by Lois Banner
Staking her success on showing off her body, she became attached to it, as though it was her most precious possession. So much else had failed during her childhood. During her preteen years it had seemed as though her body would also be ordinary, but she had gone through an “ugly duckling” phase to turn into a beautiful swan. Like her “magic” red sweater, her body, which women envied and men desired, had also become magical. Yet it must be remembered that Norma Jeane also possessed a streak of prudery, a legacy of her religious upbringing and the influence of her mother. It’s not unusual for complicated individuals to demonstrate opposing behaviors at the same time; Marilyn had to fight against that prudery to turn herself into the greatest sex symbol of her age.
In March 1946, after disreputable talent scouts had approached Norma Jeane for films, Emmeline Snively persuaded talent agent (and Christian Scientist) Helen Ainsworth of the National Concert Artists Corporation to represent Norma Jeane, who signed a contract to represent her. She got Norma Jeane an interview at Paramount, but the executives turned her down. Ainsworth decided to wait until the magazine covers came out to push her again. In the meantime, she assigned Marilyn to Harry Lipton, her assistant.
In April 1946 Jim was sent overseas again, and Gladys acted on the statement she had made when her daughter had visited her with Andre de Dienes the previous December: leaving Portland, she traveled by bus to Los Angeles and moved in with Norma Jeane in Ana Lower’s ground-floor apartment. She seemed better, less agitated and morose, although she still wore her white nurse’s uniform and was obsessed with Christian Science. She helped Norma Jeane, doing her shopping and making her modeling appointments for her. She visited Emmeline Snively and thanked her for her kindness to her daughter, impressing Snively with her ladylike behavior. Apparently Gladys thought Norma Jeane’s modeling was respectable. There was the Family Circle cover, in which Norma Jeane cradled a lamb; the next step, she hoped, was Ladies’ Home Journal. When Jim came home on leave in May, he found Gladys ensconced in the bedroom with Norma Jeane, pushing him out of the marital bed and making it necessary for him to stay at his parents’ home. For the first time he realized that the sweet Norma Jeane could be calculating. Still, he thought they could work things out. It appears that, as usual, she used sex to soothe him.
The magazine covers featuring her were appearing, indicating great success as a model: Family Circle in April; U.S. Camera in May; and Pageant in June. In early July, she filed for divorce in Las Vegas, where another of Grace’s aunts, Minnie Willette, lived. Norma Jeane moved in with Minnie during the six-week residence required for the Nevada divorce. Afraid of Jim’s reaction, she had her lawyer send him a letter informing him of the divorce. It came as a surprise; he was on a riverboat on the Yangtze buying her a camphor chest when he received the letter. He immediately cut off the stipend from his salary she had been sent and waited until he returned in September to confront her.
By July, if not earlier, Norma Jeane was dating other men. They included Bill Pursel, a college student she met in Las Vegas, and Ken Du-Main, an actor she met through another Blue Book model. She read poetry and discussed it with Pursel, as she had with Andre de Dienes. DuMain, who was just a friend, took her to a nightclub in Hollywood featuring impersonator Ray Bourbon. Playing female roles, Bourbon wore elegant women’s clothes, while delivering lines so risqué that the Los Angeles Times reporter who covered him was nonplussed. Norma Jeane liked Bourbon’s humor; she saw how comedy could be created by exaggerating gender roles, playing with femininity as though it were a masquerade.37 It was a lesson she would never forget.
