Chapter Eight
THE WAS LIKE AN EXPLOSION always happening or about to happen—the most volatile woman I’ve ever known,” said journalist Jane Wilkie about Natasha Lytess, Marilyn Monroe’s drama coach for six years.
In 1948, Natasha was about thirty-five, tall and thin, with gray-streaked, short-cropped brown hair; angular and hyperkinetic, she sometimes resembled a frantic stork on the lookout for trouble. Born in Berlin (not Russia, as she claimed to avoid anti-German sentiment when she emigrated), Natasha had studied with the great director Max Reinhardt, acted in repertory theater and married the novelist Bruno Frank. With the rise of the Nazis, the couple moved to Paris and thence to America, where they joined a throng of refugee artists, many of whom settled in Los Angeles.1 During World War II, Natasha had small roles in two Hollywood films, worked with Samuel Goldwyn’s contract players as a drama coach and then accepted the offer of a similar position at Columbia Studios. Her husband returned to Germany in 1947, leaving her with their infant daughter to raise alone.
Autocratic and severe, Natasha impressed executives and actors alike, often intimidating them with her language fluency, her knowledge of the arts and literature and her stern correction of young actors she considered inferior to those she had known abroad. However accurate her assessment of their limitations, her condescending tone with players could hardly be justified: her general demeanor suggested that she might have been an exotic baroness, exiled in Hollywood.
Natasha’s personality was perhaps best typified by handwritten letters to friends and students, in which her sentences were littered with words underlined and exclamation points scattered like comic-strip punctuation. Everything was a matter of the gravest significance, and in private sessions with actors, just as in meetings with producers and directors, she brooked neither argument nor opposition. On the studio lot, her name evoked respect but not warm sentiments, and her austere, spinsterish demeanor was abrasive to men and women alike. Only the begrudging admiration of Harry Cohn and the insistence of a few immigrant directors kept her on the payroll; had the contract players voted, she might have been back at MGM, begging for uncredited roles as a foreigner of undetermined origin.
But her manner only veiled a searing disappointment. Natasha had aspired to a great stage career, but in Los Angeles there had been only film work (and not much of that) and her accent and somewhat forbidding appearance limited the available roles. As a result, her subsequent position as drama coach meant she had to abandon hopes for herself and work for the success of younger, more attractive and less talented actors. From the first day, there were danger signals in her relationship with Marilyn.
In unpublished interviews and memoirs of her years as Marilyn’s teacher and occasional housemate, Natasha spoke with barely concealed bitterness—and not only because of the tangled and unhappy finale of their relationship. From their introduction, she resented Marilyn’s beauty and appeal even while she admired and tried to refine it. This conflict was attended by the most poignant development, for very soon the teacher was desperately in love with her student—a nearly fatal passion for Natasha, but a neat convenience for Marilyn, who knew instinctively how to turn another’s devotion to her own best advantage while ignoring or deflecting whatever sexual advances she disfavored.
On their first meeting (March 10, 1948), Marilyn was captivated by Natasha’s experience and erudition, recognizing a woman from whom she could learn very much indeed. She told Natasha about her time at the Actors Lab, and Natasha responded with a little lecture on the Moscow Art Theatre, on the great actor and theoretician Konstantin Stanislavsky, and on Anton Chekhov’s influence on modern drama. “Not very much of what she said that day stayed with me,” according to Marilyn.
She was like a waterfall, pouring out impressions and images. I just sat there watching her expressive hands and flashing eyes, and listening to her confident voice speak about the Russian soul. She told me what she’d been through and made clear how much she knew. But she gave me the impression I was something special, too.
For her part, Natasha was not so impressed:
Marilyn was inhibited and cramped, and she could not say a word freely. Her habit of barely moving her lips when she spoke was unnatural. The keyboard of the human voice is the gamut of emotion, and each emotion has its corresponding shade of tone. All this I tried to teach Marilyn. But she knew her sex appeal was infallible, that it was the one thing on which she could depend.
“There were days,” Marilyn said later, “when I couldn’t figure out why she kept me on as a student, because she made me feel so shallow and without talent. Very often it seemed that to her I was one of the hundred neediest cases.”
By pointing out only Marilyn’s deficiencies, Natasha paradoxically contributed to Marilyn’s conviction that her body, her sexual allure and prowess were her chief (indeed, her only) resources. Moreover, between teacher and student there was a wide cultural gap, one that Natasha exploited in order to exert a kind of psychological control over Marilyn—a subtle mechanism not at all uncommon in the disappointed lover. Thus the dynamics of a complicated Pygmalion-Galatea relationship were at once set in place.
“I took her in my arms one day,” Natasha said, “and I told her, ‘I want to love you.’ I remember she looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have to love me, Natasha—just as long as you work with me.’ ” Both women were being honest, but only one would feel the agony of a hopeless passion. Natasha’s pain could have sprung straight from the pages of a Russian novel, for her love had a tragic quality; she could neither satisfy nor sever it. “She was in love with me and she wanted me to love her,” was all Marilyn later said on the matter.
