We arrived at the Beverly Hills home at nine o’clock. It was a famous agent’s house. I felt as frightened entering it as if I were breaking into a bank. My stockings had a few mends in them. I was wearing a ten-dollar dress. And my shoes! I prayed nobody would look at my shoes. I stood as straight as I could and put on the highest-class expression I knew, but the best I could manage was to walk stiff legged into a large hall and stand staring like a frozen blonde at dinner jackets and evening gowns.
My escort whispered to me, “The food’s in the other room. Come on!” He went off without me. I remained in the hall, looking into a room full of wonderful furniture and wonderful people. Jennifer Jones was sitting on a couch. Olivia de Havilland was standing near a little table. Gene Tierney was laughing next to her. There were so many others I couldn’t focus on them. Evening gowns and famous faces drifted around in the room laughing and chatting. Diamonds glittered. There were men, too, but I only looked at one. Clark Gable stood by himself holding a highball and smiling wistfully at the air. He looked so familiar that it made me dizzy.
A voice spoke.
“My dear young lady,” it said, “do come and sit by my side.”
It was a charming voice, a little fuzzy with liquor, but very distinguished. I turned and saw a man sitting by himself on the stairway. He was holding a drink in his hand. His face was sardonic like his voice.
“Do you mean me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Pardon me if I don’t rise. My name is George Sanders.”
I said, “How do you do.”
“I presume you also have a name,” he scowled at me.
“I’m Marilyn Monroe,” I said.
“You will forgive me for not having heard it before,” said Mr. Sanders. “Do sit down—beside me.”
“May I have the honor of asking you to marry me?” he said solemnly. “The name, in case you’ve forgotten, is Sanders.”
I smiled at him and didn’t answer.
“You are naturally a little reluctant to marry one who is not only a stranger, but an actor,” Mr. Sanders said. “I can understand your hesitancy—particularly on the second ground. An actor is not quite a human being—but then, who is?”
Mr. Sanders’s handsome and witty face suddenly looked at me, intently.
“Blonde,” he said, “pneumatic, and full of peasant health. Just the type for me!”
I thought he was going to put his arm around me, but he didn’t. Mr. Sanders put his glass down and dozed off.
Despite George Sanders’s ennui, Charlie Feldman was known for giving some of the best parties in Hollywood. Originally a New Yorker, Feldman knew Joe Kennedy, and it was through the Kennedy family connection that Jack’s friend Chuck Spalding was working for Feldman at Famous Artists in 1946. When Jack Kennedy went to Hollywood on his “hunting expeditions” he was often a guest at the Feldman house, and he was dating two of Feldman’s clients, Gene Tierney and Peggy Cummins. According to Feldman’s ex-wife, Jean Howard, Kennedy stayed at Feldman’s house in 1946, and Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty, confirmed that it was Charlie Feldman who introduced Jack Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe.
By Christmas of 1946 Marilyn had performed as a bit-extra in only two films, and she soon realized that one of her problems at Fox was that the studio had too many blondes. Betty Grable was the star of the lot, and June Haver and Vivian Blaine were already being groomed for stardom. As the superfluous blonde, Marilyn rode on floats, appeared at premieres with studio dates, did grand openings of supermarkets, and posed for photos, but she didn’t see her name on the call sheets. Discouraged, she turned to Ben Lyon and said, “What do I do to become a star, Ben? Tell me how to become a star!” Lyon detected the tone of raw determination in her voice. “She had her heart set on becoming the queen of the lot,” Lyon reflected. “Fox had become a home to her, a replacement for the family she never had.” He advised her to be patient and study. But among the aging bit players, Marilyn noted many who had studied and had been patient.
In the hair-raising studio gossip mill, Marilyn undoubtedly heard the wave of stories about the seventy-year-old Fox studio czar, Joe Schenck. One of the founding fathers of Hollywood, Schenck had been convicted of perjury during government investigations into bribes he and other studio bosses had paid to Willy Bioff, Johnny Rosselli, and union racketeers connected with the Mafia. Schenck served a six-month prison term at Danbury in 1942. But in 1947, as an executive at 20th Century-Fox, he still wielded considerable power in the film capital.
