by Lois Banner
The backstory to the nude photo begins in the early spring of 1949, when Marilyn went by Kelley’s studio to solicit modeling work, while she was waiting for the Love Happy tour to begin. She didn’t impress him at first: her makeup was overdone, her skirt was too tight, and her blouse was too low-cut. Kelley thought she looked like a trollop. But she used a low, sexy voice to plead poverty, and he relented. Once he’d photographed her in a bathing suit for a beer ad, his opinion of her changed. She was highly professional as a model. Her body was voluptuous; she parted her lips; she assumed a mocking smile. She was on the way to developing her complete sexy Marilyn Monroe look.
Shortly after the session, John Baumgarth, head of one of the nation’s largest calendar publishing companies, happened to stop by Kelley’s studio to see if he had any nude photos to sell. Nude calendars constituted only ten percent of Baumgarth’s sales, but that amounted to two million calendars a year. Kelley had hung one of his photos of Marilyn on his wall. Baumgarth remarked on her beautiful body and told Kelley that he should photograph her nude.54
Kelley asked her if she would pose nude, but she refused. Then she remembered she’d met him by accident in the fall of 1947. Marilyn had been driving to an audition, when her car broke down opposite where he was shooting pinup photos. Kelley had given her ten dollars to help her out. She hadn’t had the money to repay him. In keeping with Ana Lower’s creed, Marilyn always tried to repay her debts, and so she accepted Kelley’s request. When she hesitated, worried that such a photo might damage her career, Kelley promised her his female partner would be in the room and by the time he finished retouching the photo, she wouldn’t be recognizable as the model.
Kelley arranged the setting. He positioned Marilyn on a red velvet theater curtain on the floor, invoking the tradition linking red velvet to female sexuality. With Marilyn lying on the curtain, he shot her from a ladder ten feet above. He played rhumbas on a phonograph during the shoot. Marilyn directed the two-hour shoot with her sensuous body movements. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing. Kelley kept quiet.
Two versions of the nude Marilyn became famous. In the first one, titled “Golden Dreams,” her body is bent into an S-curve, following the feminine “line of beauty” established by the painter William Hogarth in the eighteenth century, based on the curves of a woman’s body. In the second one, called “A New Wrinkle,” her body is stretched out. “Golden Dreams” suggests ancient tales of Zeus impregnating Danae in a shower of gold and modern references to raunchy sexuality. “A New Wrinkle” refers to the wrinkling in the velvet curtain—and to Marilyn’s ingenuity both as a model and as a fresh new face on the scene. In both of them the red nipple on her breast and her red lips match the red in the velvet curtain, although the makeup she wears is discrete, not extreme.
Her mouth is open, inviting sex, although she has neither glossy lips nor a lascivious look. In “A New Wrinkle” she looks both triumphant and afraid. With one arm extended and a hand in her hair, she looks as though she might be climbing up a wall—to achieve an exciting future or to escape a threat. Her curly sprawling reddish-gold hair forms a cloud around her face, giving it a dreamlike quality. Resembling Rita Hayworth (a skilled Latin dancer), she blends into the background while dominating it. She invites the viewer to look at her, but she is in control of the sight lines, with a relaxed tension in her body that suggests motion. She is poised for the male gaze, but she gazes back at the same time. She doesn’t look vulgar in these photos. In neither of them does her pubic hair show—or Kelley airbrushed it out. Her breasts don’t look large and her body looks as much exercised as voluptuous.
Given Marilyn’s perfectionism, she studied famous nude photos for the session. As Sheilah Graham noted, her poses reflect famed reclining nudes of the Western high art tradition: Manet’s “Olympia” and Goya’s “Naked Maja,” in particular. Marilyn’s favorite among the two nudes was “A New Wrinkle.” It is, in fact, the more aesthetically complex of the two. She looks like an Art Deco woman in it, one of those long, elegant female bodies in 1920s sculptures. Those figures led the way to the Varga girl that Bruno Bernard wanted her to be—with long legs stretching into infinity.55
The major influence on her, however, was burlesque star Lili St. Cyr. St. Cyr often posed lying down, sometimes on a bed on stage, with her long body stretched out, beckoning and eluding the viewer. That’s what striptease is about: fulfilling and resisting the male gaze. In “A New Wrinkle” Marilyn’s body looks tall, even Amazonian. Lili St. Cyr often looked that way. When Marilyn had done a stint at a downtown burlesque house, she called herself Mona Monroe. When she signed the release for the nude photograph for Tom Kelley, she also signed her name as Mona Monroe. The parallels between the two experiences weren’t lost on her.56
Yet when John Baumgarth received the nude photos of Marilyn, he wasn’t impressed. Perhaps they weren’t bawdy enough for him. He filed them away, and he put one on a calendar only after Marilyn created a stir in The Asphalt Jungle in the summer of 1950, more than a year after the original photographs were taken. He used “Golden Dreams,” the sexier of the two. Even then sales were low. They were better in 1951, after Marilyn appeared in All About Eve. But they didn’t soar until the spring of 1952, after Marilyn was identified publicly as the model.57
Paradoxically, the nude photo would make her into a major star, as the public became fascinated by her daring behavior. But she would be identified with her nude body ever after, making it difficult for her to land dramatic roles. She had violated a fundamental rule: stars could wear sexy clothes, but posing nude wasn’t acceptable.
