billy wilder

TV - Billy Wilder, La perfection hollywoodienne

 Lundi 29 mai 2023 - 23h00 - Arte

Documentaire:  Billy Wilder,
La perfection hollywoodienne 

 

 Réalisation: Julia Kuperberg & Clara Kuperberg
Pays: France
Année: 2016
Durée: 55 min

Comment le génial provocateur Billy Wilder s’est hissé au sommet de Hollywood sans se compromettre. Au fil d’extraits de ses films transgressifs et d’entretiens à l’irrésistible espièglerie, une traversée de l’œuvre de cette légende du cinéma.

Chapeau, bretelles et billes rondes pétillantes de malice derrière de grosses lunettes, Billy Wilder ironise, avec son accent yiddish : "À la cinémathèque, les gens s’extasient trop. C’est l’orgasme permanent !" Juif d’origine autrichienne, Samuel Wilder (1906-2002) fuit l’Allemagne nazie dans les années 1930 pour poser ses valises à Hollywood. En plein âge d’or, l’ancien journaliste à l’anglais incertain est recruté par la Paramount pour sa plume féconde. Les scénarios de La huitième femme de Barbe-Bleue et Ninotchka – deux œuvres de son mentor sacré Ernst Lubitsch –, qu’il écrit en tandem avec le WASP et antisémite Charles Brackett, lui assurent bientôt le succès. Mais Billy Wilder veut passer derrière la caméra. Avec Uniformes et jupons courts, qui traite, sous couvert de légèreté, de pédophilie, ce provocateur signe une satire féroce de l’Amérique, quand le chef-d’œuvre Boulevard du crépuscule, servi par Gloria Swanson et William Holden, l’un de ses acteurs fétiches avec Jack Lemmon, demeure l’un des plus grands films sur Hollywood. Dans les années 1950, ce maître incontesté de la comédie, qui rompt avec la Paramount pour préserver son indépendance, fustige le puritanisme anglo-saxon en abordant la prédation masculine avec les faussement romantiques Sabrina et Ariane, l’adultère et le meurtre dans le très noir Assurance sur la mort, l’alcoolisme avec Le poison ou encore le travestissement dans le transgressif Certains l'aiment chaud. Mais son film préféré reste Le gouffre aux chimères, charge virulente contre le cynisme médiatique, toujours d’actualité.

Émotion et dérision
Entrelaçant extraits de sa prolifique filmographie et archives d’entretiens où son acuité se mâtine d’une réjouissante (auto)dérision, ce portrait documentaire explore en finesse l’œuvre de Billy Wilder. Il rappelle aussi qu’en 1945 le cinéaste exilé, dont la mère n’a pas survécu à Auschwitz, est le premier réalisateur américain à filmer Berlin en ruines et l’enfer des camps pour son documentaire Death Mills. S’appuyant sur l’éclairage d’historiens du cinéma et le témoignage touchant du fils de son complice scénariste I. A. L. Diamond, Clara et Julia Kuperberg (Joni Mitchell – Le spleen et la colère, Hannibal Hopkins & sir Anthony) montrent comment, sous le voile élégant de comédies éblouissantes, ce géant multiprimé du septième art savait comme nul autre révéler les dessous sombres du rêve américain.

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Billy Wilder Citation 2

*réalisateur, producteur et scénariste américaine; il a réalisé deux films avec Marilyn: "Sept ans de réflexion" (1954) et "Certains l'aiment chaud" (1959).
(source: citation dans le livre "Conversation with Wilder", de Caremon Crowe, 1999 )

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Whatever she threw away, we printed it, and it was very good. It was very, very good. She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect. She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.

  

Peu importe ce qu'elle avait lâché, nous l'avons imprimé, et c'était très bien. C'était très, très bon. Elle avait une sorte de vulgarité élégante à son propre égard. Cela, je pense, était très important. Et elle savait automatiquement où était la blague. Elle n'en discutait pas. Elle est venue pour la première répétition, et elle était absolument parfaite. Elle avait un sentiment et une peur de la caméra. La frayeur. Elle a aussi aimé la caméra. Quoi qu'elle fasse, où qu'elle se trouve, il y avait toujours cette chose qui passait. Elle n'en était même pas consciente.

Doc - Billy Wilder ou le grand art de distraire

Billy Wilder ou le grand art de distraire

 

Année: 2016
Réalisation: André Schäfer, Jascha Hannover
Pays: Allemagne, ZDF
Durée: 91 min

Le Viennois d'Hollywood a écrit et tourné les comédies les plus enlevées de sa génération, de "La garçonnière" à "Certains l'aiment chaud", et défié l'Amérique puritaine. Ce documentaire ressuscite le mythe Wilder en mêlant à de savoureux extraits de ses grands classiques des interviews de ses proches et de ses collaborateurs.

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Retranscription du passage lié à Marilyn Monroe:

 
 
 

(à 47min) - extrait interview Jack Lemmon: "Il me dit "J'ai un scénario sur le massacre de la Saint Valentin. Tu es musicien, le gars qui est avec toi, aussi. Vous êtes témoins du massacre. Vous devez vous travestir et intégrer un orchestre de femmes. Sinon, les gangsters, qui savent que vous les avez vus, vont vous tuer. Pendant les trois quarts du film, tu seras sapé en femme. T'es partant ?" Je sais pas pourquoi, j'ai accepté !"
interview de Dick Guttman, écrivain et attaché de presse:"C'est la scène dans laquelle Jack Lemmon et Tony Curtis sont déguisés en femmes essaient d'intégrer l'orchestre féminin. Ils sont tous les deux sur le quai, et soudain, Marilyn arrive en se trémoussant comme elle seule savait le faire. Elle les dépasse et ils sont subjugués. Mais ce n'était pas encore assez pour Billy. Il a glissé un mot à Marilyn puis il a crié: "On la refait !" Je n'ai pas entendu ce qu'il lui disait exactement. Ensuite, il est allé voir l'accessoiriste, puis ils ont refait la scène. Quand Marilyn les a dépassé, cette fois, le train a craché de la vapeur pile sur son popotin et elle s'est retournée d'un coup en sursautant. Quand Billy est revenu, il a dit "Elle est tellement sexy que même le train veut lui mettre la main aux fesses." C'était Billy !"

 

extrait interview Jack Lemmon: "Je ne l'ai jamais vu sans voix, sauf avec Marilyn. On tournait une scène, et tout ce qu'elle... -la caméra était dirigée sur Tony et moi- Là, elle frappe à la porte, on enfile vite nos perruques, parce qu'on était censés être des femmes. Tony dit "Entrez !" Elle entre, la caméra se dirige sur elle. Et elle doit juste dire: "Où est le bourbon ?"
interview de Armgard Seegers-Karasek, journaliste et traductrice: "Ils ont du la tourner 56 fois parce qu'elle n'arrivait pas à dire cette phrase. Elle disait toujours: "Où est le whisky ?" ou "Où est-ce que je dois regarder ?" Ils ont fini par coller cette phrase partout, dans tous les tiroirs qu'elle ouvrait, c'était écrit: Où est le bourbon ? Mais elle continuait de se tromper. Au bout de la 64ème prise, Billy lui dit: "Marilyn, ne sois pas inquiète."
extrait interview Billy Wilder: "Et elle répond: "Inquiète de quoi ?"

 

extrait interview Billy Wilder: "Je n'avais aucun problème avec Monroe. C'est Monroe qui avait un problème avec elle-même. Elle était toujours un peu confuse et avait un mal fou à se concentrer. Il y avait toujours quelque chose qui la rongeait. C'était laborieux. Mais, mon Dieu, une fois que c'était passé, que vous aviez subi les 30, 40, 50 premières prises ou son retard, vous teniez quelque chose d'absolument unique."
interview de Volker Schlöndorff, régisseur: "Billy Wilder n'était pas arrogant. Simplement, il se tenait à distance des choses. Et d'une manière très drôle, aimable et amicale. Par exemple, il n'a jamais laissé les comédiens pleurer un bon coup devant lui, pour se soulager, ou de lui exposer une demande personnelle, ou existentielle. Un jour, je lui ai demandé comment il faisait, et il m'a répondu: "Je n'encourage pas ce genre d'attitude." Il ne se serait jamais embarqué là-dedans."

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TV - Billy Wilder ou le grand art de distraire

Dimanche 10 septembre 2017 - 22h55 - Arte
à revoir en replay pendant 7 jours

Documentaire:  Billy Wilder
ou le grand art de distraire

 

Durée : 91 min
Année et origine : 2016, Allemagne
Réalisation: André Schäfer, Jascha Hannover

Le Viennois d'Hollywood a écrit et tourné les comédies les plus enlevées de sa génération, de "La garçonnière" à "Certains l'aiment chaud", et défié l'Amérique puritaine. Ce documentaire ressuscite le mythe Wilder en mêlant à de savoureux extraits de ses grands classiques des interviews de ses proches et de ses collaborateurs.
Né dans une petite ville de l'empire austro-hongrois, dans l'actuelle Pologne, en 1906, Samuel Wilder passe son enfance à Vienne, dans une famille juive aisée. Très vite, il délaisse la carrière d'avocat ou de médecin à laquelle le destine son père pour partir à Berlin où, de 1927 à 1933, il travaille comme journaliste et auteur de feuilletons, puis pour le cinéma. Fuyant le nazisme, il débarque en Amérique sans parler anglais. Il commence par faire traduire ses scénarios, et parvient à vendre un premier film à la Paramount.
La touche Wilder
Une fois arrivé à Hollywood, Billy Wilder se confronte à tous les genres. Du film noir ("Assurance sur la mort, Boulevard du crépuscule") à la comédie scandaleuse ("La garçonnière, Certains l'aiment chaud"), plus sage ("Sabrina"), ou satirique ("Un, deux, trois", "Stalag 17"), son éclectisme et son brio ont imposé la "Wilder touch" au fil d'une cinquantaine de films. L'enfant de Vienne (dont il a, témoignent ici ses amis et acteurs, conservé l'humour particulier) s'est surtout illustré par sa destruction jubilatoire du discours puritain de l'Amérique des années 1950. Chez Wilder, on aime à trois, on se travestit, on trompe et on est trompé. Disparu en 2002, ce maître cinéaste, qui avait placardé dans son bureau la question "Qu'aurait fait Lubitsch ?", a influencé les frères Coen et Wes Anderson. Ce documentaire ressuscite le mythe Wilder en mêlant à de savoureux extraits de ses grands classiques des interviews de ses proches et de ses collaborateurs.

Le Top 100 des comédies par la BBC

La BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) a dévoilé, le 22 août 2017, un Top 100 des films les plus drôles de l’histoire du cinéma.

