In his home Michael devoted himself to writing, gardening, and teaching acting to a few people. I became one of them.
As Michael’s pupil, I learned more than acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art—taste.
I studied a dozen plays. Michael discussed their characters and the many ways to play them. I had never heard anything so fascinating as my teacher’s talk. Every time he spoke, the world seemed to become bigger and more exciting.
One afternoon Michael and I were doing a scene from The Cherry Orchard. To set a scene with Michael Chekhov in his house was more exciting than to act on any movie set I had known. Acting became important. It became an art that belonged to the actor, not to the director or producer, or the man whose money had bought the studio. It was an art that transformed you into somebody else, that increased your life and mind. I had always loved acting and tried hard to learn it. But with Michael Chekhov, acting became more than a profession to me. It became a sort of religion.
In the midst of our scene from The Cherry Orchard, Michael suddenly stopped, put his hand over his eyes for a moment, and then looked at me with a gentle grin.
“May I ask you a personal question?” he asked.
“Anything,” I said.
“Will you tell me truthfully,” Michael asked again. “Were you thinking of sex while we played that scene?”
“No,” I said, “there’s no sex in this scene. I wasn’t thinking of it at all.”
“You had no half thoughts of embraces and kisses in your mind?” Michael persisted.
“None,” I said. “I was completely concentrated on the scene.”
“I believe you,” said Michael, “you always speak the truth.”
“To you,” I said.
He walked up and down a few minutes and said, “It’s very strange. All through our playing of that scene I kept receiving sex vibrations from you. As if you were a woman in the grip of passion. I stopped because I thought you must be too sexually preoccupied to continue.”
I started to cry. He paid no attention to my tears but went on intently. “I understand your problem with your studio now, Marilyn, and I even understand your studio. You are a young woman who gives off sex vibrations—no matter what you are doing or thinking. The whole world has already responded to those vibrations. They come off the movie screens when you are on them. And your studio bosses are only interested in your sex vibrations. They care nothing about you as an actress. You can make them a fortune by merely vibrating in front of the camera. I see now why they refuse to regard you as an actress. You are more valuable to them as a sex stimulant. And all they want of you is to make money out of you by photographing your erotic vibrations. I can understand their reasons and plans.”
Michael Chekhov smiled at me.
“You can make a fortune just standing still or moving in front of the cameras and doing almost no acting whatsoever,” Michael said.
“I don’t want that,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked me gently.
“Because I want to be an artist,” I answered, “not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisical. Look at me and start shaking. It was all right for the first few years. But now it’s different.”
This talk started my fight with the studio.
I realized that just as I had once fought to get into the movies and become an actress, I would now have to fight to become myself and to be able to use my talents. If I didn’t fight I would become a piece of merchandise to be sold off the movie pushcart.
I kept telephoning the studio begging for an interview with its chief. I was told, “No interview—just appear on the set when you’re notified.”
I stayed in my room alone and talked to myself. They were ready to give me a lot of money—a million if I would marry them and never wander off and fall in love with art. I hadn’t wanted Johnny Hyde’s million, and Johnny was a much sweeter and kinder character than 20th Century-Fox. I decided I didn’t want the studio’s million, either. I wanted to be myself and not just a freak vibration that made fortunes for the studio sex peddlers.
34
i marry joe
I have to be careful in writing about my husband Joe DiMaggio because he winces easily. Many of the things that seem normal or even desirable to me are very annoying to him.
He dislikes being photographed or interviewed. If he is even so much as asked to participate in some publicity stunt he registers a big explosion.
Joe doesn’t mind being written about, but he is against doing anything to encourage or attract publicity. In fact, publicity is something that makes him wince more than anything else.
Publicity was one of the problems in our courtship after the three-hour tour of Beverly Hills that first night.
“I wonder if I can take all your crazy publicity,” Joe said.
“You don’t have to be part of it,” I argued.
“I am,” he said. “And it bothers me.”
“It’s part of my career,” I said. “When you were a baseball idol you didn’t duck photographers.”
“Yes, I did,” he answered.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Don’t I know it,” Joe nodded.
“Do you want me to hide in a basement?” I asked.
“We’ll see how it works out,” he said.
There were a number of things to “work out.” One was the low neckline of my dresses and suits.
