Reading SpacesThe Horizontal Walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope, and SexualityLisa CohenFiguresIn The First PlaceMarilyn Monroe has: too much written about her--too much sex about her. There was too much breath in her voice and there were too many drugs in her body. Too much vulnerability, too much trouble, too much exposure. She read too many books, she had too many abortions, she put too much bleach on her hair, she had too much interest in acting, too much willingness to undress, too much talent, too much tardiness, too much anxiety, too much foster home, too much JFK-- -- --and these days there is too much paraphernalia associated with her. Her clothes were much too tight; her house was much too messy; her life ended much too soon. Too white, too childlike, too stupid, too manipulative, too sincere. Too awkward too undulating too intelligent too pathetic too diligent too lonely too lazy too funny--too, too much. * Surely by now we all know everything about Marilyn Monroe. * Marilyn Monroe did not play any part in my adolescent infatuation with Hollywood. She was from the 1950s, a place I just missed visiting, but felt I knew too well anyway--and knew I had to avoid. If I could not love her and her excessive visibility, it was because my teenage "homosexuality" could not find itself, or any tenable refuge from itself, with her. Instead, Carole Lombard kept me company; Barbara Stanwyck was a thrill; Katharine Hepburn, above all, kept me going. Despite the fact that these women were from a more distant past, they were legible, suitable for desire and identification. Monroe was disturbing and uncanny--at once more foreign and more familiar than they. Watching her with pleasure now, I know, has something to do with the different terms of my own visibility. It has to do with how I look. 1 It also has to do with a different understanding of her excess. As I suggested above, this excess--the sense that everything about her is too much--is itself overdetermined and contradictory. Reconsidering her extreme visibility and currency has meant, first, acknowledging the 1950s domestic ideology that I once found it necessary actively to ignore: analyzing the excessive inscription of women in domestic space in the post-war years, and paying attention to the domestic as a conflicted site of Monroe's excessive visibility. It is remarkable how relentlessly [End Page 259] the discourse on this star constructs her as a site of tragic non-reproductivity and non-existent or inept domesticity, as it positions her as the incarnation of "star-ness": hyperbolically visible, female, and sexual. At the same time, thinking about Monroe and excess has meant foregrounding the very hyperbolic technologies that characterized Hollywood production when Monroe was becoming a star. Marilyn Monroe was known at the beginning of her stardom as "the girl with the horizontal walk," and she has a crucial and unexamined relation to the desperate, spectacular, and emphatically horizontal wide screen process called CinemaScope. 2 CinemaScope itself, moreover, must be read as an important part of the articulation of domestic space during the postwar period, despite--indeed partly because of--its status as an entertainment that could only be experienced outside the home. CinemaScope's wide screen condenses American dreams of territorial expansion and postwar ideologies of class and domesticity, and brings their relation to cinematic space into relief. Despite her very public construction, Marilyn Monroe has most often been emphatically located in her own private story--discussed in the most reductive psychological terms. Paying attention to some of the facts and rhetoric about postwar domesticity and the advent of CinemaScope is a way to think about the economy of excess in which Monroe circulates. In Heavenly Bodies, one of the most compelling and rigorous studies of stars and [End Page 260] the psychological structures of fandom, Richard Dyer argues that stars' power comes from their ability to resolve issues that we tend to understand as fundamental contradictions, such as those between public and private, collective and individual, producing and consuming, artifice and nature. Stars, he says, both write over these contradictions and make them more visible. 3 In his chapter on Monroe, Dyer argues that while she was alive her sexuality was perceived and marketed as a force of nature. One has only to look at the print advertisements for Niagara, in which Monroe and the Falls are one, to be convinced of this assertion. However, Marilyn Monroe was then and has since also been perceived as completely artificial--as a parody of what is therefore posited as some more "real" femininity. Looking at the artifice and spectacle of wide-screen technology makes it possible to think about the construction of Monroe's sexuality as both natural and hyperbolic or excessive. This sort of analysis also suggests that it may take a star figure to make a particular film technology viable, just as a particular technology can help produce a star figure. (Think of Betty Grable and Technicolor.) Charles Eckert, in his provocative work on Shirley Temple, describes the child star of Depression-era America as having embodied or inspired "an oxymoron in which the terms need/abundance were indissolubly fused." 4 Following Dyer and Eckert, then, I am suggesting that Monroe is such an oxymoron, in which problems of nature and technology, realism and spectacle, sexual excess and containment, and knowledge and ignorance are fused. If Monroe is a symptom of conflictual discourses, to some extent this essay is too. Most of the writing on Marilyn Monroe inevitably addresses itself to the fact that there is a huge amount of writing and other material on this star. In fact, this self-referentiality--a sort of agonized address to the archive--is one of the major tics of these texts. As one critic awkwardly expresses it: "Writing a biography of Marilyn Monroe cannot erase previous biographies; making a montage of her image does not cut out involvement in iconography." 5 The argument I have just outlined suggests a mastery (over the material and over the star herself) which I must claim and disclaim, since displays both of authority and of anxious concern about its effects are exactly what are played out, over and over, in the discourse on Marilyn Monroe. 6 It is of course absurd to assert one's independence and originality in relation to this material and this figure. However, at this point, these works' obligatory acknowledgments of being entangled in a complex scene of writing and unmanageable proliferation are just as misguided. These rhetorical gestures are, of course, part of the commodification of Monroe, and as such are an important aspect of "her" excess. My point is that star biography and the star persona, like CinemaScope, are themselves technologies ("techniques and discursive strategies," to cite Teresa de Lauretis) whose excesses, rhetorical maneuvers, and historical importance must be taken seriously. 7 In the following section of this essay, then, I find my own stylistic solutions to the question of how and why Monroe continues to proliferate. 8 In the subsequent section, I return to another mode of argumentation to suggest how postwar domestic ideologies and the genre of star biography have produced our understanding of Monroe as an icon of non-domesticity. The sorts of display and the tensions between public and private space that characterize the postwar domestic ideal are [End Page 261] crucial to this part of the argument. I then analyze Monroe's relation to CinemaScope and her appearance in How To Marry a Millionaire (1953), linking the organization of cinematic space to the domestic spatial ideologies previously discussed. Finally, in a coda to the essay, I perversely eschew the sort of feminist analysis which focuses on Monroe's construction as a paragon of heterosexual availability, and discuss her excess or multiplicity in a reading of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1952) that explores the possibility of a lesbian visual economy. * And so it's time to talk about Marilyn Monroe. But surely by now we all know everything about Marilyn Monroe? My Marilyn MonroeLook. "Marilyn Monroe" is everywhere. Her image fills the cover of a book called Starspeak: Hollywood on Everything, and she also appears in its table of contents--which is called "Categories" and which otherwise lists abstract topics such as: Acting, Ambition, Critics, Fame, Gossip, Loneliness, Sex, and Work. 9 She is the most visible star; she is the essence of movie stardom; she is a person who has the status of a category. Marilyn Monroe is everywhere; Marilyn Monroe is in Los Angeles. But is she even there?--since the friend who took me to the cemetery told me her body had been removed from behind the plaque reading: Marilyn Monroe Is it true? And how can we ever hope to get the facts about this body? Wouldn't it be nice if we could finally be comforted by a book that presents "Marilyn in premium form--life size?" 10 What does it mean to want these facts? And what does it mean, when writing about Marilyn Monroe, to ask these questions? There is an echo in here. Haven't too many people asked these questions too often already? But look. Watch me. Look. Look at Marilyn Monroe backed into a corner--head and neck thrust forward slightly, her eyes half closed--looking endlessly receptive and like she might crumple and fall to the floor at any minute; look at Marilyn nude on red satin at the beginning of her career--or nude in a swimming pool at the end of her career; and look at Marilyn wearing red satin in How To Marry A Millionaire, looking at herself in the powder-room mirror and multiplied times five. Look--now she's in a car, in a staged but intimate photo, holding a framed portrait of one of her heroes, Abraham Lincoln; now she's in a white dress, cutting a cake for the first anniversary of CinemaScope; now she's costumed and made up as Clara Bow, as Theda Bara, as Marlene Dietrich, and as Jean Harlow--looking like someone else altogether. Now she's just been autopsied, and is looking ravaged, and like--someone else altogether. Look! On page 343 of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, [End Page 262] she is the illustration for the word "décolletage." And here she is on the cover of the August 1992 McCall's, the issue commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of her death. Inside the magazine they've printed a computer-generated image, called "What She'd Look Like Today"--if she'd aged, then had a face lift. In the months that led up to that anniversary, images of Monroe, writing about her, and television "specials" on her proliferated in a gratifying, sickening, and unseemly way. But any anniversary will do. On June 1, 1995, when she would have been 69, we got a stamp to celebrate her. Look: here we are still so often trying to supply the "missing" facts about her life and death. Here we are knowing her through an abundance of facts and an uneasiness about still not having enough. 11 Look: we are always telling ourselves and each other what actually happened on the night of August 4, 1962; who she really slept with on her way to the top; why she took those drugs; whether she actually could have played Lady Macbeth on stage; how irrational she was; or that she was, in fact, impressively intelligent, curious, witty, passionate about the world, and well-read. We are always presenting a "missing" or "new" perspective, no matter how ludicrous. What does Monroe's psychiatrist's daughter have to say? What can Peter Lawford's widow, who married him long after the night of August 4, 1962, tell us about that night? By now we know that there is a standard plot line: The years of childhood trauma; the years as a struggling starlet; the years of super stardom; the abuses of the body; the inevitable decline and death; the career of her body after death. The career of the body after death. The point is that the career of the body is the plot: the childhood sexual abuse; the pre-adolescent explosion of her body (a key moment, which I see as a splashy production number in a 1950s Hollywood musical, with exaggerated color, sound, and size--although it actually occurred in the mid-1930s, when Norma Jean was twelve). And then the exercise; the grooming; her careful study of anatomy books; the corrective surgery; the bleaching and straightening of the hair; the different "looks"; the model's knowledge of how to face the camera; the pursuit of nakedness; the drugs she took in; the baths that took 3 hours; the men who got in; the children she didn't have; the inability to sleep; the children she couldn't have; and yes, yes, the inevitable decline and death. This plot involves a formula for the sad exploits of the uterus: endometriosis + pregnancy + abortions + pregnancy + miscarriages = the failed attempts at motherhood and the inevitable decline and death. Look, here is how it has been done. Look at the back of the book. The index will tell you what you need to know, point to what you want to know, or confirm what you know already. 12 See under: Monroe, Marilyn.
