by James Spada
No longer under contract to anyone, Marilyn heard about a part for a sexy blonde in the new Marx Brothers movie, Love Happy, and arranged to audition for Groucho. She didn’t have to do much. “There were three girls there, and Groucho had us each walk away from him,” Marilyn said. “I was the only one he asked to do it twice. Then he whispered in my ear, ‘You have the prettiest ass in the business.’ I’m sure he meant it in the nicest way. I was only supposed to walk in the movie, but Groucho said he would write some special lines just for me.” Even with the lines, her screen time was about ninety seconds.
Her first publicity tour—in 1949, to promote the future release of Love Happy—brought her to New York for the first time. She thought that New York was always cold, just as Los Angeles is always warm. She packed nothing but heavy woolen clothes and arrived in the midst of a brutal August heat wave. Lester Cowan, the PR man who accompanied her, had the bright idea of photographing her with ice cream cones to cool off. A close look at this picture reveals the cones as obvious impostors. “It was so hot,” Marilyn said, “I spent the rest of the visit in a cotton dress Lester got at a wholesale house.”
Wearing the cotton dress, Marilyn takes part in a Photoplay publicity stunt—the housewarming for a “Dream House” won by one of the magazine’s lucky readers. Here Marilyn, Lon McCallister, and Don DeFore demonstrate the miracle product of one of the manufacturers whose sponsorship made the “Dream House” promotion possible.
Marilyn is attended to on the set of A Ticket to Tomahawk, a quickie Western she did for Fox without a contract in 1949. She appeared in a chorus for one number with the film’s star, Dan Dailey.
When she returned to Hollywood after her trip East, Marilyn met Johnny Hyde at a poolside party in Palm Springs. He was thirty-one years older than she, a powerful agent, and he soon became her mentor and lover. “Johnny was marvelous, he really was,” Marilyn told her first biographer, Maurice Zolotow. “He believed in my talent. He listened to me when I talked, and he encouraged me. He said I would be a very big star.”
Hyde was deeply in love with her, and he begged her to marry him. She refused. “I loved him dearly, but I wasn’t in love with him. He was a dear friend, a gentle, kind, brilliant man, and I had never known anyone like him.”
If she had indeed married Jim Dougherty without loving him, she was not going to make the same mistake again. Hyde, in poor health with a bad heart, told her he didn’t have long to live and his happiness would not be complete unless she married him. Besides, he told her, as his wife she would inherit his wealth, in excess of $1 million. She turned him down, and later again as he lay in a hospital after suffering a heart attack. At his funeral she became hysterical and threw herself on his coffin sobbing. His family refused to allow her to sit in the front row with them. She later wrote: “I cried night after night. Sometimes I felt wrong in not marrying him and giving him what he wanted. But I also knew it would be wrong to marry someone you didn’t really love. I didn’t regret the million dollars I had turned down. I never stopped regretting the loss of Johnny Hyde.”
Shortly before his death in 1949, Johnny Hyde arranged for Marilyn to audition for a role in John Huston’s film The Asphalt Jungle. This was big-time, and Marilyn was nervous. “They’re looking for a girl with big bazooms,” Marilyn told her friend Jim Bacon. “Johnny told me to dress sexy.” She wore falsies stuffed with tissue paper in order to improve on nature. John Huston’s first action when he saw her was to reach down her bosom and pull out the tissue paper. “Now we’ll read for the part,” he said. She asked to read lying on the floor because there wasn’t a couch and the part called for much reclining. When she finished, she insisted on doing it again, although Huston said she didn’t have to. He gave in, then told her, “You didn’t have to read twice. You had the part the first time. You’re on salary as of Monday. I want you on the set by nine o’clock, kid.”
