Chapter Twelve
EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR 1953, Marilyn and Joe made a pact. She would not wear such revealing dresses as to embarrass him in public; he would try to be more patient with her and more polite with Natasha, with whom there was a mutual sharp antipathy. “Marilyn,” she said one evening, “this man is the punishment of God in your life”—hyperbolic even by Natasha’s standards.
Scourge or no, Joe squired Marilyn to restaurants throughout the winter, Sidney Skolsky describing them in his February 9 column as “still very much a combination.” His remark was ironic: at an award ceremony that very evening, when Photoplay magazine honored Marilyn Monroe as Hollywood’s “Fastest Rising Star,” her escort was not Joe but the hastily corralled Sidney.
The reason was simple. To the dining room of the Beverly Hills Hotel (where she lived that season), Marilyn had decided to wear a gold lamé gown designed for her by Travilla. This was a saucy, seductive, body-hugging number she had worn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—a floor-length gown with a deep-plunging neckline, which had been seen only in a momentary long shot. “She had to be hand-sewn into it,” Travilla recalled, adding that he begged her not to wear it. “You’re too fat for it at the moment, Marilyn! It’s too tight—people will laugh!” But she was adamant, telling Travilla that she had just learned “a trick to lose weight quickly—colonic irrigation, an enema that washes water out of the system and immediately shows in lost inches.” This drastic and potentially harmful way to lose weight became a regimen with Marilyn for the rest of her life. “She had two sessions of colonic irrigation that day,” Travilla recalled, although for all that she was happy to fill the dress tightly.
After Joe saw the dress and the absence of brassiere, slip or underwear beneath the costume that afternoon, he departed angrily. In his column next day, Sidney discreetly informed his readers that Joe “had to go to San Francisco for a few days”—no doubt to cool off in the northern air and to take comfort in the simple decencies of his family.
As she may well have expected, Marilyn had no competition for attention as she glided into the hotel’s Crystal Room that evening, wearing the skintight gold dress “that looked as if it had been painted on,” as columnist Florabel Muir reported next day.
With one little twist of her derriere, Marilyn Monroe stole the show. . . . The assembled guests broke into wild applause, [while] two other screen stars, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, got only casual attention. After Marilyn every other girl appeared dull by contrast.
With that, the formidable Joan Crawford swung into action. A star since the year of Marilyn’s birth, she met her potential rival with no sporting good cheer. To the contrary, she summoned the press and publicly denounced Marilyn’s “burlesque show,” advising that “the public likes provocative feminine personalities, but it also likes to know that underneath it all the actresses are ladies.” And then, with almost religious solemnity, Crawford added: “Kids don’t like [Marilyn] . . . because they don’t like to see sex exploited. And don’t forget the women. They won’t pick [a movie] for the family that won’t be suitable for their husbands and children.”
Obviously, the forty-nine-year-old star was relying on Hollywood’s (and the country’s) short memory, for as Billie Cassin and then as the young Joan Crawford she had literally jumped to fame by dancing the Charleston nude on speakeasy tabletops, and then by appearing in a number of blue movies. Nor would she have been pleased, that February night, to be reminded of a statement she made in her wild twenties: “One thing that makes for healthy American girls is a small quantity of clothing.”
But not for Marilyn the pithy rebuttal or the handy reference to Crawford’s past. Just as when she had been denounced because of her busty appearance next to America’s sedate servicewomen, she quietly disarmed the enemy: “The thing that hit me hardest about Miss Crawford’s remarks,” she told Louella Parsons and the nation, “is that I’ve always admired her for being such a wonderful mother—for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I knows what that means to homeless little ones?” It is unlikely that Marilyn knew of Crawford’s way of mothering—an appalling severity later detailed in a book by one of the unfortunates she adopted. But never mind: Marilyn the waif, with a canny appeal to her own benighted past, conquered once again.
In 1953, perhaps only in America could the matter of a young woman’s dress become front-page news—a sudden Southern California storm in an otherwise temperate climate. But moral support was forthcoming. “Marilyn’s the biggest thing that’s happened to Hollywood in years,” said Betty Grable, who had been Fox’s great audience draw during the previous decade. “The movies were just sort of going along, and all of a sudden—zowie!—there was Marilyn. She’s a shot in the arm for Hollywood!”
So much was true, and Grable was personally friendly toward Marilyn. But in fact the studio publicity department wrote those words just as the two blondes, with the brunette Lauren Bacall, began work on How To Marry a Millionaire in March. An expensive Technicolor comedy, it was designed as Fox’s attempt to make CinemaScope as effective for intimate films as for their biblical epic The Robe. The new wide-screen process and Marilyn Monroe: these were Fox’s two major defenses against the increasing defection of audiences to television. Just as with Technicolor, stereophonic sound, 3-D, Cinerama (and even a mercifully short-lived contraption alternately called Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama), studios tried to provide by gimmickry what was often lacking in strong adult stories with coherent narrative construction.
