The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Giving Up Her Soul

Despite the speed at which the actress was signed to a deal, there were no movies in the offing for the newly named Marilyn Monroe. In February 1947, Fox renewed her contract for another six months, though she hadn’t done anything other than pose for photographers in bathing suits and negligees for press layouts.

By the time she made her first film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), she was almost twenty-one years old and more beautiful than ever with her cobalt blue eyes and head of hair so silky smooth and golden blonde. There was not much of Marilyn in Miss Pilgrim, just a quick (and uncredited) shot of her as a telephone operator; most fans haven’t been able to spot her in this film. She would be (barely) seen again in 1947’s Dangerous Years. (“For heaven’s sake, don’t blink,” she wrote to Berniece, “or you’ll miss me!”)

There would be four more films (these would be released in 1948), if you count You Were Meant for Me, a Jeanne Crain–Dan Dailey musical, one that some sources maintain is part of Monroe’s filmography. Marilyn can also be spotted in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!—a Technicolor bit of nonsense set in the Hoosier state in which June Haver vies for the affections of Lon McCallister with a pair of prize-winning mules, while a ten-year-old Natalie Wood, as Haver’s bratty kid sister, just adds to the overall foolishness. It’s been published many times over the years—and even Marilyn had said it and, for that matter, even Fox had claimed it!—that her one little scene was cut from the film. Not true. It’s there. Just two words, but both present and accounted for. (She’s also seen in a distant shot with her back to the camera, on a rowboat.)

“She was a scared rabbit,” said Diana Herbert, whose father, F. Hugh Herbert, wrote the screenplay. “On the sly, I snuck her into a screening room where my father was viewing for editing, and Marilyn got to see herself in the bit part before it was trimmed. She’d had one line and whispered to me, ‘Do I sound that awful?’ My father, using the old adage, told me Marilyn photographed like a million dollars. He told me she was going to be a big star.”

That same year, 1947, Fox exchanged bucolic Indiana for the Wyoming countryside and a pair of mules for a wild white stallion in Green Grass of Wyoming, with Marilyn again uncredited as an extra at a square dance. Then, in August 1947, the studio decided not to renew her contract. Her agent Harry Lipton once recalled, “When I told her that Fox had not taken up the option, her immediate reaction was that the world had crashed around her. But typical of Marilyn, she shook her head, set her jaw and said, ‘Well, I guess it really doesn’t matter—it’s a case of supply and demand.’ She understood the film business already, and she was just a novice. She knew that the studio signed many contract players and the ones who struck gold overnight stayed while those who struggled usually ended up being cut. Still, the show had to go on.”

Meanwhile, there were a couple of strange incidents in Marilyn’s life in 1947 that may have pointed toward some of the emotional trouble she would experience later in her life. One is told by Diana Herbert. The same age as Marilyn, Herbert got to know her while Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! was being filmed and remained friendly with her. She recalled that when the film was completed, she hosted a pool party at her family’s mansion in Bel Air attended by her friends from UCLA. Marilyn said she would love to attend. She said that on that day, she and her new friend, actress Shelley Winters, had a class at the Actors’ Laboratory—a workshop for actors, directors, and writers, mostly from New York. Afterward, she would go to the party.

On the appointed day, Marilyn arrived very late. “She came quietly with her beach bag,” recalls Diana Herbert. “I got out of the pool to direct her to the dressing room. A lot of time passed… and no Marilyn. So I became concerned and went and knocked on the door. ‘Marilyn?’ I called out. ‘Are you okay?’ And she said, ‘Yeah,’ in a voice that was barely audible. ‘I’ll be right out, I just have to change.’ So I went back in the pool. An hour went by, and no Marilyn. So, again, I went back to the dressing room and knocked on the door. ‘I’ll be right out,’ she said. By this time, everyone was getting out of the pool, drying off, and going home. More time passed. I again went to the dressing room and knocked on the door. But… she was gone. She never even came out of the dressing room—except to leave.” Over the years, there would be numerous incidents like this in Marilyn’s life.

At the end of the year, she would very briefly engage the services of new “managers,” Lucille Ryman and John Carroll. However, they weren’t exactly managers. Carroll was a film actor with connections, and Lucille was director of the talent department at MGM—with connections. It’s unclear as to what the terms of the arrangement were—either she was paying them to represent her (unlikely, since she didn’t have much money), or they were taking a percentage of her work (also unlikely, since she didn’t have any). It doesn’t make any difference, really, because they came and went from her life quickly, but not before bearing witness to some unusual moments.

