Jane Russell Interviewed About Marilyn Monroe And Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1992

During a different period of her life when her career was just beginning to take off was an actress who starred with Marilyn in an unforgettable film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This woman is a Hollywood legend herself. She has been on Broadway and in dozens of films. Would you please welcome Jane Russell. Skirt, I'm so pleased. She came in in white slacks and says, I don't know if I'm going to put on this skirt or not. And I said, you're a star. I do whatever the boss wants. Jane was already a show business veteran when you and Marilyn worked together in Gentlemen Prefer 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. And she got her first dressing room when we did Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and she was very sensitive, super sensitive. So she got her feelings hurt, you know, a lot. The guys around the studio are not exactly tactful, not tactful. 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. I want to show people a clip that Jane may not have seen in a little while anyhow from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes because it mentions these people. We just happen to have it available. Take a look. We're just two little girls from Little Rock. They cut that number, but they left it in the titles. Only in Hollywood and only those days. 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, you know, 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. I'd been around a long time. I'm very all broad. 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, that she really 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. Well, I never. I think you have to have that in life. And she never. I certainly wasn't trying to introduce her to religion because I don't like religion or spirit. But it was the Lord. Yes. 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. Makes sense. And the next day she said, I don't think that's for me. OK. So I said, OK, fine. But you know what? She had some kind of stability, whether it was an accepted religion or it was Freud or anything else that she wanted. At Christian Science when she was younger, her favorite aunt, Aunt Anna, had been a Christian scientist in Maryland. Up even towards the end of her life, before she went out, let's say, to do something where she was really nervous, she would often turn to someone and say, hold a good thought for me. Which is knowing, like a little prayer. And towards the end of her life, she started doing that again, asking people to hold a good thought for me. And sometimes I think, you know, you can say their life was tragic and then she's dead, but you know what? Millions of people are still holding a good thought for her. And that's a lot more than can be said for a lot of people who are still here in the body. That's pretty good.