Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (22 page)

The Carrolls were authentic Good Samaritans, and at once they took action. They lived most of the time at their Granada Hills horse-breeding ranch in the San Fernando Valley, but they also had a top-floor apartment in town at the El Palacio, an elegant Spanish structure at the northeast corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Fountain Avenue. So that Marilyn could continue to attend classes and be available for auditions when Harry Lipton called—without having to “work the Boulevard”—the Carrolls invited her to live rent-free in the apartment’s second suite. As Lucille recalled, “She said she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven, all of which she later admitted was untrue. It was a way of getting us to take her in, to keep her off the streets of Hollywood, and it worked.” Marilyn Monroe was a vulnerable soul, to be sure; but she was also savvy enough to know which tales evoked a sympathetic reaction from this or that person.

According to their records, the Carrolls gave her cash all that September (eighty dollars on September 2; fifty on the fifteenth; another eighty on the twenty-sixth and seventy-five on the twenty-seventh). That autumn, they asked their representative, Albert Blum, to draw up a letter of agreement. They would pay to “Journey Evers, also known as Norma Jeane Dougherty” the regular sum of one hundred dollars
weekly “for personal management.” Should she find employment through Blum or the Carrolls, she could repay the money and ten percent would be duly paid to her agent Harry Lipton. Gladys’s daughter had never known such generous support.

Things happened quickly that September. On the twenty-first, Lucille noticed a casting call for a student performance of the 1940 comedy
Glamour Preferred
, to be performed at the Bliss-Hayden Miniature Theater (later the site of the Beverly Hills Playhouse) on Robertson Boulevard. She immediately telephoned Lila Bliss and her husband Harry Hayden, who welcomed Lucille’s protégés to classes and allowed them to perform onstage without charge because Lucille occasionally brought one of the students over to MGM. The Haydens met Marilyn and days later cast her (with considerable aptness, in light of her invitation to John Carroll) in the supporting role of a Hollywood starlet whose seduction of a glamorous leading man is foiled by the man’s sensible and superior wife.

The month’s run of this amateur production was scheduled to begin on October 12, but rehearsals were stymied by Marilyn’s chronic lateness and her apparent inability to memorize lines. As Lucille learned after a long discussion with her, both problems arose from the girl’s fear of dressing ineptly (she changed clothes several times before leaving the apartment), from a dread of looking unacceptable (she retouched her makeup for hours) and from her terror of failure. In fact she knew the dialogue perfectly, but she stuttered and paused so much that she threw the other student players into total confusion. Marilyn finally managed to stumble her way through two performances which were mercifully unreviewed by the Los Angeles press.
⁹
A few years later, she said that it was a terrible play in any case, and that she only took the role from a sense of obligation to the Carrolls. Her statement did not justify her tardiness, but her critical assessment was on the mark:
Glamour Preferred
had sunk from sight after an original Broadway run of eleven performances; it has (but for Bliss and Hayden) vanished into oblivion.
¹⁰

As the autumn passed, the Carrolls found themselves indulgent surrogate parents to Marilyn, who was now begging to spend weekends with them at their ranch so she would not be alone. Lucille and John valued some privacy, however, and they had many tasks as their ranch expanded. One evening Lucille arrived at the apartment to find Marilyn hovering over an array of twenty-five brassieres, for which she had spent an entire week’s allowance. Into each bra Marilyn was packing a wad of tissue, so that her breasts would seem to protrude more perkily. “I sat her down,” Lucille remembered, “and told her this was all very silly.” Marilyn’s reply was simple: “But this is all anyone ever looks at! When I walk down Hollywood Boulevard, everyone will notice me now!”

