Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (50 page)

On November 4, Marilyn completed principal photography on
The Seven Year Itch
and Charles Feldman gave a dinner party in her honor at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, inviting eighty guests to meet and praise her forthcoming hit. This was not only a generous and friendly gesture: Feldman had two other reasonable motives.

First, the gala evening was Feldman’s response to Darryl Zanuck’s increasing complaints about Marilyn’s absences, her lateness during production, and the necessity of multiple takes when she misread her
dialogue. These were ridiculous objections, Feldman insisted: the day Marilyn completed work on
Show Business
she went to New York for location work on
Itch
. Her divorce took her out almost a week, but when she returned she worked fifteen consecutive days: “She has been most cooperative—this girl is really a sensational actress.” He added that as Zanuck well knew, twenty takes or more were not unusual by a meticulous filmmaker. William Wyler routinely wearied actors by doing sixty or more, and Elia Kazan often submitted Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh to dozens of takes before he got what he wanted for the film of
A Streetcar Named Desire
(which Feldman had produced for Warner, and which won several Oscars).

Feldman’s second reason was not quite so public. Marilyn was making quiet little noises about leaving Hollywood. Her attorneys were concluding lengthy examinations of her deals with Fox and finding loopholes by which her contracts could be declared null and void. This was being accomplished so that she and Milton Greene could form a creative business partnership known as Marilyn Monroe Productions, to make films they would control from first day to last, and on which they could realize not only vaster income than her Fox salary but also a handsome tax break. As part of the deal, it was also known that Marilyn was going to leave Feldman for new agents, the men at the Music Corporation of America, familiarly called MCA (with whom she signed on July 26, 1955).

“I feel like Cinderella,” Marilyn said when she arrived at Romanoff’s, wearing a brilliant red chiffon gown borrowed from the studio wardrobe. Clark Gable danced with her, Humphrey Bogart poured her a drink, Clifton Webb spread some sharp gossip, and Sidney Skolsky got material for weeks of columns. Zanuck attended, as did Jack Warner, Claudette Colbert, Samuel Goldwyn, Gary Cooper, Billy Wilder, Susan Hayward and Loretta Young. Marilyn knew, commented Sidney Skolsky in his column a few days later, “that the so-called elite of the town had finally accepted her. Marilyn had never felt she belonged. She had gained her fame because of her popularity with the fans,” but always felt neglected by Hollywood. “I have come up from way down,” Marilyn said later. Most memorable for her that evening was her introduction to Clark Gable. “I’ve always admired you and wanted to be in a picture with you,” she said while they danced.

“I ran
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
,” replied Gable, “and I told my agent you have the magic. I’d like to do a picture with you, too.” And so they would, but under circumstances not quite so pleasant as that evening.

Radiant and happy despite her exhaustion, Marilyn charmed everyone. Told by George Axelrod and Darryl Zanuck that after seeing the first seven completed reels of
The Seven Year Itch
they thought she was magnificent, Marilyn replied, “It’s because of Billy [Wilder]. He’s a wonderful director. I want him to direct me again, but he’s doing the story of Charles Lindbergh next, and he won’t let me play Lindbergh.”

Each day of 1954 continued to be filled with complex business and personal relationships, and with minor but uncomfortable health problems. At seven o’clock on Sunday evening, November 7, Marilyn arrived (three hours late) at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital “for correction of a female disorder she has suffered for years,” said her surgeon, Leon Krohn, referring to the procedure he performed next day in an attempt to correct her chronic endometriosis.

The press documented her hospitalization, with special attention to the fact that Marilyn was delivered to the hospital by Joe, that he was the only visitor during her five-night stay and that he was present all day, every day, through dinner and each evening. On Tuesday, he brought a bottle of Chanel No. 5 to her fifth-floor room, and this set off widely reported rumors of a reconciliation. “There’s no chance of that,” Marilyn said firmly on Wednesday, “but we’ll always be friends.”

