Fifties (92 page)

After his return to Montgomery, two old and rather more liberal colleagues, Ray Jenkins and Wayne Greenhaw, would go by to visit him occasionally. Hall, now in a wheelchair, would cry out to his black physical therapist as they approached, “Get me my chicken gun—I’m going to kill these Communists.... Why, hell, I thought you’d come up here with at least a regiment of niggers to capture this place.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

S
HE WAS SO ALIVE
she seemed to jump off the screen to create a personal relationship with her growing audience. “The golden girl who was like champagne on the screen,” one of her husbands, Arthur Miller, wrote of her. Even when she was a struggling starlet, photographers understood instantly that she was special and inevitably asked her to pose. She was, photographer Richard Avedon once said, more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it. The famed French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson described something vivid, fragile, and evanescent about her, something “that disappears quickly [and] that reappears again.” “The first day a photographer took a picture of her, she was a genius,” said the director Billy Wilder, who understood and exploited her talent better than any other director. To the studio heads she was, at first, just another dumb blonde, part of the endless stream
of young women who had been voted the best-looking girls in their high school classes and who thereupon went to Hollywood and queued up at Schwab’s Drug Store hoping to be discovered. Early on, she was perceived as being at once too desirable, too available, and too vulnerable. Watching the reaction of studio wives to her at an early Hollywood party, Evelyn Keyes, the actress, turned to Arthur Miller, who had only just met Miss Monroe, and said, “They’ll eat her alive.”

Her power to project such a luminescent personality surprised the veteran actors and actresses with whom she worked. “I thought surely she won’t come over, she’s so small-scale,” said the great British actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, who worked with her on
The Prince and the Showgirl,
“but when I saw her on the screen, my goodness, how it came over. She was a revelation. We theatre people tend to be so outgoing. She was the reverse. The perfect film actress, I thought. I have seen a lot of her films since then and it’s always there—that perfect quality.” She was a sex goddess but also so desperately needy and childlike that she aroused a powerful instinct on the part of audiences to protect her. “When you look at Marilyn on the screen, you don’t want anything to happen to her. You really care that she should be all right,” said Natalie Wood. She had, said Laurence Olivier, who directed her near the end of her career, a rare ability “to suggest one moment that she is the naughtiest little thing, and the next that she’s perfectly innocent.”

She had a keen sense of her own abilities and of men’s response to them. Cast inevitably by others as the dumb blonde, she was shrewder and smarter than most directors suspected, and she often managed to deliver considerably more in a part than they had reckoned for. But only when she worked with a director as smart as Billy Wilder would she do her best work. He saw her as an uncommonly talented comedienne who mocked the sex-goddess mystique.

She was a genuine original. Her success, which looked so easy from a distance, was virtually impossible to repeat, try though Hollywood might with such pretenders as Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren. Those physically similar starlets never seemed to possess the intelligence that she had, or the vulnerability. Whereas she played the naif who somehow knew the score down deep, her imitators often tended to be hard and brittle. When she died, Wilder said later, a whole genre of comedy died with her. “People fool themselves,” he said, by trying to come up with imitations and Monroe lookalikes. “They said, ‘I have just bought myself a car, and it looks like a Cadillac,’ but it turns out they’ve just bought a Pontiac.”

The vulnerability she projected came from a nightmarish childhood; the naïveté, such as it was, came from shrewdly perceiving, however involuntarily, what men were like and what they really wanted from women. She operated on the edge: There was a very thin line between who she was in real life and the poignant, sexual figure she played on the screen. She took her strength as an actress from her real-life experiences; but as she became more and more successful, she always retained the fear of being abandoned, of being unloved. She was needy on the screen because she was needy in real life.

