Marilyn Monroe - My Story

But when I heard Miss Crawford’s voice on the phone, I had to start palavering as I’d done before. Had I made out that list of my wardrobe? No, I hadn’t. That was very lazy of me. Yes, I knew. And I would make the list out in a few days and call her up again.

“Good,” said Miss Crawford. “I’ll be expecting to hear from you.”

I didn’t call Miss Crawford again. In fact, the next time I heard from Miss Crawford was in the newspapers. This was a year later. I’d gone to work at 20th Century-Fox again, and the Marilyn Monroe boom had started. I was all over the magazines and movie columns, and the fan mail at the studio was arriving in trucks.

Among the honors that were now showering on me was the privilege of presenting one of the Oscars to one of the Award winners at the Academy’s annual affair.

I was frozen with fear the night of the Academy Award Ceremonies. I waited tremblingly for my turn to walk up to the platform and hand over the Oscar in my keeping. I prayed I wouldn’t trip and fall and that my voice wouldn’t disappear when I had to say my two lines.

When my turn came I managed to reach the platform, say my piece, and return to my table without any mishap.

Or so I thought until I read Joan Crawford’s remarks in the morning papers.

I haven’t saved the clippings, but I have sort of remembered what she said. She said that Marilyn Monroe’s vulgar performance at the Academy affair was a disgrace to all of Hollywood. The vulgarity, she said, consisted of my wearing a dress too tight for me and wriggling my rear when I walked up holding one of the holy Oscars in my hand.

I was so surprised I could hardly believe what I was reading. I called up some friends who had seen me at the ceremony and asked them if it were true. They laughed. It wasn’t true, they said. They advised me to forgive a lady who had once been young and seductive herself.

I have written out this accurate account of one of my “feuds” because it is typical. The feuds are all started by someone whom I have mysteriously offended—always a woman.

The truth is my tight dress and my wiggling were all in Miss Crawford’s mind. She obviously had been reading too much about me.

Or maybe she was just annoyed because I had never brought her a list of my wardrobe.

Success came to me in a rush. It surprised my employers much more than it did me. Even when I had played only bit parts in a few films, all the movie magazines and newspapers started printing my picture and giving me write-ups. I used to tell lies in my interviews—chiefly about my mother and father. I’d say she was dead—and he was somewhere in Europe. I lied because I was ashamed to have the world know my mother was in a mental institution—and that I had been born “out of wedlock” and never heard my illegal father’s voice.

I finally straightened these lies out, and I was surprised at the way the magazines and newspapers treated my “new confessions.” They were kind and none of them picked on me.

Just as I was beginning to go over with the public in a big way, I got word that my “nude calendar” was going to be put on the market as a Marilyn Monroe novelty. I thought this would push me into the cold again. A writer I met laughed at my tears.

“The nude calendar is going to put you over with the biggest bang the town has heard in years,” he said. “The same thing happened in the 20s to a girl who was on the verge of movie fame. She couldn’t quite seem to excite the movie-queen-makers of the studios. She was called unphotogenic and ‘good for a small part but definitely not star material.’ ”

“Like me,” I said.

“Yes,” the writer said. “Then one day a studio official giving a party got hold of a two-reel film in which the girl had performed. The film was intended for rental to stag parties. In the picture this young girl danced entirely in the nude. The dance was also vulgar and suggestive. As a result every movie producer or director who saw the stag film became haunted with the nude performer. They vied for her services as if she were the only female on tap, and the only full set of secondary female characteristics in Hollywood. She became famous in a few months and is still famous today [and one of my worst detractors].”

It turned out very much like that for me, too. Everybody in the studio wanted me as a star in his movie. I finally went into Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , and after that, How to Marry a Millionaire . I liked doing these pictures. I liked the fact that I was important in making them a great financial success and that my studio cleaned up a fortune, despite that its chief had considered me unphotogenic. I liked the fact that the movie salesmen who came to Hollywood for a big studio sales rally whistled loudest and longest when I entered their midst.

I liked the raise I finally received to twelve hundred a week. Even after all the deductions were taken from my salary it remained more money a week than I had once been able to make in six months. I had clothes, fame, money, a future, all the publicity I could dream of. I even had a few friends. And there was always a romance in the air. But instead of being happy over all these fairytale things that had happened to me I grew depressed and finally desperate. My life suddenly seemed as wrong and unbearable to me as it had in the days of my early despairs.

I have many bad social habits. People are always lecturing me about them. I am invariably late for appointments—sometimes as much as two hours. I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong—and too pleasing.

When I have to be somewhere for dinner at eight o’clock, I will lie in the bathtub for an hour or longer. Eight o’clock will come and go and I still remain in the tub. I keep pouring perfumes into the water and letting the water run out and refilling the tub with fresh water. I forget about eight o’clock and my dinner date. I keep thinking and feeling far away.

Sometimes I know the truth of what I’m doing. It isn’t Marilyn Monroe in the tub but Norma Jean. I’m giving Norma Jean a treat. She used to have to bathe in water used by six or eight other people. Now she can bathe in water as clean and transparent as a pane of glass. And it seems that Norma can’t get enough of fresh bath water that smells of real perfume.

There’s another thing that helps to make me “late.” After I get out of the tub I spend a long time rubbing creams into my skin. I love to do this. Sometimes another hour will pass, happily.

When I finally start putting my clothes on I move as slowly as I can. I begin to feel a little guilty because there seems to be an impulse in me to be as late as possible for my dinner date. It makes something in me happy—to be late.

People are waiting for me. People are eager to see me. I’m wanted. And I remember the years I was unwanted. All the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the little servant girl, Norma Jean—not even her mother.

I feel a queer satisfaction in punishing the people who are wanting me now. But it’s not them I’m really punishing. It’s the long ago people who didn’t want Norma Jean.