Photographer Tom Kelley’s call came at a propitious moment. He asked Marilyn if she would pose nude for a calendar photo.
“What does it pay?” she asked.
“Fifty dollars,” Kelley responded.
Though Marilyn Monroe bore no misgivings about nudity, she had never posed des nuda. But the mean slapstick of poverty had recently delivered a stinging blow. After her brief scene in Love Happy, which had yet to be released, Marilyn made the rounds of the casting offices in her secondhand car, but found no work and no prospects. Soon she wasn’t able to keep up with her car payments or rent.
In their travels along the perilous path of the Hollywood fringe, Marilyn and young Bob Slatzer pooled their poverty and moved in together, sharing an apartment beneath the shadows of the Hollywood sign on Primrose Path. Bob occasionally resorted to picking cotton in the fields of Indio in order to buy the groceries. After the cotton season, the pickings were still poor in Hollywood, and Marilyn received a repossession notice on her automobile. One night when the two of them returned to their apartment, they found that the landlady had changed the lock on their door for nonpayment of rent.
After waiting for the landlady to leave the building, Slatzer crawled through the window while Marilyn drove her car up the driveway. They quickly loaded their few worldly belongings into the car. Opening the apartment door from the inside, Bob and Marilyn then entered the hallway and exited the building like respectable tenants—only to see Marilyn’s car pull out of the driveway and roar off down the street with their things. The car had been repossessed. It would cost fifty dollars to get it back.
“What did you say it pays?” Marilyn asked photographer Tom Kelley.
“Fifty dollars is the best I can do,” Kelley replied.
On May 25, 1949, Marilyn arrived at Kelley’s Hollywood studio. Located at 736 North Seward, it was virtually across the street from Consolidated Film Laboratories, where Gladys, Grace Goddard, and Stan Gifford once worked. While Marilyn certainly needed the fifty dollars, posing nude for the camera also held a certain appeal—an extension of her childhood dream of appearing for all to see in the attire bestowed upon her at nature’s finest boutique. The photos Tom Kelley took that day proved to be incredibly unique. Posed on red folds of velvet, such as one might see lining a Tiffany jewelry box, Marilyn Monroe appears less erotic than iridescent, the pièce de résistance in the master jeweler’s sample case. The Baumgarth Calendar Company paid Tom Kelley five hundred dollars for the world publishing rights. Baumgarth made a small fortune on the Golden Dreams calendar. Marilyn got her fifty dollars, and the return of the priceless possession a Hollywood starlet with golden dreams can’t possibly live without—her car.
While making the rounds of the agencies and casting directors, Marilyn was waiting in an office of the William Morris Agency when she was spotted by Johnny Hyde, a onetime child juggler and acrobat in the Loew’s vaudeville circuit who had become one of Hollywood’s top agents. A diminutive man, he had had a special chair made that gave him stature as he sat behind his large executive desk, staring at the luscious blonde with the lost look.
“You’re going to be a great star,” Hyde said. “I know. Many years ago I discovered a girl like you and brought her to Metro—Lana Turner. You’re better. You’ll go farther. You’ve got more!”
“Then why can’t I get a job?” Marilyn asked. “Just to make enough to eat on.”
“It’s hard for a star to get an eating job,” said Johnny. “A star is only good as a star. You don’t fit into anything less.”
Marilyn recalled that she laughed for the first time in months, but that Johnny Hyde didn’t laugh with her—he just kept staring and staring.
Johnny began squiring Marilyn around town, showing her off. They attended Hollywood parties, had dinner at Chasen’s and Romanoff’s, danced at Ciro’s, the Mocombo, and the Troc. Sometimes there would be dinner parties at Johnny Hyde’s big house on North Palm Drive near Charlie Feldman’s. Marilyn called Johnny’s dining room “my own private Romanoff’s” because it had booths and café tables just like Mike Romanoff’s famous restaurant. Johnny bought her clothes, put her up in a small efficiency apartment at the Beverly Carlton Hotel on Olympic Boulevard, and took her to the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to the stars, Michael Gurdin, who rounded her chin and took the bump off her nose—the bump Grace had always said was her only imperfection.
While Johnny went to Europe on business, Marilyn went on a multiple-city tour for the opening of Love Happy. When she arrived in New York, Andre de Dienes located her at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and they had a reunion on the strand of Long Island, where he photographed her cavorting on the beach. “She was radiant,” de Dienes recalled. “She had the presence and ease of an established star.” But de Dienes no longer clicked with Marilyn, and the ashes of their fiery romance were never reignited.
Marilyn suddenly abandoned the Love Happy tour when Johnny called to say she had landed a role in Ticket to Tomahawk at Fox. Hoping it would be her ticket to a new contract, Marilyn played a chorus girl in a western musical. But Ticket to Tomahawk went nowhere, and it again revealed that Marilyn’s talents were far above the mediocrity of the material.
Though Darryl F. Zanuck continued to ignore the blonde, whom he referred to as “strawhead,” MGM talent director Lucille Ryman alerted Marilyn to a role Metro was casting.
“There’s a part in John Huston’s picture The Asphalt Jungle that’s perfeet for you,” Lucille said. “It’s not a big part, but you’ll be bound to make a big hit in it. Tell your agent to get in touch with Mr. Huston.”
Johnny Hyde brought me to Mr. Huston’s office, and Mr. Huston gave me a copy of the script. Unlike Mr. Zanuck, he did not believe that actresses shouldn’t be allowed to know what they were going to act in. I took it home and my friend Natasha Lytess agreed to coach me…. I studied the part for several days and then returned to Mr. Huston’s office to read for him.
