Chapter Nine
BY CONTRAST with her work for Tom Kelley in May, Marilyn Monroe was mostly overdressed during late June and early July 1949.
Lester Cowan was not only the producer of Love Happy, he was also an expert promoter who knew that movie premieres benefit from nothing so much as the presence of a shapely, sexy blonde. Thus Marilyn’s contract required a personal-appearance tour that summer on the film’s behalf: she was the most attractive thing about the picture, although her appearance onscreen was minimal. Cowan provided Marilyn with a fee of one hundred dollars weekly for five weeks, plus publicity escorts in each city and cash for a new wardrobe. “I bought the nicest things I could find in Hollywood’s department stores,” she recalled. “Nothing cheap or daring. Johnny and Natasha had told me I should travel like a lady, which I suppose they thought I wasn’t. So I bought a couple of wool suits and sweaters, high-necked blouses and a jacket.”
Unaware that summers in Chicago and New York are ordinarily more uncomfortable than in Southern California, Marilyn found her outfits unseasonably warm when the city temperatures soared past ninety and the humidity over seventy. In Manhattan, she endured only four photo sessions and two brief personal appearances before dashing out to replace her wool clothes with air-conditioned summer dresses—backless, sleeveless and mostly frontless. News cameras whirred and clicked constantly, and with typical piquant contrariness she offset the revealing dresses with elegant white gloves.
All during the tour, Marilyn was “the observed of all observers,” as Ophelia said of Hamlet, and as such she artfully combined her modeling and movie experience with what she had learned from Natasha and Johnny. “Her shrewdness was evident in her knowledge of the correct thing to say at the right time,” Natasha said. “Relating to people, she had an innate sense of what was proper.” Marilyn waved, smiled and tossed kisses through the air to crowds; she signed autographs as they entered theaters for advance screenings of Love Happy; she visited a crippled children’s hospital ward.
The point of these appearances was simply to advertise the picture. Routinely, movie stars were presented like visiting royalty: they were movie queens and princesses but, it was implied, also just plain folks and always, always concerned for the little people. But with Marilyn there was an egregious difference: she lingered with sick and handicapped children longer than with the star-struck public or joggling reporters. In Oak Park, Illinois, and Newark, New Jersey, she made schedule-bound publicists frantic when she insisted on meeting every child in a state orphanage and every man and woman in a clinic for the disabled poor. There was no false angelism in these visits; in fact she discouraged photographers from documenting these thoughtful detours.
In her hotel rooms at night, Marilyn pored through the dense chapters of novels by Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe, and sections of Freud on dreams. Then, after a few hours of reading, she ran up telephone charges during nightly conversations with Natasha, to whom she put endless questions to supplement her education. Most of all, she wanted to discuss the character of Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov (accent on the first syllable of “Grushenka,” please, Natasha insisted). Johnny Hyde had first compared her to Dostoevsky’s lusty, complex character; perhaps not very seriously, he had even mentioned it as a suitable role for Marilyn in MGM’s projected film, then being written by Julius and Philip Epstein. But she took the remark with utter gravity and was soon almost obsessed by the girl’s dissolute past and her open, generous heart. Alternately crafty and empathetic, Grushenka becomes, by loving Dmitry Karamazov, purer and less selfish, and at the end of the novel she is redeemed by her own sublime sacrifice. (In this regard, it would be interesting to speculate on Johnny’s identification of himself and Marilyn with the Dostoevsky characters.) “It was the most touching thing I’d ever read or heard of,” she said later. “I asked Natasha whether it would make a good movie. She said yes, but not for me—yet.” Her calls to Johnny were not quite so literary: he humored her when she spoke of the Russian classics, wanting most of all to know if she was faithful to him.
But Johnny had no reason to worry. By coincidence, André de Dienes was in New York on assignment that summer. He located Marilyn at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and whisked her away to the Long Island shore one Saturday morning. “She had the presence and ease of an established star,” he recalled years later. “She was radiant.” And so his photographs document her that summer day as she cavorted on the beach in a one-piece white bathing suit, her long blond hair tangled and wet. Marilyn skipped, she danced, she jumped and waded in the waves, she sat on the sand and drew silly designs, she twirled a dotted parasol. She was Sabrina or Ondine, a water nymph bewitchingly sprung into life.
