Chapter Ten
ON JANUARY 5, 1951, the lease on Natasha’s Harper Avenue apartment expired. She chose to buy a small house in Hollywood, and so Marilyn moved again to the Beverly Carlton, to be closer to Fox, she said, and to have more privacy. But Natasha was unaware of the complexities of mortgages and bank loans, and soon she was a thousand dollars short of the cash needed to close her deal. When Marilyn learned this, she arrived at Natasha’s door with the money next day. “It wasn’t until much later that I learned how she had gotten it,” Natasha said. “She had sold a mink stole Johnny Hyde had given her. It was the one really good thing she owned,” and the only item that had any material or sentimental value. The money was like the Christmas cameo—a gift for someone who, despite the complex intensity of the relationship, was a mother to Marilyn.
That year, Marilyn Monroe met three men who would be variously important to her: a famous director; a playwright who for the moment passed only quickly across the horizon of her life; and a drama teacher who affirmed both her attraction to the Russian artistic traditions and to the playwright. Before these introductions, however, she again gave one of her most effective performances: the attempt to contact her long-lost father.
Within two weeks of Johnny’s death, the incident that had first occurred with Jim Dougherty was repeated. Marilyn telephoned Natasha one morning. “She said she had just learned the identity of her natural father,” Natasha recalled, unaware of the earlier telephone call in Dougherty’s presence, “and she wanted me to drive with her to visit him.” And so Marilyn set out with her surrogate mother, apparently to meet her real father. They drove down toward Palm Springs and then further into the desert before Marilyn asked Natasha to stop the car at a service station while she telephoned ahead to assure a welcome. She returned and told Natasha they must return to Los Angeles: her father, she said, had refused to see her. But as with Jim, there were no details; Natasha could not recall a name for this man, and there was no verification of any contact then or later. In a way, the day fulfilled its purpose: Natasha showered Marilyn with more gentle attention, gave her more time for preparing the role she was to begin, made her feel like a welcome and secure child.1
Almost at once, life moved at an accelerated and intensified pace. But despite her Fox contract (at last ready for her signature that spring), Marilyn’s movie work was still confined to a series of stereotyped dumb-blonde roles. Her fame increased and her allure was more widely celebrated, but she was essentially a sexy ornament, tossed into roles any pretty starlet might have performed equally well. The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve and brief appearances in a trio of minor pictures in 1951 suggested talent as well as seductiveness. But neither Hollywood nor America was much interested in the conundrum of a beautiful young woman who might have more to offer than physical charms.
As Young As You Feel neatly summarized the problem, and the production of it made her miserable. Based on a story by Paddy Chayefsky, the picture concerns a sixty-five-year-old businessman forced into retirement who impersonates the active, elderly president of the parent company in order to change the system of age discrimination. This was the first time her name appeared before the title (sixth in a list), but nothing else was remarkable as Marilyn undertook the role of Harriet, a seductively distracting secretary. Allan Snyder as usual did her makeup and was a calming presence; “she was frightened to death of the very public that thought her so sexy,” he said at the time. “My God, if only they knew how hard it was for her!” Especially in this case, for nothing could compensate her disappointment over the silliness of the role in a picture that benefited no one.
That January she was depressed about more than the death of Johnny Hyde, which most people saw as her only grief. “She can’t stop crying,” complained director Harmon Jones to his friend Elia Kazan, whose fame as a stage director and co-founder of the Actors Studio had now extended to Hollywood with his films of Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. “Every time I need her,” Harmon continued, “she’s crying. It puffs up her eyes!” Marilyn had to be sought out in some dark corner of the soundstage, where she sat in utter dejection, perhaps more for her life’s prospects than for Johnny.
Dedicated as he was to the craft of directing for stage and screen, Kazan was also (as he frankly detailed in his published memoirs) most energetically committed to sexual escapades, and he came to the set that day specifically to visit Marilyn, whom he had met casually once before in the company of Johnny Hyde. “She hadn’t even gone out with anyone [since Johnny’s death],” he recalled, “so I wondered if I shouldn’t look the girl up. . . . All young actresses in that time and place were thought of as prey, to be overwhelmed and topped by the male. A genuine interest, which I did have, would produce results.” His randy expectations were quickly fulfilled. She accepted a dinner invitation and soon—while Kazan remained in California directing the film Viva Zapata!—he succeeded in his goal.
“All during production,” recalled Sam Shaw,
Marilyn had a big romance with Kazan, and because she was idle much of that spring, she and I and Kazan often drove out to the Fox ranch, where he was directing the picture. Usually we stopped off at some roadhouse or other on the return trip in the evening, had a beer, played the jukebox and danced.
At such times, Shaw added, no one was a gayer or more congenial friend than Marilyn. “Everybody knows about her insecurities, but not everybody knows what fun she was, that she never complained about the ordinary things of life, that she never had a bad word to say about anyone, and that she had a wonderful, spontaneous sense of humor.”
Marilyn found Kazan, then forty-two and married, a sympathetic listener (which he called the real “technique of seduction”) and a man of dazzling intelligence. For his part, he considered her “a simple, decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted,” a girl with no knowledge except her own experience, who sought her self-respect through the men she was able to attract—mostly those she allowed to abuse her because their contemptuous attitude to her coincided with hers.
