Literature

“A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none.”~ Marilyn Monroe“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom: the first is being a bore.”~ Cecil Beaton Cecil was never boring. His volatile creative mind was never turned off. Always stretching into new territories, new challenges. He had only one session with Marilyn Monroe which took place at the Ambassador Hotel in New York in February 1956. The actress turned up to his Suite 90 minutes late and in his diary Beaton admitted that he was “startled then disarmed by her lack of inhibition”.The photographer compared the actress to “an overexcited child asked downstairs after tea” and added “The initial shyness over, excitement has now got the better of her. She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps onto the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a diary as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high spirited, infectiously gay performance”.Marilyn shot to fame playing dumb yet witty blondes in films including “Some Like it Hot”, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “The Seven Year Itch”. And Beaton acknowledged that while it was “press agentry or manufactured illusion” that had helped her find success, it was “her own weird genius that had sustained her flight”.He wrote “The real marvel lies in the paradox-somehow we know that the extraordinary performance is pure charade -the little girl’s caricature of Mae West. There is an unworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child’s eyes that quick as a flash, will screw up into a pair of sexy, smoldering slits and give you a signature “come hither” look.One of the great Monroe photos for sure.