Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (40 page)

that she was just a terribly pretty girl whom all this had happened to, and all of a sudden she was a star, she was going to have to go out and do it and everybody was going to look at her. And she was just terrified! She knew that she was not equal to it. What made her not show up at the studio was that she couldn’t sleep [from fear]. . . . She would get into makeup and comb her hair “just one more time” because she was so frightened of coming out. And she was such a little girl she didn’t know how to apologize.

Not much help was provided by the ubiquitous Natasha, who was now directing her on the set immediately after she had received points from Hawks. Against the bright lights, Marilyn shielded her eyes after each shot, looking for her coach’s approval. When Hawks could no longer endure this interference, he followed the actions of Fritz Lang and removed Natasha from the soundstage, but Marilyn reacted by simply arriving later and later. Natasha was readmitted within a week, and Hawks continued to find her “the most frightened little girl [who] didn’t think she was good enough to do the things she did. But [when] she got out in front of the camera, [it] liked her.”

According to Jane, Marilyn nevertheless always seemed a little angry or unhappy. Much of the distress had to do with the increasing tension between Joe (who visited the set two or three times, only to be ignored because of all the dither about Marilyn) and Natasha (whom Joe saw at the center of the storm, and as a more important person—at least professionally—to Marilyn than himself).

The imminent stardom, which everyone felt was sure to follow the release of
Niagara
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
in 1953, did not, however, convince Marilyn she could sustain it, much less grow as a good actress. “I’m really eager to do something else,” she told a reporter during production that autumn. “Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I’d like to do roles like Julie in
Bury the Dead
, Gretchen in
Faust
and Teresa in
Cradle Song
. I don’t want to be a comedienne forever.” Nor was she much gratified when critics, typically, stressed only her looks in assessing
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

As if to prove the seriousness of her higher aspirations, Marilyn took a cue from Natasha, who saw an item in the
Los Angeles Times
. Natasha’s old friend and mentor Max Reinhardt had died in 1943, and now his
first wife was about to auction one hundred seventy-eight of his
Regiebücher:
production notebooks with his markings concerning action, timing, scenery and cuts. These materials would be wonderful additions to Marilyn’s library, said Natasha, doubtless eager for access to them herself.

And so on Wednesday, December 3, the two women rushed off to the Goldenberg Galleries in Beverly Hills. After the bidding rose beyond a few hundred dollars, Marilyn battled for the prize against the rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin, who was acting on behalf of the University of Southern California: their Doheny Library already housed more than three thousand items in its Reinhardt Collection, and the university was eager to complement the archives. The sums had reached thirteen hundred dollars.

“Thirteen twenty!” called Zeitlin.

This amount was repeated from the podium, and there was a pause.

“One thousand three hundred and thirty-five!” cried Marilyn deliberately, thus winning the collection.

Like Notre Dame’s football team that season, Marilyn had won a victory against the University of Southern California; also like Notre Dame, the victory did not make her very popular when the matter was trumpeted in the newspapers during the next week.

On December 5, the university’s librarian, Lewis Stieg, announced that he hoped Marilyn would donate the collection to the Doheny Library. Through reporters, she replied that so valuable a collection, she now realized, should be available to all drama students; she was considering Harvard and Stanford, among others, as the appropriate repository. To further his cause, Stieg then asked Marilyn to join him in a choice viewing location on the fifty-yard line at the Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day. She declined.

A few weeks later, Marilyn received a letter from Reinhardt’s son Gottfried: “Surely you will understand, dear Miss Monroe, that aside from monetary expenditure, these books belong to [me] and not to you.” Following a gracious agreement from Marilyn, he was about to send her a check for the amount she paid when the auctioneer informed him that she had neither collected nor paid for the books; payment, therefore, was due directly to the Galleries by Gottfried.

