Marilyn: A Biography (14 page)

The next question must obviously inquire what
fearful objects or monsters are to be encountered in such a void,
but it is a question to postpone until the wings of death lay wet
feathers across her face. Let us see her here in her honor. For,
whatever motive, whether the “saintliness” of rejecting money
(grave poet of the middle-class mind, Miller would indeed see the
refusal of wealth as saintly), or to protect that identity so
painfully coalescing, still she was bold enough to keep to a course
that all of her practical friends must have considered madness,
kept to it against all of her affection for Hyde, and all her fear
of being alone when he was gone. Let us suppose she was pointed so
clearly into the arrow of her own direction that, like Joan of Arc,
she could hear a voice. Since she was considerably less of a saint
— we must assume! — this voice merely told her not to marry. It
could have been no modest command to obey.

Hyde? There are men who rush to their death
as if they are in a race with something other. Gary Cooper, dying
of cancer, said to Hemingway, “Bet I beat you to the barn.” No, we
do not know enough about Hyde to find a source for his desire to
die with speed, no, we do not even know if the fingers of old
Hollywood ogres are clutching at his wrists when his own heart
finally opens an acrobat’s fingers and flies out beyond the
net.

Snively, Schenck, Karger, and Hyde! If she
had been a bargirl looking to sue an ex-lover in a raunchy case,
she would have picked her law firm out of the yellow pages with a
name like that. She could now have used their advice. Hyde had
helped her to get the part of Angela in
The Asphalt Jungle
,
and helped again for the part of Miss Caswell in
All About
Eve
. While both parts were small, she had been sensational in
both, yet Dore Schary was not impressed enough to give her a deal
at Metro, and Hyde barely succeeded in obtaining the seven-year
contract (in half-year options) at Twentieth before he died. She
had been known for years, first as a cover girl, then as a starlet
with a flair for publicity, and for a long time as a kid with
connections in the industry and therefore the poorest reputation.
Now she was even going to be seen by a few as an actress with
talent! Yet her career was in more confusion than her personality —
Twentieth did not cast her for months and then only in a series of
trivial films and small parts over the next two years. On loan to
Metro, she did
Right Cross
and
Home Town Story
. For
Twentieth there was
The Fireball
,
As Young As You
Feel
,
Love Nest
,
Let’s Make It Legal
,
We’re
Not Married!
,
Don’t Bother to Knock
,
Monkey
Business
,
O. Henry’s Full House
, and
Niagara
.
They are all in varying degree unimportant films, and need little
more description than their titles.
Love Nest
is worth a
footnote in any history of cinema, for Jack Paar has a part in it,
We’re Not Married!
is comic, and
Don’t Bother to
Knock
, although a slow and disappointing piece of cinema, is
worth study for a student of Monroe since she gives a serious
performance in the part of a deranged girl with nuances of
alternating numbness and hysteria, although she fails to project
much menace. It is a role she does not go near again. She has a
classic stuntman’s ride in an automobile with Cary Grant in
Monkey Business
, a scene with Charles Laughton in
Full
House
, and a starring role in
Niagara
, where she offers
the only interest. Her best performance in this whole period is not
even for Twentieth but RKO (across the fence from the orphanage),
where she does
Clash by Night
with Barbara Stanwyck, Robert
Ryan, and Paul Douglas, and steals all the publicity.

It is an abominable waste of the talents of
the girl who was seen in
The Asphalt Jungle
and
All About
Eve
. Her career echoes in the vacuum left by Hyde’s death. Even
his agency, in reaction, shuns her. She is without an important
guide, and yet she is still the best and most interesting
personality in all these film squiblets, bits, and tidbits, mangled
nuggets, rushed productions, factory products, vehicles for other
stars, items in omnibus movies, and supporting roles, all her
hordes of supporting roles. Before this stretch is completed, they
are billing her name on top no matter how small the part — she has
emerged. Unaccountably and incredibly, she has emerged from this
detritus of the insignificant, these films which are non-films,
this burial ground of old movies. She emerges even as we look at
the films today. She is more vivid on the screen than others. She
has more energy, more humor, more commitment to the part and to the
playing — she plays the roles, she gives off the happiness that she
is acting, and that is indispensable for any cheap entertainment.
Once actors become depressed in a work without value, then the
audience is attending an obscene rite — which may be why bad art in
theatre or film evokes such intimate rage. Instead, she is giving
every sign of being an absolute bonanza in the gold country of the
West, a sacred rite in the holy grove of film, and the studio is
the last to discover what they have.

