by Jackie Ganiy
Barbara’s most memorable film was Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and that’s exactly what she ended up doing. She was gorgeous, with a commanding screen presence, and that elusive quality that only the few who became stars possess. Barbara’s biggest love was not a man, or stardom, or her son—her biggest love was booze. That was one love affair that never waned. But alcohol is a greedy lover, and it took everything away from her: it took her beauty, her money, her self-respect, and finally, it took her life.
Before she died, ghost author Leo Guild propped Barbara up long enough for her to dictate her autobiography to him, for which she was paid a paltry thousand dollars. The book remains the only time Barbara’s story was told in her own words, and is suitably revealing. In the prologue, she laments the time she tried to warn younger actresses not to fall victim to the traps that she had, but that they just brushed her off. “I know I’m an old coot for now—almost thirty-five, wine soaked, prey for men’s five dollar bills but I can still write poetry.” Barbara had a gift for poetry. One of her compositions is particularly poignant:
“Love is a memory
Time can not kill
The cherished tune
Gay and absurd
And the music unheard.”
There is a profundity in understanding that some people do not want to be saved, but prefer that their cherished tune be silenced and their music remain unheard. Such a person was Barbara Payton.
Marilyn Monroe
A woman and a boy, clad alike in nondescript black sweaters, walked side by side down 57th street in New York. They moved along the crowded sidewalk without incident. The woman leaned over to the boy and whispered, “Do you want to see her?” He looked puzzled. “See who?” She gazed at him in mixed amusement and disbelief, and replied “HER!” A metamorphosis washed over her, a transformation that had less to do with the physical than the psychological, and it came from so deep within her that it could have easily been perceived as a physical change. If it weren’t for the fact that she did it right in front of him—in seconds—he might have thought it was someone else standing there. She tilted her head back, thrust out her chest, ran her fingers through her flaxen hair, put on a beaming, artificial smile, and began to walk with a kind of half-swish, half-wiggle (something that most women wouldn’t be able to pull off even if they spent years practicing). Immediately, people on the sidewalk began to stop and stare. A crowd gathered, and an excited murmur slowly grew in intensity. “Look! Do you know who that is? It can’t be! Miss Monroe! Miss Monroe!” Strangers that had not given her a second glance mere seconds before began to reach out to touch her, and beg her autograph. They swept the boy aside and swamped the woman. Miss Nondescript had become Marilyn Monroe, the most famous actress in the world, in less than five seconds. She did not need make-up, clothes or wigs to accomplish this. All she needed was to summon her alter ego from within.
This small, insecure woman would become not only the most famous actress of her time, but the most enduringly famous actress of all time. Her visage is even more recognizable today than it was when she held court on the screen for ten brief years, sixty years ago. The story of her life has been written about countless times. She has been portrayed on screen more than any other star, most recently in the acclaimed film, My Week with Marilyn. Recently, Macy’s department store launched a new juniors clothing line based on her iconic style. Macy’s belief that a star who died fifty years ago can still sell clothes to modern teenage girls is remarkable. She did not have a happy beginning, and it ended badly as well, but for a magical period in the middle, she was the very essence of beauty, ethereal innocence, and sex.
Norma Jeane Baker was born in June of 1926 to a mentally unstable woman named Gladys Baker. As for the identity of her father, well, that’s anyone’s guess. Gladys was married to Martin E. Mortensen at the time, but Monroe said her mother named Charles Stanley Gifford as the sire, and as he bore a slight resemblance to Clark Gable—someone Marilyn had a mad crush on—she clung to this story her entire life. Gladys worked full-time, and wasn’t really into motherhood anyway, so she left her baby daughter in the care of foster parents Ida and Albert Bolender. Norma Jeane would remain with the Bolenders for seven years—the most stable period of her childhood. In 1933, Gladys bought a small house near the Hollywood Bowl, and brought Norma Jeane back to live with her. Her stability was fleeting, though, and she sank into complete insanity the following year, eventually being placed in the same mental hospital where her own mother had died. Norma Jeane spent the rest of her life haunted by the specter of insanity. Her mother’s friend, Grace—a huge movie buff and Jean Harlow fan—adopted Norma Jeane briefly, instilling in her a love of movies and Harlow—the first blonde bombshell. Grace got married, and felt there was no place in her new life for the child, so she stuck Norma Jeane in an orphanage overlooking the Paramount Studios water tower, where she remained for nearly two years. Norma Jeane didn’t understand why she was there,and was dragged inside, kicking and screaming that she had a mother and didn’t belong there.
