What exactly happened between Arthur MiIler and Marilyn Monroe?

He wrote a whole play about it. Miller was also an ASS.

Miller wrote a play called after the fall. He was extremely vicious toward Monroe in that play.

Miller was truly an old-school sexist pig. While Marilyn played an old-school sex pot, in her own was she was radical. But she was radical in a society that shunned radical women. I would imagine being shunned by her own husband was personally devastating to her, it affirmed her lifelong fear of abandonment and low self-worth.

She married him for clout. He married her for her sex appeal. It was simply a very bad match between 2 people with nothing in common. By the time Monroe overdosed Miller was completely over her. I think he said something to the effect of her being beyond help.

Many many geniuses are jerks.

I was just watching an interview with him done in 1987 and he actually did grieve and felt guilt over not being able to "save her" and he felt she was doomed to her fate. He sounded like he was genuinely in love with her when they were married. He said something like he gave in to sensuality so I'm guessing the sex between the two was hot.

[quote]What exactly happened between Arthur MiIler and Marilyn Monroe?

Some really, really hot sex.

She married him because she wanted to be seen as a serious person and not a sex symbol but I think the die was cast by the time she married him. She couldn't change her image at that point. He married her because she was a sex symbol but he mostly ignored her while they were married.

Go to 7:40 in this interview with Olivier. The last little story he tells of Marilyn is very much like what others have said about the best of her. Such a sweet wit and native intelligence.

Miller wrote an autobiography, called Timebends. Naturally a lot of it was about Monroe, and naturally it's just from his point of view. Of course it's a good read because he's a good writer (though I don't think a lot of people have read it, after its original best-selling run in the late 80s). It's nonlinear and jumps around quite a lot, This actually allowed him to avoid talking about some things.

Years later I read that he had a son with Down Syndrome (with his 3rd wife, Inge Morath) - who he never mentioned in the book - or ever - publicly.

There are some great things in the book - the things he wrote about his family losing everything in the Depression, for example. He also talks about how he avoided testifying and how he never named names (and his rift with his friend Kazan over this).

“You’re very tough on the Strasbergs in your memoir,” I say.

“Well, I meant to be,” Miller says.

“You describe them as poisonous, and vacuous.”

“That’s a good description.”

“Humbugs.”

“Mr. and Mrs.”

“The inference one draws is that they were almost instrumental in Marilyn’s dissolution.”

“Well, put it this way. They had an immense influence on her mind. Immense. Not the wife, but him. The wife she saw through, pretty much. But she never saw through him. He had the fascination of a guru. Not just for Marilyn, but for a lot of much less suffering people. What he was saying, in effect, was, You can’t do anything without me. From time to time you’re gonna have to, but never forget that.

Well, if you’ve already got weak legs, and you’re not standing on them solidly, that can be a severe blow. In other words, you’re never gonna grow up.”

Monroe’s fantasy about Miller centered on domesticity, and true domesticity meant having a child. When she suffered an ectopic pregnancy in 1957, and learned she might never have a baby, she was crushed. As a kind of compensation, Miller wrote her a short story called “The Misfits,” about the cowboy Gay Langland and his gentle lady friend, Roslyn. The story was meant for the movies, and the part of Roslyn was patently built for Marilyn. But it was a love gift that failed. By the time, John Huston began shooting The Misfits in July 1960, the marriage barely existed.

“Is the story of The Misfits a story of the two of you coming apart under the influence of the Strasbergs?” I ask.

“Well, they helped,” Miller says. “Because they helped to justify her worst self-defeating strategies, if you’d call them strategies. In order to continue to have power over her, they would justify anything. With a large dose of intellectualization. When, if they really had her welfare at heart, they’d have tried to draw her gently closer and closer to reality. And the reality was what she ultimately faced, which was a studio that fired her. Because she wouldn’t appear to make the film.

"Had it been an ordinary situation on The Misfits, she probably would’ve come close to being fired then. ‘Cause we were up there on this dry lake, with some pretty big stars, sitting around for days at a time waiting for her to appear.

“We were coming apart ourselves, irrespective of that,” Miller says. “Because, well, Marilyn always—as I learned later—she would exhaust areas of her life. Simply exhaust them. Then she’d go on. And this was one of them.”

“You, you mean.”

“Well, the whole idea of a domestic existence. I mean, I can’t live for too long in a tent and on the road. I have to have a steady domicile, and some peace and quiet, or I can’t work. And she wanted that, too, with part of her psyche—wanted it desperately.”

“And a child.”

“And a child. But she also wanted something that made that very difficult to have. Which was this power. Star power. Because the opposite was to be destroyed. To be totally destroyed.”

That whore(!) told some f&cking racist nightclub that she’d show up if they hired Ella Fitzgerald. She was a good girl who was deeply damaged by men. A true DLer!

I believe she was a sweet person, she came off like that but oh so damaged. She may have had some inherited mental illness. Her mom ended up in an institution. Some mental illnesses are passed down from one generation to the next. Probably Bipolar and delusional.

In the best of cases, it's probably not easy to live with a movie star. But Monroe was a huge star. The press reported on her all the time, no one didn't know who she was (and as Miller stated, part of her needed that, it was like a substitute for a real identity). And as he says, she didn't behave professionally, she was indifferent to keeping whole casts and crews waiting. And he had his own ego - plus he was a writer who did need a certain amount of domestic peace in order to function, and have his mind be in a good place to create. There was no way these two copuld have a marriage.

It's hard reading about her because you never can really figure her out. I don't think she had an integrated personality or knew what she wanted. Even just reading about their house in Connecticut. She wanted this married, quiet life - but it also drove her bonkers to be stuck there with nothing exciting going on. I don't think she was really happy anywhere - she probably was happiest in her head, creating a character, and on a sound stage, acting. Living in a fantasy-reality. Like a lot of actors, only magnified.

More from Arthur's pov here.

Miller was right. She was a whore who knew nothing about love and devotion. To be fair she was mentally ill so not a great surprise.

Listening to her tapes I've co.e to love her voice. It's soft and feminine without being too babyish. She also makes some very shrewd comments. She's not as vapid and ditzy as she's mistaken as being. At least she could talk without, you know, like, using like every other word like modern celebs.

How could anyone stay married to someone who pitied them?

And how could anyone remain in a marriage with someone they pitied?

I watched that yesterday. Poor Marilyn, her childhood was just so fucked up. She must’ve been exhausting to be around though. How does Bobby Kennedy, RIP, maintain that goody two shoes image to this day?

She and Jackie sound so much alike.

Miller is the one who broke up his first marriage to be with Marilyn, and then started an affair with the photographer, Inge Morath, from The Misfits while married to Marilyn. He later married her. Miller used Marilyn's fame to prolong his own and also utilized his wife's presence to avoid being labelled a MccArthy communist by the HUAC. Everyone's a whore in love and war.

R9, both Miller and Olivier were nasty, sexist pigs. Good for them that they didn't live to get their comeuppance. The story with the Matzo balls is an old joke and most certainly a lie.

Miller, nerd intellectual, got the world’s hottest woman. She got America’s foremost playwright. It was a fair deal for a while.

In that documentary, Milker is quoted as saying she was actually whip-smart and her friends all said she was a hard worker and would often stay home nights instead of hitting the bars, in order to study scripts.

That documentary made me think differently of her. And her “real” voice was quite normal. Not the Jackie O whisper baby voice.

As a child she was just stunning. Naturally.

^ Milker. Lol. Meant Miller.

I don’t think Jackie did the whisper in private either. I imagine her voice was lower, like Lee or little Edie’s.

I think that Irish journalist was quite taken with MM while he was researching her.

That whole birthday celebration for JFK at Madison Square Garden is so weird to me. First of all to have that kind of an extravaganza to celebrate the president’s birthday, wtf. And then Marilyn practically nude onstage, singing lewdly. I forget where Jackie was, but what a public slap in the face to her, she must’ve been livid pissed because surely she knew what was going on.

Misfits is good but sad movie. Marilyn and Arthur were bad to each other at that point. She sometimes showed up eight hours late. Monty gave a fine performance. Gable died short after filming was over. Houston had good but difficult cast. Wallach died in 2014, he was 98.

Making Arthur Miller out to be some kind of violent he-male misogynist abuser is baffling. It must be Marilyn fraus posting in this thread. She was not an easy woman to live with, I don't believe she was malicious at all, but she was unstable, erratic, needy.....he didn't know what he was getting into was the problem. He married the image.

Like Rita Hayworth said, "men think they're going to bed with Gilda, but they're waking up with me." Miller thought he was going to bed with glamorous, funny movie star Marilyn, not the mentally ill child woman Norma Jean.

What I found odd was the revelation that Marilyn would often be at Lawford's house parties with all the Kennedy's including Jackie. Sounds like Jackie may have actually liked her. The thing is Jackie knew John was a horn dog but looked the other way as they do in that social group.

R31 Wait, I missed that, Jackie was there? I heard someone refer to all the wives being there, but I thought that just meant the wives of Lawford’s Hollywood crowd, not the first lady.

"The great thing about her, to me, is the struggle was valiant. She was a very courageous human being, and she didn't give up, I guess, really, until the end."

I wish somebody would put the full tv version of After the Fall with Faye Dunaway and Christopher Plummer on youtube.

R12 oh wow. She did something nice for a black person one time? *eye roll*

You're an idiot R35. Marilyn was a very progressive woman. She was watched by the FBI. And the story at R12 leaves out that she was there for Ella - every night. It's not a small thing at all.

Just as Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore would champion black talent at considerable risk to their own careers.

[quote]I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt … she personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild.

[quote] The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.

Ella

Yes R35 she very pro civil rights and she would have been a champion for gay rights too.

Whatever her problems with lovers and co stars - they all pretty much adored her. Yes, she chased fame and publicity, but Marilyn was obviously a good person.

Watching this now and it seems like they are alluding to the fact that she had threeways with both of the Kennedys?

She sucked my cock.

He married her because he was a writer, and in those days that meant queer!

If only Marilyn and Eleanor Roosevelt had gotten together in the early 1950s.

Marilyn's life would have been so much better.

Hollywood is a ride through the sewer in a glass bottom boat. Marilyn is its poster child.

Oral / vaginal / anal

She's adorable here.

[quote]He married her because he was a writer, and in those days that meant queer!

R40 Arthur Miller was already married with children by the time he began his affair with Marilyn. He eventually left his first wife for her.

She was very adept, and kind. This man asks her dumb blonde questions that anyone would answer angry or defensively today. She corrects him with a lovely finesse. This is why both men and women felt affection for her. Her image was beautiful and commercial beyond measure at times - but Marilyn remained fully human. How misunderstood she must have felt. Even by her husbands. Norman Mailer said that "She conquered a world she could not live in."

OP, I recommend this documentary from PBS's "American Masters" series. It chronicles Miller and Marilyn's first meeting in 1951, when he was already a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and she was still a starlet, all the way to 1964, with the Broadway premiere of AFTER THE FALL directed by Miller's best friend Elia Kazan and starring Kazan's second wife Barbara Loden in the Marilyn role for which she won the Tony Award.

In between, Miller and Kazan's friendship was tested and ripped apart after Kazan was subpoenaed by HUAC and named names. Later, Marilyn was instrumental in saving Miller when he himself was called to testify and in repairing their friendship. Also, Miller's affair with Marilyn and his immense guilt over it inspired the love triangle in THE CRUCIBLE (John Proctor = Miller, Abigail Williams = Marilyn, Elizabeth Proctor = Mrs., Miller).

Marilyn looked even prettier in candid moments.

The look of love.

A photographer died in a car crash on Marilyn and Miller's wedding day - racing to capture their happiness.

They did a lot of living in their four years together. HUAC hearings, miscarriages, money problems, mental health issues, infidelity. Her affair with co-star Yves Montand certainly didn't help, it was literally frontpage news and had must have been humiliating for Miller. He was supposed to write her an Oscar-winning role; she got The Misfits, which she hated. In her damaged mind, the role was an insult, a humiliation she couldn't forgive.

Watching some of these old interviews, I just realized the perfect person to play Marilyn would have been Christina Hendricks ten years ago.

He was a piece of shit. He made his wife put their retarded son (Daniel) in a home immediately after he was born. This was after Marilyn. I think it was the late 60s or 70s. He didn't visit the son either. The son also suffered a lot of abuse at the state home, which was eventually closed down. An elderly couple took him in and raised him

Arthur's wife died before him and he didn't even mention the son in her obituary. It was as if he didn't exist to Arthur.

his daughter (I think her name is Rebecca) is married to Daniel Day Lewis.

He also had syphilis

No one has ever played Marilyn well. But the woman in the Lifetime movie with Susan Sarandon playing her mother did by far the best job. Kelli Garner captured Marilyn's essence - without being as beautiful. Who is? It's also the best film about Marilyn. It does a fair job of recreating her triumphs and a better one of addressing her struggles and humanity. A good attempt at comprehensive biography.

Funny that this new Netflix makes people see Monroe all over again. She's been dead 60 years. And she IS still the most famous visage in the world.

Marilyn is best experienced in biographies. Even the bad one. The real woman needs to be seen.

I preferred this documentary. The Kennedys were not a very interesting part of Monroe's life to me.

Amy Greene and Norman Rosten give their opinions on Miller around 58 minutes in.

The MIsfits documentary was really good. Thanks, R15

A friend of mine who works for NPR interviewed Miller and his wife, back in...I forget. They were living in Connecticut at the time. Maybe 20 years ago? Anyhow she thought they were very nice and friendly and hospitable.

She was basically a drug addict alcoholic. Their marriages don’t last long.

He walked in on too many scenes like this:

"Miller thought he was going to bed with glamorous, funny movie star Marilyn, not the mentally ill child woman Norma Jean."

I feel rather sorry for any man who fell in love with the real Marilyn, because they probably started off thinking she was this sex goddess who was adorably sweet in private, and in time they found out that she was mentally ill and a bottomless pit of need. But, who was still sweet enough that they couldn't leave without a struggle. I mean everyone puts on a bit of a false face when they're trying to get someone else interested, but Marilyn took that to an extreme, to the point that it made relationships impossible.

I don't hate Miller or blame him for Marilyn's decline, she was a mess before him and a mess during and after their marriage. It's ridiculous for anyone to blame him for failing to save her, love doesn't save people from mental illness.

“I remember one day, Marilyn was drinking champagne, and by 5:30 in the afternoon she couldn't work anymore. And I saw Arthur Miller, who was then her husband, drive onto the set in a limousine and take her arm and just yank her into the car, like she was a drunk, which of course she was, except that not Miller or nobody else thought of it as a disease, and they just treated her like a drunk, and she never got the help she needed.”

[quote]He also talks about how he avoided testifying and how he never named names (and his rift with his friend Kazan over this).

One thing in Miller's defense. The HUAC offered to let him not testify if they could meet Marilyn and have their pictures taken with her. He told them to go to hell.

Arthur Miller resembles Jeff Goldblum.

R60 She also fucked Curtis while she was married to Miller.

I actually don't think she fucked those guys. I don't think she was as sexually promiscuous as the rumors made her and I think a lot of those guys embellished the truth. I remember an interview with some "Dame" who co-starred with her in The Prince and the Showgirl who said the real reason "Larry" was bitchy was because he anticipated an affair with Marilyn but she was barely back from her honeymoon so not open for business.

Well said R59 -- "I feel rather sorry for any man who fell in love with the real Marilyn, because they probably started off thinking she was this sex goddess who was adorably sweet in private, and in time they found out that she was mentally ill and a bottomless pit of need. But, who was still sweet enough that they couldn't leave without a struggle."

Well said R59 -- "I feel rather sorry for any man who fell in love with the real Marilyn, because they probably started off thinking she was this sex goddess who was adorably sweet in private, and in time they found out that she was mentally ill and a bottomless pit of need. But, who was still sweet enough that they couldn't leave without a struggle."

R64 Even Howard Keel in his autobiography said he slept with her.

Btw, I'm in the "I think they did all fuck her" camp.

After learning about histrionic personality disorder from the Depp trial, I'd bet that Marilyn had that as well. They can tend to see relationships as more intimate than they really are.

Haven't you ever known women who had such low self esteem that they thought all they had to offer was their body, r68?

Marilyn was most definitely promiscuous. Many child abuse victims are.

Miller is actually quite attractive, it's mainly the thick specs that make him look nerdy.

Miller was one of the greats. His plays will survive for centuries. And check out The Misfits for a touch of the poet. But his marrying Monroe couldn't have been more humiliating . A narcissistic moron's dream come true. At least DiMaggio could be excused as a dumb jock. As for whatever happened between Miller and and Monroe I'm sure it was pathetic as well.

R70 Well, yes, and that is why I thought she fucked everyone.

She found something insulting he'd written about her on their honeymoon, saying she was mad and he'd made a big mistake marrying her.

Anyone mention that she risked her career back in 1956 by standing by him when he refused to testify at the House of UnAmerican Activities? She could have been blacklisted. The FBI even opening a file on her.

Misfit Girl often posted here how cruel he was to her on the set of that movie. She hated that he actually took lots of things she said in real life and put them into the script. And it wasn't a gift, he charged her production company thousands of dollars for it.

Jackie Kennedy actually refused to attend a party he was at, saying she was disgusted how he used and portrayed a dead woman in After The Fall.

Plus he took plenty of her money in the divorce.

She was hypersexuai like most BPs seeking a feel good moment (relief) they hope will last. This is typical. They use booze and drugs in the same manner.

Nothing wrong with a lot of sex unless there's an agreement with the partner to save it for home. She was an impossible partner.

They interviewed a producer who said she was one of the girls in their black book who was down to fuck anyone who could help make her a star and everyone had a turn. Some of them looked really old and gross.

I've read that Marilyn imediately started cheating on him, because for her cheating/having sex with others wasn't a big deal, but apparently for Miller it was, and she couldn't understand why he was so mad about it. Maybe that note is about this.

She didn't fuck Curtis while she was married to Miller. If they fucked at all, it was likely in the early days before she even met Miller. Why would she fuck somebody who compared her to Hitler, and if they were already fucking, why would he say that about her? Curtis was a good actor, but when interest in him started to wane, he began telling lies about Monroe to increase his stature. He started saying that MM was pregnant with his child during the making of Some Like it Hot. I do believe the story about Marilyn drinking champagne on the set of SLIH and Arthur yanking her into the limo, but some of his other tales about her were highly suspect. He was all over the place when he spoke about her.

Tony Curtis changed his story about Marilyn 1,000 times. He was an absolute bastard.

Miller's treatment of his son, Daniel, tells me all I need to know about his character.

[quote]Miller's treatment of his son, Daniel, tells me all I need to know about his character.

How do you mean?

I wasn't talking of Curtis.

I was talking of Yves Montand, and apparently others

I mean, i wouldn't be surprised if Marilyn fucked Curtis too

Robert Osborne on TCM always acted like Marilyn was the only one who ever fucked for roles. He didn't seem to have a ton of respect for her.

R78 that's not true, there's no documented affairs until Yves Montland in 1960.

Tony Curtis was a complete liar who, as noted, who told all kind of lies about MM to get attention. There's no way on earth he was the father of her baby either. Huge turd.

But why would Miller call her a whore if she never cheated?

Miller is a writer and i'm sure that he has chosen the word he thought was more appropriate to describe her( i adore Marilyn btw- but she was without a doubt difficult to live with )

When did he call her a whore?

Of course Marilyn fucked Curtis.

[Quote]Why would she fuck somebody who compared her to Hitler,

Curtis was being sarcastic. When asked by a group of others what it was like fucking Marilyn Monroe he responded sarcastically "Like fucking Hitler." In other words, like the worst experience imaginable which meant are you kidding me? She's Marilyn Monroe! It was fabulous.

R59 Well, she was a gemini, they are bipolar by nature

R54, IMO one of the best portrayals of MM was a not great TV-movie from 1980 starring Catherine Hicks, with the late, great Sheree North (who was pitched as C+/B- alternative to Marilyn at Fox when she first hit Hollywood) as Norma Jean’s mother Gladys Baker. Hicks didn’t really look like MM, and was let down by the hair department, but she was able to capture some sense of the magic and got an Emmy nomination (she was coached by costar North.)

Their relationship is summed up by one anecdote in TIMEBENDS. Monroe asks Miller to write her a screenplay with a serious role which would be a departure from her other roles. Miller jumped at the chance, figuring it would be his gateway to Hollywood and film writing since Monroe would be starring. Monroe had in mind something like THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. (yep) But Miller's "Valentine" was THE MISFITS with a role for Marilyn as low-down as he could get-- a tawdry good-time girl lost in the desert with a pack of loser men. The best of the loser men is Gable, and when she falls for him, he turns her down.

I always thought how soul-destroying it must have been for Monroe to say these words of Miller's written in betrayal. MISFITS is painful to watch. Miller, Huston, and the producer Frank Taylor were like a pack of jackals taking Monroe down.

