This is a story Marilyn Monroe told to journalist and author Florabel Muir.
This *second* publishing was in the January issue of Motion Picture and Television Magazine in 1953.
TRANSCRIPT
Here’s Marilyn In Her Own Words
First I want to say that this would be a very uninteresting world if there weren’t any wolves, but a girl has to learn how to handle them or she’ll run into a bushel of trouble.
There are many types of wolves. Some are sinister. Others are just good time Charlies trying to get something for nothing, and others make a game of it.
This last type is the most interesting.
The first real wolf I encountered should have been ashamed of himself because he was trying to take advantage of a mere kid.
That’s all I was, and I wasn’t suspicious of him at all when he stopped his car at a corner and started to talk to me.
He looked at me all over and then came up with that famous line, You ought to be in pictures. That was the first time I’d ever heard it, so it didn’t sound corny to me.
He told me he had an office at the Goldwyn studio and said why didn’t I come by and see him and he would get me a screen test.
It sounded pretty good to me because I was crazy to get into the movies.
I was modeling at the time and I asked the people who ran the agency where I got my jobs what they thought of his offer.
The manager called the studio but never was able to get in touch with my would-be benefactor.
However, the wolf called the agency and I made an appointment to go to his office on a Saturday afternoon.
I didn’t know then that the producers and other movie officials don’t make Saturday afternoon appointments. Although, I found that out later.
I also found out that he didn’t really have any connection with the Goldwyn studio but had borrowed a friend’s office. He was fat and jovial and, of course, drove a Cadillac.
He gave me a script to read and told me how to pose while reading it.
All the poses had to be reclining, although the words I was reading didn’t seem to call for that position. Even as naive as I was then,
I soon figured out that this wasn’t the way to get a job in the movies.
It was getting sillier by the minute and I maneuvered over toward the door and made a hasty exit.
The next wolf I met was in policeman’s clothing.
Now, if you can’t trust an officer of the law, then whom can you trust?
At least that’s how I felt on one December evening when I stopped in at a little hamburger joint on Hollywood Boulevard to have my dinner.
I had a $20 check I got for modeling and I thought I could have it cashed at the place, but they didn’t have that much money on hand.
The policeman was having coffee at the counter and he offered to take me across the street to a clothing store and get it cashed.
I thought he was very kind to make this offer and thanked him with enthusiasm.
I wrote my address on the check and I guess he must have made a note of it.
A few nights later, I was all alone in my house in Burbank.
The people I was staying with had gone to the beach for the weekend. About 2 a.m., I heard someone peeping around the window.
I was scared silly. I got up and tiptoed around to the window and I could see that a man was trying to cut the screen. So, I ran out of the front door and over to the neighbors.
They called the police, but when they got there, the man was gone.
I asked them to stick around the house a little while for fear he would come back and sure enough, he did.
They caught him at the window again. When they brought him in the house, I saw that his face was familiar. I told the Burbank police that I thought I knew him.
I said I thought he was a policeman.
They found his badge and identification in his pocket and he admitted he had met me and thought he’d come out and call on me.
The police told him he was rushing it a little and that when a gent called on a girl, he ought to ring the front doorbell.
They took him to jail and he doesn’t wear a badge anymore.
When I was modeling, I did mostly play clothes and bathing suits.
I used to meet a lot of wolves among the buyers who wanted to take me to dinner and give me drinks, but I always told them the agency people were very strict and wouldn’t let me go out with anyone I met during business hours.
So, I didn’t have much trouble brushing them off.
I found out in those days, if I just looked sort of stupid and pretended I didn’t know what they were talking about, they soon gave up in disgust.
If you are born with what the world calls sex appeal, you can either let it wreck you or use it to your advantage in this tough show business struggle, and it isn’t always easy to pick the right route.
For instance, there was a day when I woke up and I didn’t have a nickel to make a telephone call.
I had had a small part in a Marx Brothers picture called Love Happy.
It finished in September 1949, and I thought I was on my way to success, but nothing else came along until the following spring when MGM hired me to play in Apache Junction.
In the meantime, money was scarcer than hen’s teeth to me.
It was at this very low ebb in my life that I got a phone call from a man who said he’d seen me working on the set of Love Happy and was quite impressed with me.
I didn’t remember seeing him, but I guess he was there all right because he told me about a scene he saw me do.
I wondered what he wanted with me, and I soon found out.
He said he was a married man, but that he and his wife didn’t see much of each other, and so he was lonely for feminine companionship.
Wouldn’t I like to go around with him when he made his trips into Los Angeles?
He said he would make it worth my while. He’d give me a Cadillac or money, whichever I preferred.
Money? As I didn’t even have a nickel.
For a dizzy second, I had visions of being able to pay my rent, but as he went on giving the details of what I would be expected to do, my visions vanished.
He was brutally frank, and all I could think of to say was that he shouldn’t talk that way over a public telephone.
I didn’t realize how silly that sounded until I hung up, and then I started to laugh.
That was the day I called up a photographer friend of mine whose wife had been nagging me for weeks to post for a nude calendar they had an order to do.
I decided I would be safer with them than with some wolf, one who might catch me at a weak moment when I was hungry and didn’t have enough to buy a square meal.
Of course, they told me they would camouflage my face, and nobody would ever know I posed for them, but it turned out everybody did, a year or so later.
One afternoon, a girlfriend called me and asked if I would go on a date with a man she knew who was very, very nice.
I foolishly agreed, and went with this fellow to the Ocean House in Santa Monica.
