‘She made thinking seem like a serious, deliberate process,’ he writes. But Weatherby wasn’t trying to seduce her: he was deeply interested in her thoughts.
Among her many other talents, Monroe could be credited with blowing that one right out of the water. It is of course a cliché – as well as one of the most well-worn seduction lines in the book – for a man to suggest he is interested, not in a woman’s body, but in her mind. The understanding between them was that these were private conversations (he didn’t publish his version, transcribed from memory after each meeting, till 1976). ‘Charmed’ never seems quite right, even when they started to meet regularly if intermittently in New York over the last two years of her life. ‘Not having fallen for Eisenhower’s charm,’ he writes, ‘I was determined not to succumb to Marilyn Monroe’s.’ Oddly, he seems to have succeeded. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. He couldn’t quite understand why, but thought it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. In Reno in the summer of 1960, the Manchester Guardian journalist Bill Weatherby found himself Monroe’s confidant. ‘Men do not see me,’ she said, ‘they just lay their eyes on me.’ Of what, then, is she the decoy? What does she allow us to see and not to see? Monroe herself knew the difference between seeing and looking. Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding (no other actress is defined in quite these terms). Luminousness can be a cover – in Hollywood, its own most perfect screen. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked. That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed).
There is no flattening wash over this face. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control.
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