The premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes turns Marilyn Monroe’s manufactured screen image into a public spectacle and a source of genuine exhilaration for her. Recast as Lorelei Lee for the cameras and the crowd, she experiences her first overwhelming welcome as a star. Yet the evening’s triumph carries a quieter counterpoint: while thousands celebrate Marilyn, Norma Jeane still hopes for a sign that her absent father is watching.

From studio preparation to public spectacle

The transformation took five hours and forty minutes. The Studio remade the Blonde Actress as Lorelei Lee, whose pink dress was fitted closely to her body and whose glittering accessories included studio-owned imitation diamonds. A white fox stole completed the outfit. Her high-heeled shoes were so tight that she could walk only in short, uneven steps, leaning on her escorts, Mr. Z and Mr. D. The painstaking preparation made the public appearance possible, but also rendered it a kind of physical labor: she had to smile and move through the event in clothes that constrained her.

On Hollywood Boulevard, the scale of the reception overwhelms the private effort behind the image. Traffic had been diverted, spectators filled the municipal stands and pressed against police barriers, and the Studio’s limousine procession drew cheers and a shower of red rosebuds. The crowd called for Marilyn; searchlights, microphones, applause, and boos converged on her as reporters asked about her fiancé and when they would marry. She answered playfully that the public would hear her decision before he did. Her practiced teasing kept the exchange within the entertaining, flirtatious terms expected of a star, even as the spectacle made her private relationship a matter for public questioning.

A moment of shared performance

The Blonde Actress appeared alongside her brunette co-star, Jane Russell, waving and sending kisses into the lights. The novel presents their public friendliness as a striking contrast to the rivalry Hollywood might have expected from two actresses cast as opposites. They had attended the same high school, a coincidence that attracted notice, and their real temperaments differed from those of their characters: Monroe could be sarcastic and sharp with Russell, while Russell was devout and easily shocked. Their public rapport was therefore not simply a repetition of their screen roles.

As they walked together in tightly fitted, low-cut dresses, Monroe privately joked that the pair could provoke a riot by kissing. The moment gives their appearance a brief intimacy amid the staged display. The film preserves such small exchanges, the narration observes, even though they remain unknown to Hollywood biographers and historians. The premiere thus contains two performances at once: the visible procession of celebrated actresses and a fleeting exchange between colleagues who can play with, rather than merely submit to, the attention directed at them.

The evening also marks a change in Monroe’s experience of being watched. At Schwab’s, she had imagined entering the drugstore as a scene, reminding herself that she was an actress while registering how quickly customers’ hopeful looks turned to disappointment when they recognized her as an unknown newcomer. At the premiere, the spectators’ attention no longer fades. She is still shy, but the crowd’s response gives her the exhilaration of a first mass welcome, a feeling the film will preserve. Earlier, I. E. Shinn had led her through another premiere crowd, and she had felt as if he had made her. Now the public response makes that private sense of having been created into a shared, noisy reality.

Fame becomes a relationship with strangers

After the procession, flowers, telegrams, letters, and loosely wrapped gifts filled her small dressing room. Their senders were mostly strangers across the continent, people whose ticket purchases sustained the Studio and the Blonde Actress’s existence. Many wrote as if they had a personal connection to Marilyn. Some were ill, disabled, elderly, or in hospitals for veterans; others signed themselves with sentimental names. Monroe read the letters and initially wept over them, recognizing in their emotional language something like the star-struck letters she herself might have written as a girl.

She answered many personally, with help from her assistants, and treated this attention as an obligation as well as a pleasure. To reach the correspondents’ hearts, she signed hundreds of Studio publicity photographs showing Marilyn in different poses and costumes. This repetitive work recalled her exhausting eight-hour shifts at the Radio Plane factory: the star’s image might appear effortless, but maintaining a connection with its admirers required time and labor. Their affection was moving, but also unsettling, because it asked something of her and rested on an intimacy that the correspondents could imagine more fully than they could know her.

That public intimacy sharpened the pain of private silence. Each time she entered the dressing room to examine the mail, she hoped there might be a letter from her father, following her career. No letter came, though her name and photographs were becoming difficult to avoid in newspapers, magazines, posters, and billboards. The contrast is especially stark: a continent’s worth of admirers can write to Marilyn, while the person Norma Jeane most hopes will recognize her remains absent. Mrs. Glazer, too, never wrote to her.

The image outgrows its owner

The attention around the premiere belonged to a larger publicity machinery. The Studio distributed images of Marilyn widely, while the nude photograph made when she needed money continued to circulate beyond her control. Republished in the first issue of Playboy, the image brought another wave of press attention. Monroe told reporters that she had not authorized that publication; she had sold the photograph’s rights in 1949 for fifty dollars because she desperately needed the money, and neither the negative nor the rights now belonged to her. Her growing fame did not give her ownership of every image attached to her name.

The return to Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre gives the stardom a circular shape. As a lonely child, Norma Jeane had watched blonde actresses there with adoration; now the Blonde Actress appears within the same cinematic world as one of its objects of attention. The postwar theater is presented as part of a prosperous new era, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a lavish, broad comedy, seems destined for wide release and commercial success. On screen, Marilyn’s sensual star image looms larger than the person watching it. The premiere makes her happiness visible and lasting in the film’s account, but it does not resolve the division between being loved as Marilyn and longing to be recognized as Norma Jeane.