The Genius and the Goddess by Jeffrey Meyers Read Free Book Online

on the edge of the city and
driving about in a beat-up old sedan. She cemented her friendship
with the neurotic columnist Sidney Skolsky, who was afraid to drive,
by chauffeuring him through the city. Her professional progress can
be measured from the decrepit Pontiac she drove at the beginning of
her career to the brand-new Cadillac she was given in September 1953
for appearing on theJack Benny show. In America the car had always
had social and (as Jim Dougherty noted) sexual implications. As the
California historians nicely observed, "to have a car meant being somebody;
to have to borrow a car meant knowing somebody; to have no
car at all, owned or borrowed, was to be left out – way out." 2
    In 1946 Norma Jeane signed on with her first agent,Harry Lipton,
who for the next two years helped her secure several short-term
contracts with Hollywoodstudios. She signed a six-month contract
with Fox in July 1946, renewed it in January 1947 and was terminated
by Fox – who didn't know what to do with her – in August
of that year. She changed her name in 1947. She signed a six-month
contract with Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures, then a minor studio,
in March 1948, and was crushed when they dropped her in September.
Finally, she signed another six-month contract with Fox, which was
converted to a seven-year contract with incremental pay raises, in
May 1951.
    In these early years Marilyn had tiny parts in five forgotten movies.
She was almost entirely cut out of her first two pictures. Just before
Fox dropped her in 1947, she appeared in TheDangerous Years as a
waitress in a teenage hangout. She warned a relative not to blink or
she might miss her fleeting appearance. This was a common career
path for young film actresses like Marilyn: she worked as a model,
became a starlet under contract to a studio, posed for publicity photographs
and got small parts in movies, often by performing sexual
favors for influential men. Such tiny parts were barely a step away
from modeling: she was just a blank, pretty face in a sexy body. Very
few young women got the breakout part that made them stars.
    As a starlet in the studio system, Marilyn was often treated with
contempt.Orson Welles recalled that she was even humiliated in
public: "At a Hollywood party which Marilyn attended (circa 1946
or '47) while she was still a lowly starlet, he saw someone actually
pull down the top of her dress in front of people and fondle her. She
had laughed. 'Just about everyone in town had slept with her.'" Being
sexually available, Marilyn felt, was an essential if unpleasant part of
her job. It focused attention on her greatest asset and allowed her to
show off her body. Laughter in this situation was her only defense;
moral indignation would have been pointless. She was certainly sexually
exploited, but in her casual and carefree way she was also complicit.
    Marilyn had many brief affairs, but quickly learned the difference
between one-night stands that assuaged her loneliness but achieved
nothing, and liaisons with powerful but unattractive men that advanced
her career. Her first "protector," the influential producerJoseph
Schenck, whom she met in 1948, was fifty years older than Marilyn.
Like many Hollywood moguls, he was a self-made man with a colorful
past, born in eastern Europe and from a Jewish background. He came
from a Russian village on the Volga, where his father was a woodfuel
merchant, emigrated to America in his teens and worked his way
up from errand boy to owner of several New York drugstores. In 1912
he acquired the Palisades Amusement Park, across the Hudson River
from Manhattan, then built a chain of nickelodeons and movie theaters
withMarcus Loew. In 1933, withDarryl Zanuck andWilliam Goetz
he founded Twentieth Century Pictures, which two years later merged
with Fox. Schenck made movies with the directorD.W. Griffith, the
comedians Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, and the popular silent
film actressNorma Talmadge, Norma Jeane's namesake.