Marilyn Monroe's friends honor the icon (1962)

I used to go to Grauman's Chinese Theater and try to fit my foot in the prints in the cement there. And I'd say, uh-oh, my foot's too big. I guess that's out. I did have a funny feeling later when I finally put my foot down into that wet cement. I sure knew what it really meant to me-- anything's possible, almost. Marilyn Monroe recalled that just a few weeks ago. Everything was possible for Marilyn Monroe, almost. And it was the almost which she fought against all her life and which was her tragedy. The story of Marilyn Monroe is an authentic tragedy. It began in tragedy and ended in tragedy. And in between, there was always a tragic contrast between the bright public image and the lonely, frightened, private reality. Why did this happen to Marilyn Monroe? That is the subject of tonight's eyewitness report. Your correspondent, Charles Collingwood. [CHATTER] [MUSIC PLAYING]

Eyewitness, The big news of this week. [MUSIC PLAYING] Tonight's witness, Marilyn Monroe-- Why? [MUSIC PLAYING] In the beginning, Marilyn Monroe was not a likely candidate for the role of sex goddess. You could begin the story of her rise to that estate in a number of places. But perhaps as good a place as any is that the Bluebook modeling school in Hollywood. Its proprietor, Ms. Emmeline Snively, was Marilyn Monroe's first mentor. Well, she first was brought in by a photographer in August 1945. When she was working in a defense plant, she had been in a beauty contest. And this man had shot some test shots of her and thought she might make a good model, and brought the kodachromes in to show me.

And what made you think then, that she had the qualities which you would want as a model? Well, she was a clean, shining, pleasant, expressive-faced little girl. We said the girl next door type. And she was wearing a little white dress. You wouldn't necessarily wear this on a photographic job, and it was as clean and white and ironed and shining as she was. But she had a great deal of expression, and she was very surprised, I believe, to be in the Ambassador Hotel where my office was. And she looked at the board of covered girls and said, oh, those girls are so pretty. But I thought, what a wonderful little doll she would be on a cover someday. What did she look like when she first came to you, Ms. Snively? Well, when she first came to us, she looked like the girl next door, as I said before. And she was in my casting directory that we get out of all the girls we represent and go to modeling school. I have a picture here that you might be interested in seeing. She had what I call California blonde hair, which is darker in the winter and lighter in the summer because it's bleached on top. And it was really too curly. When she leaned over, it just stayed in the same coiffure. It didn't fall down as it should. So eventually, I talked her into it. And believe me, I had to talk her into anything that was not just natural and not just Norma Jean Dougherty, which was her name then. She had to be talked into lightning it so that she was a blonde in the winter as well as in the summer. And we had it straightened, and I noticed that she kept it that way all the rest of her life. Did she need a lot of coaching? Well, she had really no background. She had only gone through the 10th grade. And so she was so eager for training that she accepted everything we gave her and everything that she could learn, which made us give her more than we would the average girl. Later, when we worked toward getting her a studio contract-- and we were instrumental in getting her to Fox-- she signed up for every course, they had to offer, which meant a dancing voice, ballet, tap toe, singing. Whether she was qualified or not, she just went whole hog in for the educational side of it because it had been neglected in her life. People saw something special in Marilyn Monroe even then. But even then, the pattern of her life had been established-- the insecurity, the desperate urge to self-improvement, the effort to find in her work, the acceptance which life had never given her. We should have known then, Ms. Snively says, that anyone who worked that hard was looking for love, not just a job. Marilyn Monroe had to look for love from the day she was born. It didn't come to her, as we shall see after this message. Marilyn Monroe was an illegitimate child. Her father disappeared when her mother announced her pregnancy. So Hollywood film cutter Gladys Baker gave her baby her own name and maybe the dream of celluloid stardom. Her mother became mentally ill, was sent to an institution. The child's life became a series of psychological jolts. She bounced from foster home to orphanage to foster home. At age five, Marilyn once said, I think that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim. The orphanage said she was well-behaved, thought she was happy. Maybe she was an actress already. Still in her teens, a war plant beauty queen, the first of such diadems, the stepping stone to Ms. Snively's and the beginning of her transformation into a cover girl. In one month, she appeared on the covers of five so-called girlie magazines, a phase of her career she discussed with Edward R. Murrow, person-to-person. Well, now your picture has been on the cover of almost all popular magazines, hasn't it? No, not the Ladies' Home journal. EDWARD R. MURROW: That you would like, would you? Yes. EDWARD.