What can I say? I want to confess that I was "Marilyn and JFK's Love Child" (in other words, that Marilyn Monroe Was My Mother); that "I was Marilyn Monroe's Lesbian Lover"; or that "I Murdered Marilyn Monroe." 13 I say: if ideology hails me, then I can also hail it back. And so I'd like to write a letter or two. The first is to a pretty book in a genre that could be called coffee table feminism (Gloria Steinem's Marilyn); the second is to an academic study (Graham McCann's Marilyn Monroe).
Dear Gloria,
Dear Graham, * It could be that epistolary criticism is all I'll ever practice now. The House of Fame"I guess I've always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife. Well, also, I had to eat. I was never kept, to be blunt about it. I always kept myself. I have always had a pride in the fact that I was on my own. And Los Angeles was my home, too, so when they said, 'Go home!' I said, 'I am home.'" 18 * "Who could have guessed at that moment that she was a movie star? She looked like a housewife with problems." 19 * Welcome to the house of fame, where domesticity and glamour, work and performance collide, where both the housewife and the star reside. Welcome to the house of fame, where your wife works all day and is as glamorous as a movie star at night, and where female film stars can be seen doing housework and spending time with their children. Welcome to the house of fame, where Marilyn Monroe made movies, mashed potatoes, and had miscarriages. * Marilyn Monroe was "discovered" for the first time in 1945, when she was working in a factory that built small aircraft for artillery practice during World War II. After the war, Monroe "became"--or worked as--a model, then a starlet, then a star. 20 After the war, many other working- and middle-class women lost their jobs as skilled factory workers, and popular media exhorted them to revel in their re-placement in their "natural" sphere, the domestic. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May emphasizes that "a unique domestic ideology fully emerged" after the war for white middle-class Americans. 21 Like cold war politics, she argues, this construction of domesticity was governed by an effort of "containment." 22 The therapeutic ethos and the commitment to procreation that were part of this investment in containment involved a focus on the individual rather than on social conditions, and meant that the home and family were seen as "fulfill[ing] virtually all its members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life." 23 As Tyler May and other feminist historians have pointed out, however, this domestic [End Page 266] ideal was hardly a univocal or uncontradictory discourse. The intense focus on home and individual that characterized this period can be seen as a response, among other things, to white middle-class women's movement in and out of production during and after the war, and to their increased public visibility. The vehemence of postwar advertising for consumer goods (the language of these ads is as emphatic as the wartime rhetoric that preceded it) is one example of just how much cultural work it took to make domesticity seem natural for women. 24 As Lynn Spigel notes in Make Room for TV, the postwar emphasis on consumption and its therapeutic, family-based rewards may have actually had the paradoxical effect of sending middle-class married white women back into the workforce, so that they could afford the goods that corporate America was promising would make home life more fulfilling. 25 In an essay on suburban domesticity and television, Mary Beth Haralovich points out that homemakers were defined in conflicting ways during this period, since they were supposed to be "simultaneously contained and liberated by domestic space." 26 Suburbia, as we know, was envisioned as the place where the domestic dream could best be realized. Kenneth T. Jackson writes that "[d]uring the war, government and industry both played up the suburban house to the families of absent servicemen"; and notes that the suburban "dream house" idea became a commonplace. 27 Jackson lists five common characteristics of suburbs during the postwar period: "peripheral location"; "relatively low density"; "architectural similarity" (regional differences disappeared in favor of the ranch-style house); "easy availability and thus. . . reduced suggestion of wealth"; and "perhaps most important. . . economic and racial homogeneity." 28 The "democratization" of home ownership and of leisure implied in these ideas about suburban domesticity were also bound up with complex, gendered notions about containment and visibility. That is, these homes, as Haralovich and Spigel also argue, were designed to both incorporate social space and keep it out; they were intended to simultaneously enhance the privatization of domestic life and put it on display. 29 In Hollywood, Tyler May notes, movies and fan magazines glamorized the single working woman up until the mid-1940s, no matter how provisionally. After the war, however, "[f]emale film celebrities began to offer a new maternal model for identification," as their publicity increasingly included images of their families and accounts of the kinds of housework they did. 30 This is in contrast to the early history of the exposure of stars' private lives to public view, when "discussions of the players' home lives was limited to the bland and discreet. It was even feared for a time that disclosure of a star's role as a spouse or parent would destroy his or her appeal as a screen lover." 31 (In 1933, in Bombshell, Monroe's predecessor Jean Harlow could mock these conventions of ordinariness and domesticity, when her character posed ineptly in the kitchen for a scandalized women's magazine editor.) Thus Hollywood was offering up various spectacles of domesticity at this time, just as domesticity itself was being constructed in relation to problems of spectacle. Marilyn Monroe's star persona partakes of these tensions between sexual display, on the one hand, and domestic containment, on the other. Dyer argues that what was new and powerful about Monroe's star image was that it "combined naturalness [End Page 267] and overt sexuality." 32 He links the synthesis she effected to the dynamics of what he calls "the Playboy discourse" of heterosexuality, and says that magazine, despite its desire to shock, was "attempt[ing] to integrate its [idea of] sexual freedom into suburban and white-collar life." 33 If Monroe is "so overdetermined in terms of sexuality," Dyer writes, she "is nevertheless not an image of the danger of sex." 34 But Monroe was also a blonde bombshell--the ultimate cold-war figure of concatenating female sexuality, of the meeting of women and war technology. I would shift Dyer's claim to state that Monroe's sexuality combined naturalness and artificality (or performance, or technology), as well as privacy and display. In addition, if her star persona can be read in terms of the contradictions of fifties suburban sexuality, the fact remains that she did not live that life, and has since been vehemently perceived as incapable of doing so. In most accounts of Monroe's career, we read that one of her first big breaks was a brief appearance in the Marx Brothers movie Love Happy and subsequent participation in the publicity tour for the film. In the movie she has a walk-on part which is all sexy walk. In New York during the publicity tour, she apparently posed in front of Photoplay magazine's "Dream House" of 1949, in a stunt designed to sell the movie and various household products. This sort of endorsement would not have been as plausible after about 1952, when her star persona had solidified. Since her death, moreover, virtually everyone who has had anything to say about Monroe has felt compelled to comment on her vexed relation to domesticity. No one simply mentions her three failed marriages. All are eager to testify to the fact that she was a slob; that she didn't know how to cook; that her car, her home, her hotel rooms, and above all her body, were always in disarray. 35 The comment by a studio fashion publicist that Monroe always looked "'like an unmade bed,'" presents her as the embodiment of her "inability" to keep house; it places her messy home furnishings on her body, or clothes her in them. 36 At the same time, of course, it describes her as the site of sexual activity itself. In the early fifties, when Monroe moved out of the Beverly Hills Hotel into an apartment, Jane Russell encouraged her: "'get used to managing your own home now, before you get married. Every woman should have her own home. Hotel life is no kind of life for a woman.'" 37 Today, everyone is interested in the fact that before she died Monroe finally bought a home of "her own." 38 According to one recent source, "she had lived in no fewer than 55 houses in her short life." 39 The respected biography Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe opens with a whole chapter about this new "Spanish-style house" and its significance in Monroe's life. The author describes it in detail (Where were the cupboards? Why were there no closets? How were the kitchen and bathroom tiled?), making the place an extended metaphor for Monroe's psyche. 40 The discourse on Monroe is as fixated on her uterus as it is on her domestic habits. There are endless ruminations about how many abortions she had, as well as ventriloquizations of her feelings about children. Despite his astute critique of the way Steinem treats Monroe's abortions, Graham McCann bizarrely and "sensitively" writes about this subject: "The desire to have children was intense for Monroe: her body would at last be her own, since she felt it would exist for the child who belonged to [End Page 268] her, a physical exclamation [!] of blood, spirit and soft, warm flesh." 41 In one television documentary, the actor who played her son in the uncompleted Something's Got to Give opines that she "would have made a very good mother." 