Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Hathaway was right. On weekends in June and July, Marilyn sped to Manhattan to be with Joe, who was broadcasting for the Yankees. Both at the stadium and in the television studio, Joe was nervous and unsure of himself with microphone and camera, forcing himself to interview players, awkwardly reading cue cards and beer commercials. But he would not accept any advice from Marilyn, who had a few tips of her own—breathing exercises she learned from Natasha, a few moments of inner focus counseled by Chekhov.

  “A lot of guys used to hang around that [television] studio just to see her,” according to Yankee player Phil Rizzuto. “She’d sit in the stands before the games and talk to some of the players. They were kids and just liked the idea of going home and telling their friends they knew a movie star.” This did not at all please Joe, however, who disliked the attention others paid to Marilyn as much as he resented her low necklines and tight skirts. “Joe loved her,” Rizzuto said. “I know that.” But the problem was that Joe was “a jealous guy, and he didn’t like all the men looking at her.” One might as well have asked the waters of Niagara to cease falling.

  But Marilyn knew how to dilute resentment. For propriety’s sake, she suggested that they book two separate rooms at the Drake Hotel; they used only one. In public, the lovers were seen at expensive restaurants like Le Pavillon, and they signed autographs everywhere. “It’s the seventh inning stretch in the Marilyn Monroe—Joe DiMaggio love game,” Sidney Skolsky reported. But the event was destined for overtime.

  Back in Hollywood for studio work on Niagara while Joe had to linger in New York with the Yankees, Marilyn was urged by Hathaway to quit the Bel-Air Hotel. He also advised her (in vain) to give up the lessons with Natasha Lytess, which he felt did nothing but make Marilyn feel more inferior and more selfconscious. Then, for a few scenes in Niagara, Hathaway asked her to wear her own clothes, but she replied without embarrassment that she possessed only slacks, sweaters and one black suit, which she bought for Johnny Hyde’s funeral. “That’s why I have to borrow clothes from the studio when I go out,” Marilyn explained. “I don’t have any of my own.”

  The reason was simple economics. Of her seven-hundred-fifty-dollar salary, Marilyn took home less than five hundred dollars after taxes. From this she paid ten percent to William Morris, almost two hundred dollars weekly for drama, diction and singing lessons, at least fifty or sixty dollars a month to Inez Melson, and more for Gladys.

  Returning to California in late July, Joe asked Marilyn to meet him in San Francisco, where he introduced her to his family. There, she picked up the cues that a DiMaggio woman was an expert in the arts of housewifery—cooking, sewing, ironing, housekeeping. To Joe and to reporters, Marilyn subsequently said that being a homemaker was the one job to which she longed to devote herself. “I think I’ll reach some real stature when I have a family,” she added.

  Before summer’s end, Joe asked her to consider abandoning moviemaking: did it not, after all, cause her only anxiety? This she was not prepared to do, but neither was she willing to disconnect herself from him. And so she asked for time. This only made DiMaggio the more pursuant. “I didn’t want to give up my career,” she said later, “and that’s what Joe wanted me to do most of all. He wanted me to be the beautiful ex-actress, just like he was the great former ballplayer. We were to ride into some sunset together. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of journey yet. I wasn’t even thirty, for heaven’s sake!”

  * * *

  Ensuring her ongoing primacy in the national press, Marilyn continued to surprise. With no advance advertising, for example, she made her live radio debut on the “Hollywood Star Playhouse” that summer, reading with poise and conviction a role in an unexceptional one-act play. On October 26, she was heard on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s radio show, trading wisecracks with Bergen’s characters Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.

  She also risked shocking the horses. To columnist Earl Wilson she gave the new information that she wore “nothing, but nothing at all—no panties, slips, girdles or bras” beneath her outerwear, a custom very rare in 1952. “I like to feel unhampered,” she explained. Accounts of her undress ran throughout the rest of that year. At a benefit baseball game in Los Angeles, for example, a group of actresses wore jerseys and shorts, “but La Monroe showed up to toss the first baseball of the game in a tight dress with absolutely nothing on underneath.” About this same time, photographer George Hurrell had a session with Marilyn at the studio. “She did the same routine that Harlow did,” he recalled. “[She arrived] wrapped in something and, all of a sudden, let it fall. I presume the idea was to get you going. Well, they were exhibitionists.”2

  Equally daringly, on a promotional tour for Monkey Business that summer Marilyn wore a dress cut so revealingly from shoulder to navel it was quite evident she wore neither slip nor brassiere. The film’s national premiere was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and so studio publicists arranged with officials of the Miss America Pageant for Marilyn to be the first female Grand Marshal of the parade.

