Marilyn Monroe Hanging Out With Clifford Odets

From Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors, by Peter Bogdonavich:

I recalled Orson Welles telling me about being at a Hollywood party which Marilyn attended (circa 1946 or ’47) while she was still a lowly starlet, and seeing someone casually pull down the top of her dress in front of people and fondle her. She had laughed. Welles said that “just about everyone in town” had slept with her. Yet, [Arthur] Miller had gone on to say that the kind of mythological figure Marilyn created on the screen was all her own and a great achievement for her…

The year before her much-speculated-over death at thirty-six (rumors of presidential involvement, etc.), playwright Clifford Odets told me that she used to come over to his house and talk, but that the only times she seemed to him really comfortable were when she was with his two young children and their large poodle. She relaxed with them, felt no threat. With everyone else, Odets said, she seemed nervous, intimidated, frightened. When I repeated to Miller this remark about her with children and animals, he said, “Well, they didn’t sneer at her.”