With Norma Jeane on magazine covers, agent Helen Ainsworth contacted the studios again on her behalf. She persuaded Ben Lyon, talent director at Twentieth Century–Fox, to interview her. He met Norma Jeane on July 17 and was impressed. He thought her photogeneity would translate into star power on the screen. She reminded him of Jean Harlow, whom he had discovered twenty years earlier. Ever since Harlow’s death in 1937, Hollywood had hoped to find a replacement for the woman considered to be the screen’s greatest sex goddess. In Lyon’s opinion no one had measured up to her—not Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, or Betty Grable. Lyon decided that Norma Jeane should be given a screen test, which was a necessity before any studio offered an aspiring performer a contract.38
Darryl Zanuck, head of the studio, authorized all screen tests, but since he was out of town Lyon went ahead on his own, testing Norma Jeane at five thirty in the morning on the deserted set of Mother Wore Tights, a Betty Grable movie in production. It was a gamble: Norma Jeane was a successful model, but she had no acting experience. Realizing that lack, Lyon had her do a silent scene, without any dialogue. To ensure quality results, he assembled a group of veteran filmmakers to do the test, including Leon Shamroy, a cameraman who had won several Oscars for cinematography.
Wearing a tight, long, sequined dress, Norma Jeane walked back and forth on the set, sat on a high stool, lit a cigarette, stubbed it out, and walked toward a window. Lyon encouraged her: “I want you to project sex the way you do in the still pictures.” Makeup artist Whitey Snyder agreed with Lyon, although Norma Jeane spoke harshly to him at first. The docile Norma Jeane was becoming more forceful. She demanded that he replicate the makeup she applied to herself as a model, even though he told her it was too heavy for films. But he did what she demanded—and Shamroy chastised him for a bad makeup job.
Norma Jeane heard the reprimand, and it set off her nervousness. She began to stutter, and her face broke out in red splotches. Whitey calmed her, telling her she wouldn’t have to speak in the scene, that it would be just like modeling. He had her wash off the makeup, and he made her up properly. She never forgot his kindness: several years later she recruited him as her personal makeup man, one of a group of loyal assistants she assembled. In control of herself after Whitey’s intervention, she performed the scene, thrilling the men who were present. Shamroy saw Norma Jeane’s potential. “She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson,” he enthused, “and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow.” But she “didn’t have that wriggle in the ass and the mouth open that she later had,” Shamroy said.39
Lyon screened the test for Darryl Zanuck, but Zanuck wasn’t that impressed. He was also put off by her lack of acting experience. It was an iffy proposition to sign a pinup model to a contract, since the Motion Picture Production Code board might object. He hesitated to sign her up. Then Ainsworth exploited a lucky break. While recuperating from a plane crash, Howard Hughes spent time reading men’s magazines, including the August issue of Laff, with Norma Jeane in the Bruno Bernard yellow bikini on the cover. Hughes had a breast fetish, and he couldn’t miss Norma Jeane’s figure in that bikini. He was a Hollywood maverick who used his considerable fortune to finance his films, and he used film contracts as a ploy to seduce women. He instructed his assistant to sign Norma Jeane.
Hearing of Hughes’s interest, Ainsworth gave the story to Hedda Hopper, who printed a squib in her column stating that Hughes was going to sign Norma Jeane Dougherty. The competition increased Fox’s interest. Norma Jeane signed a contract with Fox on August 24.
