The actor Marilyn Monroe needed to imagine was someone else: “Out with him, in with my fantasy”
Marilyn Monroe’s ascent into the spotlight came with such an overwhelming level of fame that it’s almost understandable that she died so young. There’s no way that one person can exist under such scrutiny, with so many eyes watching their every move, their very being viewed as a mere commodity and symbol, and not crumble.
The actor transcended the human condition, in a way. She was the ultimate figure of Hollywood stardom in all of its glamour and tragedy, and it has long seemed like many people have forgotten that, above everything, she was just a normal person, with normal feelings like the rest of us. She was more than a face to be reproduced on endless posters.
Monroe might’ve used a stage name and dyed her hair a bright shade of blonde that sharply contrasted with her natural brunette colour, but this act of putting on a persona was, more than anything, an act of protection, of performance – one that separated her from her actual self. But sometimes the real self and the Hollywood persona blur; after all, they’re not two separate identities.
Take, for instance, the shooting of Some Like It Hot. She might’ve been playing the beautiful blonde bombshell Sugar Kane, a naive character who was all curves and glamour, but her real life threatened to get in the way of the movie’s production, not least because she was starring opposite Tony Curtis, with whom she had a history.
Behind the scenes, Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller was in tatters, and she was also pregnant. Of course, Monroe never gave birth to any children, instead experiencing several miscarriages during her short life, and during the filming of Some Like It Hot, she was facing the anxiety of whether she would lose this baby, too.
She evidently had a lot going on in her mind while filming took place, which wasn’t helped by Curtis’s presence, someone with whom she’d had a brief relationship in 1949. Curtis has since claimed that the pair had an affair during filming, and it was he who got her pregnant.
“What I experienced with her was unforgettable,” he wrote in his memoir The Making of Some Like It Hot.
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But in 1958, during the filming of the movie, Curtis famously compared kissing Monroe to “kissing Hitler,” a comment that seemed to stem from his dissatisfaction during shooting, with his co-star reportedly acting rather unprofessionally. Monroe responded to these claims in a 1962 interview with Life, and her comments about Curtis seem to suggest that nothing was going on between them off-screen, despite Curtis’ claims later in life.
In fact, she went as far as to say that she had to imagine that she was kissing someone else when it came to these intimate scenes. “You’ve read there was some actor that once said that kissing me was like kissing Hitler. Well, I think that’s his problem,” she said. “If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has these kinds of feelings toward me, then my fantasy can come into play. In other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.”
What really went down between Monroe and Curtis seems uncertain, but one thing is for sure – shooting Some Like It Hot was far from easy for everyone involved.
