Marilyn Monroe (8 page)

The test, as it turned out, was a success. Zanuck quickly threw another obstacle in her path. Citing the test as evidence that Marilyn didn’t need a coach, he refused to allow Natasha on the set of
Don’t Bother to Knock
, telling Marilyn that it would lead to chaos if every actor or actress demanded special coaching from the sidelines. He insisted that Marilyn was quite capable of acting in a film under the sole guidance of the director. “You have built up a Svengali,” he wrote to her in a memo, “and if you are going to progress with your career and become as important talent-wise as you have publicity-wise then you must destroy this Svengali before it destroys you.”

Natasha was in an exceedingly awkward position. What happened at RKO had been of little concern to her. She worked for Twentieth, Johnny Hyde having arranged for her to be hired when he negotiated Marilyn’s contract. Darryl Zanuck was Natasha’s boss, and she did not want to be in any sort of trouble with him. His references to her as Marilyn’s Svengali were alarming. She did not want to risk her job by being seen to interfere between Marilyn and her director.

At first, Marilyn agreed to work without her coach, but repeatedly she rushed off the set to call Natasha’s office. They reviewed scenes together before Marilyn actually performed them. Meanwhile, Marilyn barraged Zanuck with letters imploring him to allow her to have Natasha. Finally, Natasha received the call she had been dreading. The production was well under way when Marilyn announced that she would not work another day without her coach. Zanuck, with a good deal of film already in the can, had little choice but to agree. Natasha was ordered to report to the Western Avenue stage at once.

Roy Baker, pale and slight, was directing his first film in Hollywood, after having made
I’ll Never Forget You
for Fox in England. He was clearly irritated by Natasha, whom he regarded as Marilyn’s security blanket. Natasha took Marilyn aside and reminded her of the difficult position she had put her in. In view of Baker’s resentment, they must tread carefully. If the director was displeased with their work, Natasha would be crucified.

In the days that followed, Marilyn repeatedly blew her lines. Though she gave the appearance of having come to the set unprepared, in fact, the truth was the very opposite. Marilyn resembled a student who has studied too hard for a crucial test. She knew her lines perfectly well,
but when it was time to deliver them, she just blanked out. One had to wonder why Marilyn persisted in putting herself through this anguish. The answer was that her drive to be effective on screen was every bit as strong as her fear and insecurity.

On the last day of filming, Marilyn appeared utterly unfamiliar with the scene she was supposed to be working on. The more the director shouted, the worse she seemed to tense up. Finally, Marilyn announced that she had to confer with Natasha. Baker, exasperated, pointed out that he was quite capable of providing all the help she required. Marilyn, in front of everyone, replied that he wasn’t. Baker permitted Marilyn to work with her coach. They shot the scene and it was perfect. Then he marched to the telephone and arranged for Natasha to be dismissed.

These problems notwithstanding, Marilyn’s first starring role turned out to be not so bad after all. The consensus at the studio was that she was pretty enough, and that somehow all the frenzy on the set had fed into the unstable character Marilyn portrayed. Zanuck, pleased with Marilyn’s performance, decided to look around for another dramatic role for her. Meanwhile, she was given minor assignments in Edmund Goulding’s
We’re Not Married
, Henry Koster’s
O. Henry’s Full House
, and Howard Hawks’s
Monkey Business.

A chance for Marilyn to work with Hawks, one of Hollywood’s finest directors, was precisely the sort of thing Johnny would have welcomed. Hawks was convinced that “the girl,” as he called Marilyn, had enormous potential. He had been tremendously impressed with her in
The Asphalt Jungle.
More recently, Hawks had suggested to Zanuck that she’d been improperly cast in
Don’t Bother to Knock.
The significance of
Monkey Business
was not that it got Marilyn noticed, as the Huston and Mankiewicz films had done, but that it presented an opportunity for Hawks to figure out how Marilyn should be used. When he knew that, he’d have the formula that would enable Marilyn to become a star.

