The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (24 page)

 

In February 1947, the studio renewed her contract for another six months at an increased salary of one hundred dollars per week. Several weeks later her name appeared on the call sheets for
Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!
starring June Haver and Lon McCallister. In what is generally considered her screen debut, she played the bit part of Betty, with two words of dialogue: “Hi, Rad!”

“Now just walk up to Miss June Haver, smile at her, say hello, wave your right hand, and walk on. Got it?” Marilyn recalled the assistant director telling her. “The bells rang. A hush fell over the set. The assistant director called, ‘Action!' I walked, smiled, waved my right hand, and spoke. I was in the movies! I was one of those hundred to one shots—a ‘bit player.'”

In the brief scene, June Haver and child actress Natalie Wood are engaged in conversation in front of a small-town church in Paducah. Parishioners are exiting the church behind them. Among them is a pretty young blonde who walks by, turns to Miss Haver and waves as she says, “Hi, Rad!” Miss Haver then responds, “Hi, Betty!” In the next reel there's a scene by a lake where blond Betty is seen in the background with another bit player paddling a canoe.

“There were a dozen of us on the set, bit players, with a gesture to make and a line or two to recite,” Marilyn recalled. “Some of them were veteran bit players. After ten years in the movies they were still saying one line and walking ten feet toward nowhere. A few were young and had nice bosoms. But I knew they were different from me. They didn't have my illusions. My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. With the arc lights on me and the camera pointed at me, I suddenly knew myself. How clumsy, empty, uncultured I was! A sullen orphan with a goose egg for a head. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But my God, how I wanted to learn! To change! To improve! I didn't want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act!”

It would be a long and bumpy ride for blond Betty of Paducah before she arrived at
Bus Stop
.

S
hortly after Shelley Winters hitchhiked from Brooklyn and arived in Hollywood, she began hanging around Schwab's Drugstore on the Sunset Strip because she had heard that it was where Lana Turner had been discovered. Though Lana Turner was discovered elsewhere, it was at Schwab's that Shelley met movie columnist Sidney Skolsky and his chauffeur, Marilyn Monroe.

Winters recalled that when she met Marilyn in 1946, “she was driving Skolsky around to interviews in her old Ford, since he had never learned to drive.” Skolsky was one of the more colorful members of the Hollywood press corps. A diminutive man, he also had a short temper and once fiercely bit columnist Louella Parsons on the arm in a fit of anger during a dinner party at Chasen's.

Though he wasn't afraid of Louella Parsons, Skolsky had many phobias. He was afraid of automobiles, cats, dogs, children, and germs. Perhaps his hypochondria as well as his love of show business led him to establish his office in a drugstore. His balcony office in Schwab's commanded a dramatic view of the Hollywood struggle pit below, which he called the “Schwabadero”—the wanna-bes' Trocadero. The Schwabadero served as
a jitney stop for volunteer drivers who took Skolsky wherever he wanted to go. It was said Skolsky didn't drive because his feet couldn't reach the pedals; however, he was truly afraid of cars. At various times his chauffeurs included almost everyone in the star system—from Marlene Dietrich to Humphrey Bogart to Marilyn Monroe. Shelley Winters recalled that one day Skolsky took Marilyn and Winters out to the parking lot behind the drugstore and pointed to a long low building where his daughter, Stefi, was a drama student. “‘That's the Actors Lab,' he told us. ‘It's the new Hollywood home of the Group Theatre, and some of the best actors in the world teach there!' We almost knocked the poor man down in our rush to get to the front door.”

The Group Theatre had been organized in New York by Hannah Weinstein, executive director of one of the Comintern fronts, the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council. Under its directors Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre presented some remarkably innovative productions in the 1930s:
Success Story
by John Howard Lawson;
Men in White
by Sidney Kingsley;
Awake and Sing
by Clifford Odets. In 1932 the Group presented
Night Over Taos
by Maxwell Anderson, the story of a revolt against landowners. The production starred Morris Carnovsky, J. Edward Bromberg, Phoebe Brand, Clifford Odets, and an attractive young actress, Paula Miller, who would later marry the play's director, Lee Strasberg.

During the thirties, the Group Theatre made no pretense of burying the Marxist message in its presentations—it was loudly projected to the cheap seats by gifted, dedicated artists. Morris Carnovsky and his wife Phoebe Brand became coaches at the Actors Lab, where Marilyn and Shelley Winters studied in 1947. There was a deep dichotomy between the mind-set of the Group Theatre, with its roots in Stanislavsky's Method, and the West Coast endocrine system of acting. Exercises in sense memory, animal improvisations, and searches for motivation were unlike anything Marilyn had previously been exposed to. Anthony Quinn, Lee J. Cobb, Joe Papp, Lloyd Bridges, John Garfield, Larry Parks, and Walter Bernstein were among the talented students. Walter Bernstein would one day become the screenwriter called in by Fox to rewrite
Something's Got to Give
.

Phoebe Brand, one of Marilyn's teachers, remembered her as a self-conscious girl who never spoke up in class. “I never knew what to make of her,” she said. “She didn't tell me what her acting problems were…. I tried to get through to her, but I couldn't. She was extremely retiring.
What I failed to see in her acting was wit, her sense of humor. It was there all the time—this lovely comedic style, but I was blind to it. Frankly I never would have predicted she would be a success.” Joe Papp remembered her as a young girl who came to class with a small dog that sat in her lap. He recalled that she was so shy she barely spoke at all.

