Blonde On Blonde - Marilyn And Judy Holliday Written by Martha Weinman Lear Photo by Howell Conant* From "FAME" magazine November 1988 ''When New York was a small town and fame a club for the chosen few, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday found themselves in front of a mirror where myth and reality converged. It seemed to happen in mirrors, faces peering into mirrors, fame peeking out, Peekabo!, amid the hot shadows of an Indian-summer afternoon in the Dakota apartments on Central Park West in New York. The Dakota, the venerable copperturreted heap where Rosemary's Baby would later be shot and John Lennon would still later be shot...a great deal of cultural history has been written at the Dakota. Thirty blocks downtown, a billboard dominated Times Square. This was in 1956, a cave age, but you remember that billboard. Even if you weren't born yet you remember that billboard: Marilyn Monroe, starring in The Seven Year Itch, loomed twenty feet tall, legs straddling Broadway, calves popping, skirt billowing up toward a finger-lickin'-good smile, eyes beaming torporous promise, emanations of damp flesh roiling forth from that great big beautiful paper doll in what was, and remains, one of the most powerful images ever to come out of movie advertising. A few blocks east, more peekaboo: Judy Holliday, the Funny Girl of her day, was transforming herself nightly into just that paper doll, and packing them into the Blue Angel supper club with her impersonation -- never mind the makeup, it was an act of brains and will, and it was brilliant -- of Marilyn Monroe. It was my first job, at Collier's magazine, doing my own impersonation -- eager researcher playing cool reporter -- and yearning for some epiphanic professional moment. It came... Leonard Lyons, gossip columnist for the old New York Post, was strolling down Fifth Avenue with Holliday one day, or so he reported, and they ran into Monroe. Reality and illusion head-to-head; how avidly the two must have eyed each other! Introductions were made. Someone said, "we ought to get together," and the women arranged to have tea at Judy's apartment in the Dakota, Collier's to record the event for some ravenous posterity. I was sent to take notes. Eager? My god. I arrived much too early and was shown to a bedroom where Holliday was systematically removing every dress from her closet, pulling it on, confronting herself wretchedly in the mirror, growling, "I look fat," and ripping it off. Oh, you funny girl. Her mother, who had come by subway on this sweltering day with two shopping bags of food, including hot chicken soup, sat on the bed reciting the requisite litany: "You're not fat, you're not fat." Judy's son, Jonathan, a golden cherub, then a preschooler, stood staring. Palpable in that room was the high anxiety of a humanoid about to face the camera with a goddess. The photographer Howell Conant, was all set up in the living room. The appointed hour came, and no Marilyn. A half hour later, no Marilyn. Judy grew tenser. Finally, after an hour, a person arrived, and it appeared that this person was Marilyn Monroe. Time has done nothing to dim the details: She wore a black cotton shirt, sleeveless, a brown cotton skirt and flats. There was a big grease stain on the front of the skirt. The belly protruded. The legs were covered with bumps and scabs, which she kept scratching. The platinum hair showed dark at the roots and, when she raised her arm, I saw a luxuriant dark undergrowth. This was before political statements; we were all shaving our armpits. She looked...tatty, a bit. Only the voice was unmistakable, pure sigh (was it afraid to be heard or demanding that we lean in to listen? I have never been sure). Only the skin, which was truly luminescent, would have stopped you in the street. "We were getting worried about you!" Judy cried. Her voice shook, I think with wrath. "I've got mosquito bites," the goddess whispered, and bent to scratch yet again. And though the sequitur escaped me, I instantly and utterly forgave her for being late. She wanted to makeup her face. Then the two of them thought that it might be fun for Judy to put on her Marilyn face first, while Marilyn watched in the mirror. They began, and it was impossible. Marilyn guided graciously, with soft breathy urgings: "Mm, make the eyebrow a little pointier...Yes, that's right..." But Judy couldn't do it. She did it every night, but here, now, in the presence of the real thing...who did not herself look much like the real thing, which gave rise to problems of philosophic scope, because who or where was the real thing? Was it here, in this sweetly scruffy presence, or was this a mere mortal metaphor for the real thing, which was up there on the billboard? Judy fussed and fussed, and then tried getting it through gestures -- chin up, head tossed back with cosmic abandon -- but gestures didn't work. "How do you do that?" she asked. "Do what?" Marilyn said. "Oh you know," Judy answered, tossing her head again. "Well, uh..." Marilyn began, and giggled, craning her own head back gingerly, as though trying to ease a stiff neck. And that was when I finally saw, quick study that I was, that both women had the same problem: They were both straining to impersonate Marilyn Monroe. So they tried it the other way. Marilyn would make up first. "Oh, I look awful," she said, but in the mirror she took on authority. She set to work with that total Teutonic dispassion of models, a touch of shadow here, a dab of highlight there, an extravagance of mascara, an artful swirling of hair around the roots. I waited, wild with curiosity -- Judy too -- for the transmutational touch, peekaboo! But Monroe was doing no magic tricks; she was simply spiffing up what she had, as we all do. And then came this remarkable moment. The child, Jonathan, appeared in the doorway. Judy bent to him and took his hand. "Jonathan," she said, "do you remember that lady we saw in the movie, Marilyn Monroe?" The cherub nodded. "You want to meet her?" Again he nodded, wide-eyed. "Jonathan," she said, and her hand swept across the room -- flourish of trumpets, roll of drums -- "this is Marilyn Monroe." Marilyn was standing. She had just hitched up her skirt to pull down the blouse from underneath. She looked at the little boy, and he at her, and in that instant it happened. She metamorphosed. The skirt stayed up. One scabrous leg came forward and pivoted on its toe. The calf muscle popped. The knee described small circles in the air, the pelvis gently following its delicate gyrations. And the head tilted easily back, the eyelids closed down, she licked her lips, became that myth and smiled full into the child's face and sighed, "Hi-iiii." Conant shot hundreds of exposures that afternoon; not a single one of Marilyn was bad, and most were splendid. Ultimately, what one saw in the room did not matter. Her face, as they say of certain faces -- as they first said of Valentino's face -- made love to the camera. The pictures were never published because Collier's, soon after, went out of business. The one shown here was taken as a souvenir for me, and I have never looked at it without remembering that moment of her transmutation, and wondering: What on earth she thought she was doing? And it must be that she simply had not thought at all, but had simply heard the bell and gone on automatic. If it was male it was her audience, her element, and she would play to it. This is a gift. It is not necessarily a gift that makes good actors, but it almost invariably makes great performers.'' Judy Holliday's ''Dumb Blonde'' impersonation of Marilyn Monroe. http://www.wtv-zone.com/lumina/av/monroeimpression.mp3 Source: Search http://www.everlasting-star.net/