ABSTRACT
To continue with the comparison between Kelly and her bustier counterpart blondes, underpinning this suggestion of purity (itself an undoubted masquerade, for in private Kelly was credited with a prodigious romantic appetite) is a sense of naturalness. There is something contrived or manufactured about Marilyn, her metamorphosis from Norma Jean Baker into the 1950s girl of celluloid dreams so assiduously and consciously undertaken, her hair so bleached and her make-up showy, as if who Marilyn was mattered less than the way in which her image was to be received. For all the performative irony of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) or Some Like It Hot (1959), Monroe’s flaunting of her assets implies a falsification or fragility (as the media has been wont to characterise it). Conversely, despite being associated with couture and refinement, Kelly projected an image that was always more ‘natural’– one of the most beautiful images of Kelly is of her clearing her clothes off the MGM lot with her publicist just prior to her departure for Monaco and marriage to Rainier. Kelly is looking off camera, contemplative and not engrossed in pleasing our gaze at all, dressed in a casually tailored suit – slightly too ample as expensive clothes often are on the skinny – that’s half hidden behind a voluminous screen gown. Like Audrey Hepburn, Kelly refused to wear falsies to pad herself out (thereby signalling the confidence to set trends rather than follow them) so her on-screen image was perceived to be an effortless extension of her real self. This has led to somewhat breathless assertions about her naturalness. Edith Head, for example, maintained, ‘there was no pretense in her make-up or her clothes; she never dressed to attract attention; she never dressed like an actress; she dressed like Grace Kelly, and she was Grace Kelly’ (Head and Ardmore 1959: 142-3), whilst Cary Grant said of her, ‘Grace acted the way Johnny Weissmuller swam or Fred Astaire danced. She made it look easy’ (Lacey 1997: 179). This fluid transition from woman to icon was an essential component of Kelly’s appeal and lay at the root of Hitchcock’s adoration. Conversely, the icons ‘Monroe’ or ‘Rita Hayworth’ were founded upon an unerasable split between their persona and their ‘real’ selves; in Monroe’s case one can point to the fetishisation of her ‘real’ unhappiness or the masquerading of her ‘real’ intelligence; in the case of Hayworth, as she herself ruefully remarked, ‘men went to bed with Gilda but woke up with me’. This cruel realisation is enacted in Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948), a noir in which the director transforms his then wife from voluptuous, red-haired siren to icy blonde, a version of femininity with which Hayworth appears totally ill at ease.
