Although Marilyn Monroe appeared in just one film during her six-month stay at Columbia Pictures, it proved to be a huge milestone in her career. Previously at Twentieth Century-Fox she had twice appeared in walk-on bit parts. In Ladies of the Chorus Marilyn Monroe graduated to a starring role.
As with a lot of young starlets on the Columbia lot, Marilyn was given acting and vocal lessons to help improve her technique. She worked tirelessly at acting, singing and dancing and was thrilled to put her skills to good use for Ladies.
Her renditions of “Every Girl Needs a Da-Da-Daddy” and “Everyone Can Tell I Love You” are solid performances, especially considering it was her first time singing on screen. Ladies also marked her first acquaintance with designer Jean-Louis, then head of Columbia’s costume department, a job he held from 1944 to 1958. Marilyn would later work with him again on The Misfits and Something’s Got to Give but, more importantly, it was Jean-Louis who would design Marilyn’s sparkling “nude” evening gown that she wore to serenade President John F. Kennedy for his birthday celebration in 1962.
By all accounts, Marilyn took the role of a chorus girl in the B-movie very seriously.
“She told me very tearfully she had lost her mother, and that, just like the chorus girls of the story, she knew what social ostracism was like,” Adele Jergens, Marilyn’s co-star in the film. “Marilyn was the sort of girl you instinctively wanted to protect, even thought she obviously had brains and probably didn’t need much protection.”
Shot in about 10 days, the one-hour picture focuses on a showgirl, Peggy Martin (Marilyn Monroe), who falls in love with a rich socialite (Rand Brooks, best known for his role as Charles Hamilton in Gone with the Wind.) Peggy’s mother, May Martin (Adele Jergens), also a showgirl, warns her daughter that their love can never be because of class differences. (A side note: Jergens was cast as Marilyn’s mother in the film despite the fact that she was just nine years older than Marilyn!) Despite some bumps in the road, love prevails and everything has a happy ending, Hollywood style.
As a result of Ladies of the Chorus, Marilyn received yet another first—her first press coverage. She generally received positive reviews, with The Hollywood Reporter summing up Ladies of the Chorus as a movie that “sets out to prove that burlesque queens are really quite proper wives for wealthy young members of socially prominent families and does a fairly competent job of making its audience like it.”
Variety reported, “Miss Monroe presents a nice personality in her portrayal of the burley singer.”
And the Motion Picture Herald: “One of the bright spots is Miss Monroe’s singing. She is pretty and, with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise.”
Marilyn was thrilled. “I kept driving past the theater with my name on the marquee,” she later said. “Was I excited! I wished they were using ‘Norma Jeane’ so that all the kids at the home and schools who never noticed me could see it.”
Audiences agreed. The low-budget B-movie was a modest financial success when it was released, but it wasn’t enough to impress Columbia head Harry Cohn. Marilyn’s contract with Columbia was not renewed when it expired and Ladies of the Chorus would remain the only picture she made with the studio.
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