Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe Read online

  ‘Marilyn,’ said Amy Greene, ‘used to fabricate a great deal, especially when she wanted to shock, to get a reaction.’ This may have been the fantasy of a woman who, by the time she was telling the story, feared she would never bear children.

  Peter Leonardi, Marilyn’s hairdresser and secretary in the mid-fifties, said she had a ‘tube-tying’ operation in her starlet days, on the advice of an agent who said pregnancy would spell professional failure. Robert Slatzer, who knew Marilyn for most of her adult life, said she later submitted to surgery to have the operation reversed. On top of that, persistent reports from friends suggest Marilyn had numerous abortions. Amy Greene, perhaps the most reliable of those sources, said Marilyn made the horrendous admission that she had had twelve abortions, some of them back-street butcheries dating back to her earliest days in Hollywood.

  ‘And then,’ said Amy Greene with a sigh, ‘she was surprised when she had trouble having babies. …’

  Marilyn’s poor battlefield of a womb had been a torment since adolescence, even before those surgical invasions. First husband Dougherty said, ‘Norma Jeane had so much trouble during her menstrual periods, the pain would just about knock her out.’

  Sometimes, in her earliest starlet days, period pain would cause Marilyn to stop her car with a screech of brakes, jump out, and crouch on the ground in agony. Maurice Zolotow, her early biographer, once penetrated her studio dressing room and noted no less than fourteen boxes of pills. Almost all were painkillers prescribed for menstrual cramps.

  Henry Rosenfeld, the wealthy New York dress manufacturer, knew Marilyn from early in her career till her death. ‘She wanted a baby so much,’ Rosenfeld remembered, ‘that she’d convince herself of it every two or three months. She’d gain, maybe fourteen or fifteen pounds. She was forever having false pregnancies.’

  Marilyn was to tell writer Ben Hecht of her dream of having a daughter. ‘She won’t be any Norma Jeane,’ she enthused. And I know how I’ll bring her up — without lies. No lies about there being a Santa Claus or about the world being full of noble and honorable people all eager to help each other and do good to each other.’

  There was something else Marilyn told Ben Hecht about the world of Norma Jeane. Before she turned nineteen, Marilyn said, she had tried to commit suicide. She had done it twice — once by leaving the gas on, once by swallowing sleeping pills. When Ben Hecht came to write her story, he left out that detail.

  On June 1, 1946, when she turned twenty, Norma Jeane had only her dreams. She spent her birthday in a rented room in Las Vegas, fulfilling residence qualifications for a quick divorce from Jim Dougherty. It was hot, and she was suffering from an unromantic case of trench mouth.

  Two months later, in Los Angeles, Dougherty made one of his last visits to see Norma Jeane — to deliver his part of the divorce documentation. In their last conversation she had shown no sign of a longing for children. On the contrary, she talked only of her urgent desire to become an actress, and no studio, she said, would spend money training a married woman who might get pregnant.

  Now, when Norma Jeane opened the door to Dougherty, she looked radiant, and not because he had finally agreed to go along with the divorce. Earlier that week, without the help of divorce papers, she had obtained what she wanted most, the promise of a contract as a stock player at Twentieth Century-Fox.

  When Norma Jeane told Dougherty about the contract she added a detail. The studio had given her a new name. What did Jim think of it? ‘Beautiful,’ he replied politely, ‘just beautiful.’ Then he left.*

  The name was Marilyn Monroe.

  *Dougherty remarried and became a policeman. Years later he trained the police unit known as the SWAT team, which made headlines in the fiery finale to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. He later became a County Commissioner in Sabattus, Maine.

  4

  A MONTH BEFORE MARILYN GOT her big break, Robert Slatzer, a budding magazine writer from Ohio with a passion for show business, had been cooling his heels in the lobby of the old Twentieth Century-Fox studios on Pico Boulevard. He was reading a book of poems, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and waiting to interview some minor star of the day. Slatzer, then nineteen, would remember that ‘this girl came pushing herself in through the big doors, carrying a big scrapbook. She caught her heel or something and the pictures fell all over the floor. I went to her rescue, and I’m glad to say there was only one place for her to sit down and wait — next to me. She said her name was Norma Jeane Mortensen. She was really interested in my poetry, and I said I might be able to write a story about her. We ended up making a date for that same evening.’