On a chilly Christmas Eve, Marilyn returned alone from a studio party to her rented suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Unlocking the door
and switching on the lights, she was surprised to find Joe, reaching up to place the last silver ornament atop a lavishly decorated tree. There was champagne in a silver ice bucket, and logs blazed cheerfully in the fireplace. It was, she told friends later, her merriest Christmas ever.

1
. On October 28, 1952, noting that Gladys did not “get a complete [Christian Science] healing,” Grace Goddard wrote to Marilyn Monroe urging that her mother be transferred either back to the hospital at Agnew or to the Rockhaven Sanitarium in Verdugo City. As usual, Grace’s counsel was followed; the following February 9, Gladys was moved to Rockhaven, and thenceforth Marilyn paid the monthly fee of two hundred fifty dollars for her care.

2
. In 1929, Jean Harlow arrived at a Hollywood movie set wearing a black crocheted dress “with not a stitch on under it,” according to director Arthur Jacobson. “You couldn’t tell whether she had put it on or painted it on.”

3
. A similar story was told by designer Ceil Chapman when Marilyn visited New York during a break from shooting
Niagara:
a saleswoman at Saks Fifth Avenue was angry with Chapman “for bringing in a girl who was trying on things without underwear or stockings.”

4
. These details would not be remarkable but for the outrageous claims made by one of the strangest fans ever to have met Marilyn Monroe. While filming scenes at Niagara Falls that summer, she was asked by a twenty-five-year-old visitor from Ohio named Robert Slatzer to pose with him for snapshots. For such impromptu photos and importuned autographs, no public figure was ever more generous and cooperative with admirers and strangers than Marilyn, nor was any more exploited before or since her death. But in this case, she unwittingly contributed to Slatzer’s fame. There is no evidence that Marilyn Monroe and Robert Slatzer ever again met, and there are neither letters, additional photos nor any documentation of a relationship between them. Years later, however, one of the most preposterous claims in American popular history was launched.
    In 1972, with Marilyn conveniently unable to contradict him, Slatzer approached journalist Will Fowler with a short, incomplete article in which Slatzer speculated that Marilyn Monroe’s death was caused by a political conspiracy—a popular hypothesis in light of the rumors then swirling round the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy; his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. “Too bad you weren’t married to Monroe,” Fowler said, unimpressed with Slatzer’s proposal. “That would
really
make a good book.” Soon after, Slatzer contacted Fowler again, saying he had forgot to mention that he had indeed been married to Marilyn. “Slatzer made a career of being a pretender,” according to Fowler, “selling gullible talk show producers who don’t do their research very well with the deception that he was married to Marilyn. He was never married to her. He met the star only once, in Niagara Falls. . . . He never met Marilyn before or since.” Eventually, Fowler withdrew from the project.

Nevertheless, Robert Slatzer proceeded and eventually published
The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe
under his own name. Among the most persistent but injudicious of his assertions is his absurd claim that he spent the weekend of October 3 to 6, 1952, with Marilyn Monroe in Tijuana, Mexico, where they were married on October 4. This marriage, according to Slatzer, was annulled a few days later because she was “afraid of Joe, of what the studio would say, and of Natasha Lytess, who was very jealous and possessive and who had a tremendous influence over her.” Quite apart from the fact that Marilyn was in Los Angeles that entire weekend, Slatzer could never produce a written record of the union or its dissolution: the marriage paper, he reports, was burnt by a
petit fonctionnaire
in Tijuana.

It is important that, since the publication of Slatzer’s book in 1974, there has not been a single witness to attest the truth of his marriage. A man named Noble Chissell once said he had been present at the event, but before he died Chissell admitted to Will Fowler that he was “just trying to help out a friend” with the false attestation. Moreover, Chissell told photographer Joseph Jasgur that Slatzer had promised him a much needed one hundred dollars to support the lie. Allan Snyder, one of Marilyn’s closest friends and confidants, was with her on every film throughout 1952. “I never believed Slatzer married Marilyn,” he said. “There was no proof of it, and there was always something that suggested to me it never happened.” Kay Eicher, to whom Slatzer was married from 1954 to 1956, has always laughed heartily when the Monroe-Slatzer marriage is mentioned: among many others, she confirmed that he met her only once, at Niagara Falls, when the impromptu snapshot was taken. “It’s the one photo he’s always using to tell his story,” according to Eicher. “He’s been fooling people too long.” Slatzer did not, of course, claim to have been married to Marilyn until long after her death, which was a wise choice: her immediate contradiction would otherwise have killed a great enterprise.

