The Genius and the Goddess (30 page)

30. Miller and
Elia Kazan,
c
.1963

31. Barbara Loden
and Jason Robards
in
After the Fall
, 1964

In August 1958, as she started work on Billy Wilder's
Some Like It
Hot
(1959), Marilyn's status in Hollywood, where you're only as
good as your last picture, had taken a downward turn.
The Prince and
the Showgirl
had been a failure and she no longer had her own production
company. Once again she was working for a big studio, with
almost no say in the script or the part. In fact, she was playing yet
another dumb blonde. Her physical and psychological condition was
deteriorating, and her behavior on the set was maddening. Yet
Some
Like It Hot
turned out to be enduringly funny, a perfect vehicle for
her comic talent, one of the finest pictures she ever made. Marilyn's
high-wire act seemed best when she was standing over a precipice,
even if she tortured everyone else.

Wilder's scripts have irony, wit and an inventive use of his third
language (he'd learned English as an adult, after German and French).
Back in 1957, Wilder had sent Marilyn a two-page outline of
Some
Like It Hot
, whose title refers to the hot jazz of the 1920s as well as
the two desperate jazz musicians, in danger and on the run. The fast-paced
plot takes off when the impulsive Joe (Tony Curtis), who plays
the saxophone, and the more cautious Jerry (
Jack Lemmon), on the
bass fiddle, accidentally witness a real event: the St. Valentine's Day
Massacre of February 14, 1929. During a gang war in the Prohibition
era, six members of Bugs Moran's gang and a car mechanic who
happened to be on the scene were lined up inside a garage on
Chicago's North Side and gunned down by Al Capone's men.

The comic essence of the movie is disguise and mistaken identities,
where almost everyone pretends to be different than he really is.
To escape the gangsters, Curtis and Lemmon dress up as "Josephine"
and "Daphne" and get jobs with an all-girls' orchestra that's about to
leave for Florida. On the train going south, Curtis falls in love with
Marilyn, or Sugar Cane, the band's ukulele-playing singer.
¹
Though
frustrated by his own disguise, Curtis manages to get Marilyn to
confide in him. He learns that she's had a series of affairs with penniless
sax players and now hopes to land a rich husband. In Miami,
Curtis intermittently drops his female persona. Posing as an oil baron,
he lures Marilyn onto a yacht and challenges her powers of seduction
by pretending that he's both extremely rich and mysteriously
unresponsive to the female sex. Curtis becomes more masculine and
Lemmon more feminine as the yacht's real owner, Osgood Fielding
(played by
Joe E. Brown), zealously courts the irresistible "Daphne."
When Lemmon announces
his
engagement and Curtis asks, "Who's
the lucky girl?", he delightedly replies, "
I
am." After the gangsters
arrive for their convention, the musicians' cover is blown and they
all escape in the yacht. The movie transforms the clichéd situation
of the gold-digger in search of a rich man (and the rich man hoodwinked
by a girl), satirizes the mobsters and combines hot music with
true love.

Marilyn hesitated at first about playing a blonde who's dumb enough
to believe that two guys are really girls. But their disguise is transparent
and obvious; and their absurd wigs, cloche hats and clownish
make-up, their mincing walk, falsetto voices and coy gestures are all
part of the comedy. When the designer
John Orry-Kelly teased Marilyn
by saying, "You know, Tony's ass is better-looking than yours," she
replied: "Oh yeah? Well, he doesn't have tits like these!" Her doubts
about taking the part were assuaged by a fee of $100,000 and 10
percent of the gross
earnings. Her share eventually came to $1.5 million;
Curtis and Lemmon got $100,000 each. Curtis later recalled a pompous
moment when Miller and Marilyn met the two screenwriters to finalize
the deal: "Miller put one arm around Wilder, the other around
[I.A.L.]
Diamond, and began, in a pedantic tone: 'The difference between
comedy and tragedy is . . .' Everybody rolled their eyes."

