Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (28 page)

3
. He later married Jane Wyman, whom he divorced, remarried and again divorced; at the time of his death in 1979 there was yet another Mrs. Karger.

Chapter Nine

J
UNE
1949–D
ECEMBER
1950

B
Y CONTRAST
with her work for Tom Kelley in May, Marilyn Monroe was mostly overdressed during late June and early July 1949.

Lester Cowan was not only the producer of
Love Happy
, he was also an expert promoter who knew that movie premieres benefit from nothing so much as the presence of a shapely, sexy blonde. Thus Marilyn’s contract required a personal-appearance tour that summer on the film’s behalf: she was the most attractive thing about the picture, although her appearance onscreen was minimal. Cowan provided Marilyn with a fee of one hundred dollars weekly for five weeks, plus publicity escorts in each city and cash for a new wardrobe. “I bought the nicest things I could find in Hollywood’s department stores,” she recalled. “Nothing cheap or daring. Johnny and Natasha had told me I should travel like a lady, which I suppose they thought I wasn’t. So I bought a couple of wool suits and sweaters, high-necked blouses and a jacket.”

Unaware that summers in Chicago and New York are ordinarily more uncomfortable than in Southern California, Marilyn found her outfits unseasonably warm when the city temperatures soared past ninety and the humidity over seventy. In Manhattan, she endured only four photo sessions and two brief personal appearances before dashing out to replace her wool clothes with air-conditioned summer
dresses—backless, sleeveless and mostly frontless. News cameras whirred and clicked constantly, and with typical piquant contrariness she offset the revealing dresses with elegant white gloves.

All during the tour, Marilyn was “the observed of all observers,” as Ophelia said of Hamlet, and as such she artfully combined her modeling and movie experience with what she had learned from Natasha and Johnny. “Her shrewdness was evident in her knowledge of the correct thing to say at the right time,” Natasha said. “Relating to people, she had an innate sense of what was proper.” Marilyn waved, smiled and tossed kisses through the air to crowds; she signed autographs as they entered theaters for advance screenings of
Love Happy;
she visited a crippled children’s hospital ward.

The point of these appearances was simply to advertise the picture. Routinely, movie stars were presented like visiting royalty: they were movie queens and princesses but, it was implied, also just plain folks and always,
always
concerned for the little people. But with Marilyn there was an egregious difference: she lingered with sick and handicapped children longer than with the star-struck public or joggling reporters. In Oak Park, Illinois, and Newark, New Jersey, she made schedule-bound publicists frantic when she insisted on meeting every child in a state orphanage and every man and woman in a clinic for the disabled poor. There was no false angelism in these visits; in fact she discouraged photographers from documenting these thoughtful detours.

In her hotel rooms at night, Marilyn pored through the dense chapters of novels by Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe, and sections of Freud on dreams. Then, after a few hours of reading, she ran up telephone charges during nightly conversations with Natasha, to whom she put endless questions to supplement her education. Most of all, she wanted to discuss the character of Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
(accent on the first syllable of “Grushenka,” please, Natasha insisted). Johnny Hyde had first compared her to Dostoevsky’s lusty, complex character; perhaps not very seriously, he had even mentioned it as a suitable role for Marilyn in MGM’s projected film, then being written by Julius and Philip Epstein. But she took the remark with utter gravity and was soon almost obsessed by the girl’s dissolute past and her open, generous heart. Alternately crafty and empathetic, Grushenka becomes, by loving Dmitry Karamazov, purer and less selfish, and at the
end of the novel she is redeemed by her own sublime sacrifice. (In this regard, it would be interesting to speculate on Johnny’s identification of himself and Marilyn with the Dostoevsky characters.) “It was the most touching thing I’d ever read or heard of,” she said later. “I asked Natasha whether it would make a good movie. She said yes, but not for me—yet.” Her calls to Johnny were not quite so literary: he humored her when she spoke of the Russian classics, wanting most of all to know if she was faithful to him.

But Johnny had no reason to worry. By coincidence, André de Dienes was in New York on assignment that summer. He located Marilyn at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and whisked her away to the Long Island shore one Saturday morning. “She had the presence and ease of an established star,” he recalled years later. “She was radiant.” And so his photographs document her that summer day as she cavorted on the beach in a one-piece white bathing suit, her long blond hair tangled and wet. Marilyn skipped, she danced, she jumped and waded in the waves, she sat on the sand and drew silly designs, she twirled a dotted parasol. She was Sabrina or Ondine, a water nymph bewitchingly sprung into life.

To the photographer’s chagrin, she was also faithful to Johnny and rejected de Dienes’s attempt that evening to reignite an old romance. Marilyn added that she had an important interview scheduled for the next morning, and she wanted to prepare carefully, for she knew the reporter would ask what she was reading and what were her nonprofessional interests.

But Marilyn’s great expectations of the press were quickly demolished when she kept that appointment. On Sunday, July 24, Earl Wilson came to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on assignment to meet “The Mmmm Girl,” as the publicity men now referred to her. Some people can’t whistle, Marilyn said, “so they just say ‘Mmmm.’ ” Wilson, who found her “a pretty dull interview,” simply consulted the publicity kit for his column and filed an unimaginative report. Marilyn Monroe, he wrote, was an unknown twenty-one-year-old from Van Nuys (she was actually twenty-three), “with a tiny waist, a 36½ bra line and long, pretty legs.” Such were Wilson’s profoundest observations: she was treated as a woman “who could make no claim to acting genius,” as Wilson snidely noted in his column, ignoring that thus far she had little chance to demonstrate much of anything. When she spoke of serious
matters and motives during the interview, Wilson was indifferent, like studio moguls who saw only another sexy blonde and, unlike still photographers, took no time to see that the radiance was accompanied by a real flair for comedy.

