The Girl’s slingbacks, The Seven Year Itch, 1955
September 15, 1954:
New York
It was just past 1:00 a.m. on Fifty-second Street and Lexington Avenue, but Marilyn Monroe wasn’t tired. The movie lights glared so brightly that it hardly seemed like night at all, and the feeling outside was electric, fueled by the thousands of fans who had gathered to watch the shoot. Fox’s publicity department had tipped off the public that the film version of The Seven Year Itch—already a hit play on Broadway—was filming a pivotal scene on the real streets of New York, and the frenzy that had been building ever since the world’s biggest movie star arrived in Manhattan exploded that night, right by the entrance to the subway. Her character, called only “The Girl,” was to pause over the grate until a train passed, relishing the cool air that blew up her skirt from beneath her. Marilyn knew that countless people would be watching and so, in a last-minute move, slipped a second pair of underwear on over the first to make sure that the coy peep show planned didn’t turn inadvertently X-rated. Marilyn wasn’t usually modest, and any misgivings she’d had about wearing a skintight dress or even posing nude she’d tried, throughout her life, to shed, the way a child acts bravely around her older friends until she’s the one leading them to sneak over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. A year earlier, when Hugh Hefner published those old, amateur photos, the whole world had seen her in her birthday suit.* Still, she didn’t want to have to worry tonight about what onlookers could or couldn’t see, especially since a busybody pressman had invited her husband, Joe, to the city, to witness firsthand the flame his twenty-eight-year-old wife had ignited just by being her blond, larger-than-life self.
Joe DiMaggio: They’d been married just nine months, and Marilyn feared that they wanted different things. He’d committed himself to an actress, yet it was quickly becoming clear that Joe was an old-fashioned Italian boy who wanted his wife to cook for him, clean the house, and iron his Yankees uniform. Marilyn tried to do all that and more, but deep down she had to admit that doting on Joe wasn’t nearly as satisfying as doing her own work. She craved that approval from the crowd: that overwhelming, indescribable feeling that they loved her, worshipped her, and that every man in a sample of thousands wished he were lucky enough to be Joe DiMaggio just for a moment. This was the second time Marilyn tried being a wife, and though she savored the rush that led her to the altar, once again life after “I do” left something to be desired. What was wrong with her that she found being someone’s wife so challenging, that she could balance over a crosshatched subway grate in teetering high-heeled sandals, but when it came to waking up every morning with the same man, her day-to-day existence just felt so tenuous?
But now Billy Wilder wanted to shoot, and it was up to Marilyn to be a professional. As costar Tom Ewell escorted her out into the street, Marilyn could hear the crowd swell, but more important, she could feel it, like a chilly shot of vodka that burned deep into her belly, and then spread down her spine and through her veins. Her wide, red-lipped smile was utterly authentic. By the time the first blast of air came up from the subway, she no longer cared if her dress flew over her head. The sounds—the hoots and hollers from faceless admirers—exhilarated Marilyn even as they drowned out the dialogue. It didn’t matter that she had to say some lines so goofy that she wondered if she’d ever be hired to play a girl who had half a brain. It didn’t matter that they’d have to reshoot on a closed soundstage, or that anyone who’d ever visited New York City knew that the air coming up from the train tracks isn’t cool or refreshing at all, but hot like the winds of hell. It didn’t matter—while the cameras were rolling, anyway—that out of the corner of her eye, she could see her husband, Joe, furious at her exhibitionism. Tonight she was Marilyn Monroe the silver screen goddess, and when you hired her, you got something fantastic.
The image of Marilyn Monroe in the billowing white halter dress, beaming over the subway grate, became one of the most recognizable in Hollywood history. While the oft-reproduced full-body still didn’t even appear in The Seven Year Itch—the Hays Office prohibited any shot from that evening in which Marilyn’s dress floated above her knees—prints from the set abounded. Producers from Fox knew they were sitting on something so special that to promote the film, they hung a fifty-foot version of The Girl over Loew’s State Theatre in New York, just in time for the June 1, 1955, premiere. And with Marilyn’s perfect platinum-blond coif, the white dress that hugged her curves so sensually, and an expression on her face at once guilelessly joyful and almost obscenely pleasure filled, the shoes put the perfect punctuation mark on the outfit: a pair of white slingback skinny-heeled sandals—quintessential CFM shoes—designed by shoemaker to the stars Salvatore Ferragamo.