42 Marilyn Monroe was not his mother, and she was not my mother; the fact is, she wasn't anybody's mother. This assiduous surveillance of her behavior and her body--both the reiterations of her failed domesticity and non-reproductivity and the more recent "respectful" or "sympathetic" discussions of the subject--is an effort to position her in relation to a fantasy of domestic life which she occasionally embraced but largely repudiated. Maurice Zolotow's Marilyn Monroe is a compelling record both of this complex fantasy of domesticity and of the extent to which it is embedded in and even enables the relation between this star and a writer/fan. Originally published in 1960, and the first book-length biography of Monroe, this study is one of the best examples of how the obsession with Monroe's domesticity intersects with the genre of star biography, and what both of these do to a writer's voice and to the idea of what makes a star. Zolotow is fascinated by the question of how Marilyn Monroe might perform at home: he both imagines her as wholly domestic and proclaims her incapable of housewifery. His articulation of this "problem" makes it clear how both the domestic ideal and Monroe's star image are predicated on the delineation of public and private space and on assumptions about appropriate or excessive modes of performance in those spaces. Zolotow wrote the book when Monroe was married to Arthur Miller, and he is obsessed with his own resemblance to the men Marilyn was drawn to, whom he describes as "tall thin men, replicas of the Abraham Lincoln physique" (187). He writes that when he first met Miller in 1937, "He was tall and thin and wore glasses and I was tall and thinner and wore glasses" (8). Zolotow also mirrors the image or idea of Arthur Miller, the American Jewish intellectual, when he displays his own erudition; astonishingly, this star biography is full of references to Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Wilde, Marlowe, Conrad, Crane, Yeats, Emerson, Freud, Woolf, Proust, and de Beauvoir. Zolotow's appreciation for Marilyn Monroe, then, leads him to imagine himself living Arthur Miller's life. But the fact that he is a serious fan means that he also wants to be Marilyn. During his research for the biography, he staged for himself the scenes of Monroe's childhood and her years as a starlet. He went to the Los Angeles orphanage where she spent part of her childhood; he stood "in the very room in which Norma Jean Baker had once slept and. . . looked out of the window she had looked out of" (8). These gestures of identification reach their apogee when Zolotow writes about the potentially domestic Marilyn, the Marilyn dreaming of married life as Mrs. Joe Di Maggio: . . . And a budget! Oh, yes, she would put herself on a budget and run the whole house. Plan the meals, do the marketing--so much for food, so much for entertainment, so much for clothes, so much for maid; by the way, she had better hire a maid, a capable, responsible, hard-working maid, as Jane Russell had advised her. And then in the early evening sometimes, she would go into the garden--oh, yes, she would learn how to grow flowers--and she would cut fresh flowers, for sometimes there would be romantic evenings when he [End Page 269] wouldn't watch television and they would have dinner in the dining room, just the two of them, flowers in a centerpiece. She would have to learn flower arranging--oh, there were so many wonderful things she would have to learn in this new life. And candles, yes. . . 43 This fantasy of the pleasures and rigors of 1950s female domestic conduct, with its mixture of glamour and drudgery, goes on and on. It is over a page long. One has to ask: Whose excess is this? Clearly, too, the extended use of free indirect discourse in this passage transforms the writer into the subject of his investigation: Maurice becomes Marilyn as he imagines Marilyn imagining herself becoming domestic. But while Zolotow's obsession with the domestic Marilyn is maddening, the extent to which it exposes and enacts the dynamics of impersonation, performance, and display that inhere in this vision of domesticity makes his book invaluable. It is also important to note that Zolotow dismisses the idea that Monroe was some kind of natural phenomenon or pure incarnation of the cinema--views commonly expressed by writers who looked at Monroe in the 1950s. He argues instead that Marilyn Monroe is an impersonation--that while she was manipulated in endless ways, she also made "Marilyn Monroe." As a fan and writer, Zolotow is thus both deeply invested in the idea of Monroe's authenticity and able to make room for skepticism about such a concept. 44 If the preceding passage from the biography describes the star and domesticity in ways that allow us to see Marilyn Monroe as a role that can be assumed--by Maurice or by Marilyn--the following long reverie on Monroe's domesticity suggests that "housewife" is also a role, and one that has odd affinities with that of "star." Zolotow writes: If it be true, as Negulesco has remarked, that it is difficult to be Marilyn Monroe and perform a simple everyday act like eating mashed potatoes, how much more difficult it must be to be Marilyn Monroe and put on an apron, go into the kitchen, peel the potatoes, boil the potatoes, and mash them. The only force that keeps many bored housewives mashing potatoes is the lack of alternatives. Yet the dream of being a normal woman obsesses every movie actress to whom I have ever talked, just as the dream of becoming a movie actress obsesses almost every American woman. The actress invents a fantasy of the happy home in which she prepares meals for a grateful husband and healthy, red-cheeked children. After the competitive pressure of movie-making, the role of wife and mother seems heavenly. But an actress, because of the very qualities that make her an actress, is usually incapable of underplaying her ego, as a housewife so often must do, unable to place herself now and then in a position secondary to her children and her husband. Marilyn Monroe had become the center of her own universe. Everything had to revolve around her.45 This speculation is one of Zolotow's many confident comments on women in general and actresses in particular. Inspired by a remark by Jean Negulesco, who directed Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire, Maurice assesses Marilyn's domestic qualities, moving her in the process from a kitchen to the center of the universe. The "star," he says, yearns to be "normal"--or domestic--while the housewife dreams all day of stardom. In fact, the parallelism that structures this passage implies that movie stardom is the normal dream of every housewife, even though the word "normal" does not appear in the second half of the sentence. Although one must question his assignment of agency in this description of the "fantasy" of perfect [End Page 270] home life--Maurice and others "invent" it as much as "the movie actress" does--he does acknowledge that it is a fantasy. In the process, he notes both the work ("the competitive pressure") involved in making movies, and the performative aspect of domestic life. Being a "wife and mother," he writes, requires playing a "role" and "underplaying her ego." This is a vision of domesticity, then, that presents the housewife as a performer, and that also tentatively acknowledges the rigors of unpaid domestic work. Thus as Maurice imagines the unimaginable--Marilyn Monroe in the kitchen--he nevertheless begins to picture housewives and stars caught in the same double bind of work and performance, domesticity and glamour. Although he finds it necessary to conclude that Monroe is incapable of being a good wife and mother, he does start to make visible both the housewife's and the star's work. Asserting how unlike one another the two are, he also binds them together. The emphasis on theatricality in the home that emerges from Zolotow's speculations is consistent with what we know about the obsession with visibility and space in discussions of and designs for postwar suburban domesticity. Indeed, the typical middle-class suburban home built after the war was specifically designed to be a technology of vision; its open, horizontal design was intended, among other things, to display the woman who lived and worked there. The point was to contain and seal off the homemaker, but still situate her as visible and available. 46 Writing about the spread of television to middle-class households during the 1950s, Lynn Spigel describes "the theatricalization of the home" that was envisioned as a result of the proper placement of the television and of family members in relation to it. "Home magazines" at this time, according to Spigel, primarily discussed family life in language organized around spatial imagery of proximity, distance, isolation, and integration. In fact, the spatial organization of the home was presented as a set of scientific laws through which family relationships could be calculated and controlled. Topics ranging from childrearing to sexuality were discussed in spatial terms, and solutions to domestic problems were overwhelmingly spatial.47 Spigel writes that "often the ideals of integration and isolation resulted in highly contradictory representations of domestic life." 48 Women were represented as working and enjoying leisure time in the home theater simultaneously--and as such they were meant to be both visible and invisible members of the family. New domestic technologies intended to save labor (washing machines, etc.) or make the home more enjoyable (television) were bound up with women's complex visibility, since the presence and location of these devices affected how women were positioned as both objects and subjects of the gaze. The suburban ranch home itself had a peculiar relation to space and visibility. It wasn't any bigger than most other middle class housing, but as Jackson argues, its open design and "pronounced horizontal lines" made it seem bigger. 49 And although the home was envisioned as a private space, "[h]ousing 'experts,'" Spigel also notes, "spoke constantly of an illusion of spaciousness, recommending ways to make homes appear as if they extended into the public domain." 50 The embrace of the charms of private space in the suburbs was accompanied both by the desire to be seen--and especially to be seen enjoying leisure time at home--and by fears about [End Page 271] being seen too much. Early suspicions about television, for example, included the perception of it as a potential instrument of surveillance. And the ranch style home's large sliding doors and picture windows, which were key to providing that "illusion of spaciousness," gave rise to a host of anxieties about being overly exposed to the neighbors' view. 51 These questions of visibility in and around the home also included, of course, an extreme vigilance about who exactly could be seen there. Jackson writes that what distinguished the new postwar suburbs "was not the presence of discrimination--Jews and Catholics as well as blacks had been excluded from certain neighborhoods for generations--but the thoroughness of the physical separation which it entailed." 