Dorothy’s second marriage, to a stockbroker, had ended in divorce two years previously, and after that there had been talk of a reconciliation with DiMaggio. Joe, apparently, had never gotten over Dorothy and welcomed a second chance. The couple spent a snowbound weekend together in Nevada, and Dorothy announced in the press that she was considering a second marriage to Joe. But just when she decided that, yes, she very much wanted to be Mrs. Joe D. again, Marilyn appeared on the scene and the choice was no longer hers. Humiliation, no doubt, accounted for the angry charges she hurled at her former husband. “I must think of my son’s emotional security,” Dorothy declared when she went to court to limit DiMaggio’s visitation rights because he had exposed the boy to an improper environment. “Although good heavens, I’m not a jealous woman, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when he took him to the Bel Air Hotel pool with Marilyn Monroe.”
Dorothy’s attack had been aimed at Joe, but the real victim was Marilyn, who was devastated by her remarks. Marilyn was already being pulled in two directions about Joe, but this incident seemed to make up her mind. There could be no question of marriage right now. She would keep Joe in her life, certainly, but her focus, whether he liked it or not, must be on work.
By October, as people at the studio began to have a first look at Niagara, everyone seemed sure that this was going to be Marilyn’s breakthrough. Yet she still had not done anything about a new agent. Hathaway persistently reminded her that she needed someone to look out for her interests. Finally, with the Hawks film about to start in November, she decided to act, and instructed her lawyer to write the long-postponed letter firing William Morris. She planned to sign with Charlie Feldman. In the last months, the regular visits from Feldman’s minions had made it obvious that Famous Artists was eager to have her as a client. She remained far from sure that she trusted Feldman, but at least she’d made a decision. Feldman himself was in New York at the moment, so she told Jack Gordean, one of his agents, that the letter had gone out and asked him to come by the studio for a drink. Gordean called to tell Feldman what had happened. Feldman, delighted, was determined to sign Marilyn before Hawks started filming.
When Gordean arrived, Marilyn said she preferred to wait a few days. She quoted Feldman; she said he had told her that for appearance’s sake she ought to wait five or six days after leaving one agency before signing with another. When her remark reached Feldman, he had little choice but to wait, though he had no memory of saying any such thing. Still, Marilyn had made her move and they would have her signed before every agent in town started chasing her.
Two days later, Marilyn arrived at Fox to find an astonishing sight. A plump-cheeked, kinky-haired Lilliputian, wearing a dark business suit and a large, crimson bow tie, handed her a massive bouquet of flowers. Abe Lastfogel, president of William Morris, focused his bright blue eyes on her. He behaved as if it were every day that he came to the studio personally to gush over Marilyn. After Johnny Hyde’s death, Lastfogel had ducked Marilyn’s calls, refusing to do anything for her. Now, he pretended to be shocked when Marilyn mentioned her lawyer’s letter. Insisting that he hadn’t received it, he vowed that his being here had nothing to do with anything but her marvellous self.
Marilyn firmly stated that she really did plan to change agencies. And that, she assumed, was that.
That afternoon, Joe Schenck summoned her to his office. The agent had been in to see him, of course. After all the lies Lastfogel had just told her, Uncle Joe insisted he was “an honorable man” and criticized Marilyn’s treatment of him. Reminding Marilyn that he always looked out for her interests, he declared that she was crazy to fire Lastfogel. She should stay with William Morris.
Marilyn left Schenck’s office badly shaken—not so much because she believed him about Lastfogel, but because he had been adamant that she should not go to Famous Artists. Suddenly, she was completely unsure again. Marilyn was well aware that Schenck and Feldman were close friends; maybe she’d be a fool to trust Feldman if even his friend warned her not to. But if she couldn’t yet bring herself to sign with Feldman, Marilyn still did have other, very immediate needs. And nervous as she was, she had at least figured out a way to satisfy them.
Marilyn placed another call to Gordean. Would he come to the studio again? Over cocktails, Marilyn described Lastfogel’s visit, including the bouquet and the talk that followed. She told of being summoned by Joe Schenck and repeated all he said. Then, having conveyed the message that Lastfogel did not plan to give up easily, Marilyn reassured Gordean that she had every intention of signing—just not tonight. She sent him to a sneak preview of Niagara in Pasadena.
