by Lois Banner
Zanuck had only to look at Marilyn’s fan mail to realize her value. After Stars and Stripes named her Miss Cheesecake of 1951, she was inundated by fan mail from servicemen, especially from the troops stationed in South Korea to enforce the truce between the Communist army in North Korea and the international force in the south. Pinup photos were popular among these men, and Marilyn, with a large number in circulation, was their favorite. Marilyn’s drive in 1945 to make herself into a top West Coast model was paying off. By March 1951 she was receiving more fan mail than many Fox stars.
Zanuck may have hesitated in signing Marilyn to a contract because she demanded that Natasha Lytess be put on the Fox payroll, but he finally capitulated. It was obvious that Natasha had been central to Marilyn’s superb performances in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. Marilyn signed the Fox contract on May 17. It was a duplicate of her original contract, with her salary raised to $750 a week and with a raise every six months to a total of $3,250 per week. It may seem like a large amount, but she had many expenses—acting, singing, and dancing lessons; agents and lawyers; clothes and makeup; the money she sent her mother; and the $250 a week she paid Natasha.31 (Given Natasha’s salary from Fox and the amount Marilyn paid her, her income was sometimes larger than Marilyn’s.)
When Johnny Hyde died, Dore Schary of MGM shelved the idea to cast Marilyn as Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, which was unfortunate for her. Had she played Grushenka at this point in her career she might have been recognized as a dramatic actress before she was typecast as a sexy blonde. Grushenka was identified with the high-art tradition of Dostoyevsky, not the burlesque tradition of the dumb blonde. And Dostoyevsky’s description of Grushenka uncannily replicates Marilyn. Grushenka is voluptuous and her movements catlike. She is proud and insolent, with an innocent look in her eyes and a childlike good nature. It would have been fascinating to see Marilyn, with similar characteristics, in the role. Milton Greene later optioned it for her, to be produced by MMP, the production company they established. But that plan to film the novel didn’t work out.32
Once Marilyn signed with Fox, Zanuck cast her in two more fluffy comedies in the spring and summer of 1951, Love Nest and Let’s Make It Legal. In Love Nest, she is an ex-Wac who rents an apartment in the building owned by her male army buddy, which causes complications in his marriage. In Let’s Make It Legal, she is a beauty queen–party girl who is elected Miss Cucamonga; the beauty title is a takeoff on Miss Cheesecake of Stars and Stripes and Miss Caswell’s “Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts” in All About Eve. Playing the companion of a divorced husband, Marilyn mostly stands around, looking fetching in tight clothes and a bathing suit. In a scene that flirts with reality, she serves drinks to men who are playing poker, as she had at Joe Schenck’s poker parties.
In these films, Marilyn is mostly sexual decoration. She speaks only a few lines in a few scenes. Her acting has little flair, although male critics, like her male fans, found her interesting to watch. Natasha wasn’t on the sets during the filming of these movies, which may explain Marilyn’s weak performances in them. In addition, she is sexually objectified in each, as the camera lingers on her breasts and hips, while other characters make fun of her body.
As a result, she ran the risk of being typecast as a “blonde bombshell.” Such typecasting was common in Hollywood, because producers felt safe repeating successful formulas. No less than Marilyn, producers identified a need to hire voluptuous blondes to compete with such figures in burlesque, on TV, and in the foreign films that were invading the American market. Moreover, voluptuous, glamorous women were popular among the general public. They served as an emblem of American prosperity and its pleasure ethic to challenge the Soviet ideal of women as tough and stolid, workers in men’s jobs who didn’t pursue glamour—which was considered a capitalist vice.33 Finding sexy women was a Hollywood strategy to win back audiences, as were large-screen Cinemascope, religious films like The Robe for conservatives, and realist dramas like On the Waterfront for the literati.
By this time Marilyn was attracting a male audience important to the studios. In the 1930s and ’40s the majority of moviegoers had been young working women, who were the fan base for the “fast-talking dames” that dominated movie screens in these decades. By 1951, however, due to Marilyn’s exposure in men’s magazines, military magazines, and pinup photos, she had captured a male market—a market that Hollywood had been trying to reach for some time through westerns and action films. Zanuck now thought of Marilyn as the next Betty Grable, a star who mostly made musicals and played a blonde working-class “girl-next-door” type with elements of a tough-talking dame to her persona. Grable appealed to both male and female moviegoers.
