Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  As Lorelei Lee, Marilyn is funny and fey, the quintessential blonde of the 1950s. Gentlemen is the first film in which she fully displays the Marilyn Monroe persona that she had been constructing since the walkon role in Love Happy. In the movie Lorelei and Dorothy travel on an ocean liner to Paris so that Lorelei can marry her wealthy lover there. His father, who controls his money and doesn’t trust Lorelei, hires a private detective to follow her. The film adds additional characters to the novel, including an elderly fake millionaire and another fake one who turns out to be a ten-year-old boy with a foghorn voice. The many plot complications involve a lost diamond tiara, a courtroom scene in which Dorothy pretends to be Lorelei, and a wedding in which Lorelei marries her millionaire and Dorothy the private detective. Gentlemen focuses on Lorelei and Dorothy as they scheme together to confuse the private detective and the millionaires and periodically perform song-and-dance numbers. “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it,” Lorelei says, indicating that she hides her intelligence behind her dumb-blonde persona. Marilyn insisted that the line be added to the film.

  In the film Russell wears dresses with squared shoulders and straight lines that accentuate her large, earthy body, making Dorothy look like a butch partner for Lorelei. She becomes involved in Lorelei’s zany schemes to elude the detective and catch another millionaire. Wearing a blonde wig and affecting a soft, seductive voice, Dorothy mimics Lorelei so effectively in the courtroom scene that the judge can’t tell which of them is actually Lorelei. In his confusion femininity seems an unstable position. It also seems unstable when the father of Lorelei’s millionaire boyfriend, present in the courtroom, describes Lorelei as a shape-shifting monster. He fears that he may encounter an engulfing swarm of such monstruous women. “How do you think I feel with thousands of Loreleis coming at me from everywhere?” In the wedding that ends the film, with Dorothy and Lorelei wearing the same dress and standing next to each other, it appears that they are marrying each other, not the men.

  But masculinity may also be relative, as Gentlemen also suggests. The Olympic athletes at the beginning of the film exercise their bodies, strike self-involved poses, and aren’t interested in Dorothy, as Russell sings, “Is there anyone here for love?” They resemble the athletic, semiclothed men in the day’s physique magazines marketed to homosexuals. In the rest of the film Dorothy and Lorelei easily outfox the male characters. In My Story Marilyn states that most male actors are “pansies” because acting is a feminine art. “When a man has to paint his face and pose and strut and pretend emotions, he isn’t doing what is normally masculine. He’s acting, just as women do in life.”3 That’s the important phrase: “just as women do in life.” Femininity, Marilyn implies, is a masquerade that women put on to conform to society’s expectation.

  Jack Cole, Broadway’s most innovative choreographer, created and directed the dance sequences in Gentlemen. He was known for an eclectic jazz dance style that drew from ballet, African-American rhythms, Eastern dance, and burlesque bumps and grinds. Homosexual in orientation, he liked to slip gay themes by the censors.4 Cole was a superb dance teacher for movie actresses like Monroe and Russell, who weren’t trained dancers. He broke down his dances into individual movements, and he or his assistant, Gwen Verdon, practiced the movements for hours with them until they knew them by rote. Cole had a hair-trigger temper, but he was gentle with Marilyn. When she performed her dances during shooting, he would do them along with her off camera, to “pump her up” and keep her on target. The technique worked. George Chakiris, a dancer in the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number, told me that Marilyn had more energy than any dancer he had ever known, on a par with the legendary Jerome Robbins.5

  Marilyn insisted that Cole choreograph the dance numbers in her later musicals: There’s No Business Like Show Business, River of No Return, and Let’s Make Love. He worked with Hal Schaefer, a jazz pianist and vocal coach, who helped him with musical arrangements and coached Monroe and Russell on their singing numbers in Gentlemen. Schaefer had coached both Judy Garland and Peggy Lee. He was a gentle man with a special gift for clarifying phrasing and increasing breath control. Marilyn later had an affair with him when he coached her on There’s No Business Like Show Business.