52 Monroe's visibility intersects in some strange ways with this emphasis on racial homogeneity. If the mass enjoyment of her intensely white hair and skin means that her popularity was in part a utopia of racial purity, and if she seemed to obliterate questions or tensions about race even as she exploded with whiteness, she also seems, looking at her now, to have made visible the production of whiteness as a desirable (and actual) quality. On the cover of a 1960 issue of Life magazine, the headline "A Drama Of Suburbanites and a Negro Neighbor" is superimposed on a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand in Let's Make Love. 53 The "drama," an excerpt from a novel in which a group of white suburbanites collaborate to prevent the sale of a house on their street to an African-American buyer, immediately follows the fluff about Monroe and Montand. This contiguity manages to suggest both strict separation or containment and some kind of intermingling. Monroe is both separate from and crucial to the "liberal" discussion of the issue. Like that issue of Life, the memoir Conversations with Marilyn, dramatizes "race relations" as a question of visibility and contiguity. The author, a white English reporter named W. J. Weatherby, asks the reader: "What did it tell you about her to say she was a Californian, a movie star, and white?" 54 Despite the "nothing" implied as the answer to his rhetorical question, Weatherby's book goes on to demonstrate that it tells a great deal--if not about her then certainly about him. Weatherby links Marilyn, whom he first meets on the set of The Misfits, with an African-American civil rights activist from New Orleans named Christine, whom he is dating, and he ultimately makes Marilyn and Christine oddly interchangeable. Noting at one point that he had to remind himself that Monroe was not attainable, he writes: "I found myself looking forward to the day after tomorrow [when he had a meeting with Monroe] in a way I didn't like. Surely I wasn't going to become obsessed with Marilyn. There was no future in that. I phoned Christine in New Orleans" (137). In this way, Weatherby makes Christine into something like Marilyn's "Negro Neighbor" --if the movie star is not home, he can always knock on the other woman's door. The postwar transformation of private life--its real and imagined transportation to the suburbs, and subsequent privatization and homogenization--also, as is commonly argued, made movie-going a decreasingly popular leisure activity. In response to this loss of audience, Hollywood anxiously started developing its own new technologies of vision. In 1952, the huge box-office success of the three-camera process Cinerama impelled 20th Century-Fox to look for an affordable, competitive equivalent. At the end of that year, the studio bought the rights to the anamorphic [End Page 272] process they called "CinemaScope," and started developing it for mass production. 55 Like sound and color technologies, CinemaScope had been developed largely outside the industry. It was bought by Fox executives from a French inventor named Henri Chrétien, who called it "Hypergonar." In addition to using only one camera and one projector, CinemaScope used standard 35mm film instead of wide gauge film, making it more practical than several other experiments with wide screen technology. The wide image was achieved by using an anamorphic lens which horizontally compressed the width of the image, while maintaining the same height. During exhibition, another lens was attached to the projector which restored the original width of the image. Echoing the American promise of endless horizon and continual newness, the horizontality of the CinemaScope picture and screen were also precisely the shape of the postwar dream house. "Happily ensconced in long cars and ranch-style homes with rectangular picture windows," Peter Biskind has written, "America's sense of space changed from (city) vertical to (country) horizontal." 56 In other words, people may have been staying at home more than they were going out to the movies at this time, but when they did go out, the films they saw often uncannily suggested the space they lived in, or wanted to live in. If CinemaScope was conceived of as a product that was as different from television as possible, then, it was also profoundly linked to the domestic ideology that was making buying televisions and staying at home the new standard or ideal. The popularity of this and other wide screen formats developed subsequently is thus an example of how the success of a technology is determined not only by smooth technical functioning, but by a culture's needs and practices. As I will argue, the pronounced horizontality of the CinemaScope screen and image--the shape of postwar prosperity and anxiety--and the use of Monroe in that space, make evident and indeed allegorize Monroe's relation to the questions of excess, containment, and visibility that shaped both her star persona and postwar domesticity. "Of Size and Scope," Or: The Horizontal Walk"'I didn't like a lot of my pictures. I'm tired of sex roles. I'm going to broaden my scope.'" 57 *
The newspaper article on that first anniversary party notes that "[m]otion picture executives generally credit CinemaScope with revitalizing the entire film industry." 62 As Belton writes, CinemaScope was, uncannily, "the shape of money"--that is, American currency and CinemaScope "both have an approximate ratio of width to height of 2.35 to 1." 63 Marilyn Monroe, of course, was also the shape of money. Time magazine estimated that in 1953, the year Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How To Marry A Millionaire were released, she "made more money for her studio than any other movie personality." 64 Or as Betty Grable put it, "She did an awful lot to boost things up for movies when everything was at a low state"--a comment that makes Monroe sound like a brassiere for all of Hollywood. 65 The fact is that no matter what reviewers thought about Monroe, exhibitors always loved her. The questions of excess and of domestic containment and display that I have raised also have a great deal to do with the relationship between Monroe and Scope. CinemaScope, like star promotion, is at least as much the story of the deployment of an excessive promotional rhetoric as it is the story of a "new" technology. It is clear from reading the material on its introduction that the "big new. . . system" starred in How to Marry A Millionaire along with the three female leads. 66 The process was hailed as "a technological revolution as far-reaching as the changeover to sound," and--in response to dwindling box office sales--as "the answer to every exhibitor's prayer." 67 Focusing on the promotional rhetoric is especially important since this technology was neither truly brand new, nor by any means deployed in all movie theaters. In fact, exhibitors were apparently quite conservative in their adoption of this innovation. 68 In addition to its excess, the most important feature of this rhetoric is the way it makes claims simultaneously for realism and for spectacle. On the one hand, the studio and the trade paper writers marketed and responded to the technology as one "designed. . . to provide the greatest approach to realism in motion picture story telling which has yet been achieved"; they promoted CinemaScope as a process that [End Page 275] "will give the screen 'a realism which it never before had.'" 69 On the other hand, they celebrated the spectacle of Scope--its capacity to provide something bigger, better, and more fabulous than life, other kinds of movies, or television. 70 According to Steve Neale, this kind of extravagant, self-contradictory language has been an integral part of cinema since its inception. Claims for both the realism and the spectacular nature of a presentation, Neale argues, have repeatedly accompanied technological innovation in film, and it is a mistake to see these two elements as opposed. In fact, as he notes about one nineteenth-century precursor to the cinema, the panorama, "the 'realism' was part of the display." 71 The success of How To Marry A Millionaire seemed to convince the studio and other viewers that the format--a wide screen picture with stereophonic sound--could be profitably used for "a GIRL movie" (a comedy or a domestic drama with female stars), not just for big boy pictures like bible epics and westerns. 72 As one reviewer wrote approvingly: the film "provides a much clearer workout photographically of the possibilities inherent in CinemaScope that [sic] is evidenced in "The Robe.'" 73 And another concluded: "Above all we have seen that CinemaScope can be utilized for domestic situations--what a difference between this picture and [End Page 276] 'The Robe.'" 74 For these writers, then, representations of enclosed domestic space were the best use of the "new" technology, which suggests that CinemaScope at once contained domesticity and presented it as an open space, a new frontier. But if Scope was shaped like the "perfect" domesticity,
and if How To Marry A Millionaire proved that Scope could be
domesticated, the movie itself nevertheless engenders some very peculiar
"domestic situations." The furniture in the apartment Monroe, Bacall, and
Grable share comes and goes, as they pawn it to pay the rent. In one joke
made possible in part by the vast screen, Bacall tells William Powell:
"Our furniture is being cleaned; won't you join us in the dining
room?"--as she leads him to a space just a few feet away which is as
spacious and sparsely and awkwardly furnished as the "living room" area
they have just left. Later in the movie, Powell can only find boxes of hot
dogs in the girls' pathetically understocked refrigerator. How To Marry
A Millionaire and CinemaScope, entertainments whose attraction had a
great deal to do with the fact that they could never be experienced at
home, reflect on the domestic ideal by producing a comically stripped down
and undomestic space, a space that is spectacular but empty, emphatically
not a home. In the process, the movie ironically dramatizes women and/as
