* * *
If 1953 was Marilyn’s breakout year, it was also the year she began to rebel. She had to beg for her own dressing room on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she was making far less than her costar, Jane Russell. The rigors of studio production were making her physically and psychically ill. She’d just finished filming How to Marry a Millionaire, her third major role in nine months. Battered by migraines, insomnia, viral infections, and bronchitis, Marilyn was visibly weakening. She’d wake up shaking, nerves already shot, gulp down a painkiller before rolling out of bed. Nausea was inevitable, and she was often vomiting, unable to keep down anything but orange juice mixed with gelatin. Like everyone else in Hollywood, she’d been diagnosed with anemia, which meant massive vitamin B injections and gagging down concoctions like tomato juice spiked with ground-up liver (“Even lime and Worcestershire sauce hardly mask the taste”). “I had no sense of satisfaction at all,” Marilyn told Modern Screen. “And I was scared.”
But Marilyn—the most popular actress in the world—was oddly powerless. America’s sexy sweetheart was still the property of Twentieth Century Fox, and back in the early fifties, the studio controlled everything: from the roles you took on, to the directors you worked with, to how often you went to the bathroom, and sometimes even who you married. Studio heads had little respect for their actors—especially the women—and often tried to coax out publicity-boosting catfights. Directors often felt irrelevant and lashed out in frustration against their cast. On-set bullying was common, and Marilyn was an especially easy target. “They tell you to cry one tear,” she complained, “and if you feel two and cry two, it’s no good. If you change ‘the’ to ‘a’ in your lines, they correct you. An actress isn’t a machine, but they treat you like one.”
Marilyn knew she deserved better from Fox. This year alone she’d raked in heaps of glammed-up money. She was their sun, their power earner, yet they treated her like a dumb-blonde cash cow. Executive Darryl Zanuck claimed she had “emotions of a child” and was “ill-equipped” to determine the course of her career. (Not too ill-equipped to earn half their revenue.)
Fox had her lined up for River of No Return, a goofy Western with a slapdash script that was below even Zanuck’s standards. Marilyn would play Kay, a honky-tonk floozy and saloon chanteuse. Roles like these made her sick—stumbling around in spiked shoes, slipping on sweat-slick floors, enduring snide cameramen’s sneering and leers. She hated being bulldozed into the bimbo act. Most of all she hated Zanuck, who called her “Strawhead” behind her back, then cashed in fast to keep Fox afloat. But Marilyn was contractually stuck. Through gritted teeth, she accepted yet another role she knew was beneath her.
She longed for meaty roles such as Hedda Gabler or Grushenka from The Brothers Karamazov. She’d recently read Émile Zola’s Nana and had fallen in love with the voluptuous French courtesan. Excited, she called George Cukor to see if he’d direct her in a film adaptation. Yet Cukor, a noted “women’s director,” declined. It was too risky, he said, and was there really an audience for decadent French novels from the nineteenth century?
Marilyn needed someone who believed in her. Her lawyers and agents would flatter her over salad and Dom Pérignon, then glaze over when she brought up her studio battles. She was beginning to lose hope. No one would take chances; no one would trust her talent. Fox, Paramount, MGM—even LA itself seemed to close in on her. She’d suffocate under its tawdry glare of misogyny, canned art, and smoggy money.
It would take a fellow outsider and artist, a soft-spoken photographer with a red-checked scarf and Brooklyn accent, to ignite Marilyn’s rebel flame and give her the strength to defy Darryl Zanuck and change the studio system forever.
* * *
Marilyn had always known the power of image—starting from her first modeling shots in the late 1940s. She’d been a visual learner since childhood. At the orphanage she’d spend hours on her bed, lying on her stomach, leafing through the film magazines of the late thirties and forties: Movie Mirror, Photoplay, and Screen Gems. She’d been studying these images for years—the lowered lash, the parted lip, the plucked brow, and the dewy eye. By the time the cameras pointed at her, she was ready.
