Marilyn Monroe Read Online Free Page B

Fred Karger, a vocal coach who had been assigned to work with her. Swept away by her feelings,Marilyn informed Uncle Joe that she could no longer live at the estate; she moved to an apartment of her own. Karger, however, was less serious about the relationship than she was. Marilyn desperately wanted to marry, and she was crushed when Karger announced that he didn’t feel comfortable with her as a stepmother for his child from a previous marriage. Nonetheless, Marilyn’s devotion to Karger meant that she turned down an invitation to spend the weekend on Harry Cohn’s yacht, and that killed any chance she might have had of being kept on by Columbia after her contract expired on September 9, 1948.
    So Marilyn was back on the party circuit—except this time she no longer had the protection of being Joe Schenck’s girl. When Marilyn attended Uncle Joe’s parties, or accompanied him to Palm Springs for the weekend, he was happy to pass her around to friends. There were plenty of men willing to take Marilyn upstairs for half an hour, but no one seemed even remotely interested in casting her in a film. Though Marilyn regularly passed in view of some of Hollywood’s best directors and producers, no one guessed her potential. No one suspected she was star material. Most didn’t even think she was worth a second look. She appeared indistinguishable from all the other girls. When Marilyn approached Howard Hawks one weekend in Palm Springs, the director made it clear that he saw nothing special about her. He thought she was stupid and told her so. He wasn’t even interested in a sexual encounter.
    Though Marilyn did her best to play the happy girl, the party circuit was a brutal, degrading, sometimes dangerous business. At times, the men become violent. On one occasion, Marilyn found herself in a bedroom, with two men holding her down while a third tried to rape her. Somehow, she managed to break free, but the incident recalled the sexual assaults she had endured as a child, when Grace taught her to believe that somehow she had provoked the violence. Marilyn had come to these parties seeking help and attention. She had no illusions about what most of the guests expected from her and the other girls. She knew the risk of being attached to no particular man. She knew that once she was no longer Joe Schenck’s girl, she was up for grabs—or, at least, that was the way most men in this milieu perceived her. So on one level Marilyn believed she had brought the incident on herself. But on another she knew better, and she was filled with rage at the men who had done this to her.
    Everything changed for Marilyn, however, at Sam Spiegel’s New Year’s Eve party in Beverly Hills on December 31, 1948. Recently, Marilyn had established herself as one of the producer’s “house girls.” Spiegel’s parties were famous for—in the words of Orson Welles—“the best delicatessen and the best whores” in town. Indeed, some of the “house girls” were actually prostitutes hired by Spiegel to entertain his guests; others were starlets who hoped to advance their careers by catering to the needs of Spiegel’s rich and powerful friends. An invitation to Spiegel’s New Year’s Eve gala was one of the hottest tickets in Hollywood. That year, the guests included the directors Otto Preminger, William Wyler, John Huston, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Anatole Litvak, and many others.
    One prominent guest, Johnny Hyde, was not in the best of moods that night. Two weeks before, his most important female client, Rita Hayworth, had sailed to Europe with Prince Aly Khan; at this point, it looked as if she had no intention of ever coming back. Harry Cohn, who had Hayworth under contract, was fuming. As Hyde entered Spiegel’s house on North Crescent Drive, he seemed preoccupied and even a bit melancholy. Then he spotted Marilyn seated on a barstool across the room, and his demeanor changed entirely. Hyde, who had discovered Lana Turner, had a