There were two other couples in the party, and we all went swimming.
While we were sitting around on the sand, this fellow I was with kept poking his finger into the flesh on my leg and telling me how he liked girls on whom you could feel the bone.
This was a strange approach, and it made me wary.
He had those piercing eyes that seemed to go right through me, and I began thinking up excuses to leave.
I finally told him if he liked my bones so much, I’d have an x-ray picture made for him, but he didn’t think that was funny and moved away from me.
He told me just before I left that he didn’t like girls with brains, and I told him that was the finest compliment I’d ever had.
An important Hollywood composer gave me quite a whirl one time, and he thought he could get me out of there by playing his songs from my ears only.
He cornered me at a party one night and asked me to sit on the piano bench with him while he played his latest song.
He said he had written it while thinking of me.
As he sang and played, he kept moving closer and closer, and I kept moving away until I was sitting on the edge of the bench.
I got out of that one quickly, and he never was able to corner me again, but he kept on singing to me whenever I met him and sending me love verses he made up.
Then there was the man about town who kept telling me about his wonderful cook and how she prepared much better food than you could find in La Rue’s or Romanov’s.
I didn’t see through his little plot until I accepted a dinner invitation at his home one night, and I found out he didn’t even have a cook. All the food was sent in from La Rue’s.
I developed a violent headache and lost my appetite.
He suggested I lie down for a little while and offered me an aspirin. But I told him I had to go home and call my doctor because I was on a special diet for such headaches.
I learned that this talk about fine cooks at home is used quite often around Hollywood.
This is a switch from the old line about coming up to see my etchings.
I had similar invitations, but needless to say, I never fell for the same gag again.
The things a gal has to think up to outwit these predatory males.
Girls in every walk of life have to take great care that they don’t find themselves just another scalp on some man’s belt. But in Hollywood, we have to work overtime to outwit the wolves.
That’s because wolves of all varieties come from far and near to snare the little red riding hood of the movies.
Once you’re fairly well established as a film actress, it’s open season on you.
I thought it was bad enough when I was just a little girl on the outside looking into the studio gates. But that, I’ve learned since, was easy by comparison.
The men I met in those days, whose line was, you ought to be in the movies, were crude amateurs compared to the ones
I met after my name began to appear in movie columns and fan magazines.
For instance, there was the screenwriter whose approach was strictly mental at first.
He talked to me about my career and gave me books to read.
This screenwriter warned me not to be seen in nightclubs too often and never ever go out with playboys.
He was like a brother to me and that’s how I felt about him because he seemed quite old to me and besides, he was married.
That brother act is quite a routine when an intelligent man plays it.
However, I soon found out there isn’t any such thing as brotherly interest.
One night, my big self-styled brother called me and said he had some fine steaks and would like to come over and cook dinner. I asked him if he were going to bring his wife and he laughed heartily and told me I was some little joker.
I told him another big brother had asked me to dine at Romanoff’s and I thought it was safer than his proposition. He lost interest in me from then on.
Then there are the Hollywood parties where carefree wolves think they have to howl.
If you can get through one of them without having to put some extra wolves in his place, then you’re lucky.
A director famous for his roving eye picked on me one night at a party and he couldn’t believe I was in earnest when I gave him the brush.
He followed me upstairs when I went to get my wrap and trapped me when he pulled the door shut on my foot.
I managed to get loose and ran into another room.
Shut out, he pounded on the door and pleaded that he just wanted to talk to me. I found a magazine and sat quietly reading while he roared.
After a while, he left. Later, when I went back downstairs, I saw another fellow bop him on the nose for flirting with his wife.
And you know, it’s a funny thing, I’ve met this fellow several times since and he told me he respected me for not letting him get fresh.
He told me that any girl who wanted to get anywhere in the film business had to hold herself aloof.
Then there are the very eligible bachelors who are in such constant demand as escorts, they become their own most ardent fans.
They imagine any girl will do wingdings to get a chance to go out with them. One of these characters telephoned me one night and said he would be over in ten minutes.
I didn’t squeal with delight or anything, I just said, “Oh yeah?”
He said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to see me?”
I said, “Not particularly. And how did he get the idea that I did?”
Then he went into his line about how he’d been thinking about me ever since he’d met me the night before and that he couldn’t get me out of his mind.
“I’ve always gone for blondes with brown eyes,” he explained. “I fall quick when I meet one.”
“That’s why I can’t wait to see you again, so I’ll be right over. I told him not to come because he was going to be very disappointed on account of I didn’t have brown eyes and that he ought to look closer the next time he saw me.”
I had an experience with a fatherly type too.
This man was an actor’s agent and he wanted to protect me from wolves by giving me $40 a week to be on call until I could get established.
I was pretty broke at the time and a steady income like that was tempting.
However, I didn’t want to be under too much obligation, so I told him I would borrow the money.
He said okay. I insisted on signing promissory notes for the first two installments and he took it as a great big joke.
He put the notes in a frame and hung them on the wall in his office.
I told him I didn’t appreciate his letting everyone know I was in debt to him.
“I want all the guys around town to know you belong to me,” he said with a superior smile.
This didn’t seem to me to be a true fatherly interest, so I didn’t borrow any more from him.
As soon as I could, I paid him back. I had quite an argument getting the notes and had to threaten to see a lawyer.
Whether a girl survives among a pack of wolves depends entirely on her.
If she is trying to get something for nothing, she often winds up getting more than she bargained for.
If she plays the game straight, she can usually avert unpleasant situations and she gains the respect of even the wolves.
The End
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