Marilyn played Louis Calhern’s “niece” in the brutally realistic MGM crime drama, considered one of the all-time great films. Her reviews were excellent, and she would later say she considered it the best acting job she’d ever done. The reactions of preview audiences to her small part were extraordinary; hundreds of cards were filled out asking “Who’s the blonde with Calhern?” (Her name was far down in the credits.) She began to get a good deal of press attention, but MGM’s production chief Dore Schary didn’t think she “looked” like a movie star and MGM already had a blonde with pretty fair credentials—Lana Turner. Schary didn’t sign Marilyn to a contract.
On the set of The Fireball, a 1950 Mickey Rooney epic in which she had a walk-on.
An unusual look at Marilyn, 1950.
With cameraman Milton Krasner on the set of All About Eve, 1950. It was another prestigious film for Marilyn, a Joseph Mankiewicz production for Fox starring Bette Davis, Gary Merrill, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Celeste Holm. “She was terribly shy,” Celeste Holm recalled. “In fact, she was scared to death. She was playing in a pretty big league, you know, but Joe relaxed her into it.” Her fright resulted in the first known instance of her famous need for numerous retakes and her renowned lateness. One short scene required twenty-five retakes because she couldn’t get her lines right, and she was an hour late her first day on the set.
Marilyn would later say about her chronic lateness: “I guess people think that why I’m late is some kind of arrogance, and I think it is the opposite of arrogance I do want to be prepared when I get there to give a good performance or whatever to the best of my ability.”
Her performance as Miss Caswell, a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art, was funny and realistic, and it impressed Darryl Zanuck. “Put that girl under contract,” he ordered when he saw the rushes. He was told she had been under contract and was dropped. “I don’t care,” he responded. “Bring her back.”
Another bit part, in Right Cross with Dick Powell (1950), allowed her to act the sophisticate.
Monroe as she appeared in Home Town Story, an hour-long industrial film that also featured Alan Hale, Jr. It was released in May of 1951.
Despite her appearances in two major films and her new Fox contract, Marilyn was offered no more roles in 1950. She spent her time studying acting and posing for pinups in cocktail dresses and bathing suits, and in outfits like this, commemorating various holidays. Her bathing suit art soon captured the imaginations of newspaper editors, servicemen, and connoisseurs of feminine beauty everywhere, and their response was phenomenal. Before long the Twentieth Century-Fox mailroom was receiving more requests for pictures of Marilyn than of any other Fox player—and she wasn’t featured in any current movies. Zanuck suspected that someone was tampering with the mail figures in an effort to promote Marilyn—but when he was convinced that wasn’t so, he ordered her put into any Fox picture requiring a beautiful blonde. Marilyn Monroe’s career was about to take off.
PART THREE
The Latest Blonde
1951-1952
The photo’s caption read: “Chicago White Sox pitcher Joe Dobson checks over film starlet Marilyn Monroe’s form, as outfielder Gus Zernial does the catching. Marilyn, a long-time baseball fan, got some pointers when she visited the Chicago team at their training camp.” Marilyn Monroe, of course, didn’t know a fast ball from a catcher’s mitt, and the photo was only one of the blizzard of publicity photos she posed for. But it would prove extremely significant: baseball immortal Joe DiMaggio saw it in his local newspaper and inquired, “Who’s the blonde?”
Marilyn attends the 1951 Academy Awards, where she presented the Oscar for Achievement in Sound Recording to Thomas Moulton for All About Eve.
Marilyn made Love Nest in 1951, playing an unwitting temptress who comes between William Lundigan and wife June Haver. She had a few scenes with another newcomer, Jack Paar. “Looking back,” Paar wrote in his autobiography, “I guess I should have been excited, but I found her pretty dull. Marilyn spoke in a breathless way which denoted either passion or asthma. She wore dresses with t
he necklines so low she looked as though she had jumped into her dress and caught her foot on the shoulder straps.... She used to carry around the books of Marcel Proust, with their titles facing out, although I never saw her read any of them. She was always holding up shooting because she was talking with someone on the phone. Judging from what’s happened, though, I guess she had the right number.”
