Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  The coincidence of the Kinsey reports with Marilyn Monroe’s rise to stardom and her firm entrenchment within it was mutually reinforcing: for the first time, academic inquiry was taking seriously the most delicate aspect of popular awareness and that which required the most stringent regulations. Like Marilyn, Kinsey punctured the pretenses of Puritan-Victorian moralism about desire (not to say female aggressiveness) that still persisted—in Hollywood through the Motion Picture Production Code and the Legion of Decency, and throughout the country in civic, school and church groups.

  Of particular relevance to American life in general, and to the beginning of a widespread backlash against the sexual openness of characters represented by Marilyn Monroe, was the discovery that women’s sex lives had changed dramatically since World War I. By 1950, Kinsey reported, more than half of the country’s women were not virgins at the time of marriage; fully a quarter of married women had extramarital affairs; and most astonishing of all, women were indeed enjoying sex. The American female, then, was leading a life quite different from the presumptions of American men. This claim was so sensational that Kinsey’s publisher, who printed a first run of five thousand copies, soon sold more than a quarter million.

  The week Marilyn’s plane touched down in Los Angeles, Time magazine was trumpeting news of “K-Day” and detailing the contradictory reactions to Kinsey’s publication by both press and public, for the book was dividing people as much as the morality of Marilyn’s costumes and Lorelei’s motives in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The New York Times buried the story of the Kinsey controversy in a remote inside page, while the Philadelphia Bulletin prepared a thirty-three-hundred-word report that it finally killed, fearful (as it said in an explanation to its readers) of giving “unnecessary offense to many in [our] large family of readers.” The Chicago Tribune was less confused, dismissing the report as “a real menace to society,” while the Raleigh Times offered free copies. Perhaps predictably, Europe yawned: Italian newspapers mentioned Kinsey only briefly or ignored him altogether, while Paris expressed surprise that anyone could be surprised. Meantime, in American nightclubs, where any word connoting sexual intercourse was forbidden, the word “Kinsey” was used as a code substitute to avoid obscenity charges. In 1953, straightforward discussion of sex could perhaps be found only in Kinsey’s books, medical and psychiatric seminars and high school locker rooms.5

  In fascinating ways, then, Marilyn Monroe’s rise to the height of stardom coincided with the Kinsey report on women and an era when America itself was in the throes of a kind of adolescent confusion about sex. She replaced the bawdy, wisecracking Mae West and the sparkling allure of Jean Harlow (both phenomena of the 1930s) with something at once adult and childlike. Although in herself she transcended America’s fantasies by a constant effort at self-perfection, Marilyn simultaneously represented those fantasies. She was the postwar ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently needy, worshipful of men, naïve, offering sex without demands.

  But there was also something quietly aggressive in her self-presentation as a frankly carnal creature; thus by a curious congruence, her sexual impact both matched and resisted the cultural expectations of 1953. Vulnerable and frightened though she was (and often appeared to be onscreen), there was yet something tenacious and independent about her. And perhaps most disturbing of all to a culture in such turmoil, she made overt sexuality seem respectable. The ladylike Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly received the Academy Awards, but Marilyn was everywhere mobbed and constantly heard the cheers of thousands.

  At the same time, this unwitting pioneer had to be presented by the studio mostly as one of life’s contingencies—little more than a dumb blonde (and thought so by the country) in order that she could charm without challenge. Men could appreciate her without feeling she had triumphed over them, and women could sense that she was no threat at all. Her admirers yielded to her without handing her a victory—or even, finally, any respect at all.

  But because she seemed to be a woman with a strong sense of her body’s power, she was an exponent, a summary of the postwar American woman Kinsey reported—and like Kinsey’s woman, she could not yet be taken seriously. In this regard, it is perhaps easier to understand America’s obsession with her during her life and since her death, for in considering Marilyn Monroe, the culture had somehow to confront both the reality of a responsive yet independent woman as well as the threat she posed to both sexes, the unfulfilled dreams and the personal (not merely sexual) maturity both longed for and feared in the American woman.

