Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  Costume designer Walter Plunkett continued: “At the start Marilyn was in a pale, washed-out pink dress that blended with the indoor complexion of the customers. As Mickey drank more, her dress changed into a stronger shade of pink, better made and more stylish. As he continued drinking and the bar became hazy with smoke she kept changing ever so subtly until she was in a bright red dress, looking absolutely radiant.”

  Mamoulian, of course, faced problems with this unconventional, unheard of treatment. Producer Arthur Freed told him: “This is over the audiences’ head—a bar is a bar and a girl is a girl.”

  Many consider Summer Holiday to be Marilyn’s shining moment at MGM. She was right to be proud of her tough-talking, edgy Belle.

  When the film was finally released in 1948, it became a rare flop for producer Arthur Freed; this despite a fine score by Harry Warren and Ralph Blane. Editing was a big culprit, with many choice musical numbers cut, diluting character development. The lone survivor of the cuts was Marilyn, with a stunning 13-minute sequence. The critics took notice. MGM didn’t.

  Her final film under contract was a minor yet attractive part in High Barbaree (1947), as Van Johnson’s wealthy, glamourous girlfriend, thrown over for the virtuous charms of June Allyson. She was no match for the teary-eyed juggernaut Allyson, more of a fan favorite than Maxwell, so Marilyn’s cool, slinky presence was lost in this mystical tale.

  Then, according to the actress, sounding optimistic for the sake of her fans: “With the studio cutting down its planned schedule … it didn’t seem as though there was anything for me; so I went to Mr. Mayer and asked him to release me from my contract. The whole thing was very friendly, and the studio finally agreed to let me go.”

  This carefully worded statement sounds too studio-oriented to be completely true; more likely they just canned her or she had to pay her way out of her dead-end contract.

  Before she left the studio for good to freelance, Marilyn was approached by director Mervyn LeRoy. Marilyn explained in a 1947 fan club journal: “He wanted to do a very dramatic test and said that producers wouldn’t take me seriously in a dramatic role as long as I was a blonde. So, I went to makeup, and they fitted me with a wig, one that Lana Turner had worn in a picture. It must be a good luck wig because the test, taken from several scenes in the movie Golden Boy … turned out even better than I hoped.”

  RKO saw the test, and the newly darktressed Maxwell, deciding she was just right for Race Street (1948) opposite George Raft. It was a comedown, for sure, from MGM, but the film afforded her a meaty part, the sort of dramatic role MGM never gave her. She’s the duplicitous, quick-thinking girlfriend of Raft, playing him for a sucker all the way. “No, he’s not stubborn,” she says acidly at one point, “he’s just a chump.” Marilyn’s a liar, a cheat, but oh-so-good at twisting Raft into believing she’s a good girl.

  Free from studio ties, Marilyn had been doing radio and nightclubs, also appearing with Jack Benny and his troupe at the London Palladium in 1948. Jack’s daughter Joan, then only a teenager, gave a good glimpse at the real Marilyn in her Sunday Nights at Seven: “The engagement at Palladium was a great success and sold out every performance … Marilyn Maxwell sang and did a skit with my father as the ‘sexy dumb blonde,’ similar to the role Marilyn Monroe later played once on his TV show. She had made her reputation as one of Bob Hope’s ‘girls,’ visiting our troops during the war. Max never made it big, but her name was well-known, she had a nice singing voice and a fair amount of talent. She was soft-spoken and had a sweet quality about her, yet was a great character with a wildly funny sense of humor. Sexy and glamorous—yes, very—but hardly dumb. I liked her because she was one of the few of the many people who came in and out of my life who paid attention to me, gave me credit for brains, and treated me as an equal. We became good friends during that trip and she would often come to my room to chat … I enjoyed knowing Max for that short time. She was a neat lady.”

  In addition to being the only real classic in her career, Champion (1949) contains Marilyn’s finest acting. At the time, critical focus centered on the breakout performances of Kirk Douglas and Ruth Roman, as boxer Douglas’ wife. So, again, Marilyn’s excellent work was for naught, although clearly she makes quite an impact when viewing the movie today.