Not long before her death, Natasha spoke more freely:
I wish I had one-tenth of Marilyn’s cleverness. The truth is, my life and my feelings were very much in her hands. I was the older [woman], the teacher, but she knew the depth of my attachment to her, and she exploited those feelings as only a beautiful younger person can. She said she was the needy one. Alas, it was the reverse. My life with her was a constant denial of myself.
Natasha was correct. Dependent on Natasha though she appeared to be, Marilyn had an independence and a strength as well, an ingrained ambition that overcame countless disappointments, lonelinesses and setbacks. The sad truth is that Natasha Lytess was more profoundly dependent on Marilyn and Marilyn’s need of her, and therein may lie the reason why she endured six years of emotional crisis. Even as she was doomed to frustration, Natasha loved so deeply she could not bring herself to the action that would have freed her—separation from Marilyn.
As it happened, their first week of acting and voice lessons coincided with Ana Lower’s death from heart disease on March 14; she was sixty-eight and had been in miserable health for over two years. Four days later she was cremated, and her ashes were interred at the Westwood Memorial Park, near the home Ana and Norma Jeane had shared. According to James Dougherty, Marilyn was not present at the final tribute: she was so afraid to miss a class with Natasha that she said nothing about Ana’s death. Only much later did she tell her mentor that Grace’s aunt was “the one human being who let me know what love is”—words that must have been agony for Natasha to hear.
Gladys Monroe Baker with two-year-old Norma Jeane: Santa Monica Beach (1928).
Baby Norma Jeane Baker (center) with her foster mother, Ida Bolender, Hawthorne, California, summer of 1926. (From the collection of Eleanor Goddard)
Norma Jeane Baker, age three (1929).
Grace Atchinson McKee and Ervin Goddard on their wedding day, 1935. (From the collection of Eleanor Goddard)
Norma Jeane Baker, age fifteen, with her classmates: ninth grade, Emerson Junior High School, Los Angeles, June 1941. (From the collection of Gladys Phillips Wilson)
Norma Jeane Baker’s wedding to James Dougherty, Los Angeles (June 1942). (Photo by Axel Fogg)
First appearance as a model, age nineteen (1945). (Photo by David Conover; copyright by T. R. Fogli)
Posing for a magazine ad (1946). (Photo by André de Dienes)
Posing for artist and photographer Earl Moran (1946). (From the collection of Mickey Song)
With agent Johnny Hyde, Palm Springs (1949). (From the collection of Mickey Song)
With drama coach Natasha Lytess (1949).
As “Miss Cheesecake of 1951,” with Edward G. Robinson. (From the collection of Mickey Song)
Marilyn’s first leading role, as the psychotic baby-sitter in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952).
Recovering from her appendectomy (1952).
Preparing for the interior closeups in River of No Return (1952).
As the nearsighted Pola in How To Marry a Millionaire, with David Wayne (1953).
With Betty Grable at a premiere (1953).
With Jane Russell at Grauman’s Chinese, after immortalizing their hand and footprints in the theater’s forecourt (1953).
Joe and Marilyn: wedding day, San Francisco (1954).
Singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” for the troops in Korea (February 1954). (Photo by Ted Cieszynski)
Arriving at an army outpost in Korea to entertain troops (February 1954). (Photo by Sakamoto; copyright by T. R. Fogli)
With her good friend and makeup artist Allan Snyder, on the set of There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). (From the collection of Allan Snyder)
Recording for RCA Records (1954).
Lexington Avenue, New York: filming The Seven Year Itch (1954). The actual skirt-blowing shots were eventually recreated in the Hollywood studio.
On location in New York for The Seven Year Itch—a shot arranged for the press but not included in the film (1954). (From the collection of Chris Basinger)
The daily tutorials in breathing and diction had an immediate and not entirely felicitous effect on Marilyn’s speech and her subsequent reading of lines before the camera. Because Natasha had a mania for clarity, she forced Marilyn to repeat every speech until each syllable fairly clicked and then to move her lips before speaking. She was especially fierce on the sharpness of final dentals, and so Marilyn had to recite over and over such sentences as “I did not want to pet the dear, soft cat” until every “d” and “t” was unnaturally stressed and each word distinct from the preceding and the following.
Unfortunately, this exercise quickly ossified into a strained and affected manner of on-screen speech it would take years (and eventually a new coach) to overcome. The exaggerated diction, the lip movements before and during her lines, the overstated emphasis on each syllable—all the verbal tics and peculiarities for which Marilyn Monroe was often vilified by critics—owed to the tutelage of Natasha Lytess. And although it would soon be evident that Natasha’s method could work well for comic roles, her next drama coach would have to work double time to relax Marilyn’s speech patterns for serious, more mature parts. In life, however, there was nothing of the breathless, slightly overwrought sensibility that characterized Marilyn’s speech on screen.
