when she finds she can get paid for it too, her joy is unconfined.
Most of the breed don’t hesitate for a second if today’s producers of
soiled sex on celluloid call on them to do a Bardot, without benefit of
bath towel. I’m sure Liz enjoyed doing her bathe-in-the-nude sequence
for _Cleopatra_. Jean Simmons didn’t object to playing stripped to the
waist in one _Spartacus_ scene that Kirk Douglas ordered to be shot in
a spiced-up version for European distribution. And those calendar poses
didn’t bother Marilyn Monroe. “I was hungry,” she explained, wide-eyed,
when I asked her once why she’d sat for them.
Even Garbo had some odd quirks when the cameras stopped rolling. She
used to go regularly to the house of some friends who had a big,
secluded pool. Before she arrived, all the servants would be dismissed,
and her host and hostess would take themselves off for an hour or so,
too. Then Garbo undressed and, naked as a jay bird except for a floppy
hat, swam gravely round and round in the water. Katharine Hepburn is
another home nudist, presumably finding it better than air conditioning
for keeping cool in summer. After all, it’s nature’s way. Didn’t we all
come into the world stripped to the pelt?
Under stress, the deep-down desire to show themselves to an audience
can take strange turns. Once in front of the crowded long bar of the
Knickerbocker Hotel, an actress whose career had run into trouble--she
was happily remarried in 1958--began to strip. This was Hollywood,
remember, so hot-eyed stares were the only help she got from anybody
in the room. When she was down to her shoes and stockings, and the
rest of her clothes lay discarded on the barroom floor, she gave a
shriek and ran down the front steps out onto Ivar Avenue. Then at last
somebody remembered to telephone the police.
More recently an agent from one of the big television studios called
at the hotel apartment of a much-married woman whose name still spells
glamour to any serviceman of World War II. His mission was to sound her
out about doing a TV show. She greeted him in a bathrobe and asked him
to run the hot water for her before they talked business. She locked
the outside door behind him. The following morning his conscience began
to stir. “I’d better leave now,” he said. “The office will think I
died.”
“You can’t go,” she cried. “I’m so lonely.” She kept him there three
days.
The town has always been full of lonely, frustrated women who have let
their few years of basking in the sun as movie queens blind them to
reality forever. You can start with Mary Pickford, who used to talk a
blue streak about a wonderful girl protégé whom she said she was going
to make over into a movie sensation. I had to try to disillusion her.
“You’re fooling yourself, Mary. What you should do is hire a press
agent. All you really want is to keep your name alive.”
Gloria Swanson is another who can’t see straight today where her career
as an actress is concerned. As a businesswoman in the dress industry
she’s not nearly as sharp as Joseph P. Kennedy was when he was a movie
tycoon and she was his reigning queen. She’d made a hit in _Sunset
Boulevard_ and her reputation was on the rise again when I suggested
she might do a movie version, written by Frances Marion, of Francis
Parkinson Keyes’ _Dinner at Antoine’s_. Not a chance. “I couldn’t
possibly play the mother of an eighteen-year-old daughter,” she
snapped. “The part’s too old for me.” At the time, she was the mother
of two daughters and a son, and she had two grandchildren.
Most of the unhappy ones have no husbands. One unfailing cause of that
brand of misery is lack of female charity. They turn their backs on
the facts of life and refuse to forgive their husbands a single act of
infidelity--I believe every man married to a movie queen deserves one
break in that department.
Barbara Stanwyck lives in a two-story mansion with her only company
an elderly maid, the books she reads by the score, and the television
set which hypnotizes her into watching old movies into all hours of
the night. You don’t see her around town much any more because people
forget to ask her down from the ivory tower in which she’s locked
herself. When you do invite her out, there are roses from her the next
day and thank-you notes so pathetically grateful they’d melt a stone.
Up to the day in 1951 that she divorced Robert Taylor, she was one of
the happiest women alive. He was such a handsome slice of man, highly
desirable, a full-size star. When he went to Rome for eleven months to
make _Quo Vadis_ with Deborah Kerr, women everywhere mobbed him. But
Barbara loved to act. The Taylors didn’t need the money, but she worked
all the time, going straight from one picture into another, instead of
taking time out to join her husband in Italy.