The result of this rush to draw audiences also meant that roles could be specifically written (more often, simply sketched) for popular stars. The clever writer and producer Nunnally Johnson had already provided Marilyn and Fox with her episode in We’re Not Married; now he was ready to oblige both by presenting her, Grable and Bacall in what was essentially a fashion show. The title How To Marry a Millionaire summarized its plot, which was based on two plays about three gold diggers who pool their resources, rent a Manhattan penthouse and set about capturing rich husbands.
Although for her sleeping scene she caused a stir (as she had during Niagara) by wearing nothing underneath the sheets, she was as usual paradoxically terrified to step clothed before the camera. When she was finally able, however, an intensity occurred—“a love affair nobody around her was aware of,” according to her director, Jean Negulesco. “It was a language of looks, a forbidden intimacy. . . . The lenses were the audience.” And they responded by the hundreds of thousands. Before the summer, Marilyn was receiving more than twenty-five thousand fan letters weekly and Redbook, following Photoplay, bestowed on Marilyn yet another award—“Best Young Box Office Personality.” All this notoriety and the unimaginable fame did not, however, turn her head; she affected no airs, demanded no privileges. She remained herself; as she had said, it all seemed to be happening to someone else.
Never had Natasha been less necessary to Marilyn’s performance than in How To Marry a Millionaire, but the actress seemed “under the spell of her dramatic coach,” as Nunnally Johnson recalled. “By this time,” added Marilyn’s co-star Alex D’Arcy, “Natasha was really advising her badly, justifying her own presence on the set by requiring take after take and simply feeding on Marilyn’s insecurity. ‘Well, that was all right, dear,’ she often said to Marilyn, ‘but maybe we should do it one more time.’ ”
The standard maneuver ensued during shooting that spring. First, Marilyn demanded retakes of every shot until she saw the nod of approbation from Natasha, who was at last banished by the exasperated producer and director on April 13. Then, claiming an attack of bronchitis, Marilyn failed to appear for work next day. Finally, Natasha was reinstated—and at a higher salary. “Monroe cannot do a picture without [Lytess],” agent Charles Feldman wrote in a memo to his staff after visiting the film set. “The coach threatens to quit unless she is compensated in a substantial manner.”
But also typically, this capitulation was well rewarded. As the myopic Pola, Marilyn had the least onscreen time of the pretty trio, yet she gave a comic performance worthy of Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin, crashing hilariously into doors and walls when not wearing her eyeglasses.1The camera also captured brief moments of real sweetness, for Pola (very like Marilyn herself, as Johnson doubtless intended) was an insecure young woman, fearful of rejection and dependent on the kindness of friends.
Marilyn’s droll rendering of nearsighted Pola was her first important comic role, and with it she joined a short list of women who successfully combined humor and sexual allure: Mabel Normand, Clara Bow, Marion Davies, Colleen Moore and Jean Harlow comprised nearly the entire pre-Monroe list; Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball were highly attractive women, to be sure, but their films stressed lightning comic antics rather than sexiness. On the contrary, most comediennes were defiantly plain—those like Louise Fazenda, Marie Dressler and Fanny Brice. With the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn conjoined a carefully planned comic timing to the appealing accidents provided by nature. With these films, too, she learned how much could be communicated by adopting Jean Harlow’s trademark humming of the simple sound “Mmmmm” to suggest just about anything, and her ability to stand quite still and overwhelm the presence of every other moving actor in a scene.
Some of the nuances in her performance may well have derived from additional acting classes she attended that spring, at the Turnabout Theater: Michael Chekhov introduced her to the famous mime Lotte Goslar, who trained actors in certain aspects of subtle movement and body language. During the production of How To Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn attended group sessions with Goslar. Her shyness, however, precluded her engaging in exercises with classmates or improvising with them more than once or twice, and so she attended only infrequently.
Despite Marilyn’s idiosyncrasies, even Lauren Bacall, no cheerful martyr to the tardiness of fellow players, had to admit that there was “no meanness in her—no bitchery. I liked her. She said that what she really wanted was to be in San Francisco with Joe DiMaggio in some spaghetti joint.” Marilyn also endeared herself to Betty Grable, who had been passed over for the role of Lorelei Lee. When Grable’s daughter was hurt while horseback riding, Marilyn telephoned frequently, offering help and comfort—“and she was the only person to call,” according to Grable. (“Honey,” she said warmly to Marilyn one day during production, “I’ve had mine—now go get yours.”)
