MM Remembered

"Unique is an overworked word, but in her case it applies. There will never be another one like her, and Lord knows there have been plenty of imitations." The speaker: movie director Billy Wilder. The subject: Marilyn Monroe, nee Norma Jean Mortenson, an illegitimate child who grew up in a foster home to become the leading lady in her own storybook dream of movie stardom -- a female so famous that her alliterative initials were known as universally as those for Sex Appeal, with which many considered her synonymous.

To the charismatic magnetism of the screen's great queens -- the carnal candor of Harlow, the lush beauty of Swanson, the bewitching mystery of Garbo, the sexual precocity of Bardot -- she added her own ineffable electricity: an enchanting amalgam of workdliness and otherworld-liness, girlish helplessness and womanly self-possession, wide-eyed naïveté and sly self-parody. "I think she's something different to each man," Clark Gable said of her, "blending somehow the things he seems to require most." But whatever her allure, her message was elemental and universal -- people began to get it loud and clear from the moment she swiveled across the screen in 1950 as Louis Calhern's pneumatic "niece" in The Asphalt Jungle, her first important bit part. By 1952, after equally minor but increasingly conspicuous roles in All About Eve, Love Nest and Clash by Night, she had unseated Betty Grable as the nation's most popular pin-up queen.

Soon after the news leaked out that she had posed for what was to become history's most famous nude photo, Marilyn appeared as Playboy's first and still foremost Playmate in the magazine's premier issue of December 1953. From then on, her rise to fame and fortune, paralleling Playboy's own, moved into high gear via such Technicolor vehicles as Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire and River of No Return. She became the reigning love goddess of the screen -- but, as such, a creature less of flesh than fantasy for millions to whom she represented the ultimate embodiment of erotic womanhood. Though she basked and bloomed in the sun of this adulation, she found herself struggling in vain to preserve her three-dimensional identity beneath the glossy façade of Celluloid sex symbolism. With her celebrated marriage to Joe DiMaggio in 1954, she sought to substantiate her womanhood as a loving wife and mother; but pre-empted by the pressures of super-stardom, these dreams of blissful domesticity were destined to dissolve before the end of the year.

Critics, meanwhile, had begun to discern in her performances a burgeoning comic flair which she refined into a genuine comedic style as the seductive girl upstairs in The Seven Year Itch. Unflattered, however, Marilyn was becoming increasingly impatient with what she felt was her typecast public image as a vapid and voluptuous kewpie doll. When the studio responded to her pleas for challenging dramatic roles by casting her as the decorative centerpiece in still another Cinemascopic confection, she simply walked out on her long-term contract, formed her own production company, abandoned Hollywood and moved to New York. In an earnest search for self-fulfillment as a serious actress, she enrolled at the Actors Studio and began to cultivate cultivated friends -- including playwright Arthur Miller. Returning triumphantly to Hollywood from this year-long self-exile to star in the film version of William Inge's Bus Stop, she brought her Method training poignantly to bear on the most evocative portrayal of her career. Converting to Judaism, she married Miller that June and traveled with him to London to film The Prince and the Showgirl -- realizing at last a long-cherished dream of co-starring with Sir Laurence Olivier. The reviews of her performance were not overgenerous; but her next role, as the ukulele-playing vocalist of an all-girl band in Some Like It Hot, was hailed as (text continued on page 190)MM Remembered(continued from page 106) hilarious confirmation of her credentials as a gifted comedienne.

Still tormented by a crippling sense of personal insecurity and professional inadequacy, however, she was unable to mitigate her worsening reputation as a slow "study" and fluffer of lines. Her legendary tardiness, meanwhile, aggravated by insomina and psychosomatic illness, was growing to monumental proportions along with the budgets of the pictures she was helpless to avoid delaying.

Finally, in the wake of two miscarriages, several hospitalizations for nervous disorders, a rumored romance with Yves Montand, and her subsequent split-up with Miller, came the fateful production of Something's Got to Give in April of 1962. Desolated by her divorce, haunted by groundless fears of fading beauty and waning stardom, Marilyn managed to show up on the set only 12 times during the 32 days of production. It was then that studio executives -- wary of costs which had climbed to $2,000,000 for just seven-and-a-half minutes of finish film (including her famous nude bathing sequence) -- made the decison which tolled the knell for her 14-year career in Hollywood: Marilyn was fired from the picture. Despondent, she withdrew to the seclusion of her home in Brentwood and to the company of a few close friends. A few weeks later, on the morning of August 5th, came the shocking news of her death from a self-administered overdose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate -- precipitating a world-wide wave of grief, guilt and righteous outrage.