On Friday, November 12, Marilyn was permitted to return home, and because Joe had briefly returned to San Francisco she asked Mary Karger Short to help her depart the hospital. Intrusive, infamous pictures were taken that day of a wan, disheveled Marilyn almost weeping as she tries to hide her face from a herd of insolent photographers. But these reflect not (as often maintained) emotional breakdown but the simple fact that she had hoped she might exit unnoticed by using the hospital’s rear freight elevator. With her hair unbrushed and without her usual cosmetics, she did not wish to be seen, much less photographed—thus her distress when the boys from the
Daily News
leaped out at her.

But she did not abide the doctor’s orders to rest. The next evening,
Joe was back in Los Angeles, and the couple dined at the Villa Capri, where they had met almost three years earlier. The first to honor his upcoming fortieth birthday on November 25, Marilyn presented him with a gold watch, which he proudly wore for years afterward, until it was accidently smashed in a minor traffic mishap.

Sidney continued to squire Marilyn during November to social events, and that month they were seen at the Tiffany Club, the Palm Springs Racquet Club and the Hob Nob Club. And at one evening, Marilyn Monroe made history in a new, unexpected fashion.

In the 1950s, Hollywood nightclubs did not invite nonwhite artists to perform, and when she learned that agents for her idol Ella Fitzgerald had been denied any discussion of an engagement, Marilyn personally called the owner of the Mocambo. “She wanted me booked immediately,” Fitzgerald remembered, “and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night I was there. She also told him—and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status—that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night.” With this, Marilyn Monroe placed herself firmly in the vanguard of a controversial support of civil rights—a concern that would become intense in the years to come as she read, asked questions, challenged lawmakers and learned about one of the shabbiest prejudices in American life.

That same season, a different sort of culture came into her life in the person of the English poet Edith Sitwell, whom Marilyn met at a Hollywood tea and to whom she expressed her own sincere interest in poetry. Dame Edith said that if Marilyn ever came to London she would be pleased to invite her to luncheon.

Everything seemed to accelerate toward the end of 1954. Milton Greene arrived in Los Angeles with preliminary papers for the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions, thenceforth familiarly called “MMP” by everyone. Just as she was taking the unpopular step of supporting the rights of minorities, so was there evident another kind of rebellion. Weary of being typecast by unimaginative studio executives, offended by the prospect of another seven years of servitude at Fox and aggrieved at the absence of the verbally promised but still unpaid $100,000 bonus for
The Seven Year Itch
, she longed for better
stories and scripts, more ambitious roles and the right to choose her projects and her directors.

Such demands were not to be taken seriously in Hollywood, but just as she had broken nightclub rules, so now Marilyn was ready to fight with Zanuck, Skouras, stockholders and critics. Aware of her power and prestige, with the success of the Romanoff party still fresh in her mind, she chose this season to make a break. She knew the studio needed her to promote
Itch
the following spring, and she knew she was America’s biggest star. Thus Marilyn was ready for a major gamble—one with enormous risks, for there was no guarantee she could in fact survive without the machinery she had come to detest.

Perhaps nobody but photographer Milton Greene could have preserved Marilyn’s career by paradoxically taking her away from Hollywood. With time out for brief sojourns at Columbia and MGM, she had been Fox’s chattel since 1947, and now she felt her own seven-year itch. No longer willing to be treated capriciously by a boss or a husband, she was attracted to Milton not only because he photographed her brilliantly but because he was not an industry figure. He had no more sense of how to make a movie deal than she, and no idea, either, of the intricacies of production control, budget or the thousand details of filmmaking. In a way, their partnership was a blind endeavor, but she would have it no other way. Part of her wanted not to be a sexy starlet but a serious actress; part of Milton Greene did not want to be a popular photographer. “He, too, wanted to rise above his past,” said his close friend, the writer and publisher Michael Korda. “He wanted to be a stage producer, a movie producer, a mogul—almost anything other than what he had done already.” At twenty-eight and thirty-two, Marilyn and Milton were primed for adventure.

