Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  The staff at the hotel realizes that Nell is unhinged. Security is called. Trying to escape, she steps out of the elevator into the lobby, blinking in confusion. Her dress is torn, her face scratched. When cornered, Nell holds a razor blade she has stolen from the lobby’s convenience store. She brings the blade to her face. With her bewildered expression and crumpled, defeated body, Nell/Marilyn conveys what it feels like to be lost and completely alone in the world.

  * * *

  With her final moments in the movie, escorted off to yet another institution, she conveys all the fragility and desperation of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. One almost expects Nell to exclaim that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

  The movie was a modest moneymaker for Fox, but reviews were mixed, leaning toward negative. Some saw Marilyn’s potential, but most were perplexed at seeing the glamour girl play serious. Archer Winsten of the New York Post was facetious but balanced: “They’ve thrown Marilyn Monroe into the deep dramatic waters, sink or swim, and while she doesn’t really do either, you might say that she floats. With that figure, what else can she do?”

  * * *

  On the set of Don’t Bother to Knock, Baker witnessed firsthand a new phenomenon that was just beginning around Marilyn but would continue for the rest of her life. Baker said he “never knew anyone who came along when Marilyn was present who didn’t want to touch her—the continuity girl, the cameraman, the gaffer. It was extraordinary.”

  After she completed her leading role in Don’t Bother to Knock, the studio decided that the most important thing was to just keep Marilyn working, to continue churning out films with her in them and see what happened. No matter how big or small her role, as long as they put her on the poster they could be assured that people would turn up.

  We’re Not Married was a series of vignettes about five couples who suddenly find that their marriage licenses are not valid. Marilyn’s segment of the film lasts less than nine minutes. They put her in O. Henry’s Full House as a streetwalker, and she had a few lines with Charles Laughton.

  She was used to somewhat better advantage when she was cast in Monkey Business, even though it was another supporting role. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers would be playing the leads. Grant is a chemist who, along with some help from laboratory monkeys, concocts a youth serum he and his wife accidentally ingest. Marilyn was cast as a voluptuous secretary—whose physical attributes far surpass her office skills—to whom Grant turns his attention when his mind reverts to that of a twenty-year-old.

  EIGHT

  THE TALK OF HOLLYWOOD

  The baseball legend Joe DiMaggio was flipping through a newspaper when he came across a publicity photo of Marilyn—posed swinging a bat at home plate during a practice game with the Chicago White Sox, wearing a pair of very white shorts.

  But perhaps because it combined his two greatest passions—baseball and a beautiful woman—DiMaggio could not get the photo out of his head. At his urging, his friends made a series of phone calls until they tracked down someone who knew Marilyn: the press agent David March, who was good friends with her. March promised to give Marilyn a call and try to set up an introduction.

  When March called he got right to the point. “I have someone I want you to meet, Marilyn. He’s a nice guy.”

  “Are there really any nice guys left?” she asked solemnly.

  “This guy is,” March replied. “It’s Joe DiMaggio.”

  “Who’s he?” Marilyn asked.

  After considering it for a moment she added, “He plays sports, doesn’t he? Baseball or football or something.” Expecting someone flashy and cocksure, Marilyn was reluctant to go out with a famous athlete—even if he was retired.

  March told Marilyn she had nothing to lose. She wasn’t going out much, and having dinner with new people might help her out of her funk. Finally she agreed. To make it less awkward, March promised to make it a double date. He would bring his girlfriend, a young actress named Peggy Raba. He set the meeting place at an Italian restaurant, the Villa Nova, on Sunset Boulevard.

  Exhausted from her demanding work schedule—and likely from lack of sleep—Marilyn arrived at the Villa Nova almost two hours late. But when she slid into the booth, she was pleasantly surprised. She had imagined a brash loudmouth, but she found DiMaggio to be quiet and dignified, wearing a conservative dark suit. It was a busy night; the patrons of the restaurant were excited to be in the presence of his celebrity. Men kept approaching the table: DiMaggio was a baseball legend, and they threw their personalities around, trying to impress him. Marilyn was amused—usually it was she whom men were wooing.

