Oh Grate! More Than Marilyn Monroe’s Dress Blew Up During the Making of ‘The Seven Year Itch’
Mention Billy Wilder‘s sexy 1955 rom-com The Seven Year Itch — or even just its star, Marilyn Monroe — and a single scene comes to mind. That would be Monroe’s “The Girl” standing atop a subway grate, the skirt of her white dress billowing up, to her “delicious” surprise.
It’s an iconic moment in film history, especially at a time when the industry was navigating the censorship of the Hayes Code. But beyond the breezy scene was a battleground of personal and professional tensions that were anything but carefree or glamorous.
To celebrate the film’s 70th anniversary on June 3, we take a behind-the-scenes look at an iconic moment in the lusty, gutsy comic farce that paved the way for Hollywood — and Monroe — to move beyond the Hayes Code and into artistic independence.
The subway scene was specific to the film
20th Century-Fox Film Corp./Courtesy: Everett Collection
Both The Seven Year Itch playwright, George Axelrod, and filmmaker Billy Wilder were eager to bring Axelrod’s work to the big screen — even though they knew the play’s racy material might be tough to get past the censors. Since the play’s adulterous, male-centered theme, and the comical lines that came with, were kiboshed, Wilder leaned hard on Monroe’s sex symbol appeal to ensure the film was a hit.
Neither the subway scene nor a bathtub scene in which Monroe’s character gets her toe caught in the faucet were part of Axelrod’s original script. And both were retooled, because of the censors, but not enough to dim the wattage of Monroe’s sensuality.
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
Monroe had a hand in the subway scene’s creation
According to Melissa Stevens, granddaughter of photographer Sam Shaw, who was both Monroe’s friend and the still photographer on Seven Year Itch, the scene evolved from her grandpa’s previous photo.
“The idea originated from an earlier photoshoot that Sam orchestrated in the 1940s for Friday magazine,” Stevens told Biography. “It featured a sailor and a young girl at Coney Island playing in a wind tunnel. A playful photograph showing the girl’s skirt moving from the wind appeared on the cover and the magazine sold out immediately. Over a decade later, when Sam read the script for The Seven Year Itch, he saw a chance to revisit this ‘skirt-blowing’ idea and turned it into one of the most memorable images ever created.” Little did they know the full scope of the drama the image would create.
Details of the subway scene shoot were leaked to the public
Everett Collection
Depending on who you ask, either Wilder, Twentieth Century-Fox, or perhaps both leaked the where and when of the sexy scene’s shoot. Because of that, hundreds of reporters and photographers, and thousands of whooping spectators, showed up on the corner of New York’s Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street … and got an eyeful.
Wilder admitted he shot the scene over and over again, not because it was necessary, but because it was a successful publicity stunt.
Crew members fought over who would work that night
“I had guys fighting as to who was going to put the ventilator on, in the shaft there, below the grille,” Wilder told fellow filmmaker Cameron Crowe in a 1999 Vanity Fair interview.
Monroe was more modest than we thought
Realizing that the set lights rendered her white panties basically see-through when her skirt blew up, Marilyn asked to pull on a second pair of panties. The double layer did the trick in the dressing room, but not in the scene.
Hollywood reporter Walter Winchell stirred the proverbial pot
Getty Images
When filming began on The Seven Year Itch, Monroe was newly married to baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Though Joe didn’t accompany her to the set, his friend Winchell — having got wind of the scandalous scene — summoned DiMaggio to New York to, er, visit his wife. Humiliated by the spectacle, DiMaggio left the set in a rage. The pair argued ferociously in their hotel room afterward and DiMaggio returned home the next day.
Monroe filed for divorce shortly thereafter, citing emotional abuse. Some outlets reported physical abuse in the relationship, as well, and even DiMaggio’s son admitted the pair fought constantly over his dad’s hyper-conservative idea of marriage and gender roles, and that violence was possible.
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The scene had to be reshot anyway
The hubbub on the streets of New York may have ensured the film’s success — and the end of Monroe and DiMaggio’s marriage — but it never actually made it into the film. The crowd noise proved so overwhelming that Wilder and company had to recreate the set and scene in the Fox studio.
Most of the original shoot exists only in photographs and archival footage, because by the time the censors were done it, The Girl’s skirt only momentarily flies above her knees.
Marilyn knew the moment likely spelled professional doom
Monroe’s friend and eventual The Misfits costar, Eli Wallach, recalled having coffee with Marilyn the day workers put up a giant cutout of her with her billowing skirt in Times Square.”You see that?,” Monroe asked Wallach. “That’s all they think of me now. That’s how they think of me.”
But Marilyn took the upper hand. After Seven Year Itch, she demanded and received script and director approval on each of the films she made next.
DiMaggio escorted Marilyn to The Seven Year Itch premiere
Though they’d been divorced for months, and despite the film’s role in the demise of their marriage, DiMaggio still accompanied Monroe to the Seven Year Itch premiere. According to Richard Ben Cramer’s biography, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, this was in part because Monroe was seeing a married man at the time and in part to salvage the public perception of his relationship with the woman he would love for the rest of his life, and well beyond her tragic death in 1961.
Everett Collection
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May 2020
Celebrate the most glamorous leading ladies from the Golden Age of Hollywood
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