6
“IT'S JUST TOO MUCH SEX THAT YOU HAVE”
My career as a model started when Potter Hueth showed the pictures he took of me to Miss [Emmeline] Snively, who then ran the largest model agency in Los Angeles. I was quite excited when she agreed to see me. An appointment was made, and I couldn't sleep the night before. If she didn't like me, that would be the end of my modeling career—before it started.
Calling in sick, I took the day off to go see Miss Snively. I was then nineteen, my marriage was strained, and I was thinking of a divorce. When I wrote to my husband, I explained I did not love him anymore, that I had a chance for a career as a model, and that I wanted freedom to pursue my career. I wanted a divorce.
Jim was still in Shanghai. He wrote asking if I would wait until he returned from overseas to see if we could patch things up and make a go of our marriage. But I knew our marriage was over. A career was more important to me. I wanted to become an actress more than ever. Perhaps through modeling I would get the break I needed.
At the appointed hour—eleven A.M.—I entered Miss Snively’s office. I was nervous and hoped it didn’t show. During the interview she told me I had the makings of a model but that I would have to attend the modeling school she also operated. This, she told me, was necessary so that I could be properly groomed. The school’s tuition would be one hundred dollars. I told her, “Well, that lets me out.” I did not have the money. She said not to worry, that I could pay her out of the modeling jobs she would get for me.
I can still remember the first modeling job I ever had. I was a hostess at an aluminum exhibit at the Los Angeles Home Show in the Pan Pacific Auditorium. I received ten dollars a day for ten days, and all of it went to paying for my modeling lessons.
My second modeling job did not turn out so well. In fact, it was quite bad. With a group of models I went on a photo assignment to model sport clothes for a famous
GEORGE BARRIS: As a nineteen-year-old, Marilyn had spent many happy days modeling at Santa Monica beach on assignments from Miss Snively’s modeling agency. She had been the agency’s top “cheesecake” model; magazine and newspaper editors were constantly assigning photographers to take pictures of the sexy Norma Jeane. Later on, when I had the opportunity to photograph Marilyn in the same location, I know she was reminded of her youthful days on the sunny beach, and she told me that the pictures I took of her there were her favorites of them all.
Her success as a model had enabled Norma Jeane to leave her aunt Ana then and to move into her own small apartment. Her mother, Gladys, had been released from a hospital stay and came to live with her
American catalogue. The location was Malibu beach. After two days they sent me home. They would not tell me why. I was very upset—here I was the only model in the group fired.
Later I found out the reason I was fired. They said no one would ever look at the clothes in their catalogue. Miss Snively later told me it’s just you have more than the usual amount of sex appeal. It’s just too much sex that you have to be a fashion model.
I believed in myself so much that I would make it as a model I quit my job at the defense plant. I was determined I would be able to succeed as a model. I never missed my modeling school classes. I always did the best I could. I wouldn’t settle for second best. I had so much confidence in myself I just knew I could make it. I would take home photographs of myself to study how I looked and if I could improve myself posing in front of a mirror for hours.
The next day I would see the photographer who took those pictures and ask, What did I do wrong in this photo? or Why didn’t this photo come out better? When they told me, I would never make that mistake again. I believed in myself. I just had to make it. I was determined to make it. Nothing was going to get in my way.
Then they started to put me in bathing suits, and all of a sudden I became popular.
daughter there. They slept in the same bed. Acting as her daughter’s secretary, Gladys took phone messages and made appointments for her. For a while all was well.
Gladys couldn’t do enough for her daughter. She ran errands, went shopping, and even traveled by streetcar to the Ambassador Hotel, where Miss Snively’s modeling agency was located, to thank her personally for being so helpful to Norma Jeane’s career.
All this came to my mind as Marilyn reviewed those Santa Monica beach photos, recalling her modeling days as a determined young girl who yearned to become a movie star. I don’t think anyone was ever more determined, and I never encountered a model who worked as hard as she did.
Photographers liked working with me. They said I knew how to take direction. I began having lots of location assignments. It was like I had been discovered. I was in great demand for bathing suit pictures. In those days I was a brunette. Miss Snively kept insisting I become a blonde. But I refused, I didn’t want to bleach my hair. But she kept telling me, “Norma Jeane, if you expect to go places, you’ve got to be a blonde.”
I refused because I felt I wouldn’t feel natural. It would not be me. Miss Snively carefully explained to me that photographers with their lighting techniques can photograph a blonde differently, light or dark, and those in-between-shades, by controlling their lighting. “You’ll become more successful than you are now, believe me,” she said. “But you’ve got to become a blonde.” I finally agreed to it when the photographer Raphael Wolff agreed to pay for the bleaching. I had long hair in those days, and they cut it short and then styled it in an upsweep. When I saw myself in the mirror, it just wasn’t the real me. They had converted me to a golden blonde. At first I couldn’t get used to myself.
But then I saw it worked. Miss Snively sure knew what she was telling me. I began to get more modeling assignments in photography for glamour poses, and especially cheesecake pictures. And the talk came back to what photographers were saying about me: That Norma Jeane—she’s built like a sex machine. She could turn it on and off.
I couldn’t believe what they were saying about me. The word was around: “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s in her hips or her bosom; you know where it is, it’s in her mind.” I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. I began to appear in all of the magazines of the day, especially the men’s.
But let me fill you in with the details. You know, when Howard Hughes saw my picture on a magazine cover, the mere fact that word got out to the Fox studio talent agent Ben Lyon that [Hughes was interested in me] was enough for Fox to take notice and then want to give me that screen test in color. The interesting thing was [Lyon] didn’t even ask me if I had any acting experience. He did not ask me to read any scripts. Nothing. Mr. Lyon himself in the 1920s and 30s was a big movie star—he costarred with Jean Harlow in the film Hell’s Angels—but now he was a talent scout for the studio.
Darryl Zanuck was head of the studio, and he had to approve all color film tests, but he was out of town. We would have to wait for his return. So the secret movie screen test was made of me while Mr. Zanuck was away.