La BBC a interrogé 253 critiques (118 femmes et 135 hommes) de 52 pays et des six continents, en leur demandant de citer les dix films qui les amusaient le plus (site de la BBC Culture). Le classement a été établi grâce aux titres les plus souvent mentionnés. Pour la France, N.T. Binh de chez Positif, Agnès Poirier de Marianne ou encore Jean-Philippe Guérand du Film Français ont répondu au sondage.
C'est le film de Billy Wilder Certains l'aiment chaud (Some Like It Hot) en 1959, qui arrive n°1 - en tête du classement:

 

Parmi les autres films tournés par Marilyn, on y retrouve Les Hommes Préfèrent les Blondes (Gentlemen Prefer Blonds) de Howard Hawks -sorti en 1953- en 87ème position:

  

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> voir la liste complète du "Top 100 des meilleures comédies de tous les temps"
sur le site de la BBC

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Saturday Evening Post, 1956/05/12

Saturday Evening Post
- The New Marilyn Monroe - Part 2

 

pays magazine: USA
paru le 12 mai 1956
article: 2ème partie "The New Marilyn Monroe"
en ligne sur saturdayeveningpost.com

 

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Part Two: Here She Talks About Herself
By Pete Martin
Originally published on May 12, 1956
Marilyn explains how Freud helped cure her inferiority complex and tells why she posed for that famous nude calendar.

 
The “new Marilyn” and Don Murray, male lead
in her next picture, Bus Stop. (Gene Lester, © SEPS)

“That nude calendar Marilyn Monroe posed for will probably be reprinted as long as we have men with twenty-twenty vision in this country,” Flack Jones told me. Jones had put in several years as a publicity worker at Marilyn Monroe’s Hollywood studio before opening his own public-relations office. “Curious thing about it,” Jones went on, “when that calendar first came out, it had no bigger sale than any other nude calendar.

“You may not know it, but there’s a steady sale for such calendars. You might think that there are too few places where you can hang them up to make them worthwhile. But there’re lots of places where they fit in very nicely — truckers’ havens, barbershops, bowling alleys, poolrooms, washrooms, garages, toolshops, taprooms, taverns — joints like that. The calendar people always publish a certain number of nude calendars along with standards like changing autumn leaves, Cape Cod fishermen bringing home their catch from a wintry sea, Old Baldy covered with snow. You’re not in the calendar business unless you have a selection of sexy calendars. The sale of the one for which Marilyn posed was satisfactory, but not outstanding. It only became a ‘hot number’ when the public became familiar with it.”

Billy Wilder, the Hollywood director who directed Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch, is witty, also pungent, pithy, and is not afraid to say what he thinks. “When you come right down to it,” Wilder told me, “that calendar is not repulsive. It’s quite lovely. Marilyn’s name was already pretty big when the calendar story broke. If it hadn’t been, nobody would have cared one way or the other. But when it became known that she had posed for it, I think that, if anything, it helped her popularity. It appealed to people who like to read about millionaires who started life selling newspapers on the corner of Forty-second and Fifth Avenue; then worked their way up. It was as if Marilyn had been working her way through college, for that pose took hours. Here was a girl who needed dough, and she made it by honest toil.”

“I was working on the Fox Western Avenue lot when this worried man from Fox came tearing in wringing his hands,” Marilyn told me recently. “He took me into my dressing room to talk about the horrible thing I’d done in posing for such a photograph. I could think of nothing else to say, so I said apologetically, ‘I thought the lighting the photographer used would disguise me.’ I thought that worried man would have a stroke when I told him that.

“What had happened was I was behind in my rent at the Hollywood Studio Club, where girls stay who hope to crash the movies. You’re only supposed to get one week behind in your rent at the club, but they must have felt sorry for me because they’d given me three warnings. A lot of photographers had asked me to pose in the nude, but I’d always said, ‘No.’ I was getting five dollars an hour for plain modeling, but the price for nude modeling was fifty an hour. So I called Tom Kelley, a photographer I knew, and said, ‘They’re kicking me out of here. How soon can we do it?’ He said, ‘We can do it tomorrow.’

“I didn’t even have to get dressed, so it didn’t take long. I mean it takes longer to get dressed than it does to get undressed. I’d asked Tom, ‘Please don’t have anyone else there except your wife, Natalie.’ He said, ‘O.K.’ He only made two poses. There was a shot of me sitting up and a shot of me lying down. I think the one of me lying down is the best.

“I’m saving a copy of that calendar for my grandchildren,” Marilyn went on, all bright-eyed. “There’s a place in Los Angeles which even reproduces it on bras and panties. But I’ve only autographed a few copies of it, mostly for sick people. On one I wrote, ‘This may not be my best angle,’ and on the other I wrote, ‘Do you like me better with long hair?”

I said to Marilyn that Roy Craft, who is one of the publicity men at Fox, had told me that he had worked with her for five years, and that in all that time he’d never heard her tell a lie. “That’s a mighty fine record for any community,” I said.

“It may be a fine record,” she admitted, “but it has also gotten me into trouble. Telling the truth, I mean. Then, when I get into trouble by being too direct and I try to pull back, people think I’m being coy. I’m supposed to have said that I dislike being interviewed by women reporters, but that it’s different with gentlemen of the press because we have a mutual appreciation of being male and female. I didn’t say I disliked women reporters. As dumb as I am, I wouldn’t be that dumb, although that in itself is kind of a mysterious remark because people don’t really know how dumb I am. But I really do prefer men reporters. They’re more stimulating.”

I asked Flack Jones in Hollywood, “When did this business of her making those wonderful Monroe cracks start?”

“You mean when somebody asked her what she wears in bed and she said, ‘Chanel Number Five’?” Jones asked. “You will find some who will tell you that her humor content seemed to pick up the moment she signed a contract with the studio, and that anybody in the department who had a smart crack lying around handy gave it to her. Actually, there were those who thought that more than the department was behind it. ‘Once you launch such a campaign,’ they said, ‘it stays launched. It’s like anyone who has a smart crack to unleash attributing it to a Georgie Jessel or to a Dorothy Parker or whoever is currently smart and funny.’ There was even a theory that the public contributed some of Marilyn’s cracks by writing or calling a columnist like Sidney Skolsky or Herb Stein, and giving him a gag, and he’d attribute it to Marilyn, and so on around town. But the majority of the thinking was that our publicity department gave her her best cracks.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like for instance. I’ll have to lead up to it; as you know, in this business you can be destroyed by one bad story — although that’s not as true as it used to be — and when the story broke that Marilyn had posed in the nude for a calendar and the studio decided that the best thing to do was to announce the facts immediately instead of trying to pretend they didn’t exist, we said that Marilyn was broke at the time and that she’d posed to pay her room rent, which was true. Then, to give it the light touch, when she was asked, ‘Didn’t you have anything on at all when you were posing for that picture?’ we were supposed to have told her to say, ‘I had the radio on.’”

Flack Jones paused for a long moment. “I’m sorry to disagree with the majority,” he said firmly, “but she makes up those cracks herself. Certainly that ‘Chanel Number Five’ was her own.”

When I told Marilyn about this, she smiled happily. “He’s right. It was my own,” she said. “The other one — the calendar crack — I made when I was up in Canada. A woman came up to me and asked, ‘You mean to say you didn’t have anything on when you had that calendar picture taken?’ I drew myself up and told her, ‘I did, too, have something on. I had the radio on.’”

“Give her a minute to think and Marilyn is the greatest little old ad-lib artist you ever saw,” Flack Jones had insisted. “She blows it in sweet and it comes out that way. One news magazine carried a whole column of her quotes I’d collected, and every one of them was her own. There’ve been times when I could have made face in this industry by claiming that I put some of those cracks into her mouth, but I didn’t do it. This girl makes her own quotables. She’ll duck a guy who wants to interview her as long as she can, but when she finally gets around to it, she concentrates on trying to give him what he wants — something intriguing, amusing and off-beat. She’s very bright at it.

“A writer was commissioned to write a story for her for a magazine,” Jones said. “The subject was to be what Marilyn eats and how she dresses. As I recall it, the title was to be ‘How I Keep My Figure,’ or maybe it was ‘How I Keep in Shape.’ The writer talked to Marilyn; then ghosted the article. He wrote it very much the way she’d told it to him, but he had to pad it out a little because he hadn’t had too much time with her. As a result, in one section of his article he had her saying that she didn’t like to get out in the sun and pick up a heavy tan because a heavy tan loused up her wardrobe by confusing the colors of her dresses and switching around what they did for her.

“The article read good to me, and took it over to Marilyn for her corrections and approval. Most of the stuff was the routine thing about diet, but when she came to the part about ‘I don’t like suntan because it confuses the coloring of my wardrobe,’ she scratched it out. I asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’

“‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Having a suntan doesn’t have anything to do with my wardrobe.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to say something, Marilyn. After all, the guy’s article is pretty short as it is.’ She thought for a minute; then wrote, ‘I do not suntan because I like to feel blonde all over.’ I saw her write that with her own hot little pencil.

“The magazine which printed that story thought her addition so great that they picked it out and made it a subtitle. She’d managed to transpose an ordinary paragraph about wardrobe colors into a highly exciting, beautiful, sexy mental image. Some guys have said to me, ‘Why, that dumb little broad couldn’t have thought that up. You thought it up, Jones.’ I wish I could say, ‘Yeah, I did,’ but I didn’t. Feeling blonde all over is a state of mind,” he said musingly. “I should think it would be a wonderful state of mind if you’re a girl.

“One reason why she’s such a good interview,” Flack Jones went on, “is that she uses her head during such sessions. She tries to say something that’s amusing and quotable, and she usually does. When I worked with Marilyn I made it a practice to introduce her to a writer and go away and leave her alone, on the grounds that a couple of grown people don’t need a press agent tugging at their sleeves while they get acquainted. So if her interviews have been any good, it’s her doing.”

“One day she gave a tape interview and it was all strictly ad-lib,” he said. “I know, because I had a hard time setting it up. It was for a man who was doing one of those fifteen-minute radio interviews here in Hollywood, to be broadcast afterward across the country. We had a frantic time trying to get him the time with her, but finally he got his recorder plugged in, and the first question he pitched her was a curve. He wanted to know what she thought of the Stanislavsky school of dramatic art or whatever. Believe it or not, old Marilyn unloaded on him with a twelve-minute dissertation on Stanislavsky that rocked him back on his heels.”

“Does she believe in the Stanislavsky method?” I asked.

“She agreed with Stanislavsky on certain points,” Jones said. “And she disagreed on others, and she explained why. It was one of the most enlightening discussions on the subject I’ve ever heard. It came over the radio a couple of nights later, and everybody who listened said, ‘Oh, yeah? Some press agent wrote that interview for her.’ My answer to that was, ‘What press agent knows that much about Stanislavsky?’ I don’t.”