  DiMaggio didn’t pose or preen. His modest demeanor and his total confidence in his accomplishments appealed to her. The other men in the room seemed vapid next to DiMaggio’s silent intensity. Marilyn sensed other qualities in him too.

  The sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, a close friend of DiMaggio, once described him as “the shyest public man I ever met,” adding, “I doubt if anyone fully understands his lonely character.” Marilyn instantly related. In spite of the fact that these were two popular and successful people, they recognized the aloneness in each other.

  Unexpectedly she was drawn to DiMaggio. She was fascinated by the flecks of gray in his dark, shiny, carefully combed hair, the silver strands seeming to accessorize his gray suit. What intrigued her most about the retired ballplayer was his silence. Yet his reserve made her unsure of his feelings toward her. Normally men came on to her by bragging or being overly attentive—she understood how to handle that. DiMaggio wasn’t giving off any obvious signals at all. He hardly looked at her, and she wondered why.

  The truth was that he was simply shy and intimidated by her. DiMaggio was already crazy about Marilyn and afraid to show it, but “you could almost feel him going to pieces,” David March recalled.

  After coffee Marilyn—still not completely sure of DiMaggio’s feelings for her—stood up to leave. He surprised her by offering to walk her to the car. When they reached her car he confessed he didn’t have a ride home. Would Marilyn mind driving him to the Knickerbocker Hotel? Marilyn’s hopes soared. During the ride he said, “I don’t feel like turning in just yet. Would you mind driving around for a while?”

  Marilyn had been very tired when the evening started off, but she was energized now. She was happy to drive around the streets of Hollywood. By now Marilyn knew that DiMaggio was a baseball legend, but she knew nothing about sports. At thirty-seven, he was retired and making a living doing sports commentary on television. He also owned a seaside restaurant in San Francisco called the Yankee Clipper. He was divorced from Dorothy Arnold. Their five-year marriage had produced a son, Joe Jr., who was now twelve.

  And they talked a little, revealing just a tiny bit of themselves, and by the end of the evening they both realized that they very much wanted to know more. Marilyn would say that “scores of men had told me I was beautiful,” but when Joe DiMaggio complimented her it “was the first time my heart had jumped to hear it.”

  She needed someone in her corner, and Joe, who loved her almost at once, was on her side. He made that abundantly clear from the very beginning. He let her know that he only wanted what was best for her. Strong, silent, smart, DiMaggio was just the kind of man she needed.

  * * *

  In 1952 a nude photograph of an alluring blond woman kneeling with one arm up, concealing half her face, was appearing on calendars that hung in barbershops, auto-mechanic garages, and men’s lockers all over the country. Simultaneously Marilyn Monroe was becoming the most recognizable blonde of the era. For the first time men began paying as much attention to the face on the calendars as they did to her splendid body. It looked like her. “Could it be?” they asked one another.

  In the morality of the early 1950s, nudity was equated with pornography. The fact that a young, nationally known woman had posed naked was scandalous enough to destroy a career. It was getting to the point where 20th Century-Fox was going to have to
confront the problem. There were many frantic meetings behind closed doors at Fox. There were consultations with lawyers and the best publicity men. The consensus among all was that Marilyn should deny that she was the beautiful blonde on the calendar.

  But Marilyn—with her uncanny sense of self and an understanding of the public’s perception of her—had other ideas. Even with all the attention being paid her, she wasn’t quite a star. This could do it. Since her fame was built on sexuality, she felt that with the right backstory, her public would stay with her: Marilyn would tell the truth.

  She had been scheduled for an interview with the journalist Aline Mosby the following week. During the interview Marilyn told Mosby in a confidential whisper: “A few years ago when I had no money for food or rent, a photographer I knew asked me to pose nude for an art calendar. His wife was there, they were both so nice, and I earned fifty dollars that I needed very bad.… They want me to deny it’s me. But I can’t lie. What should I do?”