[quote]Curtis was being sarcastic. When asked by a group of others what it was like fucking Marilyn Monroe he responded sarcastically "Like fucking Hitler." In other words, like the worst experience imaginable which meant are you kidding me?

Oh, Sweetie. Just. No.

His comment was about KISSING Hitler.

Yeah, if you say so, R88.

"Out with him, in with my fantasy!"

Tony Curtis was not Marilyn's type. She liked then tall and lean and sometimes dark. Aesthetically pleasing to her. The fact that she enjoyed sex doesn't make her any kind of mentally ill. She displayed nothing of a bipolar nature. Other disorders, perhaps.

Just whom do you think is who's date here? Marilyn with Billy Travilla, the costume designer and ...... look where her arm is.....What a fucking handsome man.

Tony Curtis was an ugly short crude man - Marilyn couldn't even fake being attracted to him. She would never fuck him. Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda exaggerated their connection to Monroe as well. When THEY got old. Tony Curtis and Jane Fonda couldn't even keep their lies straight.

Marilyn enjoyed sex. She spoke openly about it, never crudely. She was progressive and open minded. Sometimes it was transactional. But never for cash. She was married off to her first husband because no one would pay for her keep at 16 years old. She was a lifelong commodity but she's no more a whore than anyone else who turns to sex for comfort and ego gratification. Pleasure. She was ahead of her time. A most interesting spirit and a beautiful woman. She suffered from depression and self doubt. One of the least bitchy women of any Hollywood star - she remained thoughtful and sensitive and drank far too much. Pills and liquor. No doubt the ghosts of her childhood were always in the wings.

Didn't she herself, or a close friend, say about her that "sex was like a handshake". She wasn't hung up on it or by it. Not a nympho, sometimes a whore by necessity (aren't we all), and unfortunately doing exactly what was expected of most Hollywood starlets to get roles. Even Hedy Lamarr had that witty quote about your star position being determined by who you fucked, and Hedy was no dummy.

As for all of the other shit--Miller lived off her and tried to get more fame from his association, then left when she wouldn't fulfill his intellectual image.

She was borderline, not bi-polar. It happens a lot to people who lose their mothers or have crazy mothers.

^^when they lose their mothers in childhood.

What’s the news on Nick Gruber? Does he still live in NYC? Who has had him?

Oops wrong thread

[quote]Miller jumped at the chance, figuring it would be his gateway to Hollywood and film writing

Wait, this is Arthur Miller we're talking about. The celebrated playwright of All My Sons and Death Of A Salesman (plays which had already been made into movies long before this). If he had wanted to write movies prior to The Misfits, I'm sure the studios would have welcomed him. I'm sure his agent couild have gotten him a movie deal.

On the other hand, he did write a "waterfront story" for Kazan to film, which wasn't made (though Kazan's waterfront film was made with a different script - by Budd Schulberg - as On The Waterfront).

Miller never created a major work after his marriage to Marilyn. He didn't marry her for notoriety - he was hopelessly infatuated with her and she said she was insanely physically attracted to him. It was LOVE. It's clear in the many photos of them during their NYC year.

But Miller did basically turn into her manager, caretaker, personal writer and PR person during their marriage. He fired Milton H Greene who was probably the best friend that Marilyn ever had and the one who progressed her and saw her best. Because Milton and Monroe with in a financial partnership and a playful friendship. His many photos of hers reveal far more than a casual connection and understanding.

The ONLY two plays he would write in the next 50 year were BOTH about his life with Marilyn and were both heavily criticized. Did she ruin him, or did he see her as both an investment and a wife? Did she haunt him? There's no doubt that he loved her - but he was not a man seeking such an unstable life.

The weight of their failure surely was harder on her. She wanted respect, love and family AND to remain a film star and become a great actress!! Miller was the man who disappointed her the most. How could he not?

The person I loved most in my life is not the one I had the most stable or successful relationship with. Their marriage was very painful, I think. He knew more what he was getting than Marilyn did. She expected better of him than he turned out to be. He was, in the end - another man who used her. He thought he could both possess her image AND reform the parts of her he didn't like. Because he was a true man of letters and serious thought - he continued to examine his life with her for the rest of his. But After The Fall was unforgivable, less than 2 years after her suicide. He laid her out as a dumb pitiful whore. That HE was hopelessly in love with. It was too undigested. Still doesn't work. A bad, misogynist and tone deaf play.

As the poster said upthread - "they go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me"

*Because Milton and Monroe were involved in a financial partnership and a close, artistic friendship.

Her mental illness and (I hate to say this) abuse of pills and alcohol on the set of The Misfits was severe. Some days she didn't make it to the set; some days she showed up in the afternoon, wasted and barely to speak. They were unable to rouse her in the morning. They couldn't be strict with her because she'd start to cry and then ruin her makeup. It's a wonder the movie was completed. But those lines... "You're only happy when you can see something die! Why don't you kill yourselves and be happy!"

He was very generous about her in his autobiography “Timebends.” He learned how emotionally damaged she was after they married. I think part of his attraction for her was that she supposed he was part of an intellectual set she admired when in reality, he kept his distance from those cliques. He thought Strasberg and his wife undermined her natural comedic and dramatic skills. Two stories stand out, Frank Lloyd Wright visited Miller’s Connecticut farm and told Miller not to put another penny in it! Monroe wanted crushed gravel on the driveway because she liked the sound!

R80 The article about Miller disowning his newborn son Daniel broke my heart. What a fascinating read. So glad the times have changed and people aren't putting their babies in institutions anymore. Also was cool to hear that Daniel-Day Lewis encouraged his wife Rebecca's relationship with her baby brother.

He married her because he, at first, was enchanted by her. She was the ultimate trophy wife. He found her child-like and sensitive and was of course blown away by her beauty and sexuality. She married him because she thought he took her seriously and would take care of her. She had a preference for older man types who could be a father substitute. Miller soon found out that she was a train wreck mentally and that living with her was a torment. "She's devouring me", he said to Milton Greene and Laurence Olivier during the filming of "The Prince and the Showgirl." The marriage was a match made in hell, just one of those pairings that so often occur between two famous people. They were both to blame for it, although Marilyn supposedly got cold feet before the wedding and wanted to flee, but decided to go through with it so as not to "disappoint" all the people who had shown up for the wedding.

Miller did institutionalize his son but also left same son an inheritance equal to his other children.

[Quote]Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda exaggerated their connection to Monroe as well. When THEY got old.

Wtf? Shelley Winters and Marilyn lived together in a rented apt.

Jane Fonda knew Monroe well via her agent Charles Feldman who threw regular parties at his BH home which was known as the house of debauchery.

I like Marilyn but she stays hogging up all the attention from other Old Hollywood actresses. Ava Gardner was just as progressive and had several black friends yet hardly anyone talks about her. Dorothy Dandridge had an equally tragic life and had to deal with the added weight of racism yet she’s not given nearly as much sympathy as Marilyn.

Ava lived to relative old age. Marilyn died young, before she could get old and ugly. If she had, her popularity wouldn't be a tenth of what it was after she died.

Yes, Marilyn really wasn’t anything special besides her tragic death and the insane story leading up to it. Poor bitch lived 100 years in about 10, with all the horrid things that happened to her. Only a couple of her movies where she stars (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot) totally hold up and that’s mainly because they’re well written and the other cast members do the heavy lifting. The other movies are only known because she died. I don’t count All About Eve or others where she wasn’t yet “Marilyn Monroe” the image.

I don’t think she was more beautiful or sexy than Ava or ET, and her persona just creeps me out. She was basically a womanchild, with that breathy baby voice. How does one find someone so obviously vulnerable to be a hot fuck? Is it a hetero male thing? I like Ava’s bawdy wild woman image or Liz’s melodramatic glamour queen image better. I think it was Robert Mitchum who said Marilyn was the least sexy woman he knew because she was so obviously insecure and sad.

I know quite a few women who love Marilyn. It's like she's an icon for them so I actually think it's more of a straight woman thing.

I moved to a medium sized town in the Midwest 7 years ago and since then I've seen dozens of black women in Marilyn Monroe shirts. I've never seen even one in a Dorothy Dandridge shirt. It is what it is.

There is a wondaful recording of the original cast of Art Miller's After the Fall starring Mr. Jason Robards as the Miller character Quentin. Very worthwhile, if you're interested in the Miller/Monroe tale.

There was a TV movie version of it, which is impossible to find now, with Faye Dunnaway and Chris Plumber in 1974. If anyone knows where to find that, let me know!!

I completely disagree with the notion that Marilyn wasn't anything special. She is the ULTIMATE movie star. She is otherworldly in that regard. She is not human, she is STAR.

R103 For reasons I won't go into here, many years ago I studied everything I could find on THE MISFITS. There were many first-hand accounts, and this was before the easy answers on Google. The film was doomed from the start. Miller's script wasn't good, and he rewrote morning to night-- which paralyzed the actors and crew who never knew which rewrites were current. Huston was gambling and being chased by the mob for his losses, and of course, he was drinking heavily. Clift was damaged and drugged. Gable was dying. Miller was sleeping with Morath. The easy way out for producer Frank Taylor may have been pinning it all on Marilyn. She came into the production clean and hopeful, but the chaos on set and in the rustic Reno location affected her as it did them all. When the production bled money and needed an infusion, Marilyn was the easy scapegoat. She had her problems, but in this production, everyone else did too.

I’m surprised so little has been said here about Miller’s play about her, “After the Fall” (1964), directed by Elia Kazan. Though it received, and continues to receive, a mixed response, Barbara Loden, playing a thinly disguised character based on Marilyn, got the best reviews, and even won the Tony for Best Featured Actress.

I wonder if there’s any video of this production.

Monroe is absolutely iconic but she never really captured my interest for whatever reason. And I love hearing about old hollywood. I'm more interested in other glamorous ladies of that time. Like Ava Gardner, Sofia Loren ,Carole Lombard, Lena Horne, Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, Leslie Caron, Jean Seberg and Dorothy Dandridge. To name just a few. I know how much she means to others but I guess it's just lost on me.

The part in The Misfits has insulting elements, but her performance doesn't play into them. Considering how much she was struggling at this time, she still manages to find some wonderful moments. That was her gift, even in the bad times.

No one could maintain a relationship with her because she was too troubled and combined with her extraordinary career: impossible for a host of reasons.

[quote]Miller never created a major work after his marriage to Marilyn.

The Price (1967) is considered a major work, I'm pretty sure. It was nominated for a Tony for best play and won 2 acting and a directing Emmy(s) for the TV version.

*Naturally, I had to look up the awards, but I remember as a kid when it played on B'way , it got a lot of attention and was a hit play. Looking it up again, I see it ran 425 performances in New York and also did well on the road.

R117 I posed about it. R114.

There is a movie made for NBC in 1974 of it with Faye Dunnaway. Who had a bit part in it on Broadway 10 years earlier.

Listen to the recording. It's utterly fascinating.

R116 nailed it. MM had an awful time and didn't help matters but the script was constantly being rewritten everyday and the Director was so drunk everyday he was sober. She was not the main cause of that rotten production.

The only copy of the Dunaway version I’ve read of is at the the Paley Center for Media (the Museum of Television & Radio) in Los Angeles. I remember someone on the old IMDb boards wrote that you have to look hard for it - it’s not directly under the title AFTER THE FALL.

The original contracts for the show were probably arranged for a single broadcast in 1974, which is why it was never re-aired, or sold on video.

New York Times raved about Our Faye, but didn’t like the play. I do - it’s very imaginative.

———

Arthur Miller's “After the Fall” was first produced for the stage in January, 1964. Tonight at 8:30 o'clock the play is being presented as an NBC‐TV special. At the end of two and a half hours, it is clear that age cannot wither its infinite pretensions.

Ten years ago, more charitable critics were suggesting that the openly autobiographical play was still too close in time to its sources, most notably the phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Miller's former wife and the obvious inspiration for the character of Maggie, thinly disguised as a sexy pop singer. Time has nothing to do with it. The play, for all of its painful sincerity, is an egotistical abomination.

Harold Clunnan, the theater critic, once described Mr. Miller's dramatic technique as a form of “moral jurisprudence.” It is hardly an accident that the play's hero, Quentin, is a lawyer. And in the grand lawyer tradition, his moral confusions are ultimately enervating.

Quentin is the friendly narrator. “Hello, good to see you again,” he says to the audience, which he has never seen before. He is middleaged, with “two divorces in my safe‐deposit box.” He is now in love with Holga, a German girl who provides an excuse for connecting Quentin's drab life with the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.

The play takes place in Quentin's memory. He speaks directly into the camera as figures from present and past appear magically at the corner of the screen. He wonders if he has lived in good faith. He recalls when there used to be good people and bad people “and you could tell.” He worries about things falling apart but immediately wonders if they were ever Whole. He confesses, “I don't know what the hell I'm driving at.”

Sincere soul‐searching by a man of intelligence cannot be easily dismissed. The problem with “After the Fall” is that the perceived image is inflated out of all proportion to the almost banal reality. “Are we killing each other with abstractions?,” asks Quentin: Yes. “God, the hypocrisy!” he cries. Yes.

Faye Dunaway Superb as Neurotic Maggie: Apart from discrepancies of magnitude between ambition and achievement, the play is adrift in hazy characterizations casually manipulated for Quentin's attempts at profundity. His first wife is a catatonic cipher. Holga it little more than warm, mysterious comfort. His friends, caught up in the Communist hunts of the nineteen‐forties and fifties, are a collection of superficial types. Only Maggie is given any depth, and that turns out to be tediously neurotic.

The TV adaptation is, it must be noted, better than the original stage production. Mr. Miller has reworked certain scenes, changing emphasis and tightening the over‐all structure. And the cast is excellent. Christopher Plummer provides a brilliantly modulated portrait of Quentin, and Faye Dunaway is superb as Maggie, distilling the essence of a Monroe type while avoiding cheap impersonation.

The production, produced and directed by Gilbert Cates, is admirable. The play itself remains a distressing failure.

Regarding After the Fall, many found it distasteful. He lays Marilyn bare in it, but he doesn't spare himself.

One example is Jackie Kennedy. She'd been friendly with Arthur Miller for many years. But, she found his treatment of Marilyn so harsh in After The Fall, she never spoke to him again.

I don’t think Monroe’s treated “harshly” in the play, as she’s given many loving scenes. But the author doesn’t shy away from including her soggy decline. The character’s just shown for what she is: a grasping addict who’s emotionally disturbed.

Is anyone going to argue that wasn’t MM’s end?

Crazy Miss Dunaway's long fall from her glory days is pretty sad too.

He thought she was something she wasn’t.

If Faye had died in the late 70s would she be an icon too?

The classic story of falling in love with someone for the way they look, rather than who they are.

I agree with whomever said Miller liked MM's money.

I believe MM gave him their Roxbury farm in the divorce even though she plunged a fortune into it.

In After the Fall, the Marilyn stand-in Maggie keeps accusing Quentin (Miller) of being a "fag." Its one of her main things in the play.

Marilyn ADORED Miller's father. He was her date to the Happy Birthday Kennedy affair she sang at

I saw "After the Fall' in LA some years ago and was surprised at what dreadful, self-pitying dreck it was. Man oh man, Arthur Miller had an exalted sense of himself. The kind of phony "honesty" that makes you hate the person being honest.

Marriage of convenience, for both. MM wanted to prove she had a brain and Miller wanted to spend her money. MM really struggled with her mental health during their marriage. Masochistic, she married someone who made her feel intellectually inferior.

He also accepted money for "working his magic" on the Let's Make Love script.

Mm didn’t even wear sanitary pads during her period, and just lay in bed for days bleeding all over the sheets.

At least he didn’t put THAT in his play!

Marilyn ADORED Miller's father. He was her d̷a̷t̷e̷ 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑑 to the Happy Birthday Kennedy affair she sang at

Wonder how much all those rose deliveries cost DiMaggio. I know, cold, but I'm just curious.

When did Miller ever chase money? He married a Hollywood star, did they live in a big house in LA? Did he persue a career in the movies and TV? In the last decades of his life, he owned and operated a Christmas tree farm. He always lived simply. HIs play, Death Of A Salesman, is about the hollowness of the American Dream, and chasing after material success.

*pursue

Marilyn wanted to be taken seriously, but you can't marry your way into being taken seriously!

She read serious books, but like I said before, she had more important things on her mind than analyzing books in an academic way, so she was never going to get the sort of people who take books too seriously to respect her mind. She did study with good acting teachers, but she made the mistake of forming a unhealthy personal relationships with them, instead of just concentrating on learning. And she did produce her own films, which really was the most promising path to becoming a power within the industry, and actors like Burt Lancaster had pulled it off before she tried. She might have pulled it off, and made the studio heads treat her as someone to be reckoned with and not a piece of blonde meat, IF she hadn't shafted herself by single-handedly driving up the budgets on her own films. Every unprofessional hour she spent fretting in her trailer instead of doing her job, gave the powers that be one more reason to dismiss her.

There are many actresses who were always on time and professional that no one cares abolut any more.

*cares about

If that were the case, the world would be idolizing and loving Eleanor Parker or Ruth Roman.

Fangirls like R146 are determined not to see that Marilyn's failure to show up and do her job is the real answer to so many of the questions about her life.

Why didn't she get better scrips and directors? Because those went to actresses who didn't keep the director waiting, or drive up budgets by being hours late. Why didn't she get paid what she was worth? Because she drove budgets through the roof, by keeping crews waiting for hours, days, and weeks. Why didn't the studios take her seriously? Because she couldn't be arsed to show up and do her job, even when she was a producer and responsible for keeping the film on budget! Why was she fired from later films when she needed support them most? Duh! Why did the industry as a whole never take her seriously? Because it was a for-profit and highly competitive industry, with no time for people who cost more money than they generated, and she never seemed to realize that.

The studios did give her a lot more freedom to be her unprofessional charismatic self than they'd give any other actress, most contract players would have been out on their asses after less than a week of staying in their trailers. She wouldn't have lasted a week at any other job in the world, including theater acting, but the movie studios kept her employed for years anyway.

The movie studios, specifically FOX grossed 200 million dollars from Monroe - at the time of her death. Her lifetime earnings were 3 million. Yes she was unprofessional and fucked up. But she was not an arrogant, entitled grifter like Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando - who rarely even attempted to give a performance when they deigned to appear. They were paid much more for it too. Taylor nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. The studio was shut down and the bosses were fired. Liz had "whims" and demands instead of 'insecurities.'

BTW, Marilyn was directed by Billy Wilder, twice, John Huston, twice, George Cukor, Josh Logan and Olivier. Not too shabby. They all KNEW that she was a talented actress. Who couldn't hold it together. But much like Garland before her - when she showed up - she came to work and gave her very best.

{quote} Gable was dying.

Gable was not "dying." He did his own stunts in the movie, so he wasn't "dying." But a lot of people say that working on that horrible movie with those horrible fucked up people put him under so much prolonged stress that it gave him the heart attack that killed him. I tend to believe that. Gable was a drinker and smoker but I really believe doing "The Misfits" was what did him in.

[63] Are you saying Marilyn fucked Tony Curtis? The gay man who publicly insulted her kissing prowess? Sure, Jan.

Marilyn worshiped Clark Gable. He was her ultimate ideal daddy figure. I read in some bios Marilyn would pretend he was her dad when she was growing up. It must have broken her heart that her nonsense (along with everyone else's, I don't think anyone besides Thelma Ritter was behaving on that set) contributed something to his early death. She attended the christening of his son after he died. The comments on this video are such a frau fest.

Dianne Wiest (?!) played the MM character in AFTER THE FALL in 1984 and apparently did a great job.

[quote]New York Times

[quote] The Act II centerpiece - the showdown between Quentin and his new celebrity wife, Maggie - also works in its odd fashion. Or at least it does if one can adjust to Mr. Tillinger's revisionist version of Mr. Miller's heroine. By casting the brunette Miss Wiest as Maggie, a top-of-the-charts singing star, the director has gone out of his way to play down the character's resemblance to Monroe. The notion, while intriguing, seems misguided at first: Miss Wiest just isn't persuasive as the national sex symbol the text claims her to be, and, when we meet her in Act I, she's performing a calculatedly campy impersonation of a dumb starlet.

[quote] But once the storm arrives after intermission, the actress's bravura technique takes over. Maggie's decline from guileless naif to self-hating monster to incipient suicide is a seamless dance of death - paying off with the image of a puffy-faced Miss Wiest tumbling to the floor as weightlessly as a broken doll. Once the enraged and battered Mr. Langella is wrestling with her over bottles of sleeping pills and whisky, 'After the Fall' achieves real fire. It's not a Strindbergian fire, exactly - but, so uncannily does Miss Wiest's singer resemble Judy Garland, that the spectacle suggests what 'A Star Is Born' might have been like if Vicky Lester, rather than Norman Maine, were its alcoholic protagonist.

I think it was so tacky of Miller to write “After the Fall.” I mean, come on.

Exactly, R155. Why keep posting reviews and photos of a failed play that was critically scorned?

