The other way to fame open to the actress is the way of scandal. Sleep with a half dozen famous Don Juans, divorce a few husbands, get named in police raids, café brawls or other wives’ divorce suits, and you can wind up almost as much in demand by the movie producers as a Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh.
The only trouble with becoming famous as a result of a half dozen scandalous happenings is that the scandal-made star can’t just rest on her old scandals. If she wants to keep her high place in the public eye and on the Hollywood producer’s casting list she has to keep getting into more and more hot water. After you’re thirty-five getting into romantic hot water is a little difficult, and getting yourself publicized in love triangles and café duels over your favors needs not only smart press agents but also a little miracle to help out.
I became famous in the movies in none of these three accepted ways. The studio never thought of me as a Star Possibility, and the notion of putting me in as a lead on a picture was as far from Mr. Zanuck’s head as of handing me over his Front Office as a dressing room. It would make a very good one.
Thus I didn’t get a chance to burst upon the public as a Great Talent.
And there was no Studio campaign or buildup. I was never groomed. The press and the columnists were kept in ignorance of my existence. No telegrams and other passionate Front Office communiqués went out about me to the Sales Force or the nation’s exhibitors.
And there was no scandal to my name. The calendar business came after I was already famous everywhere except in Mr. Zanuck’s mind and in the plans of my Studio, 20th Century-Fox.
I had been terrified for a week before the news of my calendar nude broke. I was sure that it would put an end to my fame and that I would be dropped by the studio, press, and public and never survive my “sin.” My sin had been no more than I have written—posing for the nude picture because I needed fifty dollars desperately to get my automobile out of hock.
There are many other ways for a young and pretty girl to make fifty dollars in Hollywood without any danger of being “exposed.” I guess the public knew this. Somehow the story of the nude calendar pose didn’t reflect scandal on me. It was accepted by the public for what it was, a ghost out of poverty rather than sin risen to haunt me.
A few weeks after the story became known I realized that far from hurting me in any way it had helped me. The public was not only touched by this proof of my honest poverty a short time ago, but people also liked the calendar—by the millions.
To return to my unorthodox rise to movie fame, it came about entirely at the insistence of the movie public, and most of this movie public was in uniform in Korea, fighting.
Letters started flooding my studio by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. They were all addressed to me. They came at the rate of thirty-five hundred a week, and then five and seven thousand a week.
I received five times more mail than the studio’s top box-office star of the time, who was Betty Grable.
Reports from the mail room confused the Front Office. The Publicity Department was called in and asked if its personnel were engaged in some secret campaign in my behalf. There was none. The letters were pouring in only because moviegoers had seen me on the screen and felt excited enough to write and thank me or ask for my photograph.
News that the public was hailing me as the new Hollywood movie favorite appeared in the Hollywood gossip columns. No one sent the news out. The columnists printed it because people were talking about it.
The Studio officials remained unimpressed for a time. They had their own Star Possibilities they were plugging. I was regarded from Mr. Zanuck down as a sort of freak who for no reason anybody could put a finger on was capturing some morbid side of the public’s fancy.
I was making three hundred dollars a week and spending most of it on lessons, dancing and singing lessons and acting lessons. I lived in a small single room and was as broke as I used to be when I had no regular job. I had to borrow ten and twenty dollars every week or so. The difference was now that I could pay my debts back quicker—sometimes inside of the same week.
Finally the mail from the movie fans got to be so fantastic in quantity that the Front Office could no more ignore me than it might an earthquake that was tipping Mr. Zanuck’s desk over. I was sent for by Mr. Zanuck himself, looked at briefly, and given a few mumbled words of advice.
All I had to do, Mr. Zanuck said, was to trust him. He would do everything that was best for me and help me to become a big star for the studio.
I could tell that Mr. Zanuck didn’t like me very much and that he still couldn’t see any more talent or beauty in me than when he had fired me a year before on the general grounds of being unphotogenic. Studio Bosses are very jealous of their powers. Like political bosses they like to pick out their own candidates for greatness. They don’t like the Public rising up and dumping an unphotogenic entry in their lap and saying, “She’s our girl.”
There was some normal fumbling with how to handle me, in what sort of pictures to put me. And there was still a deep conviction in the Studio’s bosom that I was only a flash in the pan and would very likely be forgotten in a year.
It wasn’t to happen that way. I knew it at the time. I knew what I had known when I was thirteen and walked along the sea edge in a bathing suit for the first time. I knew I belonged to the Public and to the world, not because I was talented, or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else. The Public was the only family, the only Prince Charming and the only home I had ever dreamed of.
When you have only a single dream it is more than likely to come true—because you keep working toward it without getting mixed up.
I worked hard and all day long. I worked inside the studio and outside it. It wouldn’t be long now, I knew, before Mr. Zanuck would give me a lead in a big picture. The Publicity Department was already on the ball. The magazines seemed to be celebrating a perpetual Marilyn Monroe week. My picture was on nearly all their covers.
People began to treat me differently. I was no longer a freak, a sort of stray ornament, like some stray cat, to invite in and forget about. I was becoming important enough to be attacked. Famous actresses took to denouncing me as a sure way of getting their names in the papers.
In fact my popularity seemed almost entirely a masculine phenomenon. The women either pretended that I amused them or came right out, with no pretense, that I irritated them.
I did nothing vulgar on the screen. And I did nothing vulgar off the screen. All I did was work from eight to fourteen hours a day either acting or trying to improve my talents.
I felt tired all the time. Worse, I felt dull. The colors seemed to have gone out of the world. I wasn’t unhappy and I didn’t lie awake nights crying and hanging my head. That sort of thing was over—at least for now.
What happened was that in working to make good I had forgotten all about living. There was no fun anymore in anything. There was no love in me for anything or anyone. There was only success—beginning.
And then one night a friend at the Studio said, “A fellow like him. He’s Joe DiMaggio.”
“I’ve heard of him,” I said.
It was partly true. I knew the name but I didn’t actually know what it stood for.
“Don’t you know who he is?” my friend asked.
“He’s a football or baseball player,” I said.
“Wonderful,” my friend laughed. “It’s time you were coming out of your Marilyn Monroe tunnel. DiMaggio is one of the greatest names that was ever in baseball. He’s still the idol of millions of fans.”
“I don’t care to meet him,” I said. Asked why, I said that I didn’t like the way sports and athletes dressed, for one thing.