The Movies Marilyn Didn’t Make
Monroe’s movie legacy nearly included these two iconic roles.
The history of Hollywood is full of casting “might have beens.” Would Raider of the Lost Ark still be a hit if Tom Selleck had played Indiana Jones? How might the Godfather have been if Robert DeNiro played Sonny (the screen test is… scary)? How might the canon have changed if MGM had agreed to loan Shirley Temple to 20th Century Fox for The Wizard of Oz? Would Charlize Theron still have an Oscar on her mantelpiece if she had managed to beat out Elizabeth Berkley for the lead in Showgirls? What would we have made of Gene Hackman’s take on Hannibal Lecter?
Marilyn Monroe had more than her share of unrealized projects. Two of them were the Damon Runyon musical extravaganza Guys and Dolls and Billy Wilder’s Paris-set romantic comedy, Irma La Douce. The roles of lovelorn soubrette Miss Adelaide and soft-hearted prostitute Irma were both coveted by Marilyn and would seem to fit her, but neither wound up being in the cards.
First up was Guys and Dolls, made in 1955. At the time she was fresh off of The Seven Year Itch and looking for meatier roles and more prestigious projects. Guys and Dolls, a big-budget Technicolor musical, seemed to fit the bill — and it was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, whom she had worked with five years earlier in All About Eve. Marilyn ordered her agent Charlie Feldman to pitch her to Mankiewicz for the role of Miss Adelaide. When he failed, she reportedly called the director herself to ask for the part, but Mankiewicz (probably recalling how she had frequently been late and stumbled over her lines on Eve) told her the role had already been cast — with Vivian Blaine, who played the role on Broadway.
One can imagine Marilyn’s Miss Adelaide as an urban cousin to her Cherie in Bus Stop — albeit a far better performer and far wiser tomato, but it would be interesting how she would have handled songs such as “Adelaide’s Lament” with its witty catalogue of woes: Marilyn made a lot of comedies and a lot of musicals, but she never really did comedic musical numbers — the plot usually just stopped dead for her to be glamorous.
Frank Sinatra, who played Nathan Detroit, wanted Marilyn in the role and their chemistry (the two dated on and off for years) would have added a spark to their scenes that he simply doesn’t have with Vance — although it might have made Detroit’s refusal to put a ring on the long-suffering Adelaide that much more inexplicable. Of course, the real loss was the casting of Marlon Brando as Skye Masterson, a role in which the brilliant actor… looked the part. Apparently Gene Kelly was first choice for Skye, although who would have been truly brilliant would have been Dean Martin. Frank, Dean and Marilyn: Even sixty years later, it’d still be box office.
A number of actresses were considered for the starring role in Irma La Douce: Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and, of course Marilyn Monroe. Wilder’s collaborator I.A.L. Diamond said that “any number of actresses… can be sexy or funny or sad, but we knew of only one who could be all three simultaneously: Shirley MacLaine.” But, frankly, so could Marilyn Monroe, as she had just abundantly proven in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. And who could better portray a hooker who’s simultaneously spectacularly successful, yet sweet enough to believe in true love and naïve enough to not realize her client and her pimp are the same man?
“She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her,” Wilder later said, which sounds like an excellent description of the character of Irma — and, as he continued, “she automatically knew where the joke was.” One can only imagine the little masterpiece of comedy, pathos and avarice Marilyn could have made of Irma’s habit of recounting exaggerated tales of woe to earn the sympathy (and tips) of her customers. With Shirley it’s just… cute.
Still, Monroe didn’t have the chemistry with co-star Jack Lemmon that MacLaine had just demonstrated in The Apartment, which the duo helped make a massive hit. And she’d had issues with not showing up on set during Some Like It Hot that drove Wilder to distractions. But he also knew what he had when he was working with her: “It was worth going through hell,” he said, “because when she did it and it was right, it was the best it could be.” The two had a falling-out after the end of shooting, but they eventually made it up and he reportedly offered her the role at a party. However, by the time the film was shooting in 1962, Monroe was dead.
Of course, there were other missed acting opportunities in Marilyn’s life. She was considering the Marlene Dietrich part in a remake of The Blue Angel (it foundered when Spencer Tracy couldn’t fit the role of the professor into his schedule) as well as portraying Miss Sadie Thompson in a television production of Somerset Maugham’s Rain (which didn’t happen because she insisted upon Lee Strasberg as her director and no network would back a first-timer). Both roles indicate a desire to expand her range into characters that were more hardboiled than bubble-headed, a sort of return to her turn as Rose, the murderous wife in Niagara. She had also discussed a desire to play roles from Jean Harlow in a biopic and Grushenka in a film of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. But those remain in the realm of “might have been”—much like Marilyn’s life itself.
Watch Guys and Dolls and Irma La Douce on Tribeca Shortlist now, and dream of what could have been.
Originally published at www.tribecashortlist.com on October 26, 2016.
