Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  37. “Wartime Health Problems Seen in Defense Drive,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1941.

  38. Marilyn Monroe, “Who’d Marry Me?” Modern Screen, September 1951.

  39. Verge, Paradise Transformed, 12; Dougherty, To Norma Jeane, 13.

  40. Buchthal and Comment, eds., Fragments, includes several typed pages the editors contend Norma Jeane wrote at the age of seventeen. Internal evidence in the document, however, proves they are mistaken. The document’s writer refers to “being in a play.” Norma Jeane wasn’t in a play at the age of seventeen. Nor was she a “small, delicately built girl,” as the writer of the document describes herself. She was 5 feet, 5½ inches tall, and she had a well-exercised body with observable muscles. She hadn’t done any modeling or television work, unlike the writer of the document. The writer describes a man she is dating as an intellectual interested in classical music. Jim Dougherty had neither of those characteristics. In his memoirs about his relationship with Norma Jeane, he is a masculine man, not especially bright, who liked to hunt and fish.

  It’s probable that Susan Strasberg wrote the document. She modeled at the age of sixteen and became a star of films and Broadway plays at the age of seventeen. She had a romance with an older man on Fire Island. See Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 18; and Susan Strasberg, Bittersweet (New York: Signet, 1980), 34–36. The Strasbergs possessed Marilyn’s New York papers for many years, but they were not well cataloged. A document written by Susan may have been mixed up with Marilyn’s papers.

  41. Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1942, and June 13, 1942.

  42. Norma Jeane to Grace, September 14, 1942. My thanks to signature expert Charles Schwab for providing me with a photocopy of this letter. Norma Jeane ends the letter by asking Grace how she can get in touch with her mother’s colleagues at Consolidated Industries so that she can find Stanley Gifford. She also tells Grace to “give daddy [Doc Goddard] a big hug.”

  43. Wilson, “The Truth About Me,” American Weekly, November 16, 1952.

  44. James Dougherty, “Marilyn Monroe Was My Wife,” Photoplay, March 1953; Dougherty, “The Marilyn Nobody Knows,” McCall’s, February 1976.

  45. Marilyn Monroe, “Love Is My Problem,” Silver Screen, October 1951; Monroe, My Story, 29; Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 404–05.

  46. Jane Wilkie, Confessions of an Ex-Fan Magazine Writer (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 132; James Dougherty, The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe (Chicago: Playboy, 1976), 46. Robert Mitchum, “Introduction,” Smith, Men Who Killed Marilyn Monroe.

  47. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 81.

  48. Barris, Marilyn: Her Life, 43.

  49. Dougherty, quoted in London Sunday Express, August 9, 1987.

  50. Norman Rosten, Marilyn: An Untold Story, (New York: New American Library, 1973). 22.

  51. Halsman’s comments on Marilyn are in Ralph Hattersley, “Marilyn Monroe: The Image and Her Photographers,” in Edward Wagenknecht, ed., Marilyn Monroe, 61–66.

  52. Maria Elena Buszek’s analysis of pinups as powerful in Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006) is persuasive, although she misses their conservative element. See also Kurt Vonnegut, “Foreword,” Varga: The Esquire Years: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Alfred Van Der Marck, 1987), 6–7.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Norma Jeane’s employment record at Radioplane is reprinted in Woodard, Hometown Girl, 35.

  2. Stacy Eubank Collection.

  3. Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, 51. See also Membership Records, Mary Baker Eddy Library. First Christian Science Church, Boston.

  4. David Conover, Finding Marilyn: A Romance (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1981), 6–7.

  5. On genius, I have used Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009); Michael J. A. Howe, Genius Explained (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and John Briggs, Fire in the Crucible: The Self-Creation of Creativity and Genius (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1990). On creativity and bipolarity, I have relied on Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). Most recent analysts reject the still-popular nineteenth-century belief that genius is always evident in childhood and exists among only a few individuals.

  6. Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 104; Miller, Timebends, 436; Rosten, Marilyn: An Untold Story, 45.

  7. Bruno Bernard (Bernard of Hollywood), Requiem for Marilyn (Buckinghamshire, Eng.: Kensal, 1986), 3–4. On fashion shows in 1930s and 1940s films, see Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993): 122–59. On models who became stars, see Shelley Winters, Shelley, Also Known as Shirley (New York: Ballantine, 1980); Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some (New York: HarperEntertainment, 2005); Lee Server, Ava Gardner: “Love is Nothing” (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006).