Because it'd a bit of outrageous Amrricana, an inside look at their peculiar union. For that it will always be a sidenote to both their legacies.

^^ Typo apologies. I'm shitfaced high per usual at this hour.

[quote] Are you saying Marilyn fucked Tony Curtis? The gay man who publicly insulted her kissing prowess? Sure, Jan.

Marilyn fucked EVERYBODY. And what makes you think Tony Curtis was gay? I never heard anywhere that he was. And he didn't insult her "kissing prowess." He said kissing her was like kissing Hitler because he hated her for showing up hours late and not knowing her lines.

Marilyn was good in Niagara and Bus Stop. She did play some serious roles.

She played the dimwitted whore in everything she did.

takes one to know one I guess, R161

So trust me.

.......

Miller was a piece of shit. Not only was he horrible to Marilyn, when his 3rd wife gave birth to a son with Down Syndrome he insisted that the kid be institutionalized and wouldn't allow his wife to visit him. When it became known that Miller had had this son and had abandoned him, Daniel Day-Lewis and his wife Rebecca - Miller's other child and the sister of the man with Down Syndrome - claimed they were going to make it up to her brother but I bet they did nothing. They were just trying to cover up for Miller being such a mean asshole.

Miller was embarrassed to have a disabled child, not an ounce of compassion in him.

Big Jewish cut dick happened. I would be in love too.

Miller actually did his best to make his marriage to Marilyn work. Her marriage with him was the longest relationship she'd ever had with any man: five years. He really made an effort. But she was too mentally disturbed to have a healthy relationship. Mental illness ran in her family. She was profoundly mentally ill.

Probably? LMAO

That's very sad and telling. Down Syndrome children are most often very loving and high functioning. Even in the 60s they didn't need to be institutionalized. But it was too much of an embarrassment to Miller - the great man of letters, puffing on his pipe? Inge Morath came of age surrounded by Nazis. Her parents were sympathizers and she married her Jewish love. She had their son after 40 years of age. Makes Down Syndrome more likely.

All the biographies and encyclopedic entries mention up until recently say that she and Miller had one child, a daughter - Rebecca. Miller insisted this imperfection of a son with a disability be banished not only from his world - but from history. It says a lot. About a cold heart in the centre and the inability to tackle life's difficulties. Miller is the victim of all his own stories. He is intelligent enough to paint himself as a guilty victim. And to portray Inge as a concentration camp survivor in After The Fall.

Something tells me this would not surprise Marilyn Monroe at all.

He should have encouraged Marilyn to star in Breakfast At Tiffany's

At least Miller didn’t give his mentally challenged child a lobotomy, like the Kennedys did to Rosemary.

Someone HERE is against us discussing After The Fall?? At the time, it was likely THE most frank and honest celebrity "confessional" ever. That's what we're all about here.

Remind me of when someone was mad that I was talking about Mel Torme's amazing, gossip laden book about Judy Garland. So odd.

Do you know any real humans R172? Or do you just regurgitate shit that you read elsewhere ALL DAY LONG?

Your post is tasteless and stupid. Miller is a better human than the Kennedys because he didn't lobotomize his son? High bar. Brilliant observation. You're a cheap intelligence.

Climb the stairs from the basement and get some air. Tomorrow try to help someone. Stop typing, start walking.

R173 IS also R172. He's spent the last THREE days talking to himself on this thread. We KNOW who you are. Get some air. Fresh air. Not from sniffing teen boys underwear.

[quote]R156 Why keep posting reviews and photos of a failed play that was critically scorned?

You might instead ask why major artists have been attracted to reviving it over the decades.

It’s a highly creative and ambitious play. I’d much rather watch and try to untangle it than most of Miller’s other, more straightforward works.

[quote][R173] IS also [R172]. He's spent the last THREE days talking to himself on this thread.

You sound hysterical.

But that’s okay.

Faye looks like a tranny @ R175.

Marilyn was a woman.

The truth is not a conspiracy. Everyone knows who you are, R176.

And it's NOT okay.

[quote]The play has its confusions and such clumsy constructions as Holga's dream of kissing a monster baby paralleled with Quentin's final line, "And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears, and with a stroke of love, forgive it."

Yikes

Wow. Anyone interested in this topic should watch this interview. I'm kinda blown away.

Also, the clip of After The Fall with Chris Plummer and her Fayness is featured.

If you've ever seen/read the play, it takes place in Millers' mind. And on either side of the stage, there are Nazi concentration camp security towers. What Miler says about this play, and the reasons he left Marilyn Monroe is shockingly honest. And people couldn't handle it in 1964. And many can't now. Which we see on this board.

Watch this interview. I have major respect for him after seeing this.

You've already said all that and posted that same interview from one of your other accounts, R179.

^ unhinged

In midcentury there was little knowledge or compassion from the majority of people about disability. You can't judge people's actions or beliefs back then by modern standards.

My mother’s best friend put her mentally damaged daughter in a (nice) institution for life, and concentrated on raising her other kids.

Bette Davis did the same.

Where did your mother place you, R183? Do you ever get to go outside?

Marilyn's 'appeal' has always eluded us.

As with Elizabeth "AID$" Taylor, 30 seconds of painful viewing and we change the channel.

R179 it's not because he's honest and forthright in After The Fall that bothers people, I think it's that:

1. The play is completely his version of events, designed to make him come off better whilst degrading and over simplifying "Maggie"

2. He used Marilyn's celebrity and the interest in her in an attempt to get a hit play. It's similar to a celeb kiss-and-tell, just wrapped up in more intellectual writing

3. It exploits a woman who was not around to defend herself. Miller lived of his dead ex-wife for many years

I'd respect him more if he kept his trap shut about her like DiMaggio did. This was cheap, and not even a great piece of work. Miller peaked in the early 50s as a playwright.

None of MMs marriages lasted. Considering the emotional baggage she had, in addition to her later addictions, how could they have??

When you have multiple failed marriages, it’s not them, it’s you. And really, one also have to think: just how fucked up must she have been, day in and day out, for a straight man to leave MARILYN MONROE?

From what I can tell, this is actually a great play. If the topic interests you at all, do listen to the recording of the 1964 Lincoln Center cast. Jason Robards is excellent. As is Barbara Loden as Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe stand-in. She later married Elia Kazan, who directed her in After The Fall. Also, there is a character in After The Fall who is based on Kazan, and he RATS on his friends, just like Kazan did. It's that kind of play.

I really want to get my hot lil hands on the 1974 TV movie with Faye and Christopher Plummer. I'm dead curious to see it.

I was surprised to see this bit of dialogue from a Broadway play in 1964:

Quentin: Maggie, I'm going for a walk.

Maggie: Why are you wearing those pants? I toldja the seat is too tight.

Quentin: Well, they make them too tight, but I can take a walk in 'em.

Maggie: Faggots wear pants like that, I told you. They attract each other with their asses.

Quentin: You're calling me a faggot now?

Maggie: It's just that I've known fags. And some of them didn't even know themselves that they were, and I didn't know if you knew about that.

Quentin: Well, that's a hell of a way to reassure yourself, Maggie.

Maggie: I'm allowed to say what I see!

The way she delivers the line "I didn't know if you knew about that" is so cutting and acidic. I think it's amazingly honest of him to put that in there.

Anyway, as I said yesterday, it is a very interesting listen.

R174 You are wrong about that. I am one of those, but not both. I'm not saying anything at all negative about Miller and his children and all that.

I meant to type:

[quote]R187 When you have multiple failed marriages, it’s not[bold] just [/bold]them, it’s you.

R180 No. That is the only time I posted that interview. Why do you think I'm two people?

And btw, yes, I did post the After the Fall record twice, just because I finished listening to it tonight, and I want people to have a listen.

[quote]R191 That is the only time I posted that interview. Why do you think I'm two people?

That poster (r180) is sadly and hyperactively befuddled.

R193 yeah! What the hell is that person trying to prove? Very odd.

I just read about the Rupert Murdoch / Jerri Hall divorce. Same dynamics.

R 171. Actually Truman Capote wanted MM in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I don't remember the reason why, but Hepburn was chosen instead.

Truman and Marilyn were dear close sisters.

Both boozers and pill heads and sizemeat fans!

R196 he wrote Breakfast At Tiffany's with MM as Holly in mind. She's a curvy blonde in the novella.

R160 I agree, excellent performances. I love those two.

Holly Golightly is a composite of different women Capote knew in his youth. She is self made and starves herself to stay thin. The rudeway to describe her origin is white trash. Holly was a child-bride who left her husband in the south to become a sensation in NYC. Very little is known about Holly, she won't discuss the details. Holly changes the subject when the subject is about her origin.

I don't know if white trash is the correct way to describe the way Marilyn Monroes origin. It was grim and responsible for her mental health struggles.

Marilyn had a child-like quality that Capote wanted captured in the film. Blake Edwards looked at the material differently.

Did Capote ever comment about the Mickey Rooney parts of the movie?

Oh, the Elizabeth "AID$" Taylor troll is back, as if championing a disease back when the people who were suffering from it were societal lepers was some kind of marketing ploy.... You don't have to like her acting, but come on!

Anyway, Liz had a much less infantile persona than Marilyn and made better movies overall. She was also a better actress, I'm not saying she was excellent, but she was capable of excellence. Marilyn was good at comedy but totally unwatchable in dramas. The Misfits is a curio because it seemed to curse all its stars. Monty Clift is legitimately excellent in it, but he is a legitimate actor. I also think Clark Gable, even if he was sometimes wooden, was underrated as an acting talent, especially in his early work.

Well, i'm happy to read that many peopleo here consider The Misfits an awful film.

I've always read nothing but praise about it but i seriusly never understood the appeal, it looked bad and definately wasn't a movie for a glamorous star like Marilyn.

[quote]Actually Truman Capote wanted MM in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I don't remember the reason why, but Hepburn was chosen instead.

R196 I thought of MM immediately when I read the book. She was obviously his choice.

Allegedly MM was interested in Breakfast At Tiffany's until Lee Strasberg advised her playing a "call girl" would be bad for her image. The good part of the Miller interview is how he lays into The Strasbergs and how they made MM's life much worse.

I wonder if it might have helped MM if she won acclaim for BAT and even an Oscar? If she'd made this instead of "Let's Make Love" she never would have met Yves Montland and been better off for it.

She wanted desperately to be a "serious actress" but the acclaim she got for her various movies, especially after being mind-fucked at The Actors Studio, didn't seem to do much for her esteem.

[quote] he wrote Breakfast At Tiffany's with MM as Holly in mind. She's a curvy blonde in the novella.

No, she wasn't. In the novel the narrator says "I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any skinny girl who walks fast and straight." Her hair is streaked, not exactly blonde. Doesn't sound like MM at all.

R207 my mistake. I know he did base the character with MM in mind. Thanks for clarifying, I have the novella but never really read it!

The fact is that Capote wanted Marilyn to play Holly and Marilyn wanted to play Holly. Blake Edwards and Paramount Studios did not! Shirley MacLaine did turn down the role of Holly and I always thought that Lee Remick might have played her with more depth and cunning too. But Audrey it was. So it was completely sanitized.

[quote]The Oscar-nominated screenplay was written by George Axelrod, loosely based on the novella by Truman Capote. Changes were made to fit the medium of cinema and to correspond to the filmmakers' vision. Capote, who sold the film rights of his novella to Paramount Studios, wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly, whom he had described perfectly in the book. Barry Paris cites Capote's own comments on the choice of actress: "Marilyn was always my first choice to play the girl, Holly Golightly." Screenwriter Axelrod was hired to "tailor the screenplay for Monroe".

Marilyn wanted to be taken seriusly but had no problem during the filming of "Something's Got To Give" to show herself naked for the pool scene, i remember reading that it was her idea to do that and she wanted the press to talk about her(at the time the press was all over Liz Taylor's Cleopatra). If i remember correctly Miller commented that Marilyn regressed to how she was at the beginning of her career just to have cheap press coverage

Out takes from Something's Got to Give. The dollface scene was hellish to film.

Marilyn still looked quite lovely.

^^...

R210 MM was also very self-destructive. Susan Strasberg said it was sad watching her parody herself singing to JFK, destroying her image of serious actress and become everything she wanted to escape in 1955.

She was also wildly insecure and had so much rejection she may have "regressed" to doing what she knew was popular.

Plus she looked amazing in the few weeks before she died, she may have seen it as her last hoorah. She would have made Something's Got To Give a huge hit, she was terrific in those few restored scenes.

Oh indeed Marilyn looks lovely and glamorous in Something got to give, the scenes from that movie are all eyecandy

She looked great in her last few weeks. Sad thing was, she actually was really sick during filming, not pulling a stunt but little girl cried wolf.

R148 And why did they keep her employed for years? Because audiences loved her. And what do movie studios depend on for profits? Audiences.

Maybe you'd rather have seen Mitzi Gaynor in Some Like It Hot, but Wilder cast Marilyn when she became available. Ask yourself why. She's dead, nobody gives a shit now if she was late or not.

[quote]had no problem during the filming of "Something's Got To Give" to show herself naked for the pool scene, i remember reading that it was her idea to do that.

And rightly so as her character had been on a desert island for five years. She would've swum nude. Just as her feet got bigger from not wearing shoes as stated in the scene with Wally Cox.

And because she was an exhibitionist.

*said with love

Marilyn would love the phrase - We're all born naked and the rest is DRAG.

Marilyn is like a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a bedsheet.

^ a very dirty bedsheet

[quote]MM was also very self-destructive. Susan Strasberg said it was sad watching her parody herself singing to JFK, destroying her image of serious actress and become everything she wanted to escape in 1955.

Strasberg was also self-destructive.

Marilyn Monroe's gift was that the camera loved her. That was her talent: she photographed brilliantly. Louise Brooks and Garbo were the same way; they photographed like a dream.

R203.. i take exception that taylor was a better actress than monroe... could taylor have done ANY of marilyn's roles besides maybe "the misfits'? NO!.. While I can see Monroe doing a number of taylor's films... so there you go...

R224 James Dean was also very photogenic.

I’d like to have seen Carla Gugino in After the Fall but nit so much Krause with his surfer dude act. She gets terrific reviews from NY theater critics. What has she been doing lately?

Unfortunately this has turned into a thread about After The Fall

Never seen, but the play is autobiographical and it is about their marriage.

Frank Langella wrote MM attempted suicide when she was married to Miller, this came from Miller who described how her suicide attempt was kept quiet and out of the press.

The elite saw the same doctors. One doctor was famed for offering patients B12 vitamin injection that were in fact, methamphetamine. The Dr told them they were receiving vitamins and he didn't mention the meth. Meth as we know too well can cause physical dependence and cognitive decline. President Kennedy who was gravely ill more than once in his life, was a patient, Monroe was a patient, Dietrich was a patient, Capote was a patient.

Methamphetamine was not quite the same thing as "Meth." Duh. Meth is made from fertilizer and battery acid. But speed it was. Jackie Kennedy loved Dr. Jacobson shots the MOST! Long after everyone knew what it was.

Marilyn liked CNS depressants, because she was so anxious. So booze and barbiturates mostly. She did use uppers on the set of the Misfits. She was so knocked out most of the time from sedatives, that they applied her makeup for filming when she was still asleep.

But she rebounded from that as is obvious in the Let's Make Love footage and so many of her last year's photographs. She had her gallbladder removed and an operation for her endometriosis and she went on a diet and her version of a health kick. All the bloat and puffiness was gone from her. Though she looked terrible and very drunk the night she sang Happy Birthday Mister President. She never gave up champagne and sleeping pills. We all should have access to Nembutal - when the time comes.

Many people have attempted suicide. Takes guts to succeed. The Kennedys killed Marilyn, indirectly.

She saw Arthur Miller for what he really was long before she died. She wasn't mourning that marriage.

[quote]R231 She saw Arthur Miller for what he really was…

Someone who didn’t want to share their life with an out of control addict? Please.

Get to some Alanon meetings.

[quote] MM was also very self-destructive

Not self-destructive enough. We had to help her along.

She OD'd by accident. Nothing courageous about this. She was a whore to fuck two married brothers, hon.

At least she didn’t marry a gay man.

A funny anecdote about Monroe which probably most here have already heard. Jack Lemmon said while filming 'Some Like It Hot' Billy Wilder warned both him and Tony Curtis that if Marilyn ever got a scene right he was printing it regardless of anything else.

R231.. marilyn looked terrible the night she sang to JFK? she was stunning in actuality.... regardless of anyone's opinion on the actual performance, just looks wise she was a vision....

R227 Gugino played the mother in Netflix Haunting of Hill House. Great, creepy performance. She was the only good thing about that sappy drama ( which had nothing to do with the brilliant Shirley Jackson novel it was named after).

An interview with Miller from 1966:

“MILLER: I think Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion, evidently) a force that is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean, that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing … The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions … This is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it, if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction.

INTERVIEWER: What about Method acting in the movies?

MILLER: Well, in the movies, curiously enough, the Method works better. Because the camera can come right up to an actor’s nostrils and suck out of him a communicative gesture; a look in the eye, a wrinkle of his grin, and so on, which registers nothing on the stage.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think the push toward personal success dominates American life now more than it used to?

MILLER: I think it’s far more powerful today than when I wrote Death of a Salesman. I think it’s closer to a madness today than it was then. Now there’s no perspective on it at all.

INTERVIEWER: Would you say that the girl in After the Fall is a symbol of that obsession?

MILLER: Yes, she is consumed by what she does, and instead of it being a means of release, it’s a jail. A prison which defines her, finally. She can’t break through. In other words, success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel in the New York production that the girl allegedly based on Marilyn Monroe was out of proportion, entirely separate from Quentin?

MILLER: Yes, although I failed to foresee it myself. In the Italian production this never happened; it was always in proportion. I suppose, too, that by the time Zeffirelli did the play, the publicity shock had been absorbed, so that one could watch Quentin’s evolution without being distracted.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think happened in New York?

MILLER: Something I never thought could happen. The play was never judged as a play at all. Good or bad, I would never know what it was from what I read about it, only what it was supposed to have been.

INTERVIEWER: Because they all reacted as if it were simply a segment of your personal life?

MILLER: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Could this question of timing have affected the reaction here to After the Fall?

MILLER: The ironic thing to me was that I heard cries of indignation from various people who had in the lifetime of Marilyn Monroe either exploited her unmercifully, in a way that would have subjected them to peonage laws, or mocked her viciously, or refused to take any of her pretensions seriously. So consequently, it was impossible to credit their sincerity.

INTERVIEWER: Was it the play, The Crucible itself, do you think, or was it perhaps that piece you did in the Nation—’A Modest Proposal’—that focused the Un-American Activities Committee on you?

MILLER: Well, I had made a lot of statements and I had signed a great many petitions. I’d been involved in organizations, you know, putting my name down for fifteen years before that. But I don’t think they ever would have bothered me if I hadn’t married Marilyn. Had they been interested, they would have called me earlier. And, in fact, I was told on good authority that the then chairman, Francis Walter, said that if Marilyn would take a photograph with him, shaking his hand, he would call off the whole thing. It’s as simple as that. Marilyn would get them on the front pages right away.”

R93, Interesting about that clip is her real voice came out when she was angry at the beginning where it sounded like it was a completely different person then it quickly went back into the soft, light feminine voice.

Imagine the things Joe DiMaggio must have had to say about Miller.

We would have loved to have serviced Miller's rumoured massive sizemeat!

Like DiMaggio had any room to talk, about how he treated Marilyn, R241!

But it's not like any man could have saved her, or made her happy, because she wanted it all and in this life nobody gets it all. She wanted the devoted love of one man, she wanted the sexual attention of all men. She wanted a quiet life and a family, she wanted worldwide fame and stardom. She wanted to be loved for herself, she wanted to be worshipped for her image. All of those things are contradictory, and anyone who wants or needs two (or more) contradictory things is doomed to dissatisfaction.

R243 Just meant I bet Joltin Joe had some choice words for his egghead successor. Wonder how Joe's big Italian salami stacked up to Miller's Jewish sizemeat?

DiMaggio was violent with Marilyn and during the Seven Year Itch filming he BEAT her. That was the end of their marriage. He was insanely jealous. He obviously loved her or was obsessed with what could have been, because he remained a good friend and sometime lover to her until she died. DiMaggio lived another 45 years after their divorce and never married again.

Master class acting. Miller must have heard these words at some point.

[quote] She wanted a quiet life and a family,

I don't think she was really capable of being a wife and mother or having a family. She could have had those things with DiMaggio or Miller, but she didn't seem to really want it. It's just as well that she never had children. She would have been a terrible mother.

R247 I think she really wanted but she couldn't stay pregnant

The male-dominated press of the early 1960's ripped Marilyn apart when Clark Gable died 9 days after The Misfits filming ended, as if it was all her fault because of her chronic lateness. Of course no one thought his lifetime of heavy smoking, drinking, and doing his own stunts in the hot desert sun had any impact, not to mention his severe depression from the death of his life-long best friend Ward Bond would have had impact....but such was the 1960's.

