Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (37 page)

The men at Fox were terrified that March, and telephones jangled hourly with calls between executives in New York and California. Marilyn was summoned to the front office, shown “Golden Dreams” and asked if the rumors were true. Without hesitation or embarrassment she nodded yes, “although I really thought that Tom [Kelley] didn’t capture my best angle.”

For years after her death, many men and women took credit for dealing with the matter, but it was Marilyn herself who devised the successful strategy by which crisis was averted and her image untarnished—indeed, much enhanced—by this disclosure.

An interview had been scheduled for the following week with United Press International correspondent Aline Mosby. Marilyn dutifully
answered questions and posed for a photo. She then asked Mosby to remain with her alone and, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she said, “Aline, dear, I have a problem, and I don’t know what to do.” Marilyn reached for a facial tissue and dabbed at her eyes, where tears had already formed.

A few years ago, when I had no money for food or rent, a photographer I knew asked me to pose nude for an art calendar. His wife was there, they were both so nice, and I earned fifty dollars I needed very bad. That wasn’t a terrible thing to do, was it? I never thought anybody would recognize me, and now they say it will ruin my career. I need your advice. They want me to deny it’s me, but I can’t lie. What shall I do?

On March 13, 1952, the story broke in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
under Aline Mosby’s headline, “Marilyn Monroe Admits She’s Nude Blonde of Calendar.” Condemnation, as Marilyn had rightly predicted, was forestalled by her throwing herself like Little Nell on the mercy of the press and the public. Within days, the story was picked up by every wire service, magazine and newspaper in the country and many in Europe.

Thus Marilyn turned potential personal and professional disaster into conquest, gaining with this single deed unprecedented access to the press and a favorable publicity siege for herself and Fox that neither could ever have bought. She also orchestrated a brilliant exposure—not of her nakedness but of her candor and apparent purity of heart, and she created a moving and credible little drama of difficult early days (an element irresistible to just about everyone). Advertising her body and her sexuality in the frankest possible way, she simultaneously appeared to be as innocent as a cherub in a Renaissance painting. For weeks she humbly met the press, a grown-up ragamuffin straight from the pages of Dickens, an innocent whose body only a pervert could denounce. Of her former plight she begged understanding—not, it must be noted, forgiveness. She presented herself as an honest working girl who had come up from a poor and bitter situation: surely people would sympathize with that? The Salvation Army, had they press representatives, could not have devised a better scheme to win support for a street urchin or a fallen woman. She was not ashamed, she said repeatedly and emphatically.

I’ve been on a calendar. I don’t want to be just for the few, I want to be for the many, the kind of people I come from. I want a man to come home after a hard day’s work, look at this picture and feel inspired to say “Wow!”

Marilyn indeed made herself “the biggest news of the day,” as reporter Joe Hyams said. And so she was. She appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine’s April 7 issue, photographed by Philippe Halsman, wearing an off-the-shoulder white dress, her eyes half closed and her mouth slightly open; typically, she was posed as if almost quivering with her trademark blend of innocent surprise and sexual availability. The air of intimacy was highlighted by positioning her in a corner, wedged between a cabinet and a door.

Halsman had photographed her for
Life
earlier, with other aspiring starlets; now he found her much less selfconscious than before, and surrounded by exercise equipment, by photographs and by serious books (Shaw, Steinbeck, Ibsen, Wilde, Zola and the Russian novelists) and treatises on art (the works of Goya, Botticelli and da Vinci). As he worked, every move and gesture was a mixture of conscious and unconscious appeal to men—“the way she giggled, the way she stood in the corner flirting with the camera and especially the way she walked.”

“Marilyn Monroe: The Talk of Hollywood,” proclaimed the
Life
cover. The inside story showed a small reproduction of the nude calendar photo next to one of her (fully clothed) at home, dreamily listening to classical music: thus the most traditionally American weekly magazine was approving Marilyn Monroe. She was receiving five thousand fan letters a week,
Life
reported, adding that “Marilyn is naive and guileless but smart enough to have known how to make a success in the cutthroat world of glamour.” After a résumé of her childhood—with the appropriate arabesques—the article concluded that “with all Hollywood at her feet . . . a possible future project for Marilyn is a film biography of Harlow”: exactly what she and Sidney told
Life
they were planning to produce. Throughout the year, she was frequently called “the successor to Harlow,” a designation quietly circulated by Marilyn and Sidney themselves.

Henceforth, the content of every interview she gave and story she approved was magnificently contrived—not to hoodwink, but to advance herself and to contradict the prevailing Hollywood hypocrisies.
As for the slightly fictitious tints (she was not either hungry or homeless when she posed for Kelley), Marilyn always believed those points to be incidental.

At this time, with waves of adoration, forgiveness and pity washing over her, Marilyn began to meet more often with Sidney Skolsky, who urged her to continue the embellishment of the legend and helped her to do so. “If anything was ‘wrong’ in a star’s biography,” as producer David Brown said, “it could be changed by the Publicity Department, or by a star’s prudent mentor. Names were changed, ages, birthplaces, new parents were assigned—anything was possible to serve the myth-making.”

One of the hoary anecdotes devised about the early life of Norma Jeane involved the incredible story of a madwoman (sometimes named as her mother, frequently her grandmother, often a neighbor) who, when Norma Jeane was one year old, attempted to suffocate her with a pillow and had to be forcibly removed. This grotesque fiction seems to have been inspired by her recent film
Don’t Bother to Knock
(not yet released), for in its climactic moments Nell binds and gags a little girl, nearly suffocating the child. Blurring the distinction between her real self and her movie self, she made herself the victimized child of the movie.