  8. Dougherty expressed these concerns in his interview with Jane Wilkie. See Wilkie, Confessions of an Ex-Fan Magazine Writer, 129.

  9. Both Summers and Spoto interviewed Conover, and neither trusted him. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 111; Summers, Legend, 17. I have used Conover’s memoir with caution. Moreover, photographer William Carroll’s account of his trip is similar to the one described by Andre de Dienes. Numerous sources verify the de Dienes trip, although there is little independent proof of the Conover trip. On the other hand, when I interviewed Carroll, a friend of Conover’s, he told me that Conover gave him the negatives from the trip to develop. Thus he was certain the trip had happened. LB, interview with William Carroll, December 2, 2008.

  10. On Snively, I have used Ted Thackrey, “Emmeline Snively,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, August 7, 1962; MZ, interview with Snively, in Zolotow—UT; Snively, “Marilyn’s Life as a Model,” Photoplay, July 1954; Snively, “The Real Marilyn Monroe Story: Hamburgers and Cheeseburgers,” Art Photography, October 1954.

  11. Goodman, The Fifty Year Decline, 228.

  12. Lana Turner, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth (New York: Dutton, 1982), 99.

  13. Joseph Jasgur and Jeanne Sokol, The Birth of Marilyn: The Lost Photographs of Norma Jeane (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991), 3; MZ, interview with Earl Theissen, in Zolotow—UT; Bernard, ed., Bernard of Hollywood’s Marilyn, 7.

  14. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 56. William Carroll, Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe, 1945: Photography by William Carroll (Raton, N.M.: Coda, 2004); Barris, Marilyn: Her Life, 51.

  15. Gilmore, interview with Bob Shannon, Inside Marilyn Monroe, 80–81.

  16. On fashion modeling, I have used Harriet Quick, Catwalking: A History of the Fashion Model (London: Hamlyn, 1997); Charles Castle, Model Girl (Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell, 1977); Martin Harrison, Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945 (New York: Rizzoli, 1991); and my extensive reading in fashion, pinup, and general circulation magazines. On the illustrators, see Martignette and Meisel, The Great American Pin-Up.

  17. Bernard, ed., Bernard of Hollywood’s Marilyn, 8; Barris, Marilyn: Her Life, 54.

  18. Earl Leaf, “The Marilyn Monroe I Used to Know,” Movie Time, December 1954, 68.

  19. Bernard, ed., Bernard of Hollywood’s Marilyn, 7.

  20. Andre de Dienes, Marilyn, Mon Amour (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985). See also Louella O. Parsons, Tell It to Louella (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), 218; Monroe, My Story, 36; Goodman, The Fifty Year Decline, 229.

  21. See sources on Snively in note 209.

  22. Anthony Beauchamp, Focus on Fame (London: Oldhams, 1958), 234; Laszlo Willinger interview, Beyond the Legend, video produced by Gene Feldman and Suzette Winter.

  23. On de Dienes and the trip with Marilyn, I have used Andre de Dienes, Marilyn, Mon Amour, and the longer bound typescript version, which is chapter 8, “Norma Jean,” of “Hollywood: Photography: Andre de Dienes,” 149–344. A facsimile of the typescript has appeared as Vol. 1 of Steve Christ and Andre de Dienes, Marilyn (Köln: Taschen, 2011).

  24. Jorge Lewinski, The
Naked and the Nude: A History of the Nude in Photographs, 1839 to the Present (New York: Harmony, 1987), 70–71.

  25. Morgan, Up Close and Personal, 60.

  26. De Dienes, Marilyn, Mon Amour, 83.

  27. Gilmore, Inside Marilyn Monroe, 85; Norma Jeane to “Dearest Jean,” October 27, 1946, “Rare Magazine,” Autograph Collectors Website, courtesy of Stacy Eubank.

  28. Andre de Dienes to Lawrence Schiller, January 3, 1954, in Mailer—UT.

  29. On Marilyn’s magazine covers, see Brambilla, Mercurio, and Petricca, eds., Marilyn Monroe, 30–36, and Clark Kidder, Marilyn Monroe: Cover to Cover (Iola, Wis.: Krause, 2003).

  30. Earl Moran, “A Marilyn for All Seasons,” Life, January 1983, 9–15; Martignette and Meisel, Great American Pin-up, 288–303.