Schenck had a shrewd eye for business and a connoisseur’s eye for attractive women. In his waning years he maintained his keen appreciation of the feminine mystique and collected beautiful young specimens who raised his flagging spirits—if nothing else. Among the studio gossips they were known as “Schenck’s girls,” young beauties who congregated at Schenck’s Holmby Hills Mediterranean mansion for cocktails, dinner, screenings, and card parties.
In early 1947, Joe Schenck was driving from the Fox lot when his limousine encountered an exotic rara avis wiggle-walking across a studio street. Perhaps it was more than coincidence that she happened to be wiggling by at the propitious moment and gave Schenck a wide-eyed smile. Telling his chauffeur to stop the car, Schenck motioned Marilyn over and asked her name. Learning that she was a contract player, and knowing that contract players were usually hungry, he ensnared the beautiful creature with the suggestion, “Why don’t you call me about dinner-time?” and handed her a card with his home number. If, as Ben Lyon stated, Fox had become Marilyn’s surrogate home, then Joe Schenck became her surrogate father. Within weeks she became one of Schenck’s girls, and a regular at his dinner parties.
Marion Wagner, who had known Marilyn from the Blue Book modeling days, was also one of Schenck’s girls, and she vividly recalled those evenings when Schenck’s limousine brought the girls up to his elegant mansion at 141 South Carolwood Drive. After cocktails and dinner they’d either see a movie in his private projection room or play cards. “He used to get a kick out of backing us when we played gin rummy against his male pals, and if we won it pleased him,” Marion Wagner remembered. “He was like a father figure, a father confessor, a very wise, lovely old man. When the evening was over, I would simply be taken home in the limousine, and so far as I know it was the same for Marilyn.”
Among the card sharks and male pals were mafiosi Johnny Rosselli and Bugsy Siegel, and Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn. Rosselli, Siegel, and Cohn were associated with Schenck in a number of Los Angeles Mafia gambling operations as well as partners in the Aqua Caliente Race Track in Baja California. Siegel dropped out of the game when he was fatally shot in the eye at his home on June 22, 1947.
Soon it was Marilyn Monroe who was the subject of the studio gossip mill. “The first fame I achieved was a wave of gossip that identified me as Joe Schenck’s girl,” Marilyn lamented. “Mr. Schenck had invited me to his Holmby Hills mansion for dinner one evening. Then he fell into the habit of inviting me two or three evenings a week. I went to Mr. Schenck’s mansion the first few times because he was one of the heads of the studio. After that I went because I liked him. Also the food was very good, and there were always important people at the table—Mr. Schenck’s personal friends. The fact that people began to talk about me being Joe Schenck’s girl didn’t annoy me at first. But later it did annoy me. Mr. Schenck never so much as laid a finger on my wrist, or tried to. He was interested in me because I was a good table ornament and because I was what he called an ‘offbeat personality.’…I liked sitting around the fireplace with Mr. Schenck and hearing him talk about love and sex. He was full of wisdom on these subjects, like some great explorer. I also liked to look at his face. It was as much the face of a town as of a man. The whole history of Hollywood was in it.”
In February 1947, the studio renewed her contract for another six months at an increased salary of one hundred dollars per week. Several weeks later her name appeared on the call sheets for Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! starring June Haver
and Lon McCallister. In what is generally considered her screen debut, she played the bit part of Betty, with two words of dialogue: “Hi, Rad!”
“Now just walk up to Miss June Haver, smile at her, say hello, wave your right hand, and walk on. Got it?” Marilyn recalled the assistant director telling her. “The bells rang. A hush fell over the set. The assistant director called, ‘Action!’ I walked, smiled, waved my right hand, and spoke. I was in the movies! I was one of those hundred to one shots—a ‘bit player.’”
In the brief scene, June Haver and child actress Natalie Wood are engaged in conversation in front of a small-town church in Paducah. Parishioners are exiting the church behind them. Among them is a pretty young blonde who walks by, turns to Miss Haver and waves as she says, “Hi, Rad!” Miss Haver then responds, “Hi, Betty!” In the next reel there’s a scene by a lake where blond Betty is seen in the background with another bit player paddling a canoe.
