The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  With a stable of stars that included Betty Grable, Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, June Haver, and Clifton Webb, Fox made seventy-five films in 1945, and Zanuck ran the studio like a Prussian general. An ex–polo player, Zanuck had been barred from playing polo in Brentwood because he had swung his mallet at a horse in a fit of anger. He then turned his mallet into a swagger stick, and it was said that he swung it at yes men who said “yes” before he was finished talking.

  In the summer of 1946 a nineteen-year-old journalist from Ohio was waiting in the crowded lobby of Fox Studios, hoping for an interview with Gene Tierney, when an attractive blonde carrying a bulging portfolio pushed open the large entry doors. Catching her heel, she stumbled and her pictures scattered on the linoleum floor. As the young journalist helped her pick up the pictures, she smiled at him with her bright blue eyes and said, “Thank you!” before walking to the receptionist’s window.

  Young Robert Slatzer tried to return to his book, but the blonde’s perfume lingered, and he found it hard to concentrate on his reading. He glanced once more at the shy, beautiful blonde as the receptionist asked her to take a seat. Slatzer recalls feeling fortunate that there was only one place left for her to sit—next to him.

  “What kind of book is that?” she asked as she sat down.

  “Leaves of Grass,” Slatzer said.

  “What’s it about?” she asked with wide-eyed wonder.

  “It’s a collection of poems by Walt Whitman,” he told her as he handed her the book. “Are you an actress?” Slatzer inquired.

  “No, I’m a model,” she responded enthusiastically, as she began thumbing through the book’s pages. “But I hope to be an actress someday. My name is Norma Jeane.”

  When he introduced himself, she began asking Slatzer about movie stars he had interviewed: What were they like? Were they the same in person as they were on the screen? Where did they print his interviews? And as they spoke Slatzer realized there was something special about this shy, beautiful blonde. “We had an instant affection towards each other,” he recalled. “She had a certain magic about her that was quite different. I guess you could say my heart went out to her from that very first day—and she sensed that.”

  Before he knew it they had made a date for that very night. He was to pick her up at the apartment on Nebraska, and they would have dinner up in Malibu at a place she liked that overlooked the ocean. He hadn’t told her he was broke and didn’t have a car. Slatzer was staying at the home of character actor Noble “Kid” Chissell, whom he had met on location in Ohio when Fox was filming Home in Indiana. Fortunately, Chissell wasn’t using his car that night and let Slatzer borrow his car and ten bucks.

  While Slatzer never got his interview that day with Gene Tierney, he did have an entrancing evening with the beautiful blonde. Gene Tierney was filming Dragonwyck with Walter Huston, and too busy to see the young journalist; however, there was another young man from the east who had no trouble in meeting Gene Tierney on the set of Dragonwyck, a charismatic man who had recently arrived in Hollywood—Jack Kennedy.

  In June of 1946 Jack Kennedy had won the Boston primary in the Eleventh Congressional District by a landslide. Flush with his first political success, he packed his bags and headed for a vacation in Hollywood, where he could work on his tan and his image before launching the November election campaign. Following in the footsteps of his old man, he was intent on mingling with the stars and “knocking a name,” as he put it to his friend Chuck Spalding, who worked for Gene Tierney’s agent, Charles Feldman.

  Recalling meeting Jack on the set of Dragonwyck at Fox, Gene Tierney stated, “I turned and found myself staring into the most perfect blue eyes I had ever seen on a man. He smiled at me. My reaction was right out of a ladies’ romance novel. Literally, my heart skipped.” Though she was married at the time to Oleg Cassini, Gene Tierney became enamored of Jack Kennedy and believed he was in love with her.

  “I’m not sure I can explain the nature of Jack’s charm,” she said, “but he took life just as it came. He didn’t try to hide. He never worried about making an impression. He made you feel very secure. I don’t remember seeing him angry. He was good with people in a way that went beyond politics, thoughtful in more than a material way. Gifts and flowers were not his style. He gave you his time, his interest.”

  But Gene Tierney was not the only woman to whom Jack gave his time and his interest. She was only one of many married women, divorcees, stars, and starlets he pursued on his Hollywood escapade.

