To Aristophanes & Back

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Sin, sin, sin. Morning and night, that was all they talked about in the little frame house in the California poor-town where Norma Jeane Baker lived in the early years of the Depression. "You're wicked, Norma Jeane," the old woman used to shrill at the little girl. "You better be careful, or you know where you'll go." Norma Jeane was careful, especially not to talk back. If she did, she got whaled with a razor strop and told that a homeless girl should be more grateful to folks who had put a roof above her head. One night, when the child went to sleep in her cot, she had a strangely exhilarating and frightening dream: "I dreamed that I was standing up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church, and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone."

The point of the story is that the little girl grew up to be a movie star named Marilyn Monroe, and the dream came true on such a preposterous scale that her new wide world has fallen at her feet. In Hollywood's pagan pantheon, Marilyn Monroe is the Goddess of Love. Furthermore, she has shown signs of becoming a good actress, and many a once-skeptical professional now thinks she may become an outstanding one.

In any case, Marilyn Monroe's hip-flipping, lip-twitching, frolicsomely sensual figure is the latest curve on the path of erotic progress that has led Hollywood from the slithering vamp to the good-natured tramp. Her physical proportions (37-23-37) have become a vital statistic, and the poor little waif has become a big business; her last five pictures have grossed more than $50 million. Moreover, there is solid evidence that she knows how to run her business.

As many as 5,000 letters a week pour in from Marilyn's fans, and they include at least a dozen proposals of marriage. In

Turkey a young man went so daft while watching Marilyn wiggle through How to Marry a Millionaire that he slashed his wrists. The Communists have angrily denounced her as a capitalist trick to make the U.S. masses forget how miserable they really are. In Moji, Japan, her notorious nude photograph was hung in the municipal assembly building in an effort "to rejuvenate the assemblymen." In the radiation control laboratory of the world's first atomic submarine a picture of Marilyn occupies a prominent place in the Table of Elements. She is the subject of more unprintable stories than anybody since the farmer's daughter.

Figure of Fantasy. Actress Monroe stands 5 ft. 5 1/2 in. in her stocking feet (5 ft. 9 in. in the stiletto heels her roles require), and she is a little leaner (118 Ibs.) than she looks on the screen. In a sweater, as everybody can see, she is a standout; "I defy gravity," says Marilyn. In skintight toreador pants, she manages to make the world's most famous come-on out of a simple walkaway, and Marilyn's face, by popular standards, is as spectacular as her figure.

Offscreen as on, the face looks a little too beautiful to be true, like the kind of adolescent daydream served up in the comic strips. The cut of the face is Betty Boop, but the coloring and expression are Daisy Mae. The eyes are large and grey, and lend the features a look of baby-doll innocence. The innocence is in the voice, too, which is high and excited, like a little girl's.

She bears, in fact, a sharp resemblance to the airbrush Aphrodite known in the '30s as the Petty Girl. And like the Petty Girl, the Monroe is for the millions a figure of fantasy rather than of flesh. She offers the tease without the squeeze, attraction without satisfaction, frisk without risk.

Who Cares about Money? Last week, after an absence of more than a year, Marilyn was back at work. Early in 1955 she had walked out on Hollywood. "I want some respect," she huffed at the world in general, and off she flounced to New York. Her studio bosses hastily offered her more money. "I don't care about money," she said. "I want better parts and better directors. I want to be an actress."

Hollywood snickered. "Act?" sneered one of Marilyn's directors. "That blonde can't act her way out of a Whirlpool bra." Cocktail parties were convulsed with the news that Marilyn was holed up in Manhattan with the entire Modern Library, and had sworn she would not unlock the door until she was cultured. The rumors began to get wilder. Marilyn had been admitted to the Actors Studio, and was studying the deep-dish Stanislavsky Method. She wanted to play Grushenka in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

She had become the darling of the theater's intellectuals. ("My only regret," wagged one of them, "is that I have but one library to give to Marilyn Monroe.")

