Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  “There were seventeen thousand soldiers in front of me,” Marilyn told Ben Hecht a few months later:

  and they were all yelling at me at the top of their lungs.

  I stood smiling at them. It had started snowing. But I felt as warm as if I were standing in a bright sun. . . . I’ve always been frightened by an audience—any audience. My stomach pounds, my head gets dizzy and I’m sure my voice has left me.

  But standing in the snowfall facing these yelling soldiers, I felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything. I felt only happy.

  One of her accompanists, a pianist named Al Guastafeste, recalled her lack of star attitude: “She was Marilyn Monroe, but she didn’t seem to realize it! If I made a mistake, she said she was sorry. When she made a mistake, she apologized.”

  Her sixth audience was composed of ten thousand Dutch, Thai and American troops. Flanked by two tanks onstage, Marilyn was asked by a presiding officer how she felt. “Safe,” she replied, and the crowd roared with laughter. But she could be serious, and there was no doubt to chroniclers of the tour that Marilyn’s intentions were indeed earnest.

  “She gave us the feeling she really wanted to be there,” recalled Ted Cieszynski, on duty with the Army Corps of Engineers as photographer for the Public Information Office. He had a front-row seat to her performance at K-2 airbase at Tae-Gu.

  This wasn’t an obligation she had to fulfill, and it wasn’t a self-promotion. Of all the performers who came to us in Korea—and there were a half dozen or so—she was the best. She showed no nervousness and wasn’t anything like a dumb blonde. When a few of us photographers were allowed to climb up on the stage after her show, she was very pleasant and cooperative and told us how glad she was to be with us. She took her time, speaking with each of us about our families and our hometowns and our civilian jobs. It was bitter cold, but she was in no hurry to leave. Marilyn was a great entertainer. She made thousands of GIs feel she really cared.

  Marilyn knew that she was the object of ten thousand male fantasies, yet somehow she wanted to communicate that it was not desire she wished to arouse but understanding. “This is my first experience with a live audience,” she told a crowd as she prepared to depart in a helicopter after her last performance, “and my greatest experience with any kind of audience. It’s been the best thing that ever happened to me.” Later, she added:

  I felt I belonged. For the first time in my life, I had the feeling that the people seeing me were accepting me and liking me. This is what I’ve always wanted, I guess. Please come visit us in San Francisco.

  The chopper blades whirred and Marilyn turned to climb aboard. Smiling gallantly and (thus an eyewitness) with tears in her eyes, she called her farewell:

  Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye, goodbye—and God bless you all. Thank you for being so nice. Hold a good thought for me!

  There were cheering and loud applause as the men removed their caps and waved farewell.

  The importance of these four days cannot be overstated. Far from Hollywood, Marilyn had given brilliant, spontaneous performances (happily, they are preserved on newsfilm). This she did, free not only of her husband’s critical appraisal but also from the scrutiny of her drama coach, directors and executives who always reinforced her conviction that she was not good enough or that she lacked real skills. Instead of being paralyzed with anxiety as was often the case on the set, she found an outpouring of love from enthusiastic audiences. “When I went to Korea,” she told Sidney Skolsky later, “I wasn’t nervous, not one bit. I didn’t break out with red blotches on my arms or chest or anything. I was perfectly at ease.”

  Thus her potentially disastrous live performances went extremely well because she was allowed to be spontaneous, to be herself. And whereas a Hollywood set exacerbated her painful selfconsciousness and caused her to forget and stumble on her lines, in Korea she never missed a word. Nor was she required to analyze every gesture, but simply to sing boldly and with feeling, and for that she received an outpouring of unconditional love. Like orphans and disabled children to whom she related so well, the anonymous soldiers were in a way the perfect counterparts to the famous ballplayer, the overbearing director, the name or the face that asked too much of her.