In November, the Carrolls received a telephone call at the ranch one Friday evening. Marilyn said in a nervous whisper that a teenage Peeping Tom had climbed a ladder and was looking through her bedroom window. The Carrolls knew that no ladder would reach to the third floor, that this was simply Marilyn’s ploy to avoid loneliness and to join them at the ranch. But her recent mention of walking down Hollywood Boulevard alarmed them as much as the fantasy about a Peeping Tom, and Lucille feared that their little stray kitten might become a permanent alleycat; that never having known the secure love of a father at home, Marilyn might seek endlessly for affirmation from men who wanted nothing more than a few moments with her body. At twenty-one she was still drifting, even as she longed for professional and personal stability, and so by December Lucille welcomed Marilyn every weekend at Granada Hills.

At the same time, Marilyn sought constantly to have the Carrolls’ devotion reaffirmed, to be reassured they would not abandon her, for
they were indeed surrogate parents. But her conduct was not always apposite. Around the Carroll home she dressed scantily, slept nude with her door open and generally scandalized John Carroll’s mother, who was also visiting. By early 1948, as Lucille Ryman Carroll summarized the situation years later,

Marilyn had become a problem for us. She called me at my office, and John at the studio, as often as four times a day, even though we repeatedly asked her not to. We were in a trap we had unwittingly stepped into. Finally, we had no control over her: she controlled us.

Part of the control was exercised in her blunt disregard for schedules (her own and others’) and her occasional affectation of a mysterious and elusive attitude. After waiting hours for her to arrive at the ranch on several Friday evenings, the Carrolls received a call: “This weekend I’m going to be with some people,” she said vaguely. There was no need for mystery: “Being with some people,” according to Lucille, “meant she was going to be with a photographer for two or three days. The following Monday we found her room littered with photos of herself she studied day and night.”

But then Marilyn got the strange idea that her life with the Carrolls was about to alter dramatically. “Somehow,” according to Lucille,

because John rather than I had invited her out to the ranch one weekend, she thought this was going to be the beginning of an affair with him. She came to me and said, “Lucille, I want to ask if you’ll give John a divorce. I don’t think you love him—if you did you wouldn’t work so hard at your job, and you’d be with him every night instead of going out to shows and screenings. And I think he loves me. He didn’t say he does, but he’s so patient and he helps me so much. He couldn’t do that if he didn’t love me.”

Lucille’s answer was delivered calmly: if John wanted a divorce he had only to ask for it. When Marilyn went back to John, he explained that his feelings were strictly those of a mentor, that all he wanted was to assist her career and to help her materially. “And the amazing thing,” according to Lucille, “is that Marilyn didn’t seem bothered by this at all. She wasn’t heartbroken, as if a great love were being denied her.”
In fact, she may well have been relieved. With such a background as Marilyn had, she was ill equipped to read ordinary social signals, and many of them were subjected to a reading through the lens of her need for masculine acceptance and affirmation.

After five months of caring night and day for Marilyn, it was clear to the Carrolls that, as Lucille said, “we were in too deep and had to get out.” The social life in which they often included her was soon to provide help in that direction. At a party in February 1948, John introduced Marilyn to a businessman named Pat De Cicco, who was successful with a product called Bon Bons, candy-sized ice cream confections marketed chiefly at movie theaters. De Cicco had become a friend of Fox’s executive producer, Joseph Schenck, whom Marilyn had met briefly on the studio lot.

Schenck’s Spanish-Italian Renaissance mansion at 141 South Carol-wood Drive was the setting for legendary Saturday-night poker games, to which he and his friends invited attractive young women to keep the highball glasses full and the ashtrays empty. De Cicco asked Marilyn to join him the following Saturday. And so it happened that the former Fox starlet was reintroduced to the present Fox mogul. “I was invited as an ornament,” Marilyn said, “just someone to brighten the party.” And so she did—especially for Schenck, who (as Lucille Ryman Carroll knew within days) “went for Marilyn like a million dollars.”