As do many forlorn and unrequited lovers, Natasha seized every opportunity to be near the object of her devotion, forming, training and influencing her beyond the exigencies of film acting technique. “I began to feed her mind,” she said years later, adding that she introduced Marilyn to the works of poets and composers. According to Natasha, Marilyn was indeed no intellectual, but was rather “a mental beachcomber, picking the minds of others and scooping up knowledge and opinions.” Natasha provided a cultural stimulation Marilyn had never known. But emotionally the two women were ever at cross-purposes, locked in a collusion of half-met needs.
By late spring of 1948, Marilyn was receiving a regular studio paycheck; still, the Carrolls continued their allowance to her so that she could have extra private sessions with Natasha. And by this time, as Lucille recalled, Marilyn had resigned her avocation as a boulevard hooker. On June 9, Lucille arranged for Marilyn to live at the Studio Club, 1215 North Lodi Street in Hollywood, a two-minute walk from the Los Angeles Orphans Home. A Spanish-Moorish complex with an open courtyard and palm trees in profusion, the Club was a residential hotel for young women aspiring to careers in the arts, and the superintendents managed it like a college dormitory or a branch of the YWCA. There were strict curfews, and gentlemen could visit only in the open atrium-style public lounge. Lucille paid in advance the three-hundred-dollar rent for six months, and Marilyn moved into room number 334.2
With her salary and allowance, she treated herself to a new Ford convertible for which she arranged monthly payments; an expensive, cumbersome professional hair dryer; a commodious supply of cosmetics; books; a phonograph and recordings of classical music. “I felt like I was living on my own for the first time,” she said later. “The Studio Club had rules, but the women in charge were nice, and if you came home after they locked the doors at ten-thirty, a smile and apology would usually be enough to satisfy them.” The supervisors were, in other words, too smart to ask the right questions.
But Columbia had no such reticence in inquiring about fees spent on contract players who were paid but not working on pictures. Talent department chief Max Arnow was often the first to receive calls from the studio’s accountants, and he received one in June relative to Marilyn Monroe. Within days, Arnow told Natasha there would be one less student on her roster by the end of the month, for they would not subsidize her private classes at the studio. “Please don’t do this,” Natasha pleaded. “She’s doing well. She loves the work, and I’m sure I can build her up for you.” That same day, Natasha rang producer Harry Romm, who was producing a B-picture called Ladies of the Chorus. Yes, Romm said, a major role was still uncast.
By early July, after an impressive audition at which she sang one of the film’s songs, Marilyn was hired; the picture was made on the cheap in ten days. She had the role of Peggy Martin, a chorus girl whose mother (played by Adele Jergens) tries to dissuade her from marrying a handsome socialite—a union that can only end in disaster, mother insists, just as hers once did because of “class differences.” In the tradition of Hollywood’s democratic approach to everything including romantic musicals, the one-hour picture ends happily with the triumph of true love (if not of narrative honesty or social reality).
With her long, flowing and silky hair redyed a glistening blond and styled like Rita Hayworth’s, Marilyn brightened a dull and cliché-ridden script. Although Natasha’s supervision had rendered her speech too deliberate and her gestures so overrehearsed they frequently seemed mechanical, Marilyn seemed to glow—especially in scenes with her leading man (Rand Brooks) whose character’s nervousness merely encourages her to take charge of the situation. A raised eyebrow, a sudden drop in voice and there was a strong undertow of feminine wiles to her characterization. Especially in her two songs (“Anyone Can See I Love You” and “Everybody Needs a Da-da-daddy”), Marilyn revealed she had more talent than the film required. For the first time, she sang in a film—and very well, too, with a mellow, slightly smoky quality, an intriguing fusion of girlish innocence and womanly enterprise.
Her fellow players liked her, and there was talk around the lot that Marilyn was someone to watch at work. According to Milton Berle, who met her that year, there was no phony artifice about her, no airs or affectation. She wanted very much to be a star, he recalled, “but first of all she wanted to be somebody to herself.” Adele Jergens agreed that Marilyn was fiercely earnest about Ladies of the Chorus, eager to make herself agreeable by arriving on the soundstage early with her lines word-perfect for every shooting call. “She told me very tearfully she had lost her mother, and that, just like the chorus girls of the story, she knew what social ostracism was like. Marilyn was the sort of girl you instinctively wanted to protect, even though she obviously had brains and probably didn’t need much protection.”