  This entire amalgam of desire and confusion about Marilyn and her problematic presence was in a way symbolically represented in her live television debut on September 13. As a guest on Jack Benny’s comedy show, she portrayed herself in a dream sequence on a ship’s deck. But when Benny awoke there was only a large, unattractive woman at his side—who is then miraculously transmuted into Marilyn Monroe. “She was superb,” according to Benny. “She knew the hard-to-learn secret of reading comedy lines as if they were in a drama and letting the humor speak for itself.” Her Fox contract prohibited cash compensation for this performance, but Marilyn could accept a new black Cadillac convertible with red leather interior, which she proudly sported around town for the next two years.

  As usual, one of her tasks in the new car was to chauffeur her friend Skolsky, who continued to pinch-hit for the occasionally absent Joe DiMaggio. That autumn, Marilyn and Sidney were seen at Ciro’s cheering Johnnie Ray’s nightclub act; in such surroundings, even the celebrities acted like fans and begged for her autograph. “Success has helped The Monroe,” Skolsky noted. “But she hasn’t lost that rare combination of being part of the crowd as well as aloof at the same time.”

  This remark went perhaps deeper than he intended, for during her recent history Marilyn had (rather like royalty) cultivated both an involvement with people and a distance from them. A singular example of this paradox occurred when she learned on September 28 of the death of Grace McKee Goddard, who after several years of chronic alcoholism and crippling strokes took her life at the age of fifty-eight by an overdose of the barbiturate phenobarbital. When Grace was buried at the Westwood Memorial Park on October 1, Marilyn was not among the mourners.

  Her absence had less to do with a shyness of crowds than the fact that for years there had been virtually no communication between the two women. Grace, who had effectively planted the seed of Marilyn’s career, had shaped its destiny, groomed and encouraged young Norma Jeane, had been excluded from the realized success and was never present at the celebrations of stardom. After an exchange of a few warm letters in the early part of Norma Jeane’s marriage to Dougherty, subsequent correspondence was only sporadic, concerned mostly with the care and lodging of Gladys.

  Marilyn’s withdrawal from Grace was at least partly the result of Grace’s retreat into a haze of alcohol and drug dependence—a condition that so frightened Marilyn on two visits in 1949 and 1951 that she avoided meetings thereafter. In this regard, Grace may have reminded her of the gradual loss of Gladys. In effectively cutting off relations with Grace, Marilyn avoided being rejected again by the one who had once before abandoned her by marrying her off and departing to West Virginia.

  In a sad way, Marilyn’s distance from Grace was the ironic fulfillment of the distance Marilyn had once felt from Gladys—a void Grace had both filled and exploited. Making Gladys’s daughter her own, she had set in motion the schedule of her own eventual rejection, for at the end Grace had succeeded only too well in transforming her friend’s child into a creature of her own fantasy. She had also arranged Norma Jeane’s marriage and participated in its dissolution, sending her to reside with her Aunt Minnie so that a quick Nevada divorce would expedite the first contract with Fox. Married for years to a shiftless, womanizing tippler and suffering both illness and addiction, Grace could no longer endure the complete loss of meaning in her own life as she watched Marilyn’s thrive.

  Denied participation in the career for
which she felt responsible—and perhaps in some unadmitted way burdened with guilt for the separation between Gladys and her daughter—Grace saw death as her only refuge. When she was found lifeless on a fragile cot in her Van Nuys bungalow, the undramatic finale had in some ways the contours of classical tragedy. There lacked only a recognition scene and the catharsis of articulated pity for a woman driven and ultimately destroyed by that wildest of American furies, the savage quest for stardom’s empty affirmation.

  By the time she was twenty-seven, all the women Marilyn Monroe had known as role-models had come to unfortunate ends. It is not surprising, therefore, that Marilyn turned again to Natasha Lytess as a surrogate mother and spent more time with her.

