by Nancy Bacon
I remember one evening with Marilyn that was pretty typical of her when she was feeling good. We were at a restaurant in Malibu, sitting at the bar as we waited for our table. The bartender kept staring at Marilyn and finally he walked over and said, ‘Aren’t you Marilyn Monroe?’
Marilyn’s eyes grew round and she shook her head from side to side. I was afraid that she was going to have one of her stammering attacks where she would be so frightened of someone that she was literally unable to speak. But she surprised me. She began giggling and reached out and grasped the bartender’s hand, laughing out loud now, and said, ‘Oh, wow! Thank you! Hey, Nancy, did you hear what this guy said? He thinks I look like a movie star. Isn’t that a scream?’
‘She putting me on?’ the bartender asked. ‘She’s Marilyn Monroe, ain’t she?’
‘People usually tell me that I look like Mamie Van Doren or Marie MacDonald,’ Marilyn said, giving me a wink.
‘Well,’ he said coolly, miffed that he had been wrong. ‘You could pass for that Monroe dame and that’s the truth.’ He gave her a closer look and added, ‘I think she’s got a few pounds on you, though.’
Marilyn and I laughed all through dinner at that one. It was to happen several more times when I was out with her. She was at her best when pretending not to be Marilyn Monroe.
However, when we were sitting together alone and having a vodka or three, she was painfully and acutely the tragic Marilyn Monroe that she had invented as an escape from being the lonely Norma Jean Baker. She found that no matter what name she called herself, the scars of a malnourished and loveless childhood was to plague her to the bitter end.
I talked with her two and a half weeks before she died and I knew that she was having terrible problems. It had nothing to do with her career (which was going well) or her physical well-being (she was the slimmest and prettiest and healthiest I had ever seen her) or men (there was no one man that she was in love with)—it had to do with the inner Marilyn or Norma Jean. There were life-long battles taking place inside her skull and heart that only an analyst could have known how to handle.
I was shocked at how nervous she had become. Her hands were constantly moving, plucking at a thread on the sofa, smoothing her skirt, fiddling with her hair, and she stammered more often and her voice was a weak whisper as if she were frightened to speak out loud for fear I would reprimand her. She seemed vague and fuzzy as if she had lost her equilibrium, and her life during that period was like an out-of-focus picture.
Poor little Marilyn, she was an innocent victim of her parents’ neurosis. Born illegitimate, she never saw her father, and her mother’s guilt and inability to cope with or really love the child drove her to search for the ever-elusive perfect love. Hers was an endless quest toward a mystical goal.
Maybe she sensed the end was near, but she did not kill herself. I fully believe that, because she was too frightened of life to end it. She was not strong enough or brave enough to commit suicide. I can almost see what took place that night she died as clearly as if I had been in the bedroom with her. She was alone (again), drinking (still), worried about the future, wanting more than anything a husband, a strong man in her life to protect her and listen to her dreams, and she couldn’t find one. She saw all her woman friends and other actresses with their strong, handsome, successful husbands and their beautiful children, and she felt worthless and soiled and didn’t think she deserved anything good because she was no good. The men she wanted always belonged to someone else; they would never belong to her because she wasn’t worthy. She was too kind and sweet to be jealous of the wives of the men she coveted. She envied them and thought they deserved those wonderful men that she couldn’t have. I had seen her in such moods, had heard her speak similar words, and that’s the way it must have been that sultry August evening when there was no one there to hear her cry for help.
She was afraid of being alone, weary of problems, and sleep wouldn’t come with her brain so full of her unhappiness. She would take a couple of sleeping pills, just to relax her and allow her to drift off to sleep. But sometimes the little red devils turn on a person and instead of giving them the oblivion they seek, they wire them and keep the thoughts churning, but on a more lethargic depressed level. Nothing to do but take a couple more, after all, they’re strong and the doctor said they would give her relief. And, while waiting for the pills to take effect she had to have something to occupy her mind. A drink. Fixing a drink would keep her busy for awhile and sitting down to drink it would take up even more time—time for the pills to work and blessed sleep to come.