The affair continued throughout that year. At first, the lovers met in Marilyn’s small apartment, but then she made a down payment on a baby grand piano she had painted white, a replica of the chic instrument that once meant so much to her and her mother on Arbol Drive, and which Grace had eventually sold. This made her single room even more cramped, and so she often spent the night with Kazan at the home of agent Charles Feldman and his wife, the actress and photographer Jean Howard. In the mornings, Kazan simply donned a white robe and drove Marilyn back to the Beverly Carlton, the top of his convertible lowered as they sang and laughed through the morning mists of Cold-water Canyon.
This may have been the first uncomplicated, satisfying love affair of her life. Marilyn was not deterred by her awareness that there was no possibility of marriage—that fact seemed to free her. As for Kazan: “Marilyn simply wasn’t a wife,” he wrote later. “Anyone could see that.” Rather she was “a delightful companion.”
The introduction to Feldman through Kazan had an immediate professional benefit. Because Johnny had neglected other clients to devote himself to Marilyn, the William Morris Agency was disinclined to represent her after his death. They did, however, conclude the standard negotiations on her behalf with Fox, but their indifference was plain when, in March, the papers were ready for signing but remained on the Morris desks for three weeks. So it happened that (although the agency continued to receive a portion of her agent commissions), Marilyn went over to the Famous Artists Agency, the company headed by Feldman, a dignified, courtly man who, with a man named Hugh French, managed her career for the next several years.2
The Fox contract was standard. Marilyn’s salary, guaranteed for forty weeks of the year and paid whether she worked on a film or not, would be $500 a week for the first year, with the studio’s right to renew. Should they choose to do so, she would receive $750 weekly for the second year; $1,250 for the third year; $1,500 for the fourth; $2,000 for the fifth; $2,500 for the sixth; and, if she was still at Fox in 1957, $3,500 weekly for the last year.3
For seven consecutive years, Marilyn Monroe would be obliged to work only for Twentieth Century–Fox and in whatever roles they assigned. At the end of each year, the studio could unilaterally and without reason cancel the contract and dismiss her; they could at any time loan her out to another company and earn a major profit by so doing (although she would continue to receive only the amount then due from Fox). Furthermore, she was prohibited from accepting any other profitable employment (including theater, radio, television or recordings), even if she was not actively working on a film with Fox. Such were the seven-year contracts to which most actors in the American motion picture business submitted—an indentured servitude that gave all practicable rights to the film companies and few to the performers. This was a procedure that endured until the demise of the studio system itself, a radical overhaul toward which Marilyn Monroe would make a major contribution.
But when she signed the contract (which took effect May 11, 1951), Marilyn was somehow able to obtain an important privilege. Darryl Zanuck, who still considered Marilyn no great addition to his roster and had simply bowed to gentle pressure from Schenck, Hyde, the Morris office and Skouras, agreed to engage Natasha Lytess as her drama coach, and even to employ her wherever possible with other contract players. Natasha at once went on the Fox payroll at $500 per week (with annual escalations), and Marilyn paid her an additional $250 for private tutorials. And so there was the ironic situation for which Natasha never felt embarrassment, nor Marilyn jealousy: the actress was paid less than the teacher. But she was as indifferent to Natasha’s income as to her own: “I’m not interested in money,” she said. “I just want to be wonderful.”
With the Fox contract in place, it was appropriate for the studio to send its prettiest players to the annual rites of spring. Thus it happened that Marilyn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on March 29, where she presented the Oscar for best achievement in sound. She wore a deep lavender off-the-shoulder chiffon gown borrowed from the Fox wardrobe, but as she was preparing to go onstage she noticed a small tear in the fabric. Bursting into tears, she wailed that she could not possibly appear, but an attendant rushed to her side and remedied the situation while other young ladies from Fox doctored her makeup and braced her spirit. Finally, almost speechless with stage fright, Marilyn managed to approach the podium and confer the statuette (coincidentally, to Thomas Moulton, for All About Eve).
When Elia Kazan wrote in his memoirs of the day he met the lachrymose Marilyn Monroe on the set of As Young As You Feel, he failed to add that he had a companion—playwright Arthur Miller, whose original screenplay The Hook Kazan hoped to direct. This was to be a politically sensitive story of honest Brooklyn waterfront workers revolting against exploitive racketeers. Like Kazan, Miller remembered Marilyn’s subdued manner that January day at the studio. But he also recalled that when they shook hands “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with her sadness amid all this glamour and technology and the busy confusion of a new shot being set up.”4
Next day, at Kazan’s invitation, Marilyn accompanied the two men on a visit to the office of Harry Cohn, who was considering The Hook for Columbia Studios (and who did not immediately recognize his former contract player). This meeting set in motion a series of events effecting the abandonment of the film, and the reasons for this were important to what soon became an evolving relationship with Arthur Miller.
At Cohn’s insistence, the script was turned over to Roy Brewer, head of Hollywood’s stagehands union and a personal friend of Joe Ryan, leader of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Soon after, Brewer informed Cohn that he had asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to read The Hook, which was immediately labeled inflammatory and dangerously anti-American (perhaps even treasonous) at a time when the Korean War required problem-free shipping of men and arms to Asia. Brewer also announced that unless Miller’s script was changed to make Communists the villains and anticommunism the dominant theme, every theater receiving a print of The Hook would have its union projectionist ordered off the job. In this matter, Brewer himself was the more “anti-American,” the more seditious of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Miller withdrew his screenplay rather than conform to such absurd demands, and this single act of artistic integrity at once won him Marilyn’s admiration.
