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

Monroe’s voice rendered a hot mike redundant. At once torrid and tender, it 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 English classes I used to teach in the Bronx, an inevitably queerly slanted literature seminar I  dubbed “Beyond Dogs and Diamonds: Portraits of American Friendships.”

Whatever the Strasberg “Method” contributed to or however it detracted from her emoting on screen, Monroe’s voice, which also underwent coaching, never lost the lure of a Lorelei.  You know, the mythological golden-haired seductress referenced by Anita Loos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), a narrative whose popularity was eclipsed by the technicolor and stereophonic treatment it received in 1953, despite the inevitable watering down to which the rip-Roaring Twenties 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, a face, body and voice so well known that we, being overly familiar, tend to call her by the first of her professional names.  After all, watching her 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 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 West 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 yielded my study Immaterial Culture.  It also led to a 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.  To that end, I produced and narrated a series, short-lived though it was, of recordings featuring the on-air voices of legendary Hollywood actors—including silent screen vamps—and exploring the sound-only world of radio drama into which they breathed life or to which, at least, they brought a degree of glamor.

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 for 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 Monroe 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).  She 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 someone 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 credit that Monroe had received two-and-a-half years earlier reading commercial copy on Lux.

Besides, supporting roles on dramatic programs were generally assigned to a pool of professional radio actors associated with a particular series, reliable voice actors who could outperform a starlet who had flubbed her lines 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.  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. It took more than one act to air-deliver even a playlet lasting no longer than roughly twenty minutes.  On 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 and raise it again halfway through the action.

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 is a vehicle that bears a vague resemblance to Sudden Fear, a motion picture, filmed a year later, that would do much to boost Crawford’s screen career. 

Monroe, like Crawford before her, was cast as 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 intention to commit. The play concludes with a twist such as those for which the anthology series The Whistler was well known at the time—with Crawford’s and Monroe’s character breaking down when she learns that the man she murdered was terminally ill and not long for this world anyway.

How would Monroe have voiced such a role? Trying to land 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 me scream, is it not self-defense to rid yourself of a rogue who lays hands on you before the state of matrimony supposedly grants him the right to do so?

I am not sure why “Statement in Full” starring Marilyn Monroe 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, a would-be Casanova with many a ring to his wooden trunk and quite a few notches on same.  In the 1930s and ’40s, Charlie had enjoyed 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, especially 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 to laughing off 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 draw audiences away from the small screen 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 showcases reserved in the 1950s for Marlene Dietrich in Café Istanbul and Time for Love, Ilona Massey in Top Secret (1950), or for Tallulah Bankhead as hostess of The Big Show (1950-52).

Imagine. She might have followed the lead of her How to Marry co-star Lauren Bacall and entered into a Bold Venture (1951-52) of her own or reprised on of her film roles, as Ann Sothern did on the air with Maisie (1945-47; 1949-53). Saloon singers Kay Weston, perhaps, going back to the River of No Return (1954) or Chérie in Bus Stop (1956), a stage play turned Monroe vehicle that would take off, again, as a short-lived television series in 1961, by which time practically all radio drama production had ceased on network radio.

Otherwise, Some Like It Hot would certainly have been a jalopy worth taking on the road again. I can hear Monroe now, performing “Running Wild” as a theme song:

Nothing makes my imagination run quite as wild as sound. How vivid those memories are of being drawn in by the voice of Margot Leonard in Der Prinz und die Tänzerin, listening in the dark, dreaming of (being) Marilyn.