James Spada's Blog, page 10

"Smash" and Marilyn Monroe

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When Smash, the television series about the production of a Broadway play about Marilyn Monroe, first aired last year, I watched the first two episodes and then stopped. The main reason I tuned it out was that I am highly critical of impersonations of Marilyn. Unless they are so spot-on it’s amazing, I’m left cold. It seemed to me that the two actresses vying for the part of Marilyn, Karen (Katharine McPhee) and Ivy (Megan Hilty), were playing a caricature of Marilyn instead of the real woman.            After much cajoling by my ex-husband to watch the rest of the season, I relented, and I just finished watching all 15 episodes. While I still have a problem with some of the scenes and numbers involving Marilyn, there has been a progression to a more truthful representation of her.            McPhee and Hilty are both excellent actresses and have fantastic voices, but their Marilyns are far different. Hilty looks more like the somewhat zaftig Marilyn of the late 1950s, while McPhee calls to mind the thin, elegant Marilyn of 1962. I couldn’t help thinking they should have Ivy play Marilyn in the first act, and Karen play her in the second act.            The soapy plot lines and relationships are outlandish but fun. Jack Davenport is terrific as Derek, the director who’s charming when he’s bedding every leading lady in sight and tyrannical when faced with incompetence, as he far too often is. Anjelica Houston is great as usual as the beleaguered first-time producer trying to emerge from her producer-ex-husband’s shadow.             Debra Messing shows acting range she never got to display on Will & Grace as the co-songwriter tortured by her feelings for, and former and present affair with, the actor playing Joe DiMaggio.            Sometimes the writers substitute dramatic impact for common sense. Would any director allow a musical to end with the protagonist’s quiet death? Surely someone would have noticed the problem prior to the opening in Boston. And as good as Uma Thurman was as Rebecca, the movie star they bring in to play Marilyn, she looks so unlike her in face and body that I doubt any real producer would have countenanced her hiring.            But Smash is a show that asks for a suspension of disbelief, and after watching season one, I’m willing to give it that. It’s too much fun not to!
Season Two of Smash begins with a two-hour premiere on Tuesday, February 5.
           

GRACE KELLY AND RAY MILLAND'S AFFAIR WHILE FILMING "REAR wINDOW"

