It was around Christmas time, and I was worrying about where I would get money to buy a few Christmas presents with. It had been fun buying presents when I was on the studio payroll. I bought them chiefly for Aunt Grace or Aunt Anna.
When Aunt Grace was ill I would go shopping a whole day for her and buy a silk bed jacket, silk slippers, a fancy nightgown, and a bottle of perfume. I would put them all in one box and take it to her. Her happiness on seeing all the things in the box was worth a thousand times more than what they had cost.
This Christmas everything seemed extra gloomy. Not only had I flopped in my career, but there was a laziness in me that kept me from getting jobs. I preferred to lie around feeling sorry for myself and thinking how cruel and unfair the world was. As a result I didn’t have any money. Even to eat, let alone to spend on presents.
Then one day I received word from the studio that I had forty dollars coming to me. I hurried over and collected it. The cashier handed me a check for the money. I was so excited I left the studio forgetting to cash it.
When I got off the bus in Hollywood Boulevard to do some shopping I didn’t have a dime in my purse. I went into a drugstore and ate dinner, and then I offered to pay with the check. The manager refused to cash it, but he said he’d trust me if I’d give him my name and address. I did.
Then I went out and tried to cash the check in different places. Nobody would cash it.
I saw a policeman looking at me; so I went up to him.
“Pardon me, officer,” I said. “Could you help me please? I want to get a check cashed, and I don’t know where.”
He smiled and said, “Well, that is a serious predicament. Come along, I’ll see what I can do. What sort of a check is it?”
“It’s a payroll check,” I said, “from the 20th Century Fox studio.”
“Are you employed there?” the policeman asked.
“I’m not employed there any longer,” I said. “But they are still in business.”
The policeman took me into a store. He spoke to the manager who agreed to cash the check.
“So you’re an actress,” said the policeman.
“I used to be,” I said, “but, as I told you, I’m not working at the moment.”
The manager brought the check back and said, “Would you mind putting your name and address on the back of this?”
I did and noticed the policeman watching me write. I also looked at his face for the first time. He had dark hair and his eyes were close together.
After doing my shopping, I stopped in a doctor’s office. I had a cold, and I had not slept for several nights. The doctor gave me a sleeping pill.
“I don’t usually recommend sleeping pills,” he said, “but you’ve been having hysterics too long. A good sleep will not only be good for your cold but cheer you up.”
I went to bed early and took the pill. I’d been sleeping for a few hours when a noise woke me. I’d never heard this sort of noise before, but I knew what it was. Somebody was cutting the screen of the bedroom window.
I jumped out of bed and ran out of the house. I went around the side to look. A man was starting to climb into my bedroom window. I imitated a gruff male voice and called indignantly, “Hey, what are you doing there?”
The man pulled his head out of the window and looked toward me.
“Get away from here,” I shouted again in a gruff voice, “or I’ll call the police.”
The man started toward me. I turned and ran like sixty.
It was around midnight. I ran down the deserted suburban street. I was barefooted, and I was wearing the new style of half nightgown. It came just a little below the waist.
I arrived at a neighbor’s house and yelled. He came down with his wife behind him. She started yelling when she saw me. I explained about the man trying to break into my bedroom and asked the neighbor to go capture him.
The neighbor shook his head.
“The fellow probably has a gun,” he said. “Burglars usually carry them.” “He’s not a burglar,” I said. “He was after me.”
I telephoned the police and covered myself with a quilt. The police took an hour to arrive. I went back to the house with them. They found the cut screen and footprints and everything.
“Well, you scared him off,” the detective said. “You have nothing to worry about. You can go back to bed.”
“But what if he returns?” I asked.
“Never happens,” said the detective. “Once a burglar is scared off the premises he’ll never return to that place. Just relax, miss, and go to sleep. We’ll let you know if anything turns up.”
There was a loud knocking on the door. I jumped two feet. It was around 1 a.m.
“Do you usually get company at this time of night?” the detective asked me.
“No,” I said. “I never have any company. Nobody has ever come to call on me.”
“Go open the door,” the detective ordered.
I went to the door and opened it. It was the screen cutter. He made a grab for me, and I screamed.
The two detectives seized him.
“That’s the man,” I yelled. “He’s the burglar!”
“What’s all this?” the man scowled at the detectives holding him. “Marilyn’s an old friend. Good old Marilyn.” And he winked at me and said, “Tell ’em, honey”
“I don’t know the man,” I said. “He looks a little familiar, but I don’t know him.”
“Let me go,” the man cried. “You can’t arrest somebody for calling on an old friend.”
“How about it?” one of the detectives said to me. “Let’s have the truth, Miss Monroe. Is this an old sweetie of yours?”
I could feel that they were believing the man, and I was terrified they would go away and leave him alone with me.
“He’s no burglar,” the detective scowled at me. “He knows your name and address. He comes back after you chase him away. Obviously he’s—”
The other detective was searching the man and pulled a revolver out of his pocket.
“Hey,” he interrupted, “this is a police gun! Where’d you get this?”
At the words “police gun” I knew who the man was. It was the policeman with the eyes close together who had helped me cash my forty dollar check. He’d memorized the name and address as I wrote them on the back of the check.
I hadn’t recognized him at first because he was out of uniform.
I told the detectives who he was. He denied it but they found a Los Angeles police card in his pocket.
They took him away.
The next day the detectives visited me. They told me the man was a new cop, that he was married and had a fourteen-month-old baby. They said they would rather I didn’t file any charges against the man because it would give the police force a black eye.
“I don’t want to punish him,” I said, “but I would like to be sure he didn’t try to do that to me again. Or to any other girl.”
The detectives assured me he wouldn’t. So I didn’t file any charges. Instead I moved out.
I went back to a Hollywood bedroom, and I stayed in it for several days and nights without moving. I cried and stared out the window.
15
