Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

  From the Actors’ Lab, Marilyn caught more than a whiff of left-wing politics; the Carnovskys, her teachers, would be labeled communists during congressional investigations into ‘Un-American Activity’ in the fifties. Marilyn never threw herself into political activity, but she thought of herself as working class and paid homage to the common man. In her last interview, in 1962, she would say, ‘I want to say that the people — if I am a star — the people made me a star, no studio, no person, but the people did.’

  Meanwhile, as she continued to pose for pinup pictures, Marilyn sought to elevate even that. As early as 1947 photographer Earl Theisen noticed she owned a book called De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a learned study of the human anatomy by the sixteenth-century scholar, Andreas Vesalius. It was marked up in detail, and Marilyn explained that she was studying the bone structure of the body. Paintings from the book, by Jan Stephan van Kalkar, of the Titian school, would long decorate the walls of her poorly furnished rooms, and even near the end of her life when she was in the grip of drugs, Marilyn would instruct young friends with an encyclopedic knowledge of the human bone structure. The athletic Tommy Zahn had admired how she kept herself in shape, lifting weights and running in the mornings, thirty years before the jogging craze brought people out in the thousands to puff along the grass verges through the smog of Los Angeles.

  Marilyn would never be poorer than she was at this time. She skimped on meals, when men were not buying them for her, to continue paying for acting lessons. She spent a good deal of time drinking coffee at Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, which was the working headquarters of her journalist friend, Sidney Skolsky. Skolsky helped Marilyn open a charge account at a bookshop, and that helped finance the culture binge.

  The affair with Bill Burnside withered when he went on an extended trip to Latin America. On his return she would give him a poem:

  I could have loved you

  once and even said it

  But you went away,

  A long way away.

  When you came back it was too late

  And love was a forgotten word.

  Remember?

  It may have been one of the young men Marilyn met at Schwab’s who made it hard to wait for Bill Burnside. The drugstore was full of out-of-work actors, and one of them was called Charlie Chaplin. To him, too, Marilyn gave a little of herself — for a while.

  *Robert Slatzer was to become best known for a controversial book in which he claimed a relationship with Marilyn that lasted till she died, but which included as well the assertion that he briefly married her six years after they met — a madcap three-day folly celebrated on the Mexican border. That claim, which will be dealt with later, aroused skepticism. Slatzer’s story, however, remained consistent throughout a series of intensive interviews, and a number of compelling witnesses corroborate the closeness of his relationship with Marilyn.

  *According to her acting coach, Natasha Lytess, Marilyn once mentioned that she was having a brief fling with Hughes. Actress Terry Moore, who married Hughes, said he gave Marilyn a piece of jewelry — a pin. Given that the donor was Howard Hughes, Marilyn was surprised to discover it was ‘only’ worth $500, 1950s’ value.

  5

  IN THE TWENTIES, THE Charlie Chaplin had seduced and briefly married a fifteen-year-old girl named Lita Grey. She bore him two sons, a boy who was given no name for the first year of his life, and Sydney, born a year later. Lita, it is said, wanted to call her firstborn Charlie, but the great Charles was leery of having an actor son bearing the same name. After his parents’ divorce, however, Charlie he became. In 1947 he was twenty-one, the same age as Marilyn. He was a would-be actor just as his father had feared, and struggling to make ends meet.

  In spite of his father’s immense wealth, young Charlie had been spurned, and he eked out a small allowance to keep himself and his grandmother while his mother toured the country as a nightclub singer. When she came home that year, Charlie brought his girl of the moment to lunch. It was Marilyn Monroe, whom Lita thought ‘really naive, not at all sophisticated, like a little country girl. She was way heavier then; she hadn’t been thinned down and glamorized yet. Charlie was smitten with her, though.’

  Charlie stayed enamored for many months, and at Christmas he found the cash to buy Marilyn a number of stylish dresses. According to Arthur James, long a close friend of Chaplin, Marilyn would stay the night with Charlie. She would cram into a single bed with him, while brother Sydney slept in his bed in the same room. The romance ended one day when Charlie came home to find Marilyn in the wrong bunk — Sydney’s. They remained good friends, though, and fifteen years later Marilyn would make some of her last despairing calls to Chaplin and James. Chaplin would not long survive her. He failed as an actor, was a lifelong heavy drinker, and was found dying in his bathroom in 1968.

