‘Tis the season for reminiscing about Marilyn Monroe.  And why not?  This weekend marked the 50^th anniversary of her death.  Fifty years!

In honor of the occasion, I spent part of the weekend revisiting the best parts of some of my favorite MM flicks.  Looking back, I’m reminded how much more I like early Marilyn than the later version.  A lot is made of her time working with Lee Strasburg at the Actors Studio, but in a lot of ways I think she was ruined by her time there.  She obviously had a natural sense of performance that was so clear and unencumbered in the beginning.  I think her desperate efforts to learn “craft” and to be taken seriously were, to some degree, her undoing.

You only have to watch her disturbing and sad performance in “Don’t Bother to Knock” (1952) to know that she had the chops without having to depend on her looks.  Though she has a few glamorous moments, she’s primarily a troubled girl who’ll probably never even lead a normal life.

Even when she turned up the sex appeal, as she did in “Niagra” (1953), she was no lightweight.  She played Joseph Cotton for a fool and we still couldn’t hate her.  Again, it wasn’t only because she was hot.  Hollywood has always been plastered with beautiful women.  Marilyn had something more, something deeper.

A lot of people consider Marilyn’s performance in “Bus Stop” (1956) to be one of her best, but I’ve never liked it.  To me it’s the beginning of “later Marilyn,” when she’s too breathy, too fragile and generally trying too hard.  She’s given up what’s natural for the Method.  Sadly, it’s when she starts becoming a caricature of herself.

It’s funny, they key to me has always been Marilyn’s eyelids.  Stay with me on this.  When I think of Marilyn, I either think of her as wide-eyed and innocent or sultry, head back, eyelids at half mast.  The latter is her signature and it’s always the look I’ve liked least, even as a kid.  In her early films, she used the sultry look sparingly and it added spice.  Later on, it was the fallback.  She seemed to work it constantly.  More caricature.

I will credit Marilyn’s Actors Studio period for giving me my favorite Marilyn story, though.  Susan Strasburg (Lee’s daughter) told of a time when the two of them were walking together in Manhattan and no one was taking any notice at all.  Susan commented on how odd this was, to which Marilyn replied, “Oh, do you want to see her?”  Then she flipped some internal switch and they were immediately mobbed.  I love that this woman who was dismissed by so many not only knew that the movie star wasn’t who she was, but that she could turn the star on and off at will.  I think about that story frequently when I’m going into a new situation and want to project my best self.

Anyway, I’ll leave the Method Marilyn to the high-toned critics and film historians.  I’ll keep right on enjoying her in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” and “All About Eve.”  I may not know art, but I know what I like.