by Lois Banner
He also set up a “boys’ club” in his mansion, where Hollywood men could play poker and gin rummy nonstop—obsessions among some—and where liquor and “party girls” were available. Spiegel modeled his enterprise after Polly Adler’s upscale New York City bordello, where the sex workers were intelligent and educated. Writer Budd Schulberg called Spiegel “an inspired pimp. He could create those very high-class mush pits. Women were looking for acting jobs and it was a knee up the ladder.”17 Spiegel knew the studio publicists. Harry Brand, head of publicity at Fox, was a link to Marilyn.
Prominent Hollywood men frequented Spiegel’s “boys’ club,” including directors John Huston, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Orson Welles and agents Charles Feldman and Johnny Hyde, eventually agents for Marilyn. (Huston, Wilder, and Preminger later directed her in films.) Evelyn Keyes, Huston’s wife at the time, remembered Marilyn as “one more little blonde with the preferred size tits and a funny walk.” But “party girls” weren’t powerless. They could choose their partners and specify the sex acts they were willing to perform.18
And being a party girl could be fun. Actress Mamie Van Doren stated, “The casting couch did exist, and I did occasionally find myself on it. Many of us who made a career out of the movies did—many, many more than want to admit it. If you are young, healthy, and with the normal set of biological urges, the casting couch can also be fun with the right person.” Columnist Earl Wilson wrote, “She did crazy, naughty, sexy things she probably shouldn’t have.” Director Elia Kazan, later Marilyn’s lover, cautioned her against going to parties with DiCicco. “You’ll never find anyone there except people you despise. In your heart, which is both honest and very perceptive, you despise those jerks.”19
In this milieu, Marilyn became skilled at sex, especially at performing fellatio, which was often the preferred form of sex in Hollywood, since it obviated the need for birth control. It also got around any problem Marilyn had with painful intercourse due to endometriosis. In steam rooms and bars—private male spaces—Hollywood men discussed the performances of the women they bedded. In such male bonding rituals they indulged in a vicarious homoeroticism. In My Story, Marilyn stated that she was suspicious of men she dated who asked her about the sex behavior of her other male companions. She thought their curiosity revealed homosexual inclinations.20
Party girls occupied an ambiguous position. Sexual behavior usually wasn’t questioned in Hollywood, but to be labeled a slut could damage a career. According to Evelyn Keyes, expressing a sentiment Gene Tierney seconded, “Studio men liked it when actresses responded to their sexual overtures. They thought that if they found you fuckable, so would the audience. But they also had to be kept at bay. If they thought you slept around, they wouldn’t give you a job.”21
There were other dangers in playing the sex game. At one party three men as a group tried to rape Marilyn. Moreover, participating in the sex scene could damage a sensitive psyche. There was always the danger of pregnancy and then abortion. (Amy Greene and Paula Strasberg both maintained that Marilyn had as many as twelve abortions.) David Brown, a producer who ran Fox’s story department, stated that party girls often experienced “a certain loss of self-esteem, a feeling of being victimized, and always the desire to please in order to advance a career.” Brown knew Marilyn; his comment might apply to her.22 He might have added that such victimization could also produce anger. Such anger became a constant in Marilyn’s behavior once she became a star.
Marilyn’s work as a party girl was episodic. She compartmentalized her life as she did her friends, living different lives at the same time. She visited Ana Lower and Grace Goddard and occasionally saw foster parents of hers she had liked—the Knebelkamps and the Howells, in particular. She rarely saw Bebe and Nona, whose lives diverged from hers. Bebe got married, had a child, became a housewife, and worked as a waitress. Nona, a contract player at Columbia, was angry with the Goddard family. She turned herself into the film actress Jody Lawrance, a dark-haired tough-girl type. She achieved a measure of fame, but nothing on the order of what Marilyn attained.
Marilyn also had regular dates. In late November 1946, she rode as a Fox starlet on a float in the annual Hollywood Boulevard Christmas Parade. Comic actor Alan Young saw her and asked her out on a date. He picked her up at Ana Lower’s apartment, where she was living. He saw the photo of the Christian Science Mother Church on the living room wall and mentioned that he was a Christian Scientist. Marilyn was overjoyed; for the rest of the evening she talked about how much she liked the religion. They made a connection, but they didn’t go out again. Marilyn also dated Charles Chaplin Jr., a son of the great Chaplin and a fellow student at the Actors’ Lab. Unprepossessing in appearance, emotionally damaged by a rejecting father, Charlie drank too much, but he didn’t take drugs, as has been alleged. Marilyn’s relationship with him was mostly platonic, cuddly more than sexual, which wasn’t unusual for Marilyn, who sometimes craved affection more than sex.