Her affinity for the weak was frequently remarked. She felt enormous empathy for crippled children, for whom she had upset her publicists’ tour schedules, and more than once she inconvenienced others by stopping to attend a lame or stray animal. The sight of a homeless drunk on Hollywood Boulevard, the account of a black actor denied admission to a theater or restaurant, the plight of those at the fringes of conventional society (like her mother)—all these brought her to the point of tears and elicited a practical and sometimes monetary response. Now Arthur Miller seemed to her a champion of the lost and wounded, of those without a voice to speak for them, and so he won her esteem. In the soil of such sentiments love would soon take root, but the opportunity for its full flowering would require five years.
When they met, Marilyn was twenty-five, Arthur ten years older. Born in Harlem in November 1915, he and his family had endured all the hardships of the Great Depression. After working in a warehouse following high-school graduation, he attended the University of Michigan, where he won a play writing award. By the time he met Marilyn, he was married to his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, and had two children. His résumé included a Broadway failure (The Man Who Had All the Luck), a successful novel about anti-Semitism (Focus) and then fame and awards for two successful plays, All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1948). With Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, Miller was considered one of America’s great dramatic talents. Bespectacled, tall and slender, he projected a shy, somewhat diffident manner some confused with that of an intellectual. But Miller’s interests from the 1940s on were never merely (or even primarily) bookish: although committed to certain social and family themes, he was an athletic, outdoor type who enjoyed sports, gardening and carpentry more than conversations about aesthetic theory; that came later, when it was expected of him.
During the weeks after their first meeting, while Kazan and Marilyn ignited romantic sparks privately, Miller often joined them on visits to writers and composers. The trio browsed through bookstores, packed picnic lunches and drove to the shore and through canyons. Arthur felt “the air around her was charged” and that people in her company were touched “not only by Marilyn’s beauty but by her orphanhood—she had literally nowhere to go and no one to go to.” Forever after, he recalled the apprehension on her face when she read, as if her educational shortcomings would rouse mockery. He felt “something secret . . . a filament of connection” begin to shimmer between them and, disinclined to infidelity, resolved to leave Los Angeles with all dispatch.
Years later, Arthur Miller’s prose became florid, almost fragrant whenever he recalled his early meetings with Marilyn Monroe. The sight of her in 1951
was something like pain, and I knew I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. . . . [In] my very shyness she saw some safety, release from the detached and centerless and invaded life she had been given. When we parted [at the airport] I kissed her cheek and she sucked in a surprised breath. I started to laugh at her overacting until the solemnity of feeling in her eyes shocked me into remorse. . . . I had to escape her childish voracity . . . her scent still on my hands. . . . This novel secret entered me like a radiating force, and I welcomed it as a sort of proof that I would write again . . . [She] had taken on an immanence in my imagination, the vitality of a force one does not understand but that seems on the verge of lighting up a vast surrounding plain of darkness.
Typically, Natasha produced a deglazed version. “She fell in love with him and he fell in love with her, no doubt about it,” according to Natasha. “They never went to bed that year, but she told me excitedly that this was the sort of man she could love forever.” As for Arthur, he admitted that “if I had stayed, it would have had to have been for her. And I didn’t want to do that. So I just took off and left. But she sure did unsettle me.”
Kazan also knew that the couple had fallen quite chastely in love: of this he was convinced by her rhapsodic talk of Miller even while she was in bed with Kazan. She admired Miller’s work and his ethics, she hung up a photograph of him, she was disturbed by his unhappy marriage to Mary Grace Slattery. “Most people can admire their fathers,” Marilyn wrote in one of her rare letters to him over the next four years, “but I never had one. I need someone to admire.” Replied Miller, “If you want someone to admire, why not Abraham Lincoln? Carl Sandburg has written a magnificent biography of him.” The day she received this letter, she purchased the Sandburg book and a framed portrait of Lincoln. They remained with her for the rest of her life.
Kazan, on the other hand, soon departed—but not before Marilyn told him she thought she was pregnant with his child, which, as it turned out, she was not. “It scared hell out of me. I knew she dearly wanted a child . . . [but] she was so obsessed with her passion for [Arthur] that she couldn’t talk about anything else. . . . Like any other louse, I decided to call a halt to my carrying on, a resolve that didn’t last long.” By summer 1951, the Kazan-Monroe romance was history.
* * *
That spring and early summer, Marilyn played the role of a provocative blonde in a film called Love Nest—this time she was an ex-WAC who becomes one of many tenants in a Manhattan brownstone owned by a former war buddy, now married. Once again, she was mere embellishment, an item tossed in from left field to brighten a pallid script.
In his column of May 2, Sidney Skolsky duly celebrated her employment, noting that when Marilyn removed her dress to prepare for a shower scene the set was so crowded and quiet “you could hear the electricity.” For another sequence, she walked onto the set wearing the prescribed two-piece polka-dotted bathing suit that had “hardly enough room for the polka dots,” as one wag observed. Leading lady June Haver remembered that “the whole crew gasped, gaped and almost turned to stone.” But Marilyn was less inhibited about nudity than acting, and her scene was at once graceful and seductive. Jack Paar, with whom she had another brief scene, thought her shyness betokened arrogance and selfishness, yet he had to admit that even in a bit part “she grabbed the entire picture.” And reporter Ezra Goodman, otherwise rightly ignoring the nonsense of Love Nest, praised Marilyn as “one of the brightest up-and-coming [actresses].”
