Boze Hadleigh - Marilyn Forever: Musings on an American Icon by the Stars of Yesterday and Today

Boze Hadleigh is the author of twenty-two books, including An Actor Succeeds , Celebrity Feuds! , and Broadway Babylon . His writing has been translated into fourteen languages. He holds a masters degree in journalism, speaks five languages, has visited more than seventy countries, and won on Jeopardy! donating his winnings to a fire-damaged library. Hadleigh divides his time between Beverly Hills, Sydney, and Hong Kong.

FOREVER

By the same author:

Holy Cow!
Celebrity Feuds!
Hollywood Lesbians
Hollywood Gays
Broadway Babylon
An Actor Succeeds
492 Great Things about Being Italian

To Ronnie
and the Marilyn fans who
look behind the surface

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2016 by Boze Hadleigh

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-63076-263-6
ISBN 978-1-63076-264-3 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

CHAPTER 1

Kissing her was like kissing Hitler.

Tony Curtis, costar, Some Like It Hot

Marilyn Monroe was fabulous, but in my opinion she was too fat.

Elizabeth Hurley, model turned actress

She has breasts of granite and a mind like a gruyre cheese.
Billy Wilder, MMs two-time director ( Some Like It Hot and The Seven Year Itch )

Sadists desire her and masochists adore her.

Gene Simmons of KISS

People are still asking, But can she act? Not that it really matters.

Robert Downey Jr.

That broads got a great future behind her.

Constance Bennett, once Hollywoods top-paid actress, after getting a front and a rear view of Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe was only smart for ten minutes in her entire life. And that was the time it took her to sign with Twentieth Century Fox.

Anne Baxter, fellow Fox contract actor (both appeared in All About Eve )

I guess the classic apocryphal Hollywood story is that Marilyn wrote a letter to Albert Einstein. She admired him very much and wanted to have a child by him. So she writes and says, Dear Dr. Einstein, If we had a child together, it would be perfection. Because it would have my looks and your brains.

So he writes back, My dear Miss Monroe, You have to consider the possibility that if we had a child together, it might inherit my looks and your brains.

Shelley Winters, actress and one-time roommate

I was telling an anecdote to my friend and protg Marilyn Monroe the other day. I added, Of course you realize this story is apocryphal, and Marilyn said, You mean you dont know how to punctuate it?
Sidney Skolsky, columnist, one of several men who claimed to have discovered MM

Suzanne Somers of Threes Company , which shes now departing, is the latest in a long line of dumb blondes beginning with Marilyn Monroe who suddenly strike it surprisingly big.... Nor does Somers have a fraction of Marilyns charisma.

Paul Rosenfield, columnist, Los Angeles Times

They were always and always calling her a dumb blonde. Id say the correct word for what she enacted all too often and too well was naive.

Warren Fisher, publicist and friend

What passes for feminine appeal these days is rather blatant for my taste.... Miss Monroe leaves little to a males imagination. Marlene Dietrich was more my idea of a beautiful and appealing woman.

Ronald Colman, movie star

I have just come from the Actors Studio, where I saw Marilyn Monroe. She had no girdle on, her ass was hanging out. She is a disgrace to the industry.
Joan Crawford

Im not asking to be catty, but if Marilyn hadnt married Joe DiMaggio, who was a bigger icon than she was at first, how really famous would she have become? Sometimes matrimony means more to an actresss career than her movies.... I mean, look at Elizabeth Taylor.

Joan Rivers

I was in Arthur Millers [play] After the Fall . I did not play the Marilyn character.... I could sympathize with Marilyn, but I didnt want to be like her. I wanted to make the rules of my own life.

Faye Dunaway

The girls got something, but I dont think she can sing.

Darryl F. Zanuck, Fox studio chief who believed MM was dubbed when he heard her on the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes musical soundtrack

She didnt believe in herself. What she saw in the mirror wasnt enough for her. It was enough for everybody else, but not for her. She hardly knew the meaning of the word confidence.

Jane Russell, costar, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Sometimes we ran to over thirty takes until Marilyn finally got it right. That meant I had to be as good on take twenty-five or thirty as on the first and second takes, in case that was the one they printed.... But I couldnt be angry with Marilyn. She didnt do it on purpose. She had no bitchery in her.
Lauren Bacall, costar, How to Marry a Millionaire

They keep comparing me to her, but why? Because we are both blonde? If I am a sex symbol, she is not. Her movies are very innocent, and she is never without her clothes. To a Frenchman, she is not a sex symbol. We know about sex in this country!

Brigitte Bardot, French actress and rival bombshell

I think she was funny, like in comedies, but she was overrated. I think anyone who keeps being famous after theyre dead is overrated.

fellow Marilyn Marilyn Manson

She was very good, portraying Miss Caswell, an actress who cant act. Miss Monroe was a clever comedienne.... On the set [of All About Eve ] she didnt stand out in any way. She just did her job, seemed sweet, and left. Nobody guessed what she would become. I think she was more impressive on camera than in person.

Bette Davis

I got fed up with Twentieth Century Fox and Hollywood when Marilyn Monroe came on the scene and they actually built her up into this giant of tiny proportions. The things they let her get away with! On account of the money she made for them.

For instance, she took direction not from her directors but her lesbian drama coach, whom they all said she was sleeping with. Thats not my concern, but it got my goat when they took a no-talent and began ignoring those of us who could actually act!

Anne Baxter

That dyke!

Elizabeth Taylor, referring to Marilyn, as quoted in Norman Mailers book Marilyn (Taylor threatened to sue Mailer, but he had evidence of the utterance; MM may have been occasionally bisexual.)

She killed Clark Gable, you know. Shed grown up idolizing him, and when they finally got to work together, he was an old man with a heart condition and she was always late at the Nevada location, so he had to wait in the broiling sun for her to show up.