Lucille, Carroll’s wife, has insisted that Marilyn told her and her husband that she was working as a prostitute at this time, having quick sex with men in cars in order to get money for food. “She told us without pride or shame that she made a deal—she did what she did and her customers then bought her breakfast or lunch.” Lucille also said that Marilyn told her she’d been robbed in the small apartment in which she was living and that she was afraid to stay there. Things were so bad, Marilyn told her, she’d have to just continue working the streets. Moreover, she told her that she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven. “It was her way of getting us to take her in, and it worked.” They offered to allow Marilyn to live in an apartment they owned.

Marilyn was known to fabricate stories to gain sympathy. One of the problems in sorting through the Marilyn Monroe history is determining what is true and what may be the product of her overworked imagination. In short, as people in her life would begin to understand with the passing of time, one could not ever take everything Marilyn said at face value. At any rate, she did end up living in better conditions by the largesse of this couple. Then, one night in November 1947, something strange occurred. The Carrolls got a frantic telephone call from Marilyn.

“There’s a kid peeping in on me,” Marilyn said, her voice vibrating with urgency.

“What are you talking about?” Lucille said.

“I’m being watched.”

“But how?

“He has a ladder and he’s on it and he’s watching me,” Marilyn continued.

“Marilyn, a ladder would not reach the third floor. You must be dreaming,” Lucille told her.

“But I’m awake. I’m awake.”

This conversation continued until, finally, the Carrolls decided they had no choice but to have her join them at their own home that night. They felt they had their hands full with her and didn’t know what to do about it. “At one point, we thought about it and realized that she was running our lives, calling all the time, crying on the phone,” said Lucille. “We didn’t know what to do. A lot of crazy things were going on… it was too much. She didn’t know how to handle her life… she fell apart. We liked her but we needed her and her craziness out of our lives.”

The Carrolls were about to get their wish, because Marilyn would be out of their lives by the beginning of 1948. In February, they took her with them to a party where she met a businessman named Pat DeCicco, a Hollywood playboy once wed to Gloria Vanderbilt. He was also a friend of Joe Schenck, the sixty-nine-year-old president of 20th Century-Fox. As it happened, Schenck asked DeCicco to find him some models to act as window dressing at a Saturday night poker party at his home. DeCicco asked Marilyn if she would be interested. All she would have to do, she was told, was look pretty and pour drinks for Schenck’s friends, perhaps also give them a few cigars, but that was it. It sounded easy enough and also like a great opportunity, so she agreed. Of course, that’s not all that was going on at the party, as Marilyn found out once she got there. Some of the ladies present—all models and aspiring actresses—were willing and able to give themselves to any of the male guests since most of them were power players in show business. Marilyn, though, stayed close to Schenck. By the time the evening was over, he was mad for her, saying she “has an electric quality… she sparkles and bubbles like a fountain.” The next day, he sent a limousine to pick her up and drive her to have dinner with him. That night, she had sex with him.

“I can’t say that I enjoyed it,” Marilyn later told her movie stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, of her assignation with Schenck. “But I can say that I didn’t feel as if I had any choice.” She said that she felt the whole event had been “very tawdry” and that she felt “terrible about it. It was like giving up my soul.” However, she also allowed that she was starting to understand what she called “the Hollywood game” and she knew she had no choice but to play it if she were ever to make a name for herself in show business. It was a sad realization, she said. “But it’s the truth,” she concluded. She and Schenck continued their relationship off and on for some time, and, by some accounts, eventually she grew quite fond of him.

Schenck persuaded Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn to take a look at Marilyn’s screen test. Cohn wasn’t that interested. However, her test footage started circulating through the studio system, and eventually ended up on the desk of Columbia talent head Max Arnow. Also unimpressed by it, he asked one of the studio’s drama coaches, Natasha Lytess, to take a look. She wasn’t thrilled either—it seemed that no one was impressed. Lytess noted that Marilyn seemed to suffer from a lack self-confidence. However, there was still something interesting about her, Natasha thought. Her quality was difficult to describe, but it had to do with her beauty and vulnerability. She wanted to work with her, believing that “perhaps she has some potential.” Harry Cohn decided to offer Marilyn a six-month contract at $125 a week beginning on March 9, 1948. Suddenly, she was signed to Columbia Pictures.