J. Taraborrelli: The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

20th Century-Fox

PRODUCER: Sol C. Siegel

DIRECTOR: Walter Lang

WRITERS: Henry and Phoebe Ephron; original story, Lamar Trotti

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Leon Shamroy

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

Tom Ewell, Marilyn Monroe (The Girl)

Manhattan book editor Richard Sherman, thirty-eight, dispatches his wife and son to the Maine coast for the summer to escape the sweltering city heat. A gorgeous twenty-two-year-old television spokesperson (Marilyn) subleases the apartment in his building just above his own. She’s never referred to by name and the credits list her as The Girl. If this were a device used by George Axelrod, the playwright, to keep an emotional distance between the two, it only works to a point. Although Richard doesn’t get to first base with The Girl, he imagines making love to her, leaving him with an overwhelming sense of guilt. Despite this, he continues to set the stage for the great seduction—the smoking jacket, chilled champagne, potato chips, and Rachmaninoff on the record player—all with hilarious results as The Girl successfully avoids the seduction. Marilyn with her skirts a-flying over a subway grate is one of the most famous film images of all time. DeLuxe color and CinemaScope. 105 minutes.

20th Century-Fox

PRODUCER: Charles K. Feldman

DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder

WRITERS: Billy Wilder, George Axelrod

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Milton Krasner

Bus Stop (1956)

Marilyn Monroe (Cherie), Don Murray (Bo)

A macho, twenty-one-year-old rancher from Montana travels to Phoenix to enter several rodeo events and while there finds his “angel” in the person of Cherie, a vocally challenged saloon singer, who’s also been known to turn a trick to make the rent money. She is repulsed by Bo’s boorish behavior and crude attempts to woo her, only making him more determined. He kidnaps Cherie and forces her to accompany him back to Montana. A snowstorm forces their bus to wait out the bad weather at a bus stop. Cherie is won over by his heartfelt profession of love and accepts his marriage proposal. Marilyn’s touching performance earned her some of the best reviews of her career. Murray received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination. 96 minutes.

PRODUCER: Buddy Adler

DIRECTOR: Joshua Logan

WRITER: George Axelrod (based on the William Inge play)

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Milton Krasner

The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)

Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe (Elsie)

The world’s greatest actor and the movies’ love goddess join forces to bring Terence Rattigan’s stage play The Sleeping Prince to the screen, with Olivier repeating his stage role and Monroe playing the role essayed by Olivier’s then wife, Vivien Leigh. Grandduke Charles of Carpathia (Olivier) is on a mission of state to London to attend the coronation of British king George V on June 22, 1911. On his one evening free from official duties, he visits the Coconut Girl club and invites the voluptuous Elsie Marina to a dinner party at the embassy, only the alleged party is a party of two. The game of seduction begins, the outcome of which is clear from the start, but it is the getting there that makes this sex comedy work as well as it does. Marilyn was never more gorgeous and rarely funnier than in this picture. 117 minutes.

Warner/Marilyn Monroe Productions

PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Laurence Oliver

WRITER: Terence Rattigan

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jack Cardiff

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Marilyn Monroe (Sugar Kane), Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Joe E. Brown

Destined to be at or near the top of a number of “best” lists, including best film, best comedy film, and best movie line (“Nobody’s perfect”), this picture marks the second working arrangement between Marilyn and director/writer Billy Wilder, the earlier being The Seven Year Itch. It was a decision he reached despite the legendary problems she’s acknowledged to have caused on that set, or because he knew she was perfect for this role and her appearance in the film would assure its box-office success. (Marilyn would earn $2.4 million during the film’s initial run, thanks to a lucrative profit-participation deal with the studio.) The story of two out-of-work jazz-era musicians who, after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, go undercover in drag as members of an all-girl band, the premise is established before we even see Marilyn, twenty-four minutes into the film. But what an entrance. For the rest of his life, Billy Wilder would recount the problems Marilyn caused on the set, always forgiving her behavior due to her own insecurities and lack of confidence. And, yes, he would do it all over again. The film received Oscar nominations in six categories—costumes, writing, directing, cinematography, art direction, and best actor (for Lemmon), winning for Orry-Kelly’s costumes. 122 minutes.

United Artists/Mirisch

COPRODUCER/COWRITER/DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder

COWRITER: I. A. L. Diamond

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Charles Lang Jr.

Let’s Make Love (1960)

Marilyn Monroe (Amanda Dell), Yves Montand

Marilyn was welcomed back to the studio after a four-year absence, and while the return was not widely applauded among some Fox execs who knew too well the havoc precipitated whenever a Monroe picture was in production, this is a charming musical, vastly underrated at the time, with Marilyn at her comedic best, singing Cole Porter songs and dancing to moves created for her by Jack Cole. As Amanda, she is appearing in an off-Broadway review that targets the foibles of celebrities: Callas, Cliburn, Elvis, and Jean-Marc Clement, a French-born billionaire industrialist living in Manhattan (Montand). Clement impersonates an actor and auditions for the part of Clement himself and wins the role. Inevitably, after a few missteps, Jean-Marc and Amanda fulfill the promise in the film’s title. Color by DeLuxe in CinemaScope. Oscar nomination for best scoring of a musical. 118 minutes.

PRODUCER: Jerry Wald

DIRECTOR: George Cukor

WRITER: Norman Krasna

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Daniel L. Fapp

The Misfits (1961)

Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe (Roslyn Taber), Montgomery Clift Roslyn, an actress, is in Reno for a divorce when she meets and falls for Gay Langland, an aging, sexily macho ex-cowboy. The stark Nevada desert is the habitat for wild mustangs that are targeted by Gay and two other cowboy roughnecks for capture, an exercise that is as painful to watch as it is to figure out—until we learn the horses are to be sold to slaughterhouses to process as dog food. When Rose learns their fate, she goes ballistic, her passion so intense that she ultimately secures the mustangs’ freedom and their return to the wild. Film chronicler Leslie Halliwell wrote: “a solemn, unattractive, pretentious film, which seldom stops wallowing in self pity.” Considered a failure when released, it has since gained cultlike status because of the untimely deaths of the three principles. 124 minutes.

United Artists/Seven Arts

PRODUCER: Frank E. Taylor

DIRECTOR: John Huston

WRITER: Arthur Miller

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Russell Metty

Something’s Got to Give (1962)

Marilyn Monroe (Ellen), Dean Martin

A remake of the 1940 screwball comedy My Favorite Wife ,starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, the movie’s thirty-seven minutes of footage, salvaged from eight boxes of raw film in a 20th Century-Fox warehouse, were included in a documentary about the film that was shown as a television special in 2001, Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days . Marilyn lost eighteen pounds for this role, which brought to mind her beauty of ten years earlier when she was in her prime. Film purists do not consider this movie to be part of the Marilyn Monroe filmography, since it was incomplete and unreleased to theaters. But given its importance to the Monroe legacy, and that it perhaps indirectly contributed to her death, I felt compelled to include it. The film was finally made in 1963 with Doris Day and James Garner as Move Over, Darling.