Marilyn

by Gloria Steinem

  Even as a penniless starlet, invited as decoration to Hollywood parties where men risked thousands on a casual card game, she didn’t want to become one of the rich. “When I saw them hand hundred- and even thousand-dollar bills to each other,” she wrote, “I felt something bitter in my heart. I remembered how much twenty-five cents and even nickels meant to the people I had known, how happy ten dollars would have made them, how a hundred dollars would have changed their whole lives. I remembered my Aunt Grace and me waiting in line at the Holmes Bakery to buy a sackful of bread… And I remembered how she had gone with one of her lenses missing from her glasses for three months because she couldn’t afford the fifty cents to buy its replacement. I remembered all the sounds and smells of poverty, the fright in people’s eyes when they lost jobs, and the way they skimped and drudged in order to get through the week.”

  From those people, Norma Jeane had learned to work hard. Habits gained while doing chores in the orphanage and foster homes or watching the job struggles of her mother and her Aunt Grace were reinforced by her own need for approval. They helped her keep an immaculate apartment as a teenage bride and win an E for excellence when she worked spraying fuselages at a defense plant. She was also remembered by photographers as the rare model who asked for criticism and wanted to learn every aspect of composing a good photograph.

  From them, she also learned the importance of dreams in lives whose realities were hard. As Norma Jeane, imagination and fantasy had been her only refuge. “I loved playing pretend games,” Marilyn said of her fascination with acting, “and I led all the other children into making up play games, and taking different parts. And I’d listen to ‘The Lone Ranger’ and get terribly excited. Not at the horses and the chases and the guns but… the drama. The wondering of how it would be for each person in that situation… There are techniques to be learned, and it’s hard work. But it still seems sort of like play to me, and something you want terribly to do.”

  When she herself became rich, it couldn’t change the lives of ordinary people, and only made her feel estranged from them. It couldn’t even change her own sense of being an outsider among the well-to-do, where her lack of education and social skills made her feel personally out of place. But, as an actress, she could offer everyday moviegoers the hope and dreams that had built a fantasy escape for Norma Jeane. “Even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say ‘Hi,’” Marilyn explained of her obsession with work, “I’ve always felt that the people ought to get their money’s worth, and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.” Response from working people seemed to mean as much to Marilyn as praise from movie critics, or coveted invitations to the same Beverly Hills parties she once had decorated as an interchangeable starlet. When street crowds yelled their approval at premieres, she seemed to forget her terror of appearing in public. When truck drivers called a friendly greeting in the street, or children asked for her autograph, or old people stopped to say she made them proud, she was delighted and touched. She considered-herself one of them—and they seemed to sense that. Indeed, this populist support was one of the few things that could buoy up her shaky self-confidence. In Korea, where she went to entertain the troops, she was honestly amazed and moved to find an audience of thirteen thousand G.I.’s waiting in the freezing cold. When the crowd called for her over and over again, she insisted on braving the chill in a strapless dress and open sandals so she wouldn’t disappoint them. “It was the first time,” she explained later, “that I ever felt I had an effect on people.”

  Given her obsession with public stardom, the poverty of her early days in Hollywood, and her use of sex as a friendly reward to men whom she trusted to understand or help her, many biographers have been skeptical of her protestations that she was never “kept,” or her angry and fearful response to being sexually “used.” As she had told George Barris, shortly before her death, “If there’s only one thing in my life I was to be proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.” In those last months when she was out of work and had even less sense of self than usual, she raged and wept at the idea that men might be using her “only as a plaything.”

  “Maybe it was the nickel Mr. Kimmel once gave me…,” she wrote, using a name that referred to the old man she said had sexually attacked her as an eight-year-old, “but men who tried to buy me with money made me sick. There were plenty of them. The mere fact that I turned down offers ran my price up… I didn’t take their money, and they couldn’t get by my front door, but I kept riding in their limousines and sitting beside them in swanky places. There was always a chance a job and not another wolf might spot you.”