Dumb Blonde? The rumors stopped abruptly. Marilyn had taken on a business partner named Milton Greene, a 34-year-old photographer who wears black silk shirts and looks something like an adolescent George Raft. Together they announced the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions, with Marilyn as president. Her studio decided it was time to holler uncle. In return for Marilyn's services in four pictures to be made in the next seven years, 20th Century-Fox agreed to pay her $400,000--plus what amounted, when all the legal ribbons were untied, to a colossal bonus. And Marilyn won the right to approve her directors.

Was she only a dumb blonde? When Actress Monroe announced that her first independent production, The Sleeping Prince, would be made with Sir Laurence Olivier as her co-star and director, she began to look suspiciously like a shrewd business woman. "Monroe and Olivier," beamed Director Joshua Logan, "that's the best combination since black and white."

Last month, when Marilyn flew back to Hollywood to make a movie version of William Inge's Bus Stop with a Monroe approved director (Joshua Logan) Hollywood turned out to meet her as few women have been met. Hundreds of news men and photographers moiled for vantage as she stepped off the plane, and a crowd churned about her for more than two hours before she could take evasive Cadillaction. But Hollywood was not yet prepared to admit that she knew anything about acting. The part she was playing in Bus Stop, the argument ran, was the same part she had always played: the dippy chippie. And in the studio commissary there was a good deal of low voiced derision about "the Bernhardt in a Bikini."

A Natural. Yet on location in Sun Valley, Idaho, Marilyn Monroe managed to surprise the hard-bitten crew with the fire and sincerity of her feeling in a scene where she fights for her lover. And back on the set in Hollywood, she cut loose in some glancing little scenes of character play with a kind of shimmering intensity nobody on the lot had ever seen in her before. Director Logan was amazed. "It just wells up from some deep place," he said wonderingly. "She's a natural."

From Manhattan came a chorus of as sent. Director Elia Kazan declared that "Marilyn's sensitivity is extreme." Said Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio: "She has a phenomenal degree of responsiveness [and] the greatest sensitivity." Playwright Arthur Miller says Marilyn "has a terrific instinct for the basic reality of a character or a situation. She gets to the core."

Is this "The Girl Most Likely to Thaw Out Alaska," the notorious nude in the most popular photograph ever taken? The story of Actress Monroe's life is not the maudlin tale that Hollywood loves to tell about how a star is born. It more resembles the plot of a social novel by Charles Dickens. "This girl," says one of Marilyn's friends, "has had it."

Hell's Fire. Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles General Hospital, was an illegitimate child. Her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, was a pretty redhead in her middle 20s who had two young children. Norma Jeane's father was a man with a fair job in the movie business. One day while Gladys was carrying Norma Jeane she came home from her job as a film cutter to find, instead of her husband and children, a note: "I have taken the children, and you will never see them again." On top of that, her lover declined to take the consequences. Gladys held out until her child was born. Then she suffered a serious nervous breakdown--not without precedent in the family. Both her parents, Norma Jeane's grandparents, died in mental institutions.

When Norma Jeane was twelve days old, she was put to board (for $25 a month) with a family of religious zealots who lived in a sort of "semirural semi-slum" on the outskirts of Los Angeles. She was a normal baby, bright and happy, but when she was about two years old she suffered a severe shock, which she insists she can remember. A demented neighbor made a deliberate attempt to smother her with a pillow, and almost succeeded before she was dragged away.

As soon as Norma Jeane could understand what was meant, she was forced by the woman of the house to promise that she would never drink or smoke or swear. At every childish annoyance, she was told that she was headed straight for hell; on every possible occasion, she was made to say her prayers, and on every Sunday morning, noon and night, and sometimes once or twice in the middle of the week, the little girl was marched away to church. At home she had to scrub the floors before she was five years old, and do the family dishes.

"A Friend of the Family." Playacting, she remembers, was frowned on in that house. When Norma Jeane danced and sang and acted out her childish fantasies, she was sternly informed that such things were evil. She learned to hide in the woodshed when she wanted to pretend "a life more interesting than the one I had." But among her memories of this period is the recollection that at the age of six, she was raped by a grown man--"a friend," she recalls, "of the family."

