Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (27 page)

This complex of reactions was directly related to her work as model and actress. During her time as Norma Jeane with the Bolenders, Gladys, Grace McKee and Jim Dougherty, she was constantly required to rise to others’ expectations to such an extent that her own desires and the natural emergence of her own personality, her conduct and appearance, were managed by others. Karger had paid for dental work because he disapproved of her overbite, and now Hyde went further. He arranged for a Beverly Hills surgeon named Michael Gurdin
to remove a slight bump of cartilage from the tip of her nose and to insert a crescent-shaped silicone prosthesis into her jaw, beneath the lower gum, to give her face a softer line. These alterations account for the different appearances she presents in films after 1949. Eager to be acceptable, and to win the approval she so desired, smiling prettily for photographers, working toward movie stardom—these were logical stratagems for one primed to please.

Capitalizing on Marilyn’s natural sexiness, Johnny Hyde was quick to introduce his new girlfriend to independent producer Lester Cowan, who was investing some of Mary Pickford’s money in a Marx Brothers farce. With the opening credit “Introducing Marilyn Monroe,”
Love Happy
went before the cameras in February 1949 with a cameo role quickly devised for her—a simple addendum for the Marxes, whose films were grab-bags of wacky improvisation. Bug-eyed and leering, Groucho had the role of a private detective: answering a tap at his door, he opens to admit Marilyn, who slinks into his office wearing a strapless, iridescent gown.

“What can I do for you?” asks Groucho, turning to the audience to add, “What a ridiculous question.”

Placing a seductive hand on his shoulder, she purrs, “Mr. Grunion, I want you to help me.”

“What seems to be the trouble?” asks Groucho, with the trademark roll of his eyes and lift of his thick brows.

As Marilyn then strolls away from him off-camera, she replies, “Some men are following me.”

“Really?” Groucho continues, eyeing her departing figure. “I can’t understand why!” End of less-than-a-minute cameo.

“It’s amazing,” was Groucho’s comment to the press after filming. “She’s Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one!” For a single afternoon of work, Marilyn was paid five hundred dollars, plus an additional three hundred for promotional photos. More than half this sum was dispensed in gifts for the Karger women and a gold watch for Fred. She also sent a gift to the Carrolls, who soon after, aware of her connection to Johnny Hyde, rightly decided that they no longer had to throw good money after bad. Their subsidies ceased that spring of 1949, when Marilyn told them she had used their allowance to arrange for time payments on her convertible.

*    *    *

Love Happy
was Marilyn’s fourth film, but in spite of two years of studio apprenticeship and a year’s study with Natasha, her career was going nowhere and stardom seemed very remote—perhaps not even a realistic goal. No one but Johnny and Natasha, who were surrogate parents replacing the Carrolls, took much notice of her.

Whatever the mixed results of her dramatic exercises with Natasha, the teacher’s cultural influence cannot be exaggerated, for in an important way Lytess—and Johnny, too—confirmed Marilyn in her love of Russian culture and literature, an interest first sparked at the Actors Lab. Natasha was more academic about it than Johnny, but after a few whiskies he, too, spoke of the great Russian writers and recited a few lines from Pushkin and Andreyev. That year, Marilyn began a long, painstaking trek through sections of Russian poetry. “I began to see hope for her,” Natasha wrote of that year.

She had no discipline, and she was lazy, but I pounded at her. When she came unprepared for a lesson, I was furious. I berated her as I would my own daughter. And always Marilyn would look at me as though I were betraying her.

The clash of wills and attitudes in Natasha—nurturing but severe, generous but tyrannical was difficult for Marilyn to comprehend, for she was ever sensitive to criticism and needy of endorsement. And if she was aware of Natasha’s quiet disapproval over her increasing reliance on Johnny, Marilyn gave no indication at the time. “Natasha was jealous of anyone who was close to me” was her laconic comment a few years later; she did not elaborate.

