The subway grating at the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street looks like hundreds of others, but it’s different – it’s where Marilyn Monroe made movie history half a century ago.
As a crowd of thousands watched, she filmed the most iconic scene of her career – in which the rush of air from a subway train below lifts her billowing skirt in the 1955 movie “The Seven Year Itch.”
“It’s a very sensuous scene,” says Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming for Film Forum, which will be presenting a 50th-anniversary engagement of the film beginning on July 22. “It was her quintessential dumb-blonde role, and every Marilyn Monroe impersonator is doing it in that specific dress.”
The scene was shot outside the old Trans-Lux 52nd Street Theater, which was long ago torn down – along with the rest of the block – and replaced by a single, ugly concrete-block skyscraper that carries the address of 345 Park Ave.
Marilyn’s breezy moment is among a host of iconic movie scenes in which New York played a starring role – from Meg Ryan’s phony ecstasy at Katz’s Deli on East Houston Street in “When Harry Met Sally,” to the Empire State Building exploding in “Independence Day” to Audrey Hepburn biting on a cruller in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” outside the posh jewelry store.
In the “The Seven Year Itch,” Tom Ewell, as a married man whose family is away for the summer, and Marilyn, as his flirtatious upstairs neighbor, are seen leaving the Trans-Lux (approximately at the corner of 345 Park, now occupied on the ground floor by the Broadway Diner) after attending a showing of “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”
As Marilyn passes over the grate, the breeze lifts her skirt, much to her delight and Ewell’s frustration – and then it happens again.
The whole scene runs less than a minute – but it took hours to film before thousands of spectators and dozens of photographers who gathered for a shoot that began at 2 a.m. and lasted nearly until dawn.
Among the spectators was Marilyn’s then-husband, Yankee great Joe DiMaggio.
“There were a good 5,000 people there waiting to see Marilyn’s legs,” director Billy Wilder recalled years later, with the crowd chanting, “Higher! Higher” as the scene was reshot 15 or more times.
It was so noisy that part of the scene had to be reshot on a replica of the corner built in Hollywood.
“It was becoming embarrassing, and DiMaggio didn’t like his wife putting herself up for display,” Wilder said.
As Marilyn herself recalled in 1962, “The whistles and the yelling became too much for my husband.”
By most accounts, their troubled marriage, which lasted less than a year, was kaput right there.
But Marilyn – and ex-husband DiMaggio – returned to Manhattan for the film’s premiere on June 1, 1954 (coincidentally her 29th birthday), at the old Loews State in Times Square.
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Sets and the city
Famous movie scenes shot on New York City locations:
“Manhattan” – Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit on a bench at Sutton Place and the East River.
“Ghostbusters” – All hell breaks loose at 55 Central Park West.
“The Godfather” – Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) gets shot on Little Italy’s Mott Street.
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” – Audrey Hepburn feasts on a cruller outside the jewelry store on Fifth Avenue.
“The French Connection” – Gene Hackman chases drug dealer Marcel Bozzuffi below and on top of the Stillwell Avenue elevated subway line in Brooklyn.
“When Harry Met Sally” – Meg Ryan feigns an orgasm at Katz’s Delicatessen on East Houston Street.
“Men in Black” – Final showdown with the aliens takes place at the Unisphere and New York State Pavilion from the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens.
“The Naked City” – Cops shoot down bad guy Ted de Corsia during a chase on the Williamsburg Bridge.
– Lou Lumenick