Conquest

To the British press, which looks down its nose at the excitability of American reporters, the time had clearly come when it was permissible to throw off all restraint: Marilyn Monroe had landed in England. As she walked into the London Airport lounge, waiting ranks of straining newsmen swept forward, flung aside a police contingent and sent the cinema star flying disheveled behind a counter alcove for refuge. Reporters called hoarsely, hats and notebooks fell underfoot, cameramen jostled, someone bellowed: "Call out the riot squad." Finally, protected by a bar and a police bodyguard, Actress Monroe answered a few questions. But it was enough. Headlined the Sunday Graphic:

MARILYN SENDS 'EM CRAZY.

Next day she held an hour-long interview with 250 pressmen jammed into the chandeliered River Room of London's Savoy Hotel. Reported Daily Telegraph Newshen Winifred Carr, dolefully: "I've had my eyes well and truly opened about men, after watching a roomful of the most critical, cynical and sophisticated males in town, hard-bitten journalists, act like adolescents. Even those who had come to sneer were hanging on her words like impressionable schoolboys and laughing at her wit before she had completed a sentence." Glowed the Daily Mirror: "Marilyn Monroe, the sleek, the pink and the beautiful, captured Britain."

It was a wholehearted surrender; scarcely a journal--left, right, highbrow or lowbrow--held out. "Gentle, soothing and intriguing," breathed the Manchester Guardian. The Daily Express chuckled at the press-conference repartee: "Q. 'What specific Beethoven symphonies interest you?' A. 'I have a terrible time with numbers. I know it when I hear it.' "

The Daily Mail gasped at her "diplomacy, mischief, bubbling sense of fun." The News Chronicle's Percy Cudlipp, finding prose inadequate, turned and with a side glance at Playwright-Husband Arthur Miller penned a parody of Hiawatha titled Highbrowarthur's Honeymoon.

And he murmured soft endearments, And she talked of Dostoevsky . . . As they landed at the airport Braves in blue restrained the tribesfolk Held at bay the howling pressmen . . . Some there were who liked her front view;

Some more partial to the back view. Others strove to take her sideways Thus to get the best of both worlds . . . And the grateful British public Rose rejoicing from its breakfast.

The staid weeklies enthused as much as the daily press. Wrote Pharos in the Spectator: "She was in fact as intelligent as she was pleasant as she was pretty." The Sunday Observer thoughtfully wrote that "the total effect is a personality that is curiously lovable because whether in life or on the screen it is so remote from any form of viciousness or meanness." Only the august Times held out, printing not a word of the Monroe presence in London. It was promptly taken to task in the double-domed, socialist New Statesman and Nation: "The Times is a news paper--indeed, according to some, still the greatest newspaper in the world. And a newspaper ought at least to mention an event which clearly excites and interests a very large number of people and by reason of that fact alone has some place in the social history of our time."

At week's end the Times finally capitulated in its own way and in a long editorial explained that it meant no offense: "On the whole, it looks as though there were much to be said for our national habit of reading the books, looking at the pictures, listening to the music, and letting the personalities behind them get on with their job of being human beings as quietly as possible."

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