and he s always chomping on a cigar. this is somebody who has a reputation as being exacting, and sometimes brutal. it s difficult to overstate how patriarchal the hollywood studio system was in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. it was absolutely male dominated. at the top of every one of the big studios is a very powerful, controlling man, the people that we call moguls. louie b. mayer, jack warner, darryl zanuck. they are considered despotic monsters, and tough, tough businessmen, because they knew the things the public wanted were stars and stories. and they ran it like a factory. and they rolled those things out. four or five, six hundred of them a year. there were only a few large studios, and those studios made the movies, period. it was sort of like the mafia,
monroe productions speculated that marilyn would be a failure. that she was a joke. women didn t do that. women didn t make their own movies. are you crazy? it was really unfair and very sexist of the press to not give her the respect, that what she was doing was groundbreaking that that was revolutionary. back in hollywood, the news reaches fox studio boss darryl zanuck. he hadn t shown her much professional courtesy, so she left him to find out about it in the papers the next day. basically, he was the last to know, and he wasn t happy about that. he felt, i made her a star, who would she be without 20th century fox? she owes us. that s it, boom. he was so used to being able to treat actresses as bodies and not have to deal with them having any sense of power or control at all.
there are not many hollywood actresses of that era that combined clear physical attractiveness and physical comedy of a slapstick style like she does in how to marry a millionaire, where she s a bit blind and keeps running into walls. the movie is marilyn s third hit of 1953, earning fox a total of $15 million, the equivalent of $150 million today. she was a star then. she got first billing in that movie. so she made it. a few weeks later, production is due to start on marilyn s next film for fox, the girl in pink tights. darryl zanuck wanted to continue to place her in lighthearted musical comedies. pink tights was pretty one-note, and she didn t want to be stereotyped.
she didn t want to be an automatic roll em, and she does the scene. she wanted to have a motivation. yes, yes, my dear fellow, you can speak freely, there s no one here. but olivier derides her techniques. he told her to stop thinking and just to be sexy. it was like he was being a british zanuck, pushed her right back to where she had started from. i imagine for her it was very frustrating and heartbreaking to have to deal with someone s scorn when you were hoping they could support you in the role. he s treating this woman, 30 years old, in charge of her own company, as a child. and she responds in kind. she said that she started being bad with him. and what that meant was that she was late and she was obstructive, she was a pain.
you ll sneak a thousand wolf whistles at harriet. you know as a rule, i never mix business and pleasure. the new obsession in the 50s is very much with the hourglass-shaped woman. marilyn speaks to fantasy, and a big part of that is her bust size, her waist size, her, as they called it often in magazines of the time, her chassis. zanuck signs marilyn up to a seven-year contract with fox. everybody in the business at that time wanted a studio contract. it meant you were in the door. you had a chance. but the bad thing about the contract was you really were owned in a sense by the studio. you had to play the roles they wanted. so, you know, you were in a box. in the first year of her new