Back in Hollywood by early August, Marilyn was taken by Johnny to an audition at Fox, where after singing a few bars of a popular song and posing in a short skirt, she was hired (for one film only, without a continuing contract as before) to play a scene as a chorus girl in a musical western. That August she worked a few days on the uninspired trifle called
A Ticket to Tomahawk
, in which her single number—as one of four girls singing and dancing their way through “Oh, What a Forward Young Man!”—reveals her exuberant abilities as a high-stepping dancer and an estimable singer. Because she had been reduced to virtual invisibility in
Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!
, this was effectively her first Technicolor appearance; she required, as makeup artist Allan Snyder recalled, less work than the others but was seen to greater effect—resplendent in her yellow outfit. But just as the film swung into production, Fox had a crashing failure on its hands with another color, comic western—
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
, with their principal blond leading lady, Betty Grable. The timing regarding
A Ticket to Tomahawk
was therefore inauspicious, and neither casting nor production executives watched the picture or Monroe’s appearance with much interest.

In fact news of the studio’s indifference to
Ticket
reached the cast while they were filming, and everyone, Marilyn included, seems to have become bored with the project. One afternoon she arrived a half-hour late for a simple exterior long shot, prompting the assistant director to complain, “You know, you can be replaced.”

“You can be replaced, too,” Marilyn replied coolly, “but they wouldn’t have to [hire a replacement and] reshoot you.”

Then, in early September 1949, the pace of life quickened as Marilyn met two men who would be among the closest and most influential people in her life. That year, Rupert Allan was a thirty-six-year-old writer and editor for
Look
magazine whose responsibilities included arranging interviews and photoessays featuring stars actual and potential. Born in St. Louis and educated in England, he was a tall, courtly
gentleman, literate, witty, and much appreciated for his discretion and loyalty. Not long after he met Marilyn, Rupert changed professions, becoming one of the most respected personal publicists in Hollywood; his client list included Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly, for whom he eventually served as consul general of Monaco when she became Princess Grace. In Hollywood’s social circles, it was considered a great coup to be invited to dinner at the home of Rupert Allan and his mate, Frank McCarthy, former aide to General Patton and later a movie producer (of the 1970 film bearing the general’s name).

It was to the Allan-McCarthy residence on Seabright Place, high up a winding canyon in Beverly Hills, that (thanks to Johnny Hyde) Marilyn was invited one evening in early September to meet a team of New York photographers preparing a photoessay on Hollywood starlets.

Among the cameramen was the second person Marilyn met that year who would alter the course of her life.

In 1949, Milton Greene (born Greenholtz) was quickly acquiring a reputation as one of the country’s most talented fashion and celebrity photographers. “They showed me a portfolio with the most beautiful pictures I’d ever seen. I asked, ‘Who took these?’ ” Introduced to Greene, Marilyn said, “Why, you’re nothing but a boy!” Replied Milton, unfazed, “Well, you’re nothing but a girl!”

Twenty-seven and divorced, he was a short, dark-haired and intense man who immediately impressed Marilyn with his knowledge of his craft. He spoke of “painting with the camera,” of colorful and fantastic ideas for celebrating women on film. Always fascinated by his profession and eager to know how he might benefit her, Marilyn attended Milton as if there were no one else present. “I said I had a busy schedule, but I would pose for him all night.”

In a way, she did. Marilyn and Milton left the gathering and spent that evening and the next morning at what Milton referred to as his “West Coast house.” This, as it turned out, was a room at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where a romance blossomed during the remaining brief time of Milton’s Hollywood visit (which conveniently coincided with Johnny Hyde’s week-long vacation alone, in Palm Springs). By September 14, 1949, Milton had returned to New
York, without taking a single photo of Marilyn.
¹
On that date he received a telegram at his Lexington Avenue studio, boldly addressed “to Milton (Hot Shutter) Greene.”

Milton Greene, I love you dearly

And not for your “house” and hospitality merely
.

It’s that I think you are superb
—

And that, my dear, is not just a blurb
.

Love,

Marilyn.

Because both were firmly committed to pursuing their careers in cities three thousand miles apart, neither had any expectation of a reunion after this ten-day summer tryst.

A young, healthy, intelligent lover like Milton Greene, no matter how transient in her life, was a welcome diversion. Some of Marilyn Monroe’s chroniclers, without evidence, have claimed there were many such lovers in 1949 and 1950; in fact, Milton Greene was the only dalliance during her relationship with Johnny. Marilyn was (as she told Rupert Allan) “sad to see Milton return to New York.”

But there was little opportunity for romantic dejection. John Huston, who had just won two Academy Awards writing and directing
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, was casting a new picture called
The Asphalt Jungle
, a low-keyed
flim noir
about spiritually lost men and women, society’s losers involved in an unsuccessful jewel theft. Still to be cast was the part of Angela Phinlay, young mistress to a middle-aged, crooked lawyer; by the end of October, MGM had signed Marilyn for
it. This would be her fifth film assignment, and one that significantly altered her fortunes. W. R. Burnett, who wrote the novel on which Huston based his script, described Angela as “voluptuously made; and there was something about her walk—something lazy, careless and insolently assured—that was impossible to ignore.”

Among the many canards commonly recited about Marilyn’s career, few have had such strong but bogus currency as the means by which she won this role. Huston’s autobiography summed up the fiction accepted everywhere: typically, he assigned to himself the credit for recognizing Marilyn’s talent and casting her immediately after Johnny Hyde brought her to the studio for a brief audition. According to Huston, “When she finished, Arthur [Hornblow, the producer] and I looked at each other and nodded. She was Angela to a ‘T.’ ” But Marilyn got the part under quite different circumstances, as both the MGM archives and their talent director, Lucille Ryman Carroll, testified.