The Sheila Variations

Don't Bother To Knock; directed by Roy Baker

"I rather think that had she endured, had she come ten years later, maybe it would have been different. But at that time - I mean, she came in at the height of the Hollywood system - and she was not alone feeling debased by the whole thing. It was a common complaint. Like [the way] John Garfield was a terrific actor - yet he did nothing but scream and howl. There was some demeaning aspect to the whole thing. So most of them went with it. They simply adopted the contempt with which they were treated. I think that's what happened. Pretty hard to withstand - a culture of contempt. I think it helped destroy her." -- Arthur Miller on Marilyn Monroe

Seeing Monroe's performance in 1952's Don't Bother to Knock, as Nell, the psychologically shattered and borderline psychotic babysitter in a plush hotel, makes you wonder about all the roads not traveled. It makes you think of her courage in putting up with contemptuous projects like Let's Make Love or The Seven Year Itch (one of the meanest spirited movies she was ever in) ... and wonder what might have happened if she had been allowed to experiment. Now I'm not saying that her work, as it exists, in comedic gems such as Some Like It Hot is somehow lesser, or somehow lacking. I'm already rather annoyed that comedy often takes a backseat to drama with a capital D. It's why Cary Grant was stiffed in the Oscar department. You show me a better performance than what he did in His Girl Friday!

Billy Wilder said this about her (and it rambles a bit - this is a transcription of a conversation he had with Cameron Crowe):

She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came up for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line. She could do a 3-page dialogue scene perfectly, and then get stuck on a line like, "It's me, Sugar"... But if she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good ... She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She was afraid of the camera, and that's why, I think, she muffed some lines. God knows how often. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.

We all have magic in us. But Marilyn Monroe had movie magic. And, like Wilder said, "...she automatically knew where the joke was." That kind of sensibility cannot be taught. And in the same way that it is rare to find a man as outrageously good-looking as Cary Grant who is also a comedic genius, it's rare to find a bombshell at the level of Marilyn Monroe who can nail jokes in the way she does (even when she is the butt of them)! But she is always the one who comes off smelling like a rose, even in nasty misogynistic pictures like The Seven Year Itch, which tries to make a joke out of her (and women's sexuality, in general). Watch that film and watch how she evades and eludes "capture" - meaning: she somehow, gently, subtly, by being totally innocent and guileless ... evades being the butt of the joke. That takes guts. That takes smarts. Because, believe me, she was being set up in that film. In many of her films, she was being set up.

So I love Marilyn's funniness, it's one of the most spontaneous things about her. But she always yearned to show more of herself, more of what she could do. Nobody wanted to see it. However, Don't Bother to Knock is early Monroe, or relatively early ... her stardom hadn't "hit" yet. So to watch her in this psychological drama (that has elements of a thriller) is astonishing.

Who knows what demons Monroe battled on a daily basis. All I know is that sadness and fear flickers across her face in Don't Bother to Knock in a neverending dance. She seems truly dangerous at times. She never seems to push the emotion, it seems to just happen to her. She (Nell) is not fully control of herself and neither is Marilyn. I don't know if Marilyn was "tapping into" her own wealth of miserable memories, or if it was her talent allowing her the ability to portray such fragility ... it doesn't matter "how" she got there. What matters is the end result. It's a stunning performance, and most often not even mentioned when Marilyn Monroe's career is brought up - which is a shame. She's riveting.

Marilyn Monroe often played either naive breathless girls, easily taken in, a bit dopey, or vaguely trashy showgirls, who somehow have managed to maintain their sweetness. She never played bitter. She never played a wisecracker. That was not her thing. And whatever "experiences" she had had in her life, it had not touched that diamond-bright innocence inside her. Nothing could kill it. You watch her films and it's truly amazing - how it is always there, even in projects that were not worthy of her. But she never played - except in Don't Bother To Knock - a truly damaged woman. I suppose a woman with a body like that and a face like that was made to be a fantasy for audiences and audiences don't really want to see their sex goddesses as damaged. Marilyn knew that better than anyone. She had a love-hate relationship with her beauty. It was her ticket to fame, she knew that, and she was truly grateful for it, and she knew how to use it. She was a master at creating her persona. But it was also what tormented her, and gave her such intense stage fright that she wouldn't come out of her dressing room for sometimes hours, staring at herself in the mirror. What was she looking for? How hard was it for her to drag up that sexy goddess on days when she didn't feel like it? I don't have much sympathy for those who respond to questions like that with, "Oh, boo hoo, cry me a river, she was famous, we all should have such problems!" I think it represents a truly ungenerous and stingy attitude, something that she faced daily, and struggled against. And so she would lock her door, and refuse to come out, terrified of the expectations placed on her, knowing that within her was an abyss of sadness that nobody wanted to see. It had to have been horrible. I can only imagine. I don't have that kind of beauty. I have no idea what that must be like. I think it's indicative that she was often very afraid of directors, who could get impatient with her constant bungling of lines (it is thought that she had undiagnosed dyslexia) ... but absolutely loved the crew, who loved her right back. They were her audience. They were not stingy. She would walk out of her dressing room, all dolled up, after having made everyone wait for hours, and the crew - hanging off their scaffolds - would catcall and whistle, and she ate it up. It was friendly. If you've ever experienced a friendly and appreciative catcall (which is something some people just can't imagine) then you know how nice it can be. It can totally brighten your day. I'm not talking about avoiding a certain block because there's a construction site there and you're fucking sick of having to walk through a goddamn gantlet (who knew?? I sure as hell didn't!), which forces you into a sexualized atmosphere at 9 a.m. when you're just trying to go get a coffee. That's harassment. But some dude calling out at you, "Girl, YOU PRETTY!" like happened to me once ... thank you, sir!! Marilyn was loved by those guys. Because they represented her fan base. Directors loved her too, in spite of themselves - they loved her because, like Billy Wilder said, even if it took 80 takes for her to get a line - if she nailed it on the 81st, it would be the best take ever, and it would be Marilyn Monroe, after all ... so that's why she was paid the big bucks, and that's why you sucked it up and tried not to mind having to wait around for her to get over her stage fright or whatever it was. But the love the crew had for her was simple and unhindered by concerns other than appreciation. Marilyn fed off of them. She played to them.

In Don't Bother to Knock, she plays a resolutely unglamorous part. It's not made into a big deal, like, "Oooh, look at the pretty movie star being plain-ed down" ... It's appropriate for the part. She wears a simple cotton dress, low heels, a little black beret - and when she gets on the elevator for the first time and we see her from behind, her dress is a little bit wrinkled. Like it would be for any woman who had just taken a long subway ride. It's touching. Alex told me last night (she read it in some Photoplay magazine she owns. The woman is insane) that Marilyn had bought the dress herself at a five and dime for the movie. She had seen it, and known that it was Nell's dress. I love the intelligence of that, the intelligence of her choice for the character. It's perfect.

Nell's backstory unfolds slowly. When we first see her come through the revolving doors, we see a pretty woman, who seems unsure. Her step is hesitating. She looks like a raw nerve, everything making an impression on her, like she hasn't been out in public for a long long time (this turns out to be true - but watch how Marilyn is playing it in the first scene, before we know anything about her. That's smart acting. That's building a character.) If we know the rest of Marilyn Monroe's work, we may be forgiven for thinking that Nell is just another one of her naive breathless creations. She meets up with the elevator man, who turns out to be her uncle, who has gotten her a job babysitting for a child of guests in the hotel. The uncle seems solicitous, perhaps overly so. He says, "You won't have any trouble babysitting, will you, Nell?" A bottomless look of sadness battling with fear comes over Marilyn's face. It's startling. This was my first clue that Nell was going to be a little different than Marilyn's other characters. She says, "Of course not. Why would I?" She's not defensive. But unbelievably sad that his question even needs to be asked. It seems to suggest that there might be something ... wrong with her. The movie is full of tiny eloquent moments like that.

Nell is brought into the hotel room, and meets the parents of Bunny, the little girl she will be babysitting. The parents swirl out, leaving simple instructions. Nell reads Bunny a fairy story before she goes to bed. There is something touching here, and also not quite right. Marilyn reads the story in almost a monotone, a dreamy uninflected voice, as though she is trying to imagine herself into the story she is reading. Bunny is riveted.

Once Bunny goes to bed, Nell is left alone in the apartment. She's aimless. When her face is in stasis, and when she is alone, all you see is her sadness. There's no peace on her face. In the introduction to the parents, and in her dealings with her uncle, she tries to keep it together, and put on a social happy expression. But once alone, the mask is off. Marilyn was so rarely without her mask, and so it's amazing to watch.

Another thing that is fascinating about this film, and also singular in Marilyn's career, is that she gets the opportunity to show anger. Rage. I can't think of another film where she truly gets angry, where she asserts herself in that way. It's terrifying.

Meanwhile, another story goes on in the film. Richard Widmark plays Jed, a cynical pilot, who's been dating Lynn, played by Anne Bancroft. Lyn is a lounge singer in the hotel, Jed flies in on the weekends. It's obviously a "friends with benefits" type situation, and Lyn has been okay with that, up until now. She's portrayed by Bancroft as an intelligent and compassionate woman, who is not above having harmless fun, and she's not the type to yearn for domesticity or put the pressure on him to commit. But there are qualities she senses in Jed that disturb her, and she finally has come to the decision that she can't be with him anymore. It's his coldness, the way he treats people ... everything is seen through a cynical snarky lens ... and any act of kindness is assigned a base motive. You can see it in how he treats Eddie, the elevator man, who tries to joke with him. You can see it in the contemptuous way he treats the woman who wants to take their photograph. Richard Widmark (ooomph, he's sexy in this film) only has a couple of specific moments where these qualities can be displayed, and he nails them. We can see Lyn's point. He makes fun of her. She says, "You lack what I need. You lack an understanding heart." They "wrangle" back and forth in the bar of the hotel, and she's pretty certain that she needs to walk away. He's the kind of guy who has a little black book of names, always in his back pocket, but there's something about this Lyn woman that has gotten under his skin. He can't admit it yet. He's too proud. But her calm and reasoned explanation leaves him restless, pissed.