To the photographer’s chagrin, she was also faithful to Johnny and rejected de Dienes’s attempt that evening to reignite an old romance. Marilyn added that she had an important interview scheduled for the next morning, and she wanted to prepare carefully, for she knew the reporter would ask what she was reading and what were her nonprofessional interests.
But Marilyn’s great expectations of the press were quickly demolished when she kept that appointment. On Sunday, July 24, Earl Wilson came to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on assignment to meet “The Mmmm Girl,” as the publicity men now referred to her. Some people can’t whistle, Marilyn said, “so they just say ‘Mmmm.’ ” Wilson, who found her “a pretty dull interview,” simply consulted the publicity kit for his column and filed an unimaginative report. Marilyn Monroe, he wrote, was an unknown twenty-one-year-old from Van Nuys (she was actually twenty-three), “with a tiny waist, a 36½ bra line and long, pretty legs.” Such were Wilson’s profoundest observations: she was treated as a woman “who could make no claim to acting genius,” as Wilson snidely noted in his column, ignoring that thus far she had little chance to demonstrate much of anything. When she spoke of serious matters and motives during the interview, Wilson was indifferent, like studio moguls who saw only another sexy blonde and, unlike still photographers, took no time to see that the radiance was accompanied by a real flair for comedy.
Back in Hollywood by early August, Marilyn was taken by Johnny to an audition at Fox, where after singing a few bars of a popular song and posing in a short skirt, she was hired (for one film only, without a continuing contract as before) to play a scene as a chorus girl in a musical western. That August she worked a few days on the uninspired trifle called A Ticket to Tomahawk, in which her single number—as one of four girls singing and dancing their way through “Oh, What a Forward Young Man!”—reveals her exuberant abilities as a high-stepping dancer and an estimable singer. Because she had been reduced to virtual invisibility in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!, this was effectively her first Technicolor appearance; she required, as makeup artist Allan Snyder recalled, less work than the others but was seen to greater effect—resplendent in her yellow outfit. But just as the film swung into production, Fox had a crashing failure on its hands with another color, comic western—The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, with their principal blond leading lady, Betty Grable. The timing regarding A Ticket to Tomahawk was therefore inauspicious, and neither casting nor production executives watched the picture or Monroe’s appearance with much interest.
In fact news of the studio’s indifference to Ticket reached the cast while they were filming, and everyone, Marilyn included, seems to have become bored with the project. One afternoon she arrived a half-hour late for a simple exterior long shot, prompting the assistant director to complain, “You know, you can be replaced.”
“You can be replaced, too,” Marilyn replied coolly, “but they wouldn’t have to [hire a replacement and] reshoot you.”
Then, in early September 1949, the pace of life quickened as Marilyn met two men who would be among the closest and most influential people in her life. That year, Rupert Allan was a thirty-six-year-old writer and editor for Look magazine whose responsibilities included arranging interviews and photoessays featuring stars actual and potential. Born in St. Louis and educated in England, he was a tall, courtly gentleman, literate, witty, and much appreciated for his discretion and loyalty. Not long after he met Marilyn, Rupert changed professions, becoming one of the most respected personal publicists in Hollywood; his client list included Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly, for whom he eventually served as consul general of Monaco when she became Princess Grace. In Hollywood’s social circles, it was considered a great coup to be invited to dinner at the home of Rupert Allan and his mate, Frank McCarthy, former aide to General Patton and later a movie producer (of the 1970 film bearing the general’s name).
It was to the Allan-McCarthy residence on Seabright Place, high up a winding canyon in Beverly Hills, that (thanks to Johnny Hyde) Marilyn was invited one evening in early September to meet a team of New York photographers preparing a photoessay on Hollywood starlets.
Among the cameramen was the second person Marilyn met that year who would alter the course of her life.
