The scene was a news conference on Feb. 9, 1956, and about 150 “photographers, newsmen and news-hens in Manhattan’s sedate Plaza Hotel were scrambling to worm nearer to their common goal,” in Time magazine’s words.
Then
Marilyn Monroe’s dress strap broke.
One news-hen, Judith Crist, The New York Herald Tribune’s film critic, remembers it well. “I was directly behind her, pushed against her by the largely male crush of reporters,” she said via e-mail. “ ‘There’s a ladies’ room to the right,’ I said, ‘I have a safety pin.’ ”
The news conference confirmed that Monroe and
Laurence Olivier would star in a film version of “The Sleeping Prince,” Terence Rattigan’s play, which Olivier and Vivien Leigh, his wife, had originated onstage in London. Olivier would be the director; the title would become
“The Prince and the Showgirl” to spotlight the twin star power.
The story of that difficult production is the subject of a Simon Curtis film,
“My Week With Marilyn,” due later this month with Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh as Monroe and Olivier. It’s based on
the memoirs of the filmmaker
Colin Clark, who at 23 was third assistant director. But while “The Prince and the Showgirl” might have been filmed in Britain and might be concerned with coronations, curtsies and even Westminster Abbey, the story really begins in New York, site of that all-American wardrobe malfunction.
The Plaza news conference was Monroe’s first major appearance since she left Hollywood to study theater in New York and find more challenging roles. By 1956 she was seriously immersed in Method acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and making plans to
wed the playwright Arthur Miller. She was also serious about business. She negotiated a new contract with 20th Century Fox and started Marilyn Monroe Productions to engage in all forms of theatrical enterprise. “The Prince and the Showgirl” was the first (and only) independent film for the new company, of which she was president, and the vice president was the photographer Milton H. Greene. Her Fox contract had given her the freedom to develop her own projects. For “The Prince and the Showgirl” she negotiated a deal with the Warner Brothers chief Jack Warner and Olivier. Greene became the executive producer, Olivier the director and producer, Warner Brothers put up the money and served as distributor. “Last week there was persuasive evidence that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,” Time reported in January, “apparent when Marilyn Monroe Productions bought a property to serve as a starring vehicle for its president, M. Monroe.”
She had pursued the deal by sidetracking the playwright Rattigan on his way to meet the director William Wyler in Hollywood. In a New York airport lounge on his stopover from London, Rattigan received a message from Monroe inviting him to join her for a cocktail. They met in a downtown bar where he could barely hear her whispery conversation, but he got her message: If Wyler wasn’t interested in the rights to his play, she was. According to Rattigan’s biographer, Michael Darlow, “She was prepared to write out a contract on the bar table there and then.” In Hollywood, Wyler made no definite offer; on the way back through New York, Rattigan accepted Monroe’s bid.
That February, two days before the Plaza conference, Rattigan, Olivier and Cecil Tennant, Olivier’s agent, met in Monroe’s
Sutton Place apartment to drink Greene’s generous cocktails. They waited hours (reports vary on the exact length) for Monroe to appear, but when she did, they were in her thrall.
She was adorable, witty and incredible fun, Olivier wrote in “Confessions of an Actor.” Clearly, “I was going to fall most shatteringly in love with Marilyn.” (Once filming got under way, his feelings about Monroe’s desirability atrophied.) As they were about to leave, Monroe said in her “small voice”: “Just a minute. Shouldn’t somebody say something about an agreement?” By George, Olivier noted, “the girl was right.” And they arranged for a purely business meeting the next morning, then lunch at the “21” Club.
Marilyn Monroe was soon a
daily news story. Rumors of her engagement to Miller brought phalanxes of photographers to her apartment. Then
Miller was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. On June 20 Monroe — keeping her mink coat closely held against her cheek so she wouldn’t be recognized — accompanied him to Penn Station, where he boarded the train to Washington. Once he was there, as Miller wrote in his autobiography, “Timebends,” his lawyer told him that the hearing could be canceled if Monroe agreed to be photographed shaking hands with the chairman of the committee. The offer was declined.
The next day Miller explained to the committee that he needed to go to England to see about a production of
“A View From the Bridge” and “to join the woman who will be my wife.” As headlines summarized: “Playwright Talks of Reds, Marilyn.” In New York, Monroe issued a statement confirming their plans and hoping for a “quiet wedding.” Just two weeks after getting married, the couple flew to London, where production was to begin on “The Prince and the Showgirl.”
The story centers on Miss Elsie Marina, an American chorus girl (she says things like “your grand ducal”) who falls in love with an uptight Balkan prince. For the film the play was expanded slightly to include a reference to “Un-Carpathian Activities” and a scene in which the Prince Regent of Carpathia visits the cast of “The Coconut Girl” and meets Elsie,” whose gown strap breaks as she bows, whereupon a pin is called for. Whether Monroe’s strap-tease at the Plaza had been premeditated, “engineered in advance” (as Curtis Gathje writes in “At the Plaza”) or just an obliging snap, the eye-popping effect was duplicated in the film.
“The Prince and the Showgirl,” however, had an eye-closing effect when it was released in June 1957. Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that the plot was thin, that “Sir Laurence is kept pretty much a stuffed-shirt” and that “Miss Monroe mainly has to giggle, wiggle, breathe deeply and flirt.”
After seeing the final cut Monroe sent Warner her analysis: “American audiences are not as moved by stained-glass windows as the British are, and we threaten them with boredom.” But her performance was hailed in Europe; she won awards in France and Italy.
And after her fictional meeting with a royal, Monroe met a real head of state:
Queen Elizabeth II. Both were 30 at the time of their formal introduction in London that October.
The showgirl curtsied, and nothing but cameras snapped.
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