mise-en-scène: Of course, the whole premise of the film's plot is that the women want to marry rich men, not end up as middle class housewives. They are not interested in keeping house, but in getting one. The three of them take the apartment, which is really a Sutton Place luxury bachelor pad, as a sort of home-office; they are living there because they think it will help them do the work of trapping millionaires. But the movie tells a very different story from what one might find in a 1930s gold-digger film. By the end, Betty Grable has married a park ranger, and Monroe is hitched to a man in trouble with the I.R.S. Lauren Bacall, the only one who nabs a millionaire, is attracted to him because she thinks he's a regular working man--in her words, a "gas pump jockey." If How To Marry A Millionaire, like the films in the Depression-era genre, is ostensibly concerned with upward mobility, the resolution of its plot in fact suggests a more horizontal mobility--a moral about contentment with one's class position. In his New York Times review of How To Marry A Millionaire, Bowsley Crowther focused less on these issues of domestic space than on the supposed problems of excess and visibility raised by the enormous horizontal screen and image. The piece, titled "Of Size and Scope," begins in verbose ecstasy about how exciting it is to see Monroe in CinemaScope: The giant panel screen is without equal as a surface on which to display the casually recumbent figure of the temptatious Marilyn Monroe. Thirty-odd feet of the blond charmer stretched out on a forty-foot chaise lounge purring stereophonic sweet nothings into a three-foot telephone is an eye-filling sight which suits completely the modern-day taste for size.76 [End Page 277] As Crowther's description of Monroe "stretched out" implies, the star is frequently--and more often than either of the two other actresses--displayed horizontally in this film. In How To Marry A Millionaire, Crowther seems to suggest, the "girl movie" collides with "the modern-day taste for size" to ensure that there is enough--in fact that there is more than enough--Marilyn Monroe to go around. Too big to be contained by the old aspect ratio, Monroe is perfectly framed by the excess of this one. Perhaps in embarrassment at his own excess, however, Crowther goes on to criticize the "oppressive embarrassment of space" in the movie, and curtly dismisses the format if all it can offer is "the mere magnification of Miss Monroe." 77 Does he really mean that this pleasure is not enough? Is he perhaps saying that the new magnification is successful only with her and not with the other stars? Is he suggesting that she is bigger than anything else on the screen, and therefore out of proportion with the rest of the film? And this is precisely the question: can there be too much Marilyn Monroe to go around? According to one studio publicity booklet about CinemaScope, conveying the impression that Monroe (and others) could "go around" was precisely the point. The anamorphic wide screen process, combined with projection on the specially designed, slightly curved "All-Purpose Miracle Mirror Screen," was intended to give the viewer "a feeling of being surrounded by things to see." 78 Actually, Fox publicity marketed Scope in two different ways. On the one hand, the studio promoted the idea that with CinemaScope "the spectator becomes a participant of each scene," as in a 3-D or Cinerama event. 79 On the other hand, it attempted to differentiate it from 3-D movies by saying that the format "lacks the 'participation' feeling for the audience--giving instead a sense of closeness and largeness." 80 This duality, as Spigel points out in her study of television, is part of the history of conflicted responses to new technology. She notes that "the dream of eradicating distances was central to America's early discourse on technology," and that this dream was accompanied by fears about the negative effects of proximity (loss of privacy, invasion, et cetera). 81 Our ambivalence about the power of new visual and aural technologies is relevant to our understanding of Monroe's visibility and desirability. The studio promoted the idea that the feeling of "closeness and largeness" made it possible to enjoy the star more intimately--for "a guy in the eighth row [to] kiss Marilyn Monroe." But one can easily argue that the new enormity of the screen instead created an obvious, increased discrepancy and distance between spectator and spectacle, between a fan and the star. In the same way, as I have tried to show, Monroe is embedded both in a discourse of realism, which renders her familiar and attainable, and which makes it plausible, for example, to comment on her domestic habits, and in a discourse of glamour, which positions her as spectacular and remote. 82 Certainly "being" Marilyn Monroe required a constant negotiation between distance from and proximity to her own star image. But the fan exists on an equally shifting ground, the instability of which defines the problem of knowledge about a (this) star: we want to get close and know everything; we want to stay distant and remain in awe. This dynamic informs the allure of the suburbs as well, which are desirable partly because they are reasonably close to the metropolis and yet promote a sense of distance [End Page 278] from the city and those who live there. These questions of distance and proximity have also defined feminist speculations about the construction of the female film spectator. As Mary Ann Doane has argued: "It is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control of the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities of spectatorship within the problematic of sexual difference." 83 In the description of the man in the eighth row watching Marilyn Monroe in CinemaScope, a male spectator is presented as experiencing the obliteration of distance usually ascribed to women. Unlike Doane's analysis of the experience of the female spectator, however, this obliteration is imagined as a means of controlling both that space and the star, and it is represented as predicated on desire, not identification. But what if we were to posit a woman in the eighth row, and one for whom the excesses of desire and identification are equally in play? In fact, in How To Marry A Millionaire Monroe herself is one provocative emblem of female spectatorship and excess. This film and the publicity for it explicitly thematize the star's and fan's encounter with technologies of vision. 84 In its competition with 3-D movies, 20th Century-Fox promoted CinemaScope as "simple and inexpensive and not requiring glasses for viewers." 85 The review and posters for the movie called Scope "the modern miracle you see without glasses." As one trade paper remarked pedantically, 20th Century-Fox's decision to use anamorphic technology for feature films "dimmed the headlines which in recent weeks have been devoted to developments in those processes requiring the use of spectacles by the audience." 86 But if audiences did not have to wear special glasses for this movie, Monroe did. Her character is "blind as a bat," and since she refuses to wear her glasses when men might be looking at her, she is constantly taking them off and putting them back on again. 87 When they're off she follows the wrong people, bumps into furniture and walls, and gets on the wrong plane. These issues of spectacle and specularity are condensed and hyperbolized in what is probably the most famous image from the movie. Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable have just exited the scene, and Marilyn, wearing an amazing pink satin gown, stands alone in the publicly private female space of a restaurant powder room, in front of a group of four curved floor-to-ceiling mirrors. She looks at herself this way and that in the mirrors--and then she takes off her glasses. For one brief but overwhelmingly excessive and pleasurable moment, a 1953 audience would have watched five Marilyns (four in the mirror and one standing in front of it), watching herself, virtually filling the very wide Miracle Mirror Screen. With her glasses off and back in her purse, she turns away from the mirror to leave the powder room, and walks into a wall before finding the door. On one level, this short sequence succinctly presents how Monroe's character and the movie as a whole allegorize film spectatorship in the early 1950s. Looking into a huge, wide "mirror," and taking glasses off or putting them on are exactly what movie audiences were doing at that time. In addition, this first use of Scope to depict domesticated space depends on a story in which the figure most spectacularly on display and most associated with the technology constantly collides with, and thus calls attention to, the boundaries of the space represented and made possible by that technology. The power of this particular scene of excess and containment [End Page 279] comes from the spectacular image of multiple Marilyns spread across the wide screen, and from her suggestive collision not just with the powder room wall, but with the parameters of Scope itself. (One imagines that if she'd never put her glasses on at all she might have walked right into the mirror.) What are the implications of Monroe's spectacles, of the spectacle of Monroe, and of the technological spectacle of CinemaScope, for feminist film theory's notions of female spectatorship? In one sense, of course, the running gags about Monroe's refusal to wear her glasses compound her status as spectacle. Mary Ann Doane: "The woman who wears glasses constitutes one of the most intense visual clichés of the cinema. The image is a heavily marked condensation of motifs concerned with repressed sexuality, knowledge, visibility and vision, intellectuality, and desire." 88 Monroe's character is so eager to be seen that she repeatedly makes herself blind, repeatedly chooses to go from seeing to being seen. In this scene, moreover, she is like the classically constructed female spectator: she can only look to see how she looks, and then she can't see, and becomes a spectacle. But this movie also pointedly, though comically, reverses the scenario in which a woman sheds her glasses and becomes instantly alluring and marriageable, by allowing Monroe to end up both bespectacled and married. The effect--indeed the power--of this narrative reversal is compounded by the fact that the scene in which Monroe decides to wear her glasses, after David Wayne has convinced her that she is more attractive with them on, is surely one of the best pieces of her acting. In fact, it is so affecting (so "realistic," even) that it almost seems to be taking place in a different movie altogether. In addition, the fact that Monroe has her glasses on while she's looking in the mirror in the powder room scene can be seen as giving her distance from (and therefore mastery) over her own image. And although she is looking to see how she looks, she is also seeing how she looks with her glasses on. She cannot see how she looks with them off.