Look at the spite and envy even certain other women felt toward her. I'd want to stay in bed for days, too.

Reporter: Marilyn, speaking of measurements, are they still the same as when you left? Have you gained weight? Have you lost weight? Marilyn: I think I'm about the same. Reporter: Nobody has any complaints? Marilyn: I don't know. Reporter: Speak up, boys.

R249 The entertainment press wasn't male dominated, it had Hedda Hopper, Lousella Parsons, Sheila Graham, Kendis Rochlen, and others who were extremely influential. If you mean the regular press, that was male dominated.

Joe probably thought it wicked Miller exploited MM after her death with his one-sided play plus talking and writing about her. The kindest thing he did was stay silent about her.

[quote]R249 The male-dominated press of the early 1960's ripped Marilyn apart when Clark Gable died 9 days after The Misfits filming ended, as if it was all her fault because of her chronic lateness.

Do you think her unprofessionalism, and drug addiction, that pushed the hard shoot so far over schedule EXTENDED his life??

The marilyn hater is obsessed. Marilyn didn't kill anyone. She came into the world disadvantaged and unloved, was exploited and made fun of for most of her career and died tragically young. Individuals and industries are still making millions of dollars off her 60 years later. Her karmic debt was long ago paid.

She is the most famous face in the world, still.

Judging from a shower photo, DiMaggio appeared to suffer from tinymeat.

"The male-dominated press of the early 1960's ripped Marilyn apart when Clark Gable died 9 days after The Misfits filming ended, as if it was all her fault because of her chronic lateness."

I think Gable would have had some more years left to his life if he hadn't tried to make a movie with Marilyn Monroe. Although she later graciously invited Monroe to her baby's )a baby Gable never saw) christening, Gable's wife said that doing the Misfits "helped kill him," She went on:

It wasn't the physical exertion that did it. IT was the horrible tension, the eternal waiting, waiting, waiting. He waited around forever, for everybody. He'd get so angry, waiting, that he'd just go ahead and do anything ti keep occupied. That's why he did those awful horse scenes where they dragged him at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour behind a truck. He had a stand-in and a stunt man, but he did them himself. I told him "You're crazy", but he wouldn't listen."

I'd be pretty bitter if I was left with the baby of a rich, old, famous man who just died.

Just saying.

Clark's wife may have just been bitter Clark opted to be interned with his great love Carole Lombard. I made a thread on it 2 years ago..

[quote]R254 She came into the world disadvantaged and unloved, was exploited and made fun of for most of her career and died tragically young. Individuals and industries are still making millions of dollars off her 60 years later.

All that may be true, though it doesn’t mean she didn’t harm others in turn.

[quote]R257 I'd be pretty bitter if I was left with the baby of a rich, old, famous man who just died. Just saying.

I might be delighted, depending on the size of the inheritance.

That kid would be sent off to the finest nursery school in the country that accepted boarders, pronto.

I hate all this “poor victim Marilyn, who never did anything wrong” crap. She was mistreated by many in her life, but that’s no excuse for not doing your job which you’re paid exorbitant amounts of money for!

Plenty of Hollywood stars had tragic backstories, Barbara Stanwyck, like MM, was sent from foster home to foster home in early 20th century NYC after her mom died when she was 4 and her dad disappeared after leaving to work on the Panama Canal shortly after. She dropped out of to school and worked odd jobs to completely support herself at age 14. She never behaved remotely as awful as Marilyn did on her movie sets.

[quote]R261 Plenty of Hollywood stars had tragic backstories,

Clara Bow’s mother was schizophrenic. Bow awoke one night as a child and found her mom standing over her with a knife.

What are your mental illness diagnoses, R262, R261, R256? The personality disorders alone! Along with being NUTS.

It’s not nice to call MM “nuts”, r263.

Though she was institutionalized.

^ NUTS ^

^^.

R261 She supposedly suffered with terrible anxiety and was very insecure and hyper critical of her work, all of which often makes someone 'difficult' to work with.

Though she kept getting cast for some reason.

She doesn't sound much different from other actresses who wear the 'difficult' emblem, although she was also at times deliberately difficult, it was because she knew that the studios were playing her for a fool in regards to paying her proportionately to her co-stars.

After watching the Misfits and knowing the background between Monroe and Miller, just about every scene has a proverbial slap in the face. I don't know how she actually finished that film.

[quote]DiMaggio was violent with Marilyn and during the Seven Year Itch filming he BEAT her.

Um, no he didn't. In fact, the day after she filmed the grate scene, she showed up at Philippe Halsman's studio and did a photoshoot in a black dress with spaghetti straps, including repeated jumping into the air for the photographer. If DiMaggio BEAT her, she wouldn't have been able to do so.

The make-up person on Seven Year Itch said she was bruised and needed a lot of cover up.

That movie saved her career as she fled Hollywood and broke her contract to go study at The Actors Studio, refusing to film some crappy movie where she was the bimbo. If TSYI hadn't been such a huge hit she might have not been welcomed back so warmly.

The Misfits was such a dreary ass movie, I can never watch it. All of Arthur Miller's work is so depressing. Marilyn needed a Mike Todd to protect and spoil her, like what Liz had.

Here's an article about Marilyn and DiMaggio. According to the writer, they still slept together after the divorce. DiMaggio never stopped trying to get back together with her.

For someone who reportedly wanted family so much, she wasn’t particularly close to her sister Bernice.

And how much did she leave this sister in her will, versus the Strasberg?

Having suffered from terrible insecurities, deep depression and anxiety throughout my life I can only wonder that she got any movies made at all.

How long were Taylor and Todd married, like, 2 years? And he didn't protect her like she was a goddess, they had knock down physical fights, sometimes around other people.

"Marilyn needed a Mike Todd to protect and spoil her, like what Liz had."

Being spoiled and indulged would not have made her into a happy person, or affected her addictions or underlying mental illnesses. Frankly, if you spoil and indulge someone as unstable and contradictory as Marilyn, you become their enabler, not their rescuer.

Because like I keep saying, love doesn't save people from mental illness or addiction.

[quote] How long were Taylor and Todd married, like, 2 years? And he didn't protect her like she was a goddess, they had knock down physical fights, sometimes around other people.

Mike Todd was the only one of Liz's husbands who was a match for her. They probably would have stayed married forever if he hadn't gotten killed. When asked for a run down of the suitability of Liz's previous husbands Burton said the Todd was "Perfect, but he's dead."

What a fucking idiot you are R277. You're full of ancient gossip and dumb tropes. Liz Taylor was a whore and a greedy pig. A much worse alcoholic than Marilyn Monroe. And a coke head and pill addict. Of course she said that she would have stayed with Mike Todd forever - because he conveniently died before she totally bankrupted him. She grieved for 3 months before fucking men over again. Taylor destroyed all the men who didn't leave her. Almost all of them beat her- because she liked to provoke that. Liz liked it rough. NO one was lower class than Elizabeth Taylor. Tacky woman.

Liz to Hedda Hopper: “Mike’s dead and I’m alive. What do you expect me to do… sleep ALONE??”

Why, yes. Yes, we do.

Is a year asking too much?

R256 her being late to set killed him? C’mon…

Well, he never said anything to me about it anyway.

The Strasbergs seem to get a lot of flack from Marilyn fans, as well as any director, (Cukor, Wilder, Olivier) who allegedly mistreated her, yet her fans will make endless excuses for her poor treatment of others... the go-to being "she had a poor childhood." As if there aren't millions of people who have had terrible upbringings, some even worse than Marilyn, but they don't use it as a crutch or a weapon to elicit sympathy.

Only dumb Marilyn fraus hate on Cukor and Wilder et al for wanting an actress to do her damn job. Many, many Hollywood stars during the golden age from broken homes and low class backgrounds not just because of poverty but because of factors like both World Wars.

The Strasbergs do genuinely seem exploitative and probably changed her career for the worse. She wasn’t a smart enough person or a good enough actress to utilize the “method” properly. Ellen Burstyn studied under Strasberg (and she had - gasp - grown up in poverty with a mentally ill mother) and did fine.

[quote]What exactly happened between Arthur MiIler and Marilyn Monroe?

anal

Like the Method is rocket science.

[quote] her being late to set killed him? C’mon…

As any actor will tell it's not a pleasant thing to be waiting around on a movie set. It's stressful. There's always a certain amount of waiting around for various reasons but just waiting around for an actor to to grace the director, cast and crew with his or her presence is maddening. And Gable had to wait around in 120 degree weather. No doubt making that movie made his blood pressure go way, way up.

Billy Wilder said this about his experience making "Some Like It Hot" with Marilyn Monroe:

"She was never on time once. It is a terrible thing for an acting company, the director, the cameraman. You sit there and wait. You can't start without her. Thousands of dollars you see going into the hole. You can always figure a Monroe picture runs an extra few hundred thousand because she's coming late. It demoralizes the whole company. It's like trench warfare. You sit and sit, waiting for something to happen. When are the shells going to explode?"

The OLD waitress is so adorable.

R286 Marilyn was once eight hours late while making Misfits.

Clark Gable had at least FOUR heart attacks. He lived a totally unhealthy and destructive life. A late actress didn't kill him.

Wilder also said he had an aunt who is always on time, but no one will pay to see her in a movie.

Oh, good grief. He was meaner than a snake to her during The Misfits. I saw it with my own eyes. She cowered when she saw him. He had one emotion on that set - pissed off. I was just a girl, but I disliked him immediately and wanted to protect her from him. He was just nasty.

I spent several days with/around her. She was on the set each morning, but was what today's medical world would describe - she had horrible anxiety. And yes she spoke in a regular voice. And was very caring.

I'm glad there are tapes showing the other side of her. That side is who I met. She didn't want to be just a sex goddess but that's all that Hollywood wanted from her.

R291 I love your posts, but your Arthur Miller bashing is a bit cringe. I get that Marilyn was probably a very kind person to you - she seemed to adore kids - but I doubt you were able to discern a man's character or the nature of a long term relationship from a handful of strained interactions when their marriage was falling apart...

[quote]The make-up person on Seven Year Itch said she was bruised and needed a lot of cover up.

Marilyn's make-up artist WAS A MAN. Whitey Snyder. He was makeup artist throughout her career: from her first screen test at Twentieth Century Fox in 1946 to her funeral makeup in 1962. He NEVER said such a thing.

FUN FACT: He was also the lead make-up artist on Little House on the Prarie.

Many people have gone on record that DiMaggio exploded with jealousy and rage and beat Marilyn up the night of her filming the subway blowing her skirt up scene in Manhattan. In their hotel room. That WAS the end of their marriage.

STFU R293.

Joe DiMaggio asked Whitey Snyder to make up Marilyn's corpse for her funeral. He did, but he had to fortify himself with a few belts before doing it. Many years before she had asked him if anything happened to her (like dying) would he do her makeup? He said, trying to lighten the situation (it was a rather morbid request), " "Sure, bring the body back while it is still warm and I'll do it." Soon after she gave him a gold money clip engraved "Whitey Dear:/ While I'm still warm/ Marilyn." The clip was auctioned off in 2012. It's estimate was $6000 to $8000. It sold for $21, 250.

[quote]R288 Marilyn was once eight hours late while making Misfits.

Then wasn’t she carted off to rehab, and everyone had to hang around, waiting for her to dry the fuck out?

John Houston was missing as much from the Misfits as Marilyn. His drinking and gambling were of far more interest to him than the film.

And it wasn't called rehab back in 1960 you fucking idiot. Marilyn was messed up, but Garland was a MONSTER. Not only did JUDY never show up - she destroyed her children, never even tried to perform well and didn't give a rusty fuck who her total self indulgent WET BRAIN personality destroyed along the way. She was morally and personally bankrupt. A fucking delusional loser.

Monroe did dry out and get much better. More than once. She wasn't an addict like Houston or Garland or Whitney. She was addicted. Monroe's sharp intelligence and wit never left her. She strived to be a better person and actress.❤

[quote]Many people have gone on record that DiMaggio exploded with jealousy and rage and beat Marilyn up the night of her filming the subway blowing her skirt up scene in Manhattan.

Well then, I'm sure you won't mind listing a few since you seem to be so knowledgeable. Take your time.

Well, I was just going to drop by, read the first couple of posts and then be on my merry way but I spent the last hour or so devouring this thread.

I loved them all.

MM’s problem was she needed more [italic]hard dicks[/italic] spraying all her holes daily.

Oh, wait…

"He was meaner than a snake to her during The Misfits. I saw it with my own eyes. She cowered when she saw him."

Misfit girl, do you think you could tell the difference between someone being mean, or someone being fed up? Or someone being mean, and someone who was calling someone on their shit? I mean, I have difficulties with these distinctions as an adult, if I don't know the people involved well.

That's the thing about Marilyn, she could be incredibly kind and sweet, and she could try people beyond endurance. And when the latter happened, she'd run to someone else, and get them to protect her from the meanie...

The person who actually saw Marilyn and Arthur interacting with each other knows more about how they interacted than anyone else on this thread does. That's a simple fact.

[quote]Gable had to wait around in 120 degree weather. No doubt making that movie made his blood pressure go way, way up.

What made his blood pressure rise was his choice to spend his down time doing stunts for the 2nd unit crew. He knew he had health problems when he made that choice. Just because a co-worker is late, doesn't mean you're forced to do things that would harm your health, and it doesn't make it the co-worker's fault.

[quote]Not only did JUDY never show up - she destroyed her children, never even tried to perform well

Wow, she was only one of the greatest performers of all time - imagine if she HAD tried to perform well?

Clark Gable was the top-billed star of The Misfits. Isn't it obvious that Monroe was severely holding up production, and that this would have a negative impact on everyone involved? ? I mean, thinkn about it - her next film was never even finished. It was entirely due to her.

She made this production a nightmare. In the documentary above, listen to what Kevin McCarthy says about theire short scene together. I love her, I think she was great - but you can't deny facts. Gable had a professional stake in the film so the idea that he wouldn't be stressed out is stupid. Not saying she helped kill him with her unprofessional, erratic behavior, but who knows? It's not unreasonable to think it contributed.

It's not like Gable was a good guy. He did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, whether it caused pain to others or not. He was like Jack Nicholson and Ryan O'Neal and all of the other men who came after him who used their charm and looks to deflect from their awful behavior.

Everything I've read said that Gable was kind, sympathetic, and patient with Monroe, during filming. He wasn't the nicest man who ever lived or the most acute, but if he knew that she spent her miserable childhood pretending that he was her dad, then maybe he realized that if he lost his temper with her, she'd have a complete breakdown.

It's ridiculous to blame her for his death, but so many commentators who write about the making of "The Misfits" to, directly or indirectly. The man had had three heart attacks already, after a life of cigs, booze, and red meat, and it's silly to blame Marilyn for stressing him a bit when he'd abused his body for years, and when everyone else on the set was behaving badly as well. Co-star Montgomery Clift was hammered most of the time, director John Houston was always an asshole, Arthur Miller was there and giving Marilyn trouble, they were in fucking Reno, which is FYI the last filthy hair on the asshole of the universe! But there are people out there who always want to find a woman to blame (they're all over the Datalounge), and in this scenario they chose Marilyn.

Thank you R307. What you described is how I remember it. Monty and his bottle of whiskey, Clark Gable calmly staying away from everyone in the shade, John Huston busy yelling into a megaphone, all red faced and hot. Arthur Miller snarling at everybody. And that first day I met her - Marilyn sitting in a chair, under a huge tree, in somebody's back yard, going over her script over and over again. That's when she called to me to come over and talk to her.

And when she was ready, Monty would be too drunk.

Not easy for anybody.

Then you had Thelma Ritter scampering about commando, flapping her skirt and her withered beef curtains up at everyone - - to no avail.

Marilyn's last movie (Something's Got to Give) was unfinished because she died. Just days before, Fox rehired her with a substantial pay raise and agreed to can (director) George Cukor. She won; she won her biggest fight. And then she lost.

[quote] It's not like Gable was a good guy.

Obviously you know nothing, absolutely nothing, about Clark Gable. Men liked him. Women adored him. Arthur Miller called him "the man who did not know how to hate." And you believe that stupid date-rape story? Clark Gable and Loretta Young had a hot affair on the set of "Call of the Wild." She and Gable were so intensely involved that it interfered with filming, so said the director. The date rape story comes from relatives of Loretta Young's and it did not come out until ALL of the principles involved (Gable, Young and their love child) were dead. They're heavily invested in portraying Loretta Young as a sweet, virginal (hah!) Catholic girl who would NEVER have had willing sex with the premier male sex symbol of his time Clark Gable, a man who was irresistible to women. Yeah, right!

“I never met anyone who didn't like Clark Gable,” director Mervyn LeRoy once said. “He was a great individual, a great citizen, and was admired by all who knew him.

R302 How does it make sense to get a read on a long term relationship from handful of interactions at the end of it? It's like me saying I know everything about the couple I heard fighting next to me in line at Starbucks for ten minutes.

I don't doubt Misfit Girl was in fact there, met Marilyn, and witnessed arguments and tensions between AM and MM, but she seems to have enjoyed her poetic embellishment of the same story over the years (I have read her posts for the past decade or so she's been posting them) and casting MM as some kind beautiful tragic goddess figure like Elton John immortally did for the worse.

She wasn't anything extremely special in the grand realm of Big Hollywood Stars, she's just been marketed to death by the Strasberg leeches and deified due to her early grave. If she died when she was older and faded, like Rita or Ava, she'd be remembered the same way as those two - iconic, but not THE icon.

What we can’t get around is that in The Misfits, Marilyn was FAT.

[quote] What we can’t get around is that in The Misfits, Marilyn was FAT.

She did not look her best in that movie. She looked bloated, unwell. She was addicted to pills and was in a bad state mentally. And those wigs! The wigs she wore in the Misfits were some of the worst I've ever seen in a movie. They looked totally artificial. I guess her real hair would have wilted in the heat, but God those wigs were pitiful.

[quote]Marilyn's last movie (Something's Got to Give) was unfinished because she died. Just days before, Fox rehired her with a substantial pay raise and agreed to can (director) George Cukor. She won; she won her biggest fight. And then she lost.

Yes all that is technically true but she had already caused big delays - and if Dean Martin had agreed to Fox's choice, Lee Remick, as her replacement, the movie would have continued without her.

[quote]She did not look her best in that movie. She looked bloated, unwell. She was addicted to pills and was in a bad state mentally. And those wigs!

I thought she looked good, very pretty. Her body looked great. Better than in Some Like It Hot (much thinner). I didn't really notice she wore wigs until I noticed it in color stills taken on the set. Now I'm very aware of it, but I don't think they look terrible, just not as good as real hair.

Joe D'maggio loved her. Too bad they couldn't have made it a further go.

DiMaggio and Miller were close in age, born in 1914 and 1915. Marilyn was born in 1926. Her first husband, James Daugherty, was born in 1921. So even though people have suggested Marilyn was looking for a father figure in her husbands, I don't really see it. The oldest one was only 12 years older than her, which isn't that much.

[quote] Joe D'maggio loved her. Too bad they couldn't have made it a further go.

Donald Spoto, in his worshipful biography of MM, said that she and DiMaggio were going to be remarried. I find that hard to believe. Their marriage didn't work the first time, how could it have worked the second time?

[quote] have suggested Marilyn was looking for a father figure in her husbands, I don't really see it.

She didn't have a choice with her first husband. She was "married off" to him keep from going back into an orphanage. I think a 12 year age difference is rather substantial. And she did look for Daddy substitutes. She called Miller "Poppy." Two of her important lovers, Nicholas Schenck and Johnny Hyde, were both thirty something years older than her. She'd have sex with just about anybody, but she definitely preferred older men.

[quote]I think a 12 year age difference is rather substantial.

Not unless the people dating are giving a lot of thought to age. Marilyn married DiMaggio when she was 28 and he was 40, Miller when she was 30 and he was 41. Men are still young, virile and attractive at 40 so I don't think it makes the man noticeably "older". Miller was a little old looking but DiMaggio still looked young.

[quote]For someone who reportedly wanted family so much, she wasn’t particularly close to her sister Bernice.

You should read My Sister Marilyn. And Bernice is still alive. She and her daughter Mona now live in North Carolina I believe.

[quote] I didn't really notice she wore wigs until I noticed it in color stills taken on the set.

Nope, that was Monroe's own hair. It was so over processed that they had to use a wig (from the Misfits) for her funeral.

R321 What was Marilyn's own hair? Maybe I wasn't clear, I meant I saw stills of her in the wig. In scenes from the film that were shot on set or on location. In costume.

R322 is talking about MM's wig on The Misfits. As someone mentioned, that awful heat meant they couldn't style her own hair. Her natural hair was OK when she died but her makeup man was too upset to spend ages styling it.

If you see her final pics on the beach her hair was looking fine.