If Marilyn had intended to remind Gordean that it would be worth fighting to represent her, here was proof. The audience went wild when Marilyn, in a skin-tight red silk dress, sang “Kiss” in a low sultry voice, and when she lay naked, arms outstretched, beneath a white sheet. The theater erupted in cheers and wolf whistles in response to a prolonged shot of her walking in high heels, the camera focused lovingly on her rear.
Marilyn had told Gordean that they should talk when he got back to the studio. As promised, she was waiting for him. Aware that the audience’s reaction to Niagara would be fresh in his mind, she proceeded to tell Gordean about her financial troubles. She only earned $750 a week, and half of that went to acting lessons with Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov, as well as dancing and singing lessons in preparation for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Barely enough was left to cover the rent on the suite she’d moved into at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She indicated that she had no idea how she could possibly survive.
When Gordean reported the whole saga to his boss, Feldman wasted no time in offering to lend Marilyn $3,500. Gordean delivered a check to Marilyn’s hotel. She promised to come to his office later that day to sign the contracts, but she never showed up.
Feldman realized that he would have to try a new tack if he hoped to get Marilyn to make the move to Famous Artists. The loan hadn’t done the trick, and he knew that time was of the essence. He would try a more personal gesture, something to show Marilyn how well he planned to treat her as his client. Charles Chaplin was due in Los Angeles for his first visit since being sent into political exile some years before. Feldman, who was giving a black-tie dinner in Chaplin’s honor, decided to invite Marilyn. This would be the first time that she had been invited to a Feldman A-list dinner as a person in her own right. A great many people in town would have given almost anything for an invitation to the Chaplin evening. Marilyn, however, declined.
She was clearing the decks for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Being directed by Hawks in the role of Lorelei Lee was the sort of opportunity Johnny Hyde had longed to get for her. Now that she had acquired that opportunity entirely on her own, Marilyn did not want anything to go wrong. The challenges were enormous. She was always uneasy about her acting abilities, but Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would also require her to sing and dance in elaborate production numbers. Hawks, recognizing that she needed to concentrate, asked Zanuck to relieve her of all publicity assignments. There had once been a time when Marilyn had to beg the publicity department to send her out, but now it was they who constantly made demands on her. Zanuck, with much fanfare, suspended all of her publicity work for the duration of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He notified the press that Marilyn would be unavailable for interviews, personal appearances, or photographic sessions. The announcement, of course, was itself a publicity gesture; it signaled how important Twentieth believed this picture was going to be for Marilyn’s career.
Marilyn, intent on proving herself, reported to the studio for wardrobe, makeup, and color tests on November 1. Hardly had she done so, however, when her focus was shattered by something that neither Zanuck, Hawks, nor anyone else could have prevented. There was a new crisis over her mother. Gladys had disappeared from Grace Goddard’s house in September, then resurfaced in Florida at the house of her daughter Berniece. She alternated between violent rages and interludes of rigidity and mutene
ss. One focus of Gladys’s anger was the nude calendar scandal, the implication being that Marilyn’s sinful behavior had again driven her mother insane. Grace, who had always made the important decisions about Gladys’s care, advised that she should be put on a train and sent back to California. Marilyn, contacted on October 31, paid for the ticket. By the time Gladys arrived in Van Nuys, however, she was in no condition to be taken in. Grace was at home with her husband when she heard Gladys raving on the front porch. Once before, when Gladys was in this condition, she had attempted to stab Grace. Afraid of what Gladys might do this time, Grace called an ambulance. Marilyn was in pre-production when she learned that once again her mother had been committed to the state hospital.
The news revived all of Marilyn’s worst fears about herself. Gladys was a paranoid schizophrenic. Would Marilyn go insane like her mother, her grandmother, and other members of her family? As is often the case in such families, there had always been much talk of an inherited taint. Certainly, much as she may have tried to conceal it from others, Marilyn had abundant evidence that something was very wrong with her. She experienced violent mood swings, veering between depression and intense bursts of energy. She had bouts of sleeplessness. She was often angry at herself. She had attempted to take her own life.
