--- description: What becomes a legend most? Early death — as long as it is preceded by a generally acknowledged radiance and followed by a long luminescence... title: Marilyn Lost and Found image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Marilyn Lost and Found by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) May 25, 2001 4:00 AM CUT by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) May 25, 2001 4:00 AM CUT What becomes a legend most? Early death — as long as it is preceded by a generally acknowledged radiance and followed by a long luminescence tinged with melancholy. Had she lived, Marilyn Monroe would have turned 75 next Friday, June 1\. But that survival would have guaranteed her only a genteel descent into older-woman roles, perhaps a past-her-prime Broadway show (the original 1971 “Follies”? Don’t make me drool), then the tell-some autobiography and obligatory Life Achievement roasts. If she were still around, she might be doing good work, perhaps serving as honorary chair of a fund for abused children and doing a guest stint in “The Vagina Monologues.” Instead, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and being discovered, nude, her hand on the telephone, on August 5, 1962, Monroe assured herself of pop immortality. She has now been a dead legend longer than she was alive on this earth. Her after-life celebrity has been the easiest for her, and financially the most rewarding. When she died, she left an estate of about $1.6 million (of which she bequeathed 75% to her acting guru Lee Strasberg, 25% to her psychiatrist, Marilyn Kris). Today, the mere licensing of her name and likeness brings in some $2 million a year. In 1999 — the same year that PEOPLE named her Sexiest Woman of the Century — the gown that Monroe wore to President Kennedy’s 1962 birthday party was sold at auction for $1 million. So you knew someone would be throwing a party for Marilyn’s 75th birthday. On Tuesday, 20th Century Fox Home Video is issuing “Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection,” which puts five of her early hits (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “The Seven Year Itch” and “Bus Stop”) on DVD. Next Friday, American Movie Classics is to celebrate the actual birthdate with a two-hour documentary, “Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days” (also a part of the Fox Home Video collection), detailing the sorry production history of her last, uncompleted film, “Something’s Got to Give.” The documentary scoops a bit of dirt on Marilyn’s Kennedy connection and includes a first look at 37 minutes of assembled scenes from the film — including, yes, the nude scene. It also provides the closest look yet at the steep path the star trod, in the spring and summer of 1962, toward the destruction of her career and then her life. The appeal of her life and death juiced some of America’s most distinguished writers to produce works that said, at heart, either “I knew her” (Truman Capote’s story “A Beautiful Child,” about a girl’s funeral he attended with Monroe) or “She should’ve known me” (Norman Mailer’s long biographical essay “Marilyn: A Biography,” which amounted to a post-mortem proposal). She was the subject of bio-pics and Bernie Taupin and Elton John memorialized her suffering in the 1973 “Candle in the Wind” (“Loneliness was tough/ The toughest role you ever played/ Hollywood created a superstar/ And pain was the price you paid”). In 1997 they expropriated the sentiments for a rewrite in honor of Princess Diana, another doomed blonde whose life spanned exactly five fewer days than Marilyn’s had. Perhaps the most bizarrely acute rendering of the Monroe parable was in the 1983 Broadway musical “Marilyn: An American Fable.” A flop with endearing qualities — mostly in its determination to print the legend, not the facts, about a shooting star — the show rendered her life in the form of an old-fashioned backstage musical, complete with an improbable, inevitable happy ending. Marilyn doesn’t die; she is reunited with her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, and walks into the sunset hand-in-hand with her childhood self, Norma Jean. More pulp than poetry, the show gave audiences the wish-fulfillment climax to a real-life tragedy whose ending they wished they could rewrite. She had been “only” an actress; not even that, some said. Her job, which she often shirked, was to read the lines others had composed for her, and deliver them to the satisfaction of her often-exasperated directors. Yet with her self-inflicted death, whether she intended it or not, Marilyn wrote her own last