Her friends, her doctors, her childhood life, her stardom, America's Puritanical heritage, the affluent society, even civilization itself were variously held accountable for the tragedy. But Hollywood itself bore the brunt of the blame in a veritable orgy of self-recrimination. From Tokyo to Tehran, meanwhile, the unique mystique which had made her a living legend survived her death to become the elixir of a cult dedicated to her enshrinement. Necrophilic scavengers rent the wreaths laid at her grave in search of funeral souvenirs; the rate of sleeping-pill suicides rose poetry magazines and intoned in coffeehouses; eerie posthumous portraits, depicting Marilyn as a garish product of the billboards, appeared at street stalls in Paris and New York; two biographies were prepared for televison; a movie profile of clips from her film was distributed nationally as a full-length feature; LP albums of her breathy singing voice, transcribed from the sound tracks of her musicals, were released by two record companies; and a play in Rome recreated her final hours.

But Marilyn's memory, as we see it, is best served by recalling her not as she was when she died but when she lived. For she wished to be remembered by the last memento she left behind; when Something's Got to Give was abandoned in mid-production, and it seemed that her nude swimming sequence might never be seen by the public, Marilyn authorized photographers Lawrence Schiller and William Read Woodfield -- who shot all the scene stills from the unfinished film -- to release the color photographs, of her celebrated skinny dip, "I wan the world to see my body," she told a friend. Published in Life and elsewhere shortly thereafter, the pictures more than justified her pride: At 36, her figure was smooth and svelte, her face slender, suffused with a kind of ethereal beauty; she had never looked lovelier.

But the most revealing shots from the scene, including the only nudes, were withheld by Marilyn for publication exclusively in Playboy, which purchased them from the photographers for $25,000 -- possibly the highest price ever paid for a single pictorial feature. We had planned to run it in our December 1962 issue with Marilyn on the cover in a provocative seminude pose for which she had agreed to do a special sitting. But on Thursday of the week before the shooting, Editor-Publisher Hefner received a personal call from her private secretary informing him without explanation that Marilyn had changed her mind about the cover. The Sunday she was found dead in her Brentwood home.

In a strange postscript, photographers Schiller and Woodfield returned to their Hollywood studio after lunch the following day to find that an unmarked, unstamped envelope had been pushed under the door in their absence. In it were a series of additional nudes -- Marilyn's favorites -- which she had promised to turn over to them for inclusion in our scheduled feature. Because of her death, of course, we postponed our plans indefinitely.

But 16 months have softened the memory of the tragedy, and we are proud to present the photos now, in fitting commemoration of the 10 years of publication which Marilyn inaugurated as our first Playmate, as part of this fond tribute to her enduring beauty.

We add one final, affectionate remembrance to this evocative picture gallery: a composite word portrait of Marilyn assembled from her own views about herself, and from the observations of those who knew her during the years of her reign. Though this biographical mosaic does not attempt to capture the essence of her incomparable incandescence, we feel it does afford touching insight into the lonely, lovely woman behind the voluptuous facade.

Leon Shamroy, the 20th Century-Fox cinematographer who shot the screen test which led to her first studio contract: "I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson, and she radiated sex like Jean Harlow. She didn't need a sound track to tell her story."

June Haver, who starred in Love Nest, a 1951 romantic comedy in which Marilyn played a memorable bit part: "I remember one scene where she was supposed to be sunning in the back yard of this apartment house. Well, when she walked onto the set in her bathing suit and over to the beach chair, the whole crew gasped, gasped, and seemed to turn to stone. She was always nervous and shy, but with the warmth of the crew's reaction, she suddenly seemed to be another person. She became completely uninhibited in her movements -- graceful and seductive at the same time. Mind you, movie crews are quite used to seeing starlets in brief costumes. In all my years at the studio, I'd never seen that happen before. She had that electric something."

An anonymous Hollywood press agent: "She does two things beautifully: She walks, and she stands still. She's the only actress who makes her greatest entrances when she exits."

Henry Hathaway, who directed Marilyn in Niagara: "She can make any move, any gesture, almost insufferably suggestive."

Roy Craft, her onetime press agent: "She had such magnetism that if 15 men were in a room with her, each man would be convinced he was the one she'd be waiting for after the others left."

Jean Negulesco, who directed her in How to Marry a Millionaire: "She represents to man something we all want in our unfulfilled dreams. She's the girl you'd like to double-cross your wife with. A man, he's got to be dead not to be excited by her."

