The Truth About Marilyn Monroe: Sex & Victimhood Fuels Her Eternal Stardom
Modestly Talented Marilyn’s Star Faced Eclipse But Her Image Was Stuck in Amber by her Death by Overdose
Let’s face the truth ignored by all the writers and journalists who have made Marilyn Monroe a cottage industry outstripping Charles Manson & Family and just coming up short of Christ Jesus: If Marilyn Monroe wasn’t pretty, if she didn’t possess a figure that evolutionary biologists claim was a perfect advertisement for breeding, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
I know I wouldn’t be writing it.
For the everloving eternal truth is, Marilyn Monroe’s acting talent was small. Without those looks, she’d never have been before a movie camera as anything other than a background extra.
But those looks, those absolutely classical every-adolescent-boy’s-dream of losing-his-virginity to that buttermilk ’n’ apple dumplings girl: LISTEN!
Norma Jean Baker had something that transcended talent, She was a motherfuckin’ star, baby. And that’s the truth of it!
The camera loved that buttermilk ’n’ apple dumplings girl.
Those tits! And that ass! Migod! Clark Gable had it right:
“She makes a man proud to be a man.”
Some say that the life of Clark Gable — the King of Hollywood — was forfeited to Marilyn’s awful and unprofessional behavior on the set of The Misfits. According to MM’s third and last hubby, Pull-Over Prize winning scribbler Arthur Miller, things were so bad that the picture was close to being abandoned, until director John Huston had her bundled off to Los Angeles to be detoxed.
Her intake of barbiturates had Miller worrying that she would die of an overdose. She had moved out of the hotel room they shared in Reno to move in with her acting coach, Paula Strasberg. Miller was afraid that Strasberg, not knowing Marilyn’s prodigious intake of soporific substances, would not keep as close a check over her drug use as he did.
In his memoir Timebends, Miller talks about the horror of coming to Strasberg’s room and seeing Marilyn, in bed, being injected by with a drug used to anesthetize surgery patients by a young doctor. His soon-to-be-ex-wfie began screaming when he saw Miller. The doctor, who was disturbed by the episode, told Miller he had never seen anyone who be injected with what he had just shot her up with, and not immediately pass out. He was through treating her, he told Miller.
Miller said that Clark Gable treated Marilyn with respect, thinking of her as he would think of someone who was physically ill,
The Misfits was Marilyn’s first drama as a movie superstar. All of her other roles were in comedies or musicals, or genre pictures. Inveigled by Lee and Paula Strasberg of the Actors Studio, she had formed a desire to transition into a serious dramatic actress, even dreaming of playing Lady Macbeth to her serial lover Marlon Brando. (Brando, who sent a comforting letter to MM after she was put in a madhouse briefly in 1961, never believed she committed suicide. They had an annual sexual assignation both looked forward to, and they were due to make WHOOPEE not long after MM shuffled off her mortal celebrity and joined the immortals in Hollywood’s Olympus.)
Her bread and butter was comedy, but Marilyn was frequently an onset drama queen after she made the list of Top 10 Box Office Stars and gained freedom from her studio, 20th Century-Fox.
Her antics — showing up late and blowing line after line, even the most simple lines — drove her directors to distraction and caused budgets to balloon. It was aggravating to act opposite the former Norma Jean Baker — Tony Curtis said kissing her on the set of Some Like It Hot was “Like Kissing Hitler” as they had to do it over and over and over and over again, due to Marilyn’s fragile mental state and her lack of craft.
Laurence Olivier — the “Greatest Actor in the World — had to direct AND act with her in The Prince and the Showgirl. He had asked the great writer-director Billy Wilder about her, as she’d been the star of his comedy The Seven Year Itch. Billy told Larry that she was difficult to work with, but that all the aggravation was worth it due to what you got on the screen.
The camera was in love with Marilyn Monroe.
Olivier went through the tortures of hell with her —as Wilder would, too, on Some Like It Hot, as her behavior had gotten worse as her dependency on drugs deepened, her marriage to Arthur Miller having failed to save her self-esteem.
Having worked with some of the greatest actors of the English-speaking theater — Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike — Olivier didn’t know how to direct her. Thorndike, who had memorably played Jocusta to his legendary Oedipus, didn’t understand marilyn was an actress when she first came on the set. Thorndike thought she was a tea girl.
