Marilyn as Marilyn

There is a story that when the camera-work was over for Some Like It Hot, Director Billy Wilder peered with a weary wisdom into his generous heart, and discovered a marked reluctance ever to make another movie with Marilyn Monroe. She was, opined Mr. Wilder to the omnivorous press, always temperamental, always late on location—and sometimes didn’t bother to show up at all.

He cried all the way to the bank. It was an apparently wiser Mr. Wilder, during première week in New York, who leaned on a Times Square lamppost, chewed his checkbook and remarked on a crowd that stretched from the box office to the Metropole and back again: “My aunt always showed up on time. Nobody’d shell out a counterfeit kopek to see my aunt do anything”—or words to that effect.

JL

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John Leonard

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There is a story that when the camera-work was over for Some Like It Hot, Director Billy Wilder peered with a weary wisdom into his generous heart, and discovered a marked reluctance ever to make another movie with Marilyn Monroe. She was, opined Mr. Wilder to the omnivorous press, always temperamental, always late on location—and sometimes didn’t bother to show up at all.

He cried all the way to the bank. It was an apparently wiser Mr. Wilder, during première week in New York, who leaned on a Times Square lamppost, chewed his checkbook and remarked on a crowd that stretched from the box office to the Metropole and back again: “My aunt always showed up on time. Nobody’d shell out a counterfeit kopek to see my aunt do anything”—or words to that effect.