by Donald Spoto
Henceforth, the content of every interview she gave and story she approved was magnificently contrived—not to hoodwink, but to advance herself and to contradict the prevailing Hollywood hypocrisies. As for the slightly fictitious tints (she was not either hungry or homeless when she posed for Kelley), Marilyn always believed those points to be incidental.
At this time, with waves of adoration, forgiveness and pity washing over her, Marilyn began to meet more often with Sidney Skolsky, who urged her to continue the embellishment of the legend and helped her to do so. “If anything was ‘wrong’ in a star’s biography,” as producer David Brown said, “it could be changed by the Publicity Department, or by a star’s prudent mentor. Names were changed, ages, birthplaces, new parents were assigned—anything was possible to serve the myth-making.”
One of the hoary anecdotes devised about the early life of Norma Jeane involved the incredible story of a madwoman (sometimes named as her mother, frequently her grandmother, often a neighbor) who, when Norma Jeane was one year old, attempted to suffocate her with a pillow and had to be forcibly removed. This grotesque fiction seems to have been inspired by her recent film Don’t Bother to Knock (not yet released), for in its climactic moments Nell binds and gags a little girl, nearly suffocating the child. Blurring the distinction between her real self and her movie self, she made herself the victimized child of the movie.
Marilyn assumed the difficult task of sometimes justifying her life by dramatizing it. “My childhood was like this movie, which you can see later this year,” she was saying. “But I survived.” Just as she acquitted herself of a charge of pandering by claiming to have been photographed nude because she was hungry and almost homeless, so with the fabricated stories she accumulated about her childhood (fourteen foster homes, for example). The lost little girl who was in fact part of her own real self was becoming the single vital element endearing her to the world.
As Marilyn had predicted to Natasha, Joe sternly disapproved of the nude calendar, by then in print all over the world. He perhaps did not discuss this with her, but for much of late March and early April (while he was preparing his broadcast season with the Yankees), Joe did not contact her quite so frequently. He broke his silence, however, to rush to her side when yet another revelation about Marilyn’s past made news that spring. Contrary to her earlier accounts of an orphaned childhood, the press then learned that her mother was indeed alive—in fact she was sufficiently well to have been released from the state hospital at Agnew and was working temporarily as an aide at a private nursing home called Homestead Lodge on Colorado Boulevard, in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles near Pasadena. But because it had been years since Gladys had lived anything like a normal life, her behavior was erratic (especially around other psychiatric patients).
The matter surfaced on the death of a man named John Stewart Eley, to whom Gladys was briefly married during this time. An electrician who lived in West Los Angeles, he died there of heart disease at the age of sixty-two on April 23, 1952. At about this time, Gladys wrote to her daughter, addressing her by her new name:
Dear Marilyn,
Please dear child, I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.
Love,
Mother
The letter, which Marilyn kept to the end of her life, cut her to the heart; she had not shown Gladys any ill will. But she refused to visit her, despite Inez Melson’s transmission of Gladys’s requests; nor, it seems, would she ever contact her mother in any way. That Marilyn so acted denotes another paradox in her complex character. She helped her, but from a distance—by writing checks, making arrangements for her care and, eventually, by providing for her in a trust fund. But in 1952, Marilyn seems to have reached a point in her life when all her energies and talents were devoted to the creation and maintenance of an entirely new person, and it was as this new person that she wished to act—more, to become. Gladys was a reminder of an unhappy past, a family history that, she had been told by Grace McKee Goddard, was full of dark and dangerous illnesses that could be inherited. Better to be a new person with a new fresh identity—the new Jean Harlow, perhaps, or just Marilyn Monroe.
“I knew there was really nothing between us,” she said defensively of her mother a few years later, “and I knew there was so little I could do for her. We were strangers. Our time in Los Angeles was very difficult, and even she realized that we didn’t know each other.” And she concluded this statement—one of her rare discussions of her mother—with the telling words: “I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life, and I had in mine. I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works.”
Much of Marilyn Monroe’s own psychological suffering in years to come would derive from her inability to forget; and much of the psychotherapy failed to deal directly with her guilt and its aftermath.1
With the revelation that Gladys was alive, the studio for the second time that year had to devise a way of coping with the press and with public opinion. Once again, Marilyn was summoned to the executive offices, and once again she found a way to deflect resentment of the previous falsehoods and turn the issue to her advantage. The columnist Erskine Johnson was invited to receive an exclusive interview. “Unbeknown to me as a child,” Marilyn said with uncharacteristically antique vocabulary (the speech was written by Sidney Skolsky),
my mother spent many years as an invalid in a state hospital. I was raised in a series of foster homes arranged by a guardian through the County of Los Angeles and I spent more than a year in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. I haven’t known my mother intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her I have contacted her. I am helping her now and want to continue to help her when she needs me.
