Marilyn Monroe - My Story

The trouble was about something deeper. I wanted to be treated as a human being who had earned a few rights since her orphanage days.

When I had asked to see the script of a movie in which it was announced I was going to star, I was informed that Mr. Zanuck didn’t consider it necessary for me to see the script in advance. I would be given my part to memorize at the proper time.

The name of the movie was The Girl in Pink Tights . It was a remake of an old Betty Grable story.

The title made me nervous. I was working with all my might trying to become an actress. I felt that the studio might cash in on exhibiting me in pink tights in a crude movie, but that I wouldn’t.

I notified the studio that I couldn’t agree to play in Pink Tights until after I had read the script—and liked it. And I went to San Francisco where Joe lived.

The Studio’s first reply was to put me on suspension and take me off the payroll. I didn’t mind. Their next move was to take me off suspension and put me back on salary. I didn’t mind that either.

Then a copy of The Girl in Pink Tights script arrived. I read that and that I minded.

It was much worse even than I had been afraid it would be. Movie musicals usually had dull stories. This one was way below dullness. It was silly—even for a movie about the 1890s.

I had to play the character of a prim, angrily virtuous school teacher who decided to become a sort of hoochy-koochy dancer in a Bowery dive so as to earn enough money to put her fiancé through medical college. The fiancé is high up in society with a dowager ma, but they are shy on money. This dreary cliché-spouting bore in pink tights was the cheapest character I had ever read in a script.

What’s the use of being a star if you have to play something you’re ashamed of? When I thought of Joe or any of my friends seeing me on the screen as this rear-wiggling school teacher doing bumps and grinds in the great cause of medicine I blushed to my toes.

Pink Tights didn’t even get to marry the Society Man for whose sake she unveiled herself to wiggle in a Bowery Dive. She married instead the owner of the Dive—a man of rough appearance but with a heart of gold (or mush) underneath!

I sent back word to the Studio that I didn’t like the script and wouldn’t play in the movie.

I heard from different people that nobody in the Studio liked the script. Even Mr. Zanuck’s conviction that it was a masterpiece about humble but colorful people had been shaken somewhat by one of his star directors refusing to shoot it.

But that didn’t help my case any. Everybody in the world could despise the picture, including, finally, its audience, and I would still remain in the wrong. This was because of my standing in the eyes of the Front Office. In these eyes I was still a sort of freak performer who had made good against its better judgment.

I wasn’t angry but it made me sad. When the rest of the world was looking at someone called Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Zanuck, in whose hands my future rested, was able to see only Norma Jean—and treat me as Norma Jean had always been treated.

Joe and I had been talking about getting married for some months. We knew it wouldn’t be an easy marriage. On the other hand we couldn’t keep on going forever as a pair of Cross-country Lovers. It might begin to hurt both our careers.

The public doesn’t mind people living together without being married, providing they don’t overdo it. It would be very odd of the public if it did mind since, according to Dr. Kinsey in his report on such things, eighty per cent of all married women have had premarital real love experiences with their husbands.

After much talk Joe and I had decided that since we couldn’t give each other up, marriage was the only solution to our problem. But we had left time and place in the air.

One day Joe said to me:

“You’re having all this trouble with the Studio and not working so why don’t we get married now? I’ve got to go to Japan anyway on some baseball business, and we could make a honeymoon out of the trip.”

That’s the way Joe is, always cool and practical. When I get excited over some magazine giving me a big picture spread, he grins and sneers a little.

“Yes, but where’s the money?” he asks.

“It’s the publicity,” I yell back.

“Money is better,” he says in the quiet way men use when they think they have won an argument.

And so we were married and took off for Japan on our honeymoon.

That was something I had never planned on or dreamed about—becoming the wife of a great man. Anymore than Joe had ever thought of marrying a woman who seemed eighty per cent publicity.

The truth is that we were very much alike. My publicity, like Joe’s greatness, is something on the outside. It has nothing to do with what we actually are. What I seem to Joe I haven’t heard yet. He’s a slow talker. What Joe is to me is a man whose looks, and character, I love with all my heart.

My travels have always been of the same kind. No matter where I’ve gone or why I’ve gone there, it ends up that I never see anything. Becoming a movie star is living on a merry-go-round. When you travel you take the merry-go-round with you. You don’t see natives or new scenery. You see chiefly the same press agent, the same sort of interviewers, and the same picture layouts of yourself.

I thought Japan would be different because the Studio had wiped its hands of me. The Publicity Department had received instructions to spike all Monroe publicity. I was to be given the don’t-mention-her-name treatment.

Joe was very happy to hear this, but he didn’t stay happy long. From the minute the Studio washed its hands of me, my name started popping out of big front page headlines. Joe’s too.

Seeing your name in front page headlines as if you were some kind of a major accident or gun battle is always startling. No matter how often you see it you don’t get used to it. You keep thinking—“That’s about me. The whole country’s reading about me. Maybe the world is.”

And you remember things. All your hungry days and hysterical nights step up to the headlines and take a bow.

Japan turned out to be another country I never saw. An Army officer came up to our seat in the airplane as we were approaching Japan. He was General Christenberry. After introducing himself, he asked, “How would you like to entertain the soldiers in Korea?”

“I’d like to,” my husband answered, “but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” the General said. “My inquiry was directed at your wife.”

“She can do anything she wants,” said Joe. “It’s her honeymoon.”

He grinned at me and added, “Go ahead.”

Joe stayed in Tokyo, and I went to Korea. My first stop was in a hospital full of wounded soldiers. I sang some songs including one called, “Do It Again.”

The soldiers were wonderful. They cheered and applauded as if they were having a good time. Everybody loved everything I did except the officer in charge of my Korean tour. He took me aside and told me I would have to change my material.

“What material?” I asked.

“That song, ‘Do It Again,’ ” he said. “It’s too suggestive to sing to soldiers. You’ll have to do a classy song instead.”

“But ‘Do It Again’ is a classy song,” I told him. “It’s a George Gershwin song.”