  That night Bob Slatzer borrowed a battered 1938 Studebaker and made his way to Nebraska Avenue to pick up Norma Jeane. They drove along the Pacific Coast Highway and ate dinner by the ocean. Malibu was still a lovely place in those days, not the clapboard and concrete jumble of 1986. Later they walked on the beach and paddled in the surf. Slatzer says he felt shy, shyer than Norma Jeane. He thought, though he could not swear to it, that they made love for the first time that very night. When they drove home, Norma Jeane asked him to leave her at the corner rather than take her to the front door.

  ‘I think we had an instant affection towards each other,’ said Slatzer, as though a man need apologize for having slept with Marilyn Monroe. ‘For me there was something magic about her, different from the other girls the talent men at the studio would fix you up with. I don’t know, I think I can say I loved her from the first time I saw her.’

  As the years passed and Marilyn became the love of other men and an international byword, Robert Slatzer would stay in love with the girl who dropped her modeling portfolio in the lobby of Twentieth Century-Fox.* In the summer of 1946 he had frequent dates with her, and so did other young men.

  One was Tommy Zahn, who was eventually to become a legendary figure on the beaches of California. In 1946, they say, he looked like Tab Hunter after a weight-lifting course. He was a lifeguard in those days, and he thought he might end up as an actor. The acting dream nearly came true, because he had met a teenager named Darrylin Zanuck on Muscle Beach. Darrylin fancied Tommy from afar, then introduced him to her father, Darryl Zanuck, chief of production at Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck signed Zahn as a contract player, and the beach boy went to the studio to learn to act, sing and dance. So it was, in the late summer of 1946, that Tommy Zahn met an aspiring actress who became one of his modest stable of girls for the next year. His memories of Norma Jeane were fond, and perhaps unique.

  ‘She was in prime condition,’ said Zahn,’ tremendously fit. I used to take her surfing up at Malibu — tandem surfing, you know, two riders on the same surfboard. I’d take her later, in the dead of winter when it was cold, and it didn’t faze her in the least; she’d lay in the cold water, waiting for the waves. She was really good in the water, very robust, so healthy, a really fine attitude towards life. I was twenty-two when I met her, and I guess she was twenty. Gosh, I really liked her.’

  While two men played on the beach with Norma Jeane, another lay injured in the hospital, ogling her photograph. Magazines like Titter and Laff were not the sort of thing you let your mother know you were reading, not that they showed much more than long legs in short shorts and pert breasts inside sweaters a size too small. By 1946 Howard Hughes, the actress collector, did not have to worry about his mother, and he was in the hospital following a serious flying accident. He sent out for girlie magazines by the score, partly because he enjoyed them and partly because he owned RKO Radio Pictures.

  On July 29, 1946, the gossip column in the Los Angeles Times carried the following squib: ‘Howard Hughes is on the mend. Picking up a magazine, he was attracted by the cover girl and promptly instructed an aide to sign her for pictures. She is Norma Jeane Dougherty, a model.’ In those twelve months Norma Jeane had decorated the cover of Laff magazine no less than four times under three different names, two variations on her married name and as Jean Norman. It would have been hard for Hughes no
t to notice, but for once he was slow off the mark.*

  A Hughes aide did indeed place a call to Norma Jeane’s agent, who promptly used the opportunity to stoke up enthusiasm at another studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. Norma Jeane cut out the clipping from the Los Angeles Times and excitedly showed it to friends. By that time, though, she had already made the vital connection.

  The casting director at Fox was Ben Lyon, himself a star of the thirties, and in Britain celebrated for his radio series ‘Life with the Lyons.’ Years earlier it had been Lyon who spotted the potential of Jean Harlow. Now it was he who agreed to see Norma Jeane. He recalled later that ‘she had a good face. You can tell with some faces — the way the flesh sits on the bones, the planes and angles — that they’ll photograph well. … In addition, there was the way she moved.’

