* * *
For all the conflicting backstage drama and passions surrounding the production of Ladies of the Chorus, the resulting film was a bloodless trifle, notable today only because it gives us the first extended on-screen look at Marilyn Monroe.
The clichéd musical is a sort of rags-to-riches fairytale with a burlesque backdrop. Adele Jergens and Marilyn play mother and daughter burlesque dancers, Mae and Peggy Martin. When Peggy becomes the show’s headliner, she meets a society millionaire who wants to marry her.
Marilyn’s performance is for the most part natural and relaxed, with only a few wooden moments where her inexperience shows. It is also interesting to see Marilyn before she had slight cosmetic alterations on her face. Her appearance is somewhere between Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe (closer to Norma Jeane), with very few hints of her legendary screen characteristics—the hooded eyes, the whispery voice, the open smile are nowhere to be observed. Although she’s playing a “burlesque queen,” there is nothing overtly sexy about her performance. The Monroe glow is certainly in evidence, if at a somewhat lower wattage.
Nevertheless, a big disappointment was waiting for Marilyn when, in spite of her appealing work in Ladies of the Chorus, she was let go. Studio executive Harry Cohn had the power to dismiss her—and he did so. After viewing the movie he invited Marilyn to his office. Following some perfunctory praise for her performance, he invited Marilyn to accompany him on a trip to Catalina on his yacht. Marilyn had been around the business long enough to know what the invitation implied. The problem was, Marilyn did not sleep with men simply because they could advance her. She rejected him in the most agreeable way. “Of course I’d love to take a trip with you on your yacht, Mr. Cohn,” she cooed. The executive smiled. Then Marilyn added, “And I so look forward to meeting your lovely wife.”
Cohn was livid. How dare this tart be a wiseass with him? Dispensing with trite pleasantries, he told Marilyn he’d give her one last chance: She could have sex with him right there. Once again she refused. Cohn was enraged and dismissed Marilyn from his office.
Later Marilyn would say, “I was determined, no one was going to use me or my body—even if he could help my career. I’ve never gone out with a man I didn’t want to.” Shortly afterward, she received word that her contract was not being renewed.
A small consolation came when, on the film’s release, Marilyn received her first review in the Motion Picture Herald: “One of the bright spots is Miss Monroe’s singing. She is pretty, and with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise.” Regardless of the encouragement, Marilyn was once again unemployed, broke, and without any prospects. Her only choice was to go back onto the party circuit, where the studio executives continued to regard her and most of the other party girls as objects to be used and enjoyed, like a fine Scotch or a good cigar.
SIX
RISING
On New Year’s Eve 1948, Marilyn was invited to yet another party, at the home of movie producer Sam Spiegel. It promised to be the kind of party that by now Marilyn was growing weary of—filled with mogul types skulking through the crowd, rattling the ice in their drinks, leering and flirting, on the hunt for a girl they could slip a business card to, or better yet, take to one of the vacant bedrooms.
It was there that Johnny Hyde spotted Marilyn. The incandescent sight of her blinded him to anyone else in the room. Marilyn was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen. Hyde was the vice president at The William Morris Agency, the top talent agency in the world.
At fifty-three Johnny was thirty-one years older than Marilyn. Small, wiry, with a tough, distinguished face that looked as if it had been carefully drawn by a talented caricaturist, Hyde was barely five feet tall, with thinning hair. But he was always elegantly dressed in impeccable suits, and he exuded an attractive air of power and confidence.
Hyde was a tempestuous man currently in his third marriage. Through his occupation Hyde met hundreds of desirable women, many eager to have a sexual relationship with him. “It was said around the office that he signed more actresses with his dick than most guys did with a fountain pen,” writer Frank Rose noted. One actress he signed (and bedded) said that his dick was as tiny as the rest of him.
Although known as a womanizer, Hyde actually had a serious heart condition (he suffered from a defective valve). With his health failing, he was restless, eager for one last shot to grab the brass ring that had eluded him. It seemed that all his life he had been searching for something and at last, with Marilyn, he had found it. He had plans to go to Palm Springs for a brief vacation before starting the New Year, and he invited Marilyn to join him. It was in Palm Springs that their affair started.