Otherwise, the early months of 1949 were spent with Johnny (at his convenience) and with Natasha (at Marilyn’s); there seem to have been no other people of consequence in her life, and no contact with those in her past. Natasha corrected her speech and gestures and Johnny broadened her political sensitivity. His discussions of the Czar’s last days, the drama of the 1917 Revolution and his belief that there was a core of hope at the center of communism were Marilyn’s first education in global politics: “she was intrigued by it all,” according to Natasha, “and she began to reflect his political attitudes,” which were not, it seems, much more than casual conversations that expressed both his
innate love of Russia and his appreciation of democracy. What Marilyn most appreciated, however, was Johnny’s defense of serfs and outcasts, the poor and the disenfranchised.

This liberalism struck a resonant chord in her own empathetic nature, perhaps partly because of her own background. The socially conscious plays to which she had been introduced at the Actors Lab, the fiery culture represented by the melodramatic Natasha, the slightly boozy romanticism of Johnny Hyde—in love with Old Russia but aware of its need for reform—all these introductions to the Russian soul touched Marilyn deeply. Often, she told Natasha, she read a Tolstoy short story with Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker Suite
on the phonograph. However incongruous that combination, no one could fault her longing for total immersion when she was drawn to learning.

In fact she was beginning to develop an entirely new take on herself and her life. Communication with those in her past, represented by Grace, was increasingly rare. There is, for example, no record of her reply to a note from Grace on April 20, informing her that Gladys, during a temporary leave from a state hospital, had married a man named John Stewart Eley. Of this brief marriage nothing is known, nor would there be further personal communication between mother and daughter; Marilyn continued to send small sums to Gladys, however (monies that later increased with her own improved lot).

Although Marilyn was not to be deterred from her goal of movie stardom, there were no offers forthcoming after
Love Happy
. She insisted on paying her rent at the Beverly Carlton and, except for the cost of evenings out with Johnny, supported herself with the residue of her fee from
Love Happy
. Obligated to travel for a nationwide promotional tour for that film in July 1949, she was idle until then. And so, because she had some extraordinary expenses—books and car payments among them—she decided to look into her cache of photographers’ business cards. There she found the address of Tom Kelley, the man who had come to her rescue the day of her Sunset Boulevard traffic accident.

Kelley’s studio was at 736 North Seward, Hollywood; there, amid an array of cameras, lights, furniture, props, plastic trees and painted backdrops, he worked on assignment from advertising agencies. With the help of his wife, Natalie, and his brother Bill, Tom Kelley produced some of the most aesthetically pleasing camera art of that time, distinguished
by imaginative lighting, dramatic angles and, within the limitations of commercial photography, innovative approaches to the presentation of humans with products.

In early May, Marilyn arrived unannounced at the studio with her portfolio, wearing exaggerated makeup, a revealing white blouse, red spiked heels and a tight red skirt that restricted her natural walk. She was not the all-American girl of the Conover or Jasgur photos but a model eager for work. Yes, Kelley said, there was a quick job available: another model had called in sick and he had a shooting scheduled for a beer advertisement. Natalie Kelley guided Marilyn to a dressing room, adjusted her makeup and handed her a one-piece swimsuit and a colorful beach ball. “I think I see something here,” Tom said when they emerged.

Within two weeks, the makers of Pabst beer had a new poster ready, and their advertising agency told Kelley she was the prettiest model he had ever used, whoever she was. To Natalie and Bill, Tom confided that he agreed, but he did not entirely understand how the results were achieved. With the right makeup, Marilyn was attractive enough in person. But when she posed, something flashed from her an instant before the shutter winked, and Marilyn on film radiated sex appeal.

Thus it was that on May 25, Kelley contacted Marilyn through the message desk at the Beverly Carlton. The beer poster had caught the eye of a man named John Baumgarth, a Chicago calendar manufacturer, who asked Kelley if his new model would be willing to pose for an upcoming number. The idea was for a nude photo artfully rendered. Since she had already posed bare-breasted for Earl Moran and was quite casual about partial nudity both at home, on beaches and in photographers’ studios, Marilyn accepted at once. Two nights later, on May 27, 1949, she returned to Kelley’s studio and signed a release form as “Mona Monroe.”