Grace soon found herself enmeshed in a sexual imbroglio, but it had nothing to do with Hitchcock. Her forty-nine-year-old co-star Ray Milland was another highly attractive leading man, an Oscar winner in 1945 for The Lost Weekend, and powerful and well liked in Hollywood. The fact that he was married did little to dampen twenty-three-year-old Grace’s ardent interest.
       Milland had married the former Murial Weber in 1932, and they had a son, Daniel, born 1940, and a daughter, Victoria, adopted in 1949. Like Gary Cooper, however, Milland appreciated women other than his wife, and he often succumbed to temptation. He was particularly susceptible to Grace’s considerable charms, and he fell hard. So did Grace. “It was very serious between Ray and Grace,” [Grace's sister] Lizanne recalls. They began to see each other, making little effort to conceal their romance. “I was aware of it,” Mel Dellar says. “My wife and I saw them out having dinner a couple of times, and late in the evening, after we finished filming, they’d go to some little place and have a few drinks.”
       Milland surprised Lizanne one day by confiding the depth of his feelings for Grace to her. “I flew back from Hollywood on the same plane with him,” she recalls, “and we had a long talk. He told me he really was very much in love with her.”
her.”
       Gossip in Hollywood spreads faster than Southern California fires whipped by hot Santa Ana winds, and Milland’s wife, known to her friends as Mal, soon heard talk about her husband and this beautiful newcomer. She feared it was true, but there was no proof. Several weeks after her suspicions were first aroused, her fears were confirmed. A close friend of the Millands, who requested anonymity, recalls: “Jack—his friends call Milland ‘Jack’— was going on a trip, and he had just left the house. Mal's sister Harriet was there, and Mal poured her heart out to her about her suspicions. Harriet got in her car, followed Jack to the airport, and sure enough, there was Jack with Grace, going off on a tryst somewhere.”
       The Millands separated; Grace and Ray discussed marriage. He took an apartment in Hollywood and Grace spent a great deal of time there. Teet Carle, a publicist at Paramount at the time, says, “I don’t know if they were living together, but the story got back to me that someone from the studio went over to Ray’s apartment and Grace answered the door.”
       Grace’s indiscretion soon became common knowledge in Hollywood, and she was unprepared for the animosity directed toward her. Mai Milland was extremely well liked in this company town; she and Ray had a family, and none of their many friends wanted to see the marriage destroyed. A tearful late-night telephone call from Mrs. Milland to Louella Parsons about “this young girl who’s trying to steal my husband” did little to help Grace’s cause.
        It wasn’t the publicity, which the veteran Milland was more used to and less affected by than Grace was, but rather his realization of the impracticality of his divorcing Mal that caused Milland to reconsider. Studio publicist Andy Hervey recalls that Mrs. Milland had an ace up her sleeve: “Mal told Ray, ‘You go ahead and get a divorce and marry Grace Kelly. That’s okay with me, because all the property is in my name.’ Needless to say, it wasn’t long before the marriage plans were off.”
       The previously quoted friend of the Millands adds, “Jack finally came to his senses and realized that he had a wonderful woman in Mal—and of course, they’re still together to this day.* Mal still refers to the Grace Kelly period as ‘those agonizing days.’”
         Not only was Milland being pressured to break off the romance, so was Grace by her family.family. After the Cooper and Gable “situations,” Jack Kelly had asked publicist Scoop Conlan, a family friend, to “keep an eye on Grace,” and Conlan reported back to him about his daughter’s latest potentially embarrassing liaison. The Kellys were very displeased. “My father was concerned about Ray Milland,” Kell said later. “He didn’t like what he had heard about him.” Jack Kelly himself huffed to a reporter a short time later, “I don’t like that sort of thing much. I’d like to see Grace married. These people in Hollywood think marriage is like a game of musical chairs.”