Jed finds himself at loose ends back up in his hotel room, while he can hear the lovely strains of Lyn singing torch songs (or, to say it another way, Anne Bancroft lip syncing) through the radio on the wall, connected to the bar downstairs (a nice omnipresent touch). He pours a drink. He lies on the bed. He throws his black book on the floor. He's cranky. And then he catches a glimpse in the window across the way - of Nell, dressed up in a gown, dancing around. A private moment. It's a haunting image, and Jed is struck dumb. Eventually she notices him, and they begin a conversation across the space in-between. He figures out her room number from the floor plan on the back of the door, and calls her. They sit and talk on the phone, staring at each other from window to window.

Now one of the things that I really love about this film is Richard Widmark's journey through it, and how he treats Nell at first, and then adjusts to the reality before him. Here's the thing: Marilyn was really about 11 years old inside. I think that's one of the reasons why pairing her up with someone like, oh, John Wayne, wouldn't have worked. Wayne required a grown-up. The thing about Marilyn, the captivating and also complicated thing, is that she was a little innocent girl in that sex-bomb of a body. And Richard Widmark's Jed, a guy out for a good time, a guy looking, in this moment anyway, to fuck his loneliness away ... only sees the body at first. But don't we all? I can't judge him for that. It's quite a body. He looks at Nell, and sees ... well ... Marilyn Monroe ... and he thinks: I have hit the jackpot here. There's also a certain passivity in Nell (at first), a certain willingness ... and so Jed, who's not in the mood for a fight, thinks that it will be pretty easy to seduce this one. And that's what he wants right now. No more problems, for God's sake. But over the devastating course of their next couple of scenes, when he invites himself over to her room (not knowing, of course, that it is not her room at all), he begins to realize that something is not right. They kiss, they drink, they flirt ... and something opens up in Nell, something is unleashed. She projects onto him all of her hopes and dreams, which is alarming - and has a kind of Fatal Attraction feel to it. Jed gets that vibe. And instead of ignoring it, and taking what he thinks he deserves anyway (after all, she invited him over - she's in a negligee - she knows what he wants!), he turns her down. And in so doing, becomes a better man. He shows his "understanding heart". He doesn't realize that that is what is happening in the moment, he just knows that seducing this woman would be wrong. Kim Morgan, in her wonderful review of the film, writes:

In real life, most men wouldn't so sensitively resist.

That, to me, is the most moving part of the film: Widmark's growing realization that Nell is sick, and his decision to help her, rather than just add to the hurts she's experienced. I can't think of another film of Marilyn's where she is treated in quite the way that Widmark treats her. She's usually a bombshell, a friendly girlie bombshell, eager, open-eyed, innocent, and yet smokin'. There is never any concern for how she might feel, being treated like a walking-talking blow-up doll. It is assumed that she is on board with it - and, like I said, Marilyn, for the most part, was. She was a movie goddess. We don't want to know that movie goddesses might have contradictory opinions about being ogled over in film after film. Marilyn's power was in strolling through that kind of gantlet and coming out unscathed, and still glowing. She did it in film after film. But in Don't Bother To Knock, she is actually human, and Widmark, at first distracted by the boobs and the face, ends up seeing her as she really is: a damaged sad little girl, trapped in a pin-up model's body. It's incredibly moving to watch that transformation happen in Widmark's face. Marilyn has never been treated so, well, kindly, as she is in this film.

Don't Bother To Knock had a short shooting schedule, and Marilyn actually is not in a hell of a lot of it. It feels like she is, she dominates the film - but the scenes with Widmark and Bancroft take up quite a bit of time as well, and so Marilyn only really shot for 2 weeks. She was so enamored with Anne Bancroft's acting that she would show up on the set to watch Bancroft's scenes being filmed. Bancroft was a "real" actress, and this was at the point in Marilyn's life (with the encouragement of her good friend Shelley Winters) that Marilyn was starting to learn her craft, and taking acting classes at The Actors Studio. Bancroft represented the serious side of the business, the actresses, who got to act, rather than just show their awesome silhouettes, and giggle and simper and wear bathing suits, etc. Marilyn so wanted to be considered a real actress.

And you know, like I said in the beginning, I love her stuff in comedies, musicals, melodramas ... I'm a fan, regardless of the material. She's got "it". What she is able to do in Some Like It Hot is awesome - it's movie magic. And when Marilyn was put in projects like that, projects that were worthy of her talents, she was very happy. She hated some of the stuff she was forced to do (uhm, Let's Make Love, for example), and she hated that she wasn't able, most of the time, to show the full spectrum. Her idols were not other bombshells. Her idols were real actresses.

We are a couple of years away, in Don't Bother to Knock, from Marilyn's famous disappearing act, when she dropped off the face of the earth, and wasn't heard from for a month or so ... until she re-emerged in New York, having moved there to study with Lee Strasberg, and to develop her own projects. She formed a production company. She wanted to do The Brothers Karamazov. It was a hugely rebellious act, and was treated with disdain by the powers-that-be, but it was her way of saying, "I do not like the movies I am being put in. I am taking the reins of my own career." And how was she rewarded? By having a reporter ask her at a press conference, "Do you know how to spell Dostoevsky, Marilyn?"

The guts that woman had. To tolerate such condescension.

And Don't Bother to Knock, although a big flop at the time, and not well-remembered at all, is evidence of the many shades of Marilyn Monroe; it is a nuanced terrifying performance, and her crack-up at the end is shattering to watch. She walks across the hotel lobby, and her arms look stiff and un-usable, she is vaguely unsteady on her feet, as though she is learning to walk all over again, her face is wet with tears, and she blinks up at the lights of the lobby, alarmed, squinting at the glare. She goes down the steps, one step, two step, her body slack and yet also rigid, she cannot move easily. Her psychic pain emanates not just from her face, the ending is not done in closeup, it's a full-body shot ... and her physicality is eloquent. It tells the whole story. Her pain is in her pinky finger, her waist, her calves ... It surges through her and makes it difficult to even walk.

You know who plays a scene that well and with that much specificity and abandon?

A real actress does, that's who.

"Gauntlet" has been changed to "gantlet" throughout. You learn something new every day. Thanks, Kerry!

Speaking of Marilyn Monroe ...

(oh were we??) -

The wonderful Kim Morgan has a piece up about Don't Bother to Knock - with Marilyn Monroe and Richard Widmark (rest in peace) - I remember Alex telling me I HAD to see this movie - somehow I had missed it, although I had seen most of Marilyn's other stuff ... I very much liked Kim's comment here, it really resonates with me:

But, why? Why must women have to be so normal? Though suffering from deep seated psychological problems, I sense that it’s this type of "normal" pressure making her crack (the punishing and smarmy Cook Jr. doesn't help either). Monroe portrays these ideas beautifully, so much so, that I wondered how much of her real life was seeping into her performance, it plays so real. I kept wishing that she could just get out of that hotel, doll herself up and have some fun with a man who might understand her. Widmark isn't really the one, even though underneath his smirk and swagger, he’s essentially a good heart.

Don't Bother to Knock is actually on my queue right now - but apparently I am trying to see every Iranian film I haven't yet seen in as short a time as possible - so Don't Bother to Knock got pushed down. I put it on the queue when Richard Widmark died - wanting to see it again ... and now, after reading Kim's piece, I feel quite urgent about it! She writes so well. (Great and insightful comment in the comments section too).

Happy place

I love this photo. I have it on my bulletin board.

A tour of my bulletin board

Marilyn Monroe lifting weights.

Life-size icon in a white dress

Marilyn Monroe. Nice commentary - also cool photo, huh? I love that weird hand-chair right next to her.

Relevant clip from Seven Year Itch below:

I find Seven Year Itch rather nasty, actually - and it makes me feel uncomfortable to watch it. Like I feel uncomfortable at the vicious homophobia in Adam's Rib, or the little tap-dancing black children in Affair to Remember. I just have to murmur to myself, "Different time, different time ..." and enjoy the movie anyway. Seven Year Itch has a twisted sexual psychology to it - a hatred of HER, in particular - which makes me sad and angry - but Marilyn comes out of it smelling like a rose, even though the movie seems determined to humiliate her.

It's not like Some Like It Hot which shows off her sexiness in a more fun-loving way, not so hateful ... Yes, she's babealicious in a way that could sink ships and make men crash their cars. I'm not saying to treat her like she's NORMAL ... she obviously isn't ... but don't try to humiliate that lovely shining creature. Just kneel down in worship, and submit. That's all you can do.

In Seven Year Itch she slips from from the grasping fingers of the nasty-minded people who want to shame her, who look eagerly at her face waiting to see her defeat - and gives a charming sweet innocent performance anyway. That's guts.

Arthur Miller said: "I thought she had the potential for being a great performer if she were given the right stuff to do. And if you look at the stuff she did do, it's amazing that she created any impression at all because most of it was very primitive. And the fact that people remember these parts from these films is amazing ... She was committed to these parts as though they were real people, not cardboard cutouts."

Another relevant quote, I think, comes from Peter Bogdonavich - and I think of Seven year Itch when I read this:

The year before her much-speculated-over death at thirty-six (rumors of presidential involvement, etc.), playwright Clifford Odets told me that she used to come over to his house and talk, but that the only times she seemed to him really comfortable were when she was with his two young children and their large poodle. She relaxed with them, felt no threat. With everyone else, Odets said, she seemed nervous, intimidated, frightened. When I repeated to Miller this remark about her with children and animals, he said, "Well, they didn't sneer at her."