  There is not only her testimony, but the financial facts of her life to support the belief that she refused gifts of clothes and expensive apartments from the various men who wanted to “keep” her. Most of her pre-stardom days in Hollywood were spent cleaning by hand and re-wearing the same two or three dresses, eating meals at drugstore counters when she had little money, and living on peanut butter and raw hamburger in her room to keep up her energy when she had even less. Her small income as a starlet-in-training went for acting lessons in her drive for self-improvement. When she got broke enough in those early modeling and acting days, she seems to have exchanged sex for small sums of money from men she didn’t have to see again. Lena Pepitone, a maid who worked for her in New York, says Marilyn told her of trading sex for fifteen dollars in pocket money from a man she met in a bar when Jim Dougherty was away at sea, and that there were a few other such incidents after that. Acting teacher Lee Strasberg also told an interviewer that Marilyn said she had worked as a call girl at conventions, and that she felt damaged by the experience. No independent evidence has come to light to support these stories: Marilyn may have been dramatizing the deprivation of her background, as she sometimes did, as if to justify her real feelings of being deprived.

  And, as Patricia Newcomb, her friend and press assistant, has explained, “Marilyn Monroe never told anybody everything.”

  But even if the most sordid of these stories were true, they seem to parallel the famous calendar incident. After refusing other nude modeling jobs, Marilyn finally agreed to pose for the nude calendar for only fifty dollars because it was the exact sum she needed to retrieve her old car. Even though waiting until she was desperate went against her own financial self-interest, she seems to have resisted pridefully, and then given in only when she thought there was no other way out.

  “In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo,” she wrote bitterly. “You’re judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”

  When she felt she did have a choice, her standards were romantic, even idealistic. Johnny Hyde, an agent thirty years her senior who helped her greatly with her early career, knew very well that Marilyn loved him only as a father and a friend, but he also knew that his heart condition left him only a short time to live. Because he loved Marilyn and wanted her to inherit his million-dollar estate, he pleaded with her to marry him. She refused. Though Hyde was one of the few people in her life whom she trusted completely, she told him that marrying for reasons other than love “wouldn’t be fair.”

  In his biography of Marilyn, Norman Mailer admits to being mystified by her refusal to marry for money. Given the facts of her need, plus his view of her character—he calls her promiscuous and “a queen of a castrator”—Mailer treats her refusal as inexplicable. In fact, he missed the romanticism that governed her behavior and was the legacy of her Depression childhood. From families that owned little but their own good names, she had inherited the fierce pride of the poor. Because she was sometimes forced to give in, to sell herself partially, she was all the more fearful of being bought totally. “What have you got to lose?” asked a friend who was urging the marria
ge to Hyde. “Myself,” Marilyn said. “I’m only going to marry for one reason—love.”

  As for her frequent use of sex, Mailer assumes that this meant hostility toward men. In fact, she seemed so hungry for the love and approval she had been denied in childhood, particularly from a father, that she submerged her own physical pleasure, and offered sex in return for male support and affection. By her own testimony to friends and from that of lovers, she never—or rarely—had orgasms, as if the child inside her needed to absorb years of affection before a sexual adult could be born. Henry Rosenfeld, a New York dress manufacturer who met her in her early twenties and remained a close friend until her death, explained that “Marilyn thought sex got you closer, made you a closer friend. She told me she hardly ever had an orgasm, but she was very unselfish. She tried above all to please the opposite sex. Ah, but it wasn’t just sex. She could be so happy and gay. How I remember that laughter!” In an interview two years before she died, Marilyn told writer Jaik Rosenstein that sex also had been part of her first work assignments. “When I started modeling, it was like part of the job,” she explained. “All the girls did… and if you didn’t go along, there were twenty-five girls who would.” In Hollywood, she added, “You know that when a producer calls an actress into his office to discuss a script, that isn’t all he has in mind… She can go hungry and she might have to sleep in her car, but she doesn’t mind that a bit—if she can only get the part. I know because I’ve done both, lots of times. And I’ve slept with producers. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t…” She trusted Rosenstein not to use those off-the-record quotes, and he didn’t, not until long after her death when the sexual double standard was more forgiving. Thanks to Anthony Summers, who accumulated these quotes in his book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, we also know that she told W. J. Weatherby, a British journalist, “You can’t sleep your way into being a star, though. It takes much, much more. But it helps. A lot of actresses get their first chance that way. Most of the men are such horrors, they deserve all they can get out of them!”

