Private Hell: Barbara Payton & Franchot Tone

Even her detractors acknowledged her potential, but in the early Fifties, with Hollywood striving for a wholesome family image, the odds of professional survival for "Glitterville's top tramp" were nil. Barbara, at the height of her allure, had captivated Franchot Tone, who found unstable women irresistible. Barbara Stanwyck declared after reading Payton's memories "I'm Not Ashamed" (1962): "She jolly well should be!" Source: www.issuu.com

Dave Keenan was working as an associate theatrical agent on Outpost Drive when he spotted Barbara Payton climbing out of the Roosevelt pool. Soaking wet, she shook herself like a blonde dog, splashing water on Dave, who laughed and said, “You know who you remind me of?” She said no, who? He said, “You look like Lana Turner.” She laughed. “I'm not kidding,” he said, “but you've got her beat in the body. Can you act?”

“By the time Barbara got to me,” says agent Philip Feldman, “she'd bounced off a few others who'd run her through Paramount and MGM. I was partly responsible for getting her a contract at Universal. She was a hard and nervy girl underneath her special prettiness, and could speak soft, like they say, but carry a big stick. A million-dollar glamour-puss, with a sharp edge to a complex personality. She'd been a good girl, she'd say. She'd gone to church every Sunday. So they asked where she'd grabbed the aggressive attitude that gave you the idea she didn't give a hoot what you thought, she was going for your balls anyway.”

“I've always been told I'm pretty and ought to be in movies,” she'd say. Feldman says, “She had the blonde goddess shine that can't be described as anything but a radiance that makes a movie star. What she had was an immediate sense about her you couldn't overlook. She was Grade A goods.” Stupidly, according to Feldman, he had a brief fling with Barbara but confesses he has few good memories of it. “I got myself drawn in to her and I shouldn't have. I still feel a pity for her but she left scars. She scared the crap out of me and I don't mind saying it.’”

Later in Hollywood, Barbara told bitplayer and call girl Lila Leeds, “Bob Hope's sure as shit no great lover like he wants everyone to believe.” She said he had her prancing around in a half-assed strip show while he lay, “guzzling and laughing his ass off at nothing that was funny. He said, ‘Oh, look what you're doing to this poor guy,’ meaning his prick he was showing. He's saying, ‘This poor guy needs company!’ Well,” Barbara told Lila, “about five minutes later while I'm just getting the heater going, Hope's already turning cold as a dead duck.” She'd been hoping he was going to give her “like a red Cadillac convertible,” she said. But instead, Hope gave Barbara three jars of jam, she told Lila Leeds. “Some jam made in Arizona from a cactus. Supposed to be a gourmet jam. I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with three jars of jam?’ and he said, ‘Well, honey, you eat jam. You put it on your toast…’”

Jean Wallace with Franchot Tone, 1941. After a whirlwind romance and seven years of rocky marriage -and, ultimately, divorce- she attempted suicide in 1946 with sleeping pills, and in 1949 with a self inflicted knife wound. During the acrimonious divorce proceedings that followed, Jean alleged extreme jealousy and an affair with peroxide blond siren Barbara Payton, while Tone claimed that his wife had been involved with gangster Johnny Stompanato, bodyguard of infamous L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen.

Beneath his smooth veneer of poise and refinement, his nightclub savvy, Franchot Tone was a troubled man in search of disaster. As he plunged himself into Barbara's effervescent, ricocheting chaos, he would say, “I have discovered my nemesis.” In Tone's purple velvet view of the world, Barbara would be the one to make him pay for every “dark and dirty deed and thought” the actor had carried in his soul like a dose of nerve gas.

Barbara Payton and Franchot Tone depart LaGuardia Airport (New York) after Payton's arrival (January 15, 1952)

Though he'd received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in 'Mutiny on the Bounty', Tone would say, “None of that really matters. Fame always failed to reach beneath my skin.” Franchot told Barbara's agent, “This girl has struck a deep chord in me. I identify with her and I've never fallen for someone so hard or so fast in all of my life. My prayers have been answered.” The agent said, “Just don't lose your head.”