Yet despite the endorsement of press and colleagues (and Marilyn’s friendships with Schenck and Skouras), Zanuck continued to ignore her potential as a comedienne. She was not advanced to a leading role until later that year, when a Fox stockholder meeting in New York buzzed with talk of the blonde who ignited even a damp comedy like Love Nest. Their enthusiasm coincided with a New York Times review of As Young As You Feel: “Marilyn Monroe is superb as the secretary,” wrote Bosley Crowther. Bit by little bit, her presence was being recognized; eventually even Zanuck would have to defer to popular demand.
She was showing the world the face of a new kind of ingenue, a fully developed woman with the candor of an innocent child taking artless delight in the reality of her own flesh. But her life, both professionally and personally, was stalled. In a way, she was becoming trapped by an image with whose manufacture she had wholeheartedly cooperated since her modeling days. Close relationships had meant mostly sexual relationships: “I knew a lot of people I didn’t like,” she said later of this time,
but I didn’t have any friends. I had teachers and people I could look up to—but nobody I could look over at. I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be somebody was to be—well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.
That autumn, apparently through friends of Natasha Lytess, Marilyn met and began to take supplementary private drama classes with the actor and acting coach Michael Chekhov, nephew of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and a former colleague of Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Then sixty, he was the kindliest mentor-father in her life thus far, and still another of Marilyn’s connections to the Russian tradition so prized by the Actors Lab and Natasha. Highly valued as a teacher in Europe and England, he had worked with such theatrical luminaries as Max Reinhardt, Feodor Chaliapin, Louis Jouvet and John Gielgud. During World War II, Chekhov settled in Hollywood, where, among other movie roles, he was best known for his superb portrait of the elderly psychoanalyst Dr. Brulov in David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. When he met Marilyn in 1951, he was putting the final touches to his classic book To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting, and this became Marilyn’s Bible for the next several years.
“Our bodies can be either our best friends or worst enemies,” said Chekhov to Marilyn on their first meeting. “You must try to consider your body as an instrument for expressing creative ideas. You must strive for complete harmony between body and psychology.” Doubtless some of the ideas Chekhov expounded were reminiscent of Natasha’s slightly breathless emphasis on feeling with the body what she felt in her soul. But with Chekhov there was a difference: whereas Natasha always seemed impatient with Marilyn (because of her own repressed libidinous anger), Chekhov took time and put Marilyn through a series of quiet exercises radically different from the atmosphere of a movie set or a session with Natasha. Her body, he said—that instrument considered merely an object by so many—must be converted into a sensitive membrane, a conveyor of nuanced images, feelings and impulses of the will.
Perhaps the most important training Chekhov offered was his encouragement that Marilyn move outside her own frame of reference. Enlarge the circle of your interests, he advised her: thus she would more and more be able to assume the psychology of other characters without imposing on them her own viewpoint. This was basic Moscow Art Theatre philosophy, although it would be reworked as something quite different by Lee Strasberg a few years later.
The exercises were intense, yet oriented toward simple goals. Chekhov asked Marilyn to spread her arms wide, to stand with her legs far apart, to imagine herself becoming larger and larger. She was to say to herself, “I am going to awaken the sleeping muscles of my body. I am going to revivify and use them.” Then she was to kneel on the floor, to imagine herself becoming smaller, contracting as if she were about to disappear. This was followed by stretching exercises, routines to modulate breathing (and therefore natural diction)—all designed to increase her sense of freedom, which Chekhov felt had been much restricted in her.
Through this new freedom, her teacher said, Marilyn would eventually be emptied of herself and changed—possessed, he said—by a dramatic character. “Merely discussing a character, analyzing it mentally, cannot produce the desired effect of transforming the actor into another person,” he stressed. “Your rational mind will leave you cold and passive. But as you develop an imaginary body [by which he seems to have meant a use of creative imagination and a kind of physical humility] your will and feelings will want to be another character.” But Marilyn was most of all gripped and excited by Chekhov’s sense of “creative individuality,” a sense of imaginative autonomy that would enable her to become more than she had ever been—the transcendence of a limited self for which she had so longed.
She had not discussed with Chekhov anything of her private life and must, therefore, have felt something like an especial benediction when Chekhov required her to read Death of a Salesman and a week later read from his own manuscript about “artists of such magnitude as Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan and their magic. This is native American as well as human tragedy.”
Chekhov’s matter and methods seemed to Marilyn quite wonderful—but they were also rarefied, sometimes almost mystical. Inevitably, when asked to report to him on her thoughts and exercises at home, she froze with fear, unable to bear the possibility of disappointing him despite his gentle manner. At this time, her fear of failure became increasingly neurotic, her terror of embarrassing herself and others unreasonable, and she developed the nearly frantic desire to do everything perfectly, as Ida Bolender had once urged.
In an odd way, then, the seriousness of her intent was having unfortunate side-effects, for whereas Natasha’s unremitting quest for perfection had turned Marilyn’s natural speech into selfconscious and exaggerated diction, Chekhov’s sessions made her even more terrified of presenting herself as unacceptable. He asked her to read a dense book called The Thinking Body, by Mabel Elsworth Todd, and although she tried for several years to understand its teachings and theories on the interconnection between anatomy, psychology and emotions, she felt poorly equipped to comprehend its idiosyncratic language (as have many readers before and since).
Herein lies one of the most touching paradoxes of Marilyn Monroe’s life and career, for the professional means offered to raise her self-confidence had the opposite effect. She could never quite handle the analytic approach to role-playing to which she was exposed, nor could she reach the intellectual standards others set for her. But Marilyn was so charmingly docile, appealing and grateful for every morsel of education and information, that every influential person tipped the issue into a kind of control, however benevolent. She felt more, not less, intimidated as she worked harder.
