'February 16, 1954: Marilyn arrives in Korea. Her entrance is magnificent. Anticipating the Playboy-bunny scene in Apocalypse Now, she asks the helicopter pilot to swoop down over the troops in the field so she can wave to them. Lying on the helicopter floor, Marilyn extends her upper torso fully outside the bay (a pair of hefty enlisted men holding her legs) as the chopper repeatedly strafes the front. The star, who has never before played to a live audience, has pulled together an act out of numbers from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. In her posthumous memoir, My Story, Monroe describes waiting in the wings before her first performance and hearing the roar of the crowd drown out the music. An agitated officer rushes her out on stage, afraid that the audience will riot. At the last of Monroe's ten performances (during which she entertains some 100,000 troops) the troops do riot. Forced to wait for hours in subzero cold, some 6,000 members of the 45th ("Thunderbird") Division stomp down the barriers and throw rocks to clear the stage for Marilyn. The next morning she returns to wish them goodbye, but instead of sayonara uses eleewah, Korean for "Come here," and precipitates another mad stampede. Marilyn left Korea with a mild case of pneumonia, but told Jennings that her work there had been her "greatest experience with any kind of audience," "the best thing" that had ever happened to her. She reported to Di Maggio that until then she had never "felt like a movie star." Back in Hollywood, she confided in gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky that "for the first time in my life I had the feeling that the people seeing me were accepting me." My Story ends with the chapter "Korean Serenade."
celebutopia
Why can't they just be themselves??
