A Tale of Two Marilyns (2025)

Marilyn travels as her own kind of queen. Shades of Zelda! The Millers fly to England with twenty-seven pieces of luggage (of which three are Arthur's - like Barry Goldwater, he is ready to hold on to his socks!). There is $1500 in overweight luggage, of which $1333.33 is her share, and they are deluged by hundreds of press at the airports in New York and London. One of her biographers, Fred Laurence Guiles, reports Miller in a near state of shock as they are conducted from terminal to plane, "strange arms under their elbows...no air to breathe...voices become a muffled roar...a little like drowning." Miller shows just such torture in his expression for photographers. The corners of his mouth have become the creases in the smile of a stone dragon. Given the dragon's stern principles, this wrack of publicity will never end. Perhaps he will suffer most when he finds himself trying to enjoy it. There seems a will to torture himself reminiscent of Richard Nixon being jovial on command.

At London airport they are met by Sir Lawrence Oliver and wife Vivian Leigh. A photographer is trampled in the crush. Off they go with a thirty-car caravan to a "large rented estate" at Egham in the royal grounds of Windsor Park. They have been expecting a "cottage" but find an English country mansion. All one-family homes in England, they are assured, are cottages.

Gaga is the prose of the English press. One London weekly prints a special Marilyn Monroe edition. That is an honor given to no human since Queen Elizabeth's coronation. "She is here," says the London Evening News. "She walks. She talks. She really is as luscious as strawberries and cream." The Seven Year Itch has had exactly the kind of success one would expect in England, where many an Englishman can identify with Tom Ewell. Miller is naturally expected to be clever, superb, well-spoken, and romantic - a tall knight who has been ready to go to war with bloody McCarthy. England offers its oyster.

When I was 13, I owned a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which my sister had given me as a Christmas present, and a copy of Marilyn: A Biography, which friends had given my parents as a gag gift and I had promptly liberated from the coffee table, not seeing it as ridiculous at all, but rather as deep and tragic and life-changing (the book's ideal reader, it turns out, is the 13-year-old girl). I can remember sitting on the nubby brown couch in the living room, listening to "Candle in the Wind" over and over, and turning the pages of the book to look at all the portraits of my new heroine: the ballerina sitting, the Something's Got to Give nudes, the preposterous pictures from her early teenage years, when she didn't look any more beautiful than I did, which was not very beautiful at all. Maybe there was hope for plain girls everywhere; maybe magic could happen to anyone. So I was already enchanted, already on the road to losing my heart to her, when I came home from school to an empty house one day, clicked on the TV, and lo and behold: Some Like It Hot.

She was at her worst making that movie: late as hell, unprepared, incapable of remembering her lines, sick from pregnancy, and tanked up on vodka and pills, all the time willing to tease and taunt people until they were on their last nerve. Billy Wilder told Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon that they'd better keep their fingers out of their unmentionables whenever they were on camera, because "anytime she gets it right, I'm going to print it." But it's the only movie she ever made that fires on all cylinders: a perfect script, co-stars who were better than she was, a role that let her play dumb without in any way giving a dumb performance. The part also came with a sad past, as had so many of her signature roles, but this was the only past set in the midst of not a drama but a comedy, which was a fair approximation of the whole Monroe enterprise: It's been a kick in the head, this sorry life, but why not have another drink and laugh about it?