  There was a sad legacy of the affair with Chaplin. According to Arthur James, Marilyn became pregnant at some time in the winter of 1947 and had one of her many early abortions.

  On and off, through this period of professional vacuum, Marilyn was still seeing Robert Slatzer, the young magazine writer from Ohio. Slatzer had a friend in town in Will Fowler, writer and newspaperman son of John Barrymore’s biographer, Gene Fowler. Fowler’s account of an evening at Marilyn’s apartment suggests that, whatever her shyness in some situations, she was now using her body as a banner to amuse male friends.

  ‘She was stoned,’ Fowler recalled. ‘She just took off her clothes. She liked to show her body off to men. She used to do anything that men would ask her, really just as a favor. She just walked around stoned and naked. It was her suggestion as much as ours, not even a sexual thing as far as that evening was concerned.’

  Compulsive nudity is too widely reported about Marilyn to be the boast of a chance acquaintance. Years later, in New York, she would give a naked interview to publicist Joe Wohlander. Mrs Ben Bodne, wife of the owner of the Algonquin Hotel, confirms that she once met Marilyn on Fifth Avenue wearing a new mink coat. When she asked what Marilyn was wearing with it the actress replied, ‘Nothing,’ and snapped the coat open to prove it. From husband Jim Dougherty onward, innumerable witnesses corroborated the legend that Marilyn disliked underwear, and loathed wearing panties.

  Speaking of her childhood, Marilyn herself told an interviewer: ‘The wish for attention had something to do, I think, with my trouble in church on Sundays. No sooner was I in the pew with the organ playing and everybody singing a hymn than the impulse would come to me to take off all my clothes. I wanted desperately to stand up naked for God and everyone else to see. I had to clench my teeth and sit on my hands to keep myself from undressing. … I even had dreams about it. In the dreams I entered the church wearing a hooped skirt with nothing under it. The people would be lying on their backs in the church aisle, and I would step over them, and they would look up at me.’

  By 1947, when she was parading naked in front of Robert Slatzer and Will Fowler, the twenty-one-year-old Marilyn had begun dabbling in the writings of Sigmund Freud. His Interpretation of Dreams suggested that the ‘nakedness dream’ is very common, and that the dream of being naked in public indicates a real-life fear of being unmasked. Perhaps, in Marilyn, life’s irony was that the struggle to step away from her orphan childhood became a circular struggle, in which her most trusty weapon was to evoke sympathy for past mistreatment. In the summer of 1947 Marilyn added a fresh story to the catalogue of woes.

  One midnight, while she was living at a house in Burbank, Marilyn rushed out into the street dressed in a skimpy nightgown and screaming blue murder. By her own account, and in the end there really is only her account, she had awakened to find a man clambering through her bedroom window. She challenged the man, then ran for her life. Neighbors were roused and the police called. According to Marilyn, the prowler reappeared, while the police were at the scene, and turned out to be a policeman himself. Marilyn claimed that the police pressured her not to file charges against their colleague, so the matter
was dropped. This story has been treated as fact by previous biographers.

  The reader must decide what to make of Marilyn’s multiple stories of sexual assault. There is the perennial account of childhood molestation or, if we accept her maid’s account, full rape leading to pregnancy. There is a separate account by Marilyn of a violent embrace by her guardian’s husband, one which made her feel ‘violated.’ And in 1947, at a time when few people who mattered were noticing Marilyn, she claimed the sexual assault by a policeman.

  Was Marilyn a freak case in assault statistics? For this writer, the key may be her first husband’s account of the night, years earlier, when he was awakened by Marilyn screaming that she had been out in the street in her nightgown, running from a man. Jim Dougherty had no doubt this was a dream, and her loyal friend, Sydney Skolsky, never really believed her account of childhood rape.

  The story served Marilyn well, however, as did the 1947 tale of the wicked policeman.