There was nothing covert about their relationship. Within weeks of their meeting it was understood that Marilyn was Johnny Hyde’s new girl. Hyde adored her, and he wanted everyone in town to know it. In time he left his wife and four sons to devote himself exclusively to Marilyn.
Used to Hollywood infidelities, Hyde’s wife, Mozelle, had the ability to look the other way when it came to Hyde’s flings. But she sensed that his obsession with Marilyn was different: “I tried to take it for a long time,” she said of this affair, “but in the end it was impossible.”
Hyde rented a house for them to live in on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, which he had partially remodeled so that it looked like her favorite restaurant, Romanoff’s. True to form, Marilyn didn’t live with him full-time, keeping her independence by taking a modest room at a nearby hotel. She continued to study with Natasha Lytess, who once again disapproved of Marilyn being involved romantically with a man.
* * *
It wasn’t the typical scenario of a powerful older man taking a much younger beauty as his mistress. Hyde had great belief in Marilyn as a performer, even surpassing Natasha’s devotion. When she told him that she hoped someday to be a great actress, he was the first person not to snicker.
“He was the first man I ever met who didn’t think I was a dumb blonde,” Marilyn recalled. “He knew I couldn’t talk very well, but he understood I was frightened of people. He loved me, I think, and I loved him.” Realizing that one of her biggest drawbacks was her lack of confidence, Hyde brought her to the prominent plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Gurdin.
Gurdin and Hyde agreed that Marilyn had some flatness in her chin, which when filmed in close-ups could cause a problem. This was corrected by a cartilage implant, the procedure performed by going in through her mouth so it wouldn’t leave a scar. The alterations were minor, but in an industry where every physical flaw is magnified, it made a big difference to a performer who would be photographed as much as Marilyn, and who would become a standard of female perfection.
* * *
By now Hyde realized he was dying. He constantly begged Marilyn to marry him. Marilyn gently refused, explaining that, although she loved him, she wasn’t “in love” with him. All she could do was offer Hyde her body. He was dumbfounded. His life was filled with meaningless fucks—he prided himself on the number of his conquests. The more Marilyn said no to marriage, the more he wanted her. It became his unyielding obsession. He revealed to her that he wasn’t going to live long; if she was his widow she would be a very wealthy woman. Still Marilyn refused. Ultimately Hyde decided he wanted to be with her on any terms.
* * *
Early in 1949, while Hyde was attempting to get Marilyn cast in a good role in a memorable movie, she auditioned for a part in the latest (and last) Marx Brothers’ comedy, Love Happy. It was not the kind of picture Hyde had in mind—an unfunny, forgettable movie about stolen diamonds, with Groucho Marx playing a private detective.
Marilyn was sent to the set, where she met the producer, Lester Cowan, who introduced her to Groucho and Harpo Marx. “Can you walk?” Groucho asked her. She nodded. He made it clear that he wanted a woman who, when she walked by, could cause the pipe a man was smoking to whistle and shoot off tufts of smoke.
Marilyn walked across the soundstage for him. Bam! “You h
ave the prettiest ass in the business,” Groucho whispered to her. “I’m sure he meant it in the nicest way,” Marilyn would later explain. Harpo honked his horn and whistled.
Marilyn’s thirty-eight-second appearance in the movie is quite literally a walk-on. She sashays into Groucho’s office in a strapless evening gown, telling the investigator that she needs help because “Some men are following me.” There is some ogling, leering, and double-takes, and he volunteers to take her down to the bus station. “Boy, did I want to fuck her,” Groucho said much later. “She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life.”
* * *
While Johnny Hyde was in Europe for the wedding of his client Rita Hayworth to Prince Aly Khan, Marilyn found herself in financial trouble again. She was looking for modeling work to pay some bills. As luck would have it, the photographer Tom Kelley called with a job. Marilyn knew Kelley; she had posed for some beer advertisements in the past. This time he was looking for a model to pose nude for a calendar.
