Marilyn: A Biography (11 page)

It is fair to say she is a small sensation as
a model. Cover pictures of Norma Jean appear on
Laff
and
Peek
and
See
. Dienes’ photos are covers on
U.S.
Camera, Pageant
, and
Parade
, which offers much prestige
in the cheesecake trade, yet she is locked into the commercial
avenues of the still camera and hardly ready for a movie career.
She has not yet had her first acting lesson. Emmeline Snively,
however, is like a character in a Hollywood fight film — a
small-time fight promoter with the boy of his life, ready to turn
the fighter over to a big manager, if only for the love of the
game. So Emmeline comes up with a publicity item, and sends it to
Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons (who conceivably owe her a favor).
The item is printed. Because Howard Hughes is on the front page of
every newspaper after just surviving an airplane crash, and Norma
Jean Dougherty does not sound like a model, the squib — a wholly
functional factoid — reads as follows:

Howard Hughes must be on the road to
recovery. He turned over in his iron lung and wanted to know more
about Jean Norman, this month’s cover girl on Laff magazine.

It creates a little interest at movie
studios. The most mysterious property of a factoid is that it is
believed by the people who put together the factoid printed next to
it. So in many a Hollywood mind, Howard Hughes
is
interested
in her. Another Jane Russell? Even Norma Jean may not be convinced
Howard Hughes didn’t look at the cover. On this publicity zephyr
she soars into higher altitudes of identity and decides to become a
blonde, a blonde-blonde, which is to say honey-blonde,
golden-blonde, ash-blonde, platinum-blonde, silver-blonde — the
blonde will be on call. This conversion has been a campaign of
Emmeline’s ever since our heroine first came into the Blue Book
Agency. Norma Jean’s own light brown hair, described scornfully by
Emmeline as “dirty blonde,” photographs much too brunette, whereas
a blonde’s hair can be controlled by exposure to print light or
dark. But the psychological reason has to be deeper, equivalent
perhaps in some recess of Snively’s brain to the foot-binding of
Chinese ladies — when you want the role, commit yourself to it. If
you think to stand in the world for all to see, then give up your
piece of identity. Norma Jean’s resistance to the change has been
intense. She has so little identity to give away that the act of
becoming a blonde may blur the last of her few points of reference.
Besides, it must be frightening for her to conceive of the further
intensification of her sex appeal. As she will say in her Meryman
interview more than fifteen years later, “I’m always running into
people’s unconscious.” She is timid. We can do well to give her
credit, then, for the bravery, desperate perhaps, to think to walk
into the center of attention with all she knew of the violence
loose in the unconscious of everyone around her.

Norma Jean went to Frank and Joseph, hair
stylists, Hollywood: “. . . cut short, given a straight permanent”
— farewell to dungarees and bubble gum — “and then bleached a
golden blonde . . . styled in a sophisticated upsweep. She thought
it looked artificial. . . . ‘It wasn’t the
real me
.’ Then
she saw that it worked.”

She has her magazine covers, her divorce, her
publicity item, her new hair, and now, by way of Emmeline, a
Hollywood agent, Harry Lipton of National Concert Artists
Corporation. When she is famous he will say “so unsure of herself —
that terrible background . . . it gave her a quality that set her
apart.” She gets in to see Ben Lyon, the former actor, who played
with Jean Harlow in
Hell’s Angels
and now is casting
director at Fox. She is tongue-tied, helpless, bereft of film
credits, not particularly well-spoken, “I’ve tried to pick up all
the camera experience I can around the photographers who’ve used
me,” and a vision. Lyon, believing perhaps in Hughes’ interest,
orders a quick screen test, and in color — he wants her presence to
stand forth rather than her lack of training as an actress. He gets
Walter Lang (who is directing Betty Grable in
Mother Wore
Tights
) to oversee the test after shooting for the day is done,
and gambles on using a hundred feet of silent color film. Lang
talks to her all the way, as if to steady her animal nerves. Under
the lights, with three professional men concentrated entirely upon
her, Lyon, Lang and the cameraman, she must feel as if she has been
bound into a surgical pit. The cameraman, Leon Shamroy, is quoted
by Zolotow on his reaction to the test when looking at it in a
Moviola next day. “I got a cold chill. This girl had something I
hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic
beauty like Gloria Swanson, when a movie star had to look
beautiful, and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean
Harlow.”

“Flesh impact is rare,” Billy Wilder would
later say, “flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can
reach out and touch it.”

