by Lois Banner
The actresses were friendly on screen and off. Grable, as down-to-earth as Jane Russell, knew that her glory days were over. At thirty she was old by industry standards (Marilyn was then twenty-six). On the first day of shooting a lot of journalists appeared on the set looking for Marilyn, not for her. She publicly welcomed Marilyn and was touched when Marilyn was the only person on the set to express concern when Grable’s daughter was injured in a horse-riding incident. She made several more films and then retired.
Lauren Bacall, highly professional, was annoyed by Marilyn’s lateness, her need for retakes, and her habit of looking at Bacall’s forehead rather than her eyes. (Looking up at foreheads made Marilyn’s eyes seem larger. She already knew all the tricks.) Marilyn wasn’t bitchy, and Bacall liked her. Both of them were, she said, rebels against an exploitative industry. “I said to her: don’t let them push you around. She was just a commodity to them. There were so few she could really trust.” Like many individuals, however, Bacall sometimes found Marilyn difficult to understand. She used a logic of her own that didn’t always make sense to Bacall. Many people made similar comments about Marilyn.18
Nunnally Johnson rehearsed the actors before every scene. Johnson was low-key and courteous, but he was hard on the cast. He threw Marilyn off base; she retreated into her own world. He described her to others as under water, off in space. Jean Negulesco, who directed the film, made an effort to become friends with Marilyn, but he sometimes experienced her as in another world. “She walks right by you with glassy eyes, as though she is hypnotized.”19
In June, shortly before Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was released, Jane and Marilyn, wearing similar sundresses, participated in the major rite of Hollywood stardom by placing their handprints and footprints in cement in the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. At the ceremony Marilyn quipped that the imprints should have been of Jane’s breasts and her butt. The statement wasn’t that farfetched. Betty Grable, famed for her legs, had immortalized them in cement in Grauman’s courtyard. Above all, Marilyn had survived her insecurity and her difficulty with powerful Hollywood males to be immortalized as a Hollywood icon.
In 1953 Marilyn remained involved with Joe, even though he hated her sexy self-presentation and refused to go to Hollywood events that featured her as a sex symbol. Sidney Skolsky, her close friend, filled in for him. Joe spent a lot of time in New York as a TV interviewer for Yankee baseball games. He was often angry at Marilyn because she would agree to something and then do the opposite. She played along with the idea of developing their relationship by visiting his family in San Francisco some weekends, but she continued to date other men.
As Marilyn came to know Joe better, she found out he was tight with money and often self-absorbed. He could be moody and depressed. He was compulsively neat and obsessively punctual, and his favorite activities were watching television and playing poker with his male friends, drinking with them in bars, and discussing his baseball exploits. He chain-smoked, drank coffee constantly, and had a bad temper. He helped her to be tough in dealing with the moguls, but he didn’t trust anyone in Hollywood except for Frank Sinatra, a fellow Italian with roots in Sicily.
Yet he was generous. On Christmas Eve 1952, when Marilyn didn’t go with him to San Francisco because she had to attend the studio Christmas party, he was in her hotel room when she returned, and he’d set up a small decorated Christmas tree. He gave her gifts all the time, including a full-length black mink coat at Christmas 1953, which she treasured. Furs were a symbol of luxury in the 1950s, and Marilyn, who usually paid no attention to such things, adored hers. Joe became close to some of her friends, especially the Shaws and the Kargers. She liked George Solotaire, the aging Broadway ticket broker who, as Joe’s gofer, was often with him. Solotaire treated her like a daughter. Loving children, she became close to Joe DiMaggio Jr., who returned her affection.
