by Lois Banner
Jean Negulesco, who directed her in How to Marry a Millionaire in February 1953, had minimal difficulties with her. He took the time to get to know her, and paying attention to her personally helped. Sensing that she wanted to be taken seriously, he talked to her about art. Her comments were intelligent, and they became friends. After all, he wrote in his autobiography, she was a great star, with the prerogatives of coming to the set when she wanted to and regarding inflexible schedules as infringements on her civil rights. That was, in fact, the attitude in the French cinema industry, where filming was considered to be an art, not a business. Over the years Negulesco was often assigned to do retakes of scenes in films she had made with other directors. They developed a rapport. She was quick-witted and cooperative in these situations, and her costars and crews loved her.68
Over the course of her career, Marilyn was never late for dancing rehearsals or singing lessons. Lionel Newman, head of the Fox music department, reported that she was often early to recording sessions. He found her much less temperamental than most stars, although she was plagued by insecurity and a perfectionism that drove her to demand many takes on her films. In explaining her punctuality for singing lessons and recording sessions, it is important to note that she was in all probability free from anxiety in them. People who stutter don’t stutter when they sing.69
By mid-February 1952 entertainment columnists were alluding to the “calendar of Marilyn in her birthday suit.” It was probable that she would soon be openly identified as the model in the nude photo. That identification might destroy her career. A lucky break came in the form of a date with Joe DiMaggio, the famous baseball player. The date was arranged by David March, who knew DiMaggio from his days as a Broadway agent frequenting Toots Shor’s, a restaurant and bar that catered to male sports aficionados and lionized Joe DiMaggio. But this date wasn’t the first time that Joe and Marilyn had met. In 1950 Johnny Hyde’s nephew, Norman Brokaw, a fledging William Morris agent, had introduced them at the Brown Derby. Joe had asked for her phone number, but she wasn’t interested, since she didn’t know anything about baseball. When she went to New York in August 1951, she met Joe at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. He took her out to dinner, but again she wasn’t impressed.70
Yet DiMaggio occupied a unique position as a national hero and a model of masculinity. An outfielder for the New York Yankees, he was the most famous sports figure in the nation, beloved by men and women alike. No less than Marilyn, he embodied the American Dream. He was the eighth of nine children of a San Francisco fisherman from Sicily who struggled to support his family. He had made it from sandlot baseball to a position with the Yankees, the nation’s most revered baseball team, in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, after four years in the Pacific Coast League. Quiet and dignified, he never argued with umpires or other players. Tall and athletic, he had a majestic grace as a player, especially manifested in 1941, as World War Two thundered abroad, when he batted successfully in fifty-six consecutive games, breaking the record established in 1922, and inspiring national pride. He was called the Yankee Clipper, after the new Pan American airplane, for his unequaled power, range, and style; Marilyn thought his naked body looked like a Michelangelo statue.71
His bearing on and off the field was regal. In private life he wore elegant conservative dress (a dark suit, white shirt, and narrow tie). He embodied the aristocratic Italian concept of bella figura, dating from the Renaissance. He shattered ethnic stereotypes. Essayist Roger Rosenblatt eulogized him as having “a sense of civilization, hierarchy, and order that went beyond decorum to the center of middle-class values.” In 1951, suffering from numerous physical ailments, he retired from the game at the age of thirty-six. He was twelve years older than Marilyn.72
Yet he had no interests outside of baseball and a few other sports, like boxing and golfing. He didn’t read books or go to plays or art museums. He spent his leisure hours in the male world of bars, drinking with male friends and talking about his career. Why Marilyn chose him as a partner is a mystery, although he was, like her, very shy, and he had a kind and gentle side. She loved his large family and became close to his sisters. He was a good businessman, versed in how to deal with management, and he helped her stand up to Twentieth Century–Fox executives in crafting her career. He also offered her the security of his moral reputation as she faced a potential firestorm when she was identified as the model for the nude calendar photo.73
Joe dated showgirls and starlets. Although his first wife, a Broadway showgirl, had divorced him, he doted on his son, Joe DiMaggio Jr., and he supposedly didn’t engage in affairs. Joe’s purity was as much mythology as was the puffery about Marilyn being highly moral. Joe had sex with many women, including showgirls and high-class call girls. His gofer and part father, part confidant, Broadway ticket agent George Solotaire, often pimped for him. Joe had friends in the Mafia. He was, after all, Sicilian in background, and he frequented places like Toots Shor’s that were financed by the Mafia.
