Like I said in my previous post—and, this being the 871st entry in 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 parted 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 of unearthing. 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 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.
