Marilyn Monroe: My Story

“Why don’t you?” I asked.

“Because he wants me to work on his farm,” he said. “He’s got a farm in Ohio. I said to him, nothing doing. I’m not going to be a lousy farmer and work all my life for nothing like you. We had a fight, and I lit out. I was on the bum a while and couldn’t connect with a job. Then I run into this outfit with the fake stars. They bought me a couple drinks, and I agreed to go in with them. It’s easy money.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he stopped walking.

“Can you stand here awhile?” he said. “I want to ask you something.”

I stood in front of a grocery store. He smiled at me for the first time.

“What I want to ask you,” he said, “is if you’ll marry me.”

I didn’t answer him.

“I mean it,” he got excited. “If you’ll marry me, I’ll go back to the farm with you. And I’ll be a farmer. It wouldn’t be so bad. We could have fun. There’s a town twenty miles away. What do you say?”

“You don’t even know who I am or what I am,” I said.

“I like your looks,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of girls. There’s something about you I like. It’s different.”

“You shouldn’t ask a strange girl to marry you,” I said. “You’re liable to get into trouble.”

“What trouble?” he asked.

“What if she were somebody no good, some criminal or something?” I said.

He looked at me for a while and then answered.

“You’re no criminal or ‘something.’ I’m willing to take a chance. I got enough money for train fare back to the farm. Come on, what do you say—will you marry me?”

I shook my head because I could hardly talk. My heart hurt me. There was something so lonely about this young man who had been a soldier and who was selling fake tin stars that I wanted to cry.

I squeezed his arm and said, “I can’t marry you,” and walked away quickly. He didn’t follow me.

When I looked back he had taken the cover off his box of tin stars and was moving toward a crowd near a street corner.

You sit alone. It’s night outside. Automobiles roll down Sunset Boulevard like an endless string of beetles. Their rubber tires make a purring high-class noise. You’re hungry, and you say, “It’s good for my waistline not to eat. There’s nothing finer than a washboard belly.”

And you say your speech lesson out loud:

“Ariadne arose from her couch in the snows in the Akrakaronian mountains.” Followed by “Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.”

The lessons are a dollar apiece. For a dollar you could buy a pair of stockings and a hamburger sandwich. But stockings and a hamburger will never make you an actress. Speech lessons may. So with bare legs and empty stomach you hit the consonants of “Hail to thee, blithe spirit.”

I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, “There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.”

You don’t have to know anything to dream hard. I knew nothing about acting. I had never read a book about it, or tried to do it, or discussed it with anyone. I was ashamed to tell the few people I knew of what I was dreaming. I said I was hoping to make a living as a model. I called on all the model agencies and found a job now and then.

But there was this secret in me—acting. It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said “This Way Out.”

Acting was something golden and beautiful. It was like the bright colors Norma Jean used to see in her daydreams. It wasn’t an art. It was like a game you played that enabled you to step out of the dull world you knew into worlds so bright they made your heart leap just to think of them.

When I was eight I used to look out of the orphan asylum window at night and see a big lighted-up sign that read “R.K.O. Radio Pictures.” I hated the sign. It reminded me of the smell of glue. My mother had once taken me to the studio where she worked. The smell of the wet film she cut and spliced had stuck in my nose.

That was Norma Jean’s nose. Norma Dougherty, the aspiring actress, had no such feelings toward studio signs. To her they were the beacons of a Promised Land—the land of Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Haviland, Gene Tierney, Jennifer Jones.

That’s the way it was when I sat alone in my Hollywood room. I went to sleep hungry and woke up hungry. And I thought all actors and actresses were geniuses sitting on the front porch of Paradise—the movies.

I’ve never read anything about the Hollywood I knew in those first years. No hint of it is ever in the movie fan magazines. If there are any books on the subject, I must have skipped them, along with the few million other books I haven’t read.

The Hollywood I knew was the Hollywood of failure. Nearly everybody I met suffered from malnutrition or suicide impulses. It was like the line in the poem, “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” Fame, fame everywhere but not a hello for us.

We ate at drugstore counters. We sat in waiting rooms. We were the prettiest tribe of panhandlers that ever overran a town. And there were so many of us! Beauty contest winners, flashy college girls, home grown sirens from every state in the union. From cities and farms. From factories, vaudeville circuits, dramatic schools, and one from an orphan asylum.

And around us were the wolves. Not the big wolves inside the studio gates, but the little ones—talent agents without offices, press agents without clients, contact men without contacts, and managers. The drugstores and cheap cafés were full of managers ready to put you over if you enrolled under their banner. Their banner was usually a bed sheet.

I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes—an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.

Among the phonies and failures were also a set of has-beens. These were mostly actors and actresses who had been dropped by the movies—nobody knew why, least of all themselves. They had played “big parts.” They had scrapbooks full of “stills” and write-ups. And they were full of anecdotes about the big bosses with the magic names who ran the studios—Goldwyn, Zanuck, Mayer, Selznick, Schenck, Warner, Cohn. They had rubbed shoulders with them and exchanged conversations with them. Sitting in the cheap café nursing a glass of beer for an hour, they talked about the great ones, calling them by their first names. “Sam said to me,” and “I told L.B.,” and “I’ll never forget Darryl’s excitement when he saw the rushes.”

When I remember this desperate, lie-telling, dime-hunting Hollywood I knew only a few years ago I get a little homesick. It was a more human place than the paradise I dreamed of and found. The people in it, the phonies and failures, were more colorful than the great men and successful artists I was to know soon.

Even the crooks who threw me curves and set traps for me seem pleasant, mellow characters. There was Harry, the photographer, who kept photographing me when he had enough money to buy plates for his view camera.