When he arrived home after nearly a year, Barbara disposed of him,
while he found a much younger bride, Ursula Thiess. She has now had two
children by him, although now they’re having difficulty with an older
child by a former husband.
At fifty-five, Barbara remains a talented actress and a mighty
attractive woman, though she gets thinner all the time. She’s kept her
appetite for work, but suitable parts aren’t easy to find--I don’t rate
her last role as a Lesbian madam of a New Orleans brothel in _A Walk on
the Wild Side_ as worthy of her. I have begged her to kiss Hollywood
good-by and go to Europe. “There’s nothing for you here. I guarantee
you wouldn’t be over there twenty-four hours without having at least
two offers for pictures.”
But Barbara stays on; with her maid, her books, and Helen Ferguson, her
press agent and one of her closest friends.
* * * * *
Dinah Shore used to say, in one of those standard quotes that queens
come up with when life is sunny, “My family means more to me than
anything in the world--nothing will ever interfere with that.” Then
George Montgomery, her husband went off to work on his own, and
seventeen years and 362 days of a good marriage went out the window.
Her place of purgatory now is an oversized mansion, built on a $75,000
lot, near that of Richard Nixon. There she sits in melancholy, alone
much of the time, by the pool, which is equipped with a waterfall; or
perhaps in the living room, which is proportioned somewhat like Grand
Central Station. It’s a great spot for brooding, but nevertheless she
kept on singing on her shows “It’s Great to Have a Man Around the
House.”
On the face of it, this used to be a couple that could never be
divided. Certainly her reputation overshadowed George’s, a situation
which usually creates continual problems. It’s hard on a husband when
his house is invaded most nights by writers and directors who’ve come
to discuss the new picture or new TV show with his wife. He has to sit
and listen to them fuss over her with: “Now, darling, you’re looking a
little tired and you have to work tomorrow, so you’d better take a pill
and go to bed early to catch up on your beauty sleep.”
George, however, didn’t resent Dinah’s success. Though he never quite
made film stardom and his own Western series died young on TV, he had
his furniture factory, where he worked alongside his employees, and he
went on making low-budget pictures. He steered clear of the parasitic
life so many husbands enjoy when the woman is combination breadwinner,
wife, mother, and working head of the family.
When the husband carries the title of “agent” in Hollywood, it’s a safe
bet that he knows next to nothing about the business and is living off
his wife. It’s also odds that he has a mistress to while away those
long afternoons when he isn’t at the race track or propping up a bar.
What can the wife do about it? If she wants to keep her home and family
together in some semblance of order, she’s powerless. Daddy must be
allowed to continue as “agent,” even if it ruins her.
When you’re a wife as well as an actress, you have to think of your
husband, too, not only about your career. Maybe Dinah didn’t think hard
enough. George, who in the past had given up several jobs to travel
with her, went to the Philippines alone to make a picture and was gone
three months. While he was away, she heard rumors that he was seeing a
great deal of his leading woman. He hadn’t been back in Hollywood long
before she released the announcement that she was filing for divorce.
Only minutes after she’d finally decided on that step, she went on the
air with no detectable strain showing as she sang and clowned in her TV
show.
She is a forty-five-year-old woman with two children still in school.
She is up to her ears in work most of the time. The fact that good
men don’t grow on trees is something most women don’t realize until
it’s too late. Chances are that a new husband would be second-rate by
comparison with George. Could be that thought has struck home with
Dinah, too.
* * * * *
Inside the blonde head of tragedy’s child, Marilyn Monroe, fame and
misery were mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was
an unsophisticated, overly trusting creature whose career was always
professionally and emotionally complicated beyond her power to control
it. She was used by so many people.
She let herself be surrounded by such a clutch of nudgers, prodders,
counselors, and advisers that the poor child developed an inferiority
complex so ruinous that she was terrified to walk onto any movie set
for stark fear she’d fluff a line or miss a cue. She never did have
confidence in herself. Toward the end of her life, she couldn’t sit and
talk to you without her fingers twisting together like live bait in a
jar.
That wasn’t surprising in light of the words of wisdom her confidantes
poured into her ears: “You cannot worry about unhappiness. There is no
such thing as a happy artist. They develop understanding of things that
other people don’t understand.”
