Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Never had Natasha been less necessary to Marilyn’s performance than in How To Marry a Millionaire, but the actress seemed “under the spell of her dramatic coach,” as Nunnally Johnson recalled. “By this time,” added Marilyn’s co-star Alex D’Arcy, “Natasha was really advising her badly, justifying her own presence on the set by requiring take after take and simply feeding on Marilyn’s insecurity. ‘Well, that was all right, dear,’ she often said to Marilyn, ‘but maybe we should do it one more time.’ ”

  The standard maneuver ensued during shooting that spring. First, Marilyn demanded retakes of every shot until she saw the nod of approbation from Natasha, who was at last banished by the exasperated producer and director on April 13. Then, claiming an attack of bronchitis, Marilyn failed to appear for work next day. Finally, Natasha was reinstated—and at a higher salary. “Monroe cannot do a picture without [Lytess],” agent Charles Feldman wrote in a memo to his staff after visiting the film set. “The coach threatens to quit unless she is compensated in a substantial manner.”

  But also typically, this capitulation was well rewarded. As the myopic Pola, Marilyn had the least onscreen time of the pretty trio, yet she gave a comic performance worthy of Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin, crashing hilariously into doors and walls when not wearing her eyeglasses.1 The camera also captured brief moments of real sweetness, for Pola (very like Marilyn herself, as Johnson doubtless intended) was an insecure young woman, fearful of rejection and dependent on the kindness of friends.

  Marilyn’s droll rendering of nearsighted Pola was her first important comic role, and with it she joined a short list of women who successfully combined humor and sexual allure: Mabel Normand, Clara Bow, Marion Davies, Colleen Moore and Jean Harlow comprised nearly the entire pre-Monroe list; Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball were highly attractive women, to be sure, but their films stressed lightning comic antics rather than sexiness. On the contrary, most comediennes were defiantly plain—those like Louise Fazenda, Marie Dressler and Fanny Brice. With the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn conjoined a carefully planned comic timing to the appealing accidents provided by nature. With these films, too, she learned how much could be communicated by adopting Jean Harlow’s trademark humming of the simple sound “Mmmmm” to suggest just about anything, and her ability to stand quite still and overwhelm the presence of every other moving actor in a scene.

  Some of the nuances in her performance may well have derived from additional acting classes she attended that spring, at the Turnabout Theater: Michael Chekhov introduced her to the famous mime Lotte Goslar, who trained actors in certain aspects of subtle movement and body language. During the production of How To Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn attended group sessions with Goslar. Her shyness, however, precluded her engaging in exercises with classmates or improvising with them more than once or twice, and so she attended only infrequently.

  Despite Marilyn’s idiosyncrasies, even Lauren Bacall, no cheerful martyr to the tardiness of fellow players, had to admit that there was “no meanness in her—no bitchery. I liked her. She said that what she really wanted was to be in San Francisco with Joe DiMaggio in some spaghetti joint.” Marilyn also endeared herself to Betty Grable, who had been passed over for the role of Lorelei Lee. When Grable’s daughter was hurt while horseback riding, Marilyn telephoned frequently, offering help and comfort—“and she was the only person to call,” according to Grable. (“Honey,” she said warmly to Marilyn one day during production, “I’ve had mine—now go get yours.”)

  Similarly, Alex D’Arcy recalled trying to calm Marilyn’s fears of inadequacy by inviting her to dine out one evening and praising her acute comic timing. “I looked into those famous liquid eyes,” he recalled, “and saw only a little scared child. I had to avert my gaze to hide the twinge of pity I felt.” Try though they might, the Hollywood press could not find tidbits concerning uncollegial hostility during the production of either Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or How To Marry a Millionaire.

  The “little scared child” was lonely when Joe traveled on business for much of that spring. DiMaggio’s paternalistic criticisms had become as familiar as his slightly condescending protectiveness, and his absence seemed to summon the abandonment she had felt earlier—in her childhood and when Jim Dougherty shipped out during the war. Typically, Marilyn turned to her surrogate papa, Sidney Skolsky, for comfort and companionship. She chauffeured him to his appointments when she had no shooting call and accompanied him to the occasional Hollywood wedding (Sheilah Graham’s), to a nightclub opening and to a party for visiting royalty (the King and Queen of Greece, who turned up in Hollywood that autumn).

