Marilyn: A Biography (18 page)

But such an analogy has too many limitations.
It is rather as if all her anger and ambition can brazen out in
publicity, and all her charm attach itself to curious powers when
she plays a script, but she has developed next to no ability for
talking to other actors, or playing the theatrical game of
discovering which actor will dominate the other.

Indeed, she hands over her game cards before
the game can begin. She knows so much about the strategy of a
career, yet next to nothing of the tactics of small talk, she is a
witch not a warrior and wins more when she loses (even as the
buttocks of a witch once possessed will possess the bugger). But
then she is too distracted to obey even the formal logic of small
talk. “How old are you, Stevie?” she asks Lauren Bacall’s son, who
is playing on the set.

“Four.”

“Why, you’re so big for your age. I would
have thought you were two or three.”

We can go back to that moment when Della may
have been close to strangling her. It is as if the child has been
left half in life and half in the special powers of death. We count
backward as we go toward oblivion.

Zolotow gives a description of her at this
time which captures the near to monarchical phenomenology of her
life. Since Twentieth has made
How to Marry a Millionaire
with financial trepidation — can a light comedy sit comfortably on
their new and enormous CinemaScope screen? — the finished picture
which gives every promise of being a success, excites plans for a
huge world premiere on Wilshire Boulevard. DiMaggio won’t go. She
wants to be a serious actress, he points out to her. Yet she rushes
to hustle over to a circus premiere. Skolsky can’t go. So she goes
by herself. Zolotow describes a day that begins with Marilyn
retching as she tries to drink orange juice and gelatin powder.
Then she drives over to her dressing room at the studio where they
will work to make her “all platinum and white tonight.”

Gladys gave Marilyn a straight permanent.
Then she bleached and tinted her hair and set it. . . . Gladys
painted her fingernails and toenails with platinum polish. Her
slippers, her evening dress, her long white gloves arrived from
wardrobe, together with two wardrobe women. A messenger boy
delivered a box with diamond earrings. Her furs had come that
morning. . . . Except for the white fox fur stole and muff, and her
panties, everything she wore belonged to the Studio. . . .

Roy Craft dashed in to kiss her on the cheek,
and wish her luck and say that the town of Monroe, New York, had
changed its name for one day to Marilyn Monroe, New York. Telegrams
arrived. Phone calls from friends, demi-friends, pseudo-friends.
Joe finally called from New York. He said he missed her. He said he
loved her. He hoped she understood. He was praying for her. His
heart was with her. He was sorry they weren’t together. She said
bitterly, “Give my regards to Georgie Solotaire.”

“
Whitey” Snyder began changing her face,
powdering her shoulders, pencilling lines around her eyes, putting
the high gloss on her lips. The wardrobe women helped her into the
strapless evening gown.

Unchastened by Joan Crawford’s
pronouncements, Marilyn had chosen a dress made of white lace lined
with flesh-colored crepe de Chine and embroidered with thousands of
sequins. It had a high waist, and it curved under her breasts
revealingly. A long white velvet train trailed from a gold belt.
The long gloves were drawn up the length of her arms. The stole was
placed around her shoulders. She put her right hand into the muff
and with her left she carried the train as she walked outside to a
waiting studio limousine.

The time was seven-fifteen. It had taken six
hours and 20 minutes.

Outside the Fox Wilshire, for five blocks in
either direction, traffic is being rerouted. Thousands of people
are sitting in bleachers or pressing up to lines of police in front
of wooden sawhorses. She sits on the edge of her seat in the car so
as not to wrinkle the dress — she would be happier standing erect
in a chariot. When they see her, the screams of the crowd rise up
into the night with the searchlights, then reverberate over the
boulevard. “Marilyn . . . Marilyn.” Flashbulbs in the lobby,
microphones, television cameras.