They are speaking in all the symphonic
flatulence of hindsight. She will get a contract from this test —
it will start at $75 a week, and if all her options are picked up,
she will make $1,500 a week by her seventh year — she will actually
be given the nod by Zanuck, who thinks she is a “gorgeous girl” and
forgives Lyon for shooting the test without his authorization. Then
she will be christened with her new name — we can join her as
Marilyn at last! — but she will still languish for years to come:
it is now late 1946 and more than three years until
The Asphalt
Jungle
, six before
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and nine
years to wait for
The Seven-Year Itch
.

When Lyon called her in and gave the good
news that she had been taken, she wept. All that prairie madness in
the iron insane blood of her forebears must have relaxed. Perhaps
she had an inkling of future events spinning into the void. She is
reported by Guiles to have shaken her head in disbelief.

Then they talked about changing her name.
Jean Norman in itself might have been suitable, but the shift away
from herself was too small. It was to the advantage of the studio
for an actor to make a substantial change in his name since it is
more difficult to be unamenable if your roots are cut. Therefore
she gave up sentimental ties to Jean Harlow and Norma Talmadge, and
now could substitute Marlene Dietrich and President Monroe. Before
she left the office, she borrowed fifteen bucks from Lyon to pay
two weeks’ back rent at the Studio Club. Much to his surprise, she
would pay it back.

So Marilyn came to Twentieth Century-Fox (by
way of
Laff
,
Peek
, and Howard Hughes’ iron lung), and
she would be there off and on until she was finally fired fifteen
years later; that was several days after her thirty-sixth birthday,
and she died in two months. If she would make money for that studio
as few other stars ever had, she began as no more than an outside
candidate for the third blonde (as impressive a position as trying
out for third quarterback), there back behind Betty Grable and June
Haver, and took studio classes in voice and body movement and
appeared under studio orders where she was supposed to appear – at
conventions, openings of restaurants – one of a platoon of starlets
and stock girls at a big premiere. She posed endlessly for stills,
which went to such far corners and small towns of the newspaper
world that nobody at the studio ever could measure their impact or
soon react to it. “If the publicity department sent her out to the
beach or the mountains to pose she went and posed. She rode in
parades in a costume. She stood on floats, one of a bevy of
float-riding starlets.” She was still for all practical purposes a
model, but she earned less. Now, at the commencement of her true
career, she comes near to disappearing. She is lost in the talent
pool of a major studio, and if her agent nags at film executives to
give her parts, no one seems enthusiastic about her talent. She is,
if anything, more renowned for her lack of it, seen as a dumb and
not so unvulgar broad. In her first year at Fox, in the period of
two six-month options she is in two films. From
Scudda Hoo!
Scudda Hay!
, a vehicle for June Haver, her own small part is
just about entirely cut out; her second film,
Dangerous
Years
, has a bit that gives her fourteenth billing among
fifteen actors. Yet she is remembered at the Studio Club as being
up at 6:30 in the morning running around the block to keep the
condition of her figure, and her roommate will recall the small
dumbbells she used – souvenir of Catalina and Jim Dougherty. In her
first summer at the studio, she studies at Actor’s Lab with Morris
Carnovsky and Phoebe Brand, an offshoot of the old Group Theatre in
New York and so in the family line of Stanislavsky and progressive
politics. (Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, and Paula Strasberg will all be
cited by the House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities during
1952.) They are part of a tradition going back to New York in the
Depression when Communism was by actor’s logic equal to bravery,
integrity, and identity. No post-Leninist philosophers ever came
out of the acting profession, and the postulates were left to
simmer down to simple-shit – Marilyn would answer a question about
Communists years later by saying, “They’re for the people, aren’t
they?” – but there was a style to progressive actors and directors,
a vocabulary, and if they possessed a foreign accent, all the
patina of European culture was there for a Los Angeles blonde just
turned twenty-one and never graduated from high school. Besides,
much talk about the mechanics of acting possessed its own formal
jargon. “Concentration,” “sense memory,” and “penetrating the
subtext” had to impress a simple American mind with a prairie love
of technology. She was indeed impressed, if she could hardly have
understood much, for years later in New York she would seek out the
Strasbergs when she already had her career, and she would finally
know as much about concentration as any movie star alive – she
would create parts in
Bus Stop
,
Some Like It Hot
, and
The Misfits
that were triumphs of the actor’s capture of
whole identity, but in the bewilderment of this first year at
Twentieth Century, in what a daze she must have walked. At Actor’s
Lab she froze to the back bench and never spoke in class. (For that
matter, she would never talk at Actor’s Studio in New York a decade
later.) Phoebe Brand, with whom she studied Elementary Acting,
testifies, “I never knew what to make of her. I didn’t know what
she thought of the work….Frankly, I would never have predicted
she’d be a success….She was extremely retiring. What I failed to
see in her acting was . . . her lovely comedic style . . . I was
blind to it.”

