Marilyn Monroe - My Story

On the set ten minutes later, Mr. Sanders’ stand-in, who was almost as charming and polite as the star himself, came to me and said, “Mr. Sanders has asked me to request of you that hereafter when you say good morning or good-bye to him, you will make those salutations from afar.”

I turned red at being insulted like this but I suddenly realized what had happened. Mr. Sanders’ wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, obviously had a spy on the set, and this spy had flashed the news to her that he was sitting at a table with me, and Miss Gabor had telephoned him immediately and given him a full list of instructions. I laughed when I realized this, and I thought about it for some time. I could imagine loving a man with my whole heart and soul and wanting to be with him every minute. But I couldn’t imagine being so jealous of him that I would have spies planted everywhere to watch him. But maybe I was too young to understand about such things.

I could never be attracted to a man who had perfect teeth. A man with perfect teeth always alienated me. I don’t know what it is but it has something to do with the kind of men I have known who had perfect teeth. They weren’t so perfect elsewhere.

There’s another sort of man I’ve never liked—the sort that’s afraid of insulting you. They always end up by insulting you worse than anybody. I much prefer a man to be a wolf and, if he has decided to make a pass at me, to make it and have it over with.

First of all, a pass is never entirely unpleasant because men who make passes are usually bright and good-looking. Secondly, you don’t have to sit around with a wolf and listen to a lot of double-talk about income taxes and what’s wrong with the situation in India while he gets up enough courage to get into action.

Worse, though, than these double-talkers are the Good Samaritan pass-makers. These are the ones who are interested in my career and want to do something big for me. They are usually married men, of course. I don’t mean that married men are all hypocrites. Many of them are straightforward wolves. They will ask you straightforwardly to overlook the fact that they are wedded to wives who seem to adore them—and go on from there.

There is variety among men, always. Even the wolves differ from each other a little bit. Some wolves like to talk about sex a great deal. Others are terribly polite about saying anything offensive, and act as if they were inviting you to some important social event.

The nicest thing about wolves is that they seldom get angry or critical of you. This doesn’t apply, of course, if you succumb to them. Then they are likely to lose their tempers, but for a different reason than most men. A wolf is inclined to get very angry if a woman makes the mistake of falling in love with him. But it would take a rather foolish woman to do that.

The only time I ever knew a wolf really to lose his temper was the time a girl friend of mine dated a famous director.

“Here’s the key to my apartment,” she told him. “I have a dinner date. You go there and wait for me. I’ll join you around ten-thirty.”

The famous director went to her apartment. He undressed and lay down in bed. He had brought a script along to read. At eleven-thirty he had finished reading the script. The phone rang. A man’s voice inquired for Miss B.

“She is not home yet,” the famous director said.

After that the phone kept ringing every fifteen minutes. There was a way to shut off the ringing, but the director didn’t know where the switch was, so he had to keep answering. Each time it was another wolf like himself asking for Miss B.

I don’t know exactly what happened, but when Miss B. came home around 4 a.m. she found the bed empty and the telephone had been torn from the wall. The note he left behind read, “Enclosed is the key to your apartment. What you need is not a lover but an answering service.”

But to return to the Good Samaritan pass-makers, they are not only the worst but the most numerous. When they get old enough they graduate into talking to you like a father. When a man says to me, “I’m giving you exactly the same advice I’d give my own daughter,” I know he isn’t “dangerous” anymore—that is, if he actually has a daughter.

The chief drawback with men is that they are too talkative. I don’t mean intellectual men who are full of ideas and information about life. It’s always a delight to hear such men talk because they are not talking boastfully. The overtalkative men who bore me are the ones who talk about themselves. Sometimes they confine themselves to plain, uninterrupted boasting. They’ll sit for an hour telling you how smart they are and how stupid everybody else around them is. Sometimes they don’t even boast but give you an inside on what they like to eat and where they’ve been in the last five years.

Such men are a total loss. A man can please a woman by talking about himself after they’re lovers. Then he can confess all his sins and tell her of all the other women he has had.

Lovers who don’t do that and who keep silent on the subject of their pasts are very rare. And they are not too bright, either. Sometimes men like to hear about a woman’s past love affairs, but it’s better for a woman not to take a chance and tell. Unless she is truly in love and wishes to belong to the man entirely—and doesn’t mind a long spell of hollering.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak. A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many.

The most unsatisfactory men are those who pride themselves on their virility and regard sex as if it were some form of athletics at which you win cups. It is a woman’s spirit and mood a man has to stimulate in order to make sex interesting. The real lover is the man who can thrill you by just touching your head or smiling into your eyes—or by just staring into space.

I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen. Wives have a tendency to go off like burglar alarms when they see their husbands talking to me. Even young and pretty Hollywood “maidens” greet me with more sneer than smile.

This sort of sex fear that women often feel when I walk into their barnyard has different effects on me. I find it flattering—and upsetting. I find it also mysterious. Women don’t resent me because I’m prettier or better shaped than they are—or show more of myself to the male eye. I’ve seen women at parties who had only enough clothes on to keep from being arrested, and I’ve heard such party-nudists buzzing about how vulgar I was. They were showing more leg, more bosom, and more spinal column than I was—and I was the “vulgar” one!

Women also don’t like the way I talk—even when I’m not talking to their husbands or lovers. One angry woman said my voice was “too premeditated.” I found out she meant I was putting on a sort of bedroom drawl. This isn’t true. The chief difference between my voice and the voices of most women I’ve seen is that I use mine less. I can’t chatter if I wanted to. I can’t pretend to laugh and be full of some sort of foolish good spirits when I’m in company. Standing around at a party looking serious attracts unfavorable feminine comment. They think I’m plotting something, and usually the same thing—how to steal their gentlemen friends from under their noses.

I don’t mind their thinking that. I would rather a thousand women were jealous of me than I was jealous of one of them. I’ve been jealous, and its no fun.