After all the difficulty Marilyn had in making the film, her glowing
performance is extraordinary. Her fear and insecurity prevented her
from learning her lines and every scene needed costly retakes. She
would start to cry after each bad take, and caused yet another expensive
delay when they had to apply a new coating of make-up. She
drank and took drugs to ease her pain, constantly came late, and was
often rude and snappy. When an assistant director was sent to her
dressing room to fetch her to the set, she told him that she'd just
decided to wash her hair. On another occasion, though she wanted
to maintain good relations with the crew, she dismissed him, while
reading Tom Paine's
The Rights of Man
, with a curt "Fuck You!"
Mocking her egregious fault, the exasperated Wilder declared that "if
she has to go to school, why doesn't she go to Patek Philippe in
Switzerland and learn to run on time?"
²

Once on the set, she blew the simplest lines and, Wilder said,
seemed completely unaware of the problems she created: "We spent
quite a few takes getting 'It's me, Sugar!' I had signs painted on the
door: IT'S. ME. SUGAR. 'Action' would come and she would say,
'It's Sugar, me! [or even 'Sugar, it's me!']. I took her to the side after
about take fifty, and I said, 'Don't worry about it.' And she said, 'Worry
about what?'"

Jack Lemmon emphasized her absolute selfishness: "Marilyn didn't
give a damn about the director, the other actors, or anything else. . . .
She knew she was limited and goddamned well knew what was right
for Marilyn; and she wasn't about to do anything else." Lemmon also
told the producer
Walter Mirisch about the worst nightmare he ever
had. In his dream he was shooting a scene with Marilyn and had
gone through fifty-five takes. She finally got it right – and he blew
his lines. After Marilyn's death, when Lemmon had a greater understanding
of her inner torments, he became more tactful, more
sympathetic and more impressed by her transformation on screen.
He said, "She was a sweet lady who was clearly going through some
kind of hell on earth. I don't know all the reasons, but I saw she was
suffering – suffering and still producing that magic on film. It was a
courageous performance. . . . It was infuriating for us, at times, but I
was really fascinated to watch her work."
³

Some Like It Hot
was shot in San Diego at the grand Hotel del
Coronado. It was built in 1888, and its Victorian turrets and cupolas
effectively replicated a Miami hotel in the late 1920s. The picture
is laced with delightful allusions to classic films. It opens with police
cars chasing a black hearse filled with bootleg liquor, which recalls
the racing police car, with sirens wailing, in the opening scene of
Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard
(1950). The car chase signals the astonishing
pace and speed of the film. Curtis and Lemmon race to
escape a raid in a speakeasy, the massacre in the garage and the
gangsters who recognize them in Miami. Curtis and Marilyn both
race to the yacht on bicycles. Sugar Cane, whose real name is
Kowalczyk,
⁴
first appears on the railroad platform in Chicago and
seems to parody the dramatic appearance of Anna Karenina in
her
railway station. A cloud of steam shoots out of a locomotive and
recalls the rush of hot air from the subway that lifted Marilyn's
skirt in
The Seven Year Itch
.

The girls in the band, who squeeze into one berth of the sleeping
car for a late-night drinking party, recall the mass of people comically
crammed into a small closet in the Marx Brothers'
A Night at
the Opera
(1935).
Edward G. Robinson, Jr., with a toothpick in his
mouth, imitates
George Raft's signature mannerism in
Scarface
(1932)
by flipping a coin. Raft (playing Spats Colombo, the gangsters' boss)
asks him, "Where did you pick up that cheap trick?" Raft threatens
to shove a grapefruit into his henchman's face just as James Cagney
actually does to his girlfriend in
White Heat
(1949).

At the convention of the Friends of Italian Opera (a cover for the
gangsters' meeting) their leader Little Bonaparte – with bald head,
jutting jaw (and hearing aid) – looks and acts like Benito Mussolini,
just as Jack Oakie does in Charlie Chaplin's
The Great Dictator
(1940).
⁵
Marilyn's pretentious claim that she spent three years at the Sheboygan
Conservatory of Music alludes to the remark in
All About Eve
that
she was a graduate of the equally absurd Copacabana School of
Dramatic Arts. Her midnight supper in luxurious surroundings, where
she's the seducer, recalls a similar scene in
The Prince and the Showgirl
,
where Olivier tries to seduce
her
.

