The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (32 page)

One day later, Tuesday 22 May, Marilyn returned to the set. She was still suffering from exhaustion, while her co-star, Dean Martin, had reported for work suffering from a bad cold. His temperature was 100 degrees. Fearing she would inherit his germs, the actress informed Cukor and then Henry Weinstein, in no uncertain terms, that she would not participate in any scenes with the star while he was unwell. She was deaf to medical testimony that Martin’s condition was not contagious. Cukor reluctantly once again caved in to Marilyn’s demands and, while her co-star was dispatched home to bed, she reluctantly filmed a sequence with Cyd Charisse and heavily filtered, soft-focus close-ups of the actress with child actor Robert Christopher Morley.

Monroe’s maternal instincts were apparent during the shoot. When she noticed the young boy shivering, following the shooting of a scene where he had to repeatedly swim back and forth across the pool, she refused to film any more sequences until an electric heater was brought on to the set to warm him. Aside from a brief interlude when Marilyn took part in an interview with Hollywood movie and television writer Bob Thomas, shooting continued through most of the day and wrapped at 5pm.

Her journey home to Fifth Helena was delayed when she instructed her driver, Kadensky, to stop at Jorgensen’s Food Store, at 353 North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. She needed to purchase a case of 1953 Dom Perignon champagne. (Her bill, including tax, came to $173.22.) The shop was unable to fulfil her order but promised they would be able to do so the following morning. Marilyn was happy about this but insisted on a caveat: delivery must be made to her home first thing.

On Wednesday 23 May, Marilyn once more appeared on the
Something’s Got To Give
set. The trouble over Dean Martin’s cold rumbled on when she hand-delivered Cukor and Weinstein a memo, which read: ‘I cannot work with Mr. Martin until he’s well. I take this action upon the advice of my physicians.’ Since she was not up to remembering and delivering many lines or shooting anything with her cold-riddled co-star, Cukor thought it would be best if she had a crack at shooting the film’s swimming pool sequence. It was 10.40am.

In an attempt to entice her husband Nick (Martin) away from the bed he was sharing with his new wife, Bianca (Charisse), and encourage him to tell her that his first wife had returned home, the script called for Monroe to gambol nude in the house’s pool while he watched above from his bedroom window. ‘Come on in, the water’s so refreshing,’ she shouts to Martin’s absent character. (Later, when asked where Dean was during the shoot, Marilyn whimsically replied, ‘Oh, I think he was out playing golf.’ He was.)

Filming began modestly enough. In a brave attempt to fool the cameras, Marilyn started the scene by donning a flesh-coloured body-stocking cum invisible bikini, which had been produced by Jean Louis out of material left over from the actress’s stunning JFK gala gown. But, at least according to folklore, the endeavour was thwarted when the eagle-eyed cinematographer, Harry Daniels, remarked that the cameras were picking up too clearly the material adorning the upper part of Monroe’s torso. ‘Cut,’ Cukor shouted. A discussion between the camera operators and the director followed. Marilyn was alerted to the problem and informed something had to give.

The decision to film the actress sans brassiere was reached. She agreed to these provisions, but
only
if the set was cleared of everyone bar essential personnel. Security around the set was tightened as Sound Stage 14 was hastily swept free of rubber-neckers and non-essential employees. ‘The set was closed, all except for members of the crew,’ Marilyn recalled. ‘They were very sweet. I told them to close their eyes or turn their backs and I think they all did.’ Uniformed guards even stood sentry at the stage’s entrance. ‘It looked like the inner sanctum of Cape Canaveral,’ a reporter for
Hush Hush
magazine remarked. ‘Not even a top US security clearance could get anyone through that door on that particular day.’

A minimum crew of about 12 men were allowed to remain on the set. As the actress revealed, the few electricians that were allowed to linger were humorously instructed to keep their gaze away from Marilyn’s. After the disgruntled, less essential Fox employees had been speedily shepherded out of the building, the actress slid back into the water, removed the offending brassiere, re-emerged and perched herself on the pool’s edge, with her back facing towards the cameras.

But yet again, the cameras were not fooled into believing Marilyn was in the nude. Daniels announced that the line of her bikini briefs was now clearly visible. A further discussion between Cukor and his cameramen followed and once more, something had to give. The director then politely asked Monroe whether she would consider filming the sequence in the nude. She needed little persuasion. She bounced off to her dressing room and returned a few minutes later sans briefs but now wearing a blue, terry-cloth bath robe.

