(3 of 9)
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.