Some meetings are so improbable, so bizarre, that even a photographic record of the event seems fanciful; more a work of fantasy than reportage.
This was one such meeting.
In 1953, at the age of 66 and still a year away from her ascension to damehood, Edith Sitwell – aristocrat, Modernist and doctor of letters – embarked for Hollywood. She was, as she had been for much of her life, penniless. So when an invitation arrived from the celebrated director George Cuckor to write a screenplay of her book about the early life of the virgin queen, Fanfare for Elizabeth, Edith grasped it with her long, elegant fingers. This was her own personal Gold Rush; her promise of financial salvation.
That same year saw the release of Howard Hawks' hugely successful movie, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Marilyn Monroe played Lorelei Lee, a gold-digging showgirl with a penchant for diamonds. Monroe was already tiring of being cast as the sexy dumb blonde, and wanted to prove to the world at large that she was more than just Jell-O on springs*. And so, with the works of Beckett, Whitman and Joyce conspicuously displayed on her bookshelf, she set about wooing the literary elite; a courtship that was to culminate three years later in her ill-starred marriage to the playwright, Arthur Miller.
Many found her intellectual pretensions risible, believing her taste in literature to be as faux as the colour of her hair. So when Edith Sitwell, renowned acid-tongued critic and the very antithesis of the term 'sex bomb', arrived in Hollywood, Life Magazine leapt at the opportunity to bring the odd couple together to watch the sparks fly.
But, surprisingly, the two women warmed to each other almost immediately.
In her autobiography, Edith said of Marilyn: "In private life she was not in the least what her calumniators would have wished her to be. She was very quiet, had great natural dignity (I cannot imagine anyone who knew her trying to take a liberty with her) and was extremely intelligent."
The photograph, too, speaks of a cordial and relaxed occasion. It is one of very few to show Edith (incongruously resplendent in dark glasses) with a smile upon her face. As for Marilyn, demurely attired in a stylish, belted dress with matching dress gloves, she looks for all the world like a newly come-out debutante, primly seated beside a favourite dowager aunt. Both seem easy in the other's company.
So, what was it that bridged the gulf between these two polar opposites: the hypersexual womanchild and the self-proclaimed descendent of Plantagenet kings? Their celebrity, perhaps? Or a shared sense of maternal abandonment? (Both claimed to be unloved and unwanted by their unstable mothers.) Or was it simply that each recognised in the other an individual who, against the odds, had carved out a place for herself in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century? Sadly, we'll never know. All we have left to help us make our conjectures is a single black and white photograph, an echo of an extraordinary meeting a lifetime ago.
*Jack Lemmon's awed description of Marilyn's pneumatic sashaying in Some Like It Hot.