The efforts required made Marilyn ever more selfconscious and unfree in acting and effected a kind of paralysis. Instead of seeking the role within herself, Marilyn was urged by her teachers to seek herself in the role, and in so doing she was thrown back on her own insecurities and insufficiencies. With each project, she became more frightened, an anxiety-ridden performer convinced she could never please teachers or directors—a woman who, if she ate breakfast before coming to work, threw it up before she went on the set.5
In fact, it was remarkable that in the end she achieved so much with such mediocre scripts. Somehow she found the strength to pass from complete inexperience to mere competence to polished expertise in a specific kind of light comedy in the style of Billie Burke and Ina Claire. But Marilyn’s opportunities were forever limited by the studio system and the roles assigned her, by often well-meaning but overly academic advisers, by her own emotional frailty and finally by poor health. The first, immediate result was an unfortunate and eventually chronic habit of tardiness.
In July, for example, she was over an hour late for an interview with Robert Cahn, who was writing the first full-length national magazine feature story on Marilyn Monroe (it eventually appeared in Collier’s on September 8, 1951). “She is particularly concerned with looking her best and spends hours at the make-up table,” Cahn wrote. “No matter how much advance notice she is given, she is always late. ‘I’ll be just a minute’ can range from twenty minutes to two hours.” That comment notwithstanding, the article was unexpectedly laudatory and perceptive, thanks to gentle pressure exerted by studio publicist Harry Brand.
But Cahn also helped enshrine the conventions of the Marilyn myth by buying wholesale the inflated stories given him by Fox and by the actress herself. “She’s the biggest thing we’ve had at the studio since Shirley Temple and Betty Grable,” Brand said at the time.6 He then added some details of his staff’s imaginative concoctions, items calmly put out to the press from time to time to sustain the public’s interest in Fox’s stars: “With Temple, we had twenty rumors a year that she was kidnapped. With Grable, we had twenty rumors a year that she was raped. With Monroe, we have twenty rumors a year that she has been raped and kidnapped.”
According to Sidney Skolsky, who helped Marilyn and Harry Brand (and later the writer Ben Hecht) create the dramatic legend, the truth was more pedestrian. “How much of the story about her bleak childhood is actually true, I really can’t say,” Sidney said years later in a rare moment of understatement.
But she was not quite the poor waif she claimed to have been. When I first met her, she was supposed to have lived in three foster homes. As time went on it became five, eight, ten, because she knew it was a good selling point.
As Skolsky knew, Marilyn didn’t know who she was, but she knew what she ought to be. Aware of the elements of good movie storytelling, she felt her biography, too, should have the elements of a good movie. The following year, this would begin to take the shape of a literary exercise for which she would help provide the basis and Skolsky and Hecht the language.
In almost storyboard detail, Cahn described Marilyn’s stunning appearance at a studio dinner party, and her placement at the right hand of Spyros Skouras. Her proportions were of course duly noted (five feet, five inches tall, 118 pounds, measurements 37–23–34), but then Cahn discussed her childhood and indicated just how eager audiences were to see more of her.
Since The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, fan mail for Marilyn was pouring into the Fox Studio at the rate of two or three thousand letters each week—more than for Susan Hayward, Linda Darnell, Betty Grable, June Haver, Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck. Since January, the press department had sent out more than three thousand photographs of her to newspapers. The army newspaper Stars & Stripes proclaimed her “Miss Cheesecake of 1951,” and in Korea servicemen made her pin-up photos the choicest wallpaper. As Marilyn said a few weeks before her death, “The studio didn’t make me a star. If I am one, the people did it.” And, Cahn added, “Like a famous predecessor, Jean Harlow, Marilyn’s name is rapidly becoming the current Hollywood definition of sex appeal. . . . [Fox executives] hope they have another Harlow.” After visiting Marilyn’s apartment, Cahn added that this platinum blonde had real (not studio-manufactured) literary interests: he saw on her bookshelf volumes of Whitman, Rilke, Tolstoy, Sandburg and Arthur Miller, with bookmarks and notepaper peeping out between the pages.
At the same time, Rupert Allan was putting final touches to a similar (though much briefer) story for Look magazine. He, too, noted that for their interviews she was
terribly late. She arrived an hour past schedule, then departed to freshen her makeup and change her clothes. Everything was delayed until she finally settled down, and even then she was nervous as a cat. Marilyn was never happy with herself. A new selfconsciousness had gripped her, and if she picked up a hand mirror, she saw a host of flaws she felt she had to disguise.
Rupert’s article was a great success. He and his colleagues added fourteen photos of Marilyn (reading, weight lifting and jogging as well as posing for stills from her films) and he proclaimed that she had “the brightest star potential among blondes since Lana Turner.” In Skolsky’s column a week later, the comparison with Turner continued, to which he added the comment that Marilyn had Joan Crawford’s intelligence and social power. (This was dubious praise at best, since Crawford never finished fifth grade, made no pretense of anything other than what is called street wisdom, and was to most people more intimidating than lovable.7)
That summer Marilyn appeared in what she may have considered her unlucky thirteenth film, Let’s Make It Legal—perhaps the most arid, humorless pictures of her career despite its presentation as a comedy. In the altogether unnecessary, brief role of a blond gold digger, she appeared for less than two minutes but had third billing after the title credits. “Nothing happened easily for Marilyn,” recalled Robert Wagner, another young Fox supporting player in the picture who would have better fortune later. “It took a lot of time and effort to create the image that became so famous.” In Let’s Make It Legal, there was much effort but little effect.