Marilyn wasn’t visibly suffering from anything the night she stopped
off at my house for a last-minute talk on her way to Los Angeles
Airport and New York for _The Seven Year Itch_. Her husband of that
era, and one of the real men in her life, Joe DiMaggio, drove her over,
but he wouldn’t come in. “I’ll knock on the door when it’s time to go,”
said Joe, whom I’d known long before Marilyn.
She was wearing beige--beige fur collar on her beige coat, beige dress,
beige hair. “You look absolutely divine,” said I. “Are you beige all
over?”
She had started to lift her dress before she murmured: “Oh, Hedda,
that’s _vulgar_.”
“Just thought I’d ask.”
I was a booster of Marilyn’s as far back as _All About Eve_, when
she came on for a few minutes with George Sanders and glowed like
the harvest moon. She had an extraordinary power of lighting up the
whole screen. No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as she did.
In her brain and body, the distinctions between woman and actress
had edges sharp as razor blades. Off camera, she was a nervous,
amazingly fair-skinned creature almost beside herself with concern
about her roles, driven to seek relief in vodka, champagne, sleeping
pills--anything to blunt the pain of her existence. When the camera
rolled, everything was as different as night from day. Then she became
an actress using her eyes, her hands, every muscle in her body to
court and conquer the camera as though it were her lover, whom she
simultaneously dominated and was dominated by, adored and feared.
She was the original Cinderella of our times, the slavey who’d washed
dishes, swept floors, minded babies, been pushed around from one foster
home to another without anybody caring for or loving her. But she was
always as honest about her whole ugly past as an ambitious actress can
be who smells good copy in her reminiscences. She was simultaneously
lovely and pathetic most of the time, but she kept a sense of humor. I
asked her once about a man alleged to be looming large in her life. “Is
this a serious romance?” was the question.
“Say we’re friendly,” she said, “and put that ‘friendly’ in quotes.”
The girl who was rated as the sex goddess supreme used to fight tooth
and nail to hang onto the career which she was afraid might slip away
from her at any moment. But there was an air of impregnable innocence
about her in those calendar pictures. The innocence showed, too, in
shots very much like them that her first husband used to carry around
when he worked in an aircraft plant in World War II, to flash them in
front of his workmates. One of the workmates was Robert Mitchum.
In the first great picture she made, _The Seven Year Itch_, the same
charm of ignorance let her spout double-meaning lines as though she
didn’t know what they implied. She had that superb director Billy
Wilder telling her what to do. “You had the innocence of a baby,” I
told her. “We knew the words were naughty, but we didn’t think you did.”
“I didn’t know?” she said, bewildered. “But I have always known.”
Soon after that picture, she lost the little-girl quality. She was
surrounded by people all telling her how to act. They worked up her
dissatisfaction with her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. It’s an old
pitch that sycophants make to a star: “You don’t need your studio.
You’re bigger than they are. You can have your own production company.”
She believed it. Basically simple women like Marilyn, who rise as fast
as she did, are pushovers for this kind of mad propaganda.
A leading figure in her new circle was Milton Greene, the New York
photographer who set up Marilyn as a one-woman corporation to do battle
with her studio, meantime driving himself close to bankruptcy. Milton
could take credit for getting her on Ed Murrow’s “Person To Person”
television program. After that painful evening I asked her: “How could
you possibly go on TV looking like that?”
“Everybody said I looked good.”
“Everybody lied then. You were a mess. You don’t look well in skirts
and heavy sweaters because you’re too big in the bust. On that show you
should have been the glamour girl you always are. But the glamorous one
was Mrs. Milton Greene. This kind of thing will destroy you.”
She spent part of the time during those rebellious days living in
Connecticut with the Greenes, the rest in a three-room suite at the
Waldorf Towers. She told me about the joys of adventuring around New
York in dark glasses and turban with built-in black curls, going off on
a cops-and-robbers round of cafes, theaters, the Metropolitan Museum.
Meantime stupid rumors circulated that she was being kept in fantastic
luxury by one millionaire or another, but nobody bothered to deny them.
“Didn’t it occur to you,” I wrote, “that great stars pursue their
careers in conventional fashion, accepting the experienced judgment of
good producers?... How did you rationalize the idea that a photographer
who’d had no experience in making theatrical pictures could do better
by you than the men who had made you famous?”