Soon after Marilyn began work with Hawks on February 26, 1952, she had an appendix attack. Hospitalized, she refused surgery lest Zanuck pull her out of the film. Marilyn was not about to permit anything, not even excruciating pain, to impede the momentum of her career. Her doctors agreed to freeze the appendix so that Marilyn could finish her assignment. No sooner had she returned to the set, however, than a fresh crisis threatened to derail her. She was summoned to
Zanuck’s office, where he and the studio publicity director, Harry Brand, confronted her with information they had received from a UP wire service reporter, Aline Mosby. According to Mosby, Marilyn had posed for a popular nude calendar that adorned the walls of gas stations and barber shops across America. Zanuck warned Marilyn that if the story broke, her career could be destroyed. Every Hollywood contract contained a morals clause which permitted the studio to fire an artist for offensive behavior. Zanuck personally had no objection to the calendar, but if there was a public outcry he would have to dismiss her.

Marilyn admitted to having posed for the calendar in 1949. Unfortunately, Johnny Hyde had been in Europe to attend Rita Hayworth’s wedding to Prince Aly Khan, so when Marilyn needed cash she did what she often did in such circumstances—she hired herself out as a model. On this particular occasion, she called up a cheesecake photographer named Tom Kelley, who had previously asked her to pose in the nude. She had refused at the time, but now she changed her mind. He gave her fifty dollars for the session.

The consensus among studio executives was that Marilyn should deny that she was the naked girl stretched out on rumpled red velvet. When she sought his advice afterward, Sidney Skolsky recommended the opposite. He urged Marilyn to be honest about what she had done and told her to give the story exclusively to Mosby, who, besides having tipped off the studio about the calendar, had written a warm account of Marilyn’s childhood a few months previously. Harry Brand, alone among Fox executives, supported Marilyn’s decision to tell the truth. As for Marilyn herself, not only was she brilliant with the press, but she knew how good she was. Better yet, she was capable of masking that confidence so that everything she said appeared to be utterly innocent and uncalculated.

“Oh, the calendar’s hanging in garages all over town,” Marilyn told Mosby over lunch. “Why deny it? You can get one anyplace. Besides, I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong. I was told I should deny I’d posed … but I’d rather be honest about it.”

When Mosby’s story appeared in newspapers on March 13, 1952, the overwhelmingly favorable public reaction was a testament to the publicity campaign that Marilyn had launched in
Collier’s
magazine five months previously. People had nothing but sympathy for the heroine of
“the greatest Cinderella story in Hollywood history.” To judge by the fan letters with which Twentieth was inundated, the self-styled “courageous little orphan girl” could do no wrong.

Two days after the Mosby piece, Marilyn, taking no chances, seized an opportunity to endear herself further to the American public by going on a blind date with Joe DiMaggio. She and Skolsky agreed that there could be no better character reference than the nation’s favorite athlete-hero, and he planned to break the news in his column. DiMaggio, who had retired from baseball three months previously at the age of thirty-seven, was known as the greatest living ballplayer. He was idolized and revered. If “the last American knight” thought Marilyn Monroe a fine decent girl, what could anyone else say against her?

The meeting took place the following Saturday night at the dimlylit Villa Nova restaurant on the Sunset Strip. DiMaggio preferred dark restaurants. The date had been arranged by David March, who hoped to be hired as Marilyn’s business manager. DiMaggio, fascinated by a publicity photograph of Marilyn in brief white shorts, a snug sweater, and open-toe high heels, posing with a baseball player named Gus Zernial, had asked his friend March for an introduction. Under other circumstances Marilyn might not have agreed, but at the moment the potential for publicity was irresistible.

DiMaggio, nursing a sweet vermouth on the rocks in the last booth on the left, was tall and long-boned, with wavy, precisely parted, graying hair and flaring nostrils. It was said that DiMaggio’s profile came to a point at the end of his nose. He had sad brown eyes, long eyelashes and a conspicuous overbite. He had broad shoulders and massive, strong arms, with enormous wrists. He chain-smoked Camels as he waited, wearing a gray flannel suit, a white shirt, and a blue polka-dot tie. He was graceful and subdued. There was a poignant air of remoteness about him. The sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, one of DiMaggio’s closest friends, once described him as one of the loneliest men he’d ever met, adding, “I doubt if anyone fully understands his lonely character.”