Marilyn was indomitable in promoting her career. In August 1951, after finishing Let’s Make It Legal, she went to New York to see Carol Channing as Lorelei Lee in the Broadway version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Zanuck was considering casting Marilyn as Lorelei in the screen version, although Betty Grable and other stars wanted the role and Channing had received rave reviews for her Broadway performance. Sam Shaw was Marilyn’s guide in New York. He took her to Brooklyn to see Walt Whitman’s haunts; to a party for John Huston at the “21” Club where she met photographer Eve Arnold; and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a show of Goya’s drawings of the Spanish Civil War. Sam also took her to the Actors Studio and introduced her to Lee Strasberg and Marlon Brando. He took her to the Theosophical Society headquarters in Manhattan because of her interest in mystical religions. She also met Joe DiMaggio on this trip and was seen at El Morocco with Pat DiCicco.34
She was already considering changing her image. She wanted to expand beyond the sexy blonde bombshell image that she already felt was limiting her opportunities. She spoke about the possibility of a new approach to photographer Eve Arnold, extolling Arnold for her photographs in Esquire of Marlene Dietrich on a bare soundstage, without the glamour makeup and clothing that Dietrich usually wore. “If you were able to do that with Dietrich,” Marilyn said, “think what you could do with me!” She remained friendly with Arnold after this meeting, but it wasn’t until the fall of 1955 that Arnold photographed her in ways that varied her dumb-blonde image—in a park reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and as a primeval Eve slithering through tall grass and mud in a marsh.35
Once Marilyn returned from New York, Zanuck considered casting her as the disturbed babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock. When he hesitated, Sidney Skolsky persuaded Jerry Wald to cast her as a young cannery worker in Clash by Night, an adaptation of a Clifford Odets play about love and betrayal among dockworkers and roustabouts set in Monterey, California. Wanting to see if Marilyn could be effective in a complicated dramatic role, Zanuck lent her out to Wald for a modest fee.
To prepare for Clash by Night, Marilyn took an all-night bus to Monterey to observe cannery workers and to practice being working class. In fact, she was so successful in that guise that a cannery boss offered her a job cutting off the heads of fish. She was also a girl alone in a strange town, getting wolf whistles, violating the prohibition against respectable girls traveling alone. That was all part of the adventure she had undertaken; Marilyn liked wolf whistles and admiration from men on the streets. Returning home, she was the only girl in a bus of Italian men. Their admiration for her beauty made her feel like a queen. She wrote a free-verse poem about the experience.
Such charming gentlemen—they were wonderful
Not only do I love Greeks, I love Italians.
They’re so warm, lusty
And friendly as hell—
I’d love to go to Italy someday.36
Marilyn scored a triumph in Clash by Night. She is tough and feisty, a working-class girl to the hilt. She stands up to her overbearing boyfriend when he tells her that men have the right to discipline women; in fact, she punches him in the nose. With short, curly hair, dressed in baggy jeans, walking jauntily, she looks like a boy—or the street urchin she sometimes played in real life. At the
end of Clash by Night, however, she displays an underlying insecurity and gives in to her lover. Her reviews and the box office on the film were excellent.
In September Collier’s featured an article on her, written by Robert Cahn. It was the first story about her to appear in a national magazine. In October Rupert Allan wrote a story for Look about her titled “A Serious Blonde Who Can Act.” An American who had been raised in St. Louis and educated at Oxford, Allan was an elegant homosexual. Marilyn, who could be persuasive, talked him into becoming her press agent. In November she won the Henrietta Award of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as the year’s best newcomer.37 Zanuck was impressed. That month he put Don’t Bother to Knock into production, with Marilyn in the lead as a psychotic babysitter. The title isn’t related to the film, but that’s standard for Marilyn’s films, which often have sexually suggestive titles that relate only vaguely to the film involved. Those titles include Love Nest, Let’s Make It Legal, We’re Not Married, Some Like It Hot, and Let’s Make Love. (“It” was then a euphemism for sex.) Given Marilyn’s fear that she might go insane like her mother, she was brave to play the disturbed babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock. It’s also possible she used her mother as a model for the character she and Natasha created.
