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| The hottest thing in pictures cooling off. |
Not all of Monroe's autobiography "My Story" is as grim as the Mr. Kimmel story. Although she does emphasize all the difficult times she had in her climb to stardom. But I thought the story of her road tour to promote the movie "Love Happy" was pretty amusing:
On the way to New York I made plans of all the things I would see.
My lover had always said, one of the reasons you have nothing to talk about is you've never been anywhere or seen anything.
I was going to remedy that.
When the train stopped in New York I could hardly breathe, it was so hot. It was hotter than I had ever known it to be in Hollywood. The woolen suit made me feel as if I was wearing an oven.
Mr. Cowan's press agent, who was supervising my exploitation trip, rose to the situation.
"We must make capital out of what we have, " he explained. So he arranged for me to pose on the train steps with perspiration running down my face and an ice cream code in each hand.
The caption for the pictures read: "Marilyn Moroe, the hottest thing in pictures, cooling off."
That "cooling off" idea because sort of the basis for my exploitation work.
A half hour after arriving in New York I was led into an elegant suite in the Sherry-Netherland Hotal and told to put on a bathing suit.
More photographers arrived and took more pictures of me "cooling off."
I spent several days in New York looking at the walls of my elegant suite and the little figures of people fifteen stories below. All sorts of people came to interview me, not only newspapers and magazine reporters by exhibitors and other exploitation people from United Artists.
I asked questions about the Statue of Liberty and what were the best shows to see and the most glamorous cafes to goto. But I saw nothing and went nowhere.
Finally I got so tired of sitting around perspiring in one of my three woolen suites, that I complained.
"It seems to me," I said to the United Artists' representatives who were having dinner with me in my suite, "that I ought to have something more attractive to wear in the evening."
The agreed and bought me a cotton dress at a wholesale shop. It had a low-cut neck and blue polka dots. They explained, also, that cotton was much more chic in the big cities than silk. I did like the red velvet belt that came with it.
The next stop was Detrait, and then Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford. It was the same story in each of them. I was taken to a hotel, rushed into a bathing suit, given a fan and photographers arrived. The hottest thing in pictures was cooling off again.
In Rockford I decided that I had seen enough of the world. Also, due to my moving around continually and to the confusion this seemed to arouse in Mr. Cowan's bookkeeping department, I had not received any salary whatsoever. The salary, it was explained to me, would be waiting for me at the next stop. As a result I didn't have fifty cents to spend on myself during my grand tour.
After sitting in the lobby of the Rockford movie theater, "keeping cool" in a bathing suit and handing out orchids to "my favorite male moviegoers" I told the press agent that I would like to return to Hollywood.
The tour, in a way, was a failure. When I got back I didn't seem to have any more to talk about than before. And absence didn't seem to have made my friend's heart grow any fonder.
They thoughtlessly didn't pay Monroe while she was on the tour so she couldn't afford to do anything besides work for them. And she wasn't used to standing up for herself, just took whatever came along. She must have been really fed up by Rockford to get up the nerve to ask to go home.
