FOUR
In the beginning, Darryl Zanuck had questioned whether Marilyn would be able to handle the demands of her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Soon after the production began, however, he knew how wrong he had been to doubt her. And he knew how valuable a commodity she was about to become. Eager to make every penny he could, Zanuck decided to repeat the formula of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Marilyn played an adorable gold-digger in that picture, so that’s exactly what she must do again. He assigned her to How to Marry a Millionaire, with a script by Nunnally Johnson. Zanuck overlooked one essential ingredient that made Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a success: Howard Hawks was one of the finest directors in the business. Jean Negulesco, who would be directing How to Marry a Millionaire, was mediocre at best. A gregarious Romanian with a bit of the con man about him, he was cultured and an art lover, but no artist. He had charmed his way into the movies, and Zanuck was one of his main supporters. Thus, though it seems not to have occurred to Zanuck, the question remained: Without a director of Hawks’s calibre, would Marilyn be able to pull off a second miracle? Hawks’s mastery of the formal elements of filmmaking contributed just as much to an actor’s performance as anything the actor himself did. This was something Negulesco’s direction lacked. At best, he could help with a line reading, but Negulesco’s sense of framing, composition, camera movement and editing were as weak as Hawks’s were strong.
Zanuck scheduled How to Marry a Millionaire to begin on March 11, four days after Marilyn completed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. That raised a second big question, which Zanuck seems also not to have asked: Was Marilyn in any condition to go into another picture immediately? Her eighteen weeks with Hawks had left her physically and psychologically drained. She had been consuming sleeping pills like candy in order to get even a few hours of rest after practicing her lines with Natasha late into the night. In the morning, she would take another pill to get through the day. By the time she was finished working with Hawks, she was thinner than she’d ever been in her life—and her nerves were raw. As if having a mere four days off between assignments was not bad enough, Spyros Skouras, alarmed by the damaging publicity that followed the Photoplay Awards, demanded that Marilyn use the time to fly to Boston to appear at a children’s charity benefit.
Several times in the last days of filming Charlie Feldman had dropped by to watch, and he’d grown alarmed at how fragile Marilyn seemed whenever the camera was not on her. He’d observed her turmoil over Natasha, and realized that the toll taken by her work seemed to go beyond mere physical exhaustion. Having lent her money to pay for Gladys’s care, he knew something of Marilyn’s terror that she might one day end up like her mother. So Marilyn was much on his mind as he witnessed the emotional crisis of another actress; it struck him as a warning of what might lie in store for Marilyn.
When Vivien Leigh came to Los Angeles to shoot the interiors for William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk, Feldman arranged a dinner party in her honor at the Beachcomber restaurant. Though the dinner took place as scheduled, before her arrival Vivien, who was a manic depressive, had suffered a nervous breakdown on location in Ceylon. During the seventy-two-hour flight to California, Vivien, raving and tearing at her clothes, had attempted to leap out of the plane. Her husband, Laurence Olivier, traced her condition to the miscarriage she had suffered in 1944, after which she alternated between periods of madness and normality.
On the Paramount lot, she had lucid moments, but there were numerous disturbing episodes. She drank, she hallucinated, she had screaming fits. Having previously played the tortured character Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, now she recited Tennessee Williams’s lines as though they were her own thoughts. (She later said that doing Blanche on stage and screen had “tipped” her into madness.) When it became evident that Vivien was in no condition to finish Elephant Walk, the Los Angeles psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson was brought in. “I will have that woman working next week,” Greenson promised, before Olivier, heeding the advice of a different psychiatrist, took his wife back to England for electroshock therapy. She was replaced in Elephant Walk by Elizabeth Taylor.
Henceforth, Feldman made concern for Marilyn’s physical and mental health a priority. He didn’t want her to end up like Vivien.
Nonetheless, Marilyn began How to Marry a Millionaire on schedule. Zanuck had by no means been alone in pushing the project for Marilyn. How to Marry a Millionaire was to be one of the first CinemaScope films, and the new wide-screen process was very much Spyros Skouras’s baby. Skouras, intent on winning back that portion of the film audience that had defected to television, staked his reputation on CinemaScope’s ability to “save the movies!” He, as much as his adversary Zanuck, wanted Marilyn in the film.