  During the filming of Gentlemen the anger she’d repressed for years began to show. When she first arrived in Hollywood she didn’t contradict the power brokers; she was a supplicant. It was easier to withdraw into a dissociative dream world where she couldn’t be reached—or to be late to the set and then break into tears when challenged. But she had displayed anger to Jim Dougherty, and once she was a star she raged against Hollywood men. According to Adele Balkan, assistant to costume designer Billy Travilla, when Marilyn fought with Travilla over her costumes, “you could hear the commotions up and down the hall.” She fought with Cole over the number of takes on the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” scene. She demanded that they do it over and over again. When they decided to go with an early take, she apologized to the cast and crew. Frank Radcliffe danced with Marilyn in “Diamonds” and in numbers in her later musicals. He recalled, “A lot of her so-called temperament was the fact that she knew what she wanted and threatened to pull out of the picture unless she got her way.”6 What she wanted was perfection.

  Anger is the reverse side of depression; it can release emotions that might otherwise be internalized and cause self-recrimination and self-doubt. When Marilyn’s anger surfaced, it was huge: she called it her “monster” and averred that she couldn’t control it. It could be volcanic and slashing, but she could forget it the next day. Billy Wilder, who directed her in The Seven Year Itch in 1954 and in Some Like It Hot in 1958, described her “moodiness.” “She had days bubbling with joy and days of sadness,” Wilder said. “She was very unpredictable. She could be uncooperative, obstructionist, explosive. Or she could let things go smoothly.”7

  Marilyn still was shy and insecure. Trivial slights could hurt her deeply; Sammy Davis Jr. said that it sometimes seemed as though she had no skin. She was often late to the set of Gentlemen, hiding out in her suite. Whitey Snyder told Jane Russell, occupying the suite next to hers, that Marilyn was scared of Howard Hawks and intimidated by Russell’s retinue, a group demanded by Howard Hughes that Russell found amusing. Russell had met Marilyn years before, at a nightclub, when Marilyn was Norma Jeane and with Jim Dougherty. He knew Russell from their acting days at Van Nuys High. She had seemed to Russell then “a little thing, with ash-brown hair and a very sweet smile,”8 and she still seemed the same. Practical and motherly, Jane cajoled Marilyn onto the set. “Come on, blondie,” or “Let’s go, baby doll,” she would say. Russell was married to football star Bob Waterfield, and she felt a bond with Marilyn because their partners were both famous athletes.

  In addition, they both were deeply spiritual. Russell persuaded Marilyn to attend her Christian group, but Marilyn was studying Steiner’s Anthroposophy and Freud’s theories, and she soon dropped out. Using an excuse she’d repeat in the coming years, she told Russell, “Freud is my religion.”9 That was both true and an exaggeration of the truth. Marilyn studied Freud and underwent Freudian therapy, but she also studied mystical religions like Anthroposophy and practiced them in her life.

  Russell was impressed by Marilyn’s intelligence. She often quoted poetry or talked about ideas, and she constantly asked questions. One day she was reading The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám on the set of Gentlemen. Khayyám was a Sufi poet who wrote about the love between God and man as though it were love between two humans, bringing the divine and the human together. Marilyn read Jane a passage about the need for personal independence in relationships, even between lovers.

  Do not put your hearts into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together. For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.10

  Marilyn was trying to follow
Khayyám’s advice in forming a relationship with Joe DiMaggio based on independence, not on his controlling her, which was what he wanted. She wasn’t succeeding. They conflicted over her career, especially over her sexy public persona. “Didn’t he realize,” Marilyn said, “who I was? He didn’t like actors kissing me and he didn’t like my skimpy costumes. When I told him I had to dress that way for my job, he told me to quit the job.” But Marilyn was finally achieving stardom, and she wasn’t going to give it up. Nor was she faithful to Joe. There was the relationship with Nico Minardos. Moreover, when Elia Kazan arrived in Hollywood in March 1952 for the Academy Awards ceremony, she had sex with him, appearing in his hotel room in the middle of the night. As they made love she told Kazan that she was going to marry Joe DiMaggio. It is unclear whether this was true at the time or simply a ploy to attract Kazan.11