Similarly, Alex D’Arcy recalled trying to calm Marilyn’s fears of inadequacy by inviting her to dine out one evening and praising her acute comic timing. “I looked into those famous liquid eyes,” he recalled, “and saw only a little scared child. I had to avert my gaze to hide the twinge of pity I felt.” Try though they might, the Hollywood press could not find tidbits concerning uncollegial hostility during the production of either Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or How To Marry a Millionaire.
The “little scared child” was lonely when Joe traveled on business for much of that spring. DiMaggio’s paternalistic criticisms had become as familiar as his slightly condescending protectiveness, and his absence seemed to summon the abandonment she had felt earlier—in her childhood and when Jim Dougherty shipped out during the war. Typically, Marilyn turned to her surrogate papa, Sidney Skolsky, for comfort and companionship. She chauffeured him to his appointments when she had no shooting call and accompanied him to the occasional Hollywood wedding (Sheilah Graham’s), to a nightclub opening and to a party for visiting royalty (the King and Queen of Greece, who turned up in Hollywood that autumn).
But Marilyn felt forsaken if separated from Sidney for ten minutes, as happened at a party given by actor Clifton Webb. Desperately, she followed Judy Garland from room to room. “I don’t want to get too far away from you—I’m scared,” Marilyn said—to which the equally insecure Garland replied, “We’re all scared. I’m scared too.” Marilyn was also tense and selfconscious when Sidney squired her to a sneak preview of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes early that June; displeased with her own image on the screen, she seemed to enjoy only scenes without her.
No such anxiety was evident on June 26, when Monroe and Russell signed their names and placed their hands and feet in wet cement on the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard—the same place Gladys and Grace had pointed out the marks of other stars almost two decades earlier. Dressed in matching polka-dotted white summer dresses, the blonde and the brunette joined a long list of movie stars who for thirty years had accepted Sid Grauman’s invitation to this awkward act of movieland exaltation.2 That evening, Skolsky took the two stars to dinner at Chasen’s restaurant, an autograph hound’s delight where even the normally blasé kitchen staff slipped into the dining room to watch the blonde and the brunette tuck into their steaks and fried potatoes. For an entire week, the day’s events were detailed in word and picture on the pages of every major American newspaper and magazine, which gave them as much coverage as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that same month and even more than the highly publicized engagement of that glamorous couple, Senator John F. Kennedy and Miss Jacqueline Bouvier.
By early summer, Fox had given Marilyn her next assignment. Following the unjust rejection of her touching, subdued performance in the unpretentious and underrated Don’t Bother to Knock, the studio had put her in leading roles against a mighty waterfall (inNiagara), on a luxury liner and in a pasteboard Paris (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and in a Manhattan penthouse (in How To Marry a Millionaire). It was perhaps inevitable that eventually she would be cast as a saloon singer in a western.
Like the previous Technicolor extravaganzas, River of No Return was full of impressive scenery and special effects; it was also, alas, a bundle of clichés, and neither the splendor of the Canadian Rockies nor Marilyn’s maturing beauty could redeem ninety minutes of celluloid ennui.
The first problem (about which she complained to Fox at once) was the tiresome story of an ex-prisoner cowboy who finds his lost little boy in the care of a mining-camp singer. Deceived by her greedy boyfriend, the trio—Marilyn, beefy Robert Mitchum and winsome little Tommy Rettig—are left amid the glories of nature to battle the perilous rapids of the eponymous river; Indians who are out for any white scalp they can find; a hungry bobcat; and fortune hunters who appear out of nowhere with rifles and threats. After negotiating their route on a flimsy raft along the final stretch of water, they come to town and to a final shootout that will make of them a happy little family.
This was Marilyn Monroe’s twenty-second film and her fifth leading part, but Twentieth Century–Fox still had no idea what to do with her. The truth is that, whatever special qualities she brought to them, any actress could have played her roles: they required little more of her than to pose picturesquely, walk seductively, gaze blankly and sing a few songs that fed male fantasies and confirmed the cherished belief that pretty blondes are both dumb and venal. Object though she did, Marilyn was constrained to abide by her contract, and she fervently devoted herself to music rehearsals. As the performer Kay in River of No Return she was required to deliver four songs, which she did with admirable panache—a torch song (“One Silver Dollar”); a bawdy, backroom ballad (“I’m Gonna File My Claim”); a tune to amuse the boy (“Down in the Meadow”); and the title number. Thirty years after her death, this quartet was at last commercially released as part of Marilyn’s complete recordings, too late to have rightly celebrated her as a first-rate vocalist independent of an arid movie but permanent confirmation that she was capable of far more than was asked. As so often, her moments onscreen provide the picture’s only interest.