Even in a film that sneers at her, she shines. She's adorable. She eludes capture. She is loved.

Perfection: Marilyn in action

Diamonds are a girl's best friend

It's luscious, the colors, the guy's ties, the fact that in all of the women she is the ONLY blonde (she would make sure that no other blonde ever was in one of her pictures- even down to the extras ... She would scan the crowd of extras, looking for any platinum headed chick - and if there was one? She'd quietly speak to someone, and platinum extra would vanish the next day. Look closer next time you see one of her movies, even in crowd scenes - it's all brunettes, and mousy-haired girls ... except for her. Marilyn was no dummy)

The number makes me happy every time I see it. I just lose myself in it - even though I've memorized her every gesture.

And speaking of gestures: just WATCH her. Yes, it's choreography. Someone gave the moves to her. She always had good people working around her. But it takes a star to fill those gestures, to make them mythic, to have them land. Every tiny shimmy, every eensy shoulder shrug - and then every big bold burlesque move - is not just perfectly executed - but perfectly embodied and filled.

It's just so much fun to watch her.

Always and forever.

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'A Beautiful Child' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'A Beautiful Child'.

This is perhaps the most famous of these little transcripts. 1955. Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote, drinking buddies and gossipy friends, meet up at a funeral for a well-loved actress and acting teacher. Monroe and Capote spend the whole day hanging out, drinking champagne, walking down by the docks, talking ... at this point, Marilyn is divorced from Dimaggio - and has a "secret lover" - which will turn out to be Arthur Miller. Monroe has moved back to New York - to protest the crap movies the studios were placing her in - she has formed her own production company and started studying acting with Lee Strasberg. I love this photograph of Capote and Monroe - dude, hold her HAND, not her wrist!!

It's a fun piece .... an illuminating glimpse of Marilyn Monroe.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'A Beautiful Child'.

TC: Now do you think we can get the hell out of here? You promised me champagne, remember?

MARILYN: I remember. But I don't have any money.

TC: You're always late and you never have any money. By any chance are you under the delusion that you're Queen Elizabeth?

MARILYN: Who?

TC: Queen Elizabeth. The Queen of England.

MARILYN: (frowning) What's that cunt got to do with it?

TC: Queen Elizabeth never carries money either. She's not allowed to. Filthy lucre ust not stain the royal palm. It's a law or something.

MARILYN: I wish they'd pass a law like that for me.

TC: Keep going the way you are and maybe they will.

MARILYN: Well, gosh. How does she pay for anything? Like when she goes shopping?

TC: Her lady-in-waiting trots along with a bag full of farthings.

MARILYN: You know what? I'll bet she gets everything free. In return for endorsemenkts.

TC: Very possible. I wouldn't be a bit surprised. By Appointment to Her Majesty. Corgi dogs. All those Fortnum & Mason goodies. Pot. Condoms.

MARILYN: What would she want with condoms?

TC: Not her, dopey. For that chump who walks two steps behind. Prince Philip.

MARILYN: Him. Oh, yeah. He's cute. He looks like he might have a nice prick. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Errol Flynn whip out his prick and play the piano with it? Oh well, it was a hundred years ago, I'd just got into modeling, and I went to this half-ass party, and Errol Flynn, so pleased with himself, he was there and he took out his prick and played the piano with it. Thumped the keys. He played You Are My Sunshine. Christ! Everybody says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood. But who cares? Look, don't you have any money?

TC: Maybe about fifty bucks.

MARILYN: Well, that ought to buy us some bubbly.

(Outside, Lexington Avenue was empty of all but harmless pedestrians. It was around two, and as nice an April afternoon as one could wish: ideal strolling weather. So we moseyed toward Third Avenue. A few gawkers spun their heads, not because they recognized Marilyn as the Marilyn, but because of her funereal finery; she giggled her special little giggle, a sound as tempting as the jingling bells on a Good Humor wagon, and said: "Maybe I should always dress this way. Real anonymous."

As we neared P.J. Clarke's saloon, I suggested P.J.'s might be a good place to refresh ourselves, but she vetoed that: "It's full of those advertising creeps. And that bitch Dorothy Kilgallen, she's always in there getting bombed. What is it wiht these micks? The way they booze, they're worse than Indians."

I felt called upon to defend Kilgallen, who was a friend, somewhat, and I allowed as to how she could upon occasion be a clever funny woman. She said: "Be that as it may, she's written some bitchy stuff about me. But all those cunts hate me. Hedda. Louella. I know you're supposed to get used to it, but I just can't. It really hurts. What did I ever do to those hags? The only one who writes a decent word about me is Sidney Skolsky. But he's a guy. The guys treat me okay. Just like maybe I was a human person. At least they give me the benefit of the doubt. And Bob Thomas is a gentleman. And Jack O'Brian."

We looked in the windows of antique shops; one contained a tray of old rings, and Marilyn said: "That's pretty. The garnet with the seed pearls. I wish I could wear rings, but I hate people to notice my hands. They're too fat. Elizabeth Taylor has fat hands. But with those eyes, who's looking at her hands? I like to dance naked in front of mirrors and watch my titties jump around. There's nothing wrong with them. But I wish my hands weren't so fat."

Another window displayed a handsome grandfather clock, which prompted her to observe: "I've never had a home. Not a real one with all my own furniture. But if I ever get married again, and make a lot of money, I'm going to hire a couple of trucks and ride down Third Avenue buying every damn kind of crazy thing. I'm going to get a dozen grandfather clocks and line them all up in one room and have them all ticking away at the same time. That would be real homey, don't you think?")

MARILYN: Hey! Across the street!

TC: What?

MARILYN: See the sign with the palm? That must be a fortunetelling parlor.

TC: Are you in the mood for that?

MARILYN: Well, let's take a look.

(It was not an inviting establishment. Through a smearaed window we could discern a barren room with a skinny, hairy gypsy lady seated in a canvas chair under a hellfire-red ceiling lamp that shed a torturous glow; she was knitting a pair of baby-booties and did not return our stares. Nevertheless, Marilyn started to go in, then changed her mind.)

MARILYN: Sometimes I want to know what's going to happen. Then I think it's better not to. There's two things I'd like to know, though. One is whether I'm going to lose weight.

TC: And the other?

MARILYN: That's a secret.

"Want to see her?"

a beautiful shot from Marilyn Monroe's last unfinished film.

You know, certain cinematographers said that it was so easy to film her and light her because her skin was naturally reflective. Lots of actresses need makeup to pick up all that light - and to have it come across - and of course Marilyn wore makeup - but it wasn't just makeup that made her look like that - there was something glowing already about her skin. There's a wonderful grainy photograph of Marilyn, 1955, in an acting class in New York. It's dingy - there's a bare bulb - a scratched floor. People like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are also in the class. A crowd of people sit in battered wooden chairs, listening to the teacher. Marilyn is just one of that crowd. She's wearing a trench coat, very plain and simple - no makeup - and I swear, it is as though there is a special spotlight shining down on her. Partly it's the blonde - your eyes naturally go to the blonde hair - but it's more than that, and more than the fact that she's so famous. It is as though she has a key light with her, at all times. I read one photographer say that he had noticed a layer of peach fuzz over her face - almost thicker than other people have - and he thought that that was what gave her that luminous look - the fuzz catching the light - there was nothing MATTE about her face.

There are also wonderful stories about her walking around in New York completely anonymous - she was able to douse that light (by magic, I'm convinced) so that nobody would ever look at her and say, 'That's Marilyn Monroe'. She was walking with a friend through the crowded streets of Manhattan - she had a headscarf on, no makeup, she was wearing jeans, sneakers - and completely disappeared into the crowd. The friend was amazed. This was the most famous most desired woman in the world. How did she turn that OFF so completely? They discussed it a bit. And then Marilyn said, with a wicked grin, "Want to see her?" Meaning: Marilyn with a capital M. I love that she referred to her persona in the third person. The friend said, yeah, let's see "her";. So Marilyn took off the headscarf, and - without any makeup - any fluffing of hair - anything external - she turned on the light inside. And there "she" was. Marilyn Monroe, walking in the grime of 9th Avenue. And slowly - people noticed - and came over - and asked for autographs - and the whole thing ended with a mob scene - Marilyn surrounded by throngs.

"Want to see her?"

That's a movie star. It can't be taught. Whether it was a small layer of fuzz on her face that picked up the lights ... or whether it was something magical within ... that's the key to her mysterious appeal.

File My Claim

I know the song Marilyn Monroe is probably most known for singing is "Diamonds are a girl's best friend".

But the way she sings "File My Claim" in River of no Return is my personal favorite.

Marilyn in River of No Return

"File My Claim" clip below.

Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe!!

On June 1, 1926 Norma Jeane Mortenson was born.

Happy birthday, dear Marilyn Monroe!! You're one of my favorites.

Bunch of quotes about her and by her below ... Enjoy!!

(That's a photo by Sam Shaw - his photos of her are my favorites. Natural light, an innocence to them ... candid-feeling ... just beautiful.)

Marilyn Monroe:

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

That's Monroe and photographer Eve Arnold

Billy Wilder:

She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came up for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line. She could do a 3-page dialogue scene perfectly, and then get stuck on a line like, "It's me, Sugar"... But if she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good ...

She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She was afraid of the camera, and that's why, I think, she muffed some lines. God knows how often. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.

Eve Arnold:

If an editor wanted her, he had to agree to her terms. She knew how she wanted to be seen, and if her cooperation was sought, she reserved the right of veto.

She knew she was superlative at creating still pictures and she loved doing it.

