The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (23 page)

Miss Ainsworth then called 20th Century-Fox casting director Ben Lyon and told him Norma Jeane hadn't signed the Hughes contract yet, and she'd give Fox a chance, but they'd have to act fast. “Bring her right over,” Ben Lyon said.

Norma Jeane was at Aunt Ana's when she got the call. Nebraska Avenue was only minutes away from the Fox lot, but there'd be little time to fix her makeup, put on the right dress, and do her hair. Nevertheless, she was ready for this moment. When she arrived, Miss Ainsworth was there waiting for her, and this time there'd be no long wait on the hard chairs, culminating with “I'm sorry, no more interviews today.” The receptionist ushered them through the doors and they hurried down the hall of the administration building to Ben Lyon's office. Lyon didn't ask her to read a scene. He didn't recall asking about her experience. He didn't remember whether he asked about her education, her age, or whether she was married. He was struck by what he saw and sensed. Seeing was believing. He recalled saying something inane to Bunny Ainsworth like, “I think she's got good bones in her face.”

“Can you test her tomorrow, Ben?” Miss Ainsworth asked.

“Mr. Zanuck has to approve every test. It will take a little time to get his okay on it.”

“Do it fast, Ben,” Miss Ainsworth said. “We're on our way over to RKO from here.”

“Give me two days—just two days,” Ben Lyon asked. “I'll set it up.”

Two days later Lyon arranged an unauthorized screen test. Not wanting to run the risk of Zanuck's saying no, Lyon gambled that once Zanuck saw the test he'd sign her. They went on the set at five-thirty on an August morning with a skeleton crew to film the silent test. Lyon told Norma Jeane to start walking across the set when he said “Action.” Then she was to sit down and light a cigarette…put it out…get up…walk upstage…cross…look out the window…turn…come downstage, and exit.

Norma Jeane stood waiting in the dark, nervously shaking her hands as if to shake out the demons. The electrician's grip threw the knife switch that turned false dark into false day, and cameraman Leon Shamroy indicated he was ready. As Lyon said “Action,” Norma Jeane began her silent dialogue with the transfiguring eye of the camera. “I know few actresses who had the incredible talent for communicating with the camera lens as she did,” photographer Philippe Halsman once said. “She would try to seduce a camera as if it were a human being.” But the unerring eye of the camera to Norma Jeane was millions and millions of
eyes—the cyclops of the whole world, the world where the other person, whose name she didn't know, belonged. It was the lens that had the power to divine the voluptuous waif who had wandered somnambulently into the wrong world—the dreaming child with the wide-eyed Technicolor gaze of wistful incertitude. In recalling that morning when they made the test, Leon Shamroy stated, “Later, I got a cold chill. This girl had something—something I hadn't seen since silent pictures. She didn't need a soundtrack to tell her story.”

There was a prescribed ritual at Fox when Darryl F. Zanuck entered a projection room. The secretary would call the projectionist when the studio boss was on his way, and he would then buzz the theater when Zanuck entered the outer corridor. Everyone stood up for Zanuck's entrance and waited until he was seated before sitting down. When Zanuck took his seat on the afternoon he was to see the Norma Jeane Dougherty test, Ben Lyon sat down uneasily, knowing what was to come.

After the dailies ended, Norma Jeane's silent Technicolor test unexpectedly came on the screen. The room was deadly quiet. When it ended, Zanuck barked, “Who's that girl?”

“Her name's Norma Jeane Dougherty, Mr. Zanuck. She's a model.”

“I don't know her. Did I authorize this test?”

“No, sir,” Lyon said, anticipating a devastating Zanuck tirade.

“It's a damn fine test. Sign her up!”

 

Several days later Norma Jeane rushed to the Goddards' house waving her contract in the air, shouting, “I've got it! I've got it! I'm with the finest studio in Hollywood! They liked my test. I'm actually on the payroll! Look!” Grace Goddard and Norma Jeane embraced and wept with joy.

“I told you, honey!” Grace exclaimed, wiping away the tears. “I said one day you're going to be a movie star! I told you!”

“The people are all wonderful, and I'm going to be in a movie! It'll be different now for all of us,” Norma Jeane exclaimed as she excitedly told Grace all the details about the test. She mentioned that the casting director had suggested “she think up a more glamorous name than Norma Dougherty.”

“Haven't you any ideas for a name?” Grace asked.

“The man at the studio suggested ‘Marilyn,'” she said.

“That's a nice name,” Grace replied. “And it fits with your mother's maiden name. She was a Monroe.”

“That's a wonderful name,” Norma Jeane exclaimed. “Monroe…Marilyn…Marilyn…Monroe…Marilyn Monroe…Marilyn Monroe!” She repeated it over and over and over to herself and wrote it down again and again…

…until it looked comfortable and sounded familiar—like a friend. And she decided it would be the name of the other person.