The magic that Marilyn beamed on Joe in 1952 worked. Unlike many beautiful women, he said, she wasn’t self-centered. She was kind and generous, and she listened to what he had to say. She didn’t mind that he was often quiet. The day after their first Hollywood date, Sidney Skolsky announced in his column that they were a new item, and Marilyn persuaded Joe to visit her on the set of Monkey Business. A photo was taken of the two of them together, along with Cary Grant. It was easy to cut Grant out of the photo and put it on the wire services as a photo of Marilyn and Joe as a new romantic couple.
With Joe in Marilyn’s life, Roy Craft finalized a deal with Life magazine for a photographic essay on Marilyn, shot by Philippe Halsman. An essay in such a respectable magazine, with a tiny reproduction of “A Nude Wrinkle” in it, would take the photo out of the category of “dirty French postcard,” as Craft put it, and legitimize it as aesthetic art. Then Sidney Skolsky had her leak the information that she had posed for the photo to Aline Mosby of United Press, who was sympathetic to Marilyn. Mosby’s story, as planned, focused on Marilyn’s poverty, honesty, and hard work, elements of her star text. Sidney thought up a quip about the radio being on when the photo was taken. When a reporter asked Marilyn what she had on in the nude photo, she replied, “The radio.” The nation laughed at her comic skill and was captivated. Public outrage at the photo evaporated.
Her clever handling of the photo enabled her to weather the storm not only over the nude photo but also over the fuss that resulted when in April 1952 a journalist found her mother working in a rest home in Eagle Rock. Marilyn had always said that Gladys was dead. Apologizing publicly for the lie, Marilyn stated that she had done it because she didn’t want journalists bothering her mother, whom she rarely saw anyway. The journalists mentioned Gladys’s 1949 marriage to John Eley just before Marilyn posed for the nude photo, but they didn’t make much of it. In any event, that marriage had broken down. According to Gladys, in a letter to the Mother Church in Boston, a Mrs. Louella Atterberry had forced her into the marriage, and Eley had been alcoholic and abusive, once attempting to kill her with a knife and on another occasion trying to strangle her.74 In addition, he had another wife.
Gladys filed for divorce in February 1952, although Eley wrote a will that month leaving her ten percent of his property, which wasn’t inconsiderable. He called her his legal wife, even though another woman claimed to be married to him and she had a marriage certificate predating Gladys’s by several years.75 Eley died suddenly on April 23. Extant documents indicate that his first wife was awarded all of his estate. Gladys withdrew her divorce action two days later. He was buried in the Westwood Memorial Cemetery and Mortuary, joining the Goddard family members who were buried there. The Goddards seem to have accepted him; they called him Colonel Eley. Following the 1950s practice regarding women’s last names, Gladys called herself Mrs. Eley ever after. In June she went to Florida to stay with Berniece Miracle. Marilyn was happy to have her out of town.
At the end of May 1952, capital
izing on the furor over the nude calendar, Zanuck released a number of Marilyn films: Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, and We’re Not Married. On June 1, her birthday, he told her she had won the role of Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Meanwhile he put the movie Niagara into production.
Niagara, a considerable departure for Marilyn, made her into a superstar. Far from her usual innocent, sexy self, in this film she schemes with a young lover to murder her husband. Her sexual glow is fiery; the comic Marilyn is evident only insofar as she overplays her sexy self in some scenes. Playing Rose Loomis, a showgirl with a murky past, married to a man who has suffered a breakdown during World War Two, she is a film noir villainess—one of those evil women in 1950s films who destroy the men who can’t resist them. The genre was an outgrowth of post–World War Two anxiety over the Cold War. Like other films in the genre, Niagara reflected the nation’s fears about women having left the home for work during the war, while drawing from transhistorical male fears about female sexual insatiability. Like The Asphalt Jungle, her 1950 film noir movie, it was a crime melodrama. In The Asphalt Jungle, she was a victim as much as a predator. This time Marilyn was the villain.