Unlike most other models and actresses, Marilyn worked closely with her photographers, makeup artists, and costume designers—and more often than not, they learned from her. She knew her chin looked weak in profile, her left side was prettier than her right, and that the halo of down on her face gave her a soft-focus Garbo glow. She practiced dropping her lip to make her smile less gummy. When she didn’t like a picture, she gouged it with a hairpin. By 1953 she was dying to break loose from bloodless glamour shots, but she needed the right photographer. While she was browsing through stacks of picture portfolios, one in particular caught her eye. It belonged to a young fashion photographer named Milton Greene. His pictures were sensitive, spontaneous—especially the ones of Marlene Dietrich. She looked like a swan, with her arched back and snowy neck. “They’re so beautiful,” Marilyn breathed. “I want him to photograph me.” She made a few phone calls, and soon enough Milton was boarding a plane to Los Angeles.
Jaded and skeptical, Milton was far from starstruck. At thirty-one, he’d photographed Liz Taylor, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, both Hepburns; his pictures were featured in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He liked elegant women with a European flair, and he wasn’t impressed by flashy screen queens: “Marilyn was not really what I would turn around for or call a whistle at, even though she turned on a lot of guys. I’d seen some of her movies, she looked interesting, but she didn’t throw me. My style is more Dietrich, Garbo, Audrey and Katharine Hepburn, even Judy Garland in a different way.” But when he met Marilyn, all that changed: “From the very beginning it was completely comfortable, like ‘Let’s make a date’ or whatever. She put out her hand and said, ‘You’re just a boy’ and I said, ‘You’re just a girl.’ And from that moment on we sort of hit it off.”
Milton Greene burst into Marilyn’s life at just the right time, bringing with him a blast of icy East Coast air. Everything about him—his catlike way of moving, the blazers he had made in Rome, even his staccato Brooklynese—promised a fresh alternative to LA’s ostentation. Unlike the big, blowsy Darryl Zanucks, Milton was unobtrusive, a beatnik among peacocks in his black turtlenecks, black linen jackets, black jeans, and black sneakers. A native New Yorker, Milton managed to live an almost European existence. His Midtown studio, at 480 Lexington Avenue, was pure Fellini, where writers, actors, and makeup artists played, drank sherry, and put on lipstick. He partied with jazz musicians, not models, and at night Max Roach and Gene Krupa would “come to the studio and jam.” He wasn’t sleazy (an anomaly among fashion photographers), nor was he formulaic. He didn’t fuss around with lighting (“If you can’t light it with one light, you can’t light it.”). Instead of overshooting or bossing around the models, he’d switch off the phones and break out the sherry, taking time to select the perfect record for the person and occasion (for Marlene Dietrich, it was always Stravinsky).
For their first shoot, Milton stripped off all that Hollywood pancake and shellacked hair to reveal a new Marilyn. “I took off lots of makeup, because it was caked,” he said. “I made it much smoother for a fresh-scrubbed look. She wasn’t used to that; she was used to a lot of makeup. Fellini maybe did films where he used a bit of pancake or powder, but most actors were used to lots of makeup out of habit.” They shot in Laurel Canyon, but she could have been an Ivory Soap Vassar girl in her Peter Pan collar, flower-flocked cotton and almost-pageboy hair. She looked bright and bookishly sexy, not like some dial-a-goddess from a cheesecake mag. Marilyn loved the photos and immediately sent him two dozen roses.
By the time they met for their second shoot, Marilyn and Milton had bonded like school chums. They set up shop on a Fox back lot, ransacked the wardrobe rooms, and found the burlap skirt and wooden clogs Jennifer Jones had worn in The Song of Bernadette. (“It was the ultimate in joke,” Amy Greene would later say with a laugh, “to put the world’s leading sex symbol in Saint Bernadette’s clothes.”) The French village from What Price Glory provided the perfect backdrop—they’d later refer to it as The French Peasant Sitting. In scratchy black convent stockings and heavy nun’s shoes, Marilyn seemed lit from within, blonde Hollywood saint, gorgeous and tired and not unlike Bernadette herself. Like a Cinderella in reverse, Marilyn went from Van Cleef to sackcloth—with Milton as her fairy godmother.