In this Jergens was quite correct, for during rehearsals for Ladies of the Chorus, Marilyn had met and speedily fallen in love with the studio’s music arranger and vocal coach, Fred Karger. Ten years older, Karger at thirty-two was a handsome, blond-haired lothario, placid and polite with colleagues but since his recent divorce bitter toward women. Some provided him with fawning comfort, however, and at that time he lived comfortably in a rambling house with his mother, his young daughter, his divorced sister and her children—an extended family to which Marilyn quickly became attached. To Natasha, Marilyn confided that “the only security I hope for is to be married, and Freddy is the man of my dreams.”
On September 9, 1948, with Ladies of the Chorus completed, Marilyn’s contract at Columbia expired and no renewal was offered—a repudiation Cohn and Arnow may well have regretted the following month, when she received a favorable notice in the trade publication Motion Picture Herald. “One of the bright spots [in Ladies of Chorus] is Miss Monroe’s singing,” wrote critic Tibor Krekes. “She is pretty and, with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise”—hardly a rave, but nevertheless a gratifying first review that did not alter Cohn’s decision. His major star was Rita Hayworth, just as Fox had Betty Grable and MGM had Lana Turner; none of them was listening to Harry Lipton or Lucille Ryman when they spoke of a potentially sensational new movie star named Marilyn Monroe with unusual qualities and the determination to have them recognized. “Under Marilyn’s baby-doll, kitten exterior, she [was] tough and shrewd and calculating,” was Lucille’s assessment. But this was not enough to get her career moving at a more rapid rate. No one saw her comic potential, no one assessed her instinctive flair—perhaps partly because of the cliché about attractive young blondes.
There was, then, a second hiatus in her career, without prospects of advancement. According to Lucille, this encouraged Marilyn in an ingenious but eventually futile scheme to quit the Studio Club forever and to move in with the Kargers, the better to abet her prospects of marriage—not to replace employment, but in fact to work for it within the sunnier atmosphere of a loving family. Therefore when Fred drove her home after their first date, she directed him not to the Studio Club but to a grimy, flea-infested Hollywood tenement (recently abandoned by another Columbia starlet); this, she said gloomily, was all she could afford. Briefly, the plot worked, and for three weeks she lived with the Kargers on Harper Avenue, south of Sunset Boulevard.
This deception, like those she tried with the Carrolls, was another little scenario, the invention of a shrewd young woman who was quickly learning when to adopt a dramatic pose: if it was lacking at key moments, Marilyn would provide it from the present or contrive it from the past. But there is also something slightly pathetic about such conduct, and touchingly childlike about her longing to be part of a family. Fred’s mother and sister liked her enormously, and this affection she exploited, attaching herself again to a surrogate family and helping with chores to prove she would be a good wife for Fred and stepmother to his daughter.
But soon the Studio Club rang up Columbia’s talent department to ask her whereabouts, and the next afternoon Fred delivered her back to the Club. “He said that because I lied about this, he couldn’t trust me with anything,” Marilyn said later. “He didn’t think I would be a good example to the children in his family. It made me feel pretty rotten.” Given Marilyn’s psychological needs and Karger’s refusal to meet them, both of them seem to have overreacted. The event did not prevent their romance from lasting until the end of 1948, but Karger thenceforth insisted that marriage to Marilyn was not in his plans.3 “This made her miserable,” according to Natasha. “Many times after she had been with him there were tears in her eyes.” Predictably (indeed, wisely), Natasha’s advice was that Marilyn ought to end the liaison.
Whereas Karger’s emotional distance kept the affair essentially physical and limited Marilyn’s expectations, he did not at all restrain himself professionally in his efforts on her behalf. In addition to vocal training, he advised her on wardrobe and etiquette, counsel she immediately followed. That winter, Fred also took her to the orthodontist Dr. Walter Taylor and paid for the correction of an overbite, and at the same time her teeth were bleached: they had looked fine for modeling photos, but movie cameras were another matter. By the end of the year, after she had worn corrective braces and retainers, the contour of her upper jaw was more even and her smile brighter. For this improvement, Marilyn offered herself to Fred all the more importunately. He accepted her embraces but continued to reject any talk of matrimony.
But for all the specific assistance, there remains the brutal paradox that the Monroe-Karger affair was characterized by an abusive quality that was sadly consistent with her history. She confided to Natasha at the time (and three years later to director Elia Kazan) that Karger was constantly critical of her, that he derided her wardrobe and speech and said that her only real talent emerged when she was in bed. Because Karger’s low appraisal coincided with her own, she was drawn to him almost obsessively. Ever longing to reverse his estimation, to prove herself decent and worthy of love, she effectively debased herself, begged for endorsement and always made herself sexually available. And the more he acted the superior with a lightly veiled contempt, the more she tried to win him over. Father figure, lover and artistic mentor, Karger offered everything Marilyn thought she longed for. Remote and condescending, he was also the familiar man of her life history. In this regard (just as with Dougherty), she became a little girl eager to ingratiate herself, to please, to win the love of a protective older man. Likewise, Natasha—who so patiently longed for her—was the woman from whom Marilyn desired maternal support; in the cases of both Karger and Lytess, however, the relationships were doomed by almost immeasurable inequality of feeling. Marilyn loved Fred far more than he desired her, while Natasha desired Marilyn much more than she was loved in return.