act, and people have been analyzing it with the care earlier exegetes devoted to “Hamlet.” She created and controlled the official view of her life: a tragedy at the beginning and the end, with an intervening flicker of starlight. At a steep price, she purchased the eternal rights to her own biography, one that neither Mailer nor any other scribe could supercede. What a wag said in 1977, on hearing of Elvis Presley’s death — “Good career move” — is just as true of Monroe. But while she lived, she could annoy as easily as charm — more easily, if it was time to shoot a movie. She didn’t show up, or she did and was balky. Her misbehavior drove everyone nuts, and kept them on their toes, When making “Some Like It Hot” with Marilyn, Billy Wilder told co-stars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to be at their best in every shot — because if he got a take where she gets it right, Wilder was going to print it. “Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days” might more precisely be called “The Final Daze,” since Monroe was consuming jars full of sedatives that, along with her chronic feelings of insecurity, kept her out of action for most of the shooting. Full of tattle, rancor and sense of loss that the surviving members of the film team are willing to express 39 years on, the AMC show — executive-produced by Kevin Burns, produced and directed by Patty Ivins, written by Monica Bider and edited by Tori Rodman — offers further evidence to substantiate the suspicion that, in Hollywood, it’s not so much a shame that some movies go drastically wrong as it is a wonder that any movie ever goes right. Monroe had been Fox’s top moneymaking star in the ’50s. But her glory days as a box office magnet were in just a few films over a few years, which are all included in Fox Home Video’s Diamond Collection (whose title nicely plays on both the 75th birthday and Marilyn’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” ). Her lone popular success after that was “Some Like It Hot,” a loan-out to United Artists. Otherwise she treaded water in “The Prince and the Showgirl,” a Ruritanian romance co-starring and directed by Laurence Olivier, the dud musical “Let’s Make Love,” directed by George Cukor, and John Huston’s “The Misfits,” written by her then-husband Arthur Miller. All were honorable attempts, the sort of film that demonstrated Monroe’s ambition to grow beyond the formula of her old hits. The problem was that she hadn’t made any formula hits in between. She needed to flash some of the easy old magic. She still owed Fox a picture, and she was still, for Pete’s sake, Marilyn Monroe. So the studio bought the rights to a RKO comedy, “My Favorite Wife,” with the creaky premise of a man whose wife has for years been missing and presumed dead, but who returns from a desert island just after he has married another woman. Monroe began the negotiations by submitting her list of 16 approved directors. It named 15 top auteurs and one wild card: Strasberg, who never had directed a film, and never would, but who had coaxed her into believing she could be a serious actress. Monroe had fled to the Actors Studio in the mid-’50s to achieve something more than the stardom she felt debased her. In a radio interview at the time she made a poignant declaration: “I would like to be a good actress.” (The “would like,” instead of the more straightforward “I want,” is almost heartbreaking.) Lee was also the husband of Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s on-site acting coach in five films, at $500 a week. The couple may have had her best interests at heart, but they could not have been indifferent to the reflected renown Monroe’s affiliation earned them. It was as if Elvis had gone to study music composition with Darius Milhaud and brought his teacher to all his gigs. Fox said yes to Paula and no to Lee, hiring Cukor, an old master of light comedy; in 1940, the year of “My Favorite Wife,” he directed “The Philadelphia Story.” Arnold Schulman, who had written “A Hole in the Head” for Frank Sinatra and Frank Capra, got the job of updating the script. Marilyn would play the missing wife (originally it was Irene Dunne); Dean Martin would be her husband (the Cary Grant role); Cyd Charisse would be the second wife (Gail Patrick). Supporting roles were assigned to Wally Cox, Phil Silvers, Steve Allen and John McGiver. David Brown was to produce. Immediately, Monroe and her team started pulling weight and dropping it on the staff Fox had assembled. Her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, helped push Brown out in favor of Henry