Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is) 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. See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman 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. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice.

Listen to her sing "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 her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" 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 forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "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]

My favorite scene of Marilyn Monroe singing is in Bus Stop, when she sings "That Old Black Magic" just slightly off key. It's masterful performance in a terrific movie. I love the way Bo Decker sees her and says, "There's my angel!" Then he shushes the rowdy crowd and orders her to keep seeing which she does. She shows just the right combination of embarrassment and delight and gains confidence as she finishes the song.

[Sharon Mesmer]

Oh, I love her. "I don't care about money, I just want to be wonderful." She was Sartre's favorite movie star. Thanks for this consideration, David.

Have you noticed that her Monroe-ness is ref'd in three of her own movies? In "The Seven Year Itch" Tom Ewell says to Mr. Krahulik (with Marilyn hiding in the kitchen), "Yeah, I got a girl in the kitchen. I got Marilyn Monroe in the kitchen!" In "How To Marry a Millionaire" a dress is described: "Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but ... " And in "The Misfits," Marilyn slams shut a closet door upon which her own celeb-type photos are taped up.

Andy Warhol said that had she lived she might've hosted her own comedy-variety show. Had he lived, he might've been a guest. Imagine that -- the blondenesses!

-- Sharon

[Laurence Goldstein]

David and Stacey: This is an excellent tribute to Marilyn’s oft-neglected singing performances. I watched a video of Gentleman Prefer Blondes last night and was impressed again—the zillionth time since my parents took me to see the movie when I was ten; I identified then with the insolent boy who gives her a hard time on the ship—by the clarity and flourishes of her renditions. Jonathan Rosenbaum has a fine essay on this film, and the singing performances in particular, in Placing Movies. He reminds us that “Jane Russell was paid $200,000 for her part (and got top billing) while Monroe, on her Fox salary and not yet a star, got only $500 a week.” Perhaps that situation was an incentive to get Marilyn to show up at the studio on schedule.

I’m still at work on a scholarly book about poems about Orson Welles and Marilyn Monroe. Many of them are of high quality. I’d love to hear from your readership about their favorites. -- Laurence Goldstein

[lally]

beautiful tribute david... I remember as an adolescent seeing her on that Edward R. Murrow show that went into celebrities' homes with their TV cameras (was it called "Person to Person"?) when she was staying with her photographer friend and his family in Connecticut, and the way she sat on the family couch and tucked her legs under her etc. all seemed like the most provocatively sexual display I'd ever seen on TV up to that time (only a few years into us owning a TV)... but seeing it decades later realizing she wasn't being provocatively sexual, she was just being comfortable in her body in ways most people couldn't or wouldn't be in those times.... and Laurence, check out the poem I wrote about her not long after her death, it's in Another WayTo Play on page 37...