Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  that she was just a terribly pretty girl whom all this had happened to, and all of a sudden she was a star, she was going to have to go out and do it and everybody was going to look at her. And she was just terrified! She knew that she was not equal to it. What made her not show up at the studio was that she couldn’t sleep [from fear]. . . . She would get into makeup and comb her hair “just one more time” because she was so frightened of coming out. And she was such a little girl she didn’t know how to apologize.

  Not much help was provided by the ubiquitous Natasha, who was now directing her on the set immediately after she had received points from Hawks. Against the bright lights, Marilyn shielded her eyes after each shot, looking for her coach’s approval. When Hawks could no longer endure this interference, he followed the actions of Fritz Lang and removed Natasha from the soundstage, but Marilyn reacted by simply arriving later and later. Natasha was readmitted within a week, and Hawks continued to find her “the most frightened little girl [who] didn’t think she was good enough to do the things she did. But [when] she got out in front of the camera, [it] liked her.”

  According to Jane, Marilyn nevertheless always seemed a little angry or unhappy. Much of the distress had to do with the increasing tension between Joe (who visited the set two or three times, only to be ignored because of all the dither about Marilyn) and Natasha (whom Joe saw at the center of the storm, and as a more important person—at least professionally—to Marilyn than himself).

  The imminent stardom, which everyone felt was sure to follow the release of Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953, did not, however, convince Marilyn she could sustain it, much less grow as a good actress. “I’m really eager to do something else,” she told a reporter during production that autumn. “Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I’d like to do roles like Julie in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust and Teresa in Cradle Song. I don’t want to be a comedienne forever.” Nor was she much gratified when critics, typically, stressed only her looks in assessing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  As if to prove the seriousness of her higher aspirations, Marilyn took a cue from Natasha, who saw an item in the Los Angeles Times. Natasha’s old friend and mentor Max Reinhardt had died in 1943, and now his first wife was about to auction one hundred seventy-eight of his Regiebücher: production notebooks with his markings concerning action, timing, scenery and cuts. These materials would be wonderful additions to Marilyn’s library, said Natasha, doubtless eager for access to them herself.

  And so on Wednesday, December 3, the two women rushed off to the Goldenberg Galleries in Beverly Hills. After the bidding rose beyond a few hundred dollars, Marilyn battled for the prize against the rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin, who was acting on behalf of the University of Southern California: their Doheny Library already housed more than three thousand items in its Reinhardt Collection, and the university was eager to complement the archives. The sums had reached thirteen hundred dollars.

  “Thirteen twenty!” called Zeitlin.

  This amount was repeated from the podium, and there was a pause.

  “One thousand three hundred and thirty-five!” cried Marilyn deliberately, thus winning the collection.

  Like Notre Dame’s football team that season, Marilyn had won a victory against the University of Southern California; also like Notre Dame, the victory did not make her very popular when the matter was trumpeted in the newspapers during the next week.

  On December 5, the university’s librarian, Lewis Stieg, announced that he hoped Marilyn would donate the collection to the Doheny Library. Through reporters, she replied that so valuable a collection, she now realized, should be available to all drama students; she was considering Harvard and Stanford, among others, as the appropriate repository. To further his cause, Stieg then asked Marilyn to join him in a choice viewing location on the fifty-yard line at the Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day. She declined.

  A few weeks later, Marilyn received a letter from Reinhardt’s son Gottfried: “Surely you will understand, dear Miss Monroe, that aside from monetary expenditure, these books belong to [me] and not to you.” Following a gracious agreement from Marilyn, he was about to send her a check for the amount she paid when the auctioneer informed him that she had neither collected nor paid for the books; payment, therefore, was due directly to the Galleries by Gottfried.

  On a chilly Christmas Eve, Marilyn returned alone from a studio party to her rented suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Unlocking the door and switching on the lights, she was surprised to find Joe, reaching up to place the last silver ornament atop a lavishly decorated tree. There was champagne in a silver ice bucket, and logs blazed cheerfully in the fireplace. It was, she told friends later, her merriest Christmas ever.

