Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend

Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend is more than a song Marilyn Monroe performs: it is a showcase for how she makes a public image appear spontaneous while controlling it from within. First presented as a polished number on a film set, it later becomes part of the repertoire she carries to audiences overseas. Across both settings, the performance joins exacting preparation to an image designed to be watched, remembered, and adored.

The number as a constructed performance

The film-set scene begins with Marilyn Monroe already waiting in her dressing room. For three quarters of an hour she has been perfectly dressed and made up, absorbed in the mirror, wearing a pink silk gown, long gloves, and stage jewelry. When she is called, the number is not a performance she enters unprepared: once she has memorized every word, syllable, and note, she can deliver it with apparent ease. The contrast is central to the scene. The image looks effortless, but its precision rests on exhaustive rehearsal and control.

The narration treats the number as a distinctive kind of acting. Marilyn Monroe does not simply inhabit a character from the outside; she seems able to see herself already on film, as an animation she can control from within. That imagined viewpoint gives her command over how an audience in a dark theater will see her. On set, Marilyn Monroe is therefore both the performer and the maker of the image being performed: the screen figure is carefully animated for the thousands of strangers who will encounter it.

The elaborate costume and the mirror make the number an explicitly visual event as well as a musical one. This emphasis resonates with the novel’s account of Marilyn Monroe’s relationship to the camera, where the lens can function like a mirror and the photographed image can seem more powerful than human intimacy. The song scene, however, stresses control rather than passive exposure: the performer knows the material and shapes how it will appear to spectators.

Studio precision and the recorded voice

The number belongs to a repertoire associated with the film in which Marilyn Monroe performs alongside When Love Goes Wrong and A Little Girl from Little Rock. The songs are available to her from memory, like a mechanical doll’s familiar program, but the apparent automaticity conceals painstaking labor. Studio recordings were made with an average of twenty sessions for each song. Afterward, the studio sound engineer cut the separate reels apart and reassembled them to produce a perfected recording.

That process sets two kinds of control beside one another. Marilyn Monroe’s memorization and repeat performances make the song reproducible onstage; the studio’s editing makes the recorded result reproducible in a different way, by selecting and joining takes. The finished sound is not evidence of a single effortless pass but the product of repeated work and technical assembly. The novel’s attention to that work complicates the impression of a naturally effortless star: the polished number is manufactured, but the performer’s discipline is part of its manufacture.

From the film set to audiences overseas

In Tokyo, the songs travel beyond their original film setting. During her honeymoon, Marilyn Monroe has brought a short purple lamé dress and silver high-heeled sandals, clothes her husband, the Ex-Athlete, likes to see her wear. She can sing the numbers from memory, and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend is among those she has performed many times. The familiar repertoire gives her something prepared to offer when she is asked to perform for American servicemen; the number is no longer confined to the controlled space of a film production.

The scale changes dramatically in South Korea. More than one hundred thousand American soldiers see Marilyn Monroe perform in the purple lamé dress and silver heels, singing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend and I Wanna Be Loved by You. The performance takes place in bitterly cold weather, yet the account emphasizes her passion and enthusiasm. A song learned, recorded, and perfected for the studio thus becomes part of a live encounter with a vast audience. Repetition does not make the performance insignificant: it is precisely the memorized repertoire that allows her screen songs to travel with her and be performed again.

Public image, marriage, and reception

The song’s journey also exposes the distance between Marilyn Monroe’s public success and her marriage to the Ex-Athlete. He is angry that she has left him in Japan to perform for troops in South Korea, and the crowds greeting her exceed the hundreds of admirers who had gathered for him at Japanese baseball stadiums. His resentment makes the reception of her performance part of a marital conflict: her public presence commands attention on a scale that unsettles his sense of importance and authority.

The novel places the number within a broader account of an image that can be repeated, circulated, and claimed by others. Marilyn Monroe’s nude photograph as Miss Golden Dreams, for example, was sold by her for fifty dollars when she urgently needed money; she later protested that she had not authorized its subsequent publication, while lacking ownership of the negative and the rights. That episode is distinct from the song, but it sharpens the contrast between an image she can shape in performance and images whose circulation she cannot control. In Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, her exact preparation and inward command make the star seem to govern how she will be seen. The novel’s wider pattern insists that such command has limits: the public image may belong, in practice, to studios, editors, and audiences as well as to the woman who performs it.