Since his tremendous success with the wedge, Salvatore’s international business had only grown. With his wife and children he remained in Italy, but he traveled to the States frequently, and continued to make his mark, particularly when it came to designing shoes for Hollywood actresses. While Roger Vivier earned the nickname “the Fabergé of Footwear” by designing delicate sculptures—meant for admiring, not walking, as that misguided demoiselle learned—Salvatore pursued his interest in women’s feet, confident he could learn plenty about a client just by examining her toes and the curve of her arches. He believed he could read women’s feet the way others could scan their palms, or plumb their eyes, for information. Women, he determined, fell into three categories: Cinderellas, Venuses, and Aristocrats. Naturally, Cinderellas had the tiniest feet, wearing shoes smaller than a size 6. Cinderellas were the most feminine, who craved love as the singular source of happiness. Venuses (size 6) tended to be lovely and sophisticated, but underneath their polished exteriors they were simple girls who felt misunderstood, while Aristocrats (size 7 and above) could be sensitive, sometimes moody, but were deeply empathetic. One day in Hollywood, a young woman walked into his salon, and after looking at her feet, he asked if she was an artist. She told him she was a secretary, but Salvatore assured her that she was fated for something greater: one day, she would be famous. That woman was Anita Loos, future screenwriter and author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Perhaps she remembered the soothsaying shoemaker when it came time to dress the film’s blond starlet, or maybe Marilyn pursued him herself, aware that he designed shoes for all of the most stylish actresses like Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, and Gene Tierney. Once they met, it was nothing but mutual admiration: Salvatore and Marilyn formed a relationship that would lead to more than forty pairs of distinctive Ferragamos for the star. Their fittings are tempting to picture. Marilyn, in cropped black pants and a fitted sweater belted at the waist, enters his shop, which is spotless but smells strongly of treated leather. The artist, wearing impeccably polished shoes and a pin-striped bespoke suit, greets his guest, momentarily stunned not just by her beauty, but also by a special quality that sets her apart even from other comely actresses. Marilyn sits, and they make small talk, before Salvatore asks her, in a professional, unpretentious way, if he may remove her shoes. She giggles and looks away, then proffers her feet, pointing her toes like a child but then smiling and raising her eyebrows coyly, as if he’d asked something altogether less chivalrous. As he rests his weight on a footstool, Salvatore anticipates his favorite part of working with a new client: the moment when he gets a first look at the customer’s bare soles. Marilyn sits patiently, fidgeting with a fingernail before making a fist. From a distance, the transaction could be misconstrued as erotic, except that Salvatore isn’t thinking about Marilyn’s body or her famous face at all, but of the kind of shoe he can design that will perfectly capture all that and more: not only the persona but also the essence that makes her her.
“I don’t know who invented the high heel,” Marilyn Monroe once purred, “but all women owe him a lot.” Ferragamo was her prince and fairy godmother all wrapped into one. He was the man who slipped the glamorous shoe onto her ready size 7AA foot, but also the benevolent artist who created it in the first place. For Marilyn, high-heeled shoes contributed significantly to her overall appearance and, according to one tabloid myth, were at least partially responsible for her trademark walk. The noir Niagara premiered in 1953 and featured Marilyn’s character taking a 116-foot stroll toward Niagara Falls, “the longest walk in movie history,” shot from behind. She’s wearing a form-fitting black skirt and stilettos with crisscrossed ankle straps, and as she moves with quick, small steps into the horizon, her hips wiggle back and forth. The shot left audiences hot under their collars and gossip columnists scrambling to explain how the star’s walk could be so sensual, so mesmerizingly rhythmic. Stilettos could have caused her hips to swing, or as those who helped to shape her early career claimed, it was a movement she’d perfected by way of hours and hours of practice. Though Marilyn insisted that she “learned to walk as a baby and [hadn’t] had a lesson since,” one writer claimed that her gait wasn’t natural at all but could in fact be attributed to a trick. Marilyn, he said, intentionally had shoes made with one heel higher than the other, to create that rise and fall so flattering to her body. There was no smoking gun—no one was able to produce evidence of uneven pumps in her wardrobe—but it was often cited as a possible explanation for her undulating stride, considered so inexplicably divine that audiences yearned to find the secret truth behind it.
By 1954, when she was cast in The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn’s persona was so sharply honed that audiences had completely conflated her on-screen character with the actress herself. Having appeared as the gold-digging Lorelei Lee in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and then shining as the nearsighted Pola Debevoise in How to Marry a Millionaire that same year, Monroe was the obvious choice to play The Girl: a comically enticing model/actress who sublets an apartment upstairs from married Richard Sherman, conveniently living alone after his wife and young son have left town for the summer. Sherman, a book editor, is trying to avoid the vices his suddenly “single” peers enjoy—cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women—and stave off the dreaded seven-year itch. The Girl, a bombshell as wily as she is helpless, personifies this temptation, flirting and strutting yet happy to keep the new friendship chaste.
The popularity of the ultimate blond bombshell in the squeaky-clean 1950s hinted at the collective desire for a less-guarded sexuality running just below the surface. The Girl, for all of her unindulged suggestiveness, was the consummate look-but-don’t-touch fantasy. As The Girl, Monroe was stunning to look at and ultrafeminine—yet she was also oddly sexless. Although enticing and, presumably, available, The Girl is childlike and less independent than Sherman’s classy, self-sufficient wife. Rather than a husband or even a boyfriend, she needs a father figure to install the air-conditioning and teach her that martinis don’t come in nice, tall glasses. Ultimately, Sherman’s affair is innocent, occurring via a series of hallucinations, and serving to remind him of the value of his family. The film version of The Seven Year Itch advises married men to see with their eyes, but not with their hands; The Girl-next-door could be “Marilyn Monroe”—as Sherman quips to the man who he imagines vies for his wife’s affections—but she’s still not worth the substantial risk to his home life.