The second problem with River of No Return was the choice of director. Viennese-born Otto Preminger was trained as a lawyer and aspired to a judgeship; but he turned to filmmaking (most notably of Laura in 1944), in which he was reputed to act not only as jury but also as executioner with his casts and crews—a dictatorial man who could reduce even the hardiest actors to sobs. This turgid western was an assignment for Preminger as for Marilyn, but for it he was culturally unfit, and this pitched him into an ill humor from the start.
At the center of the production’s problems that summer was Natasha, who was “trying to direct [the picture],” according to Marilyn’s agent, Charles Feldman. “I pleaded with [Marilyn] to relax and speak naturally,” recalled Preminger, “but she paid no attention. She listened only to Natasha . . . and rehearsed her lines with such grave ar-tic-yew-lay-shun that her violent lip movements made it impossible to photograph her. . . . Marilyn was putty in [Natasha’s] hands.”
Those hands could be tenacious, as Natasha herself unwittingly admitted: “Marilyn,” she said one day in Canada, “you don’t care about me, only my work with you. If you didn’t need me, you wouldn’t know how to spell my name.” To such desperate statements it is almost impossible to make a reply, nor could Marilyn find one satisfactory to Natasha. “Marilyn thought there was some magic in Natasha,” said Robert Mitchum years later. “She felt she needed someone other than a director, preferably a woman, to tell her when she did something right.”
The tension was not helped by the sheer physical demands placed on Marilyn, who had (both on location and in the studio) to cope with real and recreated rapids. Paul Wurtzel, chief of Fox’s special effects department, recalled that Marilyn was subjected to considerable rough treatment—gallons of water thrown at her for take after take on the raft, to mention just one difficult sequence. “We put her through a lot on that film, and there was never one complaint. She knew what the picture required, and once we got her on her marks she was a pro. The whole crew adored her.”
Dominated by her coach, longing to please her director and (thus Robert Mitchum) fearful of going before the cameras because she was terrified of being judged, Marilyn nevertheless shone in the final cut. There was something inconsonant about her as a nineteenth-century performer in the crude wilderness: her tight jeans, stylish blouse and perfect makeup were absurdly anachronous. At the same time (as in Niagara), she was both the startling exponent of unpredictable nature and a figure in stark contrast to it. Her best moments have the ingenuous, direct appeal springing from her amalgam of tenacity and softness: singing on a makeshift stage in a mining camp; collapsing with chills and hunger in the forest; seeing the futility of her long affair with a handsome but nasty manipulator; realizing her love for quiet, protective Mitchum and his brave little boy.3
Her achievement was all the more remarkable because, as Mitchum, Wurtzel and Snyder recalled, Marilyn rarely had a moment to herself, either in Canada or back in the studio. Publicists arranged a constant stream of interviews; Zanuck or one of his minions telephoned her daily to recite Preminger’s complaints about Natasha; and Joe, anxious about false rumors of a flirtation between Marilyn and Mitchum, arrived with his friend George Solotaire. The threatening eddies and the chilly Canadian nights were easy to sustain by comparison with the emotional squalls swirling around her.
Snyder recalled one quiet, important moment. On a train to location shooting, he and Marilyn were admiring the spectacular scenery when he said, “Here are the Canadian Rockies, Marilyn. If you’re really in love with Joe, why don’t you get out of the movie business? The two of you could move up here, build yourselves a beautiful house, settle down and have kids.” She thought for a moment. “Whitey, I know all that,” she said sadly, “but I can’t do that—I just can’t.” She did not elaborate.
While Marilyn worked days, Joe fished, hunted and then waited at Becker’s Bungalows in Jasper, Alberta (where the cast and crew were also housed), and at the Mount Royal Hotel in Banff when the company moved there. They could live together at times like this, but whenever there was talk of marriage she was even more uncertain than just before a movie scene. As Snyder recalled, “Joe could be very hard to get along with—surly and withdrawn—and he was awfully jealous. Marilyn liked to invite a few people for coffee or a drink at the end of the day, but when Joe was around the mood was dark. He hated the movies and everything to do with them.”4 Joe’s only practical purpose was the star’s comfort, especially after she turned her ankle in Jasper National Park on August 19—a minor incident that brought a famished press back in full force, as if she were moribund, to document her hobbling about on crutches and behaving bravely.
Location shooting in Canada was completed at the end of August, and on September 1, Marilyn, Joe and the company returned to Hollywood for interior scenes at Fox. When the airplane landed in Los Angeles, a throng of over one hundred reporters and photographers pushed forward, shouting questions, jostling for pictures and—rare for newsmen—applauding her wildly. Robert Mitchum had to exert all his considerable brawn to protect her from injury. “She thought they were cheering for someone else,” he recalled.