Marilyn’s film noir temptress in Niagara is different from those of other actresses who played noir vamps, such as Barbara Stanwyck and Lauren Bacall. Marilyn is as tough as any of them on the exterior, but she projects a softness that is at variance with her evil nature, which makes her hard and human at the same time. The film was shot in Technicolor, unusual for film noir. The light and dark shadings that suggest menace and danger in black-and-white noir films are absent from Niagara, and that lack of menace dampens its effectiveness. The scenery and the Niagara waterfall are spectacular in the film, but it doesn’t have a compelling noir sense of mystery.
The camera often focuses on Marilyn’s body. She is shown in bed lying under sheets, obviously naked, and coming out of a shower with only a towel over her body—shocking scenes for the 1950s. In the film she often wears a tight red dress, which caused a sensation. In a renowned scene, the camera focuses on her backside as she walks down a cobblestone street with her hips swaying in an exaggerated manner. It was after this walk, which doesn’t seem like much today, that publicists dubbed her “the girl with the horizontal walk.”
The publicity on the film was over the top. She was plugged as a force of nature that couldn’t be stopped, as a woman who could inspire men to great deeds while destroying them: she was Aphrodite crossed with Vampira. In an advertisement for the film she is draped across the top of Niagara Falls, with the water from the falls flowing over the cliff beneath her—a wet dream extraordinaire. Advertising copy, alluding to the mythical siren on the rock in the Rhine River who tempts sailors to their doom, describes Marilyn as “a Lorelei flaunting her charms as she lured men to eternal destruction.” (Those ads appeared as Marilyn was filming Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she played the showgirl Lorelei Lee, a comic Lorelei who collected men as potential husbands.)
In September Fox sent her to New York on a publicity tour for Monkey Business. While there she went to Atlantic City to serve as the honorary marshal in the parade that opened the Miss America pageant. After all, she had played a beauty contest winner in several films. Riding in the back of an open convertible, wearing a tight red dress cut almost to the navel, she carried a bouquet of roses and threw them, one by one, to the crowd. She was the hit of the parade. Roy Craft, who was with her, stated that “she murdered those poor little Miss Americas.”76
But Marilyn didn’t see it that way. “Surrounded by all those fresh, young, incredibly beautiful girls,” she told Ralph Roberts, “I was terribly nervous, very unsure of myself.” After the parade the contestants waited in line to be photographed with her, one by one, for their hometown papers. None of them, she said, would have anything to do with her. But the previous year’s Miss America, Yolande Betbeze, took pity on her, exchanging small talk with her. “She took it on herself to make that time bearable to me.”77
Once again the assertive Marilyn hid the shy person at her core. Then she was photographed with a group of women officers in the female branches of the armed services, the Wacs and Waves. The photo had been printed in newspapers throughout the nation when an army officer suddenly noticed that Marilyn’s breasts were improperly exposed. By then it was too late to do anything. Playing the innocent vixen, Marilyn responded that the photographer had shot her from above her head, exposing her cleavage; she’d had nothing to do with it. Again she denied the obvious, putting on her “dumb-blonde” persona.
She went back to New York to appear with singer Mel Tormé in his nightclub act to publicize Monkey Business. Her behavior was unpredictable. At first, according to Tormé, she was wonderful in rehearsals. When she laughed, Tormé said, she raised bumps on your arms with the joyous abandon of her giggles. But fifteen minutes before the performance was to begin, she froze. Tormé joked her back to her normal self, and she went on with the show.78
During the New York visit, Earl Wilson interviewed her. He was stunned by the change in her behavior from the interview he’d done with her three years before, when she had been in New York promoting Love Happy. In the earlier interview she had been wooden and uninteresting, a young girl being oversold. She was now fire and ice, a brilliant interview subject and photographic model. She even instructed the photographer that Wilson took along with him how to shoot her.
Is it true that you don’t wear underwear? Wilson asked her. Certainly, she said. She was wearing a dress she’d bought at designer Ceil Chapman’s boutique, and she told him to call up the salesladies there, who would tell him that she didn’t wear underwear when she tried on clothes. Then she invited him to frisk her. Her exhibitionism was becoming extreme. Yet as if to exonerate her sexy behavior in Atlantic City and New York, Marilyn exhibited her humanitarian impulse. In Longport, New Jersey, she visited the Betty Bacharach home. It was a convalescent center for children recovering from serious illness, especially polio, which was then epidemic.79 This was the Marilyn who loved children and identified with the disadvantaged.
