by Lois Banner
Before the war blonde actress Carole Landis had been a favorite of his. Evidence suggests that she may have rejected him, angering him in the process. Whatever happened, she became known as the “studio slut” and was demoted to “grade B” movies.50 It was after that episode and his experiences in Europe that Zanuck turned to dark-haired women.
Zanuck was a major Hollywood producer. He returned to the film business after serving in Europe during World War Two, and he then made movies about social issues, including Gentleman’s Agreement, about anti-Semitism, and Pinky, about racial discrimination. Yet he realized that Fox, with its major market in rural areas, needed to make lightweight entertainment. Instead of casting Marilyn in serious films, he designated her as the next Betty Grable, whose musicals had brought in millions of dollars of revenue to the studio. From the beginning of Marilyn’s career in films, he would be her antagonist, engaging in an epic struggle with her.
In mid-August, while Norma Jeane, still modeling, was waiting for her Fox contract, her half-sister Berniece and her daughter, Mona Rae, arrived from Florida for a long visit. They displaced Norma Jeane, moving in with Gladys in the bottom apartment in Ana Lower’s duplex. Norma Jeane moved into the Hollywood Studio Club for a time, before returning to Ana’s duplex to share the upper apartment with Ana. Once again Norma Jeane was involved in a scheme to re-create Gladys’s family. Berniece talked of moving permanently to Los Angeles so that all of them could live together. Norma Jeane seemed enthusiastic over this prospect. In September, when Jim returned from his last tour of duty, he went to see Norma Jeane in her apartment about the divorce papers. There are differing stories of what happened at that meeting. According to Jim, Norma Jeane told him that she wanted to stay married to him while she pursued her acting career, and he refused. Marilyn told Arthur Miller that Jim wanted to have sex with her before he would sign the divorce papers.51 Perhaps he thought that such intimacy would change her mind. Both stories sound plausible; divorce is never easy. Nonetheless, Jim signed, and the divorce was final. When Norma Jeane received her divorce papers, she celebrated with Ana, Grace, Gladys, Berniece, Mona, and other female Goddard family members at a local restaurant. They seemed like a united family of women, toasting one of their members now free of a husband.
But the arrangement ended after several months. After years of institutionalization, Gladys had difficulty living with other people. Wearing her white nurse’s uniform, continually reading Science and Health, she had become fixated on geographic freedom and escape, and she frequently moved her residence. One day she moved out, stating that she wanted to be on her own. Then Berniece’s husband decided he didn’t want to move to Los Angeles, and he asked her to come home. Berniece, a dutiful wife, returned to him sooner than she had planned. Their community of women fell apart. Norma Jeane remained living with Ana until the spring of 1947. Then, at the age of twenty-one, she finally left the foster families of her childhood, while continuing to re-create them in various forms for much of the rest of her life.
Part II
Hollywood, 1946–1955
I knew how third-rate I was. 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.
Marilyn Monroe, My Story
Chapter 5
Storming the Citadel, 1946–1951
By 1946 Twentieth Century–Fox was the top Hollywood studio, with four thousand employees, sixteen soundstages, and seventy-five films in production. Central buildings housed makeup, publicity, wardrobe, photography, and administration. The architecture was utilitarian, softened by lawns and palm trees, but the three-hundred-acre back lot—the site of Century City today—contained a fantasyland, where the sets of Fox’s legendary films, looking like “oases” in a “heavenly” landscape, along with ghost towns, mountains, and a large lake, stood. It was a place for walking and for dreaming, of other times and places, of the past and future of Hollywood.1
Despite rivalries and tensions, endemic to the studios, Fox had a family feeling. Everyone ate lunch in the commissary; the guards at the gate knew everyone’s name. Workers played in a baseball league and put on amateur theatricals; the older film cutters and grips knew Gladys and Grace, and some had met Marilyn as a child. They considered her one of their own. They gave her their support; sometimes they gave her acting tips they had learned from long experience on film sets. Marilyn was close to Hilda, the Fox wardrobe mistress, and she would visit the wardrobe department to daydream among the silks and satins there, exploring the Hollywood history they contained. Marilyn knew the contents of every closet and who had worn what in what movie. Even as a star she borrowed clothes from the Fox wardrobe department, especially fancy dresses to wear to premieres and parties.2
After Marilyn signed the Fox contract in August 1946, she was assigned to the contract pool, composed of eighty young women and men who had also signed contracts. They took acting, singing, and movement classes; did walk-on roles; posed for publicity photos and attended public events on behalf of the studio. Yet there was room at the top for only a few. Contract pools, existing at most studios, were an inexpensive way to have beautiful young people on call. Most contract players were let go after a year or so.
