Read Online Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barbara Leaming
Ads: Link
dismissed.
These problems notwithstanding, Marilyn’s first starring role turned out to be not so bad after all. The consensus at the studio was that she was pretty enough, and that somehow all the frenzy on the set had fed into the unstable character Marilyn portrayed. Zanuck, pleased with Marilyn’s performance, decided to look around for another dramatic role for her. Meanwhile, she was given minor assignments in Edmund Goulding’s
We’re Not Married
, Henry Koster’s
O. Henry’s Full House
, and Howard Hawks’s
Monkey Business.
A chance for Marilyn to work with Hawks, one of Hollywood’s finest directors, was precisely the sort of thing Johnny would have welcomed. Hawks was convinced that “the girl,” as he called Marilyn, had enormous potential. He had been tremendously impressed with her in
The Asphalt Jungle.
More recently, Hawks had suggested to Zanuck that she’d been improperly cast in
Don’t Bother to Knock.
The significance of
Monkey Business
was not that it got Marilyn noticed, as the Huston and Mankiewicz films had done, but that it presented an opportunity for Hawks to figure out how Marilyn should be used. When he knew that, he’d have the formula that would enable Marilyn to become a star.
Soon after Marilyn began work with Hawks on February 26, 1952, she had an appendix attack. Hospitalized, she refused surgery lest Zanuck pull her out of the film. Marilyn was not about to permit anything, not even excruciating pain, to impede the momentum of her career. Her doctors agreed to freeze the appendix so that Marilyn could finish her assignment. No sooner had she returned to the set, however, than a fresh crisis threatened to derail her. She was summoned toZanuck’s office, where he and the studio publicity director, Harry Brand, confronted her with information they had received from a UP wire service reporter, Aline Mosby. According to Mosby, Marilyn had posed for a popular nude calendar that adorned the walls of gas stations and barber shops across America. Zanuck warned Marilyn that if the story broke, her career could be destroyed. Every Hollywood contract contained a morals clause which permitted the studio to fire an artist for offensive behavior. Zanuck personally had no objection to the calendar, but if there was a public outcry he would have to dismiss her.
Marilyn admitted to having posed for the calendar in 1949. Unfortunately, Johnny Hyde had been in Europe to attend Rita Hayworth’s wedding to Prince Aly Khan, so when Marilyn needed cash she did what she often did in such circumstances—she hired herself out as a model. On this particular occasion, she called up a cheesecake photographer named Tom Kelley, who had previously asked her to pose in the nude. She had refused at the time, but now she changed her mind. He gave her fifty dollars for the session.
The consensus among studio executives was that Marilyn should deny that she was the naked girl stretched out on rumpled red velvet. When she sought his advice afterward, Sidney Skolsky recommended the opposite. He urged Marilyn to be honest about what she had done and told her to give the story exclusively to Mosby, who, besides having tipped off the studio about the calendar, had written a warm account of Marilyn’s childhood a few months previously. Harry Brand, alone among Fox executives, supported Marilyn’s decision to tell the truth. As for Marilyn herself, not only was she brilliant with the press, but she knew how good she was. Better yet, she was capable of masking that confidence so that everything she said appeared to be utterly innocent and uncalculated.
“Oh, the calendar’s hanging in garages all over town,” Marilyn told Mosby over lunch. “Why deny it? You can get one anyplace. Besides, I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong. I was told I should deny I’d posed … but I’d rather be honest about it.”
When Mosby’s story appeared in newspapers on March 13, 1952, the overwhelmingly favorable
These problems notwithstanding, Marilyn’s first starring role turned out to be not so bad after all. The consensus at the studio was that she was pretty enough, and that somehow all the frenzy on the set had fed into the unstable character Marilyn portrayed. Zanuck, pleased with Marilyn’s performance, decided to look around for another dramatic role for her. Meanwhile, she was given minor assignments in Edmund Goulding’s
We’re Not Married
, Henry Koster’s
O. Henry’s Full House
, and Howard Hawks’s
Monkey Business.
A chance for Marilyn to work with Hawks, one of Hollywood’s finest directors, was precisely the sort of thing Johnny would have welcomed. Hawks was convinced that “the girl,” as he called Marilyn, had enormous potential. He had been tremendously impressed with her in
The Asphalt Jungle.
More recently, Hawks had suggested to Zanuck that she’d been improperly cast in
Don’t Bother to Knock.
The significance of
Monkey Business
was not that it got Marilyn noticed, as the Huston and Mankiewicz films had done, but that it presented an opportunity for Hawks to figure out how Marilyn should be used. When he knew that, he’d have the formula that would enable Marilyn to become a star.
Soon after Marilyn began work with Hawks on February 26, 1952, she had an appendix attack. Hospitalized, she refused surgery lest Zanuck pull her out of the film. Marilyn was not about to permit anything, not even excruciating pain, to impede the momentum of her career. Her doctors agreed to freeze the appendix so that Marilyn could finish her assignment. No sooner had she returned to the set, however, than a fresh crisis threatened to derail her. She was summoned toZanuck’s office, where he and the studio publicity director, Harry Brand, confronted her with information they had received from a UP wire service reporter, Aline Mosby. According to Mosby, Marilyn had posed for a popular nude calendar that adorned the walls of gas stations and barber shops across America. Zanuck warned Marilyn that if the story broke, her career could be destroyed. Every Hollywood contract contained a morals clause which permitted the studio to fire an artist for offensive behavior. Zanuck personally had no objection to the calendar, but if there was a public outcry he would have to dismiss her.
Marilyn admitted to having posed for the calendar in 1949. Unfortunately, Johnny Hyde had been in Europe to attend Rita Hayworth’s wedding to Prince Aly Khan, so when Marilyn needed cash she did what she often did in such circumstances—she hired herself out as a model. On this particular occasion, she called up a cheesecake photographer named Tom Kelley, who had previously asked her to pose in the nude. She had refused at the time, but now she changed her mind. He gave her fifty dollars for the session.
The consensus among studio executives was that Marilyn should deny that she was the naked girl stretched out on rumpled red velvet. When she sought his advice afterward, Sidney Skolsky recommended the opposite. He urged Marilyn to be honest about what she had done and told her to give the story exclusively to Mosby, who, besides having tipped off the studio about the calendar, had written a warm account of Marilyn’s childhood a few months previously. Harry Brand, alone among Fox executives, supported Marilyn’s decision to tell the truth. As for Marilyn herself, not only was she brilliant with the press, but she knew how good she was. Better yet, she was capable of masking that confidence so that everything she said appeared to be utterly innocent and uncalculated.
“Oh, the calendar’s hanging in garages all over town,” Marilyn told Mosby over lunch. “Why deny it? You can get one anyplace. Besides, I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong. I was told I should deny I’d posed … but I’d rather be honest about it.”
When Mosby’s story appeared in newspapers on March 13, 1952, the overwhelmingly favorable
Similar Books
