Part 3

I believe Grace caught the movie-making bug again after Jacqueline Kennedy went off without John F. on her triumphant trip to India and Pakistan. After all, if a great lady who can’t match Grace for beauty can score a hit, why shouldn’t Grace get back into the limelight? I’d bet that if Jackie had the chance to star in a picture, she’d take it. Wouldn’t you if you were in her shoes?

With one possible exception, there’s been a streak of exhibitionism a mile wide in every actress I’ve known, starting with Ethel Barrymore, who set my soul and ambition on fire when I saw her play in _Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines_. The possible exception is Garbo, who laid down an iron rule that she would work only on a closely screened set, and she’d freeze in her tracks the moment her privacy was invaded, especially if her boss at MGM, Louis B. Mayer, dared intrude with bankers or visitors from New York.

A movie queen has to be a born show-off before she wants to act, and when she finds she can get paid for it too, her joy is unconfined. Most of the breed don’t hesitate for a second if today’s producers of soiled sex on celluloid call on them to do a Bardot, without benefit of bath towel. I’m sure Liz enjoyed doing her bathe-in-the-nude sequence for _Cleopatra_. Jean Simmons didn’t object to playing stripped to the waist in one _Spartacus_ scene that Kirk Douglas ordered to be shot in a spiced-up version for European distribution. And those calendar poses didn’t bother Marilyn Monroe. “I was hungry,” she explained, wide-eyed, when I asked her once why she’d sat for them.

Even Garbo had some odd quirks when the cameras stopped rolling. She used to go regularly to the house of some friends who had a big, secluded pool. Before she arrived, all the servants would be dismissed, and her host and hostess would take themselves off for an hour or so, too. Then Garbo undressed and, naked as a jay bird except for a floppy hat, swam gravely round and round in the water. Katharine Hepburn is another home nudist, presumably finding it better than air conditioning for keeping cool in summer. After all, it’s nature’s way. Didn’t we all come into the world stripped to the pelt?

Under stress, the deep-down desire to show themselves to an audience can take strange turns. Once in front of the crowded long bar of the Knickerbocker Hotel, an actress whose career had run into trouble--she was happily remarried in 1958--began to strip. This was Hollywood, remember, so hot-eyed stares were the only help she got from anybody in the room. When she was down to her shoes and stockings, and the rest of her clothes lay discarded on the barroom floor, she gave a shriek and ran down the front steps out onto Ivar Avenue. Then at last somebody remembered to telephone the police.

More recently an agent from one of the big television studios called at the hotel apartment of a much-married woman whose name still spells glamour to any serviceman of World War II. His mission was to sound her out about doing a TV show. She greeted him in a bathrobe and asked him to run the hot water for her before they talked business. She locked the outside door behind him. The following morning his conscience began to stir. “I’d better leave now,” he said. “The office will think I died.”

“You can’t go,” she cried. “I’m so lonely.” She kept him there three days.

The town has always been full of lonely, frustrated women who have let their few years of basking in the sun as movie queens blind them to reality forever. You can start with Mary Pickford, who used to talk a blue streak about a wonderful girl protégé whom she said she was going to make over into a movie sensation. I had to try to disillusion her. “You’re fooling yourself, Mary. What you should do is hire a press agent. All you really want is to keep your name alive.”

Gloria Swanson is another who can’t see straight today where her career as an actress is concerned. As a businesswoman in the dress industry she’s not nearly as sharp as Joseph P. Kennedy was when he was a movie tycoon and she was his reigning queen. She’d made a hit in _Sunset Boulevard_ and her reputation was on the rise again when I suggested she might do a movie version, written by Frances Marion, of Francis Parkinson Keyes’ _Dinner at Antoine’s_. Not a chance. “I couldn’t possibly play the mother of an eighteen-year-old daughter,” she snapped. “The part’s too old for me.” At the time, she was the mother of two daughters and a son, and she had two grandchildren.