Sleep did come—but not the dawn.
no rainbow for judy
In Hedda Hopper’s book, The Whole Truth and Nothing But, she stated: ‘Our town worships success, the bitch goddess whose smile hides a taste for blood. She has a habit, before she destroys her worshippers, of turning them into a spitting image of herself. She has an army of beauties in attendance at her shrine.
‘Not many survive the encounter with success. Wreathed in smiles, she kills them in cars, like Jimmy Dean; or with torment, like Marilyn Monroe; or with illness, like Jean Harlow. She turns them into drunkards, liars, or cheats who are as dishonest in business as in love.’
How astute is Miss Hopper’s observation. I, too, have seen the bitch goddess, success, turn nice people into sick, ravaged, tormented souls who end up enjoying nothing of what they gave so dearly to obtain. Judy Garland was one such person. Her burning ambition for success finally consumed her. She was one of those child stars on the MGM lot back in the days of Louis B. Mayer. She was not cute, even as a child. She was chubby, short, stocky, with enormous round eyes under straight, dark brows. Mayer never liked Judy (whom he referred to as ‘that fat kid, Garland’) because he didn’t think she was pretty enough to be a star.
His taste ran to the Shirley Temple look and he had under contract one of the most successful young girls of that era, Deanna Durbin. However, someone at MGM made the mistake of letting Deanna’s contract lapse and she was whisked away by Universal Studios where she became an even bigger star and was given the honor of leaving her footprint in the cement at Graumann’s Chinese Theater. This burned Judy up almost as much as it did Mayer. Judy moaned that she had been in show business longer than Deanna and still hadn’t had a starring role; Mayer swore to get even with Universal by making Judy a bigger star than Deanna.
That’s where it all started.
The shrewd mogul gave orders to the MGM commissary not to serve Judy anything but ‘cottage cheese and chicken soup—no matter what she orders!’ And soon the diet pills started. Not believing that the American public could fall in love with a chubby little girl, he set out to make her a skinny little girl. In fact, Judy was not even the first choice for her most popular movie role as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. They had wanted Shirley Temple hut her studio (20th Century Fox) would not release her. Grudgingly, the role was given to Judy, and she has been a superstar ever since.
She was still a child when the vicious cycle of Seconal and Benzedrine started. Determined to keep her name up in lights, she worked herself into near collapse and gulped diet pills for energy and to curb her appetite. At night, too exhausted to sleep, she would pop a Seconal and fall into bed and let unconsciousness take over. It was a pattern that was to follow her throughout her life.
She made one musical after another at MGM in those early days, working long, hard hours, driving herself into a frenzy of perfection, sometimes so dead tired she would faint at the end of the day’s shooting. By the time she had reached her twenties, she was so thin and haggard-looking she appeared much older than her years. She was, by this time, addicted to Benzedrine and took them simply because she could not do without them. Friends tried to encourage her to eat but she would not—or could not.
Hers was a constant battle to be number one. Even when she had obtained ‘living legend’ status, she was not content. She relentlessly drove herself to be better—and then never believed that she was a
ny good at all. She wanted desperately to be beautiful and she just simply was not. Her early life at MGM, under the heavy-handed rule of Mayer, ruined her forever. What an evil man he must have been. I can think of at least twenty stars that he destroyed with his cruelty and stupidity. Thank God the era of the all-powerful movie mogul is dead and gone.
I met Judy in London when I was there with Jim Henaghan and I found her a most enchanting and delightful person. That time Jim took me to see Judy’s performance at the Palladium, as I watched (and wept) with everyone else in that huge theater, I found myself feeling great empathy for the slight, nervous figure up there behind the footlights. She seemed too frail to handle this onslaught of raw emotion that she was conjuring up as surely and deftly as if she were a sorceress.
There was something of the sorceress about Judy. She had the amazing ability to make hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world love her wholly and without reservation and to forgive her every indiscretion; but she could not keep the love of just one good man. She was so famous that the name Judy was all that was needed to sell a million records or fill the Hollywood Bowl to overflowing. In fact, the evening she appeared at the Hollywood Bowl it was cold and dreary and the rain poured down, but not one person seemed to notice or to care. They sat spellbound while their little star, the rainbow girl who believed in magic, spun tales of hope and love for them. I think she made people really believe in bluebirds and miracles and dreams that came true.
