Nobody’s Perfect: The Making of Some Like It Hot is a new book by British author Lucy Jane Santos. (Incidentally, it’s also the title of a 2001 documentary currently available to view on BBC iPlayer.)
“What happens when you bring together:
• a legendary director with a razor-sharp wit,
• a bombshell determined to prove she’s more than her appearance,
• a rising leading man hungry for his breakthrough,
• an unflappable professional striving to keep everything together,
• a fiercely protective drama coach with a reputation at stake,
• a playwright under the shadow of government scrutiny,
• and three brothers determined to reshape Hollywood moviemaking?
You get a behind-the-scenes saga like no other.
Nobody’s Perfect offers an inside look at the making of Some Like It Hot, tracing the film’s journey from pre-production to cultural legacy.
A story where Nobody’s Perfect and there’s everything to play for.”
This hardback edition includes a selection of 16 black-and-white photographs. It’s an enjoyable read and well-researched, showing how the highs and lows of the 1958 production played out in the press.
The book is generally sympathetic towards Marilyn despite her frequent clashes with co-workers. I agree that her voice is largely absent from accounts of tensions on the set and her reputation has suffered as a result. But while comments from Wilder and Curtis in particular have sometimes been cruel, there’s no doubt that her habit of being frequently late to work and needing multiple retakes was hard to tolerate.
Santos also states that Marilyn was the sole breadwinner in her marriage while playwright husband Arthur Miller battled legal troubles and creative stasis. However, the couple’s financial statements indicate that Miller was still earning substantial amounts from his earlier plays, while Marilyn hadn’t made a film in almost two years.
The author explains her defence of Marilyn in an article for Historia, ‘Dismantling the misogynistic Marilyn Monroe myth.’
“Memory – our own as much as anyone else’s – can be a treacherous foundation on which to build history. It is patchy, selective and – perhaps most importantly – largely shaped by what comes after.
And – as it turns out – when you’re writing about something as iconic as Some Like It Hot there is no shortage of memories and anecdotes. On the contrary, there are almost too many. But when you start to sift through them all, patterns emerge and you realise you are hearing the same voices, telling the same stories, and gradually, almost imperceptibility, forming a hierarchy.
In this particular case it is two voices that dominate above all others – Billy Wilder and Tony Curtis. And between them they have effectively narrated the film’s afterlife. They learned what stories worked, what drew laughter and, like any good raconteurs, they honed in on which ones got the best reaction — especially when the subject was Marilyn Monroe.
Almost everyone – whether they’ve seen the film or not, seemingly — knows the stories about her lateness, the forgotten lines, the drinking and emotional fragility. Those tales have been told so often that they have hardened into fact.
But, like any well-rehearsed anecdote, when you stop to look at them in detail they raise as many questions as they answer. Were things really so simple? Was Monroe truly as difficult as this version of events suggests? Or are we hearing a narrative shaped as much by the pleasure of storytelling (and hindsight) as the truth?
And one of the biggest difficulties here is that the most important counter-voice is largely absent. Publicly, she said very little about the experience, but there are memories from friends and family of how she felt which hint at her deep anxiety.
What we do have, however, are fragments – letters, notes, marginalia – that offer fleeting glimpses of her experience during filming. In them, we see her thinking about her performance, worrying about scenes and reflecting on her work. We can read her notes on how to approach Sugar’s vulnerability or trace the actress’s emotional state before, during and after filming.
But while these traces do matter – and were incredibly important to me in writing the book – they do not fully redress the imbalance. And in the absence of her voice, others had time to fill the space — and not always generously.
The behaviours that were framed as uniquely problematic begin to look rather different when set alongside the broader realities of Hollywood at the time. This reassessment does not require us to ignore the difficulties of the Some Like It Hot production, and by most accounts – and, indeed the studio production records – it was indeed challenging. There were delays, frustrations and moments of genuine strain.
To challenge that myth is not to replace it with another, more flattering fiction. It is, instead, to complicate the picture and to acknowledge the contradictions and accept uncertainty. And to remember that history, like memory, is not fixed. It is something we return to, again and again – each time with the chance to see it a little differently.”