I gave in on this one. I wear no more low-cut dresses. Instead they have a sort of collar. The neckline is an inch under my chin.
I put up an argument about the neckline for some time. But after my adventure with the Army in the Atlantic City Beauty Contest, I began to think that Joe might be right in his “show them nothing” stand.
The situation at the Studio seemed to grow worse everyday. I mean every time I thought about it, it looked worse to me.
Among the black marks the front office had against me was the fact that I had kept Mr. Zanuck waiting for an hour at an Award Presentations ceremony. He accused me of doing it on purpose. This wasn’t true. I was working on the set, and it took me an hour to get the makeup off and my hair restored to normal.
But keeping Mr. Zanuck waiting was only a side issue in the trouble that kept growing. Even the matter of getting more money was a side issue—to me as well as to the Studio. When a studio stumbles on to a box-office name in its midst, it means millions of dollars income. And every studio has learned to be very considerate, financially, toward the goose who lays their golden eggs—as long as she keeps laying them, at least.
The trouble was about something deeper. I wanted to be treated as a human being who had earned a few rights since her orphanage days.
When I had asked to see the script of a movie in which it was announced I was going to star, I was informed that Mr. Zanuck didn’t consider it necessary for me to see the script in advance. I would be given my part to memorize at the proper time.
The name of the movie was The Girl in Pink Tights. It was a remake of an old Betty Grable story.
The title made me nervous. I was working with all my might trying to become an actress. I felt that the studio might cash in on exhibiting me in pink tights in a crude movie, but that I wouldn’t.
I notified the studio that I couldn’t agree to play in Pink Tights until after I had read the script—and liked it. And I went to San Francisco where Joe lived.
The Studio’s first reply was to put me on suspension and take me off the payroll. I didn’t mind. Their next move was to take me off suspension and put me back on salary. I didn’t mind that either.
Then a copy of The Girl in Pink Tights script arrived. I read that and that I minded.
It was much worse even than I had been afraid it would be. Movie musicals usually had dull stories. This one was way below dullness. It was silly—even for a movie about the 1890s.
I had to play the character of a prim, angrily virtuous school teacher who
decided to become a sort of hoochy-koochy dancer in a Bowery dive so as to earn enough money to put her fiancé through medical college. The fiancé is high up in society with a dowager ma, but they are shy on money. This dreary cliché-spouting bore in pink tights was the cheapest character I had ever read in a script.
What’s the use of being a star if you have to play something you’re ashamed of? When I thought of Joe or any of my friends seeing me on the screen as this rear-wiggling school teacher doing bumps and grinds in the great cause of medicine I blushed to my toes.
Pink Tights didn’t even get to marry the Society Man for whose sake she unveiled herself to wiggle in a Bowery Dive. She married instead the owner of the Dive—a man of rough appearance but with a heart of gold (or mush) underneath!
I sent back word to the Studio that I didn’t like the script and wouldn’t play in the movie.
I heard from different people that nobody in the Studio liked the script. Even Mr. Zanuck’s conviction that it was a masterpiece about humble but colorful people had been shaken somewhat by one of his star directors refusing to shoot it.
But that didn’t help my case any. Everybody in the world could despise the picture, including, finally, its audience, and I would still remain in the wrong. This was because of my standing in the eyes of the Front Office. In these eyes I was still a sort of freak performer who had made good against its better judgment.
I wasn’t angry but it made me sad. When the rest of the world was looking at someone called Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Zanuck, in whose hands my future rested, was able to see only Norma Jean—and treat me as Norma Jean had always been treated.
Joe and I had been talking about getting married for some months. We knew it wouldn’t be an easy marriage. On the other hand we couldn’t keep on going forever as a pair of Cross-country Lovers. It might begin to hurt both our careers.
The public doesn’t mind people living together without being married, providing they don’t overdo it. It would be very odd of the public if it did mind since, according to Dr. Kinsey in his report on such things, eighty per cent of all married women have had premarital real love experiences with their husbands.
After much talk Joe and I had decided that since we couldn’t give each other up, marriage was the only solution to our problem. But we had left time and place in the air.
One day Joe said to me:
“You’re having all this trouble with the Studio and not working so why don’t we get married now? I’ve got to go to Japan anyway on some baseball business, and we could make a honeymoon out of the trip.”