It’s sad that she did not believe hard enough herself. She never thought she was any good and strove toward a perfection that was unattainable because she had already attained her perfection without quite realizing it. Her fans realized it. They knew they were witnessing greatness whenever she stepped onstage and threw back her head and played that tiny silver microphone like a solid gold trumpet.
Her personal life was as tragic as Marilyn Monroe’s had been. She had terrible hang-ups about her mother that haunted her all her adult life. She was so hooked on pills and booze by the time she was thirty that it would have taken a much stronger person than herself to kick the habit of a lifetime.
I saw her several times after that first meeting in London. One time she would be reed slim, hands shaking, eyes blinking, nervous as hell, unhappy—the next time she would be fat, dumpy, the pounds settling on her small frame like so much unkneaded dough, her eyes almost disappearing into the bloated folds of flesh, still unhappy but not giving a damn. I felt so sorry for her.
Her problem was no different from Marilyn’s or Elizabeth’s. She wanted to be in love with a man that was in love with her. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? And yet, every superstar sex symbol I have ever known couldn’t find it. Out of all of them, Elizabeth was the only strong one, the only survivor. Judy’s father had died when she was twelve; she started seeing a psychiatrist at eighteen; and she was married five times. Poor little Judy, who was used to seeing everything she wanted going to somebody else, could not convince herself (or her husbands) that she was worthy of love. So she continued her search for the perfect match, marrying and discarding one man after another until even her own children sneered at her attempts. When she was marrying for the fourth time, she allegedly called her daughter, Liza Minnelli, and invited her to the wedding. Said Liza, ‘Gee, Mom, I’m sorry I can’t make it. But I promise you I’ll come to your next wedding!’
The actor Andre Phillippe, an old friend of mine (and Judy’s) brought her to my house several times during the last years of her life. She looked terrible. She was depressed and shaky and slightly off-center. She drank quite a lot and excused herself frequently to go to the ladies’ room where, I’m sure, she was popping another pill to help her get through the party. (She hid pills in cigarette packs.) I often wondered why she even bothered to go out if it was an effort to maintain just those few hours. She once locked herself in my guest bedroom and stayed there for the duration of the party, coming out only after all the guests and even the caterers had gone home. And yet, she seemed to enjoy herself at my house, I have always loved parties and used to give rather lavish ones that were the talk of the town.
How very sad that our little Judy, the miracle girl who sold hope and magic to millions, didn’t have any left over for herself. She attempted suicide more than once, and finally died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven of an accidental overdose.
vera jane palmer mansfield hargitay cimber
An accurate accounting of Hollywood’s tragic stars would not be complete without Jayne Mansfield’s story. Hers was the most shocking, shameful, and wretched of all. I knew Jayne quite well for several years, and shared both good and bad times with her. She wanted to be a movie star from the time she was a very small girl named Vera Jayne Palmer, growing up in Dallas, Texas, and she used everything within her power to attain that dream.
Jayne hit Hollywood in 1954. She was just twenty-one years old, mother of an infant daughter, Jayne Marie, freshly separated from her young husband, Paul Mansfield, and thoroughly convinced that Hollywood was waiting for her alone. She lost no time. She snared the talents of Jim Byron and told him, ‘I want to be a movie star and I know I’ll need you. Shall we sign a contract?’ Jim knew a good thing when he saw it and immediately put Jayne to work modeling bikinis and posing for every magazine he could think of.
Her first publicity gimmick paid off in spades. It was during the Christmas holidays and Jim came up with a rather unique idea of introducing Jayne to the press. Dressed in an extremely tight, sexy, low-cut gown, she visited the newspaper offices in Los Angeles. Slipping seductively into the columnist’s or editor’s office, she would present him with a bottle of booze, kiss him lingeringly upon the mouth, and wish him a Merry Christmas as she slipped out of the door and into the next office.