  On March 13, 1952, Aline Mosby broke the story in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The headline read: “Marilyn Monroe Admits She’s Nude Blonde of Calendar.”

  It was shocking to the public that they could see a movie star’s naked body. Within days this was a major news story all over the world. The thing that titillated the public the most was that Marilyn refused to say that she regretted posing. Instead she joked about it.

  When a reporter asked her what she had on, Marilyn shrugged and said, “The radio.”

  The nude calendar story only played into the public’s paradoxical view of Marilyn Monroe. She was a bad girl who was really a good girl—it was the world that made her bad. Marilyn understood both sides of her appeal, and knew how to exploit them. Part of the public wanted it to be acceptable to admire provocative and sexual personalities—but society told them it was wrong. Marilyn’s innocence made it acceptable.

  * * *

  That April, LIFE put her on the cover with the very true headline: “The Talk of Hollywood.” It was clear that the public was insatiable for new information about Marilyn Monroe, and reporters started seriously digging into her past for a new angle. It was inevitable that the journalist Erskine Johnson would uncover that Marilyn was not the orphan girl she had claimed to be since the beginning of her publicity. Erskine had discovered that Gladys Monroe Baker was alive.

  Once again Marilyn was summoned to the Fox executive offices to explain herself. This time she truly would have preferred the story to remain unknown. But she had no choice. Her mother was alive.* Again she had to face the media to explain herself.

  When explaining to the press that her mother was alive, Marilyn went for the simple truth: “My mother spent many years at the hospital,” she said. “Through Los Angeles County, my guardian placed me in several foster families, and I spent more than a year at the Los Angeles Orphanage. I haven’t known my mother intimately, and since I’m an adult, and able to help her, I have contacted her. Now I help her, and I want to keep helping her as long as she needs me.”

  * * *

  20th Century-Fox’s selection of Niagara for Marilyn’s next movie showed her new status in Hollywood, which was to emerge full-blown in 1953. Niagara is in every way a star vehicle. A film noir about an adulterous woman, Rose Loomis, played by Marilyn, plotting with her lover to kill her husband (Joseph Cotten) as they vacation in a resort near Niagara Falls. Staying at the same resort is a young honeymooning couple who become embroiled in the sinister plot.

  Marilyn had been potent enough in black-and-white. In Niagara she exploded onto the screen in magnificent Technicolor. At one point in the film Rose requests the DJ to play her favorite song, “Kiss.” In a remarkable, lingering close-up Marilyn sings along with the record, her sultry voice the perfect complement to her seductive image on the screen. It is here that the indelible Monroe legend was born.

  Although she was very popular before Niagara was made, its release was the starting point of the image of Marilyn Monroe that is woven into the fabric of America—the tousled blond hair, the porcelain skin, the glossy red lips, the heavy-lidded eyes, the beauty mark above her lip.

  The world’s intense fascination with her was now out of even her control, and it frightened her. Joseph Cotten observed, “When we filmed on location at Niagara Falls, great crowds gathered to see her. She couldn’t cope, retreated into her shell.”

  Niagara is a tawdry, entertaining thriller. Most reviews of the day, however, focused on Marilyn’s physicality. Variety wrote: “The camera lingers on Monroe’s sensuous lips, roves over her slip-clad figure and accurately etches the outlines of her derrière as she weaves down a street to a rendezvous with her lover.” Yet Pauline Kael later saw the darkness underneath that Marilyn might bring to other roles: “The only movie that explores the mean, unsavory potential of Marilyn Monroe’s cuddly, infantile perversity.”

  But that would be the last time Marilyn would ever be given the opportunity to play a lustful character whose sexual appetite was her guiding force. Her next character—the world’s most gorgeous dumb blonde—would be so potent, so beloved, that it would erase any notion in Hollywood that Marilyn Monroe could or should ever play anything else.