By fascinating coincidence, that week an historic book was published: Dr. Alfred R. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which was even more controversial than his earlier companion volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
There was important news in the world that summer: the armistice ending the Korean War and the first return of American troops in early September; the controversy surrounding the execution of alleged spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; the rantings of Senator Joseph McCarthy (who madly accused former President Truman of deliberately supporting communism); the bloody Soviet crackdown against anti-Communist demonstrations in East Berlin and Russia’s announcement that it had the hydrogen bomb.
But of equal importance to both the media and to the American people was Dr. Kinsey’s published research, the first serious scientific studies of sexual activity in the United States. The mere fact of its contents and its availability virtually divided a country still mired in Puritanism, still in a kind of perpetual adolescence, incapable of confronting its collective id. Marilyn Monroe and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which had opened nationwide in July, were popular manifestations of exactly what Dr. Kinsey was exploring and exactly what movie audiences both longed for and deeply feared.
From 1942 to his death in 1956, Kinsey was a zoologist and director of the Institute for Sex Research at the University of Indiana. In 1948, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the first academic study of sex in America and a surprise bestseller. Kinsey and his staff had interviewed more than five thousand American males, of whom they asked detailed questions about their frequency of marital and extramarital intercourse, petting, masturbation, homosexual experiences and incidents of bestiality. When the book appeared in stores (and only a few public libraries), many municipal police departments tried to confiscate copies—just as women’s groups and church societies had tried to interfere with interviews and suppress the publication. As shocking as the inquiry was, it was equaled by the news that the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation had provided funding for the study. Millions claimed it was a filthy book and many shrugged it off as unnecessary and really quite boring; there is no count available on how many copies were borrowed, loaned, stolen and smuggled into schoolbags.
Then, more than twelve thousand interviews and five years later, came Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, just when Marilyn Monroe was appearing daily in newspapers, weekly in magazines and constantly (or so it seemed) on the neighborhood movie screens. Many civic and religious leaders attacked both Kinsey and Monroe as if they were directly, commercially linked, but neither could be controlled or contained. Marilyn puckishly cavorted her way through “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” while the Institute for Sex Research organized and interpreted questionnaires, films, literature and art, thus attempting an interdisciplinary study of sex and sexual practices. In 1952, just when the scandal had broken over Marilyn’s calendar poses, the United States Customs Office was suing the Institute for importing foreign erotica. Such works, after all, were carefully controlled by authorities, lest the purity of the American mind be contaminated by unseemly considerations of matters sexual.
The Kinsey reports were designed to be read: although they extended to eight hundred pages, the format and contents were simple. After detailing their methodology, they gave dispassionate, clinical lists of results. No consideration was allowed for either bravado or false humility, but the essential veracity of the reports was supported by the anonymous nature of the interviews and the frankness of the subject matter.
The 1948 study of men focused on the variety and frequency of heterosexual and homosexual activity, while in 1953 the women’s study calmly dwelt—to the horror of millions in America—on the female orgasm. Equally appalling to many was Kinsey’s sober insistence that no particular type of sexual activity could be called “more normal” than any other type; to the contrary, he said, sexual activity runs a gamut of procedures and “outlets.” Normality, in other words, is the province of legislatures and social customs.
The coincidence of the Kinsey reports with Marilyn Monroe’s rise to stardom and her firm entrenchment within it was mutually reinforcing: for the first time, academic inquiry was taking seriously the most delicate aspect of popular awareness and that which required the most stringent regulations. Like Marilyn, Kinsey punctured the pretenses of Puritan-Victorian moralism about desire (not to say female aggressiveness) that still persisted—in Hollywood through the Motion Picture Production Code and the Legion of Decency, and throughout the country in civic, school and church groups.
Of particular relevance to American life in general, and to the beginning of a widespread backlash against the sexual openness of characters represented by Marilyn Monroe, was the discovery that women’s sex lives had changed dramatically since World War I. By 1950, Kinsey reported, more than half of the country’s women were not virgins at the time of marriage; fully a quarter of married women had extramarital affairs; and most astonishing of all, women were indeed enjoying sex. The American female, then, was leading a life quite different from the presumptions of American men. This claim was so sensational that Kinsey’s publisher, who printed a first run of five thousand copies, soon sold more than a quarter million.