During her first year at Fox, Marilyn was a dynamo. She hounded producers, watched films being shot, observed makeup artists at work. She hung out at the publicity department, joking with the publicists, always willing to pose for cheesecake photos. When the studio gate was locked, she whistled loudly, and the publicists let her in. In appreciation for her hard work, they gave her their “eight ball” award, named after the title of their newsletter. She never missed an acting class and was never late. Ben Lyon called her “the most conscientious youngster on the lot.”3 She was cast in several scenes in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!, about a family and several mules, but her scenes were cut. Still, her contract was renewed after six months, in February 1947.
In publicity materials issued about her, Fox publicists claimed she had been discovered while babysitting the children of a studio executive. The story was absurd, but she may have been under consideration for the ingenue role in Sitting Pretty, a comedy starring the amusing and avuncular Clifton Webb as an aging babysitter. She wasn’t cast in the role, but she visited Webb on the set of the film, in production that summer, and they became friends. They liked each other’s humor; both had a dry, self-deprecating wit. Homosexual in orientation, Webb didn’t come on to her—a welcome relief. A major Fox star, he did what he could to promote her career.4
Then she had a lucky break. In June she was sent to study acting at the Actors’ Laboratory in Hollywood, one of the nation’s best acting schools, with an acclaimed theater attached to it that functioned as a showcase for professional actors. A group of Broadway actors lured into films by high salaries founded the Actors’ Lab in 1941 to practice their craft away from studio commercialism. A number of them, like Phoebe Brand and Morris Carnovsky, came from New York from the Group Theatre, established by leftist theater people during the 1930s to produce plays about the working class. Their major playwright was Clifford Odets.5
The Group Theatre members also explored the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre, considered the founder of modern acting. Classic acting—as performed by Sarah Bernhardt, for example—was based on fixed gestures and expressions, codified in manuals and performed dramatically. Today, we would call it “overacting.” Stanislavsky favored a more subtle, realistic style that allowed for individual interpretation. He encouraged actors to create their own version of the characters they played by probing their psyches and their memories of past events that related to the experiences of those characters.
The great twentieth-century acting teachers—including Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg—based their approaches on Stanislavsky’s ideas. (Marilyn eventually studied with both Chekhov and Strasberg.) Chekhov, the nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov, studied with Stanislavsky in M
oscow, but he rejected his mentor’s memory technique to stress intuition, imagination, and a mystical approach in which actors tried to develop a spirituality through which they would project radiance on stage. After founding acting schools in England and New England, he established one in Hollywood in 1942. Strasberg, a member of the Group Theatre, continued to act and teach in New York before he became the head of the Actors Studio in New York in 1951. He adopted and refined Stanislavsky’s memory system, although he rejected Chekhov’s mysticism.6
The Actors’ Lab took an eclectic approach to acting. Following standard practice, its teachers taught students exercises for relaxation, body control, and proper breathing. Students also did improvisations. Phoebe Brand had her students act out the meaning of a word, for example, or what they did after getting up in the morning. They read texts and performed scenes from plays. They were introduced to Stanislavsky and Chekhov, although lab teachers were critical of them. Many of the teachers were social realists from the Group Theatre, and they didn’t like Chekhov’s mysticism. They also downplayed Stanislavsky’s memory exploration as a way of creating a character because Lab students included World War Two veterans funded by the G.I. Bill, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, then called shell shock) because of terrible battle experiences. If they fully unlocked their memories, they might break down. The Lab teachers wanted to avoid that possibility.
