Modern Screen (Dec 1954 - Dec 1955)

TOBER-SAIFER SHOE MANUFACTURING CO. • DEPT. J • 1204 WASHINGTON AVE. • ST. LOUIS 3, MO (Continued from page 62) tual uplift, perhaps even salvation. Whether consciously or not, Marilyn couldn't help resenting California. It was there, twenty-nine years ago, that she had been born in the charity ward of a Los Angeles hospital. (Her mother is still i alive, supported by Marilyn in a nursing j home.) Until her first marriage at sixteen, she was brought up by eleven different foster parents, passed around like a piece i of goods. Naturally, such experiences left her starved for affection and grimly j determined to prove herself. For a long time, self -justification amounted to little more than keeping her head above water. Her first job was in an orphanage pantry, at five cents a month; later she was promoted to setting tables, at ten cents a month. In 1949, she posed [ for the famous nude photograph to earn enough money — a grand total of fifty dol | lars — to pay the rent. Marilyn was almost indistinguishable in those days from hundreds of Hollywood starlets, all striving for recognition. She seemed to have neither the extra talent nor beauty to reach the top. But she was fortunately befriended by the late Johnny Hyde, an agent for the William Morris Agency. He gave her the will and contacts to get ahead. Although she was put under contract ; by several studios, nothing much came of | it until John Huston picked her for the brief role of a trollop in The Asphalt I Jungle, which sent her stock skyrocketing. ; Huston and Hyde were the first of several i masterminds who shaped Marilyn's career, i Her primary need has always been outside guidance. Lacking parents who might have instilled self confidence, she s had to look beyond herself for values. Often life seemed chaotic and morality a hoax, i In her drive for success, she was ready j and willing to adopt whatever personality I seemed to promise the biggest pay-off. ! With Hyde's approval, Huston came up I with just the right model. Like a chameleon, Marilyn readily j' adopted the character, so different from \ her own, which Huston's script called for. 't When Darryl F. Zanuck, production chief ! at Twentieth Century-Fox, signed Marilyn to a long-term contract, he was not signing the indecisive starlet of former days, but the open-mouthed blonde he had seen on the screen. Marilyn was stuck with it. But her sudden success didn't give her the satisfaction she had expected. Plagued by illness and self-doubt, she took ! two hours to put on make-up for public appearances — including her celebrated press conference to announce her divorce < from Joe DiMaggio — because she was terrified of being revealed as a fraud. That was the basis for what Hollywood cruelly called her "Narcissus complex." As an actress, Marilyn relied heavily 1 on her coach, a short, gray-haired woman named Natasha Lytess. She became critical of her own performances, and began to think of her talent as wasted on secondrate scripts. Gradually she discovered material rewards were not enough to compensate for her deep-seated guilt complex. Meanwhile, Zanuck had managed to project Marilyn's image on the public j as almost a parody of sex. People started laughing at Marilyn, rather than respect i ing her. On her trip to the Orient with DiMaggio in 1954, a Japanese radio commentator referred to her as "the honor i able hipswinging actress." In February of this year, twenty-three California stockholders in Fox publicly requested ! her removal from the payroll as "a blight on the company." Her flaunting of sex