The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

How to Marry a Millionaire

In mid-March 1953, at the same time that Marilyn moved into a new apartment on Doheny Drive in West Hollywood just outside of Beverly Hills, she began work on her next picture, How to Marry a Millionaire. The picture was shot in about six weeks (March 9–end of April 1953).

How to Marry a Millionaire has a provenance that goes all the way back to 1932 when Sam Goldwyn purchased the movie rights to Zoe Akins’s Broadway play of the previous season, The Greeks Had a Word for It, about three beautiful young gold diggers who set out in New York City to get their hooks into three wealthy men, reel them in, and navigate them down the bridal path. When the project was announced, it was said to be based on Doris Lilly’s best seller of the same name, but the only thing the studio used was the book’s title.

The studio powers knew they would have to dress up the familiar plot with something spectacular, and that they did: Technicolor, CinemaScope, and stereophonic sound. In fact the film marked the first use of the new widescreen process, but the studio’s prestige picture of 1953, The Robe, filmed after Millionaire, was released to theaters before it, thus its claim to being the world’s first Cinema-Scope film. Another untried tactic was used to give the picture heft, to make it feel “important”—Alfred Newman, the studio’s musical director for twenty years by this time, was filmed conducting the 20th Century-Fox Symphony Orchestra on a soundstage dressed to look like an amphitheater, replete with Greek columns and blue sky, where they performed Newman’s classic paean to Manhattan, the soaring “Street Scene.” It had been written for the film version of Elmer Rice’s Broadway play of the same name twenty years earlier, and later became a musical signature for New York. After completing the conducting of “Street Scene,” Newman turned and bowed to the camera, turned back to the orchestra, and gave the downbeat on the musical score of How to Marry a Millionaire, as the film’s credits rolled.

The film was produced and cowritten by Fox mainstay and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Grapes of Wrath, Nunnally Johnson, and directed by Jean Negulesco, also Oscar-nominated, as director of Johnny Belinda. Costumes were by Travilla under the direction of wardrobe supervisor Charles LeMaire, with both eventually receiving Oscar nominations.

When this movie was announced, the Hollywood press rubbed its collective hands together, practically salivating for a dustup between the queen of the Fox lot, Betty Grable, and the pretender to the throne—Marilyn Monroe. But they would be disappointed. They had not calculated the genuine unselfishness of Grable toward her ten-years-younger costar. In fact, she told the press that Marilyn “was a shot in the arm for Hollywood.”

Later, on the set during the shoot of Millionaire in front of witnesses, Betty reportedly told Marilyn, “Honey, I’ve had it. Go get yours. It’s your turn now.” If Betty now felt she was playing second fiddle to the upstart Marilyn, it was something she apparently felt no need to articulate.

The situation with Lauren Bacall was different. Only two years older than Marilyn, Bacall was a disciplined actress; she had been a star since she was nineteen and was said to be put off by Marilyn’s constant tardiness on the set, but she remained quiet and did not make an issue of it. But in her autobiography, By Myself, Bacall wrote about how irritating it was with Marilyn, prompted by Natasha Lytess sitting just off camera, calling for take after take, “often as many as 15 or more.” She wrote that she didn’t dislike Marilyn; that she had no meanness in her, no bitchery. “There was something sad about her,” Bacall wrote.

Still, Marilyn’s comic genius was on full display in How to Marry a Millionaire, as she achieved a level of physical comedy so subtle as to be almost invisible. Playing her nearsightedness for all it was worth, her sexy vulnerability raised the humor to new heights as she tripped over stairs and bumped into walls, her dignity intact. How to Marry a Millionaire would premiere in New York on October 29, and open nationally on November 5. It would wind up as the second highest grossing movie of 1953, after Columbia’s From Here to Eternity. The picture was a success with both the public and the critics, with Marilyn being singled out in the reviews for her beauty and comic timing. Over the years, Marilyn’s biographers and industry insiders have maintained that her true calling was comedy, and when one reassesses the Monroe filmography, it is hard to argue against that point.