The Genius and the Goddess (8 page)

Marilyn seemed more at ease on screen in the comedy
Monkey
Business
, her third movie of 1952, but did not get on with the
director, Howard Hawks. Physically impressive (like Huston) Hawks
was "six-feet-three, broad shouldered, slim-hipped, soft-spoken,
confident in manner, conservative in dress, and utterly distinguished
overall." Born in Indiana, the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer,
Hawks was educated at Exeter and graduated from Cornell in 1917
with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a lieutenant in
the Army Air Corps in World War I, and after the war built airplanes
and a racing car that won the Indianapolis 500. In 1922 he came
to Hollywood, where screenwriter
Niven Busch found him impressively
distant and formidably frigid: "He gave me his reptilian glare.
The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners. He
was like that with everyone – women, men, whatever. He was
remote; he came from outer space. He wore beautiful clothes. He
spoke slowly in a deep voice. He looked at you with these frozen
eyes."

This haughty patrician directed the absurd and labored
Monkey
Business
, in which a chimpanzee in a research lab accidentally concocts
an elixir of youth that makes
Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers behave
like children. Marilyn has the decorative but unrewarding role of
Charles Coburn's secretary. In one scene the seventy-five-year-old
Coburn "had to chase and squirt Marilyn with a siphon of soda, a
moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later
explained, was only his indecision about
where
on Marilyn's . . . um . . .
ample
proportions to
squirt
the soda." Despite her small part, Marilyn
also caused trouble on this picture and forced Hawks to shoot around
her when she failed to show up. The problem, as everyone later discovered,
was her infected appendix, which she had removed, in late
April 1952, as soon as her work was completed.

No doctor performing an appendectomy would excise her reproductive
organs. But Marilyn, who hoped to have children, taped a
pleading note to her abdomen before the operation:

Dr. Rabwin – most important to Read Before operation. Cut
as little as possible. I know it seems vain but that doesn't really
enter into it. The fact that I'm a woman is important and means
much to me.

Save please (I can't ask enough) what you can – I'm in your
hands. You have children and must know what it means – please
Dr. Rabwin – I know somehow you will!

Thank you – thank you – thank you. For God's sake Dear
Doctor No ovaries removed – please again do whatever you can
to prevent large scars.

Thanking you with all my heart.

Marilyn Monroe.

The formidable Hawks, mistaking her pain and fear for stupidity,
was even more critical than Fritz Lang. Hawks considered Marilyn
"'so goddamn dumb' that she was wary and afraid of him. Still, Hawks
admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that 'the camera liked
her.'" Cary Grant, like Celeste Holm and many other colleagues, was
surprised by her meteoric rise to fame the following year: "I had no
idea she would become a big star. If she had something different from
any other actress, it wasn't apparent at the time. She seemed very shy
and quiet. There was something sad about her."
¹³
To the other actors
Marilyn could seem ordinary, unresponsive and apparently "dumb,"
but on camera she seemed to glow.

In
Don't Bother to Knock
(1952) Marilyn had a spectacularly unsuitable
role that revealed her inability to play a dramatic part. She gave
an unconvincingly hysterical performance as a drab, unglamorous,
psychopathic babysitter who almost murders the child in her care. In
Niagara
(1953) she played a beer-hall waitress, a good-time girl married
to a psychopath,
Joseph Cotton.
Oscar Wilde had called Niagara Falls
"the second great disappointment of the American bride," but Marilyn
managed to complement the orgasmic
fortissimo
of the cataract. The
film was advertised with a poster of a gigantic Marilyn, reclining across
the entire width of the Falls, which equated her powerful sexuality
with its immense volume, everlasting duration and uncontrollable force.
When she sees some young couples dancing outside her motel room,
she puts a record on the phonograph and sings, "Kiss me . . . take me
in your arms and make my life perfection. . . .
Perfection
." The gloomy
Cotton, who seems impotent when confronted with Marilyn's seductive
sensuality and mocked by the romantic theme of her song, rushes
out of their room and smashes the record.