  1. On October 28, 1952, noting that Gladys did not “get a complete [Christian Science] healing,” Grace Goddard wrote to Marilyn Monroe urging that her mother be transferred either back to the hospital at Agnew or to the Rockhaven Sanitarium in Verdugo City. As usual, Grace’s counsel was followed; the following February 9, Gladys was moved to Rockhaven, and thenceforth Marilyn paid the monthly fee of two hundred fifty dollars for her care.

  2. In 1929, Jean Harlow arrived at a Hollywood movie set wearing a black crocheted dress “with not a stitch on under it,” according to director Arthur Jacobson. “You couldn’t tell whether she had put it on or painted it on.”

  3. A similar story was told by designer Ceil Chapman when Marilyn visited New York during a break from shooting Niagara: a saleswoman at Saks Fifth Avenue was angry with Chapman “for bringing in a girl who was trying on things without underwear or stockings.”

  4. These details would not be remarkable but for the outrageous claims made by one of the strangest fans ever to have met Marilyn Monroe. While filming scenes at Niagara Falls that summer, she was asked by a twenty-five-year-old visitor from Ohio named Robert Slatzer to pose with him for snapshots. For such impromptu photos and importuned autographs, no public figure was ever more generous and cooperative with admirers and strangers than Marilyn, nor was any more exploited before or since her death. But in this case, she unwittingly contributed to Slatzer’s fame. There is no evidence that Marilyn Monroe and Robert Slatzer ever again met, and there are neither letters, additional photos nor any documentation of a relationship between them. Years later, however, one of the most preposterous claims in American popular history was launched.

  In 1972, with Marilyn conveniently unable to contradict him, Slatzer approached journalist Will Fowler with a short, incomplete article in which Slatzer speculated that Marilyn Monroe’s death was caused by a political conspiracy—a popular hypothesis in light of the rumors then swirling round the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy; his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. “Too bad you weren’t married to Monroe,” Fowler said, unimpressed with Slatzer’s proposal. “That would really make a good book.” Soon after, Slatzer contacted Fowler again, saying he had forgot to mention that he had indeed been married to Marilyn. “Slatzer made a career of being a pretender,” according to Fowler, “selling gullible talk show producers who don’t do their research very well with the deception that he was married to Marilyn. He was never married to her. He met the star only once, in Niagara Falls. . . . He never met Marilyn before or since.” Eventually, Fowler withdrew from the project.

  Nevertheless, Robert Slatzer proceeded and eventually published The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe under his own name. Among the most persistent but injudicious of his assertions is his absurd claim that he spent the weekend of October 3 to 6, 1952, with Marilyn Monroe in Tijuana, Mexico, where they were married on October 4. This marriage, according to Slatzer, was annulled a few days later because she was “afraid of Joe, of what the studio would say, and of Natasha Lytess, who was very jealous and possessive and who had a tremendous influence over her.” Quite apart from the fact that Marilyn was in Los Angeles
that entire weekend, Slatzer could never produce a written record of the union or its dissolution: the marriage paper, he reports, was burnt by a petit fonctionnaire in Tijuana.

  It is important that, since the publication of Slatzer’s book in 1974, there has not been a single witness to attest the truth of his marriage. A man named Noble Chissell once said he had been present at the event, but before he died Chissell admitted to Will Fowler that he was “just trying to help out a friend” with the false attestation. Moreover, Chissell told photographer Joseph Jasgur that Slatzer had promised him a much needed one hundred dollars to support the lie. Allan Snyder, one of Marilyn’s closest friends and confidants, was with her on every film throughout 1952. “I never believed Slatzer married Marilyn,” he said. “There was no proof of it, and there was always something that suggested to me it never happened.” Kay Eicher, to whom Slatzer was married from 1954 to 1956, has always laughed heartily when the Monroe-Slatzer marriage is mentioned: among many others, she confirmed that he met her only once, at Niagara Falls, when the impromptu snapshot was taken. “It’s the one photo he’s always using to tell his story,” according to Eicher. “He’s been fooling people too long.” Slatzer did not, of course, claim to have been married to Marilyn until long after her death, which was a wise choice: her immediate contradiction would otherwise have killed a great enterprise.

