Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (45 page)

A stopover in Honolulu provided little rest. A mob of fans pushed onto the tarmac screaming “Marilyn!,” sweeping round her and tearing at her clothes and hair. Amid her growing panic, six policemen rushed forward to escort the couple to a waiting lounge. “Airport
officials,” reported United Press International on the spot, “said it was the most enthusiastic greeting given a movie star in years.”

On February 2, they arrived in Tokyo, where (as
Time
reported) Joe again “went virtually unnoticed as Japanese by the thousands swarmed to meet his bride. Marilyn’s fans pressed so thickly about the arriving couple that both were forced to scramble back into the airplane, escaping later through its baggage hatch.” At the Imperial Hotel, two hundred police were summoned to restore order as Marilyn’s devotees—demanding a glimpse of her or at least a photo of her room—caused a riot, fell into koi ponds, jammed themselves in revolving doors and broke plate-glass windows. Unwilling to disperse until she waved to them from a balcony, the crowd shouted until Marilyn reluctantly agreed to appear, saying she loved her public but this was going too far: she was being treated “like I was a dictator or something.”

According to Lefty O’Doul, this was the first time Joe appreciated just how much Marilyn’s celebrity exceeded his. And with this realization, Joe became surly. He would permit her to leave the hotel only to attend the ball game with him: “No shopping, Marilyn. The crowds will kill us.” She did not argue, but O’Doul saw that she resented being given orders.

As for Joe, his resentment blazed even hotter next morning, at the only press conference arranged in his honor. All the questions were directed at Marilyn, who with almost Zen-like composure about the intimacy of such matters had to field spontaneous replies:

Did she agree with the Kinsey report? “Not fully.”

Did she sleep naked? “No comment.”

Was her walk natural? “I’ve been walking since I was six months old.”

What kind of fur was she wearing? “Fox—and not the Twentieth Century kind.”

Did she wear underclothes? She shot a withering glance at the translator and replied caustically
à la
Rose Loomis (in
Niagara
), “I’ll buy a kimono tomorrow.” It is not hard to imagine Joe’s reaction when the Tokyo press dubbed his wife “Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Actress.”

As if it had been sketched for a television comedy, the DiMaggio situation became even more complex the following day, February 3.
Just as Joe tried to separate Marilyn from press and public, an invitation arrived from General John E. Hull’s Far East command headquarters. If necessary government clearances and USO status could be obtained, would Miss Monroe like to visit American troops still stationed in Korea—perhaps to entertain them with an improvised one-woman show? With Joe and Lefty scheduled for days of baseball and nights of meetings with Tokyo’s sports reporters, Marilyn considered this an excellent suggestion—in the great tradition of those performers who went to sing for the men in uniform. Joe, however, was adamantly opposed, and according to two friends, “the marriage seemed to go wrong from their honeymoon, [when] some general asked her to go to Korea. . . . Marilyn looked at Joe. ‘It’s your honeymoon,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Go ahead if you want to.’ ” She did. On February 8, Marilyn received USO Entertainer Serial Number 129278 and her clearance papers for Korea.

For four days, beginning February 16, Marilyn, accompanied by Jean O’Doul and army entertainment officer Walter Bouillet, traveled by airplane, helicopter and open jeep to ten wintry sites where more than 100,000 soldiers and 13,000 marines welcomed her with deafening roars and prolonged applause for a dozen performances. In two days alone, her audiences included grateful troops of the Third, Seventh, Twenty-fourth and Fortieth Army divisions—sixty thousand men. Most of them had never seen a Monroe film, for they had been in the service since her rise to stardom. But they knew her photograph, the calendar, the snapshots, the thousands of pictures in newspapers and magazines.
³

At each stop, Bouillet alighted first, like a sideshowman about to produce a rabbit from his hat. Then, instead of a furry white bunny, out popped Marilyn, eyelashes fluttering, kisses flying from her mouth to her palm, then blown over the hillside teeming with uniformed soldiers. She wore clam-tight olive drab pants, a windbreaker and dazzling rhinestone earrings before changing into her show gear: heedless of
biting winds and freezing temperatures, she wore a tightly fitted lavender dress she kept as a memento for the rest of her life. On makeshift stages Marilyn sang, among other songs, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Do It Again.” The temperature may have risen some few degrees as she sang the second song, whose lyrics only seemed to question the title of the first.