She had learned the trick of moving infinitesimally to stay in range, so that the photographer need not refocus but could easily follow movements that were endlessly changing.

At first I thought it was surface technique, but it went beyond technique. It didn't always work, and sometimes she would tire and it was as though her radar had failed; but when it did work, it was magic. With her it was never a formula; it was her will, her improvisation.

Peter Bogdonavich:

The fact is that Marilyn was in bad trouble from the day she was born as Norma Jean Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in the city of angels and movies, a poor bastard angel child who rose to be queen of a town and a way of life that nevertheless held her in contempt. That she died a martyr to pictures at the same time as the original studio star system -- through which she had risen -- finally collapsed and went also to its death seems too obviously symbolic not to note. Indeed, the coincidence of the two passing together is why I chose to end this long book about movie stars with Marilyn Monroe. What I saw so briefly in my glimpse of Marilyn at the very peak of her stardom (and the start of my career) -- that fervent, still remarkably naive look of all-consuming passion for learning about her craft and art -- haunts me still. She is the most touching, strangely innocent -- despite all the emphasis on sex -- sacrifice to the twentieth-century art of cinematic mythology, with real people as gods and goddesses. While Lillian Gish had been film's first hearth goddess, Marilyn was the last love goddess of the screen, the final Venus or Aphrodite. The minute she was gone, we started to miss her and that sense of loss has grown, never to be replaced. In death, of course, she triumphed at last, her spirit being imperishable, and keenly to be felt in the images she left behind to mark her brief visit among us.

Elia Kazan:

Relieve your mind now of the images you have of this person. When I met her, she was a simple, eager young woman who rode a bike to the classes she was taking, a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to ...

The girl had little education and no knowledge except the knowledge of her own experience; of that she had a great deal, and for an actor, that is the important kind of knowledge. For her, I found, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. She had no interest in abstract, formal, or impersonal concepts but was passionately devoted to her own life's experiences. What she needed above all was to have her sense of worth confirmed. Born out of wedlock, abandoned by her parents, kicked around, scorned by the men she'd been with until Johnny, she wanted more than anything else approval from men she could respect. Comparing her with many of the wives I got to know in that community, I thought her the honest one, them the "chumps". But there was a fatal contradiction in Marilyn. She deeply wanted reassurance of her worth, yet she respected the men who scorned her, because their estimate of her was her own.

Marilyn Monroe:

Well-behaved women rarely make history.

John Strasberg (son of Lee Strasberg, Marilyn's acting teacher):

I think I was talking about cars to Mother and Father. You know how I loved cars. I'd just come home and it was going to be my eighteenth birthday. I'd wanted to come for that.

Mother and Father hadn't wanted me to come. "Why don't you wait till the end of the year?" Well, i'd already been kicked out of college. They didn't know yet.

When I'd gone off at the airport, I'd turned to Mother and said, "For two cents, I won't go." Nobody gave me the two cents, but I'd meant it. What I'd wanted to do was work. I'd wanted to work from the time I was fifteen, and they were always against any effort on my part to be strong or independent. I remember how much I resented it. "You don't have to work, we'll take care of everything," undermining me.

So I was talking about cars, no one was listening, and Marilyn was there and out of the blue said, "Why don't you take my car, Johnny?"

I thought I hadn't heard her right, and I said, "What?" She had remembered the summer before, in California, I'd had that Chevy I'd rented. God, I loved that car, a '57 Bel Air silver Chevy, and she had the Thunderbird.

She continued, "I've got the Ford Mustang the corporation gave me, and Arthur and I have a car. That one's just sitting in the garage, we don't use it."

I was stunned. I couldn't believe she meant it.

Mother and Father were horrified; they didn't like it at all. I don't know if it felt like too much to give me or if they were worried about my driving in my state of mind, but they objected strenuously. "He's too young. Maybe later, Marilyn. You don't have to. It's impossible, he can't afford it, it could be dangerous."

Marilyn just said, "Well, don't worry about any of that, it's in the corporation's name, so I'll take care of the insurance."

I'll never forget that ... There were so few, so very few people who were generous like that. Especially to me, who couldn't do anything for her.

I think that car saved my life.

Billy Wilder:

I never knew what Marilyn was going to do, how she was going to play a scene. I had to talk her out of it, or I had to underline it and say, "That's very good" or "Do it this way." But I never knew anybody who ... except for a dress that blows up and she's standing there ... I don't know why she became so popular. I never knew. She was really kind of ... She was a star. Every time you saw her, she was something. Even when she was angry, it was just a remarkable person. A remarkable person, and in spades when she was on the screen. She was much better on the screen than not on the screen.

Marilyn Monroe:

Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.

Billy Wilder:

It's very difficult to talk seriously about Monroe, because she was so glitzy, you know. She escaped the seriousness somehow; she changed the subject. Except that she was very tough to work with. But what you had, by hook or crook, once you saw it on the screen, it was just amazing. Amazing, the radiation that came out. And she was, believe it or not, an excellent dialogue actress. She knew where the laugh was. She knew.

Marilyn Monroe:

"For breakfast, I have two raw beaten eggs in a glass of hot milk. I never eat dessert. My nail polish is transparent. I never wear stockings or underclothes because I think it is important to breathe freely. I wash my hair everyday and I am always brushing it. Every morning I walk across my apartment rolling an empty soda bottle between my ankles, in order to preserve my balance."

Eve Arnold:

I never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have -- unconsciously -- judged other subjects.

Marilyn Monroe:

It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.

Ernest Cunningham (photographer):

I worked with Marilyn Monroe. A rather dull person. But when I said "Now!" she lit up. Suddenly, something unbelievable came across. The minute she heard the click of the camera, she was down again. It was over. I said, "What is it between you and the camera that doesn't show at any other time?" She said, "It's like being screwed by a thousand guys and you can't get pregnant."

Peter Bogdonavich:

More than forty years have passed since Marilyn's mysterious death, but her legend and persona have survived. This is all the more remarkable because she actually made very few films, and even fewer that were any good. But there was a reality to her artifice -- she believed in the characters she played, even if they were inherently unbelievable. "Everything she did," [Arthur] Miller said to me, "she played realistically. I don't think she knew any other way to play anything -- only to tell you the truth. She was always psychologically committed to that person as a person, no matter what the hell it was, rather than a stock figure. Because the parts she got could easily have been stock figures, which had no other dimension. But she wouldn't have known how to do that. In other words, she did not have the usual technique for doing something as a stock figure ... She was even that way when [director] John Huston used her the first time [in a memorable walk-on bit] in The Asphalt Jungle [1950]."

This went for every picture she did in her surprisingly, painfully short career as a star, barely a decade, little more than a dozen pictures. Though she managed to work with quite a number of major directors, it was not necessarily always in their best efforts; but still they were Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks (twice), Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder (twice), George Cukor (twice, if you count her last unfinished one), John Huston (twice), Laurence Olivier, Joshua Logan, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (bit part in 1950's classic All About Eve). In my conversation with Miller, he said, "I thought she had the potential for being a great performer if she were given the right stuff to do. And if you look at the stuff she did do, it's amazing that she created any impression at all because most of it was very primitive. And the fact that people remember these parts from these films is amazing ... She was comitted to these parts as though they were real people, not cardboard cutouts. Even though the director and author and the rest might have thought they were cutouts and would deal with them that way. The way the two men [Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon] in Some Like It Hot felt with their parts, or George Raft with his part. She was real. And therefore she had the potential of being a great comedienne." (Norman Mailer, in his book on Monroe -- he never met her -- wrote that starting with 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she was a great comedienne.)

Marilyn Monroe:

I'd prefer not to analyze it [acting] ... it's subjective; rather, I want to remain subjective while I'm doing it. Rather than do much talking I'd rather act. When it's on the screen, that's when you'll know who Roslyn [her character in The Misfits] is. I don't want to water down my own feeling ... Goethe says a career is developed in public but talent is developed in private, or silence. It's true for the actor. To really say what's in my heart, I'd rather show than to say. Even though I want people to understand, I'd much rather they understand on the screen. If I don't do that, I'm on the wrong track, or in the wrong profession.... Nobody would have heard of me if it hadn't been for John Huston. When we started Asphalt Jungle, my first picture, I was very nervous, but John said, 'Look at Calhern [the late Louis Calhern, a veteran actor], see how he's shaking. If you're not nervous, you might as well give up.' John has meant a great deal in my life. It's sort of a coincidence to be with him ten years later.

John Strasberg:

The first time I met her I remember she came out of the living room and Pop said, "This is my son," and my first impression of her was that she was different from most of the people who came to the house. I'd watch all these people trading their most human qualities, betraying themselves for success at all costs, to become rich and famous, and afterward, when it was too late, they'd realize they had lost the best part of themselves along the way, but she, she was like me. When I looked into her eyes, it was like looking into my own, they were like a child's eyes. I was still a child. You know how children just look at you. My feeling was she had less ego or was less narcissistic than most of the actors who never really bothered with me. She was just another person to me, another one from that world I felt cut off, excluded, from. She was nicer, real simple, no makeup, and she really looked at me as if she saw me. It wasn't that I wanted people to look at me, but I knew the difference when she did. I knew everyone said she was the sexiest, most sensual woman in the world. Not to me. I thought there was something wrong with me for not feeling that from her. I'd felt it from other women who came to the house. I was pretty sexually frustrated then. She was so open, so loose, and her sensuality as such was so totally innocent, nothing dirty in it at all, and the first time it was just like talking to an ordinary person, only realer than most who came into the house in those days. She was quiet, too, I remember, like an animal is quiet, and I was like that too, survival tactics. She seemed smart, but not in an educated way, instinctively smart, nobody's fool.