  Marilyn supplied sex so that she would be allowed to work, but not so that she wouldn’t have to work.

  The Depression idea that a job was a coveted opportunity, a gift, not a right, was a good preparation for Hollywood. “I knew how third-rate I was,” Marilyn wrote with characteristic self-deprecation. “I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn! To change, to improve! I didn’t want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act. With the arc lights on me and the camera pointed at me, I suddenly knew myself. How clumsy, empty, uncultured I was! A sullen orphan with a goose egg for a head.

  “But I would change… I spent my salary on dramatic lessons, on dancing lessons, and singing lessons. I bought books to read. I sneaked scripts off the set and sat up alone in my room reading them out loud in front of the mirror. And an odd thing happened to me. I fell in love with myself—not how I was but how I was going to be.”

  In fact, whether or not she was confident enough to know it, she already had an extraordinary luminescence and vulnerability that set her apart. Marion Marshall, who would later marry actor Robert Wagner, remembered meeting her as Norma Jeane when they both were applying for a job as bathing-suit models. “Marilyn was the most spectacular girl I ever met, not particularly beautiful, but she radiated a special dynamism,” she explained. “I remember, when I first saw her, she arrived late as usual, after all the other girls. I’m sitting with all these very sophisticated models, dressed in silks, with the gloves and the hat and all that, and Marilyn came in a little scoop-necked gingham sundress, her hair unbleached and un-straightened. When she walked in, it was like the room stopped, and everyone in the room knew she was going to get the job, and she did.”

  But the Marilyn-who-was-going-to-be needed to lower her squeaky speaking voice, to train her soft but pleasant singing voice, and to learn how to drop barriers of childhood isolation so that internal emotion could come through. She also had to memorize scripts, camera instructions, and makeup procedures, and acquire the technical ability to re-create the same scene over and over again. Acting coach Natasha Lytess was enlisted to help with voice-lowering and general training. Their relationship would last seven years, during which Natasha took Marilyn into her own home, rescued her from one suicide attempt—when she was grief-stricken following Johnny Hyde’s death—and came both to feel used by Marilyn and to love her. (“Don’t love me,” Marilyn pleaded with Natasha, “just teach me.”) Marilyn herself sought out Michael Chekhov, the nephew of the playwright, who had studied under Stanislavsky and then given up his own acting career to become a teacher. With Chekhov she undertook such challenges as The Cherry Orchard and Cordelia in King Lear. Inspired by the cultured and well-read Lytess and Chekov, Marilyn nourished her habit of hungry but random reading and tried to fathom everything from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, her childhood hero, to such abstract treatises as The Thinking Body, a study of the relationship between body and mind. She never stopped feeling inferior because she had not even finished high school, and she never stopped trying to make up for it.

  But in movies, her growing number of bit parts were a far cry from Shakespeare. Given the background she was escaping, some had an added irony. Dangerous Years, released in 1947, gave her a small role as a brassy waitress in a drama of juvenile delinquency. The murderer was a boy raised in an orphanage as Norma Jeane had been. The following year, Ladies of the Chorus cast her with Adele Jergens as mother-and-daughter chorines, and required Marilyn, the child who obsessively longed for a father, to hold a baby doll in her arms while singing “Every Baby Needs a Da Da Daddy.” After a particularly miserable, insecure period in which her starlet’s contract was allowed to lapse for a second time—first by Twentieth Century-Fox and then by Columbia Pictures—she won a small part in Love Happy, a Marx Brothers movie in which she unveiled her very sexy walk.