The rite of name changing happened next. That was standard after new actors signed a contract. It signaled their rebirth into the world of Hollywood and acknowledged studio control over them. The name Norma Jeane Dougherty wouldn’t do: it wasn’t catchy; it was too long for a marquee. Lyon chose the name Marilyn because he thought Norma Jeane resembled Marilyn Miller, a star of the Ziegfeld Follies to whom he had once been engaged. Norma Jeane chose Monroe because it was a family name.40
Marion Marshall signed a contract the same day. She told me that the studio liked the MM combination because it had a sexy lilt. Thus her name was changed from Marion Tanner to Marion Marshall and the original Norma Jeane Dougherty to Marilyn Monroe. But Norma Jeane didn’t like the name, and she didn’t assume it immediately. On October 22, 1946, she wrote a friend that she thought her name would be Clare Norman. Fellow F
ox starlet Jean Peters suggested that she use the name Meredith, while Carol Lind was the choice for a while. Norma Jeane’s screen name wasn’t finalized until early December. For a number of years she stated in interviews that she didn’t like the name Marilyn Monroe. She said that she had wanted to use her modeling name, Jean Norman.41
Once she had a contract, Norma Jeane faced the next hurdle: she had to learn how to act. Could she translate a skill at posing before a still camera into a skill at acting? It also meant dealing with her stuttering and her anxiety. Encomiums from Ben Lyon, Leon Shamroy, and Whitey Snyder helped cheer her on. There was also Helen Ainsworth’s artful statement to her when she signed with National Concert Artists Corporation in March 1946, which Harry Lipton, present at the interview, remembered. Ainsworth told Norma Jeane that she had possibilities for film. “‘I can tell by your eyes,’ Ainsworth said. Marilyn seemed surprised.” Lipton surmised that many people had told her that her voluptuous body was her ticket to success, not her eyes. But, Lipton concluded, Helen was right. “There was something warm and gentle in Marilyn’s eyes that had nothing to do with sex.”42
Like Ainsworth, Ben Lyon also saw something special in Norma Jeane’s eyes during her screen test. “I want you to see,” he told Louella Parsons, a close friend. So Parsons viewed the test. There it was: fright, sheer fright. “It came out of her eyes and created a feeling of compassion in me that I have never lost.” Patricia Cox, a member of the MGM contract pool under the name Carol Eden, recognized that fear. She had been sexually abused as a child, and her grandmother had been committed to a state mental hospital. That’s what came out of Norma Jeane’s eyes, Patricia said, sadness and fear over the terrible experiences she had undergone as a child that she could never forget.43
Meantime, Norma Jeane had become close to Harry Lipton, who took over from Helen Ainsworth as her agent and remained her agent until 1949. He helped her arrange her divorce from Jim Dougherty; he negotiated contracts for her. Soon after he took over, he was startled to receive a phone call from her in the middle of the night. She couldn’t go to sleep, she said, and she wanted to talk with him about her fears. He talked to her for a while, calming her down. It was the first of many such phone calls he would receive from her. It is also the first example we have of behavior that would become characteristic of Marilyn, as she would call close friends in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep and was lonely or frightened of life and wanted reassurance.44
When Norma Jeane signed a contract with Twentieth Century–Fox, the studio system was much the same as it had been in the 1930s, when Gladys and Grace worked as film cutters. There were still five major studios: Twentieth-Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and RKO; and three minor ones: Columbia, Universal, and United Artists, with smaller enterprises like Republic Studios still existing and independent production companies formed by actors and agents. (In 1935 Fox Pictures had been combined with Twentieth Century Pictures to form Twentieth Century–Fox.) The men who had founded these major studios—the immigrants, largely Jewish, called “the moguls”—were still their chief executives. They were now in their late fifties and their sixties.
The moguls retained control over the industry against the competing forces of television, foreign films, and independent production companies. By 1970 these forces would bring down the studio system, but for several decades the moguls fought them off. Darryl Zanuck at Fox, Harry Cohn at Columbia, and Louis B. Mayer at MGM, the three most powerful studio heads, involved themselves in all aspects of production, including project creation, hiring and firing, writing and editing, casting and costume design, and publicity. Excellent businessmen, they watched over production costs. Sometimes acting as artists, they made A movies with major stars and competed to win Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony each year, a showcase for their artistic intentions.
Their operations were split between production facilities in Hollywood and business offices in New York close to the Wall Street banks that often financed their films. At Twentieth Century–Fox, for example, Darryl Zanuck was head of production in Hollywood and Joe Schenck ran the business operations there. Both Zanuck and Schenck reported to Spyros Skouras, an immigrant from Greece who had risen to the top, and a board of directors in New York. Joe Schenck’s brother, Nicholas, ran the business office in New York for MGM.
Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker published a study of the film industry in 1950, basing it on interviews with three hundred individuals, at all ranks of production. She found the industry filled with tension, with a “constant jockeying for position and power” and an atmosphere like “a gambler’s den.”45 The moguls, legendary in their own right, stood above it. Connected by their Jewishness, they fraternized with each other in country clubs and synagogues. Darryl Zanuck wasn’t Jewish, although he was as driven as the others. They went to the same restaurants and parties, played poker, tennis, and golf with each other, and served on the boards of the racetracks they founded, Santa Anita in Arcadia and Hollywood Park in Inglewood.