Couldn't resist:

Marilyn Monroe:

"I am a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me because of the image they have made of me and that I have made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much and I can't live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy's the same as any other woman's. I can't live up to it."

Marilyn Monroe:

My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!

Arthur Miller:

She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence. Sometimes she seemed to see all men as boys, children with immeidate needs that it was her place in nature to fulfill; meanwhile her adult self stood aside observingt he game. Men were their need, imperious and somehow sacred. She might tell about being held down at a party by two of the guests in a rape attempt from which she said she had escaped, but the truth of the account was far less important than its strange remoteness from her personally. And ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization. She was at this point incapable of condemning or even of judging people who had damaged her, and to be with her was to be accepted, like moving out into a kind of sanctifying light from a life where suspicions was common sense. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted most was not to be judged but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it -- "Oh, there's lots of beautiful girls," she would say to some expression of awed amazement, as though her beauty betrayed her quest for a more enduring acceptance.

Peter Bogdonavich:

The year before her much-speculated-over death at thirty-six (rumors of presidential involvement, etc.), playwright Clifford Odets told me that she used to come over to his house and talk, but that the only times she seemed to him really comfortable were when she was with his two young children and their large poodle. She relaxed with them, felt no threat. With everyone else, Odets said, she seemed nervous, intimidated, frightened. When I repeated to Miller this remark about her with children and animals, he said, "Well, they didn't sneer at her."

Burt Glinn (photographer):

She had no bone structure -- the face was a Polish flat plate. Not photogenic in the accepted sense, the features were not memorable or special; what she had was the ability to project.

Billy Wilder:

Marilyn was not interested in costumes. She was not a clotheshose. You could put anything on her you wanted. If it showed something, then she accepted it. As long as it showed a little something.

Henri Cartier Bresson (photographer):

She's American and it's very clear that she is - she's very good that way - one has to be very local to be universal.

Here's the mega-post I wrote about the making of The Misfits

Marilyn Monroe:

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Marilyn Monroe:

Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

Marilyn Monroe:

Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.

Arthur Miller:

To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.

Marilyn Monroe:

I'm not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.

Marilyn Monroe (this is what she pleaded at the end of the last interview she gave):

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.

Question for Ceci

On Saturday, my sister Jean and I went and got mani/pedis. French nails on Ye Olde Digits - and I got the lovely shade called "Kinky from Helsinki" on the toes. As we sat there, getting pampered, we watched television with the other ladies in the shop. River of No Return was playing on AMC - the Saturday morning Western. Love that movie!

A funny moment:

A lady sitting in the chair next to me, getting her heels scrubbed by the manicurist, said, in a growly voice, with a RI accent, "God, look at huh." ("huh" meaning "her") We were staring up at Marilyn in her showgirl outfit. Lady said to no one in particular, "People said she was fat." Long pause, as we all contemplated the "fat"-ness of Marilyn Monroe. Lady in the chair then said, to complete the thought, "Jesus. I'd love to be fat." (Meaning: if "fat" means I look like "huh" - then bring it on!)

Now Ceci - my question for you is:

There are all of those lovely scenes with Marilyn playing the guitar. Sometimes during her show, and then sometimes out in the wild, to entertain the little boy. Her guitar-playing looks very realistic. The chord changes, the way her fingers move ... all seemed perfect.

Jean asked me, "Did she really play?"

And I didn't know the answer. It looks like she knew how to play. And I also recall the little ukelele in Some Like It Hot - but I KNOW, Ceci, that you will know the answer.

Could Marilyn Monroe play the guitar? Was that her really playing in River of No Return?

A bit of Marilyn Monroe to start the day

RTG has photos of a beautiful little relic. I LOVE RTG's childlike writing on the back pages.

Second of all - last week, RTG sent me an URGENT email with URGENT new Marilyn Monroe information:

Heretofore unseen photographs of Monroe by Eve Arnold - who was totally brilliant, in terms of capturing Monroe. I love Arnold's stuff. If you click through the gallery of new photos - my favorite, I think, is Marilyn at the mirror. Her back is to the camera, and she's pulled her white dress up - it's bunched around her waist - and she's messing with her hair.

The Making of the Misfits

Eve Arnold, photographer

So I have finished my third book in the From the Stacks challenge.

First of all - the challenge has exploded. Check out the updated list of participants - as well as all of the books that will be read by all of us in this challenge. Amazing!! Also amazing how little overlap there is - in terms of books.

Here is my own personal list.

I read Master and Margarita and I read Isaac Newton.

And I finished The Making of the Misfits this past week.

This is a book I have been wanting to read for a long time - but it's a bit hard to find. (At least, you can't find it in your regular old Barnes and Noble). I have known about the notoriously difficult shoot for The Misfits since I was in high school - just because - if you study film, if you're interested in Marilyn Monroe, whatever - you would have heard about this shoot. It's like the shoot for Cleopatra. Or Waterworld, for that matter. Certain movies become famous for the difficulty of the actual shooting itself. The Misfits is one of those. And I had heard about this book The Making of the Misfits - it's quoted left and right in Marilyn Monroe biographies, Monty Clift biographies, John Huston biographies ... and I finally tracked down a copy at a used bookseller - and I've had it for quite some time.

Now - another thing that makes the shooting of The Misfits stand out:

Magnum sent a barrage of photographers to hang out on the location - and document the entire process. We're talking about photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath ... and more. People who are famous. So this is also one of the most documented shoots EVER. Every single second of it is captured by at least one of these photographers. The photos are amazing. I've spoken about Eve Arnold before ... and her gift with photographing Marilyn (although Marilyn was one of the most photogenic women ever to grace the planet).

So there is that as well (having all the photographers there). The photographers were not clustered on the edges, trying to get a good shot (the way they were on the Cleopatra shoot - which was barred to outsiders and press - because of the sensitivity of the fact that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were openly cheating on their spouses - who were RIGHT THERE) ... The Misfits, a grueling difficult shoot, was documented by people who were asked to be there. These are not blurry paparazzi shots. ... these are works of art.

Bruce Davidson, photographer

Eve Arnold, photographer - that's Frank Taylor, the producer, Arthur Miller, and Gable

Ernst Haas, photographer

Magnum also wanted to do a picture book on the shooting of the movie (this is all from before they even started shooting - there was a buzz around this movie, for many reasons) - and so there were also reporters and writers who came along on the shoot, to do interviews, articles, etc. James Goode was one of those people.

One of the things that really interested me about this book was that there is no retrospective point of view. It is a running diary of James Goode's experience on the film - so it's all: Today we moved to the second location ... Last night we gambled all night ... whatever. He is writing down his impressions as they occur.

I have heard so much about the problems on this shoot from other books - the breakup of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe - John Huston's compulsive gambling - Monroe being hospitalized for exhaustion (this was not a Lindsey Lohan type thing - where "exhaustion" stands in for "partying non-stop without wearing panties". Monroe was not a partier - although she was addicted to sleeping pills, due to her lifelong struggle with insomnia.) Not to mention Monroe's mental state at the time - which was not good - due to the growing distance with Arthur Miller, her embarrassing failed love affair with Yves Montand - the arduous nature of the shoot in Reno - the fact that Monroe was in every shot of the film practically - she got no rest - and, in general, her acting demons coming up and grabbing her by the throat. Monroe always wanted to be taken seriously as an actress. It seemed to her, at times, that the studio wanted to thwart her in this goal - putting her in crappy vehicles like Let's make Love to punish her. This is why she formed her own production company. This is why she read books like The Brothers Karamazov because she knew she could play parts like the seductress in that book. The Misfits was, by far, the most serious and grueling part she had ever been asked to do. Arthur Miller had written it for her. He had used aspects of her personality in the role of Roslyn. He probably had a Svengali thing going on ... if I just write this piece for her, and she gets the acclaim she deserves, maybe our marriage will survive?? Sadly, it was too late - and everything started to fall apart DURING the shooting.

James Goode - observing all of this - doesn't have much to say about it - since he's on the ground with them, everything is going down right in front of him - all he knows is Marilyn moved out of the hotel room she had been sharing with Miller. That's it.

It surprised me, reading this book, how professional Marilyn Monroe was - what a trooper she was. Not that I didn't think she was professional - but just from all the stories I've heard of what a nightmare she could be (she had a real problem with memorizing lines - it is thought that she probably was undiagnosed dyslexic - she would invert words, repeatedly - causing much problems with simple lines like, "We're over here!" A small line like that could take 70 takes for Marilyn to get right.) I had assumed that the entire story here in this book would be one of growing annoyance, or impatience ... with her illnesses, her tantrums, all that ... but that's not the case at ALL. I'm obviously a huge fan of Marilyn Monroe, and I feel protective of her (I realize this is ridiculous, but whatever) ... so I was so pleased to read that while yes, she had some mental and physical problems during the shoot - shooting had to stop while she was airlifted to a hospital in Los Angeles so she could recover - Everyone still had to be paid during the time she was gone - and, uhm, Clark Gable was the freakin' star - so the costs started skyrocketing. But besides all of that - I was happy to read about how much the crew loved her, how much the people of Dayton (the little town in Nevada where they shot a lot of the film) loved her - "When she wasn't filming, she would talk to anybody. She was real down to earth" - said one Dayton resident. Stuff like that ... I am not surprised at all. A sweet woman - whose life fell apart during the filming of this movie.

