Max Collins - Bye bye,baby

As for me, in the several official inquiries and the many more launched by authors and documentary filmmakers, I routinely declined to be interviewed. Most everything I knew could be had elsewhere, and the things that only I knew were still risky to talk about. No statute of limitations on murder, for example.

Anyway, I always told them, I might write my own book some-day.

By the way, Fred Rubinski and I finally made some real money off Sherry’s, by selling it. The restaurant became the famous rock club Gazzarri’s, running from 1963 to 1993. Fred retired in the 1980s and passed away in 1990. My son, Sam, still runs the A-1 Detective Agency, with offices in half a dozen cities. I’m officially a consultant, not that I remember ever being consulted.

Marilyn? Well, I don’t have to tell you. She didn’t make that many movies, with only a handful that could be called good, and one or two that might be great (for me, Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, both Billy Wilder). And yet she’s the biggest superstar of all, leaving Liz and Cleopatra in the dust. The gold standard of female beauty, worldwide, how many years later? But if one thing makes me sad about her luminous, enduring fame, it’s the focus on her death. And now here I am adding to it.

Of course, Marilyn gets the last giddy laugh. Over the years, to make itself look better, the Fox studio had always portrayed her work on Something’s Got to Give as a drug-addled, unusable embarrassment. Many authors to this day routinely accept that assessment.

But in 1988 master tapes of the lost footage were smuggled out for a group of fans to enjoy. What they saw was a radiant, glowing Marilyn, funny and displaying fine comic timing. Not missing a cue, only rarely flubbing a line, and-between takes-professional and easy to work with. In addition, she seemed sleeker, and more modern, keenly attuned to the 1960s, poised to leave the pinup fifties behind, exhibiting a natural delivery that bore only the faintest hints of her famous dumb-blonde hesitancy.

Eventually the studio realized what they had, and in 1990 a documentary-including an edited version of the existing material, to show what the movie would have been-showcased Marilyn’s beauty and her talent, along the way becoming the highest-rated news program in the history of the Fox Broadcasting Network. With Marilyn, their most underpaid star, again making Fox a pot of money.

What it came down to was, the studio had tried to kill her reputation. But the film she shot had told the truth.

You see, the camera had something in common with the rest of us.

It loved her.