Nanette Barber, a secretary to Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht during his collaboration with Marilyn on her memoir, has died aged 98, Legacy reports.
She was born Nanette Herbuveaux in Chicago in 1925, and grew up in Wilmette, Illinois with her parents and two sisters. After graduating from MacMurray College in 1947 with a liberal arts degree, she began working for Ben Hecht in 1949.
At 56, Hecht was based in his hometown of New York, but had first made his name as a journalist in Chicago before penning The Front Page, a Broadway smash. During the 1930s and ’40s, he became Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter.
By the 1950s, however, Hecht’s career was flagging. He later said that Darryl F. Zanuck was the only studio head to offer him work at this time, as a co-writer on the 1952 comedy, Monkey Business, with Marilyn Monroe among the stars.
Hecht was married with a young daughter, and Nanette became close to his family while accompanying the author on his travels. In a 2012 interview for the Northbrook Star, Nanette remembered meeting Marilyn in San Francisco in early 1954.
“Hecht, who, for years was uncredited for Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, spent several interview sessions with the star while Barber typed, often at Monroe’s residence, just before she married Joe DiMaggio.
‘(Hecht) sent each (memoir) chapter to his agent in London and his agent put it in the tabloids,’ said Barber. ‘Just one more treacherous thing that happened in her life.’
‘She (Monroe) was utterly beautiful, absolutely beautiful. She was bright (intelligent), she was just so lush looking. And she talked about her mother,’ said Barber, describing a household dry cleaning method. During Monroe’s childhood, her mother dried chemical laundry by spreading it on a lawn.
‘She (Monroe) said, “I used to sit next to these clothes and I would feel the lawn,”‘ said Barber. ‘And she had a mink coat on and she said, “Maybe that’s why I like to touch mink.”’
During one interview, Monroe sat near a picture window.
‘Ben said, “Where’s Joe (DiMaggio) today?” You could see San Francisco over her shoulder and she said, “Out there.” It was so cute,’ said Barber, ‘San Francisco is a fishing community and (DiMaggio’s) family all fished out there.’”
However, the collaboration soon fell apart, as revealed in my 2019 blog post which you can read in full here.
“In early 1954, Hecht spent five days in a San Francisco hotel interviewing Marilyn, whom he called ‘La Belle Bumps and Tears’. To Ken McCormick, the Doubleday editor who commissioned the project, he described the experience as ‘the longest series of log jams I’ve ever run into.’ Hecht had back taxes to pay, and needed the money.
At first, he said, Marilyn was ‘100% clinging and co-operative’; but after her marriage to Joe DiMaggio, ‘the picture changed.’ At DiMaggio’s behest, Marilyn’s lawyer demanded far tighter control. When the marriage collapsed months later, a devastated Marilyn refused to mention the divorce in the book.
Calling the situation ‘critical,’ McCormick proposed ‘shift[ing] this all over into the third person and do[ing] a Ben Hecht biography of Marilyn Monroe … It seems to us that this would give you an elegant chance to write one hell of a book about Hollywood.’ According to Hecht’s biographer, Adina Hoffman, he preferred to remain anonymous. Meanwhile, his shady agent Jacques Chambrun secretly sold the manuscript to a British tabloid. It was then serialised with neither Hecht’s nor Marilyn’s permission, landing the writer in legal trouble.
The book, My Story, wouldn’t be published until 1974, when both writer and subject were deceased. It was only in 2000 that Hecht was acknowledged publicly as the author.”
In 1956, Nanette was reunited with former classmate Thomas H. Barber in Glencoe, Illinois. They married a year later and raised four children together. Always a book lover, Nanette worked for 43 years at Northbrook Public Library. “I love to read mysteries,” she said. “But I don’t like unhappy endings. It’s gotta be a Cinderella story for me, no angst.”
‘Nanette never forgot a person’s name,’ her obituary reads. ‘Her friendships were forever. Everyone that met her loved her. She was kind to all, especially the children she helped over the years at the Northbrook Public Library. She had her wit and sense of humor until her very last day. She will be missed by many.’
Nanette Barber died peacefully July 8, 2024 in Green Oaks, Illinois. She was predeceased by her husband in 2022, and is survived by her four children and four grandchildren.
The Marilyn Report 