Charlie arrived home one day to find her in bed with his brother Sydney, a Hollywood rake, good-looking and witty, a sometime romantic hero in films. Even after this betrayal she and Charlie remained close friends; she boosted his ego and gave him good advice. Shelley Winters claimed that the four of them (Sydney, Charlie, Marilyn, and she) sometimes doubledated, exploring the Hollywood scene.23
Marilyn also dated Tommy Zahn, a member of the Fox contract pool. An orphan raised in a foster home, he was a Christian Scientist and a world-class surfer—an attractive combination to Marilyn. She went tandem surfing with him at the Santa Monica beach, holding acrobatic poses as he lifted her to his shoulders, performing for the crowd of girls who clustered on the beach and tried to snag surfers (who had become, like bodybuilders, models of masculinity for the nation). Marilyn had once stood on the sidelines to watch the bodybuilders; she was now a performer with the surfers. Peter Lawford, later important in Marilyn’s life, was passionate about surfing. When he appeared on the beach one day, Tommy Zahn introduced him to Marilyn.24
Photographer Bill Burnside, another Marilyn boyfriend, represented the British J. Arthur Rank Company in Hollywood. He met Marilyn at Bruno Bernard’s studio. She liked his learning, and they read Keats and Shelley together and walked on the beach. He was fascinated by her offbeat ways. Scattered in her thinking, she jumped from one subject to another. With sudden mood shifts from “grave” to “gay,” she was sometimes hard to follow. And she wouldn’t talk about her private life. She was wary of men, but she wasn’t sexually frigid. She could be underhanded and sly: she was “dumb like a fox.”25
Marilyn never lost her innocent look and manner, but she developed a cynical side, as she came to feel exploited by the industry and by men. Still, she was always sweet and generous, as she had long been. She easily assumed this persona. Many people who knew her during her early Hollywood years described her as looking like a waif or a kitten, a curious description, since she was five feet eight inches tall in her platform shoes. This estimation of her probably reflected the sweet docility and sometimes tough, tomboy manner that she projected, not her height. MGM costume designer Edith Head said that she looked like a fluffy Persian kitten. Tom Prideaux, entertainment editor of Life, described her as looking like a “street urchin.”26 This was Marilyn the trickster, appealing to people’s sympathy, a Little Orphan Annie doing a Shirley Temple turn. An astute observer of human behavior, Marilyn knew men liked the little-girl look, while it stirred women’s maternal feelings. Femininity and its variations were her stock in trade.
But Marilyn could drop the childlike persona in a heartbeat to become the sexy Marilyn of the pinups or the mature person that Dorothy Muir had known. Billy Travilla, who designed her costumes for eight of her films, said she liked to shock people and her “dirty little bum pose” was one way she did it. She still mesmerized people—especially men—by looking them directly in the eyes. According to Travilla, “She was one woman I knew who could make a man feel tall, handsome, fascinating, with that
unblinking look of hers, dead in the eye.” Columnist Sheilah Graham called her look a way of making all men she met feel she was in love with them. Joan Greenson, the daughter of Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s last psychiatrist, said that Marilyn often couldn’t do ordinary things that most everyone could do, but she could undertake bold actions most people wouldn’t even contemplate doing.27
The part of her that had internalized her mother’s gentility and the evangelical and Christian Science strictures against sin didn’t like the direction she was taking, but it was clear that her path to success lay in creating an outrageously sexualized persona. Trying to become a “girl next door” at Fox hadn’t worked; and the fan magazines were calling for a more extreme sex symbol to compete with sexy Italian actresses, like Gina Lollobrigida, who were invading Hollywood, and the buxom blonde beauties on the TV screen. Thus she created the synthetic Marilyn Monroe, whom she played most often in her personal appearances at parties and premieres. In her movies, however, she varied that persona considerably.28
Even before Zanuck fired Marilyn from Fox in August 1947, she had met other individuals who could promote her career. These individuals especially included Lucille Ryman, head of new talent at MGM, and her husband, John Carroll, a B player who resembled Clark Gable and did a lot of action movies. This power couple became her new champions. Ben Lyon was still promoting her, and he was close friends with Lucille, who held the same job at MGM that he held at Fox. Marilyn met John at Ben Lyon’s Santa Monica beach house in the early summer of 1947. They began an affair. He seems to have been attracted to blonde starlets, since Lila Leeds, another young blonde contract player, had lived with them the previous year.29
Given Lucille’s clout at MGM, John had no intention of leaving her. In fact, Lucille at first liked Marilyn, describing her as a “stray waif” and a “sex kitten” with considerable charm. When Marilyn told them that fall she had nearly been raped in her apartment by an off-duty policeman, they invited her to live with them. (The Black Dahlia murder, involving the rape and mutilation of a young woman trying to make it in Hollywood, had occurred the previous January, sending shock waves through the industry.) When Marilyn confessed she was broke, John agreed to pay her a hundred dollars a week while he promoted her career. For her part, Lucille let Marilyn borrow clothes from her wardrobe.
