The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

is seated in the center with most of the film’s stars seated or standing around her—Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, George Sanders, Gregory Ratoff—and it is impossible to take your eyes off her, even when other characters are delivering their lines. As has been said a thousand times, the camera loves her, and so do we. In her other scene, in the lobby of a theater, she has just fallen victim to her nerves over an audition and has gotten sick in the ladies’ room. Her queasiness is unmistakable and we feel like pressing a cold towel to her forehead, her emotions spent, raw.

Today, All About Eve is recognized as one of the classic films of all time and certainly the best picture about the Broadway theater ever made. Entire books have been written about the movie, the best of these being More About All About Eve, by Sam Staggs. Anecdotes abound about this production, one of the best being that production was constantly held up due to Marilyn’s lateness. She simply could never be on time.

At any rate, when released, All About Eve would generate fourteen Oscar nominations. It would also hold the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ record for most nominations for a single picture until 1997, when James Cameron’s disaster epic Titanic received the same number of nods—with Titanic winning a total of eleven Oscars, while Eve earned six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Also, interestingly, the first and only appearance Marilyn would make at the Oscars—on March 29, 1951—was to present the award to Thomas Moulton for All About Eve for Best Sound Recording.

Considering her small part in All About Eve, one would think Marilyn would have done anything in her power to not be tardy, but that just wasn’t her way. One day, actor Gregory Ratoff declared of her, “That girl will be a big star!” Celeste Holm rolled her eyes and said, “Why, because she keeps everyone waiting?” Indeed, much has been made over the years about Marilyn’s penchant for being late. She was tardy for just about every appointment she made, whether it was work-related or just a coffee date with a friend. It didn’t matter the occasion, everyone in her life knew she would be late for it. It was a maddening habit, but because she was who she was, most people just put up with it. To be fair, she usually made it worth their while. One thing was certain: She did light up the room with her presence. “It’s not so much that I’m always late,” she once quipped, “it’s just that everybody else is in such a hurry!”

Dumb as a Blonde Fox

In the autumn of 1950, Marilyn—now twenty-four—went back to school. She enrolled in a ten-week program at the University of California at Los Angeles to study world literature. Fellow classmates don’t have remarkable memories of her because she did what she could to fit in as a student and not call much attention to herself. “I want to expand my horizons,” she explained to Grace Goddard, who wholeheartedly approved. In the last few years, as she lived her life on her own terms and met a wide range of fascinating people, she had become much more thoughtful and introspective. Anyone who thought she was a brainless blonde had been fooled by her carefully constructed image. It’s true that she was still a vulnerable and scared child at heart. Norma Jeane was alive and well in everything Marilyn did—or was afraid to do—in her life and career. However, she was, at the very least, manageable. Marilyn wasn’t as helpless as Norma Jeane had been, that much was clear by the time she was twenty-four. But, she also knew that her weak routine could work to her advantage. There’s probably nothing more attractive to a powerful man, she decided, than a beautiful and hopelessly vulnerable young woman.

“When she would go to cocktail parties, she would put on the act for all to see,” said Jerry Eidelman, an aspiring actor who knew Marilyn. “She was living in a duplex on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood at the time with a scary acting teacher. [Marilyn had moved in with Natasha—but platonically, just to save money.] She and the teacher had a cocktail party one night and invited me because I lived in the neighborhood. When I would see Marilyn here and there, I found her to be bright… and interested. But when I went to this cocktail party, I was amazed by what I saw of her. She came off like she didn’t have two brain cells to rub together. She was very flirtatious with anyone she thought might help her, any of the acting teacher’s guests who, I took it, were casting agents. She had on a dress that was so tight there was no way she could sit down while wearing it. I noticed that she just sort of propped herself up in a corner with a martini in her hand and received admirers as if she was royalty—a princess who was just a bit drunk. She had this little girl’s kind of voice, which was not very much like what I knew her to sound like in her day-to-day life. I knew she put some of that on for most of her movies, I just didn’t know she did it in real life.” ^*

Her costar in the movie The Fireball, James Brown, concurred. “She’d sit there batting her eyes and give you the feeling she was a pretty dumb girl, but then there was this intense, almost secret-like sincerity behind what she’d say, and that left me with the idea that this girl is a mystery. She was truly a mystery.”

