Okay, bitches. I am about to do a lot of cutting and pasting for you (yes, YOU!) (bitches!) to post most of Simone Signoret's chapter on Monroe from her autobiography "Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be". These excerpts appeared in the New York Times appeared on 05/07/1978
I undertake this Herculean task because the Times article is behind a paywall.
You're welcome. Bitches.
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[bold]“Marilyn Without Makeup” Simone Signoret - Excerpt from autobiography, New York Times, 05/07/1978[/bold]
[italic]They made international headlines in 1960: Marilyn Monroe was reported to have had an offscreen as well as onscreen affair with French star Yves Montand during the filming of “Let's Make Love.” And, for a while, the press followed every detail in the lives of “the blond heartbreaker” and “the moody dark man,” and speculated about the effect of the affair on “the bookworm” (Marilyn's husband, Arthur Miller) and Montand's “admirable wife” (Simone Signoret). But what few people knew was that for months during the early part of the shooting, when they lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the four had developed a warm, supportive friendship. It is this period that Simone Signoret recalls in the following excerpt from her autobiography, “Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be.” [/italic]
One evening in August 1962, Montand phoned me in Toulouse, from Paris. I was having dinner with Costa‐Gavras and Claude Pinoteau. I came back to the table and told them, “Marilyn is dead.”
I was very sad. But I wasn't surprised.
A half‐hour later, the hotel manager told me that he had just refused to rent rooms to journalists from Paris who had asked him where I could be found. I am grateful to this gentleman. He helped me to avoid shining the limelight on an incident that the press had unmercifully hammered away at two years earlier.
That same press had latched on to the four of us ‐ Marilyn, Montand, Miller and myself ‐ in order to make us play parts we had never learned in a play we hadn't read. It's a pity that they never saw us live as we did for four months. They knew nothing about the quiet lives of the four people in Bungalows No. 20 and 21. If they had, they would have seen nothing resembling the blond heartbreaker, or the moody dark man, or the bookworm, or the admirable wife standing on her dignity, which were the labels they pasted on us.
And it's a pity, too, that Arthur Miller, of whom I was very fond, wrote “After the Fall.” After her death.
I am not Norman Mailer: I'm going to talk about somebody I knew. Not about a myth; not about a “poster.” I'm going to talk about my neighbor across the hall, who was fond of her neighbor across the hall; about two women who lived together as neighbors, as one does in any apartment house anywhere.
Montand usually came back from the studio first. After a shower, he closeted himself in his room and, for at least an hour before dinner, furiously attacked the text he had to learn for the next day, often in the company of his coach, come to watch over his accent and tonic emphases.
(CONT'D)