Senior Wambler
AFTER she had been. working with her on The Prince and the Showgirl, Sybil Thorndike said about Marilyn Monroe: On the set, I thought, surely she won't come over, she's so small scale, but when I saw her on the screen, my goodness, how it came over. She was a revelation. We theatre people tend to be so outgoing. She was the reverse. The perfect film actress, I thought. . . .
0 wise and piercing sibyl. The long to-and-fro about whether or not Marilyn Monroe is an actress is really a question of semantics. If acting means the ability to project the idea of a big role through a proscenium arch, the answer is obviously no: on a stage, I doubt whether she would have a fraction of the extraordinary sweet power that she has on the screen. But then nor would Garbo, with whom she has, in fact, a good deal else in common : the same curious phosphorescence on film, the same hint of sym- pathy for the men who fall in love with her, and the same mixture of omniscience and immaturity, though where Garbo is half ice-goddess and half a surprisingly athletic boy, Marilyn is a tragi- comic blend of a sumptuous courtesan and a stammering small girl. In a way, her sheer gift of poignant physical presence is an essence of film acting, for the weight that cinema gives to sensuous detail is one of its great potencies, dis- tinguishing it sharply from the theatre. When this characteristic fuses with an actor who has as much physical magnetism as lames Dean, or Marlon Brando, or Marilyn Monroe, the effect is transfixing. It is also much more than simply sexual. Apart from the 'flesh-impact' (Billy Wilder) and the 'tortile, wambling walk' (Time), Marilyn Monroe's abundant physique has the most subtle and perfected comic implications.
One comes, with a pair of tongs, to Maurice Zolotow's noxious book. Apart from the style, a peep-bo prose that uses 'the bovine' for 'cow' and constantly scampers off to hide its face in French (the mystere, the jeunes gens, a magnifi- cent derriere), the material of the book is an unseemly pile of private anecdotes, leering asides And cheap psychological speculations, bolstered by a personality that seems, on the evidence here,
to be remarkably self-important even in the con- text of the iron-clad trade to which the author belongs. The phenomenon of the show-business gossip-writer who sees himself as the star's dear personal friend is becoming a familiar one, but Mr. Zolotow is the first reporter I have read who actually casts himself as his subject's lover.
1 found the room—or rather myself—growing unbearably hot. The jersey blouse was cut loosely, or perhaps it was my mind that was cut loosely that day. . . . A combination of literary curiosity and lust sorely tempted me to fling myself on the bed and make love to her. What would have been her reaction? And how inspired was she as an amorisre? . . . The world will never know.
PENELOPE G !MATT
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