Kelley, thirty-seven and calmly serious about the assignment, put one of Marilyn’s favorite recordings on his portable phonograph: Artie Shaw’s famous rendition of “Begin the Beguine.” A red velvet drape was spread on the studio floor, and for two hours Marilyn posed nude, moving easily from one position to another as the photographer, perched ten feet above her on a ladder, clicked away. Obediently, she
turned this way and that . . . arched her back . . . faced the camera . . . stretched in profile.

Among dozens of shots, only two clear portraits survived: “A New Wrinkle” was the Baumgarth Company’s designation for her naked profile against a casually rumpled drape and “Golden Dreams” the title for a full-breasted pose of Marilyn with her legs discreetly angled for decency’s sake. Baumgarth paid Kelley five hundred dollars for all future publication rights; of this Marilyn received fifty dollars for the session. She never met Kelley again.

Three years later, the photographs became world-famous, and to deflect scandal Marilyn orchestrated a brilliant campaign to exploit conduct that Hollywood and the entire country would otherwise have found unacceptable from a celebrity. She was hungry at the time, she said—out of work, awaiting a movie assignment. Alternatively, she would claim that her car had been repossessed by the finance company, and how could she travel to look for work in Los Angeles without a car? (This excuse was quickly dropped: overdue payments for an expensive new convertible would not go down well with the public.) In any case, the setting was private, the photographer’s wife was present. Art photos were taken. What could be wrong? Nothing was, but some of the details, suggested later by her mentors, were asynchronous with the facts.

Quite simply, Marilyn posed nude because it pleased her to do so. The shy girl who tended to stutter during first takes on a movie set remembered (or was creating) the dream of her childhood: she was naked and unashamed before her adorers. Proud of her body, she often paraded unclothed at home; indeed, a casual visitor to Palm Drive might glimpse her naked passing from bedroom to bath or swimming pool to cabaña. “I’m only comfortable when I’m naked,” she told reporter Earl Wilson. Yet in her nudity she was both innocent and calculating. Like her appearance in
Love Happy
, the calendar presented her as a body; this was all that seemed to matter to anyone.

Marilyn’s antecedent was again her own exemplar Jean Harlow, of whom Edwin Bower Hesser had taken famous photos in 1929 in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Draped in diaphanous chiffon beneath which she was naked, Harlow was captured in nymphlike attitudes, just as she had posed naked beneath a fishnet for Ted Allan. The Hesser pictures so infuriated her first husband that he divorced her: this was the final insult,
he charged, from a woman whose display of her body was as well known in life as in her films. “Can you see through this dress?” Harlow asked in
Red Headed Woman
. “I’m afraid you can, dear,” a woman replied. “Then I’ll wear it!” announced Harlow with a triumphant smile.

More than any other portraits of a nude woman in the history of photography, those of Marilyn Monroe taken in 1949 became virtual icons, everywhere recognizable, ever in demand. Landmarks in the union of art with commerce, the photographs have appeared on calendars, playing cards, keychains, pens, clothing, accessories, linens and household items; for decades, entrepreneurs have become wealthy by claiming or purchasing rights to their dissemination. “Golden Dreams,” for one example, provided the premiere issue of
Playboy
magazine with its first centerfold in December 1953.

Because of Kelley’s craftsmanship, there is nothing prurient about the photographs; rather, in her frank carnality, there was a kind of classic composure, the presentation of artless femininity. Nervous in person, Marilyn was immediately self-possessed when naked before the lenses and beneath the lights. And so the resulting voluptuousness is natural rather than indecent. Desirable, she seems invincible; childlike, she emanates adult repose; nubile, she portrays an innocence that appeals to both men and women. Nudity has rarely been so sublimely rendered photographically as in the results of the Kelley-Monroe session that May evening in 1949.

1
. Among the most notable: architect Walter Gropius; designer Marcel Breuer; philosophers Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Herbert Marcuse and Claude Lévi-Strauss; conductors Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf and Bruno Walter; composers Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith; writers Bertolt Brecht and the Mann brothers (Thomas and Heinrich); scientists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller; filmmakers Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang and Detlef Sierck (later Douglas Sirk).

2
. The Studio Club was at various times the residence of many successful actresses, among them Evelyn Keyes, Linda Darnell, Donna Reed, Dorothy Malone and Kim Novak.