Remembering her days at the Actors Lab, Marilyn said, “All I could think of was this far, faraway place called New York, where actors and directors did very different things than stand around all day arguing about a close-up or a camera angle. I had never seen a play, and I don't think I knew how to read one very well. But Phoebe Brand and her company somehow made it all very real. It seemed so exciting to me, and I wanted to be part of that life.”

The list of Actors Lab sponsors was a who's who of Hollywood Stalinism: John Howard Lawson; Alvah Bessie; Ring Lardner, Jr.; Albert Maltz; Dalton Trumbo; Waldo Salt; Donald Ogden Stewart; J. Edward Bromberg; Abe Polonsky. But the majority of students, many of whom attended under the G.I. Bill, were merely ambitious young innocents like Marilyn Monroe who had a fierce determination to learn their craft.

Once, asked how she felt about communists, Marilyn said, “They're for the people, aren't they?” But Marilyn wasn't a political person. Her opinions were opinions of the heart, not dialectics. She didn't take part in the political and artistic arguments that raged in the Actors Lab commissary, at the Schwabadero, or at Greenblatt's Deli across the street. Her golden dreams had little to do with ideology, revolution, or a new social order. Her dreams had to do with the quiet revolution going on within herself.

In May, Marilyn Monroe was cast by Fox in
Dangerous Years
, a B movie produced by Sol Wurtzel. It would be a best-forgotten film of 1947 had Marilyn not played Eve, a waitress in a hangout for delinquent teenagers. She was on the screen for only a few minutes; nevertheless, it was the first real bit part in which she could do a portrayal. Though the director, Arthur Pierson, admired her performance and Ben Lyon saw promise, the studio didn't renew Marilyn's contract when the option fell due in August of 1947.

“I got called into the casting department and informed that I was being dropped by the studio and that my presence would no longer be required,” Marilyn recalled. “I went to my room in Hollywood and lay down in bed and cried. I cried for a week. I didn't eat or talk or comb my hair. I kept crying as if I were at a funeral burying Marilyn Monroe.”

Several days later, she was invited to the Schenck home for dinner, and Marilyn remembered sitting at the dinner table feeling too ashamed to look into anyone's eyes. She remarked,

But the truth was that Harry Cohn was reluctant to put Marilyn under contract until pressure was put on him by Joe Kennedy's occasional golf partner, Johnny Rosselli. There were other odd contingencies to Marilyn's sudden departure from Fox and her new arrangement with Columbia. Though one would conclude from reading Marilyn's account that it all happened very quickly—a matter of a few days and a phone call—actually there was an extended period of time between Marilyn's departure from Fox in August 1947 and her new contract with Columbia in March of 1948. Marilyn dropped from sight for seven months.

Uncharacteristically, there are no known photographs taken of Marilyn from July 1947 until her career resumed in early 1948. Normally she would have been busy modeling and appearing in ads and on the covers of girlie magazines. Some biographers have stated that she performed at the Bliss-Hayden Playhouse in
Glamour Preferred
in October 1947, but there's no advertising, clippings, or programs to document her appearance.
The source of the play date was based on the hazy recollections of the theater manager, Lila Bliss, twenty years later.

At Harry Drucker's barber shop in Beverly Hills—where film moguls and mafiosi talked business, broads, and horses—the hot rumor wafting in the cigar smoke was that Fox had dropped Marilyn Monroe because she was pregnant. The rumor was in later years supported by Marilyn's own revelation to several friends that she had given birth to a baby girl when she was barely twenty, and that the baby had been taken away from her.

When Marilyn lived with Milton and Amy Greene in 1955, she told Amy that she had given birth to a baby when she was barely out of her teens and felt very guilty about letting the baby go for adoption. In 1961 she told her New York maid, Lena Pepitone, about having a baby before she became a film star. “I had the baby—my baby!” Marilyn said to Pepitone. “It was wonderful, but the doctor and the nurse came in with Grace. They all looked strange and said they'd be taking the baby from me…. I begged them, ‘Don't take my baby!'”

During the time Marilyn dropped from sight, she stayed at the San Fernando Valley ranch of Rosselli's Golf and Turf Club buddy, actor John Carroll, who, it was said, looked after Marilyn for Rosselli.

A baby girl born in November of 1947 was placed with the Maniscalcos, a family of Sicilian descent living in Brooklyn. When the girl grew up, she took on the name Nancy Maniscalco Greene and insisted she was the daughter of Marilyn Monroe. Appearing on
Hard Copy
in 1991, she stated that a “pretty woman” used to visit her on Long Island in the late 1950s. She knew the woman as “Mrs. Greene.” Later, Nancy was told by her grandmother that the “pretty woman” was Marilyn Monroe, and that Marilyn was her birth mother. Subsequently, Nancy learned that she had been placed with the Maniscalco family by New York mafia boss, Vito Genovese.

Though Nancy's sincerity on
Hard Copy
was evident, her story was unsubstantiated by documentation and dismissed as another aberration of tabloid television. But Nancy Greene has now become central to the legal arguments and looming court battles over the controversial Cusack papers, which the Kennedy family and
20/20
have dismissed as forgeries.

The Cusack papers comprise over three hundred documents, many of them handwritten, regarding legal matters between Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Allegedly found among the papers of Kennedy attorney Lawrence Cusack, the papers refer to a financial settlement in the form
of a trust to be established for Marilyn's mother, Gladys, and her half sister, Berniece, in compensation to Marilyn Monroe for “wrongs and broken promises” by JFK.

A handwritten document among the Cusack papers, allegedly written by Jack Kennedy in 1960, expresses his concern regarding “Nancy Greene” and that “MM claims to make this public.” Highly respected Kennedy handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, attested that the document is genuine. If so, the implication is that Jack Kennedy was the father.