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.”