In the course of my research, before interviewing Marilyn, I’d discovered that Billy Wilder agreed with Jones. “I think that she thinks up those funny things for herself,” he said. Wilder’s Austrian background gives his phrases an offbeat rhythm, but because of its very differentness, his way of talking picks up flavor and extra meaning.

“I think also that she says those funny things without realizing that they’re so funny,” Wilder said. “One very funny thing she said involves the fact that she has great difficulties in remembering her lines. Tremendous difficulties. I’ve heard of one director who wrote her lines on a blackboard and kept that blackboard just out of camera range. The odd thing is that if she has a long scene for which she has to remember a lot of words, she’s fine once she gets past the second word. If she gets over that one little hump, there’s no trouble. Then, too, if you start a scene and say, ‘Action!’ and hers is the first line, it takes her ten or fifteen seconds to gather herself. Nothing happens during those fifteen seconds. It seems a very long time.”

“How about an example of when she’s bogged down on a second word,” I asked.

“For instance, if she had to say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Sherman,”’ Wilder told me, “she couldn’t get out the word ‘morning.’ She’d say, ‘Good …’ and stick. Once she got ‘morning’ out, she’d be good for two pages of dialogue. It’s just that sometimes she trips over mental stumbling blocks at the beginning of a scene.

“Another director should be telling you this story, not me,” Wilder said. “This other director was directing her in a scene in a movie, and she couldn’t get the lines out. It was just muff, muff, muff, and take, take, take. Finally, after Take Thirty-two, he took her to one side, patted her on the head, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Marilyn, honey. It’ll be all right.’ She looked up into his face with those big wide eyes of hers and asked, ‘Worry about what?’ She seemed to have no idea that thirty-two takes is a lot of takes.”

When I sat down to talk to Marilyn, I said, “I’ve tried to trace those famous remarks attributed to you and find out who originated them.”

“They are mine,” Marilyn told me. “Take that Chanel Number Five one. Somebody was always asking me, ‘What do you sleep in, Marilyn? Do you sleep in P.J.’s? Do you sleep in a nightie? Do you sleep raw, Marilyn?’ It’s one of those questions which make you wonder how to answer them. Then I remembered that the truth is the easiest way out, so I said, ‘I sleep in Chanel Number Five,’ because I do. Or you take the columnist, Earl Wilson, when he asked me if I have a bedroom voice. I said, ‘I don’t talk in the bedroom, Earl.’ Then, thinking back over that remark, I thought maybe I ought to say something else to clarify it, so I added, ‘because I live alone.’”

The phone rang in her apartment, and she took a call from one of the hand-picked few to whom she’d given her privately listed number. While she talked I thought back upon a thing Flack Jones had said to me thoughtfully, “I’m no psychiatrist or psychologist, but I think that Marilyn has a tremendous inferiority complex. I think she’s scared to death all the time. I know she needs and requires attention and that she needs and requires somebody to tell her she’s doing well. And she’s extremely grateful for a pat on the back.”

“Name me a patter,” I said.

“For example,” he said, “when we put her under contract for the second time, her best friend and encourager was the agent, Johnny Hyde, who was then with the William Morris Agency, although he subsequently died of a heart attack. Johnny was a little guy, but he was Marilyn’s good friend, and, in spite of his lack of size, I think that she had a father fixation on him.

“I don’t want to get involved in the psychology of all this,” Flack Jones continued, “because it was a very complicated problem, of which I have only a layman’s view, but I honestly think that Marilyn’s the most complicated woman I’ve ever known. Her complexes are so complex that she has complexes about complexes. That, I think, is one reason why she’s always leaning on weird little people who attach themselves to her like remoras, and why she lets herself be guided by them. A remora is a sucker fish which attaches itself to a bigger fish and eats the dribblings which fall from the bigger fish’s mouth. After she became prominent, a lot of these little people latched onto Marilyn. They told her that Hollywood was a great, greedy ogre who was exploiting her and holding back her artistic progress.”

I said that the way I’d heard it, those hangers-on seemed to come and go, and that her trail was strewn with those from whom she had detached herself. I’d been told that the routine was for her to go down one day to the corner for the mail or a bottle of milk and not come back; not even wave good-by.

“But she has complete confidence in these little odd balls, both men and women, who latch onto her, while they’re latched,” Jones said. “I’m sure their basic appeal to her has always been in telling her that somebody is taking advantage of her, and in some cases they’ve been right. This has nothing to do with your story, but it does have something to do with my observation that she’s frightened and insecure, and she’ll listen to anybody who can get her ear.”

“Johnny Hyde was no remora,” I said.

“Johnny was a switch on the usual pattern,” Jones agreed. “He was devoted to her. He could and did do things for her. I happened to know that Johnny wanted to marry her and Marilyn wouldn’t do it. She told me, ‘I like him very much, but I don’t love him enough to marry him.’ A lot of girls would have married him, for Johnny was not only attractive, he was wealthy, and when he died Marilyn would have inherited scads of money, but while you may not believe it, she’s never cared about money as money. It’s only a symbol to her.”

“A symbol of what?” I asked.

“It’s my guess that to her it’s a symbol of success. By the same token I think that people have talked so much to her about not getting what she ought to get that a lack of large quantities of it has also become a symbol of oppression in her mind. If I sound contradictory, that’s the way it is.”

When Marilyn had completed her phone call, I put it up to her, “I guess you’ve heard it argued back and forth as to whether you are a complicated person or a very simple person, even a naive person,” I said. “Which do you think is right?”

“I think I’m a mixture of simplicity and complexes,” she told me. “But I’m beginning to understand myself now. I can face myself more, you might say. I’ve spent most of my life running away from myself.”

It didn’t sound very clear to me, but I pursued the subject further. “For example,” I asked, “do you have an inferiority complex? Are you beset by fears? Do you need someone to tell you that you’re doing well all the time?”

“I don’t feel as hopeless as I did,” she said. “I don’t know why it is. I’ve read a little of Freud and it might have to do with what he said. I think he was on the right track.” I gave up. I never found out what portions of Freud she referred to or what “right track” he was on.

“What happened in 1952, when the studio sent you to Atlantic City to be grand marshal of the annual beauty pageant?” I asked Marilyn instead. “Did you mind going?”

She smiled. “It was all right with me,” she said. “At the time I wanted to come to New York anyhow. There was somebody I wanted to see here. This was why it was hard for me to be on time leaving New York for Atlantic City for that date. I missed the train and the studio chartered a plane for me, but it didn’t set the studio back as much as they let on. They could afford it.”

Flack Jones had told me that story too. “They’d arranged a big reception for Marilyn at Atlantic City,” he said. “There was a band to meet her at the train, and the mayor was to be on hand. Marilyn and the flacks who were running interference for her were to arrive on a Pennsylvania Railroad train at a certain hour, but, as usual, Marilyn was late, and when they got to the Pennsylvania Station the train had pulled out. So there they were, in New York, with a band and the mayor waiting in Atlantic City. Charlie Einfeld, a Fox vice-president — and Charlie can operate mighty fast when he has to — got on the phone and chartered an air liner — the only one available for charter was a forty-six-seat job; it was an Eastern Air Lines plane as I recall it — and they all went screaming across town in a limousine headed for Idlewild.

“The studio’s magazine man in New York, Marilyn and a flack from out here on the Coast boarded the plane and took off for Atlantic City,” Flack Jones said. “Bob and the Coast flack were so embarrassed at missing the train, and the plane was such a costly substitute that they were sweating like pigs. On this big air liner there was a steward aboard — they’d shanghaied a steward in a hurry from some place to serve coffee — but all of this didn’t bother Marilyn at all. She tucked herself into a seat back in the tail section, hummed softly; then fell fast asleep and slept all the way. The other two sat up front with the steward, drinking quarts of coffee because that was what he was being paid to serve. They drank an awful lot of coffee.”

Flack Jones said that Marilyn and her outriders were met at the Atlantic City airport by a sheriff’s car and that they were only three minutes late for the reception for Marilyn on the boardwalk. There she was given an enormous bouquet of flowers, and she perched on the folded-down top of a convertible, to roll down the boardwalk with a press of people following her car.

“She sat up there like Lindbergh riding down Broadway on his return from Paris,” Flack Jones said. “The people and the cops and the beauty-carnival press agents followed behind like slaves tied to her chariot wheels. That is, she managed to move a little every once in a while when the crowd could be persuaded to back away. Then Marilyn would pitch a rose at the crowd and it would set them off again, and there’d be another riot. This sort of thing went on — with variations — for several days. It was frantic.

  “But,” Flack Jones explained, “there was one publicity thing which broke which wasn’t intended to break. It was typical of the way things happen to Marilyn without anybody devising them. When each potential Miss America from a different part of the country lined up to register, a photograph of Marilyn greet- ing her was taken. Those pictures were serviced back to the local papers and eventually a shot of Miss Colorado with Marilyn wound up in a Denver paper; and a shot of Miss California and Marilyn in the Los Angeles and San Francisco papers, and so forth.”

For a moment Flack Jones collected his thoughts in orderly array; then went on, “Pretty soon in came an Army public-information officer with four young ladies from the Pentagon. There was a WAF and a WAC and a lady Marine and a WAVE. The thought was that it would be nice to get a shot of Marilyn with ‘the four real Miss Americas’ who were serving their country, so they were lined up. It was to be just another of the routine, catalogue shots we’d taken all day long, but Marilyn was wearing a low-cut dress which showed quite a bit of cleavage — quite a bit of cleavage. That would have been all right, since the dress was designed for eye level, but one of the photographers climbed up on a chair to shoot the picture.”

The way Marilyn described this scene to me was this: “I had met the girls from each state and had shaken hands with them,” she said. “Then this Army man got the idea of aiming his camera down my neck while I posed with the service girls. It wasn’t my idea for the photographer to get up on a chair.”

“Nobody thought anything of it at the time,” Jones had told me, “and those around Marilyn went on with the business of their workaday world. In due course the United Press — among others — serviced that shot. Actually it was a pretty dull picture because, to the casual glance, it just showed five gals lined up looking at the camera.”

Jones said that when the shot of the four service women and Marilyn went out across the country by wirephoto, editors took one look at it and dropped it into the nearest wastebasket because they had had much better art from Atlantic City.

“That night the Army PIO officer drifted back to the improvised press headquarters set up for the Miss America contest,” Flack Jones said. “He took one look and sent out a wire ordering that the picture be stopped.”

“On what grounds?” I asked.