Schenck, then sixty-nine, had a long and influential career. He and his brother Nicholas, childhood Russian émigrés to New York, had owned some drugstores and operated amusement parks before their association with Marcus Loew, executive of a theater chain that became the parent company of MGM. Nicholas remained with Loew, but in 1917 Joe became an independent producer, successful with, among others, the films of his wife Norma Talmadge; his brother-in-law, Buster Keaton; and the comic Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle. By 1948, Joe Schenck had been at various times board chairman of United Artists, president of Twentieth Century Pictures and then board chairman of Twentieth Century–Fox, where he was still a major power. Bald, with large features and penetrating gray eyes, Joe Schenck had a severe mouth that belied a keen sense of humor and good business sense, both of which were epitomized by advice he gave a friend: “If four or five guys tell you that you’re drunk, even though you know you haven’t had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little while.”
Accustomed to deferential treatment, he could be crude and demanding or gentle and helpful, depending on what opinion he thought someone had of him.

Marilyn was not the only young woman present that Saturday evening; there were other models, starlets and pretty young things hoping for entrée to a movie career or advancement in it. Besides distributing drinks and cigars, some were willing (not to say expected) to provide more intimate services for one or another of the cardplayers during a break in the game. That evening, Marilyn remained close to De Cicco and tried gracefully to ignore the host’s suggestive glances.

Next day, a limousine was dispatched to bring Marilyn to a private dinner with Joe Schenck—an invitation she knew it would have been folly to refuse. “What do I do after dinner when he gets around to what he really wants?” she asked Lucille, who suggested the reply she often gave her MGM starlets: “Tell him you’re a virgin, saving yourself for the right man.” Late that night, Lucille was awakened by an agitated Marilyn, whispering into a private phone from Schenck’s home: “He knows I’ve been married!
Now
what do I tell him?” The evening ended, perhaps predictably, with Marilyn’s submission.

Later, she told Lucille and a few other confidantes that this was the first of many times she had to kneel before an executive, a position not assumed in prayerful supplication. She wanted desperately to work, to succeed as a movie star, and she accepted the fact that sometimes employment conditions are negotiated privately, not in an agent’s office. “Marilyn spoke quite openly of her affair with Schenck,” recalled Amy Greene, later a close friend. “He helped her career and she provided what she was asked to provide.”

Inveterate womanizer though he was—and Marilyn was but one of many conquests—Joe Schenck did not toss her aside, and in fact she grew quite fond of him. Although he had an agreement with Zanuck not to press for girlfriends to be given preferential treatment, Schenck called his poker buddy Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios. In late February, Marilyn arrived at Cohn’s office at the corner of Sunset and Gower. One of the most feared and disliked men in the history of Hollywood, Cohn had been responsible for molding the career of a dancer named Margarita Cansino, who became Rita Hayworth. He was willing to offer Marilyn a six-month contract at one hundred twenty-five
dollars a week beginning March 9. There was, however, one condition—and not the one she at first expected.

The following week, her hairline was permanently heightened by electrolysis and, after several applications of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, the basic brown of Marilyn’s cheaply dyed blond hair was entirely stripped away. The mirror showed her a woman more and more like the favored star of her childhood, Jean Harlow. “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Harlow asked rhetorically, gazing in a hand mirror in the 1932 film
Red Headed Woman
—and then she turned to the camera, smiled and replied, “Yes, they do!”

Harry Cohn was no gentleman, but he preferred Marilyn blond. Having approved her new look, he dispatched her to three studio offices. After Max Arnow in the Talent Department had compiled a page of statistics on this latest contract player and the men in publicity had arranged for some trial photographs, Marilyn arrived at the cozy cottage of Columbia’s drama coach, a formidable lady named Natasha Lytess who had interests far more serious than dying hair.

1
. The on-screen emblem, the studio advertising and the lot’s marquee always identified the company as “20th Century—Fox,” but for legal reasons the contracts, documents and stationery had to designate it as “Twentieth Century—Fox.” In 1984, the hyphen which since 1935 had marked the merger was removed.

2
. Among the most popular contract players were Don Ameche, Anne Baxter, Alice Faye, Henry Fonda, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, Gregory Peck, Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney and Loretta Young; directors included Henry Hathaway, Elia Kazan, Anatole Litvak, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Otto Preminger.

3
. Among the best-known Zanuck films up to 1946:
The House of Rothschild, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road
and
How Green Was My Valley
.