  Star Douglas really came into his own as an actor with this small independent movie, playing his first anti-hero, boxer Midge Kelly, whose rise to the top is achieved through the destruction of those closest to him. Marilyn plays Grace Diamond, an expensive name for an expensive dame, with a self-possessed but sexy air, as she wraps the naive pug around her finger. She thrives on money, particularly if a macho boxer is attached to the bankroll. Looking cool in furs and seductive with a cigarette holder, Marilyn gets her point across after slapping Douglas: “I’m expensive, awful expensive. I didn’t want you to think you could buy me cheap.” Who’s Kirk to argue? The assured beauty gets the boxer so mixed up, his manager (Paul Stewart) cracks, “He got himself a new manager—a blonde.” (Judging from their steamy scenes in Champion, it’s no surprise Marilyn and Kirk had an affair off-camera.)

  When Kirk becomes full of himself, their relationship, which she had dictated up to this point, sours; Kirk finds himself another blonde (Lola Albright). Marilyn’s confidence turns to hopelessness as she tries fiercely to hold Douglas’ attention. Her best scenes follow as he throws her over. At first she insists “you’re not going to shake me,” threatening to expose his true nature. Catching her fingers in his arm, Kirk tells the wincing Marilyn, very quietly: “No, you’re not going to do that. You’re going to be a very good girl. Because if you’re not, I’ll put you in the hospital for a long time.” Marilyn’s desperation and resentment toward Douglas make these scenes the best acting of her career.

  Director Mark Robson’s gritty, unrelenting realism helped make Champion the sleeper of the year. It did wonders for Douglas’ career and it should have done the same for Maxwell’s. Sadly, her downfall started after her impressive work in this picture.

  Key to the City (1950) led her back to MGM, but her old studio put her in support to Clark Gable and Loretta Young. It was a small part that Marilyn gamely tackled, that of Sheila, an “Atom Dancer”—MGM’s variation on a bubble dancer, only more explosive—to whom Gable is briefly attracted. Lending her bubbly presence to the proceedings, Marilyn steals her scenes, especially with one suggestive dance.

  Marilyn wed again on New Year’s Day, 1950 to Anders (Andy) MacIntyre, owner of the Encore Room, but the couple was doomed from the start. Dancer Dan Dailey was best man at their wedding, but many in Hollywood claimed that wasn’t a good sign: Marilyn, alleges agent Al Melnick, “had a crush on Dailey.” She would later appear with Dailey on the Shower of Stars TV adaptation of the play Burlesque (co-starring Joan Blondell and Jack Oakie). She told reporters at the time that MacIntyre drank, some hinted he was abusive, but when the couple finally parted in 1951, privately the finger was pointed in the direction of, not Dailey, but comedian Bob Hope.

  In June of 1950 Marilyn joined Hope to entertain in Korea, becoming the first woman to perform for the troops over there. Even though the two had known each other during the ’40s, many believe the relationship started on this tour. Hope was quoted in the early ’50s as to the kind of women who interested him: “I guess my top favorites are the fun girls, the ones who love to clown—among them, Dorothy Lamour, Marilyn Maxwell, Lucille Ball, Jane Russell. I like the ones who quip back.” Of the actresses named, only Marilyn had a personal relationship with the comedian, which was opined by many who knew Hope to be very serious.

  The gritty, realistic classic Champion (UA, 1949), starring Kirk Douglas, contained some of the best acting of Maxwell’s career.

  In addition to the Korean tour, Max found herself co-starring with Hope in their first movie together, The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), directed by Sidney Lanfield; the Damon Runyon story was filmed previously in 1934 with Lee Tracy. She played Brainey Baxter, girlfriend of obnoxious rac
etrack tout Hope.

  It was a nice, strictly supporting gig for Marilyn. She gets two songs to sing, one a duet introducing the now-classic Christmas song “Silver Bells” with Hope, a nice moment as the two stroll down Broadway. The number was added after Hope saw a rough cut of the film and wasn’t happy with certain scenes and the overall pacing. Frank Tashlin did the rewrites and directed the few inserted scenes.

  Hope and Maxwell were inseparable and, of course, there was talk. The rumors prompted Louella Parsons to speak out: “In an exclusive interview with Dolores Hope, I have learned that there’s absolutely no truth to the current rumors that Bob Hope and his leading lady, Marilyn Maxwell, are serious about each other just because they have been seen together so much. ‘Our marriage is stronger than ever,’ Mrs. Hope assured me.”