Then along came Arthur Miller, a writer held in awe by most of
Hollywood, who ended a fifteen-year-old marriage to marry her. They
were deeply in love and happy at first. When that ended, she came
and sipped a martini in my home. He was, she said, “a charming and
wonderful man--a great writer.” And Joe DiMaggio? “A good friend.” I
believe Miller loved her, though it was Joe who turned up trumps in the
end when she lay dead and deserted in Westwood Village Mortuary. One
other man loved her, too--Miller’s father, Isadore.
She said: “I have only married for love and happiness. Except perhaps
my first one, but let’s don’t discuss that ever.... I still love
everybody a little that I ever loved.” And about being the ex-Mrs.
Miller? “When you put so much into a marriage and have it end, you feel
something has died--and it has. But it didn’t die abruptly. ‘Died’
isn’t the right word for me,” she said when we talked. But I think she
was already dying inside her heart.
She went into _Let’s Make Love_,--it was a terrible script, in her
opinion--out of shape physically and mentally. As her leading man, she
had Yves Montand, who was Lucky Pierre himself in getting the role,
being choice number seven after Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant,
Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, and Jimmy Stewart had all turned down
the part. Montand had performed beautifully in his own one-man theater
show, though three quarters of his American audiences obviously hadn’t
the least idea what he was talking about, since it was all in French.
Opposite Marilyn, he thought he had only a small part after Arthur
Miller had been asked to write additional dialogue for the heroine.
During shooting I detected that something strange was happening to
Mrs. Arthur Miller, who hadn’t announced yet that she was going to get
a divorce. She was falling hard for this Frenchman with the carefully
polished charm. Between the end of that picture and the start of her
next, _The Misfits_, the stories spread that he would divorce his wife,
Simone Signoret. M. Montand scored high in the publicity sweepstakes.
The gossip spread all over town, with some help from the Twentieth
Century-Fox promotion department and no hindrance from himself.
Before the prophetically titled _Misfits_ was finished, she became so
ill she was flown in from Reno and put into the Good Samaritan Hospital
for a week’s rest. She couldn’t even reach Montand on the telephone,
and she called him repeatedly, day after day.
The night before he left to rejoin his wife in Paris, I received a tip
that he could be found in a certain bungalow in the grounds of Beverly
Hills Hotel. “Just knock on the door; he’ll let you in.”
I did precisely that. He was astonished to see who had rapped on
his door, but I was invited in. The telephone started to ring almost
immediately. He wouldn’t accept the call. “I won’t talk to her,” he
told the switchboard operator.
“Why not?” said I. “You’ll probably never see her again. Go on. Speak
to her.” But he couldn’t be persuaded. He suggested a drink, and I
offered to mix them. I stirred up one hell of a martini to get him
talking.
“You deliberately made love to this girl. You knew she wasn’t
sophisticated. Was that right?”
“Had Marilyn been sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened.
I did everything I could for her when I realized that mine was a very
small part. The only thing that could stand out in my performance were
my love scenes. So, naturally, I did everything I could to make them
good.”
I’m sure that he knew what he was saying no more than half the time.
She was “an enchanting child” and “a simple girl without any guile.” He
said: “Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But
nothing will break up my marriage.”
The last time I talked with Marilyn, there was no new man in sight. She
owed Twentieth Century-Fox another picture, _Something’s Got to Give_,
under her old contract, but even if she’d finished it it would have
paid her only $100,000, where she could have made at least $500,000
elsewhere. Her courtiers made her feel sore over that, though the only
thing on her mind should have been the need to make a movie that was
good for her after _Let’s Make Love_ and _The Misfits_. Three flops
in a row, and anybody’s out. Marie Dressler said it best years ago:
“You’re only as good as your last picture.”
I believe Marilyn realized that the end of her acting career was
waiting for her just around the corner. The last scenes she did in
_Something’s Got to Give_ looked as though she was acting under water.
She was sweet as ever, but vague, as if she were slightly off center.
She did little more than the near-nude bathing shots, and she gave a
still photographer who was on the set exclusive rights to pictures
of the scene because “I want the world to see my body.” Newspaper
and magazine readers around the world were promptly granted that
opportunity, needless to say.