She had been invited to several supper
parties after the premiere, but she was tired. The studio limousine
returned her to the studio — now almost deserted. A wardrobe woman
waited in dressing room M. It was almost midnight and time to end
the masquerade. Off went the gloves, the earrings, the shoes, the
gown. Off went the false face, erased by cold cream and paper
tissues. . . . She got into the slacks and the sport shirt and the
loafers. She placed the muff and the stole in their boxes, carried
the boxes to her car, and dumped them in the back seat. She felt
fatigued but not sleepy. A restlessness pervaded her. She drove out
by the sea, cruising along the highway for a long time. When she
got home, she drank a glass of orange juice mixed with gelatin and
took three Seconals.

“That night,” concludes Zolotow, “she was the
most famous woman in Hollywood.” And could not sleep. She could not
sleep when she won. In later years she would also be unable to
sleep when she lost.

All the while she is fighting the studio and
they are fighting her back. She wants more money and the right to
choose her script and director. They refuse. By the end of 1953,
Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a
Millionaire
will gross $25,000,000 for Twentieth, more than any
other movie star will earn for a studio in those twelve months. Yet
she is not yet being paid $1,000 a week (while working with Jane
Russell who gets $100,000 for the same film), and even has to fight
for a decent dressing room. Executives tell Marilyn she is spoiled.
“Remember, you’re not a star,” they tell her.

She has one of her better moments. “Well,
gentlemen, whatever I am, the name of this picture is
Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes
, and whatever I am, I
am
the blonde.”

It would seem in retrospect as if they could
renegotiate her contract or sweeten the choice of films. Her
resentment already exhibits itself in the form of showdowns and
will yet cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions,
but they cannot be conciliatory, for she is attacking the
foundation of the studio system, and that base is built on decades
of entrenched waste. Studios in the early Fifties are still
factories with whole companies of actors on contract, and
over-staffed departments forever seeking to enlarge themselves.
Like government spending, the system seems to function in a time of
expansion, but television has already done its first damage by
reducing the volume of people who go to movies. The solution is
going to be worked out with fewer theatres, better movies, and a
higher priced ticket; but at this point, the studios are still
geared to turning out fifty films a year for chains of exhibitors –
even if the exhibitor chains are about to be separated from the
production companies, thereby intensifying the crisis. When that
finally arrives, half the studio executives will be obliged to
retire. But that is later. She is premature. She is tipping the
system just when anxiety is at its greatest.

At such times, executives look to advertise
those aspects of their system that are most spectacular, which is
to say, profitable. She is the most spectacular. At a cost in
salary of $50,000 a year, she has brought back $25,000,000, a
return of 500 to 1. That is a statistic to show a board of
directors. It is about the only one they can show. The cost of
every film is multiplied half again by overhead, and hundreds of
seven-year option contract players have gone through the studio
mill and never helped to gross a dollar. It is an economic
procedure that penalizes actors for success while enforcing their
obedience to mediocre films. The contract player is part of a slave
corps, aesthetic filler to be stuffed into the sausage of the
product, a lost morsel in Zanuck’s exploration of the American
appetite for shit. Obviously wasteful, it is still a system that
has managed to survive for decades because of the psychological
rewards it offers executives. Its demise has to be accelerated if
they open her contract. Every other contract player of value will
soon demand a raise. So they hold the line against her, then double
their resistance when it comes to her choice of films. Somewhere in
the root of his unconscious, every studio executive must have a
glimmer of the concentration camp in which he is incarcerating
actors (whose souls will slowly expire from lack of nourishment in
meaningless scripts). So the executive also knows that once actors
begin to choose scripts, the studio system is dead, the studio
executives are next to dead. For they, after all, have devoted
their lives to making money out of meaningless productions. What
will be their moral crime before eternity — asks the unconscious —
if one can also make money with
good
films.

