MovieChat Forums > Marilyn Monroe Discussion > The real woman...

The real woman...

posted 9 years ago by denis-38
13 replies | jump to latest

Photographer Elliott Erwitt on MM:

"What struck me about her was how really funny she was and very bright--extremely bright. I hadn't known this. I always thought those amusing remarks she was supposed to have said had probably been manufactured for her, but they weren't. She was a very bright person, an instinctive type, especially when the situation seemed right. Very rarely does one meet a truly witty woman. Marilyn Monroe was one."

Photographer John Bryson: "She was a very warm, sensitive, shy creature, and it was fascinating to watch her at close range over a long period of time and to learn that many of the unflattering legends about her were untrue...I'm proud to have been her friend and to have photographed her. She was a good girl."

Magazine writer Adele Whitely Fletcher: "There was never anyone who tried harder to be a good, right person. She didn't always make it--she couldn't, of course, not with the scars from her childhood. But there was never a time when her failure was from lack of trying...those of us who knew Marilyn and had affection for her, remember her still with sadness. Fear! Fear! Fear! This was her woe."

Norman Rosten: "She has escaped facts and flown into myth, caught in a twilight of blended history and remembrance. She haunts us with questions that can never be answered. I have no answers, no new revelations. All beauty is mystery. What comes back to us is the smile, the desperate heart, the image that flares up and will not go away. She is still remembered and loved."

P.S. Rosten's book, published in 1974, is one of the very few I recommend without hesitation. It is a charming and poignant look at the sweetest aspects of the real woman.

I would also suggest James Goode's book, "The Making of the Misfits" which was written on-set as the movie happened in a no-nonsense, non-sensational, truly objective manner. It gives a significantly different view of this "nightmarish" production. Troubled, yes, grueling, absolutely (summer in Nevada), Marilyn unable to film in the morning--true. But not quite the mythical hot mess of legend, with almost all that mess falling on the conveniently dead and defenseless Monroe. Goode's dispassionate reporting is useful if only to get an idea of how difficult and unglamorous film-making is.

[–] denis-38 9 years ago

Clifford Odets, playwright on Monroe:

"If they tell you she died of sleeping pills, you must know that she died of a wasting grief, a slow bleeding of the soul."

Kenneth Battelle, hairdresser:

"She was really a very simple person. What nobody understands is how generous she was. And I don't mean with money, although she was generous that way. I mean she had a great generosity of spirit."

[–] Denis-64 (26) 7 years ago

"I never felt Marilyn's much publicized sexual attraction in the flesh, but on the screen in came across forcefully. But there was much more to her than that. She was appreciated in Europe as an artist, rather than a sex-symbol. Jean Paul Sartre considered her the to be the finest actress alive. He wanted her to play the leading female role in "Freud."

John Huston, on MM

[–] 9 (1235) 7 years ago

[–] Denis-64 (26) 7 years ago

"She was beautiful, of course. Anyone could see that. But there is something extremely alert and vivid in her, an intelligence. I had the pleasure of having dinner next to her and saw that all these things came fluidly all the time, all these amusing remarks, precise, pungent, direct. It was flowing all the time. In her you feel the woman, and also great discipline as an actress."

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, on meeting Marilyn during the filming of "The Misfits."

[–] Strannger (2007) 7 years ago

She was really bright and had a knack for bussiness. She was the one who made her image and her name known in every house hold.