Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (34 page)

At the same time, Rupert Allan was putting final touches to a similar (though much briefer) story for
Look
magazine. He, too, noted that for their interviews she was

terribly late. She arrived an hour past schedule, then departed to freshen her makeup and change her clothes. Everything was delayed until she finally settled down, and even then she was nervous as a cat. Marilyn was never happy with herself. A new selfconsciousness had gripped her, and if she picked up a hand mirror, she saw a host of flaws she felt she had to disguise.

Rupert’s article was a great success. He and his colleagues added fourteen photos of Marilyn (reading, weight lifting and jogging as well as posing for stills from her films) and he proclaimed that she had “the brightest star potential among blondes since Lana Turner.” In Skolsky’s column a week later, the comparison with Turner continued, to which he added the comment that Marilyn had Joan Crawford’s intelligence and social power. (This was dubious praise at best, since Crawford never finished fifth grade, made no pretense of anything other than what is called street wisdom, and was to most people more intimidating than lovable.
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)

That summer Marilyn appeared in what she may have considered her unlucky thirteenth film,
Let’s Make It Legal
—perhaps the most arid, humorless pictures of her career despite its presentation as a comedy. In the altogether unnecessary, brief role of a blond gold digger, she appeared for less than two minutes but had third billing after the title credits. “Nothing happened easily for Marilyn,” recalled Robert Wagner, another young Fox supporting player in the picture who would have better fortune later. “It took a lot of time and effort to create the image that became so famous.” In
Let’s Make It Legal
, there was much effort but little effect.

Because they liked her and had to make a virtue of necessity, F. Hugh Herbert created the role and I. A. L. Diamond the script with special attention to Marilyn’s personal history. Another character first describes her as “the girl who won a beauty contest as Miss Cucamonga and
has a contract to model. She’s down here [in Los Angeles] posing for cheesecake and trying to better her life,” which she does by chasing a handsome plutocrat on the golf course—shades of John Carroll. Then, in her final seconds onscreen, she is nothing so much as Joe Schenck’s dinner guest: the setting is a men’s poker party, and Marilyn pours drinks and wins the game; the ambitious model has made herself agreeable to those in power. In each scene she wears some of Fox’s most revealing outfits, and although her role is but a decorative one, she provides the comedy’s only light moments. So agreed the critics, who for the most part found the story “indifferent” but Marilyn “amusing.”

There was nothing droll about the next picture (her fourth in 1951), an adaptation of Clifford Odets’s play
Clash by Night
, directed by the formidable German immigrant Fritz Lang. For this, Marilyn was loaned out to RKO since Fox had no immediate plans for her. The scenario of
Clash by Night
, set among fishermen and canneries in Monterey, California, tells of an unhappily married woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who, after an affair with a theater projectionist (Robert Ryan), returns to her fisherman husband (Paul Douglas). Marilyn was cast as Peggy, a girl who works as a sardine packer and is engaged to Stanwyck’s brother (Keith Andes).

According to a letter of acknowledgment from the film’s producer Jerry Wald to Sidney Skolsky, Marilyn landed the part only because Skolsky championed her to the point of manic coercion. For this browbeating, Wald was forever grateful: Marilyn attracted moviegoers to this stark and static picture and her performance enlivened an otherwise sordid, dreary business.

Her success was not achieved easily, however, and the production was an ordeal for her and her colleagues. To begin with, as Sidney and Natasha clearly recalled, Marilyn was so nervous during production that—as with the radio show—she vomited before almost every scene, and red blotches appeared on her hands and face. Only powerful determination drove her onto the set. “Hold a good thought for me,” she whispered time and again to her coach and her patron as she went, shivering with fright, to film a scene.

Marjorie Plecher, who supervised her wardrobe on
Clash by Night
(and who later became Mrs. Allan Snyder), recalled that Marilyn’s quest for perfection led many to think of her as difficult. “Every element had to be just so—not only in her performance, but also in wardrobe
and props. She didn’t think the costume jewelry engagement ring given her for the part was right, but she liked mine—so that’s the one she wore in the picture.”