The week Marilyn’s plane touched down in Los Angeles, Time magazine was trumpeting news of “K-Day” and detailing the contradictory reactions to Kinsey’s publication by both press and public, for the book was dividing people as much as the morality of Marilyn’s costumes and Lorelei’s motives in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The New York Times buried the story of the Kinsey controversy in a remote inside page, while the Philadelphia Bulletin prepared a thirty-three-hundred-word report that it finally killed, fearful (as it said in an explanation to its readers) of giving “unnecessary offense to many in [our] large family of readers.” The Chicago Tribune was less confused, dismissing the report as “a real menace to society,” while the Raleigh Times offered free copies. Perhaps predictably, Europe yawned: Italian newspapers mentioned Kinsey only briefly or ignored him altogether, while Paris expressed surprise that anyone could be surprised. Meantime, in American nightclubs, where any word connoting sexual intercourse was forbidden, the word “Kinsey” was used as a code substitute to avoid obscenity charges. In 1953, straightforward discussion of sex could perhaps be found only in Kinsey’s books, medical and psychiatric seminars and high school locker rooms.5
In fascinating ways, then, Marilyn Monroe’s rise to the height of stardom coincided with the Kinsey report on women and an era when America itself was in the throes of a kind of adolescent confusion about sex. She replaced the bawdy, wisecracking Mae West and the sparkling allure of Jean Harlow (both phenomena of the 1930s) with something at once adult and childlike. Although in herself she transcended America’s fantasies by a constant effort at self-perfection, Marilyn simultaneously represented those fantasies. She was the postwar ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently needy, worshipful of men, naïve, offering sex without demands.
But there was also something quietly aggressive in her self-presentation as a frankly carnal creature; thus by a curious congruence, her sexual impact both matched and resisted the cultural expectations of 1953. Vulnerable and frightened though she was (and often appeared to be onscreen), there was yet something tenacious and independent about her. And perhaps most disturbing of all to a culture in such turmoil, she made overt sexuality seem respectable. The ladylike Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly received the Academy Awards, but Marilyn was everywhere mobbed and constantly heard the cheers of thousands.
At the same time, this unwitting pioneer had to be presented by the studio mostly as one of life’s contingencies—little more than a dumb blonde (and thought so by the country) in order that she could charm without challenge. Men could appreciate her without feeling she had triumphed over them, and women could sense that she was no threat at all. Her admirers yielded to her without handing her a victory—or even, finally, any respect at all.
But because she seemed to be a woman with a strong sense of her body’s power, she was an exponent, a summary of the postwar American woman Kinsey reported—and like Kinsey’s woman, she could not yet be taken seriously. In this regard, it is perhaps easier to understand America’s obsession with her during her life and since her death, for in considering Marilyn Monroe, the culture had somehow to confront both the reality of a responsive yet independent woman as well as the threat she posed to both sexes, the unfulfilled dreams and the personal (not merely sexual) maturity both longed for and feared in the American woman.
This entire amalgam of desire and confusion about Marilyn and her problematic presence was in a way symbolically represented in her live television debut on September 13. As a guest on Jack Benny’s comedy show, she portrayed herself in a dream sequence on a ship’s deck. But when Benny awoke there was only a large, unattractive woman at his side—who is then miraculously transmuted into Marilyn Monroe. “She was superb,” according to Benny. “She knew the hard-to-learn secret of reading comedy lines as if they were in a drama and letting the humor speak for itself.” Her Fox contract prohibited cash compensation for this performance, but Marilyn could accept a new black Cadillac convertible with red leather interior, which she proudly sported around town for the next two years.
As usual, one of her tasks in the new car was to chauffeur her friend Skolsky, who continued to pinch-hit for the occasionally absent Joe DiMaggio. That autumn, Marilyn and Sidney were seen at Ciro’s cheering Johnnie Ray’s nightclub act; in such surroundings, even the celebrities acted like fans and begged for her autograph. “Success has helped The Monroe,” Skolsky noted. “But she hasn’t lost that rare combination of being part of the crowd as well as aloof at the same time.”
This remark went perhaps deeper than he intended, for during her recent history Marilyn had (rather like royalty) cultivated both an involvement with people and a distance from them. A singular example of this paradox occurred when she learned on September 28 of the death of Grace McKee Goddard, who after several years of chronic alcoholism and crippling strokes took her life at the age of fifty-eight by an overdose of the barbiturate phenobarbital. When Grace was buried at the Westwood Memorial Park on October 1, Marilyn was not among the mourners.
Her absence had less to do with a shyness of crowds than the fact that for years there had been virtually no communication between the two women. Grace, who had effectively planted the seed of Marilyn’s career, had shaped its destiny, groomed and encouraged young Norma Jeane, had been excluded from the realized success and was never present at the celebrations of stardom. After an exchange of a few warm letters in the early part of Norma Jeane’s marriage to Dougherty, subsequent correspondence was only sporadic, concerned mostly with the care and lodging of Gladys.