In 1949, Milton Greene (born Greenholtz) was quickly acquiring a reputation as one of the country’s most talented fashion and celebrity photographers. “They showed me a portfolio with the most beautiful pictures I’d ever seen. I asked, ‘Who took these?’ ” Introduced to Greene, Marilyn said, “Why, you’re nothing but a boy!” Replied Milton, unfazed, “Well, you’re nothing but a girl!”
Twenty-seven and divorced, he was a short, dark-haired and intense man who immediately impressed Marilyn with his knowledge of his craft. He spoke of “painting with the camera,” of colorful and fantastic ideas for celebrating women on film. Always fascinated by his profession and eager to know how he might benefit her, Marilyn attended Milton as if there were no one else present. “I said I had a busy schedule, but I would pose for him all night.”
In a way, she did. Marilyn and Milton left the gathering and spent that evening and the next morning at what Milton referred to as his “West Coast house.” This, as it turned out, was a room at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where a romance blossomed during the remaining brief time of Milton’s Hollywood visit (which conveniently coincided with Johnny Hyde’s week-long vacation alone, in Palm Springs). By September 14, 1949, Milton had returned to New York, without taking a single photo of Marilyn.1 On that date he received a telegram at his Lexington Avenue studio, boldly addressed “to Milton (Hot Shutter) Greene.”
Milton Greene, I love you dearly
And not for your “house” and hospitality merely.
It’s that I think you are superb—
And that, my dear, is not just a blurb.
Love,
Marilyn.
Because both were firmly committed to pursuing their careers in cities three thousand miles apart, neither had any expectation of a reunion after this ten-day summer tryst.
A young, healthy, intelligent lover like Milton Greene, no matter how transient in her life, was a welcome diversion. Some of Marilyn Monroe’s chroniclers, without evidence, have claimed there were many such lovers in 1949 and 1950; in fact, Milton Greene was the only dalliance during her relationship with Johnny. Marilyn was (as she told Rupert Allan) “sad to see Milton return to New York.”
But there was little opportunity for romantic dejection. John Huston, who had just won two Academy Awards writing and directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was casting a new picture called The Asphalt Jungle, a low-keyed flim noir about spiritually lost men and women, society’s losers involved in an unsuccessful jewel theft. Still to be cast was the part of Angela Phinlay, young mistress to a middle-aged, crooked lawyer; by the end of October, MGM had signed Marilyn for it. This would be her fifth film assignment, and one that significantly altered her fortunes. W. R. Burnett, who wrote the novel on which Huston based his script, described Angela as “voluptuously made; and there was something about her walk—something lazy, careless and insolently assured—that was impossible to ignore.”
Among the many canards commonly recited about Marilyn’s career, few have had such strong but bogus currency as the means by which she won this role. Huston’s autobiography summed up the fiction accepted everywhere: typically, he assigned to himself the credit for recognizing Marilyn’s talent and casting her immediately after Johnny Hyde brought her to the studio for a brief audition. According to Huston, “When she finished, Arthur [Hornblow, the producer] and I looked at each other and nodded. She was Angela to a ‘T.’ ” But Marilyn got the part under quite different circumstances, as both the MGM archives and their talent director, Lucille Ryman Carroll, testified.
Hyde indeed brought Marilyn to Hornblow and Huston. “But she was just awful,” Hornblow recalled. “She had heard we were looking for someone very sexy, so she had dressed accordingly, over-emphasizing her figure at every point.” Convinced that only her body would land her the role, she seemed to Hornblow “a nervous little girl half scared to death.” She read a few lines for Hornblow and Huston and departed with Johnny.
Huston had already decided on his choice for the role, a blond actress named Lola Albright. But Lucille told Huston that Albright (following her success with Kirk Douglas in a picture called Champion) was receiving $1,500 a week; the role of Angela, on the other hand, was a small one paying at most a fifth of that. Why not reconsider Marilyn? Huston was adamant and stalled, testing at least eight other starlets he knew MGM would reject. At the same time, Lucille agreed with Johnny that Marilyn could indeed play Angela “to a ‘T.’ ”
At last Lucille forced the issue. Huston, a flamboyant horse fancier, had a team of Irish stallions he boarded and trained at the Carroll ranch. Accomplished writer and filmmaker though he was, Huston was also a playboy, an inveterate gambler and a notorious roustabout who rarely took his debts seriously. That year he was $18,000 in arrears for payments to the Carrolls. On a Sunday afternoon in September, they invited Huston out to the ranch, where Carroll said quite bluntly that if Huston did not allow Marilyn another test he would sell the stallions outright and collect the money due. The matter was quickly resolved in Marilyn’s favor.