Lizanne recalls, “In our family at that point divorce was not the thing to do, and going out with a married man or a divorced man was a no-no. If Milland had been single, things might have been different.” Once again, Mrs. Kelly flew to Hollywood to make sure her daughter kept her head. Jack Kelly later said, “She and Scoop sat down and talked things over with Grace. They found her willing to listen.”
“My mother and father were very strong-willed people,” Lizanne says, and they convinced Grace that she simply had to drop Ray Milland. “Grace came to realize that Ray hadn’t quite gotten over his wife, and that it was wrong for her to be the cause of his divorce. That was the main reason Ray and Grace never pursued it.”
      The gossip in Hollywood about Grace and Milland was so fierce—and the reaction so virulent—that both Grace’s own studio and Warner Brothers feared a tidal wave of bad publicity that could harm her very promising career. Robert Slatzer recalls, “In those days the studios would routinely pay off reporters to keep unsavory things out of the newspapers. In Grace’s case, it got to be very expensive because the studios were always buying off journalists in order to keep her image pure.”
A few gossip column items did appear, but it was always possible to dismiss these as exaggerations of a few innocent dates. One publication that couldn’t be bought off, however, was Confidential, the Enquirer of its day, and before long the magazine blew the whistle on the Kelly/Milland liaison in a salacious account that caused Grace deep consternation and public humiliation. In its colorful style, the magazine detailed Ray’s infatuation with Grace and the domestic discord it caused: “After one look at Gracie he went into a tailspin that reverberated from Perino’s to Ciro’s. The whole town soon hee-hawed over the news that suave Milland, who had a wife and family at home, was ga-ga over Grace. Ray pursued her ardently and Hollywood cackled. Then mama Milland found out. She lowered the boom on Ramblin’ Ray and there followed one of the loudest, most tearful fights their Beverly Hills neighbors can remember.”
       Grace was shaken. She had never experienced the glare of the spotlight in quite this way before. Perhaps Confidential could be dismissed as a rag, but disapproving tidbits soon began turning up in respectable newspapers as well. “I felt like a streetwalker,” she told an interviewer later.
A good deal of the resentment against Grace in Hollywood stemmed from what many saw as the hypocrisy of her Goody Two-shoes image in light of her healthy sexual appetite. Mrs. Henry Hathaway, the widow of Grace’s first motion picture director, feels bitter toward Grace to this day. “I have nothing good to say about Grace,” she says. “She had an affair with my best friend’s husband, Ray Milland. And all the time wearing those white gloves!” Asked whom else in Hollywood Grace may have had affairs with, Mrs. Hathaway replies, “You name it. Everybody. She wore those white gloves, but she was no saint.”
      Many in Hollywood shared Mrs. Hathaway’s feelings. They mocked Grace as “Little Miss Prim and Proper.” Columnist Kendis Rochlen cackled in the Los Angeles Mirror-News, “She’s supposed to be so terribly proper, but then look at all those whispers about her and Ray Milland.”
Hollywood’s reaction to Grace’s behavior upset her deeply. She never looked upon her frequent sexual dalliances as promiscuous—and they were not, in the true sense of the word. They were neither indiscriminate nor casual. When Grace gave herself to a man, it was, as Don Richardson has said, because of a deep-seated desire for affection and acceptance from father substitutes, much more than the physical delights of sex. And, more often than not, she felt herself truly in love before she would have sex with a man. She wanted to marry Ray Milland, and the fact that her conviction that he would leave his wife and marry her was rooted more in naivete than reality does not make it any less genuine.

