Today is the centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, and over at Prospect I have an article on how Marilyn Monroe took on Twentieth Century and won.
Below I set out the story with more context and more detail.
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By way of background – Ella Fitzgerald
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. This meant that while everyone else was listening to disco or punk or new romantics, I was listening to Deanna Durbin and Ella Fitzgerald.
When I was older I sought to listen to every available recording of Fitzgerald, from her time with Chick Webb onwards (and I also watched also every film of Durbin). For me Fitzgerald’s songbooks, produced by Norman Granz, were perhaps the greatest artistic achievement of the twentieth century. If I ever were to be on desert island discs, every track would probably be a Fitzgerald one (apart from this one by Teddy Grace).
On the other hand, I did not really give Marilyn Monroe much thought – or at least not any more thought than I gave to Judy Garland or Doris Day or Elvis Presley: an icon, yes, and part of the cultural furniture. But my interest was elsewhere.
And then I read the following story.
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Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe
The story was told by Fitzgerald herself in 1972, ten years after Monroe died.
“I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt. It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”
Fitzgerald can be regarded as a reliable source, and she certainly was not given to talking about herself or exaggeration. As far as one can tell, it was also not a story ever told by Monroe to promote herself.
This story did not accord with a common view of Monroe as vacuous and self-obsessed. This was someone freely using privilege and leverage to help someone else.
Reading further, one learned that Monroe had listened to Fitzgerald’s records as she learned to sing. And on a later occasion it seemed, according to a Fitzgerald biographer, that Monroe had insisted that she and Fitzgerald must enter the same door at a segregationist club.
In an interview, when asked about her favourite singer, Monroe said:
“Well, my very favorite person, and I love her as a person as well as a singer, I think she’s the greatest, and that’s Ella Fitzgerald.”
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The films of Marilyn Monroe
Coming from the perspective of a Fitzgerald devotee, this was fascinating – and subversive of the shallow image of Monroe.
Being a completist and a hoarder, I decided to acquire and watch all of Monroe’s films in chronological order.
And then I realised something else: that she was a far more interesting actor than often suggested by her cultural profile.
In one of earlier films, 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock (and my favourite of her films) she played a psychopathic babysitter.
Not long after, in Niagara (1953) – a film which boosted her cinematic popularity and arguable made her a movie star – she played a murderer.
Taking these together with her small but significant roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve (both 1950) – two of the greatest films of all time – one can form an impression of Monroe different to a mere fluffy actor.
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Of course, all these are before her big four films – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire (both 1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959) – where her impeccable comic acting and timing are obvious. But she had a greater range than comedy. I formed the view that, had she lived she may well have become, like her All About Eve co-star Bette Davis or Gloria Swanson, a great cinematic anti-hero or villain.
Again, the popular image of Monroe was subverted.
There was more to it.
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Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood system and the law of contract
I them started reading about her – which was a frustrating experience, as a great deal written about her is conspiracy theory or drenched in hindsght or derivative and unoriginal. More and more “interpretations” (and “re-interpretations”!) based on the same few sometimes unreliable facts.
But as a legal commentator with a background in media and commercial law, what struck me was when Monroe took on and defeated Twentieth Century Fox – one of the great studios of the time – in a contractual dispute.
I am not a cultural historian, and still less a cultural theorist, but this was something I did know something about.
And what was apparent in what happened was that Monroe had considerable autonomy and agency – and was certainly not the “victim” portrayed in many narratives of her life. In fact, she did something which was very difficult to pull off – and did so without being dominated by lawyers or advisors. Indeed, she discarded and disregarded advice when it did not accord with her aims. She knew her own mind and what she wanted to achieve, and she went about doing it.
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I have summarised what happened over at Prospect – click here. Here I set out what happened in more detail.
Monroe had a contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Ironically, given the title of one of her best films, it was a seven year service contract.
(Seven years was the industry standard – for legal background see the hugely significant 1943 legal case brought by Olivia de Havilland.)
Monroe entered the contract in 1950, after some previous short-term contracts with both Fox and Columbia, another major studio.
Sometimes when an unknown enters a long-term contract with a media company (like a studio or a record label), there is a sense of a trade-off. The media company invests in the unknown and when, sometimes, the unknown makes it big then what seems an imbalanced contract is really just compensation for the media company for taking the risk.
