Marilyn Monroe: The 100 Year Itch

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson at Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. One hundred years later, she is still, without a doubt, the most famous movie star of all time. Yet many continue to view her as a sex symbol rather than a stellar actress. To me, she was a brilliant performer, a natural, who never shouted her lines to convey despair. She made acting seem simple and effortless. Monroe’s centenary is being celebrated at two major film festivals this spring. The Film Forum is presenting “Marilyn 100” from May 29 to June 11 while the Museum of Modern Art opened its season “Celluloid Dream” on Thursday, running through March 25. The classic films screened at these festivals feature Monroe appearing alongside some of the best actors of the 1950s and 1960s such as Robert Mitchum, who starred opposite Monroe in Otto Preminger’s Western “River of No Return” (1954), and Sir Laurence Olivier, who featured with her in “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957), which Olivier himself directed. And let’s not forget George Cukor’s musical “Let’s Make Love” (1960), starring the irresistible Italian-French actor Yves Montand, with whom Monroe had a brief affair. (Montand’s wife, the actress Simone Signoret drily remarked, “If Marilyn is in love with my husband, it proves she has good taste.”) Interestingly, MoMA has added a twist to its Monroe programme the neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” (2001) written and directed by the late arthouse filmmaker David Lynch, who once said, “Everything is about Marilyn Monroe.” The festival’s curator Franciso Valente cited Lynch in an accompanying essay, stating “Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too.” He compares the tragic life of the Hollywood legend to the main character in Lynch’s film, an aspiring actress, whose Hollywood dreams end up destroying her.Marilyn Monroe continues to inspire the young. A few years ago, the so-called “Marilyn Monroe Effect” went viral on TikTok, a self-help technique that captivated Gen-Z, who sought to boost their confidence and acquire magnetic presence through imitating her body language and posture. A young psychology student, Mikaela Wilson, described the effect as a “psychological phenomenon that explains how Marilyn Monroe went from Norma Jeane Mortenson, who was just your average, everyday person, to becoming Marilyn Monroe and getting recognized on the streets, all by changing how she carried herself.” Thousands of young women followed the trend.In reality, Norma Jeane Mortenson was far from an average, everyday person. She was an orphan. 12 days after she was born in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital, she was taken to a foster home, the first of many. She never met her father. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, was in her life sporadically, spending most of her time in mental institutions after she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim,” Monroe told Life magazine in 1962. “Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it.” After signing her first contract with a modeling agency in 1945 aged 19, she dyed her hair platinum blonde and was taught how to pose, handle her body, lower her smile, relax her knees and walk smoothly. The “Marilyn Monroe Effect”, now seen on TikTok, took months of strenuous training to develop. Ed Feingersh via Wikimedia CommonsMarilyn Monroe wanted to be an actress, and finally, in 1950, she landed her first significant role in John Huston’s heist film noir “The Asphalt Jungle.” In 1955, she moved to New York to study “The Method” with the acting guru Lee Strasberg. “The help she got from…her studies with various acting groups, I think only confused her,” the director Billy Wilder once said, adding, “I think that she was born with something that is beyond directing.” Wilder directed her in his smash hit comedies “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), which gave us one of the most memorable moments in cinematic history, when Monroe, wearing a white halter dress, steps onto a subway grate and exclaims, “Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway? Isn’t it delicious?” as the draft blows her skirt upward. Wilder made the comments about her natural talent being “beyond directing” in the 1980s, decades after he had worked with her. It amounted to a stark change in tune. After the shooting for “Some Like It Hot” had wrapped, he had slammed her in the press, telling reporters she was impossible to work with. Monroe was notoriously late to her film shoots, often making crews wait for several hours, and she had trouble remembering her lines. Film legend has it that making “Some Like It Hot,” her co-stars, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, would place bets as to the number of takes Monroe would need to master simple sentences like “Where’s that bourbon?” Years later, Wilder acknowledged that the hassle was worth the effort. “No matter how much you suffered through those days and weeks, and pulling those lines out like a dentist, they looked so absolutely and totally natural once she said them,” he said. “And you loved her on the screen.” As for her comedic timing, “she automatically knew where the joke was.” Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe on the set of ‘The Misfits.’ United Artists/ Getty imagesOne of Monroe’s most striking performances is her characterization of the disillusioned divorcée Roslyn Taber in John Huston’s haunting 1961 neo-Western “The Misfits” opposite Montgomery Clift and her life-long hero Clark Gable. It was the last feature film she completed before she died at the age of 36 on August 4, 1962. The melancholic drama tells the story of a newly divorced woman who falls in love with an aging, disillusioned cowboy, Gay Langland (Clark Gable), in Nevada. Seeking a new life, she joins him, a mechanic (Eli Wallach), and a rodeo rider (Montgomery Clift) in capturing wild mustangs. But when Roslyn realizes the men want to sell the horses to a butcher for pet food, she panics. As the men battle with the horses to tie them up with ropes, she begs them to let the animals go free and live. But Gay refuses and tosses her to the ground. She gets up and runs off into the naked Nevada desert. In the distance, far away from the camera, she stops, turns around and desperately screams (she doesn’t shout) and her body shrieks with pain. The film is based on a short story penned by Monroe’s third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller. In his autobiography “Timebends: A Life” he wrote that the script was meant to be “a gift for her,” motivated by his desire to create a complex role for his then-wife and enhance her opportunities as a performer in dramatic films: “As I neared the end of the first draft, I thought of John Houston as the film’s director. He had been the first to see some potential in Marilyn when he cast her in “The Asphalt Jungle,” and she had never forgotten his brusque kindness to her. Houston was one of her few good Hollywood memories.” In 1987, Miller said that “she was generally thought of as a rather lightheaded, if not a silly human being,” and that she was drawn to him because he took her seriously. I remember meeting Miller when I was a child. My father knew the playwright and he invited our family to his 18th-century farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. I will never forget Arthur Miller’s hands. He had big, manly, impressive farmer’s hands. Miller was constantly asked about his relationship to Monroe but did not like to talk about it. Despite his hope that “The Misfits” would bring them closer, their four-and-half-year marriage fell apart during the shooting. In his book, he blamed her emotional turbulence and her self-destructive struggles with addiction and mental health for their divorce.In 1955, the writer Truman Capote, published an essay about attending the funeral of the actress Constance Collier with his friend Marilyn Monroe in New York. Monroe asked him how he would describe her: “If anyone ever asked you, what I was like, what Marilyn Monroe was really like – well, how would you answer them?” “I’d say you are a beautiful child,” Capote answered.

Marilyn Monroe: The 100 Year Itch

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