After thinking it over for a few days she called Kelley and told him she would like to pose.* She did ask that the photographer’s wife be present. “But none of your helpers, please,” she added. Then, after further consideration, she asked Kelley if they could shoot it at night. The photographer agreed to all of Marilyn’s requests.
On May 27, 1949, a few days before her twenty-third birthday, Marilyn showed up at Kelley’s studio. As promised, his wife, Natalie, was there to help set up the shoot. Natalie draped plush red velvet over a backdrop. The photo session lasted for two hours. In some shots Marilyn is posed kneeling in front of the velvet-covered backdrop with her hands behind her head. One of those shots would be called “Golden Dreams.” Then the backdrop was tilted back so Marilyn could lie down on her side and seductively stretch out her body while twisting slightly so that her pubic area was not visible. “She had the greatest figure I think I’ve ever seen in my life,” Kelley commented.
After she became successful, Marilyn spoke of the nude photo shoot many times, never with the slightest hint of regret. “He sort of stretched me out on this red velvet,” she explained. “I was little embarrassed. There I am with my bare tochas out. It was a little drafty. He was very nice. He kept going ‘Ahhh, my God!’ I said, ‘Well maybe it’s not too bad.’ Red velvet! When I was a kid I used to dream of red velvet. But anyway I never thought I’d end up nude on red velvet.”
In another sense it was getting back at Aunt Ida, who had taught Norma Jeane that displaying the human form was wrong. Here she was glorifying it.
* * *
Meanwhile Hyde was still attempting to secure a script for her that had a “star part.” When he read the screenplay for John Huston’s film noir titled The Asphalt Jungle, to be made for MGM, Hyde immediately thought of Marilyn for the very small but important part of the gangster’s mistress, Angela Phinlay.
The character was that of a naive, young, somewhat greedy girl, lost in a world of crime and corruption, dependent on a much older man, getting by on her angelic looks and bewildered demeanor. Instinctively Hyde knew this was exactly the right kind of role for Marilyn. Hyde asked Huston to see Marilyn as a professional courtesy.
Huston didn’t know that Hyde had already given Marilyn the entire script and that she had been rehearsing it for days with Natasha. In the scene she would be performing, Angela was supposed to be lounging on a couch. Noticing that there was nothing to lie down on, Marilyn asked Huston if she could perform reclining on the floor. Since Huston wasn’t really interested in her, he couldn’t have cared less how she played the scene. But after she finished the performance, according to him, he couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role. Marilyn, however, felt differently about her reading.
“Oh that was just awful, Mr. Huston!” she cried. “May I please do it again?”
Huston allowed Marilyn to begin again, but it was unnecessary. He had already decided to give her the part.
During shooting, the word around town was that Johnny Hyde’s mistress was very good indeed. As a baby-faced bimbo, Marilyn’s performance in The Asphalt Jungle was a standout because of the layer of kittenish vulnerability she brought to it. Even with her limited screen time, she was featured in the movie trailers and posters.
Although most of the audience went to the preview expecting a gritty crime drama, on exiting they commented on appraisal cards: “Hot blonde” or: “Let’s see more of the blonde.”
The reviews for The Asphalt Jungle were excellent, and it went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards. Photoplay declared, “There’s a beautiful blonde, too, name of Marilyn Monroe, who plays [Louis] Calhern’s girlfriend, and makes the most of her footage.”
It was as if all of Hyde’s belief in Marilyn had been justified.
However, soon after the movie’s triumphant release came yet another disappointment: Marilyn was not offered a contract with MGM. Astonishingly, the head of the studio, Dore Schary, told Hyde that Marilyn “wasn’t photogenic” and that she didn’t have “the sort of looks that make a movie star.”
* * *
What was it about Marilyn that made so many in the industry not only dismiss her but downright dislike her? (Years later Darryl Zanuck admitted he hated her.) Most likely it was the morality of the day, the double standard of male and female sexuality.
Hollywood is a small town; the columnist James Bacon called it “a four letter town” and Marilyn was known to come from an impoverished background. On the party circuit she was observed with a mixture of lust and disgust. Where it was possible to look at Marilyn and see beauty, talent, and a genuine desire to improve, instead they saw her lack of proper upbringing. She didn’t speak properly. She didn’t dress properly. She didn’t behave properly. Her clothes had been cheap—in style and in price—so to them she had been cheap. To their amusement and scorn, she often didn’t wear undergarments.
