Sunday Times 2
The Young King from Ceylon and the Showgirl Marilyn
Marilyn is missing. The main Marilyn, the magnificent, most expensive Marilyn we’ve discovered, purchased and brought home, has gone AWOL. Marilyn Absent Without Leave. My, my.
Producer- director-actor Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe in "The Prince and the Showgirl". Photo: The Guardian
Miss Monroe, the beloved Hollywood actress who died 53 years ago this week, the star who once upon a time set the world on fire, is to be found in every room in the house (except kitchen, pantry, washrooms). Her prominent presence takes manifold forms – books, videos, CDs, DVDs, old magazines smothered under mothballs, and Bert Stern pictures and Sam Shaw picture postcards picked up from here and there. Monroe Magic has cast its spell on the house, and the magic is felt especially strongly in weeks such as this. Marilyn is alive in this home, in Sri Lanka, 9,362 miles from where the adored American Idol lived and died.
Marilyn Monroe — found dead on August 5, 1962, apparently from a drug overdose, at her home in Brentwood, West California — is on the minds of millions this week.
The house search for Monroe memorabilia these few days has yielded much, but the main Marilyn manifestation — a heavy large-format album of photographs taken shortly before the star’s death, a book that should be staring us in the face because of its size (and cost — it is the most expensive book under this roof) — annnoyingly eludes us.
Jeremy Spenser (de Saram) as the King of Carpathia surprising showgirl Marilyn Monroe as she dances in the 1957 romantic comedy "The Prince and the Showgirl." Photo: classicfilmsreloaded.com
Our affection for Miss Monroe must have started very, very early, because aged 11 we were already fond enough of her, or the idea of her, to be greatly saddened by the news of her death. At 7 AM, August 6, 1962, Mother leaned over our bed to open the window and wake us, as she did every day. That sunny morning, however, her usual bright Good Morning face was sad. “Marilyn Monroe is dead,” she said. The story and the picture were on the front page of the Daily News.
At 11 years, what did we and our 11-year-old movie-mad peers know about Monroe?
That she was the “hottest” person on the planet, and that before we knew what it took to be “hot” (we had a vague idea); that crowds, mostly men, queued up for blocks to see her movies; that mature males had a strange look on their faces when they spoke of her; that her real name was Norma Jean Mortensen, and that her blonde hair was really brunette; that her mother entered a succession of mental homes and that Norma Jean was sent to one foster home after another; that she posed nude for a calendar, and that her nudity was a strong selling point in Hollywood flesh-marketing; that in 1954 she cheered up battle-weary GIs fighting in Korea; and that precocious brats like us tried to understand what all the fuss was about by attempting to visualise Monroe through Adult Eyes.
Monroe (mon-ROE – accent on the second syllable) was on the covers of magazines and books in the ’50s and ’60s, aeons before the invention of videos and CDs. That’s really where we got to know her, in the pages of Movie Pictorials and Hollywood Albums. She was Cover Girl-Cover Story all her short life, 36 years — and for long after.
On August 5, 1962, the Monroe radiance went out. Theatre lights in all movie-lit cities dimmed. The world was in mourning.
Mourning becomes Monroe — the Magical, Marvellous, Once-in-a-Millennium Marilyn. The golden, dazzling, pulse-quickening name will always be shot through with a strain of sadness, however brightly the Monroe moniker continues to shine.
Amidst the international grief of August ’62, there was one Ceylonese who must have felt the star’s demise as much, or more, as any person east of Suez, west of Seoul. That person had once worked with Marilyn Monroe.
This person, hailing from an upper-class Burgher-Sinhalese family, was on the set of possibly of Monroe’s most publicized film, and he was there not as an extra, a gaffer or a camera technician, but as a star in his own right, playing opposite Miss Monroe in a speaking role central to the plot of the film.
The young actor was Jeremy Spenser, known back home by his full name Jeremy Spenser de Saram. The UK-born Jeremy Spenser and his older brother David entered the arena of English-speaking performing arts in the West as child stars: David would figure prominently in British radio and theatre, and Jeremy on the bigger platform of British, American and European cinema. Between the ’50s and early ’70s, actor Jeremy Spenser figured among some of cinema’s most distinguished names, appearing in a string of must-see, much-talked-about, star-embedded movies. His most prominent appearance was in the heavily publicised 1957 Marilyn Monroe vehicle, “The Prince and the Showgirl.”
The film was popular British playwright Terence Rattigan’s film treatment of his stage play “The Sleeping Prince.” The other big names in a big cast were Laurence Olivier and Sybil Thorndike. The film was shot at Pinewood Studios, London. From the moment Monroe’s name was dropped, Britain was agog. She arrived in England in a roaring TWA blaze of publicity. The Brits treated the star and her daddy-figure husband, the American playwright Arthur Miller, like royalty. The couple was presented to royalty during their visit.
Taking notes on the side, tracking the making of the film, was another young man, Colin Clark, son of historian and art critic Kenneth Clark. Colin had recently come down from Oxford and was looking for a job. During a visit to the Clark castle of a home, family friend Laurence Olivier offered the young man a temporary job to look after Marilyn Monroe during the filming of “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Talk about Dream Job – to be close daily, 9-to-5 (and even later) to the world’s most desired woman.