GREAT NEWS FOR STREISAND FANS!!

   Barbra Streisand headed to the Oscars. If you ever wanted to see Seth MacFarlane and Barbra Streisand share the stage, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has some good news: Streisand will perform at the Oscars on Feb. 24, the first time she's appeared on stage during an Academy Awards broadcast in 36 years.
Streisand last performed at the Oscars in 1977, when she sang the love theme for "A Star is Born."
"In an evening that celebrates the artistry of movies and music, how could the telecast be complete without Barbra Streisand?" producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron said in a statement. "We are honored that she has agreed to do a very special performance on this year's Oscars, her first time singing on the show in 36 years."
Streisand hasn't performed at the Oscars, but she has been a part of the ceremony since 1977. At the 75th annual Academy Awards, she presented Eminem with an Oscar for Best Original Song for "Lose Yourself"; at the 82nd annual Academy Awards, Streisand announced that Kathryn Bigelow won for Best Director.
Streisand herself has two Oscars: She won Best Actress at the 1969 ceremony for "Funny Girl" and shared the Best Original Song trophy with Paul Williams for "Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)" from "A Star is Born" at the 1977 show.
[via Oscars.org]

THE NIGHT PETER LAWFORD'S MANAGER TRIED TO GET MARILYN TO A PARTY

While Marilyn had seen Jack Kennedy only at intervals since their first meeting in 1954, by early 1962 she was trying to be with him as often as possible. They saw each other whenever Jack was in California, and on at least two occasions during the spring of 1962, Marilyn made a special trip to New York to be with Kennedy.
The first was a black-tie dinner party in the President’s honor given by Fifi Fell, a socialite, in her Park Avenue penthouse. Among the two dozen guests were a number of presidential aides, Ambassador Earl Smith, Peter, Milt Ebbins, and Marilyn. Around seven o’clock, Ebbins and Dave Powers were dispatched to pick Marilyn up at her apartment and bring her to the party. “We got there at about seven- thirty — dinner was at eight — and she wasn’t ready,” Ebbins recalled. “Powers didn’t want to wait for her, so he told me to stay and went back to the party, then sent the limousine back for us.”
As Ebbins sat and waited, he noticed that everything in the apartment was white — the rugs, the ceilings, the walls, the furniture, even a piano. At eight o’clock, Marilyn’s maid told Ebbins that her hairstylist, Kenneth, was finishing up Marilyn’s hair. “She should be out very soon.” At eight-fifteen, the phone rang, and Ebbins picked it up. It was Peter. “Where is she? The President’s here. Everybody’s waiting!”
“She’s not ready yet. I’m sitting here waiting for her.” “C’mon,” Peter shouted. “Dinner’s practically ready!”At eight-thirty, the maid announced to Ebbins that Marilyn was done with Kenneth and should be out in just a few minutes. By nine o’clock, there was still no Marilyn. Peter called again. “You son of a bitch!” he screamed. Ebbins could hear Dave Powers in the background, threatening him with physical violence.
By nine-thirty, Ebbins couldn’t take it anymore. He opened Marilyn’s door and walked into her bedroom. He saw her sitting at her vanity table, naked, staring at herself in the mirror. “Marilyn, for crissakes,” he said. “Come on! ThePresident’s waiting, everybody’s waiting.”
                 Marilyn looked at him dreamily. “Oh,” she said finally. “Will you help me on with my       
   dress?” “So I’m watching this giant international movie superstar standing there starknaked in her high heels,” Ebbins recalled. “She puts a scarf over her hair so it won’t getmussed and pulls this beaded dress over her head. This dress was so tight it took meten minutes to pull it down over her ass! She says, ‘Take it easy. Don’t tear the beads.’I’m on my knees inching this dress down over her ass and my face is right at hercrotch. But I’m not thinking of anything but getting her to that goddamn party.”Finally, at ten o’clock, Monroe was ready. Ebbins was astounded. “Whew, did she look sensational — like a princess. I said to her, ‘Jesus Christ, you sure are pretty.’ She just said, ‘Thank you.’”
Marilyn put a red wig over her hair, slipped on dark glasses, and rode in the limousine with Milt to Park Avenue. When they arrived, over fifty photographers were milling around the lobby of the building, hoping to capture some of the celebrities attending the party upstairs as they left. Not one of them recognized Marilyn. When she got off the elevator three Secret Service men watched her slip offthe wig, take off the glasses and become Marilyn Monroe again.
As she and Ebbins entered the apartment, Jack Kennedy had his back to them. He turned around, smiled at Marilyn, and said, “Hi!” She sashayed up to him and he took her arm. “Come on,” he said to her. “I want you to meet some people.” As they walked away, Marilyn looked back at Milt Ebbins and winked.
For a few seconds, Ebbins thought he was in the clear. Then someone grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him into a bedroom. It was Peter, red with fury. “You son of a bitch!” he hissed, and raised his fist, measuring Milt for a punch. Dave Powers grabbed Ebbins by the collar and tore open his shirt at the neck.
Ebbins managed to calm the two men down, and it was then that he learned that there had been no dinner. “Everybody just ate hors d’oeuvres and drank and got blind drunk and happy as larks,” he recalled being told. “Nobody cared about dinner after a while. They told me the chef tried to jump out the window. Here he had cooked a fabulous dinner for the President of the United States and nobody ate it!”