There was a strain of emotional instability that had run through her family for several generations. Her mother, Gladys Mortensen, had brought Marilyn, whose real name was Norma Jeane, into the world in 1926 in Los Angeles as an illegitimate child. Her husband seemed to have disappeared and was clearly not the father of the child. The man Marilyn believed to be her father, a co-worker of her mother’s named C. Stanley Gifford, never accepted responsibility for her. That weighed heavily on her, and as an adult she put no little effort into trying to fight that rejection by pursuing Gifford and trying to make contact with him. But even as the most successful actress in the world, she found that her phone calls to him were still not accepted.

Her mother, always mentally unstable, was institutionalized when she was not yet eight. Norma Jeane was passed around to different families and moved in and out of orphanages. All of this was traumatic for a child. She knew she had a mother and somewhere out there was a father, so why was she being handed over to strangers? She pleaded, “But I’m not an orphan! I’m not an orphan!” Of the families paid by the state to take her in, she was abused by the head of at least one. Another was a harsh fundamentalist: “Jesus is supposed to be so forgiving, but they never mentioned that,” she said later. “He was basically out to smack you in the head if you did something wrong.” She was precocious physically, and given the rejections and insecurities of her childhood, it was hardly surprising that she soon decided that the world was not interested in her goodness or intelligence. That was particularly true in Hollywood, she decided: “In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hair-do. You’re judged on how you look, not by what you are.”

As such she was always wary, for there were dangers everywhere, people who you thought you could count on who would let you down. “You’d catch glimpses,” noted her first husband, James Dougherty, an airplane-factory worker she married at age sixteen as
much to escape her life as anything else, “of someone who had been unloved for too long and unwanted for too many years.”

Her dream had always been to become a movie star. Her mother had fantasized about Clark Gable and kept a photo of him by her bedside; Norma Jeane/Marilyn had even fantasized that Gable was her father. She wended her way inevitably toward the studios and was noticed by a variety of people on the fringes of Hollywood. She made friends with a number of photographers who worked for the seedy, sex-oriented magazines of the time. She was well aware that the men who said they would help her might or might not: There was no doubt in her mind, she later told writer Jaik Rosenstein, that trading off physical favors was part of her early career requirements. “When I started modelling, it was like part of the job.... They weren’t shooting all those sexy pictures just to sell peanut butter in an ad or get a layout in some picture magazine. They wanted to sample the merchandise, and if you didn’t go along, there were 25 girls who would. It wasn’t any big dramatic tragedy.”

In 1949 she agreed to do a nude shoot for a photographer friend named Tom Kelley. He paid only fifty dollars, but she was living hand to mouth and she owed him a favor—he had lent her five dollars on an earlier occasion for cab fare. Besides, fifty dollars was precisely the amount of money she needed for the monthly payment on her secondhand car. She was not nervous about the nudity, only its potential effect on her career, and she signed the model release with the name Mona Monroe. In fact, Kelley noted that once she took her clothes off, she seemed more comfortable than before—in his words, “graceful as an otter, turning sinuously with utter naturalness. All her constraints vanished as soon as her clothes were off.” Not long after, she was finally given a screen test and it was considered a stunning success by those who looked at the results. But she was also stereotyped: starlet; dumb-blonde category; keep her speaking lines to a minimum.

Later there were those who believed that the studio had invented her. Certainly, with studio help, her hair became blonder, and plastic surgery was used to make her more photogenic. Her teeth were straightened, some work was done on her nose to slim it down, and additional work was done to refinish the contours of her chin. But the studios did that with hundreds of other young women and lightning did not strike them. Her success was completely hers.

By the late forties, she began to appear in the background in a number of films. Her first lines were spoken in a film with Groucho Marx called
Love Happy,
released in April 1950. Groucho played a
private eye and Miss Monroe was cast as a dumb blonde who sashayed into his office (a move that later became something of a trademark): “Some men are following me,” she said. Groucho did a full eye roll. “I can’t imagine why,” he answered. (“You have,” he told her off camera, “the prettiest ass in the business.”)