In the film she is hired to babysit the child of a couple staying in a hotel when they go out to dinner. She vamps Richard Widmark, who is staying in the next room. As her attempt at seduction goes awry and the child she is watching begins to cry, Marilyn gags the child and ties her up. The police are called, and Marilyn is apprehended. Actress Anne Bancroft plays a nightclub singer in the film. In her one scene with Marilyn, toward the end of the film, they encounter each other in the hotel’s lobby, as a policeman escorts Marilyn to a waiting police car. Their eyes connect. Bancroft was so moved by the look in Marilyn’s eyes, she said, that her own eyes filled with tears. “It was one of my few times in Hollywood,” Bancroft stated, “that I felt the give and take that can only come from fine acting [on Marilyn’s part].”38
Critics were mixed on Marilyn’s acting in Don’t Bother to Knock, and Zanuck wasn’t impressed by it. However, her box office draw was still strong, and so he cast her in two sexy-blonde roles. She plays a prostitute in a brief episode in O. Henry’s Full House, which was drawn from O. Henry’s short story “The Cop and the Anthem.” Charles Laughton plays opposite her as a friendly bum. She next played in a sequence in We’re Not Married, about five couples who discover their marriage licenses are invalid. A beauty contest winner, she is suddenly disqualified from the Mrs. America contest because she isn’t legally married. The role she plays allows her to wear a bathing suit, thus appealing to her male fans.
Monkey Business was her next film. It began production in February 1952. A research chemist, played by Cary Grant, invents a formula to restore youth to aging people, which he intends to try out on research chimps in his lab. Before he does so, however, a chimp gets out of the cage in the lab and pours the formula into the lab’s bottled drinking water. The humans drink it by mistake, resulting in madcap mayhem. Marilyn plays a sexy secretary whose main attributes are her large breasts and hips. Ginger Rogers, playing Grant’s wife, calls her “a little pinup girl, half an infant,” an apt description of her character. Once again, as in her previous sexy-blonde roles, the camera lingers on her breasts and buttocks, fetishizing them.
Marilyn participates in her sexual objectification more fully in this film than ever before. Wearing a dress with a full skirt that obfuscates her lower body, she pushes the back of the dress’s skirt between her buttocks, drawing attention to them. Billy Travilla had designed the dress so that she could move easily in a scene in which she roller skates with Grant. But Marilyn wanted to attract her male fans with tight-fitting clothes.39 She battled Travilla over the design of the dress and when she lost the battle, she cleverly devised a way to achieve what she wanted.
Filming Monkey Business wasn’t easy for her. She was suffering from attacks of appendicitis, although she didn’t have her appendix removed until May. She had issues with Howard Hawks, the overbearing director of the film, and she began to date Joe DiMaggio. Meanwhile, the rumor was spreading that she had posed nude for a calendar photo—a shocking act for a rising star. It was enough to destroy her career, especially given the “morals clause” in film contracts, which forbade actors from doing anything that might embarrass a studio. She had to deal carefully with the issue of the photo.
