(7 of 9)
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.")