the top. Diners now have a view through the streetcar windows into the new back room, where the elaborately carved bar from beloved Chinatown bar Yee Mee Loo has been brought out of storage to become the centerpiece of the new addition.”