Authors: Barbara Leaming
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 muteness. 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 determination.
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.
By the time the banquet was over, it appeared that Marilyn might have succeeded in sabotaging her own career. Joan Crawford, of all people, led the attack. “It was like a burlesque show,” the forty-eight-year-old actress told a reporter. “But those of us in the industry just shuddered. Sex plays a tremendously important part in every person’s life. But they don’t like to see it flaunted in their faces. She should be told that the
public like provocative feminine personalities; but it also likes to know that underneath it all, the actresses are ladies.” Far more alarmingly, Crawford warned that she anticipated protests against Marilyn’s behavior by various women’s clubs and that American women might boycott any film in which Marilyn appeared if she failed to clean up her act.
The next day, Sidney Skolsky helped Marilyn formulate a reply. “The thing that hit me the hardest about Miss Crawford’s story was that it came from her,” Marilyn declared. “I’ve always admired her for being such a wonderful mother—for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I know what it means to homeless little ones?” With that response, Marilyn did her best to repair some of the damage she herself had done. At the same time, she came perilously close to disclosing the real trigger of her rage that night; her entire performance had been directed at her mother.
Marilyn’s press release was only partially effective. Just as Crawford had warned, letters of protest against Monroe’s flagrant sexuality poured in from women’s groups. Zanuck, nervous about a possible boycott, immediately sent word to Hawks that the costume Marilyn was to have worn for the number “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” was to be replaced by something more discreet. The nude leotard stitched with strategic “diamonds” was quickly replaced by a strapless, shocking-pink gown, carefully lined to ensure that it didn’t cling too tightly. Marilyn agreed to whatever was suggested. She seemed to have regained control of herself, remembered who she really was—and most of all, what she wanted to be. All that she wanted now was to find the focus and the strength necessary to finish the picture.
But her troubles weren’t over. As Marilyn tried to pull herself together in the week following the
Photoplay
debacle, Natasha decided to take advantage of her vulnerability. Declaring that Marilyn’s vulgarity had damaged her own reputation, Natasha demanded a raise in compensation. If Marilyn refused to go to Zanuck, or to pay Natasha out of her own pocket if necessary, Natasha threatened to quit. She would stop coming to the set. She would stop spending nights in Marilyn’s hotel suite, where they rehearsed on a green velvet sofa with the heavy blue curtains tightly shut. Natasha told Marilyn that she had active tuberculosis and that her doctor had advised her to stop working. She would be happy to have the opportunity to rest.
Marilyn panicked. She was convinced that she could not finish the film without Natasha, and she believed that if she did not finish it, her life would be ruined and not worth living. Still, there was no way she could go to Zanuck on Natasha’s behalf. He would throw her out of his office. And with the expense of her mother’s care, Marilyn had no money of her own. There was only one place to turn. On February 19, ten days after the
Photoplay
dinner, Marilyn drove to Charlie Feldman’s house in Coldwater Canyon. In November, Marilyn had literally left his agent on her doorstep waiting for her to sign a contract. When Feldman himself had later called from New York, begging her at least to let him discuss her needs with Spyros Skouras and offering to fly back to Los Angeles at a moment’s notice, he had offered to lend her money if she needed it.