When Marilyn Took Manhattan – The New York Times
Why read an author who’s not willing to annotate her best quotations for readers who’d like to pursue them? Would it be for Winder’s prose? (“Who was this warm-blooded space creature who lugged around dictionaries, spoke like a drugged-up puppy and looked like a French pastry?”) We do not lack for writers who have enjoyed going overboard where Monroe is concerned — although Winder mostly overlooks one of the most prominent, Norman Mailer (she says she did visit the Norman Mailer collection but doesn’t make serious use of her research).
The factoids? It’s already known, to anyone who cares, that Monroe put Vaseline on her cheekbones and sewed marbles into her costumes where her nipples should be.
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The possible errors? Did Monroe really eat “lone liver chops broiled in hotel kitchenettes”? Are there liver chops or is this just chopped liver?
The questionable names? Winder has the media tycoon “Leo Lyons” holding court at the 21 Club along with his fellow gossip columnist Earl Wilson. She’s probably talking about Leonard Lyons, and the only reason this matters is that it’s more filler in a book that’s very slight to begin with.
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The bulk of what’s here is a strangely culled, often repetitive set of anecdotes from only a few easily obtainable books that most Marilyn fans probably know about. Winder leans heavily on books by Shelley Winters, Susan Strasberg, Norman Rosten and James Haspiel, as well as filmed interviews with Amy Greene (Milton Greene’s widow) and Jack Garfein of the Actors Studio.
Garfein speaks more candidly than anyone else quoted, because he addresses the elephant in the room: How did Marilyn, during this year of childlike innocence, deal with the various men whose families she had dropped into? Not as naïvely as most of “Marilyn in Manhattan” makes it sound. Winder, perhaps mad for Marilyn, doesn’t seem to want to confront the household problems she might have created.
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Garfein describes a Marilyn who never intended to make trouble but wasn’t willing to give up flirting, either. She invited him shopping, saying she’d heard he was good at choosing women’s clothes, then dared him to hold hands with her in a coffee shop. He was wary: Marilyn could go largely unnoticed or make tabloid front pages, and it was hard to predict which would happen when. She ended up walking him home, and he “had a sense that if I wanted to invite her upstairs she probably would have come.” He went upstairs alone.
“She laughed, because she knew that there was a conflict and she was enjoying it,” Garfein said. And there was a New York ambiguity, a sense of power, that she hadn’t had in Hollywood. That’s the joy and freedom this book seems to be after, and it comes through much more clearly in Garfein’s understated anecdote than in Winder’s hot air and specious detail.
Marilyn Monroe wanted to get away from her movie stardom. She managed it for a while, though not without a cadre of protective men. Then the hiatus ended, and she went back to the movie world she hated. Thanks to New York she had become a more seasoned actress and a stronger person. But by then she was doomed anyway.
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