Marilyn From The 22nd Row

Marilyn  agreed to accept Milton Krasner as her cinematographer, since Milton had just filmed her on The Seven Year Itch and had won an Academy Award in 1954 for Three Coins in the Fountain. Marilyn had no control over the screenwriter 20th Century-Fox selected: George Axelrod. Even while he developed the adaptation of William Inge’s play, George’s most recent Broadway play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, was running successfully in New York City; but more about George and his play later. 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation, along with Marilyn Monroe Productions Inc., shared uncredited co-production responsibilities while Buddy Adler was the credited producer.

Bus Stop presented Marilyn with more than a few challenges, not the least of which was the importance of her performance. On prior movies, while her performances were important in a broad sense, with Bus Stop, how she handled the material, and the associated stress, would impact the success or failure of the movie, the future of Marilyn Monroe Productions and her future as an actress.

Also, a calculated risk was involved in playing Cherie, a weary, unglamorous chanteuse with little or no talent, the complete opposite of the world’s reigning sex symbol and most glamorous movie star. The executives in the offices on Pico Boulevard in Hollywood expressed their concern; they wondered if they had made a serious mistake as they watched the world’s most famous movie star, who they considered to be their own personal creation, completely deconstructed by an artistically involved and free Marilyn Monroe. She accepted Milton Greene’s suggestion regarding her make-up. A saloon singer would seldom be exposed to sunlight, he reasoned correctly; so Whitey Snyder, her personal make-up artist, developed a thick and unflattering chalky make-up, Cherie’s paleness made even more pronounced by the color of her oft disheveled curls.

William Travilla designed some glamorous costumes, including a beautiful gown for Cherie’s on-stage musical performance; and even though she approved Travilla’s design, she planned to transform it into the type of threadbare costume an impoverished saloon singer would be forced to wear. She poked several holes into the costume’s fishnet stockings, which were then clumsily darned by the wardrobe department according to Marilyn’s instructions. Travilla’s beautiful gown became a beat-up, tattered and worn mermaid’s costume with a tail and punctured fishnet stockings. Marilyn’s fealty to realism would not be denied.

To all the expectations and concern, add that Marilyn had to maintain a consistent and believable Arkansan Hillbilly accent, deliver a completely horrible but convincing singing performance and effectively display a range of emotions: joy, anger, fear, frustration, sympathy and sadness, just to mention a few. She also had to appear alluring and sexy, innocent, wise, dumb, repulsed, certain, confused, affectionate, forgiving, disappointed and content. And if that wasn’t enough, she had to portray all the various emotions and existential states against a cartoonesque performance by her leading man.

Born in Hollywood but reared in East Rockaway, New York, Don Murray admitted in subsequent interviews that he knew absolutely nothing about cowboys and certainly did not know how to play one. He could not even ride a horse; so he played the cowboy character according to his director’s instructions. Joshua directed him, Don claimed, to act like Attila the Hun; so that is exactly what he did, created a caricature of a brash, strident, noisy, uncouth, naïve and overly self-confident cowboy never before off the ranch and with no experience at all with women. Joshua advised Don that the Bo he wanted, in fact, saw little difference between livestock and women, both were something to be roped, branded and drug home to the ranch.

Don Murray’s portrayal of Bo Decker, directed or not, initially disappointed me. His performance was just too ludicrous, too cartoonesque to be taken seriously. However, after many subsequent viewings, my opinion of Murray’s noisy and wild antics has softened somewhat. I cannot say that I enjoy his stridence, but I appreciate certain parts of his performance. For the movie to be successful as a comedy, I admit, Bo had to display near fits of churlish behavior and naïve braggadocio.

Additionally, Joshua wanted Don’s animated portrayal of the deeply tanned, healthy cowboy with coal black hair to be contrapuntal to Marilyn’s restrained portrayal of the confused young woman with a bar room pallor, crimson lips and strawberry blonde curls. While Don’s performance interferes somewhat with Marilyn’s, in my opinion, their juxtaposition works; and Bo is frequently funny. And, in the end, I must also admit, after Bo has been beaten into submission and humility, Don is allowed to actually act, to reveal and transmit a boyish charm previously hidden by Bo’s obnoxious naiveté. While the cowboy remains uncouth, we believe he is being sincere and thus we accept his transformation; we believe that Cherie just might follow him anywhere.

Also born in Hollywood and reared there as well, Marilyn was intimately familiar with the character of Cherie and her performance is proof thereof. As ambivalent as I might still be about Don Murray’s performance, I am not ambivalent at all about Marilyn’s portrayal of the sweet but mistreated chantooeuse. It is nearly flawless. Marilyn delivers an appropriate, unwavering Arkansan Ozark accent, all the requisite emotions; and she invests Cherie with a childlike innocence that doesn’t conceal her mature sexuality or her unabated ambition. In scene after scene, Marilyn shines and enthralls.

Arguably, one of her most demanding scenes must have been her on-stage singing performance. In the end, Cherie just might complete her journey to Hollywood and Vine; but she will never be discovered by fortune or fame, for she is as talentless as she is ambitious. Marilyn delivers a vocal performance that is brilliantly bad, complete with humorously trite and stale hand gestures. Her performance in Cherie’s threadbare mermaid’s costume, a metaphor for her existence, is, in its own special way, as dazzling and mesmerizing, somehow even as polished, as any theretofore delivered by Marilyn. Only a heartless lout could watch Cherie’s terrible but emotional rendition of “That Old Black Magic” as she tugs at her full length gloves to keep them up and operates the colored spot lights with her feet, exposed before the loud and disinterested crowd of beer drinkers and hell raisers, and not be deeply touched. Marilyn gives her heart and her soul, invests all her feelings and all the childlike sincerity she possesses in Cherie’s song. And yet, as she leaves the stage, not one person, other than Bo, applauds. Art, once again, imitates life.