  In late 1947 actor John Carroll met Marilyn at a drive-in restaurant. She was carrying a bag containing a few belongings, and said she was about to hitchhike to San Francisco. She told Carroll she was depressed — sick of Hollywood and her failure to get proper work. Carroll said he would try to help. They met again when Marilyn made an appearance as a ‘starlet caddy’ at a golf tournament, and this time Marilyn also met Carroll’s wife, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer casting director, Lucille Ryman. Carroll, hearing the story of the midnight prowler, and not having failed to see the lusciousness of the victim, suggested to his wife that they help ‘this little girl.’

  Soon the Carrolls were paying Marilyn’s rent and providing her with pocket money. Next she moved into an apartment the Carrolls owned but were not using, and there followed a now-familiar episode: Marilyn said she had seen a boy on a ladder peeping into her room. She then moved in with the Carrolls altogether.

  Soon Carroll was giving Marilyn jewelry, which mysteriously vanished. For her part, Marilyn astounded Lucille one day by informing her, ‘You don’t love John. … I think I’m in love with him. … Would you divorce him so we can marry?’ Astonishingly, there was no lasting acrimony. The relationship brought Marilyn a personal management contract with the Carrolls, and Lucille would one day be instrumental in Marilyn’s most important breakthrough in movies, her part in John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle.

  ‘Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and my soul isn’t for sale. Men who tried to proposition me made me sick. I didn’t accept. …’

  That was Marilyn’s public line when she talked to writer Ben Hecht, in the first flush of success. She told a detailed story of how she foiled the advances of a casting-couch shark who lured her to his office at the Goldwyn studio. Tommy Zahn, Marilyn’s old boyfriend, remembered that she could indeed be selective. Randolph Churchill, visiting California from England, had invited Marilyn to visit him in an otherwise empty beach house ‘to discuss a deal.’

  ‘I think she knew he had other things in mind,’ says Zahn, ‘and she asked me along as protection.’

  Cynics, however, have suggested that a real chance of advancement in movies would often buy Marilyn’s body. The cynics, it seems, were right.

  Two years before she died, in a conversation with writer Jaik Rosenstein, Marilyn said, ‘When I started modelling, it was like part of the job. All the girls did. They weren’t shooting all those sexy pictures just to sell peanut butter in an ad, or get a layout in some picture magazine. They wanted to sample the merchandise, and if you didn’t go along, there were twenty-five girls who would. It wasn’t any big dramatic tragedy. Nobody ever got cancer from sex.’

  As for Hollywood, Marilyn told Rosenstein, ‘You know that when a producer calls an actress into his office to discuss a script that isn’t all he has in mind. And a part in a picture, or any kind of a little stock contract is the most important thing in the world to the girl, more than eating. She can go hungry, and she might have to sleep in her car, but she doesn’t mind that a bit — if she can only get the part. I know, because I’ve done both, lots of times. And I’ve slept with producers. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t. …’

  By the time she said that, Marilyn had known Rosenstein for years. She trusted him not to write about it at the time, and he did not. Today, however, it is clear that Marilyn made judicious use of her favors. A key beneficiary, reportedly, was the man who got Marilyn that vital first contract at Fox — Ben Lyon. According to writer Sheilah Graham, Lyon had been sleeping with Marilyn and promising to further her career. When nothing materialized, and Marilyn began badgering him, Lyon called the casting director who worked for Sol Wurtzel, a B-movie producer of the time. According to the casting director, Wurtzel obliged by giving Marilyn a small part in Dangerous Years, a 1947 movie about juvenile delinquents which he was producing. Marilyn, playing a waitress in a café used by a teenage gang, had a couple of lines.

  There has long been speculation about Marilyn’s relations with Joseph Schenck, the seventy-year-old potentate of Twentieth Century-Fox. He was one of the founding fathers of the studio, which had been formed a dozen years earlier in a merger between Fox and Twentieth Century Pictures, the company he owned with his brother and Darryl Zanuck. He was a weathered bear of a man, aging but active, a bon viveur who rightly saw himself as one of Hollywood’s grand old men.

  Schenck had a shrewd eye for potential stars and a vast appreciation of beautiful women. He gathered them around him, to quote one writer, ‘the way certain men prize fine stallions.’ By late 1947 the eye of this connoisseur had lit upon two such beauties, Marilyn Monroe and Marion Marshall, who would later become the wife of Robert Wagner.