  When this news circulated, a branch of the United States government wanted to benefit from her visit, too. On Monday, September 1, Marilyn was asked to pose with uniformed servicewomen as part of an advertising drive to recruit more ladies into the armed forces. Flanked by several of them wearing regulation dark suits and ties, Marilyn smiled broadly in her low-cut white summer dress with red polka-dots. Because the photographer insisted on snapping the picture from a balcony and asked Marilyn to lean slightly forward, her ample bosom appeared all too prominently, perilously close to total exposure in the resulting photo. Three hours after United Press International had wired it round the country, an army official ordered the picture withdrawn and Marilyn canceled from the recruiting campaign. “This picture might give parents of potential women recruits a wrong conception [of military life],” said an unidentified officer with absolute gravity. Marilyn fired off a reply at once: “I am very surprised and hurt.”

  Next day, September 2, she was even more boldly semidressed when leading the Miss America parade. For days there were loud shock waves and indignant announcements from some church and women’s groups as newspapers across the country showed a beaming Marilyn, wearing a wispy black item with little here, less there, nothing much anywhere and a neckline that plunged to the waist and threatened to keep on going. The result was predictable: she had more attention than any of the contestants. “People were staring down at me all day long,” she said innocently a few days later, “but I thought they were admiring my grand marshall’s badge.” After Joe met her in Los Angeles and angrily expressed to Marilyn his fierce disapproval of such public displays, she summoned a reporter: “That dress was designed for eye level,” she said, “not for photographers who stood on a balcony and shot downward. I’m embarrassed and hurt.” Sidney Skolsky helped to calm the troubled waters, too: “Photographers stood on a high platform and shot down,” he wrote indignantly. “What did they expect to see?”

  Such bold exploits, designed to shock and therefore attract attention, are often typical of performers, who require publicity to maintain their careers; but all actors are to some extent exhibitionists, some more literally so than others. Nor is this need for attention inconsistent with an acute shyness or reticence in private life; an actor’s true nature, after all, is very often wildly variant from the public persona.

  In this case, “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed becoming a carefully calculated role she assumed: an audacious, luxuriantly sensuous woman with ever blonder (and eventually white platinum) hair and moist lips, smiling for crowds and singing saucily for thousands. In a way, the role of Marilyn Monroe fulfilled and released a part of her that, she said, had dreamed of nudity and the adoration of masses since childhood. Since she began to speak of that dream at this time in her life, it may indeed have been a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The increasing danger, however, was that while dedication to a film career sometimes endorsed and enhanced her self-image, it long prevented her from achieving
a solid inner basis from which to live; that which she so fiercely desired, in other words—to portray convincingly other people—was a hindrance for one who had little sense of her own identity.

  Although she was not hesitant to appear nearly naked for certain public events throughout her life, Marilyn was hereafter seen less frequently at Hollywood nightclubs, parties, restaurants and premieres than any actress of her time and fame. She was available and admired on screen, in magazines and newspapers, but people seldom saw her in person, and only a handful of other celebrities met her at intimate gatherings. A notable exception was her presence at a party given by Fox at the home of bandleader Ray Anthony in late 1952. The occasion celebrated Anthony’s recording of the song “Marilyn,” by Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl. She delighted the guests by playing the drums under Mickey Rooney’s direction.

  Otherwise, there were two reasons for her social reticence: first, while she was comfortable being a focus of a crowd’s attention, singing, smiling or waving, Marilyn was hesitant to speak in public. She always hated impromptu interviews and press conferences, for which she felt unprepared, and she was fearful of appearing stupid or socially inept and therefore unacceptable. In addition, by restricting her Hollywood personal appearances, she was effectively making herself the celebrity of celebrities, fascinatingly enigmatic for movie folk as well as the world at large.