What Tone didn't know but suspected, enough to thrust himself through episodes of anguish, was the extent of Barbara's ‘playing the field,’ as he put it. Tone tortured over her past, dwelling on whatever vague episodes she could dredge up, digging and coaxing her to divulge details that he'd use to fuel his obsession and pain. Tone told seasoned actress Connie Gilchrist while filming 'Here Comes the Groom,' “Barbara has aroused in me the idea of gathering her into my life completely. She is unpredictable and radiates the idea that she cannot be tamed anymore than one could break a tigress.”

I asked him why he was going to marry her and with that incredulous look he can give, he said, ‘Of course, I am in love with her and want her to be my wife.’ But he confessed he wasn't sure she felt the same. He said that it hardly mattered. I asked why he said it didn't matter. ‘She needs me,’ he said. She was incapable of seeing the situation she was in, from without, he said. She needed his guidance, his tutorship. He said she needed him to manage her way through ‘this jungle of illusion each and every one of us are living in.’

Barbara and Franchot emerged from the Beverly Hills hotel room, shining and smiling after two hours, Barbara would say, “of sex that'd raise the dead Lazarus with a hard-on.” They showed up at Ciro's, “cozy and affectionate,” as one columnist observed. Barbara was asked, “I understood you were marrying Tom Neal today? Or is it tomorrow? Or is it off?” It was past one o'clock in the morning when Tone and Barbara returned to her apartment. Tom, half-plastered, watched as Barbara deliberately gave Franchot a long kiss, lips smearing, her tongue going into Tone's mouth. Tom's red eyes, bleary from booze, grew hot as a bull's fixed on a cape. “Walking right in together like they'd just climbed out of the sack,” Tom would say. “Both loaded and her with that foggy look she'd get when she'd been pumped for an hour. Standing there frenching the bastard right in front of me.” Tom claims, I said, ‘Barbara and I are supposed to get married,’ and he says, ‘Nobody's marrying you, Neal, at least no one that's present company.’

Columnist Florbel Muir wrote, “What always puzzled me about this romantic trio is how Tone, who has a very trained mind, could play around in a league of daffy dillies and muscle developers.” A producer at Warners said, “Payton has made herself world famous as a ‘daffy dilly,’ and she's a jinx to anyone giving her a second glance.” Barbara called agent Feldman. He says, “She begged me to see her, and I met her in a bar on Sunset. We talked and she wanted help and was saying, ‘What can you do to help me?’ I said I couldn't do anything. ‘I take you on,’ I said, ‘and link my name with yours and I get a strike against me.’I said she needed to talk to someone, she needed some personal counseling. I told her she needed some mental help, and she gave me a dirty look. ‘You've got problems that're going to cause you grief and nobody in Hollywood's got any interest in somebody's problems unless they show a profit. With all the bad publicity you've gone out of your way to drum up, they think they're going to lose money on you.’

Barbara said, “Franchot never talked the same again, after the fight. He was a sweet man, had a sweet side to him, but he had a bad masochistic streak in his personality. He wanted something beautiful for its own sake, not for what it did for him… I was gorgeous and young and fit the bill in his private hell. He wanted me to be what I was, so he said at the start.

With Tom, there was basic chemistry. We couldn't stay out of bed. It was simmering and cooking all the time. I could see in Franchot this purist's obsession for a thing of beauty, and sometimes just parts of a body could satisfy him —legs, breasts, your hind end.…” Barbara's marriage to Franchot lasted for fifty-three days. A defeated, deflated Tone said, “She can't get Neal out of her hair. I am disillusioned and heartsick and there's nothing before us but divorce and hardship.”

Bill Watson of the Hollywood Citizen-News: "The town had washed its hands of Barbara Payton, though the public still showed a kind of morbid interest. Half the movie business had laid out a red carpet for her, and she threw it all back in their faces. She wasn't a star—not a star that the great mass wants to see and love or identify with. Payton was a tramp, yet she hadn't done it alone. She'd had a lot of help." Bill Watson says, “The Hollywood Citizen wanted a piece chalking off the deep water marks to which Payton was sinking and I covered it. I might add reluctantly. She broke down in the corridor like it suddenly hit her she'd lost her kid. “Another press conference,” says Watson. “Only a few showed up —including me. It had been about two years since I'd seen her at the child custody slaughter and I heard she looked awful and was falling apart. But she actually looked pretty good. She appeared trim and tanned and was dressed in a tailored suit.