Most of the unhappy ones have no husbands. One unfailing cause of that brand of misery is lack of female charity. They turn their backs on the facts of life and refuse to forgive their husbands a single act of infidelity--I believe every man married to a movie queen deserves one break in that department.

Barbara Stanwyck lives in a two-story mansion with her only company an elderly maid, the books she reads by the score, and the television set which hypnotizes her into watching old movies into all hours of the night. You don’t see her around town much any more because people forget to ask her down from the ivory tower in which she’s locked herself. When you do invite her out, there are roses from her the next day and thank-you notes so pathetically grateful they’d melt a stone.

Up to the day in 1951 that she divorced Robert Taylor, she was one of the happiest women alive. He was such a handsome slice of man, highly desirable, a full-size star. When he went to Rome for eleven months to make _Quo Vadis_ with Deborah Kerr, women everywhere mobbed him. But Barbara loved to act. The Taylors didn’t need the money, but she worked all the time, going straight from one picture into another, instead of taking time out to join her husband in Italy.

When he arrived home after nearly a year, Barbara disposed of him, while he found a much younger bride, Ursula Thiess. She has now had two children by him, although now they’re having difficulty with an older child by a former husband.

At fifty-five, Barbara remains a talented actress and a mighty attractive woman, though she gets thinner all the time. She’s kept her appetite for work, but suitable parts aren’t easy to find--I don’t rate her last role as a Lesbian madam of a New Orleans brothel in _A Walk on the Wild Side_ as worthy of her. I have begged her to kiss Hollywood good-by and go to Europe. “There’s nothing for you here. I guarantee you wouldn’t be over there twenty-four hours without having at least two offers for pictures.”

But Barbara stays on; with her maid, her books, and Helen Ferguson, her press agent and one of her closest friends.

* * * * *

Dinah Shore used to say, in one of those standard quotes that queens come up with when life is sunny, “My family means more to me than anything in the world--nothing will ever interfere with that.” Then George Montgomery, her husband went off to work on his own, and seventeen years and 362 days of a good marriage went out the window.

Her place of purgatory now is an oversized mansion, built on a $75,000 lot, near that of Richard Nixon. There she sits in melancholy, alone much of the time, by the pool, which is equipped with a waterfall; or perhaps in the living room, which is proportioned somewhat like Grand Central Station. It’s a great spot for brooding, but nevertheless she kept on singing on her shows “It’s Great to Have a Man Around the House.”

On the face of it, this used to be a couple that could never be divided. Certainly her reputation overshadowed George’s, a situation which usually creates continual problems. It’s hard on a husband when his house is invaded most nights by writers and directors who’ve come to discuss the new picture or new TV show with his wife. He has to sit and listen to them fuss over her with: “Now, darling, you’re looking a little tired and you have to work tomorrow, so you’d better take a pill and go to bed early to catch up on your beauty sleep.”

George, however, didn’t resent Dinah’s success. Though he never quite made film stardom and his own Western series died young on TV, he had his furniture factory, where he worked alongside his employees, and he went on making low-budget pictures. He steered clear of the parasitic life so many husbands enjoy when the woman is combination breadwinner, wife, mother, and working head of the family.

When the husband carries the title of “agent” in Hollywood, it’s a safe bet that he knows next to nothing about the business and is living off his wife. It’s also odds that he has a mistress to while away those long afternoons when he isn’t at the race track or propping up a bar. What can the wife do about it? If she wants to keep her home and family together in some semblance of order, she’s powerless. Daddy must be allowed to continue as “agent,” even if it ruins her.

When you’re a wife as well as an actress, you have to think of your husband, too, not only about your career. Maybe Dinah didn’t think hard enough. George, who in the past had given up several jobs to travel with her, went to the Philippines alone to make a picture and was gone three months. While he was away, she heard rumors that he was seeing a great deal of his leading woman. He hadn’t been back in Hollywood long before she released the announcement that she was filing for divorce.