  Clothes occupied much of her time that autumn. While interior sequences, retakes and dialogue redubbing for Niagara remained to be done at the studio, Marilyn set herself an important task. Joe heartily agreed with Henry Hathaway that her wardrobe needed major additions, and he accompanied her, providing advice and expressing opinions as she purchased blouses, dresses and suits from startled clerks in Los Angeles clothing stores.

  The general astonishment at one store derived not so much from the presence of celebrities shopping (a common enough occurrence in Los Angeles, after all) but from Marilyn’s choice of tightly fitted trousers below an equally clinging blouse leaving a bare midriff. In the dressing room of another store, she shocked an employee in attendance when, about to try a sleeveless white dress with a plunging neckline, she removed her jeans and sweater and stood stark naked.3

  As she may have expected, this brought loud disapproval from Joe, and more than once that autumn there were news reports of “some estrangement” and a “rift” separating America’s favorite unmarried couple. This was all the more rumored around October 1, when Joe left town after what Marilyn later termed “a lot of name-calling [by Joe].” And so, on the afternoon of Saturday, October 4, Marilyn (who never liked to shop alone) asked Natasha to accompany her on a shopping expedition to Jax, a store on Wilshire Boulevard. There she selected several pairs of lounging trousers, shirts, blouses and accessories and wrote a check against her account at the Bank of America for $313.-13. Beneath her signature, she added her current address: 2393 Castilian Drive, where she and Joe had taken a two-month sublease to avoid the annoying reporters surrounding them so often at the Bel-Air Hotel.4

  * * *

  Before the end of 1952, Marilyn was at work on the twentieth film of her career and her sixth that year—the Technicolor musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (written by Charles Lederer), which forever enshrined her in memory as the luscious, nubile gold digger, apparently witless but in fact savvy about the ways of men, misers and millionaires. “I thought you were dumb!” remarks the father of her rich boyfriend. “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” This crucial bit of dialogue (as the script assistant’s notes reveal) was inserted at Marilyn’s direct suggestion: as usual, she understood the part better than anyone, and her addition is her own sly riposte to the prevailing sexism of the 1950s. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn was Lorelei Lee, and Jane Russell was cast as her wisecracking brunette sidekick, Dorothy Shaw. (At her contractual fee of $1,250 per week, Marilyn received about $15,000 for the picture; Jane Russell was paid $150,000. She was still subject to the terms of her contract, and the tangled skein of her relationship with the Morris and Famous Artists agencies had not yet been unraveled.)

  Lorelei and Dorothy sail from America to Paris; they meet millionaires; they work in a nightclub; they cope with various silly misadventures surrounding Lorelei’s weakness for rich men and her fragile fidelity to her wimpy fiancé; and the stars save a thin story from total collapse by sheer energy in several song-and-dance numbers (which really ought to be designated “strut numbers”).

  Most notable, however, was Marilyn’s legendary rendition of the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” by Jule Styne and Leo Robin. Surrounded by dozens of men in black tie and tails, Marilyn fairly shimmers in Travilla’s pink strapless gown against a garish red cyclorama. Like the other musical numbers, the sequence was directed not by Howard Hawks (whose métier was not musical comedy) but by the respected choreographer Jack Cole. But Marilyn did not really dance: she skipped, ran, leaped, strolled, pointed, threw her arms about and was whisked here and there by a platoon of men as she caresses ropes of diamonds and rhapsodizes over the erotic appeal of “Tiffany’s . . . Cartier’s . . . Speak to me, Harry Winston!!!” This was a parody of greed-as-sex, legitimized in 1953 (so the studio and critics thought) by its own amoral cuteness. The number succeeds in spite of itself and remains the most frequently shown piece of Monroe footage because Marilyn played it for high-class satire.