She was sixteen when she wed Jimmy Dougherty, and already a beauty, with thick, wavy hair, perfect skin and a perfectly proportioned body. She was also thoroughly scarred from her traumatic childhood, and wrestled for the rest of her life with the insecurities and inner demons it left in her. Dougherty probably couldn’t believe his luck, but Norma Jeane was less interested in marital bliss than she was in following the footlights of the movie premieres she lived next door to in Hollywood. It wasn’t long before Dougherty left for the fun of WWII, leaving his new bride with his mother. Norma Jeane went to work in a munitions factory with her mother-in-law. One day, photographer David Conover came to the factory to photograph the women doing their part for the war effort, and spotted the lovely brunette right away. David spent most of the afternoon shooting her, ignoring the rest of the women at the plant. The camera’s love affair with Norma Jeane had begun.
David got her an audition with the Blue Book Modeling Agency, and she began modeling for print ads. She asked a hairdresser to add some zing to her hair for a shampoo ad, which turned her hair strawberry blonde. She loved the effect, and returned to the salon to have them take it even blonder. Her next series of modeling photos got significantly more attention, the blonder she got, the more the phone rang. Twentieth Century Fox saw her modeling photos, and offered her a standard, six-month contract at seventy-five dollars a week in 1946, with the stipulation that she change her name to Marilyn. She chose her new last name as an homage to her grandmother. Years later, she said she wanted to keep Jeane as her first name, but Ben Lyon, head of talent at the studio, had insisted on changing both. She also divorced her husband that same year, as he did not approve of the trajectory her life had taken.
Rare photo of a young Marilyn posing semi-nude.
After nothing but bit parts, Fox dropped her option, and Columbia picked it up. This was due in large part to her relationship with Joe Schenck—Fox Studio mogul and good friend of Columbia boss, Harry Cohn. Columbia put her into her first real film role in Ladies of the Chorus, where she shined. She also met two people who would become two of the most important influences in her life and career: drama coach Natasha Lytess, and powerful agent, Johnny Hyde. Marilyn was not above showing powerful, older men a good time between the sheets, and most were wise enough not to take it beyond the bedroom. Hyde, however, fell hard for her. He left his wife and children, and pleaded with Marilyn to marry him. Despite receiving great reviews for Ladies of the Chorus, Columbia dropped her option anyway. Bet someone got fired over that decision.
Needing to eat during this lull, she posed nude for photographer, Tom Kelley. Her milky white body was laid against a deep crimson velvet background, to stunning effect. Several photos were snapped, and Marilyn received fifty dollars for her time. Wifey was there the whole time, and all three went out to Barney’s Beanery afterward for coffee. No kidding. Of course, the photos would come back to haunt her. One of them, showing Monroe laying on her si
de, with her torso stretched out and her arm above her head, would make its way to a pinup calendar, creating a sensational scandal when it came out during the pinnacle of her success. It would become the most famous nude photograph ever taken of a star, and go on to achieve pop culture status as a definitive timestamp of that era. Astonishingly, it did not end her career, but rather only enhanced her popularity. A young upstart named Hugh Hefner would use the photos in the very first edition of a new magazine called Playboy, but all of that was in the future.