Marilyn is naked in bed as well as in the shower, and wears a tight,
red-hot dress (one man observes) "cut so low you can see her kneecaps."
In one scene, as she lies in a hospital bed, a fringe of down shows
up on her cheek. Adorned with heavy make-up, she has characteristically
pouting lips, half-open mouth and girlish giggle. The camera
then follows her and captures, from behind and in a long-shot, her
patented sensuous
walk. Always fueled by an erotic flame, she stirs the
men around her as she moves. But her acting in this melodrama is
mannered, uncertain and unconvincing.

When a Hollywood columnist noted that "her derrière looked like
two puppies fighting under a silk sheet," Marilyn, stretching the truth
in an amusing remark, defended her natural gait: "I learned to walk
when I was ten months old, and I've been walking this way ever
since." In a rather stilted statement, almost certainly written by a studio
publicist and designed to separate her sleazy character on screen from
the respectable Miss Monroe, she tried to dissociate herself from her
role: "The girl I played was an amoral type whose plot to kill her
husband was attempted with no apparent cost to her conscience. She
had been picked out of a beer parlour, she entirely lacked the social
graces and she was overdressed, over made-up, and completely wanton.
The uninhibited deportment in the motel room and the walk seemed
normal facets of such a character's portrayal. I honestly believe such
a girl would behave in that manner."
¹⁴

In Marilyn's last two films of 1953 she played her typical and most
popular incarnation: the gold-digger with a heart of gold. In
Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes
– based on the book and musical comedy by Anita Loos
and directed by Howard Hawks – a dumb blonde and a showgirl,
both well endowed, sail to Paris to find rich husbands. In one scene
of
Gentlemen
Marilyn wears a top hat, long black gloves, transparent
black stockings, high heels and a gaudy sequined costume cut like a
bathing suit. In another, wearing a strapless, floor-length, pink satin
gown, with long-sleeved gloves, she steals the show by singing
"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." The best lines in the film –
"Those girls couldn't drown. Something about them tells me they
couldn't sink" – were cut by the censor.

In
Gentlemen
Marilyn has pouting lips, whispery speech and a
kittenish way of saying, "don't wowwy" and "get mawwied." She
arrives at the ship bound for Cherbourg dressed in a leopard skin
cape and muff, and asks, "Is this the way to Europe France?" When
introduced to people on the ship, she says, "A pleasure to meet you
I'm ever so sure." She's comically obsessed by jewels and money, and
there's a long shot of her wiggling her behind while dancing in order
to attract rich men. A little boy on the ship, who has a deep voice
and uses uncommonly long words, provides an amusing contrast to
her character. In a French court, the black-haired
Jane Russell, wearing
a blond wig, pretends to be Marilyn and imitates her peculiar mannerisms.
Her rich but nerdy fiancé, Tommy Noonan, ironically praises
her "wonderful willingness to learn." At the end of the movie, in a
spirited exchange with Noonan's disapproving father, she seems serious
but is not afraid to make fun of herself and allow him to mock her:

FATHER
: They told me you were stupid. You don't seem stupid to
me.

MARILYN
: I can be smart when it's important. But most men don't
like it. Except Gus. He's always been interested in my brains.

FATHER
: He's not such a fool as all that.

While making
Gentlemen
Marilyn formed a rare friendship with
her co-star. "Jane Russell, a down-home gal with no pretences or
complexes despite her status, welcomed Marilyn at once and gained
her confidence personally and professionally. She stuck with her
endlessly through rehearsals and privately confided to her about life
as the wife of a professional athlete, as Russell's husband, Bob Waterfield,
was the Los Angeles Rams' quarterback" – and Marilyn was planning
to marry Joe DiMaggio. She needed Russell's crucial support in this
demanding role. Under the hot lights and with millions of dollars
riding on her performance, she had to dance without losing her breath
and, at the same time, hit her musical notes, her camera marks and
her key light. Though
Gentlemen
was one of the most popular musicals
of the 1950s, Marilyn felt justly aggrieved that Russell earned
$200,000 for the picture and she – the blonde whom the gentlemen
preferred – got only $18,000.