  But the “marriage” was not sufficient drama for Slatzer, who also claimed to have been Marilyn’s most intimate confidant until her death—the man who knew and kept all the secrets of her career and her love life. It was a bold assertion, for not one of Marilyn’s friends, relatives, business associates, colleagues, spouses or lovers could ever recall meeting him (much less Marilyn ever mentioning him), nor is he to be found in any of her personal telephone or address books; indeed, not one of her intimates ever heard of Robert Slatzer during her lifetime or after her death—not, indeed, until the appearance of his book. Worst of all, however, has been Slatzer’s influence on Marilyn Monroe’s chroniclers. The nonsense about a love affair between her and Robert F. Kennedy, and Slatzer’s accusations that Kennedy was directly involved in her death, owed much to the improvisations of Slatzer. For years—in print and on television talk shows—Slatzer turned an enormous profit. He also furthered his unsubstantiated claims of intimacy with Marilyn by selling photographs he claimed to have taken of her in 1962 on the set of her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give. But the negatives and contact sheets for the photos he sold prove that those pictures were taken not by Slatzer (whom no one can recall visiting director George Cukor’s closed set) but by James Mitchell, Fox’s still photographer assigned to the production. Few have profited so richly and undeservedly as Slatzer, whose claims could otherwise be ignored except that he and a few cronies have greedily created a nefarious industry that has persisted for decades, and one by which reputations have been gravely, deliberately and systematically vilified. On this entire matter, see the Afterword: “The Great Deception.”

  Chapter Twelve

  1953

  EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR 1953, Marilyn and Joe made a pact. She would not wear such revealing dresses as to embarrass him in public; he would try to be more patient with her and more polite with Natasha, with whom there was a mutual sharp antipathy. “Marilyn,” she said one evening, “this man is the punishment of God in your life”—hyperbolic even by Natasha’s standards.

  Scourge or no, Joe squired Marilyn to restaurants throughout the winter, Sidney Skolsky describing them in his February 9 column as “still very much a combination.” His remark was ironic: at an award ceremony that very evening, when Photoplay magazine honored Marilyn Monroe as Hollywood’s “Fastest Rising Star,” her escort was not Joe but the hastily corralled Sidney.

  The reason was simple. To the dining room of the Beverly Hills Hotel (where she lived that season), Marilyn had decided to wear a gold lamé gown designed for her by Travilla. This was a saucy, seductive, body-hugging number she had worn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—a floor-length gown with a deep-plunging neckline, which had been seen only in a momentary long shot. “She had to be hand-sewn into it,” Travilla recalled, adding that he begged her not to wear it. “You’re too fat for it at the moment, Marilyn! It’s too tight—people will laugh!” But she was adamant, telling Travilla that she had just learned “a trick to lose weight quickly—colonic irrigation, an enema that washes water out of the system and immediately shows in lost inches.” This drastic and potentially harmful way to lose weight became a regimen with Marilyn for the rest of her life. “She had two sessions of colonic irrigation that day,” Travilla recalled, although for all that she was happy to fill the dress tightly.

  After Joe saw the dress and the absence of brassiere, slip or underwear beneath the costume that afternoon, he departed angrily. In his column next day, Sidney discreetly informed his readers that Joe “had to go to San Francisco for a few days”—no doubt to cool off in the northern air and to take comfort in the simple decencies of his family.

  As she may well have expected, Marilyn had no competition for attention as she glided into the hotel’s Crystal Room that evening, wearing the skintight gold dress “that looked as if it had been painted on,” as columnist Florabel Muir reported next day.

  With one little twist of her derriere, Marilyn Monroe stole the show. . . . The assembled guests broke into wild applause, [while] two other screen stars, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, got only casual attention. After Marilyn every other girl appeared dull by contrast.