  Two days later a movie camera turned its glass eye on Norma Jeane for the first time. Dressed in a sequined gown, teetering on high heels, she obeyed instructions to ‘walk across the set. Sit down. Light a cigarette. Put it out. Go upstage. Cross. Look out of a window. Sit down. Come downstage and exit.’

  The cameraman, Leon Shamroy, would one day photograph Marilyn in There’s No Business Like Show Business. Now, as he looked at the rushes, he got a cold chill. ‘This girl,’ he was to say, ‘had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson … she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow. … She was showing us she could sell emotions in pictures.’

  Within a week Darryl Zanuck himself had seen the footage, enthused, and agreed that Norma Jeane Dougherty should be signed as a contract player, at $75 a week, to be reviewed in six months. Her weekly pay would then probably go up to $100. Norma Jeane rushed home with the news, announcing, ‘It’s the finest studio in the world. … The people are wonderful, and I’m going to be in a movie. It’ll be a small part. But once I’m on the screen. …’

  Now Norma Jeane could shed not only her previous life, but also her name. Tommy Zahn, the sometime lifeguard she joined in the ranks of Fox contract hopefuls, revealed that the studio christening got off to a false start. ‘Ben Lyon,’ said Zahn, ‘could not abide her real name, so he changed it to Carole Lind. They tried that for a while, but it didn’t sound right; it was a rather obvious composite of an opera singer and a dead actress.’

  Ben Lyon and his actress wife, Bebe Daniels, who quickly became fond of Norma Jeane, decided they could do better. They invited Norma Jeane to their Malibu beachhouse to swap ideas. Lyon recalled, ‘I finally said to her, “I know who you are. You’re Marilyn!” I told her that once there was a lovely actress named Marilyn Miller and that she reminded me of her. “But what about the last name?” Marilyn said, “My grandmother’s name was Monroe and I’d like to keep that.” I said, “Great! That’s got a nice flow, and two M’s should be lucky.” That’s how she got her name.’ Marilyn was still doing modeling jobs, but her heart was at the studio. Tommy Zahn recalled that everyone worked hard, and nobody more so than her.

  Zahn would pick up Marilyn early in the morning and the two of them would spend their weekdays learning to act, sing, and dance. The dancing did not come easy to either of them. On Saturdays all the stock players would meet at the studio. Some would do pantomime or charades, and others would guess exactly what they were portraying. Zahn would devise a pantomime, and he and a rather shy Marilyn would perform as a couple.

  There were no real parts to play yet, but Marilyn busied herself paving the way. She made sure the publicity men knew who she was, and she courted the reporters permanently based at the studio. One of them, Ralph Casey Shawhan, remembered that often, when the artists’ entrance was closed, Marilyn would whistle to the press men on the third floor to come down and let her in. Shawhan could still see her peering up at the window, dressed in ‘cut-off jeans frayed at the bottom, before anyone else was wearing them.’

  Marilyn, giggling in the cold, posed for still shots at the beach in mid-November. The journalists liked her, and the Press Club gave her a special award. None of this had anything to do with movies, but Marilyn understood early on the importance of a good press.

  Sometime during that first year a diminutive figure, five feet tall, shoes scuffed and socks down round his ankles, was ambling through the Fox administration building. Sidney Skolsky, the legendary New York Post writer whose syndicated column on Hollywood could change careers, was headed for the water fountain. He was delayed, though less than irritated, by a shapely behind bent interminably over the fountain. He and the owner of the behind made jokes to each other about the capacity of camels, and ended up having a long conversation. Marilyn poured out the woeful tale of her childhood, and gained a new and influential friend. Except for an interruption during her New York years, Skolsky would remain Marilyn’s confidant till she died.

  Skolsky was to observe, ‘It was clear that Marilyn was prepared to work hard to improve herself. She wanted to be an actress and a movie star. I knew nothing would stop her. The drive and determination and need inside Marilyn could not be halted.’

  ‘My illusions didn’t have anything to do with being a fine actress.’ Marilyn would say a few years later. ‘I knew how third-rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn! To change, to improve! I didn’t want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act.’