Authoress Diana Trilling, writing in Redbook: "Hollywood, Broadway, the night clubs all produce their quota of sex queens, but the public takes them or leaves them; the world is not as enslaved by them as it was by Marilyn Monroe, because none but she could suggest such a purity of sexual delight. The boldness with which she could parade herself and yet never be gross, her sexual flamboyance and bravado which yet breathed an air of mystery and even reticence, her voice which carried such ripe overtones of erotic excitement and yet was the voice of a shy child -- these anomalies were integral to her gift. And they described a young woman trapped in a never-never land of unawareness. Even while she symbolized an extreme of sexual knowingness, she took each new circumstance of life like a newborn babe. And this is what made her luminous. The glow was not rubbed off by the ugliness of life because finally, in some vital depth, she had been untouched by it."

Sir Laurence Olivier: "Miss Monroe has an extraordinary gift of being able to suggest one moment that she is the naughtiest little thing and the next that she's perfectly innocent. The audience leaves the theater gently titillated into a state of excitement by not knowing which she is and thoroughly enjoying it."

Allen Snyder, Marilyn's make-up man since 1947: "This is a little kid who wants to be with the other little kids sucking lollipops and watching the roller coaster, but she can't because they won't let her. She's frightened to death of that public which thinks she is so sexy. My God, if they only knew."

Photographer Philippe Halsman: "Marilyn was history's most phenomenal love goddess. Why? Most people think the reason was self-evident, especially when she wore a snug evening gown. But there are other girls who have outstanding figures. Paradoxically, Marilyn's very weakness was her great strength. Her inferiority complex, her pathetic, almost childlike need for security are the very things that made her irresistible."

Marilyn said of her early years as a contract player for 20th Century-Fox: "I knew then what I had known when I was 13 and walked along the sea edge in a bathing suit for the first time. I knew I belonged to the public and to the world -- not because I was talented, or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anyone else. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming, the only home I had ever dreamed about. I didn't go into the movies to make money. I wanted to become famous so that everyone would like me and I'd be surrounded by love and affection."

Evelyn Moriarty, Marilyn's stand-in: "Any little thing I did for her, she was so appreciative. She treated me more like a friend than a studio associate. Before I would go into a scene to stand in for her, she would come over and fix my hair and my clothes and she'd give me the motivation for the scene, so I would know what I was doing. She was my Paula Strasberg."

Poet Carl Sandburg: "She was not the usual movie idol. There was something democratic about her. She was the type who would join in and wash up the supper dishes even if you didn't ask her. She was a good talker. There were realms of science, politics and economics in which she wasn't at home, but she spoke well on the national scene, the Hollywood scene, and on people who are good to know and people who ain't. We agreed on a number of things. She sometimes threw her arms around me, like people do who like each other very much. Too bad I was 48 years older -- I couldn't play her leading man."

Peter Lawford: "She liked being a star. But she never put on airs or snobbish pretenses with us. She was a marvelous, warm human being, wonderful to be around. She was the friendliest kind of person, always looking for a party, a good time. You know what she liked to do best? Laugh. Marilyn had a natural kind of humor, fresh and quick, the sort that just fits of depression, they were behind closed doors. Sure, she was sometimes unhappy about her work. Every actor who is serious about his art gets that way occasionally. She had an intense desire to be better than she was."

Nunnally Johnson, her writer-producer in How to Marry a Millionaire: "Marilyn made me lose all sympathy for actresses In most of her takes she was either fluffing lines or freezing. She didn't bother to learn her lines. I don't think she could act her way out of a paper script. She has no charm, delicacy or taste. She's just an arrogant little tail switcher who's learned how to throw sex in your face."

Billy Wilder, who directed Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot: "She's basically a good girl, but what's happened to her is enough to drive almost anybody slightly daffy, even someone whose slightly daffy, even someone whose background has armored her with poise and calmness. But 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 you 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."

A friend of Marilyn's, speaking about the efficacy of psychotherapy as a cure for her tardiness: "It didn't help. She always walked in when the hour was almost over. Then, too, when she was late she felt guilty, and since she always felt guilty, she felt comfortable that way. It was easier for Marilyn to take guilt than responsibility."

Wilder, recalling Marilyn's attendance during the filming of The Seven Year Itch: "You can figure a Monroe picture is going to run an extra few hundred thousand dollars because she's coming late. Of course, I have an Aunt Ida in Vienna who is always on time to the second, but her I wouldn't put in a movie. Anyway, I don't think Marilyn is late on purpose, and it's not because she oversleeps. It's because she has to force herself to come to the studio. She's scared and unsure of herself. 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."