He did not know how to get what he wanted out of her. Allegedly, Olivier offended her by telling her to “act sexy.” In a scene with no dialogue in which she sat on a set representing Westminster Cathedral’s pews, he had to play Greensleeves over and over for her, to generate the reaction he needed.
The thing about movie stars and movie acting is — someone like Gary Cooper, in front of a camera, did not act. When the young Orson Welles was visiting the set of a Cooper picture, he was astonished after a scene in which Coop have nothing, nothing at all, in terms of acting, the director yelled CUT! PRINT THAT.
The Great Orsoni was perplexed and queried the director. “Come to the rushes,” was his answer. Seeing the printed takes (rushes) being projected on the screen, he saw the Cooper magic at work.
On the set of The Misfits, Miller — who had befriended Gable as they both sat around for hour upon hour waiting for Marilyn to show up — had a similar reaction to Gable, and told The King of Hollywood so.
“Acting is all in the eyes,” Gable told Miller. “I just turn it on a little more on,” and was careful not to overdo it. At the rushes, Miller had the Welles experience: Gable’s performance was just fine.
What Marilyn Monroe had — the love of the camera — was something that can’t be taught, or acquired. The problem with Marilyn, as she started breaking down, was that she wasn’t that girl who had become a superstar anymore. it was more difficult to turn it on.
The greats of the movie business including Huston went through these mythical tortures of the damned because of her — Wilder two times — but at the end, they realized it was worth it. The image the camera diffused, splot and refocused was pure gold on the screen.
Now, listen: Three days after the wrap of The Misfits, Clark Gable might have croaked — the gossip columnists ran with this calumny, which upset MM terribly — but he had his best role since Gone With the Wind opposite the Sinema’s Golden Girl, who as a young moral girl dreamt the movie legend was her father
(Clark filmed a bedroom scene with his little girl admirer where, in one take, MM managed to drop a sheet and reveal a bare breast. The take didn’t make the final cut. It was hardly the first nude scene that Clark had participated in, though in neither scene did he doff his duds. In Red Dust, Gable sudsed a “She just had to be nekkid” pre-Code Jean Harlow, whose modesty was preserved by a rain barrel. But whose pud gets stiff over Jean Harlow these days? MM in color can still sock it to you. — More on that to come.)
When we speak of Sir Laurence, we must remember that he was the youngest actor ever to be knighted, and was beloved in Hollywood, even if he did walk way from what was predicted to be true movie stardom, to return to England to take a commission in the Royal Navy during the dark days of WWII. Larry was a Best Actor Oscar winner, on five nominations —and for playing Hamlet, no less, the greatest role in the theahytuh!
Marilyn wanted to act with him as he was the real thing. He had class, and that’s what she aspired to, to leave Bimbodom behind her.
When Larry met the bombshell M.M. for the first time, he was convinced he was going to fall in love with her. At the press conference introducing her to the British press, the strap holding up her dress snapped, and nearly revealed a glimpse of one of more of those heavenly bubs.
Shortly into filming The Prince and the Showgirl, he was ready strangle her. The animosity was mutual: Marilyn complained to hubby Artie Miller that Olivier was a male bitch out to upstage her. But that was impossible, as Olivier readily conceded. What appeared on screen made all the turmoil worth it. The movie star had acted Sir Laurence (later Lord Olivier) off the screen, the reputed “Greatest Actor in the World.”
Marilyn Monroe not only had it in her to make a man proud to be a man, but she had the stuff to shake, stir, and bake a boy into a man. Talk about your Earth Mother!
The “more” is about to “come.”
A Tale of Two Titties (and Two Brains)
When I saw The Seven Year Itch in a pristine print at David Packard’s refurbished Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, California in the mid-1990s, I was embarrassed when my then 30-something body responded to the onscreen Marilyn in the way it responded to seeing my first porno films in impossibly filthy and vile old movie houses in the late 1970s, when I was at university.
In kind if not degree.
My pecker, to put it plainly, was of one mind — stirring to life as if it were an old combat vet, hearing what he thought was “The Stars and Stripes Forever” being played by some marching band on an Armistice Day of his imagination, more memory than reality.
Like our old vet in my metaphor, “It” (I’m not one of those foolishly embarrassing American males who names his male member, well, nothing beyond the appellation “My Cock” when barking out directions to a dedicated sweet thing in the midst to surrendering to the exigencies of love between the sheets) — “It” was preparing to come to attention, if not salute.
