‘Billy Dear, Please Dress Me Forever. I love you, Marilyn,’ reads the inscription on the nude calendar Billy Travilla was given. After three years of knowing each other professionally, said Travilla, there was a brief affair during Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, ‘while my wife was in Florida and Joe DiMaggio was away.’ The liaison lasted only weeks, but Travilla provides an intimate glimpse of the woman with the ways of a child.
It had been hard to resist a dalliance with Marilyn. Once the designer’s secretary came in while Marilyn was sitting on his knee. Marilyn stood up while Travilla — in a condition that discouraged getting up till he could adjust himself — remained seated. Delightedly, and in front of his secretary, Marilyn giggled and asked, ‘Billy, why can’t you stand up?’
‘I remember I was going to pick her up at seven-thirty,’ said Travilla. ‘I knocked at her hotel door, and she asked me to wait. Then came this handsome young actor, also carrying flowers. We knew each other casually, and we stood in line. He said he had a date, and I said I did. A good twenty minutes went by; then she opened the door. She took the flowers from the bellboy, told the other guy she had a date with me rather than him, and I went in. The place was obviously quickly made ready to receive a visitor, and done badly. Her barbells were sticking out from under the couch and she didn’t know what to do with the flowers. I told her to call down to the office, and she said, “No, I’ve got a better idea,” and put both the bouquets in the toilet. Then came the matter of whether she was too tall, in high heels, to go out with me. I had to prance to the mirror with her while we checked her height in high heels, and she was an inch taller than me. The high heels won anyway, after about twenty minutes.’
Another of Travilla’s recollections was that ‘one night we went to Tiffany’s on Eighth Street. I went to the men’s room, which was down past the club’s office. I noticed Marilyn’s nude calendar hanging in the office, and told Marilyn. She said, “Oh, Billy, where? I want to see it.” We went back and the door was shut, so we knocked. A tall black man came and asked what we wanted, and Marilyn said she wanted to look at her calendar. As it turned out, Billie Holiday was using the office as a dressing room, and I guess she’d heard Marilyn Monroe was in the audience and thought Marilyn had come to say hello. When she learned different what we did see of Holiday was very fast — just a whirl of white sleeve with beads dangling from it, and a dark hand. She pulled the calendar off the wall, crumpled it, threw it in Marilyn’s face, and called her a cunt. Dumbfounded, we went back to the table. The manager wanted us to stay and see the show, but we left.’
Looking back, Travilla tempered a lover’s fondness with the keen perceptions of a lifetime spent working with female stars. ‘I think she wanted to love, but could only love herself,’ he said. ‘She was totally narcissistic. She adored her own face, constantly wanted to make it better and different. Everything she did in that regard, by the way, was right at the time. She once told me, “I can make my face do anything, same as you can take a white board and build from that and make a painting.” But the only way she was highly sexed was the charge she got out of looking in the mirror and seeing the beautiful mouth that she’d painted with about five shades of lipstick, to get the right curves, the right shadows to bring out the lips, because her lips were really very flat.’
‘If ever there was a prick-teaser,’ said Travilla, ‘it was Marilyn, when she wanted to be. She did it for real and for show. We’d be doing a still picture in the gallery, and I’d be standing right next to her, and she’d whisper, “Say something dirty,” and I would. And you could read it in the pictures, you could see it, that mouth was saying, “Fuck me” or “Suck me.” It was a turn-on for her.’
‘One time,’ Travilla recalled, ‘there was this little fuddy-duddy man from Eastman Kodak — we were using a new kind of film — and she comes out in this chiffon nightie, and she poses this way and that way, and the little guy gets uncomfortable. And she knew, and she came over and said, “Is this okay for you, Mr Eastman?” That was her sexual kick — to arouse.’
Like many others, colleagues as well as lovers, Travilla was amazed at his own tolerance of Marilyn. He said, ‘There was something about the girl you had to love. She would be late for a morning appointment, call at three to say she was on the way, and you’d wait till seven. She was the one woman I’ve known who could make a man feel tall, handsome, fascinating, with that unblinking look of hers, dead in the eyes. You were the king of the evening, if she so decided. She made you feel like the only one, even when you were not.’