This wasn’t a still photo from a movie, so the Production Code didn’t apply. But the post office censors didn’t like it. To get around them, Kelley produced an alternate version of the photo, with a skimpy black nightgown covering Marilyn’s body. Kelley also assembled a board of artists to judge the photographs. They rated them aesthetic and in the high-art tradition. Those nude photos of Marilyn, with no pubic hair showing, became the standard for acceptability in nude photographs.
In June Marilyn finally embarked on her promotional tour for Love Happy. She made appearances in New York and several midwestern cities. While in New York, she went by train to Warrensberg, near Albany, with Adele Whiteley Fletcher, editor of Photoplay, to honor the winner of a Photoplay contest who lived there. Fletcher had promised to bring a starlet along, and she found Marilyn. At first Marilyn annoyed her. She went into the ladies’ room at Grand Central Station at the last minute to redo her makeup, and she almost missed the train. Fletcher’s assistant, who followed Marilyn, reported that she was painfully insecure about her appearance; thus the makeup redo. Fletcher didn’t like Marilyn’s dress—a shirred sundress, cut low front and back, which she feared would offend provincial New Yorkers. When they arrived at Warrensberg, Marilyn asked Fletcher to go to the ladies’ room with her. She had spilled coffee on her dress during the train ride, and she wanted to wash it out. She was stuttering badly.58
In the bathroom she took off all her clothes. Standing nude, she rinsed out her dress, slip, and skimpy panties. A townswoman barged in, looked at Marilyn, and, horrified, backed out. “What’s she so cross about?” Marilyn asked, in a bewildered voice, with no stutter. Fletcher was amazed Marilyn didn’t realize that the woman’s reaction would set off a scandalized buzz in the town. It seems that Marilyn was playing a joke on Fletcher, experimenting with nudity, or caught by her compulsions. Raised by religious people, she knew about provincial morality.
The Love Happy tour generated some publicity. Cowan’s publicists dubbed Marilyn the “Mmm girl,” and some newspapers picked up the title. Earl Wilson interviewed her in New York but, like Sheilah Graham and Jim Henaghan, he wasn’t impressed by her. He thought she was a pretty girl being oversold. Yet, he compared her in print to the “It Girl” (Clara Bow) and the “Sweater Girl” (Lana Turner). Given his stature, those comparisons were invaluable. He also noted that she didn’t wear underpants. She was
using a new publicity gimmick.59 In New York she met Henry Rosenfeld, a women’s clothing manufacturer. Called the “Christian Dior of the Bronx,” he made stylish clothing at reasonable prices for a middle-class market. When she went with Earl Wilson to El Morocco, a fashionable New York nightclub, they were seated at an ordinary table. Intrigued by her, Rosenfeld invited them to join him in the upscale section. He and Marilyn were drawn to each other. She would remain close to Rosenfeld for the rest of her life.
During the tour Marilyn revealed another side of herself. With a humanitarian conscience, she insisted on visiting an orphanage and a medical clinic. In Oak Park, Illinois, she met every child in a state orphanage, and in Newark, New Jersey, she met every patient at a clinic for the disabled poor. She was garnering a reputation for generosity, but the impulse was genuine, a result of Ana Lower’s teachings and her Christian Science faith. She still attended Christian Science services, although she would soon leave the church, as other spiritual paths began to attract her.