I felt sick. I had told myself a million times that I was an actress. I had practiced acting for years. Here, finally, was my first chance at a real acting part with a great director to direct me. And all I could do is stand there with quivering knees and a quivering stomach…. I felt desperate. Mr. Huston caught my eye and grinned.
“We’re waiting, Miss Monroe,” he said.
“Would you mind if I read the part lying on the floor?” I blurted out.
“Why, not at all,” Mr. Huston replied gallantly.
“I stretched myself out on the floor…. I had rehearsed the part lying on a couch, as the directors indicated. There wasn’t any couch in the office. Lying on the floor was almost the same thing, however. I went through the part and when I finished I said, “Oh, let me do it again.”
“If you want to,” said Mr. Huston, “but there’s no need.”
I did it again.
When I stood up Mr. Huston said, “You got the part after the first reading. Go fix yourself up with the wardrobe department.”
During the shooting Johnny Hyde was as excited as I was. He kept telling me, “This is it, honey. You’re in. Everybody is crazy about your work.”
When the picture was previewed, all the studio heads went to see it. It was a fine picture. I was thrilled by it. The audience whistled at me. They made wolf noises and laughed happily when I spoke. They liked me very much.
It’s a nice sensation to please an audience. I sat in the theater with Johnny Hyde. He held my hand. We didn’t say anything on the way home. He sat in my room beaming at me. It was as though he had made good on the screen, not me. His heart was happy for me. I could feel his unselfishness and his deep kindness. No man had ever looked on me with such kindness. He not only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane, too. He knew all the pain and all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like that. I wished in all my heart I could love him back. My heart ached with gratitude. But the love he hoped for wasn’t in me. You might as well try to make yourself fly as to make yourself love. But I felt everything else toward Johnny Hyde, and I was always happy to be with him. It was like being with a whole family and belonging to a full set of relations.
Johnny found Marilyn bit parts in a number of films: she was a roller-derby fan in The Fireball, a model who dodges a flirtatious feint from a has-been boxing champ in Right Cross, and a receptionist ogled by her boss in Home Town Story. But it wasn’t until Hyde placed her in the role of Miss Caswell of the “Copacabana School of Dramatic Art” in All About Eve that the dotted line was rolled out for her return to 20th Century-Fox.
Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, and though he never fully understood the special appeal of the starlet, he realized at the preview of Eve that nobody was looking at Bette Davis, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, or Anne Baxter when “strawhead” was on the screen. Zanuck arranged a new screen test for Marilyn, and she was offered a new seven-year contract.
Another person whose star was rising in 1950 was Captain William Parker of the LAPD. Known as “Whisky Bill” to those in the know at Los Angeles Police Headquarters, Bill Parker was an ambitious man who had his eye on the chief’s badge. By 1950, Parker had become the hard-drinking buddy of the hard-drinking interim chief, William Worton. When Worton retired and recommended “Whisky Bill” Parker as his replacement, it raised some ire and eyebrows in City Hall. The powers that be had assumed the chief’s badge would go to Norman Chandler’s favorite, Captain Thad Brown, chief of detectives.
Thad Brown was expected to nose out Parker because Brown was Chandler’s choice. As head of the L.A. Times, Chandler held the power; however, in the summer of 1950 intrigue of the highest Machiavellian order shifted the balance of power from Thad Brown to “Whisky Bill” Parker.
Parker’s friend Lieutenant James Hamilton was assigned by Parker’s mentor, Chief Worton, to be the investigator for the Police Commission. But instead of investigating for the Commission, Hamilton became an investigator of the Commission. It was the five police commissioners, political friends of Chandler, who would ultimately vote on the appointment of the new police chief. In the course of his duties, Lieutenant Hamilton observed Norman Chandler picking up one of the Police Commissioners, Mrs. Curtis Albro, on the steps of the L.A. City Hall. Mrs. Albro, an attractive member of the Southern California social set, was the wife of a prominent Los Angeles businessman.
Sensing an auspicious career move for himself within the power structure of the LAPD, Lieutenant James Hamilton tailed Chandler and Mrs. Albro to a luxurious Malibu beach house and staked out the home until the curvaceous Commissioner Albro left the next morning with Chandler.
Recruiting the assistance of two detectives, Archie Case and James Ahearn, Hamilton put Albro and Chandler under surveillance. Cameras and bugs were installed in the Malibu beach house, and the tide soon changed in the power struggle for the chief’s badge. The detectives assured Hamilton that they had enough evidence to ensure “Whisky Bill’s” appointment. Chandler, however, had already come out with a story in the L.A. Times stating that Thad Brown would be appointed the next chief of police. According to the Times article, three of the five commissioners, including Mrs. Albro, supported Brown.
The majority would ensure Brown’s appointment, but shortly after Parker and Hamilton revealed to Norman Chandler the compromising surveillance gathered by the two detectives, Mrs. Albro suddenly died. While her mysterious death was mourned by high society, low society persuaded Chandler’s friends on the Police Commission to vote unanimously for “Whisky Bill” Parker as the new police chief.
In an act of noblesse oblige, Parker promoted Hamilton and made him captain of the newly formed Intelligence Unit. The two detectives Archie Case and James Ahearn were also promoted and became Hamilton’s key lieutenants. Later they would serve dutifully under Captain Daryl Gates, who was to be appointed Hamilton’s successor when Bobby Kennedy arranged for Hamilton’s executive position within the National Football League in 1963.
Parker served as chief for sixteen years, from 1950 until his untimely death in 1966. He was buried wearing the badge.