But the “marriage” was not sufficient drama for Slatzer, who also claimed to have been Marilyn’s most intimate confidant until her death—the man who knew and kept all the secrets of her career and her love life. It was a bold assertion, for not one of Marilyn’s friends, relatives, business associates, colleagues, spouses or lovers could ever recall meeting him (much less Marilyn ever mentioning him), nor is he to be found in any of her personal telephone or address books; indeed, not one of her intimates ever heard of Robert Slatzer during her lifetime or after her death—not, indeed, until the appearance of his book. Worst of all, however, has been Slatzer’s influence on Marilyn Monroe’s chroniclers. The nonsense about a love affair between her and Robert F. Kennedy, and Slatzer’s accusations that Kennedy was directly involved in her death, owed much to the improvisations of Slatzer. For years—in print and on television talk shows—Slatzer turned an enormous profit. He also furthered his unsubstantiated claims of intimacy with Marilyn by selling photographs he claimed to have taken of her in 1962 on the set of her last, unfinished film,
Something’s Got to Give
. But the negatives and contact sheets for the photos he sold prove that those pictures were taken not by Slatzer (whom no one can recall visiting director George Cukor’s closed set) but by James Mitchell, Fox’s still photographer assigned to the production. Few have profited so richly and undeservedly as Slatzer, whose claims could otherwise be ignored except that he and a few cronies have greedily created a nefarious industry that has persisted for decades, and one by which reputations have been gravely, deliberately and systematically vilified. On this entire matter, see the Afterword: “The Great Deception.”

Chapter Twelve

1953

E
ARLY IN THE NEW YEAR
1953, Marilyn and Joe made a pact. She would not wear such revealing dresses as to embarrass him in public; he would try to be more patient with her and more polite with Natasha, with whom there was a mutual sharp antipathy. “Marilyn,” she said one evening, “this man is the punishment of God in your life”—hyperbolic even by Natasha’s standards.

Scourge or no, Joe squired Marilyn to restaurants throughout the winter, Sidney Skolsky describing them in his February 9 column as “still very much a combination.” His remark was ironic: at an award ceremony that very evening, when
Photoplay
magazine honored Marilyn Monroe as Hollywood’s “Fastest Rising Star,” her escort was not Joe but the hastily corralled Sidney.

The reason was simple. To the dining room of the Beverly Hills Hotel (where she lived that season), Marilyn had decided to wear a gold lamé gown designed for her by Travilla. This was a saucy, seductive, body-hugging number she had worn in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
—a floor-length gown with a deep-plunging neckline, which had been seen only in a momentary long shot. “She had to be hand-sewn into it,” Travilla recalled, adding that he begged her not to wear it. “You’re too fat for it at the moment, Marilyn! It’s too tight—people will laugh!” But she was adamant, telling Travilla that she had just learned “a trick
to lose weight quickly—colonic irrigation, an enema that washes water out of the system and immediately shows in lost inches.” This drastic and potentially harmful way to lose weight became a regimen with Marilyn for the rest of her life. “She had two sessions of colonic irrigation that day,” Travilla recalled, although for all that she was happy to fill the dress tightly.

After Joe saw the dress and the absence of brassiere, slip or underwear beneath the costume that afternoon, he departed angrily. In his column next day, Sidney discreetly informed his readers that Joe “had to go to San Francisco for a few days”—no doubt to cool off in the northern air and to take comfort in the simple decencies of his family.