  But Marilyn felt forsaken if separated from Sidney for ten minutes, as happened at a party given by actor Clifton Webb. Desperately, she followed Judy Garland from room to room. “I don’t want to get too far away from you—I’m scared,” Marilyn said—to which the equally insecure Garland replied, “We’re all scared. I’m scared too.” Marilyn was also tense and selfconscious when Sidney squired her to a sneak preview of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes early that June; displeased with her own image on the screen, she seemed to enjoy only scenes without her.

  No such anxiety was evident on June 26, when Monroe and Russell signed their names and placed their hands and feet in wet cement on the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard—the same place Gladys and Grace had pointed out the marks of other stars almost two decades earlier. Dressed in matching polka-dotted white summer dresses, the blonde and the brunette joined a long list of movie stars who for thirty years had accepted Sid Grauman’s invitation to this awkward act of movieland exaltation.2 That evening, Skolsky took the two stars to dinner at Chasen’s restaurant, an autograph hound’s delight where even the normally blasé kitchen staff slipped into the dining room to watch the blonde and the brunette tuck into their steaks and fried potatoes. For an entire week, the day’s events were detailed in word and picture on the pages of every major American newspaper and magazine, which gave them as much coverage as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that same month and even more than the highly publicized engagement of that glamorous couple, Senator John F. Kennedy and Miss Jacqueline Bouvier.

  By early summer, Fox had given Marilyn her next assignment. Following the unjust rejection of her touching, subdued performance in the unpretentious and underrated Don’t Bother to Knock, the studio had put her in leading roles against a mighty waterfall (in Niagara), on a luxury liner and in a pasteboard Paris (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and in a Manhattan penthouse (in How To Marry a Millionaire). It was perhaps inevitable that eventually she would be cast as a saloon singer in a western.

  Like the previous Technicolor extravaganzas, River of No Return was full of impressive scenery and special effects; it was also, alas, a bundle of clichés, and neither the splendor of the Canadian Rockies nor Marilyn’s maturing beauty could redeem ninety minutes of celluloid ennui.

  The first problem (about which she complained to Fox at once) was the tiresome story of an ex-prisoner cowboy who finds his lost little boy in the care of a mining-camp singer. Deceived by her greedy boyfriend, the trio—Marilyn, beefy Robert Mitchum and winsome little Tommy Rettig—are left amid the glories of nature to battle the perilous rapids of the eponymous river; Indians who are out for any white scalp they can find; a hungry bobcat; and fortune hunters who appear out of nowhere with rifles and threats. After negotiating their route on a flimsy raft along the final stretch of water, they come to town and to a final shootout that will make of them a happy little family.

  This was Marilyn Monroe’s twenty-second film and her fifth leading part, but Twentieth Century–Fox still had no idea what to do with her. The truth is that, whatever special qualities she brought to them, any actress could have played her roles: they required little more of her than to pose picturesquely, walk seductively, gaze blankly and sing a few songs that fed male fantasies and confirmed the cherished belief that pretty blondes are both dumb and
venal. Object though she did, Marilyn was constrained to abide by her contract, and she fervently devoted herself to music rehearsals. As the performer Kay in River of No Return she was required to deliver four songs, which she did with admirable panache—a torch song (“One Silver Dollar”); a bawdy, backroom ballad (“I’m Gonna File My Claim”); a tune to amuse the boy (“Down in the Meadow”); and the title number. Thirty years after her death, this quartet was at last commercially released as part of Marilyn’s complete recordings, too late to have rightly celebrated her as a first-rate vocalist independent of an arid movie but permanent confirmation that she was capable of far more than was asked. As so often, her moments onscreen provide the picture’s only interest.