In another recent publication, Billy Wilder and Some Like It Hot: The Genesis of America’s Greatest Screen Comedy, film professor Wes D. Gehring steers away from behind-the-scenes controversy, focusing more closely on the movie itself.
“The American Film Institute has ranked Some Like it Hot as the greatest comedy of the 20th century for 25 years. Much has been written about its talented co-writer and director Billy Wilder and the trainwreck casting of the unstable Marilyn Monroe, from whom Wilder managed to get a successful performance. However, the real secret of the film’s greatness lies in Wilder’s career up to its production. He had fully nailed the six comedy subgenres, and his masterful intertwining of parody, dark comedy, romantic comedy, personality comedian, screwball comedy and populism was the trick.
The famous final line ‘Nobody’s perfect’ was Wilder’s own little LGBTQ+ time bomb. At the end of his screenplay (1959) he wrote that America was just not ready for Joe E. Brown’s comment. But the film’s critical accolades and today’s popularity of its musical comedy adaptation say otherwise. As critics suggest, the provocative Wilder would be loving it. This book explores the history, context, and success secrets of this venerated American comedy.”
And coming on June 1st, 2027 – Marilyn’s 101st birthday – Runnin’ Wild: The Madcap Story of Some Like It Hot will be published in the US by W.W. Norton, and in the UK by Faber & Faber (TBC.)
“Widely considered the funniest American comedy ever made, Billy Wilder’s 1959 smash hit Some Like It Hot was so far ahead of its time that it’s become ever more relevant and beloved in our own. Best-selling film historian Noah Isenberg delves into the untold drama behind the movie’s zany tale, in which two down-and-out Chicago musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) elude the mob by disguising themselves as members of an all-girl band fronted by an unsuspecting ukelele player named Sugar (Marilyn Monroe). Runnin’ Wild tells the incredible story of the film’s origins in Wilder’s experiences of Jazz Age Berlin, the racy lessons imparted by a drag coach named Barbette, the colourful ensemble cast, Wilder’s charmed collaboration with cowriter I.A.L. Diamond, and epic on-set battles between the director and Monroe. As infectiously fun as the film itself, Runnin’ Wild offers the definitive account of an all-time-favorite movie.”
Noah Isenberg, whose previous books include Billy Wilder On Assignment, recently paid tribute to Marilyn in the Boston Globe.
“Anyone who’s ever seen Marilyn Monroe as Sugar ‘Kane’ Kowalczyk making her grand entrance at a Chicago train station in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) — dressed in a form-fitting black skirt, frilly overcoat, and flapper hat, carrying a ukulele in one hand and a small, boxy suitcase in the other — likely still holds that indelible image mostly intact. As Sugar saunters by, a burst of steam shoots out from the Florida Limited, tickling her nether regions and giving a nod to an iconic scene from an earlier picture, also directed by Wilder and starring Monroe: billowy white dress perilously close to wardrobe malfunction as she’s perched above a New York City subway grate in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch.
Ever since she first appeared on screen, Monroe, who would turn 100 today, has titillated audiences across the globe. A famous nude, taken when the young Norma Jeane Mortenson hadn’t yet been dubbed Marilyn Monroe, appeared in countless pinup calendars and was later repurposed as Playboy’s first centerfold. In her screen test at 20th Century-Fox, in summer 1946, Leon Shamroy, who shot the test, said that she was like ‘sex on a piece of film.’ Wilder himself spoke of ‘flesh impact’ to describe the phenomenon. ‘You swear … when she was on screen that if you reached up and touched it, you’d touch flesh,’ he said in a 1989 interview in these pages. ‘Nobody else had that. Not even Garbo.’
But despite her tantalizing luminescence, her unique mix of childlike innocence and erotic knowingness, Monroe herself vehemently rejected the idea of being a sex symbol. In her final interview, with Life reporter Richard Meryman, given a month before her death from a barbiturate overdose in August 1962 at the age of 36, she observed: ‘That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.'”