She sat on the edge of a table with her legs crossed, giving us a treat, or so she thought, but we were more there out of curiosity —bizarre curiosity— watching her play the sex doll to the hilt as she told us she was divorcing the joker she was married to and was resuming her movie career. We all laughed when she said, ‘The ants in my pants are crawlin' again!’ Big joke! I can still see her sitting there and laughing like she's Betty Grable, thinking she's still a hot star. But from that moment on it was all downhill to a hard, merciless bottom.” -"L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times" (2011) by John Gilmore

Franchot Tone (Three Comrades), Tom Neal & Barbara Payton (Downward Slope)

"Three Comrades" (1938) directed by Frank Borzage, starring Margaret Sullavan, Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young.

The cast is distinguished. Playing Patricia is Margaret Sullavan; a radiant screen actress who made far too few films and yet made a strong impact in those that she did appear in such as The Moon’s Our Home, The Shop Around the Corner and The Mortal Storm. In Three Comrades we can understand why these three men are captivated by her vivacious beauty —inside and out. Robert Taylor enjoyed working with Sullavan, describing her as “enchanting. Her talent warranted a much bigger career than Hollywood ever allowed her.”

Appearing with Bob, as his fellow Comrades, are Franchot Tone, a superb actor who never became the huge star in pictures he should have, and Robert Young, who had been toiling in films since 1930, and despite some good performances over the years would find his greatest success on television as the patriarch of Father Knows Best.

Joseph Mankiewicz, was frustrated by Fitzgerald’s overanalytical and talky script and ended up hiring an MGM contract writer named Edward Paramoure to collaborate with him on a rewrite. Despite having written some superb films, like The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Trouble for Two and the 1936 version of Three Godfathers, Mankiewicz thought of Paramore as “a Hollywood hack,” but someone he felt might be able to rein Fitzgerald in. Mankiewicz became known as “the man who rewrote Fitzgerald.” Sullavan told Frank Borzage that the “dialogue is beautiful, but there is too much of it.” She felt that the “camera, rather than the dialogue,” should tell the story.

According to author Lawrence Quirk, Franchot Tone also objected to the wordiness, but he came to rue it. “I could have kicked myself because I had cut off my nose to spite my face—half my footage was cut, and I had only myself to blame.” Fitzgerald called Mankiewicz an “ignorant and vulgar gent.” He did acknowledge that about 1/3 of the picture was his script, but with “all shadows and rhythm removed.” However, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was more enthusiastic. She lauded the love scene on the beach between Taylor and Sullavan, calling it “superb.”

The resulting film was right up Borzage’s ally as he had a reputation for being a director who could bring out the romantic quality in almost all of his films. Robert Young, who worked with Borzage more than once, would recall him as a “sentimental slob but... a lovely, lovely man.” It is a film beautifully played by each of its four lead actors, despite the drawback of not being more relevant to the events then occurring in Nazi Germany. Commonweal was mixed. It felt the film was “too sentimental,” but tossed a bouquet to Sullavan and Tone by calling their performances “entirely convincing.” Much to Metro’s chagrin the picture didn’t perform well at the box office. Despite this it did turn up on several critic’s best ten lists. -"Robert Taylor: A Biography" (2013) by Charles Tranberg,

After leaving him on the Fourth of July, Vicky Lane filed for divorce from Tom Neal, citing his “unreasoning jealousy.” During the divorce proceedings in 1949 —which were dutifully reported by the Los Angles Times— she told the court that “I couldn’t go down to the corner to get a package of cigarettes without being accused.” In August, Lane won her decree on the grounds of mental cruelty.

After the divorce, Neal spent most of his time chasing starlets and cocktail waitresses in between notching screen credits as a grade-Z Errol Flynn in dreck like Amazon Quest (1949) and Radar Secret Service (1950). Then in 1951, at a pool party at the Sunset Plaza Apartments, he met the woman who would drive the final nail into the coffin of his Hollywood career.