By this point in her career, reporters and paparazzi began to follow her every move. She now had to be particularly discreet about her private life. Trying to avoid press scrutiny, she changed her residence every six months or so. She now had fans who were obsessed with her. Even when she lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Hotel Bel-Air, both with tight security, the press managed to find her. She regularly changed her phone number to elude crank callers. She wore disguises to go out in public: Hal Schaefer, her voice coach and later her lover, said she wasn’t recognized when she wore a black wig, no makeup, and shapeless dresses. Other individuals who knew her well made similar observations. Sometimes she wore a red wig and sometimes a scarf. According to friends, when she wore no makeup and hadn’t psyched herself into becoming Marilyn Monroe, she wasn’t recognized.40
In 1951 and ’52 she dated director Nicholas Ray, a protégé of Elia Kazan and a former lover of Shelley Winters. Fan magazines published photos of them together at parties and nightclubs. Yul Brynner, who studied with Michael Chekhov, was another brief lover; both Susan Strasberg and Rock Brynner, Yul’s son, confirmed the relationship. Marilyn also dated Peter Lawford once or twice, but their relationship didn’t work. Some say that he pursued her and she rejected him, but a more convincing argument is that the fastidious Peter found Marilyn too messy. Joe Naar, Peter’s close friend, doubledated with Peter and Marilyn on their first date. By the end of the evening Peter had persuaded Joe to switch dates with him, and Joe took Marilyn home. When she got busy or seriously depressed, she could be lax about hygiene, not bathing and wearing the same clothes for days on end. Sometimes she didn’t walk her dog, Josefa, so there were piles of excrement on the carpet of her apartment—or stains when she cleaned them up.41
Marilyn had a sexual fling and a long friendship with Hollywood designer Billy Travilla, who designed her clothes in eight of her thirty films, beginning with Monkey Business. They went to jazz clubs on Central Avenue to hear singers like Billie Holiday. But their intimacy mostly involved his calming her down. He was one of the individuals she called late at night when she couldn’t sleep, and he soothed her over the phone. If she was especially upset, he went to her apartment and cuddled her, telling her that everything was going to be all right. “It was like helping Shirley Temple get through a Mae West nightmare,” Travilla said with regard to those sessions.42
Actor Nico Minardos also claimed to have been involved with her that year. By late February 1952, she was dating Joe DiMaggio, but he was frequently out of town doing baseball interviews. Minardos was Greek, tall, dark, and handsome, and he had a small role in Monkey Business. Marilyn met him on the set of that movie. According to Minardos, they discussed the theories of P. D. Ouspensky about how to attain serenity. Ouspensky was a turn-of-the-century mystic who mixed Western mathematical theory about a fourth dimension with Sufi ideas about self-realization. Only Marilyn’s close friends knew about her spiritual interests, which gives reliability to Minardos’s claims. Sidney Skolsky, for one, called her mystic, serious, religious, and superstitious all at once.43
The list of friends and lovers goes on. It probably included Sidney Skolsky. Marilyn was still promiscuous, still believed that men posessed her body. She still believed in free love, that true friendship should expand to include sex. David March, a Broadway agent who wanted to become her business manager, became friendly with her after he called her in June 1951 and she mischievously told him she was a housewife named Ethel Hapgood.44 (Marilyn loved to make up pseudonyms.) She was devil-may-care wit
h him. They bought pizzas and drove around Beverly Hills eating them. They discussed their philosophies of life. March, who arranged Marilyn’s first Hollywood date with DiMaggio, was a friend, not a lover; Marilyn had the unique capacity to be friends with men, even some heterosexual men. March was one of those friends, and so were Sam Shaw and eventually Norman Rosten, Eli Wallach, and others.
As she moved toward stardom, Marilyn faced a number of potential minefields. The first was her use of sex to advance her career. The second was the nude photo. Every Hollywood contract had a clause stating the actor would do nothing to embarrass the studio, and Marilyn could be humiliated and fired under this clause. The women’s clubs and the Catholic Church, emboldened by post–World War Two conservatism, were once again attacking Hollywood in the early 1950s for immorality. On the other hand, to retain their audiences, the studios were increasing sex in films and exposing female bodies more than ever before. Conflicts between the studios and the Motion Picture Production Board increased.
The studios had the upper hand, since the moguls appointed the members of the Production Board, who represented their interests while trying to mollify the moralists. The studios also controlled the Hollywood journalists, whom they kept in line through kickbacks, invitations to parties and trips, and access to the stars. Studio publicists had to approve stories written about their stars before they could be published. One industry insider divulged that “all hanky-panky indulged in by the stars was to be blanketed immediately and completely.” Star marriages, divorces, and dating were staples of Hollywood journalism, but the physical side of sex was blanked out. Sidney Skolsky and Earl Wilson wrote, “The Hollywood of the fan magazines was a gauzy, oddly sexless place. The dark Hollywood was never recorded in their pages.”45 No one wrote about Sam Spiegel’s “boys’ club” or Pat DiCicco’s activities, except for his dates with starlets. Too many important individuals were involved.