The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Early Films

The films featuring Marilyn Monroe in 1950 and 1951 were not exactly memorable. As Young as You Feel found her back at 20th Century-Fox, and despite her sixth-place billing and her prominent display on the posters and lobby cards, she had but two brief scenes as Harriet, a secretary. Then there was Love Nest, a post–World War II sex comedy without the sex, starring June Haver and William Lundigan. Marilyn’s role was described in a review as “an extended cameo,” the highlight being a scene in which she emerges from a shower, draped in a towel. There was also Let’s Make It Legal, with things only slightly better for Marilyn as regards her screen time, which is mostly spent in a bathing suit. Claudette Colbert and Macdonald Carey star in this romantic comedy “that feels overstretched even at an hour and a quarter,” in one critic’s appraisal.

In March 1951, the deal Johnny Hyde had been working on for Marilyn to re-sign with Fox was finally finished, without him. The William Morris Agency, Johnny’s firm, wasn’t interested in Marilyn after his death, so she ended up with the Famous Artists Agency, where she would be managed for the next several years by a man named Hugh French. The Fox deal was for forty weeks and $500 a week whether she worked or not—and she couldn’t work for anyone else either, unless the company loaned her out. At the end of each year, the studio could decide not to renew, and if so, she would be on her own once again. However, Fox could also renew at the end of the term, and if it did she would receive $750 a week for the second year, $1,250 for the third, $1,500 for the fourth, $2,000 for the fifth, $2,500 for the sixth, and $3,500 for the seventh, if she lasted that long. It’s interesting that she would now be working for Darryl Zanuck again, a man who clearly had no love for her. He only signed her because Joe Schenck, Johnny Hyde, and so many others kept pressuring him about it. Natasha Lytess also went with Marilyn as part of the deal, and would be getting $750 a week to coach Marilyn—$500 from Fox and $250 from Marilyn. So Marilyn was paying Natasha 50 percent of what Fox paid her that first year, which certainly showed how much value she placed on her work with the acting teacher. Natasha was making quite a bit more money that first year than Marilyn herself.

Another of her early films was Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (made in 1951, though released in 1952), adapted for the screen from an unsuccessful Broadway play by Clifford Odets, who, with the play’s director, Lee Strasberg, and others, had founded the controversial, left-leaning Group Theatre in the 1930s. The play starred Tallulah Bankhead as Mae Doyle, a part assumed by Barbara Stanwyck in the film. Despite her prominent billing, Marilyn’s role was minor. Still, she received excellent notices, among them these words of praise by Alton Cook in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: “The girl has a refreshing exuberance, an abundance of girlish high spirits. She is a forceful actress, too.… She has definitely stamped herself as a gifted new star.… Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” If Fox’s loaning out of its contract player to RKO was meant to test the waters as to her box-office potential, as has been speculated, the studio got its answer. Thus reassured, Fox set about finding scripts to showcase her obvious charms, pairing her with more established leading men.