When she got a part in an old-fashioned crime film called
The Asphalt Jungle,
she was initially not even listed in the credits. But the early screening audiences responded so enthusiastically to her on the comment cards that the studio executives took notice and somewhat reluctantly included her name. She was the girlfriend of a corrupt lawyer, played by Louis Calhern. Her presence was electric. There she was, sexual, defenseless, with her potent body and her little-girl voice. “Some sweet kid,” Calhern says about her early in the film, telling her to go to bed. “Some sweet kid.”

With
The Asphalt Jungle
her career exploded. She made thirteen films in the next two years, few of them memorable. The studios seemed to have no real idea who she was, only that somehow there was something that worked. She was becoming, almost without anyone knowing exactly how, the first female superstar of the postwar years. It was Billy Wilder who once said of her, “She never flattens out on the screen.... She never gets lost up there.... You can’t watch any other performer when she’s playing a scene with somebody else.” Her image was perfect for Hollywood, fighting new competition from television, which now offered free home entertainment. Hollywood was responding to the challenge by gradually allowing greater latitude in showing sexual matters on the screen. Her sexuality, so overt it might previously have been doomed by the censors (in such scenes as the famous blowing up of her skirt in
The Seven Year Itch,
for example) was now not only permissible, it was desirable.

“The truth,” she once said, “is that I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men fool themselves. Men sometimes didn’t bother to find out who I was, and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving someone I wasn’t. When they found this out they would blame me for disillusioning them and fooling them.”

Even as professional success came, her personal life remained in turmoil. Relationships began well but ended badly. In 1952 she was introduced by a friend to Joe DiMaggio, the greatest baseball player of his era, who had just retired. They went out intermittently, starting in March 1952, and in January 1954 they were finally married in the San Francisco city hall. The relationship thrilled the tabloid soul
of America: the greatest athlete-hero of the nation going out with the greatest sex symbol. They were both shy; both had risen by dint of talent to social spheres in which they were often uncomfortable. DiMaggio was attractive but not particularly verbal. Friends noted their powerful mutual attraction but also his inability to talk to her. Her career was just taking off; his career (but not his fame) was to all intents and purposes finished. He saw her as a good and sweet girl and hated the idea that Hollywood perpetually cast her (to his mind) as a slut.

It was to be an uneasy marriage. For their honeymoon they went to Japan, where DiMaggio was doing a celebrity tour. Her passport read Norma Jean DiMaggio. On the way, though, she was asked by American military officers to entertain the troops still serving in Korea, a year after the war had finally ended. She did, though DiMaggio declined to accompany her. There were some 100,000 soldiers gathered enthusiastically in an outdoor instant amphitheater to hear her perform. Later, as Gay Talese wrote in a brilliant piece in
Esquire,
when she rejoined DiMaggio, she reported to him breathlessly, “Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering.” “Yes I have,” he answered.

Within months it was clear that the marriage was in trouble. She went to New York to film
The Seven Year Itch.
DiMaggio decided reluctantly to go with her. They shot scene of the air blowing her skirt up at 2
A.M.
to avoid a crowd, but the word got out and several thousand people showed up. She stood over the subway grating, the wind blowing her skirt above her panties, the crowd cheering, applauding and shouting, “
Higher, higher.
” DiMaggio, the child of Italian immigrants, a man who perhaps more than any athlete of his generation valued his
dignity,
watched from the corner, stone-faced and silent. That the movie was a marvelous celebration of her innocence did not matter; instead he saw it as exposing of her in
public
for financial exploitation. They had a bitter fight that night. The next day he flew back to California alone. The marriage was effectively over. In late 1954 they were divorced; the marriage had lasted a scant year. As DiMaggio packed his things and moved out of the house, a crowd of newspapermen gathered. Someone asked him where he was going. “Back to San Francisco. That’s my home.”

But they remained close friends; there was no doubt of his devotion. Years later as her third marriage, to playwright Arthur Miller, began to disintegrate, she talked wistfully to her maid about DiMaggio as the great love of her life, and she kept a large poster of him in her bedroom closet.