My Story (17 page)

I have written out this accurate account of one of my “feuds” because it is typical. The feuds are all started by someone whom I have mysteriously offended—always a woman.

The truth is my tight dress and my wiggling were all in Miss Crawford's mind. She obviously had been reading too much about me.

Or maybe she was just annoyed because I had never brought her a list of my wardrobe.

 

 

Success came to me in a rush. It surprised my employers much more than it did me. Even when I had played only bit parts in a few films, all the movie magazines and newspapers started printing my picture and giving me write-ups. I used to tell lies in my interviews—chiefly about my mother and father. I'd say she was dead—and he was somewhere in Europe. I lied because I was ashamed to have the world know my mother was in a mental institution—and that I had been born “out of wedlock” and never heard my illegal father's voice.

I finally straightened these lies out, and I was surprised at the way the magazines and newspapers treated my “new confessions.” They were kind and none of them picked on me.

Just as I was beginning to go over with the public in a big way, I got word that my “nude calendar” was going to be put on the market as a Marilyn Monroe novelty. I thought this would push me into the cold again. A writer I met laughed at my tears.

“The nude calendar is going to put you over with the biggest bang the town has heard in years,” he said. “The same thing happened in the 20s to a girl who was on the verge of movie fame. She couldn't quite seem to excite the movie-queen-makers of the studios. She was called unphotogenic and ‘good for a small part but definitely not star material.' ”

“Like me,” I said.

“Yes,” the writer said. “Then one day a studio official giving a party got hold of a two-reel film in which the girl had performed. The film was intended for rental to stag parties. In the picture this young girl danced entirely in the nude. The dance was also vulgar and suggestive. As a result every movie producer or director who saw the stag film became haunted with the nude performer. They vied for her services as if she were the only female on tap, and the only full set of secondary female characteristics in Hollywood. She became famous in a few months and is still famous today [and one of my worst detractors].”

It turned out very much like that for me, too. Everybody in the studio wanted me as a star in his movie. I finally went into
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and after that,
How to Marry a Millionaire
. I liked doing these pictures. I liked the fact that I was important in making them a great financial success and that my studio cleaned up a fortune, despite that its chief had considered me unphotogenic. I liked the fact that the movie salesmen who came to Hollywood for a big studio sales rally whistled loudest and longest when I entered their midst.

I liked the raise I finally received to twelve hundred a week. Even after all the deductions were taken from my salary it remained more money a week than I had once been able to make in six months. I had clothes, fame, money, a future, all the publicity I could dream of. I even had a few friends. And there was always a romance in the air. But instead of being happy over all these fairytale things that had happened to me I grew depressed and finally desperate. My life suddenly seemed as wrong and unbearable to me as it had in the days of my early despairs.

 

 

I have many bad social habits. People are always lecturing me about them. I am invariably late for appointments—sometimes as much as two hours. I've tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong—and too pleasing.

When I have to be somewhere for dinner at eight o'clock, I will lie in the bathtub for an hour or longer. Eight o'clock will come and go and I still remain in the tub. I keep pouring perfumes into the water and letting the water run out and refilling the tub with fresh water. I forget about eight o'clock and my dinner date. I keep thinking and feeling far away.

Sometimes I know the truth of what I'm doing. It isn't Marilyn Monroe in the tub but Norma Jean. I'm giving Norma Jean a treat. She used to have to bathe in water used by six or eight other people. Now she can bathe in water as clean and transparent as a pane of glass. And it seems that Norma can't get enough of fresh bath water that smells of real perfume.

There's another thing that helps to make me “late.” After I get out of the tub I spend a long time rubbing creams into my skin. I love to do this. Sometimes another hour will pass, happily.

When I finally start putting my clothes on I move as slowly as I can. I begin to feel a little guilty because there seems to be an impulse in me to be as late as possible for my dinner date. It makes something in me happy—to be late.

People are waiting for me. People are eager to see me. I'm wanted. And I remember the years I was unwanted. All the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the little servant girl, Norma Jean—not even her mother.

I feel a queer satisfaction in punishing the people who are wanting me now. But it's not them I'm really punishing. It's the long ago people who didn't want Norma Jean.

It isn't only punishment I feel. I get thrilled as if I were Norma Jean going to a party and not Miss Monroe. The later I am the happier Norma Jean grows.