Only minutes after she’d finally decided on that step, she went on the air with no detectable strain showing as she sang and clowned in her TV show.

She is a forty-five-year-old woman with two children still in school. She is up to her ears in work most of the time. The fact that good men don’t grow on trees is something most women don’t realize until it’s too late. Chances are that a new husband would be second-rate by comparison with George. Could be that thought has struck home with Dinah, too.

* * * * *

Inside the blonde head of tragedy’s child, Marilyn Monroe, fame and misery were mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was an unsophisticated, overly trusting creature whose career was always professionally and emotionally complicated beyond her power to control it. She was used by so many people.

She let herself be surrounded by such a clutch of nudgers, prodders, counselors, and advisers that the poor child developed an inferiority complex so ruinous that she was terrified to walk onto any movie set for stark fear she’d fluff a line or miss a cue. She never did have confidence in herself. Toward the end of her life, she couldn’t sit and talk to you without her fingers twisting together like live bait in a jar.

That wasn’t surprising in light of the words of wisdom her confidantes poured into her ears: “You cannot worry about unhappiness. There is no such thing as a happy artist. They develop understanding of things that other people don’t understand.”

Marilyn wasn’t visibly suffering from anything the night she stopped off at my house for a last-minute talk on her way to Los Angeles Airport and New York for _The Seven Year Itch_. Her husband of that era, and one of the real men in her life, Joe DiMaggio, drove her over, but he wouldn’t come in. “I’ll knock on the door when it’s time to go,” said Joe, whom I’d known long before Marilyn.

She was wearing beige--beige fur collar on her beige coat, beige dress, beige hair. “You look absolutely divine,” said I. “Are you beige all over?”

She had started to lift her dress before she murmured: “Oh, Hedda, that’s _vulgar_.”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

I was a booster of Marilyn’s as far back as _All About Eve_, when she came on for a few minutes with George Sanders and glowed like the harvest moon. She had an extraordinary power of lighting up the whole screen. No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as she did. In her brain and body, the distinctions between woman and actress had edges sharp as razor blades. Off camera, she was a nervous, amazingly fair-skinned creature almost beside herself with concern about her roles, driven to seek relief in vodka, champagne, sleeping pills--anything to blunt the pain of her existence. When the camera rolled, everything was as different as night from day. Then she became an actress using her eyes, her hands, every muscle in her body to court and conquer the camera as though it were her lover, whom she simultaneously dominated and was dominated by, adored and feared.

She was the original Cinderella of our times, the slavey who’d washed dishes, swept floors, minded babies, been pushed around from one foster home to another without anybody caring for or loving her. But she was always as honest about her whole ugly past as an ambitious actress can be who smells good copy in her reminiscences. She was simultaneously lovely and pathetic most of the time, but she kept a sense of humor. I asked her once about a man alleged to be looming large in her life. “Is this a serious romance?” was the question.

“Say we’re friendly,” she said, “and put that ‘friendly’ in quotes.”

The girl who was rated as the sex goddess supreme used to fight tooth and nail to hang onto the career which she was afraid might slip away from her at any moment. But there was an air of impregnable innocence about her in those calendar pictures. The innocence showed, too, in shots very much like them that her first husband used to carry around when he worked in an aircraft plant in World War II, to flash them in front of his workmates. One of the workmates was Robert Mitchum.

In the first great picture she made, _The Seven Year Itch_, the same charm of ignorance let her spout double-meaning lines as though she didn’t know what they implied. She had that superb director Billy Wilder telling her what to do. “You had the innocence of a baby,” I told her. “We knew the words were naughty, but we didn’t think you did.”

“I didn’t know?” she said, bewildered. “But I have always known.”

Soon after that picture, she lost the little-girl quality. She was surrounded by people all telling her how to act. They worked up her dissatisfaction with her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. It’s an old pitch that sycophants make to a star: “You don’t need your studio. You’re bigger than they are. You can have your own production company.” She believed it. Basically simple women like Marilyn, who rise as fast as she did, are pushovers for this kind of mad propaganda.