  In early 1947, Marilyn, at twenty-one, moved across a sound stage at last, as one of a dozen extras in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!, a movie about a farmer and his team of mules. Much of Marilyn’s part ended up on the cutting-room floor, but one spoken line — fittingly, the one word ‘Hello!’ — survived, along with a brief long shot in which she was seen paddling a canoe.

  Meanwhile the studio had been paying for Marilyn to attend classes at the Actors’ Lab, a drama school off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. ‘She came to classes on time and did all her assignments conscientiously,’ said Mrs Morris Carnovsky, who ran the school with her husband, ‘but I never would have predicted she would be a success.’ To Mrs Carnovsky, Marilyn seemed very young, self-conscious, and shy. It was at this point that Marilyn suffered a massive setback. A year into her contract, Fox decided to drop her.

  The firing of Marilyn has never been explained. Ben Lyon, her first studio benefactor, was dumbfounded. Marilyn desperately wandered the studio corridors till she found the office of the great man himself, Darryl Zanuck. Whenever she tried to see him, Zanuck was ‘out of town.’ Tommy Zahn, Marilyn’s lifeguard boyfriend, thought he knew what happened, not least because he was fired at the same time. Zahn believed that he was only hired in the first place because Zanuck wished to groom him for marriage to one of his daughters. Zahn’s dalliance with Marilyn was noted and disapproved from on high, and both were fired. Zahn shipped out to Honolulu. Marilyn was adrift, professionally and emotionally.

  She did not give up. Living now in a succession of furnished rooms, apparently alone or sharing with other girls, Marilyn continued at the Actors’ Lab. She tried to pay her way with the proceeds from new modeling assignments, and perhaps with the call-girl sideline about which she would later tell Lee Strasberg.

  One modeling job was arranged by Bill Burnside, a forty-three-year-old Scot who represented the J. Arthur Rank Organization in Hollywood. She was interested in him, not least because he knew her idol, Clark Gable, whose photograph accompanied her everywhere. Now that Marilyn was out of work, Burnside tried to help. He took her to pose for Paul Hesse, a top commercial photographer. Hesse said simply, ‘Darling, you’re too fat,’ and Marilyn burst into tears. Burnside salvaged the moment by taking pictures himself, and the two became close.

  Burnside was to recall, ‘She was very aware of how she affected men. If I took her to a restaurant, however elegant, the waiters were ready to jump at her bidding. She had it there all right, that star quality, at the age of twenty-one. … Physically, she was wary of me for the first months of our knowin
g each other.’ In the end there was a sporadic affair, lasting for months. Burnside kept one of the photographs he took, inscribed, ‘Anything worth having is worth waiting for. Love, Marilyn.’

  ‘I think what she wanted from me was my education,’ said Burnside. ‘She was into Shelley and Keats, as well as some lighter stuff. She knew that she needed knowledge.’ During this worldess period, Marilyn plunged into the acquisition of ‘Culture.’ In school, which she had quit when she was fifteen, her work habits had been generally graded as only ‘Acceptable’; but she had been rated ‘Good’ in her English classes. Now, seeking to broaden her mind — partly to help in her career, partly because she was thirsty for information — she began to build up a considerable library.

  Marilyn had a lifetime interest in the occult, and she often visited astrologers and psychics. She retained a sense of proportion, however, and dismissed one famous astrologer, Carroll Righter, in a way that demonstrated her priorities. Righter asked her, ‘Did you know you were born under the same sign [Gemini] as Rosalind Russell, Judy Garland, and Rosemary Clooney?’ Marilyn looked him straight in the eye and replied, ‘I know nothing of these people. I was born under the same sign as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen Victoria, and Walt Whitman.’

  The sign of Gemini, Marilyn said, stood for intellect. Her search for knowledge was to become a lifetime preoccupation, one many would mock as pretentious posturing. It was not. Marilyn devoured Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, poetry (mostly romantic), biographies, and history books.

  Abraham Lincoln became Marilyn’s special hero. (She would later strike up a friendship with Lincoln’s biographer, Carl Sandburg.) Lincoln’s portrait would follow her from home to home till the end of her life, and his Gettysburg Address usually hung nearby. It was her first love affair with a president of the United States.