Young Clark’s task as personal assistant to Monroe was to make sure all was well with the star and that she turned up for work on time. Clarke discovered early that no one in the world could make Marilyn Monroe punctual. Years later, Colin Clark published his notes in a book called “The Prince and the Showgirl and Me.”
When we saw the book newly out in a Hong Kong store, we pounced. Our interest in Monroe was actually second to our curiosity about any mention there might be of Jeremy Spenser, the young actor who played the part of King Nicholas of Carpathia. The good-looking, clean-cut 20-year-old actor came with a clear-cut Ceylon background, and, to pique our interest even more, a blood tie with the family, in a Prins-Dornhorst-de Saram connection that Father clarified.
Clark’s book has a small but significant reference to Jeremy Spenser. The young actor was the recipient of the biggest of compliments from the main star, delivered through Miss Monroe’s actions, rather than her words. According to Clark, by the time filming wound up the only person the temperamental star was on speaking terms with (excepting, of course, Colin Clark) was Jeremy Spenser.
Monroe’s blithe indifference to the rules of conduct on film sets had driven everyone up the wall. She had made enemies all around, from actors to extras to crew. Her biggest enemy was Laurence Olivier, the Prince Regent of Carpathia and love interest in the script.
In an amusing BBC documentary based on Colin Clark’s memoirs, the narrator says that the great Shakespearean actor’s impatience shows in giveaway moments. Olivier had reason to be angry; he was producer, director and male lead. The film’s success rested squarely on his shoulders.
That Olivier was gay and likely impervious to female charm, even that of Monroe’s, may not have helped the cause, however great the actor’s professionalism. (Colin Clark is cheerfully bitchy about a lot of people, quick to point out who was fey, as if it mattered. Yet who’s to say that knowing that Olivier, scriptwriter Rattigan and others involved in the film were homosexual is beside the point? Such knowledge, irrelevant or not, comes inevitably, given the over-informative nature of theatre chronicling. Has Olivier ever been as camp on screen as he is in this film?)
Years after Colin Clark’s book appeared, a separate book related to the making of “The Prince and the Showgirl” surfaced. These were notes that did not make it into the diary and the first book. The newly revealed chunk of text describes time spent off the set with Marilyn Monroe. Clark said he was too busy with Monroe at the time to write his diary. True or not, the fresh text was published two years before Clark’s death in 2002, and was the basis for the movie, “My Week With Marilyn.”
There is debate over Clarke’s account of his time off with Monroe. People who were close to the Monroe set said Clarke could never have disappeared on jaunts with the celebrity without everyone knowing. Others say there might be a bit of truth in the story, and that as Monroe’s minder he might well have had some down time with her, at Monroe’s request, though it may not have been as lipstick-smeared an adventure as Clarke will have us imagine.
“My Week With Marilyn” had good international press, and the actress Michelle Williams as Monroe seems perfect in the role. There was a screening of the film two years ago at the Russian Centre, Colombo 7. The audience comprised two persons – a lady with a scarf, and ourself, without a scarf. DVDs projected on a large screen are dim affairs; the images and the colour are spread too thin. The lady in the scarf and self could have watched the film on DVD at home, but we wanted to see Miss Monroe played big on a full screen.
The Complete Works of Marilyn Monroe are scattered around the house. When we watch the CDs and DVDs, picked up at pirate outlets on the streets of Hong Kong, we recall friends’ comments about Monroe:
She is a wonderful, delightful comedian (should that be ‘comedienne’?), said music students Leonard Ludekens and Isaac Kulendran. She has perfect timing, said Danny Horowitz, an American-Russian IT writer living in Hong Kong. She is stupid and a bore, said Gerda Stickler, a Hungarian-German brunette visiting Hong Kong. She is incandescent, said Michael Taylor, an American linguist working in Hong Kong.
Monroe books and magazines distributed around the house include a 1987 Vanity Fair with a cover story on Norman Mailer’s play “Strawhead”, about Marilyn. Mailer was Monroe-smitten; he also wrote a controversial book titled “Marilyn” that said Monroe was murdered by the FBI and the CIA; a black-and-white photo-biography of Monroe; Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “Blonde”; a book of word portraits by Truman Capote, which has a gem about his dear friend Marilyn titled “A Beautiful Child,” three words that seem to sum up the essence of Monroe.
And then there’s the elusive “MARILYN”, the expensive coffee-table book we saw occupying a central, come-hither spot at the BAREFOOT Bookshop eight months ago. She, “MARILYN”, wanted us to notice her and come up to her. Hold her. The book covers the star’s last photo session, done a couple of weeks before her death. We brought MARILYN home and placed her tenderly on a table in our bedroom. We hesitated to take her out of her slipcase. We were nervous to touch here. The big book felt a bit intimidating, as if the ghost of Monroe had solidified before us.
And now she is missing. It is likely that persons who have entered our bedroom on one pretext or another, as domestic helpers, wadu-baas, electricians, were tempted by MARILYN. That they slid her out of her close-fitting case and scanned her – the pages with close-ups, middle-distance shots, nude and half-nude portraits – and carried her away. Can you expect a hot-blooded male to hold and behold MARILYN and leave without her?
Marilyn Monroe lived to make the world happy. Men especially.