The ideological organization of Monroe looking at herself and of our gaze at her, and the gendering of genre (the girl movie) and of this technology are intertwined. As in star biography, CinemaScope both brings us close and keeps us distant, [End Page 280] gives us a surfeit of information and yet represents and produces anxiety about a lack thereof. In this scene, Monroe is both purveyor of and witness to her own excess. Her compelling association with the apparatus itself, by virtue of the publicity for Scope, and by virtue of her status as spectacle--indeed as the grande horizontale of the late twentieth-century imagination--makes her both subject and object of its gaze, or blurs the distinction between these positions. Looking for her pleasure and for ours, "the girl with the horizontal walk" is both a figure of spectacle and of spectatorship--and a sign of the excesses and constraints of both. Coda: How to Marry Marilyn Monroe
In "The Disembodied Body of Marilyn Monroe," Wendy Lesser has pointed out that Monroe's career consisted mostly of impersonating impersonators--actresses or showgirls. 91 Monroe is also, of course, a stock figure of drag performance; and her critics have referred to her as a female impersonator herself. Writing about Monroe also often involves a feat of impersonation, as Maurice Zolotow demonstrates in his own inimitably empathic way. 92 But Jane Russell was the first and most spectacular impersonator of Marilyn Monroe, and for me her version of her costar in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes remains the most intriguing of all. 93 Jane also marries Marilyn at the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and I would like to suggest that these two gestures--impersonating Monroe and marrying her--are neighborly, allied, and can tell us more about how Monroe has been constructed as both unique and excessive. 94 * How to marry Marilyn Monroe? I am asking you a question. I am giving you directions. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, the term "bride" was not specifically gendered; it meant, simply, someone who was about to be or had just been married. Among the other definitions of "bride" are the verb forms-- transitive and intransitive. "To bride" means to wed or to marry. It also means: "to mince." It also means: "to play or act the bride"--that is, to impersonate a bride. When you are just married, you play the bride. Just married, and playing the bride, you carry your bride, or you are carried, across some threshold. And now we're crossing over. How to marry Marilyn Monroe? If you were marrying Marilyn, it might be because you were her friend, or it might be because you were her fan. In any case, if you were marrying Marilyn, you would want to get dressed up. You'd want to wear a nice gown, to play the bride [End Page 281] with her. If you were marrying Marilyn, you'd be in costume. And it wouldn't be just any costume--you and she would want to wear matching bridal gowns. Impersonation and adulation are the attire of the girl and the fan who wants to marry Marilyn Monroe. But this raises another question. What does it mean to find yourself in the same room, in the same dress, as another woman? The trauma of this event was one of many plot twists or conventions I could never understand as a child. Hollywood musicals give us something like a guide to representations of, or the rules about, female multiplicity and interchangeability. Chorus girls almost always wear the same thing; two leading ladies--never. The problem, the mortification, of wearing the same dress as your friend or your rival has everything to do with our desire to believe that, participating in mass culture, we are nevertheless unique--that every purchase makes us at once more like others and more "ourselves." But I believe this supposed mortification also has to do with fear of the homo, fear of the lesbian, fear of sexy sameness, fear of walking the line between desire and identification. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, quite uniquely, often gives us Marilyn and Jane (two chorus girls, in the film, who are the stars of the film) dressed identically. And here this symmetry is not a problem, but part of the pleasure that animates the film. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell play two full-figured gals, best friends, bosom buddies, show girls, who are sent abroad by Marilyn's fiancé. The fiancé is testing Marilyn's fidelity, and he asks Jane to act as her chaperone as they sail to gay Paree. As the film opens, Russell and Monroe are dancing and swaying together in long, matching, hot-red, sequined dresses, singing "We're Just Two Little Girls From Little Rock." The final scene is a chaste reprise of that number: they enter the ship's dining room dressed in matching wedding gowns, and singing a revised version of their song. While the soundtrack blends the "Little Rock" theme first with the wedding march and then with "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend," the girls process toward their grooms. This is a double wedding, and here come the brides. In the final shot of the film, as the music swells, the camera tracks toward the two women, excluding the grooms who now flank them, and presenting us (and, importantly, them: they exchange a quick, knowing glance in that moment) with a brief but radiant vision of how a girl might marry Marilyn. Is this fact or fantasy? Studying in the school of Zolotow and others, I have learned that the two are not necessarily opposed. But how do you know enough to know it, name it, want it? How do you get close enough? Did Jane Russell marry Marilyn? If she did, it was because she knew how to impersonate her. Throughout Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, each of the two women worries about her friend and tries to convince the other to be more like her. Jane, however, is generally seen as Marilyn's better half. Reports of their friendship on the set (after the initial expectation and desire that they would fight) suggest that Russell was also trying to set Marilyn a good example while they were shooting the movie. "'When I go home at night,'" she told Monroe, "'I put the studio completely out of my mind. You've got to have a good housekeeper to run the house for you, and a cook. Then when you come home, you have plenty of time to concentrate on your family. I know lots of women in Hollywood who are doing it, Marilyn.'" 95 (At the time, Jane was encouraging [End Page 282] her to tie the knot with Joe DiMaggio; here, the question of how to marry Marilyn Monroe was linked to the question of how to marry her off.) But if Jane set the standard on the set, in the movie she most spectacularly follows Marilyn's example. Just before the double wedding, Jane doubles for Marilyn. In an attempt to protect her friend, she becomes a blond, mimics Monroe's voice, and burlesques her version of "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend." This feat of impersonation reunites the two women with their beaus and leads to the double wedding. In 1952, the perfectly named Starlight Songs published "Marilyn," a song "Inspired by MARILYN MONROE 20th Century Fox Film Star Currently Starring with Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters in 'NIAGARA.'" Here are some of the lyrics: "No gal I believe, Beginning with Eve, Could weave a fascination like my MARILYN . . . I planned ev'rything, The church and the ring. The one I haven't told it yet is MARILYN. She hasn't said yes, I have to confess, I haven't kissed or even met my MARILYN! But if luck is with me, She'll be my bride for ever more. I'll be marryin', carryin' MARILYN through my door." 96 I have to confess, I haven't kissed or even met my MARILYN. I have to confess--this is my theme song now. How to marry Marilyn Monroe: you could be the boy next door (Jim Dougherty). You could be a slugger, an American hero of the all-American sport (Joe DiMaggio). Or you could be a playwright, and the perfect picture of the American Jewish intellectual (Arthur Miller). Of course, you could also wear glasses and have tax problems (David Wayne in How to Marry a Millionaire)--or wear a cowboy hat and lasso her (Don Murray in Bus Stop). You could be the ne'er-do-well [End Page 283] son of a show biz family led by Ethel Merman (Donald O'Connor in There's No Business Like Show Business), or you could play the saxophone and dress like a girl, then steal some clothes and dress like Cary Grant (Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot). But if I were going to marry Marilyn Monroe, I'd do it in white, the way Jane Russell does at the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I would. I do. And if luck is with me, she'll be my bride forever more. Lisa Cohen's work appears in Global Television (MIT Press, 1988), and is forthcoming in Fashion Theory and Queer 13 (William Morrow, 1998). She has contributed to The Lingua Franca Book Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, and Bookforum, among other publications, and has taught at Yale University, Swarthmore College, and Lang College. She is currently writing a book on English fashion doyenne Madge Garland and the history of British Vogue. NotesThe photographs on pages 260 and 276 are courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Film Stills Archive. The photograph on page 274 is by Bruno Bernard and is reprinted courtesy of Bernard of Hollywood Publishing, from Bernard of Hollywood's Marilyn, by Susan Bernard (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). Many thanks to Jennifer Wicke, Patricia White, Siobhan Somerville, and Bruce Hainley for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1. By this I mean the whole complex of issues Teresa de Lauretis describes as embedded in the question "How do I look?" She writes: "The first take is to hear it narcissistically. . . to hear it as an intransitive verb: how do I look--to you, to myself, how do I appear, how am I seen? What are the. . . conditions of my visibility? The second take is to hear the transitive, active verb, subject to object: how do I look at you, at her, at the film, at myself? How do I see, what are the modes, constraints, and possibilities of my seeing, the terms of vision for me? The next take is to hear the verb as active but not transitive: how do I look on, as the film unrolls from reel to reel in the projector, as the images appear and the story unfolds on the screen, as the fantasy scenario unveils and the soundtrack plays on in my head?" Teresa de Lauretis, "Film and the Visible," in How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 223-264, 223. 