  PART 2

  THE PREFERRED BLONDE

  NINE

  MELTING THE SCREEN

  Marilyn Monroe was born to play Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  Once in a great while the stars align in Hollywood, and there is a perfect marriage between an actor and a role. Marilyn had one of the greatest breaks in her career when she was cast in the role of the diamond-loving Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was the perfect role for the perfect actress in the first perfect time and place. No one could have played the role of Lorelei Lee better than Marilyn Monroe in 1952.

  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a madcap musical comedy about a gold-digging blonde who is engaged to the millionaire she loves but gets into trouble on a transatlantic cruise to France with her girlfriend Dorothy (played by Jane Russell). During the cruise hijinks ensue, and trouble brews when Lorelei persuades an aging millionaire, Piggy, to give her his wife’s diamond tiara—which the latter promptly reports as stolen.

  The journalist Denis Ferrara has joked that Jane Russell was the best leading man that Marilyn Monroe ever had. Cast as Dorothy, Russell is the wisecracking, tough-as-nails-on-the-outside-but-compassionate-and-protective-on-the-inside gal pal. The media was anticipating a feud between the two bombshells. In his column Earl Wilson predicted it would be “the Battle of the Bulges.” Russell would be getting top billing and was being paid $150,000 for the picture.

  Fox held Marilyn to the contract she signed before her remarkably rapid rise, and her salary remained at $1,500 a week. Russell did witness the antagonism Marilyn felt toward the Fox big boys, who continued to treat her as if she were a struggling starlet. But the conflict wasn’t about money. Marilyn was incensed that the studio still hadn’t given her a private dressing room.

  Fox kept telling her she wasn’t a “star”; it was their way of keeping her in line. In spite of all the fan mail, publicity, and adoration, she was still a contract player. “I was always being talked down to,” she said. Yet, when she was driving a friend to the airport, she saw her name up in lights on a marquee advertising As Young as You Feel. Dazed with disbelief, Marilyn pulled over to the side of the road and stared at the marquee. “So that’s what it looks like,” she said, marveling.

  It emboldened her to go to the head office and ask for a dressing room. “What makes you think you’re a star?” they retorted dismissively. “Then I got angry,” she told journalist Richard Meryman in a tipsy interview.* “I said, ‘Well whatever I am, I am the blonde—and it is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Marilyn didn’t think they’d give her a dressing room “but they did.”

  The anticipated feud between Marilyn and Jane Russell never happened. “She was like my little sister,” Russell said. Marilyn understood that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was her moment to seal the deal
once and for all. It was the opportunity to become—for all time—the blonde everyone prefers. “I never saw anybody work harder in my life,” Russell observed. “Sometimes she was so engrossed she’d forget to eat lunch.” Russell would bring her a hamburger. At the end of a long day of shooting, Marilyn would go back to Natasha’s to continue working on the script for several more hours.

  Marilyn had never danced professionally, and she paid particular attention to the dance numbers. The much-admired dancer Jack Cole had been assigned to choreograph the musical sequences. Cole was known to be very demanding and tough with his dancers.

  According to Jane Russell, he would work with the two leading ladies for hours. After many run-throughs Russell would flee the rehearsal in exhaustion while Marilyn begged Cole to continue going over the dances late into the night.

  Marilyn was especially anxious about how her big number in the movie, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” would be staged. She needn’t have worried. Cole had complete understanding of Marilyn’s persona, and masterfully choreographed movements that perfectly suited her character. Understanding that she was not a trained dancer, he taught her to sometimes make her gestures subtle and precise.

  Rather than teach her dance steps where she would need to be fast on her feet, much of Cole’s choreography has to do with her manipulating her expressive torso, arms, hands, and fingers—even her facial expressions. He gave her small physical movements made gigantic by her powerful magnetism. She clutches her gloved hands to her chest, shrugs, winks, and points her fingers in either direction like a pistol. Sometimes she simply works her luscious bare shoulders.

  For “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” the costume designer Travilla designed Marilyn an elegant, shocking pink satin strapless evening gown with an oversize bow in back, which he accessorized with matching opera gloves and lots of jewelry, keeping in line with the theme of the song.