Cinema: To Aristophanes & Back

(2 of 9)

Offscreen as on, the face looks a little too beautiful to be true, like the kind of adolescent daydream served up in the comic strips. The cut of the face is Betty Boop, but the coloring and expression are Daisy Mae. The eyes are large and grey, and lend the features a look of baby-doll innocence. The innocence is in the voice, too, which is high and excited, like a little girl's.

She bears, in fact, a sharp resemblance to the airbrush Aphrodite known in the '30s as the Petty Girl. And like the Petty Girl, the Monroe is for the millions a figure of fantasy rather than of flesh. She offers the tease without the squeeze, attraction without satisfaction, frisk without risk.

Who Cares about Money? Last week, after an absence of more than a year, Marilyn was back at work. Early in 1955 she had walked out on Hollywood. "I want some respect," she huffed at the world in general, and off she flounced to New York. Her studio bosses hastily offered her more money. "I don't care about money," she said. "I want better parts and better directors. I want to be an actress."

Hollywood snickered. "Act?" sneered one of Marilyn's directors. "That blonde can't act her way out of a Whirlpool bra." Cocktail parties were convulsed with the news that Marilyn was holed up in Manhattan with the entire Modern Library, and had sworn she would not unlock the door until she was cultured. The rumors began to get wilder. Marilyn had been admitted to the Actors Studio, and was studying the deep-dish Stanislavsky Method. She wanted to play Grushenka in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

She had become the darling of the theater's intellectuals. ("My only regret," wagged one of them, "is that I have but one library to give to Marilyn Monroe.")

Dumb Blonde? The rumors stopped abruptly. Marilyn had taken on a business partner named Milton Greene, a 34-year-old photographer who wears black silk shirts and looks something like an adolescent George Raft. Together they announced the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions, with Marilyn as president. Her studio decided it was time to holler uncle. In return for Marilyn's services in four pictures to be made in the next seven years, 20th Century-Fox agreed to pay her $400,000—plus what amounted, when all the legal ribbons were untied, to a colossal bonus. And Marilyn won the right to approve her directors.

Was she only a dumb blonde? When Actress Monroe announced that her first independent production, The Sleeping Prince, would be made with Sir Laurence Olivier as her co-star and director, she began to look suspiciously like a shrewd business woman. "Monroe and Olivier," beamed Director Joshua Logan, "that's the best combination since black and white."