Travilla had no illusions about being the only one. Another lover that year, for a month or so, was Edward G. Robinson, Jr. Robinson, son of the famous actor, was a sad figure, the product of a broken home and a catastrophic relationship with his father. He never became more than an aspiring actor, and was to die an alcoholic at the age of forty, choking to death while watching one of his father’s movies. In 1953 Robinson was nineteen, something of a hell-raiser, and chasing older women. Marilyn was one of them, according to Robinson’s friend Arthur James and his last wife, Nan Morris.
James said Marilyn met Robinson through a mutual friendship with another son with a famous name — Charlie Chaplin, Jr., Marilyn’s former lover. The acquaintance became an affair during Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Robinson was looking for bit parts at Marilyn’s studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Marilyn tried to help. He lived in an apartment in the same house as James’s sister, and it was there that James would see them together.
Any passion in the Robinson affair was soon spent, and turned to friendship. James said, ‘We three men were a sort of trio, and Marilyn saw us all occasionally, together or separately, for the rest of her life. They were all depressives, Marilyn, Charlie, and Eddie, and they would hunt each other down when things were bad. She was very dear to both of them, and they would try to help. But Charlie and Eddie were suicidal, more so than Marilyn. They couldn’t make it on their own, and they couldn’t deal with their famous names. Sometimes it was Marilyn who literally kept them alive.’
Arthur James, on the sidelines, became one of the many who put up with Marilyn’s mindless late-night phone calls. ‘She would call from somebody’s place at three or four o’clock in the morning,’ he remembered, ‘asking me if I could come right over. I’d put something on over my pajamas, drive all the way there, and she’d be gone. …’
In Eddie Robinson, Marilyn had met not only a drinker, but a man experimenting with drugs, a ‘pill freak,’ as Arthur James put it. It was probably now and in these circles, that Marilyn, the keep-fit girl with the barbells under the couch, crossed a grim new threshold into the Hollywood world of drugs.
Drug abuse has been the scourge of the movie colony since 1920. Only the fashion has changed. The earliest stars of silent pictures fell for marijuana or, worse, heroin. Pills came into their own in the forties and fifties, with the growth of the pharmaceutical industry. The post-war years were the heyday of ‘bennies,’ the various derivatives of Benzedrine. Bennies kept you awake, kept you slim by suppressing the appetite, and provided a vague euphoria.
Next came Dexedrine, son of Benzedrine, and then, with amytal sodium thrown in, Dexamyl. Dexamyl, went the Hollywood talk in the early fifties, gave the perfect high. After the highs, and the metabolic chaos, came the craving for sleep. Stars and failures alike reached for the new wave of barbiturates — Seconal and Nembutal — little tickets to oblivion on the jagged sea of insomnia. Add alcohol, which had been there all along, and the cocktail of peril was complete. One day, Nembutal would kill Marilyn.
In Hollywood the steady trickle of deaths had done nothing to stop the torrent of lethal prescriptions. Dr Lee Siegel, a studio doctor for Twentieth Century-Fox, was physician to both Judy Garland, and for extended periods, to Marilyn Monroe. Still practicing on Wilshire Boulevard when interviewed for this book, Dr Siegel shook his head as he recalled how pill-taking was once positively encouraged by studio bosses. ‘In those days,’ he said, ‘pills were seen
as another tool to keep stars working. The doctors were caught in the middle. If one doctor would not prescribe, there was always another who would. When I first treated Marilyn, back in the early fifties, everyone was using pills.’
Since 1962, when Marilyn died of barbiturate poisoning, biographers have assumed she used only sleeping pills, and these only from the mid-fifties. Interviews today suggest an earlier entrapment. Amy Greene, who lived with Marilyn in 1955, said, ‘She told me she’d always used drugs. She was a baby when she started taking pills, just seventeen or eighteen years old.’ Milton Greene, Marilyn’s partner when she broke away from Fox, said she had long been using Dexamyl, the fashionable ‘upper’ of the period. This contained amphetamine, commonly known as ‘speed.’
Bunny Gardel, who did Marilyn’s body makeup on numerous pictures, knew her from her earliest days at Fox. By the early fifties, said Gardel, ‘She used to come to the dressing room and put down a plastic bag, and you never saw so many pills in one bag. There would be uppers, downers, vitamins, and God knows what in the bag.’