Thanks to the Carrolls, Marilyn’s unemployment that autumn of 1948 did not mean penury. But they did insist that she continue her lessons with Natasha (for which they paid) and that she audition for roles at the Bliss-Hayden Theater.
On her way to one tryout in October, a fortuitous accident occurred. Never a particularly cautious or observant driver, she smashed into the rear of a car on Sunset Boulevard and immediately a crowd gathered. Neither she nor the other driver was injured, but Marilyn—wearing red spiked heels and a red-and-white polka-dot sundress two sizes too small—caused a minor sensation. Among the bystanders was a former Associated Press cameraman named Tom Kelley, then an independent photographer noted for superb work that often included Hollywood’s most photogenic models. When Marilyn said she was late for an important meeting and had no money for a taxi, Kelley gave her five dollars and his business card. She thanked him, called Harry Lipton to deal with the accident and raced off to her appointment. The meeting with Kelley augured more favorably than the audition, which did not have a happy outcome.
Nor did her affair with Fred Karger, which by Christmas was seriously foundering. “Marilyn was beginning to see how she was hurting herself with him,” Natasha said a few years later. “She was in love with somebody who was treating her miserably, as a convenience. All the time, she was so nice to his family and to his daughter. Marilyn would have loved to marry him, even though he was impossible. She thought love would change him. I hoped she would somehow be distracted from this relationship.”
Natasha’s wish was granted, but not as she expected. At a New Year’s Eve party given by producer Sam Spiegel, Marilyn was introduced to Johnny Hyde, executive vice-president of the William Morris Agency and one of Hollywood’s most powerful representatives. Before the night was over, Hyde was besotted, and not with liquor. During the first week of January 1949, he prevailed on Marilyn to accompany him on a short vacation to Palm Springs, where he spoke of her career prospects and took her to bed. From that night, Johnny Hyde was desperately in love. But Marilyn was not, and when she next saw Natasha and told her the news, her teacher shrugged and muttered the old French idiom—Un clou chasse l’autre: One man goes and another takes his place.
Karger’s successor could not have been more different. That season, Marilyn was twenty-two, Johnny Hyde, fifty-three. Born Ivan Haidabura in Russia, he emigrated to America at the age of ten with his family, a troupe of acrobats. Never strong in childhood and often an unwell young man with various cardiopulmonary ailments, Johnny became an agent in New York and proceeded to Hollywood in 1935, where he succeeded as an astute developer and manager of talent; among his many clients were Lana Turner, Betty Hutton, Bob Hope and Rita Hayworth. Barely five feet tall, with sharp features, thinning hair and a generally sickly appearance, he was nothing like a glamorous industry denizen. He was nonetheless very much respected and wielded considerable influence. Although a husband and father, Johnny was never deterred from a brief romance or a quick conquest—even by a serious heart condition for which, by his fifties, he was under weekly medical observation.
From the night he met Marilyn, Johnny Hyde became a victim of a fierce sexual obsession for this new, formidably young mistress. For her part, Marilyn loved Johnny as if he were her lost father. She learned from him, and, especially since she was not progressing with Harry Lipton, she wanted to benefit from Johnny’s representation—a shift easily accomplished when Hyde bought out her Lipton contract. Within weeks, Johnny was devoting virtually his entire professional and personal time to her.
Before spring turned to summer 1949, Johnny left his family. Determined to make Marilyn the second Mrs. Hyde, he brought her from the Studio Club to live with him in a rented house at 718 North Palm Drive, Beverly Hills. To avoid press problems, however, she agreed to maintain a tiny one-room apartment at the modest Beverly Carlton Hotel, 9400 Olympic Boulevard, where she received mail and professional notices. According to Elia Kazan and Natasha Lytess, Marilyn insisted that she would not marry him although she continued to manifest her gratitude sexually. Her rejection of his proposal and concomitant offer of wealth only made him more persistent: “I’m not going to live long, Marilyn,” he told her repeatedly. “Marry me and you’ll be a very rich woman.” This did not alter her decision, for according to her own code she would not wed someone with whom she was not in love. Also, in refusing Hyde’s offer of marriage Marilyn was the more realistic partner, foreseeing the contumely that would otherwise have been directed at her: she would be called a gold digger, not only romancing for her career but even marrying a man known to be gravely ill.