  Back in Tokyo, Marilyn rushed to Joe like an excited child, telling him she had never felt so accepted. “It was so wonderful, Joe! You never heard such cheering!” But Joe, ever the realist, seemed not to care. “You never heard such cheering, Joe!” she repeated.

  There was a pause, and he looked away. “Yes, I have,” he said calmly.4

  The marriage was already deeply troubled by the time Marilyn and Joe returned to San Francisco on February 24. When the annual Photoplay awards for best performances were announced for the previous year, Marilyn was the winner again, this time for her work in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire. But when she went to Los Angeles to pick up the prize, her husband did not accompany her and again Sidney filled in as escort. “Joe hates crowds and glamour,” she told him, unable to conceal her disappointment in her husband’s indifference. Nevertheless, when she entered the Beverly Hills Hotel dining room on March 8, the earlier scene there was repeated. Wearing a dazzling white satin sheath cut low from the shoulders, Marilyn looked somehow different, and it took some reporters a while to notice that her hair had been recolored from honey blond to a brilliant halo of platinum. Like Harlow, Marilyn now undertook to have as much white in her life as possible—not only her hair and her wardrobe, but her furnishings as well. Everything she chose was calculated to bedazzle, as if she could again win from her public the adoration she was denied at home.

  After the ceremony, Marilyn and Sidney had a nightcap in her suite. And then, for perhaps the first time, she stunned him.

  “Sidney, do you know who I’m going to marry?”

  “Marry? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to marry Arthur Miller.”

  “Arthur Miller! You just got home from a honeymoon. You told me how wonderful Joe was, how happy he made you, and what a great time you had! Now you tell me you’re going to marry Arthur Miller. I don’t understand.”

  “You wait. You’ll see.”

  There is no evidence of a reunion or correspondence between Marilyn and her favorite playwright, but this was one fantasy she intended to realize.

  Prolonging her sojourn at the Beverly Hills Hotel that March, Marilyn took the advice of Charles Feldman and Hugh French that there would be superb publicity and perhaps a respectable income from a published movie star autobiography, a genre just appearing on literary horizons. Marilyn agreed, with the understanding that a first-rate ghostwriter would be required, someone with whom she could speak freely about her past; she also demanded approval of the contents.

  Thus it happened that Marilyn’s agents quickly contacted Jacques Chambrun, agent for the prolific journalist, novelist and screenwriter Ben Hecht; that spring a deal was struck. Marilyn and Hecht, who had met cordially during production of his script for Monkey Business, scheduled meetings several times weekly—often, at her insistence, with Sidney Skolsky ready to chime in. Hecht wrote quickly (in those days before convenient tape recorders), and before the end of April a first draft of her autobiography was ready. “Marilyn wept and wept for joy at what I had written,” Hecht wrote to Chambrun.5

  The result had a strange and tangled history, for the book was not finally published until 1974, after the deaths of both star and writer. My Story, as it was titled, contains imaginative anecdotes created in 1951 and 1952 by Marilyn and Sidney; life stories told that spring of 1954 by Marilyn and Sidney to Hecht; heavily redrafted portions of an unauthorized serialization of the Hecht manuscript, which were published in the London Empire News from May to August 1954 (a serialization illegally sold by Chambrun without the approval of Monroe or Hecht); and the final reworking of the text in the early 1970s by Milton Greene and an unknown writer or writers engaged by him.

  Hecht’s draft, preserved amon
g his papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago, contains no account of some of the most commonly believed moments in the life of Marilyn Monroe. According to the writer’s widow, the disorganized and incomplete 168-page typescript submitted to the Empire News was not the work of her husband, but was instead prepared under the supervision of the shrewd (not to say unethical) Chambrun, whom Hecht subsequently fired for multiple acts of misrepresentation, unauthorized publication and downright theft of income.