Marilyn always said that Joe was a wonderful lover. She called him her slugger and said that he could hit the ball out of the park. If sex was all there was to a marriage, she said, she and Joe would be married forever. When I asked Tom Sobeck, a friend of Joe’s, to explain what she meant by “slugger,” he said that Joe was so “well hung” that even prostitutes retreated when they saw him naked. It seems that Marilyn was referring to the mythology that penis size matters to women and that large is always better than small.20
Joe’s friends in the Mafia both frightened and fascinated Marilyn. Many of his favorite male hangouts and nightclubs had mob backers. In New York, he went to Toots Shor’s, a restaurant for male sports aficionados that Sinatra also frequented. He traveled to Atlantic City to the 500 Club, owned by his friend Pasquale (Skinny) D’Amato, whom he had met when he was stationed near Atlantic City during World War Two. Joe first met Sinatra at Skinny’s, where Sinatra often performed. Skinny had done jail time under the White-Slave Traffic Act for transporting women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution, but he also was elegant and suave, an Italian bella figura who was a model for Sinatra and his Rat Pack.21
The death of Joe’s brother Mike in May 1953 brought Marilyn and Joe closer together, as Joe turned to her for solace. Three months later, she began shooting River of No Return, a film about homesteading in the American West in the 1890s, in Banff, Alberta, Canada, which had scenery like that of the film’s setting. She had agreed to do it because she owed Fox a film, and she liked the songs she was to sing in it. But once filming began, difficulties emerged between Marilyn and Otto Preminger, the film’s director. Like Marilyn, he had been ordered by Zanuck to direct it because he owed Fox a film. Like Marilyn, he didn’t like the film, but he also didn’t like her acting. The combination of Preminger and Marilyn was lethal. Joe flew there to help her.
Among Hollywood’s dictatorial directors, Otto Preminger was the worst. Shelley Winters, who was making a movie nearby, went to watch the filming. She observed Preminger terrorize Marilyn “into total immobility.” Stanley Rubin, the film’s producer, called him a “bully” and became Marilyn’s protector. Robert Mitchum found him vicious and crude, especially to women. Preminger and Marilyn stopped speaking after the first day of shooting, and Mitchum became their go-between. Marilyn became increasingly difficult, showing up late and flubbing lines. Mitchum noted, however, that she was having difficult menstrual periods. Many times, Mitchum stated, when people on the set cursed her selfishness at closing down the production, she was in her dressing room immobilized by cramps, suffering and embarrassed.22
Preminger predictably clashed with Natasha Lytess, who was there to coach Marilyn. He fired her, but Marilyn got her reinstated. Then Preminger, who frequented Sam Spiegel’s “boys’ club,” barked at Marilyn that she should go back to her “original profession.” That statement infuriated her, and she got back at him after she twisted her ankle on a wet rock and returned to the set with her ankle taped. Preminger was kinder to her after her accident. Shelley Winters contended that Marilyn had her ankle taped to make him feel guilty. Winters commented: “Dumb? Like a fox, was my friend Marilyn.”23
River of No Return is a confused movie about Indians, a shyster gambler, and homesteading beside a river. Marilyn is a dance hall singer who takes care of Mitchum’s son while he is in jail on a trumped-up charge and who winds up on Mitchum’s ranch. Throughout the film she wears either an abbreviated dance hall costume or tight blue jeans. In one scene, she is drenched with water when she and Mitchum, escaping from Indians, run river rapids on a raft. Her wet clothes cling to her, revealing the contours of her body.
Marilyn detested the movie, calling it her “Z” western (a wordplay on B movies) in which the actors came in third after the scenery and the horses. She saw it with Sidney Skolsky at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Afterward, she walked around the corner out of sight and vomited. Noreen Nash was with Darryl Zanuck when he watched a preview of the movie. He was vocal about disliking Marilyn in it.24 But Marilyn isn’t a dumb blonde in the film. Her character is strong and resilient, as Marilyn had b
een in Don’t Bother to Knock and Clash by Night. She shows potential as a dramatic actress and only rarely turns on her sexy Marilyn Monroe voltage.
According to Shelley Winters, after turning her ankle Marilyn took a Percodan for pain, washing it down with several shots of vodka. Percodan, an opiate, had been developed in the early 1950s. It soon became the major drug prescribed for severe pain. In addition to lessening pain, it can produce euphoria. It is also highly addictive.
By 1952 Marilyn was using prescription drugs, especially the barbiturates Nembutal and Seconal for anxiety and insomnia, and amphetamines for energy. Developed years earlier, those drugs had been given to soldiers during World War Two and then had been heavily marketed to civilians once the war ended. They were considered miracle drugs that countered the anxiety and depression from which many Americans suffered. Their side effects and addictive potential were poorly understood. By 1947 some 1,500 variants of barbiturates had been developed, and Nembutal, Seconal, and Amytal were among the best known. Doctors freely prescribed them.25 They were popular in Hollywood, where movie making produced tension among everyone involved. So were amphetamines, which were used to counter the grogginess that barbiturates produced. Actors, in particular, had to get up early in the morning and look fresh through a long day’s shooting. Amphetamines were also used as an aide to dieting.