  The second problem with River of No Return was the choice of director. Viennese-born Otto Preminger was trained as a lawyer and aspired to a judgeship; but he turned to filmmaking (most notably of Laura in 1944), in which he was reputed to act not only as jury but also as executioner with his casts and crews—a dictatorial man who could reduce even the hardiest actors to sobs. This turgid western was an assignment for Preminger as for Marilyn, but for it he was culturally unfit, and this pitched him into an ill humor from the start.

  At the center of the production’s problems that summer was Natasha, who was “trying to direct [the picture],” according to Marilyn’s agent, Charles Feldman. “I pleaded with [Marilyn] to relax and speak naturally,” recalled Preminger, “but she paid no attention. She listened only to Natasha . . . and rehearsed her lines with such grave ar-tic-yew-lay-shun that her violent lip movements made it impossible to photograph her. . . . Marilyn was putty in [Natasha’s] hands.”

  Those hands could be tenacious, as Natasha herself unwittingly admitted: “Marilyn,” she said one day in Canada, “you don’t care about me, only my work with you. If you didn’t need me, you wouldn’t know how to spell my name.” To such desperate statements it is almost impossible to make a reply, nor could Marilyn find one satisfactory to Natasha. “Marilyn thought there was some magic in Natasha,” said Robert Mitchum years later. “She felt she needed someone other than a director, preferably a woman, to tell her when she did something right.”

  The tension was not helped by the sheer physical demands placed on Marilyn, who had (both on location and in the studio) to cope with real and recreated rapids. Paul Wurtzel, chief of Fox’s special effects department, recalled that Marilyn was subjected to considerable rough treatment—gallons of water thrown at her for take after take on the raft, to mention just one difficult sequence. “We put her through a lot on that film, and there was never one complaint. She knew what the picture required, and once we got her on her marks she was a pro. The whole crew adored her.”

  Dominated by her coach, longing to please her director and (thus Robert Mitchum) fearful of going before the cameras because she was terrified of being judged, Marilyn nevertheless shone in the final cut. There was something inconsonant about her as a nineteenth-century performer in the crude wilderness: her tight jeans, stylish blouse and perfect makeup were absurdly anachronous. At the same time (as in Niagara), she was both the startling exponent of unpredictable nature and a figure in stark contrast to it. Her best moments have the ingenuous, direct appeal springing from her amalgam of tenacity and softness: singing on a makeshift stage in a mining camp; collapsing with chills and hunger in the forest; seeing the futility of her long affair with a handsome but nasty manipulator; realizing her love for quiet, protective Mitchum and his brave little boy.3

  Her achievement was all the more remarkable because, as Mitchum, Wurtzel and Snyder recalled, Marilyn rarely had a moment to herself, either in Canada or back in the studio. Publicists arranged a constant stream of interviews; Zanuck or one of his minions telephoned her daily to recite Preminger’s complaints about Natasha; and Joe, anxious about false rumors of a flirtation between Marilyn and Mitchum, arrived with his friend George Solotaire. The threatening eddies and the chilly Canadian nights were easy to sustain by comparison with the emotional squalls swirling around her.

  Snyder recalled one quiet, important moment. On a train to location shooting, he and Marilyn were admiring the spectacular scenery when he said, “Here are the Canadian Rockies, Marilyn. If you’re really in love with Joe, why don’t you get out of the movie business? The two of you could move up here, build yourselves a beautiful house, settle down and have kids.” She thought for a moment. “Whitey, I know all that,” she said sadly, “but I can’t do that—I just can’t.” She did not elaborate.

  While Marilyn worked days, Joe fished, hunted and then waited at Becker’s Bungalows in Jasper, Alberta (where the cast and crew were also housed), and at the Mount Royal Hotel in Banff when the company moved there. They could live together at times like this, but whenever there was talk of marriage she was even more uncertain than just before a movie scene. As Snyder recalled, “Joe could be very hard to get along with—surly and withdrawn—and he was awfully jealous. Marilyn liked to invite a few people for coffee or a drink at the end of the day, but when Joe was around the mood was dark. He hated the movies and everything to do with them.”4 Joe’s only practical purpose was the star’s comfort, especially after she turned her ankle in Jasper National Park on August 19—a minor incident that brought a famished press back in full force, as if she were moribund, to document her hobbling about on crutches and behaving bravely.