Admitted Marilyn: "It makes something in me happy to be late. People are waiting for me. People are eager to see me. I remember all the years I was unwanted, all the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the little servant girl, Norma Jean -- not even her mother. And I feel a queer satisfaction in punishing the people who are wanting me now. But it's not them I'm really punishing. It's the long-ago people who didn't want Norma Jean. The later I am, the happier she grows. To me, it's remarkable that I get there at all."

Sir Laurence Olivier: "It can be no news to anyone to say that she was difficult to work with. Her work frightened her, and although she had undoubted talent, I think she had a subconscious resistance to the exercise of being an actress. But she was intrigued by its mystique and happy as a child when being photographed; she managed all the business of stardom with uncanny, clever, apparent ease."

She said, however: "I feel as though it's all happening to someone right next to me. I'm close, I can feel it, I can hear it, but it isn't really me."

Maurice Zolotow, in his 1960 biography of Marilyn: "A great force of nature, she was becoming a victim of the propaganda machine, of her own struggle to build herself up. About her swirled a hurricane, and she was its eye. She longed for privacy, but she had murdered privacy, as Macbeth had murdered sleep. Her time was not hers. And her personality was not hers."

Said Marilyn: "I don't want to play sex roles anymore. I'm tired of being known as the girl with the shape. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves, but it is something I must do. The best way to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I'm an actress."

Lee Strasberg, creator-director of the Actors Studio, who took Marilyn under his personal wing: "I saw that what she looked like was not what she really was, and what was going on inside her was not what was going on outside, and that always means there may be something there to work with. In Marilyn's case, the reactions were phenomenal. She can call up emotionally whatever is required for a scene. Her range is infinite. She is more nervous than any other actress I have ever known, but nervousness, for an actress, is not a handicap. It is a sign of sensitivity. Marilyn had to learn how to channel her nervousness, this wild flow of energy, into her work. For too long she had been living for the newspapers, for that publicity. She had to live for herself and her work."

Wilder: "She's built herself a career on overstating something, and she's made up her mind to understate. It's like herring alamode. Put the chocolate ice cream on the herring and you spoil the ice cream, and the herring is no damn good either. They're trying to elvate her to a level where she can't exist. The lines the public really wants from her are not written in English."

Joshua Logan, another of Marilyn's mentor-friends, and the director of Bus Stop, her first Studio-period picture: "It is a disease of our profession that we believe a woman with physical appeal has no talent. Marilyn is as near a genius as any actress I ever knew. She is an artist beyond artistry. She is the most completely realized and authentic film acress since Garbo. She has that same unfathomable mysteriousness. She is pure cinema."

A Hollywood friend: "There were moments when she thought her acting was good. But for the most part she was terribly critical of her work. She wanted everything to be so perfect."

Evelyn Moriarty: "she would always try to do something above and beyond what others might do. But people didn't realize how nervous she really was. People on the set didn't know it, but if she ate breakfast, she'd have to go to the rest room and throw up, she was so nervous."

Bill Travilla, Marilyn's dress designer: "On the surface, she was still a happy girl. But those who criticized her never saw her as I did, crying like a baby because she often herself so inadequate. sometimes she suffered terrific depressions, and would even talk about death. Occasionally, when she had one of these spells at home, she'd telephone me in the middle of the night, and I'd talk her out of it; or when I couldn't and was afraid she'd do what she finally did, I'd get dressed, drive to her place and talk to her. She had this great fear of becoming mentally unbalanced like her mother. I'd tell her that just because of her family history it didn't mean she'd ever suffer the same fate, that she was beautiful, hale, hearty and successful. But she said to me one night, 'Promise me one thing, Billy; if it ever happens to me, you come over and get me and don't let people see me; just hide me somewhere.' I had to promise."

On her release in March of 1961 form Manhattan's payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where she had been under treatment for severe depression since shortly after her divorce decree from Miller became final in January, Marilyn said flippantly to reporters: "Just before I left, I told all those doctors they should have their heads examined."

A Fox executive, after the cancellation of Something's Got to Give: "She's sick, but it's not a physical sickness. It's something she can't control. I don't think she will ever work again."

The Associated Press, August 6, 1962:

"Hollywood -- Blonde and beautiful Marilyn Monroe, a glamorous symbol of the gay, exciting life of Hollywood, died tragically Sunday. Her body was found nude in bed, a probable suicide. She was 36. The long-troubled star clutched a telephone in one hand. An empty bottle of slepping pills was nearby."