With Johnny Hyde going to bat with the studios for her, she began appearing in small but memorable roles, such as the dumb blonde starlet in All About Eve, in which she has the memorable line “Why do they all look like unhappy rabbits?” (a reference to movie directors). She had a meaty role in the gritty crime drama, The Asphalt Jungle, and critics loved her in it. Things were going well, but there was one problem: Johnny Hyde, who was already married, was still pressuring her to marry him. He had become obsessed with Marilyn, but she did not return his passion. Hyde was wealthy, powerful, and kind, but she did not love him, and felt her career would stall if she married him. She did fall in love with her voice coach, Fred Karger, who rejected her pleas to get married. After the rejection, she attempted suicide, the first of many attempts. Though she didn’t marry Hyde, she let him keep on lavishing her with expensive gifts like jewels and furs, and taking her to many elite Hollywood schmoozefests. She also didn’t mind that he alone stood between her and two-bit roles in subpar films.That gravy train would have screeched to a halt when Hyde dropped dead of a massive heart attack in 1950, if he had not secured a long-term contract for her at Fox beforehand.
Fox’s publicity department went into overdrive, displaying Marilyn in all kinds of ridiculous poses, everything from a stocking stuffer for GIs to a “pastry chef” in a bathing suit and six-inch heels preparing to slice a (cheese?) cake. The studio began to see her as a viable replacement for the glamorous, multitalented pinup queen, Betty Grable, who was nearing her mid-thirties (gasp), and thus, the end of her career. As Grable had dominated musical comedies, that’s where Fox saw Marilyn’s future. She was cast in a series of light comedies, which took advantage of her dumb blonde persona, and her ample physical assets.
When Marilyn signed with Fox, she insisted that Natasha Lytess be present during all of her scenes, and that Lytess—not the director—have the last say on whether her performance was good enough. This put her costars in an awkward position: they knew they had to be “on” no matter how many takes they did with her, as the one take that favored Marilyn most would be the one used. She was barely beyond bit parts, yet her reputation for being difficult was already preceding her.
Monroe in Niagara
Marilyn was soon working on the film that would catapult her into major stardom, Niagara. The movie was a suspenseful thriller, set against the backdrop of the majestic Niagara Falls. Monroe played a married woman of slight moral character, who fooled around on her very jealous and shell-shocked vet husband, played by Joseph Cotton. In one scene, she had to walk down the street... sounds simple enough, yet when Marilyn walked down that street, it was an event. The camera kept focus squarely on her as she did that half-wiggle, half-swishing thing, for an entire minute. This was the longest single tracking shot in a major film thus far. As she made her way toward the falls, it was as if everyone and everything else faded away—so riveting was her image—even as that image got smaller and smaller as she moved further and further down the street. Marilyn literally walked into stardom right then and there. Of her performance, The New York Times wrote, “Perhaps Miss Monroe is not the perfect actress at this point. But neither the director nor the gentlemen who handled the cameras appeared to be concerned with this. They have caught every possible curve both in the intimacy of the boudoir and in the equally revealing tight dresses. And they have illustrated pretty concretely that she can be seductive—even when she walked. As had been noted, Niagara may not be the place to visit under these circumstances, but the falls, and Miss Monroe, are something to see.”
As Marilyn seemed poised on the edge of major fame, two stories broke that could have derailed it. The press—having been fed that she was a poor orphan who struggled against adversity to achieve the American dream—one day got wind that she had a mother, who was not only alive, but wasting away in a mental institution. The story broke around the same time that the nude photographs resurfaced. It’s astonishing that Fox Studios didn’t kick her to the curb. Instead, they went into full damage control, hastily arranging two news conferences, in which Marilyn explained these things to the public. She claimed that in all that time she spent in an orphanage, she did not know her mother was still alive (pants on fire, Marilyn?), but having learned about it when the press did, she had already begun trying to help her in any way she could. As for the nudie pics, she said that she was desperate for money at the time, felt they were artistic and in good taste, and that the photographer’s wife had been present the entire time. Astonishingly, not only did the public accept her explanations, she was seen as even more vulnerable and appealing than before. Kudos Marilyn! Thus began the public’s perception of her as a woman/child who exuded sex and fragility at the same time.