2. Sidney Skolsky, "Hollywood Is My Beat," Hollywood Citizen-News, n.d. This newspaper article, like many of the others I cite in this chapter, are located in the "Marilyn Monroe" clipping files at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 3. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986). 4. Charles Eckert, "Shirley Temple and the House of Rockefeller" in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1991), 60-73; 69. It is further appropriate to compare Monroe to Shirley Temple because "the transforming power of [Shirley's] love" (73) was seen as a natural force during the Depression, and Shirley Temple's box-office appeal, like Monroe's, saved her studio from financial disaster (60). W.J. Weatherby, in contrast, suggests in Conversations With Marilyn (New York: Paragon House, 1992) that the two stars can be productively compared because they shared a blonde, childish innocence. 5. Graham McCann, Marilyn Monroe: The Body in the Library (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 27. 6. The many television documentaries about Marilyn Monroe seem somewhat less agonized; they invariably spend what seems to be an obligatory amount of time displaying the trinkets associated with her--telling us just how much Marilyn Monroe there is to go around--but there is a reckless innocence and irresponsibility about their footage and narration: they disclose what is already excessively visible, and they present the shop windows and bookstore displays as wholly separate from the enterprise in which they are themselves engaged. 7. De Lauretis' theorization of the intersections of gender and/as technology also informs this essay. For her, the "technology of gender" is "the techniques and discursive strategies by which gender is constructed." Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 38. 8. "What is form?" the novelist and essayist Marguerite Young has asked, and then answered her own question: "Form is that which keeps the reader reading. What is style? Style is thinking." Marguerite Young, "Inviting the Muses," in Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), 114. For more on the ideology of style, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986), 43, 199. 9. Doug McClelland, Starspeak: Hollywood on Everything (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987). 10. Back jacket blurb on Weatherby, Conversations With Marilyn, from the Hollywood Reporter review of the book. 11. Part of this drive and this anxiety is endemic to the project of biography: it is a feeling that adheres to any inquiry into the relation between the "surface" and the "depth" of an "individual." This feeling is exacerbated, as Dyer points out, in relation to a star, a figure who we commonly understand to have a successful public persona and a more "real" private self composed both of and in opposition to that persona. This experience of surfeit and scarcity plays an enormous part in the discourse on Marilyn Monroe. We, "the hundreds of millions of Marilyn fans. . . constantly desire to know more about her" by both embracing the star persona and disdaining it as false. (David Conover, catalogue, The Discovery Photographs, Lucky Street Gallery, n.p., last page of text.) 12. This list is compiled and elaborated from the indices of Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985); McCann, Marilyn Monroe; and Fred Lawrence Guiles, Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Stein and Day, 1984). 13. Headlines taken from, respectively, the Weekly World News, December 18, 1990; the Star, November 19, 1991; and the Weekly World News, April 30, 1991. 14. Truman Capote's noticeably different relation to Monroe's body is one striking aspect of his essay, "A Beautiful Child," in Music for Chameleons (New York: Random House, 1980). Is this because Capote was gay? Because he, too, medicated himself heavily? 15. Her makeup man and dresser, Whitey Snyder and Marjorie Snyder, have appeared on the television special "Marilyn: Something's Got To Give," as well as on other documentaries. 16. Gloria Steinem, Marilyn (New York: Henry Holt, 1986). For invocations of the "real Marilyn Monroe," see the dedication of the book, as well as pages 2, 23, 44. On the child within, see 69, 42, 57-61, 95. On acting and East Coast/West Coast hierarchy, see 168, 76. Dean MacCannell's excellent reading of this book is the best thing about his otherwise odd essay, "Marilyn Monroe Was Not a Man," Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 114-127. 17. McCann, Marilyn Monroe. On "sensitive" see 37, 58; on "demystification" see 27; for "comprehending . . . " see 3; on alliteration see 94, 150, 27; see also 16, 10. 18. "Marilyn Monroe: The Last Interview," Life, August 1992, 73-78. 19. Weatherby, Conversations With Marilyn, 189. 20. Starlets were a vast subclass of female bodies used by the studios for small parts and various promotional events. In her autobiography, My Story (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), Monroe herself vividly describes how this and other kinds of supporting labor were required to make the studio system work. 21. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 90. 22. Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 102. 23. Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 11; see also 49. 24. Michael Renov has described the imperative voice used in much wartime and postwar advertising and noted that the same magazines that presented images of women war workers later exhorted them back to the kitchens. "Advertising/Photojournalism/Cinema: The Shifting Rhetoric of Forties Female Representation," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11.1 (1989): 1-21. Dana Polan also notes the "direct address" to the consumer in the rhetorical strategies of 1940s advertising, in Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 294. 25. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See 33, 34, 42. 26. Mary Beth Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11.1 (1989): 61-83; 67. 27. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 232. He adds that "some of the nation's most promising architects published their 'dream houses' in a series in the Ladies' Home Journal" between 1941 and 1946. See also Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 162-171. Polan argues that by the 1950s there was also widespread criticism of suburbia, which found "in the suburban phenomenon the cause for all American maladies and malaise." Power and Paranoia, 254. 28. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 238-241. 29. What Tyler May calls "the twentieth-century idea of the sexualized home" embodied or expressed a related tension between increased sexual openness and various efforts of censorship. Homeward Bound, 140. As John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman have pointed out, the trend toward increased public displays of sexuality during this period was accompanied by strong campaigns of suppression. See their Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), especially chapters 11 and 12. 30. Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 41, 140. 31. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1975), 233. 32. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 35. 33. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 32, 39. 34. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 45. 35. Steinem, supposedly the purveyor of the "feminist" reading of Monroe, is one of the worst practitioners of this sort of criticism: she is repeatedly titillated and appalled by the idea of Monroe's frequent unkempt appearance. See also Willoughby: "She was dressed in the same sloppy way." Conversations With Marilyn, 143. 36. McClelland, Starspeak, 200. This statement also names her as the site of her death. 37. Maurice Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 180. 38. Guiles, Legend, 23. See also Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 180. 39. "Remembering Marilyn." Television documentary. Viewed at the Museum of Television and Radio, New York City. 40. Guiles, Legend, 23. 41. McCann, Marilyn Monroe, 148; emphasis mine. This "soft, warm" prose is from an (apparently unedited) university press-published book. 42. "Marilyn: Something's Got to Give," Fox television network. 43. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 212-213. 44. In this sense, his approach is reminiscent of Arthur Miller's use of quotation marks in an article in which Miller writes that "in everything she does she is 'herself.'" Arthur Miller, "My Wife Marilyn," Life, December 22, 1958. This text accompanied the series of photographs in which Monroe impersonated some of her predecessors; see footnote 94. 45. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 210. 46. It was not only the place for your wife to be seen, it was also a prose from which she could see "everything." The floor plan and windows in a typical home in Levittown, for example, were placed for the maximum ease of surveillance or supervision of children inside and outside the house. Jackson notes: "the kitchen [was] moved to the front of the house near the entrance so that mothers could watch their children from kitchen windows and do their washing and cooking with a minimum of movement. Similarly, the living room was placed in the rear and given a picture window overlooking the back yard." Crabgrass Frontier, 235-6. 