Marilyn then employed her make-up man, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder, to stand guard beside the main camera to ensure that revealing sights of her unclad body were kept to a minimum. She instructed Cukor that she wanted the outline of her figure to show, and nothing more. Feeling slightly apprehensive about his decision, Marilyn then enlisted the services of a trusted female, her wardrobe girl Marjorie Plecher, to work alongside Snyder to ensure her demands were met.

With Snyder and Plecher standing firm on either side of the main, poolside camera, Marilyn felt comfortable enough to disrobe. After doing so, she slid back into the pool and began shooting a much more satisfactory sequence. She looked totally exquisite. ‘It was a scene of sheer voluptuousness, raw, unveiled desirability. Vesuvius erupting,’
Hush Hush
magazine excitedly gushed. ‘It was the first time I’d ever worked in a movie without any clothes on,’ Marilyn later remarked.

Curiously, as shooting continued, she became more bashful about showing off her limited swimming strokes than her figure. ‘All I can do is dog-paddle,’ she shouted to Cukor. ‘That will be just fine, darling,’ he replied. ‘I was a little embarrassed by the fact I don’t swim very well,’ Marilyn jokingly admitted. ‘I only dog-paddle but I’m buoyant and I can float. I once went under but I popped right back to the surface. There was a lifeguard on the set to help me out if I needed him. But I’m not sure it would have worked. He had his eyes closed too.’

As the cameras rolled, Monroe frolicked up and down the pool, simultaneously teasing the cinematographers with tantalising, exceedingly brief glimpses of her magnificent naked body. A year earlier, Marilyn had been 15 pounds overweight and would have thought twice about doing such a brazen scene. But in May 1962, she had trimmed down and was back to her most famous, truly sensational, highly photogenic 37-22-35 best. ‘Why, she looks exactly the same as she did when she posed for that calendar,’ one startled spectator was heard to remark. ‘She looks like a girl of 20, not a woman of 35.’

News that Marilyn was shooting a sequence in the raw unsurprisingly spread like wildfire across the Fox lot and naturally, everyone wanted to get a better view of it. Security guards fought hard to keep out all uninvited personnel. However, close scrutiny of the ‘unofficial’ shots, taken at the end of the shoot, reveals that, contrary to what we’ve previously been told, a large number of bystanders
did
manage to gate-crash their way on to the supposedly impermeable sound stage.

Realising that images from the sequence would be good for the movie’s worldwide publicity, Marilyn allowed three photographers on to the set. Celebrity snapper Larry Schiller was one; the others were William Read Woodfield and Fox’s still-pictures expert, Jimmy Mitchell. Once more, for
their benefit, and once filming had wrapped, she doggy-paddled up and down the pool and playfully posed on the poolside edge. Gambolling over, the actress clambered out of the water and for one extremely brief blurred moment, posed in the altogether before vanishing into the swirl of a bath towel. Paula Strasberg, however, refused to watch any of it, preferring instead to sit out of the way, in a quiet room, alone, and eat her lunch off a tray. ‘If she wants to be taken seriously,’ she blasted to friends, ‘she can’t jump into a pool naked anymore.’

Though Monroe’s flesh-coloured bikini
was
clearly evident through the camera’s highly sensitive lens, clever editing and complex shooting could have easily camouflaged the lines of the attire. Cukor chose instead to mislead her into doing it for real. However, she was wise to his scheme. In July of that year, Marilyn recalled, ‘I did it because George Cukor asked me to. I have confidence in his good taste. When he said the swimming pool scene would look more realistic if I did it in the nude, I agreed. I did it only because I was told it would make the picture more of an artistic and commercial success. That picture meant a lot to me. I really wanted it to be great.’ When asked about her second nude appearance before the cameras, Marilyn giggled and quipped, ‘My birthday is June 1, and I thought I’d celebrate a little early by acting in my birthday suit.’ Elsewhere she joked, ‘I hope it doesn’t end up on a calendar.’

The scorching, colour 35mm footage of Marilyn’s four-hour swimming pool shoot was developed later that day, in the humorous words of one Hollywood columnist, ‘behind doors locked tighter than Jack Benny’s safe’. The processed photographs from the session were confiscated by the actress for censoring. (Negatives of those she disapproved of were immediately destroyed with a pair of scissors.) Larry Schiller excitedly remarked, ‘Miss Monroe looked 1,000 per cent better than I had imagined. She looked slim and well proportioned.’

