My Story

17 i buy a present

During the time I loved this man, I kept looking for work. I had forgotten about my “career.” I looked for work because I thought he would love me more if I were employed. I felt it made him a little nervous to have me just sitting around and doing nothing but wait for him. A man sometimes gets guilty and angry if you love him too much.

Besides I was broke. I was living on money I could borrow.

Someone I met at a lunch counter told me they were making retakes on a movie called Love Happy and needed a girl for a bit part. Harpo and Groucho Marx were in the movie.

I went on the set and found the producer Lester Cowan in charge. He was a small man with dark, sad eyes. He introduced me to Groucho and Harpo Marx. It was like meeting familiar characters out of Mother Goose. There they were with the same happy, crazy look I had seen on the screen. They both smiled at me as if I were a piece of French pastry.

“This is the young lady for the office bit,” said Mr. Cowan.

Groucho stared thoughtfully at me.

“Can you walk?” he demanded.

I nodded.

“I am not referring to the type of walking my Tante Zippa has mastered,” said Groucho. “This role calls for a young lady who can walk by me in such a manner as to arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears.”

Harpo honked a horn at the end of his cane and grinned at me.

I walked the way Groucho wanted.

“Exceedingly well done,” he beamed.

Harpo’s horn honked three times, and he stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing whistle.

“Walk again,” said Mr. Cowan.

I walked up and down in front of the three men. They stood grinning.

“It’s Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one,” said Groucho. “We shoot the scene tomorrow morning. Come early.”

“And don’t do any walking in any unpoliced areas,” said Harpo.

I played the next day; Groucho directed me. It was hardly more than a walk-on, but Mr. Cowan, the producer, said I had the makings of a star and that he was going to do something about it right away.

When you’re broke and a nobody and a man tells you that, he becomes a genius in your eyes. But nothing happened for a week. I sat every evening listening to my lover argue about my various shortcomings, and I remained blissfully happy.

Then one morning I found my name in the headline of Louella Parsons’ movie column in the Los Angeles Examiner. I was so excited I fell out of bed. The headline said Lester Cowan had put me under contract to star in a forthcoming movie.

That was something to read! I dressed and made up quicker than a fireman and squandered my last two dollars on a taxi.

Mr. Cowan was in his office.

“What can I do for you, Miss Monroe?” he inquired. He always spoke like a gentleman.

“I would like to sign the contract,” I said, “that I read about in Miss Louella Parsons’ column.”

“I haven’t drawn it up yet,” Mr. Cowan smiled. “It will take a while.”

“How much are you going to pay me?” I asked. Mr. Cowan said he hadn’t decided on a figure yet.

“A hundred dollars a week will be enough,” I said.

“We’ll see about it,” Mr. Cowan replied. “You just go home and wait till you hear from me. I’ll send for you.”

“Your word of honor?” I asked.

“Word of honor,” Mr. Cowan said solemnly.

I borrowed two dollars from a friend I knew sort of and hurried off to a jewelry store. I had never given my lover a present of any kind, due to my financial condition. Now I saw a chance to get him something beautiful.

I showed the man in the jewelry store the headline in Louella Parsons’ column and my picture in it.

“I’m Marilyn Monroe,” I said. “You can compare me to the photograph.”

“I can see you are,” the jeweler agreed.

“I haven’t any money now,” I said. “In fact I have less than two dollars in the world. But you can see from what it says in Miss Parsons’ column that I am on my way to stardom and will soon receive a great deal of money from Mr. Cowan.”

The jeweler nodded.

“Of course, I haven’t signed the contract yet, or even seen it.” I didn’t want him to misunderstand anything. “And Mr. Cowan, whom I just saw, said it would take a while—but I thought perhaps you might trust me. I want to buy a present for someone very dear to me.”

The man smiled and said he would trust me and that I could pick out anything in the store.

I picked out an object that cost five hundred dollars and ran to my lover’s home and waited for him.

He was quite overcome by the beauty of my present. Nobody had ever given him such an expensive object before.

“But you haven’t engraved it,” he said. “From Marilyn to ___________ with love. Or something like that.”

My heart almost stopped as he said this.

“I was going to have it engraved,” I answered, “but changed my mind.”

“Why?” he asked. He looked very tenderly at me.

“Because you’ll leave me someday,” I said, “and you’ll have some other girl to love. And thus you wouldn’t be able to use my present if my name was on it. This way you can always use it, as if it were something you’d bought yourself.”

Usually when a woman says that sort of thing to her lover she expects to be contradicted and soothed out of her fears. I didn’t. At night I lay in bed and cried. To love without hope is a sad thing for the heart.

It took me two years to pay the jeweler the five hundred dollars. By the time I had paid the last twenty-five dollar installment, my lover was married to another woman.