  “News from the Hollywood love front!” Sheilah Graham coyly revealed in her gossip column of August 15, 1946. “Peggy Cummins and Jack Kennedy are a surprise twosome around town during this Congressman-for-Boston’s visit here!”

  According to his PT-J09 shipmate Red Fay, Jack also had an affair with Sonja Henie, whom he had met at the Hollywood home of his friend actor Robert Stack. Fay recalls Jack stating, “Making it with the ice-skating star was one of my greatest triumphs.” It was that summer, when Jack was eyeing the stars and starlets at Hollywood parties, that Robert Stack remembers seeing a pretty model named Norma Jeane.

  “I first met Norma Jeane Dougherty before she changed her name, when a good-looking Hungarian actor named Eric Feldary took her to one of our swimming parties,” Stack recalled. Feldary, who was also a friend of Sonja Henie, appeared in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Hold Back the Dawn. Stack noted that Norma Jeane wore a white bathing suit, “which she filled beautifully, but then so did many of the other pretty girls. I remember that she appeared to be shy and somehow on the outside of everything taking place at the party. I tried being a good host, and every time I’d ask if she wanted anything she’d say, ‘No, everything is fine.’”

  In the summer of 1946, Norma Jeane appeared in her bathing suit on the cover of Laff, a girlie magazine that Howard Hughes found more than amusing. On July 7, Hughes had narrowly escaped death when the experimental plane he was testing crashed into a Beverly Hills residence. He was semicomatose for days and encased in a plaster cast, but signs of life returned when he spotted Norma Jeane’s photo on Laff’s cover. Hughes called his office at RKO and told one of his associates to find out who the cover girl was and arrange a screen test. Learning of Hughes’s interest, but savvy enough to know that a Hughes screen test for a starlet often meant a command performance between the call sheets, Bunny Ainsworth planted an item in Hedda Hopper’s syndicated movie column of July 29:

  Howard Hughes is on the mend. Picking up a magazine, he was attracted by the cover girl and promptly instructed an aide to sign her for pictures. She’s Norma Jeane Dougherty, a model.

  Miss Ainsworth then called 20th Century-Fox casting director Ben Lyon and told him Norma Jeane hadn’t signed the Hughes contract yet, and she’d give Fox a chance, but they’d have to act fast. “Bring her right over,” Ben Lyon said.

  Norma Jeane was at Aunt Ana’s when she got the call. Nebraska Avenue was only minutes away from the Fox lot, but there’d be little time to fix her makeup, put on the right dress, and do her hair. Nevertheless, she was ready for this moment. When she arrived, Miss Ainsworth was there waiting for her, and this time there’d be no long wait on the hard chairs, culminating with “I’m sorry, no more interviews today.” The receptionist ushered them through the doors and they hurried down the hall of the administration building to Ben Lyon’s office. Lyon didn’t ask her to read a scene. He didn’t recall asking about her experience. He didn’t remember whether he asked about her education, her age, or whether she was married. He was struck by what he saw and sensed. Seeing was believing. He recalled saying something inane to Bunny Ainsworth like, “I think she’s got good bones in her face.”

  “Can you test her tomorrow, Ben?” Miss Ainsworth asked.

  “Mr. Zanuck has to approve every test. It will take a little time to get his okay on it.”

  “Do it fast, Ben,” Miss Ainsworth said. “We’re on our way over to RKO from here.”

  “Give me two days—just
two days,” Ben Lyon asked. “I’ll set it up.”

  Two days later Lyon arranged an unauthorized screen test. Not wanting to run the risk of Zanuck’s saying no, Lyon gambled that once Zanuck saw the test he’d sign her. They went on the set at five-thirty on an August morning with a skeleton crew to film the silent test. Lyon told Norma Jeane to start walking across the set when he said “Action.” Then she was to sit down and light a cigarette…put it out…get up…walk upstage…cross…look out the window…turn…come downstage, and exit.