  On this number Marilyn worked tirelessly, as if she knew the sequence would endure as a kind of national icon: according to the actor Ron Nyman (one of the team of adoring chorus men in the “Diamonds” sequence), she was very much liked on the film, but her shyness hindered the kind of immediate warmth Jane Russell projected. In addition, when Marilyn insisted on something (a retake, an alteration to the number, a conference with Natasha), she got it (“when she put her foot down, it was down,” as Nyman said). Musical director Lionel Newman recalled the recording sessions, for which Marilyn insisted on singing with the orchestra—an unusual practice for film recording, which usually depends on voice overdubbing of prerecorded music. She also asked for eleven takes, agonizing to get the song perfectly. “She was damned sure of what she wanted,” according to Newman, “[but] the men in the orchestra adored her. She was always congenial, courteous, not temperamental, and never forgot to thank everyone who worked with her.”

  Marilyn (perhaps the least materialistic movie star in history) performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” as if it were a kind of satire. Hers is an unreal cupidity, as her winks and smiles attest. “I feel as though it’s all happening to someone right next to me,” she said of the resulting notoriety when the picture was released. “I’m close, I can feel it, I can hear it. But it really isn’t me.” (“There wasn’t a real thing about her,” said Hawks. “Everything was completely unreal.”) For this sequence, Marilyn prepared with almost manic ferocity, according to Jack Cole. Hal Schaefer, Fox’s chief music coach responsible for developing and arranging the picture’s score and coaching Marilyn privately, agreed. “She loved to sing, she sang well, and she just adored her idol, Ella [Fitzgerald]. The most important influence on Marilyn’s vocal art was in fact a recording I gave her called Ella Sings Gershwin, for which there was only Ellis Larkin’s piano accompaniment.”

  The role of Lorelei Lee fixed Marilyn in the world’s consciousness as the exaggeratedly, dishily seductive blonde—all body; no thought; little feeling; all whispery, high voice and no sensibility. Impossibly lacquered, moistly cosmeticized, she is at once a kind of winsome Kew-pie doll and a clear peril to a man with money. Defined by avarice, Lorelei Lee on paper is little more than a buxom cartoon. Marilyn, however, made her the satiric icon of a decade. “My great ambition,” she said that winter, “is to have people comment on my fine dramatic performances, [but] I also intend to concentrate on singing and comedy parts.”

  She was, however, of clearly divided mind, whether to aspire to such high dramatic roles or to concentrate on musical comedy. Of this time,
she later said:

  I had to get out, I just had to. The danger was, I began to believe this was all I could do—all I was—all any woman was. Natasha and everybody else was talking about how convincing, how much of me must have been in this role, or how much of the role was in me. I knew there was more I could do, and more that I was. Nobody was listening to me.

  “She wants to be a star so much she aches,” said Sidney Skolsky during production of this elaborate movie, which took from November 1952 through February 1953. This desire was frankly admitted by Marilyn herself: “I want to be a big star more than anything. It’s something precious.”

  But the intensity of her desire was not quite so evident to those who observed her chronic lateness and her terror of beginning to work even when she finally arrived on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Natasha Lytess hovered, Allan Snyder gently encouraged, Howard Hawks (his direction unhampered by subtlety) cajoled, co-star Jane Russell befriended Marilyn. Still, she hesitated to show herself on the soundstage for both small scenes and complex musical numbers. Lorelei Lee was dedicated to the proposition; Marilyn Monroe was committed to every detail of her craft. Any man with a bankroll was fair game to her movie character; anyone who would increase her confidence and refine her art was a friend to Marilyn.

  “She was terrified,” according to Jane Russell, always known as an amiable, calm and courteous professional; she attributed Marilyn’s anxiety to her “desperate, desperate desire to be a star.” To help calm Marilyn’s nerves, Jane invited her to informal religious discussions held at the home of fellow Christians that winter; for her part, Marilyn gave Jane a book on Sigmund Freud. “Neither of us converted the other,” according to Marilyn. Jane quickly recognized that Marilyn was “far more intelligent than people gave her credit for,” and she admired Marilyn for remaining long after the day’s shutdown to work with Jack Cole—and then arriving next morning with “no makeup, tangled hair and blue jeans,” Jane recalled, “for dance rehearsals that were hard, sweaty work.” Marilyn was, as Cole added, quite aware that she had no dance technique,