The dinner was arranged for 6:30. David March and his girlfriend, sipping dry Martinis, were sitting with DiMaggio when Marilyn walked in, two hours late. DiMaggio bashfully told Marilyn that he was glad to meet her, his strident voice competing with the schmaltzy Italian music on the sound system. His long face was oddly expressionless, a reminder
of why some people called him Dead Pan Joe. Instead of the garishly-dressed sports figure Marilyn had expected, DiMaggio reminded her of a steel magnate or a Congressman. His endearing shyness reminded her of Arthur Miller.

“There’s a blue polka dot exactly in the middle of your tie knot,” she said, in an effort to break the ice. “Did it take you long to fix it just that way?”

That was virtually the extent of their conversation. DiMaggio never talked much, leading a friend to remark once that when Joe said hello, it was a long conversation. March told some funny stories about his experiences in Hollywood and Mickey Rooney bounded over to display his knowledge of DiMaggio’s feats on the baseball field. Ignoring hints and signals that he ought to leave, Rooney monopolized his hero for most of the evening. After about an hour and a half, Marilyn went home. DiMaggio called the next day to ask her to dine with him alone. She refused, DiMaggio persisted, and finally Marilyn agreed to an intimate dinner with him on Wednesday the 19th.

By March 17, when Skolsky revealed to America that Marilyn was dating Joe DiMaggio, there was no question at Twentieth that she had turned the nude calendar scandal into perhaps the greatest publicity coup in Hollywood history. Marilyn hadn’t distinguished herself on screen yet, but as each day passed she was becoming an increasingly valuable commodity. Everyone at the studio would have known exactly what it meant when Charlie Feldman arrived on the set of
Monkey Business
on March 18 to see Marilyn. Ordinarily he would have sent one of his staff to court a new client. That he came himself, and that he talked quietly with Marilyn for a long while on the fringe of the set, was a sure sign Feldman was concerned that every agency in town would soon be after her.

The day Feldman went to see Marilyn, he was in an exceptionally good mood.
A Streetcar Named Desire
, which had opened to critical acclaim in September, was nominated for twelve Oscars. The awards ceremony was two days away, and Feldman and Jack Warner predicted that the picture would sweep the major awards. In addition, Feldman was sure this would be the first time all four acting citations went to one film.

Since the New York critics had chosen
A Streetcar Named Desire
as their best picture of the year, Warner, who had backed the film with
Feldman, had virtually been begging Williams and Kazan to do another project for him. The playwright and the director were both very hot at the moment. When they couldn’t come to Los Angeles, Feldman and Jack Warner went to New York. In discussions with Audrey Wood, Warner emphasized that he didn’t just want to make a deal, he wanted to make an “important” deal. Feldman knew that Warner was prepared to pay handsomely for
Baby Doll
, the screenplay Williams was writing in close consultation with Kazan, based on his one-act plays
27 Wagons Full of Cotton
and
The Unsatisfactory Supper.

Marilyn wasn’t surprised when, just as she was preparing to go out on her second date with Joe DiMaggio, she had a call from Kazan, who had arrived from New York and checked into the Bel Air Hotel. Tennessee Williams was staying there, too, along with his agent, Audrey Wood, and her husband. Wood had arrived in Los Angeles determined not to show Warner the screenplay-in-progress until there was a signed contract, though she brought a typed copy just in case. Fortunately, Warner seemed even more anxious than she to put a deal in place.

One might have expected Kazan to be on top of the world. In private, however, he was in turmoil. HUAC was again holding hearings about the entertainment world. The trio of Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lillian Hellman, all former Communist Party members, came from Broadway’s upper echelon. They were precisely the sort of successful, prosperous people who tended to be friendly witnesses, if only because they had so much to lose. All three of them would be called in this round of hearings. Indeed, Kazan had already been interrogated. On January 14, 1952, in secret testimony in Washington, D.C., Kazan admitted to having briefly been a Communist but refused to identify other Party members. Afterward, he had chest pains. His hands trembled. He had difficulty sleeping. He worried that if Jack Warner learned about his refusal to name names, the deal would be off. Back in New York, Kazan had been summoned by Spyros Skouras, who urged Kazan to change his HUAC testimony. He offered personally to accompany Kazan to Washington, and made it clear that if Kazan failed to name names, he would never direct another Hollywood film.