But the scene in which Marilyn displays her skill, perhaps her genius, the long bus ride back to Bo’s Montana ranch, features Cherie’s conversation with Elma and another song of sorts: Cherie’s soliloquy. It is during this delicate scene that Marilyn invests Cherie with pathos and strength. She confesses and yet she demands. Maybe I don’t know what love is, she confesses to Elma, then declares:

I want a guy I can look up to and admire. But I don’t want him to browbeat me. I want a guy who’ll be sweet with me. But I don’t want him to baby me, either. I just gotta feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me, aside from all that lovin’ stuff.

As Donald Spoto observed:

But it is in her long speech on the bus that Marilyn gave shape and substance to the character, somehow reaching into herself with a wistfulness that never seems self-indulgent: the character’s hopes collide with her fragility in one of the great performances of the decade. In a voice poised between tremulous confession and a great ache of longing, she spoke of Marilyn as well as of Cherie, and this gave her the truth she so immediately conveyed (Spoto 357).

Some reviewers and commentators express consternation that Marilyn chose Bus Stop as her first role after she founded Marilyn Monroe Productions and had control over her projects. She chose the part of Cherie, they contend, because Marilyn was not quite brave enough just yet to play against type. There may be some truth to their contention; and her next selected role of showgirl Elsie Marina in The Prince and the Showgirl adds some weight to their assessment of Marilyn’s trepidation.

Certainly by 1956, Marilyn was committed to casting aside the dumb-blonde-sex-symbol persona that she had created for herself, embraced and played flawlessly, a persona also embraced by what some label the Cult of Celebrity. Travis Wagner observed that Marilyn deconstructed that persona in 1955 during her seven-year-itch performance: Marilyn rejected everything that the cult of celebrity had created for her, according to Mr. Wagner. If Norma Jeane believed she had to completely dismantle her Marilyn Monroe persona in order to escape it, then any deconstruction she began on the sets of The Seven Year Itch she continued on the sets of Bus Stop.

Cherie may be a variation of the dumb-blonde-sex-symbol characters that Marilyn was forced to play during the majority of her career; but Cherie is not Pola or Lorelei Lee, and she certainly is not TheGirl. Those women probably never experienced the intractable disregard, the cruelty that men often display towards impoverished women who they believe are of easy virtue and naturally willing because of their difficult and sad circumstances. Cherie certainly experienced it, as Norma Jeane certainly did; and she certainly sustained the type of damage that flesh and blood women often do at the hands of baboons and gorillas, as Norma Jeane certainly did. Yet, neither the irrepressible Cherie, nor the irrepressible Norma Jeane, surrendered to past disappointments and fears. Neither surrendered their dreams. In some specific regards, Marilyn chose a role against type but just not completely out of her comfort zone. Unfortunately, Norma Jeane would never completely escape the gravity of her brilliant persona. To her, at times, it must have felt like a black hole.

Cinema experts and pundits assert and mostly agree that in rendering Cherie, Marilyn, the actress, rendered her best performance and that Bus Stop was her best movie. I could argue their assertion but here is not the time or the place. Bus Stop was the movie that putatively proved to all Marilyn’s critics, all her detractors and the cynics, that Marilyn was a real actress, as if she hadn’t proven that already. Bosley Crowther intoned through his typewriter from the offices of the New York Times, obviously high above the humanity filling the streets of New York City and even higher above the ignominious pretender actress, Marilyn Monroe:

HOLD onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in “Bus Stop” … For the striking fact is that Mr. Logan has got her to do a great deal more than wiggle and pout and pop her big eyes and play the synthetic vamp in this film. He has got her to be the beat-up B-girl of Mr. Inge’s play, even down to the Ozark accent and the look of pellagra about her skin.

Don’t ask me why cause I don’t know why Bosley Crowther disliked Marilyn as much as he apparently did; but the man obviously had a goofy axe to grind. Maybe his dislike for American Cinema tainted his perception of Marilyn Monroe or maybe it was simply her beauty; but for the amazing performance delivered by Marilyn to be so glibly described, almost dismissed as something created by Joshua Logan, reveals much more about Mr. Crowther than it does about Marilyn’s ability as an actress: he was not a nice man. Still, The Saturday Review of Literature commented that Marilyn effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality; and Joshua Logan, hesitant and dubious initially became her adoring director and proclaimed Marilyn

one of the great talents of all time, and the most talented motion picture actress of her day … I’d say she was the greatest artist I ever worked with in my entire career … Hollywood shamefully wasted her, hasn’t given the girl a chance. She has immense subtlety, but she is a frightened girl, terrified of the whole filmmaking process and self-critical to the point of an inferiority complex.

Marilyn could not attend the premiere of Bus Stop. She was in England, struggling with Sir Laurence Olivier to make The Prince and the Showgirl. Even though Joshua Logan counseled Sir Laurence regarding the way to direct and treat Marilyn, as did Lee Strasberg, Olivier would ignore their advice. Likewise, Hollywood and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignored Marilyn on Oscar night. For his performance as Bo Decker, Don Murray was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Weird, considering he was Marilyn’s leading man. Marilyn’s compelling performance was not acknowledged. While she must have felt like she was being ridiculed by the town she once called a large varicose vein, once again, life just imitated art, and once again, Cherie was ignored on stage. She left unappreciated and unapplauded.