The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Niagara

Marilyn’s 1953 films, three carefully constructed, big-budget, high-profile properties in gorgeous, eye-popping Technicolor—Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire— would define the Monroe screen persona and secure her place in the firmament of Hollywood for the next decade, always billed above the title and more often than not in the top spot. The films would also propel Marilyn to the number five spot in Quigley’s Top Ten list of the year’s box-office stars. “The time when I sort of began to think I was famous, I was driving somebody to the airport,” she would recall in 1962, “and as I came back there was this movie house and I saw my name in lights. I pulled the car up at a distance down the street—it was too much to take in up close, you know? And I said, ‘God, somebody’s made a mistake!’ But there it was, in lights.… And I sat there and said, ‘So, that’s the way it looks’… it was all very strange to me.”

Charles Casillo, an author and Marilyn Monroe historian, best summed up Marilyn’s appeal this way: “Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. Marilyn Monroe was sexy. Marilyn Monroe was delicious… always delicious. Everyone knew that. She wasn’t just a sex symbol. She was the sex symbol. But it was a certain kind of sex appeal, initiated, developed and perfected by her. Her appeal was childlike, innocent, tempting, glowing—bursting forth and available like a dish of fresh strawberries arranged in cream.… The creation of Marilyn Monroe had made an unwanted girl of the streets the most desired, written about, analyzed, gossiped about, wondered about and longed for woman of her era.”

For the first of these landmark movies, Niagara, the studio lavished the film with an impressive team of Oscar-honored artisans and craftsmen, with veteran Fox director Henry Hathaway, who had just directed Monroe the previous year in O. Henry’s Full House.

Joseph Cotten played Loomis, a mentally damaged Korean War vet who, with his wife, Rose (Monroe), makes a trip to Niagara Falls in an attempt to repair their broken marriage. In Rose’s mind, the marriage is beyond repair and she uses the trip to continue an adulterous affair with her lover, Patrick, who agrees to murder George. The plot to kill George backfires when he hurls Patrick into the falls to his death. Rose escapes and begins a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with George, played out against the awesome beauty and deafening power of the falls. George’s pursuit of Rose moves furtively in and out of Niagara’s watery veil. We teeter between horror and relief as George corners the beautiful Rose in the belltower and chokes the life out of her.

Since the beginning of her film career, Marilyn had striven to win the approval and respect of those in her profession. She studied her craft and worked with coaches from day one. She had the adoration of millions of fans yet somehow felt her beauty got in the way of her being recognized as a serious actress. There is evidence that some movie critics felt the same way. But occasionally there would be favorable comments about her acting chops, and her films would also get a thumbs-up. Even Pauline Kael, the feared film critic of the New Yorker, would praise her with faint damns, as she did when writing about Niagara. “This isn’t a good movie,” she wrote, “but it’s compellingly tawdry and nasty… the only movie that explores the mean, unsavory potential of Marilyn Monroe’s cuddly, infantile perversity.” Of the same movie, a critic at the New York Times wrote, “Seen from any angle, the Falls and Miss Monroe leave little to be desired.”