A leading figure in her new circle was Milton Greene, the New York photographer who set up Marilyn as a one-woman corporation to do battle with her studio, meantime driving himself close to bankruptcy. Milton could take credit for getting her on Ed Murrow’s “Person To Person” television program. After that painful evening I asked her: “How could you possibly go on TV looking like that?”

“Everybody said I looked good.”

“Everybody lied then. You were a mess. You don’t look well in skirts and heavy sweaters because you’re too big in the bust. On that show you should have been the glamour girl you always are. But the glamorous one was Mrs. Milton Greene. This kind of thing will destroy you.”

She spent part of the time during those rebellious days living in Connecticut with the Greenes, the rest in a three-room suite at the Waldorf Towers. She told me about the joys of adventuring around New York in dark glasses and turban with built-in black curls, going off on a cops-and-robbers round of cafes, theaters, the Metropolitan Museum. Meantime stupid rumors circulated that she was being kept in fantastic luxury by one millionaire or another, but nobody bothered to deny them.

“Didn’t it occur to you,” I wrote, “that great stars pursue their careers in conventional fashion, accepting the experienced judgment of good producers?... How did you rationalize the idea that a photographer who’d had no experience in making theatrical pictures could do better by you than the men who had made you famous?”

Then along came Arthur Miller, a writer held in awe by most of Hollywood, who ended a fifteen-year-old marriage to marry her. They were deeply in love and happy at first. When that ended, she came and sipped a martini in my home. He was, she said, “a charming and wonderful man--a great writer.” And Joe DiMaggio? “A good friend.” I believe Miller loved her, though it was Joe who turned up trumps in the end when she lay dead and deserted in Westwood Village Mortuary. One other man loved her, too--Miller’s father, Isadore.

She said: “I have only married for love and happiness. Except perhaps my first one, but let’s don’t discuss that ever.... I still love everybody a little that I ever loved.” And about being the ex-Mrs. Miller? “When you put so much into a marriage and have it end, you feel something has died--and it has. But it didn’t die abruptly. ‘Died’ isn’t the right word for me,” she said when we talked. But I think she was already dying inside her heart.

She went into _Let’s Make Love_,--it was a terrible script, in her opinion--out of shape physically and mentally. As her leading man, she had Yves Montand, who was Lucky Pierre himself in getting the role, being choice number seven after Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, and Jimmy Stewart had all turned down the part. Montand had performed beautifully in his own one-man theater show, though three quarters of his American audiences obviously hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, since it was all in French. Opposite Marilyn, he thought he had only a small part after Arthur Miller had been asked to write additional dialogue for the heroine.

During shooting I detected that something strange was happening to Mrs. Arthur Miller, who hadn’t announced yet that she was going to get a divorce. She was falling hard for this Frenchman with the carefully polished charm. Between the end of that picture and the start of her next, _The Misfits_, the stories spread that he would divorce his wife, Simone Signoret. M. Montand scored high in the publicity sweepstakes. The gossip spread all over town, with some help from the Twentieth Century-Fox promotion department and no hindrance from himself.

Before the prophetically titled _Misfits_ was finished, she became so ill she was flown in from Reno and put into the Good Samaritan Hospital for a week’s rest. She couldn’t even reach Montand on the telephone, and she called him repeatedly, day after day.

The night before he left to rejoin his wife in Paris, I received a tip that he could be found in a certain bungalow in the grounds of Beverly Hills Hotel. “Just knock on the door; he’ll let you in.”

I did precisely that. He was astonished to see who had rapped on his door, but I was invited in. The telephone started to ring almost immediately. He wouldn’t accept the call. “I won’t talk to her,” he told the switchboard operator.

“Why not?” said I. “You’ll probably never see her again. Go on. Speak to her.” But he couldn’t be persuaded. He suggested a drink, and I offered to mix them. I stirred up one hell of a martini to get him talking.