Wilder originally wanted Cary Grant to play Tony Curtis' part.
When he pretends to be a wealthy oilman Curtis, wearing glasses and
a yachting outfit, imitates Grant's accent and mannerisms as both he
and Marilyn fake their background, social position and wealth. (When
he saw the film, Grant missed Curtis' exaggerated tour de force and
stiffly insisted, "I don't talk like that!") Like Horner in William
Wycherley's Restoration comedy
The Country Wife
(1675), Curtis
beguiles Marilyn by pretending to be impotent. Despite his notorious
remark that making love to Marilyn was like "kissing Hitler,"
their seduction scene is superb. He regretfully tells her: "My family
did everything they could – hired the most beautiful French upstairs
maids – got a special tutor to read me all the books that were banned
in Boston – imported a whole troupe of Balinese dancers with bells
on their ankles and those long fingernails." He even, to no avail, "spent
six months in Vienna with Professor Freud – flat on my back." Marilyn
then innocently asks, "Have you ever tried American girls? . . . I may
not be Dr. Freud or a Mayo brother or one of those French upstairs
girls but could I take another crack at it." Curtis replies, "All right –
if you insist."

Though Marilyn (playing Sugar) calls herself "not very bright,
I guess . . . just dumb" and Lemmon compares her to "Jello on
springs," her character has surprising depth. In contrast to all
the deception around her, Marilyn's Sugar is genuine and
sincere, naïve and trusting. After being badly wounded by a
number of men, she's retreated to the protection of an all-girls'
band. Her songs – "Running Wild," "I Want To Be Loved By You"
and "I'm Through With Love" – are (for once) well integrated into
the story and beautifully sung. They suggest the three stages of her
love-life – promiscuity, romance and renunciation – as well as her
difficulty in finding the right man. She alludes to Miller and longingly
notes, "Men who wear glasses are so much more gentle and
sweet and helpless."
⁶
She has a
thing
about saxophone players and
always falls for the wrong man. As she laments in a famous line,
"That's the story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the
lollipop." But the fuzzy and the sweet end are the
same
, since the
fuzz always adheres to the sweet and no one ever licks the end of
the stick.

In her longest, poignant speech, Marilyn gives a brief history of
her involvement with a series of parasitic and unfaithful men:

You fall for them and you love 'em – you think it's going to
be the biggest thing since the Graf Zeppelin – and the next
thing you know they're borrowing money from you and spending
it on other dames and betting the horses. . . . Then one morning
you wake up and the saxophone is gone and the guy is gone,
and all that's left behind is a pair of old socks and a tube of
toothpaste, all squeezed out. . . . So you pull yourself together
and you go on to the next job, and the next saxophone player,
and it's the same thing all over again. See what I mean? – not
very bright. . . . I can tell you one thing – it's not going to
happen to me again. Ever.

Marilyn's reference to the
Graf Zeppelin
suggests the depths of her
disappointment. The German dirigible, built in 1928 and the biggest
airship of the time, was suddenly retired in 1937 after another dirigible,
the
Hindenburg
, crashed in New Jersey, burst into flames and
killed thirty-five people.

Before they escape together on the yacht, Marilyn begins to weep
about her past disappointments with men and Curtis, still dressed as
Josephine, consoles her by saying, "None of that, Sugar – no guy is
worth it."Yet Curtis himself, a hardened gambler who loses his money
on the dogs, seems just the sort of unreliable guy she's been trying
to avoid. Sugar, like Marilyn, is emotionally battered but still dreamily
romantic. At the end of the film, the musicians have lost their cover
and their jobs and are still being hunted by the surviving gangsters.
Though Marilyn and Curtis are both poor, and he's not yet revealed
that he's a complete fraud, they fall for each other and plan to get
married. Though everything in the film is a fake, love (even with the
deceitful Curtis) is still real.

The final scene, still making fun of fakery and self-deception, ends
with a brilliant non sequitur. Lemmon tries to squirm out of his
engagement with a series of absolutely honest excuses while Brown
is unrelenting in his forgiveness:

J
ERRY
(
firmly
): We can't get married at
all
.

O
SGOOD
: Why not?

J
ERRY
: Well, to begin with, I'm not a natural blonde.

O
SGOOD
(
tolerantly
): It doesn't matter.

J
ERRY
: And I smoke. I smoke all the time.

O
SGOOD
: I don't care.