Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (38 page)

On April 18, Marilyn’s option was, to no one’s surprise, exercised by Fox: she would receive seven hundred fifty dollars a week for the year beginning May 11—one of the lowest salaries then paid any important star. She had not yet officially signed with Feldman and Famous Artists; her status with the Morris agency was still unclear; and even if representatives had gone to seek redress and a new contract in light of her increased value to the studio, their chances would have been slim. A seven-year contract was in full force, and there was nothing to be done about it.

After months of intermittent distress, she then had her appendix removed, on April 28, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. When Dr. Marcus Rabwin lifted the hospital linen to begin surgery, he was astonished to find that Marilyn had taped a handwritten note to her abdomen, a plea that revealed her terror of infertility:

Dr. Rabwin—
most important
to read before
operation!

Dear Dr. Rabwin,

Cut as little
as possible. I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter into it. The fact that I’m a
woman
is important and means much to me.

Save please (I can’t ask you enough) what you can—I’m in your hands. You have children and you must know
what
it means—
please Dr. Rabwin
—I know somehow
you will! Thank you
—
thank you
—
thank you
. For Gods sake Dear Doctor
No ovaries
removed—please again do whatever you can to prevent large
scars
.

Thanking you with all my
heart
.

Marilyn Monroe

Rabwin, slightly disarmed, thought it a good idea to have a gynecologist present during the surgery, and so Dr. Leon Krohn was brought in to assist. From that day, he became Marilyn’s specialist, caring for her during a lifetime of chronic menstrual and reproductive problems. On May 6, Marilyn was back at home with only a small scar and, she happily told Joe, her ability to conceive intact.

During May, she recuperated at the Doheny Drive apartment, but before the end of the month—because fans had learned her address and were besieging her with mail (and unwanted visits)—she decided, with Joe’s help, to move into a small suite at the Bel-Air Hotel.

Nineteen fifty-two was, then, the first year Marilyn Monroe engrossed universal attention. From the calendar to the news of her mother and her relationship with Joe; from the release of not one but five films (
Clash by Night
in June,
We’re Not Married
and
Don’t Bother to Knock
in July,
Monkey Business
and
O. Henry’s Full House
in September and October); from her frequent appearances in Sidney Skolsky’s column to her presence on magazine covers and in news stories at least thrice weekly and sometimes more—never before, perhaps in the history of the world, had someone other than a great ruler or head of state received such celebration. Pictures, interviews and news of Marilyn Monroe flowed in an uninterrupted cascade.

On June 1, she turned twenty-six and was informed by Fox that a color film test made a week before had been approved. She was already scheduled to appear in a Technicolor picture that summer—
Niagara
, a thriller to begin immediately with location shooting at the falls. Now it was announced, on her birthday, that in the autumn she would have the plum leading role in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, a musical comedy based on stories, a book, a silent film and a Broadway musical by Anita Loos. Originally planned for Betty Grable, the second role went to Marilyn because of her increasing popularity; because at her contracted weekly salary she
came much cheaper than Grable; because she was ten years younger than Grable; because Zanuck, after hearing the unreleased recording of “Do It Again,” was persuaded she could handle the musical numbers; and perhaps most of all because she was championed for the role by Jule Styne, who wrote the Broadway songs, including what would become Marilyn’s signature tune, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

On June 8, Marilyn left a farewell note for Sidney at Schwab’s and flew to New York. Sharing the news with his readers, he observed on June 10, “My, how fast the months go—and the calendars!” Two days later, his entire column was devoted to a résumé of her life and career.

By this time, she and her co-stars in
Niagara
—among them Joseph Cotten and supporting players Jean Peters and Max Showalter (then known as Casey Adams)—were enduring the sounds and furies of both Niagara Falls and Henry Hathaway, a director not known for his friendliness to actors. He was leading them through a script by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard Breen about a tortured former mental patient named George Loomis (Cotten), who is to be murdered in a plot hatched by his wantonly voluptuous wife Rose (Marilyn) and her young lover Patrick (Richard Allan). While the cataract rages, so do everyone’s passions: George is mad with jealousy, Rose seethes with lust, and Patrick is hot to kill for his mistress. At the finale, the plot is foiled by George, who kills the lover and Rose before going over Niagara Falls to his own death.