Even if Marilyn hadn’t inherited a mood disorder, Gladys’s actions would have been enough to drive her to the edge of madness. Marilyn had grown up being told that she was the embodiment of sin and evil. From childhood, she had had to live with the message that the very circumstances of her birth had driven her mother mad. Gladys had imposed on the child an insupportable burden of guilt. As if all that were not enough, once again Marilyn, as an adult, was being blamed for her mother’s illness. Worse yet, it was happening at a moment when Marilyn had been hoping finally to prove that Gladys was wrong about her. From the first, Marilyn’s powerful drive to be a movie star had been a means to establish her worth. Now it was as if Gladys, in choosing this of all moments to erupt, were actually trying to make it impossible for Marilyn to succeed. It was as if the mother who had once tried to snuff out her daughter’s life was trying to do it all over again.
Determined not to let that happen, Marilyn pushed the nightmare of her mother as far back in her thoughts as possible. She turned her full attention to work. For hours she would stand without a word of a complaint as her costumes were fitted, then torn apart and refitted. Marilyn was to have a completely different look for this film. Though she would be playing a nightclub dancer and singer, Hawks wanted her to appear polished and sleek in a way that she had not in previous films. His personal taste in women—as evidenced by his former wife, Slim—ran to a much more sophisticated look than Marilyn currently possessed. Not that Hawks expected Marilyn to emulate his lanky racehorse of an ex-wife, but he did want to move her as far away as possible from the smalltime pin-up girl she’d been. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the keynote of Marilyn’s costumes would be simplicity. Her dresses would be flashy enough, but only in terms of color and sparkle; otherwise the emphasis was on strong, simple, clean lines. Hawks also ordered a total makeover. Marilyn sat patiently as various makeups were tried out, her hair set and colored, until the director pronounced every element exactly right.
When she wasn’t working on her new look, Marilyn practiced her dance numbers with Jane Russell and the choreographer Jack Cole. Marilyn, honest about her weakness as a dancer, drove herself to exhaustion. She insisted on going over every number countless times. Russell would finally reach a point where she was unable to continue, but Marilyn, unwilling to go home, would beg Cole to stay on for another few hours in order to work with her alone. She simply would not permit herself to be tired. She seemed to believe that, through an act of will, she could transcend her limitations.
Friday, November 14, was the last day of pre-production. When Marilyn finally went home from dance rehearsals late that night, her doorbell rang. It was Jack Gordean, making a last-ditch attempt to get the agency contracts signed. Precisely as Feldman had feared, the situation had recently become more complicated, another suitor having arrived on the scene in the form of Lew Wasserman, head of MCA. Marilyn took the papers from Gordean, promising to have them back after the weekend, but on Monday morning Marilyn called to say that preparations for the film had kept her from the contracts. She also dropped some hints about having been in touch with MCA.
That day, at the age of twenty-six, Marilyn began the film that would profoundly alter her life. That day, it immediately became apparent that, with Hawks’s guidance, Marilyn had discovered her gift. She had a flair for comedy. She had a natural sense of timing. On Bringing Up Baby, Hawks had had enormous difficulty in getting Katharine Hepburn to adjust to the requirements of deadpan humor. Repeatedly, Hepburn would fire off a line, then wait for the laugh. Hawks had to show Hepburn that the whole point of this sort of comedy was to go right ahead as though she had no idea she was being funny. Only when Hepburn understood the principle intellectually was she able to deliver her finest comic performance. Marilyn, by contrast, didn’t need Hawks to set her straight. Ignoring people’s reactions, she raced from joke to joke. She radiated complete innocence of how wonderfully funny she was.