According to Sheree North, who was hired by Fox in 1954 to keep Marilyn in line, most Fox actors were on prescription drugs. “We’d all be working so hard that we couldn’t sleep. We had to take sleeping pills to look at all rested in the morning.” Amphetamines and barbiturates were handed out at parties, given as house presents, and used as chips in poker games. They were advertised in magazines and distributed at studio conferences in the form of little pills in all colors, sizes, and shapes, to keep one calm, according to writer Terence Rattigan.26
Bunny Gardel, who did Marilyn’s body makeup on her movies, remembered that by the early 1950s she carried a plastic bag filled with pills, including uppers and downers. By 1955 her prescription drug use was heavy. Typical of addicts, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of drugs. “If I haven’t tried it,” Marilyn said to Susan Strasberg, “it doesn’t exist. I’m a war veteran of the night.” Marilyn’s friend Delos Smith stated that she was playing Russian roulette with her life. “It took her five pills to get to sleep,” he stated. “Seven would kill her. For many years she lived two pills away from dying.” She often suggested that they commit suicide together, although she also made pacts with other close friends to call one another if either seriously considered suicide. It was hard to deal with the demons inside of her, what Clifford Odets called the dark subsoil on which her roots were feeding; sometimes she looked on death as a welcome relief. It was, Susan Strasberg said, her “ace in the hole.”27
Sammy Davis Jr., who knew Marilyn well, maintained that her drug use was no greater than that of many Hollywood actors, although he may have downplayed her problem.28 The danger with barbiturates is that the body adjusts to them, requiring increasing numbers of pills to provide relief. One can recover from that tolerance only by abstaining for a time or by switching to another class of drugs—from barbiturates to opiates, for example. In the beginning the addiction itself isn’t that heavy and withdrawal symptoms are minor. Yet over time withdrawal symptoms can be severe, while the addiction can result in insomnia, panic attacks, bad moods, absentmindedness, and hallucinations. Amphetamines are also dangerous. After long use they reduce the ability of the centers in the body that store serotonin, the body’s natural mood elevator, to release the neurotransmitter. Depression can result. Marilyn’s depressive episodes became more frequent over the years.
Marilyn also used alcohol to calm herself and elevate her mood, although she kept her drinking under control for many years. It began, she said, when a gynecologist recommended that she take an occasional sip of vodka for menstrual cramps. When Sammy Davis Jr. visited her on the set of Gentlemen he concluded she wasn’t drinking heavily, although John Strasberg stated that she used Listerine to mask the smell of liquor on her breath. With a natural tendency to gain weight, she worried about the caloric content of liquor. When she lived with Milton and Amy Greene in Connecticut early in 1955, she drank only one glass of wine a day at dinner. Other friends stated that she didn’t drink because she was allergic to liquor, although she may have sometimes avoided it because she was taking barbiturates or amphetamines.29
Before she began filming How to Marry a Millionaire in the spring of 1953, Marilyn hadn’t been seriously ill, except for her menstrual issues and the removal of her appendix in May 1952. Her health began to deteriorate. She came down with headaches, hives, and bronchial complications. She sometimes vomited before going on the set, although Nembutal, her major drug of choice, can produce headaches, nausea, and constipation.