Such a view does not really apply here.
Monroe got her big chances in the 1950 films of The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve with no studio support. Her champion was the Hollywood agent Johnny Hyde (who was to die in 1950), who supported her even when she was initially rejected by Fox and Columbia. The seven-year contract came as a result.
Her growing popularity, which pressed Fox into finding more prominent roles for her, was again from her own efforts. She also deftly dealt with adverse news developments by herself, and not with studio publicists.
And she relentlessly invested in herself. She spent so much on acting lessons – she did not graduate from an acting school, either the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts or otherwise – that she had to borrow money from her rent. She taught herself to dance. She listened to Fitzgerald and others to help her learn to sing.
This was not someone being made by a studio, but someone making themselves.
And when she got the seven-year contract, she was worked hard on making several films a years – few of which would be known about now, but for Monroe’s involvement.
But by late 1952 it became obvious to Fox that they had not just an emerging star but a superstar, and a very bankable one too. And so they finally placed her in star vehicles, which were in turn heavily successful.
But Monroe was stuck on her seven year contract. Her weekly salary was capped at $1,500.
This meant, for example, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her co-star Jane Russell had received $200,000, and Monroe just $18,000.
Monroe was also worried about typecasting and wanted to do more than comedy roles or to play a stereotype
And when, following the successes of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, Monroe was offered something called The Girl in Pink Tights, she decided she had had enough.
She went on strike.
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By this time she was close to Joe Di Maggio – briefly her husband – who was a sporting legend and media celebrity in his own right. She learned from him more about how to use leverage in commercial negotiations.
(It was also about this time she helped Fitzgerald.)
She got a clever lawyer who averred that the seven year contract was no longer on force because of technicality. Twentieth Century Fox disputed this but – tellingly – they did not litigate the point.
She realised that if her position was that a contract was not valid, she should not affirm the contract by accepting cheques from the studio, even though this was against her own immediate self-interest.
And most of all she realised that Fox needed more Monroe films, and the cupboard was becoming bare.
Fox’s response was to treat her like a naughty and irritating dysfunctional factor of production in their film factory.
Her key demands – not only financial but about artistic control and freedom to work for other studios – were treated as bizarre and outlandish.
Twentieth Century Fox had their business model and they were not going to change it for anyone, not even Marilyn Monroe.
But the media context was changing: television was rising, and the cinema-going public were becoming more discriminating.
And so, after three years – on the very last day of 1955 (and perhaps significantly also the last day of their financial year) Twentieth Century Fox surrendered to then 29-year old Monroe
There would be a new seven-year contract, with a requirement to make only four films for Fox at a six-figure fee for each.
She would be able to choose her directors and for two of the films the cinematographer too.
She could work for other studios.
The Girl in Pink Tights was abandoned.
The headlines read “Battle with studio won by Marilyn.”
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This exercise in autonomy and agency does not accord with common views of Monroe as not being in control, but it does accord with the facts of 1953-56.
After her victory, Monroe went about setting up her own production company and entering into negotiations with the likes of Laurence Olivier and Terrence Rattigan.
And then the story changes direction.
After 1956, with the exception of Some Like It Hot (1959), few would regard her films as highly as her mid-1950s hits.
Like some other actors and stars, Monroe went into a lull. She was not to make the agreed quota of films for Fox.
What we now know is that she was to die in 1962 (most likely accidental death – sorry, conspiracy theorists), and so the years before look like years of decline rather than of rest. A decline and fall, a tragedy.
But there is no inherent reason that she could not have resumed and returned to active film-making in due course.
She did not, for example, decide to leave Hollywood altogether – like Durbin, or her Niagara co-star Jean Peters, or Grace Kelly, or Greta Garbo.
And of course – she could have carried on in the movie business on for a long time. For example, Mel Brooks – also born in 1926 – is still with us. She was born within a few weeks of the Queen – and David Attenborough, also still with us.
But narratives and myths and lore die hard, and so the popular view of Monroe as always a victim prevails.
But she was not always a victim, and by taking on and defeating Twentieth Century Fox in 1953-56, she showed she was very much in control.