  With that, the formidable Joan Crawford swung into action. A star since the year of Marilyn’s birth, she met her potential rival with no sporting good cheer. To the contrary, she summoned the press and publicly denounced Marilyn’s “burlesque show,” advising that “the public likes provocative feminine personalities, but it also likes to know that underneath it all the actresses are ladies.” And then, with almost religious solemnity, Crawford added: “Kids don’t like [Marilyn] . . . because they don’t like to see sex exploited. And don’t forget the women. They won’t pick [a movie] for the family that won’t be suitable for their husbands and children.”

  Obviously, the forty-nine-year-old star was relying on Hollywood’s (and the country’s) short memory, for as Billie Cassin and then as the young Joan Crawford she had literally jumped to fame by dancing the Charleston nude on speakeasy tabletops, and then by appearing in a number of blue movies. Nor would she have been pleased, that February night, to be reminded of a statement she made in her wild twenties: “One thing that makes for healthy American girls is a small quantity of clothing.”

  But not for Marilyn the pithy rebuttal or the handy reference to Crawford’s past. Just as when she had been denounced because of her busty appearance next to America’s sedate servicewomen, she quietly disarmed the enemy: “The thing that hit me hardest about Miss Crawford’s remarks,” she told Louella Parsons and the nation, “is that I’ve always admired her for being such a wonderful mother—for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I knows what that means to homeless little ones?” It is unlikely that Marilyn knew of Crawford’s way of mothering—an appalling severity later detailed in a book by one of the unfortunates she adopted. But never mind: Marilyn the waif, with a canny appeal to her own benighted past, conquered once again.

  In 1953, perhaps only in America could the matter of a young woman’s dress become front-page news—a sudden Southern California storm in an otherwise temperate climate. But moral support was forthcoming. “Marilyn’s the biggest thing that’s happened to Hollywood in years,” said Betty Grable, who had been Fox’s great audience draw during the previous decade. “The movies were just sort of going along, and all of a sudden—zowie!—there was Marilyn. She’s a shot in the arm for Hollywood!”

  So much was true, and Grable was personally friendly toward Marilyn. But in fact the studio publicity department wrote those words just as the two blondes, with the brunette Lauren Bacall, began work on How To Marr
y a Millionaire in March. An expensive Technicolor comedy, it was designed as Fox’s attempt to make CinemaScope as effective for intimate films as for their biblical epic The Robe. The new wide-screen process and Marilyn Monroe: these were Fox’s two major defenses against the increasing defection of audiences to television. Just as with Technicolor, stereophonic sound, 3-D, Cinerama (and even a mercifully short-lived contraption alternately called Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama), studios tried to provide by gimmickry what was often lacking in strong adult stories with coherent narrative construction.

  The result of this rush to draw audiences also meant that roles could be specifically written (more often, simply sketched) for popular stars. The clever writer and producer Nunnally Johnson had already provided Marilyn and Fox with her episode in We’re Not Married; now he was ready to oblige both by presenting her, Grable and Bacall in what was essentially a fashion show. The title How To Marry a Millionaire summarized its plot, which was based on two plays about three gold diggers who pool their resources, rent a Manhattan penthouse and set about capturing rich husbands.

  Although for her sleeping scene she caused a stir (as she had during Niagara) by wearing nothing underneath the sheets, she was as usual paradoxically terrified to step clothed before the camera. When she was finally able, however, an intensity occurred—“a love affair nobody around her was aware of,” according to her director, Jean Negulesco. “It was a language of looks, a forbidden intimacy. . . . The lenses were the audience.” And they responded by the hundreds of thousands. Before the summer, Marilyn was receiving more than twenty-five thousand fan letters weekly and Redbook, following Photoplay, bestowed on Marilyn yet another award—“Best Young Box Office Personality.” All this notoriety and the unimaginable fame did not, however, turn her head; she affected no airs, demanded no privileges. She remained herself; as she had said, it all seemed to be happening to someone else.