"CLASSICAL BARBRA" TO BE REISSUED WITH TWO NEW TRACKS

Though best known as one of the preeminent pop singers of our time, Barbra Streisand made a powerful statement in the classical music realm when she recorded Classical Barbra in 1973. Originally released in 1976, the album gained Streisand a raft of admirers in the classical music world. Glenn Gould called her voice "one of the natural wonders of the age, an instrument of infinite diversity and timbral resource." Classical Barbra was one of the first and is still one of the greatest records in the category we know today as “classical crossover” and is available February 5th, 2013 from Sony Masterworks.
Of the reissue, Ms. Streisand says, “I have always had a special affection for Classical Barbra. I loved the process of developing and making the recording, and I was gratified by the success it had when it was originally released and, what a thrill it was to receive a Grammy nomination in the Classical division...Now it is back in a new expanded edition, beautifully remastered and sounding better than it has since the LP release. I’m also pleased that we could include two bonus tracks that have never before been available. They remind me again how rewarding this whole project was."
Fifteen-time Grammy-winning producer Steven Epstein has remastered the original recording for this new release, the first reissue of the now-classic album since it became available on CD a quarter of a century ago. In addition to the original 10 songs, it now includes two previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded during the original sessions. Both new tracks are two songs composed by Franz Schubert – “An Sylvia” and “Auf dem wasser zu singen” – which offer the unique opportunity to hear Streisand’s amazing voice with a piano as its only accompaniment.
Comprised of art songs and arias by a range of European composers, from George Frideric Handel and Robert Schumann to Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, Classical Barbra rose to No. 46 on the Billboard Top 200 chart in 1976 and is certified gold in the U.S. Accompanied by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Claus Ogerman, Streisand sings in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and (in Joseph Canteloube's "Brezairola") in a European provincial dialect called Occitan. Other gems include Fauré's Pavane, songs that include Debussy's "Beau Soir" and Robert Schumann's "Mondnacht," as well as the arias "Lascia ch'io pianga" from Händel's opera Rinaldo, and "In Trutina" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.
In the original liner notes Leonard Bernstein wrote, "Barbra Streisand's natural ability to make music takes her over to the classical field with extraordinary ease. It's clear that she loves these songs. In her sensitive, straightforward and enormously appealing performance, she has given us a very special musical experience."
More recently, New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommasini said of Streisand that "her ability to shape a phrase with velvety legato and find the right expressive coloring for each note and each word is the epitome of cultured vocalism."

ANOTHER HONOR FOR MS STREISAND

   FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES BARBRA STREISAND AS RECIPIENT OF THE 40TH ANNUAL CHAPLIN AWARD

AWARD WILL BE PRESENTED APRIL 22
New York, NY (January 18, 2013) -The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced that Academy Award-winner Barbra Streisand, the first American woman artist to receive credit as writer, director, producer and star of a major feature film, YENTL, will be honored at the 40th Annual Chaplin Award Gala held at Lincoln Center on the evening of Monday, April 22, 2013. The event will be attended by a host of notable guests and celebrities honoring the international film legend’s groundbreaking career and will feature film and interview clips culminating in the presentation of The Chaplin Award.

"The Board is very excited to have Barbra Streisand as the next recipient of The Chaplin Award," said Ann Tenenbaum, The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Board Chairman. “She is an artist whose long career of incomparable achievements is most powerfully expressed by the fact that her acclaimed YENTL was such a milestone film. We welcome her to the list of masterful directors who have been prior recipients of the Chaplin Award Tribute."

The Film Society’s Annual Gala began in 1972 and honored Charles Chaplin – who returned to the US from exile to accept the commendation. Since then, the award has been renamed for Chaplin, and has honored many of the film industry’s most notable talents, including Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Laurence Olivier, Federico Fellini, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, James Stewart, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Michael Douglas, Sidney Poitier, and last year, Catherine Deneuve.

"Barbra Streisand is an American icon whose groundbreaking work significantly opened the doors for other female filmmakers.  She has been an inspiration to me and so many of my peers," said FSLC Executive Director Rose Kuo.  "She is the perfect recipient for our 40th anniversary because, like our award's namesake, she is a world class, multi-faceted film artist."

The only artist ever to receive an Academy Award, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Directors Guild of America, Golden Globe, National Medal of Arts and Peabody Awards and France’s Legion d’honneur as well as the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Streisand is also the first female film director to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.

She won Academy Awards for both Best Actress for her iconic portrayal of Fanny Brice in FUNNY GIRL (1968) and Best Original Song for composing “Evergreen” for A STAR IS BORN (1976). She also was nominated for Best Actress for THE WAY WE WERE (1973). The three films she directed (YENTL, THE PRINCE OF TIDES, THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES) received 14 Oscar nominations.