  31. United Press Wire Service, June 18, 1952: “Photographer Says Most Film Queens Could Never Pose for Nude Picture,” Eubank, “Holding a Good Thought”; Dougherty, To Norma Jeane, 112.

  32. I have constructed Jaik Rosenstein’s biography from Rosenstein, Hollywood Leg Man (Los Angeles: Madison, 1950), and from the articles and columns in Hollywood CloseUp, in AMPAS. He wrote the newsletter himself.

  33. On Colin Clark, see Clark, My Week with Marilyn (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), and Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me: Six Months on the Set with Marilyn and Olivier (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). On prostitution at the Ambassador Hotel, see DS, interview with Joseph Jasgur, in Spoto—AMPAS; LB, interview with William Carroll, December 7, 2008.

  34. LB, interview with Malcolm Boyd, June 8, 2009; Charles F. Stocker, Thicker ’n Thieves (Santa Monica, Calif.: Sidereal, 1951), 253.

  35. Wilson, Show Business Laid Bare, 68; AS, interview with Henry Rosenfeld, in AS.

  36. Bruno Bernard, Bernard of Hollywood: The Ultimate Pin-up Book (New York: Taschen, 2002), 251. The classic free-love text for the twentieth century is Havelock Ellis, The Art of Love, Vol. 6 of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1910; New York: Random House, 1936). Ellis’s work went through many editions and had a large readership. I can’t find proof that Marilyn read Ellis, but his ideas run through her statements about friendship, love, and sex.

  37. “Bourbon’s Stage Review Puts Emphasis on Smut,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1954; “Ray Bourbon Opens Review,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1945. On Bill Pursel, see Morgan, Up Close and Personal, 62–64; on Ken DuMain, see Crivello, Fallen Angels, 242–43; for Miller’s statement, see Miller file in Mailer—UT.

  38. Columnist Sheilah Graham contended that Ben Lyon promoted Marilyn’s career because he had an affair with her. I can find no proof for this allegation, except that Louella Parsons, who was friendly with Lyon and his wife, film star Bebe Daniels, stated that a rumor to that effect had circulated in Hollywood, but she didn’t believe it. AS, interview with Sheilah Graham, in AS; Summers, Goddess, 40; Parsons, Tell It to Louella, 214.

  39. Lawence Crown, interview with Whitey Snyder, in Crown, Marilyn at Twentieth Century–Fox (Los Angeles: Comet, 1987) 30–31; MZ, interview with Leon Shamroy, in Zolotow—UT; Parsons, Tell It to Louella, 213.

  40. Typescript manuscript, “Marilyn Monroe’s Childhood,” in RR—Salisbury.

  41. Richard Buskin, interview with Jean Peters, in Buskin, Blonde Heat: The Sizzling Screen Career of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Billboard, 2001), 14; Harry Evans, “What Caused Marilyn Monroe,” Family Circle, June 1958.

  42. Harry Lipton, “Marilyn’s the Most!,” Motion Picture, May 28, 1956.

  43. LB, interview with Patricia Tiernan Cox, June 17, 2010. Cox’s name as a starlet was Carol Eden.

  44. Morgan, Marilyn Monroe, 54; Conover, Finding Marilyn, 13; Harry Lipton, “Marilyn’s the Most!,” Motion Picture, May 28, 1956.

  45. Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 29.

  46. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: BFI, 2005). Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000). I have also used Neal Gabler, How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1989); Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941); Shirley MacLaine, You Can Get There from Here (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 23–30; Kazan, Elia Kazan, 227. See also Robert Stack, Straight Shooting (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 184; and Shelley Winters, Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 65.

  47. Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, 22. Before studying the Hollywood film industry, Powdermaker had studied the antebellum South, including the plantation system.

  48. Leonard Mosley, Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon (Boston: Little Brown, 1984); Mervyn LeRoy, Mervyn LeRoy, Take One (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1994), 210; Bob Thomas, King Cohn: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Mogul (Beverly Hills, Calif.: New Millennium, 2000).

  49. LB, interview with Michael Selsman, October 9, 2008.

  50. E. J. Fleming, Carole Landis: A Tragic Life in Hollywood (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005).

  51. Arthur Miller comment, in Mailer—UT.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Ronald Davis, interview with Vanessa Brown, in Davis—AMPAS; Ronald Davis, The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993), 6; Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe 59; Peter Harry Brown and Patte Barham, Marilyn: The Last Take (1992; Thorndike, Me.: Thorndike, 1993), 47.