How did she top all this? She dated the wholesome hero of that all-American pastime, the epitome of respectability and apple pie, Yankees slugger, Joe DiMaggio. Marilyn fell for the lifestyle DiMaggio dangled before her: the proverbial white picket fence and the feeling of really belonging to a family. He came from a tight-knit, Italian clan—complete with domineering Italian mama and gobs of siblings—and she loved it. A discrepancy exists between what she appeared to yearn for later, and what she initially wanted back when she ditched her first husband—and her own picket fence—for the Hollywood hamster wheel.
Marilyn entered a period generally known as her golden years. She did a handful of films that would forever be associated with her, films that exploited the perception of her as a silly, clueless, yet overtly sexual, child. The first of these was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it was during this production that she really leveled up her reputation for being difficult. Problems started from day one, when, as usual, her acting coach, Natasha Lytess had to be present on the set for Monroe even to come out of her dressing room to perform. Speaking of dressing rooms, Marilyn complained years later that her dressing room was half the size of Russell’s. She described going to the producers and saying, “The film is called ‘Gentlemen Prefer BLONDES’”. They gave in, giving her a larger dressing room, and she remained there for hours, until Jane Russell came and escorted her to the set. This happened almost every day. Director Howard Hawks was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Jane just shrugged, and kept walking her to the set. Russell later said that she did not believe Marilyn was being difficult on purpose, but that she was just had a severe case of stage fright and a fear of failure. Whatever. Monroe only started this nonsense after she had a bit of clout. If she had behaved this way when she was still struggling, she would have never gotten further than bit roles.
Gentleman Prefer Blondes was a huge success, and contained some of the most enduring Marilyn moments on film. She dazzled in a sleeveless pink velvet gown—dripping rhinestones—in the musical number Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend—one of the most well-known and parodied songs in film history. She exhibited a flair for comic timing, and she and Russell played off each other beautifully. Add the sugar overload of gorgeous Technicolor, and the recipe for a film classic was complete. To promote the film, Russell and Monroe were asked to leave their foot and handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Newsreel footage of the two busty bombshells, side by side on their stomachs, holding up their cement-covered hands, remains an iconic image of 1950s Hollywood. Marilyn hung out at Grauman’s as a child, placing her tiny feet into the prints of movie stars. It must have felt like all her dreams were finally coming true.
Marilyn in New York, 1956.
Marilyn and Jane Russel making handpri
nts on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Marilyn played another dumb blonde in How to Marry a Millionaire. Her costars, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall, were old Hollywood veterans. Monroe had actually replaced Grable in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, so, awkward much? It was well-known that Monroe was Fox’s answer to Grable’s forced exit from the screen. The studio made up a story about a feud between the two blondes, but it was bullshit. Betty Grable was one of the nicest actresses in a town not known for nice people, and she became fast friends with Monroe, a friendship that lasted until Monroe’s death ten years later. Monroe continued showing up to the set hours late, when she showed up at all. Hollywood was beginning to notice, but as long as she continued to drive smash hits, which How to Marry a Millionaire was, her behavior was tolerated.
In 1953, Marilyn received Photoplay’s Gold Medal Award for How to Marry a Millionaire, and the occasion would include the first public indication that there was trouble in paradise between her and DiMaggio. Marilyn insisted on wearing the daring, amazing, and now iconic, gold lamé halter dress from the film to the awards ceremony. Everyone who is even a rainy-day Monroe fan knows this dress; it was handcrafted from a single exquisite piece of pleated gold lamé, and she had to be sewn into it. The dress did not leave much to the imagination, and since it hugged every curve, she obviously could not wear underwear with it. She and DiMaggio must have gotten into a terrible argument over it, because he refused to accompany her to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the awards were being held, if she insisted on going out in public like that. So, she went with old flame: syndicated columnist, Sidney Skolsky. By all accounts, she created quite a stir with her swishy walk sans underwear, prompting Joan Crawford to label her as vulgar. Marilyn knew what she was doing. The following morning, entertainment columns could talk of nothing else.