“There were seventeen thousand soldiers in front of me,” Marilyn told Ben Hecht a few months later:

and they were all yelling at me at the top of their lungs.

I stood smiling at them. It had started snowing. But I felt as warm as if I were standing in a bright sun. . . . I’ve always been frightened by an audience—any audience. My stomach pounds, my head gets dizzy and I’m sure my voice has left me.

But standing in the snowfall facing these yelling soldiers, I felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything. I felt only happy.

One of her accompanists, a pianist named Al Guastafeste, recalled her lack of star attitude: “She was Marilyn Monroe, but she didn’t seem to realize it! If I made a mistake, she said she was sorry. When she made a mistake, she apologized.”

Her sixth audience was composed of ten thousand Dutch, Thai and American troops. Flanked by two tanks onstage, Marilyn was asked by a presiding officer how she felt. “Safe,” she replied, and the crowd roared with laughter. But she could be serious, and there was no doubt to chroniclers of the tour that Marilyn’s intentions were indeed earnest.

“She gave us the feeling she really wanted to be there,” recalled Ted Cieszynski, on duty with the Army Corps of Engineers as photographer for the Public Information Office. He had a front-row seat to her performance at K-2 airbase at Tae-Gu.

This wasn’t an obligation she had to fulfill, and it wasn’t a self-promotion. Of all the performers who came to us in Korea—and there were a half dozen or so—she was the best. She showed no nervousness and wasn’t anything like a dumb blonde. When a few of us photographers were allowed to climb up on the stage after her show, she was very pleasant and cooperative and told us how glad she was to be with us. She took her time, speaking with each of us about our families and our hometowns and our civilian jobs. It was bitter cold, but she was in no hurry to leave. Marilyn was a great entertainer. She made thousands of GIs feel she really cared.

Marilyn knew that she was the object of ten thousand male fantasies, yet somehow she wanted to communicate that it was not desire she wished to arouse but understanding. “This is my first experience with a live audience,” she told a crowd as she prepared to depart in a helicopter after her last performance, “and my greatest experience with any kind of audience. It’s been the best thing that ever happened to me.” Later, she added:

I felt I belonged. For the first time in my life, I had the feeling that the people seeing me were accepting me and liking me. This is what I’ve always wanted, I guess. Please come visit us in San Francisco.

The chopper blades whirred and Marilyn turned to climb aboard. Smiling gallantly and (thus an eyewitness) with tears in her eyes, she called her farewell:

Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye, goodbye—and God bless you all. Thank you for being so nice. Hold a good thought for me!

There were cheering and loud applause as the men removed their caps and waved farewell.

The importance of these four days cannot be overstated. Far from Hollywood, Marilyn had given brilliant, spontaneous performances (happily, they are preserved on newsfilm). This she did, free not only of her husband’s critical appraisal but also from the scrutiny of her drama coach, directors and executives who always reinforced her conviction that she was not good enough or that she lacked real skills. Instead of being paralyzed with anxiety as was often the case on the set, she found an outpouring of love from enthusiastic audiences. “When I went to Korea,” she told Sidney Skolsky later, “I wasn’t nervous, not one bit. I didn’t break out with red blotches on my arms or chest or anything. I was perfectly at ease.”

Thus her potentially disastrous live performances went extremely well because she was allowed to be spontaneous, to be herself. And whereas a Hollywood set exacerbated her painful selfconsciousness and caused her to forget and stumble on her lines, in Korea she never missed a word. Nor was she required to analyze every gesture, but simply to sing boldly and with feeling, and for that she received an outpouring of unconditional love. Like orphans and disabled children to whom she related so well, the anonymous soldiers were in a way the perfect counterparts to the famous ballplayer, the overbearing director, the name or the face that asked too much of her.

Back in Tokyo, Marilyn rushed to Joe like an excited child, telling him she had never felt so accepted. “It was so wonderful, Joe! You never heard such cheering!” But Joe, ever the realist, seemed not to care. “You never
heard
such cheering, Joe!” she repeated.

