Marilyn’s jade satin leotard with jet-like sequins in a webbed pattern and black net overlay from Bus Stop (1956) is featured in the November 2024 issue of UK nostalgia magazine Yours Retro (#81), as part of the regular ‘Screen Chic’ series. The costume was designed by Travilla for a nightclub scene, when naive cowboy Bo Decker (Don Murray) first sets eyes on his honky-tonk angel.
However, as director Joshua Logan wrote in his 1978 memoir, Movie Stars, Real People and Me, Marilyn had a rather different idea of how Cherie should look than the studio may have envisioned.
“The costume designer brought in the designs for her clothes. We looked at them and felt a bit sick. They were too grand, too movie star – not pitiful, comic, and humorous enough for Cherie. There was supposed to be a very skimpy, home-made showgirl’s costume for Cherie’s ‘That Old Black Magic‘ number. The designer had come up with something too well made, too rich, too slick.
But Marilyn jumped up and started wiggling with excitement. ‘Go ahead! Put it in production! It’s perfect, I love it.’ She pushed the designer out of the room.
After she closed the door, I said, ‘Do you really like it? I thought -‘
‘I hate it! I hate it the way it is.’ But then came that rippling laugh. ‘But it isn’t gonna be the way it is. You and I are gonna shred it up, pull out part of the fringe, poke holes in the fishnet stockings, then have ’em darned with big, sprawling darns. Oh, it’s gonna be so sorry and pitiful and it’ll make you cry.'”
Marilyn also had her platinum hair darkened to a honey blonde by hairdresser Helen Turpin, and with makeup artist Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder and photographer Milton Greene, she devised a paler foundation befitting Cherie, who worked at night and never saw the sun.
When Bus Stop opened in the US, Marilyn was shooting The Prince and the Showgirl in England. By the time Bus Stop came to the UK, she had dominated Britain’s headlines for months. As part of a publicity drive for the release, Cherie’s ‘snake costume’ was won by Birmingham teenager Pam Harrison after her mother persuaded her to enter a newspaper contest. She sold it for £25 in 1962, a few months before Marilyn’s death.
In 1975 the costume was auctioned at Christie’s in Kensington, with PR executive Jane Keiren modelling it at a bus stop on Brompton Road. The costume went under the hammer again at Sotheby’s in 1987, with Marilyn lookalike Vicki Scott striking a pose outside the auction house. The costume was purchased by English collector David Gainsborough Roberts at another Christie’s sale in 1989, and showcased in exhibitions, before selling for $100,000 at Julien’s Auctions in 2016.
However, this wasn’t the only copy of Marilyn’s green corset. Actress Debbie Reynolds reportedly acquired her version from a costume sale at Twentieth Century-Fox, and sold it for $230,000 at Profiles in History in 2011.
Furthermore, a similar costume was reworn by Leslie Caron in another Fox film, The Man Who Understood Women (1959.) However, Leslie’s version had black straps whereas Marilyn’s were gold. In a 1963 interview for Paris Match, wardrobe mistress Ollie Hughes said that Marilyn’s costume had been reused by ‘twenty other girls.’
Turning to her other Bus Stop costumes, the green lace blouse and black skirt ensemble was originally designed by Charles LeMaire for Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart (1953), and Marilyn wore it for a 1954 photo shoot with Milton Greene on the Fox lot before selecting it for Bus Stop.
The skirt was reworn by May Britt in the 1959 remake of The Blue Angel – a project once planned for Marilyn – and Madonna donned both skirt and blouse in posters for her 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare.
The complete ensemble was owned by American collector Gene London, and sold for $399,000 at Heritage Auctions in 2021.
A replica of the green blouse was won by a reader of Picture Show magazine in another UK contest. It was later modelled by Monroe impersonator Kay Kent at a Sotheby’s auction in 1988, and again by Pauline Bailey in 1993. It was acquired by David Gainsborough Roberts, who sold it for $7,040 at Julien’s Auctions in 2016.
Marilyn wore a floral negligée for her opening scene in the dressing room of the Blue Dragon nightclub.
And this Travilla trenchcoat, while not seen in the movie, was worn by Marilyn during her first photo call with co-star Don Murray on the Fox lot, and while rehearsing the bus station scene on location in Phoenix, Arizona.
She replaced Travilla’s stylish coat with a rather shabby number which was more in character. As with the negligée, little is known about this costume – but Joshua Logan has shed light on how he and Marilyn created a unique look for Cherie.
“Cherie needed a skimpy little coat to wear – a coat that was her idea of a grand coat but would photograph as the opposite. We found an almost disintegrated, wrinkled, green-gold lamé coat on which we asked the costume department to add a skimpy border of moth-eaten rabbit fur dyed brown. It turned out to be an inspiration. All the rest of the clothes were found in the next half hour. We chose the oldest, the most worn, the saddest, but each with a kind of reach that exceeded its grasp.”
Thanks to Fraser, April, Jackie at Marilyn Remembered, and Jackie at Irish MM Fanclub
The Marilyn Report 