To the surprise of many, Marilyn and Hathaway worked seriously and cordially together, although she was terrified during production in New York and California that summer: “She never had any confidence,” according to the director, “never sure she was a good actress. The tragedy was that she was never
allowed
to be.” Somewhat to the contrary, however,
Niagara
permitted her just that latitude, and her portrait of Rose, generally disregarded because of the camera’s emphasis on her walk and her nakedness under the bedclothes, is convincingly sluttish. There is nothing of the breathless, innocently sexy, comic ingenue here—only the surly, selfish tart, confident of her power to seduce and destroy, her voice coated with contempt for a weak and ineffectual husband who refuses to help himself.

Joseph Cotten found Marilyn easy to work with and a genial colleague. “If you wanted to talk about yourself, she listened. If you wanted to talk about her, she blushed. A rather lost little girl, I found
her to be.” As for her tardiness, Cotten recalled Marilyn replying to the unit manager, “Am I making a picture or punching a time clock?”

Like Nell Forbes in
Don’t Bother to Knock
, Rose (as portrayed by Marilyn) is entirely at odds with the safe, sexy beauty with whom Fox and America’s audiences felt comfortable. In these two films, Marilyn’s appeal is dangerous; she cannot be trusted; her allure is deadly. From these pictures it would be only a slight turn of type to the coy, manipulative dumb-when-convenient gold diggers of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How To Marry a Millionaire
, roles that made her even more determined to escape typecasting. Yet in
Niagara
, she had a little more to do: indeed, this was the film that established her stardom.

In an early scene, arriving at the tourists’ community party in Niagara Falls wearing a tight red dress, Marilyn as Rose reclines languidly and hums a few measures of the song “Kiss,” which she has requested. She is at once the incarnation of every male fantasy of available sex, and every young man in the sequence turns away from his date, stupefied by this force of nature. “Kiss” and the more innocent gathering are then aborted when Rose’s husband smashes the record. This moment was improvised on the set at the last minute, when studio watchdogs, after an outraged representative of the Woman’s Clubs of America visited the shooting, felt forced to proclaim Marilyn’s singing as too suggestive.

In the fully preserved recording of the Lionel Newman/Haven Gillespie song (unreleased until years after her death), Marilyn’s significant gifts as a singer are evident. There is, in her sureness of pitch and breath control, in the silkiness and calmness of her approach to each phrase, a certitude of winning her request; she makes, in other words, the stereotypical 1950 love lyrics both credible and enticing: “Kiss me . . . thrill me . . . Hold me in your arms . . . This is the moment . . .” One hears in her smoky vibrato the influence of Ella Fitzgerald (whose recordings she studied nightly at home), and even the dynamics of contemporary singers like Julie Wilson, Jo Stafford and Doris Day. But this is no simple composite of imitations: had her complete catalog of recordings been commercially available in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe would have been hailed as one of the finest balladeers of her time.

Henry Hathaway called Marilyn “the best natural actress I ever directed,” an assessment not generally shared by critics (although
Time
and
Newsweek
took note of her growing dramatic abilities). Her nuances of expression, her impatience and her lusty bravado throw this Technicolor
film noir
, about mismatched couples at romantic Niagara Falls, into a state of constant anxiety. Desire, her performance implies, is as perilous as proximity to the torrent. It was also, as Allan Snyder recalled, the film in which she accidentally learned her famous hip-swinging walk. The crew was shooting her as she walked a long distance away from the camera, but the uneven cobblestone street threw her high heels off, and the result was a seductive swivel she used forever after.

For Hathaway, she was

marvelous to work with, very easy to direct and terrifically ambitious to do better. And
bright
, really bright. She may not have had an education, but she was just naturally bright. But always being trampled on by bums. I don’t think anyone ever treated her on her own level. To most men she was something that they were a little bit ashamed of—even Joe DiMaggio.