On Feldman’s advice, Jean Negulesco did everything possible to make Marilyn feel happy and relaxed at their first meeting. He had been told to turn on the full voltage of his charm to calm the highly-strung young woman. Sensing that she longed to be taken seriously and loved to learn, he won her over by talking about art. He showed her his own paintings and drawings, teaching her about Chagall, Gauguin, Matisse, and Miró. He drew her portrait in brown ink. When she protested, as she sat for him, that she could not understand modern art, Negulesco replied that art is like sex; it isn’t something one understands but something one feels.
When they began to shoot, Negulesco continued his campaign to put Marilyn at ease. He could be of little real help to her as a director, but he went out of his way to eliminate the usual sources of tension. On the set, Negulesco cheerfully accepted Natasha’s hawk-eyed presence behind his director’s chair. When Marilyn demanded another take, he didn’t have to turn around to know that Natasha had shaken her head. He seemed less annoyed than amused. He smiled, shrugged, and did as Marilyn asked. Sometimes she demanded fifteen takes or more. Other actors, irritated, knew they had to be good in every take because there was no telling which one Negulesco would select.
Marilyn and the director, whom she affectionately called “Johnny,” developed a rapport. But they had not been shooting long when Marilyn collapsed and had to be hospitalized with near bronchial pneumonia. She had gone directly from one film to another, and had been pushing herself relentlessly. Feldman, already nervous about her fragility, began to be really frightened.
The studio was mainly concerned about the cost of the lost days, and someone came up with the bright idea that maybe they could compensate for the expense with some extra publicity. The studio called Marilyn at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to tell her that photographers were on their way over. It was a mark of how sick Marilyn was that she exploded with rage; usually, she would have done anything she could to accommodate them. Feldman warned the studio’s executive manager, Lew Schreiber, that Twentieth was pushing Marilyn too hard. Now that she was everyone’s investment, Feldman argued, they would all be wise to protect her. Marilyn came back to work in a few days, but though she put on a good show in public, it was months before she fully regained her strength.
It was not her physical condition, however, or even her constant fear of not being good enough that bothered Marilyn during this time. Her co-stars in How to Marry a Millionaire were Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, who had been the leading box-office star during World War II as well as the U.S. military’s favorite pin-up girl. For more than a decade, the peachy-skinned Grable remained on the top-ten list of box-office personalities. In her day, she’d earned some five million dollars yearly for Fox. Now, at thirty-six, she was considered by studio executives to be “used up,” and it was no secret that How to Marry a Millionaire would probably be her last film under contract. She accepted her lot with dignity. “Honey, I’ve had it,” Grable told Marilyn when Negulesco introduced them on the set. “Go get yours. It’s your turn now.” It was not long before the idea that Grable had passed the torch to her became a focus for Marilyn’s anxieties.
At 1 a.m. on Thursday, July 25, Marilyn was woken by the phone as she slept beneath a satin comforter. She had a party
line in the three-room garden apartment she had recently rented on North Doheny Drive, but the call was for her—a drawling voice saying “wonderful” over and over again. Feldman never called in the middle of the night, but he had just been to a screening of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and could not wait to tell her.
Niagara had broken box-office records, but it was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that introduced the funny, sexy, innocent, appealing Marilyn Monroe that audiences around the world would fall in love with. Feldman was certain that after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the public was going to demand to see “the girl” again and again. He talked to Marilyn for a long time about what the Hawks film meant for her future. He assumed she’d be excited that they’d finally hit upon a crowd-pleasing, money-making formula, but Marilyn wasn’t responding in quite the way Feldman had expected. Though she was pleased by his compliments and enthusiasm, at the same time she seemed confused, uncertain, almost wary.
