On Marilyn Monroe, Actress

As a young, would-be actor, I never paid much attention to Marilyn Monroe's acting. Believe it or not, when I first saw the film she made with Sir Laurence Olivier, the Prince and the Showgirl, I was watching Olivier, studying his technique and so on.

Now, as the Dorothy Fields' lyric goes, I'm not asbestos. But when I would watch Marilyn Monroe when I was younger, I thought she was just an incredibly beautiful woman, with a magnificently proportioned body and a giggly voice. I don't think I saw much difference between Marilyn and those who came after her and to a large extent imitated her--Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Joi Lansing, Barbara Nichols, and another vastly underappreciated actress, Sherri North, who was positioned as Marilyn's replacement at 20th Century Fox.

I was wrong, of course. The 50th anniversary of her death has brought the occasion for a reassessment. She was an excellent actress and a troubled human being who took acting very seriously. The problem was that it sometimes overwhelmed to the extent that she could not appreciate her talents.

I just read a wonderful anecdote in the new book, Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Benner that supports the argument that she took acting seriously. She was making Some Like It Hot--the 1959 Billy Wilder movie about two jazz musicians who dress up as women and join an all-woman band to hide from mobsters who want to kill them. She had been told that the singer Sugar Kane, the part she was playing, was a smart woman in contrast to the dumb blondes she sometimes played. But Marilyn went to the legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg and said, "If she's so smart, how 'come she can't tell they're not women?" Strasburg thought about it. The obvious answer was that if she saw through their disguises there would be no movie. Other actresses in her place would just have done it. But she needed to know. Strasberg told her, "She is smart, so smart that other women want to stay away from her. And here, for the first time, there are two women who want to be your friends. That's why she doesn't see through their disguises. She's just so happy to have two friends!" That was all Marilyn needed to create a funny and sad portrait of a smart, gifted, and often lonely woman who sometimes drinks too much.

Even in her "dumb blonde" comedies--We're Not Married, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven year Itch, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn is very funny and very sexy. In Blondes, she is a sexy lady who amazes the rich man whose son she wants to marry by showing him she is not as dumb as people think, while her co-star Jane Russell sometimes comes across as a stolid Amazon Queen, lacking only a breastplate, a big breastplate.

Marilyn could dance, she could sing. She sings all of her songs in Blondes except for the operatic patch in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" that is clearly dubbed and all of them in Let's Make Love, There's No Business Like Show Business, Bus Stop, and Some Like It Hot. She's supposedly dubbed by Gloria Wood in River of No Return, but the only singing that doesn't sound like her is the title song. She also sounds dubbed in the very brief operetta-like singing in The Prince and the Showgirl, but I really don't know. But hey, she had to be able to sing--she performed for the troups in Korea and sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to President Kennedy shortly before she died. And her dancing in Business and Love is pretty good.

I compare her sadly with Rita Hayworth, who also died so tragically and was chewed up by Columbia Pictures the way Marilyn was by 20th Century Fox. She was a superb dancer who held her own with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly but was too often given mediocre material and who, although she had a pleasing singing voice (listen to her in the Carol Burnette Show she did), allowed herself to be dubbed in all of her musicals. She evidently had so little ambition that she did not insist on cutting her own soundtracks so that she could hear them when she was singing on the screen (and they would dub her later) and so appear more natural in singing. She was evidently quite content to simply mime someone else singing.

Marilyn wasn't content. She wanted to be in The Brothers Karamazov and Freud. She challenged herself in Bus Stop and The Misfits.  

Marilyn seems to be a team player in her movies, bringing out the best in young Tommy Rettig in River of No Return, and playing off rather than against such fine actors as Olivier, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Barbara Stanwyck, and Robert Mitchum, and comic actors such as Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Tom Ewell, David Wayne, Charles Coburn, Tommy Noonan, and Elliot Reid. The comic, all-girl teamwork with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in Millionaire is sharp. All of the stories about her being really late on the set and often absent are probably true, but they tend to date from later in her career. 

One way to see how solid she was on the screen is to compare her with actrresses who played her. Watching Heather Thomas sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" in the 1987 tv movie Hoover v. The Kennedys: The Second Civil War is absolutely painful.  Catherine Hicks in Marilyn: The Untold Story, Mia Sorvino in Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996), and Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn (2011) had some good moments, but they mostly come across as frail compared to the real Marilyn.

When you think of it, there are so few films in which she starred--just 13 if you count her share of We're Not Married as one--and 19 in support. James Dean only starred in three films, but if you count all of his television work and his supporting film roles there's a much fuller record of his oeuvre than hers. And of the 13 films in which she starred, there aren't too many bad ones--even River is more than a guilty pleasure and better than comparable films of the time--and a few are very good--Blondes, Millionaire, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, Misfits, and Seven Year Itch.

If she had been playing baseball like her second husband, she'd have batted over .500, which is a pretty good acting legacy.