Her feelings of guilt began to be obsessive. She began to hear a noise in her head at night--and she began to brood about killing herself. The family noticed the change in her, and the whispers went around: "We have to watch her very carefully. It's in the family, you know." Norma Jeane knew what they were saying, and sank deeper into her troubles.

Then there was relief; she was sent to live with another family. But the change in atmospheric pressure was so sudden that she got the moral bends. Everybody in the house was a movie extra, and the first day Norma Jeane was there they gave her whisky bottles to play with, taught her a card game and put her up to a hula dance. "They drank, they smoked, they swore," says Marilyn. "It used to keep me busy praying for them all."

When Norma Jeane was about eight years old, her mother collapsed for the second time and was taken away to a state hospital, where she was kept until her daughter could afford the private care she has today. "I was sorry she was sick," says Marilyn. "But we never had any kind of relationship. I didn't see her very often. To me she was just the woman with the red hair."

The Stutter. With nobody to pay her board, Norma Jeane was sent to an orphanage. "I remember," she says, "when I got out of the car, and my feet absolutely couldn't move on the sidewalk. I saw a big black sign with bright gold lettering. I thought it said 'Orphan.' I never could spell very well. I know I cried. They had to drag me in by force. I tried to tell them I wasn't an orphan." Soon after that Norma Jeane began to stutter.

She hated the orphanage. As one of the older children, Norma Jeane was assigned to wash the dishes: 100 plates, 100 cups, 100 knives, forks, spoons. "I did it three times a day, seven days a week," says Marilyn. "But it wasn't so bad. It was worse to scrub out the toilets." As payment for their work, most of the children got 5-c- a month. Since everybody had to put a penny in the plate on Sunday, that left each child with 1-c- a month to spend. With her penny, Norma Jeane usually bought a ribbon for her hair.

The Blue Sweater. At 11, Norma Jeane went to live with her new guardian, a friend of her mother's who could not always afford to keep her. In the next five years the child was batted back and forth from family to family. In all, she lived with twelve families, all poor. Once she was "sent back" because she made the lady nervous. Once she was happy with a goodhearted woman named Ana Lower. Once she lived in a drought area with a family of seven people; they all bathed once a week in the same tub of water, and the "orphan girl" was always the last one in the tub. There was always the dry bread, the army cot by the water heater, the monthly visit from the county social worker who inspected the soles of her shoes and patted the top of her head and went away. And there were still the noises in her head and the nameless feelings of guilt.

"How did I get through it?" Marilyn wonders today. "Or maybe it wasn't really so bad? Maybe I just took it all too hard?" For consolation, she went to the movies whenever she had a dime.

One day, when Norma Jeane was twelve and getting sick and tired of her "county dresses" and the boys who called her "Norma Jeane the Human Bean," she borrowed a blue sweater from a girl friend. "When I walked into the class room," she says, "the boys suddenly began screaming and groaning and throwing themselves on the floor." In the schoolyard at lunchtime the swains stood around her three deep, and every afternoon after that there were a dozen bikes stacked along the curb outside her house. The neighbors were soon in a snit about "that little bitch." Norma Jeane was in a daze. "For the first time in my life people paid attention to me," she says. "For the first time I had friends. I prayed that they wouldn't go away."

She did everything she could to keep them. She smeared on the lipstick with a will, and soon discovered mascara. "The neighbors called me cheap," she says, "but I knew I really wasn't." Her stutter began to disappear. She wrote verse. She skipped the last half of the eighth grade. "I looked back on the whole mess around that time," Marilyn recalls. "And something came up inside me and I said to myself. 'Somebody's got to come out of this whole!' ':

Laying on Paint. Life did not seem to agree. When Norma Jeane was scarcely 16 years old, she was urged by her guardian into a marriage with a man she did not love. The groom was 21 years old, an aircraft worker named Jim Dougherty who is now a Los Angeles cop. They lived with his family for awhile, and then, she recalls, "in a little fold-up-bed place." In her despair, Norma Jeane made her first attempt--"not a very serious one"--at suicide. In 1943, after almost a year of such goings-on, Jim joined the Merchant Marine, and Norma Jeane went to work in a defense plant as a paint sprayer. That was that, in effect, though they were not divorced until 1946.