Life had taught Marilyn to be suspicious. Now and then, some of her mother’s and grandmother’s clinical paranoia may also have kicked in. Marilyn was always on the alert for the moment when things would go wrong. It wasn’t a question of worrying that she might be hurt or abandoned; she expected that to happen, it was only a matter of when. The experience of working with Betty Grable had set off alarm bells in Marilyn’s head. She knew she had replaced Grable in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And she knew it was widely anticipated that from this point on she’d take over Grable’s position at Twentieth. Filmgoers had evidently wearied of seeing Grable in the same sort of role. Even if they hadn’t, Grable was too old to keep doing those roles.
So even before Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had been released, Marilyn was worried about losing all she’d won. Before she had actually tasted success, she was thinking about how to protect herself. Instinctively, she assumed a defensive posture. Accustomed to being used and abandoned, she was already seeking ways to avoid suffering that fate again. Marilyn was smart. She didn’t want audiences to tire of her. She had been rushed into a second film where she had to repeat the character she’d just played in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And here was Charlie telling her that the idea was to have her do “the girl” many times more.
With an eye on the future when she would no longer be able to play “the girl,” Marilyn was already preoccupied with convincing the studio to let her try different kinds of roles. At a moment when Twentieth seemed to be very happy with her indeed, she was already viewing the studio in adversarial terms. Whatever Zanuck might have in mind, she didn’t want to re-enact the Betty Grable story: endlessly repeating the same tired formula until the studio decided that she was “used up.” Betty Grable was thirty-six; what age would Marilyn Monroe be when Twentieth no longer wanted her?
Feldman, for his part, didn’t seem to understand. He never really comprehended Marilyn’s terror of being exploited. But there was one person who, however much he resented her work, was every bit as wary and suspicious as she. At a moment when Marilyn was particularly concerned with protecting herself against a host of potential users, Joe DiMaggio’s role in her life became increasingly important.
A blue Cadillac with the license plate “JOE D” was often parked outside Marilyn’s small white apartment house on Doheny, below the Sunset Strip. A high iron gate opened onto a courtyard. A fountain splashed blue-tinted water, but the sound was frequently drowned out by a television set in Apartment Four. Behind a screen door, then a black enameled door, a tiny hall led to the living room which contained a fireplace with a brick hearth, with mirrored walls on both sides. One mirror slid back to disclose the television set that DiMaggio, stretched out on a bright orange velvet sofa beneath several bookshelves, watched incessantly when he visited. Oversized crystal and ceramic ashtrays, filled with Joe’s cigarette butts, littered the cocktail table and other surfaces.
Off the hall was a small, dark bedroom. A double bed was flanked by a folding snack tray with a brass lamp, and a wooden night-table with a black telephone. The portrait of Lincoln hung over the bed.
When the Cadillac was gone, the apartment quiet, baskets of velvety, long-stemmed roses arrived several times a day. The delivery boy left them in front of Miss Monroe’s screen door. The attached card always bore the same message: “I love you, I love you.”
To most observers, Joe, who had his own quarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel, remained a shadowy presence in Marilyn’s life. Sometimes he was the subtext of Marilyn’s conversation, as when she asked Jane Russell what it was like to be married to a professional athlete. (Russell’s husband played NFL football.) Sometimes Marilyn talked openly about Joe, as when she told David Conover, the photographer who had discovered her in 1946, that DiMaggio had proposed on numerous occasions.
Did she love him? Conover asked.
“I don’t know,” Marilyn replied. “He’s very sweet and kind. And very much a gentleman. But sometimes he’s so boring I could scream. All he knows and talks about is baseball. That’s why I’m not sure.” She complained to Sidney Skolsky in a similar vein.
Though DiMaggio’s refusal to escort Marilyn to industry events like the Photoplay Awards led people to speculate about the relationship, afterwards, more often than not, his blue Cadillac would be waiting for her outside. “You know Joe, he doesn’t like crowds,” Marilyn would apologize before they drove off together.