Why? Well, I used to long for it. I used to appear on-- when I was modeling on men's magazine covers such as I don't know, Squint, Peep, take a peep, all those things. [LAUGHTER] EDWARD R. MURROW: But not the Ladies' Home Journal? No.

He was 20, a war worker, then a merchant seaman. She was 16, confused, insecure. And she later said she married Jim Dougherty to avoid returning to an orphanage. They were divorced in 1946. He remembers her as a good cook. Her second marriage was something else again. Joe DiMaggio was a symbol in his own right. True, his was a very different world from hers, but it seemed, at the time, a perfect marriage, although her career conflicted from the beginning. She interrupted their wedding trip to Japan, leaving DiMaggio in Tokyo, to tour the Korean front lines, entertaining the troops. It was something she felt she ought to do, something she wanted to do. She felt a sense of obligation to her public. In these performances, in subzero temperature, were a show of gratitude. But she was already developing pneumonia, and there were signs of marital unhappiness. The marriage ended as it began in the full glare of publicity-- her unhappiness on display Hollywood style at a front lawn news conference. Arthur Miller, her third husband, was about as different from Joe DiMaggio as you could find. A major playwright, a certified intellectual, his world was different, too. And this third and final grab for emotional security ended with the loud, well-publicized crash. All right, guys, give us our shot. Marilyn, what's the reason for the breakup? Could you tell us? I'm sorry.

Marilyn, are you going to seek a divorce? I can't talk about my personal life. Before they were divorced, Arthur Miller wrote a screenplay for Marilyn. He said, I based a lot of Rosalynn in the misfits on Marilyn. Here is a scene from that film, the last one she completed. Cheer up. I will. I just hate to fight with anybody. When you win, you lose in your heart. Well you're free. Maybe the trouble is you're not used to it yet. No, the trouble is, I always end up back where I started. I never had anybody much. Here I am. Well, you had your mother, didn't you? [MUSIC PLAYING] How do you have somebody who disappears all the time? They both weren't there. She'd go off with a patient for three months. And you know how long three months is to a kid.

By this time, the real Marilyn Monroe had arrived. She was a star, bigger than life size to everyone but herself, every girl's dream. It isn't easy to be a star identified with sex. Kim Novak is a star, and she knows.

You can't trust who are really your friends because, so often, people will seem like it. And then the slightest thing alters, and that shifts also. Everything keeps moving about so. It's never the same. You just don't really know where you're at all the time.

It's because you feel people are treating you as a movie star, a thing rather than a person. Yes, it was so beautifully put by Marilyn. I had read the article today and was very impressed by it. You are. I remember once the head of publicity at the studio said to me, just remember, never forget that all you are is a piece of meat. It's like in a butcher shop. And it's a pretty awful thing to think about, to think that that's what you are, that you have to look at yourself that way. And the worst part is that you're treated that way. And Marilyn said it so well about the fact that people don't seem to mind saying it right to your face, or talking about you in ways in which-- it's fine for someone. You like to have criticism, helpful criticism or anything. But somehow, they almost overdo it. It seems sometimes almost deliberate, as if they think that, well, we don't want to get her to get a swollen head, so we'll just starve her from the heart, everything, not let her have anything, not ever say anything nice. In some deep sense, the public demands unhappiness of its idols. It's part of the price the public extracts for the fame and riches it showers upon them. In Marilyn Monroe's case, unhappiness was not difficult to extract. It was there to begin with. And as her public image grew, she began to withdraw increasingly upon herself and her unhappiness. It grew harder to face the public, to face the cameras even. She began to take lots of pills. She went to a psychoanalyst. She saw friends, of course. But somehow, even friends could not mitigate her loneliness, although they tried according to their different understandings of her trouble. It is perhaps a mark of how little she was understood that her friends are as hard put as anyone else to explain what happened. We will hear about her from some of those who knew her best after this message. Lee Strasberg, her friend and teacher, delivered the eulogy at Marilyn's funeral. Harry Reasoner asked him last night about reports that her life was increasingly tangled. Well, in the first place, there was not as much of a mess as has been made out. I mean, the actual thing that happened at the end is naturally a tragic one. But in the first place, whatever happened to her before goes back a long time, obviously, to early childhood, which created deep disturbances within her and deep emotional problems. Her whole career, obviously, was a series of continuous pressures to which she was subjected, and subjected by the very people that now speak very glibly about the kind of person that she was and how disturbed she was, and so on, and forget that, often, the reactions that she had were caused by the very things that were done to her.

