In the spring of 1948, a twenty-one-year-old actress named Norma Jeane Baker walked onto the Columbia Pictures lot in Hollywood. She had recently finished a brief contract at 20th Century Fox, where studio executives decided her look did not translate well to the screen. Columbia head Harry Cohn offered her a six-month contract starting at one hundred twenty-five dollars a week. Her first assignment for the studio was a low-budget musical called *Ladies of the Chorus*. Phil Karlson directed the picture, and Harry Romm produced it on a tight schedule.
Studio makeup artists went to work transforming the young actress into the character of Peggy Martin, a chorus girl who falls in love with a wealthy society man. They bleached her light brown hair to a bright golden blonde and shaped her eyebrows into thin arches. Assistants helped her into sequined dance costumes that cost a fraction of the wardrobes given to top-tier stars like Rita Hayworth. She sat for hours in the studio dressing rooms, studying herself in mirrors surrounded by hot incandescent bulbs while technicians adjusted her face for black-and-white film stocks.
Filming began in May 1948 on Stage 3 at the Columbia studio on Gower Street. The production schedule lasted just twelve days, which was typical for B-movies produced during that era. Marilyn shared top billing with Adele Jergens, an established Columbia contract player who played her mother in the film. Adele Jergens was twenty-nine years old and had already starred in several serials and westerns. Crew members remembered the younger actress as quiet, studious, and intensely focused on her lines between takes. She brought a worn copy of a Stanislavski acting text to the set and practiced her dance steps in the hallways during lunch breaks.
The musical numbers required hours of rehearsal with choreographer Jack Boyle. Dancers performed on cramped soundstages under blazing carbon-arc lights that pushed temperatures past one hundred degrees. Marilyn sang two songs in the picture, "Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy" and "The Ladies of the Chorus." Her singing voice was dubbed by studio vocalists in some scenes, but she performed the physical choreography herself despite wearing high heels that left blisters on her feet.
*Ladies of the Chorus* premiered in October 1948 to modest box office returns. Exhibitors booked the film as the bottom half of double features in neighborhood theaters across the United States. Trade publications gave the picture mixed reviews, though critics occasionally singled out the fresh screen presence of the blonde newcomer. Despite the mild reception, Harry Cohn chose not to renew her contract when it expired in September 1948. Studio executives believed she lacked the dramatic range required for major motion pictures.
She left Columbia Pictures with no agent, very little money, and forty dollars in unpaid bills. She returned to posing for pin-up photographers and taking odd jobs around Los Angeles to pay rent. Two years later, casting director Fred Karger, who had worked on *Ladies of the Chorus*, recommended her for a small role in John Huston's crime drama *The Asphalt Jungle*. That part brought her back to the attention of major studio executives and set her on a path toward international stardom.