Due to a tabloid nightlife that included copious amounts of booze, dope, and shady underworld characters, Barbara Payton had blacklisted herself with the major studios in little more than a year and a half. When they met, she was still seeing actor Franchot Tone (himself on the downward slope of a classy A-list career), but when she saw Neal at the pool, “It was,” she said “love at first sight.” He felt the same, later telling reporters. “Four minutes after we met, we decided to get married.” Neal blamed Tone for throwing the first punch, but in an unintentional slip of honesty, he blamed the ferocity of his attack on a deeper need to impress Payton. Claiming that she kept egging him on, he said, “She digs that blood and guts stuff.” Neal had nearly killed Tone. With a cerebral concussion, and a broken nose and cheekbone, Tone was rushed to California Lutheran Hospital.

Of course, in his own horrible way, Neal had helped the "Detour" myth take shape by living his life like a noir antihero. Over time, Tom Neal and Al Roberts simply merged—actor and role folding into one dusty, broken man wandering the desert at night, cursing his fate. -"Tom Neal: The Broken Man" by Jake Hinkson (Noir City, 2012)

Jean Wallace had married Franchot Tone in Yuma (Arizona) in 1941. In August of 1948, she sued Tone for divorce, asserting that he was "extremely jealous" and had frequent violent fits of temper. On December 8, Jean testified in Santa Monica Superior Court that she “had warned Franchot against association with Barbara Payton, because Barbara was mixed up with narcotics.” Jean then pointed to Barbara in the courtroom as the main reason why Franchot should not be granted custody of their children. Jean's attorney mentioned a dozen glamour girls involved with Tone (while still occasionally sleeping with Jean). Tone, under questioning, admits he had seen Barbara Payton unclothed "frequently."

Alternating between civil and contentious, the custody battle between Franchot Tone and Jean Wallace would continue into the following year. On May 21, 1952, Wallace obtains custody of her two children in Santa Monica, reminding the court about Tone’s love brawl with Tom Neal about Barbara Payton. [...] “I feel the deepest sympathy for her and retain the most lovely memories of the time we spent together,” with his characteristic formality intact, Franchot Tone issued this statement upon hearing of Barbara’s re-emergence in the news, arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in 1962. -"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd

Barbara’s button nose, pert and bunnylike as any Midwestern cheerleader’s, curved into the baby spot and above it her incomparable white-lashed black eyes batted. “Life’s for the living,” she said, downing her gimlet and running her delicious pulpy tongue across her Minnesota-farm-girl teeth, thick and white as a bar of Ivory soap. “So what’s the bottom line, then, pretty boy? For the ruckus? What did my wayward boyfriends cost me?” He flicked his finger along the sheen of sweat on her glass. “It’s simple. You clean it up for a little while, close those lilywhite gams on set and everything’s apples and ice cream again.” He forced himself to meet her eyes and gave her his jolliest smile. “Making a late-night date, Hop? I do all the warming up and some other girl gets the hot payoff?”, Barbara grinned widely. She’s not interested in me, he reminded himself. Barbara Payton had two tastes: dull-eyed muscle men and flush, faux-ivy debonairs. He was a long way from either. “A girl like you,” he began, moving right past her sarcasm, “she’s not meant for the bruising ride through the darker corners of the Hollywood Hills.” “I’ve done the sugar-daddy gig, hon. Maybe you heard.”

“I don’t mean a sugar daddy, sugar lips. I mean a man who will do right by you. Bells and whistles and rice and the bouquet. And I think Franchot is the fella to do it.”

The girl, she had it all, but her legs went only one way—out. But the stories never stopped. Divorce from Franchot Tone. Divorce from wife-beating drunk Tom Neal. Paying a two-hundred-dollar bar tab with two fur coats. Rumors of heroin and picking up bellboys at the Garden of Allah on Sunset... He knew this was coming. Were there no surprises? -"The Song Is You" (2009) by Megan Abbott


Franchot Tone ("Bewildered") video

A fall from grace: Franchot Tone & Barbara Payton (She wasn't Ashamed)

Franchot Video ("My love for you") video.