In the contract Marilyn signed with Carroll, she called herself Journey Evers, an ironic reference to her “stray kitten” behavior, as she moved around Hollywood, without a permanent home, often thinking of herself as a foster child roaming from place to place, unable to release herself from the emotional hold of her childhood. Like many contract players, Marilyn had trouble getting by financially. She paid for acting and voice lessons, clothes, and a car. She splurged on gifts for friends. At one point she was so much in debt that Harry Lipton, still her agent, put her on an allowance, using the rest of her salary to pay off the credit agencies dunning her.30
Hollywood columnists called Lucille Ryman Marilyn’s “best friend,” although years later Ryman was vicious in describing her, claiming that Marilyn had used her waiflike persona and her tales of being abused to gain emotional control over John and her. Lucille claimed she went nude in their house and disappeared on the weekends with no explanation. Lucille denied that Marilyn and John had an affair, and she accused Marilyn of inventing the attempted rape. Yet Harry Lipton verified the affair, and gossip columnists pegged Marilyn and John as a couple. Lipton also verified the attempted rape, since she called him in a panic after it occurred and he rushed to her apartment to help her.31
Lucille also claimed that Marilyn prostituted herself on Hollywood Boulevard in return for meals. It’s hard to take those claims seriously. After all, Lucille was an older woman whose husband had an eye for young blondes. Lila Leeds, who had lived with them the previous year, was a known drug offender. She may have been the streetwalker, not Marilyn. It’s possible, however, that Marilyn’s compulsions led her to offer herself sexually—for food, not for money. She may have felt compelled to punish herself for the sexual abuse visited on her as a child, but she didn’t want to consider herself to be a prostitute.
In early 1948, if not before, Marilyn met Joe Schenck, a founder of Fox and its business manager in Hollywood, by then nearly seventy and in semiretirement. A legendary womanizer, he kept an eye on the Fox starlets, and Marilyn seemed fair game. Lucille wanted Marilyn out of her house and out of John’s life. Schenck, friends with Lucille and John, could take over. Marilyn moved into the Studio Club in the spring of 1948, but she often stayed in the guesthouse on Joe’s estate in Beverly Hills over the next several years. It was a place to retreat to if there were tensions elsewhere in her life.
Clarice Evans roomed with Marilyn at the Studio Club. Her account of Marilyn’s behavior differs markedly from Lucille Ryman’s. The Marilyn Clarice knew was organized and owned many books. She was devoted to Christian Science, attended services, and consulted a healer. She meditated on Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health every day, using it as her “medicine” for discontent. “She never complained,” Clarice stated. “She reacted to adversity by refusing to dwell on it and by taking immediate positive action.” Her motto was “Make yourself the best in the field and you will reach the top. That’s why I’m spending my last penny on lessons.” She told Clarice, “If one hundred percent of the movie bigshots in Hollywood told me I couldn’t make it to the top, I wouldn’t believe them.”32
In March 1948 Ana Lower succumbed to her heart condition. She was buried in Westwood Memorial Cemetery and Mortuary, in the middle of Westwood, with Grace and Marilyn present at her funeral. Marilyn was bereft; she contended she threw herself in Ana’s grave as it was being dug, despairing Ana’s fate, but it sounds like an imagined dramatic gesture more than a real one, since Ana had been ill for a long time and Marilyn had met other middle-aged mentors, Lucille Ryman and Joe Schenck, in particular. Some weekends she went with Whitey Snyder and his family to the Ocean Park Pier, where they rode the rides and played arcade games. Once Ana was interred, Marilyn sometimes went to the Westwood cemetery, where she would sit on a bench and read a book in the calm of its green lawn and trees in the middle of urban sprawl, remembering Ana. At the Studio Club she was often on the phone in the hall, talking to agents, producers, and the men she dated. She dated a lot of men, according to Clarice, although Clarice never met any of them and Marilyn didn’t talk about them.33
Joe Schenck was one of those men. An immigrant from Russia who came to New York at the turn of the century, he opened a drugstore in Brooklyn, where he made a lot of money selling illegal drugs. He and his brother Nicholas, who eventually became the New York head of MGM, built an amusement park on the New Jersey Palisades. By 1910 Joe managed a national vaudeville chain and one of movie theaters. He married Norma Talmadge in 1916 and promoted her to stardom. In 1926 he became president of United Artists; and in 1935, along with Darryl Zanuck, he created Twentieth Century–Fox by merging Twentieth Century Studios with Fox Pictures.