Marilyn learned about acting at the Lab, while at the Lab theater she saw exciting productions of plays like Odets’s Awake and Sing. “It was my first taste of what real acting in real drama could be, and I was hooked. It was as far from Scudda-Hoo as you could get.” With ties to Broadway, the Lab teachers had luminaries like Elia Kazan lecture when they were in Hollywood. Marilyn began to regard Broadway as a mecca for actors. She thought a lot about the “far, far-away place called New York, where actors and directors did very different things than stand around all day arguing about a closeup or a camera angle.”7
She also met African-American actors at the Lab, which was boldly progressive in that racist era in admitting students of color. She became friends with Dorothy Dandridge, later a star dubbed the “black Marilyn Monroe” because she looked like Marilyn. Through Dandridge she met other black performers, like Sammy Davis Jr., and she began studying voice with Phil Moore, Dandridge’s coach and lover, a wellknown jazz artist and voice coach. During this time Marilyn had an affair with a black man. They didn’t meet in public, Marilyn said, because they were too scared. “I used to sort of sidle into his room when nobody was looking. We liked each other. But it couldn’t last in those conditions. It was like trying to love someone in jail.”8
While studying at the Actors’ Lab, she met influential columnist Sidney Skolsky—either on the Fox lot or at Schwab’s Pharmacy, located in front of the Lab on Sunset Boulevard. Skolsky spent a lot of time at Schwab’s, plugging the drugstore in his column in return for being given an office there. Lab students and aspiring film actors also hung out at Schwab’s, since the food was cheap and regulars could run a tab and read the trade sheets for free. A dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, Skolsky didn’t drive a car. In return for a line in his column, young actors who owned cars chauffeured him. In the 1930s he had written up unknown players like Carole Lombard and Betty Grable, who became stars. Marilyn owned a car and loved to drive; she joined Sidney’s pool of drivers.9
Lab students also discussed acting and politics at Schwab’s. Marilyn learned about the Lab’s leftist views and about the anticommunist movement that was sweeping the nation. By 1947 Hollywood was the major target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and studio leftists were being called to Washington to testify before the committee about Communism in their industry. To avoid being jailed they had to “name names” of Communists they knew to the committee. Even being summoned by HUAC to testify could ruin a career. Focused on her acting, Marilyn wasn’t much interested in politics at that point. But she had a strong sense of justice and fair play, and she identified with the working class and the underdog.
In August 1947 Darryl Zanuck didn’t renew her contract after the first-year review, even though early that month she had done well in a bit part as a waitress in The Dangerous Years, a film about juvenile delinquents. Unfortunately for her, it was a B movie without much cachet. Zanuck still didn’t think much of her acting, and there were plenty of blondes in the contract pool. Besides, the teachers at the Actors’ Lab weren’t impressed by her. Phoebe Brand found her shy and insecure, without much promise. But Marilyn didn’t give up. After she was dismissed from Fox, she took to her bed for a week, deeply depressed, but she rallied, following her characteristic pattern of energetic recovery after deep depression. She continued at the Lab, paying for the classes herself. She explored the local small theater scene. In the fall of 1947 she played the blonde vamp in Glamour Preferred, a hackneyed comedy at the Bliss-Hayden Theater. Lela Bliss-Hayden, who managed the theater, remembered Marilyn as “a nice little girl” with modest talent, although she cast her in several plays in succeeding years.10
Marilyn supported herself through modeling, found wealthy men to pay for clothes and meals, haunted producers’ offices, and was employed as a studio “floater.” Roddy McDowall met her when she was a “pacer” at Columbia, doing his dancing steps on the sidelines to keep him on target. She never spoke to him. When he asked someone why she didn’t talk to him, he was told that Marilyn didn’t like men because everyone tried to “lay” her.11 To further her career, however, she had sex with influential men. She resorted to the legendary casting couch, which actually exited in the 1950s.