  Norma Jeane stood waiting in the dark, nervously shaking her hands as if to shake out the demons. The electrician’s grip threw the knife switch that turned false dark into false day, and cameraman Leon Shamroy indicated he was ready. As Lyon said “Action,” Norma Jeane began her silent dialogue with the transfiguring eye of the camera. “I know few actresses who had the incredible talent for communicating with the camera lens as she did,” photographer Philippe Halsman once said. “She would try to seduce a camera as if it were a human being.” But the unerring eye of the camera to Norma Jeane was millions and millions of eyes—the cyclops of the whole world, the world where the other person, whose name she didn’t know, belonged. It was the lens that had the power to divine the voluptuous waif who had wandered somnambulently into the wrong world—the dreaming child with the wide-eyed Technicolor gaze of wistful incertitude. In recalling that morning when they made the test, Leon Shamroy stated, “Later, I got a cold chill. This girl had something—something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She didn’t need a soundtrack to tell her story.”

  There was a prescribed ritual at Fox when Darryl F. Zanuck entered a projection room. The secretary would call the projectionist when the studio boss was on his way, and he would then buzz the theater when Zanuck entered the outer corridor. Everyone stood up for Zanuck’s entrance and waited until he was seated before sitting down. When Zanuck took his seat on the afternoon he was to see the Norma Jeane Dougherty test, Ben Lyon sat down uneasily, knowing what was to come.

  After the dailies ended, Norma Jeane’s silent Technicolor test unexpectedly came on the screen. The room was deadly quiet. When it ended, Zanuck barked, “Who’s that girl?”

  “Her name’s Norma Jeane Dougherty, Mr. Zanuck. She’s a model.”

  “I don’t know her. Did I authorize this test?”

  “No, sir,” Lyon said, anticipating a devastating Zanuck tirade.

  “It’s a damn fine test. Sign her up!”

  Several days later Norma Jeane rushed to the Goddards’ house waving her contract in the air, shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I’m with the finest studio in Hollywood! They liked my test. I’m actually on the payroll! Look!” Grace Goddard and Norma Jeane embraced and wept with joy.

  “I told you, honey!” Grace exclaimed, wiping away the tears. “I said one day you’re going to be a movie star! I told you!”

  “The people are all wonderful, and I’m going to be in a movie! It’ll be different now for all of us,” Norma Jeane exclaimed as she excitedly told Grace all the details about the test. She mentioned that the casting director had suggested “she think up a more glamorous name than Norma Dougherty.”

  “Haven’t you any ideas for a name?” Grace asked.

  “The man at the studio suggested ‘Marilyn,’” she said.

  “That’s a nice name,” Grace replied. “And it fits with your mother’s maiden name. She was a Monroe.”

  “That’s a wonderful name,” Norma Jeane exclaimed. “Monroe…Marilyn…Marilyn…Monroe…Marilyn Monroe…Marilyn Monroe!” She repeated it over and over and over to herself and wrote it down again and again…

  …until it looked comfortable and sounded familiar—like a friend. And she decided it would be the name of the other person.

  PART III

  1946–1954

  All the Bright Colors

  26

  Rara Avis—With Options

  I had a new name, Marilyn Monroe. I had to get born. And this time better than before.

  —Marilyn Monroe

  Ten years after entering the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home, orphan number 3,463 became Marilyn Monroe. Reborn on August 24, 1946, in the 20th Century-Fox legal department, she entered the celluloid world of dreams as a starlet earning seventy-five dollars a week, “subject to the terms of a seven-year contract, hereinbefore amended with options of the aforesaid agreement and subject to renewal, as herebefore agreed.”

  For the wide-eyed starlet it was like being a refugee escaping to the promised land, and the rolling hills of 20th Century-Fox became her adopted home. Though she wasn’t required to be at the studio every day, she regularly attended the studio classes in voice, acting, and dance. In the hairdressing department she learned the tricks of being a blonde, and heard the latest hair-curling studio gossip. Visiting the editing rooms and soundstages, she learned the boiler-room mechanics of the Fox film factory. Allan “Whitey” Snyder, who first met Marilyn at Fox in 1946, recalled that she was “desperate to absorb all she could.”