They resort therefore to the social reflex of
a slave system: punishment. They send her up the river to northwest
Canada. She is in a “Z cowboy film” — it is Monroe’s concise
description of
River of No Return
. She will be the only
woman and, surrounded by strong male actors (who will presumably
break her balls), is also drenched in scenes with a boy actor (who
will steal them) and with a director (Otto Preminger) who is famous
for grinding actors’ bones (balls and all) in the maw of his
legendary rage. Frightened perhaps, she calls on DiMaggio to
accompany her — they can have a vacation in Banff — but predictably
they fight before she leaves, and she is alone except for Natasha
Lytess, until DiMaggio must come up in response to Marilyn’s cry
for help — she has torn a ligament in an accident on a raft and
doesn’t trust the local doctor. DiMaggio arrives with a good
doctor. It is the surest route to a woman’s heart, and stands out
by contrast to everything else in this deteriorating situation.
Lytess, at war with Whitey Snyder (who is sympathetic to DiMaggio’s
desire for Marilyn to get out of movies) declares to Marilyn that
she must make a choice between Whitey and herself. In turn,
Preminger discovers that his boy actor has been demoralized by a
conversation with Lytess (who has told him that child actors lose
their talent “unless they take lessons and learn to use their
instrument”). She is barred from the set by Preminger, who tells
Natasha in his German accent “to
just
disappear.” Marilyn
says nothing, but obviously gets in touch with Zanuck, who
intercedes for fear Marilyn will quit the production. Lytess is
reinstated. The film is somehow finished. That is Preminger’s forte
— to finish. Of course, it is the most demoralizing movie in which
Marilyn has ever played a lead, and must be the worst of
Preminger’s films. In its aftermath — shuddering no doubt at the
fadeout on her red dance hall shoes lying in the dust — she feels
close to DiMaggio, and then is brought even closer by the sudden
death of his brother who drowns in a fishing accident. She promises
at this time to marry him, and sets a date, which she begins soon
to delay again. For she has met a man who has opened her mind to
the possibility of starting her own production company.

DiMaggio is like the hero of a farce.
Whenever he is closest to achieving his aim, the forces of the plot
converge and wipe him out. While there is something near to
ludicrous in his hopes to take her away from acting, the desire is
less comic if we assume the theme of suicide is always present. He
has to see moviemaking as a danger, and feel close to success after
River of No Return
. For the first time since becoming a
star, she has been trapped in a script, has gone through a species
of creative death, and been obliged to recognize that the studio is
powerful enough to do it again to her, and will. She has to
consider the possibility of retiring while still champion. Yet a
few weeks later she meets Milton Greene, out from
Look
magazine to do a cover story on her. He is the most talked about
fashion photographer in New York, his good taste is legend, his
humor is sweet as an ocean breeze on a day of summer inversion.
“You’re just a boy,” she says in surprise when she meets him.

He smiles back. “You’re just a girl.” She
adores him like an old friend after an hour. In the next hour they
are talking about making films together. If DiMaggio is finally
close to separating Marilyn from her professional ogres, a
soothsayer has flown in, a man of fashion to give Marilyn the sweet
conviction that she, too, is chic. DiMaggio will now be able to
settle for a marriage, but not the renunciation of a career.
Indeed, she will marry him as the last high card she can play in a
studio publicity game for high stakes; she chooses to marry only
after Twentieth has put her on suspension for refusing to do
Pink Tights
, a film she considers as bad as
River of No
Return
. In fact, she is doing her best to drive a spike into
every studio executive’s raging heart — to the press she confesses
that she “blushed to the toes” at the thought of playing a
“rear-wiggling schoolteacher doing a cheap dance.” Yet the studio
is obliged to lift the suspension. For a wedding present! The bride
of Joe DiMaggio can hardly be kept rear-wiggling. Delighted with
her success at studio card games, she disappears with DiMag for a
couple of weeks in a snow-covered lodge above Palm Springs. Let us
hope he has a honeymoon, for soon enough he will begin to live once
more in farce and be obliged to put up with a robber bridegroom:
there is reason to believe she is still in love with the ghost of
an old passion for Arthur Miller.