Barbara Stanwyck saw what was happening with Joan Crawford’s marriage to Franchot Tone, and though Joan had been changed by Franchot (Joan had hoped their marriage would be like that of the Lunts, joined onstage and off—longtime, loving friends and actors), she was already wearying of him and their endless arguments, in which Tone occasionally, in a drunken rage, beat her, and she would go to work wearing dark glasses to hide the bruises on her face.

Joan and Franchot had finished making The Bride Wore Red, and Joan was working on a picture with Spencer Tracy. Barbara [Stanwyck] knew that Joan was mixed up with Tracy. What Joan was doing with her marriage infuriated Barbara. It was only a flurry with Tracy, but Joan would come home after being with him and call people at two or three in the morning asking if Franchot was there. “Well, I don’t know where he is. He’s out... and I can’t find him. And I’m desperate.” Franchot was out drinking and, said Barbara [Stanwyck], “wearing his heart on his sleeve and staying in some lousy bar” because he’d found out “about Joan and Tracy.”

In addition to Robert Montgomery, the negotiating committee for the Screen Actors Guild consisted of Kenneth Thomson, the guild’s executive secretary and veteran actor from the mid-1920s who appeared in more than sixty pictures; and Franchot Tone, scion of an industrialist fortune, who’d fled his privileged upbringing for the stage to become the handsome, genteel leading man of the Group Theatre. Tone decided to leave the stage for a year when an offer came from Hollywood; the other Group Theatre founders were heartbroken to see him go; they believed Tone had the makings of a great stage actor. Twenty pictures later and with a long-term contract with Metro, Tone was married to one of the studio’s most glamorous stars and had himself become the ultimate of urbane movie idols. Tone, ever ambivalent in his choices, saw his defection from the stage as a fall from grace.

Barbara Payton: "I was engaged to the actor with the most class in Hollywood-Franchot Tone. In other words I was the queen bee, the nuts and boiling hot. The odds were a million to one I'd grow old with twenty servants, three swimming pools and a personal masseuse plus an adoring husband. I try to think of what was my biggest moment-my biggest thrill. I think it was 1950 on St. Valentine's Day. I was going to start a big movie with Jimmy Cagney the next day and I went with Franchot Tone to the opera. I wore a mink stole he had given me and I was dripping ice (diamonds). We marched into the Opera House and it was like everyone had suddenly been struck silent. People stopped whatever they were doing and just stared at us. We were the most glamorous thing since Lily St. Cyr's pasties. Franchot and me, we just stood there and let them gape for a moment. It was heaven."

"Franchot Tone, suave, likeable, quiet, unexciting Franchot asked me to do a play with him in New York. He was hooked on me. He spelled it out for me and I read him... 'Kiss me and your troubles are over.' I may not look like I used to but, not very long ago Franchot Tone asked me again if I'd marry him. You know what he said? 'If you'll marry me, I'll become young for you again. I'll become a boy again.' After living a full life he wanted me back again."

"I was good to Franchot. He was good to me, too. You'd think that combo would strike oil-but it was a dry well." Tom kept zinging Franchot with, 'What the hell, you're twenty years older than Barbara. She's a passionate broad. What happens ten years from now? Are you going to be able to satisfy her?' Franchot kept debating the subject politely but I know he was getting madder and madder and madder. ------A next-door neighbor of Barbara’s named Judson O’Donnell claimed to have witnessed the fight, he said that Tom Neal pummeled Franchot over thirty times, adding, “It was like watching a butcher slaughtering a steer. At first, I thought my refrigerator was on the fritz. It sounded like a prizefighter in a gym beating the bag. It was one of the bloodiest fights I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty — on that very lawn!” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner staff writer James Bacon reported that he visited Franchot the morning after his plastic surgery. “He was wrapped in enough bandages to fill a Johnson and Johnson warehouse,” said Bacon. “I was told that his face underneath looked like a piece of beefsteak that had been run over by a truck.”------

Barbara Payton: "I loved Tom. I liked and respected Franchot. In May of 1951, I married Franchot Tone, a millionaire success who loved me more than any girl in the world. Sounds like a happy ending to a fairy tale, doesn't it? Sorry - it was just the beginning. Franchot is a lovable, honest, irascible, masochistic man who loves beauty for beauty's sake. Some core of insecurity makes him insanely jealous. He tortured himself. I was only somebody for his doubts, fears, recriminations to bounce off. I resolved to let him spend himself of the torture. It was endless. It built and there was no end in sight. After days of wrangling and reconciliations our attorneys agreed on a settlement."