  Everyone seemed to notice the attractive and personable new starlet except the head of the studio, Darryl F. Zanuck. In the fall of 1946, Zanuck was producing Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck. Directed by Elia Kazan, it was to be an award-winning, heartfelt statement about anti-Semitism. At the same time Zanuck was supervising postproduction of The Razor’s Edge and The Late George Apley. He was the overseer of the entire output of the studio, which produced fifty-three films in 1946. Fox had over forty contract players, and Marilyn was only one of a dozen starlets. Zanuck seldom saw a starlet unless it was on the screen or on the chaise of his studio chateau. Seldom seen by the ordinary studio employee, Zanuck was a night person. Marilyn belonged to the day.

  Studio publicist Roy Craft was sent to interview Marilyn and put together a brief bio for the studio files. He recalled being deeply moved by her Dickensian story concerning the orphanage and the series of foster homes. Grace Goddard had advised Marilyn not to reveal her mother’s history of mental illness. And so Marilyn told Roy Craft what she once suspected to be true in her early days at the orphanage—that her mother was dead.

  At the time of the interview, however, Gladys was staying with Marilyn at Aunt Ana’s. Shortly after Marilyn had signed her Fox contract, Berniece and her daughter Mona Rae came to visit for several months. It was the first time Berniece had seen her mother since they said good-bye in Kentucky in 1923.

  According to Berniece, there was always friction between Marilyn and her mother, who frequently was argumentative and critical of her daughter. “I keep telling myself,” Marilyn confided to her half sister, “that mother will act better when she has been on the outside longer. I still feel as if we’re strangers. I’m still trying to get acquainted with her. When I went to see her in Portland, I drove up there thinking it would be a joyful occasion—all those years I had waited and wished…but then she was so cold. I felt so let down.” Berniece noted that Marilyn went to great lengths to try and heal the relationship and was ingeniously inventive in trying to divert Gladys’s urge to be argumentative. But Marilyn ultimately confided to Berniece, “Mother and I could never live together.”

  Shortly after Berniece and Mona Rae ended their visit, Gladys moved from the Nebraska Avenue apartment she shared with Marilyn and returned to Oregon with an itinerant salesman, John Stewart Eley, whom she later married. In the fall of 1946, Marilyn moved from Aunt Ana’s to a rented room in the Hollywood Hills on Temple Hill Way. It would be one of many rooms and small apartments she would live in during the difficult years of her early career.

  In her first weeks as a Fox starlet, Marilyn occasionally met with the young Ohio journalist, Bob Slatzer, who was a fountain of film lore. He took her to Hollywood landmarks and loaned her books to fill her insatiable appetite for knowledge. Slatzer recalled that one Sunday they visited the old John Barrymore estate on Tower Grove, which had been put up for auction after Barrymore’s death. The fifty-five-room mansion had fa
llen into decay, but it still contained many relics from Barrymore’s eclectic collections—totem poles, shrunken human heads, armor, paintings, and stuffed rare birds. Slatzer remembered that Marilyn found the sight of the stuffed birds distressing, and that she quickly tuned in to the tragedy that lingered in the halls of the Barrymore estate. When they visited the room where Barrymore had lain near death, hemorrhaging from the ravages of alcoholism, Marilyn said, “This place is a nightmare of everything that went wrong with a man.” Slatzer observed that Marilyn was instinctively repelled by possessions, and when they drove out of the rusting Barrymore gates, she remarked, “I never want to own anything pretentious in my life—especially not a big home.” She then blurted out, as if Norma Jeane were making a vow to Marilyn Monroe, “Remember that you’re here for just a little while. And don’t you damn well forget it!”

  Slatzer left Los Angeles in September to resume his college studies in Ohio, but he was determined to return to Hollywood to pursue his career and learn more about the fascinating creature who had stumbled into his life in the lobby of 20th Century-Fox.

  In November, Marilyn played her first bit part, as a telephone operator in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. Because she’s barely seen the film is seldom mentioned in her filmographies; nevertheless, it was her first professional motion-picture experience.

  Reminiscing about her early days at Fox, Marilyn recalled attending a party at the home of agent Charles Feldman, whose Famous Artists Corporation was one of the top agencies in Beverly Hills.

  One night a bit player, a male, invited me out for dinner.

  “I haven’t any money,” I warned him. “Have you?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’ve received a sort of invitation to a party. And I would like to take you along. All the stars will be there.”