Because they liked her and had to make a virtue of necessity, F. Hugh Herbert created the role and I. A. L. Diamond the script with special attention to Marilyn’s personal history. Another character first describes her as “the girl who won a beauty contest as Miss Cucamonga and has a contract to model. She’s down here [in Los Angeles] posing for cheesecake and trying to better her life,” which she does by chasing a handsome plutocrat on the golf course—shades of John Carroll. Then, in her final seconds onscreen, she is nothing so much as Joe Schenck’s dinner guest: the setting is a men’s poker party, and Marilyn pours drinks and wins the game; the ambitious model has made herself agreeable to those in power. In each scene she wears some of Fox’s most revealing outfits, and although her role is but a decorative one, she provides the comedy’s only light moments. So agreed the critics, who for the most part found the story “indifferent” but Marilyn “amusing.”
There was nothing droll about the next picture (her fourth in 1951), an adaptation of Clifford Odets’s play Clash by Night, directed by the formidable German immigrant Fritz Lang. For this, Marilyn was loaned out to RKO since Fox had no immediate plans for her. The scenario of Clash by Night, set among fishermen and canneries in Monterey, California, tells of an unhappily married woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who, after an affair with a theater projectionist (Robert Ryan), returns to her fisherman husband (Paul Douglas). Marilyn was cast as Peggy, a girl who works as a sardine packer and is engaged to Stanwyck’s brother (Keith Andes).
According to a letter of acknowledgment from the film’s producer Jerry Wald to Sidney Skolsky, Marilyn landed the part only because Skolsky championed her to the point of manic coercion. For this browbeating, Wald was forever grateful: Marilyn attracted moviegoers to this stark and static picture and her performance enlivened an otherwise sordid, dreary business.
Her success was not achieved easily, however, and the production was an ordeal for her and her colleagues. To begin with, as Sidney and Natasha clearly recalled, Marilyn was so nervous during production that—as with the radio show—she vomited before almost every scene, and red blotches appeared on her hands and face. Only powerful determination drove her onto the set. “Hold a good thought for me,” she whispered time and again to her coach and her patron as she went, shivering with fright, to film a scene.
Marjorie Plecher, who supervised her wardrobe on Clash by Night (and who later became Mrs. Allan Snyder), recalled that Marilyn’s quest for perfection led many to think of her as difficult. “Every element had to be just so—not only in her performance, but also in wardrobe and props. She didn’t think the costume jewelry engagement ring given her for the part was right, but she liked mine—so that’s the one she wore in the picture.”
Marilyn required all the goodwill she could muster. Fritz Lang, who did not suffer actors’ idiosyncrasies easily (much less the frail or unfamous), summarized the young co-star tout court as “scared as hell to come to the studio, always late, couldn’t remember her lines and was certainly responsible for slowing down the work.” Most of all, Lang resented the interference of Natasha, a daily presence on location and in the studio. “She fought Lang to have me there,” according to Natasha. “I was glued to her, working in her tiny dressing room all day long. She was so nervous she missed many of her lines, and then Lang took her on like a madman.”
But especial kindness was extended to Marilyn by Barbara Stanwyck, an actress already well established and willing to be patient with an anxious newcomer touted as a potential star. “She wasn’t disciplined and she was always late,” according to Stanwyck, “but there was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once.” When reporters, newsmen and visitors came to watch filming of Clash by Night, Marilyn was the object of their attention: “We don’t want to talk to [Stanwyck or the two leading male actors],” Lang recalled hearing more than once. “We want to talk to the girl with the big tits.” Proud as ever of her body, Marilyn was nonetheless resentful that the press wanted only pictures and spicy anecdotes about her life and her boyfriends: she much preferred to discuss her career, a topic the reporters resolutely avoided as if it were tangential. Robert Ryan recalled that this journalistic attitude depressed her and made her fearful that she would certainly not last very long as a serious apprentice.
Released in 1952, Clash by Night earned Marilyn several favorable notices. Alton Cook, writing in the New York World-Telegram & Sun, rightly proclaimed her performance in Clash by Night worthy of citation: “a forceful actress [and] a gifted new star, worthy of all that fantastic press agentry. Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” And so she did, investing Peggy’s few scenes with a combination of brash carnality and skewed masochism: when her fiancé threatens her (not entirely playfully) with strangulation, she punches his jaw. The gesture gives him and the audience second thoughts about this submissive sexpot.
* * *
Before 1951 was history, Marilyn was back at her home studio. Theatrical exhibitors had seen a rough cut of Lang’s film, and word quickly circulated at Fox that their loaned-out player ought not to be so lightly assessed or casually employed. In the New York office, studio stockholders asked Spyros Skouras when Fox would put Marilyn in a new picture; he, in turn, put the same question to Zanuck. At last the issue had to be faced.
In fact, there was a dramatic property available—an adaptation of a Charlotte Armstrong thriller about an unstable young woman who lost her lover in a wartime airplane crash. Released after several years in an asylum, she is hired as a baby-sitter in a hotel. There, she is pushed to the brink of madness again when she fantasizes that a rude, exploitive hotel guest (played by Richard Widmark) is her dead beloved: he tries to push his advantage with her and the poor girl spins out of control, endangering herself and the child in her care.