Somehow, Milton had done what no other photographer had: tease out the deepest underpinnings of Marilyn’s personality. His photos were playful, puckish, and poles apart from the glossy brutality of her Hollywood images. “I wish he could photograph me always,” Marilyn gushed. “I’ve had my pictures taken a lot, but with Milton Greene, it gave me new hope and a new outlook. I’ve never really liked the way I was photographed until I saw Milton’s pictures. He has a way … he’s not just a photographer, he’s an artist, really. Even when he does fashions which are usually boring, he can make something so beautiful.”
She was equally impressed with Milton’s work methods: “It was the first time I didn’t have to pose. He just let me think, but he always kept the camera going … I wasn’t aware of it.” He spoke in soothing murmurs, listening to his subjects and subtly adjusting to their needs. He radiated calm—even Judy Garland mellowed out around him. “Some photographers either went overboard with ‘lovey … honey,’” wrote one of Marilyn’s press agents years later. “Or they maintained an aloofness. Milton had a way of making a star feel very comfortable, very relaxed, and someone like Marilyn had to feel cared for, had to feel relaxed.”
She also had to feel safe, which was hard in a town where batches of girls were hauled in by the busload. For years she’d kept mute, emptying ashtrays and pimping herself out at parties on Doheny Drive. Before it was the talent scouts, now it was producers, but there was always some man gawking, eyeing her up and down like a prized hock of ham. “They treat me like a thing,” she confided to Milton. “I hate being treated like a thing.”
Milton didn’t treat her like a thing. In fact, when she’d strip to change looks he’d turn politely around. (“I was surprised when they told me that everyone used to ball her on the set,” he said. “I didn’t believe it. I still don’t.”) He respected her as an equal—they worked together not just as photographer and model but as collaborators. Milton thought more like a filmmaker or director. Each shoot had a story behind it, a dynamic narrative he made up as he went along. His dress-up-box attitude gave Marilyn a safe space to get creative and play. And play she did, pulling peasant blouses and clangy bangles from wardrobe rooms, costume shops, and sometimes her own closet. For one shoot: a loose taupe sweater thrown over a shimmery peach negligee—worn barefoot as she strummed a balalaika against a black velvet background strewn with poppies and ostrich plumes dyed white, plum, and green. For another: a fox fur wrap and fisherman’s hat. Or another: tumbled into a friend’s unmade bed, drinking a glassful of juice. The Dutch Girl Sitting, The Pekingese Dog Sitting, The Gypsy in the Window Sitting: Each picture is infused with glowing vulnerability, a candor and gentle humor specific to a rare kind of friendship—the friendship between two artists.
That summer, Milton and Marilyn forged an alliance that would change their lives. They met intermittently in Fox’s back lots, romping among fabric scraps and Hollywood frocks, speaking the same private language, communicating in electrical little gestures like twins. Both battled childhood wounds (and childhood stutters); both shrank from crowds yet longed for companionship; both were moody but laughed easily and smiled even more. Both were otherworldly—more absorbed in their imaginations than in the concrete moment. Friends of Milton’s said that chatting with him was like looking at an abstract painting. He’d get you talking about Greta Garbo’s hair or the color of snow in Russia only to steal off to his studio and write. Beguiled by Milton’s artistry and flair, Marilyn knew she’d found a kindred spirit: “He’s so sensitive and introspective,” she raved. “I work with other photographers, but this man is a great artist.”
Throughout her life, Marilyn would be drawn to two types of men: the creative, emotive types she befriended, and the resolute, dignified hunks she married. Milton Greene belonged to the former category. But with his alley-cat hipness and soft-coal eyes, Milton had his own subtle lure over women—and Marilyn’s lines between friendship and romance were always fuzzy. They may not have been each other’s type, but the sparks were mutual. “I think,” Milton mused after Marilyn’s death, “I had the feeling that we were going to make it. It’s easy to say this now, but between exchanged looks and handshakes, there was a feeling that we were going to get together. It was just a feeling.”
