Marilyn, My Marilyn

After Marilyn Monroe's death, it might have been expected that a vast cult would develop, necrophilic and worshipful, similar to the one that lengthened the notoriety of James Dean. But the cult of Marilyn has turned out to be more esoteric. Her memory is tended by the somewhat-intellectuals. And the theme of their compassionate communions is a touching waif who was destroyed by a cruel world she never made.

Painters have abstracted her. Minor poets have done minor poems about her. In the current Harper's, Penelope Gilliatt, wife of Playwright John Osborne, moons about Marilyn's "innocent and anxious talent'' that was wasted in the Hollywood child-woman fixation: "One sensed that Marilyn Monroe had probably been made tragically unhappy by the infant mold that was forced upon her."

Forgotten Image. A refreshing contrast to all the cocktail-hour psychology has come from an unlikely quarter. Twentieth Century-Fox, looking for nothing deeper than solvency, has assembled an absorbing synopsis of the Marilyn Monroe that was often overlooked--the one on the screen.

Called simply Marilyn, the new picture contains about 90 minutes' worth of segments from old Marilyn Monroe movies, adding some never-seen takes from her last, unfinished film. Fox has brought in Rock Hudson as narrator. The script is a little sticky now and again, but there is no fatigued pseudo-psychoanalysis, nor is there any of the newsreel documentation that so long and frenetically concentrated on the private disaster rather than the public star.

All her great films are represented--that is, all her 20th Century-Fox films: The Seven Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bus Stop and so on. Milestones like The Misfits and Some Like It Hot, both United Artists pictures, are unexplainedly absent. With exaggerated curls and lumpish contours, she starts out in a four-girl chorus in A Ticket to Tomahawk. George Sanders in All About Eve tells her that he can see her "career rising in the east like the sun." Incongruously, she sits on a couch beside Jack Paar in Love Nest.

The Molders. Marilyn in those days looked like nothing much at all, a glass of milk with some lipstick near the rim. The fascination of this picture is to watch the changes--not as they came over her, but as they were effected upon her by all the faceless image molders who, in the end, made the Pygmalion of legend seem by comparison a mass of clumsy thumbs. Under close and improving direction, her famous walk developed from something crudely virginal into something profanely sophisticated. Some unknown Corot reduced the red of her lips from a massive smear to a spot in a breathtaking landscape. Her hair, sprayed and sculpted a thousand times, softened down into a pangloss of wishful thinking, making nature say uncle.

When she went to work on her final picture last year (Something's Got to Give), she had lost weight, and the close-ups that remain show the ultimate refinement of the material--gentle face, slender neck, a look of airy distance. Galatea would have been jealous.

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