But the studio continued to put her into silly Grade B comedies, always playing somebody’s dumb blond secretary. One of these “classics” was called Let’s Make It Legal, and as part of her job MM costarred in the screen test of another young hopeful, Robert Wagner.
Taking a break from shooting Love Nest. Her bathing suit, described by one wit as having “barely enough room for the dots,” caused a sensation around the studio lot, and anyone who could make an excuse to be around when Marilyn was filming did so. Finally it got so disruptive the director barred visitors from the set. Zanuck, though skeptical about Marilyn’s potential as a major star, couldn’t deny her impact on people. He said, “Miss Monroe is the most exciting new personality in Hollywood in a long time.” When her contract expired, he re-signed her to a seven-year pact, beginning at $500 a week and escalating semiannually to a ceiling of $1,500 per week. Marilyn was joyous, and confident that Fox now believed in her potential as an actress and a star.
The roles may not have been memorable, but Marilyn was, and her brief appearances in minor films like As Young As You Feel were at least promoted prominently.
Marilyn wins the 1951 Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Henrietta Award as Most Promising Personality of the Year. It has to be the world’s most unwieldy award; and Marilyn’s gown, one of the world’s skimpiest.
Her barely apparent dress at the Golden Globe Awards stirred up the first of many controversies around Monroe. “One columnist wrote that I was cheap and vulgar in it,” Marilyn said, “and that I would’ve looked better in a potato sack. So somebody in publicity asked, ‘So O.K., why don’t we put old Marilyn in a potato sack?’” Over four hundred newspapers across the country published at least one of the various poses in early 1952.
Although Marilyn’s cheesecake pictures were considered very sexy, they were heavily censored by the studio, much to her dismay. “The Johnston office kills practically everything taken of me—and what the Johnston office passes the studio retouches. They spend a lot of time worrying about whether a girl has cleavage or not. It seems to me they ought to worry if she doesn’t have any.”
Marilyn was lent out to RKO in 1951 for a relatively significant dramatic role in Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night, costarring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan. Monroe received equal billing with the stars and most of the attention during filming. Douglas complained bitterly about it one day: “Why the hell don’t these photographers ever take any pictures of us? It’s always that goddamn blond bitch.” Barbara Stanwyck responded, “It’s this way, Paul—she’s younger and more beautiful than any of us.”
Marilyn took her dramatic opportunity in the film quite seriously. For the first time her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, accompanied her onto the set, and Monroe demanded retakes whenever Lytess disapproved, regardless of whether director Fritz Lang was happy with the take or not. Lang ordered Lytess off the set, and MM refused to work without her. Finally, a compromise: Lytess would stay, but she could not contradict any of Lang’s directives.
Marilyn’s perfectionism paid off—she received her best reviews ever for Clash by Night. Alton Cook of the New York World-Telegram and Sun wrote: “Before going any further with a report on Clash, perhaps we should mention the first full-length glimpses the picture gives us of Marilyn Monroe as an actress. The verdict is gratifyingly good... this girl has a refreshing exuberance, an abundance of girlish high spirits. She is a forceful actress, too, when crisis comes along. She has definitely stamped herself as a gifted new star, worthy of all that fantastic press agentry. Her role is not very big, but she makes it dominant.”
Another publicity gimmick: “Sexy blond starlet Marilyn Monroe returns to her alma mater, Van Nuys High School, and gives a few of the students pointers on attaining success in life.”
By the end of 1951 Marilyn was on the verge of major stardom. She appeared on the front page of Stars and Stripes, the serviceman’s newspaper, every day for weeks—and when there weren’t any new pictures available, the editors reprinted old ones. She was profiled in movie magazines as an orphan waif struggling to the top. One of the reasons Marilyn captured the imagination of so many men during this period was pictures like this. If you’re good, you might find in your stocking this Christmas...