  Thanks to Love Happy and the publicity tour she did for it, Marilyn began to get some attention from the press and public. After playing another chorine in a Dan Dailey feature, A Ticket to Tomahawk, agent Johnny Hyde helped her get a reading for the role of a crooked lawyer’s mistress in her first grade-A movie—John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle—but it was Marilyn’s agonizingly prepared audition that won the part. As one of the best movies of 1950, The Asphalt Jungle got favorable reviews that included Marilyn’s small role. More important, Johnny Hyde successfully suggested to Joe Mankiewicz, writer-director of the classic All About Eve, that he cast her in that memorable mistress role because of it. She was now back under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox and getting fan mail the studio executives couldn’t ignore.

  It was on this Mankiewicz set that Marilyn, who was largely innocent of newspapers and politics, got one of her first tastes of the McCarthyite atmosphere of the 1950s. As part of her unguided self-education, she had picked up The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, a book she described in her own autobiography as “bitter but strong… [He] knew all about poor people and about injustice. He knew about the lies people used to get ahead, and how smug rich people sometimes were. It was almost as if he’d lived the hard way I’d lived. I loved his book.” She was surprised when Joe Mankiewicz took her aside and, as she remembered, “gave me a quiet lecture.

  “‘I wouldn’t go around raving about Lincoln Steffens,’ he said. ‘It’s certain to get you into trouble. People will begin to talk of you as a radical.’”

  Not understanding what a radical was, she assumed this was “a very personal attitude on Mr. Mankiewicz’s part and that, genius though he was, of a sort, he was badly frightened by the Front Office or something. I couldn’t imagine anybody picking on me because I admired Lincoln Steffens.”

  When the publicity department asked her to list the ten greatest men in the world, no doubt as a sex-story gimmick, Marilyn put Steffens’s name at the top. The publicity man refused. “We’ll have to omit that
one,” he explained patronizingly. “We don’t want anybody investigating our Marilyn.”

  She said no more about Steffens to anyone, not even to Johnny Hyde, who was then her lover and mentor, but she continued to read the second volume secretly and kept both volumes hidden under her bed.

  Two years later, Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand, who had established the Actor’s Lab, where Marilyn also studied, were investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Once, when Marilyn was asked about Communists, she said, “They’re for the people, aren’t they?” With or without knowledge, her sympathy was with the underdog.

  Though Marilyn was rapidly becoming a star, she was also beginning to learn that even a star, especially an indentured contract player with little choice of scripts, could still be the underdog. She made a dozen grade-B films in rapid succession. Only three of them—Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, and Niagara—were more than forgettable, or offered her anything other than secondary roles as a dumb blonde. One especially, Don’t Bother to Knock, showed her as a serious actress. Anne Bancroft remembers a moment in which she was to react to Marilyn as a deranged baby-sitter who had threatened suicide. “There was just this scene of one woman seeing another woman who was helpless and in pain, and she was helpless and in pain,” Bancroft explained. “It was so real, I responded; I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came into my eyes. Believe me, such moments happened rarely, if ever again, in the early things I was doing out there.” Marilyn may have been playing her own experience as Norma Jeane, but that reality wasn’t what interested Hollywood. In her next film, Monkey Business, she was back in a dumb-blonde role that gave her body all the rave reviews.

  By 1952, Marilyn had graduated to stardom and the quintessential dumb blonde—Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—but she loved being able to sing and dance in this movie musical like those that had been Norma Jeane’s escape. The following year when that was released, so was her next film, How to Marry a Millionaire, a sex comedy that allowed Marilyn to wear glasses, to change her image, and to show her talent as a comedienne. Reviewers praised her gift for comedy, but one noted that sitting in the front row of a Marilyn Monroe movie was like being “smothered in baked Alaska.”