Arthur Miller: "It had to happen. I didn't know when or how, but it was inevitable."

Following an earlier suicide attempt, Marilyn had confided to a friend: "The full reason for my trying to kill myself was simply that I didn't want to live. There was too much pain in living. When they restored me to life after my second suicide attempt, I felt very angry. I thought people had no right to make you live when you didn't want to."

Jean Cocteau: "This atrocious death will be a terrible lesson for those whose principal occupation consists in spying on and tormenting the film stars."

An offical of the Hearst newspaper syndicate, exulting over record seasonal circulation in the week following her death: "I'm just as sorry as the next fellow about Marilyn Monroe. But as long as she had to do it, what a break that she did it in August."

Sir Laurence Olivier: "She was the complete victim of ballyhoo and sensation. Popular opinion and all that goes to promote it is a horrible, unsteady conveyance for life, and she was exploited beyond anyone's means."

Russia's Izvestia: "Marilyn Monroe was a victim of Hollywood. It gave birth to her, and it killed her."

Hedda Hopper: "I suppose all the sob sisters in the world will now start to go to work. In a way, we're all guilty. We built her up to the skies, we loved her, but we left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most."

Ben Hecht: "The legend is that Marilyn Monroe was a movie star 'wrecked' by Hollywood, driven despair by the obliterating glare of fame, and by fear that this glare was vanishing; and who was further stricken by the failure of her last two marriages. It wasn't that way. Marilyn had been wrecked by the circumstances of her life since the age of five. The truth about Marilyn Monroe is that she was saved by Hollywood. Fame saved her. The spotlight beating on her 24 hours a day made the world seem livable to her. She lived in the midst of her fame as if she were more a poster than a woman, but the unreality never hurt her. It was the only world in which she could thrive. The real world held only hobgoblins for her, terrors that harried her nights. The movies did not destory Marilyn; they gave her a long and joyous reprieve from the devils which hounded her in earlier years, and which came back to hound her in the end."

Novelist Ayn Rand: "If there was ever a victim of society, Marilyn Monroe was that victim -- of a society that professes dedication to the relief of the suffering but kills the joyous. The evil of a cultural atmosphere is made by all those who share it. Anyone who has ever felf resentment against the good for being the good, and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe."

Diana Trilling: "She was not primarily a victim of Hollywood commercialism, nor of exploitation, nor of the inhumanity of the press. She was not even primarily a victim of the narcissistic inflation that so regularly attends the grim business of being a great screen personality. Primarily, she was a victim of her gift, a biological victim of life itself, a tragedy of civilzation."

Time magazine: "Marilyn Monroe's unique charisma was the force that caused distant men to think that if only a well-intentioned, understanding person like me could have known her, she would have been all right. In death, it has caused women who before resented her frolicsome sexuality to join in the unspoken plea she leaves behind -- the simple, noble wish to be taken seriously."

Lee Strasberg, in his eulogy at her funeral: "In her own lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine. But I have no words to describe the myth and the legend. I did not know this Marilyn Monroe. For us, Marilyn was a devoted and loyal friend, a colleague constantly reaching for perfection. She was a member of our family. We shared her pain and difficulties and some of her joys. It is difficult to accept the fact that her zest for life has been ended by this dreadful accident. I am truly sorry that the public who loved her did not have the opportunity to see her as we did, in many of the roles that foreshadowed what she would have become. Without doubt, she would have been one of the really great actresses of the stage. Despite the heights and brilliance she had attained on the screen, she was planning for the future. In her eyes and in mine, her career was just beginning. Now it is all at an end. I hope that her death will stir sympathy and understanding for a sensitive artist and woman who brought joy and pleasure to the world."

Diana Trilling: "She was alive in a way not granted the rest of us. She communicated scuh a charge of vitality as altered our imagination of life, which is the job and wonder of art."

In a touching Life magazine interview published the week before her death, Marilyn said: "I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that I was fooling somebody -- I don't know who or what -- maybe myself. I have feelings some days when there are scenes with a lot of responsibility, and I'll wish, gee, if only I would have been a cleaning woman. Fame to me is only a temporary and partial happiness; that's not what fulfills me. It warms you a bit, but the warming is temporary. It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It's sort of like you don't know what kind of a yard dash you're running, and then you're at the finish line and you sort of sigh -- you've made it. But fame will go by -- and so long, I've had you, fame. I've always known it was fickle."