Go Easy

Like many another woman getting ready for a party, Marilyn Monroe felt last week that she didn't have a thing to wear. So she asked her employer, 20th Century-Fox, if she might borrow, just for the evening, a gown she is wearing in her new picture, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The sleek, skintight gold lame dress was designed to make the most of Marilyn's natural talents. Fox agreed to the loan, and glittering in her gold sheath, Marilyn was off to the party.

It was not a particularly lively party until Marilyn rose and threaded her way to the microphone to receive a Photoplay Magazine plaque ("Fastest Rising Star of 1952"). The girl who likes "to feel blonde all over" accepted her plaque demurely and got a polite round of applause. Then she turned and started back in the hip-flicking "walkaway" that has contributed to her fame. It was suddenly too much for the audience. They cheered, leered, whistled and made wolf noises. But amid all the good-natured laughter and shouting, Marilyn's boss, Fox's Darryl Zanuck, sat with a stiff, straight face.

Had Marilyn's super sex buildup backfired? The Hollywood scuttlebutt was that Fox was already getting complaints from women's clubs and other organizations about Marilyn's recent appearance in Niagara, in which she plays a wife with lowdown morals and lowdown necklines (TIME, Feb. 9). Her singing style in the picture is highly suggestive, and Fox has postponed release of her recording of the Niagara song, Kiss. To top it off, moviemakers were worried about a United Press poll of editors which revealed that they are tiring of the sort of "news" Marilyn and other starlets have been making lately. At week's end, the word was out to Hollywood's pressagents: go easier on the sex angle.

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