Milton’s hunch was confirmed one midsummer photo shoot in 1953 on assignment for Look. First he rubbed her with body makeup, coaxing her vanilla-matte pallor into warm, wet honey. Marilyn posed naked under a borrowed black cardigan, gently parted to reveal an unzipped slice of silky bare skin. The sweater belonged to Amy Franco, Milton’s Cuban-model fiancée, who was back in New York planning the perfect September wedding.
Still flushed from the intimacy of the afternoon’s shoot, they dined at a quiet little bistro on Sunset with private rooms and candlelit tables. They talked about art, New York City, Marlene Dietrich—all their usual subjects—but this time the conversation was charged with urgency. Milton was flying back east that night, and Marilyn offered to drive him to LAX. “When I was ready to leave she gave me a kiss,” Milton admitted. “And then she pulled back and gave me another kiss. Then I said, ‘Wait a moment, now it’s my turn,’ and gave her a kiss and said, ‘Gee, I don’t really feel like leaving.’ And she said—you know, the way she talks—‘I really wish you wouldn’t,’ and I said, ‘I wish I didn’t have to either, but I’ll be back.’ I left, and I kept thinking of her on the way back to New York.”
Two weeks later, Milton went back to LA on an unrelated assignment for Look. This time he spent every free moment with Marilyn, holed up in her duplex below the Sunset Strip, drinking scotch, listening to records, and lounging around in bed with her neurotic black cat. “I really got to know her, and that was different,” he explained. “The feeling was different; the movement was different; we liked each other; I couldn’t help it.”
On Milton’s last weekend in LA, they drove to Palm Springs, taking photos along the way. “We slept together in Palm Springs,” he remembered, “then drove back to her house and went to bed again. Then we got dressed and went to a party. Everyone was there, including Frank Sinatra. Everyone heard Marilyn was taking singing lessons, and everyone wanted to hear her sing, so she sang a song from River of No Return. She was fantastic, because she was so sexy. She never sang like Judy Garland, she never turned it out like Frank Sinatra, but she had this voice like ‘I wanna eat you.…’ Her voice would go high, and then glow, and it was really sexy. It wasn’t the greatest voice in the world, but it was sexy.”
Sexy or not, Milton was due back in New York to marry Amy, who was already two months pregnant. Marilyn was devastated: “She was sad; she was very upset. I said, ‘Look, we’ll always be friends; we’ll always love each other.’” Marilyn doubted that, but there wasn’t much she could do. She wondered if she’d ever see her new friend again.
Milton had given her hope when she’d needed it most. She was closing in on that dreaded age: thirty. As an actress you went from kitten to crone, begging for fringe roles as lunatic spinsters and murderous aunts. Marilyn lost faith in Hollywood—but not in herself. All along she’d been smiling for the camera with Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man hidden behind her script, lolling around pools in Beverly Hills, actually reading the books everyone thought were just dopey props. For years she’d kept Leaves of Grass on her night tables, dreaming of change. Like Whitman, she knew she contained multitudes.
* * *
When she met Milton, in 1953, Marilyn was heavily involved with her boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio. For eighteen months he’d been courting her, visiting her on set, taking her for drinks at Villa Capri or Chinese at Bruce Wong’s. He spent weekends sprawled out in her duplex, commandeering the TV until her gargantuan crystal ashtrays overflowed with Camel stubs. Their chemistry was fierce, buttressed by tenderness and respect. With his Old World manners and quiet devotion, Joe shielded her from the vulgarities of Hollywood—its ugly narcissism and cheap fame.
Marilyn knew Joe wanted to marry her, but something was holding her back. She worried they didn’t have enough in common, didn’t have enough to talk about. His silences bored her—and even frightened her. Addicted to television with no interest in art, Joe rarely cracked open the many books she kept giving him—Saint-Exupéry, Jules Verne. Ambivalent at best toward her acting career, Joe brushed off her creative struggles as Hollywood nonsense. “I don’t know if I can take all your crazy publicity,” Joe said to her early on in their courtship. Marilyn told him he didn’t have to be part of it. “I am,” he snapped back, “and it bothers me.”