The enterprise briefly succeeded, at least in part because it took Hollywood by surprise. Milton Greene and his attorneys Frank Delaney and Irving Stein could maneuver deals because the West Coast movie people did not take seriously those on the East Coast they considered ignorant
arrivistes
. MMP was thought to be a typical bit of Marilyn’s fey daydreaming, like her occasional statements that she would like to play Grushenka in a film of
The Brothers Karamazov
.

At the same time, Marilyn felt that Charles Feldman’s friendship with Zanuck put her at a disadvantage. Famous Artists and Feldman did more business and had more clients at Fox than any other agency in
town, and this did not go down well with her. Suspicious of almost everyone connected with the studio, she left Feldman—casually breaking that contract, too, even though she owed him $23,350 advanced to her as a personal loan; at the encouragement of Milton Greene, she now went over to MCA.
⁵
There, agency president Lew Wasserman saw to it that she would be managed on both coasts: by himself and his colleagues in California, and by Jay Kanter and Mort Viner in New York.

Feldman, ever the gentleman, chose not to force his contract with a volatile and unhappy client; he did, however, insist on being repaid the money she owed him, although it would take five years for him to collect. As for Wasserman and company, Marilyn knew he was the most powerful agent in the business. He had already negotiated an historic deal for James Stewart by which the actor waived a portion of his salary for a percentage of a film’s profits. This was the origin of the so-called percentage deal, which revolutionized actors’ fees, eventually enabling them to be producers as well and creating the phenomenon of the hyphenate—the actor-producer-writer-director becoming the jack of all Hollywood trades.

As for Marilyn, she felt that thus far she had

never had a chance to learn anything in Hollywood. They worked me too fast. They rushed me from one picture into another. It’s no challenge to do the same thing over and over. I want to keep growing as a person and as an actress, and in Hollywood they never ask me my opinion. They just tell me what time to show up for work. In leaving Hollywood and coming to New York, I feel I can be more myself. After all, if I can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all?

The fear that she was not indeed herself, that there were major parts of her person unknown and unexplored, was her central concern for the rest of her life.

In 1955, she set for herself several tasks—producer, acting student,
analysand—that suggested her desire to try a very different persona than “Marilyn Monroe,” whom she all but abandoned that year. If this were mere caprice, or a series of shallow “experiences” to which she gave herself in lieu of serious pursuits, it would be easy to label her as many did: an immature, self-absorbed, lazy dilettante. But in fact she was nothing of the kind. At twenty-eight, much of her experimentation was a legitimate kind of self-exploration that would only become permissible later for people of post-college age in American culture; in the 1950s, uniformity and the aspiration to stability were set forth as prime national virtues, and by one’s early twenties a respectable person was expected to have achieved a passport into some aspect of the commercial scramble. Honest enough to admit that she was neither familiar nor comfortable with an identity she poorly understood and had in fact not yet achieved, Norma Jeane/Marilyn for a year disposed of The Monroe and became a frank wanderer into new realms.

In this regard, her lifelong obsession with mirrors was not simply the sign of an actress’s narcissism. Colleagues at work and friends at home often found her before a wall of mirrors, or seated at a three-paneled vanity table as if it were sacred triptychs; she gazed not in dreamy, mute adoration but in ruthless assessment, studiously refashioning and recreating, ever dissatisfied with the image she beheld. Constantly dressing and undressing, reviewing, repainting, drawing once again the lip and brow lines, washing and recommencing the application of a new look on a new face, she lived in a perpetual state of self-criticism, ever trying and retrying to focus some unrealized image of an unfinished self.

As she embarked on the search for a new Marilyn, the men at Fox were rightly alert to their own best interests and wise enough to find mechanisms to sustain them. For an entire year, from the end of 1954 to Marilyn’s signature on a new Fox contract at the end of 1955, Greene’s lawyers dealt with Fox’s.

The eventual collapse of the traditional studio system and its ownership of actors owed much to her tenacity and to the success of efforts exerted by her, Greene and his attorneys. Marilyn Monroe was Fox’s prodigal daughter, to be sure, but ultimately she was enthusiastically welcomed home and very much on her terms. It was as before a relationship
of mutual benefit, for Marilyn and Milton needed Fox’s money, and Fox needed her to bring them profits.