“On grounds that that photograph showed too much meat and potatoes, and before he’d left the Pentagon he’d been told not to have any cheesecake shots taken in connection with the girls in his charge. Obviously what was meant by those instructions was that he shouldn’t have those service girls sitting on the boardwalk railings showing their legs or assuming other undignified poses. There was nothing in that PIO officer’s instructions which gave him the right to censor Marilyn’s garb, but he ordered that picture killed anyhow.”

According to Jones, every editor who had junked that picture immediately reached down into his wastebasket, drew it out and gave it a big play. “In Los Angeles it ran seven columns,” he said, “and it got a featured position in the Herald Express and the New York Daily News. All the way across country it became a celebrated picture, and all because the Army had ‘killed’ it.”

He was silent for a moment; then he said, “Those who were with her told me afterward that it had been a murderous day, as any day is when you’re with Marilyn on a junket,” he went on. “The demands on her and on those with her are simply unbelievable. But finally she hit the sack about midnight because she had to get up the next day for other activities. The rest of her crowd had turned in too, when they got a call from the U.P. in New York, asking them for a statement from Marilyn about ‘that picture.’”

“‘What picture?’ our publicist-guardian asked, and it was then that they got the story. They hated to do it, but they rousted Marilyn out of bed. She thought it over for a while; then issued a statement apologizing for any possible reflection on the service girls, and making it plain that she hadn’t meant it that way. She ended with a genuine Monroeism. ‘I wasn’t aware of any objectionable décolletage on my part. I’d noticed people looking at me all day, but I thought they were looking at my grand marshal’s badge.’ This was widely quoted, and it had the effect of giving the whole thing a lighter touch. The point is this: a lot of things happen when Marilyn is around.” He shook his head. “Yes, sir,” he said. “A lot of things.

“Another example of the impact she packs: when she went back to New York on the Seven Year Itch location,” Jones went on. “All of a sudden New York was a whistle stop, with the folks all down to see the daily train come in. When Marilyn reached LaGuardia, everything stopped out there. One columnist said that the Russians could have buzzed the field at five hundred feet and nobody would have looked up. There has seldom been such a heavy concentration of newsreel cameramen anywhere. From then on in, during the ten days of her stay, one excitement followed another. She was on the front page of the Herald Tribune, with art, five days running, which I’m told set some sort of a local record.

“In the case of The Itch, there was a contractual restriction situation,” Flack Jones said. “The studio’s contract called for the picture’s release to be held up until after the Broadway run of the play. When Marilyn went back to New York for the location shots for Itch, the play version was still doing a fair business, but it was approaching the end of its long run. If you bought a seat, the house was only half full. Then Marilyn arrived in New York and shot off publicity sparks and suddenly The Itch had S.R.O. signs out again. The result was that it seemed it was never going to stop its stage run; so, after finishing the picture, Fox had to pay out an additional hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to the owners of the stage property for the privilege of releasing their movie.

“Things reached a new high — and no joke intended,” Flack Jones went on, “when Billy Wilder shot the scene where her skirts were swept up around her shoulders by a draft from a subway ventilator grating. That really set the publicity afire again, and shortly after that The Itch location company blew town while they were ahead. The unit production manager had picked the Trans-Lux Theater on Lexington Avenue for the skirt-blowing scene. He’d been down there at two o’clock in the morning to case the spot; he’d reported happily, ‘The street was fully deserted,’ and he’d made a deal with the Trans-Lux people for getting the scene shot there because there was nobody on the street at that hour.

“It seemed certain that Billy Wilder would have all the room in the world to work, and he had left word that nobody was to know what location he’d selected, because he didn’t want crowds. But word leaked out. It was on radio and TV and in the papers, so instead of secrecy you might almost say that the public was being urged to be at Lexington Avenue on a given night to Marilyn’s skirts blow. Instead of having a nice, quiet side street in which to work, Wilder had all the people you can pack on a street. Finally the cops roped off the sidewalk on the opposite side to restrain the public, and they erected a barricade close to the movie camera. But that wasn’t good enough, and they had to call out a whole bunch of special cops.”

Flack Jones said that when Wilder was ready to shoot, there were 200 or 300 photographers, professional and amateur, swarming over the place. Then Marilyn made her entrance from inside the theater out onto the sidewalk, and when she appeared the hordes really got out of control and there was chaos. Finally Wilder announced that he’d enter into a gentleman’s agreement. If the press would retire behind the barricades, and if the real working photographers would help control the amateurs, he would shoot the scene of Marilyn and Tom Ewell standing over the subway grating; then he’d move the movie camera back and the amateur shutter hounds could pop away at Marilyn until they were satisfied.

“So the New York press took care of the amateurs and made them quit popping their flashbulbs,” Flack Jones said. “Wilder got the scene and the volunteer snapshooters got their pictures. Everybody was there. Winchell came over with DiMaggio, who showed a proper husbandly disapproval of the proceedings. I myself couldn’t see why Joe had any right to disapprove. After all, when he married the girl her figure was already highly publicized, and it seemed odd if he had suddenly decided that she should be seen only in Mother Hubbards.”

I asked Marilyn herself if she thought that Joe had disapproved of her skirts blowing around her shoulders in that scene. I said I had heard his reaction described in two ways: that he had been furious and that he had taken it calmly.

“One of those two is correct,” Marilyn said. “Maybe you can figure it out for yourself if you’ll give it a little thought.”

Something told me that, in her opinion, Joe had been very annoyed indeed. And while we were on the subject of Joe, it seemed a good time to find out about how things had been between them when they had been married, and the unbelievable scene which accompanied the breaking up of that marriage. “Not in his wildest dreams could a press agent imagine a series of events like that,” Flack Jones had told me.

When I brought the subject up, Marilyn said, “For a man and a wife to live intimately together is not an easy thing at best. If it’s not just exactly right in every way it’s practically impossible, but I’m still optimistic.” She sat there being optimistic. Then she said, with feeling, “However, I think TV sets should be taken out of the bedroom.”

“Did you and Joe have one in your bedroom?” I asked.

“No comment,” she said emphatically. “But everything I say to you I speak from experience. You can make what you want of that.”

She was quiet for a moment; then she said, “When I showed up in divorce court to get my divorce from Joe, there were mobs of people there asking me bunches of questions. And they asked, ‘Are you and Joe still friends?’ and I said, ‘Yes, but I still don’t know anything about baseball.’ And they all laughed. I don’t see what was so funny. I’d heard that he was a fine baseball player, but I’d never seen him play.”

“As I said, the final scenes of All-American Boy loses Snow White were unbelievable,” Flack Jones told me. “Joe and Marilyn rented a house on Palm Drive, in Beverly Hills, and we had a unique situation there with the embattled ex-lovebirds both cooped in the same cage. Marilyn was living on the second floor and Joe was camping on the first floor. When Joe walked out of that first floor, it was like the heart-tearing business of a pitcher taking the long walk from the mound to the dugout after being jerked from the game in a World Series.”

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Saturday Evening Post, 1956/05/19

Saturday Evening Post
- The New Marilyn Monroe - Part 3

 

pays magazine: USA
paru le 19 mai 1956
article: 3ème partie "The New Marilyn Monroe"
en ligne sur saturdayeveningpost.com

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Blonde, Incorporated
By Pete Martin
Originally published on May 19, 1956
The story of Marilyn’s brief marriage to Joe DiMaggio, her battle with Hollywood, and her surprising new career.

 
Milton Greene, vice-president of Marilyn Monroe Productions, playwright Terence
Rattigan, Sir Lawrence Olivier and Marilyn in New York. The occasion: To announce
plans for a movie version cf a Rattigan play, costarring Olivier and Monroe. (Hans Knopf, © SEPS)

I put this question to my friend and confidant, whom I call Flack Jones: “How did Joe DiMaggio happen to come into Marilyn’s life?” Jones is one of my principal sources of Marilyn Monroe information. As a skilled and articulate employee of the publicity department of the 20th Century-Fox motion-picture studio, he had worked closely with Marilyn for several years before her highly publicized departure from Hollywood to live in New York and “learn to be an actress.”

“Marilyn met him in a café one night on a blind double date,” Jones said. “DiMaggio had heard about her and wanted to meet her. They met through friends and had dinner. Everything went just fine and dandy, until ultimately their friendship ripened into a romance which led to their marriage.

“But to complicate things, late in 1952 she decided to mix her first holdout with her romance,” Flack Jones said. Then he corrected himself, “It must have been ’53, for she had made River of No Return and How to Marry a Millionaire. Anyhow, she decided — or else her confidential advisers had persuaded her — that she was worth more money. But instead of stalking into Darryl Zanuck’s office, slapping her next script down and saying, ‘I won’t do it!’ she simply hid out. She sneaked down alleys, didn’t answer her phone and couldn’t be reached by anybody.

“This was before she ran off and married Joe DiMaggio, and the studio was taking a firm tone with her — a very firm tone. But when the romance reached full flower, the studio had to do a fast switch,” Jones said. “Here we were, issuing communiqués about this ‘silly and stubborn girl who was ill-advised enough not to come back and take this important part’ in whatever the picture was — Pink Tights, I think — when all of a sudden she ups and marries Joe, the All-American Boy. After that, if we kept on beefing about her absence, the studio would be the big bully in the plot so far as the public was concerned.

“Then, to add to the studio’s confusion, the pair went off to Korea to entertain the troops. How are you going to snap a blacksnake whip at a girl’s calves for doing a thing like that? Snow White has married Prince Charming and they’ve gone off to Korea together to entertain the servicemen. So the studio started talking sweet in a hurry.

“However, the sharp-eyed and cynical could tell that that marriage was in danger as early as their arrival in the Orient,” Flack Jones went on. “The press interviewed Marilyn in Tokyo, and a story was radioed back which said that Marilyn had talked about this and about that, and — oh yes — there was a man in the far corner of the room whose name was Joe DiMaggio. It didn’t take much of a genius to figure that situation was the beginning of the end. Then, after an interval, the lovebirds flew back to Beverly Hills.”

“Did the studio start having its troubles making her report for work before she married DiMaggio or after she married him?” I asked.

“We were having trouble before,” Flack Jones told me.

“When was the first fly in the Monroe-Fox ointment?” I asked.

“I don’t know the exact time,” he said. “But it was not peculiar to Monroe alone. It’s peculiar to life in Hollywood. It almost invariably happens when money and success make an impact on a male or female ego. We expect it to set in when the fan mail of the party in question zooms up to over two thousand a week. It’s almost as much of a sure thing as the thermostat in your house turning on the heat. Two thousand fan letters a week is when we begin to say. ‘We’ll be having troubles with this doll.”

“What form does it usually take?” I asked. “‘I want more dough,’ or ‘I don’t like my contract.’ or ‘My script stinks’?”