As usual, all this came at great cost to Marilyn. She would arrive at the studio hours early, only to hide in her dressing room long after the time had passed for Hawks to begin. Annoyed, he assumed that it was laziness, or perhaps a late night out, that made Marilyn unable to show up on time. The truth could hardly have been more different. Good as she was, Marilyn was simply terrified of going in front of the camera. Having come so close to success, she could not bear the thought of failure. It was Jane Russell who finally figured out what was going on. Every morning, Russell would stop at Marilyn’s dressing room and personally lead her to the set. Once there, Marilyn worked at a snail’s pace, which helped to make the shoot long and arduous. The more exhausted Marilyn became, the more pressure she put on herself to make her performance seem effortless. Despite her anxieties, the rushes confirmed that Hawks had been right to take her in this new direction. By February, even Marilyn had begun to accept that her hard work was paying off.
Again, the shadow of her mother fell across her hopes. Grace notified Marilyn that she could no longer be responsible for Gladys, and asked Marilyn to take over her mother’s care at once. Grace pointed out that Marilyn was an adult now, after all. Marilyn’s $750 weekly salary, though barely enough to pay her own expenses, was far more than Grace ever hoped to earn. Marilyn suddenly faced huge bills. Gladys would have to be moved to a private institution, since the unending press scrutiny of Marilyn’s life made it unwise for her mother to remain in a public facility. On February 9, 1953, Marilyn arranged for Gladys to be transferred to Rockhaven Sanitarium. Marilyn had to face the fact that from that day on, to all intents and purposes she was the protector of a woman who, she believed, had tried to murder her as an infant. It was as though the mad mother refused to let go.
That morning, even as Gladys was being moved, Marilyn betrayed her own tortured feelings about her mother. She appeared at the Fox wardrobe department to select a dress for that evening’s Photoplay Awards. The fan magazines were then very powerful and the annual Photoplay banquet was a major event, attended by important members of the film industry. Tonight, Marilyn was to be honored as Best Newcomer, which was why Twentieth had made an exception to its ban on her public appearances while Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was being shot. From the first it was evident that Marilyn knew precisely what she wanted: a skintight gold lamé dress she’d worn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The costume designer, Billy Travilla, pointed out that this was impossible. The material was too thin to be worn in public; the gown had been designed with the camera and a careful lighting set-up in mind. If she tried to wear it to the dinner, the delicate dress might not survive. Besides, it would look like she had arrived naked, wearing only a coat of gold paint. Instead of deterring Marilyn, Travilla’s warning seemed only to strengthen her det
ermination.
Nor, later, would Marilyn listen to Natasha’s protests that the costume was vulgar, all the more so as she intended to wear it without underwear. Her mother had accused her of being a slut; tonight, Marilyn seemed intent on going out in front of the world and behaving like one. After months of trying to save herself through hard work, suddenly she appeared hell-bent on self-destruction.
DiMaggio had refused to accompany her to the dinner, so Sidney Skolsky was drafted as Marilyn’s escort. In addition to his syndicated newspaper column, he wrote articles for Photoplay under the heading “Sidney Skolsky Sounds Off, From a Stool at Schwab’s.” Two hours after the banquet began in the Crystal Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Skolsky was still waiting in the lobby for Marilyn. She was upstairs in her suite, where dressmakers sewed the tissue-thin fabric onto her body. It was nearly time for her name to be called when she finally emerged from the elevator. The low-cut, pleated gown fit so tightly around the hips and knees that Marilyn had to walk with short, dainty steps. Sidney gripped Marilyn’s elbow, steering her inside. As she came through the door, Jerry Lewis, the master of ceremonies, spotted her from the stage. He jumped on a table and shrieked in his ear-splitting voice, “Whoooo!” That triggered the crowd. Laughter, whistles, cheers and jeers filled the Crystal Room. Marilyn wriggled up the aisle to the podium, her “derrière,” as the columnist James Bacon would write, resembling “two puppies fighting under a silk sheet.”
Flashbulbs popped on all sides, photographers shouting for her to turn this way and that. The few people who looked away from Marilyn’s body to her eyes noticed that there was something very strange about them. She appeared to be drugged. The laughter she provoked was that of a group of men smoking cigars as they watched a dirty movie. No one was laughing in appreciation of Marilyn Monroe’s comic skills; they were laughing at her.
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