Disappointed with the tour, Marilyn left early and returned home. Cowan was angry with her, but Johnny Hyde persuaded Zanuck to cast her as a saloon girl in Ticket to Tomahawk, a musical spoof of westerns. Hyde also arranged an audition for her with Ken Murray to take the place of Marie Wilson, the comic dumb blonde in his revue Blackouts, on a national tour at the time. Murray thought Marilyn resembled a fluttering bird, but she spoke in a low, sultry voice. She hadn’t yet settled on the soft, childlike intonations of the full-developed Marilyn. He regretfully rejected her, because her breasts were too small to fit into Wilson’s costumes. Marilyn was a size thirty-six; Wilson a size forty.60
In October, at Johnny Hyde’s insistence, Lucille Ryman pressured John Huston to cast Marilyn in MGM’s The Asphalt Jungle. The movie, shot in black and white, fits into the genre of film noir, a postwar category generated by Cold War fears and influenced by German expressionism that highlights social corruption and often features an evil, seductive vamp. In film noir, menacing shadings highlight a corrupt urban scene, which in The Asphalt Jungle forms the background to a story about a jewel heist. Marilyn, playing Angela Phinlay, the “niece” of a crooked lawyer, is brilliant. Working with Natasha Lytess, she grafted a lush sexuality and a dumb-blonde innocence to her sweetness, making her a victim as well as a predator. Hints of Marilyn Monroe are there. Huston, known as an actor’s director, helped her with her role. After her success in the movie, Johnny Hyde expected Louis B. Mayer to give her a contract at MGM, but he didn’t. He was close to Zanuck and shared his opinion of Marilyn. Besides, he was grooming other players to succeed Lana Turner, his blonde star. He didn’t need Marilyn.
Johnny pressured Dore Schary, Mayer’s assistant, to do something for her. Schary was considering producing a film version of The Brothers Karamazov, and Johnny convinced him that Marilyn could play Grushenka, the prostitute in the novel whom no man can resist. Schary gave Hyde a script for Natasha and Marilyn to work on. Schary didn’t like Marilyn’s reputation for promiscuity, but The Asphalt Jungle was being played in the screening rooms of Beverly Hills mansions of film executives and major directors, and everyone was saying that Marilyn had stolen the film.61
While Johnny waited to hear from Schary, he landed Marilyn supporting roles in Mickey Rooney’s Fireball as the tough girlfriend of a gangster and in MGM’s Right Cross as a nightclub singer. Even in her early career, she didn’t always play a “dumb blonde.” He had a print made of her scenes in The Asphalt Jungle, and he showed them to anyone he could pin down at the studios. Then he got lucky. Director Joseph Mankiewicz, a William Morris client, was about to film All About Eve. Johnny persuaded him to cast Marilyn as showgirl Claudia Caswell. When Lew Schreiber, Zanuck’s assistant, vetoed the idea, Johnny called in a favor that Zanuck owed him. Marilyn got the part.
All About Eve is the story of Margo Channing, a forty-year-old Broadway star, and a younger actress, Eve Harrington, who lies and cheats to take over her starring role in a Broadway play. It’s a fable about aging women in the glittery world of Broadway, about the perfidy of female—and male—friendships and love, about jealousy in a volatile profession based on public favor. Claudia Caswell is a party girl, using her body to advance her interests, who has latched onto Addison DeWitt, a famous newspaper critic. Claudia is a trophy companion who relies on her beauty and her body; she is the reverse of the hardworking Eve. “A graduate of the Copacabana School of Acting,” she fails in an audition because she can’t act. (The Copacabana was a wellknown New York nightclub.) She is expendable but, like Angela Phinlay in The Asphalt Jungle, she is indomitable. As long as she is young and beautiful, she will find another man. And she speaks “dumb-blonde” lines, as when Addison sends her to vamp a middle-aged producer and she comments, “Why do they always look like scared rabbits?” It’s a silly line, but it contains the ironic truth often displayed by the dumb blonde, a resonant female clown.
With Marilyn’s triumph in All About Eve, Johnny Hyde persuaded Zanuck to give her a six-month contract and to consider her for roles in As Young As You Feel and Don’t Bother to Knock.62 Marilyn was featured that year in Photoplay in an article on rising Hollywood stars; Johnny had persuaded Life magazine to include her in a story on “Hollywood’s Apprentice Goddesses” to appear in the January 1951 issue. Toward the end of 1950, Hyde paid for cosmetic surgery for Marilyn. The surgeon removed the bump on the end of her nose and inserted a plate in her chin to give it more definition. Johnny wanted her to be perfect.