  By careful comparison of the published version with the unpublished Hecht draft, it is clear that none of the first sixty-six pages of My Story was composed by Hecht at all. As internal evidence, there are Rose Hecht’s detailed notes to Folder Twelve of her husband’s papers, as well as a comparison with the corpus of Hecht’s work: the vocabulary and diction of My Story in these sections bear scant resemblance to anything ever written by Ben Hecht. For external evidence, there is the absence of Hecht’s completed manuscript as differentiated from the typescript of these pages, both of which he always personally approved. The various typed versions (even those not of Hecht’s provenance) found their way into the Hecht papers simply because Chambrun, when fired, was required to return to Hecht’s attorneys everything relative to his work. “Sit down and try to think up something interesting about yourself,” Hecht said to Marilyn when they began their task. She did, he did, Sidney did (and later Milton Greene did).

  As part of the task, Marilyn telephoned her old friend Lucille Ryman Carroll, asking her to welcome Ben Hecht and to be entirely frank about Marilyn’s early days in Hollywood. “But you’re married to Joe now,” said Lucille, surprised. “Surely you don’t want me to tell Hecht everything! This will be the end of your career and your marriage.” But Marilyn insisted, perhaps because she hoped Hecht would indeed print the entire truth, thus simultaneously assuring ever-fresh controversy for herself as well as precipitating what Lucille feared, the end of her marriage to Joe. The calendar he had ruefully accepted as Marilyn’s momentary aberration; her days on the boulevard would surely be difficult to justify. But Hecht knew what could be published in those more discriminating days, and the more incandescent details of Marilyn’s life “walking the boulevard” were entirely omitted. Alas, the entire Monroe-Hecht enterprise collapsed that June, when Hecht learned that Chambrun had sold extracts from the manuscript—much of it doctored by Chambrun himself—to the London Empire News without the permission required of himself and Marilyn. At the same time, Skolsky was not about to let a good thing entirely evaporate: he quickly drafted a little book about Marilyn that received her endorsement when it was published serially in newspapers and between covers later that year. (The first book about her was a slim volume under one hundred pages—news items stitched together into a narrative by Joe Franklin and Laurie Palmer, published in 1953.)

  But by this time Marilyn had other concerns. She rented a house at 508 North Palm Drive, Beverly Hills (Jean Harlow had lived at 512), and a reluctant Joe agreed to move from San Francisco to live with her there—at least part-time, for by the end of May she was back on a movie set. Of this he did not approve, but neither did he wish her to work without some sort of supervision.

  Although Feldman had been representing Marilyn unofficially and without contract since the death of Johnny Hyde, the William Morris agency legally had rights to a percentage of her earnings through 1953. With that deal now expired, Marilyn signed with Famous Artists at last, on March 31, 1954—just as Feldman and French were concluding the terms of her reconciliation with Fox.

  Marilyn’s arrangement with the studio was straightforward, although it, too, would soon be open to question and become the basis for a complicated battle when she left Hollywood later that year. For the present, however, things looked manageable. Fox agreed to drop their demand that Marilyn appear in Pink Tights. Instead, if she would play a supporting role in the musical There’s No Business Like Show Business, they would give her the leading role later that year in the film version of George Axelrod’s Broadway hit The Seven Year Itch, to be directed by Billy Wilder.

  Marilyn was back on her contracted salary—but only until August 1954, when a new seven-year deal would commence. There would also be a bonus of $100,000 for The Seven Year Itch, although this was never put in writing, was never entirely paid and became a bargaining chip when she next defied Fox and (they claimed) reneged on her contractual obligations.

  A singular bit of contention was caused by Marilyn’s insistence on the studio paying for her drama coach (Natasha), her choice of music coach (Hal Schaefer) and her dance director (Jack Cole) for There’s No Business Like Show Business. These concessions she won, but Fox still feared losing the world’s biggest star; they demanded, therefore, that her time of suspensions (two periods from January to April) be added to her current contract before the new seven-year deal took effect in August. Thus Marilyn would have to be available for another film—a clear reflection of their anxiety that she would repeat the ploy of absence. Little did they know at the time that this demand would have disastrous consequences for them.