Next morning, Lucille telephoned the hair designer Sidney Guilaroff and alerted general manager Louis B. Mayer that an important test was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. “For the better part of the next three days and nights we rehearsed,” according to Natasha—and with good results, for Mayer was duly impressed with Marilyn’s reading on the set and said so to Huston and Hornblow, who reluctantly accepted what was virtually a command decision. “She impressed me more off the screen than on,” Huston said. “There was something touching and appealing about her.” Not until Marilyn’s leap to stardom a few years later did Huston express much enthusiasm for her talent as well, and then, typically, he took credit. Some of it, of course, belongs to the gifted cameraman Hal Rosson—who, Marilyn learned, had been briefly married to Jean Harlow.
During the filming of The Asphalt Jungle that autumn, Marilyn asked that Natasha be present on the set to coach her. “It was the first evidence I’d seen of her courage,” Natasha said, “for no director takes kindly to the idea of a drama teacher who might interfere with his work. But Huston agreed, and so for the first time I worked exclusively with Marilyn.” The results were impressive not because of, but despite Natasha’s presence. As Huston and Hornblow recalled, Marilyn glanced over toward her coach after each take: a nod or shake of Natasha’s head indicated her approval or dissatisfaction. Had the role been larger, Huston surely would not have endured the intervention, for Natasha made Marilyn self-conscious and exacerbated her anxiety. (In the finished film, at the end of her first scene she may be glimpsed glancing toward her coach as she walks off-camera.) Yet despite her dependence on Natasha, Marilyn’s performance in The Asphalt Jungle is remarkable and delineates an important moment of growth in her abilities.
The first of her three brief appearances occurs twenty-three minutes into the story, when, like a napping kitten on a sofa, she glances up to see her Sugar Daddy. Half smiling, half fearful, she asks softly, “What’s the big idea, standing there and staring at me, Uncle Lon?” As he embraces her before sending her off to bed with a good-night kiss, there is a rueful look on her face, the weariness of a kept woman who has stayed with an older man only for the material benefits. In seventy-five seconds of screen time, Marilyn etched a character both pitiable and frightening.
In her second scene, she played Angela even more naïve and carnal. Wearing a black strapless gown, she is at one moment morose at the thought of being abandoned, then exuberant when she learns she may be sent on a luxurious cruise: “Imagine me on this beach with my green bathing suit,” she says breathlessly to her lover. “Yipes! I almost bought a white one, but it wasn’t quite extreme enough. Don’t get me wrong! If I’d gone in for the extreme extreme, I’d have bought a French one! Run for your life, girls, the fleet’s in!” In a single take after one rehearsal, Marilyn assumed the right balance between gold-digging insistence and girlish high spirits.
Moments later, in her final scene, she has her greatest range in the picture. First angry at a policeman’s intrusion, she is then a frightened child, caught in her lies to the police for the alibi she gave her crooked paramour. In two and a half minutes and after only two takes, Marilyn created Angela not as a cartoonlike simpleton but a voluptuary torn between fear, childlike loyalty, brassy self-interest and weary self-loathing.
In The Asphalt Jungle, she moved effectively from movie model to serious actress in a brief but crucial role. But perhaps because her character was seen for a total of only five minutes in the picture’s two hours, the name “Marilyn Monroe” appeared onscreen not at the opening but at the end of the picture, eleventh among fifteen. “There’s a beautiful blonde, name of Marilyn Monroe,” wrote Liza Wilson in Photoplay, almost alone among reviewers. “She makes the most of her footage.” Otherwise, there was silence over a role Marilyn forever after considered one of her best. “I don’t know what I did,” she told Natasha after completing her last scene, “but I do know it felt wonderful.” Her coach, the sort of mentor who considered explicit praise dangerous for the student’s ego, indicated only that Marilyn had performed competently.