“There were a dozen of us on the set, bit players, with a gesture to make and a line or two to recite,” Marilyn recalled. “Some of them were veteran bit players. After ten years in the movies they were still saying one line and walking ten feet toward nowhere. A few were young and had nice bosoms. But I knew they were different from me. They didn’t have my illusions. My illusions didn’t have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. With the arc lights on me and the camera pointed at me, I suddenly knew myself. How clumsy, empty, uncultured I was! A sullen orphan with a goose egg for a head. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But my God, how I wanted to learn! To change! To improve! I didn’t want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act!”
It would be a long and bumpy ride for blond Betty of Paducah before she arrived at Bus Stop.
27
Smog
There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure.
—Thomas Paine
Shortly after Shelley Winters hitchhiked from Brooklyn and arived in Hollywood, she began hanging around Schwab’s Drugstore on the Sunset Strip because she had heard that it was where Lana Turner had been discovered. Though Lana Turner was discovered elsewhere, it was at Schwab’s that Shelley met movie columnist Sidney Skolsky and his chauffeur, Marilyn Monroe.
Winters recalled that when she met Marilyn in 1946, “she was driving Skolsky around to interviews in her old Ford, since he had never learned to drive.” Skolsky was one of the more colorful members of the Hollywood press corps. A diminutive man, he also had a short temper and once fiercely bit columnist Louella Parsons on the arm in a fit of anger during a dinner party at Chasen’s.
Though he wasn’t afraid of Louella Parsons, Skolsky had many phobias. He was afraid of automobiles, cats, dogs, children, and germs. Perhaps his hypochondria as well as his love of show business led him to establish his office in a drugstore. His balcony office in Schwab’s commanded a dramatic view of the Hollywood struggle pit below, which he called the “Schwabadero”—the wanna-bes’ Trocadero. The Schwabadero served as a jitney stop for volunteer drivers who took Skolsky wherever he wanted to go. It was said Skolsky didn’t drive because his feet couldn’t reach the pedals; however, he was truly afraid of cars. At various times his chauffeurs included almost everyone in the star system—from Marlene Dietrich to Humphrey Bogart to Marilyn Monroe. Shelley Winters recalled that one day Skolsky took Marilyn and Winters out to the parking lot behind the drugstore and pointed to a long low building where his daughter, Stefi, was a drama student. “‘That’s the Actors Lab,’ he told us. ‘It’s the new Hollywood home of the Group Theatre, and some of the best actors in the world teach there!’ We almost knocked the poor man down in our rush to get to the front door.”
The Group Theatre had been organized in New York by Hannah Weinstein, executive director of one of the Comintern fronts, the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council. Under its directors Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre presented some remarkably innovative productions in the 1930s: Success Story by John Howard Lawson; Men in White by Sidney Kingsley; Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets. In 1932 the Group presented Night Over Taos by Maxwell Anderson, the story of a revolt against landowners. The production starred Morris Carnovsky, J. Edward Bromberg, Phoebe Brand, Clifford Odets, and an attractive young actress, Paula Miller, who would later marry the play’s director, Lee Strasberg.
During the thirties, the Group Theatre made no pretense of burying the Marxist message in its presentations—it was loudly projected to the cheap seats by gifted, dedicated artists. Morris Carnovsky and his wife Phoebe Brand became coaches at the Actors Lab, where Marilyn and Shelley Winters studied in 1947. There was a deep dichotomy between the mind-set of the Group Theatre, with its roots in Stanislavsky’s Method, and the West Coast endocrine system of acting. Exercises in sense memory, animal improvisations, and searches for motivation were unlike anything Marilyn had previously been exposed to. Anthony Quinn, Lee J. Cobb, Joe Papp, Lloyd Bridges, John Garfield, Larry Parks, and Walter Bernstein were among the talented students. Walter Bernstein would one day become the screenwriter called in by Fox to rewrite Something’s Got to Give.