Marilyn required all the goodwill she could muster. Fritz Lang, who did not suffer actors’ idiosyncrasies easily (much less the frail or unfamous), summarized the young co-star
tout court
as “scared as hell to come to the studio, always late, couldn’t remember her lines and was certainly responsible for slowing down the work.” Most of all, Lang resented the interference of Natasha, a daily presence on location and in the studio. “She fought Lang to have me there,” according to Natasha. “I was glued to her, working in her tiny dressing room all day long. She was so nervous she missed many of her lines, and then Lang took her on like a madman.”

But especial kindness was extended to Marilyn by Barbara Stanwyck, an actress already well established and willing to be patient with an anxious newcomer touted as a potential star. “She wasn’t disciplined and she was always late,” according to Stanwyck, “but there was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once.” When reporters, newsmen and visitors came to watch filming of
Clash by Night
, Marilyn was the object of their attention: “We don’t want to talk to [Stanwyck or the two leading male actors],” Lang recalled hearing more than once. “We want to talk to the girl with the big tits.” Proud as ever of her body, Marilyn was nonetheless resentful that the press wanted only pictures and spicy anecdotes about her life and her boyfriends: she much preferred to discuss her career, a topic the reporters resolutely avoided as if it were tangential. Robert Ryan recalled that this journalistic attitude depressed her and made her fearful that she would certainly not last very long as a serious apprentice.

Released in 1952,
Clash by Night
earned Marilyn several favorable notices. Alton Cook, writing in the
New York World-Telegram & Sun
, rightly proclaimed her performance in
Clash by Night
worthy of citation: “a forceful actress [and] a gifted new star, worthy of all that fantastic press agentry. Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” And so she did, investing Peggy’s few scenes with a combination of brash carnality and skewed masochism: when her fiancé threatens her (not entirely playfully) with strangulation, she punches his jaw. The gesture gives him and the audience second thoughts about this submissive sexpot.

*    *    *

Before 1951 was history, Marilyn was back at her home studio. Theatrical exhibitors had seen a rough cut of Lang’s film, and word quickly circulated at Fox that their loaned-out player ought not to be so lightly assessed or casually employed. In the New York office, studio stockholders asked Spyros Skouras when Fox would put Marilyn in a new picture; he, in turn, put the same question to Zanuck. At last the issue had to be faced.

In fact, there was a dramatic property available—an adaptation of a Charlotte Armstrong thriller about an unstable young woman who lost her lover in a wartime airplane crash. Released after several years in an asylum, she is hired as a baby-sitter in a hotel. There, she is pushed to the brink of madness again when she fantasizes that a rude, exploitive hotel guest (played by Richard Widmark) is her dead beloved: he tries to push his advantage with her and the poor girl spins out of control, endangering herself and the child in her care.

This was Marilyn Monroe’s first leading part in a serious feature film.
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Finally titled
Don’t Bother to Knock
after much studio dithering, it was the project to prove that Marilyn Monroe could tackle and succeed in something other than a pretty
comprimario
role. And so she did, despite a script threaded with clichés, a production budget that must have established a new low in Hollywood and a director even more contemptuous of Marilyn than Lang (the Englishman Roy Baker, who snarled unintelligible orders when he was not downing mugs of strong tea).

Zanuck required a screen test before formally assigning the role. “Natasha, I’m terrified,” Marilyn said breathlessly, arriving at her coach’s home without warning late one night. Filled with her typically conflicting feelings of longing and terror, she threw herself on Natasha’s patience, and they worked with only brief intervals for two days and nights. “I didn’t think she was ready for so demanding a role,” Natasha admitted years later, “but she made such a beautiful test that even Zanuck had to write her a glowing note.” She was even more impressive in the film, which was shot rapidly and in continuity. Baker
printed the first take of every scene despite Marilyn’s protests; hence
Don’t Bother to Knock
, as completed in early 1952, represents Marilyn’s acting in flashes of astonishing improvisation. “Actually, I had very little to do,” Natasha added. “She was terrified of the entire project, but she knew exactly what the role required and how to do it. I simply tried to infuse her with some confidence.”

From her first appearance, entering through the revolving door of a New York hotel, Marilyn’s portrait of Nell Forbes is that of a fearful doe, unsure of herself and her place in society. Wearing a plain gray dress, black cardigan and matching tam, she has a dislocated glance and demeanor, as if she were a war orphan or a displaced child. Everything about her appearance is muted, her hair scarcely brushed, only a touch of makeup on her face: there is nothing glamorous about this woman, only the beauty of marred porcelain.