  According to Hope’s unauthorized biographer Arthur Marx, the devoutly Catholic Dolores privately pleaded with her husband to stop seeing Marilyn. In an interview with Maxwell’s personal secretary Jean Greenberg, Marx asked her about the relationship, which Hope was flaunting during personal publicity trips to Ireland and England. “I will tell you this much,” Greenberg replied, “Bob asked Marilyn to marry him when they were in Ireland together. But she turned him down because she knew Dolores would never give him a divorce…”

  Known on the Paramount lot as “Mrs. Bob Hope,” Marilyn had a serious affair with Hope during the early ’50s. The Lemon Drop Kid (Paramount, 1951) was their first of three movies together.

  She tried to see others. Allegedly Hope caught her in a compromising position with, of all people, Jimmy Durante. If that incident made Hope laugh (wouldn’t you?), another did not. One night Hope phoned Marilyn at her apartment seeking a date when a man answered. Hope demanded to know what this particular man, a popular singer, was doing there. Bob was informed that Marilyn was “upstairs getting ready for our date.” When Hope shouted at him to “Stay away from my woman!,” the handsome crooner told him, “Go flip yourself, we’re going out!”

  Alas, working extensively with Hope did little for Marilyn’s screen career or reputation. She managed to appear in the low-budget Western New Mexico (1951) with Lew Ayres, but it was a dull venture. MM plays “Cherry, a well-known entertainer [pause] in the theater,” who shows up in the middle of an Indian-cavalry war. The only bright spot was Marilyn singing and dancing—in the dark, mind you, as they await the Indians to attack them on a mountain—the song “Soldier, Soldier, Won’t You Marry Me Now.” The Indians are considerate enough to delay their attack until after the song.

  It wasn’t until 1953 that she finally appeared in another film, but again it was with Hope at Paramount. Off Limits was a mild comedy of a fight manager (Hope) in the Army training a boxer (Mickey Rooney). Marilyn plays Rooney’s aunt (creative casting), owner of “The Pink Owl” bar who disapproves of boxing and Hope. She does get to sing the catchy “I Learned All About Love,” and reprises it later as a duet with Bob, who does a nice tap dance on top of the piano—until he falls off.

  One of her better roles came in Universal’s East of Sumatra (1953), co-starring virile Jeff Chandler. “I came for tin, not trouble,” Jeff growls to Anthony Quinn, blue-turbaned king of an uncharted island laden with unmined tin worth millions. Marilyn is engaged to Jeff’s boss John Sutton. Between hairdo changes, she sashays around in improbably glamourous gowns, driving both men crazy. Marilyn’s romantic scenes with Chandler (whom she was seeing off-screen) were impressively intense, but undermined the believability of his attraction to native girl Suzan Ball. Max gave the proceedings a fun, light touch.

  Her work at Universal introduced her to an actor who would play a key role in her life, becoming her best friend: Rock Hudson, then just a budding contract player, whom she nicknamed “Big Sam.” At this point in his career, the homosexual Hudson had to stay in the closet, so the fan magazines viewed the friendship, especially later in the 1960s, as “a love affair.” Some feel that the relationship was sexual. “Marilyn Maxwell made the statement that even though she couldn’t get Rock to marry her,” actress Lori Nelson claimed, “she still wanted his child. I do recall that she really wanted to have his child,” but Nelson concedes, “I was young and naive then.”

  Nelson wasn’t the only one who was confused about their closeness. Marilyn married for the third and last time on November 21, 1954. The groom was producer-screenwriter Jerry Davis, who at first didn’t know what to make of Rock’s presence. He stated that Rock was “omnipresent during his marriage” to Marilyn, and that he would return home to find “this handsome six-foot-whatever man who was absolutely in tune with my wife. I felt a little like Woody Allen—‘Hi, honey, I’m home.’ She would get quite defensive. ‘Are you paranoid? Do you actually think this man has any interest in me?’” Finally, Davis concluded that it was just “a remarkable friendship,” which indeed it was. The Davis-Maxwell marriage, though producing a son (Matthew Paul, born 1956), was not a remarkable one, ending in divorce in 1960.