  A pamphlet on Marilyn written in Russell’s voice and widely distributed, discusses her relationship with Joe and praises her femininity and intelligence. A publicist probably wrote it, but Hollywood was surprised that these two “sex queens” didn’t compete with each other, which movie divas were supposed to do. The pamphlet explored their friendship, promoting both of them. In the pamphlet Russell advised Marilyn on how to combine marriage and a career. Get a housekeeper, Russell said; get tough with the studios. Joe DiMaggio is tough; he will give you strength.

  When Marilyn married Joe two years later, in January 1954, Russell was delighted. But several months into the marriage, Russell realized that it was a disaster. Marilyn hadn’t been able to infuse Khayyám’s philosophy about independence into her life with Joe. “Part of Marilyn was dying in the marriage,” Russell told Anthony Summers, “because Marilyn couldn’t express herself.”12 Joe was simply too controlling at this point.

  Filming Gentlemen was grueling, and Marilyn’s mother was acting up. After the spring 1952 episode with the press followed by John Eley’s death, Gladys went to Florida to live with Berniece. In September, however, she appeared at Grace’s house in Van Nuys. She wasn’t in good shape. The problems with Eley, plus Marilyn’s nude photo, had sent her over the edge. From reading Science and Health, she had decided that sex was evil, but her daughter was an international sex icon. She was outraged. Ranting on Grace’s front porch that demons were out to get her, she seemed out of her mind, so Grace called the police to take her to Norwalk State Mental Hospital. That solution, however, was temporary. Once the press found Gladys in a public mental institution, they would probably excoriate Marilyn, who was supposed to be wealthy, even though, given her expenses, she hardly made enough money to get by. For publicity purposes and for her own good, Gladys had to be placed in a private institution.

  The ever resourceful Grace Goddard found a sanitarium for Gladys in a valley in the Glendale hills, close to the center of La Crescenta, on the main road. Named Rockhaven, it had cabins arranged around a central building—all in Mediterranean style—with a lot of trees and shrubbery. It was expensive, but its residents, all women, were well cared for and had private rooms. Psychotherapy wasn’t offered, nor was Gladys given shock treatments, since her condition was now considered permanent. Patricia Traviss, whose grandmother had founded Rockhaven in 1923, owned and ran the sanitarium during the fourteen years that Gladys lived there. Traviss told me that from 1953, when Gladys entered Rockhaven, until 1962, when Marilyn died, Marilyn didn’t visit her. Marilyn became anxious even thinking of going there. All her demons came out, she told Ralph Roberts. She simply couldn’t see Gladys. In her absence, Grace visited Gladys and took care of her for Marilyn. After Grace died in the fall of 1953, Inez Melson, whom Marilyn hired as her business manager and Gladys’s guardian, would provide the same service for Marilyn.13

  On February 8, 1953, Grace moved Gladys to Rockhaven from Norwalk State Mental Hospital. At a ceremony in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel that evening, Marilyn received Photoplay’s award as the year’s best newcomer. Photoplay was the nation’s most widely read movie fan magazine, and its awards were as important as the Oscars. But Niagara had opened several weeks earlier, and women’s clubs throughout the nation were protesting the immorality of Marilyn’s character in the movie and especially the red dress she wore in it. Despite the backlash, Marilyn was outrageous in dress and manner at the Photoplay ceremony. Was she testing the moralists? Was she feeling guilty about her mother? Did her drive to expose herself take over?