Nobody can ever estimate the damage this does
to whatever reservoir of good will she has managed to carry up from
childhood; it is not hard to comprehend her later detestation of
directors and producers; her retaliations will be nihilistic. She
will savage the best of directors with the worst, and push the
cancer of wasted waiting time into actors she loves just as much as
she will punish actors she detests; she probably is deprived by
these early films of the last chance to become a great artist and
still have a little happiness left for herself — no, she will
become instead a sly leviathan of survival, and, Faust among the
Faustians, will set out to become one of the world’s most
formidable monsters of publicity, all to advance that career she
deserves and which the studio will begrudge her.

It is here that the sharpest and most cogent
account of her actions is to be found in Zolotow and Hecht rather
than Guiles, as if Zolotow who purveys old feature stories and
Hecht who makes them up with all the joy other biographers look for
in facts have thereby the better instinct for poking into Marilyn’s
tricks when the subject turns to publicity; so the portrait they
give of her in these situations seems not only livelier but closer
to the essential imbalance of her position in the year after Hyde
is gone.

Marilyn testifies: “I used to have nightmares
about Mr. Zanuck. I used to wake up in the morning thinking I have
to make Mr. Zanuck appreciate me and . . . I couldn’t get in to see
him. I couldn’t get in to see anybody that counted. . . . [Mr.
Zanuck] told somebody in the front office . . . that I was just a
freak and he didn’t want to waste time on me.” In her bitterness,
she makes a nice comment (even if it is written by Hecht): “Studio
bosses are jealous of their power. They are like political bosses.
They want to pick out their own candidate for public office. They
don’t want the public rising up and dumping a girl . . . in their
laps and saying, ‘Make her a star.’”

No one ever seems to have disagreed with the
estimate that Darryl Zanuck liked to put his own meat into a star’s
meat so that the product was truly stamped Twentieth Century-Fox.
In his eyes she had to be Schenck’s meat and Hyde’s potatoes. No
glory to his own sausage. Of course this is just a factor among
twenty others — Zanuck has better reasons for not advancing her.
His idea of a great movie is
Gentleman’s Agreement
. Marilyn
simply does not fit his concept of what to offer the public — which
is a three-word secret formula of Zanuck’s which has brought in
great sums of money for Twentieth Century-Fox in the past. The
formula: “Make good shit.” He does not hold the pulse of the
American public, he inhabits its bowels. Marilyn Monroe is much too
wicked for good shit. She ups the ante, a freak, and Zanuck likes a
game where he controls the limits. He is hardly plotting against
her, she is merely one of a hundred tendencies he is holding in
firm restraint.

She now, however, has the indispensable
rallying cry of the artist — a tangible villain to hate. And an art
to espouse — herself. Since he, in her mind, is determined to
obliterate her, she will in turn vanquish him. Like any great
political leader, she will go to the people. He can cut off her
acting roles, but he cannot control every last avenue of her
publicity. So she returns to what she will always know — the still
camera. And is the perfect pet of the shooting gallery at Twentieth
Century where still photographers work with starlets. They welcome
Marilyn back. She takes up where she began on her first contract
three years before, and her publicity stills begin once again to
cross thousands of newspaper desks, her face pops forth.
Irrepressibly, she whispers in the ear of the man who looks at the
photo, “You can fuck me if you’re lucky, Mr. Sugar.”

But she is a true general marshaling every
aspect of her campaign, and not only shoots her guns out to the
world, but into the charged centers of the studio. Zolotow portrays
one salute to Darryl Zanuck on a day when she is called to pose for
pictures in a negligee while supposedly relaxing in her apartment
after a day of moviemaking at the studio. The pictures are of
course to be taken at the shooting gallery. (In Factoid Manor, it
does not matter; one starlet’s apartment looks pretty much like
another.)

Marilyn decided to be dramatic. She changed
into a negligee in wardrobe, and then she walked the six blocks to
the gallery. Barefooted, her long hair streaming loosely behind
her, her skin clearly visible under the diaphanous negligee, she
slowly floated along the studio streets. The studio messengers, on
bicycles, spread the news. By the time she started back to
wardrobe, after posing, the streets were lined with cheering
throngs of studio employees. The next day, items about her escapade
appeared in the trade papers. She was the talk of the movie
colony.

