Some Mike It Hot: Tuning in Marilyn Monroe on the Eve of Her One-Hundredth Birthday

Like I said in my previous post—and, this being the 871st entry into the broadcastellan journal, I might be excused for repeating myself or at least be expected to do so on occasion—“I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure.”  Now, there is nothing obscure about the one-hundredth birthday of one of Hollywood’s most enduring screen icons—Marilyn Monroe, to whose eightieth I devoted a blog entry two decades ago.  

So much an icon (i.e., a devotional image) is Monroe that the endlessly reproduced sight of her lips has overshadowed the sound of the distinctive and, to me, equally enthralling coos and whispers emanating from them.

To this day, Monroe’s infrequent non-musical, voice-only performances remain largely unheard or else are dismissed as not worth the bother. And yet, regardless of the material Monroe was dealt with for recital, the sound of her voice on the air is itself an event. Broadcast though it was to the multitude, it has the capacity, when experienced with closed eyes and under cover of dark and duvet, to assume the for-your-ears-only confidentiality of a personal call or a confessional eavesdropped on clandestinely.  

Monroe’s voice rendered a hot mike redundant. At once torrid and tender, it is a voice that smolders rather than blazes.  Carrying promises of pleasure and warmth, it has the charm of a lullaby sung on what could not be anything but a sleepless night of reverie.

Many such a night I spent as a teenage boy, alone in my room, listening to—and secretly performing—“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” a song whose title would later be echoed by one of my classes in college English, an inevitably queerly slanted literature seminar I  dubbed “Beyond Dogs and Diamonds: Portraits of American Friendships.”

Whatever the Strasberg “Method” contributed to or detracted from her emoting on screen, Monroe’s voice, which also underwent some coaching, never lost the lure of a Lorelei.  I mean, the mythological golden-haired seductress referenced by Anita Loos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), a narrative whose fame was eclipsed by the technicolor and stereophonic treatment it received in 1953, despite the inevitable watering down to which the flapper chronicle was subjected.

It is no coincidence that Lorelei, the fabled temptress of my native Rhineland, first comes to mind when I think of Marilyn, whose voice is so familiar that we tend to call her to mind by the first of her professional names.  After all, watching Monroe’s movies on German television in my youth, I did not actually get to hear Monroe.  The sound reel featured Margot Leonard (1927–2014), a much-in-demand voice-over artist who dubbed not only Marilyn Monroe but also lent her larynx to the likes of Kim Novak and Gracy Kelly.

I have already commented on the havoc German dubbing could wreak, The Prince and the Showgirl being a prime example.  By turning Elsie, Monroe’s Deutsch-speaking character French-American, the German version mutes “[w]hatever historical context there was” in the original—”the Balkan crisis leading to World War I”—to “leave nothing but a fairytale.”  

Considering that the The Prince and the Showgirl is mostly that, anyway, I marvelled at the “pains the German film industry took during the late 1950s to change the background of this innocuous piece of popular culture so as to keep from those who came to see a bombshell any memories of bombs and shell shock.”  Muffled though the foreign intrigue became in Der Prinz und die Tänzerin, the loss—of which most viewers without access to the English-language version would have been unaware—was well made up for by Leonard at her most Monroesque.

In Germany, Leonard’s voice became so closely associated with Monroe that, in 1982, on the twentieth anniversary of Monroe’s death, Leonard was called upon to resurrect the screen legend in a radio interview.  Glued to the receiver that day for soundings of Marilyn, my teenaged self had the finger on the recording button, catching part of the telephone conversation with Leonard, whose name was hardly a household one like Monroe’s.  When told by the interviewer that he had never seen her, Leonard sounded rather indignant.

All that second-hand exposure to Monroe on the air and on the small screen no doubt motivated my subsequent search for the real voices of Hollywood actors that eventually begot my study Immaterial Culture.  It also led to brief foray into podcasting.

When I started blogging in the mid-noughties, still consumed with the subject matter of my 2004 doctoral thesis Etherized Victorians, for which broadcastellan was meant to serve as a sequel of sorts, I was keenly aware that my chosen subject—at that time almost exclusively radiophonic—could be rendered less arcane by recordings of the performances about which I wrote.  I produced and narrated a series, short-lived though it was, of recordings featuring the on-air voices of legendary film actors—including silent screen vamps—and exploring the sound-only world of radio drama into which they briefly breathed life at a time when their on-screen visibility was diminishing.  

Since “The Voice of Marilyn” contained copyrighted sound recordings, it was rejected for publication on my YouTube channel.  In a wistfully reminiscent mood brought on by the centenary of Norma Jean’s nativity, I am revisiting the short script of the podcast to reflect on a few instances of Monroe’s disembodiment on the airwaves.

Monroe’s career in motion pictures commenced, almost unnoticed, in 1946, when she became a contract player for Twentieth Century Fox.  For the remainder of the decade, even minor roles were sparse.  During those days of invisibility—those Dangerous Years following her debut in a B-picture with that title—the time Monroe spent on the lot translated into only a few minutes on the screen, a notable exception being the low-budget musical backstage drama Ladies of the Chorus, which premiered in December 1948 but was not widely released until the February the following year.

Before she had been as much as glimpsed at in a single motion picture, the nervous starlet made her broadcasting debut on the Lux Radio Theater on 24 February 1947 (as previously discussed here).  Monroe had just been subjected to her first Technicolor screen test but would remain limited to walk-ons in lesser black and white fare for years to come.