T
en years after entering the Los Angeles Orphans' Home, orphan number 3,463 became Marilyn Monroe. Reborn on August 24, 1946, in the 20th Century-Fox legal department, she entered the celluloid world of dreams as a starlet earning seventy-five dollars a week, “subject to the terms of a seven-year contract, hereinbefore amended with options of the aforesaid agreement and subject to renewal, as herebefore agreed.”

For the wide-eyed starlet it was like being a refugee escaping to the promised land, and the rolling hills of 20th Century-Fox became her adopted home. Though she wasn't required to be at the studio every day, she regularly attended the studio classes in voice, acting, and dance. In the hairdressing department she learned the tricks of being a blonde, and heard the latest hair-curling studio gossip. Visiting the editing rooms and soundstages, she learned the boiler-room mechanics of the Fox film factory. Allan “Whitey” Snyder, who first met Marilyn at Fox in 1946, recalled that she was “desperate to absorb all she could.”

Everyone seemed to notice the attractive and personable new starlet except the head of the studio, Darryl F. Zanuck. In the fall of 1946, Zanuck was producing
Gentleman's Agreement
, starring Gregory Peck. Di
rected by Elia Kazan, it was to be an award-winning, heartfelt statement about anti-Semitism. At the same time Zanuck was supervising postproduction of
The Razor's Edge
and
The Late George Apley
. He was the overseer of the entire output of the studio, which produced fifty-three films in 1946. Fox had over forty contract players, and Marilyn was only one of a dozen starlets. Zanuck seldom saw a starlet unless it was on the screen or on the chaise of his studio chateau. Seldom seen by the ordinary studio employee, Zanuck was a night person. Marilyn belonged to the day.

Studio publicist Roy Craft was sent to interview Marilyn and put together a brief bio for the studio files. He recalled being deeply moved by her Dickensian story concerning the orphanage and the series of foster homes. Grace Goddard had advised Marilyn not to reveal her mother's history of mental illness. And so Marilyn told Roy Craft what she once suspected to be true in her early days at the orphanage—that her mother was dead.

At the time of the interview, however, Gladys was staying with Marilyn at Aunt Ana's. Shortly after Marilyn had signed her Fox contract, Berniece and her daughter Mona Rae came to visit for several months. It was the first time Berniece had seen her mother since they said good-bye in Kentucky in 1923.

According to Berniece, there was always friction between Marilyn and her mother, who frequently was argumentative and critical of her daughter. “I keep telling myself,” Marilyn confided to her half sister, “that mother will act better when she has been on the outside longer. I still feel as if we're strangers. I'm still trying to get acquainted with her. When I went to see her in Portland, I drove up there thinking it would be a joyful occasion—all those years I had waited and wished…but then she was so cold. I felt so let down.” Berniece noted that Marilyn went to great lengths to try and heal the relationship and was ingeniously inventive in trying to divert Gladys's urge to be argumentative. But Marilyn ultimately confided to Berniece, “Mother and I could never live together.”

Shortly after Berniece and Mona Rae ended their visit, Gladys moved from the Nebraska Avenue apartment she shared with Marilyn and returned to Oregon with an itinerant salesman, John Stewart Eley, whom she later married. In the fall of 1946, Marilyn moved from Aunt Ana's to a rented room in the Hollywood Hills on Temple Hill Way. It would be one of many rooms and small apartments she would live in during the difficult years of her early career.

In her first weeks as a Fox starlet, Marilyn occasionally met with the young Ohio journalist, Bob Slatzer, who was a fountain of film lore. He took her to Hollywood landmarks and loaned her books to fill her insatiable appetite for knowledge. Slatzer recalled that one Sunday they visited the old John Barrymore estate on Tower Grove, which had been put up for auction after Barrymore's death. The fifty-five-room mansion had fallen into decay, but it still contained many relics from Barrymore's eclectic collections—totem poles, shrunken human heads, armor, paintings, and stuffed rare birds. Slatzer remembered that Marilyn found the sight of the stuffed birds distressing, and that she quickly tuned in to the tragedy that lingered in the halls of the Barrymore estate. When they visited the room where Barrymore had lain near death, hemorrhaging from the ravages of alcoholism, Marilyn said, “This place is a nightmare of everything that went wrong with a man.” Slatzer observed that Marilyn was instinctively repelled by possessions, and when they drove out of the rusting Barrymore gates, she remarked, “I never want to own anything pretentious in my life—especially not a big home.” She then blurted out, as if Norma Jeane were making a vow to Marilyn Monroe, “Remember that you're here for just a little while. And don't you damn well forget it!”

Slatzer left Los Angeles in September to resume his college studies in Ohio, but he was determined to return to Hollywood to pursue his career and learn more about the fascinating creature who had stumbled into his life in the lobby of 20th Century-Fox.

In November, Marilyn played her first bit part, as a telephone operator in
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim
. Because she's barely seen the film is seldom mentioned in her filmographies; nevertheless, it was her first professional motion-picture experience.

Reminiscing about her early days at Fox, Marilyn recalled attending a party at the home of agent Charles Feldman, whose Famous Artists Corporation was one of the top agencies in Beverly Hills.

