Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1963)

The Monroe Mystery Grows Continued from page 28 thought no one loved her or would, ever. She was — this marvel, this outwardlooking voluptuary, this so-called sex queen, this peer of Venus, this ever-to-be child who was christened by Hollywood at age nineteen with a sprinkling of champagne and a robe sewn heavy with spangles, this Marilyn Monroe. She was — in all reality and though few people realized it — a terrified and lonely young human being. Who — as one person has written— “stood alone at an empty mailbox for most of her life, waiting for a letter that might one day come and that might have written over its signature the small word: Love.” In a way, the letter, the love letter, in fact the love letters did come — although Marilyn, perhaps afflicted with that blurred vision peculiar to some people who have been followed unmercifully by shadows, could not see them. After all, there were people who adored her, and who told her so, day after day, time after time. But — and this is the simple truth — they were in most cases busy people, with their own workaday cares and problems. Who, understandably, could spare only so much time for Marilyn. Who could profess only so much love for her. And it was only after her death when they — like everyone else — realized just how much love this poor and unsure girl had really needed. And then they wrote the words which, in life, she had never quite been able to hear. . . . They wrote then — as they are still writing, nine months after her death — of her beauty, a beauty which Marilyn feared she was losing. And they wrote of it in the true terms of that beauty — as something timeless and ageless and unforgettable. She was Mother Earth . . . Dorothy Kilgallen, for instance: “You have left more of a legacy than most, sweet girl, if all you ever left was a handful of photographs of one of the loveliest women who walked the earth.” Sidney Skolsky: “There were plenty of blondes before Marilyn. Since, there has been an army of blondes trying to be Marilyn. But the people knew the difference. The people knew.” Nunnally Johnson, the producer: “She was a phenomenon of nature, like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. You couldn’t talk to it. It couldn’t talk to you. All you could do was stand back and be awed by it.” A Photoplay reader (one of the thousands who has written to us about Marilyn since last August) : “At the beginning, I’ll admit. I thought she was kind of cheaplooking. It wasn’t Marilyn’s fault, I know now. It was the kind of roles they wanted her to play. Sirens and hussies and women of the world when she herself was so young. But Marilyn fought that kind of thing when she got big enough. And, slowly, she threw off the fakeness and she emerged as something real. I know a lot of people who didn’t like ‘The Misfits,’ her last picture. But I for one will never forget her in the final scene — when she stands there in that field and when she cries out to the men about to kill those horses. ‘Let them live. Please.’ A chill ran up and down my body which I can still feel when I think of it. She wasn’t dressed in a beautiful gown by Jean Louis for that scene. They didn’t have her hair fixed in any special and artificial way; in fact, they let the wind blow it around, just natural. They didn’t use any tricks. They just let her stand there and say the words and be herself as she felt the scene. And there she stood, just Marilyn Monroe as she was, crying out for mercy, crying out like a tiny Mother Earth for the salvation of all of humanity, and she was real in that scene. And a woman. And the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” They wrote now not only of her perfections, but of her “flaws,” if such they must be called: Natasha Lytess, friend and coach: “There was more to Marilyn than met the eye. The trouble was that when people looked at her, they immediately figured her as a Hollywood blonde. It wasn’t their fault, though. Marilyn’s soul just didn’t fit that body.” Mrs. Lee Strasberg, friend and coach: “Marilyn had the fragility of a female but the constitution of an ox. She was a beautiful hummingbird made of iron. Her only trouble was that she was a very pure person in a very impure world.” . . . Hollywood's plaything They wrote now of her intelligence, of her intellectual impact — highbrows whom she feared had always laughed at her during those years when she had tried so hard to read all the “important” books and “understand” them and be able to “discuss” them. Max ' Lerner, the distinguished columnist, for instance: “It is hard to think of the movie world or the American life without her as part of the landscape. When you said Marilyn you never had to add the last name. She was of our time and place and of our cultural bone.” Diana Trilling, the distinguished literary critic: “Among the very few weapons available to the artist in the monstrous struggle, naivete can be the most useful. But it is not at all my impression that Marilyn was a naive person. I think she was innocent, which is very different. To be naive is to be simple or stupid on the basis of experience, and Marilyn was far from stupid. No one who was stupid could have been so quick to turn her wit against herself or to manage the ruefulness with which she habitually replied to awkward questioning.” A senior editor on Time magazine: “Marilyn was never more than Hollywood’s plaything, when she might have been its lesson and guide. What things she had to say were never heard because her voice was a dog whistle in a town accustomed to brass bands. Her misery was less the price of living up to an image too big for her than living down the reflections of her own abysmal past, and her inability to share the lessons it taught her.” They wrote now of her courage. Someone on Vogue magazine: “She emerged from the hoyden’s shell into a profoundly beautiful, profoundly moving young woman. That she withstood the incredible, unknowable pressures of her public legend as long as she did is evidence of the stamina of the human spirit.” A Photoplay reader: “I try to imagine sometimes what it must have been like for her— having to glossy herself up for public appearances, having to prove she was sick when she said she was, having to read some of the terrible things people wrote about her, having to smile for waiting photographers after a miscarriage — when her heart was really breaking — having to see one of her marriages wrecked after admitting practically publicly that she was in love with a certain married man and then having that man leave her. I try to imagine sometimes what it must have been like for her, having to live like that. And, trying, I find myself shuddering. How could she bear it?” We’re all guilty They wrote now of a genuine feeling of guilt for having ignored Marilyn’s courage. Hedda Hopper: “In a way we’re all i guilty. We built her up to the skies, we loved her, but left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most.” They wrote now of her tiny personal 1 charms which, on screen, the paste of 1 makeup sometimes succeeded in hiding and which were sometimes vulgarized by the hugeness of CinemaScope and Panavision and what-have-you and which one could only see on face-to-face contact. Richard Meryman, an editor on Life : “If Marilyn Monroe was glad to see you, her ‘hello’ will sound in your mind all of your life — the breathless warmth of the emphasis on the ‘lo,’ her well-deep eyes turned up toward you and her face radiantly crinkled in a wonderfully girlish smile.” A Photoplay reader: “I saw her once at a premiere here in Chicago. I stood no more than three feet from her when her car pulled up and she got out. I thought she’d be a snob about all this and bored — after all, this must have been the thousandth premiere she’d attended. But when she got out of that car, I couldn’t resist saying something to her. So I said the only thing I could think of in all that excitement, ‘Wow, you’re for real.’ I know it was a stupid thing to say. But she heard, and she smiled at me. And she said, ‘Gee, I sure hope so.’ And we both laughed for a moment, a very nice moment together.” They wrote now of her very personal movie magic, and the career she felt was slipping by her — but which, in actuality, never would. Natalie Wood: “When you looked at Marilyn on the screen, you didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. You really cared that she should be all right and happy.” Someone on Time magazine: “Vague, troubled, shy ... all the same she was a star; and it hardly matters that she never quite became an actress.” They wrote now of her sweet and genuine innate capacity to be a good friend — to the young and the old, the famous, the friendless and those little heard of.