ARTS

Architecture

Close encounter of a curved kind

Alan Powers hears what happened when Le Corbusier met Marilyn Monroe . . . Idon't think many people know that Marilyn Monroe once met Le Corbusier. I was the only other person there,' said the grey-haired architect beside me on the plane.

'Tell me how it happened,' I replied.

'It was in 1958, at Amaganssett, Long Island. I was vacationing with friends and I knew that Corbu was over to see the site for his Harvard building. He used to stay with Nivola the sculptor, and stopped off on the way back to New York.'

'And Monroe, what was she doing there?'

'Well, Arthur Miller had a beach house there too. Marilyn was about to start work on Some Like it Hot. She didn't show up on the beach often, except this one day. I was sitting there and first of all I see Corbu coming out of the water. He liked swim- ming. I don't need to tell you that he died in the water. I knew it was him because I had his photo pinned up over my drawing- board. And, of course, I had Marilyn's too.'

'Did you talk to him?'

'He just came and sat down. I knew he wouldn't talk English, so I tried my French on him. It didn't take much to get him going — the terribleness of America, how they had messed him up on the UN build- ing, you know the kind of thing. And then there was this tingling in my spine and we both turned round, and there was Marilyn, almost hidden in a white towelling wrap.' 'Your two pin-ups.'

'Incredible, wasn't it? To start with, Corbu just went on and on as if he hadn't noticed. But even with only one eye work- ing and his pebble glasses, he could see who it was. "America wastes everything," I remember him saying. "Paris could live for a month on the waste New York makes in one day. Waste of ground — like these houses here." He gestured behind him and his eyes met Marilyn's.

'Well, you may know that Marilyn was a great reader. She'd read Tom Paine's Rights of Man on the set of her first movie. She always had her head in some book or other. And she understood his French too. So she says, very quietly, "Mister Corbusi- er, I think? I'm pleased to meet you." And funnily enough, he seemed to get it all in English with no trouble.

"A wall of apartment buildings, a mile long — then there is a city," he went on.

"But Mister Corbusier, that's not a city," she says. "I've seen that kind of build- ing in England, and it's no good."

'He might have been angry, but she said it so sweetly he just smiled. "Marseilles — my Unite d'Habitation, magnificent. Sun for all. The vertical city — borne up by pilotis like the thighs of giant bathers." He was getting eloquent. She stretched her legs out in the sun.

"New York — a terrifying city," he went on. "The offices so expensive and smooth, like the suits of businessmen. Nature denied. Only at United Nations could I have made New York civilised, and look! it is now made like a movie, because I am not allowed to control it."

"I like movies and I like New York," replies Marilyn with a wink at me. "But tell me, Mister Corbusier, I've always wanted to go to Paris, and I hear that you want to knock it down."

"Only my little joke," says Corbu. "Pub- licity stunt — you understand." There was not much you could tell Marilyn about publicity. She seemed to understand that pretty well and nodded, but she said, "You ought not to play with people's lives that way. Just think what some dumb Ameri- cans are going to do with your joke. Now, if I make dumb movies sometimes, nobody get hurt."

"But with my Modulor, there I have given even the dumb architect a way to make the good easy and the bad difficult." Corb got out his little roll of paper with dif- ferent dimensions on it and started explain- ing about proportion. Marilyn stood up and tossed off the robe, like she was on camera. She had a swimsuit underneath, of course, but it didn't hide too much. "OK, Mister Modulor man," she said, "Come and test my proportions." Well, Corbu wasn't gen- erally slow with girls and he seemed to appreciate the invitation. He went on call- ing out figures and putting them into har- monic sequences. "Perfection," he finally exclaimed as they sat down beside each other. "You are a work of Nature, and architecture is part of Nature."

"So you think your architecture is part of nature?" asks Marilyn. "I follow nature — sex is part of nature."

"And architecture is part of sex,' says Corbu. "It is a truth I have tried to tell the world but the world is blind."

"Well, my experience is that the world can see pretty well," replies Marilyn. "So perhaps you're not getting the message across. All that concrete, that's not very sexy, and it's not very natural either."

'I could see Corbu wasn't too happy being told this, but he wasn't going to turn his back and walk away, even if meeting someone more famous than himself was a little disconcerting. He tried to change the subject to Josephine Baker, because he had once had a passion for her and travelled back from Rio with her in 1929. "You remind me of Josephine," he said. "She was not Beaux Arts, she was the most mod- ern thing to come out of America." "She wasn't exactly old-fashioned, I agree," said Marilyn, "but when it comes to pulling men, I don't think much has changed since the Stone Age. So why does architecture always have to be new and dif- ferent? I don't want to change my beach house, and I don't think I'd like to make it out of concrete."

—If you let me, I will design you a beach house," offered Corbu. I think he had always resented that it was Adolf Loos not he who had designed a house for Josephine Baker, and here was his chance to get one up. He started drawing the plan in the sand right away, talking all the time, then mod- elled it up solid. Marilyn watched fascinat- ed. The design was a little more curvaceous than most of Corb's, but if you imagine the Ronchamp chapel with a series of convex surfaces, you might be getting somewhere near it.

"'That's nice," said Marilyn when it seemed to be finished, and lay down on the sand to compare herself to the model. "I think your architecture is like nature after all, that's what I like about it. Say, would you like to come back to my place and talk it over some more? Mr Miller is away in New York — he would so much have enjoyed meeting you." She seemed to have quite a look in her eye just then, but I regret that it wasn't for me. Still, as they disappeared over the sand dune, I thought that this was a meeting that really should have happened. They had more in common than you'd imagine.'

'You're right there,' I said. 'Look, I think we're just coming down to earth. . . '