On the set of We’re Not Married with dialogue director Tony Jowitt, January 1952. The film was a series of stories of couples who discover their marriages are illegal. Marilyn played a wife who wins the Mrs. Mississippi contest, much to her husband’s dismay. He welcomes the news that they’re not married because she can no longer be Mrs. Mississippi. Of course, she immediately enters the Miss Mississippi pageant—which she wins as former husband and baby look on.
Marilyn poses again for the publicity machine, checking the card file at the University of California library for a night class in which she enrolled. “She’s very serious,” the caption read, “about her course in ‘Backgrounds in Literature. ’”
In April 1952 Life magazine featured a sexy Marilyn on its cover and billed her as “the talk of Hollywood.” If she wasn’t before, she surely was now. These rejected poses are as appealing as the photo used, and photographer Philippe Halsman later recalled that at this time “she was at the height of her sex appeal; and everything she did, every motion, was a mixture of conscious and unconscious appeal and challenge to the desire of men.... Though I have photographed hundreds of actresses, I have never seen one with a greater inferiority complex.... She always had the feeling that she was not good enough, that she was unworthy; even her sex appeal stemmed from this. When she faced a man she didn’t know, she felt safe and secure only when she knew the man desired her; so everything in her life was geared to provoke this feeling. Her talent in this respect was very great. I remember my experience in her tiny apartment with my assistant and the Life researcher. Each of us felt that if the other two would leave, something incredible would happen.... She would try to seduce the camera as if it were a human being.... She knew that the camera lens was not just a glass eye but a symbol for the eyes of millions of men; so the camera stimulated her strongly. Because she had a great talent for directing the entire impact of her personality at the lens she was a remarkably gifted and exciting model.”
On the set of Monkey Business with one of her costars, summer 1952. The others were Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Charles Coburn. The film did little more than allow more people to experience Marilyn. As Paul V. Beckley of the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “Not having seen Miss Monroe before, I know now what that’s all about, and I’ve no dissenting opinions to offer. She disproves more than adequately the efficacy of the old stage rule about not turning one’s back to the audience.”
The rumors are confirmed. Marilyn poses with baseball immortal Joe DiMaggio on the Monkey Business set—their first photo together. Joe had wanted to meet Marilyn ever since he saw that photo of her at bat, and a mutual friend arranged a blind date. “We almost didn’t meet,” Marilyn said. “I’d heard of Joe DiMaggio but I didn’t know much about him. I’ve never followed baseball.... I was very tired the night of the date and asked if I could get out of it. But I’d promised. I had visualized him as having slick black hair, wearing flashy sports clothes, with a New York line of patter.... He had no line at all. No jokes. He was shy and reserved but, at the same time, rather warm and friendly. I noticed that he wasn’t eating the food in front of him, that he was looking at me. Then the next thing I noticed was that I wasn’t tired anymore. Joe asked me to have dinner with him the next night. I had dinner with him that night, the next night and every night until he had to leave for New York. I haven’t dated anyone e
lse.”
Marilyn’s first starring role for Fox, and her most dramatic, was in Don’t Bother to Knock; she played a drab, psychotic baby-sitter. During filming in early 1952, the revelation that Marilyn had posed nude for a calendar five years earlier hit the newspapers. The studio front office first tried to squelch the story, then told Marilyn to deny it. Terrified that her highly promising career would be ruined, Marilyn sought advice and finally refused to lie. “I was broke and needed the money,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong.” Her candor and the beauty of the calendar photo turned a potential public relations disaster into a swirl of sympathy and publicity for Monroe. By the time Don’t Bother to Knock was released in the summer of 1952, Marilyn was indeed, as Life had called her, “the most talked-about actress in America.” While many critics thought Marilyn was out of her depth in the film, her performance has been re-evaluated more positively in recent years. The film was not a big hit; what money it did make, though, was attributed to Marilyn’s rapidly burgeoning popularity.