Marilyn: Norma Jeane (8 page)

“In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo,” she wrote bitterly. “You’re judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”

When she felt she did have a choice, her standards were romantic, even idealistic. Johnny Hyde, an agent thirty years her senior who helped her greatly with her early career, knew very well that Marilyn loved him only as a father and a friend, but he also knew that his heart condition left him only a short time to live. Because he loved Marilyn and wanted her to inherit his million-dollar estate, he pleaded with her to marry him. She refused. Though Hyde was one of the few people in her life whom she trusted completely, she told him that marrying for reasons other than love “wouldn’t be fair.”

In his biography of Marilyn, Norman Mailer admits to being mystified by her refusal to marry for money. Given the facts of her need, plus his view of her character—he calls her promiscuous and “a queen of a castrator”—Mailer treats her refusal as inexplicable. In fact, he missed the romanticism that governed her behavior and was the legacy of her Depression childhood. From families that owned little but their own good names, she had inherited the fierce pride of the poor. Because she was sometimes forced to give in, to sell herself partially, she was all the more fearful of being bought totally. “What have you got to lose?” asked a friend who was urging the marriage to Hyde. “Myself,” Marilyn said. “I’m only going to marry for one reason—love.”

As for her frequent use of sex, Mailer assumes that this meant hostility toward men. In fact, she seemed so hungry for the love and approval she had been denied in childhood, particularly from a father, that she submerged her own physical pleasure, and offered sex in return for male support and affection. By her own testimony to friends and from that of lovers, she never—or rarely—had orgasms, as if the child inside her needed to absorb years of affection before a sexual adult could be born. Henry Rosenfeld, a New York dress manufacturer who met her in her early twenties and remained a close friend until her death, explained that “Marilyn thought sex got you closer, made you a closer friend. She told me she hardly ever had an orgasm, but she was very unselfish. She tried above all to please the opposite sex. Ah, but it wasn’t just sex. She could be so happy and gay. How I remember that laughter!” In an interview two years before she died, Marilyn told writer Jaik Rosenstein that sex also had been part of her first work assignments. “When I started modeling, it was like part of the job,” she explained. “All the girls did… and if you didn’t go along, there were twenty-five girls who would.” In Hollywood, she added, “You know that when a producer calls an actress into his office to discuss a script, that isn’t all he has in mind… She can go hungry and she might have to sleep in her car, but she doesn’t mind that a bit—if she can only get the part. I know because I’ve done both, lots of times. And I’ve slept with producers. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t…” She trusted Rosenstein not to use those off-the-record quotes, and he didn’t, not until long after her death when the sexual double standard was more forgiving. Thanks to Anthony Summers, who accumulated these quotes in his book
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,
we also know that she told W. J. Weatherby, a British journalist, “You can’t sleep your way into being a star, though. It takes much, much more. But it helps. A lot of actresses get their first chance that way. Most of the men are such horrors, they deserve all they can get out of them!”

Marilyn supplied sex so that she would be allowed to work, but not so that she wouldn’t have to work.

The Depression idea that a job was a coveted opportunity, a gift, not a right, was a good preparation for Hollywood. “I knew how third-rate I was,” Marilyn wrote with characteristic self-deprecation. “I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn! To change, to improve! I didn’t want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act. With the arc lights on me and the camera pointed at me, I suddenly knew myself. How clumsy, empty, uncultured I was! A sullen orphan with a goose egg for a head.

“But I would change… I spent my salary on dramatic lessons, on dancing lessons, and singing lessons. I bought books to read. I sneaked scripts off the set and sat up alone in my room reading them out loud in front of the mirror. And an odd thing happened to me. I fell in love with myself—not how I was but how I was going to be.”

In fact, whether or not she was confident enough to know it, she already had an extraordinary luminescence and vulnerability that set her apart. Marion Marshall, who would later marry actor Robert Wagner, remembered meeting her as Norma Jeane when they both were applying for a job as bathing-suit models. “Marilyn was the most spectacular girl I ever met, not particularly beautiful, but she radiated a special dynamism,” she explained. “I remember, when I first saw her, she arrived late as usual, after all the other girls. I’m sitting with all these very sophisticated models, dressed in silks, with the gloves and the hat and all that, and Marilyn came in a little scoop-necked gingham sundress, her hair unbleached and un-straightened. When she walked in, it was like the room stopped, and everyone in the room knew she was going to get the job, and she did.”