Another interesting fact about The Misfits is that it's filmed in sequence. Nobody does that. But Miller insisted, so he could have some control. As a playwright, he thought linearly and couldn't fathom filming any other way. By being in sequence, you can watch Monroe disintegrate. She starts out rested, hopeful, and by the end, after she's been scapegoated by all the men to be the film's rotten core, she is bloated and sad. (Misfit Girl, are you related to Frank Taylor?)

Not everyone adored Clark Gable.

DO ANY OF YOU REALIZE THAT CLARK GABLE PLAYS GAY IN "THE MISFITS"??? HOW COULD YOU MISS THAT!! WHY AM I THE FIRST TO POINT IT OUT!!!!!

Seriously, his character is named Gaylord Langland, and everyone addresses him as "Gay".

[quote][R321] What was Marilyn's own hair? Maybe I wasn't clear, I meant I saw stills of her in the wig. In scenes from the film that were shot on set or on location. In costume.

As SGTG was the only film mentioned in the comment R322, I didn't realize the second quote was in reference to The Misfits, in which she did wear wigs.

[quote]Her natural hair was OK when she died but her makeup man was too upset to spend ages styling it.

Whitey never did Marilyn's hair. Agnes Flannigan was her hairdresser (pictured below prepping Monroe for her George Barris photoshoot in the Summer of 62. In fact, Agnes and Whitey got married. Sidney Guilaroff was supposed to do her hair but fainted at the sight of her corpse, hence the Misfits wig.

Link.

[quote]r327 Sidney Guilaroff was supposed to do her hair but fainted at the sight of her corpse

MARY!

I met Guilaroff one or two years before his death at one of the annual memorial services they hold for Marilyn on August 5th.

Boy, Marilyn looks almost dead in the pic at R328.

I heard that one of the policemen at the scene at Marilyn death said her hair was terrible "all burnt up from all those treatments." Maybe that's why a wig was used when getting her body ready for her funeral; her hair was in such bad shape it was a lost cause.

A wig from "The Misfits" was supposedly used to cover her hair. Ralph Greenson's (he was her weird psychiatrist) daughter was at the funeral. She said that when the casket lid was lifted for a final viewing "a shock of yellow hair popped out. I couldn't bear to look."

I

Marilyn's death photo is on the internet, R331. I don't think I'm going to post it.

I will post how messed up she looked when she was with Sinatra in the last months of her life. I think she really did get raped at Cal Neva Lodge. Not that he set it up though.

With Lawford and Sinatra - some party girls. I wonder if the Kennedy brothers were there this night?

When the lockdown started one of the distractions I indulged in was watching YT video interviews with women who knew Marilyn. It is extraordinary that many women had nothing but good things to say about Marilyn. They saw her vulnerability and innocence and instead of hating her for being who she was many felt protective over her. It seems she possessed authentic innocence and at the same time also was very ambitious and desperately wanted stardom. A deadly combination without someone you can trust to have your back when you need it.

[quote]Donald Spoto, in his worshipful biography of MM, said that she and DiMaggio were going to be remarried. I find that hard to believe. Their marriage didn't work the first time, how could it have worked the second time?

It didn't work out the first time because DiMaggio was insanely jealous and possessive and it drove Marilyn away from him. You can't be an actress and have a husband that freaks out about you being around other people.

I don't think Marilyn would have remarried DiMaggio. But they were lovers again after her marriage ended with Miller. And he was a good friend to her when she was hospitalized and at many other turns that we shall never hear about. But as we know, Marilyn had other men too. Story goes is that Joe kind of bored her and that he was far too possessive.

They try not to be seen together here during a trip they took to Florida in 1961. It's very tabloidy - but a great photo. She looks so simple and chic. He's looks both powerful and elegant.

"It seems she possessed authentic innocence and at the same time also was very ambitious and desperately wanted stardom."

Given her history, Marilyn can't have been genuinely innocent. Nobody who's been abandoned and allegedly raped as a child and sexually harassed on the job for years is innocent.

But if she was genuinely sweet and likable in spite of all that, that's really impressive! Most people who've been through that kind of hell get mean and bitter, but Marilyn didn't.

He fucked her, hard and often. Probably in the ass sometimes. He made her look him in the eye as she gagged on his huge cock. made her thank him as he came all over her fucking face. Then he would slap her.

^^ yes. She gave an interview to Look magazine about that once!

Mitzi got Marilyn.

Uh, no. R336.

Nothing you posted disputes what I said R341. Uh, no is such a teenage girl kind of response. I doubt that you are a teenager. Or even under 75.

In the photo I posted, Marilyn and DiMaggio did not want to be photographed. The body language speaks for itself.

Marilyn was bored with DiMaggio, outside of the bedroom. But he remained a champion for her. For the rest of his life.

I read something about Marilyn being on drugs and throwing up at Cal-Neva, Pat Lawford feeling sorry for her and trying to help her. I thought Sinatra had her come there to rest. Never heard about rape.

Your comment R337/R342 was this

[quote]They try not to be seen together here during a trip they took to Florida in 1961.

I simply posted a nice selection of photographs of them at the beach, going out to dinner and Monroe watching the Yankees Spring Training which disprove your statement.

I'd also like to know when Marilyn contacted you on your Ouija Board to tell you she was bored with DiMaggio in bed.

What about the word 'here' do you not understand? R344. As "in this instance". That particular photo. They did not want to be photographed. She looks distressed and he looks pissed. Everyone has seen those Florida pictures before. Marilyn couldn't do much in secret.

Yikes. Don't mess with me old man. You can't even reference the correct posts. Too many accounts open at once?

The quotes about Marilyn being bored with Dimaggio are in many of her biographies. Read one. Attributed. She loved his body and enjoyed the sex - but he did not inspire her in any way. And when they were married, he expected her to stay home and cook spaghetti.! They didn't have much in common. Dimaggio did not stimulate her enough to be a life partner. If Monroe wanted to get back with him - she had every opportunity.

Omg girls take it outside

Sex was not Marilyn and DiMaggio's problem. She said "If that was all there was to it we'd still be married."

[quote]You can't even reference the correct posts.

And you can't spell DiMaggio correctly.

R347 IS R344. He's famous for pretending to be two or three or more posters on one thread. Talks to himself. So when R347 says "take it outside girls" when I best him and prove him wrong, it's in the same dumb teenage girl speak of R341. He is NOT an outsider to our conflict. It's all the same messy old man.

The majority of the posts on this thread are from ONE poster with several DL accounts.

He takes on more than one point of view - but never directly strays from his inherent premise. SAD. LONELY. CRAZY.

Funny what someone said about the hot sex as I read she faked every orgasm she ever had and really had no interest in sex . Due to her sad past. That she slept with both men and women but it was about pleasing others and not herself. I also read she was in love with her female acting coach.

How would anyone know though if she was faking every orgasm she ever had?

R352 it was supposedly on those tapes her therapist made.

But those have always been a bit dodgy.

Wow. Well that’s interesting to read. I had no idea of such tapes. Dodgy though, huh.

R354 your obvious sarcasm is poorly done and you sound like an asshole.

Is it true MM had sex with Lili St. Cyr? And that she went muff diving on the Lytess woman?

R350 Can't you use the ignore function to see I'm not the same poster as R344? I said take it outside girls because I was joking about the two of you arguing. Wtf.

Sorry to disappoint you R350, I have no clue who you think I am, or want me to be, but I have just one account. Of course, you'll say I'm lying, but I know my truth.

"Funny what someone said about the hot sex as I read she faked every orgasm she ever had and really had no interest in sex . Due to her sad past."

For some reason, I've always thought this was true, and I think it's true of a lot of female "sex symbols". It's a feeling I have, that anyone who genuinely likes sex will try to get the relationship and the sex on their own terms, but someone who is in the relationship because they want something from their partner will concentrate on pleasing the partner. They know the sex isn't going to be fun, so they're just in it for the end goal, whatever that may be.

So Monroe was definitely willing to have joyless sex to advance her career, but I've always suspected that she had joyless sex to get people to fall in love with her. She wasn't her authentic self with straight men, she was the innocent/sexy "child-woman" of their fantasies, and anyone who tries that hard to please without being pleased is following an agenda.

[quote] I also read she was in love with her female acting coach.

No, her female acting coach, Natasha Lytess, was in love with HER. She supposedly told Marilyn "You're wonderful! I love you!" and Marilyn said "Natasha don't love me, just teach me." It was an intense relationship and for a time Marilyn lived with Lytess. Their relationship may have partly been sexual. Some people put forth the notion that Marilyn loved sex with women but the relationship with Lytess seems to be the only one she ever had with another woman that may have included sex. On movie sets she needed Lytess there with her all the time and it annoyed her directors to no end. But as soon as the Strasbergs got their hooks into her she dumped Lytess flat. Lytess never really recovered from Marilyn's cutting her out of her life. She was indeed in love with her.

Those crazy tapes of her psychiatric sessions supposedly made by her weird psychiatrist never existed. There is no proof, none at all, that they ever existed. An old guy named John Miner who was some kind of medical examiner said he "heard" the tapes and "took extensive notes." That's all the proof he can provide, which is none. In the tapes Marilyn sounds like what a middle aged man would think she sounded like: a brainless, sex crazed bubble head.

I'll take flakey over cruel in actresses. Nutsy is OK by me, too. But my take on Marilyn was she was cruel by being uncaring of others in so many ways. It may have been beyond her control - or not - she didn't go diva at the beginning of her career because she knew she was expendable then - but when she had the power she pushed it to the limit.

She wasn't a diva. Dean Martin wouldn't have refused to go on with Something's Got To Give, with another actress, if Marilyn was a diva. He'd have been glad to get rid of her. A guy who worked 10 years with Jerry Lewis, who eventually drove him crazy with his narcissism.

Hey, it could have been worse - she could have hooked up with Philip Roth, who makes Arthur Miller seem angelic by comparison.

Yes, I read Claire Bloom's book.

R363 Oh, you were the one.

C'mon, 362, she tried to get Hope Lange fired from Bus Stop. That's not Diva-ish? It's not surprising that she wasn't a Diva to Dean Martin.

Also, what about that serial thing she would do where she would move on from people in her life after she got what she needed from them? (Hello, Natasha Lytess)

Even Norman Rosten, a great friend of hers, said that, although she was very gallant and generous, she was also a difficult person who brought her troubles with her wherever she went.

I don't think of Marilyn as a victim or a saint. That's boring to me. Her contradictions are what make her one of the most fascinating people who ever lived. She had her reasons for doing the things she did and it seems like she was probably the kind of person who felt guilty about things later on, afterthe fact. I think she had a hard time not thinking about things that she didn't want to think about.

"But Marilyn wasn’t just passive-aggressive; at times she was frankly hateful. Her personal hairdresser, George Masters, remembered that if he was “two minutes late, she was furious, though she thought nothing of keeping others waiting for hours or days.” Masters called her the coldest person he ever knew, while Billy Wilder, who directed two of her best films, once said that he had “never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe,” perhaps thinking of her tirade after she watched rushes of Some Like It Hot—“I’m not going back into that fucking film until Wilder reshoots my opening”—or her response to an assistant director’s knock on her dressing-room door: “Go fuck yourself.”

But such accounts are typically overlooked, or anyway rationalized, by those acquainted with them. There’s no pathos in the images they suggest; but there’s pathos aplenty in the image of Marilyn as an orphaned angel; as the candle in the wind of Elton John song; as a martyr of celebrity, of Hollywood, of men and patriarchy and the male gaze. This image—and, with variations, it’s finally a single image—excludes those traits it can’t, and doesn’t want to, accommodate: toughness, willfulness, petulance, truculence, all of which, and then some, can be found in a woman who demonstrates, like no one else, the folly of trusting images, which can never do more than hint at what we believe, or choose to believe, they reveal."

C'mon, 362, she tried to get Hope Lange fired from Bus Stop. That's not Diva-ish? It's not surprising that she wasn't a Diva to Dean Martin.

Also, what about that serial thing she would do where she would move on from people in her life after she got what she needed from them? (Hello, Natasha Lytess)

Even Norman Rosten, a great friend of hers, said that, although she was very gallant and generous, she was also a difficult person who brought her troubles with her wherever she went.

I don't think of Marilyn as a victim or a saint. That's boring to me. Her contradictions are what make her one of the most fascinating people who ever lived. She had her reasons for doing the things she did and it seems like she was probably the kind of person who felt guilty about things later on, afterthe fact. I think she had a hard time not thinking about things that she didn't want to think about.

"But Marilyn wasn’t just passive-aggressive; at times she was frankly hateful. Her personal hairdresser, George Masters, remembered that if he was “two minutes late, she was furious, though she thought nothing of keeping others waiting for hours or days.” Masters called her the coldest person he ever knew, while Billy Wilder, who directed two of her best films, once said that he had “never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe,” perhaps thinking of her tirade after she watched rushes of Some Like It Hot—“I’m not going back into that fucking film until Wilder reshoots my opening”—or her response to an assistant director’s knock on her dressing-room door: “Go fuck yourself.”

But such accounts are typically overlooked, or anyway rationalized, by those acquainted with them. There’s no pathos in the images they suggest; but there’s pathos aplenty in the image of Marilyn as an orphaned angel; as the candle in the wind of Elton John song; as a martyr of celebrity, of Hollywood, of men and patriarchy and the male gaze. This image—and, with variations, it’s finally a single image—excludes those traits it can’t, and doesn’t want to, accommodate: toughness, willfulness, petulance, truculence, all of which, and then some, can be found in a woman who demonstrates, like no one else, the folly of trusting images, which can never do more than hint at what we believe, or choose to believe, they reveal."

C'mon, 362, she tried to get Hope Lange fired from Bus Stop. That's not Diva-ish? It's not surprising that she wasn't a Diva to Dean Martin.

Also, what about that serial thing she would do where she would move on from people in her life after she got what she needed from them? (Hello, Natasha Lytess)

Even Norman Rosten, a great friend of hers, said that, although she was very gallant and generous, she was also a difficult person who brought her troubles with her wherever she went.

I don't think of Marilyn as a victim or a saint. That's boring to me. Her contradictions are what make her one of the most fascinating people who ever lived. She had her reasons for doing the things she did and it seems like she was probably the kind of person who felt guilty about things later on, afterthe fact. I think she had a hard time not thinking about things that she didn't want to think about.

"But Marilyn wasn’t just passive-aggressive; at times she was frankly hateful. Her personal hairdresser, George Masters, remembered that if he was “two minutes late, she was furious, though she thought nothing of keeping others waiting for hours or days.” Masters called her the coldest person he ever knew, while Billy Wilder, who directed two of her best films, once said that he had “never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe,” perhaps thinking of her tirade after she watched rushes of Some Like It Hot—“I’m not going back into that fucking film until Wilder reshoots my opening”—or her response to an assistant director’s knock on her dressing-room door: “Go fuck yourself.”

But such accounts are typically overlooked, or anyway rationalized, by those acquainted with them. There’s no pathos in the images they suggest; but there’s pathos aplenty in the image of Marilyn as an orphaned angel; as the candle in the wind of Elton John song; as a martyr of celebrity, of Hollywood, of men and patriarchy and the male gaze. This image—and, with variations, it’s finally a single image—excludes those traits it can’t, and doesn’t want to, accommodate: toughness, willfulness, petulance, truculence, all of which, and then some, can be found in a woman who demonstrates, like no one else, the folly of trusting images, which can never do more than hint at what we believe, or choose to believe, they reveal."

Well, we’ve certainly been given a lot to read!

[quote] Dean Martin wouldn't have refused to go on with Something's Got To Give, with another actress, if Marilyn was a diva.

Dean Martin had no great loyalty to Marilyn Monroe. He just wanted out of the damned movie. It wasn't a good movie in the first place and it was hell making it; he just wanted out.

And he wanted to be in a box office hit. MM was a bigger star than Miss Lee Remick.

[quote] MM was a bigger star than Miss Lee Remick.

Marilyn's star was fading at the time of her death. Her last two movies, "Let's Make Love" and "The Misfits", were flops. She needed a hit. But I don't think "Something's Got To Give" would have been one. It was a remake of an old Cary Grant movie, a retread. In outtakes of SGTG it's evident she and Martin have no chemistry at all. The movie would have failed and Dean Martin knew is, which is why he just wanted to be out of the whole mess.

"But my take on Marilyn was she was cruel by being uncaring of others in so many ways"

I don't think she was cruel, a cruel person is someone who enjoys making others miserable. Marilyn made others miserable more through thoughtlessness than cruelty, when she was having a bad time due to anxiety or unhappiness or other personal issues, she'd leave others waiting for hours or days as if their time was unimportant and their feelings didn't matter.

I think that's why some people were willing to put up with the shit she pulled on movie sets, she made quite a habit of behaving badly and some people refused to work with her more than once... but others were willing to put up with her shit, and I think one of the reasons was that they didn't see any malice in her behavior.

R371 Somethings Got To Give was filmed, with some changes, in 1963 as Move Over Darling. It was a big hit

"The film grossed $12,705,882 in the United States,[2] becoming one of the biggest hits of the year and helping keep 20th Century Fox afloat after the losses it had incurred in the making of Cleopatra."

MM's version might have been bigger due to her nude scene

R371 I think Somethings got to Give would have been a hit, because it had the Marilyn everyone wanted to watch : Glamorous, flirty, beautiful, in a comedy movie, and in COLORS.

Marilyn herself was never fond of doing movie in black and white since she knew she looked better in colors.

She needed a hit. But I don't think "Something's Got To Give" would have been one. It was a remake of an old Cary Grant movie, a retread. In outtakes of SGTG it's evident she and Martin have no chemistry at all. The movie would have failed and Dean Martin knew is, which is why he just wanted to be out of the whole mess.

The movie was eventually made the following year, with a new cast (except Thelma Ritter, who was also in the Monroe/Cukor version) starring Doris Day, James Garner, and Polly Bergen, rather than Marilyn, Dean, and Cyd Charisse. It was a big hit, regardless of being a retread. And director Michael Gordon was no George Cukor.

[quote]"The film grossed $12,705,882 in the United States,[2] becoming one of the biggest hits of the year and helping keep 20th Century Fox afloat after the losses it had incurred in the making of Cleopatra.

After Marilyn was fired, she was re-hired, so I assume had she lived, and continued with the film, Martin still would have been the male lead. So it doesn't look like his motive for holding out for Monroe was getting out of the film.

[quote]She needed a hit. But I don't think "Something's Got To Give" would have been one. It was a remake of an old Cary Grant movie, a retread. In outtakes of SGTG it's evident she and Martin have no chemistry at all. The movie would have failed and Dean Martin knew is, which is why he just wanted to be out of the whole mess.

The movie was eventually made the following year, with a new cast (except Thelma Ritter, who was also in the Monroe/Cukor version) starring Doris Day, James Garner, and Polly Bergen, rather than Marilyn, Dean, and Cyd Charisse. It was a big hit, regardless of being a retread. And director Michael Gordon was no George Cukor.

"The film grossed $12,705,882 in the United States,[2] becoming one of the biggest hits of the year and helping keep 20th Century Fox afloat after the losses it had incurred in the making of Cleopatra.

After Marilyn was fired, she was re-hired, so I assume, had she lived, and continued with the film, Martin still would have been the male lead. So it doesn't look like his motive for holding out for Monroe was getting out of the film.

[quote] Somethings Got To Give was filmed, with some changes, in 1963 as Move Over Darling. It was a big hit

Sure it was. It starred Doris Day and James Garner, a very popular movie couple. Of course people would want to see them together in a movie. MM and Dean Martin, not so much.

[quote] After Marilyn was fired, she was re-hired, so I assume, had she lived, and continued with the film, Martin still would have been the male lead. So it doesn't look like his motive for holding out for Monroe was getting out of the film.

He wanted out and figured if he said he wouldn't work with anyone but Monroe that would be the end of it. If they rehired her (what a DUMB thing to do; she was a trainwreck) and he had to finish the movie with her he would have fulfilled his professional obligation. But working on the film was sheer hell for him, having a co-star who couldn't remember her lines and rarely showed. up.

Yeah, I’ve always seen it as Dean Martin trying to be polite as well rather than having some great loyalty to MM - Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. were closer to her out of the rat pack. George Cukor probably voiced the actual thoughts the cast and crew had when he fired her for her behavior.

Liz was born covered in black hair, from head to toe. Without makeup - she looked like a shorter fatter Adele, with a moustache.

[quote]Sure it was. It starred Doris Day and James Garner, a very popular movie couple. Of course people would want to see them together in a movie. MM and Dean Martin, not so much.

Day and Garner only made 2 movies together, both in 1963 - The Thrill Of It All , and Move Over, Darling. I guess you could say they were a "popular movie couple" for a year. As for MM and Dean Martin, you have no idea people wouldn't want to see them. That's just total fantasy.

[quote]Marilyn's star was fading at the time of her death.

Monroe received the 1961 Golden Globe Award as "World Film Favorite" in March 1962, five months before her death.

[quote] As for MM and Dean Martin, you have no idea people wouldn't want to see them. That's just total fantasy.