This was Marilyn Monroe’s first leading part in a serious feature film.8 Finally titled Don’t Bother to Knock after much studio dithering, it was the project to prove that Marilyn Monroe could tackle and succeed in something other than a pretty comprimario role. And so she did, despite a script threaded with clichés, a production budget that must have established a new low in Hollywood and a director even more contemptuous of Marilyn than Lang (the Englishman Roy Baker, who snarled unintelligible orders when he was not downing mugs of strong tea).
Zanuck required a screen test before formally assigning the role. “Natasha, I’m terrified,” Marilyn said breathlessly, arriving at her coach’s home without warning late one night. Filled with her typically conflicting feelings of longing and terror, she threw herself on Natasha’s patience, and they worked with only brief intervals for two days and nights. “I didn’t think she was ready for so demanding a role,” Natasha admitted years later, “but she made such a beautiful test that even Zanuck had to write her a glowing note.” She was even more impressive in the film, which was shot rapidly and in continuity. Baker printed the first take of every scene despite Marilyn’s protests; hence Don’t Bother to Knock, as completed in early 1952, represents Marilyn’s acting in flashes of astonishing improvisation. “Actually, I had very little to do,” Natasha added. “She was terrified of the entire project, but she knew exactly what the role required and how to do it. I simply tried to infuse her with some confidence.”
From her first appearance, entering through the revolving door of a New York hotel, Marilyn’s portrait of Nell Forbes is that of a fearful doe, unsure of herself and her place in society. Wearing a plain gray dress, black cardigan and matching tam, she has a dislocated glance and demeanor, as if she were a war orphan or a displaced child. Everything about her appearance is muted, her hair scarcely brushed, only a touch of makeup on her face: there is nothing glamorous about this woman, only the beauty of marred porcelain.
In the hotel suite where she cares for a young girl, she pours on cologne, then tentatively clips on her employer’s earrings and bracelet. Gazing in a mirror, she slowly smiles—but her pleasure turns to fear when the noise of an airplane draws her to the window; she gazes out, a tear gliding down her cheek; a haze of memories overcomes her. In these close-ups, as in extreme long shots when Widmark watches her across the hotel courtyard, Marilyn acts with the surest of gestures, her hands and shoulders poised with the right balance of fear and expectation.
In fact her performance never falters. Everything in her gaze at Widmark, who she insists is her lamented fiancé, conveys a fierce but tender plea for refuge, and in finely modulated phrasing her long speech becomes affectingly piteous. “I’ll be any way you want me,” she says in a hoarse whisper, her voice almost breaking, “because I belong to you. Didn’t you ever have the feeling that if you let somebody walk away from you, you’d be lost—you wouldn’t know which way to turn, or have anybody to take their place?”
Marilyn made of Nell not a stereotypical madwoman but the recognizable casualty of a wider urban madness, a kind of representative personality for all the fragmented characters seen elsewhere in the hotel. As she said her lines that winter (“When I was in high school, I never had a pretty dress of my own”), she may well have thought of her own girlhood; when she spoke of the character’s loneliness in an Oregon asylum, the memory of her Portland visit with Gladys may have come to mind. Her performance had extraordinary density and subtlety, and the result is a fully realized portrait: a woman psychologically wounded by war, emotionally broken by loss—one who has attempted suicide but longs deeply for a reason to live. In her last scene, surrounded by a crowd of staring hotel guests, she seems a frightened animal; led away, she glances wistfully at Widmark, reconciled to estranged girlfriend Anne Bancroft. “People ought to love one another,” she says, giving the line the reverence of a prayer. Of her talent for nuanced dramatic acting there could no longer be any doubt. When the film was released the following summer, the trade journal Motion Picture Herald hailed her as “the kind of big new star for which exhibitors are always asking,” and Variety declared Marilyn a “surefire money attraction.” She was, added the New York Daily Mirror, “completely in charge of her role.”
“We had a hell of a time getting her out of the dressing room and onto the set,” as Richard Widmark put it years later. “At first we thought she’d never get anything right, and we’d mutter, ‘Oh, this is impossible—you can’t print this!’ But something happened between the lens and the film, and when we looked at the rushes she had the rest of us knocked off the screen!” Anne Bancroft, Jim Backus and others were equally enthusiastic about Marilyn’s acting.
Marilyn’s reaction to the praise of her colleagues was a bemused and sincere modesty: so far as she was concerned, the performance could have been much better. Congratulated and comforted by Aline Mosby, a United Press correspondent she trusted, Marilyn simply said: “I’m trying to find myself now, to be a good actress and a good person. Sometimes I feel strong inside but I have to reach in and pull it up. It isn’t easy. Nothing’s easy. But you go on.” And then she added: “I don’t like to talk about my own past, it’s an unpleasant experience I’m trying to forget.” Studying with Chekhov and Lytess, creating a new image for herself, playing difficult and demanding roles like Nell Forbes—these were mechanisms by which she could escape those unhappy experiences. To become “a good person” meant, however, that Marilyn longed to be a new and different person, and in 1952 this goal became virtually an obsession with which studio publicists were only too happy to cooperate.
Secretive about her past though she was, Marilyn could never forget its most poignant facts—her unknown father and unfamiliar mother. As 1952 began, she set up a plan for a woman named Inez Melson to act as her business manager and to act as Gladys’s conservator. From Marilyn’s income a regular contribution was made toward the care of her mother, whom Inez visited several times each month in the various state hospitals where she dwelled. Mother and daughter had not met in five years, nor had there been any exchange of telephone calls or letters. More to the point, Gladys was never discussed, for Fox’s publicists had long followed Marilyn’s lead and declared the actress an orphan. And so for the present Gladys Monroe remained a woman on the fringes of her daughter’s memory, a shadowy figure who was a potential cause of shame, someone Marilyn assisted only privately.