But the Marilyn-who-was-going-to-be needed to lower her squeaky speaking voice, to train her soft but pleasant singing voice, and to learn how to drop barriers of childhood isolation so that internal emotion could come through. She also had to memorize scripts, camera instructions, and makeup procedures, and acquire the technical ability to re-create the same scene over and over again. Acting coach Natasha Lytess was enlisted to help with voice-lowering and general training. Their relationship would last seven years, during which Natasha took Marilyn into her own home, rescued her from one suicide attempt—when she was grief-stricken following Johnny Hyde’s death—and came both to feel used by Marilyn and to love her. (“Don’t love me,” Marilyn pleaded with Natasha, “just teach me.”) Marilyn herself sought out Michael Chekhov, the nephew of the playwright, who had studied under Stanislavsky and then given up his own acting career to become a teacher. With Chekhov she undertook such challenges as
The Cherry Orchard
and Cordelia in
King Lear.
Inspired by the cultured and well-read Lytess and Chekov, Marilyn nourished her habit of hungry but random reading and tried to fathom everything from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, her childhood hero, to such abstract treatises as
The Thinking Body,
a study of the relationship between body and mind. She never stopped feeling inferior because she had not even finished high school, and she never stopped trying to make up for it.

But in movies, her growing number of bit parts were a far cry from Shakespeare. Given the background she was escaping, some had an added irony.
Dangerous Years,
released in 1947, gave her a small role as a brassy waitress in a drama of juvenile delinquency. The murderer was a boy raised in an orphanage as Norma Jeane had been. The following year,
Ladies of the Chorus
cast her with Adele Jergens as mother-and-daughter chorines, and required Marilyn, the child who obsessively longed for a father, to hold a baby doll in her arms while singing “Every Baby Needs a Da Da Daddy.” After a particularly miserable, insecure period in which her starlet’s contract was allowed to lapse for a second time—first by Twentieth Century-Fox and then by Columbia Pictures—she won a small part in
Love Happy,
a Marx Brothers movie in which she unveiled her very sexy walk.

Thanks to
Love Happy
and the publicity tour she did for it, Marilyn began to get some attention from the press and public. After playing another chorine in a Dan Dailey feature,
A Ticket to Tomahawk,
agent Johnny Hyde helped her get a reading for the role of a crooked lawyer’s mistress in her first grade-A movie—John Huston’s
The Asphalt Jungle
—but it was Marilyn’s agonizingly prepared audition that won the part. As one of the best movies of 1950,
The Asphalt Jungle
got favorable reviews that included Marilyn’s small role. More important, Johnny Hyde successfully suggested to Joe Mankiewicz, writer-director of the classic
All About Eve,
that he cast her in that memorable mistress role because of it. She was now back under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox and getting fan mail the studio executives couldn’t ignore.

It was on this Mankiewicz set that Marilyn, who was largely innocent of newspapers and politics, got one of her first tastes of the McCarthyite atmosphere of the 1950s. As part of her unguided self-education, she had picked up
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens,
a book she described in her own autobiography as “bitter but strong… [He] knew all about poor people and about injustice. He knew about the lies people used to get ahead, and how smug rich people sometimes were. It was almost as if he’d lived the hard way I’d lived. I loved his book.” She was surprised when Joe Mankiewicz took her aside and, as she remembered, “gave me a quiet lecture.

“‘I wouldn’t go around raving about Lincoln Steffens,’ he said. ‘It’s certain to get you into trouble. People will begin to talk of you as a radical.’”

Not understanding what a radical was, she assumed this was “a very personal attitude on Mr. Mankiewicz’s part and that, genius though he was, of a sort, he was badly frightened by the Front Office or something. I couldn’t imagine anybody picking on me because I admired Lincoln Steffens.”