Neither of them were big box office draws at the time. And outtakes from the film show they had no chemistry at all. I think it's YOUR "total fantasy" that this movie, which seemed to be cursed, would have been a box office smash.

[quote] Monroe received the 1961 Golden Globe Award as "World Film Favorite" in March 1962, five months before her death.

So what? Winning a Golden Globe isn't a stellar achievement. Her last two films were flops. She was an aging sex symbol. Her career was on the downswing. She supposedly had a lot of projects in the works and a new movie contract but judging from her behavior during the filming of "Something's Got To Give" none of it would have amounted to much or come to fruition. Her are two facts: she couldn't remember lines, was always late, and frequently didn't show up at all. Yeah, THAT kind of behavior does wonders for an actor's career.

It was like 70 years ago. Move on.

^ More like 60 years ago.

Some Marilyn hating OLD troll keeps talking to himself in this thread. And it's boring as fuck.

In Something’s got to give she actually looked better than she had in Some like it hot but I wish Billy Wilder would’ve directed her again. He had the magic touch. If he had done that film I think it would’ve had a better chance, had it ever crossed the finished line.

She looked sensational in 1962, the idiot poster who claimed she was over the hill and that SGTG would flop has no idea.

Cukor was fired off the picture at MM's request and her salary was increased. Her career was far from over when she died.

[quote]Her personal hairdresser, George Masters.

He wasn't. He did her hair for the Bert Stern shoot in June 1962. That's it.

Gladys Rasmussen was her hairdresser from 1952-56 and Kenneth Battelle was her hairdresser from 1958-62.

[quote] She looked sensational in 1962, the idiot poster who claimed she was over the hill and that SGTG would flop has no idea.

If you thought Marilyn Monroe was at the top of her game in 1962 then you truly are a raving halfwit MM worshiper. STTG was supposed to be her "comeback" picture and she couldn't even get it done! Mort Viner, Dean Martin's agent had this to say about that debacle of a film. When it was announced that Lee Remick was to replace Monroe:

"That was the end of it as far as Dean was concerned. He called me and said "Get me out of this movie. Jesus Christ, this is the biggest three ring circus in show business and I'm the clown in the middle of it all" So we referenced a clause in his deal that said he would only work with Marilyn. And he quit the film saying "No Marilyn. No Dean." It was bullshit, really. The real reason is that he didn't want to start over with another actress and do all that work again, on a movie that was not that great to being with. He felt bad for the crew. A lot of people worked hard on that goddamn movie. It was a shame. But it was jinxed from the start. On the very first day she didn't show up for work, the very first day, Dean said "That's it. This picture will not get made."

"Her career was far from over when she died."

She still had loads of potential as an actress, but Hollywood was run by straight men back then, straight man who believed that women ceased to exist, or matter, after 35. Marilyn was 36 and still a knockout in 1962, but Hollywood wouldn't have had much to offer her in the years to come, just because it was Hollywood. She'd mostly have been offered roles in the weak farces of the era, playing sex wives opposite Dean Martin or Tony Curtis, she could have kept going for a while as a sort of sexier Doris Day.

Of course Marilyn wanted more from the art of acting than Doris Day roles, but I don't think the studios would have developed a lot of primo scripts for their aging and unstable property, and as far as producing her own films... On her own productions she'd run up the budget single-handedly by spending 2/3 of the working days having meltdowns in her trailer, so she'd have had a hell of a time getting financing for future productions. So IMHO Hollywood wouldn't have had a lot more to offer her, and of course she could never have done theater. In the theater you meet your fucking cues on time every time, an actor who sits in their dressing room until they feel strong enough to do their job is fired by the end of the play.

[quote]Neither of them were big box office draws at the time. And outtakes from the film show they had no chemistry at all. I think it's YOUR "total fantasy" that this movie, which seemed to be cursed, would have been a box office smash.

Unlike you, I don't have a crystal ball into the past to know how audiences would react. I only said the film that resulted was a big hit, to counter your argument that "a retread" (of My Favorite Wife) was a bad thing.

Some of the things you claim make little sense. "Neither of them were big box office draws at the time." Then why would Fox co-star them in a big "A" picture with first-rate production values and a big-name supporting cast (Cyd Charisse, Thelma Ritter, Phil Silvers, etc.), and George Cukor directing (who won a Best Director Oscar only two years later)? Grow up, dude.

MM was once able to do the kind of light comedy (see: Monkey Business) that DD made her bread and butter in the 60s, but she abandoned that for acting aspirations way beyond her ability. It's not a crime to be a limited performer if you excel in those limits, but for Marilyn it was an insult to be pigeonholed into fluffy comedies. It always makes me laugh when Marilyn stans insist she could have done grand Broadway shows or Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate - this just wasn't in her in toolbox.

I have read in past biographies that MM was constantly being told by both Strasburgs and Natasha that she was the greatest star and she could do anything that her heart desired. They were forever pumping her up with overblown praise for the slightest action she took, both on screen and off. They knew who was buttering their toast and wanted to keep her happy even if it meant lying to her. She bought it all, which is very sad because like someone above wrote, she could be brilliant in light comedy films.

Thelma Ritter was in The Misfits with Marilyn. She must have been willing to be in another movie with her.

Thelma and Marilyn were also in All About Eve together.

I actually do think she could have carried off the right dramatic roles, she did have the rare gift of letting the camera see into her soul, and seeming completely real and authentic onscreen. Sure, she was great in light comedies, and so many light comedies were made in the early 1960s that it was the likeliest career path for her, but I do think she had the chops for more.

But not the discipline. Like I said her work habits made theater impossible, and I also suspect that the demands of dramatic roles weren't good for her mental health. I think her attempts to become a serious actor cost her more than she gained.

[quote] Unlike you, I don't have a crystal ball into the past to know how audiences would react. I only said the film that resulted was a big hit, to counter your argument that "a retread" (of My Favorite Wife) was a bad thing.

"The film that resulted" was quite different from what the MM vehicle would have been. And that's really all it was, an MM vehicle designed to jumpstart her career, which was lagging. And in Dean Martin's opinion the damn movie wasn't very good in the first place. Chances are it wouldn't have been an immense hit. I guess YOUR crystal ball tells you that if the picture had gotten finished audinces would have been stampeding to go see it. But your crystal ball is evidently full of wishful thinking on your part.

[quote] Some of the things you claim make little sense. "Neither of them were big box office draws at the time." Then why would Fox co-star them in a big "A" picture with first-rate production values and a big-name supporting cast (Cyd Charisse, Thelma Ritter, Phil Silvers, etc.), and George Cukor directing (who won a Best Director Oscar only two years later)? Grow up, dude.

Sweetie, you just don't know what you're talking about. Although neither of them were top box office draws at the time it was thought that the pairing of MM and Dean Martin might interest audiences. And of course competent actors and a good director and crew were hired; why wouldn't they have been? And it wasn't exactly an "A picture"; it was a remake.. You're just a silly Marilyn Monroe worshipping simpleton.

R397 You're a simpleton if you think a remake can't be an A picture. What was A Star Is Born (1954), a cheapie? You're ridiculous. Give up. A simple watch of the assembled material from Something's Got To Give shows it's a big, glossy, first-class Hollywood romantic comedy of that era. And it's also extremely good. Nobody wants to read any more of this nonsense.

R393 Marilyn did dramatic parts, she was good in Don't Bother To Knock, Niagara, and yes, The Misfits. And the comedy-drama, Bus Stop.

[quote] You're a simpleton if you think a remake can't be an A picture. What was A Star Is Born (1954), a cheapie? You're ridiculous. Give up. A simple watch of the assembled material from Something's Got To Give shows it's a big, glossy, first-class Hollywood romantic comedy of that era. And it's also extremely good. Nobody wants to read any more of this nonsense.

SGTG was no "A Star Is Born." And how can you can it's "extremely good?" It NEVER GOT MADE, you poor delusional fool. It got rehashed as a Doris Day movie, but the movie that you are in love with never existed. By the way, the outtakes show that it was shaping up to be a mediocre comedy and that Monroe was seriously unable to give a performance. George Cukor described the completed scenes as ‘"Unusable. Marilyn was acting as if she were underwater." Of course her crazy fans, and you are surely one of them, will dispute that but George Cukor knew what he was talking about. He was THERE.

Nobody wants to read any more of your craziness. You're an insane MM fan, totally off your nut. Give it up. You're pathetic.

Marilyn starred in some of the biggest hits of the 50s: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How To Marry A Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot. Why do you think she kept getting hired?

Cukor would blame it all on MM, she had him fired when she was rehired. People also forget she was legitimately sick for a lot of the shoot, even her housekeeper Eunice confirms this.

In the released footage of SGTG I think she comes across really well.

Oh and Let's Make Love was NOT a flop:

"Given the box office popularity of Monroe, and the press surrounding Montand and their relationship at the time, the film was considered to be a disappointment, although it was, in truth, a moderate success. The high expectations and modest results have led to many viewing the film as either a total flop or a huge success. It opened at the top of the box office its first weekend, but made only $6.54 million in total. It was the first film starring Monroe to earn so little money on its initial release, although it was the top-grossing musical of the year and one of only two musicals in the top 20 in 1960. It fared better in overseas markets than in the United States."

A couple of weeks ago there was some thread something like "Why do gay men identify with MM?" and I was like, really now?

This is a woman who couldn't calm down and stop thinking about her troubles enough to sleep without pills. A woman who struggled to get enough rest every night to be as beautiful as everybody wanted her to be the next day. Many gay men don't worry about such things?

Then there's of course the whole depression angle. There are many writings of MM's that have been collected over the years. Many of them are variations on the theme of "I wish I were dead." She was a person who pretended to be happy for a long time until the mask just started to crack. Certainly not an uncommon thing among gay men, either.

"You're fabulous, Marilyn! The whole world adores you! Keep dancing! You're gorgeous!"

Well, she was someone with a miserable childhood that many people could not have overcome, who did become one of the most famous and popular movie stars of all time. How many people achieve anything like that? She had mental/emotional problems, the lack of sympathy for which would be pretty shocking, here, if I wasn't already used to DL. If you don't enjoy her work, fine, but she's been dead a long time, I don't get why you have the need to flog her. And, no, I'm not a superfan, I just have always liked her work.

"A couple of weeks ago there was some thread something like "Why do gay men identify with MM?" and I was like, really now?"

I think a lot of today's young people, gay and straight, identify with her - because they belong to the generation that thinks they have a 100% rate of depression and anxiety.

So yes, people who spend their lives trying to look thrilled to be alive on social media and trying to cope with "depression and anxiety" could sure see something to identify with in Marilyn, so I think her popularity is going to last at least another generation.

[quote]George Cukor described the completed scenes as ‘"Unusable. Marilyn was acting as if she were underwater."

Hedda Hopper attributed this statement to Cukor, when in reality, it was supplied to her by Fox Publicity.

[quote]Of course her crazy fans, and you are surely one of them, will dispute that but George Cukor knew what he was talking about. He was THERE.

I was very lucky to befriend Evelyn Moriarty, MM's stand-in on Let's Make Love, The Misfits and SGTG. Like Cukor, SHE WAS THERE and had nothing but contempt for the director as he forced Marilyn to spend an entire day filming a scene with an uncooperative dog.

Take the time to educate yourself R399.

[quote] Take the time to educate yourself

Oh shut up, you Marilyn worshipping twat. Cukor wasa just trying to get the goddamn film finished and within the budget. He was trying to get the work done. It must have been driving him crazy to have to deal with a dog that wasn't cooperating and an actress that rarely showed up. She'd missed twenty days out of thirty two; TWENTY days. Poor Cukor, such a good director, and having to put up with all that shit.

[quote]Oh shut up, you Marilyn worshipping twat.

When people have no valid argument or point, they resort to name calling. The entire SGTG fiasco is clearly laid out in the special from Monroe's own studio. Pity some can't stand the truth.

[quote] Pity some can't stand the truth.

And what "truth" is that? Well, the simple truth is that Marilyn Monroe was a horror to work with on the picture and her performance was, to be kind, inadequate. An article on the subject said this, and it, of course, the truth:

“Fox was weak and stupid and deserved everything it got,” Cukor said off record. But Marilyn deserved what she got, too. It was obvious to him from her brief appearances on the screen that she couldn’t function anymore. After shooting for seven weeks, they had five days work of work, but the sad thing was that the five days were no good. Marilyn couldn’t remember her lines, acting as though she were under water, and in the afternoon, she was under alcohol. To her credit, Marilyn was intelligent enough to know she was no good.

Working with Marilyn for the second time, Cukor realized that as a director, he had "very little influence” on her. All he tried to do was to create a climate that was agreeable for her. In spite of her shenanigans, he was sorry for her because he believed her career was over. When Fox finally called it quits, Cukor was relieved, for all he could see was disaster looming up for all of them. Cukor’s words of cure and comfort proved a consolation to Fox’s Jerry Wald. Wald felt better when he looked over his list of upcoming projects and saw there were no roles to be tailored for a certain blonde actress.

He wasn't The One for her.

R405 he made her shoot that scene over again all day in the blazing sun.

Fox/Hedda/Cukor made those comments about MM's work being unusable years before the footage was released to the public (in the 80s). If you actually watch what she filmed she was terrific and looked great, in spite of being ill.

They wouldn't have hired her back for more money if they thought she was unable to perform. How do you explain them scrambling to sign her up to more movies if they didn't think she was bankable?

"Fox relented and re-hired her, even agreeing to pay her more than her previous salary of $100,000, with the stipulation that she make this and one more film at $500,000 per film, plus a bonus if completed on time."

"Fox asked Kanter to fashion a film around all the existing footage, and release it without ever having to bring Monroe back. This request came despite Fox's insistence that only mere minutes existed of Monroe on film, despite there being crates full of scenes shot repeatedly with no perceptible difference."

Marilyn was bullied by Cukor, making her repeat scenes endlessly for no point other than to get his own back, like Wilder did on SLIH

I'll believe a two hour plus special by her home studio over some "article" you cut and pasted from with no substantiating link, R410.

The proof is in the footage and interviews and studio documents. But since you haven't watched it, you no not of what you bitch. And why are you on this thread if you hate Monroe so much? Be off, before someone drops a house on you.

Evelyn had a word for people like you. "Assholes."

Marilyn Monroe was highly unprofessional and unreliable by the late fifties. She was never going to be a great actress, her work in Bus Stop is quite amateurish. But she was a luminous screen presence, a true movie STAR and the most beautifully photographed woman in the history of the world. As a photographer's model she is without peer. It's those hundreds of thousands of still photos and her absolute physical perfection in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that make her an ICON for all time. She doesn't even look human in that film - she looks created in a lab. And she's delightfully camp and deadpan and very interesting. She knew what she was doing and she might have been a great dramatic actress. But she decompensated a bit more year after year. Addictions are not great motivators. Her life was not a linear line of loss. We all age - and yet she was at the loveliest she had been in 5 years at the time of her death.

The photos of Marilyn, whether high glam, sensitive soul, plain-pretty girl or sex bomb are almost all fascinating. She was also most elegant and very beautiful in simple clothes and suits. Much has been written about her relationship to the still camera. Those images haunt and move and delight us still. There isn't a mood that Marilyn could not convey and she did it with every fibre of her being. That alone tells us she was a GREAT actress - as long as she had time to do it till it was right - or when just captured by the light. She wasn't trusting enough to turn her will and creativity over to male film directors. She started out as little more than the producer's casting couch whore on the right. She was never respected by most of the men in the business. Her female co stars and friends all spoke very highly of her. Even when she DID make them wait. Photographers and poets and brilliant minds loved her more.

That Girl

Cukor hated her. I believe those hours of footage of her emoting were filmed so he could take the rushes to the studio heads and say "look - she's wandering around aimlessly; she's acting like she's underwater".

That little devil Cukor got her fired. Then when saner heads prevailed then they hired her back at five times her original salary, plus $500k for her next movie. Plus let her dictate that Cukor should be replaced by a Director of their choice.

If the heads of Fox felt she was so shit in her performance maybe this was not wise? Fuck the poster who keeps trying to shit on MM.

Those of us who watched the footage see she's still sensational in the unfinished movie.

Kiss my Ass, George Cukor.

Technically, I think it’s so interesting Polly Bergen wears some of the clothes designed for Cyd Charise and the aborted version. It reminds me of the business side of things. These weren’t just generic costumes - the studio was like, “We just spent a shitload of money on these Jean Louis creations!” and they were set carefully aside for the right time.

The house set was also the same.

AND the pool is still embedded in the floor of Stage 14.

[quote] Cukor hated her.

You know how bitchy fags can be.

R422 are you a Hollywood insider?

Well, she looked lovely on film at the end, after spending hours in the hair and makeup dept. (like all stars had) but the fact that she killed herself and couldn’t manage her ordinary day-to-day life KIND OF proved she couldn’t handle the rigors of movie making any more…. where even more people were depending on her.

She was burning out fast.

Take a hike R425. You must be near the end of life yourself. Godspeed.

"She wasn't trusting enough to turn her will and creativity over to male film directors. She started out as little more than the producer's casting couch whore on the right. She was never respected by most of the men in the business."

You could be right, maybe she never got used to taking orders from the kind of man who used her as a cumdump early in her career. Maybe that's one reason she tried so hard to become a Serious Actor and a producer, so she wouldn't have to be in the position of taking orders from her directors.

But the fact is, movies are a collaborative process, and you can't make movies with Marilyn's method of waiting until she felt like working, it's a complex process of making multiple takes and assembling them into a movie, within a given budget. Producing her own films did indeed make her the director's boss, and was a good career move in theory, but she did make things difficult for herself by single-handedly running up her own budgets. And an independent producer who ignores the bottom line isn't going to have an easy time getting financed...

[quote]But the fact is, movies are a collaborative process, and you can't make movies with Marilyn's method of waiting until she felt like working,

You mean like Liz and Cleopatra?

R428 Liz's delays were mostly because of health problems, not doing things like flying out to meet JFK for his birthday party, and following Cleopatra, she didn't have that much of a big Hollywood career save a couple of flops with Burton. Marilyn would have gone this exact same way.

Also, the MM stans demonizing George Cukor for the grand crime wanting an actress to be professional are insane. Marilyn was not some fucking deity who a seasoned professional like Cukor should have bowed to. Christ. It's not bullying for a director to you know, DIRECT their actors.

Cukor was a prissy old fag. He only liked female actresses that he could swoon over or who were gay, like him. Marilyn was too womanly and sexual for him to give a fuck about. He wasn't nice to Audrey Hepburn either. She was TOO much of a lady.

Read up on how LIZ Taylor almost single handedly bankrupted FOX studios with her self indulgent fuckery and LOTS of FUCKING during the years long Cleopatra shoot R429. You seem to enjoy reading things about movies just after your time.

[quote]Producing her own films did indeed make her the director's boss, and was a good career move in theory, but she did make things difficult for herself by single-handedly running up her own budgets. And an independent producer who ignores the bottom line isn't going to have an easy time getting financed...

And this is where you reveal your ignorance, R427.

Despite Marilyn’s issues, Bus Stop was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. However, it was produced by 20th Century-Fox, not Marilyn Monroe Productions. Despite all the problems on set and her unprofessional behavior, The Prince and the Showgirl (the only film produced and funded by MMP), was completed in less time than scheduled, came in under budget, and required only two days of reshoots. This was reported in several biographies.

Marilyn’s production company dissolved soon after this one film because of the conflict between Arthur Miller and Milton Greene. Miller was jealous of his wife’s close relationship with Greene and Greene’s influence. Unsurprisingly, Marilyn eventually sided with her husband over her good friend, but that turned out to be a mistake. They paid Greene off to leave the company and he only asked for $100,000—half his original investment. She told him to take more. His response: “Let me be the only one in your life never to take more.”

It’s best if your criticisms are based on reported facts rather than on assumptions in your head.

I don't know how Liz managed to maintain her stardom when she single-handedly ran up budgets rather higher than Marilyn ever had, I think a big part of it was that she got SO MUCH publicity that the studio PTB thought the public would pay anything to see her, in anything. Another part of it was that she managed to make people think of her as an Alpha female, the "most beautiful", the richest, the one men were always dumping their wives and buying massive diamonds for. Hollywood respects that kind of dominance.

Marilyn never had that Alpha aura. Too vulnerable, too unstable, too aware of a lowly past, too eager to improve herself and win respect. Ambitious people try to better themselves, real Alphas assume they're already the best, and that you know it.

Liz was a bloated old booze bag her whole adult life. She grew stupider each year. She could convince men to fuck her and give her jewelry. That WAS her talent. She liked being beaten up too. Bonus.

[quote] They wouldn't have hired her back for more money if they thought she was unable to perform. How do you explain them scrambling to sign her up to more movies if they didn't think she was bankable?