Joe had been a leader in raunchy Hollywood circles. Earlier in his life he had embodied “almost every Hollywood cliché of decadence and debauchery.” The gambling crowd revolved around him; his yacht trips to Catalina, accompanied by starlets, were legendary. He had been a founder of Agua Caliente, the Mexican gambling resort that preceded Las Vegas as a place of uninhibited entertainment for Hollywood people. Several years before Marilyn met him he had taken the rap for the studio moguls in a tax evasion scheme connected to the mob and had spent several months in prison.34
Bald, with ice-blue eyes and thin lips, Schenck looked like an inscrutable Buddha. Still, he was a good listener and he gave good advice. These qualities attracted young women to him as friends and companions. On Saturday nights he held a formal dinner party at his Beverly Hills mansion and sent a limousine to pick up the starlets he invited. Marilyn was often among them. But they weren’t the only guests. Noreen Nash attended the parties with her husband, Lee Siegel, who was the
Fox studio physician. Gloria Romanoff also went to them, along with her husband, Michael Romanoff, the owner of Romanoff’s restaurant, a favorite place for film people to dine and to hold parties. Columnist Louella Parsons also attended Joe’s Saturday night parties. Marilyn charmed her by calling her Miss Parsons and telling her that Gladys and Grace had taught her to read by using her columns as their primer. According to Gloria Romanoff, Marilyn arrived at her first Schenck party wearing white gloves and a hat, to look like a lady; she developed a taste for expensive champagne at those parties, and she always drank it in later years. “Each popping cork proclaimed: Look at me, this is no abandoned child, no orphan!”35
Marilyn also attended Joe Schenck’s poker parties. The rumor was that “party girls” dressed in scanty costumes served liquor at them and were available for sex, although Marion Marshall dismissed those rumors. She and Marilyn poured drinks at those parties, she said, but they wore regular clothing and didn’t engage in sex. “Schenck was a lonely old man,” Marion said. “He was a father confessor to me.” In Marilyn’s version of the poker games, she sat in a corner and kept to herself, annoyed at the men for showing off by betting huge sums of money.36
Marilyn charmed Joe. He liked her offbeat ways and her stories about her childhood. He soon seated her next to him at his dinner parties, in the place of honor. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who was Pat DiCicco’s cousin as well as a movie producer and a poker player, was often at Joe’s mansion when Marilyn was there. Cubby thought Joe adored her. “He just wanted to have this sweet and giving creature as a friend. Many times I’d see his face light up when she walked into the room. We’d all sit together by the pool, and just to hear her laughter was a tonic to him.”37
Marilyn asked Schenck to persuade Zanuck to reinstate her, but Schenck and Zanuck were at odds. Marilyn stated in My Story, “Mr. Schenck looked at me and I saw a thousand stories in his face—stories of the girls he had known who had lost jobs, of all the actresses he had heard boasting and giggling with success and then moaning and sobbing with defeat. He didn’t try to console me. He didn’t take my hand or make any promises. The history of Hollywood looked out of his tired eyes at me and he said, ‘Keep going.’ “Marilyn sometimes stayed in his guesthouse and aided him sexually when he had issues with potency. But they were also friends. She consulted him on studio matters, getting advice on her career. “He described to me the workings of the ‘inner circle’ and how to deal with them. He pointed the signpost to me many times.”38