“A better way to answer your question is to say that when they realize they’ve got weight to throw around, they start throwing it,” Flack Jones said. “They don’t do those things you mentioned right away; they do less serious things first. They complain about wardrobe, or, if it’s a musical, they complain about the songs or the dances, or, if it’s a plain comedy or a straight drama, they gripe about how a certain scene is being directed. Whatever’s handy, that’s what they complain about. It makes no sense, but it’s a means of saying that they have some weight now, and they want you to know it.”

“What’s the next move?” I asked.

Flack Jones rubbed his fingers over his scalp thoughtfully and said, “Ordinarily it’s a preliminary test of strength, like bracing the front office for more dough for your dramatic coach.

“When she found out that she had that much weight, she decided to go out for herself, and she did. Some people think that she has always been a naive, flibbertigibbet girl moving through life. This is utter nonsense. She wasn’t that way when she first was under contract; she was a grown person then. She kept her dates, she was always on time.”

From now on,” Jones said, “what I say is merely my own opinion, but I think that it was then that she discovered that there are people in Hollywood who respect other people who kick their teeth in. That’s not just Hollywood for you. Most people do.”

“Let’s cut to the split-up between Joe and Marilyn,” I said. “As I recall it, first there were rumors of strife, then things reached an impasse.”

“Joe and Marilyn had a rented house on Palm Drive, in Beverly Hills,” Jones said. “We had a unique situation there with the embattled ex-lovebirds both cooped in the same cage. Marilyn was living on the second floor and Joe was camping on the first floor. Then a famous attorney, Jerry Giesler, was brought into the act for Marilyn, although why they had to employ such a great lawyer to handle a simple divorce case I don’t know. The public was all worked up, the press was, too, and they’re circling the house like Indians loping around a wagon tram, waiting for somebody to poke a head out. The next move was Giesler’s announcement that came Wednesday, at eleven o’clock, Marilyn would hold a press conference in his office.

“In the Fox publicity department,” Jones said, “we concluded that if you call a press conference in a lawyer’s office, it presupposes an obligation to say something, and what could Snow White say when she was breaking up with Prince Charming, or Cinderella say when she was splitting from the All-American Boy? Any press conference would only bring more characters out to chase Marilyn from her house to Giesler’s office. And once they got there, if anybody issued one of those ‘They’re just a young couple who couldn’t make a go of it’ statements, it would only irritate everybody.

“So the studio issued a statement of its own in advance. We said that Marilyn wasn’t going to hold any press conference, but she’d be leaving for work at ten o’clock from her house, to fulfill her commitment on Seven Year Itch, based on the Broadway play of the same name and costarring Tom Ewell, in Cinemascope. Once we’d got in that plug, we said that while we didn’t promise an interview, the boys would get some pictures. So forty or fifty of the press congregated. In addition, there were several hundred volunteer reporters and photographers in the trees and trampling the lawn.

“Then an unbelievable thing happened,” Flack Jones said. He grinned when he thought of it. “They were all there to get a picture of Marilyn going to work, because it would be the first picture since her announcement that she wanted a divorce, and all at once, in front of the house a great, big, beautiful automobile pulled up. In it was a friend of Joe’s from San Francisco. As I’ve said, Joe’s been in that house for three days on the first floor, with Marilyn on the second. There was a back alley, and a rejected husband could have snuck out of that back alley and disappeared if he’d wanted to. But Joe faced up to his responsibilities and took them like a man. So what do the press and newsreels get? A bonus! Out of the front door comes Joe, grim-lipped, walking the last long mile, with his pal carrying his suitcase.

“The press stopped him on the lawn, but Joe had no comment to make. They got pictures of him as he climbed into the car slowly, and one guy asked, ‘Where you going, Joe?’

“‘I’m going home,’ Joe said.

“‘We thought this was your home, Joe,’ chirped the press like a Greek chorus.

“San Francisco has always been my home,’ Joe said. He stood there waving farewell, then he drove away.”

Looking at Flack Jones, I could see that he was still marveling at a scene which no press agent would have thought of inventing in his wildest dreams. He said, “I’ve always admired Joe for that. A lot of guys would have sneaked out the back way and gone to San Francisco, avoiding that encounter in the front yard. Not old Joe.

“About ten minutes later, Marilyn came down the stairs, sobbing, on Giesler’s arm. She was all broken up. Everybody was shoving and pushing. A lady columnist kicked the crime reporter for the Los Angeles Mirror in the shins. He turned on her and asked, ‘Who do you think you’re kicking?’ and she said, ‘I’ll kick you in the pants if you don’t get out of my way.’ All in all, there was quite a hubbub. The newsreel guys were grinding away, and somebody asked, ‘How about Joe, Marilyn?’ and Marilyn said, between sobs, ‘1 can’t talk! I can’t!’ And she got in a car and drove off.”

  Later, when I talked to Marilyn in New York, I guided our conversation around to a story written by Aline Mosby, of the United Press. The story was about how Marilyn had told her that she had bought Joe a king-size, eight-foot bed because she didn’t approve of separate bedrooms. “People say it’s chic to have separate bedrooms,” Marilyn told me. “That way a man can have a place for his fishing equipment and guns as well as sleeping, and a woman can have a fluffy, ruffly place with rows and rows of perfume bottles. The way I feel, they ought to share the same bedroom. With a separate-bedroom deal, if you happen to think of something you want to say, it means you have to go traipsing down the hall, and you may be tired. For that matter, you may forget what you started out to say. Besides, separate bedrooms are lonely. I think that people need human warmth even when they’re asleep and unconscious.”

There were other things I wanted to ask her. “I’ve heard that in Asphalt Jungle you displayed a highly individual way of walking that called attention to you and made you stand out. I’ve heard a lot of people try to describe the way you walk, and some of those descriptions are pretty lurid. How do you describe it?”

She leaned forward, placed her elbows on a table and cupped her chin in her palms. She was very effective that way. “I’ve never deliberately done anything about the way I walk,” she said. “People say I walk all wiggly and wobbly, but I don’t know what they mean. I just walk. I’ve never wiggled deliberately in my life, but all my life I’ve had trouble with people who say I do. In high school the other girls asked me, ‘Why do you walk down the hall that way?’ I guess the boys must have been watching me and it made the other girls jealous or something, but I said, ‘I learned to walk when I was ten months old, and I’ve been walking this way ever since.’”

In California I had asked Flack Jones, “What would you say Marilyn does best? Is her walk her greatest asset?” Jones regarded the feathery top of a slender, swaying palm tree, as if searching for an answer. “She does two things beautifully,” he said. “She walks and she stands. Also, as I’ve already told you she has wit enough to buy her clothes one or two sizes too small, and with a chassis like hers, this infuriates women and intrigues guys. From a woman’s standpoint, there is no subtlety in such gowns. I remember when Marilyn came to a party. In a number which fitted her like a thin banana peel and the other women there thought it outrageous. Comments were made about that gown in a gossip column.”

“How did Marilyn react to that?” I asked.

“Marilyn asked me, ‘What should I have done?”’ Jones said. “I said, ‘Look, honey, the men loved it. Pay no attention to what the gossip-column cat said. You’re a man’s woman, so dress for men, not for other women. Any time you quit dressing for men you’re out of business.’”

I told Jones that I’d been trying to find a phrase which would describe her walk, but that I hadn’t been able to. “I can’t help you there,” Jones said. “I’ve heard the words ‘quivering’ and ‘trembling’ used in connection with her walk, but I don’t know a description that really does the job. But when she walks across a screen a couple or three times, she attracts attention — a whole lot. That much I know.

“The public laughed at her walk in Niagara,” Jones told me, “but Marilyn was only doing what the director wanted her to. It wasn’t up to her to cut the picture or to tell the director not to point the camera at her during a long walk across cobblestones. I challenge any girl to walkdown a cobblestoned street in high heels without wiggling at least once.”

After his analysis of Marilyn as a pedestrian, Flack Jones picked up our conversational threads where we’d broken them off with her parting from Joe DiMaggio, and tied them together again. “After that she came back and finished Seven Year Itch at Fox,” he said. “Her agent, Charlie Feldman, flung a snazzy party for her at Romanoff’s, and she went to New York. The next thing anybody knew, she announced that, with a New York photographer named Milton Greene, she had formed Marilyn Monroe, Inc. She’s the president of the corporation; Greene’s vice-president. But I have reason to think that she’d done that before she left Hollywood, for a hairdresser at the studio told me that one day when he had Marilyn in front of his mirror, she had said, ‘Gee, I feel good. I’m incorporated.’”

I put it to Jones, “When she left the studio that last time, was it a clean, sharp break or did her relations with the studio gradually become fuzzy and vague?”

“After Itch,” Flack Jones said, “she simply didn’t show up again. I don’t know whether you’d call that sharp or vague.”

I said, when I finally met Marilyn, “The way I get it, you invented a whole new system of holding out; you just disappeared.”

“I disappeared because if people won’t listen to you, there’s no point in talking to people,” Marilyn told me. “You’re just banging your head against a wall. If you can’t do what they want you to do, the thing is to leave. I never got a chance to learn anything in Hollywood. They worked me too fast. They rushed me from one picture into another.

“I know who started all of those stories which were sent out about me after I left Hollywood the last time,” she added. One paper had an editorial about me. It said: ‘Marilyn Monroe is a very stupid girl to give up all the wonderful things the movie industry has done for her and go to New York to learn how to act.’ Those weren’t the exact words, but that was the idea. That editorial was supposed to scare me, but it didn’t, and when I read it and I realized that it wasn’t frightening me, I felt strong. That’s why I know I’m stronger than I was.”

She thought for a while; then she said, “I’m for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is, the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them an individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It’s tragic.”

Going back to a straight question-and-answer routine, I said, “You’re habitually late for appointments. What are the psychological reasons for your lateness?’

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never come to any conclusion. If I knew, I’d get over it.”

I said that I’d heard she was so nervous before appointments that she was sometimes became nauseated. I asked if this was caused by a feeling of pressure — of people pushing and hauling and pulling at her.

“You’d throw up, too, in some situations,” she told me. “I flew into New York at eight o’clock one morning and there were photographers waiting to take pictures of me at the airport, and all that morning I had a series of interviews with newspaper people. Those interviews came twenty minutes or a half hour apart. Then I was rushed to a luncheon with a group of magazine people, and right after luncheon I tore over to the Daily News Building. I don’t think anybody can take that routine very long. Another complication is that I have a certain stupid sincerity. I don’t want to tell everybody who interviews me the same thing. I want them all to have something new, different, exclusive. When I worry about that, I start to get sick at my stomach.”

I asked her if writers had ever prepared material for her to use in an “interview” or in a “by-line story.”