Arthur Miller once called her “the greatest actress in the world.” She
was far from that, in my book. In spite of all her talk about playing
Dostoevski heroines or some of Duse’s roles, the sex-appealing blonde
remained her stock in trade. And there was something else missing among
her ambitions. She ached to have children, though she was physically
incapable of it. Twice she lost babies through miscarriages when she
was Mrs. Miller. She told friends that she longed for a baby on whom
she could shower the attention she never had.
On June 1, 1962, she reached her thirty-sixth birthday, married three
times, with still no baby and no husband. Two months later the end
came, and all the sob sisters of the world fell to work explaining why.
Of course, we shall never know. She took that secret with her. When
you’re alone and unhappy, the past, present, and future get mixed up
in your brain. You say to yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Nobody
loves me. Perhaps I shall never find happiness again.”
She seemed to be touched by forces that few human beings can bear, and
her life turned into a nightmare of broken dreams, broken promises, and
pain. In a way, we were all guilty. We loved her, yet left her lonely
and afraid when she needed us most. Now she is gone forever, leaving
us with bitter memories of what might have been. Dear Marilyn, may she
rest in peace!
* * * * *
One of the men I loved most above all others was Gene Fowler. He once
wrote me a letter from London. “What is success?” he asked. “I shall
tell you out of the wisdom of my years. It is a toy balloon among
children armed with sharp pins.”
How can anyone say it better than that?
_Three_
Much as I regret it afterward, I all too often speak before I think.
And too many years have gone by for much to be done about it now. For
better or worse, I’m doomed to shoot from the hip, to be a chatterbox
who’ll fire off a quip if one comes to mind, without much thought about
the consequences.
I love to laugh and to make other people laugh. That’s what we’re put
in the world for. But I sometimes don’t realize how thin some skins can
be. I talked my merry way out of a tête-à-tête with Frank Sinatra, whom
I’ve always liked, and I’ll be sorry to my dying day for what was said
on the spur of that moment.
The place was Romanoff’s penthouse; the occasion, the crushingly dull
farewell party that Sol Siegel, then head of MGM, and his wife gave
Grace Kelly before she sailed off to be a princess.
To start with, the arrangement for welcoming guests was peculiar, to
say the least. Instead of standing beside Mr. and Mrs. Siegel to say
hello, Grace stood in solitary state in the middle of the floor. She
was dressed up, rightly, for the fray--white gloves, a beautiful coat
and dress. But she stood with her handbag hanging over her arm as
though poised for take-off at the flash of a tiara.
Like all the rest of us, I went up alone to wish her well for her
future in Monaco. She was regal already, smiling as benignly as Queen
Mother Elizabeth opening a charity bazaar.
“If you’ll excuse me,” said I, after three minutes of nothing much, “I
think I’ll go and have a glass of champagne.”
That party never did pick up. As the hours dragged by, it grew stiffer
and duller and colder, though the champagne flowed and the orchestra
played its head off.
Come eleven o’clock I was dancing with Frank. _Confidential_, the
scandal sheet which was the scourge of Hollywood in those days, had
very recently printed the doleful reminiscences of one young woman
whose expectations, she confided, had been aroused when Frank whisked
her off to his Palm Springs hideaway. But hope had crumbled when he
spent the night constantly getting up to eat Wheaties.
As the Siegels’ guest, he was as bored as I was. “Let’s blow this
creepy party,” he said, “and go down to my Palm Springs place.”
“Why, Frank, I couldn’t do that; I didn’t bring my Wheaties.” The
wisecrack popped out without a second’s consideration, and he nearly
fell down on the floor. So ended the chances of getting the name of
Hopper on the roll call of Sinatra dates, which has included Marilyn
Maxwell, Anita Ekberg, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kim Novak, Lady Beatty (who
became Mrs. Stanley Donen), and, according to witnesses, a master list
of conquests among the female stars at MGM that he used to keep behind
his dressing-room door.
He continues to send me gorgeous flowers for Christmas and Mother’s
Day, so I guess I’ll be content with that. I got asked up to his
handsome new house on top of a Beverly Hills mountain, equipped with
lights that fade at the touch of a switch and a telescope through
which he studies the stars (celestial variety) in their courses. But I
haven’t been invited to Palm Springs again.