About the same time, according to one of Marilyn’s later associates named Peter Leonardi, Johnny Hyde urged her to have a Fallopian tubal ligation. “Johnny Hyde knew that in Hollywood the girls have to go to bed a lot,” said Peter Leonardi, Marilyn’s friend and personal assistant a few years later. “It was before the [availability of the contraceptive] pill, and he just didn’t want her to be encumbered with children.” Marilyn at first agreed to the procedure but then decided against it. “She never had it done,” according to Dr. Leon Krohn, her gynecologist. “And the rumors of her multiple abortions are ridiculous. She never had even one. Later there were two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy requiring emergency termination [of a pregnancy], but no abortion.”
* * *
At twenty-two, Marilyn was eager for both professional success and a decent, honorable life. “He was willing to act as my agent even though the only coat I had was a beat-up polo coat,” she said, “and I went to interviews without stockings before it was fashionable, because I couldn’t afford any. . . . [Johnny] inspired me to read good books, to enjoy good music, and he started me talking again. I’d figured early in life that if I didn’t talk I couldn’t be blamed for anything.”
Seasoned in the established ways of Hollywood’s bartering, she sought recognition and approbation through and from those she could attract. In the case of Johnny Hyde, Marilyn felt singularly essential to someone’s happiness—perhaps more than ever before—because of his physical frailty. To this her finest instincts responded, and she submitted to his sexual demands, although without any pleasure or satisfaction of her own: “I knew nobody could help me like Johnny Hyde,” she confided to Natasha. “But I felt sorry for him, too, and he was crazy about me. I never lied to him, and I didn’t think it was wrong to let him love me the way he did. The sex meant so much to him, but not much to me.” Such sentiments are not those of a callous predator.
Like many such entanglements, however, the affair was not without a dark and dangerous undertow created by the lovers’ differing perspectives and expectations. Marilyn was absolutely faithful to him for over a year, ignoring both repeated invitations from the influential Joe Schenck and from the more attractive Fred Karger, who apparently had jealous second thoughts. Despite her constancy, Johnny referred to Marilyn in her presence as a “chump”—his word for a mindless woman of easy virtue—just as he referred to almost all women as “tramps and pushovers.” Like Karger, Hyde could be openly abusive: once again, she was drawn to a man who berated her because his evaluation matched hers.
This complex of reactions was directly related to her work as model and actress. During her time as Norma Jeane with the Bolenders, Gladys, Grace McKee and Jim Dougherty, she was constantly required to rise to others’ expectations to such an extent that her own desires and the natural emergence of her own personality, her conduct and appearance, were managed by others. Karger had paid for dental work because he disapproved of her overbite, and now Hyde went further. He arranged for a Beverly Hills surgeon named Michael Gurdin to remove a slight bump of cartilage from the tip of her nose and to insert a crescent-shaped silicone prosthesis into her jaw, beneath the lower gum, to give her face a softer line. These alterations account for the different appearances she presents in films after 1949. Eager to be acceptable, and to win the approval she so desired, smiling prettily for photographers, working toward movie stardom—these were logical stratagems for one primed to please.
Capitalizing on Marilyn’s natural sexiness, Johnny Hyde was quick to introduce his new girlfriend to independent producer Lester Cowan, who was investing some of Mary Pickford’s money in a Marx Brothers farce. With the opening credit “Introducing Marilyn Monroe,” Love Happy went before the cameras in February 1949 with a cameo role quickly devised for her—a simple addendum for the Marxes, whose films were grab-bags of wacky improvisation. Bug-eyed and leering, Groucho had the role of a private detective: answering a tap at his door, he opens to admit Marilyn, who slinks into his office wearing a strapless, iridescent gown.
“What can I do for you?” asks Groucho, turning to the audience to add, “What a ridiculous question.”
Placing a seductive hand on his shoulder, she purrs, “Mr. Grunion, I want you to help me.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” asks Groucho, with the trademark roll of his eyes and lift of his thick brows.
As Marilyn then strolls away from him off-camera, she replies, “Some men are following me.”
“Really?” Groucho continues, eyeing her departing figure. “I can’t understand why!” End of less-than-a-minute cameo.
“It’s amazing,” was Groucho’s comment to the press after filming. “She’s Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one!” For a single afternoon of work, Marilyn was paid five hundred dollars, plus an additional three hundred for promotional photos. More than half this sum was dispensed in gifts for the Karger women and a gold watch for Fred. She also sent a gift to the Carrolls, who soon after, aware of her connection to Johnny Hyde, rightly decided that they no longer had to throw good money after bad. Their subsidies ceased that spring of 1949, when Marilyn told them she had used their allowance to arrange for time payments on her convertible.
* * *
Love Happy was Marilyn’s fourth film, but in spite of two years of studio apprenticeship and a year’s study with Natasha, her career was going nowhere and stardom seemed very remote—perhaps not even a realistic goal. No one but Johnny and Natasha, who were surrogate parents replacing the Carrolls, took much notice of her.