“I refuse to let articles appear in movie magazines signed ‘By Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I might never see that article and it might be O.K.’d by somebody in the studio. This is wrong, because when I was a little girl I read signed stories in fan magazines and I believed every word of them. Then I tried to model my life after the lives of the stars I read about. If I’m going to have that kind of influence, I want to be sure it’s because of something I’ve actually said or written.”

“I’ve been told that you devote hours to selecting and editing pinup pictures of yourself,” I said.

“I haven’t so far,” she told me. “But maybe it’s time I did. At least I’d like to have my pictures not look any worse than I do. I’d like them to resemble me a little bit. With some photographers, all they ask is that a picture doesn’t look blurred, as if you’ve moved while they were taking it. If it’s not blurry they print it.”

“Somewhere,” I said, “I’ve read that at least half of the photographs taken of you are killed because they are too revealing.”

“That’s the Johnston Office for you,” she sighed. “They’re very small about stuff like that, and what the Johnston Office passes, the studio ruins with retouching. After one sitting of thirty poses, twenty-eight of those poses were killed. The Johnston Office spends a lot of time worrying about whether a girl has cleavage or not. They ought to worry if she doesn’t have any. That really would make people emotionally disturbed. I don’t know what their reasoning is,” she went on with a puzzled air. “They certainly can’t expect girls to look like boys.”

“I’ve read that your measurements are 37-23-34,” I told her.

“If you’re talking about my lower hips, they’re thirty-seven inches,” she said. “If you’re talking about my upper hips, they’re thirty-four.” Eying her, I tried to decide where “upper” hip left off and “lower” began. I gave up.

“Nowadays,” she said, “there’s a vogue for women with twenty-twenty-twenty figures. Models in the high-style magazines stick out their hipbones and nothing else. But I’m a woman, and the longer I am one the more I enjoy it. And since I have to be a woman, I’m glad I’m me. I’ve been asked, ‘Do you mind living in a man’s world?’ I answer, ‘Not as long as I can be a woman in it.’”

“There’s another thing I want to ask you,” I said. “It’s about something you said to a man in the Fox Studio legal department. You said, ‘I don’t care about money. I just want to be wonderful.’ He didn’t know what you meant by that.”

“I meant that I want to be a real actress instead of a superficial one,” Marilyn herself told me. “For the first time I’m learning to use myself fully as an actress. I want to add something to what I had before. I want to be in the kind of pictures where I can develop, not just wear tights. Some people thought that they were getting their money’s worth when they saw me in The Seven Year Itch, but in future I want people to get even more for their money when they see me. Only today a taxi driver said to me, ‘Why did they ever put you in that little stinker, River of No Return?’

“I thought it was a good question,” Marilyn told me. “I’m with that taxi driver. He’s my boy. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t accept River of No Return today. I think that I deserve a better deal than a Z cowboy movie, in which the acting finishes third to the scenery and CinemaScope. The studio was CinemaScope-conscious then, and that meant that it pushed the scenery instead of actors and actresses.” Without missing a beat, she switched gears into another subject. “One of the things about leaving Hollywood and coming to New York and attending the Actors’ Studio was that I felt that I could be more myself,” she said. “After all, if I can’t be myself, who can I be?” I shook my head. She had me puzzled too.

Nunnally Johnson had directed How to Marry a Millionaire, costarring Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn. “Do her pictures make a lot of money?” I asked him in Hollywood.

“Millionaire earned a tremendous amount,” Nunnally told me.

“What about The Seven Year Itch?” I asked.

“Variety reports it as the top Fox grosser for 1955,” he said. “But speaking for myself, I can’t say that I saw the ‘new Marilyn Monroe’ in The Seven Year Itch that some others did. I thought that essentially it was the same performance, just longer. Still, this could scarcely be a cause for worry for her; God had given her that equipment and it was still magnificent. She was still a phenomenon.”

“Maybe she’ll grow into a young Mae West and make people laugh at sex,” I suggested.

Johnson agreed that it might be a good thing if she could do that. “I believe that the first time anybody genuinely liked Marilyn for herself, in a picture, was in How to Marry a Millionaire,” he said. “She herself diagnosed the reason for that very shrewdly, I think. She said that this was the only picture she’d been in in which she had a measure of modesty. Not physical modesty, but modesty about her own attractiveness. In Millionaire she was nearsighted; she didn’t think men would look at her twice, because she wore glasses; she blundered into walls and stumbled into things and she was most disarming. In the course of the plot she married an astigmatic; so there they were, a couple of astigmatic lovers. In her other pictures they’ve cast her as a somewhat arrogant sex trap, but when Millionaire was released, I heard people say, ‘Why, I really liked her!’ in surprised tones.”

These comments of Johnson’s were made before Marilyn was enlightened by exposure to the Actors’ Studio. Upon her return from New York to work at Fox in Bus Stop, Johnson did see a “new Marilyn Monroe.”

“In contrast to the old Marilyn, in her present incarnation she is a liberated soul, happy, co-operative, friendly, relaxed,” he wrote me. “Actually, it is as if she had undergone a psychoanalysis so successful that the analyst himself was flabbergasted. Now she’s different; her behavior and her manner as a member of the social order are O.K. As for her acting, that remains to be seen.”

I told Marilyn that I had read an Associated Press story which estimated that her newest contract — scheduled to run for seven years — would bring her more than $8,000,000. When I mentioned this, she said, “Eight million dollars is a lot. However, no matter what they tell you, it’s not for money alone that I’m going back to Hollywood. I am free to make as many pictures for my own company as I do for Fox, and I can do TV and stage shows.”

Among others I’d talked to about Marilyn, before discussing her with herself, was Milton H. Greene, the New York photographer who’d become vice president of Marilyn Monroe Productions.

“I don’t know where they got that figure eight million, either,” Greene had told me. “Not from me or Marilyn.” He went on, “I don’t ask you what you make, do I? Everybody wants an exclusive release or an exclusive interview with Marilyn on the subject, and I want everybody to be happy, but things like that are confidential.”

Like Marilyn, Greene asked me not to use a tape-recording machine when interviewing him. “Makes me stutter,” he said. So, carefully, laboriously, and word for word, I wrote down everything he said to me. While doing it, I noticed no signs of stuttering. Evidently a notebook and pencils didn’t bother him. Greene had also asked me to put the initial “H” in his name, making it Milton H. Greene. “Would you mind very much?” he said. “There’re other Milton Greenes who are also in the photography business.”

He had met Marilyn when he had gone to California to do a series of photographs of Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons and Marilyn Monroe. It hadn’t been his idea to do anything too sexy. “After all,” he said, “in a national magazine you can only expose so much of a girl, even if the girl is willing. Marilyn turned out to be different from what I thought she’d be. More sensitive.”

Greene had gone to California on a second assignment, and had begun to think of doing a book of photographs of Marilyn. “The book isn’t out yet,” he said, “but I’ll show you a few of the pictures I made for it. It will be Marilyn in different moods and settings, as if she were playing different parts.” He went to a shelf and brought back a box of aluminum squares. Each square contained a color transparency. “Here’s one where she looks as if she’s in England,” he said. “As you can see, she’s wearing an Edwardian hat. Here’s one where she looks like Bernadette in The Song of Bernadette.” I looked at that one for a long time. It was, I thought, a novel idea.

Milton H. Greene watched me write down what he’d said in my notebook; then he went off on a slight tangent. “One day I plan to do a cookbook for dogs,” he said. “It would contain dog-dish recipes. I think it would be amusing.” I brought him back from his dog cookbook project to his association with Marilyn. “In Hollywood,” he said, “we got to talking. This was after she’d made Seven Year Itch and after her divorce from Joe, and I told her that I hoped to go into television and theatrical production. I found that all Marilyn wants is to make just enough money to be able to afford to make good pictures. That’s the way I feel about it, too, so Marilyn Monroe Productions hopes to buy a good story property; then approach the right studio about making and distributing the picture.”

He stood up, walked around his office and came back to his chair. “If Marilyn had been only interested in making money,” he said, “she wouldn’t have been interested in me.”

When I asked Marilyn to tell me about her association with the Actors’ Studio, she said that she not only attended classes there, but had also had private lessons from Lee Strasberg and his wife, who are the mainsprings of the project.

Greene told me, “Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, Julie Harris and Montgomery Clift all studied under the Strasbergs. Marilyn observes, studies and watches. She listens to lectures. Occasionally she is allowed to take part.”

The Actors’ Studio lets interested people like Marilyn sit in on an informal, guest basis. She is not an officially enrolled student member of the Actors’ Studio, because you are not admitted there on that basis unless you have contributed something notable on the stage in a performance or have passed a series of exacting auditions. Just wanting to be in isn’t enough. This is very smart of the Strasbergs, because it eliminates all those who are without talent; otherwise the studio would be full of women all seven feet tall and all trying to be actresses.

I said to Marilyn that I’d heard she’d spent some time with Terence Rattigan, the British playwright, discussing the screenplay he was adapting for her from his London stage success, The Sleeping Prince, a vehicle in which Sir Laurence Olivier had played the prince. Sir Laurence had also agreed to play the same role opposite Marilyn and also to direct the film. “I had a bad cold the evening I spent with Mr. Rattigan, and he said I sounded like Tallulah Bankhead,” Marilyn told me proudly. Then she added thoughtfully, “Mr. Rattigan is young, but not too young.”

I asked her what she meant. She smiled and said, “I guess you want me to say over twelve and not quite ninety. I don’t know how old Mr. Rattigan is. I’d say he’s kind of ageless.”

I asked her to give me a hint of the story line followed by The Sleeping Prince. “I’m an American chorus girl in London, in it,” she said, “and the regent of a foreign country notices me and asks me to a reception at his country’s legation. I wriggle into my only formal and go, only it turns out it’s not a large gathering at all. In fact, it’s the same stale bit that’s been tried out on girls for the last three thousand years: dinner for two, candles, wine and soft music, when she’s expecting other guests. The next thing I know, I’ve had too much champagne and I’ve passed out. I won’t tell you any more. You ought to be willing to spend money to find out what happens next.

“The truth is,” she said, “the plot is about a man who’s been asleep — at least his emotional something or other has been asleep — but little by little a relationship builds up between him and this American chorus girl, and he begins to stir in his sleep, as you might say. He’s a married man, but that doesn’t complicate things because he’s sophisticated about the whole deal. Terence Rattigan describes it as ‘an occasional fairy tale or a comedy with serious overtones.’”

Weeks before, when I’d talked to Billy Wilder about Marilyn, I’d said to him, “I should think it would take a great deal of mature mental and moral strength to cope with becoming an enormous success overnight. It must be unsettling to suddenly become a sex symbol known all over the world.”

