Page 35 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

ON A STAR-STUDDED EVENING at Santa Monica’s Club Del Mar, Marilyn poses forLifemagazine with Mitzi Gaynor, Tony Curtis, and John Derek. It’s January 1952 and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is honoring her with a “Henrietta” award statuette.

In a velvet gown with a plunging bustier, bare shoulders covered by a fur stole, twenty-five-year-old Marilyn crosses the room to receive the award for Best Young Box Office Personality.

It’s a glamorous, champagne-soaked evening. But in the light of day, Marilyn demands more.

“I want to expand my horizons,” she tells Grace McKee.

And her self-esteem:There was no hiding from it anymore.I was terribly dumb. I didn’t know anything about painting, music, books, history, geography. I didn’t know anything about sports or politics.

The Westwood campus of UCLA is less than three miles from the Fox lot. Marilyn decides to enroll in an extension course.

On February 12, 1952, a photographer fromMovies Dayis on hand to snap Marilyn—the magazine’s “Most Exciting Woman of the Year”—studying in the library, laughing with fellow students in the cafeteria, and holding a stuffed brown bear, the university’s “Bruin” mascot.

In her literature class, she slips into the back, wearing a scarf, sweater, and jeans. No one recognizes her, or pays her much interest or attention, but Marilyn is in awe of the worlds her professors reveal to her. She reads Freud, Proust, Turgenev. “I read them till I got dizzy,” she says. She learns how to digest books and break down stories—and she learns about herself. She possesses a mind that is quick, smart, and voracious for knowledge.

Next month, she’ll be on set for a master class in comedy from Howard Hawks, director ofBringing Up BabyandHis Girl Friday.

Darryl Zanuck had complained to Hawks that he didn’t know what to do with Marilyn Monroe or her baffling popularity.

Hawks is pretty sure he sees the problem. Marilyn’s not a dramatist; she’s a persona. “She’s as phony as a three-dollar bill, and you’re trying to make her real,” the director told the studio chief. “She belongs in an outrageous comedy or in a musical.” Now Hawks is making good on his theory. He casts Marilyn in his newest screwball comedy,Monkey Business,as Lois Laurel, secretary to the head of a chemical company who directs a research scientist played by leading man Cary Grant to create an elixir of youth.

Zanuck soon finds another reason to be irritated with Marilyn.

Aline Mosby of United Press calls up the studio. “I’ve got a hot tip,” she says, “that the anonymous nude model in that ‘Golden Dreams’ calendar all over town is actually 20th Century-Fox starlet Marilyn Monroe.”

The hand-wringing executives at the studio immediately deny the story.

Marilyn is also initially concerned but quickly changes her mind. Why lie? She’s not embarrassed. It amuses her to spot the 1952 calendar popping up in local barbershops and garages. She’s proud that it’s so popular.

In March, Marilyn gives Mosby an exclusive interview and dares to tell the truth. “I was told I should deny I’d posed … but I’d rather be honest about it,” she tells the reporter. Her voice is soft but serious, words flowing in a breathless rush. “Besides, I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

The truth is that she posed for photographer Tom Kelley because she needed the money. “I was in debt,” she admits. “I always supported myself. No one else ever supported me in my life. I had no family. And I had no place to go.”

Honest work to pay the bills, now that’s a situation the public can relate to—far more than Fox’s strategy of deception. Instead of adding fuel to the scandal, Marilyn’s decision to publicly admit the photos nips it in the bud.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.

“I’ve gotten a lot of fan letters on it. The men like the picture and want copies. The women, well. One gossip columnist said I autographed the pictures and handed them out and said, ‘Art for art’s sake.’ I never said that.” She grins a little. “Why, I only gave two away.”

Cary Grant, Marilyn’sMonkey Businessco-star, comes to her defense as well. And he is willing to make the art comparison. “There wouldn’t be any great art if girls hadn’t posed in the nude,” he reminds reporters.

“We’re all sexual creatures,” Marilyn says. “Thank God.”

The calendar sells out. Fan mail surges.

MGM is pitching the musicalSingin’ in the Rainahead of its April release, but journalists demand, “We don’t want to interview Debbie Reynolds. We want to talk to the girl with the big tits.”

Marilyn will take what she can get. She has over-the-title billing in RKO Studio’sClash by Night,and she would rather talk about her role in the romantic film noir than her physical measurements. It’s her largest part yet, with fourth billing behind lead Barbara Stanwyck and co-stars Robert Ryan and Paul Douglas. But she makes the most of this increase in attention. It’s what she’s hoped, prayed, and waited for.

Besides, all the publicity surrounding the nude calendar significantly heightens the public’s interest inClash by Night.Some folks gossip that it might’ve even beenClashdirector Fritz Lang who first dropped the hint in Aline Mosby’s ear.

Stanwyck is supportive. Marilyn is “just a carefree kid,” in the film star’s opinion.

“There was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once,” Stanwyck says of the up-and-coming actress.

Reviewers are beginning to agree.

“Marilyn Monroe, the calendar girl … proves she can also act and can hold her own with top performers,” says theLos Angeles ExaminerofClash by Night.TheNew York World Telegram and Sunraves, “This girl has a refreshing exuberance, anabundance of girlish high spirits. She is a forceful actress, too, when crisis comes along. She has definitely stamped herself as a gifted new star, worthy of all that fantastic press…. Her role is not very big, but she makes it dominant.”

“I’m on calendars, but never onTime,” Marilyn jokes to reporters, at once sending up both the weekly news magazine and her reputation for perpetual lateness. But now sheisonTime—as well as on the cover ofLife,which notes that “Every so often, more in hope than conviction, Hollywood announces the advent of a sensational new glamor girl … today the most respected studio seers, in a crescendo of talk unparalleled since the debut of Rita Hayworth, are saying that the genuine article is here at last: a sturdy blonde named Marilyn Monroe.”

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