Remembering Stanley Price’s Lunch With Marilyn

Stanley Price, who died in 2019, was a London-born journalist who later became a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Among his many credits was Arabesque, a 1966 spy caper starring Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. In later life Stanley shared reminiscences of his brushes with the rich and famous in The Oldie magazine, now collected by his son, historian Munro Price, in a new book, My Lunch With Marilyn … and Other Stories.

Of course, any connection to Marilyn – however tenuous – is a great marketing tool for publishers, and this tongue-in-cheek title (recalling another memoir turned movie, Colin Clark’s My Week With Marilyn) is no exception. Unlike Clark, however, Stanley Price never claimed any intimacy with Marilyn.

Stanley was a reporter for LIFE magazine in New York during the late 1950s. His singular encounter with Marilyn began at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, where she lived for a few months in 1955; and ended at the Time-Life Building, where she opened the Sidewalk Superintendents Club in 1957. (At this point the main building was still under construction, to be completed in 1959.)

Reviewing My Lunch With Marilyn for the Daily Mail, Roger Price takes up the story…

“Maureen Lipman, in the foreword, says Stanley was ‘erudite, emotional, dry, witty and intellectual’. And although these qualities are intermittently reflected in this book, it must be said that Stanley’s lunch with Marilyn was somewhat inconsequential. His job was to collect her from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, and he found her nervous, a mess.

‘I don’t know why I agreed to have this crazy lunch,’ she muttered. The lunch took place at the top of the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue. The host was Henry Luce, the billionaire panjandrum whose magazines dominated U.S. popular culture in the days before television.

Marilyn was feted with oysters, caviar, champagne — she was a perfect example of Luce’s belief that what readers wanted were ‘titillating trivialities’ about glamorous celebrities. Stanley sat silently down the other end of the table, miles below the salt.

So, a better title would have been, I Didn’t Really Have Lunch With Marilyn. Stanley had lost her on the way to the lift. She wandered away down corridors. Eventually she was discovered in the Ladies, popping a mystery pill.

Pharmaceutically enhanced, she transformed herself into Marilyn. ‘She looked almost like her publicity photos’, in her scarf and dark glasses. ‘Thank you for looking after me,’ Marilyn whispered flirtatiously to Stanley, who was weak at the knees.”

Thanks to Nicola at Marilyn Remembered