“And don’t do any walking in any unpoliced areas,” said Harpo.
I played the next day; Groucho directed me. It was hardly more than a walk-on, but Mr. Cowan, the producer, said I had the makings of a star and that he was going to do something about it right away.
When you’re broke and a nobody and a man tells you that, he becomes a genius in your eyes. But nothing happened for a week. I sat every evening listening to my lover argue about my various shortcomings, and I remained blissfully happy.
Then one morning I found my name in the headline of Louella Parsons’ movie column in the Los Angeles Examiner. I was so excited I fell out of bed. The headline said Lester Cowan had put me under contract to star in a forthcoming movie.
That was something to read! I dressed and made up quicker than a fireman and squandered my last two dollars on a taxi.
Mr. Cowan was in his office.
“What can I do for you, Miss Monroe?” he inquired. He always spoke like a gentleman.
“I would like to sign the contract,” I said, “that I read about in Miss Louella Parsons’ column.”
“I haven’t drawn it up yet,” Mr. Cowan smiled. “It will take a while.”
“How much are you going to pay me?” I asked. Mr. Cowan said he hadn’t decided on a figure yet.
“A hundred dollars a week will be enough,” I said.
“We’ll see about it,” Mr. Cowan replied. “You just go home and wait till you hear from me. I’ll send for you.”
“Your word of honor?” I asked.
“Word of honor,” Mr. Cowan said solemnly.
I borrowed two dollars from a friend I knew sort of and hurried off to a jewelry store. I had never given my lover a present of any kind, due to my financial condition. Now I saw a chance to get him something beautiful.
I showed the man in the jewelry store the headline in Louella Parsons’ column and my picture in it.
“I’m Marilyn Monroe,” I said. “You can compare me to the photograph.”
“I can see you are,” the jeweler agreed.
“I haven’t any money now,” I said. “In fact I have less than two dollars in the world. But you can see from what it says in Miss Parsons’ column that I am on my way to stardom and will soon receive a great deal of money from Mr. Cowan.”
The jeweler nodded.
“Of course, I haven’t signed the contract yet, or even seen it.” I didn’t want him to misunderstand anything. “And Mr. Cowan, whom I just saw, said it would take a while—but I thought perhaps you might trust me. I want to buy a present for someone very dear to me.”
The man smiled and said he would trust me and that I could pick out anything in the store.
I picked out an object that cost five hundred dollars and ran to my lover’s home and waited for him.
He was quite overcome by the beauty of my present. Nobody had ever given him such an expensive object before.
“But you haven’t engraved it,” he said. “From Marilyn to ___________ with love. Or something like that.”
My heart almost stopped as he said this.
“I was going to have it engraved,” I answered, “but changed my mind.”
“Why?” he asked. He looked very tenderly at me.
“Because you’ll leave me someday,” I said, “and you’ll have some other girl to love. And thus you wouldn’t be able to use my present if my name was on it. This way you can always use it, as if it were something you’d bought yourself.”
Usually when a woman says that sort of thing to her lover she expects to be contradicted and soothed out of her fears. I didn’t. At night I lay in bed and cried. To love without hope is a sad thing for the heart.
It took me two years to pay the jeweler the five hundred dollars. By the time I had paid the last twenty-five dollar installment, my lover was married to another woman.
18
i see the world
Mr. Cowan kept his word and sent for me. He wasn’t ready to use me as a star, seeing he had no picture to put me in. But he would like to engage me to exploit the movie Love Happy.
“But I don’t know how to exploit a picture,” I said.
“You don’t have to know,” Mr. Cowan replied. “All you have to do is to be Marilyn Monroe.”
He explained that I would travel from city to city, put up in the finest hotels, meet the press, give out interviews, and pose for photographers.
“You will have a chance to see the world,” Mr. Cowan said, “and it will broaden your horizons.”
I agreed to exploit the picture, and Mr. Cowan agreed to pay all my traveling expenses and give me a salary of a hundred dollars a week.
One of the reasons I accepted the job was that I thought it would make my lover realize how much he loved me—if I went away for a few weeks. He didn’t seem to be able to realize it with me hanging around twenty-four hours a day. I had read that men love you more if they can be made a little uncertain about owning you. But reading something is one thing, doing it is quite another. Besides, I could never pretend to feel something I didn’t feel. I could never make love if I didn’t love, and if I loved I could no more hide the fact than change the color of my eyes.
The day before I left for New York to start the Love Happy exploitation tours of the U.S.A. I suddenly realized that I had almost no wardrobe. I called on Mr. Cowan and told him about this.
“I won’t be much of an advertisement in one old suit,” I said.
Mr. Cowan smiled and agreed I had better have a larger wardrobe. He gave me seventy-five dollars to outfit myself for the tour. I rushed over to the May Company store and bought three woolen suits for twenty-five dollars apiece.
I bought the woolen suits because I remembered that New York and Chicago were in the North. I had seen them in the movies blanketed with snow. In my excitement over going to see these great cities for the first time I forgot it was summertime there as well as in Los Angeles.
On the way to New York I made plans of all the things I would see.
My lover had always said, one of the reasons you have nothing to talk about is you’ve never been anywhere or seen anything.
I was going to remedy that.
When the train stopped in New York I could hardly breathe, it was so hot. It was hotter than I had ever known it to be in Hollywood. The woolen suit made me feel as if I was wearing an oven.
Mr. Cowan’s press agent, who was supervising my exploitation trip, rose to the situation.
“We must make capital out of what we have,” he explained. So he arranged for me to pose on the train steps with perspiration running down my face and an ice cream cone in each hand.
The caption for the pictures read: “Marilyn Monroe, the hottest thing in pictures, cooling off.”
That “cooling off” idea became sort of the basis for my exploitation work.
A half hour after arriving in New York I was led into an elegant suite in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and told to put on a bathing suit.
More photographers arrived and took more pictures of me “cooling off.”
I spent several days in New York looking at the walls of my elegant suite and the little figures of people fifteen stories below. All sorts of people came to interview me, not only newspapers and magazine reporters but exhibitors and other exploitation people from United Artists.
I asked questions about the Statue of Liberty and what were the best shows to see and the most glamorous cafés to go to. But I saw nothing and went nowhere.
Finally I got so tired of sitting around perspiring in one of my three woolen suits, that I complained.