  Location shooting in Canada was completed at the end of August, and on September 1, Marilyn, Joe and the company returned to Hollywood for interior scenes at Fox. When the airplane landed in Los Angeles, a throng of over one hundred reporters and photographers pushed forward, shouting questions, jostling for pictures and—rare for newsmen—applauding her wildly. Robert Mitchum had to exert all his considerable brawn to protect her from injury. “She thought they were cheering for someone else,” he recalled.

  By fascinating coincidence, that week an historic book was published: Dr. Alfred R. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which was even more controversial than his earlier companion volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

  There was important news in the world that summer: the armistice ending the Korean War and the first return of American troops in early September; the controversy surrounding the execution of alleged spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; the rantings of Senator Joseph McCarthy (who madly accused former President Truman of deliberately supporting communism); the bloody Soviet crackdown against anti-Communist demonstrations in East Berlin and Russia’s announcement that it had the hydrogen bomb.

  But of equal importance to both the media and to the American people was Dr. Kinsey’s published research, the first serious scientific studies of sexual activity in the United States. The mere fact of its contents and its availability virtually divided a country still mired in Puritanism, still in a kind of perpetual adolescence, incapable of confronting its collective id. Marilyn Monroe and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which had opened nationwide in July, were popular manifestations of exactly what Dr. Kinsey was exploring and exactly what movie audiences both longed for and deeply feared.

  From 1942 to his death in 1956, Kinsey was a zoologist and director of the Institute for Sex Research at the University of Indiana. In 1948, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the first academic study of sex in America and a surprise bestseller. Kinsey and his staff had interviewed more than five thousand American males, of whom they asked detailed questions about their frequency of marital and extramarital intercourse, petting, masturbation, homosexual experiences and incidents of bestiality. When the book appeared in stores (and only a few public libraries), many municipal police departments tried to confiscate copies—just as women’s groups and church societies had tried to interfere with interviews and suppress the publication. As shocking as the inquiry was, it was equaled by the news that the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation had provided funding for the study. Millions claimed it was a filthy book and many shrugged it off as unnecessary and rea
lly quite boring; there is no count available on how many copies were borrowed, loaned, stolen and smuggled into schoolbags.

  Then, more than twelve thousand interviews and five years later, came Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, just when Marilyn Monroe was appearing daily in newspapers, weekly in magazines and constantly (or so it seemed) on the neighborhood movie screens. Many civic and religious leaders attacked both Kinsey and Monroe as if they were directly, commercially linked, but neither could be controlled or contained. Marilyn puckishly cavorted her way through “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” while the Institute for Sex Research organized and interpreted questionnaires, films, literature and art, thus attempting an interdisciplinary study of sex and sexual practices. In 1952, just when the scandal had broken over Marilyn’s calendar poses, the United States Customs Office was suing the Institute for importing foreign erotica. Such works, after all, were carefully controlled by authorities, lest the purity of the American mind be contaminated by unseemly considerations of matters sexual.

  The Kinsey reports were designed to be read: although they extended to eight hundred pages, the format and contents were simple. After detailing their methodology, they gave dispassionate, clinical lists of results. No consideration was allowed for either bravado or false humility, but the essential veracity of the reports was supported by the anonymous nature of the interviews and the frankness of the subject matter.

  The 1948 study of men focused on the variety and frequency of heterosexual and homosexual activity, while in 1953 the women’s study calmly dwelt—to the horror of millions in America—on the female orgasm. Equally appalling to many was Kinsey’s sober insistence that no particular type of sexual activity could be called “more normal” than any other type; to the contrary, he said, sexual activity runs a gamut of procedures and “outlets.” Normality, in other words, is the province of legislatures and social customs.