Wilder replied, “It’s my opinion that she’s basically a good girl, but what’s happened to her is enough to drive almost anybody slightly daffy, even someone who is armored with poise and calmness by his background and bringing up. You take a girl like Marilyn, who’s never really had a chance to learn, who’s never really had a chance to live, and suddenly confront her with a Frankenstein’s monster of herself built of fame and publicity and notoriety, and naturally she’s a little mixed up and made giddy by it all. However, I’d like to go on record with this: I worked with her in Seven Year Itch and I had a good time with her. She was seldom on time, but it wasn’t because she overslept. It was because she had to force herself to come to the studio. She’s emotionally upset all the time; she’s scared and unsure of herself — so much so that when I worked with her I found myself wishing that I were a psychoanalyst and she were my patient. It might be that I couldn’t have helped her, but she would have looked lovely on a couch.”

“You mean you didn’t get annoyed when she was late?” I asked.

“I understood the reasons for it,” Wilder told me. “There was no use getting annoyed. Even at the beginning, when I discovered that I had let myself in for a certain amount of trouble, I found myself liking her. At no time did I find her malicious, mean, capricious or anything but conscientious. There are certain urges and drives in her which make her different, but, as a director, I think it worth combating those things and living with them in order to work with her.”

I found myself hoping that Josh Logan, who will direct her in her next picture, the filmed version of Bus Stop, and Buddy Adler, the producer who bought that play for Fox, would feel the same way about her Wilder feels. That’s what she does to you. In spite of her spells of procrastination carried to fantastic lengths, in spite of her verbal convolutions, you wind up liking her.

By “her” I mean, of course, all of the various Marilyn Monroes — and there are several of them. There is the sexpot Marilyn Monroe; she’s the one who tries so hard to live up to the legend of her sexiness that even her own stomach sometimes can’t take it. Then there’s the frightened Marilyn Monroe, product of a broken home and a battered childhood — a girl named Mortenson who still can’t believe that she’s that girl on the screen they’re making all the fuss about. And last of all there is “The New Marilyn Monroe” — the one who is supposed to have emerged from the Actors’ Studio as a composed and studied performer, “having achieved growth” and “developed more.”

Somehow, as I neared the end of my interview, I found myself wondering if people would accept her as the new and different Marilyn Monroe she thinks she is. I had heard one man say, “Even if you hung Ethel Barrymore’s and Helen Hayes’ talent on Marilyn’s beautiful body, people wouldn’t take her acting seriously.”

To my surprise, I realized that I was dreading the possibility that when she turned on her new brand of acting, audiences might laugh at her, as they laughed at Zasu Pitts when she went in for “heavy drahma” after a lifetime as a comedienne.

“It doesn’t scare me,” Marilyn told me bravely, when I mentioned my fears. “If I have the same things I had before I started to go to the Actors’ Studio and I’ve added more — well, how can I lose?”

Whether she has really “added more” or not, I don’t know. But, as she herself points out, she does — emphatically — still have the same things she had before. My guess is that they’re still negotiable at the box office.

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© All images are copyright and protected by their respective owners, assignees or others.
copyright text by Saturday Evening Post.

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25/10/1954 Sur le tournage de "The Seven Year Itch"

Le 25 octobre 1954, Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell et Robert Strauss tournent une scène du film "Sept ans de réflexion" dans les studios de Los Angeles, sous la direction du réalisateur Billy Wilder. Cette scène sera cependant coupée au montage.
In October, 25, 1954, Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell and Robert Strauss shot a scene for the movie "The Seven Year Itch" in the Los Angeles studios, directed by Billy Wilder. This scene will be deleted in the final cut.
photographies de Sam Shaw.
> voir les articles et photographies de Marilyn sur le tournage de la scène coupée et la scène coupée

  

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© All images are copyright and protected by their respective owners, assignees or others.
copyright text by GinieLand. 

Billy Wilder Citation 1

*réalisateur, producteur et scénariste américaine; il a réalisé deux films avec Marilyn: "Sept ans de réflexion" (1954) et "Certains l'aiment chaud" (1959).
(source: citation sur mptvimages )

There was an actress named Marilyn Monroe. She was always late. She never remembered her lines.
She was a pain in the ass.
My Aunt Millie is a nice lady. If she were in pictures she would always be on time. She would know her lines. She would be nice.
Why does everyone in Hollywood want to work with Marilyn Monroe and no one wants to work with my Aunt Millie ? Because no one will go to the movies to watch my Aunt Millie.

 

Il y avait une actrice qui s'appelait Marilyn Monroe. Elle était toujours en retard. Elle ne se souvenait jamais de son texte. C'était une emmerdeuse.
Ma tante Millie est une dame charmante. Si elle ferait un film, elle serait toujours à l'heure. Elle connaîtrait son texte. Elle serait sympa.
Pourquoi tout le monde à Hollywood veut travailler avec Marilyn et personne ne veut travailler avec ma tante Millie ? Parce que personne n'irait voir les films pour regarder ma tante Millie.

Julien's Auction Hollywood Legends 04/2014

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Photographies

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lot 981: MARILYN MONROE INSCRIBED PHOTOGRAPH
A photograph of Marilyn Monroe mounted to board and inscribed on the board “Oh George,/ You’re a genius!/ Marilyn Monroe.” The black and white image was taken by Cecil Beaton and said to be Monroe’s favorite image of herself.
The consignor relates that in the late 1950s he attended an event at Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs home as a guest of Sammy Davis Jr. The consignor remembers the photograph being given by Monroe, who was also a guest of Sinatra’s, to Davis’ valet, whom he named as “George.” This is a possible inaccuracy and may have been given to Frank Sinatra’s longtime valet, George Jacobs. The consignor was given the image by the valet George, who said he could not take the item back to Los Angeles. The consignor has had the photograph in his possession since that time.

   

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lot 986 à 999: MARILYN MONROE JOSEPH JASGUR PHOTOGRAPHS


 


 




 
 
 

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Lot 1001: COLLECTION OF MARILYN MONROE PHOTOGRAPHS
A group of approximately 35 unsigned copies of photographs and images of Marilyn Monroe taken by various photographers, collected by photographer Joseph Jasgur.
 

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Lot 1003: MARILYN MONROE 1941 SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPH
A vintage original Marilyn Monroe school photograph from Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School. Titled "Class of Summer, 1941." Monroe appears in the seventh row from the bottom and the 15th person from the right. inscriptions on verso are written to a student named Barbara. The then named Norma Jeane Baker was 15 years old.
 
 

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Lot 1004 à 1023: MARILYN MONROE ANDRE DE DIENES PHOTOGRAPHS

   
  
 

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Lot 1027: MARILYN MONROE HAROLD LLOYD PHOTOGRAPH PRINT

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Lot 1028: MARILYN MONROE BEHIND-THE-SCENES PHOTOGRAPHS
A pair of photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the set of Niagara (20th Century, 1953). The black and white images show Monroe in a skirt suit and beret. One marked on verso "Marilyn Monroe/ in film 'Niagara'/ taken June 11, 1952/ Park St. Niagara Falls." The images are believed to have never been published.
 

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Lot 1029: MARILYN MONROE AND BILLY WILDER PHOTOGRAPH
 

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Lot 1031: DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK WARDROBE AND PUBLICITY PHOTOGRAPH ARCHIVE

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Lot 1032: THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS ARCHIVE
 

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Lot 1033-34, 1036-37: MARILYN MONROE GEORGE BARRIS PHOTOGRAPHS

 
 

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 Lot 1035: MARILYN MONROE IMAGES
 
 

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Lot 1038: MARILYN MONROE BUS STOP MILTON GREENE NEGATIVES AND COPYRIGHTS

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Lot 1039: MARILYN MONROE AND TONY CURTIS PHOTOGRAPH

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Lot 1046 à 1050: MARILYN MONROE MANFRED LINUS KREINER PHOTOGRAPHS 
     
 

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 Lot 1051: MARILYN MONROE AND MARLON BRANDO AT PREMIERE
 

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Lot 1055: MARILYN MONROE CANDID PHOTOGRAPH
 

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lot 1061-62: THE MISFITS NEGATIVES AND COPYRIGHT
The photographs offered here were taken on the Nevada set of the film by Thomas Kaminski in 1960.

 

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Lot 1067: MARILYN MONROE PHOTOGRAPH SIGNED BY ALLAN GRANT
An original vintage photograph signed by Allan Grant. This photograph was taken on July 7, 1962, in Monroe’s Brentwood home for an article in LIFE magazine that went to newsstands on August 3. Monroe died on August 5, two days later.
 

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lots 1074 à 1079: MARILYN MONROE BERT STERN "THE LAST SITTING" PHOTOGRAPH
 

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Documents papiers

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lot 982: PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S BIRTHDAY GALA TICKETS AND PROGRAM
A pair of two tickets to President John F. Kennedy’s Birthday Party at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. Side Balcony Seats 305 J 1 &2. With a color program titled on the cover "Happy Birthday Mr. President." The four-page booklet includes a list of the dinner committee and sponsors and order of appearance: Jack Benny, Ella Fitzgerald, Jerome Robbins Ballets, Danny Kaye, Henry Fonda, Maria Callas, Peggy Lee, Peter Lawford, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Durante and Eddie Jackson, Bobby Darin, Henry Fonda, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Diahann Carroll.

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Lot 1002: MARILYN MONROE SIGNED MODEL RELEASE FORM
A signed model release form for Marilyn Monroe’s third modeling session with Joseph Jasgur. Jasgur photographed Norma Jeane Dougherty and the cast of a local production titled “The Drunkards” in color and black and white at Zuma Beach, California. The form is dated “March23-’46” and signed in ink “Norma Jeane Dougherty.” The form is also signed by Mary Lou Bennett and Tom Burton, who participated in the session.
 

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Lot 1042: MARILYN MONROE RECEIVED FAN MAIL
A postcard and pair of envelopes received by Marilyn Monroe from fans. The fan mail was sent to Monroe at 20th Century Fox from international fans; envelopes are postmarked 1954. Accompanied by a contemporary print publicity still showing Monroe surrounded by fan mail.

 

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Lot 1044: MARILYN MONROE PRODUCTIONS BANK REGISTRY
A page of transaction activity for a Colonial Trust Company account of Marilyn Monroe Productions Inc. dating from July 1, 1959, to July 30, 1959. Showing an ending balance of $78, 476.80.

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Lot 1045: MARILYN MONROE TRUSTEE ACCOUNT CHECK
A typed check written to the Screen Actors Guild, Inc. in the amount of $25.00, drawn from a Marilyn Monroe Trustee Account at Bank of America. The check is numbered 655 and dated March 9, 1956, signed by Inez Melson, Monroe's business manager. Description notes that this check was for Monroe's current SAG dues.
   