My “rational” mind was embarrassed and I can’t remember truly but I’d like to think and swear so for the sake of this piece, that “it” (small “i” denoting my gray matter) managed to dampen the other response from a man’s other brain, “It” (capital “I” denoting purple matter).
Shit! … And they talk of dinosaur’s having two brains! One in the head, and one in the tail. Is it surprising that men have two brains, one in the head and one (with another head) seeking tail? Men do have more of the reptilian brain, it’s been said by some kind of scientist, or some journalistic hack engaged in “scientism” (rhymes with ____) …. Yet another theory that probably has been unceremoniously shitcanned by the “Woke” crowd, as has evolutionary biology, for sure!
Speaking of tail: It took me years to remember who gave me my first hard-on as a seven-year boy. That true right of passage, a bellwether signaling a youngster with two balls ripening like a fever blister from a homunculus into the hairy, stinking, itching, pimply thing that is the adolescent male — at 13, a man at last!
There was actually a Seven Year Itch connection to my right of passage. Billy Wilder directed that movie, as he did Some Like It Hot, the movie in which Marilyn — playing Marilyn — has her best role. As Arthur Miller said, Marilyn had a small but fine talent as a light comedienne, and who’s going to argue with that, Artie being a man of the theater (Pulitzer Prize winner for the Great American Play, The Death of a Salesman) and principle (sentenced to jail for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee).
Yeah, Boy Howdy! Art Miller was a Man of The People— but he was also A MAN, dumping the wife and kids for M.M.
I mean, he might have dissed the American Dream as a pinko fellow-traveler if not a downright communisssss (dig that sibilance), but he was the ultimate in living the American Dream. I mean, he got to Hit that Thang!
I may have been watching Some Likes It Hot at the Stanford, but I really think it was likely my first time seeing it on videotape , uncut — that is uninterrupted by TV commercials — and on a screen bigger than the one I first saw the movie on in my family’s TV room, the old B+W 21-incher. (The B+W was the only difference.) When I was watching the scene where Marilyn crawls out of Jack Lemmon’s upperberth on the Pullman car:
CUT TO:
Watching the shot of her ass poking out from the drapes, I was transported back in time faster than Jim Kirk could say, “Beam me up, Scotty.”
I knew. This was the scene, and the woman — who had given me my first proper erection all those years ago.
None other than Miss Marilyn Monroe.
It’s hard to write such a thing in these #metoo times, but a movie actress’ stardom depends on her fuckability — with the exception of Marie Dressler. The extremely unfuckable star of Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie achieved three things MM never did: win a Best Actress Oscar, be crowned #1 at the box office (1933 ), and make the cover of TIME Magazine — yet, who speaks of the once beloved movie queen now?
Speaking of Oscar-winnning #1 box office stars (1966 + ‘67), Julie Andrews had a sweet ass herself, though hardly in Monroe’s class, and her stardom likely depended on the fact that husbands would allow their wives to drag them to a Julie Andrews movie and they could enjoy the idea of fucking her while suffering through such dreck.
“Yes, dear.”
How many ladies, who were given the high hard one that night after the evening at the Strand or Palace or State or Rex Theatre, thanked Julie for the two or three minutes of happe-nis that their Roger gave them, after suffering from an emotional drought in the interim between Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.
(The SOM ran for a solid year in my hometown at a downtown movie palace. Mrs. Middle America probably had the time of her life, that hadn’t been matched since her halcyon post-honeymoon/pre-first kid daze — and likely wasn’t again.)
So was Audrey Hepburn, whose beauty was ethereal…. The uber-pretty Grace Kelly was extremely fuckable.
Though no great beauty, part of the box office success of movie star cum chanteuse Barbra Streisand was her fuckability. Her boyfriend, hairdresser and Svengali, Jon Peters, understood this and made her do gluteus maximus-sculpting exercises so — in the immortal words that Steve McQueen used when demanding the same from Ali McGraw — “Your ass doesn’t wind up looking like a 70-year-old Japanese soldier.”
And then we come — as we inevitably must — to a virtual Titanness of fuckability, Elizabeth Taylor. A greater star than Marilyn Monroe ever was, for a far longer time, her achievement was achieved not so much from possessing more talent than MM, or by being possessed of more street smarts, whch she clearly did — but because she was the the 50 Foot Woman of the ‘50s and beyond when it came to fuckability.