In 1952, she had no less than three addresses—furnished apartments on Hilldale Avenue in West Hollywood and, two blocks from that, on Doheny Drive; and then a comfortable suite at the Bel-Air Hotel in the rustic, secluded setting of Stone Canyon. Then as ever, Marilyn seemed a rootless soul who felt she belonged to no one; it was her unstated (and perhaps unacknowledged) aim, therefore, to belong to everyone.
There would always be surrogate parents, and in 1952 those roles were neatly filled by Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov. In this regard, Marilyn’s renewed desire to play Grushenka in a film of The Brothers Karamazov had a pointed basis, for in so doing she could become the adopted Russian daughter of this exotic Russian “couple.” And because they were convinced it was possible, Chekhov and Lytess encouraged her—as did Arthur Miller, to whom she wrote. He had been “dazzled by the richness of The Brothers Karamazov,” he wrote, since his college days.
But Marilyn could be recalcitrant and uncooperative, selfishly late for appointments and presumptuous of others’ generosity. When Michael Chekhov told Marilyn that her tardiness upset his schedule and that perhaps they should suspend tutorials, he received an irresistible letter:
Dear Mr. Chekhov:
Please don’t give me up yet—I know (painfully so) that I try your patience.
I need the work and your friendship desperately. I shall call you soon.
Love,
Marilyn Monroe.
Chekhov was won over on the spot.
As for Natasha, she was left in a kind of emotional limbo with Marilyn, who wanted to be protégée, daughter and generally the most important person in Natasha’s life—but on her own terms, and without regard for the pain she must have known this caused. Such a situation Natasha sustained not only for the income and influence but also because she was still in love with her wounded but increasingly proficient student.
Following Don’t Bother to Knock, Zanuck again put Marilyn in two undemanding and decorative roles. First she was a shapely, dumb-blonde secretary in the farce Monkey Business, in which scientist Cary Grant invents a youth potion. Then, in the anthology comedy We’re Not Married, she appeared for about five minutes as a wife and mother who wins a “Mrs. Mississippi” beauty contest only to learn that her marriage was technically illegal and she can after all bill herself as “Miss.” The role was created, according to the film’s writer Nunnally Johnson, only to present Marilyn in two bathing suits.
Allan Snyder, as usual making up Marilyn for Monkey Business, agreed with director Howard Hawks that rarely had an actress seemed so frightened of coming to the set. But when she finally arrived, according to Hawks, the camera liked her; it was odd, he added: “The more important she became the more frightened she became. . . . She had no confidence in her own ability.” Snyder, who had by this time been working with her for almost six years, understood: Marilyn was simply terrified that she didn’t look good enough.
She knew every trick of the makeup trade—how to line her eyes, what oils and color bases to use, how to create the right color for her lips. She looked fantastic, of course, but it was all an illusion: in person, out of makeup, she was very pretty but in a plain way, and she knew it.
A crisis interrupted the filming of Monkey Business and preproduction of We’re Not Married. On March 1, 1952, Marilyn’s persistent abdominal pain and fever were diagnosed by Dr. Eliot Corday as appendicitis. She begged him to delay an operation, and for several days she lay in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital while antibiotics allayed the infection. After a week, Marilyn returned to work without surgery.
Her request did not signify any dedication to the two films, which she would happily have forsaken; on the contrary, she had a very personal concern. In early February, Marilyn had been introduced to a world-famous baseball player, and by the end of the month they were dating steadily. “But we’re not married!” she told an inquiring reporter who suspected monkey business.
1. In his memoirs (pp. 220–222), Sidney Skolsky described an identical outing with Marilyn.
2. Three years were necessary to resolve the matter of Marilyn’s agreement with the Morris office. She was not formally represented by Famous Artists until March 12, 1953, and did not sign a contract with them until March 1954—not long before that relationship, too, was terminated.
3. For decades it was erroneously reported that Marilyn’s Fox salary was contracted to peak at $1,500 weekly. In fact that was her salary when she walked out on her contract in 1955; had she remained, the increments would have been as scheduled here.
4. According to Kazan (p. 408), Miller’s first meeting with Marilyn occurred when Charles Feldman tendered the playwright a dinner party some time later that winter. But Sam Shaw and Rupert Allan, among others, endorse Miller’s account of the earlier introduction. Kazan’s entertaining and sumptuously self-revealing autobiography often synthesizes, rearranges and wholly confuses dates and facts: he states, for example, that Marilyn was under contract to Harry Cohn when he and Miller took her along to Columbia Studios next day.
5. According to reporter Louella Parsons, Marilyn vomited just before airtime on the several occasions she was a guest on Parsons’s radio program—a reaction surely betokening nervousness and not her reaction to Parson’s show (cf. Louella O. Parsons, Tell It To Louella [New York: Putnam’s, 1961], p. 225).
6. This was of course true, but it was also virtually an indictment of Zanuck’s low estimate of Marilyn.
7. Marilyn was the cover story for Quick magazine (November 19, 1951), which designated her “The New Jean Harlow”—as did Focus for that December, also designating her fair competition for Turner, Grable and Hay worth.
8. Ladies of the Chorus was a so-called B-picture, a second feature; by 1951, it was also a forgotten film.