Phoebe Brand, one of Marilyn’s teachers, remembered her as a self-conscious girl who never spoke up in class. “I never knew what to make of her,” she said. “She didn’t tell me what her acting problems were…. I tried to get through to her, but I couldn’t. She was extremely retiring. What I failed to see in her acting was wit, her sense of humor. It was there all the time—this lovely comedic style, but I was blind to it. Frankly I never would have predicted she would be a success.” Joe Papp remembered her as a young girl who came to class with a small dog that sat in her lap. He recalled that she was so shy she barely spoke at all.
Remembering her days at the Actors Lab, Marilyn said, “All I could think of was this far, faraway place called New York, where actors and directors did very different things than stand around all day arguing about a close-up or a camera angle. I had never seen a play, and I don’t think I knew how to read one very well. But Phoebe Brand and her company somehow made it all very real. It seemed so exciting to me, and I wanted to be part of that life.”
The list of Actors Lab sponsors was a who’s who of Hollywood Stalinism: John Howard Lawson; Alvah Bessie; Ring Lardner, Jr.; Albert Maltz; Dalton Trumbo; Waldo Salt; Donald Ogden Stewart; J. Edward Bromberg; Abe Polonsky. But the majority of students, many of whom attended under the G.I. Bill, were merely ambitious young innocents like Marilyn Monroe who had a fierce determination to learn their craft.
Once, asked how she felt about communists, Marilyn said, “They’re for the people, aren’t they?” But Marilyn wasn’t a political person. Her opinions were opinions of the heart, not dialectics. She didn’t take part in the political and artistic arguments that raged in the Actors Lab commissary, at the Schwabadero, or at Greenblatt’s Deli across the street. Her golden dreams had little to do with ideology, revolution, or a new social order. Her dreams had to do with the quiet revolution going on within herself.
In May, Marilyn Monroe was cast by Fox in Dangerous Years, a B movie produced by Sol Wurtzel. It would be a best-forgotten film of 1947 had Marilyn not played Eve, a waitress in a hangout for delinquent teenagers. She was on the screen for only a few minutes; nevertheless, it was the first real bit part in which she could do a portrayal. Though the director, Arthur Pierson, admired her performance and Ben Lyon saw promise, the studio didn’t renew Marilyn’s contract when the option fell due in August of 1947.
“I got called into the casting department and informed that I was being dropped by the studio and that my presence would no longer be required,” Marilyn recalled. “I went to my room in Hollywood and lay down in bed and cried. I cried for a week. I didn’t eat or talk or comb my hair. I kept crying as if I were at a funeral burying Marilyn Monroe.”
That’s the way you feel when you’re beaten inside. You don’t feel angry at those who’ve beaten you. You just feel ashamed.
When we were sitting in the living room Mr. Schenck said to me, “How are things going at the studio?’
I smiled at him because I was glad he hadn’t had a hand in my being fired.
“I lost my job there last week,” I said. Mr. Schenck didn’t try to console me. He didn’t take my hand or make any promises.
“Keep trying,” he told me.
“I will,” I said.
“Try Columbia,” Mr. Schenck said. “There may be something there.”
I called Columbia two days later. The casting department was very polite. Yes, they had a place for me. They would put me on the payroll and see that I was given a chance at any part that came up. Max Arnow, the casting director, smiled, squeezed my hand and added, “You ought to go a long way here. I’ll watch out for a good part for you.”
I returned to my room feeling alive again. And the daydreams started coming back—kind of on tiptoe. The casting director saw hundreds of girls every week, whom he turned down, real actresses and beauties of every sort. There must be something special about me for him to have hired me right off, after a first look.
There was something special about me in the casting director’s eyes, but I didn’t find it out till much later. Mr. Schenck had called up the head of Columbia and asked him as a favor to give me a job.
But the truth was that Harry Cohn was reluctant to put Marilyn under contract until pressure was put on him by Joe Kennedy’s occasional golf partner, Johnny Rosselli. There were other odd contingencies to Marilyn’s sudden departure from Fox and her new arrangement with Columbia. Though one would conclude from reading Marilyn’s account that it all happened very quickly—a matter of a few days and a phone call—actually there was an extended period of time between Marilyn’s departure from Fox in August 1947 and her new contract with Columbia in March of 1948. Marilyn dropped from sight for seven months.
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 23