In spite of Hollywood’s rejection of her, Hyde’s belief in Marilyn remained unshakeable. Knowing that roles like Angela in movies as good as The Asphalt Jungle don’t come around every day, Hyde decided it was better for Marilyn to continue taking small parts in mediocre films. It would give her experience on movie sets and help build her confidence, while keeping her face (no matter how briefly) in front of movie audiences.
In Right Cross, a boxing film, she’s glimpsed fleetingly in one scene in which Dick Powell tries to pick her up. In Hometown Story she has an insignificant part as a receptionist in a newspaper office, where Natasha Lytess’s overemphasis on Marilyn’s diction in her training is already becoming apparent. If her career kept going down this path, all the good attention she had received in The Asphalt Jungle would soon be forgotten. Time was running out, not only for Marilyn, but also for Johnny Hyde.
Over at Fox, Joe Mankiewicz was casting a first-rate project entitled All About Eve. This was a backstage story about an aging Broadway actress, Margo Channing, to be played by superstar Bette Davis, and the young fan, Eve (Anne Baxter), who befriends her with a hard-luck story, and then betrays her by using all of Margo’s show-business friends as pawns to climb the ladder of success. The only characters Eve doesn’t manage to fool are an acerbic theater critic, Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), and his protégée, the lovely but no-talent Miss Casswell.
Well aware that most Hollywood executives perceived Marilyn exactly the way Miss Casswell was written—the gorgeous plaything of an important man—Hyde implored Mankiewicz to cast her in the role. Like Angela in The Asphalt Jungle, Miss Casswell was a small part with a few standout scenes which would allow Marilyn to shine.
Mankiewicz cast her. “It was suggested that the character would do whatever she had to do to get ahead, and I sensed that in Marilyn there was a certain amount of cunning as well as innocence,” Mankiewicz observed. “On one hand, she was vulnerable. But, on the other, calculating. She knew what she was doing, that one.”
Marilyn was nervous about being able to hold her own in scenes that included the great Bette Davis. Ironically Da
vis—whose marriage with costar Gary Merrill (a man a decade younger than her) was breaking up, assumed that a young woman who looked like Marilyn had it easy. “I felt a certain envy for what I assumed was Marilyn’s more-than-obvious popularity,” she said later. “Here was a girl who did not know what it was like to be lonely. Then I noticed how shy she was, and I think now that she was as lonely as I was. Lonelier. It was something I felt, a deep well of loneliness she was trying to fill.”
The actress Celeste Holm, who played Margo Channing’s unassuming best friend, had a low opinion of Marilyn on the set. “I never thought of Marilyn as being an actress.… I thought she was quite sweet and terribly dumb and my natural reaction was: Whose girl is that?”
It was only costar Gregory Ratoff in the role of a Broadway producer who truly recognized Marilyn’s charisma. “That girl is going to be a big star,” he said in his heavy Russian accent.
“Why?” Holm sniffed. “Because she keeps us waiting for an hour?”
“No. She has a quality,” he replied.
The quality is in evidence from the moment she makes her entrance on the arm of George Sanders, playing the influential theater critic. It’s a party scene, and Marilyn is luminous in a Helen Rose strapless ball gown. “I can see your career rise in the east like the sun,” Sanders purrs admiringly when she successfully flirts with an influential producer.
Once again word leaked out that Marilyn was doing a superb job in a major movie, and Hyde was able to negotiate a new contract for Marilyn with 20th Century-Fox, ironically the first studio to sign her three years earlier, only to drop her because Darryl Zanuck felt she had no future.
The contract offered her more money than the previous one she had signed; this one was for $500 a week for the first year, giving the studio the right to renew. If she was optioned for the second year her salary would be raised to $750 weekly, $1,250 for the third year, $1,500 for the fourth, $2,000 for the sixth, and if she was still making films for Fox in 1957, she would receive $3,500 for that last year of the contract.
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