J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“My father and his friend Ray Guthrie lived together at the time he was dating Gladys,” Gifford Jr. continues. “I once called Ray and asked him about this time. He said, ‘Yeah, I remember Gladys. She used to come around and cook breakfast for us and we’d go out and do this and that, just have fun, nothing serious.’ I asked, ‘Well did Dad ever say anything to you about fathering a child by her?’ He just laughed and said, ‘No, but if he had, he sure would have mentioned it.’

“My father’s DNA is on record at Riverside Hospital,” he concludes. “If Marilyn Monroe’s DNA is on record at one of the hospitals she was ever in, I challenge someone to do a test and compare them, and you’ll find that Charles Stanley Gifford is not her father—and I am not her half brother.”

Early Films

T he films featuring Marilyn Monroe in 1950 and 1951 were not exactly memorable. As Young as You Feel found her back at 20th Century-Fox, and despite her sixth-place billing and her prominent display on the posters and lobby cards, she had but two brief scenes as Harriet, a secretary. Then there was Love Nest , a post–World War II sex comedy without the sex, starring June Haver and William Lundigan. Marilyn’s role was described in a review as “an extended cameo,” the highlight being a scene in which she emerges from a shower, draped in a towel. There was also Let’s Make It Legal , with things only slightly better for Marilyn as regards her screen time, which is mostly spent in a bathing suit. Claudette Colbert and Macdonald Carey star in this romantic comedy “that feels overstretched even at an hour and a quarter,” in one critic’s appraisal.

In March 1951, the deal Johnny Hyde had been working on for Marilyn to re-sign with Fox was finally finished, without him. The William Morris Agency, Johnny’s firm, wasn’t interested in Marilyn after his death, so she ended up with the Famous Artists Agency, where she would be managed for the next several years by a man named Hugh French. The Fox deal was for forty weeks and $500 a week whether she worked or not—and she couldn’t work for anyone else either, unless the company loaned her out. At the end of each year, the studio could decide not to renew, and if so, she would be on her own once again. However, Fox could also renew at the end of the term, and if it did she would receive $750 a week for the second year, $1,250 for the third, $1,500 for the fourth, $2,000 for the fifth, $2,500 for the sixth, and $3,500 for the seventh, if she lasted that long. It’s interesting that she would now be working for Darryl Zanuck again, a man who clearly had no love for her. He only signed her because Joe Schenck, Johnny Hyde, and so many others kept pressuring him about it. Natasha Lytess also went with Marilyn as part of the deal, and would be getting $750 a week to coach Marilyn—$500 from Fox and $250 from Marilyn. So Marilyn was paying Natasha 50 percent of what Fox paid her that first year, which certainly showed how much value she placed on her work with the acting teacher. Natasha was making quite a bit more money that first year than Marilyn herself.

Another of her early films was Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (made in 1951, though released in 1952), adapted for the screen from an unsuccessful Broadway play by Clifford Odets, who, with the play’s director, Lee Strasberg, and others, had founded the controversial, left-leaning Group Theatre in the 1930s. The play starred Tallulah Bankhead as Mae Doyle, a part assumed by Barbara Stanwyck in the film. Despite her prominent billing, Marilyn’s role was minor. Still, she received excellent notices, among them these words of praise by Alton Cook in the New York World-Telegram and Sun : “The girl has a refreshing exuberance, an abundance of girlish high spirits. She is a forceful actress, too.… She has definitely stamped herself as a gifted new star.… Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” If Fox’s loaning out of its contract player to RKO was meant to test the waters as to her box-office potential, as has been speculated, the studio got its answer. Thus reassured, Fox set about finding scripts to showcase her obvious charms, pairing her with more established leading men.

Jasper Dies

B y the fall of 1951, Marilyn Monroe had moved out of Natasha Lytess’s apartment and begun sharing a home with Shelley Winters in Hollywood. There were no hard feelings, apparently, since the three women remained social together after Marilyn moved in with Shelley. That said, she would have a lot more fun with the thrill-seeking Winters than she ever did with the often maudlin Natasha Lytess. Also, at the suggestion of one of her intimates, Elia Kazan, Marilyn would begin taking additional acting classes with renowned drama teacher Michael Chekhov, known for his acting technique called “The Method.” She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing more than to challenge herself with more complex parts—and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature. He agreed. She had a lot to give, she just needed to sharpen her skills. (It’s not known how Natasha Lytess felt about Marilyn’s second acting teacher.) Kazan also suggested that Marilyn take more classes at UCLA, and she did. She enrolled there for a course in “Backgrounds of Literature,” described as “Historical, social and cultural aspects of various periods with an introduction to the literature, itself.” Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it. This time, though, she caused quite a sensation on campus, unlike her previous experience there when she wasn’t as well known. She would have much preferred to blend in with the other students, but how could she?

At this same time, Marilyn received a telephone call from her half sister Berniece. Berniece’s father, Jasper—who had been married to Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, and who had absconded with her children so many years ago—had died. Even though Marilyn never met him, she did have some knowledge of him. When, as Norma Jeane, she had become old enough to start asking questions about her father, Gladys had told her that he had died in an automobile accident. (Marilyn would later say that she never really believed it. Once, she said, when she pushed the issue, Gladys “went into the bedroom and locked herself in.”) Gladys had kept a photo of Edward Mortenson—Jasper—on her wall, seen by Norma Jeane on the few occasions she would visit. When the young girl finally inquired as to the identity of the man in the picture, Gladys lied and said that he was her father. Marilyn then fell completely under his spell, she would later say, even if he was just a man in a photograph. “It felt so good to have a father, to be able to look at his picture and know I belonged to him,” she later recalled. “And what a wonderful photograph it was. He wore a slouch hat a little gaily on the side. There was a lively smile in his eyes, and he had a thin mustache like Clark Gable. I felt very warm toward the picture.” In fact, Marilyn recalled that looking at that photo of her father was “my first happy time.” She said she spent many nights dreaming of him and fantasizing about the kind of man he might have been if only he’d been in her life.

Now the man Marilyn had spun so many fantasies around was gone. Jasper was the only parent Berniece had ever known. The most Marilyn could do was feel sorry for Berniece’s loss and stash her conflicted feelings about Jasper in her heart—along with all of the other ambivalent feelings she had about her parents.