Marilyn’s withdrawal from Grace was at least partly the result of Grace’s retreat into a haze of alcohol and drug dependence—a condition that so frightened Marilyn on two visits in 1949 and 1951 that she avoided meetings thereafter. In this regard, Grace may have reminded her of the gradual loss of Gladys. In effectively cutting off relations with Grace, Marilyn avoided being rejected again by the one who had once before abandoned her by marrying her off and departing to West Virginia.
In a sad way, Marilyn’s distance from Grace was the ironic fulfillment of the distance Marilyn had once felt from Gladys—a void Grace had both filled and exploited. Making Gladys’s daughter her own, she had set in motion the schedule of her own eventual rejection, for at the end Grace had succeeded only too well in transforming her friend’s child into a creature of her own fantasy. She had also arranged Norma Jeane’s marriage and participated in its dissolution, sending her to reside with her Aunt Minnie so that a quick Nevada divorce would expedite the first contract with Fox. Married for years to a shiftless, womanizing tippler and suffering both illness and addiction, Grace could no longer endure the complete loss of meaning in her own life as she watched Marilyn’s thrive.
Denied participation in the career for which she felt responsible—and perhaps in some unadmitted way burdened with guilt for the separation between Gladys and her daughter—Grace saw death as her only refuge. When she was found lifeless on a fragile cot in her Van Nuys bungalow, the undramatic finale had in some ways the contours of classical tragedy. There lacked only a recognition scene and the catharsis of articulated pity for a woman driven and ultimately destroyed by that wildest of American furies, the savage quest for stardom’s empty affirmation.
By the time she was twenty-seven, all the women Marilyn Monroe had known as role-models had come to unfortunate ends. It is not surprising, therefore, that Marilyn turned again to Natasha Lytess as a surrogate mother and spent more time with her.
Although she did not attend the gala event, Natasha helped select a studio gown for the premiere of How To Marry a Millionaire on November 4. Before the screening, Nunnally Johnson and his wife Dorris invited to their home for drinks and a buffet supper Marilyn, Lauren Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart. Vivacious, laughing and radiantly beautiful, Marilyn was also edgy with excitement over the imminent reception of the film. Unaccustomed to liquor, she then downed three beakers of bourbon and soda and headed for the theater, amiably supported by the notorious imbiber Bogart—her gait as much restricted by her tight dress as by her tight confusion. The waiting crowd, however, saw only their beloved Marilyn and repeatedly roared her name as an array of celebrities arrived. Dressed in platinum-colored silk with shining beads, she was indeed the cynosure of all eyes. That night, as Jean Negulesco recalled, Marilyn felt “she had proved to everyone (and herself) that she could stand any competition.”
Marilyn’s entrance into the theater, reported a trade journal, defied everything “since Gloria Swanson at her most glittering,” but a few snide comments from her contemporaries did not escape her attention. “This is just about the happiest night of my life,” she said. “It’s like when I was a little girl and pretended wonderful things were happening to me. Now they are. But it’s funny how success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you.”
She may well have been thinking of Natasha Lytess as much as of any proximate star rival. Coach and occasional, unofficial dresser she may have been, but Natasha was also (thus Marilyn) “going quite mad and asking [my] attorney to give her $5000 to cover medical costs about to be incurred by surgery. I am completely fed up with her and now realize that she is an extremely tricky woman. But,” she added kindly, “I don’t want her to lose her job at Fox.”
There were, it seems, three reasons for this sudden shift in attitude. First, after twenty films under Natasha’s tutelage, it was clear that not one of Marilyn’s colleagues had ever approved of the coach’s tactics or appreciated her interference. At last the complaints had accumulated beyond Marilyn’s ability to ignore them. Second, Marilyn was quite simply gaining in confidence; third, she wished to please Joe. By late 1953, according to Marilyn’s new agent, Hugh French, Lytess’s days were “numbered, and in the long run that surely must be a good thing for Marilyn.”
The end of the Marilyn-Natasha symbiosis, which would actually require two more years for its official rupture, was applauded by no one more than Joe, who after almost two years of courtship at last obtained Marilyn’s consent to marry him. At the same time, he was as resentful of her attachment to Hollywood in general as much as to Natasha in particular, and he constantly urged Marilyn to quit moviemaking altogether—or at least to improve her financial status in the business, which was his only level of interest in it. By December 1, for example, after a meeting with Marilyn, Feldman’s colleague Ray Stark drafted an interoffice memorandum to the effect that DiMaggio had “convinced Marilyn not to do any more Fox pictures until she can negotiate a better contract.”