  Although she did not attend the gala event, Natasha helped select a studio gown for the premiere of How To Marry a Millionaire on November 4. Before the screening, Nunnally Johnson and his wife Dorris invited to their home for drinks and a buffet supper Marilyn, Lauren Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart. Vivacious, laughing and radiantly beautiful, Marilyn was also edgy with excitement over the imminent reception of the film. Unaccustomed to liquor, she then downed three beakers of bourbon and soda and headed for the theater, amiably supported by the notorious imbiber Bogart—her gait as much restricted by her tight dress as by her tight confusion. The waiting crowd, however, saw only their beloved Marilyn and repeatedly roared her name as an array of celebrities arrived. Dressed in platinum-colored silk with shining beads, she was indeed the cynosure of all eyes. That night, as Jean Negulesco recalled, Marilyn felt “she had proved to everyone (and herself) that she could stand any competition.”

  Marilyn’s entrance into the theater, reported a trade journal, defied everything “since Gloria Swanson at her most glittering,” but a few snide comments from her contemporaries did not escape her attention. “This is just about the happiest night of my life,” she said. “It’s like when I was a little girl and pretended wonderful things were happening to me. Now they are. But it’s funny how success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you.”

  She may well have been thinking of Natasha Lytess as much as of any proximate star rival. Coach and occasional, unofficial dresser she may have been, but Natasha was also (thus Marilyn) “going quite mad and asking [my] attorney to give her $5000 to cover medical costs about to be incurred by surgery. I am completely fed up with her and now realize that she is an extremely tricky woman. But,” she added kindly, “I don’t want her to lose her job at Fox.”

  There were, it seems, three reasons for this sudden shift in attitude. First, after twenty films under Natasha’s tutelage, it was clear that not one of Marilyn’s colleagues had ever approved of the coach’s tactics or appreciated her interference. At last the complaints had accumulated beyond Marilyn’s ability to ignore them. Second, Marilyn was quite simply gaining in confidence; third, she wished to please Joe. By late 1953, according to Marilyn’s new agent, Hugh French, Lytess’s days were “numbered, and in the long run that surely must be a good thing for Marilyn.”

  The end of the Marilyn-Natasha symbiosis, which would actually require two more years for its official rupture, was applauded by no one more than Joe, who after almost two years of courtship at last obtained Marilyn’s consent to marry him. At the same time, he was as resentful of her attachment to Hollywood in general as much as to Natasha in particular, and he constantly urged Marilyn to quit moviemaking altogether—or at least to improve her financial status in the business, which was his only level of interest in it. By December 1, for example, after a meeting with Marilyn, Feldman’s colleague Ray Stark drafted an interoffice memorandum to the effect that DiMaggio had “convinced Marilyn not to do any more Fox pictures until she can negotiate a better contract.”

  Joe could not have realized that these were soon to be identical suggestions from Marilyn’s old acquaintance, the photographer Milton Greene, who would add to his counsel the idea of a bold new venture. He arrived in October with his new bride, Amy, a former Richard Avedon model who subsequently worked as an executive fashion consultant.

  Since their rendezvous in 1949, Milton (now thirty-one) had left Life for Look magazine and had become one of the most sought-after celebrity photographers. One of his assignments in 1953 was a series on Hollywood stars, and that summer he took nine portraits of Marilyn as she strummed an antique mandolin and then half reclined, casual and relaxed in a short, black and provocative caftan. When Milton’s photographs were published in the November 17 issue of Look, Marilyn sent him a dozen roses in gratitude.

  But there was more. Milton also listened to Marilyn complain of the studio system, of her absurd salary (fifteen hundred dollars weekly) in light of the great sums her films were making for Fox, and of her boredom with roles like Lorelei, Pola and Kay. He suggested that they consider forming their own production company, to raise financing, to choose subjects and directors, to bring their best creative efforts to bear on Marilyn’s future. And so there was set in motion a crucial turn in Marilyn’s professional life and, as she and Milton began to speak quietly with their attorneys, a complicated task that would transport her from Hollywood for over a year and help to alter forever the tradition of actors’ long-term contracts to studios. From Milton Greene, in other words, she was hearing the counsel, the concern and the offer of representation such as no agent had given her since the death of Johnny Hyde.