When the publicity department asked her to list the ten greatest men in the world, no doubt as a sex-story gimmick, Marilyn put Steffens’s name at the top. The publicity man refused. “We’ll have to omit that one,” he explained patronizingly. “We don’t want anybody investigating our Marilyn.”

She said no more about Steffens to anyone, not even to Johnny Hyde, who was then her lover and mentor, but she continued to read the second volume secretly and kept both volumes hidden under her bed.

Two years later, Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand, who had established the Actor’s Lab, where Marilyn also studied, were investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Once, when Marilyn was asked about Communists, she said, “They’re for the people, aren’t they?” With or without knowledge, her sympathy was with the underdog.

Though Marilyn was rapidly becoming a star, she was also beginning to learn that even a star, especially an indentured contract player with little choice of scripts, could still be the underdog. She made a dozen grade-B films in rapid succession. Only three of them—
Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to Knock,
and
Niagara
—were more than forgettable, or offered her anything other than secondary roles as a dumb blonde. One especially,
Don’t Bother to Knock,
showed her as a serious actress. Anne Bancroft remembers a moment in which she was to react to Marilyn as a deranged baby-sitter who had threatened suicide. “There was just this scene of one woman seeing another woman who was helpless and in pain, and she
was
helpless and in pain,” Bancroft explained. “It was so real, I responded; I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came into my eyes. Believe me, such moments happened rarely, if ever again, in the early things I was doing out there.” Marilyn may have been playing her own experience as Norma Jeane, but that reality wasn’t what interested Hollywood. In her next film,
Monkey Business,
she was back in a dumb-blonde role that gave her body all the rave reviews.

By 1952, Marilyn had graduated to stardom and the quintessential dumb blonde—Lorelei Lee in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
—but she loved being able to sing and dance in this movie musical like those that had been Norma Jeane’s escape. The following year when that was released, so was her next film,
How to Marry a Millionaire,
a sex comedy that allowed Marilyn to wear glasses, to change her image, and to show her talent as a comedienne. Reviewers praised her gift for comedy, but one noted that sitting in the front row of a Marilyn Monroe movie was like being “smothered in baked Alaska.”

After playing a wilderness version of a sexy blonde opposite Robert Mitchum in
River of No Return,
with reviews that compared her mostly to the mountainous scenery, Marilyn married Joe DiMaggio and took seven months off. After this inactivity, Marilyn welcomed a role in
There’s No Business Like Show Business.
Surely this showcase of Irving Berlin songs would offer a little more class. Her own misgivings about being constantly used as a not-too-bright sex symbol were now being reinforced by her marriage to Joe DiMaggio. He was unenthusiastic about her career, and puritanical about her public use of sex. In fact, two of Marilyn’s major song-and-dance numbers were ridiculed by reviewers.
The New York Times
called them “wriggling and squirming” that was “embarrassing to behold.” DiMaggio was so embarrassed that according to Marilyn he agreed to pose for publicity pictures with Irving Berlin and the movie’s star, Ethel Merman—but not with his own wife.

“I did what they said,” Lena Pepitone remembered Marilyn saying bitterly. “And all it got me was a lot of abuse… Big breasts, big ass, big deal. Can’t I be anything else? … I was wearing this open skirt—I think they call it flamenco—with this black bra and panties underneath. The dance people kept making me flash the skirt wide open and jump around like I had a fever… It was ridiculous…”

Marilyn’s next role, in
The Seven Year Itch,
was another sex comedy, but, under the direction of Billy Wilder, she felt it would be a classier one. Nonetheless, her typecasting as the dumb-blonde-upstairs—and especially the famous sex-icon pose of Marilyn with her white dress blowing over her head as she stands with legs apart over a subway grating—became one of the breaking points in her brief marriage to DiMaggio. In the fall of 1954, their divorce was announced and Marilyn fled Hollywood for New York. By escaping Hollywood and her Twentieth Century-Fox contract that was restricting her to scripts she didn’t like, she also hoped to do more serious work by forming her own production company and studying acting. DiMaggio had wanted her to give up work—and she clearly had chosen her work.