From As Young as You Feel to Niagara, Marilyn had moved from being a sexpot to being a star. She had created her blonde sex goddess character, and it had worked. Now she would modify it, adding comic dimensions, becoming the greatest dumb blonde in the American comic tradition, until she felt trapped by the role and had to flee it. She was already lobbying Zanuck for dramatic roles, but not even directors Henry Hathaway and Jean Negulesco, major Marilyn admirers, could talk him into casting her in them. Blondes had become his bugaboo, and Marilyn had come to represent the dark side of Hollywood to him. In his eyes and the eyes of many Hollywood men, she had slept with too many men on her way to the top, thus stepping outside the bounds of their definitions of respectability. Now she was forcing them to promote her as a star, and she had done it by posing for a nude calendar and becoming involved with Joe DiMaggio. They would continue resisting her, even as she fought back.
Chapter 7
Breakaway, 1954–1955
Filming on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes began in November 1952, after Marilyn had returned from her promotional tour for Monkey Business. Zanuck had been ambivalent about casting her, but he wasn’t happy with the alternatives: Betty Grable was getting on in years and Carol Channing had played Lorelei on Broadway with a bowlegged walk, baby-doll eyes, and a foghorn lisp. Zanuck didn’t want his Lorelei to be a complete caricature. He asked Howard Hawks, Marilyn’s director on Monkey Business, if she could do it. Hawks assured him she could. In fact, he chastised Zanuck for casting Marilyn in dramas like Don’t Bother to Knock. Her métier, he said, was comedy. “You’re making realism with a very unreal girl. She’s a completely storybook character.”1
Hawks’s comment was one-sided. She had played a “dumb blonde” in Monkey Business and, terrified of Hawks, she had also played that role with him offscreen. He hadn’t drawn out her serious side. Both Zanuck and Hawks forgot Marilyn’s complex acting i
n The Asphalt Jungle and Clash by Night and her effective singing in Ladies of the Chorus. Jule Styne, who wrote the music for Gentlemen, praised her voice. She’d been a smash hit at Camp Pendleton marine base the previous spring, where she’d brought down the house with her sultry rendition of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It Again.” Her voice lessons with Phil Moore were paying off.
Hawks was known for directing male adventure films, but he also specialized in comedies like Monkey Business that upended conventional gender roles. Zanuck asked him to direct Gentlemen, filled with subtle references to gender crossing and the complexities of femininity and masculinity. Hawks accepted the offer, but only if a strong actress played Dorothy, Lorelei’s showgirl sidekick, to offset Marilyn’s softness. Hawks suggested Jane Russell, whom he had directed in The Outlaw, and Zanuck agreed. She was under contract to Howard Hughes, who demanded $200,000 to lend her out for Gentlemen, plus salaries for her cameraman, hairdresser, and makeup artist. The exorbitant sum made Marilyn more attractive to Zanuck, since Betty Grable wanted $100,000 to play Lorelei and Marilyn, still on a weekly salary, would make about $20,000 for the anticipated twelve weeks of filming. She was only on the second year of her May 1951 contract and her salary was at $1,700 a week.
Marilyn realized that she probably could have gotten a larger salary, but she wanted creative input into her films more than money. Most major stars had clauses in their contracts giving them a voice in selecting directors, cameraman, and scripts for their films, but Zanuck refused to grant such concessions to Marilyn. Summoning her courage, she demanded that Zanuck at least give her a dressing room suite, which was standard for stars. That would be a concession. “This is a movie about a blonde,” she said, “and I’m the blonde.” Zanuck gave in, assigning her the suite that Marlene Dietrich and Alice Faye had once used. The dispute suggests the contempt in which Fox executives held her. Lew Shreiber, Zanuck’s assistant, a “a pint-sized Fox executive” hadn’t given her a suite, according to actor Robert Stack, because he didn’t want her to develop “a swelled head.”2