Despite George Sanders's ennui, Charlie Feldman was known for giving some of the best parties in Hollywood. Originally a New Yorker, Feldman knew Joe Kennedy, and it was through the Kennedy family connection that Jack's friend Chuck Spalding was working for Feldman at Famous Artists in 1946. When Jack Kennedy went to Hollywood on his “hunting expeditions” he was often a guest at the Feldman house, and he was dating two of Feldman's clients, Gene Tierney and Peggy Cummins. According to Feldman's ex-wife, Jean Howard, Kennedy stayed at Feldman's
house in 1946, and Chuck Spalding's wife, Betty, confirmed that it was Charlie Feldman who introduced Jack Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe.

By Christmas of 1946 Marilyn had performed as a bit-extra in only two films, and she soon realized that one of her problems at Fox was that the studio had too many blondes. Betty Grable was the star of the lot, and June Haver and Vivian Blaine were already being groomed for stardom. As the superfluous blonde, Marilyn rode on floats, appeared at premieres with studio dates, did grand openings of supermarkets, and posed for photos, but she didn't see her name on the call sheets. Discouraged, she turned to Ben Lyon and said, “What do I do to become a star, Ben? Tell me how to become a star!” Lyon detected the tone of raw determination in her voice. “She had her heart set on becoming the queen of the lot,” Lyon reflected. “Fox had become a home to her, a replacement for the family she never had.” He advised her to be patient and study. But among the aging bit players, Marilyn noted many who
had
studied and
had
been patient.

In the hair-raising studio gossip mill, Marilyn undoubtedly heard the wave of stories about the seventy-year-old Fox studio czar, Joe Schenck. One of the founding fathers of Hollywood, Schenck had been convicted of perjury during government investigations into bribes he and other studio bosses had paid to Willy Bioff, Johnny Rosselli, and union racketeers connected with the Mafia. Schenck served a six-month prison term at Danbury in 1942. But in 1947, as an executive at 20th Century-Fox, he still wielded considerable power in the film capital.

Schenck had a shrewd eye for business and a connoisseur's eye for attractive women. In his waning years he maintained his keen appreciation of the feminine mystique and collected beautiful young specimens who raised his flagging spirits—if nothing else. Among the studio gossips they were known as “Schenck's girls,” young beauties who congregated at Schenck's Holmby Hills Mediterranean mansion for cocktails, dinner, screenings, and card parties.

In early 1947, Joe Schenck was driving from the Fox lot when his limousine encountered an exotic
rara avis
wiggle-walking across a studio street. Perhaps it was more than coincidence that she happened to be wiggling by at the propitious moment and gave Schenck a wide-eyed smile. Telling his chauffeur to stop the car, Schenck motioned Marilyn over and asked her name. Learning that she was a contract player, and knowing that contract players were usually hungry, he ensnared the beautiful creature with the suggestion, “Why don't you call me about dinner-
time?” and handed her a card with his home number. If, as Ben Lyon stated, Fox had become Marilyn's surrogate home, then Joe Schenck became her surrogate father. Within weeks she became one of Schenck's girls, and a regular at his dinner parties.

Marion Wagner, who had known Marilyn from the Blue Book modeling days, was also one of Schenck's girls, and she vividly recalled those evenings when Schenck's limousine brought the girls up to his elegant mansion at 141 South Carolwood Drive. After cocktails and dinner they'd either see a movie in his private projection room or play cards. “He used to get a kick out of backing us when we played gin rummy against his male pals, and if we won it pleased him,” Marion Wagner remembered. “He was like a father figure, a father confessor, a very wise, lovely old man. When the evening was over, I would simply be taken home in the limousine, and so far as I know it was the same for Marilyn.”

Among the card sharks and male pals were mafiosi Johnny Rosselli and Bugsy Siegel, and Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn. Rosselli, Siegel, and Cohn were associated with Schenck in a number of Los Angeles Mafia gambling operations as well as partners in the Aqua Caliente Race Track in Baja California. Siegel dropped out of the game when he was fatally shot in the eye at his home on June 22, 1947.

Soon it was Marilyn Monroe who was the subject of the studio gossip mill. “The first fame I achieved was a wave of gossip that identified me as Joe Schenck's girl,” Marilyn lamented. “Mr. Schenck had invited me to his Holmby Hills mansion for dinner one evening. Then he fell into the habit of inviting me two or three evenings a week. I went to Mr. Schenck's mansion the first few times because he was one of the heads of the studio. After that I went because I liked him. Also the food was very good, and there were always important people at the table—Mr. Schenck's personal friends. The fact that people began to talk about me being Joe Schenck's girl didn't annoy me at first. But later it did annoy me. Mr. Schenck never so much as laid a finger on my wrist, or tried to. He was interested in me because I was a good table ornament and because I was what he called an ‘offbeat personality.'…I liked sitting around the fireplace with Mr. Schenck and hearing him talk about love and sex. He was full of wisdom on these subjects, like some great explorer. I also liked to look at his face. It was as much the face of a town as of a man. The whole history of Hollywood was in it.”