Jean Negulesco, director one of her first smash hit films, How to Marry a Millionaire.

What was Marilyn Monroe like to work with? Well, as the director of the first intimate cinemascope picture, How to Marry a Millionaire,we become friends and we had a problem, a big problem. So we had difficulties in doing this picture a little more than the usual ordinary picture. And we needed more cooperation from the actors than usually. I found Marilyn Monroe alert, enthusiastic, and especially a hunger for knowledge, for being better. And this probably accounts for the name she got of being late. But she wanted so much to be so perfect for it that she always regarded her arrival in front of the camera. The quality Marilyn had is that she never felt that she was ready to face that camera. For that reason, she took two hours to fix her lips, or an hour and a half to arrange her hair and change it, and so on. But the moment she arrived on the front of the camera, there was this romance, this love affair between her and the lens. And she gave something which nobody was able to catch during the life but the camera. You see, the camera to us is still that extraordinary mystery, which we never know what it will catch because we all think we are always making great successes. And until the film gets together, the camera has caught the success or the flop. As an actress. She always wanted to find a key, a simple answer to the character she had to portray. In How to Marry a Millionaire, I made a sketch of her, and I show her the sketch. And she liked it, but she still was not convinced and find the key. So during the one scene we had when she was walking around telephoning, and I saw her trying more or less to, let's say, sell the sex of what everybody believes that Marilyn Monroe is and believed, and it was this symbol. I came to her, and I said, Marilyn, don't try to sell the sex. You are sex. You are the institution of sex. This is the only key to this part is that you are blind as a bat without glasses. And her big blue eyes, open. And she says, that's the key.

George Cukor, Director of Something's Got to Give,the film from which he was fired last June, Robert Shacknai asks the questions. Marilyn was an actress who you'd have to produce her more than direct her. If you let her have her own head, she did things that were quite original and quite enchanting.

Is it true that performers who are unusually good, who stand out, are frequently temperamental? Yes, but so is everybody else. The great thing, everybody has doubts and difficulties and fears. But the great one, the great thing is if you can overcome it, and you can function in spite of them.

Did Marilyn? Well, apparently not, poor darling. You see what happened to her.

The feeling now is that Hollywood destroyed Marilyn Monroe and her innate creative abilities. Would you, as a man who knows Hollywood, say that there are substance to something like that? Well, I think of course, an awful lot of nonsense. And I think people are jumping in with all kinds of sensational and rather silly statements from my point of view, and big generalities, I suppose under the stress of emotion. I don't know why. And I'm surprised that other intelligent people have said that. I know why. What do you mean Hollywood destroyed her? Hollywood, in a sense, created her. Other pretty girls with good figures and platinum blond hair did some of the same things that Marilyn did. But when they did it, it was vulgar. When Marilyn did it, it had something. What was the difference? Well, for all her flash, Marilyn was a very distinguished creature in her own way. The clothes may have been absurd, but she had the distinguished mind. And she had real-- she was unique, and she had a quality of excitement. She was a real movie queen. Just even when she was fully dressed with a big fur coat on, and she ran across the screen, you followed her. There was this curious excitement with her. I would always have such pleasure in watching her work with these very, very high heels, which never seem to interfere with her. And she'd run, and she'd jump, and there was always an enormous interest in that. Mrs. Patrick Campbell said many years ago Mrs. Patrick Campbell was a very witty woman who said about Tallulah Bankhead she said watching Tallulah on the stage was like watching somebody skate on very thin ice. And the secret of her success in England was that the English wanted to be there when she fell through. But one always felt that somehow about Marilyn.