Was she mad, went a query through the
studios, or a sexual bomb Zanuck did not know how to use?

A few weeks later, the studio gave a party
for a group of visiting exhibitors. Marilyn, together with other
starlets, had been ordered to attend. Naturally, the main
attraction was such stars as Anne Baxter, Dan Dailey, June Haver,
Richard Widmark, and Tyrone Power. But when Marilyn arrived, an
hour and a half late, it was she who was mobbed by the theatre
operators and film salesmen. The exhibitors kept asking her, “And
what pictures are you going to be in, Miss Monroe?” She fluttered
her eyelashes, and said, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Zanuck or Mr.
Schreiber about that.” Soon Spyros Skouras, the president of 20th
Century-Fox, became aware that his leading stars were being
trampled to death in the stampede for Marilyn.

“
Who is that girl?” Skouras inquired of
one of his myrmidons. The myrmidon didn’t know. He went to ask, and
reported that her name was Marilyn Monroe and that she was a
contract player. Skouras then asked the same question everybody
else was asking. “What picture is she in?” Informed, rather
nervously, that she was not in any forthcoming studio products,
Skouras glowered. . . . Skouras growled, “The exhibitors like her.
If the exhibitors like her, the public likes her, no?” . .
.

Zanuck gave orders that Marilyn must be
worked into any film that was in production and could use a sexy
blonde, and there are very few Hollywood films that can’t use a
sexy blonde. Supporting roles for her were found in As Young As You
Feel and Love Nest.

Now she is making films, precisely those
inconsequential mediocre films, and the publicity mills of prose
are also working. Stories appear of her in
Collier’s
and
Look
. “Miss Monroe’s value during the past year has risen
faster than the cost of living,” go the words in “Hollywood’s 1951
Model Blonde.” Less than a year before, her friend Sidney Skolsky
relates how in a depression she had said “that she’d keep working
and that nothing — do you hear? — nothing would stop her from
becoming a movie star. Then in the next breath she’d doubt that she
could ever make it.”

Of course, she was in a period when the inner
life of a race car driver would be clear to her. She was living in
publicity, and in all the perils of publicity. (The virtue of
little identity was that she did not have to suffer too much
embarrassment with publicity.) Since she was, however, the
near-empty and close to wholly prevaricating center of every last
piece of dialogue she was slugging into newspapers, she had to feel
the gap between history and publicity. It was the gap between flesh
and plastic. Just as one never knew when a piece of plastic would
break because there were never proper signs of stress, so one could
know no better when a factoid was ready to explode. That she
worried about a few items in her past seems likely, for unless
Johnny Hyde had been given the nude calendar of her by someone else
(which would be a story in itself!), more likely it was in his
papers because Marilyn wanted him to think about the problem of
possible exposure.

Zolotow gives a version of how the calendar
photo was finally revealed which is good enough to make a vintage
film; the plot is as intricate as a three-cushion carom with
English and draw, and yet believable since Jerry Wald – the happy
model for
What Makes Sammy Run
– was the center of it. Wald,
who had just finished producing
Clash by Night
at RKO, was
blackmailed one day by a man who wanted $10,000 not to reveal what
he had discovered. Into Wald’s ear came the information over the
phone that Marilyn Monroe could be seen nude in half the bars of
America. Exposure might hurt the release of
Clash by Night
,
especially if religious groups were to start a boycott. Wald,
however – we
must
be watching a movie – listens to the
arguments of Norman Krasna, the writer, who thinks this will help
the picture more than hurt it. Fell moment! We are at a turning
point in publicity, and Eisenhower is not yet even President! The
game plan is worked out as follows: Monroe is merely on loan to
RKO, and the immediate notoriety will make people curious to see
the film. If her later career is hurt, that can only do damage to
Twentieth – and her seven year contract. RKO may as well take the
money and run (from the wind whistling in the orphanage windows).
Wald has a new worry, however. What if the blackmailer loses his
nerve and never exposes Marilyn? They decide to do it themselves. A
tip is phoned to Aline Mosby of United Press. Mosby calls
Twentieth. They pull Marilyn off the set of
Don’t Bother to
Knock
. Naturally she has been discovered just in the hour she
is playing the madwoman under the director named Baker.