Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe: the names don't generally go together, as the old song has it, "like a horse and carriage". Arminta Wallace writes.
It's tempting to typecast these two female icons, one as a limelight-seeking blonde bombshell, the other as a modest and famously reserved jazz singer (no prizes for guessing which is which). But behind the typecasting, the reality isn't so clearly black and white.
In the 1950s both women were at the height of their fame. Monroe was the most sought-after box-office attraction in Hollywood, and Fitzgerald a legendary singer who could draw audiences from all sides of the tracks. The only trouble was, the tracks weren't easy to cross. Although she had sold millions of records, Fitzgerald was barred from appearing in many of America's most glamorous nightclubs because she was black - this despite the fact that her manager Norman Granz, the record producer and founder of the famous Verve label, was a tireless civil rights campaigner.
Granz demanded equal treatment for his musicians and refused to accept any discrimination at hotels, restaurants or concert halls, even in the Deep South. On one occasion, while Fitzgerald was in Dallas on tour with a big band, a police squad - clearly focused on Granz's political, rather than his musical, track record - barged right into Fitzgerald's dressing-room. They found band members Dizzy Gillespie and Illinois Jacquet shooting dice, and arrested everyone. "They took us down," Fitzgerald later recalled, "and then they had the nerve to ask for an autograph."
When Monroe was making her first musical, There's No Business Like Show Business, her vocal trainer bought her a fistful of Fitzgerald records and told her to listen to them constantly. The film, released in 1954, was received with some coolness - but within five years Monroe's performance in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot marked her as a first-rate musical comedienne. She may have felt she owed Fitzgerald, or she may simply have been a genuine fan - but in any case, she created a sensation by orchestrating a five-night run for Fitzgerald in an influential whites-only Hollywood club called Mocambo.
This odd-couple encounter has been dramatised by the US-born playwright and critic Bonnie Greer in her piece Ella, Meet Marilyn. Having seen the incident recounted in a programme on The Biography Channel, Greer - a regular panellist on BBC2's Newsnight Review - imagined it as a moment stolen in the backstage area of history. "I wrote this basically because the information has been suppressed," she told an interviewer when the play opened at last year's Edinburgh Festival. "And if you don't control the information, it controls you. That's certainly true in the case of Marilyn Monroe, who was a victim of information control even after her death. She was the biggest movie star in the world and she made this kind of stand for Ella Fitzgerald. People at the time didn't understand it, so they glossed over it, and now not many even know about it. Which means that it has never really been celebrated."
What Monroe actually did was to make a personal call to the owner of the Mocambo, Charlie Morrison, to tell him she wanted Fitzgerald booked immediately. If he would do it, she promised to take a front table every night - which, of course, was enough to guarantee massive publicity and a paparazzi feeding frenzy. In Fitzgerald's rather more sober words, "The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - a little ahead of her times. And she didn't know it."
It would be a mistake to read too much into the meeting of Monroe and Fitzgerald; Monroe was no civil rights activist, and Fitzgerald's talent spoke - indeed, still speaks - for itself. She sold some 40 million albums, won 13 Grammy awards, and is still regarded as one of the finest of all jazz singers. She is celebrated not just for her flawless intonation and three-octave range - "she had," in Mel Torme's somewhat spatially confused phrase, "a vocal range so wide you needed an elevator to go from the top to the bottom" - but for her extraordinarily fluid scat singing, in which she recreated the sounds of orchestral instruments in a stream of wordless improvised syllables and sounds.
It is this aspect of Fitzgerald which will be celebrated at The Helix, Dublin next Saturday night, October 7th, at 8pm when the RTÉ Concert Orchestra joins forces with singer Claire Martin and conductor John Wilson for an evening of Fitzgerald favourites. The show is planned partly to mark the 10th anniversary of Fitzgerald's death at the age of 79 from a diabetes-related illness, partly for the sheer joy of hearing Cheek to Cheek, Every Time We Say Goodbye, Too Darn Hot, Blue Skies and all the rest of them.
And if the atmosphere is in danger of getting too reverent or too serious, perhaps the ghost of an impish Marilyn Monroe will add a little mischief to the proceedings.