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said he would understand if as his wife she wanted to sleep with other men. His only stipulation was that Marilyn not have the same fellow twice in a row. In short, Uncle Joe was asking Marilyn to marry him. When he died, which seemed likely to happen soon enough, Marilyn would inherit everything. Marilyn, stunned by the offer, said she needed time to make up her mind.
    Back at the Beverly-Carlton, she spent days considering what todo. Of course, Schenck had totally missed the point of her affair with Kazan. It wasn’t marriage she had been hoping for; she certainly hadn’t expected him to leave his wife. All Marilyn wanted was a part in Kazan’s new film. But Schenck would never have understood that. He didn’t think she was star material. He’d always thought her dreams unrealistic. Fond as he was of Marilyn, Uncle Joe, unlike Johnny, had never believed in her. He was utterly sincere in the conviction that the best thing that could happen to her was marriage to a wealthy man.
    His offer was certainly very tempting. Marilyn still had not heard from the studio or her agents. No one in either place would see her or take her calls. There were no film assignments on the horizon. The way things stood, all she had to look forward to was the termination of her contract. The William Morris Agency was doing nothing for her. As far as Abe Lastfogel seemed to be concerned, now that Johnny Hyde was dead Marilyn didn’t exist. Though she wrote to both Kazan and Miller in New York, she really had no idea whether she would ever see either of them again.
    For all that, Joe Schenck’s marriage proposal only reminded Marilyn of what she had really wanted all along. It brought into sharp focus what her struggle had always been about. Money and security, the things Hyde and now Schenck offered, were never really what she was after. The whole point of getting involved with Johnny, Kazan, or any of the other men in her life had been to help her reach a goal. She wanted to be a person in her own right.
    Johnny had often compared Marilyn to Rita Hayworth, but there was a fundamental and revealing difference. Hayworth had been pushed by a father, then by a husband, to pursue a film career that she herself had never really wanted. By contrast, the only person driving Marilyn was herself, and she did so relentlessly. In the end, Marilyn turned down Uncle Joe. Being an important man’s wife was never what she’d wanted. If it had been, she would have married Johnny.
    Marilyn had chosen her dream over marriage. But she was left to face the probability that she was about to lose the means to realize that dream. She wasn’t on any producer’s casting list. Darryl Zanuck had sent down word that she was “just a freak” and that he didn’t want to waste time on her. For Marilyn, it was no longer a question of being cast in good films by the best directors; the issue was whether she would be assignedto any films at all. In Kazan’s absence, Marilyn decided that she had to abandon Johnny’s plan temporarily. She had to find some way around Zanuck. She had to get Twentieth to put her in a film—any film. Otherwise, there wasn’t a chance that her contract would be renewed.
    Marilyn was smart. Though she had rarely said a word at all those endless business lunches Hyde had required her to attend, she had listened carefully. She had often heard him remark that when he wanted something at Twentieth, it could be useful to play the studio’s two top men against each other. She’d heard Charlie Feldman and others speak along the same lines. The key to doing deals at Twentieth was to keep in mind that the production chief and the president were fiercely at odds.
    Spyros Skouras had been president of Twentieth since 1942, yet he spent little time in Hollywood. The Old Greek, as he was known, preferred to run the business from New York, where he put in sixteen-hour days. A gigantic world map, with bright red stars to indicate Fox offices, was fixed