Marilyn was certainly beautiful, but ironically, her home life was suffering at the hands of her own alter ego. The similarities between her and her Seven Year Itch character were marked; The Girl is a pristine canvas for Sherman’s lewd imaginings, but she can’t compete with the flesh-and-blood woman he married. That night outside the subway, after the crowds dispersed and Billy Wilder called, “Cut!” for the last time, Marilyn sidled up to her husband, Joe, who gave her the cold shoulder and wouldn’t speak a word to her until they arrived back in their Manhattan hotel room. Then, behind the safety of closed doors, the fury: how could she mug for the camera like that, where was her respect for herself, for her body, for him? They divorced soon after amid rumors that Joe DiMaggio hit her that night. Marilyn must have felt gutted. The man’s pinup fantasy appeared in the flesh, but just like the movie, his desire for a refined yet docile housewife invariably won out.
Because wartime fiscal conservatism bred a generation of eager consumers, for 1955, the year The Seven Year Itch premiered in theaters, footwear industry insiders predicted their best season yet. “For the past three years,” William J. Ahern, editor of the Coast Shoe Reporter, wrote in his August 1955 editorial, “shoe production has been at an all-time high of approximately 525 million pairs annually, and at the rate production is going right now, 1955 will reach a new top, of about 600 million pairs.” So much for three pairs of shoes per person per year. “Why does she buy more than eight pairs of shoes a year?” one ad for Carmelletes shoes asks in the January 1955 edition of Footwear News. “She loves high fashion. . . . Fashion moves merchandise more than any other force!”
Fashion moved merchandise—as did the feeling among women that they were expected to look a certain way. The goal wasn’t necessarily to look sexy for one’s husband but appropriate; the wife was a reflection of her mate, and thus the rules of dress didn’t favor self-expression either, but rather a rigid set of conventions aimed at crafting the cookie-cutter image of the ideal wife and mom. As the economy steadily grew there was a return to old-fashioned gender politics, in which men were viewed as rational and, on the other end of the spectrum, women as innately irrational, which placed additional pressure on them to be polished and put together, as an indication of the husband’s newfound wealth and success. Under no circumstances was she to make it look effortful; “A lady never admits that her feet hurt,” Marilyn, as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, advises her brunette partner-in-crimes-of-the-heart played by Jane Russell. After a while, the particulars of the new fashions were so ingrained that they seemed nothing but obvious. High heels, for the average 1950s woman, weren’t sexually loaded or politically charged, so much as they were an expression of her femininity, a physical extension of her womanhood.
During these years, families expanded, houses grew, and the American Dream—in which a prosperous, capable man could provide for his lovely wife and darling children—proved alive and well. American men and women alike got everything they thought they wanted—while simultaneously erecting the walls of their own prison cells. Doris Day, the blue-eyed darling of squeaky-clean rom-coms, starred in Pillow Talk opposite Rock Hudson in 1959. The film opened with a shot of her medium-heeled violet mule sandal, which signaled to the audience that although she’s happily single for the moment, deep down she’s the kind of dame who wants to be admired. “If there’s anything worse than a woman living alone, it’s a woman saying she likes it,” Day’s character, the independent Jan Morrow, is counseled by a friend early on. Meanwhile her romantic interest Brad Allen gets the corresponding earful from his thrice-married buddy about his playboy lifestyle: “A wife, a family, a house—a mature man wants those responsibilities.” Like most films in its genre, Pillow Talk ends with a kiss and a promise, courting the viewer but not daring to venture past the altar to define what actual married life might look like.
For women, their initial enthusiasm about buying new clothes and looking pretty gave way to the suspicion that this was, in fact, an obligation, and that wearing heavy skirts, girdles, corsets, and uncomfortable shoes wasn’t exactly a luxury but was, more accurately, a wifely duty. They received this message not just from their husbands (also, in their own ways, becoming slowly demoralized by the limited roles available to them) but also from other women, who penned articles in fashion magazines describing the art of being well dressed. Most famously, fashion designer Anne Fogarty published a 1959 how-to book called Wife Dressing, aimed not at Svengali husbands but at female readers interested in curating their wardrobes. “The first principle of wife-dressing is Complete Femininity,” wrote Fogarty, a successful career woman who nonetheless maintained that she was most proud of her roles as wife and homemaker. “The most dangerous threat to successful wife-dressing is the triumphant cry, ‘I’m married! The battle is won!’ To paraphrase John Paul Jones: ‘You have not yet begun to fight.’ ” Despite its questionable title and very limited ideas about wedded bliss, the book provided accessible advice about keeping a wardrobe manageable and current, making Fogarty a popular style guru to the 1950s housewife. Her firm belief that shoes should always be stylish and well maintained suggested the notion that clean footwear is a signpost of the upper crust: “Old Garbo movies may make you cry—but old shoes are only good for hanging on the back of a bridal car or giving to the children for dress-up play. Nothing spoils an outfit more than time-worn shoes. . . . If you feel guilty about spending lots on shoes, spend a little less on each pair but replenish more frequently. Fashion is a living, changing part of your life.”