In September 1953, Grace McKee, Marilyn’s former guardian and the woman who had been the closest thing she ever had to a mother, committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates. It may be that Marilyn never learned the precise cause, since the death certificate was only recently unearthed by a researcher, but she did know it was suicide. Meanwhile Marilyn herself careened onward into a life that would always, in varying degrees, be blurred by barbiturates.
In 1953 Marilyn’s private confusions were matched by a growing professional dilemma. On the other hand, encouraged by a gleeful studio, she cemented her image as the national sex symbol. She caused an uproar by arriving at a Photoplay awards ceremony in a dress that designer Billy Travilla had to sew into position on every famous curve. ‘When she wiggled through the audience to come up on the podium,’ wrote her former journalist-lover, James Bacon, ‘her derrière looked like two puppies fighting under a silk sheet.’
Meanwhile, as the world sniggered, Marilyn was hanging on the words of director John Huston, who had once told her she could ‘turn into a very good actress.’ She now told the New York Times, ‘That is really what I want to be. I want to grow and develop and play serious dramatic parts. My dramatic coach, Natasha Lytess, tells everybody that I have a great soul, but so far nobody’s interested in it.’
Marilyn got her chance to act in How to Marry a Millionaire. She was to star with Betty Grable — the reigning queen of Hollywood — and Lauren Bacall, in a fairly sophisticated comedy about three New York models scheming to trap wealthy husbands. Brimming with doubts, Marilyn burst unannounced into the office of the director, Jean Negulesco. Her questions were self-conscious ones about ‘characterization and motivation,’ and an amused Negulesco soon learned that ‘she was concerned about how her role would transmit the sex image, which is what she believed she had to represent.’ He told her, ‘Marilyn, don’t try to sell this sex. You are sex. You are the institution of sex. The only motivation you need for this part is the fact that in the movie you are as blind as a bat without glasses.’
Marilyn understood, and plunged into her role. Nunnally Johnson, the producer and scriptwriter, believed that ‘the first time anybody genuinely liked Marilyn for herself in a picture, was in How to Marry a Millionaire. She herself diagnosed the reason for that very shrewdly. She said that this was the only picture she’d been in, in which she had a measure of modesty — not physical modesty, but modesty about her own attractiveness.’
Marilyn’s producers and fellow actors saw a troubled woman and a struggling actress. In one scene, involving a telephone call during breakfast in bed, she became ‘hopelessly confused, answering the phone before it rang, drinking out of the coffee cup before she had filled it.’ After an entire afternoon of stalled production, Marilyn was oblivious to the producer’s concern.
Lauren Bacall recalled, ‘Marilyn was frightened, insecure, trusted only her coach and was always late. During our scenes she’d look at my forehead instead of my eyes. … Not easy, often irritating. And yet I couldn’t dislike Marilyn. She had no meanness in her, no bitchery. She just had to concentrate on herself and the people who were there only for her.’
Soon scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson was writing to a friend, ‘Monroe is something of a zombie. Talking to her is like talking to somebody underwater. …’ Johnson never forgot the image. Years later he placed her ‘ten feet under water. … You can’t get through to her. She reminds me of a sloth. You stick a pin in a sloth’s belly and eight days later it says, “Ouch.”’
The sloth triumphed on the screen. Director Negulesco said, ‘In the end I adored her, because she was a pure child who had this “something” that God had given her, that we still can’t define or understand. It’s the thing that made her a star. We did not know whether she’d been good or bad, and then when we put the picture together there was one person on that screen who was a great actress — Marilyn.’ In the end, even Nunnally Johnson was pleased.
On the night of the premiere of How to Marry a Millionaire, Johnson and his wife included Marilyn in their party along with Humphrey Bogart and Betty Grable. The evening proved hilarious. ‘Marilyn entered with a request for a drink, a stiff one, bourbon and soda,’ Johnson recalled. ‘Then, even though it was to be a quick and early dinner, she asked for another. She was on edge with excitement, nervous and frightened too, terrified about the evening. I had no idea how naive and youthful she was, how almost unbearably important the evening was for her. Then, as we’re about to get in the car, a hired limousine with a driver, she asked for her third drink, a really stiff one this time. Gentlemen to the last, Bogey and I drank with her on the way to the theater. By the time we made our entrance you couldn’t have found three more amiable people in the whole state of California.’
