The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Charles Lang Jr.

Let’s Make Love (1960)

Marilyn Monroe (Amanda Dell), Yves Montand

Marilyn was welcomed back to the studio after a four-year absence, and while the return was not widely applauded among some Fox execs who knew too well the havoc precipitated whenever a Monroe picture was in production, this is a charming musical, vastly underrated at the time, with Marilyn at her comedic best, singing Cole Porter songs and dancing to moves created for her by Jack Cole. As Amanda, she is appearing in an off-Broadway review that targets the foibles of celebrities: Callas, Cliburn, Elvis, and Jean-Marc Clement, a French-born billionaire industrialist living in Manhattan (Montand). Clement impersonates an actor and auditions for the part of Clement himself and wins the role. Inevitably, after a few missteps, Jean-Marc and Amanda fulfill the promise in the film’s title. Color by DeLuxe in CinemaScope. Oscar nomination for best scoring of a musical. 118 minutes.

PRODUCER: Jerry Wald

DIRECTOR: George Cukor

WRITER: Norman Krasna

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Daniel L. Fapp

The Misfits (1961)

Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe (Roslyn Taber), Montgomery Clift Roslyn, an actress, is in Reno for a divorce when she meets and falls for Gay Langland, an aging, sexily macho ex-cowboy. The stark Nevada desert is the habitat for wild mustangs that are targeted by Gay and two other cowboy roughnecks for capture, an exercise that is as painful to watch as it is to figure out—until we learn the horses are to be sold to slaughterhouses to process as dog food. When Rose learns their fate, she goes ballistic, her passion so intense that she ultimately secures the mustangs’ freedom and their return to the wild. Film chronicler Leslie Halliwell wrote: “a solemn, unattractive, pretentious film, which seldom stops wallowing in self pity.” Considered a failure when released, it has since gained cultlike status because of the untimely deaths of the three principles. 124 minutes.

United Artists/Seven Arts

PRODUCER: Frank E. Taylor

DIRECTOR: John Huston

WRITER: Arthur Miller

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Russell Metty

Something’s Got to Give (1962)

Marilyn Monroe (Ellen), Dean Martin

A remake of the 1940 screwball comedy My Favorite Wife,starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, the movie’s thirty-seven minutes of footage, salvaged from eight boxes of raw film in a 20th Century- Fox warehouse, were included in a documentary about the film that was shown as a television special in 2001, Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days. Marilyn lost eighteen pounds for this role, which brought to mind her beauty of ten years earlier when she was in her prime. Film purists do not consider this movie to be part of the Marilyn Monroe filmography, since it was incomplete and unreleased to theaters. But given its importance to the Monroe legacy, and that it perhaps indirectly contributed to her death, I felt compelled to include it. The film was finally made in 1963 with Doris Day and James Garner as Move Over, Darling.

20th Century-Fox

PRODUCERS: Gene Allen, Henry T. Weinstein

DIRECTOR: George Cukor

WRITERS: Nunnally Johnson, Walter Bernstein

CINEMATOGRAPHERS: Franz Planer, Leo Tover

^* The Hawthorne Community Church was nondenominational but more Baptist than not in doctrine.

^† It should be noted that this wasn’t foster care in the strictest sense of the word. What Ida was offering would today be considered “full-time child care.” However, she and her husband were licensed to care for children through the County of Los Angeles.

^* Note to reader: From this point on, when referring to Edward, it’s Mortenson. When referring to Norma Jeane, it’s Mortensen.

^* Redistricting took place in Hawthorne in the 1940s, and at that time the address was changed to 4201 West 134th Street. The original home is still standing.

^* It’s been previously reported that she was married three times by 1933. Not true. She had two husbands by this time: Reginald Evans and John Wallace McKee.

^* Besides appearing as Clark Gable’s leading ladies in their cinematic swan songs, Harlow and Monroe share a couple of other coincidental parallels in their lives. Like Marilyn would do years later, seventeen- year-old Jean Harlow was photographed nude (in Griffith Park in 1928 by Edward Bower). Harlow would also be the first movie star to appear on the cover of Life magazine, in the edition of May 3, 1937. Similarly, Marilyn appeared on the cover of the first issue of Playboy, in August 1954.

^* This orphanage was rebuilt in 1956 and a year later renamed Hollygrove Orphanage.

^* Of course, she would get her wish—men and women. An interesting story from Marilyn Monroe historian James Haspiel: “She had a ‘Man Friday’ named Peter Leonardi who drove her around the city. His sister, Marie, went shopping with Marilyn one day to Saks Fifth Avenue. When they got back to Marilyn’s apartment at the Waldorf Towers, they were going to try on the clothing. But Marilyn felt she should take a bath before she put on the new clothes. So she went into the bathroom and got into the bathtub and the two women continued talking, Marie from the living room. Finally, Marilyn said, ‘Come in here, so I can hear you.’ Marie, this 100 percent heterosexual female, went to the bathroom door and, later, she said to me, ‘Jimmy, I looked into the tub and she was so breathtakingly beautiful, I couldn’t believe it. Even her toes were beautiful. And I felt myself being drawn into the bathtub with her, and I said, “Marilyn, I have to leave. Right now!” I was going to go over there and make a fool of myself, if I didn’t leave at once!’ ”

^* In October 1947, ten years after Norma Jeane left the orphanage, Mrs. Dewey wrote to Grace Goddard to ask how the girl was faring. Grace wrote back, “Norma Jean [sic] Baker has great success in pictures and promises to be a star. She is a very beautiful woman and is now acting as Marilyn Monroe.”

^* An undated letter from Grace Goddard makes clear Gladys’s troubled mental state. “She thinks she was sent to State hospital because years ago she voted on a Socialist Ballot,” Grace wrote. “[She] sleeps with her head at the foot of the bed [so] as not to look at Marilyn’s pictures—they disturb her.… [She] wishes she never had a sexual experience so she could be more Christ like.”

^* Norma Jeane was five feet five and a half inches tall.

^* Her friend the acting coach Michael Shaw recalls, “When the studio changed her name, she was okay with it, but not thrilled. She said to me, ‘But I don’t even know how to spell Marilyn!’ She was so frustrated by that. In that little breathless voice of hers, she asked me, ‘Honey, is there an ‘i’ in it?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ But it turned out to be a ‘y.’ ”