  That season, the Greenes and Marilyn became fast friends—primarily because, according to Amy, Milton saw a potential in her that no one else had, and on him she began to rely. He had rendered her sublimely in still photographs: what might they together not accomplish as producers of films specifically made for and starring the most famous woman in entertainment history?

  On November 21, 1953, Joe departed Los Angeles for San Francisco, where he began to make quiet plans for their wedding. Marilyn, meantime, kept her counsel and when ordered to report for ten days of difficult interior retakes on the dreaded River of No Return, “she cooperated to the fullest,” as the vigilant Hugh French was pleased to observe.

  Everyone had good reason, therefore, to expect that Marilyn would comply with Fox’s order for her to report on December 15 for her next assignment—a silly affair called Pink Tights, a remake of Betty Grable’s 1943 film Coney Island, about a schoolteacher-turned-music hall crooner. But this stereotypical Monroe role was only one of the last several straws in the burden of Marilyn’s resentment against Fox. Nor was she mollified with the news that Frank Sinatra would co-star, for she also learned that he would be paid five thousand dollars a week, more than three times her salary.6

  At a quarter to midnight on December 23, as studio executives wondered how to bring pressure against her for being a week late to work, she boarded Western Air Lines flight 440. Booked as Miss Norma Dougherty, she paid $15.53 for a cheap seat in the rear of the aircraft and stowed a small overnight bag with one suit, a skirt and two sweaters. But lavish Christmas gifts from Joe (among them a mink coat) awaited her in San Francisco.

  1. The picture is spiced with lines rewarding the movie maven. Modeling a luscious orange bathing suit at a fashion show, Marilyn enters as a hostess comments, “You know, of course, that gentlemen prefer blondes—and this is our proof of it!” Similarly, Bacall protests a fondness for much older men: “Look at that old fellow what’s-his-name in The African Queen . . .”—a reference, of course, to Bacall’s husband Humphrey Bogart (twenty-five years her senior).

  2. The tradition began when Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks accidentally stepped into freshly poured cement in front of the theater, and Grauman—leaping to assist them—asked the stars to make a virtue of necessity and add signatures to the footprints. Marilyn’s were not far from those of Jean Harlow, who had obliged Grauman on September 29, 1935.

  3. “I wouldn’t accept River of No Return [as an assignment] today,” Marilyn said in 1955. “I think I deserve a b
etter deal than a grade-Z cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery and the CinemaScope process. The studio was [backing] the scenery instead of actors and actresses.”

  4. The press, however, saw only undiluted bliss in the Monroe-DiMaggio affair: even the New York Times, on July 12, was delighted to report their “long-time romance.”

  5. As if on cue, that same September calendar distributors and playing card manufacturers were reshipping in record numbers the image of Marilyn Monroe nude. Hot on their trail were the police, who in several cities raided shops, confiscating calendars as if they were dangerous chemicals. One hapless Los Angeles businessman, Phil Max, made headlines round the country that year when he was arrested and fined after placing “A New Wrinkle” in the window of his camera store on Wilshire Boulevard. With equal fervor, the district attorney of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, banned distribution of the notorious calendar and urged the governor to impose a similar restriction statewide.

  6. Her resentment of this discrepancy may have motivated her blunt “reservations” about Sinatra’s recent album when she spoke with Dave Garroway on the Today television show early in 1954: otherwise, she always spoke with highest praise for him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  JANUARY–SEPTEMBER 1954

  MARILYN MONROE’S CAREER spanned sixteen years. During the first eight, 1947 to 1954, she appeared in twenty-four productions; during the second half, from 1955 to 1962, only five. For years this diminution in professional activity—never caused by any loss of her worldwide popularity—was put down to laziness, alcohol and drug addiction and psychological problems that led at last to an almost blithe self-destruction.