Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe, Queen of June Geminis (Reprise) [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday is today), sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (In another column I will salute the wonderful voices that emerge from Mesdames Hayworth, Novak, Kerr, Wood, and Hepburn in those flicks. Say, does anyone say "flicks" anymore?)  See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. The way she pronounces the "z" in Berlin's "Lazy," for example, or the electricity when she strolls among the nightclub plutocrats and sagely notes that "after you get what you want you don't want it. / I could give you the moon, / you'd be tired of it soon. / You're like a baby, / that wants what it wants when it wants it, / ah, but when you are presented / with what you want you're discontented." (Irving Berlin never fails to amaze me.) This lyric was made to order for Miss Monroe. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. There's a heat wave coming in from the south and you can't keep your eyes of the north of her body even as your brain wanders to the tropics. "The way that she moves / the thermometer proves / that she certainly can can-can."  No, you can't keep your eyes off her, all of her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Listen to her do "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare MM's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and commands Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to cease and desist; don't "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses. -- DL

Comments

[Stacey]

I love MM's version of all of the songs you mention but I never tire of hearing her sing "That Old Black Magic" in Bus Stop. She's just slightly off-key. Some of us can't help but sing that way; she's doing it on purpose and that isn't easy and requires a lot of control. Stacey

[Lloyd Schwartz]

Thank you, David, for this terrific, thoughtful piece on MM as chanteuse. Here's an interesting little footnote. See if you can find the trailer for There's No Business Like Show Business (a dreadful movie except for MM and a few moments of Ethel Merman). In the film itself, while MM is singing After You Get What You Want to a nightclub filled with dirty old men, the camera turns away from her for a moment to focus on the club's staff enjoying her performance. But in the trailer, what we see in those few second is Monroe herself shaking one of the night club tables as if she's on the verge of an orgasm. Guess the moment was too much for 20th-century Fox but they forgot to take it out of the trailer.

[Lloyd Schwartz]

PS. I agree with Stacey about That Old Black Magic--it's funny and heartbreaking, and I love "I"m Through with Love"--a high point of Some Like It Hot.

[The Best American Poetry]

I love it that Marilyn Monroe and Walt Whitman, two fellow Gems, were born on the same day (almost: Marilyn June 1, Walt May 31): MM an inversion of WW -- the American yin and yang. . . David

[carmen verandah]

"Flicks" is like playing movies without a Net.

[lally]

great post, great comments, great topic...brilliant as always David...

[jim c]

David, if all your analyses range from "brilliant to more brilliant to most brilliant" (and they do), this one is a close encounter of the third kind. Really really nice.

[Caroline Seebohm]

So agree with this. MM's singing vastly underestimated. The breathy wobbliness breaks your heart, and it also makes you feel she
might suddenly fall into a sob.

[Caroline Seebohm]

So agree with this. MM's singing vastly underestimated. Her breathy wobbly vibrato breaks your heart, also making you feel she might at any moment fall into a sob. Caroline

[Peter Fortunato]

Aw shucks, as of a moment ago the link to the clip for After you Get What You Want is blocked by Fox on copyright grounds -- and so I never even got to get what I wanted. Good thing MM is perennial in our collective imagination. Thanks, David.