Norma Jeane and Actor C's set conflict and respect for her performance

Norma Jeane Baker and C’s relationship on the set of Some Like It Hot is a study in collision between private distress and public performance. C’s frustration with her lateness and repeated takes becomes intensely personal, even as the film requires them to play lovers. The reversal comes when Norma Jeane performs a long, intimate scene flawlessly in one take: C cannot overlook the skill behind the delays he has despised.

A working relationship under strain

By the late phase of production, Norma Jeane’s difficulties were entangled with a painful private life. She was grieving the loss of a child, her marriage was deteriorating, and her use of medication was a source of concern. One scene places her in a dim room with her husband, who tries to comfort her and worries about her health. Her thoughts, however, are already on the next day’s love scene with C. The gap between the tenderness required onscreen and the estrangement in her home sharpens the pressure surrounding the work.

C’s resentment had its own material causes. He was ambitious, proud of his career, and unwilling to let the production’s disruptions jeopardize a role he considered valuable. Shooting days scheduled to begin at ten in the morning could be delayed until four or even six in the afternoon while the cast and crew waited for Norma Jeane. On one occasion, the wait reached five hours. In telling the story later, C mocked her confused, disjointed manner of speaking and recalled her arriving without an apology. For him, the lost time was not an abstract inconvenience: it threatened his work and his schedule, and he believed he could not allow her troubles to spill over into his own life.

From early joking to open hostility

The antagonism had not been present from the beginning. During preproduction, C and Norma Jeane joked together about the many love scenes they would have to perform. One involved a yacht, where C’s character would pretend to be impotent and Sugar Kane would try to cure him with kisses. The scene was designed as farce, a comic premise that also let the production present its sexual suggestiveness as comedy. C later remembered those early exchanges with nostalgia, emphasizing the contrast between their playful anticipation and the hostility that followed.

As the work wore on, the contrast became stark. One comparatively simple scene required sixty-five takes. C and the others sometimes waited for hours, and he felt that his own performance was deteriorating as the days passed. His irritation hardened into disgust: during the crucial kiss, he would have preferred to spit in Norma Jeane’s face rather than touch her. The scene demanded that they simulate passion and love while the actual working relationship had become antagonistic. Their onscreen intimacy therefore depended on a performance that concealed, rather than resolved, their conflict.

The kiss and the sudden rupture

C’s account of their first kiss in that deteriorated period makes the hostility physical. He had bitter almonds on his lips. Terrified, Norma Jeane abruptly pushed him away and ran off the set, accusing him of having put poison on his mouth. The story was later told as an anecdote about the production, but its force lies in the collision it stages: a scripted kiss becomes an alarming bodily encounter, and an actor’s antipathy is transformed into a moment of fear and flight.

The novel places this episode against an earlier period when the same performers could joke about their simulated romance. It also preserves the asymmetry of their positions. C could recount the incident and mock Norma Jeane’s behavior; she was the one whose body had to meet his in scenes meant to look intimate. Their professional conflict was thus not simply disagreement over how to work. It was enacted through waiting, repetition, physical contact, and the public stories later told about what happened on set.

The one-take scene

The relationship changes, briefly, when Norma Jeane arrives several hours late for the yacht sequence. This time she is contrite, asks to be forgiven, and takes C’s hands. Her hands are so cold that he shivers. Then she performs four or five pages of difficult material without hesitation, carrying the long scene through dozens of kisses and its awkwardly sensual comic business. C cannot believe how smoothly the work is proceeding between two actors who can barely tolerate one another.

He expects her to ask to repeat the scene. Instead, she smiles, and the scene remains intact after a single take. The achievement is especially striking because it follows weeks of exhausting repetitions and delays. C wonders whether she has suddenly recovered from a genuine illness or has chosen to prove that she can do the work when she wants to. The narrative leaves that explanation unsettled; what it makes unmistakable is the performance itself. For once, the evidence is not a story told afterward but the scene completed before the crew.

Recognition without reconciliation

Even those who hated Norma Jeane had to admit that she was magnificent that day. The crew applauded, relieved and glad that she seemed to have returned, even if only temporarily. C’s recognition is not a reconciliation: the account gives no sign that his resentment disappeared or that their personal relations were repaired. Rather, his judgment is forced to accommodate what his hostility had obscured. The actor he regarded as a costly disruption could also deliver difficult work with extraordinary precision.

That contradiction is central to the relationship. C’s later recollections foreground the lateness, the repeated takes, and the friction; the single-take scene interrupts that account with a demonstration of Norma Jeane’s command. Onscreen, the scene must read as credible desire; offscreen, C and Norma Jeane remain at odds. Their working relationship therefore exposes the unstable boundary between the performer and the role: conflict does not prevent a convincing illusion, and professional recognition does not erase the conflict that produced it.