Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (25 page)

With Betty Grable at a premiere (1953).

With Jane Russell at Grauman’s Chinese, after immortalizing their hand and footprints in the theater’s forecourt (1953).

Joe and Marilyn: wedding day, San Francisco (1954).

Singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” for the troops in Korea (February 1954). (Photo by Ted Cieszynski)

Arriving at an army outpost in Korea to entertain troops (February 1954). (Photo by Sakamoto; copyright by T. R. Fogli)

With her good friend and makeup artist Allan Snyder, on the set of
There’s No Business Like Show Business
(1954). (From the collection of Allan Snyder)

Recording for RCA Records (1954).

Lexington Avenue, New York: filming
The Seven Year Itch
(1954). The actual skirt-blowing shots were eventually recreated in the Hollywood studio.

On location in New York for
The Seven Year Itch
—a shot arranged for the press but not included in the film (1954). (From the collection of Chris Basinger)

The daily tutorials in breathing and diction had an immediate and not entirely felicitous effect on Marilyn’s speech and her subsequent reading of lines before the camera. Because Natasha had a mania for clarity, she forced Marilyn to repeat every speech until each syllable fairly clicked and then to move her lips before speaking. She was especially fierce on the sharpness of final dentals, and so Marilyn had to recite over and over such sentences as “I did not want to pet the dear, soft cat” until every “d” and “t” was unnaturally stressed and each word distinct from the preceding and the following.

Unfortunately, this exercise quickly ossified into a strained and affected manner of on-screen speech it would take years (and eventually a new coach) to overcome. The exaggerated diction, the lip movements before and during her lines, the overstated emphasis on each syllable—all the verbal tics and peculiarities for which Marilyn Monroe was often vilified by critics—owed to the tutelage of Natasha Lytess. And although it would soon be evident that Natasha’s method could work well for comic roles, her next drama coach would have to work double time to relax Marilyn’s speech patterns for serious, more mature parts. In life, however, there was nothing of the breathless, slightly overwrought sensibility that characterized Marilyn’s speech on screen.

As do many forlorn and unrequited lovers, Natasha seized every opportunity to be near the object of her devotion, forming, training and influencing her beyond the exigencies of film acting technique. “I began to feed her mind,” she said years later, adding that she introduced Marilyn to the works of poets and composers. According to Natasha, Marilyn was indeed no intellectual, but was rather “a mental beachcomber, picking the minds of others and scooping up knowledge and opinions.” Natasha provided a cultural stimulation Marilyn had never known. But emotionally the two women were ever at cross-purposes, locked in a collusion of half-met needs.

By late spring of 1948, Marilyn was receiving a regular studio paycheck; still, the Carrolls continued their allowance to her so that she could have
extra private sessions with Natasha. And by this time, as Lucille recalled, Marilyn had resigned her avocation as a boulevard hooker. On June 9, Lucille arranged for Marilyn to live at the Studio Club, 1215 North Lodi Street in Hollywood, a two-minute walk from the Los Angeles Orphans Home. A Spanish-Moorish complex with an open courtyard and palm trees in profusion, the Club was a residential hotel for young women aspiring to careers in the arts, and the superintendents managed it like a college dormitory or a branch of the YWCA. There were strict curfews, and gentlemen could visit only in the open atrium-style public lounge. Lucille paid in advance the three-hundred-dollar rent for six months, and Marilyn moved into room number 334.
²

With her salary and allowance, she treated herself to a new Ford convertible for which she arranged monthly payments; an expensive, cumbersome professional hair dryer; a commodious supply of cosmetics; books; a phonograph and recordings of classical music. “I felt like I was living on my own for the first time,” she said later. “The Studio Club had rules, but the women in charge were nice, and if you came home after they locked the doors at ten-thirty, a smile and apology would usually be enough to satisfy them.” The supervisors were, in other words, too smart to ask the right questions.

But Columbia had no such reticence in inquiring about fees spent on contract players who were paid but not working on pictures. Talent department chief Max Arnow was often the first to receive calls from the studio’s accountants, and he received one in June relative to Marilyn Monroe. Within days, Arnow told Natasha there would be one less student on her roster by the end of the month, for they would not subsidize her private classes at the studio. “Please don’t do this,” Natasha pleaded. “She’s doing well. She loves the work, and I’m sure I can build her up for you.” That same day, Natasha rang producer Harry Romm, who was producing a B-picture called
Ladies of the Chorus
. Yes, Romm said, a major role was still uncast.

By early July, after an impressive audition at which she sang one of
the film’s songs, Marilyn was hired; the picture was made on the cheap in ten days. She had the role of Peggy Martin, a chorus girl whose mother (played by Adele Jergens) tries to dissuade her from marrying a handsome socialite—a union that can only end in disaster, mother insists, just as hers once did because of “class differences.” In the tradition of Hollywood’s democratic approach to everything including romantic musicals, the one-hour picture ends happily with the triumph of true love (if not of narrative honesty or social reality).

With her long, flowing and silky hair redyed a glistening blond and styled like Rita Hayworth’s, Marilyn brightened a dull and cliché-ridden script. Although Natasha’s supervision had rendered her speech too deliberate and her gestures so overrehearsed they frequently seemed mechanical, Marilyn seemed to glow—especially in scenes with her leading man (Rand Brooks) whose character’s nervousness merely encourages her to take charge of the situation. A raised eyebrow, a sudden drop in voice and there was a strong undertow of feminine wiles to her characterization. Especially in her two songs (“Anyone Can See I Love You” and “Everybody Needs a Da-da-daddy”), Marilyn revealed she had more talent than the film required. For the first time, she sang in a film—and very well, too, with a mellow, slightly smoky quality, an intriguing fusion of girlish innocence and womanly enterprise.