Marilyn assumed the difficult task of sometimes justifying her life by dramatizing it. “My childhood was like this movie, which you can see later this year,” she was saying. “But I survived.” Just as she acquitted herself of a charge of pandering by claiming to have been photographed nude because she was hungry and almost homeless, so with the fabricated stories she accumulated about her childhood (fourteen foster homes, for example). The lost little girl who was in fact
part
of her own real self was becoming the
single
vital element endearing her to the world.

As Marilyn had predicted to Natasha, Joe sternly disapproved of the nude calendar, by then in print all over the world. He perhaps did not discuss this with her, but for much of late March and early April (while he was preparing his broadcast season with the Yankees), Joe did not contact her quite so frequently. He broke his silence, however, to rush to her side when yet another revelation about Marilyn’s past made
news that spring. Contrary to her earlier accounts of an orphaned childhood, the press then learned that her mother was indeed alive—in fact she was sufficiently well to have been released from the state hospital at Agnew and was working temporarily as an aide at a private nursing home called Homestead Lodge on Colorado Boulevard, in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles near Pasadena. But because it had been years since Gladys had lived anything like a normal life, her behavior was erratic (especially around other psychiatric patients).

The matter surfaced on the death of a man named John Stewart Eley, to whom Gladys was briefly married during this time. An electrician who lived in West Los Angeles, he died there of heart disease at the age of sixty-two on April 23, 1952. At about this time, Gladys wrote to her daughter, addressing her by her new name:

Dear Marilyn,

Please dear child, I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.

Love,

Mother

The letter, which Marilyn kept to the end of her life, cut her to the heart; she had not shown Gladys any ill will. But she refused to visit her, despite Inez Melson’s transmission of Gladys’s requests; nor, it seems, would she ever contact her mother in any way. That Marilyn so acted denotes another paradox in her complex character. She helped her, but from a distance—by writing checks, making arrangements for her care and, eventually, by providing for her in a trust fund. But in 1952, Marilyn seems to have reached a point in her life when all her energies and talents were devoted to the creation and maintenance of an entirely new person, and it was as this new person that she wished to act—more, to become. Gladys was a reminder of an unhappy past, a family history that, she had been told by Grace McKee Goddard, was full of dark and dangerous illnesses that could be inherited. Better to be a new person with a new fresh identity—the new Jean Harlow, perhaps, or just Marilyn Monroe.

“I knew there was really nothing between us,” she said defensively of her mother a few years later, “and I knew there was so little I could do for her. We were strangers. Our time in Los Angeles was very difficult, and even she realized that we didn’t know each other.” And she concluded this statement—one of her rare discussions of her mother—with the telling words: “I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life, and I had in mine. I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works.”

Much of Marilyn Monroe’s own psychological suffering in years to come would derive from her inability to forget; and much of the psychotherapy failed to deal directly with her guilt and its aftermath.
¹

With the revelation that Gladys was alive, the studio for the second time that year had to devise a way of coping with the press and with public opinion. Once again, Marilyn was summoned to the executive offices, and once again she found a way to deflect resentment of the previous falsehoods and turn the issue to her advantage. The columnist Erskine Johnson was invited to receive an exclusive interview. “Unbeknown to me as a child,” Marilyn said with uncharacteristically antique vocabulary (the speech was written by Sidney Skolsky),

my mother spent many years as an invalid in a state hospital. I was raised in a series of foster homes arranged by a guardian through the County of Los Angeles and I spent more than a year in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. I haven’t known my mother intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her I have contacted her. I am helping her now and want to continue to help her when she needs me.

To this she added, in a July letter to the editor of
Redbook
, that she had

told the story the way I knew it as a child, and even since knowing of her existence, I have tried to respect my mother’s wish to remain anonymous. . . . We have never known each other intimately and have never enjoyed the normal relationship of mother and daughter. If I have erred in concealing these facts, please accept my deepest apologies and please believe that my motive was one of consideration for a person for whom I feel a great obligation.

What she meant by her mother’s wish to remain anonymous is unclear. All that can be known for certain about Marilyn’s attitude to Gladys is that fear made her seem callous. Resenting her past, she tried to cloak it.

More to the point, her illegitimacy had to remain hidden. “Marilyn’s father was killed in an automobile accident,” wrote Johnson, “and her mother subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown.” Little else concerned the studio executives, glad to have the question of Marilyn’s maternity settled because that year a number of women had stepped forward claiming they were her mother.

Although Marilyn appeared for only a minute in another Fox anthology movie in 1952, she was billed as the star when it was released.
O. Henry’s Full House
begins with “The Cop and the Anthem,” in which an amusingly pompous vagrant, played by Charles Laughton, tries vainly to have himself arrested in order to assure a warm bed and food for the winter. For his last effort, aware he is being watched by a patrolman, Laughton approaches Marilyn, a well-dressed streetwalker, to proposition her. But he whispers that he cannot afford to give her money or buy her a drink and, touched by her beauty and simplicity, offers her his only possession—his umbrella: “for a charming and delightful young lady,” he says, tipping his bowler hat. As he hurries away, she gazes at him with a long, sad gaze. The policeman approaches: “What’s going on here? What’s happening?”

“He called me a lady!” she says in grateful astonishment, and as the scene fades she begins to weep—for herself rather than for him, it is
implied. This was one of the most touching moments in Marilyn’s screen career—a perfect vignette delicately acted.

In addition to his frequent Los Angeles trips to play umpire for Marilyn with the press, Joe attended her during an incident that earned her even more sympathy. Two Los Angeles sharpies were arrested and charged after it was proven that photographs of a nude woman they peddled were indeed of Marilyn. It seemed that every week of her life was newsworthy: every relationship, every part of her history, everything past, present and possible, especially now that she was seen and photographed so often with Joe. Rumors of imminent marriage swirled in and out of Hollywood.