In this candid, Marilyn Monroe, clad in a matching red ensemble and diamonds, is caught in a moment of laughter while relaxing in her dressing room. We can’t help but wonder what was so funny!
Grable, Bacall and Monroe are absolutely charming in an off-the-cuff black-and-white-turned-color portrait from the set. Look at those perfect pearly whites!
Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, get maybe a little too cozy with Monroe at the film’s premiere. (Where are those eyes going, Bogie?) Bogart and Monroe never acted together, but he and his wife famously met during the making of To Have and Have Not (1944) and went on to costar in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
In a cute meta moment, Bacall refers to Bogart in How to Marry a Millionaire when she says, “I've always liked older men... Look at that old fellow, what's-his-name, in The African Queen. Absolutely crazy about him!"
Monroe looks stunning in this promotional pin-up.
There’s that red diamond get-up again!
Given the loneliness and sadness Monroe notoriously felt for much of her short life, there’s something poignant about seeing her smiling with a gaggle of adoring fans, as seen in this photo from the film’s premiere.
Monroe, 26, and Betty Grable, 36, look like they’re having fun in this set photo, and their chemistry was real. Contemporary viewers assumed that because Grable was a sex symbol of an earlier era, she’d view Monroe as a rival, but this was hardly the case. In fact, she reportedly told the star 10 years her junior, “Honey, I've had mine—go get yours,” and the blondes became offscreen friends.
Monroe and Lauren Bacall are stylishly spectacled during a break in filming. The two stars were friendly, but in a 1994 NPR interview, Bacall quipped, “My only complaint about her was that she was late all the time, but she was late out of fear as much as anything else, but it was hard to sit around and wait. She was usually an hour or two late every morning.”
Bacall also acknowledged that she and Monroe were very different, and spoke candidly of her impressions of her, telling radio listeners, “I wish I had been as photogenic as she was, but she was very sweet, kind of far away, very self-involved, but no meanness. She was not bitchy, she was not strident in any way, she just always seemed a little lost to me—wistful, kind of, just kind of not quite there.”
In 1953, Marilyn Monroe starred in not one but two classic Technicolor rom-coms, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. Both films featured the blonde icon as an effervescent young woman looking to marry rich men, and in How to Marry a Millionaire, she’s part of a power trio, playing a lovable, occasionally bespectacled ditz opposite veteran stars Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable.
More than 70 years after How to Marry a Millionaire was released, Monroe, Bacall and Grable remain a true pleasure to watch, and the film’s witty humor, colorful costumes and evocative New York setting have inspired many a comedy in its wake. Take a look at 10 rare photos from behind the scenes of the beloved ’50s hit and learn what Bacall and Grable really thought of Monroe.
Everyone wants to marry a millionaire, but maybe not as much as Pola Debevoise, Loco Dempsey and Schatze Page in the hit 1953 Marilyn Monroe film How to Marry a Millionaire. In it, those ladies do everything they can to try marrying a rich man of New York City with William Powell playing one of them.
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