Whatever the mixed results of her dramatic exercises with Natasha, the teacher’s cultural influence cannot be exaggerated, for in an important way Lytess—and Johnny, too—confirmed Marilyn in her love of Russian culture and literature, an interest first sparked at the Actors Lab. Natasha was more academic about it than Johnny, but after a few whiskies he, too, spoke of the great Russian writers and recited a few lines from Pushkin and Andreyev. That year, Marilyn began a long, painstaking trek through sections of Russian poetry. “I began to see hope for her,” Natasha wrote of that year.
She had no discipline, and she was lazy, but I pounded at her. When she came unprepared for a lesson, I was furious. I berated her as I would my own daughter. And always Marilyn would look at me as though I were betraying her.
The clash of wills and attitudes in Natasha—nurturing but severe, generous but tyrannical was difficult for Marilyn to comprehend, for she was ever sensitive to criticism and needy of endorsement. And if she was aware of Natasha’s quiet disapproval over her increasing reliance on Johnny, Marilyn gave no indication at the time. “Natasha was jealous of anyone who was close to me” was her laconic comment a few years later; she did not elaborate.
Otherwise, the early months of 1949 were spent with Johnny (at his convenience) and with Natasha (at Marilyn’s); there seem to have been no other people of consequence in her life, and no contact with those in her past. Natasha corrected her speech and gestures and Johnny broadened her political sensitivity. His discussions of the Czar’s last days, the drama of the 1917 Revolution and his belief that there was a core of hope at the center of communism were Marilyn’s first education in global politics: “she was intrigued by it all,” according to Natasha, “and she began to reflect his political attitudes,” which were not, it seems, much more than casual conversations that expressed both his innate love of Russia and his appreciation of democracy. What Marilyn most appreciated, however, was Johnny’s defense of serfs and outcasts, the poor and the disenfranchised.
This liberalism struck a resonant chord in her own empathetic nature, perhaps partly because of her own background. The socially conscious plays to which she had been introduced at the Actors Lab, the fiery culture represented by the melodramatic Natasha, the slightly boozy romanticism of Johnny Hyde—in love with Old Russia but aware of its need for reform—all these introductions to the Russian soul touched Marilyn deeply. Often, she told Natasha, she read a Tolstoy short story with Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite on the phonograph. However incongruous that combination, no one could fault her longing for total immersion when she was drawn to learning.
In fact she was beginning to develop an entirely new take on herself and her life. Communication with those in her past, represented by Grace, was increasingly rare. There is, for example, no record of her reply to a note from Grace on April 20, informing her that Gladys, during a temporary leave from a state hospital, had married a man named John Stewart Eley. Of this brief marriage nothing is known, nor would there be further personal communication between mother and daughter; Marilyn continued to send small sums to Gladys, however (monies that later increased with her own improved lot).
Although Marilyn was not to be deterred from her goal of movie stardom, there were no offers forthcoming after Love Happy. She insisted on paying her rent at the Beverly Carlton and, except for the cost of evenings out with Johnny, supported herself with the residue of her fee from Love Happy. Obligated to travel for a nationwide promotional tour for that film in July 1949, she was idle until then. And so, because she had some extraordinary expenses—books and car payments among them—she decided to look into her cache of photographers’ business cards. There she found the address of Tom Kelley, the man who had come to her rescue the day of her Sunset Boulevard traffic accident.
Kelley’s studio was at 736 North Seward, Hollywood; there, amid an array of cameras, lights, furniture, props, plastic trees and painted backdrops, he worked on assignment from advertising agencies. With the help of his wife, Natalie, and his brother Bill, Tom Kelley produced some of the most aesthetically pleasing camera art of that time, distinguished by imaginative lighting, dramatic angles and, within the limitations of commercial photography, innovative approaches to the presentation of humans with products.
In early May, Marilyn arrived unannounced at the studio with her portfolio, wearing exaggerated makeup, a revealing white blouse, red spiked heels and a tight red skirt that restricted her natural walk. She was not the all-American girl of the Conover or Jasgur photos but a model eager for work. Yes, Kelley said, there was a quick job available: another model had called in sick and he had a shooting scheduled for a beer advertisement. Natalie Kelley guided Marilyn to a dressing room, adjusted her makeup and handed her a one-piece swimsuit and a colorful beach ball. “I think I see something here,” Tom said when they emerged.
Within two weeks, the makers of Pabst beer had a new poster ready, and their advertising agency told Kelley she was the prettiest model he had ever used, whoever she was. To Natalie and Bill, Tom confided that he agreed, but he did not entirely understand how the results were achieved. With the right makeup, Marilyn was attractive enough in person. But when she posed, something flashed from her an instant before the shutter winked, and Marilyn on film radiated sex appeal.