That’s the way Joe is, always cool and practical. When I get excited over some magazine giving me a big picture spread, he grins and sneers a little.
“Yes, but where’s the money?” he asks.
“It’s the publicity,” I yell back.
“Money is better,” he says in the quiet way men use when they think they have won an argument.
And so we were married and took off for Japan on our honeymoon.
That was something I had never planned on or dreamed about—becoming the wife of a great man. Anymore than Joe had ever thought of marrying a woman who seemed eighty per cent publicity.
The truth is that we were very much alike. My publicity, like Joe’s greatness, is something on the outside. It has nothing to do with what we actually are. What I seem to Joe I haven’t heard yet. He’s a slow talker. What Joe is to me is a man whose looks, and character, I love with all my heart.
35
korean serenade
My travels have always been of the same kind. No matter where I’ve gone or why I’ve gone there, it ends up that I never see anything. Becoming a movie star is living on a merry-go-round. When you travel you take the merry-go-round with you. You don’t see natives or new scenery. You see chiefly the same press agent, the same sort of interviewers, and the same picture layouts of yourself.
I thought Japan would be different because the Studio had wiped its hands of me. The Publicity Department had received instructions to spike all Monroe publicity. I was to be given the don’t-mention-her-name treatment.
Joe was very happy to hear this, but he didn’t stay happy long. From the minute the Studio washed its hands of me, my name started popping out of big front page headlines. Joe’s too.
Seeing your name in front page headlines as if you were some kind of a major accident or gun battle is always startling. No matter how often you see it you don’t get used to it. You keep thinking—“That’s about me. The whole country’s reading about me. Maybe the world is.”
And you remember things. All your hungry days and hysterical nights step up to the headlines and take a bow.
Japan turned out to be another country I never saw. An Army officer came up to our seat in the airplane as we were approaching Japan. He was General Christenberry. After introducing himself, he asked, “How would you like to entertain the soldiers in Korea?”
“I’d like to,” my husband answered, “but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” the General said. “My inquiry was directed at your wife.”
“She can do anything she wants,” said Joe. “It’s her honeymoon.”
He grinned at me and added, “Go ahead.”
Joe stayed in Tokyo, and I went to Korea. My first stop was in a hospital full of wounded soldiers. I sang some songs including one called, “Do It Again.”
The soldiers were wonderful. They cheered and applauded as if they were having a good time. Everybody loved everything I did except the officer in charge of my Korean tour. He took me aside and told me I would have to change my material.
“What material?” I asked.
“That song, ‘Do It Again,’ ” he said. “It’s too suggestive to sing to soldiers. You’ll have to do a classy song instead.”
“But ‘Do It Again’ is a classy song,” I told him. “It’s a George Gershwin song.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the officer insisted. “You’ll have to change it.”
I hadn’t sung the song with any suggestive meaning. I had sung it as a straight, wistful love song. But I knew there was no use arguing about it. I’d been up against this sort of thing before. People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of a mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts. Then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.
“If I change the phrase, ‘do it again,’ to ‘kiss me again,’ will that be all right?” I asked.
The officer was dubious, but he finally agreed.
“Try it,” he said, “and try not to put any suggestive meaning into it.”
“Just kissing,” I said.
We took a helicopter for the front. I didn’t see Korea and its battlefields and beaten up towns. I left one landing field and came down on another. Then I was put in a truck and taken to where the 45th Division was waiting. The 45th Division was my first audience after the wounded in the hospital.
It was cold and starting to snow. I was backstage in dungarees. Out front the show was on. I could hear music playing and a roar of voices trying to drown it out.
An officer came back stage. He was excited.
“You’ll have to go on ahead of schedule,” he said. “I don’t think we can hold them any longer. They’re throwing rocks on the stage.”
The roar I’d been hearing was my name being yelled by the soldiers.
I changed into my silk gown as quickly as I could. It had a low neckline and no sleeves. I felt worried all of a sudden about my material, not the Gershwin song but the others I was going to sing—“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
It seemed like the wrong thing to say to soldiers in Korea, earning only soldiers’ pay. Then I remembered the dance I did after the song. It was a cute dance. I knew they would like it.
This is where Marilyn’s manuscript ended when she gave it to me.
Milton H. Greene
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Marilyn Monroe, My Story
My Story Page 13