They were both competitive and collegial. They exchanged information and sometimes formed a united front. Powdermaker found their power so great that she depicts them as akin to the plantation owners of the antebellum South, with the actors their slaves. They had created one of the most powerful patriarchies in the history of the United States.
In signing a contract, Norma Jeane came up against their power. Decades before, during the consolidation of the late 1920s, the studio heads had gained control over actors and had written that control into the actors’ contracts. Norma Jeane signed a standard beginner’s seven-year contract that stipulated her salary at seventy-five dollars a week, guaranteed for forty-two weeks of each year, with regular raises. Beyond that the studio had complete power. The contract provided for reviews every six months, but the actor had no input into the review, and the studio could fire the actor without cause.
In addition, an actor had no control over the roles he or she was assigned. If an actor refused a role, the estimated time that person would have spent playing the role could be added to the stipulated seven years of the contract. In 1944 Actress Olivia De Havilland successfully challenged this provision in the courts as a violation of the legal limit of seven years in indentured-servitude contracts in the California farm industry, but the studios still applied it. Moreover, the studio received any money that an actor under contract made outside the studio, in television or posing for advertisments, for example. And the studio could “lend out” a player to another studio for a large sum and then pocket the difference between that amount and the actor’s contractual salary.
Softening the rigors of such contracts and further manipulating their actors, the moguls often adopted a fatherly attitude toward their young contract players, sometimes in their teens. They advised them on their careers, soothed them when they were upset, lent them money, and even arranged for abortions. Shirley MacLaine described how they operated. “The moguls,” she wrote, “were hard-fisted authoritarians who had created a system of linked dictatorship. We were the children, to be led, guided, manipulated, bought, sold, packaged, and coddled.” Elia Kazan called them “marvelous monsters.”46
Despite the Motion Picture Production Code, with its restrictions on the open display of sex in movies, Hortense Powdermaker found sex omnipresent in Hollywood. “Sex relations are constantly used by those ambitious to succeed and by the successful in demonstrating their power. There is an obsession on sex in conversation and in print. The whole industry revolves around sex. Despite the Production Code, sexuality is omnipresent on the movie screen, and no one becomes a star without having sex appeal.” Its major manifestation, according to Powdermaker, was the large number of young girls who went to Hollywood hoping to become stars and who used sex as a means of getting ahead.47
Studio executives also manipulated the system to fulfill their sexual desires. Louis B. Mayer was an “old goat” who liked “party girls.” Harry Cohn, called “White Fang,” was
reputed to like kinky sex. The story with regard to Darryl Zanuck was that he had closed down the Fox executive offices every afternoon before World War Two to have sex with a different starlet each day. According to his major biographer, he believed that he needed to bed as many women as possible to maintain his virility.48
Some of these men were short—between five feet and five feet five inches tall, including Zanuck at Fox and Mayer at MGM. They seemed driven by a “Napoleonic complex” that impelled them to boost their egos by having sex with beautiful women who otherwise would have rejected them.49 When Marilyn wore three-inch heels, she was five feet nine inches tall. She must have towered over Zanuck and the others.
Zanuck hadn’t liked Marilyn when he saw her test, and his opinion of her didn’t change over the years. He grudgingly acknowledged that she had a talent similar to Betty Grable’s, but he refused to cast her in dramatic roles. Yet Zanuck had his own issues with blonde women. In the 1930s he mentored blonde actresses Alice Faye, Sonja Henie, and Betty Grable to stardom. Then he became an army officer during World War Two, stationed in Europe. His taste in women changed from blondes to dark-haired Europeans. No less than Marilyn, his childhood may have influenced his choices. He both adored and detested his beautiful blonde mother, who was sexually promiscuous and drawn to rough sex. As a child he heard his stepfather beat her, followed by passionate lovemaking. He grew up a pugilist and a polo player, tough and muscular.