During her year at Fox as a contract player and even after Zanuck dropped her in August 1947, Marilyn entertained important out-of-town visitors, serving as a “party girl.” Not all contract players did this. Marion Marshall and Felice Ingersoll Early told me they had nothing to do with this part of the business, although Felice also said that she was nowhere near as ambitious as Marilyn. Marilyn was an easy mark. She had appeared nearly nude in men’s magazines. A divorced woman, she was regarded as sexually awakened and eager for sex, and she couldn’t claim that she was saving her virginity for a husband—a common goal for young unmarried women in the 1950s. The sexual abuse she had endured as a child had programmed her to please men. And she didn’t have an assertive mother to protect her, or an upper-class background or Broadway acting experience to impress studio executives. According to Fox star actress Gene Tierney, these three attributes, which she herself possessed, kept her off the “casting couch.”12
Actress Jean Peters was in the Fox contract pool with Marilyn. She remembered Marilyn wearing a baby blue angora sweater, a straight white skirt, and white pumps. She looked adorable in the outfit, Peters said. That was the innocent Marilyn. Peters described the studio pool as like a college dormitory, filled with respectable young women. She failed to mention that Hollywood men called it “the stable.” Designer Oleg Cassini, one of a group of rakes known as the Wolf Pack, found his major source of “horseflesh” (women) at studio commissaries. Starlets, Marilyn included, paraded informally at the commissaries at lunchtime, showing off their bodies and hoping to catch a producer’s eye. One day at lunch, Ben Lyon chided Marilyn for wearing a pink angora sweater without a bra. “Marilyn,” he said, “I tell you all the time, there are some very important people in this commissary. Why don’t you dress better?” Marilyn delivered a typical double entendre to a companion: “I guess Ben doesn’t like pink.”13
Sidney Skolsky called the contract pools “harems” for studio executives and out-of-town visitors. Marilyn told Lee Strasberg that she had served as a “call girl” for visiting executives, and she told Colin Clark and Jaik Rosenstein that she had slept with producers to get ahead. She told W. J. Weatherby, “I was never kept; I kept myself. But there was a period when I responded too much to flattery and slept around too much, thinking it would help my career, though I always liked the guy at the time.” In My Story she called Holly
wood “an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.” John Springer, head of magazine publicity at Fox, was appalled by how the executives treated her. “She was just their nutsy little blonde that they would fix up with the visiting bigwigs.” Mike Cowles, Look’s publisher, visited the Fox studio in 1946. A studio executive said to him, “We have a new girl on the lot with something unusual. Instead of sticking straight out, her tits tilt up.” (That, in fact, was true of Marilyn.) The executive sent for Marilyn, who came in smiling. He lifted her sweater to show what he meant. “She never stopped smiling.”14
Pat DiCicco, a leader of the Wolf Pack, now entered Marilyn’s life. Tall, dark, and handsome, with a sophomoric wit and a cool demeanor, DiCicco resembled Dean Martin. Hollywood men liked him: he was good at gin rummy and poker and always ready for a game. He charmed Gloria Vanderbilt into marriage, but she divorced him after he physically abused her. The source of his money was obscure; he was rumored to be a Mafia plant, a talent agent, or Howard Hughes’s procurer for the “harem” of women he kept in apartments after signing them to contracts. He bought RKO in the spring of 1948. DiCicco kept an address book with the telephone numbers of “available” starlets, including Marilyn, which he shared with other Hollywood men. Along with the rest of the Wolf Pack, his name often appeared in the gossip columns as the date of a starlet.15
DiCicco was a regular at Sam Spiegel’s mansion in Beverly Hills, where Marilyn sometimes went. A refugee from Hitler’s Austria, Spiegel was a talented salesman, a gifted poseur, and a stellar poker player. He held a weekly salon at his mansion and a famed New Year’s Eve party that in 1947 drew seven hundred guests, including call girls. Backed by his wealthy friends, Spiegel became a producer, most notably of The African Queen.16