  She borrowed a dress from the Fox wardrobe department to wear to the ceremony. It was made of gold lamé with a deep V-neck; Billy Travilla had designed it for a scene in Gentlemen that was cut from the movie. Travilla didn’t want her to wear it, because it was too small for her. Giving herself enemas, she lost ten pounds in two days. (Film actresses used colonic cleansing to lose weight in a hurry.) Even after the weight loss, the dress was still so tight that it hugged her body, accentuating her hipswaying walk and the absence of underwear under the dress. She was sewn into it because it hadn’t been finished and had no zipper. Reporter James Bacon’s description of her as she walked in the dress makes her seem like a soft-porn fantasy. “Her breasts undulated, and her derriere looked like two puppies fighting under a silk sheet.”14

  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, a famed comedy team, were masters of ceremony at the event. As Marilyn walked with mincing steps to the podium to receive her award, Jerry leaped on the table and hooted like a chimpanzee, while Dean broke into a hip-swinging dance. The audience howled with laughter.

  The reaction was swift in the following days. Columnist Florabel Muir applauded Marilyn for stealing the show from stars like Joan Crawford. Crawford replied by accusing Marilyn of offending the nation by wearing the gold lamé dress—and the red dress in Niagara. Marilyn replied to Crawford in an interview with Louella Parsons. She didn’t understand why Crawford picked on her: she was a beginner, and Crawford was a star. She wore sexy clothes to publicize herself. Besides, her character in Niagara was a slut. In wearing the red dress she was true to the role. She didn’t mention the gold dress.15

  Now that she was a star, she continued, her erotic days were over. Her focus would be on serious acting. Then she delivered a low blow by stating that Crawford’s criticism especially hurt because she admired her as a mother. It was a subtle put-down, since it was widely known that Crawford physically abused her adopted children and that she had made an underground nude movie early in her career. Neither Crawford nor Marilyn mentioned the lesbian episode of the previous year, which Marilyn would describe in My Story as a pass on the part of Crawford.

  Marilyn also replied to Crawford in an article written under her own name in the June issue of Motion Picture. It’s one of the most revealing articles written about her. She described herself as independent, and she made a brief for the relativity of morality. She cited Abraham Lincoln: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” That comment sounds like the fey Marilyn, using her own bizarre logic. Then she became more rational, as she pointed out that the Supreme Court is often split on decisions, with four judges on one side and five on the other. “Each of us is entitled to a point of view and the right of decision,” she said to Crawford. “Name calling won’t alter the facts, and it is unlikely to change me. I live as I please, and I like it.”16

  The fan magazines had a field day. Photoplay ran an article titled “Hollywood vs. Marilyn Monroe,” asserting that “all the town’s heavy artillery was hauled out to assail her with a walloping barrage of criticism.” During the next year the magazines continued to debate her behavior. Her protective star text was invoked to defend her: she was moral, shy, and a homebody. Her supporters introduced a new theme as they praised her for influencing many Hollywood stars to become more sexy. It was a change, they contended, that would bring the television audience back to films. According to Sheilah Graham, even “girl-next-door” stars like Janet Leigh and Jeanne Crain were wearing tight dresses. The dignified Anne Baxter had dyed her hair blonde and ha
d done a belly dance in her latest film.17

  In Marilyn’s next movie, How to Marry a Millionaire, filmed in the spring of 1953, she was more a naïf than a vamp, although she still wore tight, sexy clothing. The movie was shot in Cinemascope, only the second movie shot in the new big-screen technique, which had been introduced recently to appeal to the public’s attraction to spectacle, especially given the small size of TV screens. Fox had bought the process from its French inventor and was shooting many of its films in the new process, while leasing its use for a hefty sum to other studios.

  Fox capitalized on Marilyn’s body in How to Marry a Millionaire by making it even more of a spectacle in the large-screen process than in Niagara, although Marilyn spoofed her sexuality in this film. Playing the nearsighted Pola Debevoise, she bumps into walls when she takes off her glasses. She does a brilliant comic turn, as a dumb blonde with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay, stated that he based Pola on the real-life Marilyn. How to Marry a Millionaire costarred Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall as Marilyn’s chums in another female buddy film, with three women friends rather than two (which had been the case in Gentlemen). The three friends rent an elegant New York apartment as part of a scheme to trap three millionaires into marriage, although in the end they settle for ordinary men.