OCR Text |
Show Family Wee.Icly J ScpUember 30, 1962 n V V H M J t By BEN HECHT Newspaper reporter, dramatist, novelist, screen writer, biographer, critic over the past 50 years Ben Hech t has displayed his" versatile writing talent as each of these. His O - I .W I J .... V y mujL best-remember- ed include "The Fron Page," "Twentieth Century," "A Child of the Century," "Perfidy" .works f v I JS VI " ) . 4 J. -- and "Charlie" His many notable screenplays include "The Scoundrel," "Wuthering Heights" "Vim Villa? "Scarf ace," "Gunga Din," "Notorious" and "Spellbound" Often an outspoken critic of Hollywood, Hecht here presents a surprising movie industry and the part i4tppmisaL-of-4Jie it played in the tragic life and death of Marilyn Monroe. THE ' ( I ::'v::-."- s legend of Marilyn Monroe will growing for many years. It will end up, as legends usually do, with all the facts upside down. Just weeks after her death, eager tales of Marilyn's life already are filled with moony misconceptionsand these from people who knew her Well. Wait till the historians take over her legend-building. The legend basis, already solidly laid down, is that Marilyn Monroe was a movie star "wrecked" "byjlollywood, driven to despair by the obliter-- ttnglarefmerwHyeaihahis-glar- ( was vanishing; and who was further stricken by two marriages. the failure of her-laIt wasn't that way. I spent 10 days in 19o4 interviewing Miss Monroe in San Francisco. A publishing house had asked me to write a book about the new glamour girl ablaze on the cinema horizon. Her, marriage to Joe DiMaggio interrupted the interview, and the book never, was finished. Marilyn told me hundreds of stories of her first 28 years, stories that will never be part of the growing Monroe legends because they revealed that Marilyn had been wrecked by the circumstances of jier life since the age of five; by the disturbed character she had inherited; by a string of evil events that would have n crushed a "ordinary'1 girls. Tvfice in her prefame days she had tried suicide, each time st ! i' N: V IX--! I ? .. V X -- half-doze- me VldLJ because a man she loved abandoned her. "That wasn't really the reason for my trying, to kill myself," Marilyn t6ld me. "The full rea-- . son was that I didn't want to live. There was too much pain in living." There's the truth about Marilyn Monroe she was saved' by Hollywood. Fame saved her. The on her 24 hours a day made spotlight-beatin- g the "world seem livable to her. And her last two marriages gave her years of important human relationships w.hich she had never known in her days of prefame vagabonding. Marilyn embraced her fame as her greatest love. After her return from her Korean honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio, I asked her, "What's r the4iappiesHi myouveverhad I to "It was the time last month when sang the soldiers in Korea," she answered. "There were thousands of them. It was a very cold afternoon, in their' and it was snowing. All the soidiers-s- at winter uniforms. I appeared in a decollete evening gown, bare back, bare arms. And I was so happy and so excited that I didn't know it was cold or snowing. In fact, the snow, never fell on me. It melted away almost before it touched my skin. That was my happiest time when the thousands of soldiers all yelled niy name over :: . and over." Reigrt of the Sex Goddess The reprieve of fame had begun before Korea. Marilyn continued to enjoy the "snowfall that never touched her," the pole-to-po- le i huzzahs y It was all more or less unreal. Marilyn told me before her second marriage: "I've never liked sex. I don't think I ever will. It seems justjthe " opposite of love." Disliking sex didn't interfere with Marilyn's emergence as a world sex symbol. In fact, of it helped. It added a note of childlike innocence to her siren face. The truth aboijt' Marilyn was that she was a sort oi evangel ist.She peddled a dream to' a preoccupied vatom age. Her fervor was that of the missionary with happy tidings. Her happy tidings wereof her luscious -- figure, her inviting mouth. She looked for no romance for herself. Her happiness lay in her missionary work for others. She lived in the midst of her fame as if she' were more a poster than a woman. her-dislik- The unreality "never hurt Marilyn. Unreality "' " - v' ' .' Legend already claims that Hollywood killed ATVU0V the extraordinary stories she once 9 Family Weekly, September 30, 1962 |