Someone said of how the studio was being run at that time: "the lunatics are running the asylum." I guess stupid studio executives still believed that Monroe would be a big moneymaker for them. But I doubt she would have been. She was an aging sex symbol; she couldn't have gone on playing the breathy blonde sex goddess much longer. And judging from her behavior on SGTG she was incapable of working, constantly absent, not knowing her lines. Of course she was still very famous, but famous don't cut it on a movie set. They hired her back, gave her a new contract, thought she'd be making big money for them in the future...and a few weeks later she was dead. That kind of says it all.

"In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, however, he places two women front and center as his leads: the man-eating Dorothy and the gold-digging Lorelei, who, played by Marilyn Monroe, is like the parody of what men want in a woman, but whose predatory instincts are revealed when she imagines Charles Coburn’s head turning into a humongous diamond. Unlike Cukor or Mizoguchi, those supposed masters of directing women, who too often regard the opposite sex with little more than reverence or pity, Hawks actually gives Dorothy and Lorelei sexual agency. From the opening image of the movie, when the two gals pop on screen in their bombshell red dresses against a black, then blue, backdrop, it’s clear he intends for them to dominate the screen from start to finish. This is no mere cheesecake spectacle served up for a horny male audience. Even at their most glamorous, in the opening number or during the iconic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” centerpiece of the film, Monroe and Russell always look directly into the camera, the gazed gazing back, fully aware of their power over the men in the film and in the audience. In fact, if there’s a single film that could shatter Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze” it’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The camera’s point of view in much of Hollywood cinema may be a male one, regarding women with fetishistic fascination, but Hawks shows how it can be easily hijacked by gals smart enough to control—and manipulate—what it is that their drooling dude audience is seeing."

^ that's it, R436! Bravo.

R436 I don't disagree with the assessment of GPB, but in what world does Cukor look down on or pity women? Certainly not the world where he directed The Women, Gaslight, The Philadelphia Story, Dinner at Eight, Girls About Town, Born Yesterday, and A Star is Born. What a dumb and uneducated assessment of his work. The writer didn't need to say that to praise GPB.

[quote] I'll believe a two hour plus special by her home studio over some "article" you cut and pasted from with no substantiating link, [R410].

You'll believe anything, because you're stupid. No doubt the studio would try to put a positive spin on the debacle that was the wretched movie SGTG and attempt to portray Monroe as troubled, but also divine, fabulous, incomparably gorgeous and just a poor dear who needed sympathy. So what if she never showed up for work and didn't know her lines. The poor darling wasn't well and George Cukor was so mean to her. Even her sad attempts at a performance were probably lauded as sensational. You're just a pathetic MM worshipper, you poor asshole. .

[quote]She was never going to be a great actress, her work in Bus Stop is quite amateurish.

Bosley Crowther thought she was great in it (and he was right).

[quote]You'll believe anything, because you're stupid.

Bless your little retarded heart. I've forgotten more about Marilyn than you'll ever know.

[quote]You're just a pathetic MM worshipper, you poor asshole.

Actually, I'm more of a Marilyn expert, listed in several of the top biographies as a researchist and contributor. Had access to a vast majority of her costumes, personal possessions and furniture. I've interacted and befriended her family, friends, peers, co-stars and more. I don't place Marilyn on a pedestal as most of the fans do. I can freely admit her faults along with her emotional and mental issues.

You want to come across as some "intellectual" with your opinions and statements which are mostly erroneous. Frankly you just come across as pathetic when you resort to the name calling.

I thought this was about what happened between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe...?

[quote]Those of us who watched the footage see she's still sensational in the unfinished movie

Lee Remick was kind of embarrassed about the whole Monroe replacement. She knew there was no way the studio would really go through with it, but she owed Fox a film on an old contract and this was an easy way out of that. She had it agreed upon that the obligation was fulfilled whether she finally played Ellen or not.

What’s really tacky is Fox immediately released two quotes they attributed to Remick, stating, “I think they were right to fire Marilyn,” etc. She never said that.

Lee Remick would have been a very good Holly Golightly. I often think this. She was lovely but with a feral quality. And she conveyed depth and something under the exterior. She was NOT a total knockout like Monroe or Audrey. I think Lee would have given the film more authenticity and pathos - a little less glamor. Marilyn of course, would have been the best. If she could perform it as she understood it. The Strasberg's and too many analysts did not really help Monroe's creative output. She found new places in herself and in her ambitions. But she became far less sure of herself and even more in doubt of her natural talent.

With all that said, Monroe was born to play Holly Golightly. And it was indeed written with her in mind. She COULD easily have encompassed all of that character AND brought so much more to it.

It's a nice romantic movie that nobody wants to watch anymore. Audrey's voice patterns and fey plaintiveness are the same in every film. Only her little black dresses and hairstyles change.

Monroe is not overrated. She is underrated. BUT - she chased and captured worldwide fame as a character and persona that she would continually fall back on when she felt desperate. If she had lived another 10 years - she probably would have had a great resurgence as a funky character actor like Shelley Winters or Geraldine Page or even Ruth Gordon!!!

LET’S MAKE LOVE is such a drab, awful film, it’s strange that Fox thought reteaming Cukor and Monroe would result in magic.

[quote] Bless your little retarded heart. I've forgotten more about Marilyn than you'll ever know.

Sweetie pie, all you "know" about MM is that you love her and think she could do no wrong. You're a retarded MM worshipper.

[quote] Actually, I'm more of a Marilyn expert, listed in several of the top biographies as a researchist and contributor. Had access to a vast majority of her costumes, personal possessions and furniture. I've interacted and befriended her family, friends, peers, co-stars and more. I don't place Marilyn on a pedestal as most of the fans do. I can freely admit her faults along with her emotional and mental issues.

"A Marilyn expert?" HAHAHAHAHA! Hon, you don't sound like an expert of anything, much less MM. From the way you defend her it sure doesn't sound like you "freely admit her faults." You sound like like a smitten, delusional, disturbed, pathological fan of hers, her "Number One Fan." I think that's very sad.

He was gorgeous.

I never thought Miller was good looking. He just looked "severe." Like a stuck up intellectual, which no doubt he was.

SGTG would have been great if Marilyn had got her choice for the male role, Gardner McKay.

No, r424, he's a racist troll calling people the n-word and "jungle bunnies" on other threads. I imagine it's KELT, or possibly Jeffrey Wells, since we discovered he posts here as well. Both Old Hollywood fans and dire, grotesque racists.

^I'm neither. And someone needs to get a grip over what truly, are just words to make a joke. A joke in poor taste to some, but then again, this is Data Lounge. This ain't Feelgood Farm or Happy Meadows. A great majority of us assume identities and characters that we aren't in the real world.

So, Pollyanna Police, go fuck yourself.

Miller was extremely sexy for a Jewish egghead. Had a serious daddy vibe going on, which is probably why Marilyn liked him.

Wasn't Lee Remick too young to play this woman who's been lost at sea for 7 years and already had 2 kids before she disappeared? In the original it was Irene Dunne who was @ 42.

When I interviewed Mitzi Gaynor, she spoke of an actress she worked with who often refused to come out of her dressing room. Even to use the bathroom. She would pee in a towel, and leave it there for the help to wash.

She flatly REFUSED to tell me who it was. But if I had to guess....

Who constitutes "the help" in a studio setting?

[quote]She flatly REFUSED to tell me who it was. But if I had to guess....

Ethel Merman.

Dan Dailey in drag.

Pre-Hollywood but post Brunette Marilyn having lunch with family. Her mother Gladys is front, center.

[quote]r457 Gaynor spoke of an actress she worked with who often refused to come out of her dressing room. Even to use the bathroom. She would pee in a towel, and leave it there for the help to wash.

Excuse me - am calling my car, to leave this thread.

Thank you.

R461 Marilyn is so beautiful, she always look flawless in every photo, she has seriusly no bad photo.

I think that if she lived long enough she would have been perfect as mrs Robinson in the graduate, but i have doubt she would have accepted the role, i think she would have rejected it the same way she rejected Breakfast at Tiffanys.

R463 some of the pictures from "The Last Sitting" aren't very flattering, she put crosses through them to denote they weren't to be released. Of course they were released after she died to make as much money off her.

Bert got her drunk during the shoot and convinced her to go topless

R464 Yea Bert totally took advances of Marilyn in that photo session, by making her drunk and all, but i still find her in those photos very beautiful, even the ones that she rejected are absolutely perfection ( i think there is only one photo i don't find flattering, the one with her with the pearl necklace in her mouth, she looks high af)

[quote]R464 Bert got her drunk during the shoot and convinced her to go topless

I think convincing MM to keep her top ON was the usual battle.

But sure, the helpless waif (a mere 36-years-old) who arranged the sitting herself and couldn’t stop pouring booze and pills down her own throat had absolutely nothing to do with her own behavior.

[quote]who arranged the sitting herself .

Bless your heart. The photo shoot was commissioned by Vogue magazine.

MM did arrange the sitting. It was she who reached out to that publication in a desire to counter the recent bad press resulting from her being fired.

Of course she didn’t personally book the hotel rooms and cameras that were used, etc… though on the first day did do her own makeup.

I thought those Bert Stern photos were disturbing. I didn't think she looked very good in most of them. The white, overbleached hair looked so artificial and her makeup was quite harsh. White eye shadow and heavy black eyeliner.

R466 Her hand and arm look weird there.

[quote] what exactly happened between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe ?

She was only interested in his body, and he only used her intellectual reputation to boost his profile OP, Duh!!!

Trainwreck and former international sensation Isabella Adjani just tried to revive her career by playing Monroe (yes, at 65 yo people!). And flopped. Olalah Isabella cela tu n'auras pas du là vraiment!

R466 OMG that picture ! talk about trainwreck. Imagine if she had lived another 10 years

She was in the process of dying.

KELT is DEAD

[quote]MM did arrange the sitting. It was she who reached out to that publication in a desire to counter the recent bad press resulting from her being fired.

Reputable sources please.

Because Stern tells it differently in his book about the photoshoot.

"The photo shoot was commissioned by Vogue magazine. Surprisingly, Marilyn had never appeared in Vogue, and at that time Bert had a contract with the magazine that gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted with 8 pages. He wanted Marilyn. He felt that there had not yet been one immortal black and white photograph of Marilyn, and it was his destiny to make that happen."

I had this book when I was a teenager. Found it at the flee market, a special edition (numbered, please).= 5 $ I proudly displayed it for my str8 friends for years, and then sold it to a book store for a nice profit. the most common reaction I got from my friends was "EWWWWW the make up!!!!"

Charlie: Smart? Arthur: Well, she wasn't smart enough to survive.

She did two photo shoots for Vogue with Stern. Only the second one was so bad. They should not have continued. She looked very drunk and dehydrated. Worn out and for the first time - she looked old. Her hair and makeup are terrible and his lens was cruel. The first Vogue shooting was fashion, which Marilyn rarely did. Stern did get this great black and white of her, but Milton Greene took all the immortal ones. In the ballet Tutu, in the black tights and bowler hat....

Still a beauty, in a Dior dress. Weeks before her death.

Such a sad case

^This photo was one of many taken during an acting class where she was asked to portray different emotions. Here's a group shot of up and comers taken by Phillipe Halsman.

I like this better.

R482 what emotions is she "portraying" ? Bland ? psychotically absent minded ? she was smart enough to be front and centre, with her face covered in vaseline, but TBH, I re-watched a couple of her movies recently, including the 7 year itch and some like it hot, and she was ATROCIOUS. She wouldn't have made it to 1968 professionaly. No way. She would be remembered, if at all, like Betty Grable. Even Lana could act circles around her. and I like Monroe. Let's be honest, she fotographed well, and she had something special and unique, but the myth is entirely based on her untimely death and a ferocious exploitation of her image

^Mamie Van Doren.

In his autobio, Anthony Quayle tells how one week-end he was invited to Notley Abbaye, along with other people, during the shooting of the prince and the showgirl, and AM and MM were there. Marilyn had an epic meltdown, spent several hours locked in the loo, drunk and high as the Burj Khalifa tower, and wouldn't come out. they all took turns at the door to negociate and try getting her out of there. she was convinced that aliens were in the process of landing on earth and kidnapping her. Can you imagine the embarrassment ?

^Maime, isn't it lights out at the rest home?

McCarthy was after Arthur Miller for being a communist before he married Marilyn. Some claim that he married her to buffer the issue. He did appear before the committee to be questioned.

She was fabulous in Some Like It Hot, r484.

Some Marilyn Monroe/Arthur Miller trivia. In February 1959 the Millers and Isak Dinesen were invited to a "luncheon" at the Nyack home of the very weird Southern writer Carson McCullers The menu was raw oysters, champagne, grapes, and soufflé. Gag! But then McCullers had been informed that the only things Dinesen would eat were oysters and grapes. I suppose the soufflé was for the Millers. A photograph of the three women, one commentator noted, "a study in contrasts": "Isak Dinesen, wrapped in a shawl and headscarf, sipping champagne was looking downright mummified. Across the table from her, a giggling Monroe in black plunging neckline was being pecked on the cheek by a puffy McCullers."

The meeting went well. Music was put on a phonograph and McCullers said she and Marilyn and Dinesen started dancing together and were having such a good time they started dancing on top of McCullers' black marble table. Carson McCullers, however, was full of shit. When, many years later, Arthur Miller was asked about the fabled luncheon he said he could barely remember it. He said he was "fond" of a few of McCullers' stories was was unimpressed by her writing. When asked about the dancing on the table he said “Carson seemed very ill, she was almost an invalid, paralyzed, her muscles shriveled. And contrary to the legend, she did not start dancing on the table. She simply would not have been capable of it.”

All three women were doomed. A blog stated:

?Carson McCullers, Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen were never to meet again. Three days after the Nyack luncheon, Isak Dinesen was rushed to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed her with acute malnutrition, noting that her medical condition was similar to that of a World War II concentration camp survivor. Dinesen continued to waste away until she became so emaciated that her skin bruised when touched. She died in her sleep—from malnutrition—at age 77. Marilyn Monroe completed only one more movie—The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller. After less than five years of marriage, she and Miller divorced. On August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills in her West Los Angeles home. She was 36 years old. Carson McCullers endured eight more years of deteriorating health. Then in August, 1967, she suffered a massive stroke and died. After 47 days in a coma, Carson McCullers died at age 50. She was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery on the bank of the Hudson in Nyack, New York, just down the way from her white clapboard home where once three women—an invalid Southern writer with a lonely heart, an ancient, champagne-sipping Danish storyteller, and a blonde bombshell who yearned to be more—connected for a few brief hours on a singular winter afternoon."

Sounds like the oysters were bad.

[quote]r488 McCarthy was after Arthur Miller for being a communist before he married Marilyn. Some claim that he married her to buffer the issue.

And this elaborate plot involved divorcing his wife?

I don’t think any male back then needed incentive to marry Marilyn Monroe.

R489 she was soooo tired and haggard in that dreck. overweight, sad, going through the motion etc...the little girl breathy shtick was painful. The movie belongs to Lemmon. The gal needs to be put to rest, honestly, RIP.

R493 go fuck yourself with a rusty brush you miserable Marilyn-hater!

I don't HATE her, I like her in fact. But she was SO limited !!! Classic Hollywood has so much better to offer. She's a tired, tired icon. Just like A.Hepburn. Enough. Please.

we all know she was severely mentally ill, extremely rude to people who couldn't defend themselves (she was famously horrid to the "little people" on film sets, the crew, the staff, she would shout FUCK OFF to the poor 23rd assistants who were sent to get her out of her fucking dressing-room-elephant-gestation retreats), hygienically challenged and so on. Nothing glamorous there. Again when she was in England, she went shopping at a high-end place, and I know the story first hand, the poor shop assistant was reduced to tears because the great MM wasn't wearing any underwear, was smelly and dirty, and kept insisting for trying on stuff. Gross.

and as for being taken "seriously" she was pushing the enveloppe a tad far. She wasn't an unknown when she started in Hollywood, she was one of the most sought after cover girls in the country, she should have been more careful because she was immediately infamous as a casting coach enthusiast. For instance the Oliviers knew her way before TPATSG, as Ben Lyon's mistress. They were friendly with Lyon and they met her on many occasions then, and again as Kazan's mistress during the filming of Streetcar, she was passed around for sure, but she was more than willing, and she didn't even care to hide it. Nothing wrong with that, but then screaming disrespect when you're in fact, a very privileged A-lister with approval of everyone on the set includind the director (and no blonde extra) , is a bit much. Katharine Hepburn was taken seriously, but between movies she would drag her sorry ass on a stage and try playing Shakespeare, not mounting elephant with feathers up her A-hole

R496 Didn't know MM was rude, it's definately the first time hearing this, usually people tell stories about how angelic she was to everyone around her( a thing i find unbelivable )

<3 <3 <3

I am interested in your claims r475, and would like to hear more!

OP - He fucked her dear. Literally and figuratively.

R500 what claims ? KELT is dead ? what does that even mean ?

MM and AM had been banging for years. as far back as 1950. She thought she was in love with him, but he was married. When they became serious, Amy Greene thought it was bad news. She asked Marilyn what she saw in him. Reply "he looks like Abe Lincoln".... I don't know why he married her, and neither did he apparently, because he was over her very quickly. By the time they reached London he couldn't stand her anymore and she knew. there was the diary incident, and she was treated like dirt by cunt-in-chief Olivier, and he didn't support her. On the contrary, he had long boohooo sessions with Larry, on the grounds that both their mrs were crazy bitches who were hampering their creativity. Incidently they were both crazy AND pregnant. Marilyn miscarried during the filming (so did Vivien). Miller didn't take it too seriously. he bought a very expensive sports car for himself for consolation, paid by Marilyn Monroe prod. Greene was furious, they had a major falling out and MM took her husband's side. Back in the US he kept spending her money extravagantly, and forced her to accept SOME LIKE IT HOT.She didn't want to do it, she thought it was the dumbest character she had ever been asked to play. ("she can't even see that they're MEN!!!" but they were running out of cash. She miscarried again. He didn't care, like, at all. Lena Pepitone, her maid in NYC, told how she would scream in her bedroom while he would lock himself in his office with his typewriter. Lovely couple

R503 don't mention that money-grabbing Lena Pepitone on here! She who repeated conversations verbatim when she can barely speak English.

[bold]#LeaveLenaAlone!

I agree that was she was an extremely limited and enjoyable actress - Betty Grable's successor. If she had stayed on that path instead of becoming some kind of Actors Studio acolyte, she might have lived. Her problem was the exploitative Strasbergs, who convinced her that being seen as the sex bomb funny girl was beneath her (it absolutely was not). I think R497 makes a good point, but Monroe didn't even have half of Hepburn's personal discipline and professionalism to do a Broadway production.

interesting watch "she had problems with her creepy husband " LOL

more about the split of MM prod because of Miller

[quote]Found it at the flee market

[quote]Let's be honest, she fotographed well

[quote]In his autobio, Anthony Quayle tells how one week-end he was invited to Notley Abbaye

Dear, dear, dear.

[quote]and kept insisting for trying on stuff.

Dearie me.

I know, and I apologize, I'm Oh dearing myself harder than any of you could, but I'm too excited when I type. Anyways R506, Monroe, despite all the BS about her "crippling sensitivity" WAS stage trained. Nobody will tell you that, but in the late 40's, she and Shelley were members of an L.A. theater company, (ran by commies) and MM even played a rather big part in one of the plays, that was good enough to run for a whole week LOL. She COULD have done much better with her career, but she decided that pills, booze, and cock were easier than hard training. Gaynor said that when they were doing THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW-BUSINESS, MM was STILL working harder than anyone else.

When people just write Gaynor I think at first they mean Janet.

R511 Taking acting classes and doing a production for a week is something the vast, vast majority of people who have appeared on film have done. Carrying a Broadway show near eight times a week is something far different. MM, in my eyes, worked hard at being a star rather than actress and then got mad that people didn’t see her as an actress.

[quote]r506 Her problem was the exploitative Strasbergs, who convinced her that being seen as the sex bomb funny girl was beneath her

She was the customer and they were the hired help. The Strasberg told MM what she wanted to hear.

She didn’t go to them to polish her “Heat Wave” bumps and grinds.

What exactly did Marilyn Monroe do that was so beyond her supposedly limited gifts? She appeared almost exclusively in light comedies, a western with Robert Mitchum, musicals...she did very few dramas, and when she did, she was excellent. She was good in everything she did, at least once she was a star. That's it.

[quote] What exactly did Marilyn Monroe do that was so beyond her supposedly limited gifts?

The Misfits. Audiences did not buy her in that very serious movie, which required her to and have a hysterical, screaming fit out in the desert. She didn't seem credible in a tole like that.

I didn't think she was believable as a mother in "Something's Got To Give." In the outtakes from that movie where she's with the kids she seems more like another child than a parent.

[quote]What exactly did Marilyn Monroe do that was so beyond her supposedly limited gifts?

TALK.

I thought she was believable in three serious roles:

1. In Don't Bother To Knock, she played an unhinged babysitter. Perhaps not a difficult role for her because of her own mental health issues.