‘In short,’ said Johnson, ‘she was tight when she had to go to the ladies’ room as the picture began. Mrs Johnson, not tight, accompanied her, for clearly she needed company. She was tight in the ladies’ room, and in a tight dress, for she had been sewn into it. … It was a wild and exhausting business (my wife told me afterward) getting Marilyn in condition for the john and then properly dressed again to return to her seat. Women who have been sewn into their clothes should never drink to excess. …’
The critics judged How to Marry a Millionaire an unqualified success. An actress was emerging from the chrysalis of flagrant sexuality. And now, behind the ballyhoo about celluloid husbands, Marilyn was on the brink of a new marriage of her own.
Lauren Bacall remembered how Marilyn ‘came into my dressing room one day and said that what she really wanted was to be in San Francisco with Joe DiMaggio in some spaghetti joint. She wanted to know about my children, my home life — was I happy? She seemed envious of that aspect of my life, wistful, hoping to have it herself. …’
Marilyn had asked to join the Johnson party at the premiere because she did not want to be seen at the theater with any man other than Joe DiMaggio. The lover who had seemed dull a year ago was now her safe landfall. By November 1953, marriage to an American hero was only two months away. It had not been an easy passage.
*As photographs taken in her thirties show, Marilyn did later grow facial hair on her cheeks.
13
THERE HAD COME A moment, during the summer of 1953, when the trials of being Marilyn’s suitor defeated even Joe DiMaggio. They had conducted a public courtship of more than a year, and the press was still parroting stories of the couple’s devotion. Marilyn had taken an apartment on Doheny Drive, on the unfashionable side of Sunset Boulevard, a modest three-room place which Jane Russell helped her to organize.
The apartment on Doheny would be a perennial retreat for years to come — and so far as the press was concerned, it was a love nest for Marilyn and DiMaggio. Marilyn made sure the public knew Joe had moved in some of his clothes. She would tell her reporter friend, Sidney Skolsky, that she was rushing home to cook dinner for her man. Skolsky dutiful
ly regaled his readers with the details: Joe had taught Marilyn how to prepare Italian spaghetti, they drank Italian wine, and Marilyn had learned a few words of Italian. Joe liked to watch television, said Skolsky, breaking off occasionally to offer his actress lady a word of advice, such as ‘Never mind the publicity, baby. Get the money.’
In late spring 1953 DiMaggio’s brother Mike had been found dead in the water near his fishing boat in Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco. Marilyn traveled north with DiMaggio to the very Italian family gathering that followed. The word in Hollywood, when she came home, was that the sight of DiMaggio’s grief had finally opened Marilyn’s heart. She was ready to marry him — but not quite yet.
On the heels of the marriage rumor came conflicting news. The couple were at bitter odds, virtually splitting up. For the proud DiMaggio, Marilyn brought as much humiliation as bliss. He hated the foolish publicity, detested the way Marilyn flaunted her body in public. He had refused to attend the Photoplay awards ceremonies, where she made an exhibition of herself; it was not the way an Italian’s woman behaved. Instead he was spotted lurking outside, waiting to whisk her away afterward. We now know that, worse than all this, these had been months in which Marilyn had a succession of lovers. If DiMaggio heard even a whisper of this, it was remarkable that he contained himself at all. He was possessive, and jealous of Marilyn’s Hollywood intimates, regardless of sex.
Natasha Lytess, Marilyn’s drama coach, was to say, ‘I first met him when I went to her apartment on Doheny one evening. He opened the door, and I disliked him instinctively — a man with a closed, vapid look. She introduced us, and only two weeks later when I phoned her, he answered and said, “I think if you want to talk to Miss Monroe, you’d better call her agent. …” She hadn’t the courage to stand up to him about it.’
There was more than a touch of jealousy on Lytess’s part, too. George Masters, Marilyn’s hairdresser in later years, knew both women well. Natasha, he said, once told Marilyn, ‘You’re wonderful. I love you.’ To which Marilyn reportedly replied, ‘Don’t love me, Natasha. Just teach me.’