Hathaway was right. On weekends in June and July, Marilyn sped to Manhattan to be with Joe, who was broadcasting for the Yankees. Both at the stadium and in the television studio, Joe was nervous and unsure of himself with microphone and camera, forcing himself to interview players, awkwardly reading cue cards and beer commercials. But he would not accept any advice from Marilyn, who had a few tips of her own—breathing exercises she learned from Natasha, a few moments of inner focus counseled by Chekhov.

“A lot of guys used to hang around that [television] studio just to see her,” according to Yankee player Phil Rizzuto. “She’d sit in the stands before the games and talk to some of the players. They were kids and just liked the idea of going home and telling their friends they knew a movie star.” This did not at all please Joe, however, who disliked the attention others paid to Marilyn as much as he resented her low necklines and tight skirts. “Joe loved her,” Rizzuto said. “I know that.” But the problem was that Joe was “a jealous guy, and he didn’t like all the men looking at her.” One might as well have asked the waters of Niagara to cease falling.

But Marilyn knew how to dilute resentment. For propriety’s sake, she suggested that they book two separate rooms at the Drake Hotel; they used only one. In public, the lovers were seen at expensive restaurants
like Le Pavillon, and they signed autographs everywhere. “It’s the seventh inning stretch in the Marilyn Monroe—Joe DiMaggio love game,” Sidney Skolsky reported. But the event was destined for overtime.

Back in Hollywood for studio work on
Niagara
while Joe had to linger in New York with the Yankees, Marilyn was urged by Hathaway to quit the Bel-Air Hotel. He also advised her (in vain) to give up the lessons with Natasha Lytess, which he felt did nothing but make Marilyn feel more inferior and more selfconscious. Then, for a few scenes in
Niagara
, Hathaway asked her to wear her own clothes, but she replied without embarrassment that she possessed only slacks, sweaters and one black suit, which she bought for Johnny Hyde’s funeral. “That’s why I have to borrow clothes from the studio when I go out,” Marilyn explained. “I don’t have any of my own.”

The reason was simple economics. Of her seven-hundred-fifty-dollar salary, Marilyn took home less than five hundred dollars after taxes. From this she paid ten percent to William Morris, almost two hundred dollars weekly for drama, diction and singing lessons, at least fifty or sixty dollars a month to Inez Melson, and more for Gladys.

Returning to California in late July, Joe asked Marilyn to meet him in San Francisco, where he introduced her to his family. There, she picked up the cues that a DiMaggio woman was an expert in the arts of housewifery—cooking, sewing, ironing, housekeeping. To Joe and to reporters, Marilyn subsequently said that being a homemaker was the one job to which she longed to devote herself. “I think I’ll reach some real stature when I have a family,” she added.

Before summer’s end, Joe asked her to consider abandoning moviemaking: did it not, after all, cause her only anxiety? This she was not prepared to do, but neither was she willing to disconnect herself from him. And so she asked for time. This only made DiMaggio the more pursuant. “I didn’t want to give up my career,” she said later, “and that’s what Joe wanted me to do most of all. He wanted me to be the beautiful ex-actress, just like he was the great former ballplayer. We were to ride into some sunset together. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of journey yet. I wasn’t even thirty, for heaven’s sake!”

*    *    *

Ensuring her ongoing primacy in the national press, Marilyn continued to surprise. With no advance advertising, for example, she made her live radio debut on the “Hollywood Star Playhouse” that summer, reading with poise and conviction a role in an unexceptional one-act play. On October 26, she was heard on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s radio show, trading wisecracks with Bergen’s characters Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.

She also risked shocking the horses. To columnist Earl Wilson she gave the new information that she wore “nothing, but nothing at all—no panties, slips, girdles or bras” beneath her outerwear, a custom very rare in 1952. “I like to feel unhampered,” she explained. Accounts of her undress ran throughout the rest of that year. At a benefit baseball game in Los Angeles, for example, a group of actresses wore jerseys and shorts, “but La Monroe showed up to toss the first baseball of the game in a tight dress with absolutely nothing on underneath.” About this same time, photographer George Hurrell had a session with Marilyn at the studio. “She did the same routine that Harlow did,” he recalled. “[She arrived] wrapped in something and, all of a sudden, let it fall. I presume the idea was to get you going. Well, they were exhibitionists.”
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