A virtual marriage/baby/divorce machine, Liz Taylor was like a Schmoo (for Al Capp/Li’l Abner fans) or a Tribble (for us Baby Boomers) — something pleasant and mobile and breeding that not just invited a fella to throw her a fuck, but absolutely demanded sexual congress right then and now on her terms and her terms only.
When contemplating the exigencies of Liz Taylor’s fuckability, one is reminded of a sermon preached by the Rev. Ike, perhaps during his hitching of Sly of the Family Stone and his intended Missus at the Madison Square Garden in 1974:
“I don’t want no pie in the sky, in the sweet bye and bye — NO! I WANT MY PIE RIGHT NOW WITH ICE CREAM AND A CHERRY ON TOP!”
Yes sir! Marilyn was all buttermilk and apple dumpling dreams of the adolescent, such was her school girlish charms wedded to a body that was a case of arrested development: “With that body, somebody’s bound to get arrested!” Groucho leered at a pre-stardom MM, on-screen.
Liz Taylor wasn’t just cherry pie, she was cherry pie in motion, in the act of consuming and being consumed, with viscous dark-red jelly and vanilla-colored glop smeared across both faces — hers and the guy getting devoured! Marilyn seduced with a smirk and a toss of the head, La Liz conquered via a full-body press.
I think both superstars in terms of the Civil War… the War of the Rebellion, the War Between the Steaks: One filet mignon, the other porterhouse (with its generous share of the tenderloin).
I cast MM as a sweet thing in a movie about the Lost Cause (after all, her part in The Prince and the Showgirl was played by Scarlett O’Hara, one Larry O’s main squeeze:
Picture yourself as the Ashley Wilkes type sitting on the family plantation as the War is still far far away, with Marilyn in her hoop skirt and a diaphanous hat cupping those golden curls…. MMs spirit the living embodiment of the mint juleps you sip together under softly warming sunshine, its effect on youse (you’re a John Garfield type, hopelessly miscast) being paralleled by a booze-bred warmth quickening through the body… feeling the cosmic pull of etheric fluid, thickening yes thickening then Smack! turning solid — MM’s charms plucking at you pecker —
We’ve cast Liz Taylor of her Sandpiper era in a Yankee meller, as a Unionist slavey. Forced to become a camp follower in one of the border states, after the family estate was sacked, hubby being identified as a rebel sympathizer by some Elia Kazan loose-lipped rat hiding his flirtation back in college with some sinister entity known as “The Party”… La Liz has been brought down from pedestal, with relish, by the union officer with which she shares an unspeakable, uncouth passion. The estate has a vineyard, real Hollywood geography. In a white shift increasingly besmirched with purplish grape juice, Liz is trapped in a rain barrel a good ten times the one that hid Jean Harlow’s nekkid charms. You are the union officer:
POV* — The wench’s big ass and stout thighs are in constant motion, her big boobs akimbo, slapping a tattoo under her nearly translucent shift, three splotches of grape juice maintaing her modesty as she stomps Stomps STOMPS! out the grapes of wrath wherever the backlot in Hollywood they be stored: The honeymoon suite at the Conrad Hilton, a yacht a bob-bobbin’ along (like Liz’s fat tis) alongside a quay in Cannes, or in Louis B. Mayer’ john.
Liz is an Earth Mother: All tits and guts and blood and shit. This is a woman who could swap blows with the Devil hisself and not get a hair mussed.
You think wistfully about Marilyn, but if cast in a real-life remake of Bonnie & Clyde, you understand you’d rather have Liz wielding a pistol as you break out of the police cordon surrounding the bank.
KODACHROME CODA Featuring Laments
Arthur Miller lamented those who, like the Kennedys, would treat his second wife like a “merry whore.” Maybe that’s why Marilyn lasts…. She died before she turned fat and wrinkled and old, still the Merry Whore. Liz Taylor became the nightmare of your ex-wife.
But still:
La Liz was the most gorgeous teenager in the history of movies in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun. (How could any of their contemporaries ever have doubted that homosexuality was genetic, when this BOMBSHELL more beautiful than Jean Harlow on her best day wanted not just to fuck Monty Clift but marry him — and he couldn’t even rise to the occasion of putting his pecker into this walking talking flesh+blood Fertility Symbol — a genyoowine (as the press agents used to say) Goddess, the epitome if not the living embodiment of fuckability? I, myself, offered such charms might have failed the first time due to performance anxiety, but that’s why God begat Dionysius to provide us with a sure remedy for performance anxiety: liquor.