Just as blind will be the studio executives.
Guiles has her trying one desperate afternoon to get in to see
Darryl Zanuck and is told by the secretary that he is “in Sun
Valley.” She goes back. “Still in Sun Valley.” She is living at
times on thirty cents a day – hot dogs and coffee – and gets second
lead in a play in a local Hollywood playhouse, but no talent scouts
get in touch with her agent. Her only reward is that Huntington
Hartford is introduced to her after the performance. Actually, she
has another kind of notoriety in these years. Poor, and reduced to
taking modeling jobs on the side, anonymous as an actress, she is
also known as Joe Schenck’s girl. The old producer has his
chauffeur stop the limousine as she is passing on the studio street
one day, for she has just given him a cover-picture smile. He could
not feel more attractive if he were a camera lens. (“I’ll focus on
her,” says Earl Thiesen, “and then looking in the finder, I can
actually see the sex blossoming out, like it was a flower. If I’m
in a hurry and want to shoot too quickly, she’ll say ‘Earl, you
shot it too quick. It won’t be right. Let’s do it over.’ You see,
it takes time for her to create this sex thing.”) We may as well
assume she had seen Schenk’s car approaching from all the way down
the street, and gives her best performance in a lean season, for
Schenck offers his card, his phone number, and tells her to call
him for dinner. Their friendship begins. To Zolotow she says, “The
word around Hollywood was I was Joe Schenck’s girl friend, but
that’s a lie.” It is possible she was telling the truth, for
Schenck was almost seventy and by Guiles’ description “beginning to
resemble an aging Chinese warlord.” Schenck’s women were legend (he
had treated them like prize leopards, mares, and poodles) but by
now his sex life may have been over. Of course, sex dies hard in a
sultan, and Hollywood was built on the contemptuous principle that
if an actor was nothing but a mouth, what could an actress be?
Hollywood had long sustained the obscene myth of the big producer
installed in his private office, welcoming the little starlet in
the middle of business hours, then locking the door, unzipping his
fly – we can skip the moment when she goes to her knees. It is one
of the few historical myths which lives in fact – rare was the
Hollywood tycoon who did not like his eminence in such an act. So
the gossip in Hollywood has to be graphic about legendary sensual
mean old Joe Schenck, co-founder of Twentieth Century-Fox, and the
unknown blonde he has lifted from a studio street, and indeed she
visits him often, is regularly seen at small dinner parties in his
hilltop mansion. But unless her sexuality has divided into twin
compartments, Christian Science to one side and the other lobe of
her mind capable of playing the totally ambitious girl who will
never vomit over what she has to put in her mouth since she is in
fact excited by the sexual pursuit of her ambition – all of which
assumes some striking sexual metamorphoses to have accompanied her
new blonde hair and new name – the likelihood is that Schenck and
Monroe had, or at least also had, some kind of genuine friendship;
if there was sex, it was not necessarily the first of the qualities
he found in her. We are not going to know. There is, on the other
hand no reason why they would not find each other interesting. He
would have a pipeline into what was going on in the depths of the
studio – he was inactive these years compared to Zanuck – and he
probably also had an instinct that she could yet be a star. We can
be also certain, however, that he did nothing to advance her career
during all of this period. Having recently served four months of a
prison sentence for perjury after bribing a labor racketeer, then
turning state’s evidence, to be pardoned by President Truman – what
a gift to the Democratic Party must have been arranged! – he was
more or less out of power at Twentieth, still respected, but kept
to the side by Darryl Zanuck. He may not have been in a real
position to help her, and may not have wished to advertise this
inability in a showdown. Since it was one of his favorite remarks
that he had to buy his friends, it was just as likely that he was
testing her. She in turn may have been wise enough never to push
him. Or, equally, she may have been keeping to a quiet faith in the
coincidences of her destiny. Schneck, after all, had been married
to Norma Talmadge.