With YENTL (1983), Streisand’s first film as a director, she became the first woman ever credited as to the writer, director, producer, and star in a major motion picture. The film earned five Oscar nominations and also brought her Golden Globes for both Best Director and Best Picture.

THE PRINCE OF TIDES (1991) her next directorial feature, was the first motion picture directed by its female star to receive a Best Director nomination from the Directors Guild of America (and third woman to ever receive a feature film direction nomination) as well as seven Academy Award nominations. Streisand also produced the film in addition to directing and starring in it.

Her Academy Award for "Evergreen" established Streisand as the first female composer to win that award. She was nominated again in 1997 as co-composer of "I Finally Found Someone," based on her love theme for THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES (1996). Streisand directed, produced and starred in the film which went on to achieve two Oscar nominations and the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for Lauren Bacall.

Streisand was born April 24th in Brooklyn to Diana and Emanuel Streisand. Her father, who passed away when Barbra was 15 months old, was a highly respected teacher and scholar.

An honor student at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, the teenage Streisand won a singing contest at a small Manhattan club and soon after developed a devout and growing following as a singer at the clubs. Not long after that she was attracting music industry attention at such spots as the Bon Soir and the Blue Angel. She then signed a contract with Columbia Records in 1962, and her debut album quickly became the nation's top-selling record by a female vocalist.

Following her award-winning stage debut performance in "I Can Get It For You Wholesale," she was signed to play the great comedienne Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of "Funny Girl." When the curtain came down at the Winter Garden Theatre on March 26, 1964, the star and the show were major hits. Her performance won her a second Tony nomination.

Few movie debuts have been as auspicious as Streisand's in Columbia Pictures' FUNNY GIRL. In addition to winning the 1968 Academy Award for this performance, she won the Golden Globe and was named Star of the Year by the National Association of Theatre Owners.

After appearing in the films HELLO, DOLLY! (1969) and ON A CLEAR DAY, YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970), she starred in the non-musical comedy THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT (1970). 1972 brought another resounding comedy hit, WHAT’S UP DOC?, followed by UP THE SANDBOX, one of the first American films to deal with the growing women's movement. It was the premiere picture for Streisand’s own production company, Barwood Films.

THE WAY WE WERE (1973) brought Streisand her second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Her first feature film producing effort, A STAR IS BORN (1976) won six Golden Globes. The soundtrack album topped the charts and has been certified quadruple-platinum.

Streisand made her directorial debut with the highly acclaimed, YENTL (1983). The film received five Academy Award nominations, and she received Golden Globe Awards both as Best Director and as producer of the Best Picture (musical or comedy) of 1983. The 11 Golden Globes (plus the Cecil B. DeMille Award) she has received from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association throughout her career are the most achieved by any entertainment artist. In January 2000 she received that organization's coveted Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.

After a break from feature films following her performance in 1987’s NUTS, Streisand returned to the director’s chair for THE PRINCE OF TIDES (1991). In 1996 she directed, produced and starred in THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES (1996).

Then, in 2004, Streisand made a celebrated return to film acting (her first performance on film since THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES) in MEET THE FOCKERS (2004) which teamed her with Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller and Robert DeNiro. It quickly became the highest grossing live-action comedy film ever, the first (and only to date) to earn more that a half billion dollars. The DVD had similar success, selling three million copies in its first 24 hours. She is currently starring in THE GUILT TRIP opposite Seth Rogen.

Streisand is married to director/actor, James Brolin.

For ticketing and additional information, go to filmlinc.com/gala.