Thus it was that on May 25, Kelley contacted Marilyn through the message desk at the Beverly Carlton. The beer poster had caught the eye of a man named John Baumgarth, a Chicago calendar manufacturer, who asked Kelley if his new model would be willing to pose for an upcoming number. The idea was for a nude photo artfully rendered. Since she had already posed bare-breasted for Earl Moran and was quite casual about partial nudity both at home, on beaches and in photographers’ studios, Marilyn accepted at once. Two nights later, on May 27, 1949, she returned to Kelley’s studio and signed a release form as “Mona Monroe.”
Kelley, thirty-seven and calmly serious about the assignment, put one of Marilyn’s favorite recordings on his portable phonograph: Artie Shaw’s famous rendition of “Begin the Beguine.” A red velvet drape was spread on the studio floor, and for two hours Marilyn posed nude, moving easily from one position to another as the photographer, perched ten feet above her on a ladder, clicked away. Obediently, she turned this way and that . . . arched her back . . . faced the camera . . . stretched in profile.
Among dozens of shots, only two clear portraits survived: “A New Wrinkle” was the Baumgarth Company’s designation for her naked profile against a casually rumpled drape and “Golden Dreams” the title for a full-breasted pose of Marilyn with her legs discreetly angled for decency’s sake. Baumgarth paid Kelley five hundred dollars for all future publication rights; of this Marilyn received fifty dollars for the session. She never met Kelley again.
Three years later, the photographs became world-famous, and to deflect scandal Marilyn orchestrated a brilliant campaign to exploit conduct that Hollywood and the entire country would otherwise have found unacceptable from a celebrity. She was hungry at the time, she said—out of work, awaiting a movie assignment. Alternatively, she would claim that her car had been repossessed by the finance company, and how could she travel to look for work in Los Angeles without a car? (This excuse was quickly dropped: overdue payments for an expensive new convertible would not go down well with the public.) In any case, the setting was private, the photographer’s wife was present. Art photos were taken. What could be wrong? Nothing was, but some of the details, suggested later by her mentors, were asynchronous with the facts.
Quite simply, Marilyn posed nude because it pleased her to do so. The shy girl who tended to stutter during first takes on a movie set remembered (or was creating) the dream of her childhood: she was naked and unashamed before her adorers. Proud of her body, she often paraded unclothed at home; indeed, a casual visitor to Palm Drive might glimpse her naked passing from bedroom to bath or swimming pool to cabaña. “I’m only comfortable when I’m naked,” she told reporter Earl Wilson. Yet in her nudity she was both innocent and calculating. Like her appearance in Love Happy, the calendar presented her as a body; this was all that seemed to matter to anyone.
Marilyn’s antecedent was again her own exemplar Jean Harlow, of whom Edwin Bower Hesser had taken famous photos in 1929 in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Draped in diaphanous chiffon beneath which she was naked, Harlow was captured in nymphlike attitudes, just as she had posed naked beneath a fishnet for Ted Allan. The Hesser pictures so infuriated her first husband that he divorced her: this was the final insult, he charged, from a woman whose display of her body was as well known in life as in her films. “Can you see through this dress?” Harlow asked in Red Headed Woman. “I’m afraid you can, dear,” a woman replied. “Then I’ll wear it!” announced Harlow with a triumphant smile.
More than any other portraits of a nude woman in the history of photography, those of Marilyn Monroe taken in 1949 became virtual icons, everywhere recognizable, ever in demand. Landmarks in the union of art with commerce, the photographs have appeared on calendars, playing cards, keychains, pens, clothing, accessories, linens and household items; for decades, entrepreneurs have become wealthy by claiming or purchasing rights to their dissemination. “Golden Dreams,” for one example, provided the premiere issue of Playboy magazine with its first centerfold in December 1953.
Because of Kelley’s craftsmanship, there is nothing prurient about the photographs; rather, in her frank carnality, there was a kind of classic composure, the presentation of artless femininity. Nervous in person, Marilyn was immediately self-possessed when naked before the lenses and beneath the lights. And so the resulting voluptuousness is natural rather than indecent. Desirable, she seems invincible; childlike, she emanates adult repose; nubile, she portrays an innocence that appeals to both men and women. Nudity has rarely been so sublimely rendered photographically as in the results of the Kelley-Monroe session that May evening in 1949.
1. Among the most notable: architect Walter Gropius; designer Marcel Breuer; philosophers Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Herbert Marcuse and Claude Lévi-Strauss; conductors Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf and Bruno Walter; composers Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith; writers Bertolt Brecht and the Mann brothers (Thomas and Heinrich); scientists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller; filmmakers Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang and Detlef Sierck (later Douglas Sirk).
2. The Studio Club was at various times the residence of many successful actresses, among them Evelyn Keyes, Linda Darnell, Donna Reed, Dorothy Malone and Kim Novak.
3. He later married Jane Wyman, whom he divorced, remarried and again divorced; at the time of his death in 1979 there was yet another Mrs. Karger.