The scheme worked—better than even Byron had hoped—and the next day newspapers were filled with photos and descriptions of ‘Hollywood’s latest aspirant.’ That was the beginning of a love affair between Jayne and those hard-nosed types that was to endure a lifetime. Jayne was shrewd enough to realize that she would need these boys in her corner if she was going to crash Hollywood’s golden gates overnight and they knew that they would always get a good, sexy quote and a sexier photograph of the bustiest gal to hit town in a long time. They both got what they wanted.
Jayne had done a few small parts in movies and had had reams of publicity but her big break did not come until she had starred in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? When she returned to Hollywood, 20th Century Fox was waiting with a seven-year contract—and the rest, as they say, is history. She took off like a comet with the release of the screen version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? followed closely by The Girl Can’t Help It. Whatever Jayne wanted, Jayne got. She wanted a handsome Hungarian muscleman, Mickey Hargitay, and the fact that he was married did not stop her. It merely slowed her down. They had to wait for the divorce, but they waited it out together—mostly in bed.
By the late fifties, Jayne was the movie star she had always dreamed of being. Movie stars had to have the proper setting so she purchased a large, rambling, three-acre estate in Beverly Hills, painted it pink, and put Mickey to work refurbishing it in a style befitting a celluloid queen. I visited Jayne and Mickey’s pink palace many times and was always a little in awe of it. It was certainly most grand, if a bit nouveau riche, with ankle-deep white carpets, velvet furnishings, crystal chandeliers dripping icily from every room in the house. Her bathroom was done in mirrored gold tile and held a sunken, heart-shaped bathtub; the floors and walls were carpeted with thick, pink plush and the faucets were twenty-four carat gold. Her bedroom was pink and white with a gigantic, specially made, heart-shaped bed, and a small alcove off to the side (which she called her ‘balling room’) that had a wall-to-wall mattress, and the whole affair, bed, walls, and ceiling were covered in thick, lush pink carpet.
It overlooked the huge, heart-shaped swimming pool which Mickey had built (lovingly) with his own two hands and had even si
gned in gold tiles ‘I Love You, Jaynie’ at the bottom near the steps. (Years after her death, when other tenants bought or rented the pink palace and tried to paint over the tiles, they would mysteriously reappear, refusing to stay covered and out of sight; much like Jayne Mansfield herself.) A large cabana-bar was built alongside the pool with a ceiling-to-floor aquarium built in behind the dark oak bar. The grounds were lush, plush, a garden of Eden, and I think that Jayne sometimes believed that she was the first woman, Eve. She thoroughly enjoyed her success and all that money, saying to me at one time, ‘If you’ve got it, honey, why not flaunt it?’
Downstairs was a huge playroom with the entire walls and stairway covered with literally thousands or photographs and magazine covers of Jayne Mansfield, sex symbol. She had indeed arrived. She should have been happy, but she was not. She was restless, bored with Mickey and her two handsome sons, Mickey Jr. and Zoltan. She fumed and fretted to Jim that her career was not moving ahead fast enough. I can well imagine Jim’s bewilderment. She had taken off like a rocket just a few short years before and was the most photographed and talked about star in the world —even more so than Elizabeth Taylor during that era. In fact, she became angry with her agent, Bill Shiffrin, one day and demanded of her assistant (and my good friend to this day), Raymond (Rusty) Strait, ‘Get me the name of Elizabeth Taylor’s agent!’
She was never satisfied, even as she cooed to the press that she was ‘fabulously happy and very much in love with my husband,’ and went on to prove it by practically raping poor Mickey whenever they were in public. One amusing tale is told of a plane trip they took to New York. They both disappeared into the same bathroom and it wasn’t very long before even the squarest passenger knew what they were doing in there. One flight attendant was to say, ‘The door on the bathroom was actually moving in and out as they bumped against it and I could hear Jayne’s moans of passion.’ They emerged, Jayne radiant as she always was after having sex, and returned to their seats. There they snuggled and cooed until they reached their destination.