In the hotel suite where she cares for a young girl, she pours on cologne, then tentatively clips on her employer’s earrings and bracelet. Gazing in a mirror, she slowly smiles—but her pleasure turns to fear when the noise of an airplane draws her to the window; she gazes out, a tear gliding down her cheek; a haze of memories overcomes her. In these close-ups, as in extreme long shots when Widmark watches her across the hotel courtyard, Marilyn acts with the surest of gestures, her hands and shoulders poised with the right balance of fear and expectation.

In fact her performance never falters. Everything in her gaze at Widmark, who she insists is her lamented fiancé, conveys a fierce but tender plea for refuge, and in finely modulated phrasing her long speech becomes affectingly piteous. “I’ll be any way you want me,” she says in a hoarse whisper, her voice almost breaking, “because I belong to you. Didn’t you ever have the feeling that if you let somebody walk away from you, you’d be lost—you wouldn’t know which way to turn, or have anybody to take their place?”

Marilyn made of Nell not a stereotypical madwoman but the recognizable casualty of a wider urban madness, a kind of representative personality for all the fragmented characters seen elsewhere in the hotel. As she said her lines that winter (“When I was in high school, I never had a pretty dress of my own”), she may well have thought of her own girlhood; when she spoke of the character’s loneliness in an Oregon asylum,
the memory of her Portland visit with Gladys may have come to mind. Her performance had extraordinary density and subtlety, and the result is a fully realized portrait: a woman psychologically wounded by war, emotionally broken by loss—one who has attempted suicide but longs deeply for a reason to live. In her last scene, surrounded by a crowd of staring hotel guests, she seems a frightened animal; led away, she glances wistfully at Widmark, reconciled to estranged girlfriend Anne Bancroft. “People ought to love one another,” she says, giving the line the reverence of a prayer. Of her talent for nuanced dramatic acting there could no longer be any doubt. When the film was released the following summer, the trade journal
Motion Picture Herald
hailed her as “the kind of big new star for which exhibitors are always asking,” and
Variety
declared Marilyn a “surefire money attraction.” She was, added the New York
Daily Mirror
, “completely in charge of her role.”

“We had a hell of a time getting her out of the dressing room and onto the set,” as Richard Widmark put it years later. “At first we thought she’d never get anything right, and we’d mutter, ‘Oh, this is impossible—you can’t print this!’ But something happened between the lens and the film, and when we looked at the rushes she had the rest of us knocked off the screen!” Anne Bancroft, Jim Backus and others were equally enthusiastic about Marilyn’s acting.

Marilyn’s reaction to the praise of her colleagues was a bemused and sincere modesty: so far as she was concerned, the performance could have been much better. Congratulated and comforted by Aline Mosby, a United Press correspondent she trusted, Marilyn simply said: “I’m trying to find myself now, to be a good actress and a good person. Sometimes I feel strong inside but I have to reach in and pull it up. It isn’t easy. Nothing’s easy. But you go on.” And then she added: “I don’t like to talk about my own past, it’s an unpleasant experience I’m trying to forget.” Studying with Chekhov and Lytess, creating a new image for herself, playing difficult and demanding roles like Nell Forbes—these were mechanisms by which she could escape those unhappy experiences. To become “a good person” meant, however, that Marilyn longed to be a new and different person, and in 1952 this goal
became virtually an obsession with which studio publicists were only too happy to cooperate.

Secretive about her past though she was, Marilyn could never forget its most poignant facts—her unknown father and unfamiliar mother. As 1952 began, she set up a plan for a woman named Inez Melson to act as her business manager and to act as Gladys’s conservator. From Marilyn’s income a regular contribution was made toward the care of her mother, whom Inez visited several times each month in the various state hospitals where she dwelled. Mother and daughter had not met in five years, nor had there been any exchange of telephone calls or letters. More to the point, Gladys was never discussed, for Fox’s publicists had long followed Marilyn’s lead and declared the actress an orphan. And so for the present Gladys Monroe remained a woman on the fringes of her daughter’s memory, a shadowy figure who was a potential cause of shame, someone Marilyn assisted only privately.