“Your funeral!” he laughs. “I’ll be dead myself by then!”
“Promise,” she insists.
“I promise,” he replies. “Sure, bring the body back while it is still warm and I’ll do it.”
“With your pinky,” she adds, extending her own as they shake little fingers.
A few days later, Whitey Snyder receives a golden Tiffany money clip engraved “Whitey Dear: / While I’m still warm / Marilyn.”
While Marilyn lies in the hospital recovering, questions about her past are coming to light.
There’s boundless curiosity about the 20th Century-Fox star, now receiving over five thousand fan letters a week. On the heels of the nude photo revelation, Marilyn recently gave an interview to a reporter from ladies’ magazineRedbookabout her childhood as an orphan, titled “So Far to Go Alone,” which it’s slated to publish in its June edition. But what if the endearing little-girl-lost story of the orphan who made good isn’t airtight?
MARILYN MONROE CONFESSES MOTHER ALIVE, LIVING HEREruns the headline to Erskine Johnson’s May 3, 1952, story in theHollywood Reporter. A photograph shows Homestead Lodge, a nursing home outside Pasadena where her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker (now Gladys Eley), is working a low-wage job.
This latest blow is a harder recovery than either the nude photo scandal or the appendectomy. Marilyn is immediatelybranded a liar. An eager young hustler. The most focused, most determined, most ambitious, and most pushy starlet out there.
Maybe in those first few years I didn’t do anything to deserve other people’s trust,Marilyn frets.I don’t know much about these things. I just tried not to hurt anybody, and to help myself.
As annoyed as he is thatRedbookmagazine will be now on press with a discredited story of an orphaned Marilyn, Fox’s lead press agent, the hard-nosed former newsman Harry Brand, is still doing his best to guard a far more explosive secret: that Marilyn was born illegitimate.
In full damage-control mode, Marilyn writes an apology toRedbook, taking the position that as a child she’d been unaware her mother was alive. “I frankly did not feel wrong in withholding from you the fact that my mother is still alive … since we have never known each other intimately and have never enjoyed the normal relationship of mother and daughter.”
The anger toward Marilyn subsides, replaced by a flow of letters from people claiming to be her mother.
Not long after theHollywood Reporter’s scoop runs, Gladys writes Marilyn herself.
Please dear child, I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.
With love, Mother
Marilyn doesn’t reply.
I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life and I had in mine,she thinks.I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works.
CHAPTER 28
“EVERY INCH AN ACTRESS!” declares the trailer forDon’t Bother to Knock.“The screen has never shown this kind of woman before … The most talked about actress of 1952 rockets to stardom!”
Though filmed at the end of December 1951, the movie opens at the Globe Theater in New York City on July 18, 1952. Marilyn plays Nell Forbes, a grieving young woman whose uncle puts her up for a babysitting job in the New York City hotel where he works. A case of mistaken identity over a man Nell’s convinced is her dead beau plunges her into a psychosis that endangers the baby she’s been hired to care for. With depth and intensity drawn from her own family history with mental illness, Marilyn delivers a convincing performance of sanity destroyed by war.
Her costar Richard Widmark wasn’t convinced they’d get there. “Zanuck wanted to make her a dramatic actress, even though acting scared her to death. So we had a lot of trouble just getting her out of her dressing room,” he recalls.
The lede of theNew York Timesreview highlights the studio publicity campaign: “The story is that Marilyn Monroe is being groomed by Twentieth Century-Fox for razzle-dazzle stardom on the assumption, we are told, that she is the hottest number to hit Hollywood in years.”
Her next role is in the noir filmNiagara,the latest fromSunset Boulevardco-screenwriter Charles Brackett. During the two weeks Marilyn spends on location directly across from the Falls, it’s a toss-up which one is the more popular sight. “Milling crowds are often around her” come news reports from set locations around the area, from the landmark Rainbow Bridge to a specially constructed six-unit motel facade.
Twentieth Century-Fox has set up headquarters on the American side, at the General Brock Hotel—where Marilyn has Room 801—and budgeted $2 million for the shoot in lavish Technicolor.
Marilyn’s delighted to take on a darker role, playing Rose Loomis, a femme-fatale type vacationing in Niagara Falls with her jealous, brooding older husband, George (played by Joseph Cotten). When Rose attends a casual motel party in a fuchsia off-the-shoulder dress with a peek-a-boo midriff, George complains it’s so low-cut that he can “see her kneecaps.”
It’s the same sort of criticism Joe DiMaggio gives. Though the world at large seems entranced by the pairing of “the greatest woman in the world and the greatest guy in the world,” as DiMaggio’s former Yankee teammate Jerry Coleman calls them, the couple isn’t racing to the altar.
Sporting Newsreports: “The blond beauty denied that she and Joe were contemplating marriage—at least in the immediate future.”
“Marilyn Monroe won’t be able to marry Joe DiMaggio right away even if she wants to,” Sheilah Graham reports in August. Her column, “Hollywood Today,” runs in 180 newspapers worldwide. “Starting this week, Monroe plunges into 50 poster sittings and 40 fan-magazine layouts. Every paper and periodical in the country is clamoring for more of Marilyn.”
DiMaggio wishes they wouldn’t. He’s of the opinion that wives stay home, take care of the house. They cook, they clean, they set the table, and they don’t express opinions.