Bruce Davidson, photographer

One of the things that I loved about this book was how funny it was. It's just a running diary - but I think Goode captures so well that sense of absurdity and collaboration in trying to make a picture like this one. Instead of being on the backlot at Paramount - they are out in the desert - working with wild horses, real cowboys, raging bulls, dust storms, airplanes, rodeos ... Location shoots are intensely difficult - it's hard to control the sound, the extras, mother nature ... And Goode just captures so much of what I love about film-making: the hunker-down mentality, the "let's just get it done" mentality ... everyone working their asses off towards one goal. Everyone a part of this larger project. Yes, we've got Clark Gable. He is very important. But so is the sound guy. So is the stunt double for Montgomery Clift, the rodeo cowboy Clift had been following around for months before shooting began. So is the proprietor of the hotel in Dayton - who opened up their entire hotel for the cast and crew of this film - and treated them with kindness, welcoming them to their town. The guy who figures out how to get the lights into Roslyn's tiny room - and the makeup person who makes sure that Marilyn's pancake makeup didn't melt off of her - Just the whole TEAM. The book is so evocative of that crazy atmosphere. Like - there's a combination of plain old hard work - and then also an awareness of the absurdity of the entire thing. I loved how funny the book was - it made me feel like I was there.

Bruce Davidson, photographer

I'll post some excerpts, some of my favorites:

Gambling is a vice and may be a sin, but at least there was no hypocrisy about it in Reno. Everything was in the open, including the expressions of greed, momentary triumph, and, finally, despair, in the eyes of the tourists and permanent residents. Every human quality was enlarged a hundredfold in the unseeing faces of the players. Here, for the first time, an observer could see absolute greed, absolute degeneration, and often an absolute vacuum of emotion. Listening to stories on The Misfits set about the avariciousness of the Reno inhabitants, [John] Huston defended the town, himself belieing Reno, and the West in general, to be the last stop for the vanishing American innocent. [Arthur] Miller, of course, was saying much the same thing in his screenplay about some of the last free men on the continent.

Miller and Tom Shaw, Huston's first assistant director, were given an example of Miller's point when they tried to hire some casual faces for the picture. They wanted an Indian, for one, as a kind of grace note or signature to reappear throughout the picture in the crowd scenes, and finally found the man they wanted drinking in a skid-row saloon with a white friend. The friend translated Shaw's offer, but the Indian, a Paiute from the local Pyramid Lake reservation, was umoved. Shaw: "Would you do a job for ten dollars?" The Indian: "I have ten dollars. I'm an Indian, and you won't take my picture. I may be the face on the nickel, but I won't kiss the buffalo's ass." Shaw later found a corrupt Indian.

Okay - so can you get the tone here? These are the kinds of anedotes that are MANNA to my soul. Maybe because of the inherent humor in this. The humor in this ridiculous (and yet - also - important) business of entertainment.

I LOVED this anecdote - because, to me, it is so indicative of Clark Gable's character. Well, not just of his character - but of his talent. More inexperienced actors talk about working with, say, Robert DeNiro - and how he makes you be better. He forces you to be in the moment, to listen. And it doesn't seem like he is doing anything at all. It is just that he knows how to be PRESENT. Listen to this anecdote from a woman who is not even an actress - but who had a small part in the film:

Playing opposite Gable in this brief scene was blonde Marietta Tree, socialite and friend of John Huston, and most famous for the Democratic political salon that she runs in her upper-Eastside mansion in New York. Mrs. Tree had not intended to appear in the picture, but had simply stopped off to see Huston on her way to San Francisco. The day before, Huston had interviewed a local actress who was to play the part of the departing St. Louis divorcee, and had decided against using her. Gable, Huston, and Mrs. Tree were talking later at lunch when Gable suddenly said, "Why don't we have that one over there?" meaning that Mrs. Tree could very well play the part. Mrs. Tree protested, saying that she wasn't an actress, and not the type. Gable replied that she was just the type he wanted. Huston said, "Why don't you do it, honey? We can fix you up so you'll look real flashy."

Mrs. Tree described her first role, "Gable and I read the scene three times and acted it once. Then I went out to dinner with John and rehearsed the scene twenty times during dinner. Huston even played the part of Susan for me. The next morning I was called for makeup at 6:15 and I was shown how to make up my own mouth, which came to me as a revelation. There were three rehearsals but I did the scene in one take.

There was really no reason to be ervous, because Gable and Huston gave me such a feeling, as professionals. I felt like a very young ballet dancer being wafted across the stage by Nijinsky. Gable played the part so completely that he became the man and I became the girl. When the time came for me to turn, I couldn't leave and he put me on the train. I had no responsibility."

Why does that move me so much? It just does. The book is FULL of glimpses of these people - Gable, Clift, Monroe, Huston - people who are, frankly, idols to me. I look up to them. They are, partly, why I am who I am today. Because of their inspiration, because of seeing their movies at a young age and thinking: Hoooooleeeee crap. I have to do that!!

So I just love to learn more about them. I never get over them. And I love the image of Gable being so good - and so in character - and just so solid - that this woman who wasn't even an actress found herself playing this scene. (And if you see the movie - she's only in it for 10 seconds, maybe? It's a short scene - but she's great. Her presence tells the whole story - totally sets up the Gable character. You don't have to do it with dialogue - we don't have to have Gable give a huge monologue about who he is - all you see is him putting this crying divorcee on the train out of town ... and you know who he is.)

Then there's this:

July 23 - Rehearsals began this morning for the scene between Rosly and Mr. Taber on the courthouse steps. Policement were necessary to keep off the crowds but a number of children made their way to Huston and the principals. One little boy looked at [Kevin] McCarthy in his shiny Chicago suit, announcing, "This is a gangster movie and that's him!" Another, perceiving Huston's good nature, reached out and tweaked John's nose, saying, "Gee, mister, you got a lot of guts to direct this picture." And he had.

Kevin McCarthy talked about his role that evening at the hotel. "I grew up with Nan Taylor, Frank's wife, in Deerwood, Minnesota. My sister is Mary McCarthy, who wrote Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I've been a member of the Actor's Studio since 1947, with Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach. I work there about ten hours a week. My agent was against me doing this small part in The Misfits but for me it was a sentimental appearance. They're compensating for my minute part by a special arrangement card in the title for me, Estelle Winwood and James Barton. Really, I only do twenty-seven words. I didn't feel I was Mr. Taber until I put on that shiny suit. It bothered me that Frank Taylor thought I could be Mr. Taber. I worked for Miller once before in the Robin Hood Theatre at Arden, Delaware. He directed All My Sons, which we played for comedy. I told Huston that I didn't feel I was accomplishing this character. He said, 'It's there by implication in what she's saying to you. Just imagine that you run the most successful Cadillac agency in Chicago.' Frank Taylor thought I ran a used-car lot.

Marilyn had the difficult scene, the blast-off for the picture. She had considerable anxiety but like a wise child she uses it. Huston is the best director I ever worked for."

"She had considerable anxiety but like a wise child she uses it."

Peeps, I have not been able to stop thinking about that sentence from the first moment I read it. God.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographer

Here's more - from one of Goode's many interviews with John Huston:

"We had no difference in casting, or in the story. In collaborating with Miller, I'd go a little further, a little deeper. He'd go a little further. Knowing when you arrive at the point where you should stop is maturity as an artist. I had to use drawings, now I try and get as much out of the people as I possibly can. I know automatically each scene. I court accident. I try to keep them that way, spontaneous. I very much like going into a little room. It has its own requirements. Confronted with limitations, thinking is less prosaic. Don't forget the eye of the public. They'd laugh like hell at Booth's Hamlet. The public now knows what ham acting is. We try to get all the reality we can in this picture, but still you must remember the picture is a convention. It is on a screen with music, and it must be a convention. I tell an actor as little as I possibly can. When I have to step in I feel defeated. I haven't had to tell anyone anything on this picture.

Guido [played by Eli Wallach] is probably the most complex character in this film, a bit of the hypocrite. He changes tune. None of the others would. He'd become an animal lover if he could have the girl. He has made his compromise. Perce [played by Montgomery Clift] on the other hand is very simple. What he does makes no damn sense but thank God for them. They're awful good men. Pity is that they're inverted. You've got to be singularly blessed to be part of anything and keep your self-respect."

Speaking about working for the major studios in Hollywood before the war, Huston said, "I'm not sure I wasn't better then. Some of the worst pictures I ever made, I've made since I've had complete freedom. As for Langland [the part played by Clark Gable], as long as those horses are in the hills, he's a free man. As for myself, I'm not in the system as long as I can tell anyone to kiss my ass."

Heh. A lot of those old studio directors had that "I'm not sure I wasn't better then" sensibility.

This next excerpt made me laugh. A bit of background. Montgomery Clift, by this point, had had the accident which had ruined his face - and had begun his downward spiral that would kill him not too many years later. This poor man. This poor tormented unbelievably talented man. Nobody wanted to work with him anymore - because of the drug addiction, and all of his problems. Despite the fact that once upon a time he had been the premiere actor of his generation. Marlon Brando was freakin' intimidated by this guy's talent, mkay?? But Huston decided to take a chance - because Clift was so perfect for this part - especially with his now battered face, and that kind of - constantly tormented blank look in his eyes. God, what a tragedy. But anyway - I can't remember the details - either the insurance company would NOT back Clift - or Huston said he would pay the insurance himself - I'm not sure ... but it turned out that Clift was, perhaps, the most reliable one on that entire shoot. He didn't drink (he guzzled grapefruit juice 24/7 - and that was it) - didn't do drugs - showed up on time - knew his lines - and would be so brilliant on the first take that people, hardened crew members who don't impress easily, would burst into applause. He was that good (and if you see the movie - he IS that good.)

Inge Morath, photographer

Anyway, the following anecdote made me laugh - just because of the whole mumbly Actor's Studio thing - which was still a new thing at this point. And having Gable - king of the studio system - acting with all these younger Actors' Studio types - that's another reason why the film (although not perfect) is SO interesting to watch. It doesn't matter your "method". Talent is talent.

