Page 15 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“MY MOTHER IS actually dead … as is my father.”

The newly minted Marilyn Monroe sighs and looks out the window, pausing her interview with Roy Craft. Twentieth Century-Fox has assigned the former Life magazine correspondent and RKO Pictures publicist to be Marilyn’s press agent.

“I was brought up in an orphanage, where I shared a room with twenty-six other girls. It was a terrible place. For birthdays, they brought out a wooden cake with one slice cut into it. One small piece of cake for the birthday boy or girl. I went to many, many foster homes. Too many to count.”

“That’s so sad,” replies the young man sitting opposite. He’s bent over his notepad, scribbling down every word.

“Isn’t it?” agrees Marilyn.

It was Grace’s idea to lie to Roy Craft.

Having dead parents evokes sympathy. Being the illegitimate child of a mother whose paranoid schizophrenia had her cycling in and out of institutions risks judgment, shame, and public humiliation—especially if a reporter were to track down Gladys at the hospital.

“So?” Craft is waiting, pen poised. “How did they die? Car crash? Drowning? Spanish flu?”

Marilyn panics behind her fixed half smile. She and Grace McKee had not settled on a cause of death, only that the deaths had occurred.

“Mmm, I find it too upsetting to talk about,” she mumbles, rubbing her left eye as if to hold back tears.

“Of course,” he nods.

“But my childhood was very poor. I used to stand in line outside Helms Bakery at the end of the day to buy bags of stale bread for 25 cents and I’d eat the bread, I’d dunk it in milk for dinner. Stale bread and milk. I had one blue dress, that was it …”

“One blue dress.” The young man is taking copious notes. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“I am all alone in this world.” Marilyn smiles again.

“So how were you discovered? How did you land your contract?”

“Oh, that’s such a good story!” She leans forward. “I was babysitting for a Fox executive, and he found me in his living room looking after his daughter. So, he didn’t really have to go far, not even to Schwab’s where they found Lana Turner.”

“Lana Turner wasn’t discovered in Schwab’s.” Craft looks up from his notepad. “That’s just one of those Hollywood myths.”

“Oh. But I like that story.” She pauses. “It’s just a shame for all those pretty girls sitting in Schwab’s right now, staring at the door, hoping for lightning to strike twice.”

“Well, that’s Hollywood for you!” The press officer laughs. “Full of lies.”

Marilyn laughs too. Little does Roy Craft know, as he is drafting his press release, that he is adding to the list of lies.

There was never a babysitting job with a Fox executive, and the fact that the Helms Bakery story was told to her by her foster sister Bebe doesn’t really matter.

It’s her story now. She tells it over and over to any reporter who will listen.

With each telling, she adds more detail: the line lengthens, the bread hardens, the milk sours.

I have a new name, Marilyn Monroe. I have to get born. And this time better than before.

Such is her determination to outrank the other half-dozen starlets newly contracted by the studio in September 1946 that every day Marilyn arrives at the Fox lot early.

Dance classes, acting classes, voice coaching: Marilyn attends every lesson offered.

She hangs out in the lighting department, dressed in her uniform of a tight sweater and snug-fitting pants, swinging her legs on the chair, asking endless questions.

She visits the editing rooms and sits in the hairdressing department.

She has nowhere else to go, no husband to cook for, no children to nurture, no family at all.

She has only the studio and its staff. Technicians become her closest friends.

“You’re desperate to absorb all you can, aren’t you?” asks Allan “Whitey” Snyder as he spins her around in the makeup chair.

They’ve been sitting together all afternoon while he tries different makeup looks on her.

He’s working on a film on the lot, but he’s already fond of the “orphan from nowheresville.” She makes him laugh and she’s smart, so between takes he paints her face—a light base, sharp pointed eyebrows to expand the forehead, and a pale eyeshadow and a black kohl flick on the eyes. Only the lipstick color varies.

“This is your ‘look,’” he says. “You shouldn’t change it.”

Marilyn looks at her newly made-up face in the mirror, her arched black brows and heavily lined eyes.

She knows that this city is full of boys and girls lying in bed, looking at the stars, hoping that one day they will be among them. But surely she’s dreamed bigger, hoped harder, and prayed longer than all of them.

“I do get a terrible case of the doldrums sometimes,” she declares to Snyder. “I do try and snap out of it.” She laughs. “When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you’re laughing again.”

“Well, I, for one, am thankful that it’s a Friday,” he replies.

Fridays . “They put the call list up on Fridays and that’s when you look down and you find your name and beside it, they’ve written—‘No call,’” she pouts.

“And I’ve had a ‘no call’ again today. I’ve had ‘no calls’ for months.

No auditions, no callbacks, no work. All I want to do is work, Whitey, work! Is it too much to ask?”

I know I’m a third-rate actress. When the lights and the camera face me, I feel myself to be clumsy, empty and uncultured.

I am a sullen orphan with a goose egg for a head!

I can actually feel my lack of talent. But my God, how I want to learn!

To change! To improve. I don’t want anything else.

Not men. Not money, not love, but to act!