Playwright Clifford Odets, a friend of her third husband, Arthur Miller, also a friend of Marilyn's. What was the burden that Marilyn Monroe carried with her? Well, Charles, talking in terms of burdens about Marilyn, oh, I would like to use a term that astronomers use. They frequently talk of a star. Marilyn was a star. They talk of a bright and visible star as being accompanied by another invisible star, which they call a dark companion. They mean by that the bright and visible star seems to be acting erratically. It won't stay in the orbit that they have preordained for it as an example. And they then realized that the bright and visible star is being pulled out of orbit. Its pathways, or trackways, are being determined by an invisible star, which they call a dark companion. And about Marilyn, I feel that always in her life, her adult and working life, the years of her fame, she was accompanied by this dark companion. And what would that be in her life? Those would be the early and what I think are the invincible patterns of childhood. They would have to do with a severely mother-deprived life. They would have to do with not being wanted as a child, being shunted from foster home to foster home. They would have to do with being not only deprived, but even, from her point of view, despised, rejected, unneeded, so that the total result was a very severe lack of self-esteem on her part. And always, this luminous star traveled with this dark companion. When she was working in front of a camera, where she had to be in full panoply, ready for everything, ready to grapple with any emergency, and it was not her nature. She was too uncertain. She was too shy. She would brave out things. Or the fact that she was dilatory so often meant that she had an unconscious deep resistance to standing there and working at the moment, or she felt she didn't look her best. She felt she couldn't work her best that hour. And then she would try to doge the working problem. She lacked what, I would say, a well-trained circus pony has. She lacked flexibility. She lacked tractability. She lacked cynicism. If she'd been more cynical and just approached the work as not only a craftsman, but just in a easy way-- well, I brought myself there. They photographed my body. Now, I can go about more important things. If she'd had that kind of cynicism, she might have been happier, but that was not her nature. Her nature was sensitive, intuitive, idealistic. Clifford, how will Marilyn Monroe be remembered? She has been a legend in her lifetime. This is obvious. It need not even be said. But I think that now that she's gone, she will become an even greater legend. I feel it in the air everywhere I go. People were very shocked about her death, but there's a feeling that the legend is spreading, that she will be more vivid, fresher and greener in death than she was in life. I'll be back with more on this legend of Marilyn Monroe in a moment after this message. Marilyn Monroe is not, of course, the first Hollywood star whose problems were greater than her strength to bear them. But there is something that sets her apart in death, as there was something that set her apart in life, some quality of universality to which people instinctively respond. The things that struck her down were things against which we all fight. Maybe we sensed this all along, and maybe that was the secret of her extraordinary appeal. Life had conspired against her from the start. And its subtlest conspiracy was that when it seemed, as it must have seemed to her, that she had won, it was the sign that she had lost. The Los Angeles medical examiner said today her death is still unexplained, but there was always something about her that was unexplained. Her story is the stuff of legend. And like all legends, lends itself to be interpreted as you wish to interpret it. She was, as Clifford Odets said, one of those accompanied all her life by a dark companion. It drew her to destruction. This is Charles Collingwood. Good night. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Eyewitness, Marilyn Monroe-- Why? [MUSIC PLAYING] The excerpt from the motion picture, The Misfits,released through United Artists, origination from Television City Hollywood. Next Friday and every Friday at the same time for the drama of big events, keep an eye on Eyewitness. This program, pre-recorded, is produced by CBS News,which has sole responsibility for the news judgments, the contents, and the editing. This is John Harlan speaking.