Joe could not have realized that these were soon to be identical suggestions from Marilyn’s old acquaintance, the photographer Milton Greene, who would add to his counsel the idea of a bold new venture. He arrived in October with his new bride, Amy, a former Richard Avedon model who subsequently worked as an executive fashion consultant.
Since their rendezvous in 1949, Milton (now thirty-one) had left Life for Look magazine and had become one of the most sought-after celebrity photographers. One of his assignments in 1953 was a series on Hollywood stars, and that summer he took nine portraits of Marilyn as she strummed an antique mandolin and then half reclined, casual and relaxed in a short, black and provocative caftan. When Milton’s photographs were published in the November 17 issue of Look, Marilyn sent him a dozen roses in gratitude.
But there was more. Milton also listened to Marilyn complain of the studio system, of her absurd salary (fifteen hundred dollars weekly) in light of the great sums her films were making for Fox, and of her boredom with roles like Lorelei, Pola and Kay. He suggested that they consider forming their own production company, to raise financing, to choose subjects and directors, to bring their best creative efforts to bear on Marilyn’s future. And so there was set in motion a crucial turn in Marilyn’s professional life and, as she and Milton began to speak quietly with their attorneys, a complicated task that would transport her from Hollywood for over a year and help to alter forever the tradition of actors’ long-term contracts to studios. From Milton Greene, in other words, she was hearing the counsel, the concern and the offer of representation such as no agent had given her since the death of Johnny Hyde.
That season, the Greenes and Marilyn became fast friends—primarily because, according to Amy, Milton saw a potential in her that no one else had, and on him she began to rely. He had rendered her sublimely in still photographs: what might they together not accomplish as producers of films specifically made for and starring the most famous woman in entertainment history?
On November 21, 1953, Joe departed Los Angeles for San Francisco, where he began to make quiet plans for their wedding. Marilyn, meantime, kept her counsel and when ordered to report for ten days of difficult interior retakes on the dreaded River of No Return, “she cooperated to the fullest,” as the vigilant Hugh French was pleased to observe.
Everyone had good reason, therefore, to expect that Marilyn would comply with Fox’s order for her to report on December 15 for her next assignment—a silly affair called Pink Tights, a remake of Betty Grable’s 1943 film Coney Island, about a schoolteacher-turned-music hall crooner. But this stereotypical Monroe role was only one of the last several straws in the burden of Marilyn’s resentment against Fox. Nor was she mollified with the news that Frank Sinatra would co-star, for she also learned that he would be paid five thousand dollars a week, more than three times her salary.6
At a quarter to midnight on December 23, as studio executives wondered how to bring pressure against her for being a week late to work, she boarded Western Air Lines flight 440. Booked as Miss Norma Dougherty, she paid $15.53 for a cheap seat in the rear of the aircraft and stowed a small overnight bag with one suit, a skirt and two sweaters. But lavish Christmas gifts from Joe (among them a mink coat) awaited her in San Francisco.
1. The picture is spiced with lines rewarding the movie maven. Modeling a luscious orange bathing suit at a fashion show, Marilyn enters as a hostess comments, “You know, of course, that gentlemen prefer blondes—and this is our proof of it!” Similarly, Bacall protests a fondness for much older men: “Look at that old fellow what’s-his-name in The African Queen . . .”—a reference, of course, to Bacall’s husband Humphrey Bogart (twenty-five years her senior).
2. The tradition began when Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks accidentally stepped into freshly poured cement in front of the theater, and Grauman—leaping to assist them—asked the stars to make a virtue of necessity and add signatures to the footprints. Marilyn’s were not far from those of Jean Harlow, who had obliged Grauman on September 29, 1935.
3. “I wouldn’t accept River of No Return [as an assignment] today,” Marilyn said in 1955. “I think I deserve a better deal than a grade-Z cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery and the CinemaScope process. The studio was [backing] the scenery instead of actors and actresses.”
4. The press, however, saw only undiluted bliss in the Monroe-DiMaggio affair: even the New York Times, on July 12, was delighted to report their “long-time romance.”
5. As if on cue, that same September calendar distributors and playing card manufacturers were reshipping in record numbers the image of Marilyn Monroe nude. Hot on their trail were the police, who in several cities raided shops, confiscating calendars as if they were dangerous chemicals. One hapless Los Angeles businessman, Phil Max, made headlines round the country that year when he was arrested and fined after placing “A New Wrinkle” in the window of his camera store on Wilshire Boulevard. With equal fervor, the district attorney of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, banned distribution of the notorious calendar and urged the governor to impose a similar restriction statewide.
6. Her resentment of this discrepancy may have motivated her blunt “reservations” about Sinatra’s recent album when she spoke with Dave Garroway on the Today television show early in 1954: otherwise, she always spoke with highest praise for him.