One of Tom’s more understated (and ludicrous) quotes to the press during this time alluded to his and Barbara’s wedding plans, now canceled. “I’m not paying for her Wassermann if she’s going to continue to see Tone,” he declared with an almost laughable sincerity. With very little effort, Tom’s artless offerings became fodder for a ravenous press intent on crucifying him. Barbara’s friend Tina Ballard offers, “I think Barbara wished she could combine Franchot’s qualities of wealth, intelligence and class with Tom’s down-and-dirty, raw sexuality, and make a whole other person out of them!"

In an example of Hollywood’s growing vendetta against Barbara for the humiliation she had brought to the well-liked Franchot Tone, as well as to the film community in general, Dore Schary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Chief of Production, and Darryl F. Zanuck, Vice President of 20th Century-Fox, both of whom had once publicly expressed an interest in buying Barbara’s contract from WB, quickly changed their minds.

Sources: "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd, "I Am Not Ashamed" (1962) by Barbara Payton, and "A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940" by Victoria Wilson

Barbara Payton, nominated 'the girl most of men would like to be trapped with in an ice-manufacturing plant' about to star in her first major production "Trapped" (1949)

"The Song is You" (2007) by Megan Abbott (Excerpts):

Hop felt funny. She was lonely and he was willing to spare a
minute. “Barbara?”
“Yeah?”
“Let me ask you: you’ve been around this dirty town a few years. You’ve never been afraid to dig your heels in.”
“Hell no.”
“You ever run into Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel out on the town?”
“Yeah.” She paused, which she’d never done once since Hop met her.
“What’s their story?”
“Fuck if I know, Hop.”
“C’mon, Barbara. Between you and me. You don’t need to pussyfoot with me.”
There was another pause. Then, “Look, I don’t like repeating what I ain’t seen firsthand.”
“I’m a clam, Barbara. It’s my one and only virtue.”
“Well, that Marv’s cuddled up to me a few times, but there was something about both of them that rubbed me the wrong way. A girl gets a kind of radar.”

Barbara Payton, circa 1950

So he said now, pointedly, to Barbara Payton, bleached-brittle hair and toreador pants, smell of bar vibrating off her, “You’re the last person, Barbara, that I’d expect to take stock in rumors.” “Hey, I got nothing to hide,” she said, crossing her legs, lipstick-red mule hanging from her twitching foot. “They’re probably all true, every last one. Did you see the photos Mr. Franchot Tone spread all over town a few years back? Those private dick shots of me on my knees, all black garters and beads, before my beloved boxing partner, Tom Neal? How many girls get out of that?”

Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton outside the Mocambo nightclub on July 8, 1951 in Los Angeles, California

Hop nodded his signature knowing, understanding nod. She sighed, rubbing her arm wistfully. “What was I supposed to do? Play the blessed virgin or Betty Crocker? I was having a ball. And I wasn’t about to pull the brakes for Louella Parsons or Daryl Zanuck. I know it’s hurt me. I’ve paid. You don’t see me on-screen with Gregory Peck or Jimmy Cagney these days. The money ran out. There were some bad men. I hit the sauce. A bottle of Seconal a hotel doctor had to suck back out of me with a tube. Then I took the route, as the junkies say. It started sticking to me. You know the song. You could sing it to me.” -"The Song is You" (2008) by Megan Abbott

Happy Anniversary, Marilyn Monroe! (new biography by Carl Rollyson)

When Marilyn remained focused, she created an extraordinary range of performances: from the introvert in Bus Stop to the extrovert in The Prince and the Showgirl. Watch just those two films, and you will see why she is a great actress. Each performance is a de novo creation built through a vocabulary of gesture and movement that is inimitable. In her major roles, Marilyn Monroe did not repeat herself.