Although it is not unusual for leading female stars to pose au naturel for a feature film, Marilyn’s cinematic nude shoot was believed to be the first time that a star of her calibre had done so for a domestic movie release. In fact, on Monday 5 March, approximately 11 weeks before Monroe shot her sequence, Elizabeth Taylor had filmed a rather rude – at least for its time – nude bathing scene for
Cleopatra
, as well as a back massage sequence with exposed flesh. News that she had filmed these sequences was, surprisingly, kept under wraps by Fox and therefore failed to attract any attention until the movie was released in June of the following year. By shooting and announcing her own scene in the way she did, Marilyn had managed to pre-empt her rival’s quite racy performance by several months.

With so many critics unaware of Taylor’s sequences, the question as to why exactly Monroe had appeared in the nude began to circulate around
Hollywood and the film-loving capitals of the world. The general consensus was that, since her last couple of movies had not been particularly successful at the box office, her career needed something of a jolt. In recent years she had seemingly lost her ‘queen of glamour’ title to French actress Brigitte Bardot. When hearing of this accusation, a spokesman for Monroe at 20th Century-Fox moved quickly to deny the actress had done the scene purely for publicity for herself or the movie. This, of course, was completely untrue.

In fact, there were two reasons why Marilyn shot the sequence. First, she was desperate to regain her rating as the world’s number-one sex symbol and canny enough to realise that flaunting herself was the best way to do it. Second, as she forthrightly told a reporter, and as we can safely guess, she did it because she wanted to ‘knock Elizabeth Taylor off the front of every magazine cover’. (In recent months, Marilyn’s great Fox rival had appeared on the face of practically every magazine around the world through coverage of her starring role in
Cleopatra
and it annoyed her.)

Monroe was successful in her second aim. In total, pictures of her nude swim would feature on the covers of 72 different magazines. Many of the globe’s biggest magazines and newspapers, including the American magazines
Saga
and
Life
(who paid $10,000 for the US rights alone), the Italian publication
L’Europeo
, Swedish magazine
Se
and Australian publication
Everybodys
would all outbid each other to scoop a selection of the pictures. In the UK (in the edition published on Monday 18 June), the
Daily Mirror
perfectly summed up the situation by printing a small selection of the images under the heading, ‘It Was For A Film . . . It Was Also Her Idea . . . But The Pictures Rocked Hollywood And Are Exploding Across The World!’ (
Playboy
paid $25,000 but, out of respect for both the actress and
Life
, delayed publishing the shots until January 1964.)

Selected photos from Marilyn’s swim were published in a total of 32 countries, collectively earning Messrs Schiller and Woodfield alone a hefty $200,000. A proviso was included in all their deals: a publication deadline of approximately 30 days after the shoot had taken place. The reason was simple. In order to gain the maximum exposure, Marilyn wanted the pictures to appear around the world simultaneously.

Pictures of a modern-day, unclad Marilyn were of course priceless, but strangely, she was uninterested in the money. Publicity was all she craved from the deals. Amazingly, she even managed to thrust this view on to Fox who, albeit reluctantly, relinquished their rights to the images. When Schiller asked the actress what she wanted from his windfall, she solemnly replied, ‘A slide projector to show them on.’ Her request moved him to tears.

The actress’s nude sequence naturally became a major selling point for the film and Fox were overjoyed. As one Los Angeles-based press agent correctly remarked, ‘A lot of people are going to want to see the film now.’ Marilyn’s plan had worked.

Monroe reported bright and early for work on the
Something’s Got To Give
set for the next two days, Thursday and Friday, 24 and 25 May. Dean Martin’s lingering cold was the only black mark on two otherwise highly successful days of shooting. Surprisingly, in a brave attempt to catch up on the schedule, Monroe was an active participant when filming was hastily pencilled in for Saturday 26 May. Finally working with both Charisse and Martin, whose cold had now thankfully subsided, the actress shot the sequence where her character, Ellen, pretended to be her husband’s Swedish maid and child-minder, Ingrid Tic. It was a superbly acted, humorous scene and as the surviving footage shows, the time Marilyn spent with her language coach, Edith Evanson, had not gone to waste. The actress managed to seize the American–Swedish-tinged dialect with charming, heart-warming accuracy.