In contrast to those who merely glimpsed or heard about Joe, the few people who had dealings with Marilyn on a close daily basis, such as her new lawyer Loyd Wright and her agent Charlie Feldman, saw DiMaggio as a formidable presence, a strong if taciturn personality. Joe desperately wanted to marry Marilyn, but he was too stoical to allow other people to see his feelings. It was a point of honor to keep those feelings bottled up inside, leading him to suffer severe stomach-aches and ulcers.
He very much wanted Marilyn to give up acting, but as long as she planned to remain in the movies he did much to help and advise her. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to prevent all those phonies from taking advantage of her. He may also have wanted to show Marilyn that she could trust and depend on him. Whatever his motives, DiMaggio had an increasing influence on some of her most important decisions.
That May, just as she finished How to Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn’s weekly salary escalated to $1,250. It was an insignificant sum in relation to the box-office success of Niagara and, soon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There was no question that the terms of Marilyn’s contract had to be completely renegotiated. In 1950, Johnny Hyde had made a deal on behalf of a starlet in whom he alone believed. By the summer of 1953, it was obvious that Marilyn was about to be a very major star. From the moment Feldman had seen the rushes of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and heard the buzz about Marilyn at the studio, he’d known that the time to start talking about a new deal would be after the film went into release. If audiences and critics reacted as he expected they would, Marilyn would be in an excellent position to maximize her salary demands.
Meanwhile, Feldman had considered other ways to squeeze money out of the studio. A strategy he had used with other clients seemed appropriate here: Feldman urged Marilyn to buy the screen rights to a novel and to commission a screenwriter to tailor a script for her. Famous Artists would then make it a condition of her new contract that Zanuck purchase the rights from Marilyn. He calculated that would earn her a profit in excess of $200,000. Marilyn, advised by her lawyer to go ahead, agreed. Feldman’s office sent ten different books to Doheny, and Joe and Marilyn studied them carefully.
The sports pages were DiMaggio’s typical reading matter, but in the end it was he who chose the novel Horns of the Devil. Marilyn, with $5,000 advanced by Feldman, bought the book strictly on Joe’s say-so. Then she conferred with the screenwriter Alfred Hayes, whom she had met during Clash by Night. She paid him another few thousand dollars of Feldman’s money to complete a script. The decision to buy Horns of the Devil would have a significant impact on the timing of the contract negotiations. For tax reasons, Marilyn had to hold on
to the screen rights for at least six months after the date of purchase. Therefore, if the rights were to be used as a negotiating tool, she couldn’t sign a new studio contract until six months had passed.
Even at this stage, Feldman was not being paid for his work on Marilyn’s behalf. Johnny Hyde had negotiated her current contract, and the agency commission deducted from her paycheck still went to William Morris. As long as that contract remained in force, no matter who handled Marilyn’s day-to-day interests, William Morris collected the commission. That situation would change when a new studio contract was signed. Then, Feldman would be entitled not only to the agent’s commission but also to a cut of the proceeds from the sale of Horns of The Devil, if (and that “if” was beginning to be a source of embarrassment) Marilyn had finally signed an agency contract with Famous Artists. She had postponed so many times that Feldman had stopped raising the issue. Until she did sign, Feldman would not be entitled to a penny, no matter how many hours he and his staff devoted to her.
On July 15, 1953, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was released. It was a spectacular critical and box-office success. This was the moment Marilyn had been working toward since she was a sad, lonely little girl in an orphanage. This was everything Grace and, later, Johnny Hyde had wanted for her. Niagara had excited audiences; but the impact of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was entirely different. Suddenly, people felt they really knew “Marilyn Monroe.” And it was immediately obvious that they couldn’t get enough of her.
Zanuck expected to hear from Feldman with his demands for a new contract, but the agent, usually so aggressive, was mysteriously silent. What Zanuck didn’t know was that the purchase of Horns of the Devil would not become final before August 5, 1953. Lest a deal be struck before the six months required by the tax law had safely passed, Feldman did not plan to renegotiate Marilyn’s contract until February. The delay had several advantages. By that time, the box-office figures on both Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would be in and How to Marry a Millionaire would have opened. Furthermore, six months would give Marilyn and her representatives plenty of time to work out exactly what they wanted from Twentieth.
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