In the comedy
How to Marry a Millionaire
, three attractive women
rent a New York penthouse and plan to trap three millionaires. The
script of
Millionaire
alludes to
Betty Grable's husband, the bandleader
Harry James, and to
Lauren Bacall's husband, "the man in
The African
Queen
," but Marilyn had no husband to enhance her fame. The women's
apartment is on Sutton Place, where Marilyn actually lived at the time.
She arrives in her first scene wearing a fur muff, drinks her favorite
champagne, and is breathy, naïve and excited. Too vain to wear glasses,
especially when hunting for a husband, she has only one bit of business,
constantly crashing into doors and furniture. The near-sighted
joke is not funny. At the end of the movie, she gets on the wrong
plane and sits next to David Wayne, who's on his way to unromantic
Kansas City. The bespectacled Wayne has been beaten up by the crooked
colleague who's stolen his check instead of sending it to the IRS, and
Marilyn, for no apparent reason, marries her battered beau.

All three gold-diggers, including the "brainy" and sophisticated
Bacall (who has the best part, but with third billing), are incredibly
dumb. This movie suggests that pretty, empty-headed women are irresistibly
attractive and desirable. Bacall mistakes the millionaire Cameron
Mitchell for a gas-pump attendant merely because he's not wearing
a tie. She deceives the elderly William Powell by declaring that she
loves him, but cruelly jilts him at the altar to marry the younger
Mitchell. The plot is hopelessly contrived, the male characters equally
stereotyped, and all the women get married suddenly and unexpectedly.
The picture could have been called "How
Not
to Marry a
Millionaire." The forest ranger, Grable's husband, is poor; Wayne's
money must be used to pay his huge tax debt; Mitchell is the only
rich man.

In a scene cut from
Millionaire
, Marilyn is supposed to answer a
phone call while having breakfast in bed. For some reason, she became
hopelessly confused about the sequence, drank the coffee before it
had been poured and answered the phone before it rang. Bacall,
though sympathetic to Marilyn, was brutally frank about her faults:
"She was really very selfish but she was so sad you couldn't dislike
her. You just had to feel sorry for her, her whole life was a fuck-up."
Bacall also recorded an incident in which Marilyn was either ironically
witty or hopelessly dim. When Bacall brought her little son, Stevie,
onto the set, Marilyn asked, "'How old are you?' He said, 'I'm four.'
She: 'But you're so
big
for four. I would have thought you were two
or three.'"

Employing a metaphor that colleagues often used to describe the
frequently remote, self-absorbed and almost somnambulistic Marilyn,
the screenwriter and producer of the movie, Nunnally Johnson, said
Marilyn "is generally something of a zombie. Talking to her is like
talking to somebody
underwater
. She's very honest and
ambitious and
is either studying her lines or her face during all of her working
hours, and there is nothing whatever to be said against her, but she's
not material for warm friendship." Johnson also felt she was as unresponsive
as "a sloth. You stick a pin in her and eight days later she
says 'Ouch.'"
¹⁵
Despite Marilyn's difficulties, this first Cinemascope
picture was a great success and grossed five times its lavish budget of
$2.5 million.

Fox rewarded Marilyn's lucrative success in
Gentlemen
and
Millionaire
with a wretched part in
River of No Return
(1954), a cliché-ridden
Western shot in the Canadian Rockies. Marilyn plays a saloon-singer,
rigged out in tacky costumes, and sings four songs. She also falls in
love with the hero, Robert Mitchum, who'd once worked in a wartime
airplane factory with her ex-husband. In a reprise of the dangerous
raft scene in
Niagara
– in which an innocent young woman escapes
and the killer, Joseph Cotton, plunges over the falls to his death –
Marilyn, Mitchum and his young son, played by
Tommy Rettig, fight
off outlaws and Indians while negotiating the perils of a treacherous
river. While shooting the dangerous raft scene, Marilyn tripped over
a rock in the river and tore a ligament. Her ankle swelled up badly,
she was put into a cast and hobbled around on crutches for ten days.

Marilyn had even more trouble with the director
Otto Preminger,
another authoritarian Viennese, than she'd had with Fritz Lang.
Preminger had recently played the brutal commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in
Billy Wilder's
Stalag 17
, which provoked Wilder's
remark that he had to be very nice to Preminger because Wilder
still had relatives in Germany. A strict disciplinarian, in absolute control
of every aspect of the picture, Preminger quickly lost patience with
Marilyn. Though she responded best when treated gently, he launched
a frontal assault, yelled at her in front of everybody and reduced her
to tears. He also insulted her by alluding to her shady past and
declaring "she was so untalented that she should stick to her original
'profession.'"