But he could be harsh. Like some of the moguls, he was short, not much more than five feet tall. He looked like a gnome. He was sensitive about the size of his sex organs. He had a misogynist side, calling all women, including Marilyn, “tramps” and “chumps.” He frequented Sam Spiegel’s “boys’ club.” After Marilyn told Elia Kazan that Fred Karger and Johnny Hyde had abused her, Kazan asked her if she was attracted to men who belittled her because that judgment coincided with her own view of herself. She replied, “I don’t know.”63
Just before Christmas 1950 Johnny died of a heart attack. Marilyn was bereft. He had begged her to marry him during his last months, but she had refused. His family held her responsible for his death because she had imposed her youthful energy on him despite his heart condition, demanding sex and a good time. In their eyes she was a tramp. They prohibited her from attending his funeral. Marilyn went anyway, weeping copiously over his grave. The family refused to give her any money from his large estate.
Soon after Johnny died, Natasha found Marilyn unconscious in the apartment she shared with her at that point, with sleeping pills dissolving in her mouth. Did she try to commit suicide? Biographers have accused her of shamming, but suicide can be an ambivalent act, a cry for help as much as the attempt to end one’s life. This time Natasha saved her, and Marilyn pulled herself together, although she soon moved out of Natasha’s apartment, while giving her mentor the money for a down payment on a house by selling an expensive fur jacket that Johnny had given her. She was rearranging her life.
Soon after the New Year, Marilyn took Natasha to Hemet, near Palm Springs, where Stanley Gifford had his farm. Having lost Johnny, she wanted to find her father, and she was convince that Gifford, not Mortensen, had sired her. They stopped before reaching the farm, and Marilyn telephoned him from a pay phone. A woman answered the phone and screamed at her when she identified herself. She didn’t have the nerve to go to the house and confront Stan. Several years later she took Sidney Skolsky on the same mission and met the same resistance. But she kept trying: she desperately wanted a father. Her desire may seem excessive, until we remember the sexual abuse of her as a child by older men and realize that after World War Two, as Freud’s theories about the oedipal complex became popular and men returned from the war, a girl’s relationship with her father was seen as the most important part of her development into a woman. Marilyn was driven by the tenor of the times, as well as by her own desires.64 It was only during the last two years of her life, when her father
tried to contact her, that she gave up the quest.
A week after the Hemet trip, she met Arthur Miller on the set of As Young as You Feel. That meeting launched a romance that would occupy her thoughts for the next nine years. She also began an affair with Elia Kazan. And on December 31, 1950, Stars and Stripes crowned her “Miss Cheesecake” of the year. That honor, which celebrated her popularity among the servicemen in Korea, would have a major impact on her career.
Did Marilyn have an affair with Natasha Lytess? Previous biographers have dismissed the possibility. The evidence for their affair, however, is substantial, and it needs to be seriously considered. Bruno Frank died in 1945. By 1948, when Natasha and Marilyn met, all sources identify Natasha as lesbian, without naming a partner. When Natasha met her, Marilyn was a failure. Fox had rejected her; she was hanging by a thread at Columbia; and Louis B. Mayer wasn’t interested. Natasha was head of Columbia’s acting program. She had previously taught at the Samuel Goldwyn studio, where she coached several leading actors, including most of the cast of The Best Years of Our Lives. A large photo of Max Reinhardt hung on the wall of her office at Columbia, and bookshelves contained classics of Western drama and literature.
Why would Natasha give up her career to coach Marilyn? The tight red dress Marilyn wore in her first interview with Natasha was a vamp outfit. Natasha was smitten. Susan Strasberg and Peter Lawford confirmed their affair. Several of Marilyn’s friends told me she was “experimental” in sex, while Steffi Skolsky, Sidney Skolsky’s daughter, said that her father knew about Marilyn’s lesbian affairs but concealed them. In his autobiography, however, he stated that noted lesbian actresses visited Marilyn when she was on the sets of her movies. One, famed for her masculine wardrobe, sent flowers to Marilyn. (It sounds like Marlene Dietrich.) Donna Hamilton, a Fox contract player, stated that Hollywood men “passed Marilyn around” so much that she turned to women for relief, although she was not a habitual lesbian. Elia Kazan told her to stay away from Natasha; “I know those types,” he wrote. Natasha told reporter Ezra Goodman, “I have letters in my drawer saying that she needs me more than life itself.”65