Weinstein. In the documentary, Brown says that Richard Zanuck, then a Fox producer and soon to be named company president, told him to watch his back. “I did, says Brown, “and there was an arrow in it.” (Brown is too much the gentleman to say “knife.”) Then Schulman was replaced by Nunnally Johnson, a 30-year Hollywood pro and the writer-producer of “How to Marry a Millionaire.” But the entrance to any Hollywood writers’ building is a revolving door: Johnson soon gave way to Walter Bernstein, who had recently written “Heller in Pink Tights” for Cukor. The film could have been shut down, permanently, before it ever began. A few weeks prior to the first day of shooting, Weinstein visited Monroe’s home and found her, according to the AMC narration, “unconscious from an apparent overdose of sleeping pills.” She was diagnosed with acute sinusitis, but Hyman Engelberg, Monroe’s physician, describes her condition as mostly mental: she was “manic depressive.” And, one has to add, the cause of it in others. The first day of shooting, April 23, saw 104 crew members on the set, but not Monroe. She didn’t come in for a week. When she did, she was given some silent emoting to do. The rushes show an actress-model in full flower; she had never looked so slim in pictures, her smile never so sweet or enchanting. Marilyn could turn “it” on — also the camera, and the audience. It’s called star quality. The next day she collapsed and was rushed home. On May 10, the film was shut down; Monroe had been on the set only two of 18 days. She showed up again on May 14 and, weirdly, was given a scene with a dog! Again, with the cocker spaniel (named Tippy, like a dog she had as a child), she is terrific. Later that week, she worked well and generously with the two child actors playing her the son and daughter she had not seen for years. When she was there, she was very very good. What’s hard to figure is why, as long as his vulnerable star had showed up, Cukor didn’t put some important dialogue scenes in the can. One possible explanation, on the evidence of the rushes: she kept blowing her lines. Even here, though, she’s cute and sympathetic. And she fairly glows in the film’s most famous scene: a nude dip in the family swimming pool. At first Monroe wore a body stocking, then discarded it to go au naturel. Engaging, relaxed, sexy without pushing it, Marilyn is so effervescent here, the pool water could have been Perrier. Cukor had a short temper, but any director would have felt like Job on this shoot. Marilyn would consult with Paula Strasberg on whether a scene worked or not. To talk with Monroe, he often had to go through her publicist, Pat Newcomb. And even when the star was home sick, she invented cause for complaint. She cattily told Weinstein she had heard that, in a bedroom scene, Charisse was wearing a padded negligee bra. Her growing relationship by Robert Kennedy added more intrigue and delays. The documentary gives every indication that Monroe had an affair with the Attorney General. Weinstein volunteers a telling anecdote, which might be called An Actress Prepares. Before a date with Bobby, she asked her producer for some intelligent questions to spur the conversation; she even rehearsed some dialogue on the Civil Rights movement. But after a few meetings with Kennedy, she told Weinstein, “I don’t need any more questions.” In her time at the Actors Studio, she had apparently learned to improvise. Despite holding up shooting for a month, Monroe insisted on attending President Kennedy’s May 16 birthday party at New York’s Madison Square Garden, and did, angering the studio brass even further. It was there she famously sang “Happy Birthday to You,” breathily fellating every syllable. The documentary captures an eerie moment before her song: Peter Lawford introduces the chronically tardy actress as “the late Marilyn Monroe.” Standing next to Lawford, she seems nonplussed by the gag — and not in a deadpan, dumb-blonde way. Neither, of course, could have guessed that within three months she would indeed be the late Marilyn Monroe. When shooting resumed back in Los Angeles, Monroe showed up but refused closeups. Then she refused to do scenes with Martin, because he had a cold and she was apprehensive of catching it. On her 36th birthday, a Friday, she appeared at a Muscular Dystrophy benefit at Dodger Stadium and caught a cold. The following Monday she called in sick — for the 17th time in 30 days of shooting. That cracked it for Cukor. He told gossip doyenne Hedda Hopper that Monroe was off the picture; Hopper speculated it meant the “end of her career.” And indeed, on June 