My Story

18 i see the world

Mr. Cowan kept his word and sent for me. He wasn’t ready to use me as a star, seeing he had no picture to put me in. But he would like to engage me to exploit the movie Love Happy.

“But I don’t know how to exploit a picture,” I said.

“You don’t have to know,” Mr. Cowan replied. “All you have to do is to be Marilyn Monroe.”

He explained that I would travel from city to city, put up in the finest hotels, meet the press, give out interviews, and pose for photographers.

“You will have a chance to see the world,” Mr. Cowan said, “and it will broaden your horizons.”

I agreed to exploit the picture, and Mr. Cowan agreed to pay all my traveling expenses and give me a salary of a hundred dollars a week.

One of the reasons I accepted the job was that I thought it would make my lover realize how much he loved me—if I went away for a few weeks. He didn’t seem to be able to realize it with me hanging around twenty-four hours a day. I had read that men love you more if they can be made a little uncertain about owning you. But reading something is one thing, doing it is quite another. Besides, I could never pretend to feel something I didn’t feel. I could never make love if I didn’t love, and if I loved I could no more hide the fact than change the color of my eyes.

The day before I left for New York to start the Love Happy exploitation tours of the U.S.A. I suddenly realized that I had almost no wardrobe. I called on Mr. Cowan and told him about this.

“I won’t be much of an advertisement in one old suit,” I said.

Mr. Cowan smiled and agreed I had better have a larger wardrobe. He gave me seventy-five dollars to outfit myself for the tour. I rushed over to the May Company store and bought three woolen suits for twenty-five dollars apiece.

I bought the woolen suits because I remembered that New York and Chicago were in the North. I had seen them in the movies blanketed with snow. In my excitement over going to see these great cities for the first time I forgot it was summertime there as well as in Los Angeles.

On the way to New York I made plans of all the things I would see.

My lover had always said, one of the reasons you have nothing to talk about is you’ve never been anywhere or seen anything.

I was going to remedy that.

When the train stopped in New York I could hardly breathe, it was so hot. It was hotter than I had ever known it to be in Hollywood. The woolen suit made me feel as if I was wearing an oven.

Mr. Cowan’s press agent, who was supervising my exploitation trip, rose to the situation.

“We must make capital out of what we have,” he explained. So he arranged for me to pose on the train steps with perspiration running down my face and an ice cream cone in each hand.

The caption for the pictures read: “Marilyn Monroe, the hottest thing in pictures, cooling off.”

That “cooling off” idea became sort of the basis for my exploitation work.

A half hour after arriving in New York I was led into an elegant suite in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and told to put on a bathing suit.

More photographers arrived and took more pictures of me “cooling off.”

I spent several days in New York looking at the walls of my elegant suite and the little figures of people fifteen stories below. All sorts of people came to interview me, not only newspapers and magazine reporters but exhibitors and other exploitation people from United Artists.

I asked questions about the Statue of Liberty and what were the best shows to see and the most glamorous cafés to go to. But I saw nothing and went nowhere.

Finally I got so tired of sitting around perspiring in one of my three woolen suits, that I complained.

“It seems to me,” I said to the United Artists’ representatives who were having dinner with me in my suite, “that I ought to have something more attractive to wear in the evening.”

They agreed and bought me a cotton dress at a wholesale shop. It had a low-cut neck and blue polka dots. They explained, also, that cotton was much more chic in the big cities than silk. I did like the red velvet belt that came with it.

The next stop was Detroit, and then Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford. It was the same story in each of them. I was taken to a hotel, rushed into a bathing suit, given a fan and photographers arrived. The hottest thing in pictures was cooling off again.

In Rockford I decided that I had seen enough of the world. Also, due to my moving around continually and to the confusion this seemed to arouse in Mr. Cowan’s bookkeeping department, I had not received any salary whatsoever. The salary, it was explained to me, would be waiting for me at the next stop. As a result I didn’t have fifty cents to spend on myself during my grand tour.

After sitting in the lobby of a Rockford movie theater, “keeping cool” in a bathing suit and handing out orchids to “my favorite male moviegoers” I told the press agent that I would like to return to Hollywood.

The tour, in a way, was a failure. When I got back I didn’t seem to have any more to talk about than before. And absence didn’t seem to have made my friend’s heart grow any fonder.