2. In Niagara, she was an unfaithful wife planning murder. It was the only time she played a villain and her character wasn't neither likeable nor sympathetic.

3. In Bus Stop, which had more drama than comedy, she played an uneducated Ozark hillbilly. Her co-star was nominated for an Oscar, but she was the better actor in this film.

Billy Wilder said Monroe's marriage to DeMaggio fell apart because he found out she was Marilyn Monroe and her marriage to Arthur Miller fell apart because he found out she wasn't Marilyn Monroe.

Also Miller was an ass.

[quote]What exactly did Marilyn Monroe do that was so beyond her supposedly limited gifts?

OK, seriously ? all about eve/don't bother to knock/monkey business/bus stop/there's no business like show business/the mifits were way beyond her, most stars of the era did much worse, but she's soooo wildly overrated ... she could have been better in some like it hot, honestly she looked terrible and the scene with Curtis on the boat is excrutiating. let's make love and the prince and the showgirl were horribly unfunny and sinister but it's not really her fault. I think she was at her best in gentlemen prefer blondes and how to marry a millionaire. Her great gift was singing IMO. That was special. What she SHOULD have done, absolutely, no question, was LOLA in DAMN YANKEES. That was her call. oh, and the "tits falling out of every costume" is beyond vulgar we know you have big knockers Marilyn, get over it!

I used to think Monroe had no talent - it was how she spoke, that stilted kind of emphasis on consonants. Now I think she had a LOT of talent and only became bad in her later rolls because she stopped being genuine and was sort of imitating Marilyn Monroe. The outtakes from Something's Got to Give are terrible, she's doing a cloying Marilyn Monroe impression in The Prince and the Showgirl and even Some Like it Hot is not up to her best in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Seven Year Itch.

She was good in drama IMO, and even good in a bit part as a waitress where she's not the "Monroe character" but just a cynical teen waitress putting stupid schoolboys in their place.

Her biggest acting flaw IMO was she only worked off of her own internal life. She never "used" the energy of the other people in the scene or fed off a connection with another actor. Lauren Bacall and Jack Lemmon each liked her fine but said she would look at the middle of your forehead, not in your eyes. I think she didn't want to be distracted from her "process" or something.

Went into a Marilyn Monroe deep dive reading bios a few years ago and I don't know how she survived til 36. It seems just exhausting being her. She self-sabotaged all the time. One of the stupidest things she did was her agent situation. I can't recall if after Johnny Hyde died she just kept the same agency who did not demand more money, or if she refused to sign with a powerhouse agency that wanted badly to rep her but she just kept them on a string. The money thing was partly her own fault - she was valuable enough to get more and they would have given her more if her representation had been in place. Deals where she could have easily been paid much more include Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Jane Russell also said Monroe had a chip on her shoulder where the studios were concerned and was very paranoid.

In her pre-stardom years she seemed to see saw between being massively arrogant and horrifically immature. There were times she acted like her sex appeal could get her ANYONE, no matter what the circumstances (she made moves on the husband in a couple that were critical benefactors in her early career and then wanted the wife to give him over). There were times before stardom she seemed to be hugely entitled. And I guess her experiences justified it - she probably had been through enough to think why not; nobody has integrity.

At the end of her life she had moved past her "serious actress" attempt - the wanting to do serious work, etc. I think that expired with the demise of her relationship with Miller.

WAS neither likeable nor sympathetic

The Misfits was not a movie that the general public was really ready for in 1961. It deals with a kind of disillusionment and disappointment with life that became more common as a general theme in America after (ironically) Marilyn's own death and JFK's assassination.

I think she handled the scene where she goes off just fine. I mean "You're three, dear, sweet dead men!" is not exactly easy dialogue to deliver.

that scene was badly written, badly directed and badly acted. Very amateurish. She also didn't have the vocal chops to carry it. she's just struggling to deliver the lines. Zero technique

She had one scene in All About Eve that sets up a punchline. Why do MM fans like to point this out as some kind of indicator of great talent?

Anyway, she ranges from mediocre to totally unwatchable in most of her post-1953 movies. The Misfits in particular she’s outacted by Monty Clift, Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter in a role that was written specifically FOR her and a thinly veiled version of herself (well most her dramatic roles were that, to be fair).

R518 Oh i agree for " Niagara", she was excellent in it, she could totally play the femme fatale villain character in noir or serious movies, i would have loved to see more of that side of her .

i didn't like her in The Misfits, she wasn't credible , i think she was even at her lowest aesthetically.

R 521 I also think that she was over about those kind of "serius" movies after the misfits, in something got to give she was ready to show off herself nude(she was absolutely gorgeous)

I don't understand her appeal and I'm a gold star gay who adores the Divas. That speech. That moronic speech in every thing she did.

I don't think Cukor wanted to direct this movie. But he was on her list. He didn't direct the costume/make-up tests, and at the time for a major star, that was more than a slight, that was a huge snub. I think the war started right there

Of course he didn't want to direct it

Maybe HE should have called in sick then, Blake Edwards or Quine or some poor bastard would have been appointed and MM would still be alive, and gorgeous, and oh so talented, becoming the american Maggie Smith

At least Audrey and Marilyn were lovely and unique. They were not grotesque, sexless, talentless gargoyles like Julie Andrews.

I'm so glad that KELT is DEAD.

[quote] They were not grotesque, sexless, talentless gargoyles like Julie Andrews.

OMG thank you. I never ever understood the passion for that sexless upity bore, with the flat-as-a-washing-board body and the Slappable face. and the "acting" . Don't start me on that one. the deep, multilayered, oscar winning performance as the flying fucking nanny in that turd. and THE SOUND OF MUSIC. PUKE. Syrup on top of fluff on top of jam on top of saccharine, EEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW

I’ve also said above I don’t get her either. People compare her to Judy Garland, but Judy had more pure talent in her little finger than Marilyn had in her whole body. Rita Hayworth is a more apt comparison and even Rita had the skillset of being an exceptional dancer. Marilyn wasn’t the most beautiful woman of that time, and she wasn’t the sexiest woman either. She didn’t break any new ground except for being a walking heterosexual male fantasy in her films - complacent and never endingly horny for Daddy. And not even in a sexually liberated way like you can argue Ava Gardner was. It’s not something as a gay who loves divas I find appealing, but I guess I’m also in the minority.

"Feminism came too late for Marilyn."

Marilyn really was a piss-poor actress when she was young, her elocution lessons had given her a horrible false voice that still grates on the nerves. But she was so charismatic that she became a star in spite of her deficits, and she got a lot better with experience.

It's a pity she never valued her own gift for light comedy, it's a rare skill and one I much appreciate, and it's a pity she fell in with Miller and the Strasbergs and other humorless twats who thought dreary heavy dramas were the only form of entertainment that mattered. They didn't appreciate what she had, and as long as she was under their sway she didn't either.

I feel like her dramatic acting did improve after the Strasberg's help compared to some of the stuff she was doing before, like bulging out her eyes to show anger in River of No Return.

I would have liked to have seen Marilyn in "thriller/escapade" movies as the 60's moved forward....Or movies like "charade" with cary grant for example. I think she would have excelled in such movies, of course it would be the matter if the public would accept her in these roles, not that she couldn't do them...

Marilyn Monroe's great gift was that she was very photogenic. Extremely so. She wasn't that talented as an actress or singer, but she photographed brilliantly, though no effort of her own. She was just blessed that way. Louise Brooks was the same way; very limited as an actress but a stunning screen and photographic image. She was said to be good dancer, though.

You would all enjoy and appreciate entertainment and entertainers a lot more if you would realize the best ones are good at what they do, not what other stars do. No, Marilyn Monroe did not sing like Judy Garland, or act like Ingrid Bergman. Gary Cooper was not Laurence Olivier. But the opposite is also true. What one could do, another could not. Frank Sinatra couldn't sing like Mario Lanza, and vice-versa. Marilyn was a great Marilyn. Nobody did it better. What you critics are really saying is you just didn't care for her.

r502, KELT is an old poster on here, who was always on threads about Hollywood and old stars, but he was also astonishingly racist, like Stormfront kinds of racism. I was asking why someone said he was dead, because I'm curious about it.

Thks R540. I can see Monroe in Charade. That would have been better than the drecks whe was making in the late 50's

I was curious enough about KELT so I looked him up at some of his old haunts, and one of his alts is still posting on a celebrity death forum. In fact, he got upset about this very thread, it seems, and complained about it elsewhere. That answers my question, I guess.

Charade required an actress who could convey high class and an intelligent kind of comedic persona - MM did not. Doris Day wouldn’t have worked in Charade either. Mrs. Robinson required an actress who could embody a maneating and predatory woman, MM could not do this - and neither could Doris Day. Dramatic talent doesn’t mean you can play every single role ever, I don’t think any actor or actress can do that successfully - despite what Meryl wants you to believe about her, she is outright awfully miscast in stuff like Falling in Love or She-Devil. Cagney and Stanwyck were the ones who came closest, and even Stanwyck couldn’t do musicals…

R543 MM was quite predatory in Niagara, a classic femme fatale

R543.. we'll have to agree to disagree on Monroe in a film like "Charade"... marilyn was actually moving towards a more refined mature persona in 1962 (i.e. her visit to mexico and her dress, holding a scarf and her demeanor)...and she could wear high fashion quite well too...(i.e. the mink outfit from something's got to give and her love of Pucci wardrobe)....

There is a very small number of posters on this thread determined to knock MM no matter what. According to them she looked awful in Some Like It Hot and gave an awful performance. And was lucky enough to photograph well, not that she didn't spend many hours training to model for the camera.

R543 Then why was Doris Day offered the role? I can't really picture Marilyn in it - was she offered it? Oh, no, she was dead. So why are we arguing about how she would have been in it?

[quote] There is a very small number of posters on this thread determined to knock MM no matter what.

Not me, I think I've contributed a lot , and interesting things to boot. I'm just saying that while she was radiant, she wasn't the misunderstood genius that some people want to pass her of as , and in the context of declining Hollywood, she was absurdly entitled, and a pain in the ass. She also wasn't all that beautiful and anyway, her talent fell quite short of her looks. Yes she looked sad and bloated in SLIH, and no amount of make-up can hide that fact. Beneath the surface it's quite clear that she had deep and scary issues, and now she's just not really relevant anymore. But I like her work.

^ moron ^

We know who you are. Most of the obsessive posts on this thread are yours, R548. Talking to yourself.

You do hate MM. Read your own words - ancient white gay. I can hear your lisp.

Bloated is when you have a distended stomach, not a fat ass and bigger tits. She was just somewhat fat in SLIH.

R546: Some people dislike her acting, her voice, her singing, and her comedic skills. Fine. As a photographic model, she was supreme. Anyone who is dismissive of that talent is a fool. She had a natural ability for it and worked at being the best. Her knowledge of photography wasn't limited to being in front of a camera. Famous photographers who worked with her said that she knew as much as they did about the craft of taking an excellent photo.

[quote] ^ moron ^ We know who you are.

Okay....that tells me everything I need to know about you lady. Sorry i've hurt your feelings...moving on

Am I a BLACK lady from LSA?

Are you KELT?

OOOKay...more...don't waist your time with me dear homophobic person, your thread is about miss Monroe and M. Miller, not me, have a nice day

[quote]She was just somewhat fat in SLIH.

She became pregnant but lost the baby during filming.

She was pregnant with MONTAND's child, not Miller's. It's all over the french press. Enceinte= preggo

R556 Except there's no evidence whatsoever to prove that.

Simone's face

Except, R556, SLIH was filmed in 1958 and LML was filmed in 1960.

You retard.

How dare she smoke around her husband's pregnant mistress!

OK R559, really lovely people Monroe attracts !!

R561 Necrophiliacs?

Is KELT still DEAD?🙏🏾🙏🏾

Damn, R558, Marilyn looks 45 and blowsy in that picture!

Damn I miss going out to a bar or restaurant and lighting up a cig.

Marilyn and Yves Montand had a hot affair during the filming of "Let's Make Love." They were not exactly discreet and it was widely known what was going on. By all accounts she fell head over heels in love with Montand and believed he would leave his wife and marry her, but for him it was just another affair. He would say she was "not as sophisticated" as other ladies might have been and that "perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush." He added "If Marilyn were not married and I were not married I would not object to marrying her. But nothing will break up my marriage." She tried to get him back by meeting in at an airport with a limo and champagne. But it was over. Poor Marilyn. Another failed love affair.

^^ Hard to know how serious she was about him. During this same shoot MM bedded Capucine who was lodged next door while filming North to Alaska. Maybe MM was on a French kick or maybe they were all a bunch of whores having a bit of fun.

[Quote]In 2004, Allégret published a memoir titled World Upside Down (Un monde à l'envers) in which she wrote that she was sexually abused by her stepfather Yves Montand for many years from the age of 5.[

Montand was a piece of work. SS' daughter and grandson have been vocal about Montand's perverse take on life.

[quote]During this same shoot MM bedded Capucine.

Um. No.

R556 EW Montand face is so ugly, i definately see a pattern in MM lovers, they all look cartoonish ugly

I'm sure she could be a bitch, especially as she got older and more disillusioned with different aspects of her life, but it's not like there aren't numerous examples of her extreme sensitivity toward other people.

"As I lifted the Nikon with the 105-mm. telephoto lens, Marilyn smiled at me, and I pressed the shutter. Immediately, I realized I had the shot. In fact, Marilyn had shown me what other photographers who had shot her knew: that when she turned herself on to the camera, the photographer didn’t have to be more than a mechanic; it was almost as if she were both the shooter and the subject.

Before I moved to find another angle, she faced the mirror and continued. “There’s something different about you,” she said while Agnes kept on combing.

I was surprised that she wanted to talk about me. “My smile?,” I said.

“No,” she said.

Marilyn seemed to be looking me over. “It’s your eye,” she said suddenly. “You didn’t close your left eye when you were shooting.”

I’d been photographing people up close for nearly a decade, from the governor of California to pretty girls, to great athletes, and no one had ever noticed that before or said anything to me about it.

“That’s because I’m nearly blind in that eye,” I said.

The look on her face changed from curiosity to concern. “Was it an accident?” she asked.

As a photographer, I always tried to ingratiate myself, hoping that my subjects would feel comfortable as I photographed them. With Marilyn, I didn’t have to work too hard at it. Her question had given me an opening. I’d never before used my disability to cozy up to a subject, but now I jumped in, not knowing how deep the well was.

“I was seven and we lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn that had a garbage chute that my mother called a dumbwaiter—”

“I know what that is,” she said, interrupting, like a schoolgirl responding to a teacher’s explanation. “I lived in Brooklyn for a while with Arthur,” a reference to her current husband, playwright Arthur Miller.

I decided to continue my story, not knowing what else to do. “Outside each apartment there was a little door that opened onto a shaft—that’s where we threw away our garbage.” Marilyn was silent, listening. “My mother had asked me to throw something out, and I went into the hallway, opened the door, and stuck my head inside out of curiosity. At that exact moment, someone on a floor above was throwing an umbrella down the shaft. It hit me in my eye. The next thing I knew, my mother was screaming and my uncle was carrying me. I didn’t lose the eye, but I did lose most of my sight.”

Marilyn’s manner seemed to shift. Her lips opened, and I saw how perfect her teeth were. Her eyes became warmer and watery, as if what I was describing gave her comfort. It was an odd reaction, and I didn’t understand it. It would be many years before I came to realize that some questions in life simply have no answers.

“Oh, my God,” she said, her voice an octave lower than what it had been a minute earlier. “That’s such a tragic story!”

“It isn’t so bad,” I said. “I don’t know anything other than the sight I have. Maybe I see things the way the camera does—flat. It has never inhibited me.”

“But it must have changed you,” she said. “Something like that—it changes you.”

“Well,” I replied, “it changed the way my parents saw me. They were always worried that I might lose my other eye.”

I wonder just how many abortions she had.

None. According to her gynecologist, Leon Khron. “And the rumors of her multiple abortions are ridiculous. She never had even one.”.

Of course, some people on this thread will say he's lying to fit their narrative.

I find it quite hard to believe that Marilyn Monroe "never had even one" abortion. Very hard to believe. Keep in mind that quote supposedly from her gynecologist, comes from Donald Spoto's worshipful biography of MM. Spoto also said that she was not a drug addict and not promiscuous that the tales of her unprofessionalism are gross distortions. Spoto is a nutty Marilyn loving queen.

Her autopsy also showed no chronic drug or alcohol abuse for those who claim she was forever on pills or booze

Marilyn as Marlene Dietrich. Photographed by Avedon.

He said she was the greatest model he had ever photographed.

[quote] She gave more to the camera than every other actress – every other woman – I had the opportunity to photograph; much more patient, more demanding with herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than out of the work sessions. I think of her often.

[quote]Keep in mind that quote supposedly from her gynecologist

And right on cue, R574 proves my point about "he's lying" in the very next post.

So you think Spoto made up the quote to fit his narrative? Krohn was her gynecologist from at least 1952 until her death. His complete quote is “The rumors of her multiple abortions are ridiculous. She never had even one. Later there were two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy requiring emergency termination, but no abortion.”

As for Spoto being a "nutty Marilyn loving queen" is far from the truth. Having discussed his MM bio with him several times, he wasn't going to publish rumors or inuendo. He dealt with facts. Hence his dismissing the Kennedy affairs because other than one night in Palm Springs with JFK, there is no proof. In fact, he called out the likes of Robert Slatzer, Jeanne Carmen and Anthony Summers.

And here are Marilyn's own words on the subject of her alleged promiscuity. (But you'll say she was lying as well, I'm sure.)

"I think I had many problems as the next starlet keeping the Hollywood wolves from my door. These wolves just could not understand me. They would tell me ‘but Marilyn, you’re not playing the game the way you should. Be smart. You’ll never get anywhere in this business acting the way you do.’ My answer to them would be ‘the only acting I’ll do is for the camera.’ I was determined, no one was going to use me or my body - even if he could help my career. I’ve never gone out with a man I didn’t want to. No one, not even the studio, could force me to date someone. The one thing I hate more than anything else is being used. I’ve always worked hard for the sake of someday becoming a talented actress. I knew I would make it someday if I only kept at it and worked hard without lowering my principles and pride in myself.”

Meanwhile, that p.o.s. "writer" anthony summers (who outrageously had the post-autopsy photo of Marilyn published in his book "Goddess" which is utterly sick and twisted and disgusting!) wrote that Marilyn had at least 13 abortions! and that is why she could never conceive. And he knew this as fact how? because?...

[quote]r573 According to her gynecologist, Leon Khron. “And the rumors of her multiple abortions are ridiculous. She never had even one.”. Of course, some people on this thread will say he's lying to fit their narrative.

I thought she had such painful periods because she was all scar tissue up inside?

I mean, practically speaking, how could she have fucked all the producers etc. she did early in WITHOUT getting pregnant??

^^ early ON - not in!

(tho I guess all those guys were “early in,” too.)

"Now I think she had a LOT of talent and only became bad in her later roles because she stopped being genuine and was sort of imitating Marilyn Monroe."

Her vocals for the title song of LET'S MAKE LOVE sound like she's imitating Jayne Mansfield.

[quote] As for Spoto being a "nutty Marilyn loving queen" is far from the truth.

No it's not. He swears up and down in his fawning biography that all the mean talk about how unprofessional she was is unfair to poor Marilyn. He says that male stars held up filming because of drinking binges and whatnot, so why pick on poor little Marilyn? Well, she was a horror to work with. Andy one who is hours and hours late and doesn't know their lines certainly would be.

By the way, Spoto said that towards the end of he life Marilyn was just fine and looking forward to remarrying Joe DiMaggio. If you believe THAT you're as nutty as Spoto.

r571: During the making of HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE, One of Betty Grable's daughters was thrown by a horse and seriously injured. Grable left the set and rushed to the hospital. Grable later noted "Marilyn was the only person to call to find out how she was."

Well, R582, you can base your opinion from reading his biography, while I base my opinions on several discussions over the years with the author himself.

[quote] I base my opinions on several discussions over the years with the author himself.

The author himself is pretty fucked up. He grinded out not one, not two, but THREE books vilifying Alfred Hitchcock, who for some reason he loathes. He claimed in a Laurence Olivier bio that Olivier and Danny Kaye had a passionate love affair, without providing anything in the way of hard evidence. He also claimed that Kaye played an amusing trick on Olivier. Disguised as some kind of customs agent Kaye accosted Olivier in an airport and detained him. When they were alone he commanded Olivier to disrobe to he could check him for any illegal contraband, and then proceeded to probe Olivier's every orifice. After doing so he whipped off his disguises and the two lovers had a good laugh together. I guess you believe that happened. You'll evidently believe anything.

Lovely Marilyn

Goddess next Door.

Modern Girl

A mystery.

____

*****

Born Beautiful

Won the war, lost the battle.

*****

^^^^^+

Hope

Icons

You need to upload those images on Imgurl if you want an image preview. No one’s going to click on your links.

m o r e

I know what I'm doing.