  According to Rock Hudson: His Story (written with Sara Davidson, in the third person), their relationship only became sexual after her divorce from Davis. “I know for a fact they were having an affair,” Jean Greenberg told Davidson. “Marilyn confided everything in me, and she talked about it in detail. She was in love with him. She said he always told her he loved her but he wasn’t in love with her.” But they did contemplate getting married and having a child, just as Lori Nelson remembers, but Rock told Max that she had to cope with his male lovers. She thought seriously about it, then declined, and they continued as friends. “People who saw them together said they laughed and played ‘like little kids,’” wrote Davidson. “Rock had an aversion to Jell-O, and Marilyn would chase him through the house with a bowl of green Jell-O. She’d get him on the floor and tickle him, and they’d wrestle like bear cubs, laughing until tears were streaming down their cheeks.”

  Max had little to do in New York Confidential (1955). In another brief role, a favor to friend Lucille Ball, she showed up unbilled in Forever, Darling (1956). She performed a scene from a fictional movie Shadows of Africa, doing some fun overacting with James Mason. Lucy then imagines herself on-screen, dressing and vamping it up as Maxwell. It was the film’s most inspired bit.

  The Jerry Lewis dud Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958) gave her a bigger role. Movie star Marilyn, newly-widowed mother of triplets, goes on location in Egypt, foolishly trusting her children with schnook Lewis. Max is given one glorious moment, her production number “The White Virgin of the Nile,” a campy bit of nonsense featuring her in a spectacular sequined Cleopatra costume. It was a breath of fresh air in a musical as moldy as Lewis’ vocal chords. The New York World-Telegram and Sun praised Marilyn’s performance as being “full of sly mirth as she takes charge of idiotic doings,” while noting that she “is an old and expert hand at rowdy comedy.”

  She kept herself busy on TV, nightclubs and a Vegas act. She also recorded, but not for major labels. In 1953 she was heard on Forecast with “Plaid and Calico” and “Why Should I Flirt With the Blues?” Another recording during this period was her contribution of a song (“Zip”) to Tops Records’ Pal Joey studio recording. Martha Tilton, who also sang on the LP, remembered Marilyn vividly as “a funny gal. She had a wonderful sense of humor, and was extremely nice,” adding with a chuckle, “She told me she was going to write her autobiography and call it 101 Night Stands. Isn’t that something? She was so fun to be around!” For Design, Marilyn shared an album with Roberta Sherwood in 1962.

  Marilyn signed on for a TV series in 1961, Bus Stop, a project bearing scant likeness to William Inge’s play or the Marilyn Monroe film of 1956. The action centered on the Sherwood Diner owned by Marilyn’s character. There were high expectations for the show, but it was not to be. “It was a great experience working every week and improving my craft,” she explained, “but after 13 weeks I had to withdraw. It turned out I was doing little more than direct people to the washroom and serve them coffee. In 13 weeks I had only three rousing
good episodes! But it was just as well. The show went off the air.”

  More TV spots continued into the 1960s on game shows, where she was especially welcome because of her quick wit. She also worked on popular series like Gunsmoke, 77 Sunset Strip, Wagon Train and Burke’s Law. On a telethon hosted by singer Jack Smith, viewers were treated to Marilyn’s off-the-cuff, straightforward personality. Jack recalls today: “Marilyn was working the phones, and I went back to talk with her on camera. We were talking away, and she says to me, ‘Are you having fun?’ And I said, of course, I was. I always enjoy doing telethons. She said, ‘No, you were looking down my dress!’ I said, ‘I wasn’t! … I would never think of…!’ Marilyn looked at me, very seriously, with a twinkle in her eye, and said, ‘Well, you should!’ Isn’t that wonderful? That’s the way she was. A great sense of humor. Very nice girl.”

  Finally, a film role presented itself when Bob Hope cast her in Critic’s Choice (1963)—probably not a wise choice. Hope is a Walter Kerr-ish Broadway critic who’s been, as one character puts it, “closing shows single-handedly.” When his wife (Lucille Ball) writes a play, he is expected to curb his acid pen. Marilyn plays Hope’s ex-wife, an actress and past victim of his bad reviews: “The truth is, Ivy London’s clothes give a better performance than she did.” Our blonde tornado rustles up trouble in the Hope-Ball marriage: “I miss you too,” Hope tells her wearily. “On my masochistic days.” Marilyn breezes in and out of the narrative; she sparkles, she shines, she gets Hope drunk, and steals this not-worth-stealing movie.