47. Spigel, Make Room for TV, 37. 48. Spigel, Make Room for TV, 91. 49. Jackson,Crabgrass Frontier, 240. 50. Spigel, Make Room for TV, 101. 51. Spigel, Make Room for TV, 117-19. Michael Rogin also notes that many of the anti-Communist films produced in Hollywood between 1943 and 1964--the period he refers to as the years of "the cold war consensus"--described and glorified state surveillance of private life. These movies also showed a fascination with various secret technologies of vision that made those interventions into the home possible. "Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies," in Ronald Reagan: The Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 238. 52. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 241; see also Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 170-1. 53. Life, August 15, 1960. 54. Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 7. 55. When I started writing this essay I was aware of one history of wide screen filmmaking, Wide Screen Movies, by Robert E. Carr and R. M. Hayes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988). This is a compendium of nearly every wide screen process ever developed, along with lists of films shot in each process. While the authors are critical of the enormous amount of hype that accompanied CinemaScope releases, their own prose often reproduces publicists' rhetoric. Writing about Todd-AO, for example, they muse that the process "is still alive, waiting for some other dreamer or master showman to resurrect it and thrill anew the generations of movie fans around the world" (172). John Belton's Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), a study of the cultural meanings of widescreen technology and its ascendancy in postwar America, appeared after I had done my own archival research on Scope. This is an important book which has confirmed and strengthened my argument in this essay. Alan Nadel, "God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War 'Epic,'" PMLA 108 (May 1993): 415-430, is another recent analysis of the ideology of the wide screen. 56. Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 333. 57. Summers, Goddess, 124. Cited from reports of a press conference Monroe gave in 1955. 58. Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1954; pt. III, 10. This photo and another from the same event are reproduced in Bernard of Hollywood's Marilyn, photographs by Bruno Bernard, text and edited by Susan Bernard (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). Much of the material in this section of the essay comes from the "CinemaScope" clipping file at the Margaret Herrick library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. I have given the fullest citations available. 59. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, 144, 200. 60. Although it was the first completed, it was the second released; the studio saw the biblical epic The Robe as a more appropriate innaugural display of CinemaScope. 61. Hollywood Citizen-News, February 2, 1953. 62. Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1954; pt. III, 10. 63. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, 223 64. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 183. 65. McClelland, Starspeak, 190. 66. Hollywood Citizen-News, February 2, 1953. 67. Motion Picture Herald, February 7, 1953. W. R. Wilkerson, Hollywood Reporter, March 19, 1953. 68. Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 126. Neale notes that this conservative stance also contributed to difficulties and failures in the introduction of 3-D and stereophonic sound. 69. Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox, quoted in the New York Times, April 5, 1953. This insistence on realism can also be found in Charles Barr's "CinemaScope: Before and After," an ode to Bazinian principles of filmmaking and viewing, which disregards both the spectacular elements of the technology and the constant invocation of spectacle in the promotional rhetoric. Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 70. As one writer put it: "And another thing! What 20th showed yesterday is something that television will NEVER be able to capture. TV will get color. TV might go for another dimension if it can be developed, but TV will never be able to develop the panorama that the theatres will soon be able to project from their big screens." W. R. Wilkerson, The Hollywood Reporter, March 19, 1953. According to a recent article in the New York Times, however, televisions with the aspect ratio of movies will soon be available to the "67 percent of the American public that. . . prefers watching movies at home than [sic] in a theater." Hans Fantel, "Wide-Screen Sets Define The Shape of the Future," New York Times, September 12, 1993. 71. The spectacle, Neale continues, was "appreciated simultaneously both [sic] for its verisimilitude and for its artifice." Cinema and Technology, 50, 26. Or as Polan observes of Technicolor, it "is a technique caught between storytelling possibilities and the possibility of display for display's sake." Power and Paranoia, 297. 72. "Here we have a GIRL movie (and WHAT girls. . .)" Dorothy Manners writes in "3 Beauties in Comedy," Los Angeles Examiner, November 5, 1953. 73. "'Millionaire' Eye-Filling Girl Show With Scenery" Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1953. 74. "CinemaScope Proves Itself With 'How Marry Millionaire,'" Beverly Hills News Life, November 4, 1953. 75. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 53. 76. Bosley Crowther, New York Times, November 15, 1953. 77. Crowther, New York Times, November 15, 1953. 78. Advertisement, Daily Variety, April 22, 1953. "CinemaScope," booklet published by Twentieth Century-Fox, circa 1953, n.p. 79. Charles Clarke A.S.C., CinemaScope Techniques [also titled: CinemaScope: Photographic Techniques] (Los Angeles, 20th Century-Fox), 10. 80. Hollywood Citizen-News, October 28, 1953. 81. Spigel, Make Room for TV, 103. 82. On the subject of Monroe and realism: Howard Hawks apparently once told Darryl Zanuck that the studio was not putting Monroe in the right vehicles: "you're making realism with a very unreal girl. She's a completely storybook character." McClelland, Starspeak, 192. 83. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen 23.3-4 (September-October 1982): 74-86; 78. 84. How To Marry A Millionaire also calls attention to the technologies of travel and of sound. When the film was shot, in the early 1950s, commercial air travel was still a novelty but was becoming more accessible to the middle class. Monroe's character takes two plane trips, one in her dreams in a hilariously phallic gold plane, and another toward the end of the movie when she finds the man of her dreams. On the second trip, we see passengers boarding, the propellers spinning, the plane in midair, and, most spectacularly, a pilot's point-of-view shot of the plane landing. This sequence includes its own internal audience: as the runway looms up ahead we see a car pulled over to the side of the road, its occupants standing next to the car staring up at the plane. CinemaScope, like Cinerama (This Is Cinerama was essentially an extended travelogue), is also a vehicle for tourism--note the use of city- and mountain-scapes in the film. Stereophonic sound was another part of the spectacle of CinemaScope: the audience was supposed to be surrounded by things to hear, as well as by things to see. How To Marry A Millionaire opens with an "overture," played by the studio orchestra. This sequence gestures back to the last big technological innovation in cinema, sound film (in fact, many early sound films were simply audio-visual recordings of orchestras and opera singers), and it also echoes the early practice of accompanying the movies we now call "silent" with pianos, organs, and orchestras. 85. "CinemaScope," booklet, Twentieth Century-Fox, circa 1953, n.p. 86. Motion Picture Herald, February 7, 1953. 87. In addition, the fake millionaire for whom Monroe first falls wears an eye patch--which is itself fake, he doesn't really need it--and the man she ends up marrying, played by David Wayne is, as Monroe's character puts it, "blinder than me." 88. Doane, "Film and the Masquerade," 82. 89. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 53. 90. Kaja Silverman, "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 139, 143. 91. Wendy Lesser, His Better Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 92. Impersonation is also the basis of Norman Mailer's work of "fiction," Of Women and Their Elegance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), which Mailer describes as a novel narrated in the first person by Marilyn Monroe, as well as a more recent novel based on Monroe's life, Sam Toperoff's Queen of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). Toperoff has said that his authority for this gesture comes from "25 years of marriage." Interview, "All Things Considered," National Public Radio, January, 1992. 93. I am claiming that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a classical Hollywood text that suggests something more than simply the possibility of close female friendships that Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca see, in their "Pre-Text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 94. Bruce Connor's short experimental film Marilyn Times Five (released in the early 1970s) and the Life magazine spread (December 22, 1958) in which Marilyn appeared as Theda Bara, Lillian Russell, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, and Jean Harlow, as well as two different versions of herself, are two places to look further at how Monroe has been represented as both unique and multiple. 95. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 172. 96. Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl, "Marilyn" (Starlight Songs, 1952).
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