JACK & JACKIE & MARILYN & JOE

In the summer of 1954, Peter arranged for Jack and Jackie to be invited to the agent Charles Feldman’s home for a party. Peter knew that among the guests would be Marilyn Monroe, the most talked- about woman in the world that year, and her husband of six months, former New York Yankee baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Their marriage was already on the rocks, and it would end a few months later, destroyed by DiMaggio’s jealousy and Monroe’s unwillingness to give up her burgeoning career, as DiMaggio insisted, and be a housewife.
DiMaggio’s mistrust of Marilyn’s fidelity was usually unfounded, but in the case of Marilyn and John F. Kennedy, his suspicions were justified. Marilyn said she felt uncomfortable at the party because Jack Kennedy stared at her the entire evening. “I may be flattering myself,” she giggled, “but he couldn’t take his eyes off me.” Charlie Feldman noticed that Jackie saw what Jack was doing, and she was getting angry. Joe DiMaggio was aware of what was going on, too. Every few minutes he would grab Marilyn’s arm and say, “Let’s go! I’ve had enough of this!” Marilyn didn’t want to leave, and Feldman recalled that “they had words about it.”
The DiMaggios did leave early, but sometime before that Marilyn gave Senator Kennedy her phone number. Thenext day Jack called, and DiMaggio answered the phone. When he asked who was calling, Kennedy said, “A friend.” DiMaggio hung up in Jack’s face and started to grill Marilyn about who it was, because he hadn’t recognized Kennedy’s voice. Thenext time Marilyn saw Kennedy, he said, “I guess I shouldn’t call at certain times, huh?”

A few months after the party at Charlie Feldman’s, Jack was hospitalized for surgery to alleviate a chronic back problem. Visitors to his room were amused by a color poster of Marilyn Monroe he had taped to the wall, in which she wore blue shorts and stood with her legs spread widely apart. Kennedy had hung the poster upside down. 

MARILYN'S DECOLLETAGE CREATES AN UPROAR

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In Atlantic City to appear as the Grand Marshall for the 1952 Miss America pageant, Marilyn was asked to pose with “the real Miss Americas,” women in the Armed Services, as part of a “glamour” recruitment campaign. An enterprising photographer stood on a chair to capture the full measure of the Monroe cleavage. The photo wasn’t given much press play because of the plenitude of beautiful women at the pageant; most papers were interested more in their state’s entry. But an irate army information officer, aghast at the thought that the picture would give parents of potential recruits “a wrong impression of Army life,” ordered that the picture be killed. Of course, it then received tremendous play, running seven columns wide in the Los Angeles Herald and Express and on front pages across the country. Marilyn was asked about the brouhaha, and in a story under the headline “Marilyn Wounded by Army Blushoff,” she said, “I am very surprised and very hurt. I wasn’t aware of any objectionable decolletage on my part. I’d noticed people looking at me all day, but I thought they were admiring my Grand Marshal’s badge.”

MARILYN'S FIRST "LIFE" MAGAZINE COVER

In April 1952 Life magazine featured a sexy Marilyn on its cover and billed her as “the talk of Hollywood.” If she wasn’t before, she surely was now...photographer Philippe Halsman later recalled that at this time “she was at the height of her sex appeal; and everything she did, every motion, was a mixture of conscious and unconscious appeal and challenge to the desire of men.... Though I have photographed hundreds of actresses, I have never seen one with a greater inferiority complex.... She always had the feeling that she was not good enough, that she was unworthy; even her sex appeal stemmed from this. When she faced a man she didn’t know, she felt safe and secure only when she knew the man desired her; so everything in her life was geared to provoke this feeling. Her talent in this respect was very great. I remember my experience in her tiny apartment with my assistant and the Life researcher. Each of us felt that if the other two would leave, something incredible would happen.... She would try to seduce the camera as if it were a human being.... She knew that the camera lens was not just a glass eye but a symbol for the eyes of millions of men; so the camera stimulated her strongly. Because she had a great talent for directing the entire impact of her personality at the lens she was a remarkably gifted and exciting model.”

BARBRATIMELESS FAN SITE EXCERPTS UPDATE CHAPTER FROM 'STREISAND: HER LIFE!'

Sal LaBarbera's BarbraTimeless.com is running an excerpt from the "Mirror Has Two Faces" chapter from "Streisand: Her Life, 2012," the new updated eBook version of my biography. I thank Sal and I hope you'll take a look! Here's the link:

http://www.barbratimeless.com/2009str...