To this she added, in a July letter to the editor of Redbook, that she had
told the story the way I knew it as a child, and even since knowing of her existence, I have tried to respect my mother’s wish to remain anonymous. . . . We have never known each other intimately and have never enjoyed the normal relationship of mother and daughter. If I have erred in concealing these facts, please accept my deepest apologies and please believe that my motive was one of consideration for a person for whom I feel a great obligation.
What she meant by her mother’s wish to remain anonymous is unclear. All that can be known for certain about Marilyn’s attitude to Gladys is that fear made her seem callous. Resenting her past, she tried to cloak it.
More to the point, her illegitimacy had to remain hidden. “Marilyn’s father was killed in an automobile accident,” wrote Johnson, “and her mother subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown.” Little else concerned the studio executives, glad to have the question of Marilyn’s maternity settled because that year a number of women had stepped forward claiming they were her mother.
Although Marilyn appeared for only a minute in another Fox anthology movie in 1952, she was billed as the star when it was released. O. Henry’s Full House begins with “The Cop and the Anthem,” in which an amusingly pompous vagrant, played by Charles Laughton, tries vainly to have himself arrested in order to assure a warm bed and food for the winter. For his last effort, aware he is being watched by a patrolman, Laughton approaches Marilyn, a well-dressed streetwalker, to proposition her. But he whispers that he cannot afford to give her money or buy her a drink and, touched by her beauty and simplicity, offers her his only possession—his umbrella: “for a charming and delightful young lady,” he says, tipping his bowler hat. As he hurries away, she gazes at him with a long, sad gaze. The policeman approaches: “What’s going on here? What’s happening?”
“He called me a lady!” she says in grateful astonishment, and as the scene fades she begins to weep—for herself rather than for him, it is implied. This was one of the most touching moments i
n Marilyn’s screen career—a perfect vignette delicately acted.
In addition to his frequent Los Angeles trips to play umpire for Marilyn with the press, Joe attended her during an incident that earned her even more sympathy. Two Los Angeles sharpies were arrested and charged after it was proven that photographs of a nude woman they peddled were indeed of Marilyn. It seemed that every week of her life was newsworthy: every relationship, every part of her history, everything past, present and possible, especially now that she was seen and photographed so often with Joe. Rumors of imminent marriage swirled in and out of Hollywood.
On April 18, Marilyn’s option was, to no one’s surprise, exercised by Fox: she would receive seven hundred fifty dollars a week for the year beginning May 11—one of the lowest salaries then paid any important star. She had not yet officially signed with Feldman and Famous Artists; her status with the Morris agency was still unclear; and even if representatives had gone to seek redress and a new contract in light of her increased value to the studio, their chances would have been slim. A seven-year contract was in full force, and there was nothing to be done about it.
After months of intermittent distress, she then had her appendix removed, on April 28, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. When Dr. Marcus Rabwin lifted the hospital linen to begin surgery, he was astonished to find that Marilyn had taped a handwritten note to her abdomen, a plea that revealed her terror of infertility:
Dr. Rabwin—most important to read before operation!
Dear Dr. Rabwin,
Cut as little as possible. I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter into it. The fact that I’m a woman is important and means much to me.
Save please (I can’t ask you enough) what you can—I’m in your hands. You have children and you must know what it means—please Dr. Rabwin—I know somehow you will! Thank you—thank you—thank you. For Gods sake Dear Doctor No ovaries removed—please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars.
Thanking you with all my heart.
Marilyn Monroe
Rabwin, slightly disarmed, thought it a good idea to have a gynecologist present during the surgery, and so Dr. Leon Krohn was brought in to assist. From that day, he became Marilyn’s specialist, caring for her during a lifetime of chronic menstrual and reproductive problems. On May 6, Marilyn was back at home with only a small scar and, she happily told Joe, her ability to conceive intact.
During May, she recuperated at the Doheny Drive apartment, but before the end of the month—because fans had learned her address and were besieging her with mail (and unwanted visits)—she decided, with Joe’s help, to move into a small suite at the Bel-Air Hotel.
Nineteen fifty-two was, then, the first year Marilyn Monroe engrossed universal attention. From the calendar to the news of her mother and her relationship with Joe; from the release of not one but five films (Clash by Night in June, We’re Not Married and Don’t Bother to Knock in July, Monkey Business and O. Henry’s Full House in September and October); from her frequent appearances in Sidney Skolsky’s column to her presence on magazine covers and in news stories at least thrice weekly and sometimes more—never before, perhaps in the history of the world, had someone other than a great ruler or head of state received such celebration. Pictures, interviews and news of Marilyn Monroe flowed in an uninterrupted cascade.
On June 1, she turned twenty-six and was informed by Fox that a color film test made a week before had been approved. She was already scheduled to appear in a Technicolor picture that summer—Niagara, a thriller to begin immediately with location shooting at the falls. Now it was announced, on her birthday, that in the autumn she would have the plum leading role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical comedy based on stories, a book, a silent film and a Broadway musical by Anita Loos. Originally planned for Betty Grable, the second role went to Marilyn because of her increasing popularity; because at her contracted weekly salary she came much cheaper than Grable; because she was ten years younger than Grable; because Zanuck, after hearing the unreleased recording of “Do It Again,” was persuaded she could handle the musical numbers; and perhaps most of all because she was championed for the role by Jule Styne, who wrote the Broadway songs, including what would become Marilyn’s signature tune, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
On June 8, Marilyn left a farewell note for Sidney at Schwab’s and flew to New York. Sharing the news with his readers, he observed on June 10, “My, how fast the months go—and the calendars!” Two days later, his entire column was devoted to a résumé of her life and career.
