Wissot: Marilyn Monroe was nobody’s fool
Marilyn Monroe’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. She became famous as America was shaking off the shackles of two consecutive decades of misery caused by an economic depression and a world war. Not since the 1920s era of flappers and bathtub gin were mid-20th century Americans ready to party and lift the lids from their ids. Marilyn was the ideal aphrodisiac, blending vulnerable innocence with explosive sexual appeal.
Hollywood manufactured sex symbols before her, Jean Harlow in the 1930s and Lana Turner in the 1940s, and attempted imitations like Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren after her. But the movie camera found in Marilyn a force of nature so seismic that she never had a serious rival.
Her third husband, the playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote that she was “the golden girl who was like champagne on the screen.” Billy Wilder, who directed her in several movies, said that movie producers who thought they’d found the “next” Marilyn were fooling themselves. Wilder compared them to automobile buyers who bought a car that “looks like a Cadillac, but it turns out they’ve just bought a Pontiac.”
Marilyn loved being photographed. Early in her career, she sought out photographers in the hope that the photos they took of her would be seen by a Hollywood producer or director. She was often unclothed for these photo shoots because the photographers could sell the photos for more money if the models were nude. Marilyn willingly obliged.
She was not averse to posing naked. Tom Kelley, a photographer who befriended her, remarked that once Marilyn removed her clothes “she seemed more comfortable than before … all her constraints vanished as soon as she took her clothes off.” When asked years later what she had on when some of the photos Kelly took of her went public, she replied: “The radio.”
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The ease and poise Marilyn conveyed when being photographed transferred seamlessly to a movie set. The acclaimed thespian Dame Sybil Thorndyke described her as the “perfect film actress.”
“She was a sex goddess but also so desperately needy and childlike that she aroused a powerful instinct on the part of audiences to protect her,” Thorndyke said. Laurence Olivier, who directed her in “The Prince and the Showgirl,” said she possessed the rare capacity “to suggest one moment that she is the naughtiest little thing and the next that she’s perfectly innocent.”
Marilyn’s biggest box office movies like, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” exploited her sexual appeal for substantial profit. She clearly understood how she was being used by Hollywood and how she still retained leverage over the industry. In a spat with a studio executive who belittled her by shouting, “You’re not a star,” she forcefully reminded him, “Whatever I am, the name of the picture is, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and whatever I am, I am the blonde.”
Marilyn knew she was playing a character on the screen that was created to appeal to men’s sexual fantasies. She deflected responsibility for the image men had of her. “The truth is that I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men fool themselves. … They were obviously loving someone I wasn’t. When they found out they would blame me for disillusioning and fooling them.” She cynically added that, “the only men who love me are masturbating.”
Marilyn understood the sordid mores and customs of Hollywood better than anyone. Decades before predators like Harvey Weinstein, she personally experienced the raw savage treatment of actresses that reflected the movie business in the late 1940s. The price she paid for getting a small role in an early film was not reporting a studio head who raped her. Movie moguls viewed starlets hungry for stardom as their sex slaves. Women in the sex trade soliciting on street corners were treated better by men than young ingenues in the movie industry.
Lost in all the attention Marilyn received for being a box office bonanza is the fact that her lesser-known films proved that she was much more than a “blonde bombshell” — she was an accomplished actress. Her work in early films like “Asphalt Jungle,” “Niagara,” “Bus Stop,” and in her last film, “The Misfits,” showed that she could command the screen with more than just her sexuality.
Marilyn knew she wasn’t the “dumb blonde” character she was asked to play in movies. Paris Hilton, a much less talented version of Marilyn, knew the same to be true for herself. “I’m not a dumb blonde,” she said recently. “I’m just very good at pretending to be one.”
She went on to explain, ” I was inspired by Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, and Dolly Parton — blond icons who were definitely playing characters.” Parton echoed Marilyn’s self-awareness when she revealed, “I’m not offended by the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb … and I also know I’m not blonde.”
The problem for Marilyn was that the sexpot role she was asked to play made her crazy famous and brought in gobs of money for the movie studios. It prevented her, however, from being taken seriously as an actress and given more roles in movies that would have showcased her acting chops.
In the end, she couldn’t escape the clutches of stardom and the corrosive underside of fame. She died at 36 addicted to alcohol, drugs and pills which collectively proved fatal. We will never know how long she might have lived and how good an actress she might have become had she not been typecast as a purring sex goddess.
Jay Wissot is a resident of Denver and Vail. Email him at [email protected]
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