People dislike me for such tardiness. They scold me and explain to me it's because I want to seem important and make a spectacular entrance. That's partly true, except it's Norma that longs for importance—and not me.

My social faults such as this one, and also not being able to laugh all the time at parties as if I were swooning with joy, or not being able to keep chattering like a parrot to other parrots—seem less important to me than some social faults I notice in others.

The worst thing that happens to people when they dress up and go to a party is that they leave their real selves at home. They're like people on a stage playing somebody else. They play that they're important, and they want you to meet their importance, not themselves. But worse than that is the fact that when people are being “social” they don't dare be human or intelligent. They don't dare to think anything different than the other people at the party. The men and women are not only dressed alike but their minds become all alike. And they expect everybody at the party to say only “party things.”

I freeze up when I see people making important faces at me, or when I notice them strutting among the lesser party-lights. I like important people, but I like
them when they're doing important things—not just collecting a few bows from lesser guests.

In party society there are also people who are unable to feel important—even if it's an important party and their names are going to be in the movie columns the next morning in “among those present.” These people usually just mill around like extras on a movie set. They don't seem to have any lines or any “business” except to be ornamental space fillers.

But I can't feel sorry for them because the minute I join one of these extra-groups they all start chattering like mad and laughing and saying things that nobody can understand. I feel that having found someone more ill at ease than themselves—me—they're out to impress me what a gay and intimate time they're having.

Hollywood parties not only confuse me, but they often disillusion me. The disillusion comes when I meet a movie star I've been admiring since childhood.

I always thought that movie stars were exciting and talented people full of special personality. Meeting one of them at a party I discover usually that he (or she) is colorless and even frightened. I've often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.

 

 

There are three different ways of becoming famous in the movies. The first way more often happens to men than to women. It happens suddenly as the result of a single performance in a movie.

An actor will go along getting jobs and doing good work and getting nowhere. Then all of a sudden, like John Garfield long ago or Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, Jose Ferrer, more recently—he will appear as a lead in a picture and wake up after the reviews as star for the rest of his life.

Occasionally this also happens to an actress, but the occasions haven't been recent. The actress usually becomes a star in two other ways. The first way is the Studio Buildup. When the Front Office is convinced that one of their contract players has star possibilities in her, a big campaign is started. The Star Possibility is surrounded by various teachers and coaches. Word is sent out to all the Producers in the Studio that the Possibility is the biggest coming box-office attraction in the industry. And all the producers in the studio start fighting to get her as the lead for one of their pictures.

In the meantime the publicity department goes to work on the Star Possibility and floods the press, the wire services, and the magazines with stories about her wonderful character and fascinating oddities and thousands of photographs.

The columnists are bombarded with announcements about the possibilities of every sort, from a half dozen impending marriages to an equal number of starring vehicles.

Pretty soon the whole country gets the impression that nearly all the eligible romantic males of the land are trying to marry the Possibility and that she is going to appear in half the important movies produced in Hollywood.

All this takes a great deal of money and powerful efforts on everybody's part except the young actress on whose brow the Studio has decided to weld a silver star.

The other way to fame open to the actress is the way of scandal. Sleep with a half dozen famous Don Juans, divorce a few husbands, get named in police raids, café brawls or other wives' divorce suits, and you can wind up almost as much in demand by the movie producers as a Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh.

The only trouble with becoming famous as a result of a half dozen scandalous happenings is that the scandal-made star can't just rest on her old scandals. If she wants to keep her high place in the public eye and on the Hollywood producer's casting list she has to keep getting into more and more hot water. After you're thirty-five getting into romantic hot water is a little difficult, and getting yourself publicized in love triangles and café duels over your favors needs not only smart press agents but also a little miracle to help out.

I became famous in the movies in none of these three accepted ways. The studio never thought of me as a Star Possibility, and the notion of putting me in as a lead on a picture was as far from Mr. Zanuck's head as of handing me over his Front Office as a dressing room. It would make a very good one.

Thus I didn't get a chance to burst upon the public as a Great Talent.

And there was no Studio campaign or buildup. I was never groomed. The press and the columnists were kept in ignorance of my existence. No telegrams and
other passionate Front Office communiqués went out about me to the Sales Force or the nation's exhibitors.