There was a pause, and he looked away. “Yes, I have,” he said calmly.
⁴

The marriage was already deeply troubled by the time Marilyn and Joe returned to San Francisco on February 24. When the annual
Photoplay
awards for best performances were announced for the previous year, Marilyn was the winner again, this time for her work in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How To Marry a Millionaire
. But when she went to Los Angeles to pick up the prize, her husband did not accompany her and again Sidney filled in as escort. “Joe hates crowds and glamour,” she told him, unable to conceal her disappointment in her husband’s indifference. Nevertheless, when she entered the Beverly Hills Hotel dining room on March 8, the earlier scene there was repeated. Wearing a dazzling white satin sheath cut low from the shoulders, Marilyn looked somehow different, and it took some reporters a while to notice that her hair had been recolored from honey blond to a brilliant halo of platinum. Like Harlow, Marilyn now undertook to have as much white in her life as possible—not only her hair and her wardrobe, but her
furnishings as well. Everything she chose was calculated to bedazzle, as if she could again win from her public the adoration she was denied at home.

After the ceremony, Marilyn and Sidney had a nightcap in her suite. And then, for perhaps the first time, she stunned him.

“Sidney, do you know who I’m going to marry?”

“Marry? What are you talking about?”

“I’m going to marry Arthur Miller.”

“Arthur Miller! You just got home from a honeymoon. You told me how wonderful Joe was, how happy he made you, and what a great time you had! Now you tell me you’re going to marry Arthur Miller. I don’t understand.”

“You wait. You’ll see.”

There is no evidence of a reunion or correspondence between Marilyn and her favorite playwright, but this was one fantasy she intended to realize.

Prolonging her sojourn at the Beverly Hills Hotel that March, Marilyn took the advice of Charles Feldman and Hugh French that there would be superb publicity and perhaps a respectable income from a published movie star autobiography, a genre just appearing on literary horizons. Marilyn agreed, with the understanding that a first-rate ghostwriter would be required, someone with whom she could speak freely about her past; she also demanded approval of the contents.

Thus it happened that Marilyn’s agents quickly contacted Jacques Chambrun, agent for the prolific journalist, novelist and screenwriter Ben Hecht; that spring a deal was struck. Marilyn and Hecht, who had met cordially during production of his script for
Monkey Business
, scheduled meetings several times weekly—often, at her insistence, with Sidney Skolsky ready to chime in. Hecht wrote quickly (in those days before convenient tape recorders), and before the end of April a first draft of her autobiography was ready. “Marilyn wept and wept for joy at what I had written,” Hecht wrote to Chambrun.
⁵

The result had a strange and tangled history, for the book was not finally published until 1974, after the deaths of both star and writer.
My Story
, as it was titled, contains imaginative anecdotes created in 1951 and 1952 by Marilyn and Sidney; life stories told that spring of 1954 by Marilyn and Sidney to Hecht; heavily redrafted portions of an unauthorized serialization of the Hecht manuscript, which were published in the London
Empire News
from May to August 1954 (a serialization illegally sold by Chambrun without the approval of Monroe or Hecht); and the final reworking of the text in the early 1970s by Milton Greene and an unknown writer or writers engaged by him.

Hecht’s draft, preserved among his papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago, contains no account of some of the most commonly believed moments in the life of Marilyn Monroe. According to the writer’s widow, the disorganized and incomplete 168-page typescript submitted to the
Empire News
was not the work of her husband, but was instead prepared under the supervision of the shrewd (not to say unethical) Chambrun, whom Hecht subsequently fired for multiple acts of misrepresentation, unauthorized publication and downright theft of income.

By careful comparison of the published version with the unpublished Hecht draft, it is clear that none of the first sixty-six pages of
My Story
was composed by Hecht at all. As internal evidence, there are Rose Hecht’s detailed notes to Folder Twelve of her husband’s papers, as well as a comparison with the corpus of Hecht’s work: the vocabulary and diction of
My Story
in these sections bear scant resemblance to anything ever written by Ben Hecht. For external evidence, there is the absence of Hecht’s completed
manuscript
as differentiated from the
typescript
of these pages, both of which he always personally approved. The various typed versions (even those not of Hecht’s provenance)
found their way into the Hecht papers simply because Chambrun, when fired, was required to return to Hecht’s attorneys everything relative to his work. “Sit down and try to think up something interesting about yourself,” Hecht said to Marilyn when they began their task. She did, he did, Sidney did (and later Milton Greene did).