The play presented that night on the long-running Lux Radio Theatre program was an adaptation of the costume drama Kitty, which, in 1945, had been a vehicle for Paulette Goddard.  Monroe was not cast in the adaptation.  She was heard instead during a commercial break, peddling soap and plugging the latest motion picture starring Betty Grable, with whom Monroe would share the screen years later in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).  Apparently, Fox did not think of the newcomer as being bankable enough to speak for herself.

Such broadcasts reveal something about the personality of a performer that can be obscured on the screen.  On live radio, unlike in the movies, there were no second (or twenty-second) takes.  There was the microphone, demanding and daunting.  There was the crowd of spectators, gawking at the performers in the studio.  And there was Monroe, a nervous young woman, not yet twenty-one, clutching the script she had been instructed to read.

After this none too auspicious debut, Marilyn was probably kept away from the microphone; and unlike many of her peers, who found lucrative acting work in radio, Monroe was rarely heard on the air, even though some latter-day listeners believe to have discerned her voice in “The Little Man’s Lament,” a 9 November 1949 episode of the episodic crime drama Jeff Regan, Investigator (1948; 1948-50) starring radio actor Frank Graham (and, after Graham’s death by suicide, Jack Webb of Dragnet fame).

As thrilling as such a rare radio encounter with Marilyn sounds, and sounds to me, I am somewhat dubious, or at least dumbfounded.  Only a casting sheet and a voice identification expert could entirely convince me that this is indeed a performance by Marilyn Monroe.  

It strikes me as unlikely that a motion picture starlet, especially one inexperienced in broadcasting, would perform on a less-than-high-profile episodic radio thriller series without the kind of credit, let alone fanfare, that Monroe had received two-and-a-half years earlier on Lux.  Besides, supporting roles on dramatic programs were generally assigned to a reliable troupe of professional radio actors associated with a particular series, voice actors who could outperform a starlet who had flubbed her lines before on national radio.

When Monroe eventually achieved stardom in 1952, her performance in the play “Statement in Full” on the Hollywood Star Playhouse was well documented in number of publicity shots befitting a rising star.  Monroe biographer Donald Spoto asserted that Monroe delivered “with poise and conviction a role in an unexceptional one-act play.”  I am not sure just how he, or anyone, could arrive at that assessment.

There seems to be no surviving recording of Monroe in “Statement in Full,” a thriller by Mel Dinelli, one of whose radio plays would hit the screen as Beware, My Lovely (1952) with Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan in the leading roles.

Spoto’s term “one-act play” betrays a lack of understanding of radio broadcasting. However short, it took more than one act to air-deliver even a playlet lasting no longer than roughly twenty minutes.  In a commercial program such as Hollywood Star Playhouse there was always room for a word or two from the sponsor, the provision for which required half-hour programs to lower the curtain half-way through the play.

Now, “Statement in Full” had been presented once before, on 15 January 1951, with the once mike-frightened Joan Crawford taking the principal part.  It was a vehicle in the vein of Sudden Fear, which did much to boost Crawford’s screen career in 1952.  

Monroe, like Crawford, would have played a matrimonial hopeful who kills her boyfriend after being told by him that, despite previous claims to the contrary, he was unmarried and had no reason to keep stalling.  The play concludes with a twist such as the ones for which the anthology series The Whistler was well known at the time—with Crawford’s character breaking down when she learns that the man she murdered was terminally ill.

How would Monroe have voiced such a role? Trying to woe a presumed bigamist, she might have cooed like the manipulative Rose Loomis in Niagara (1953) before veering into Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) territory to express the anguish and mania called for in the face of impending spinsterhood according to the misogynist logic of the day.  Come on, plays like “Statement in Full” make you scream, is it not self-defense to rid yourself of a rogue who lay hands on you before the state of matrimony presumably grants him the right to do so?

I am not sure why “Statement in Full” vanished—given that broadcasts were generally recorded, if only to give sponsors proof of delivery—unless Fox pulled the recording because Monroe’s delivery was not equal to the screen image the studio had finally begun to shape after her loan-out to MGM for Asphalt Jungle and her memorable turn in Fox’s All About Eve, both in 1950.

Following “Statement in Full,” Marilyn returned to the air a few months later, on 13 December 1952, to be teamed up with ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy. By then Charlie was a Casanova with many a ring to his wooden trunk.  In the 1930s and ’40s, he had enjoyed, albeit temporarily, the company of many an exotic and glamorous Hollywood beauty.  There was Dorothy Lamour, for instance, and Hedy Lamarr.  He had flirted with Carmen Miranda and, most notoriously, with Mae West.  

Going on the air with a beloved puppet that cast Edgar Bergen in the role of a perennial sidekick was risky business, considering the block that flirting with a mere chip of a chap had meant for West’s broadcasting career (as reported here).  Not satisfied with fantasizing about Mae, Charlie was determined to woe and wed her, taking her home on behalf of the many listeners who were reduced laughing at their wet dreams.  And so it was with Marilyn, some fifteen years later.

After woodworking with Edgar Bergen, Monroe never returned to radio in a dramatic role, although she did appear opposite one of radio’s best-known comedians, Jack Benny, in an episode of whose television series she guest-starred in 1953.  At the time, television was fast surpassing radio as the main source of home entertainment, a fact from which Monroe’s film career benefitted as studios aimed to keep the small screen in its place with spectacularizing advancements such as Cinemascope.

Now, seeing Monroe in a wide-screen format would no doubt be swell; but I regret all the same that her voice did not take center stage on radio in the kind of voice-generated showcase provided in the 1950s for Marlene Dietrich in Café Istanbul and Time for Love, for Tallulah Bankhead in The Big Show, or for Ilona Massey in the breathless Top Secret.

I feel like listening to Margot Leonard in Der Prinz und die Tänzerin, with the lights turned off. If only I had kept the recording.