Jerry Eidelman continued, “The next day, I saw her walking a little dog she had, a Chihuahua, I think. I remember she had on black-and-white checked pedal pushers with a little white peasant blouse, buttoned all the way to the top. And she had on what looked like ballerina shoes—flats of some kind, made of a satin material. One thing about running into her, if you liked her as much as I did you instantly memorized whatever she had on—at least I always did. Anyway, I stopped her and said, ‘You know, Marilyn, you were very different last night at the party.’ She looked at me with wide eyes and said, ‘Why, whatever do you mean, Jerry?’ I just smiled at her and said, ‘You know what I mean.’ She gave me a little look. ‘Marilyn, you’re no dumb blonde, and you know it,’ I told her. ‘If anything, you’re as dumb as a blonde fox.’ She loved that. ‘I don’t even know what that means,’ she said, ‘but that’s pretty funny, Jerry.’ Then she winked at me and continued on her way with her dog.”

By this time Johnny Hyde’s health had begun to fail and he was for the most part restricted to his bed. For a man who had tried to stay so vital despite his heart disease, this was a heavy cross to bear. He was still devoted to Marilyn, though she seemed less interested in him—especially when he became ill. “I don’t know how to deal with it,” she told one relative. “It makes me so sad to see him. I think he believes I’m heartless because I don’t want to see him that way. I just don’t know what to do.”

At the end of the year, Marilyn finally signed a three-year contract with the William Morris Agency for representation. She’d just had a handshake deal with Johnny the entire time they’d been working together. Now it was time to make it official. At this same time, Johnny arranged for her to have an important screen test at Fox. “She was excited about that, I remember,” said Jerry Eidelman. “She told me that she wanted nothing more than to do a good job, sign with Fox, and, as she put it, ‘become the biggest star there is, Jerry—the biggest star there is!’ I told her, ‘You know, Marilyn, there’s more to show business than stardom. There’s acting.’ And she looked at me squarely and said, ‘Yes, Jerry, but sadly you don’t get to do much unless you’re a big star.’ She had me there.

“The day after the screen test, she was on cloud nine. She said it had gone very well. A couple days later, she looked a little crushed when I saw her. She said she didn’t get a big contract with the studio, but she did get a movie. ‘It’s a comedy,’ she said glumly. ‘I play a secretary.’ I asked her what it was called. She said, ‘Who cares, Jerry? I play a dumb secretary. That’s not going to take me anywhere I haven’t already been.’ I suggested that maybe she needed a new agent. ‘Great,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I just signed with William Morris for three years.’ Then she tossed her head back and laughed. ‘I think my goose is cooked,’ she said. ‘If you see me still out here walking my own dog next month, you’ll know it was a bit part, like all my other pictures.’ She was disappointed but, still, there was something about her that made you know she was not going to give up. I thought to myself, you know, she’s really something, that Marilyn Monroe.”

The movie Marilyn referred to was to be called As Young as You Feel. The deal was put together for her by Johnny Hyde, of course, with an eye toward securing a contract with Fox. He was really working for her, he loved her so much. “You know, maybe you should marry him,” Joseph Schenck told Marilyn. “What do you have to lose?” She usually respected Schenck’s opinion, but not this time. “I’m not going to marry someone I’m not in love with,” she told him. “But Marilyn, which would you rather have—a poor boy you loved with all your heart, or a rich man who loved you with all his?” She said she’d rather have the poor boy. “I thought you were smarter than that,” Schenck told her, joking with her now. “I’m disappointed in you, Marilyn.”