  2. For Fox activities, see the studio newsletter, Spring 1948, in LB; Shaw and Rosten, Marilyn Among Friends, 22; Amy Greene and Joshua Greene, But That’s Another Story: A Photographic Retrospective of Milton H. Greene (Brooklyn: powerHouse, 2010), 174.

  3. AS, interview with Ralph Casey Shawhan, in AS; Jill Allgood, Bebe and Ben (London: R. Hale, 1995), 145.

  4. DS, interview with Rupert Allan, in Spoto—AMPAS; Clifton Webb, “You Really Don’t Know Marilyn Monroe,” an interview with Ernie Player, Picturegoer, 1955.

  5. Delia Salvi, “The History of the Actors’ Laboratory, Inc., 1941–1950,” Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1969; Cynthia Baron, “Actors’ Lab in Hollywood,” in Adrienne L. MacLean, ed., Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 146–53.

  6. Joseph R. Roach, The Players’ Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1985). Charles Marowitz, The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov, the Legendary Actor, Director, and Theorist (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2004).

  7. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 122, 125.

  8. Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 129.

  9. Susan Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 11.

  10. On Phoebe Brand’s reaction to Marilyn, see Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, 72; on Lila Bliss Hayden see James Haspiel, Young Marilyn: Becoming the Legend (London: Hyperion, 1994), 34.

  11. Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, 155–56.

  12. Actress Janet Leigh describes the 1950s attitude toward divorced women and sex in There Really Was a Hollywood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), 15. See also Gene Tierney, Self-Portrait (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 12; and Sammy Davis Jr., Hollywood in a Suitcase (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 231.

  13. Richard Buskin, interview with Jean Peters, in Blonde Heat: The Sizzling Screen Career of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Billboard, 2001), 24. Oleg Cassini, In My Own Fashion: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 110; Buskin, interview with Mary Anita Loos, in Blonde Heat, 16.

  14. Sidney Skolsky, “Hollywood Harems,” Hollywood Citizen News, in Skolsky—AMPAS; Cindy Adams, Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 253; Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 144; Marilyn, My Story, 48; James Kotsibilis-Davis, ed. Joshua Greene, Milton’s Marilyn, (Moss Runn, Schirmer/Mosel, 1994) 28; Robert Stein, “Do You Want to See Her?” American Heritage, November–December 2005, 144. According to Malcolm Boyd, the starlets slept
with producers more for conversation than for sex. Rather than waiting in a producer’s office all day and then not getting an interview, by sleeping with him they could sell their talents at breakfast the next morning. LB, interview with Malcolm Boyd, June 8, 2009.

  See also Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, 21; Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Primus, 1985), 481; Arthur Miller, Timebends, 302; Ronald Davis, interview with Joan Fontaine, April 12, 1979, in Davis—AMPAS; Joan Fontaine, No Bed of Roses (New York: Morrow, 1978), 76.

  15. Gloria Vanderbilt, It Seemed Important at the Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 14–20; Vanderbilt, White Knight, Black Knight (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987): Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan, 422; Cassini, In My Fashion, 147. Cubby Broccoli and Donald Zec: When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli (London: Boxtree, 1998).

  16. Natasha Fraser-Caravansi, Sam Spiegel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003); Andrew Sinclair, Spiegel: The Man Behind the Pictures (Boston: Little Brown, 1987).

  17. Fraser-Caravansi, interview with Budd Schulberg, in Sam Spiegel, 86. John Houseman, Front and Center (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 121.

  18. Evelyn Keyes, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1977), 209; Keyes, I’ll Think About That Tomorrow (New York: Dutton, 1991), 286; John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Ballantine, 1981), 43; LB, interview with Michael Selsman, November 11, 2009; W. J. Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, 144; Peter Bogdanovich, “Marilyn Monroe,” in Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s In It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 484.

  19. Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, 21; LB, interview with Malcolm Boyd, June 8, 2009; Monroe, My Story, 48; Mamie Van Doren, Playing the Field: My Story (New York: Berkeley, 1988), 7; Earl Wilson, Hot Times: True Tales of Hollywood and Broadway (Chicago: Contemporary, 1940), 70. The Kazan letter, which is undated, can be dated by internal evidence. It was sold at Butterfield’s auction house in 1951. The original purchaser gave me a copy of it. It is reproduced in the catalog for the auction.