Primarily because of the skirt-blowing scene, she was treated as having shown more of herself than ever before. The filming of this celebrated scene at 2:30 a.m. on September 10, 1954, in New York City, attracted a crowd variously estimated to have been between one thousand and four thousand people, who watched Monroe’s skirt fly up fifteen times as the scene was rehearsed. DiMaggio had arrived two days earlier and drew the attention of some fans and the press. Amid shouts of “higher” and “hurrah” as the wind-blowing machine puffed his wife’s skirt over her head, DiMaggio retreated in silent anger.

Monroe herself seemed taken aback at the spectacle Billy Wilder had made of her. She is reported to have asked him if he was going to show the more lurid shots to his male cronies. Around 4:00 a.m., Monroe returned to her hotel room. DiMaggio arrived somewhat later. Evidently they quarreled over her night’s work, for “some shouting and scuffling was overheard by other hotel residents nearby, followed by hysterical weeping.” The next day DiMaggio departed for California, and Monroe remained heavily sedated.

When she arrived on the set of The Seven Year Itch, her bruises had to be covered with makeup. Given Monroe’s superb command of Hollywood publicity, it came as a shock a few months later when she announced that she was leaving Twentieth Century-Fox and moving to New York. Almost immediately, however, her move was suspected to be a publicity ploy, and few people seemed to appreciate that she had become so saturated with her own stardom that she felt stymied. Although Monroe would indulge in various kinds of publicity maneuvers for the rest of her career, never again would her life be quite as public as it has been during The Seven Year Itch and her divorce from DiMaggio.

Marilyn celebrating her birthday, 1962 1st June, on the set of Something’s Gotta Give

By the time Something’s Got to Give went into full production on April 23, 1962, the actress was facing a lifetime of failed enthusiasms. Although both Dr. Greenson and Mrs. Murray (acting now as the actress’s housekeeper) believed she was making significant progress, she felt profoundly ambivalent about going back to work. She had not been able to cope well with her buried paranoia, feelings of persecution, frustration, and rage. Before the shooting date, she consulted Nunnally Johnson, who was writing the script, a remake of a 1940 comedy, My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Johnson had worked on How to Marry a Millionaire and We’re Not Married. Her first words to him, “Have you been trapped into this too?” were a fair indication of her distrust of the studio and of her suspicion of any project it might propose. When Cukor began to revise the script, his actions were tantamount to challenging Monroe’s hard won convictions, for this was a script she could believe in.

The revisions were an attack upon her—especially since, according to Johnson, Cukor had similarly sabotaged her performance in Let’s Make Love. And the studio wanted to get a picture out of Monroe as soon as possible, figuring that her reign as sex symbol was about to expire. Walter Bernstein, the last of six writers to work on Something’s Got To Give, recalls that the studio catered to Monroe’s every whim. Once her artistic vision of the film was violated, she reacted like a politician or a general, making sure her power remained intact. “Sometimes she would refer to herself in the third person, like Caesar. ‘Remember you’ve got Marilyn Monroe,’ she said to Bernstein when she wanted to wear a bikini in one scene. Such comments reveal how difficult it was for the actress to jettison her screen personality. -"Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (Revised and Updated)" (2014) by Carl Rollyson

Happy Anniversary, Howard Hawks! Marilyn Monroe: Another World's Blonde

Marilyn Monroe - 'Monkey Business' Premiere (Rare footage). "Monkey Business" (1952) is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey Business.

Marilyn seemed at ease on screen in the comedy 'Monkey Business,' her third movie of 1952, but did not get on with the director, Howard Hawks. Physically impressive (like Huston) Hawks was “six-feet-three, broad shouldered, slim-hipped, soft-spoken, confident in manner, conservative in dress, and utterly distinguished overall.” Born in Indiana, the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer, Hawks was educated at Exeter and graduated from Cornell in 1917 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps in World War I, and after the war built airplanes and a racing car that won the Indianapolis 500.

In 1922 he came to Hollywood, where screenwriter Niven Busch found him impressively distant and formidably frigid: “He gave me his reptilian glare. The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners. He was like that with everyone – women, men, whatever. He was remote; he came from outer space. He wore beautiful clothes. He spoke slowly in a deep voice. He looked at you with these frozen eyes.” Marilyn has the decorative but unrewarding role of Charles Coburn’s secretary. In one scene the seventy-five-year-old Coburn “had to chase and squirt Marilyn with a siphon of soda, a moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later explained,was only his indecision about where on Marilyn’s... um... ample proportions to squirt the soda.”