But anyway, I love this because it shows Clift's sense of humor about the whole Actor's Studio thing - and also Gable's graciousness:

[Gable] told Nan Taylor that she must understand that when he spoke of himself as an actor he spoke without vanity, that vanity was a sin. Monty Clift said that actors could speak with pride, however, and Gable agreed. Gable spoke about his own early career on Broadway and on the road, including Shakespearean roles. The others compared the Actor's Studio as training for acting, and Kevin McCarthy said, "Of course, the Studio can't teach you how to do Shakespeare, but it can give you things you can use." Monty replied, "Yes, Kevin, you and I have hung on to our purity of diction."

Ha! Which is so true. Clift was never one of the Brando-Dean mumblers. There is an elegance about his work - and I would venture to say as well, that when he is good? He's not just good - he's perfect.

Tragedy. Thinking about Montgomery Clift makes me sad.

Everyone is interviewed for Making of the Misfits - any film buff, of anyone interested in the process of film-making, should definitely check it out. It's not just the actors. The costume crew is interviewed, the sound people, the cowboys, the townspeople, the assistant directors - and here is Russell Metty, cameraman, talking about his part of this process:

"The quality of this picture is adjusted for realism. We get blacker blacks, whiter whites, and fewer grays, high contrast, more like a news photograph, by using less light. It's harder to shoot here on location because this house is confined.

"I became a lab technician when I was eighteen, and spent two years developing, printing, cutting. I was an assistant cameraman for two years, an operator for six years, and became a first cameraman on West of the Pecos. I am here on loan-out from Universal-International, and my last picture was Spartacus."

Signs of trouble - Goode doesn't dwell on it - just makes note of it:

July 30 - No shooting; Monroe is indisposed. Clift, Eli Wallach, and Frank Taylor have flown off to Los Angeles for an Ella Fitzgerald concert.

Here's a snippet of an interview with the wonderful Eli Wallach (I love the bit about "who pays the check?" That's thinking like an actor. Knowing who's gonna pay the check in the scene makes all the difference in how it is played. THAT is detail:

"John Huston elicits a performance, gives you clues, suggests, doesn't stomp on it, draws it out of you. He's very amenable to suggestions. I feel it; it's up to him to orchestrate it. Huston said, 'Make an impression on her. Make a dent.'

"In that scene in Harrah's Club in the bar, I asked, 'Who pays the check in this scene, John?' and he said, 'I don't know.' It was kind of a struggle of virility and manhood and honor about who paid the check. Nor did we rehearse the dance scene ...

"There were times today when marilyn was absolutely wonderful when she began to relax a little. She had a kind of innocence, a freshness. Gable was sincere, cooperative, warm - an actor. Thelma [Ritter] I have great respect and warmth for. For each of us this is the first time we have worked together. I identify with each role. It was good to take Marilyn and dance with her, to take her away from Gable. I understand Guido. I find that Arthur has written in depth in this screenplay, that you can walk around each character. They are self-contradictory, unpredictable. Do you realize the split in a guy like Guido? At the very moment he speaks of his wife he is wooing this girl.

"What I know about acting is - trying to capture a universal that people can identify with, a behavior they have seen, known, or experienced themselves. Why the popularity of Mickey Spillane if not for images? To capture that genie and bottle him and to seemingly let him out accidentally, that's what is marvelous about acting to me....

"I have a great trust in John because I think he understands almost in Hemingway's terms that man can take his licks without whimpering. He keeps me from being self-pitying, self-indulgent, or weak. And Marilyn said a very touching thing to me in the lobby the other day. I was wearing a Sigmund Freud costume [Huston was going to be directing Freud the next year - and Eli Wallach dressed up as Freud on one of their days off, as a gag]. She said, 'Eli, you're going to be working all your life.' I said, 'Yes, until I die.' She said it so sweetly. I would like to be like A.E. Mathews, an actor who just died this week. He was working until this season. He was ninety-three years old."

Eli and Marilyn were great friends. I love that sweet glimpse of her in that anecdote.

There was a dog who had a part in the picture and he caused a lot of problems. He was not a good movie dog. Humorous anecdote here:

Completing the action in the living room of the Stix house, Huston rehearsed the players for a scene in which Roslyn [played by Monroe], a little high from the drinks and the dancing, falls fromt he front door, where the step is missing. The rehearsal of the fall was so realistic that everyone held his breath until Eli caught Marilyn in his arms. This prompted Gable to say that for a moment he was afraid Eli wasn't going to catch her and they would all be out of work. After a moment in the picture in which Roslyn dances dreamily by herself around a large tree, Gay Langland takes her to the station wagon to drive her back to town. Guido helps them into the wagon, but Langland's dog, Tom Dooley, wouldn't cooperate during the takes. Miller thought that Eli could simply kick the dog into the car. Furiously, Eli wondered whether they couldn't find a dog that would simply get in and sit down. But it was too late; Tom Dooley was in too many scenes to be replaced. Alabam' Davis thoguht that Tom Dooley was simply a "method" dog and all he needed was a dramatic coach.

And this made me laugh out loud (the book is full of overheard snippets like this):

Two persons were discussing [Frank] Taylor in the lobby and one man said, "What's Frank Taylor's background?" His friend, "He's a publisher." "What's a publisher doing producing a movie?" "They're going to release the book in movie form."

I know this isn't really a book review (what I'm writing here) - but I kept a running list of anecdotes and snippets I loved from this book - and I knew Ceci, at least, would appreciate it ... there's so much good stuff (although I would also like to read a more distanced story of this shoot: why it got so expensive, what happened, why the film doesn't really WORK - at least not the way everyone expected it to - a lot of that had to do with the fact that Gable died shortly after shooting - before the picture was released - and that gave the picture a kind of notorious reputation - Huston was watching a scene in the editing room of Gable being dragged by a rope behind a truck and he commented to himself, "They're gonna say we killed Gable." Who knows - it might have been a mega-hit if Gable had been alive when it came out.) But anyway. Onward with the excerpts.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with the great Montgomery Clift who is, in my opinion, the definition of an intelligent (and yet also intuitive) actor. The guy had it all. He was a raw nerve, but he was also an intellect, he studied his craft. Amazing - it's all here in his language. Listen to his openness. Is it any wonder that this man was destroyed by the mere act of living? He couldn't hack it. Thank God he was an actor - at least he had a place where he was SUPPOSED to be that open. Oh, and believe it or not - Montgomery Clift was terrified of working with all of these people whom he considered to be giants (and they are - but so is he!) - he was intimidated by Gable, by Huston, by Miller - he couldn't believe he had been asked to be in this thing ... the beautiful (and yet tragic - because he couldn't see his own goodness) of this man:

"What I think of Miller - boy, he represents to me such an ideal as an artist! Somehow the artists are all allied, whether it's Miller, Cartier-Bresson, Marilyn or Huston. My feeling aobut Miller is that I sort of face East every time I see him. I'm that much in admiration of him.

"I was happy that there was something he genuinely wanted me to do. Acting with all these goddamned talented people around is pretty frightening, but I look forward to it. If I were convinced they were also scared ... The problem is how to remain thin-skinned and yet survive. One can uncallous one's self, you know. I haven't talked to John or Arthur about the part. I don't have any desire to formulate anything too strong of my own. I don't know what John or Arthur may be after. He knows what he's written about. I think Taylor's tremendously talented to put together this network of people. Nothing of him is the norm. There is the whole terrible problem of remaining vulnerable, and Taylor has the small, intimate means of making you feel wanted. And it's a lovely thing to work with a director who is not vain.

"I have no misgivings about this character. Someone said, 'My God, it's exactly like you.' Now it's just a question of can I do it? It's a wonderful part, and if I don't do it justice I'll shoot myself. You're not the master of a film as an actor. A director with control contributes. I don't know where contribution begins and ends. Whenever the fortuitous happens, it happens. When I see the film, if I vomit, I'll know I haven't done it justice.

"I find no value for myself in analyzing something down to some terribly finite Freudian point, because it loses its measure of relish. Wonderfully enough, Arthur is so wildly aware of the ambivalence in relations between people that for a performer it is almost an offense to dissect it. I imagine that he, as a writer, would not be able to write it if he consciously tried to become clinical and symbolic. Nothing would flow. I have trouble working with people I greatly admire. I started with Eli. You know, it's been two weeks now and I can't find one goddamned thing I don't like about him. I've never worked with any of these people before.

"I wish I were more thin-skinned. The problem is to remain sensitive to all kinds of things wihtout letting them pull you down. Now, take this - the fact that someone drops a book of matches at a time when he most wants not to seem ill at ease. To a normal person that is not a terribly moving talent, but to an actor in films, such a thing maybe perhaps changes the whole relationship to the girl that dropped the matches. The only line I know of that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'Holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold the magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with a situation. If it were a mirror we would have no art. Essence is a wonderful word. Miller has written the essence of Roslyn. You'd be bored to death if it were a mirror. Take the line in the script, 'Who did this to me? The ambulance did it.' Magnifying the essential things that liberate the imagination and enable one to identify - when one has those qualities, they are fabulous gifts. Take a pause, for example. That I call a magnification. I wouldn't call it a mirror. The magnifying glass has been misused totally, but in this picture it has been put to the use of capturing what possibly is flitting in and out of someone's mind and one person's relationship to another and another, and that's what's fascinating."

Amazing analysis. I have a lot to think about from his words.