By this time, she and her co-stars in Niagara—among them Joseph Cotten and supporting players Jean Peters and Max Showalter (then known as Casey Adams)—were enduring the sounds and furies of both Niagara Falls and Henry Hathaway, a director not known for his friendliness to actors. He was leading them through a script by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard Breen about a tortured former mental patient named George Loomis (Cotten), who is to be murdered in a plot hatched by his wantonly voluptuous wife Rose (Marilyn) and her young lover Patrick (Richard Allan). While the cataract rages, so do everyone’s passions: George is mad with jealousy, Rose seethes with lust, and Patrick is hot to kill for his mistress. At the finale, the plot is foiled by George, who kills the lover and Rose before going over Niagara Falls to his own death.
To the surprise of many, Marilyn and Hathaway worked seriously and cordially together, although she was terrified during production in New York and California that summer: “She never had any confidence,” according to the director, “never sure she was a good actress. The tragedy was that she was never allowed to be.” Somewhat to the contrary, however, Niagara permitted her just that latitude, and her portrait of Rose, generally disregarded because of the camera’s emphasis on her walk and her nakedness under the bedclothes, is convincingly sluttish. There is nothing of the breathless, innocently sexy, comic ingenue here—only the surly, selfish tart, confident of her power to seduce and destroy, her voice coated with contempt for a weak and ineffectual husband who refuses to help himself.
Joseph Cotten found Marilyn easy to work with and a genial colleague. “If you wanted to talk about yourself, she listened. If you wanted to talk about her, she blushed. A rather lost little girl, I found her to be.” As for her tardiness, Cotten recalled Marilyn replying to the unit manager, “Am I making a picture or punching a time clock?”
Like Nell Forbes in Don’t Bother to Knock, Rose (as portrayed by Marilyn) is entirely at odds with the safe, sexy beauty with whom Fox and America’s audiences felt comfortable. In these two films, Marilyn’s appeal is dangerous; she cannot be trusted; her allure is deadly. From these pictures it would be only a slight turn of type to the coy, manipulative dumb-when-convenient gold diggers of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire, roles that made her even more determined to escape typecasting. Yet in Niagara, she had a little more to do: indeed, this was the film that established her stardom.
In an early scene, arriving at the tourists’ community party in Niagara Falls wearing a tight red dress, Marilyn as Rose reclines languidly and hums a few measures of the song “Kiss,” which she has requested. She is at once the incarnation of every male fantasy of available sex, and every young man in the sequence turns away from his date, stupefied by this force of nature. “Kiss” and the more innocent gathering are then aborted when Rose’s husband smashes the record. This moment was improvised on the set at the last minute, when studio watchdogs, after an outraged representative of the Woman’s Clubs of America visited the shooting, felt forced to proclaim Marilyn’s singing as too suggestive.
In the fully preserved recording of the Lionel Newman/Haven Gillespie song (unreleased until years after her death), Marilyn’s significant gifts as a singer are evident. There is, in her sureness of pitch and breath control, in the silkiness and calmness of her approach to each phrase, a certitude of winning her request; she makes, in other words, the stereotypical 1950 love lyrics both credible and enti
cing: “Kiss me . . . thrill me . . . Hold me in your arms . . . This is the moment . . .” One hears in her smoky vibrato the influence of Ella Fitzgerald (whose recordings she studied nightly at home), and even the dynamics of contemporary singers like Julie Wilson, Jo Stafford and Doris Day. But this is no simple composite of imitations: had her complete catalog of recordings been commercially available in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe would have been hailed as one of the finest balladeers of her time.
Henry Hathaway called Marilyn “the best natural actress I ever directed,” an assessment not generally shared by critics (although Time and Newsweek took note of her growing dramatic abilities). Her nuances of expression, her impatience and her lusty bravado throw this Technicolor film noir, about mismatched couples at romantic Niagara Falls, into a state of constant anxiety. Desire, her performance implies, is as perilous as proximity to the torrent. It was also, as Allan Snyder recalled, the film in which she accidentally learned her famous hip-swinging walk. The crew was shooting her as she walked a long distance away from the camera, but the uneven cobblestone street threw her high heels off, and the result was a seductive swivel she used forever after.
For Hathaway, she was
marvelous to work with, very easy to direct and terrifically ambitious to do better. And bright, really bright. She may not have had an education, but she was just naturally bright. But always being trampled on by bums. I don’t think anyone ever treated her on her own level. To most men she was something that they were a little bit ashamed of—even Joe DiMaggio.