Jane Rusell On Marilyn Monroe — Diva On Diva.

But little rocks, or square rocks, these gals must have their rocks. Diamonds are a girl's best friend. Yes, it was a great book. Greater is a Broadway stage hit. And even more gorgeous, glittering, and hilarious on the screen. With Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee, the world's most fabulous gold-digging blonde. I just love finding new places to wear diamonds. And Jane Russell as Dorothy Shaw, the world's most talked-about brunette. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are welcomed by George Bowser, manager of the Fox West Coast Theaters, as they arrive to make their imprints in the famous concrete of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Filmdom's first blonde and first brunette, Marilyn and Jane won their chance to join Filmdom's immortals by their work in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the Technicolor adaptation of the sensationally humorous musical comedy stage hit. And there you are with Marilyn Monroe. There's with the blonde old. Was she good to work with? Yes, very good. How would you describe her personality? Marilyn is very shy. She was a very hard worker, and bound and determined to get ahead. What do you think when you hear these stories now, even tonight's news? I was hearing, I guess it was entertainment tonight. They're still trying to figure out what happened, circumstances around her death. Do you think it's better left alone? Oh, when are they going to let the poor girl go? Is that your feeling about the books written about people? Absolutely. My God, if I was dead, I'd want to just be, just go on. In working with Marilyn Monroe, I know in reading your book, you say that all that stuff that the studios or the media people tried to hype a feud between you and Marilyn was not true at all. Not at all. We got along very well. And as a matter of fact, Jane, you must have been a special friend to her, were you not? From things I, reading between the lines in the book. Well, I don't know. We didn't get to know each other that well, but we were there every day on the set. And when I found out that she was a little nervous about going out on the set, I'd stop by her dressing room and, you know, say, come on, Blondie, it's time to go. We're due, you know. And she'd say, oh, oh, all right, Jane. And she'd get up and we'd trot on the set together. She worked very hard. She always knew her lines and was absolutely determined to get ahead. But then what are all those stories about interminable delays that she would cause? I don't know. That was way later, much later. This was her first big starring role in her first big dressing room on the lot. And she did look to her coach a lot. And she worked with her coach after the full day shooting when I couldn't think of anything. We'd go home and eat and crash, you know. She'd go and work. She was really determined. And, of course, Howard Hawks would see her look to the coach immediately after a take. And he wasn't having any of that, so he finally had the coach put off the set. Got a little unhappy about that. She was very sensitive and much brighter than people thought she was. You know, I've thought so many times, Jane, because I've covered films and actors and actresses for a good many years. And I've wondered why it is that a person like yourself now, you've been able to cope with everything that's come along in your life professionally and personally. And then you take somebody like Marilyn, who couldn't cope, and it ultimately, you know, just overcame her. Do you have any theories on that? Well, I know in my own case I was home. I didn't have to leave home and then go to Hollywood. I lived across the hills. I was only half an hour away. And we saw people from studios all around. It was a way of life there. And I had my four brothers and my mom and all my old, same old, you know, high school friends. And my life didn't change that radically. And I think that's a very important thing to have that, you know, that home base. And when you're up, it's great. And when you have a tough time, they're there for support. And I think that's very important. I think that's one of the reasons that I, you know, I'm so hep on adoption because I think everybody needs to have a home base. And that's what Marilyn did not have. Yeah. And she kind of went from one group to another group to another group, you know. And she didn't, I don't think she had very many really old buddies. Were you able to keep up with her through the years? No. I don't think Marilyn kept up with too many people at all. She kind of, whichever, whoever was managing or running the show at the time, she spent all her time with them. And that may have contributed to the problem, too. I think so. Of insecurity. Yeah. Which is basically, I guess, what it was. Because then you're totally alone. Yeah. She did call when we made Gentleman Mary Brunettes after that. Jean Crane and I were in New York doing publicity. And she had her secretary call and say if there was anything that she could do, she was there to help. And so it was friendly, but we just weren't in touch, really. She had just a tremendous amount of sympathy and empathy and feeling for people, situations. And she was always a little unhappy and mad at the big boys, you know. She did have a chip on her shoulder about it. And it's too bad if she could have dropped that, she might not have had to fight so hard. She was certainly not your dumb blonde at all. She was a very bright, sensitive girl. She had a lot of empathy and understanding, and she had a fey sense of humor, which was really very cute. And they all adored her. Marilyn worked very hard. I would go home after a day's work, and I was exhausted, and I wanted to go home and spend it with my family and eat dinner and relax for a few hours. She'd go and work with her coach until midnight sometimes and then turn around and come back in the next morning. I don't know how she did it. Everybody wanted to help her, because she was a very sweet, sensitive, super sensitive girl. In fact, she got her feelings hurt a lot of times when she really didn't have to, because she was so sensitive. To me, it was just a wonderful combination. Here was a little helpless blonde who was doing all this, collecting diamonds, and the dame that didn't care about diamonds at all but would rather have a real love life. It was a good combination, and I knew that. Jane was already a show business veteran when you and Marilyn worked together in Gentleman for Fur Blondes, but it was one of her first big pictures, I think. What was it like to work with her? Was this lady on time? Was she punctual? Was she a pro? I know you are, but what was she like? Well, I'd been working for a long time, and Marilyn didn't even have a dressing room on the 20th Century Fox lot. She'd already made Niagara, but she didn't have her own dressing room, which is insane. She got her first dressing room when we did Gentleman for Fur Blondes, and she was very sensitive, super sensitive. So she got her feelings hurt a lot. The guys around the studio were not exactly... Tactful. No, not tactful. And she started being a little bit late, and Howard Hawks was the director, and Jack Cole was