Okay, so anyone who discussed impressions of Marilyn Monroe, anyone who knew her, came into contact with her, has my ear. Listen to Henri Cartier-Bresson's impressions of this woman:

Henri Cartier-Bresson, photographer. That's Thelma Ritter, Monroe, and Huston - discussing an upcoming scene

"I saw her bodily - Marilyn Monroe - for the first time, and I was struck as by an apparition in a fairy tale. Well, she's beautiful - anybody can notice this, and she represents a certain myth of what we call in France la femme eternelle. On the other hand, there's something extremely alert and vivid in her, an intelligence. It's her personality, it's a glance, it's something very tenuous, very vivid that disappears quickly, that appears again. You see it's all these elements of her beauty and also her intelligence that makes the actress not only a model but a real woman expressing herself. Like many people I heard many things that she had said, but last night I had the pleasure of having dinner next to her and I saw that these things came fluidly all the time ... all these amusing remarks, precise, pungent, direct. It was flowing all the time. It was almost a quality of naivete ... and it was completely natural.

"In her you feel the woman, and also the great discipline as an actress. She's American and it's very clear that she is - she's very good that way - one has to be very local to be universal."

"One has to be very local to be universal." God, this is also food for thought. This is something I have been working on in my own writing, my own acting, my own art - for years. The best artists are, indeed, "very local" and it is this very local-ness that makes them universal. Thanks, Henri. And thanks for appreciating Miss Monroe in such a specific way.

Inge Morath - that's Monroe talking with Paula Strasberg, her ubiquitous acting coach

Now listen to this conversation between Huston and Miller (unlike most writers - he was there throughout filming - and although he messed up a couple of times, in terms of not knowing his relationship to a film director - which is different from that to a theatre director, where - 9 times out of 10 - Miller will be the bigger star, and Miller will always have the final word. Not so in films. However, the following conversation - about how to shoot a certain scene - shows that Huston was completley open to Miller's contributions - mainly because it is he who wrote it, and it is he who understands, better than anyone else, the point of view of each scene. BUT - how to make that come across? That'll be Huston's job. This is true collaboration here:

John Huston and Arthur Miller sat for an hour in Steve Grimes' reactivated saloon, discussing the camera's point of view as the station wagon with Roslyn, Gay, Isabelle, Perce and Guido enters the town. The shot in question was to be a long continuous look at the car from a motorized cameral dolly, involving a great deal of action on both sides of the street. There was understandable anxiety.

Huston: "Do we shoot them or what they see?"
Miller: "What they see."
Huston: "Then we hold on a few things."
Miller: "A cowboy backing a horse out of a trailer, or the shot I wrote about the Cadillac and the bumper."
Huston: "Thsi thing about the gamblers and the showgirl. It's just happening. If it's pointed out, it's bad. It acquires a significance it doesn't have. (Pause) I'm just trying to see which is the better way."
Miller: "I'm inclined to stretch her (Roslyn's) point of view.
Huston: "It's her point of view, or it's our comment."
Miller: "The shots can be brief."
Huston: "They ahve to hold long enough on the screen to be seen. (Pause) These shots are literally vignettes."
Miller: "My feeling is there is a compromise to be made here. If you keep referring back to their car, you can pull in anything you want."
Huston: "You have to keep moving. As you go by things, you see them."
Miller: "I'm afraid if we stick to their point of view (the passengers in the car), it would limit us. Shoot the car and the passengers from inside the car."
Huston: "Then you can't cut to vignettes, like the deputy jumping up and down on the Cadillac bumper."
Miller: "How about an omniscent view."
Huston: "Then you lose your people, you go into God's viewpoint of the town. (Pause) We mustn't confuse Roslyn's viewpoint with our own. If we shoot her looking at the deputy, aren't we endowing it with significance?"

And that is a glimpse of a good director at work. Young directors today should study John Huston's movies for this kind of intelligent structured point-of-view work.

The following anecdote made me laugh:

August 22 - For once, everyone was glad to go to work, just to escape the hell of Reno. The power lines had not yet been repeaired and the Mapes coffee shop was down to cold cuts and coffee. Shooting today was a sequence of Dick Pascoe, as Clift's stunt double, riding a black and white Brahma bull out of a chute and across the ring until he was thrown, then rescued from the bull's horns in the nick of time by Jim Palen, made up as a rodeo clown. Four times the bull crashed through Steve Grimes' fencing with Jones' horsemen in frantic pursuit. On the last breakout, the bull scattered the crowd of extras in the street, taking refuge in Gold Canyon Creek. Each time the bull got loose, Pete Logan, who used to announce the rodeos in Madison Square Garden, called over the public address system, "Carpenter, please."

hahahaha They're so over it. Oh, bull got loose, there goes the fence again, carpenter, please.

More on the bull (and notice the good humor here about Monroe's absences ... yes, it was annoying ... but the tone of the anecdote is not annoyed):

August 25 - Shooting again in the rodeo ring, long shots of Pascoe on the bull and the bucking horse. The bull got loose again, prompting remakrs that the bull needed a carpenter's local to follow him around and was harder to get on the set than Marilyn Monroe.

hahahahaha

Monroe could not work in the morning - due to many issues, mainly having to do with insomnia - and always crashing into the deepest of pill-induced sleeps at around 6 a.m. This kind of thing was always a problem for her - ALWAYS. John Huston took care of her, was gentle with her, made her feel confident about her ability to play the part - never harassed her - and yet obviously was frustrated that he could not begin shooting with her until noon, at the earliest. They got so little done, waiting for Monroe. And every single night - Huston and a couple of buddies - sat up gambling and drinking. So everyone was sort of losing it - in terms of sleep, (and also money - Huston lost a ton - thousands of dollars). Monroe was addicted to sleeping pills and Huston could never walk away from a bet. Eventually the situation cracked and Monroe's health broke down. She was flown to Los Angeles to recover. Shooting stopped.

Take a look at this photo.

Cornell Capa, photographer

Members of the crew and also locals in the town ... gathering to see Marilyn off. This photo goes a long way to explaining Marilyn's affect on people, and even though she was a pain in the ass - she was so well loved. I mean, obviously - she was a huge star - that wasn't an accident - audiences loved her as well - who cares that it took her an entire day to get out the line "Where's the bourbon" in Some Like it Hot? Yes, it drove Billy Wilder to distraction that she could not get the line right ... but when push comes to shove, she's Marilyn Monroe, and her mere presence in a film was enough to justify all that crap (Lindsey Lohan - who I actually like, and think is very talented - needs to realize that she is not yet at that place ... she may be some day ... but not yet). When the cameras rolled, and Marilyn was on ... you didn't want anybody else to be there. You didnt' care about the lost day of work. Because she is Marilyn Monroe and you can count on 1 or 2 or 3 fingers the actors who had that kind of magic. Not only that - but the photo shows her relationship with the crews on her films - having a good rapport with the crew was always very important to her. She loved crews - the gaffers, and grips, and carpenters. They treated her with kindness, they loved her, and she loved them back. She had a harder time with the executives, the business folks - who treated her like a whore who just got lucky. The dudes holding sound equipment up on ladders knew better. A lucky whore? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what happens to this woman when the cameras start to roll? Marilyn, in her scenes, often played to them - the crew - because she knew how much she was loved, it made her feel comfortable and confident.

Another anecdote showing why John Huston was so good with actors. If you tell an actor exactly how to do something - well, first of all, you're an ass. Why don't YOU act then if you think you can do it better? Second of all, you're cutting off the magic - the possibility of something that might be better than what is in your own head. People say about Woody Allen that he never tells them anything, never directs ANYthing - what he does is - is cast well - he casts perfectly - and he is completley confident in whatever EVENT is taking place in any given scene. The actors need to know the EVENT ... not how to do it. Here is what I am talking about:

Eli Wallach volunteered an example of Huston's genius as a director. In the scene today, Gable and Wallach are alone at the table, watching Monroe and Clift dancing, and getting drunker and drunker. Wallach quoted Huston as saying, "Eli, yesterday in Virginia City I was deeply drunk. So drunk it didn't show." That was all he said, and Eli played the scene that way, saying later that Huston was a master of indirection.

So many directors have no idea what the actor's craft even is (especially now - when directors come out of film schools, as opposed to the theatre). Telling an intuitive actor like Wallach to be so "drunk it didn't show" is perfect. It's just mysterious enough that Wallach can just run with it.

James Goode gets some AMAZING interviews with Clark Gable - who at this point - had only a couple months left to live. It's astonishing - and so sad - how vital and YOUNG this man still was. His intelligence, his openness, his curiosity about life and his own craft ... he's still in process. He worked his ass off.

Eve Arnold, photographer

Amazing actor. There are also a couple of anecdotes in the book about him murmuring to John Huston after watching Montgomery Clift do a scene: "That Clift boy really comes across." He was amazed by Clift. In my opinion, Montgomery Clift gives the best performance in that film - and Gable could notice it happening - and didn't have any weird ego thing about it - he was more just in awe. "The look that comes in that kid's eyes sometimes ..." Here are some excerpts:

"I don't know exatly what they mean by method acting. I do know it must have a lot of merit, because it has proven itself with some of the people we have in the business today. The acting I know - what I know of it - originally came by working with professionals in the theatre, being privileged to working with them, watching them work from behind the scenes. I had a great deal of training from Lionel Barrymore. I was a juvenile lead in a play called Copperhead. I played an extra in Romeo and Juliet with Jane Cowl. I was given the opportunity to understudy Romeo, Mercutio, Tybalt, Benvolio. I memorized all of the parts and watched all of the movements from the wings, understudying Dennis King as Mercutio, Rollo Peters as Romeo, and Lewis Hester as Tybalt, and got a great deal of experience in Shakespearean roles ...

"Acting came to me first because I wanted to do it, but it was hard work. You had to work. I didn't learn one particular way of acting. I learned several different ways - I'm still learning. Strangely enough, I learn something new in every picture I make. I don't know what they mean by a finished actor. As far as I know, finished is when you can't get a job."

heh. I just find all of that so moving

Now a bit about the bedroom scene - w