Page 33 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
By design, Marilyn must be sewn into the dress.
To slim down, she undergoes two sessions of colonic irrigation.
Joe DiMaggio complains that the dress “looks as if it has been painted on” and walks out of the fitting, suddenly called “to San Francisco on family business,” Sid Skolsky explains in his column.
As Marilyn crosses the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel wearing the golden gown to accept Photoplay ’s New Star Award, she’s also subjected to a spontaneous critique.
“She looks vulgar,” hisses Joan Crawford, who’s currently filming the MGM musical drama Torch Song, about a tough, unhappy Broadway star.
Crawford’s jealous is the response that ripples through the audience. The gossip columnists play the moment for all it’s worth.
“With one little twist of her derrière,” one writes, “Marilyn stole the show. The assembled guests broke into wild applause. Two other screen stars, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, got only casual attention. After Marilyn every other girl appeared dull by contrast.”
Another likens the motion of her buttocks to “two puppies fighting under a silk sheet.”
William Travilla designs over thirty gowns for the stylish comedy How to Marry a Millionaire, which co-stars Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable as three models who rent a luxury Manhattan apartment in order to attract wealthy husbands.
Marilyn’s costumes, for once, are relatively demure.
“It was the first time that Marilyn was not self-consciously the sex symbol,” screenwriter Nunnally Johnson says.
“The character had a measure of modesty.”
Shooting on location in New York City and Idaho in March and April 1953, Fox spares no expense on the first romantic comedy ever to be filmed with the CinemaScope lens billed as “the new miracle medium.” Bacall, best known for her sultry noir performances with husband Humphrey Bogart, is returning to the screen after a three-year absence.
She’s been cast in her first comedic role, as the trio’s unofficial leader, Schatze Page.
Marilyn uses her gifts of physical comedy as the nearsighted Pola Debevoise, though the part she’d originally wanted was Loco Dempsey, which is played by Grable—whose hefty salary of $150,000 is three times what Bacall is earning, and in another stratosphere from Marilyn’s $750 a week rate.
For more than a decade, Betty Grable has been Fox’s top star—her legs famously insured by the studio for $1 million—but it’s clear that Marilyn is gaining on her popularity. Tensions are expected on set, but Grable deftly defuses them.
“Honey, I’ve had mine. Go get yours. It’s your turn now,” she tells her nervous co-star.
To United Press reporter Aline Mosby, Gable declares, “Marilyn’s the biggest thing that’s happened to Hollywood in years.
The movies were just sort of going along, and all of a sudden—zowie!
—there was Marilyn. She’s a shot in the arm for Hollywood! ”
The two develop a close friendship. Even Lauren Bacall, initially irritated by Marilyn’s constant lateness, eventually sets it aside. “I couldn’t dislike Marilyn. She had no meanness in her—no bitchery,” says Bacall.
She takes Marilyn under her wing and advises her not to let the studios push her around.
“I’m a little rebel too. And I know that when you stand up to them, the bastards back off.
” Marilyn in turn tells Bacall about how conflicted she feels between what she wants for her career versus for her home life.
“She came into my dressing room one day and said that what she really wanted was to be in San Francisco with Joe DiMaggio in some spaghetti joint,” Bacall says.
Marilyn asks a lot of questions about her co-stars’ marriages and children.
“She seemed envious of that aspect of my life—wistful—hoping to have it herself one day.”
Romanian-born Jean Negulesco, known for his deft touch with the genre, is directing Marilyn for the first time.
“When I started work with Marilyn, I realized she was one of the most atomic personalities ever to come out of Hollywood,” he tells the Los Angeles Times .
“But I was surprised to find how hard she worked and how much she wanted to give a good performance.”
Natasha Lytess takes her usual place on set, but during the shoot, she gives an interview deeply critical of Marilyn.
“She is not a natural actress. She has to learn to have a free voice and free body to act. Luckily Marilyn has a wonderful instinct for the right timing. I think she will eventually be a good actress.”
Lytess suggests retake after retake, annoying the other actors and infuriating Negulesco. If he once again hears “Well, that was all right, dear, but maybe we should do it again one more time,” he is leaving the film.
The director’s dislike for the drama coach nearly matches Joe DiMaggio’s. “Maybe I could get through to Marilyn if I didn’t have this broad to deal with,” DiMaggio tells a friend. “She’s going to ruin her, I’m telling you.”
Lytess likes DiMaggio even less. DiMaggio is “the punishment of God in your life,” she tells Marilyn.
Yet when Lytess is dismissed from the picture, Marilyn protests by complaining of bronchitis and is a no-show on set. What begins as a lone act of defiance quickly becomes a pattern.
When Marilyn doesn’t get her way, the studio doesn’t get her performance. If she does show up, she arrives late and deliberately forgets or botches her lines, until she gets what she wants. She is beginning to realize that the studio needs her more than she needs the studio.