Norma Jeane was trained for nothing except laying on paint; her education was so poor that she could not even fake a cultural conversation. In public she was smothered by feelings of inferiority. In private she was swept by panics, anxieties and hallucinations. And yet, curiously, life in its deepest expressions was on Norma Jeane's side--perhaps had always been on her side. The sensitivity which made her feel so deeply the shocks of her childhood was countered by a set of instincts as solid as an anvil. She took blows that would have smashed many people, and she cracked a little, but she did not fall apart. And always there was that traffic-jamming, production-stopping hunk of woman that the scared little girl inhabited.

High Smile. A photographer was the first to appreciate her professional possibilities. He took some publicity stills of Norma Jeane at the defense plant, and dragged her over to see Miss Emmeline Snively at the Blue Book School of Charm and Modeling in Hollywood. Miss Snively bleached Norma Jeane's hair, taught her to lower her voice and smile ("She smiled high, and that made wrinkles"), and "tried to correct that awful walk, but I couldn't --she had double-jointed knees."

By the spring of 1947, Norma Jeane was the busiest model in Hollywood. In one month she adorned the covers of five magazines. The film studios cocked an eye. One day Norma Jeane got a call from two of them: Starmaker Howard Hughes and 2Oth Century-Fox. She went to Fox first. Cried Casting Director Ben Lyon: "It's Jean Harlow all over again!" He signed her for $125 a week. He slapped a new label on her (Monroe was the maiden name of Norma Jeane's mother, and Marilyn began with an M too), and put her to work on her first part, in Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay. Marilyn's part: "Hello." It was cut from the finished film. Nevertheless, Marilyn began to acquire some of a celebrity's mannerisms. She roared through the studio gate in her battered jalopy as though it were a Hispano-Suiza, and she was seldom less than an hour late.

Others Are in a Hurry. Marilyn's lateness has since become legendary. She once missed a plane because she stopped at the boarding gate to smear a little more lipstick on. Already half an hour late for a mass reception in her honor, she ducked into a ladies' room and was not seen again for 45 minutes. She was even two hours late for her own appendectomy. She went to a psychoanalyst about her lateness; a friend says it was no good because she always walked in when the hour was almost over.

The amazing thing is that nobody ever really seems to mind. When Marilyn turns on the charm, the affronted waiter forgets his waiting. She once explained the whole situation to a friend. "It's not really me that's late. It's the others who are in such a hurry." The truth is that Marilyn has been so terrified of failure during most of her life that she has often had to screw up her courage for the slightest encounter with the world. Before the least important interview she will put on her makeup five or six times before she is satisfied with her looks. "And then, too," a friend points out, "when she is late she feels guilty, and since she has always felt guilty she feels comfortable that way. It is easier for Marilyn to take guilt than responsibility."

Marilyn was fired by Fox, and a friend got her a contract at Columbia, where she was called to the office of an executive. He asked her to visit his yacht. She declined. She was fired a few days later. No work for months, and money ran low. The finance company repossessed her car; she was four weeks behind in her rent. She called up Photographer Tom Kelley, who had often asked her to pose in the nude, and said she would. She got $50 for the job. He sold two pictures to two calendar companies for $900; the John Baumgarth Co., which produced the more popular calendar, sold 6,000,000 copies of it, most of them after Marilyn became famous. The company cleared around $750,000 on the deal.

Who's That Blonde? A friend got her the big break: a chance to play the shyster's house pet in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. In this tidbit part, she was an instant sensation. Letters came in by the sackful. All asked the same question: "Who's that blonde?" Fox grabbed her back for $500 a week, raised her to $750 a week. She was on her way to the top--when suddenly the bottom fell out.