8, she was officially fired. Something finally gave on “Something’s Got to Give.” The Fox bosses had forced themselves to answer the question that, at some time, must cross the mind of every studio executive: How much crap do I have to put up with before I tell a big star it’s over? The studio, unwilling to lose a big investment, tried to keep the project going by offering Monroe’s part to Kim Novak and Shirley MacLaine; both said no. Lee Remick was asked and quickly signed. When Martin heard this, he resigned. Marilyn then launched a campaign to resuscitate the picture with herself as star. She dickered more reasonably with the studio (agreeing to do without Paula Strasberg’s counsel) and, between June 20 and July 15, sat for five interviews with journalists. At the end of one long conversation with Life Magazine’s Richard Meryman, she made a plaintive plea: “Don’t make me a joke.” Marilyn Monroe thought she was Jayne Mansfield. Fox revived the project, with Monroe in and Cukor out. Fox veteran Jean Negulesco (who had directed “How to Marry a Millionaire”) was assigned to take over. But before the project got under way, Marilyn was dead. Would “Something’s Got to Give” ever have been a decent movie? It’s hard to tell, on the basis of the 37-min. reconstruction. There’s not much promise in the situation, and the dialogue has a few innuendos that are, by the standards of the time, gross. (Cox, as a wimpy shoe salesman Marilyn has seductively invited to lunch, says “I bring my lunch to the store,” and she, turning on the cartoon-Marilyn voice, replies, “I’d be so grateful if you’d … take it out.”) But of course the picture was shut down because Monroe was too rarely captured on film; so there’s precious little of her on display here. What’s there, though, is pretty precious. She’s got glamour, fabulous comic timing and an awareness of her sexuality — that gift or curse that turned every adult male into a panting teenage Romeo. I was a teenager when Monroe died. She had never been quite my type; I liked my goddesses with a touch of class and a bit of a Brit accent: beloved Audrey, smoldery taunting Grace Kelly. But I doted on Marilyn as a singer, on her wittily tremulous reading of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and especially her interpretation of “I’m Thru With Love” in “Some Like It Hot” — a romantic elegy with the thrilling, trilling throb of regret. That rendition played in my mind the week she died. From that moment of mourning I remember two other things: the grace of the TIME obituary (written, I later learned, by John McPhee) and my naive certitude that, if only she’d known me, she wouldn’t have taken those pills. I’ll wager that millions of males felt an identical idiot pang of egotistical gallantry. If I’m right, it indicates that even then we understood that Marilyn’s siren call was, in part, the cry of a lost child. Monroe knew this better than anyone, because she lived it. After all, she had been deserted by her father before she was born; abandoned to a series of foster homes by her beautiful, mad mother, an assistant film editor at RKO. She had come close to being smothered to death at two, to being raped at six. It’s trite, but true, to say that her movie career amounted to looking for (and finding) love in all the wrong places. “I knew I belonged to the public and to the world,” she said, “not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I never had belonged to anything or anyone else.” Many abandoned children never learn to love themselves; many of the abused turn into crafty abusers. Monroe’s habitual lateness on the set, her need to exasperate the men who directed her, can be seen as stern tests of the adults in charge. I’ve been naughty, the abused child says; love me or punish me. Finally, fatally, Monroe punished herself. You could say she punished all of us who wanted to let a lovely star continue to grow, to vex her coworkers and astonish her audience. To be witness to that maturing, couldn’t we have done without one more cautionary fable in the brutality of starmaking? So it’s best to consider the “Something’s Got to Give” footage not as the last moments of Monroe on film, but a glimpse of what else she had in her. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907962/marilyn-lost-and-found/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907962/marilyn-lost-and-found/"},"headline":"Marilyn Lost and Found","datePublished":"2001-05-25T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:14:46.267Z","description":"What becomes a legend most? 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