  Because The Seven Year Itch would be co-produced by Wilder and Feldman (who had a particularly good relationship with Fox and many clients there), Marilyn realized that once again she would be making other people rich without either her creative control or fair financial compensation. At the same time, she was in fact planning a longer absence than anyone expected. Throughout 1954, letters and telephone calls were exchanged between her attorney, Loyd Wright and Milton Greene’s attorney, Frank Delaney—both men eager to find financial backing for a new venture to be called Marilyn Monroe Productions. This was all discussed in remarkable secrecy, for had Fox learned her plans, the contract might well have been legally invalidated by virtue of her contrary intentions.

  Marilyn spent most of April and May in San Francisco, where she and Joe lived with his sister Marie and others of his family. As before with the Kargers, Marilyn tried to attach herself to a family, longing to find what had been denied in childhood. But the idea of Marilyn as a simple housewife is ludicrous, as are fantasies of her scrubbing the stovetop, sewing booties for children-to-be and tasting to see if the pasta is perfectly al dente.

  She returned to Hollywood in late May and worked daily with Hal Schaefer and Jack Cole for her numbers in Show Business.6 Shooting began on May 29, with Natasha, at Marilyn’s request and to Joe’s annoyance, back on the set and very much in her life again. He was also jealous of the time his wife had with Schaefer, a handsome, polished bachelor with whom Marilyn spent long hours at the studio, often into the evening. For weeks, Marilyn ignored Joe’s jealousy over this, and (as she later said) Joe ignored her completely: they seemed, in fact, like mere roommates who met occasionally at Palm Drive.

  There’s No Business Like Show Business was little more than a Cinema-Scope excuse for overdesigned musical numbers by Irving Berlin, the sequences vaguely stitched together by the story of a terribly sweet family of Irish vaudevillians (Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor, Donald O’Connor and Johnny Ray). Marilyn had the superfluous supporting role of a hat-check girl who falls in love with one of them and proves she can sing, pose and posture. But she and the film sink in an extravagant cuteness of bloated production values, excessively fussy costumes and saccharine pieties including everything from little homilies on sobriety to discourses on performers becoming clergymen.

  * * *

  Throughout the filming that summer, Marilyn was ill with bronchitis (the lingering effects of a virus she had picked up in Korea), anemia and, for the first time, serious side-effects of sleeping pills, which made her groggy, moody and weepy on the rare mornings she appeared on time for shooting calls. Director Walter Lang and the other cast members were annoyed and alarmed when Marilyn repeatedly arrived confused, shaky and unprepared. According to Natasha,

  At night she would do scenes beautifully with me in a rehearsal, but the following morning she had forgotten the words entirely. “You don’t know how unhappy I am,” Maril
yn said. And that was all she said, but the company working with her was driven half insane by the delays.

  There was, her coach noted, “this conflict between her laziness and her ambition.” But even Natasha had to admit that more than an indictment of sloth was at stake here; she spoke dolefully of how Marilyn

  called me at two or three in the morning that spring when DiMaggio was being so filthy to her, when he beat her. She couldn’t stand being treated that way. I talked to her for hours, until my hand was clammy on the telephone. She knew she could call me at any time, and that spring she did.

  This reliance on Natasha explains an otherwise odd occurrence on June 14, when Marilyn telephoned Hugh French and insisted that Natasha be kept on the Fox payroll with an increased salary. When studio executive Lew Schreiber flatly refused this request, Marilyn threatened to resign from moviemaking for four years. This provoked a series of hastily called meetings among Marilyn, Zanuck, Feldman and French. Natasha got her raise. In light of that victory, Marilyn went further. She refused to sign the new Fox contract for The Seven Year Itch unless she was guaranteed her choice of dialogue, vocal and dance coaches on all forthcoming pictures. She insisted (thus the interoffice memoranda at Famous Artists) that she was “tired of having to fight the studio when all she was interested in was getting great parts.”