doing the dancing, and he really had a problem with the two of us. When I first met Marilyn, we were rehearsing the dancing, and neither one of us were dancers. Jack Cole would be very tough on his own dancers, but he was the patience of Job with us. He was so dear and so sweet, and he would do it over and over until we were doing it without even thinking, because that was the only way we could do it. You would think with high-powered women like that, I noticed you got top billing. Well, I'd been around a long time. I met her all abroad. What was your nickname for Marilyn? I called her Blondel. Blondel? Blondel. There's something that I say in the book that's something that Marilyn said about you, which I'm sure you know, but which I really liked, which Marilyn at one point said, well, gee, how nice Jane had been to her, and she said, you know, gee, Jane tried to convert me to religion, and I tried to convert her to Freud. But you know, the strange thing is that one of the things I feel that Marilyn was looking for all her life and that would have helped her was not religious, but some kind of spiritual center, something to hold on to. I think you have to have that in life. And she never got it. I certainly wasn't trying to introduce her to religion, because I don't like religion. But it was the Lord. Yes, exactly. It was the Lord. And we had a group called the Hollywood Christian Group, and Connie Haynes and Rhonda Fleming, Donald O'Connor, a whole gang of us would meet in a home, and we asked different speakers. So after Marilyn and I were working for a while, I thought, well, maybe she would be interested. So one night she followed me out to Connie's house, and we had to do. And it was a very good speaker, and we just sat around half the time on the floor because there were never enough seats in anybody's house for this gang. And we did it because everybody that had come to Hollywood might feel peculiar going to church. They'd get stared at and that kind of thing. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. So it is a Christian meeting. It was a Christian meeting, very informal, and the next day she said, I don't think that's for me. Okay. So I said, okay, fine. In 1953, you go to Fox. You're a big star. You bring your team with you. You're teamed up with a sort of unknown blonde girl called Marilyn Monroe to make a film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It's understandable and obvious why men loved you in the films because of your beauty, but it's also interesting, my mom said to me, your dad loved Jane Russell, but I loved her too. And women liked you very much in your films, particularly in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I think. And it's something to do with the scene I've got here. We were buddies. Yeah, that kind of buddy protectiveness. And there's just two little girls from Little Rock, the opening song, when Monroe's doing her bits, there's this look on your face of absolute sisterliness, which is so sweet and so charming. Little Rock, Little Rock. Oh, she was something else. She was adorable. But she would get her feelings hurt. Now, this is what we were talking about earlier, girls. The one that was playing her boyfriend, after their first kiss, somebody asked him what was it like, and he says, I felt like I was being swallowed whole. Well, she overheard that, and she burst into tears and went running into the dressing room and closed the door, and it took forever to get her out. Now, that's ridiculous. You know, I would just say, you'd be so lucky, honey. But that's what I mean about girls. See, Marilyn was not raised around boys. Yeah. That's why she needed you, the girl on the team, to sort of make her feel part of it all. There's a big difference if girls have been raised around boys or if they haven't. Marilyn had never had a dressing room before, so they gave her her first dressing room, and she was afraid to come out on the set. She would get there much earlier than I did. I would get completely dressed in an hour, and other actresses would come in anywhere from 5.30 on, and you had to be on the set at 9 o'clock. I would come in at 8, and they would have my breakfast ready, and they would be rolling my hair dry, and I'd be putting my, I was on the set at 9. Well, Marilyn wasn't there, and she'd been in since 5 or 5.30. So her makeup man told my makeup man, Shotgun, that Marilyn was just nervous about coming out. He said, She's all ready, but she just, you know. Howard Hughes was getting a little irritated. Hawks. Hawks, I mean. So I would go by her dressing room, and I'd say, Come on, Blondie, let's go. It's almost time. And she'd, Oh, okay, all right. And she'd get up, and we'd trot on the set, and she was never late. She didn't know anybody out there, and she was working with someone that had made a whole bunch of pictures, you know, and my crew and I were family. Howard Hawks, the director, says that sometimes he would give you direction, and then you would sort of translate it for her, and then she would say, Oh, right, I can do that. It's almost as if you were his go-between. Is that true? Well, we were friendly. We were very friendly, and I felt like she was a little sister, you know, that you could help along, and the thing was, she had a coach on the set, and instead of looking to the director after a take to see if it was okay, she would look to her coach. You don't do that with Howard Hawks, honey. So he put the coach off the lot. We started out, Marilyn and I started out learning the dance routines first, and Marilyn would have been with her coach the night before, and she'd come in to do the dance rehearsals because neither one of us were dancers, and then after, I'd say, Jack, I'm not learning, you know, and he'd say, Go, baby, go, it's fine, and then Marilyn would stay for another hour. Well, when I worked with Marilyn, it was really only her second starring role, and she was shy about going out on the set, but her makeup man told my makeup man that she was all ready. She'd been in way before I had, and so I said, Well, I'll just go by and get her, and I'd go by and say, Come on, baby, it's time, you know, and she'd go, Oh, okay, and she'd just get up and trot along. You liked her. Yeah, very much. Jane, how good was she as a talent? She was very good, and she had, you know, they said it before, she really wanted to be there. She would work with her coach the night before. She'd come on the set, and her first instinct was to look at her coach. Well, you don't do that to Howard Hawks. Did she share well with you? I mean, they were two beautiful women, and that gentleman was for blondes. Did she share well with you? Yes, she was wonderful. No, no, no, no. She was like a little sister. Jane, did you think suicide when you heard she died? I had no idea. I was at the beach in Malibu at our beach house, and I had a lot of my girlfriends there, and each one had had a problem bigger than the last one, and we were all really laughing about it because it was like, Oh, man, nothing could be that bad, and the guys came home from hunting, and they heard it on the air, and I just thought, Oh, God, if Marilyn had only been here, we would have been laughing about all the problems everybody had.