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lot 1056: MARILYN MONROE AND ARTHUR MILLER CHECK
An unwritten check from Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller's joint account at The First National City Bank of New York. The check is numbered 44 on the top right and still has the attached ledger on the left. 8 by 2 3/4 inches
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 142, "Property from the Estate of Marilyn Monroe and Other Collections," Julien's Auctions, Los Angeles, California,
June 4, 2005

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 lot 1057: MARILYN MONROE SIGNED CARD
A Marilyn Monroe signed card. The card, from Saks Fifth Avenue, is signed in blue ink and upside down from the department store name. 2 3/4 by 3 1/2 inches 
 

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lot 1059: MARILYN MONROE LETTERS TO AND ABOUT
A collection of letters sent to and about Marilyn Monroe. The group includes a letter written to Marilyn Monroe from Jack Hirschberg on Some Like It Hot (UA, 1959) stationery, dated December 17, 1958. Hirschberg was the publicist for the film. He wrote to offer his condolences regarding Monroe’s miscarriage. Also included are a letter from American Airlines dated August 1, 1960, regarding a lost piece of luggage and attached form that was supposed to be filled out and returned to the airline, accompanied by return envelope; copies of letters written by Cherie Redmond and attached note dated July 27, 1962, ten days before Monroe’s death, to Eunice Murray explaining the two letters that are in regard to a furniture order of Monroe’s.

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lot 1060: LET'S MAKE LOVE ORIGINAL SCRIPT
A Let's Make Love script dated January 15, 1960. Blue paper cover, reads at upper right "Second Revised Shooting/ Final/ 4014-79/ Permanent File," 139 pages. The comedic film starred Marilyn Monroe opposite Yves Montand. The pair were rumored to have had an affair during the the production of the film.
 

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Lot 1064: MARILYN MONROE TAX DOCUMENT AND TYPED LETTER
Relating to Marilyn Monroe's purchase of her home at 12305 5th Helena Drive in Brentwood, California. The typed letter, dated "March 6, 1962," reads, "Dear Sir: Please change your records to show that I am the owner of Lot 20, Tract No. 5462. Very Truly Yours, Marilyn Monroe."
Larger, 11 by 8 1/2 inches
 

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Lot 1068: MARILYN MONROE REAL ESTATE DOCUMENT
A Marilyn Monroe signed, typed purchase offer for Monroe's Los Angeles home on Helena Drive. This is the only home Monroe ever purchased. Document dated January 9, 1962, with a purchase price of $52,500. Monroe would die eight short months later.
15 by 9 1/4 inches
 

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Lot 1071: MARILYN MONROE RECEIVED AND SENT CORRESPONDENCE
A group of correspondence sent and received by Marilyn Monroe, including a two-page typed, signed letter to Monroe from Jean Negulesco, typed on Negulesco’s stationery and dated July 14, 1958. The letter is in regard to flowers and a book sent by the director to Monroe. The book was The Midwife of Pont Clary , which Negulesco wanted to adapt into a film for Monroe. He wrote, “The thing of The Midwife of Pont Clary is fundamentally sex …” and later suggests Monroe give the book to her husband, Arthur Miller, to read. Also included are a copy of a wire message sent by Monroe to Inez Melson dated June 10, 1959, regarding the boarding of a bird named Clyde; a typed, signed letter from playwright William Inge complimenting Monroe on her performance in Some Like It Hot (UA, 1959), dated April 6, 1959, and signed “Bill Inge"; and a confirmation copy of a telegram sent by Monroe to Roberto Boss in Mexico regarding a furniture order, with a typed, dictated copy of same, dated June 16, 1962, less than two months before Monroe’s death.
 

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Vêtements, Bijoux

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lot 983: MARILYN MONROE/ANDY WARHOL LAVENDER TRIBUTE DRESS
A lavender Travilla tribute dress honoring Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol. The sheer crepe sunburst pleated halter dress was inspired by the white dress Monroe made famous in The Seven Year Itch (20th Century, 1955) and attributed by the Travilla estate as being re-created for an Andy Warhol memorial service at The Beverly Hilton in the colors of his iconic "Marilyn" silkscreen images. A label reads "Travilla." No size present.
PROVENANCE From the Estate of William Travilla

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Lot 1052: MARILYN MONROE EARRINGS
A pair of clip-on rhinestone earrings owned by Marilyn Monroe. Each earring is composed of a single full-cut prong-set rhinestone and five strands of cascading prong-set baguette cut rhinestones with simple clip backs. Monroe wore these earrings to the premiere of The Rose Tattoo (Paramount Pictures, 1955) and Actor's Studio benefit dinner which she attended with Marlon Brando. Also believed to have been worn to the opening of The Middle of the Night on Broadway in 1956. The play was produced by Joshua Logan who also directed Monroe in Bus Stop (20th Century, 1956). The link below contains video of Monroe wearing the earrings.
noseasboba.tumblr.com/post/56723074922
PROVENANCE Lot 200, “The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe,” Christie’s, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27 & 28, 1999
 

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 lot 1053: MARILYN MONROE SKIRT
 A black wool straight skirt with arched seams down the front, a back zipper and a back slit; interior label reads "Jax." Marilyn Monroe had numerous basic black wool straight skirts that were virtually all identical, this being one of them. Accompanied by a reprinted image of Monroe in the same or similar skirt.
PROVENANCE Lot 32, "Property from the Estate of Marilyn Monroe and Other Collections," Julien's Auctions, Los Angeles, California, June 4, 2005
 

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lot 1058: MARILYN MONROE BLACK BRASSIERE
Marilyn Monroe’s black brassiere. Underwire brassiere, sheer black material covers each cup with solid black fabric covering demi-cup. Originally intended for sale at the landmark Marilyn Monroe auction at Christie’s in 1999, it still bears a Christie’s tag. Housed with an image of Monroe with a small plaque that reads “From the Wardrobe of Marilyn Monroe.”
21 3/4 by 19 3/4 inches, Framed
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 72,"Property From the Estate of Marilyn Monroe," Julien's, Los Angeles, June 4, 2005

 

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Lot 1063: MARILYN MONROE CEIL CHAPMAN COCKTAIL DRESS
A black jersey figure hugging Ceil Chapman cocktail dress from the personal wardrobe of Marilyn Monroe. The dress has a ruched bodice, draping to the hips, 3/4 sleeves, a ballerina neckline with piping trim that plunges to the back.
PROVENANCE Lot 226, “The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe,” Christie’s, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27 & 28, 1999

 

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Objets Divers

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Lot 1000: JOSEPH JASGUR GRAFLEX CAMERA
Vintage Graflex R.B. Super D 4x5 film camera used by Joseph Jasgur to take photos of Norma Jeane (Marilyn Monroe). Accompanied by a 4x5 Graflarger back, five 4x5 film magazines, one Ektalite field lens for 4x5 back, one Polaroid Land back for Graflex camera, one box of Polaroid Polapan 4x5 Land Film Type 52, and four shutter release cables.
      
     

 

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lot 1024: PLAYBOY MAGAZINE FIRST ISSUE SIGNED BY HUGH HEFNER
A first issue of Playboy magazine (HMH Publishing, 1953) with Marilyn Monroe on the cover and signed by Hugh Hefner. The magazine, which launched in December 1953, sold for 50 cents a copy. Accompanied by a photograph of Hefner with the signed item.
   

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lot 1025: MARILYN MONROE 1954 "GOLDEN DREAMS" CALENDAR

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lot 1026: MARILYN MONROE 1955 GOLDEN DREAMS CALENDAR
 

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Lot 1030: MARILYN MONROE 1952 PHOTOPLAY AWARD
 An award plaque presented to Marilyn Monroe by Photoplay magazine. The bronze-tone plaque affixed to a wood frame reads "Photoplay Magazine/ Presents/ The New Star Award/ To/ Marilyn Monroe/ for her/ Rapid Rise to Stardom/ in 1952." Monroe wore the Travilla designed gold lamé gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (20th Century, 1953) to the February 9, 1953, event where the award was presented. 14 by 11 1/2 inches
PROVENANCE Lot 313, "The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe," Christie's, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27-28, 1999
   
    

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Lot 1043: MARILYN MONROE HAIR ROLLER
A spring-style wire hair roller owned by Marilyn Monroe.
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 245, "Property From the Estate of Marilyn Monroe," Julien's Auctions, Los Angeles, June 4, 2005
 

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lot 1054: MARILYN MONROE MASCARA
A gold-toned metal tube of Helena Rubinstein mascara.
Length, 4 1/2 inches
PROVENANCE Partial lot 275, "Property from the Estate of Marilyn Monroe and Other Collections," Julien's Auctions, Los Angeles, California, June 4, 2005
 

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Lot 1065: MARILYN MONROE MEXICAN TAPESTRY
A Mexican wall hanging wool tapestry owned by Marilyn Monroe. Tapestry reads “Chac Mool,” with figure holding a bowl of fire.  Accompanied by a Gene Anthony photograph of the tapestry in Monroe’s Brentwood home.
77 by 55 inches
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 450, "The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe," Christie's, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27-28,1999; Lot 893, "Julien's Summer Sale," Julien's Auctions, Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, June 27, 2009
 

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Lot 1066: MARILYN MONROE OWNED PAINTING
A framed oil on canvas painting, signed "Olga" on lower left corner.
30 1/4 by 49 1/4 inches
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 426, “The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe,” Christie’s, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27-28, 1999
 

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 Lot 1069: MARILYN MONROE OWNED BOOK
A copy of Relax and Live by Joseph Kennedy (New York: Prentice Hall, 1953) from the personal collection of Marilyn Monroe with Christie's auction bookplate on front inside cover. Pencil markings can be found on page 43 and evidence of candle wax on page 47.
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 559, “The Personal Collection of Marilyn Monroe,” Christie’s, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27 & 28, 1999

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Lot 1070: MARILYN MONROE OWNED BOOK
 A copy of Some Characteristics of To - Day by Dr. Rudolf Steiner (London: Steiner Publishing, 1942) from the personal collection of Marilyn Monroe with Christie's auction bookplate on front inside cover. Accompanied by a contemporary image of Monroe in front of a bookshelf.
PROVENANCE Partial Lot 559, “The Personal Collection of Marilyn Monroe,” Christie’s, New York, Sale number 9216, October 27 & 28, 1999
 

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Lot 1072: LIFE MAGAZINE "REMEMBER MARILYN"
from September 8, 1972
 

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Lot 1073: MARILYN MONROE BERT STERN AVANT GARDE 2 MAGAZINE
published in March 1968