A columnist printed the news that the girl on the nude calendar was Marilyn, and the scandal broke full about her ears.

She was terrified, but she decided to tell the truth: "I needed the money." The press was delighted--especially when, in reply to the clucking of a newshen ("You mean you didn't have anything on?"), Marilyn delivered herself of a famous Monroeism: "Oh yes, I had the radio on."

It was quite a victory, and she had won it by being herself. Marilyn began to think that maybe that was the way the public wanted her to be. Slowly she began to trust her own ear, and to play by it. She began to show up at public gatherings in dresses into which she had obviously been sewed, and under which there was just as obviously nothing at all. She made a series of not-so-Dumb-Dora remarks in public that soon added up to a widely quoted Monroe Doctrine of life and love. (Monroe on sex: "Sex is a part of nature. I'll go along with nature." On men: "We have a mutual appreciation of being male and female." On her walk: "I learned to walk as a baby, and 'I haven't had a lesson since.")

Pink Champagne. Marilyn's publicity clippings began to arrive in bales. Her next three pictures (Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire) were box-office blockbusters. At the end of 1953, according to the trade press, she had made more money for her studio than any other actress in Hollywood. She also won the Photoplay Award as the year's most popular actress.

This was pink champagne, and Marilyn loved it. But there was an emotional hangover. What she needed, Marilyn felt in a confused way, was not success so much as salvation. She developed a passion to put her life in order, and her vague longings to find a meaning in it took stronger direction. She had already enrolled in an extension course in literature at U.C.L.A. and had started a collection of classical records. Now she plowed deeper into her problem through psychoanalysis, got in touch with lettered people, e.g., Poetess Edith Sitwell, whenever she had the chance, began to read more serious books.

As a result of all the heavy thinking, Marilyn began to nag her studio for better parts, and to wonder if she really should not marry baseball's Joe DiMaggio, with whom she had been keeping company for more than a year. When Fox told her flatly that she could have Betty Grable parts or nothing, Marilyn walked out of Pink Tights. She and Joe were married in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1954. Laughing for the cameras, they took their trip to the Far East, where Japanese crowds smashed doors, mobbed cars and fell in fish ponds to get a look at the "Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Actress." When Marilyn sang and danced for the troops in Korea, she got a wilder reception than the news of peace in Seoul.

Back home, the DiMaggios sat under their expensive thatch in Beverly Hills night after night with almost nothing to say to each other. They had fights, and on Oct. 4, 1954, nine months after the wedding, they announced that they would be divorced.

Desperate Attempt. Marilyn took the failure of her marriage hard. As soon as she was through with The Seven Year Itch, she walked out on her contract, went to New York in "an absolute, desperate attempt," says a friend, "to find out what she was and what she wanted."

Almost at once Marilyn found friends in the theater--Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, the Strasbergs, Arthur Miller, Norman and Hedda Rosten, Maureen Stapleton. "For the first time," she says, "I felt accepted, not as a freak, but as myself." She showed a nice talent for painting (watercolors), and she read aloud from poems she could hardly understand. Friends sent her to the Actors Studio. After about six months of study and exercise, she finally worked up courage to do a 20-minute scene from Anna Christie before the other students, many of them practiced professionals. They praised her work in extravagant terms.

A Real Actress? All at once Marilyn could talk without any stutter at all. She could hardly stop talking. She was gay, and her wit ran free. She leaned less on her friends, stood more on her own feet. Her health was better. The rashes, the sweats, the psychosomatic colds came less often. The old fears were still there, but now there was a way to transform them. "I never dared to think about it," says Marilyn, "but now I want to be an artist. I want to be a real actress."

She probably can be. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Marilyn showed her talent for comedy. In Bits Stop she has a chance to show what she can do with the first part she has ever played that is any deeper than her makeup. In Sleeping Prince she will have to hold the screen against Sir Laurence Olivier, one of the most accomplished actors of the English-speaking world. Next winter, it was reported last week, Marilyn will tackle Aristophanes' Lysistrata on TV, and she is deadly determined that some day she will play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov.

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