  Marion Wagner had met Marilyn when both were applying for a job modeling bathing suits. She recalled, ‘Marilyn was the most spectacular girl I ever met, not particularly beautiful, but she radiated a special dynamism. I remember, when I first saw her, she arrived late as usual, after all the other girls. I’m sitting with all these very sophisticated models, dressed in silks, with the gloves and the hat and all that, and Marilyn came in a little scoop-necked gingham sundress, her hair unbleached and unstraightened. When she walked in, it was like the room stopped, and everyone in the room knew she was going to get the job, and she did.’

  Marion Wagner’s is one of the best observed and most compassionate views of the early Marilyn, and she well remembered the evenings they shared at Joe Schenck’s house off Sunset Boulevard. A limousine would bring the girls, together or separately, to the elegant Mediterranean-style mansion. There would be cocktails, dinner, then perhaps a private showing of a movie in the old man’s personal projection room. Joe had a passion for cards, and Wagner recalled that ‘he used to get a kick out of backing us when we played gin rummy against his male pals, and if we won it pleased him. He liked both of us very much. … He was like a father figure to me, a father confessor, a very wise, lovely old man. When the evening was over, I would simply be taken home in the limousine, and so far as I know it was the same for Marilyn.’

  In March 1948 Marilyn was given a six-month contract at Columbia Pictures. As at Fox, she was to be paid $75 a week. There are varying accounts of how it came about, but Jonie Taps, then executive assistant to Harry Cohn, head of Columbia, offered this personal recollection.

  ‘I got a call from Joe Schenck. He said, “I’m indebted to her, and if you can give her twenty-six weeks, I’d appreciate it.” I went to see Harry Cohn, and he said, “Well, if he needs it that bad, give it to him. Put the girl on.”’

  Marion Wagner says, ‘Whatever she did, I don’t think it was into bed every night. I think it was a tasteful relationship, that was my impression.’ Marilyn herself, asked straight out by a writer, flatly denied ever having had sex with Joseph Schenck.

  Veteran Hollywood columnist James Bacon, however, fueled the gossip in a highly specific way. He wrote, and repeated to me, an earthy account of the way
he learned of services rendered to Schenck. Bacon said he met Marilyn in 1948, during her Columbia contract. They were introduced by press agent Milton Stein, and Bacon said his first thought was, ‘Holy God! She’s so exciting.’ He went on: ‘There was something about this girl. The moment you met her you knew she was going to make it.’

  As a male, Bacon had other reactions, and he made sure he saw Marilyn again. After a third meeting Bacon offered to drive her home to the Studio Club, a hotel for aspiring young actresses, where she had been living. According to Bacon, Marilyn asked him to drive instead to Joe Schenck’s property where, she explained, she was living in the guesthouse.

  Bacon said Marilyn made it clear she was one of the girls who looked after Schenck’s failing sexual needs. She had him in stitches, saying the old man could manage only an occasional brief erection, sometimes with medical assistance. By being in the guesthouse Marilyn was on hand should such a happy moment arise. She and Bacon merrily quaffed the great man’s champagne, and ended up in bed themselves. Then, at 3:00 A.M., there came a knock at the door; it was Joe Schenck’s butler, summoning Marilyn. She scrambled to oblige, only to return giggling that she had arrived ‘too late.’

  Bacon, as others confirmed, did know Marilyn well. He was a friend to many of the famous, and their press agents say he was an accurate reporter. He shrugged off criticism for having told his anecdote about Marilyn. He said, ‘I know she was promiscuous in those early days. She admitted it helped, and I had no illusions that Marilyn Monroe was after me for me. She liked me, sure, but she was also after all the newspapers my syndicated column appeared in.’

  Other stories seemed to support what James Bacon says about Marilyn and Schenck. Two reporters for national magazines recalled visiting Schenck at Palm Springs and becoming aware that Marilyn ‘looked after’ the old man. One remembered Schenck affably suggesting that Marilyn could look after the reporter too. Perhaps the most compelling verdict came from the venerable agent, George Chasin. What was going on between Marilyn and Schenck was, he said, a ‘physical thing.’