Despite her small part, Marilyn also caused trouble on this picture and forced Hawks to shoot around her when she failed to show up. The problem, as everyone later discovered, was her infected appendix, which she had removed, in late April 1952, as soon as her work was completed. No doctor performing an appendectomy would excise her reproductive organs. The formidable Hawks, mistaking her pain and fear for stupidity, was even more critical than Fritz Lang. Hawks considered Marilyn ‘so goddamn dumb’ that she was wary and afraid of him.

Still, Hawks admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that ‘the camera liked her.’ Cary Grant, like Celeste Holm and many other colleagues, was surprised by her meteoric rise to fame the following year: “I had no idea she would become a big star. If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn’t apparent at the time. She seemed very shy and quiet. There was something sad about her.” To the other actors Marilyn could seem ordinary, unresponsive and apparently “dumb,” but on camera she seemed to glow.

By 1953, against almost impossible odds, Marilyn had achieved the stardom she longed for. Yet her celebrity intensified her insecurity and unhappiness. The novelist Daphne Merkin wrote that Marilyn’s “desperation was implacable in the face of fame, fortune and the love of celebrated men. . . There is never sufficient explanation for the commotion of her soul” – though the reasons can, in fact, be found. Her wretched background, together with the pressures of life as a movie star, created her mental and emotional chaos. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff described it as “an aura of blank remoteness, of being in another world.”

As Howard Hawks remarked, “there wasn’t a real thing about her. Everything was completely unreal.” In Marilyn’s last two films of 1953 she played her typical and most popular incarnation: the gold-digger with a heart of gold. In 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' – based on the book and musical comedy by Anita Loos and directed by Howard Hawks – a dumb blonde and a showgirl, both well endowed, sail to Paris to find rich husbands.

In one scene of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' Marilyn wears a top hat, long black gloves, transparent black stockings, high heels and a gaudy sequined costume cut like a bathing suit. In another, wearing a strapless, floor-length, pink satin gown, with long-sleeved gloves, she steals the show by singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The best lines in the film – “Those girls couldn’t drown. Something about them tells me they couldn’t sink” – were cut by the censor.

'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' had been a 1925 book by the fabulous Anita Loos, which spawned a long-running Broadway adaptation. Hawks was ostensibly making a film version of the play, but the play didn’t have much of a workable plot, so he was rewriting it extensively with Charles Lederer, and the rewrite entailed discarding a fair number of the famous songs from the stage version—a decision which somewhat calls into question the logic of making a movie version of the show in the first place. And if the whole point of the thing seemed to be a justification for 90 minutes worth of breast jokes, Hawks seemed blithely unaware of the sex appeal of his two stars. In one of the strangest things anyone has ever said, Hawks said of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell “I never thought of either of them as having any sex.” They just weren’t his type.

Marilyn made a freeflowing tape for her psychiatrist, with “extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm – in very blunt language.” Emphasizing the crucial paradox in her life, she bitterly said, “I just don’t get out of sex what I hear other women do. Maybe I’m a sexless sex goddess.” It’s sadly ironic that Marilyn herself did not live to see the sexual revolution and suffered greatly for being its symbol. She’d experienced intense sexual pleasure with Jim Dougherty and with Fred Karger in the mid-1940s; but by the 1950s, under the stress of promiscuous sex and stardom, she’d become frigid.

The photographer André de Dienes said that “Marilyn is not sexy at all. She has very little feeling toward sex. She is not sensuous.” The make-up man George Masters frankly called her “an ice-cold cookie, as frigid as forty below zero, and about as passionate as a calculating machine.” The costume designer Billy Travilla, who knew her in the early 1950s, was more sympathetic and felt the need to protect her, but was also disappointed by her inability to respond: “Her lips would tremble. Those lips! And a man can’t fight it. You don’t want that baby to cry. I think she wanted to love, but she could only love herself. She was totally narcissistic.” -"The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller & Marilyn Monroe" (2009) by Jeffrey Meyers