On August 8, 1953, Marilyn flew to Canada to film River of No Return. From the very beginning, she was out of her element. In addition to singing and playing guitar, Marilyn was forced to do her own stunts—horse riding, gunfights, and whitewater rafting. The director, Otto Preminger, bullied her, slapping her ass, teasing her as she struggled with the harrowing stuntwork. During an action-packed scene in the Athabasca River, Marilyn’s raft tipped over, filling her boots with icy water. She sprained her leg, nearly drowned, and spent the rest of the summer in a cast and crutches. When DiMaggio heard of her accident, he flew to Canada immediately and kept watch over her for the rest of production. After the film wrapped, Joe whisked her away to San Francisco, where she met his mother, cooked pasta with his sister, and watched him fish for perch from the Fisherman’s Wharf pier. Reluctant to race back to LA, Marilyn stayed on in San Francisco, a decision that pleased Joe endlessly. When she did return to Hollywood, Joe came with her, and they rented a home together on North Palm Drive.
On November 4, 1953, How to Marry a Millionaire premiered at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills. A hit with the critics and box office alike, the film earned $8 million worldwide—Fox’s second-highest-grossing film of the year. More important, it cemented Marilyn’s status as a gifted comedienne. Now, she hoped, Fox would finally give her the respect she deserved.
But Zanuck already had her next film picked out—The Girl in Pink Tights—another bimbo role with an idiotic storyline. When he sent her the script, Marilyn promptly returned it—with TRASH scrawled in marker on the title page. Zanuck reminded her that she was under contract and advised her to be a good girl and learn her lines.
With DiMaggio’s support, Marilyn flatly refused to consider the script. On December 15, she failed to show up for her first day of filming. True to his word, Zanuck suspended Marilyn for having violated her contract. Jobless and directionless, Marilyn braced herself for another lonely holiday at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
On Christmas Day, Joe surprised her with a blazing fire and decorated tree, flank steaks and buckets of ice and Dom Pérignon. He flung a black mink round her shoulders and gave her a thirty-five-baguette eternity ring. This time when he asked her to marry him, she said yes.
* * *
In the spring of 1954, Marilyn warily renewed her contract with Fox. Her agent, Charlie Feldman, had negotiated a substantial salary spike and secured her the lead in Billy Wilder’s exciting new comedy, The Seven Year Itch. But first she had to do one last musical: There’s No Business Like Show Business. Marilyn winced at the thought of more lip-synching and shimmying, but she was under contract again and was forced to accept.
Within weeks, Marilyn was seriously regretting her choice to return to Fox. Once more, it was working her like a dog—fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, on another throwaway musical Zanuck thought would make him rich. She’d wake at dawn, stuff herself into sequins and plastic paste flowers, and prance around in huge hoops and high-plumed headgear like some deranged cockatiel. She flubbed her way through campy dances under the Fox lot’s Technicolor glare, sweating under the hot klieg lights, dripping body makeup. Inwardly she seethed at Feldman for having pushed her into accepting Zanuck’s terms.
Joe wasn’t much help. He’d gone from supportive to outright surly, spending his evenings glued to TV Westerns or out all night at poker games. He made no effort with her Hollywood crowd—glowering in the dark when she brought back friends, hissing to himself about “that bunch of phonies.” When he did deign to visit the Show Business set, Joe seemed to prefer the jaunty vigor of Ethel Merman to Marilyn’s exasperating drama. Off set she was spotted wandering down Sunset Boulevard, wrapped in minks in ninety-degree heat, weeping softly. Five months in, their marriage was foundering. She thought he’d never tire of taking care of her—all those midnight flights and financial advice and pretending to like her attempts at cooking lasagna. Here was a man who’d fly across the country when she’d twisted her foot yet wouldn’t talk to her at dinner.
Twenty-four hours after wrapping up Show Business, Marilyn flew to New York to begin The Seven Year Itch. She begged Joe to explore the city with her: the Met, the jazz spots, even Central Park. Joe blew her off and spent his days at Toots Shor’s gabbing with friends about the 1952 pennant races. By now, the cracks in their marriage were obvious. The hacks hovered, ready to pounce, steno pads poised for the next slammed door, the next dressing room shouting match.