“You deliberately made love to this girl. You knew she wasn’t sophisticated. Was that right?”

“Had Marilyn been sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened. I did everything I could for her when I realized that mine was a very small part. The only thing that could stand out in my performance were my love scenes. So, naturally, I did everything I could to make them good.”

I’m sure that he knew what he was saying no more than half the time. She was “an enchanting child” and “a simple girl without any guile.” He said: “Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”

The last time I talked with Marilyn, there was no new man in sight. She owed Twentieth Century-Fox another picture, _Something’s Got to Give_, under her old contract, but even if she’d finished it it would have paid her only $100,000, where she could have made at least $500,000 elsewhere. Her courtiers made her feel sore over that, though the only thing on her mind should have been the need to make a movie that was good for her after _Let’s Make Love_ and _The Misfits_. Three flops in a row, and anybody’s out. Marie Dressler said it best years ago: “You’re only as good as your last picture.”

I believe Marilyn realized that the end of her acting career was waiting for her just around the corner. The last scenes she did in _Something’s Got to Give_ looked as though she was acting under water. She was sweet as ever, but vague, as if she were slightly off center. She did little more than the near-nude bathing shots, and she gave a still photographer who was on the set exclusive rights to pictures of the scene because “I want the world to see my body.” Newspaper and magazine readers around the world were promptly granted that opportunity, needless to say.

Arthur Miller once called her “the greatest actress in the world.” She was far from that, in my book. In spite of all her talk about playing Dostoevski heroines or some of Duse’s roles, the sex-appealing blonde remained her stock in trade. And there was something else missing among her ambitions. She ached to have children, though she was physically incapable of it. Twice she lost babies through miscarriages when she was Mrs. Miller. She told friends that she longed for a baby on whom she could shower the attention she never had.

On June 1, 1962, she reached her thirty-sixth birthday, married three times, with still no baby and no husband. Two months later the end came, and all the sob sisters of the world fell to work explaining why. Of course, we shall never know. She took that secret with her. When you’re alone and unhappy, the past, present, and future get mixed up in your brain. You say to yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Nobody loves me. Perhaps I shall never find happiness again.”

She seemed to be touched by forces that few human beings can bear, and her life turned into a nightmare of broken dreams, broken promises, and pain. In a way, we were all guilty. We loved her, yet left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most. Now she is gone forever, leaving us with bitter memories of what might have been. Dear Marilyn, may she rest in peace!

* * * * *

One of the men I loved most above all others was Gene Fowler. He once wrote me a letter from London. “What is success?” he asked. “I shall tell you out of the wisdom of my years. It is a toy balloon among children armed with sharp pins.”

How can anyone say it better than that?

_Three_

Much as I regret it afterward, I all too often speak before I think. And too many years have gone by for much to be done about it now. For better or worse, I’m doomed to shoot from the hip, to be a chatterbox who’ll fire off a quip if one comes to mind, without much thought about the consequences.

I love to laugh and to make other people laugh. That’s what we’re put in the world for. But I sometimes don’t realize how thin some skins can be. I talked my merry way out of a tête-à-tête with Frank Sinatra, whom I’ve always liked, and I’ll be sorry to my dying day for what was said on the spur of that moment.

The place was Romanoff’s penthouse; the occasion, the crushingly dull farewell party that Sol Siegel, then head of MGM, and his wife gave Grace Kelly before she sailed off to be a princess.

To start with, the arrangement for welcoming guests was peculiar, to say the least. Instead of standing beside Mr. and Mrs. Siegel to say hello, Grace stood in solitary state in the middle of the floor. She was dressed up, rightly, for the fray--white gloves, a beautiful coat and dress. But she stood with her handbag hanging over her arm as though poised for take-off at the flash of a tiara.

Like all the rest of us, I went up alone to wish her well for her future in Monaco. She was regal already, smiling as benignly as Queen Mother Elizabeth opening a charity bazaar.