All the Way

All the Way is the music accompanying Marilyn Monroe at a moonlit poolside gathering, where she silently mouths the words to Frank Sinatra’s version with her eyes closed. Its brief appearance binds a public performance to an image of vulnerability: she is watched as a star, yet seems remote from the company around her.

The Poolside Scene

The recording plays over speakers around the illuminated pool as Marilyn Monroe advances onto the terrace with a sleepwalker’s gait and a vague smile. With her eyes closed, she shapes the words of All the Way without singing aloud. The detail makes the song part of her physical presence in the scene, rather than merely background music: its audible performance and her silent mouthing occupy the same moment.

Her appearance intensifies that contrast. Her platinum hair seems almost phosphorescent, and her vermilion lipstick gives her mouth the shape of a perfect O. She wears a short terry-cloth robe borrowed from the hostess, cinched at the waist; the narration suggests that she is probably naked beneath it. The song accompanies an image carefully poised between polished star display and exposure.

A Song Under Observation

President Kennedy watches her as she crosses the terrace. His brother-in-law, anxious about introducing her to him, describes her in hostile, degrading terms and urges caution. Kennedy has stopped listening. The scene instead holds on his gaze and on Marilyn Monroe, her eyes closed as All the Way plays around the pool.

The surrounding narrative makes this act of watching part of a larger pattern. During a photographic session, Norma Jeane’s relation to the camera is described as almost instinctive: its lens seems to her like a mirror, giving the image of herself a force beyond ordinary human contact. The resulting photographs, however, also place her body under another person’s control. In the poolside scene, the song accompanies a similar tension between the woman’s performed image and the observers’ possession of the view.

Performance and Public Image

Elsewhere, the novel traces how a photograph Norma Jeane sold for fifty dollars when desperate for money later circulated without her authorization, appearing in a calendar and then in Playboy as her fame grew. The image linked her emerging public persona to an intimate photograph whose negative and rights she did not own. All the Way appears in a different setting, but the scene likewise frames Marilyn Monroe as both an active performer and an object of public attention.

The novel does not provide the song’s lyrics or explain what they mean to her, so its significance rests in the staging: Frank Sinatra’s voice fills the space while Marilyn Monroe mouths along, eyes shut, and President Kennedy looks on. The moment gives the song a role in the book’s recurring tension between performance and private experience, without resolving how much of the woman before the watchers belongs to the star they think they see.