Somebody either didn’t tell Monty, or somebody did and the advice didn’t stick: Drink some Hooch and Surrender to the Cooch. If the woman is too aggressive and tries to top you at the clang of the bell, hell! Roll her over and do your business for both of you, and let her ride topside for seconds.
There’s ways of smoothing out the rough edges that detract from the charity between husband and wife, a woman and her lover, or a crook and the cop who has collared him, as the detective says between trimmings of a “suspect” by his fellow dicks. (“Now, I’m going to ask you one more time. WHERE’S THE FUCKING MONEY!?!” — “Oh, yass,” he hears the little one with the cast in his right eye say. “Once you get beyond the booking sergeant’s desk, you are beyond-the-law.)
A decade later, the rumor mill had it that MM — a more perfect fertility symbol than La Liz (who grew dumpy and resembled a fishmonger after she hit her mid-30s) — tried to seduce Monty Clift, her Misfits co-star. Excusing himself to make a b-line to his favorite rough trade bar on Christopher Street in the Village, Monty told her she had a “great ass” and, before exiting MM’s New York pad, either did or did not spank her world-class world-famous rump (the say-shaying twitching and shimmying of said fanny having resulted in Japanese men falling into koi ponds the chronicles of history relate).
After that, Marilyn had no doubt Clift — the only person she had ever met more fucked up than she was — was queer.
In the, “I Want to Fuck Montgomery Clift Sweepstakes — Straight Woman Under 40 Division” (Monty did have a taste for old bags and young boys) — both MM and La Liz were scuppered. They tied with a goose egg, though it must be said, Liz went up to bat far more times than Marilyn’s solo shot.
Liz had shitloads of husbands and shitloads of kids, got fat, got old, and was thoroughly past it as a movie star by the time she hit the big Four-Oh. Nobody much gives a fiddler’s fart about her anymore.
In fact, looking at her and the only man she married twice, Richard Burton — in their old fuddy duddy clothes and ridiculous hairstyles (can’t you just remember her with a beehive hairdo under a scarf even if she never did sport the style? and he had grey sideburns that stretched down to his adam’s apple) — when they are still in their 30s they look like they are 400 years old, like somebody’s aunt and uncle from somewhere nobody has ever been to, nor wants to go). Their look, rather than being classic like that of Jackie Kennedy, conveys about as much class as a cat’s bunghole.
These are the two great sex symbols of the 1960s? These are the movie stars who, in 10 years of their greatest fame, made the equivalent of a billion dollars in fees and cuts of the box office? They seem hopelessly old fashioned.
While Marilyn Monroe remains eternal.
Liz Taylor was never anybody’s victim. She comes from another time…. Despite the costly clothes and million-dollar diamond rings, she looks as sturdy as a pioneer woman from the mid 19th century. If the Rolls breaks down, you could throw a hoss-collar on her and she’d pull while you push the blasted thing from behind. She was no wilting flower, La Liz. Not as coarse and the proverbial Soviet tractor driving lady comrade, but I bet Liz wouldn’t have shirked from swapping blows and pulling hair with such a red bitch, if it came down to it.
To Marilyn, the six-years-younger Liz Taylor — who received the first million dollar fee paid to an actress by Marilyn’s own studio, 20th Century-Fox to appear in Cleopatra — “That whore with the fat tits” — was a broad-in-the-beam dyke.
(Such is the competitiveness of women! Expect no days of paradise when they finally take over, my straight male friends. I’ve already resigned myself to the whipping post.)
Marilyn’s top salary at Fox was $100,000. As an independent, her salary never exceeded $300k (America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickford had commanded $350k per picture in the years before Marilyn was born) and MM’s career was in free fall while Liz went on to command seven-figure salaries for the rest of the ‘60s.
But she’s merely a curiosity. MM’s legend runs through the blood of homo sapiens, those saps for celebrities — and in this age — victimization. It’s an atavistic desire she stirs.
James Dean and Marilyn Monroe had the good sense to die young and leave good lookin’ corpses. The Dean Cult had a good run, but is played out. After a half a century, it played out.
Marilyn still thrives, as her victimhood is the touchstone for Western women, not just American women. In these “Woke” times, History as well as HERstory are being written by the Losers. But Marilyn is beyond that.
Marilyn transcends. Blessed with the perfect figure, the prettiest titties and the Sweetest Seat Man has ever seen, she will abide.
And that is the Truth About Marilyn Monroe.
And you read it here.