She sometimes fabricated illness because she was exhausted or as a bargaining chip with producers. According to Jack Cole, if she saw a single line on her face she called in sick. Cole overstates the case, but the Marilyn who was a perfectionist and the Marilyn who had no self-confidence worked together to impel her to call in sick. Doctors often diagnosed her with anemia and gave her vitamin B12 shots, which can produce a sense of well-being.30
She also developed allergies. Drinking and drug taking can overload the liver, the body’s detoxification center. Allergies including sensitivity to food or pollen can then develop, causing nasal stuffiness, and the effects can be increased by smoking—in which Marilyn, like most of her generation, indulged. If the nasal passages become consistently clogged, bacteria and viruses easily lodge in them, causing colds and bronchitis. What about the many abortions she had? That was enough to cause a serious issue with scar tissue. When I asked Steffi Skolsky about them, she answered me obliquely, stating that they were a popular form of birth control in Hollywood. Indeed, despite her statements about wanting to have a child, the paradoxical Marilyn, according to Susan Strasberg, was afraid that pregnancy would cause her body to sag, while she feared the pain of childbirth. On the other hand, her miscarriages and abortions produced depression, the sense that she would never have a child again.31
Nonetheless, Marilyn tapped into her great energy as she moved between films, sometimes with only a brief rest. The studio was determined to get their money’s worth from their stars, and they rushed them into film after film. Marilyn had depressive episodes, but she hid them, as she hid her menstrual pains. Insomnia still plagued her as did her monsters, but she often seemed hypomanic in this period, in an emotional balance that enabled her to finish her films.
At the end of September 1953, Grace Goddard died. It was a blow to Marilyn. Grace had been a major support in her childhood; along with Doc, Grace had served as her business manager for several years, keeping her accounts, figuring her taxes, and answering fan mail. Grace had also overseen Gladys’s care and regularly visited her. Marilyn paid for Grace to be interred at the Westwood Memorial Cemetery and Mortuary, where Ana Lower was buried. Joe DiMaggio now stepped in to help Marilyn with her career. He thought she needed a professional business manager to manage her affairs, not another family member. After all, she was a major star. Through his lawyer Loyd Wright, he had met Inez Melson, a tough and maternal older woman who had her own small Hollywood management firm. Joe recommended Inez to Marilyn, and Marilyn hired her. Inez was also a loyalist for Joe among the growing number of Marilyn’s assistants.32
Marilyn liked Inez, another older woman to depend on for advice. Inez raised parakeets, multicolored talking birds that Marilyn adored. She had played with parakeets in the Giffens’ aviary when she lived with them as a child; she liked to go to Inez’s house in the Hollywood Hills and play with her birds. Inez had swings, perches, and birdbaths in their cages. It seemed that Inez might take Grace’s place in Marilyn’s life, and Inez did become friendly with some of Marilyn’s family members, such as Enid Knebelkamp; but she didn’t become another Grace to Marilyn. She already had Anne Karger, Xenia Che
khov, and Lotte Goslar to serve as older female mentors and sometime mothers to her.33
Inez took over supervising Gladys Eley. She visited her every week or so and made certain she was taken to the local Christian Science church on Sundays. She bought Gladys birthday and Christmas cards, signing them with Marilyn’s name. Gladys still wore a nurse’s uniform, deep in her fantasy that she was a Christian Science nurse. She spent her time reading Science and Health and writing letters to officials in the government or in the Christian Science Church in Boston. Inez never posted them.34 Inez served Marilyn faithfully for many years, although she was angry when Marilyn didn’t leave her anything in her will. Appointed executrix of Marilyn’s California estate after she died, Inez kept the file cabinets that were in Marilyn’s Brentwood house, which contained many of Marilyn’s personal documents.
In September 1953, Look magazine sent photographer Milton Greene to Hollywood to do a story on Marilyn. They may have met four years previously, when he went to Hollywood, but this was Greene’s first photographic session with her. He was now famous: Look had just hired him away from Life with a $100,000 yearly salary, a huge sum in the 1950s. He lived a chic bohemian high life in New York, with a studio on the top floor of an old office building on Lexington Avenue. Cavernous and flooded with light, it was a gathering place for celebrities: jazz musicians, theater people, film stars. He was one of the first New Yorkers to remodel a barn in Connecticut as a second home, to combine a marble Noguchi table with Baccarat crystal, to line a coat with mink.35 He always dressed in black. He looked much younger than his thirty years. When Marilyn met him, she said to him, “You look like a boy!” He replied, “You look like a girl!”
Born Milton Greengold in Brooklyn to a family of modest means, he began his career as an apprentice to a Life photographer and soon made his mark by developing a style in which his photos suggested a story. He posed his models as though they were characters in a play he was producing. Marilyn was dissatisfied by the way others were photographing her. She wanted to look distinctive, with less emphasis on sex. Greene promised to photograph her as though she were Garbo, dramatic but mysterious. During the next four years he followed through on this promise many times.