* * *
The new year 1950 began with an unsettling admixture of anticipation, pride and disappointment.
Natasha now emphasized gestures. “Body control, body control, body control!” she intoned liturgically, as if she were addressing herself and her own suppressed desires. Meantime, Johnny badgered production supervisors to employ Marilyn wherever possible. In January, she was rushed into a tedious little Mickey Rooney picture at Fox called The Fireball, in which she appeared for a few seconds as (of all things) a roller derby groupie.
The assignment was memorable only because she met a Fox studio hairdresser named Agnes Flanagan, a kindly, mothering soul who would many times in the years to come groom Marilyn’s hair. Whereas Johnny Hyde was (at least partly) a father figure, Agnes was more maternal than stern Natasha, and Marilyn often visited the Flanagans and their two children, intermittently attaching herself to them as a family member. As Agnes recalled just before her death in 1985, she had to be careful when telling Marilyn about a piece of clothing or something she admired, for usually the item would appear at her home next day. This prodigality continued right up to 1962, when Marilyn sent Agnes a duplicate of the garden swing she had so admired. Such spontaneous acts of generosity were typical, even when Marilyn’s finances were limited; throughout her life, in fact, she regarded money as something to spend on people she liked.
Roles in two more minor, forgettable pictures followed later that season, at MGM. In Right Cross, she spoke less than twenty words and was again uncredited, flashing briefly across the screen as Dusky Le Doux, characterized in the script as “a new model” with the same implication as she was termed a “niece” in The Asphalt Jungle. At a cocktail lounge, she is approached by a stranger (played by Dick Powell) who invites her to his apartment for a home-cooked dinner and promises, “If you’re good, I’ll tell you the recipe,” to which she replies sarcastically, “I know the ingredients.”
Then, in early spring, Marilyn was pitchforked into an odd movie that quickly vanished before turning up in Australia years after her death. Home Town Story was an industrially financed paean to postwar American corporate ingenuity. Marilyn appeared briefly as Iris, the receptionist in a newspaper office who has no patience with the unwelcome leering of her boss.
Despite Johnny Hyde’s strong recommendation of her to MGM after these two cameos, production chief Dore Schary did not offer a deal for more work. His excuse was that the studio had Lana Turner under contract and therefore no need of a rival blonde; to colleagues like Lucille Ryman Carroll, he expressed a quaint moral outrage at the Hyde-Monroe affair. By April, Marilyn could count nine movie roles in three years, none of them enough to bring her closer to stardom. Ladies of the Chorus was already a forgotten second feature, and The Asphalt Jungle, despite some critical acclaim, was too bleak to win much popular favor.
When not studying with Natasha, Marilyn posed for pinups in evening gowns or swimsuits, scoured the trade dailies and was seen in the movie colony’s dinner-party circuit with Johnny, with whom life became increasingly difficult as his health became ever more fragile. Despite this, he refused to limit himself, escorting Marilyn to an endless round of social and corporate events, presenting her proudly as valuable and available talent. More poignantly, Johnny also wanted Marilyn known around town as his fiancée, the desirable young woman he still hoped to marry.
Fearful of displeasing or alienating her, Johnny acted the nervous, benighted lover, taking action perilous in his condition: with the ardor of a twenty-year-old, he was often breathless and in pain after trying to satisfy what he presumed were her sexual needs. However, as she confided to Lucille, Marilyn felt that Johnny might indeed be more disadvantageous than beneficial to her career, and that marriage would effectively ruin her reputation beyond repair. Despite the imprecations of Johnny’s friends, she was unyielding. “It would be ridiculous to pass myself off as Mrs. Johnny Hyde,” she told Rupert Allan flatly, adding, “I’d be taken less seriously than I am now.”
And that was indeed her primary goal: to become more than an agent’s mistress and a curvaceous window-dressing in minor movies. Natasha had taught her that there was a difficult and demanding craft to be mastered if one were to become an accomplished actress; that Marilyn had to work constantly on clear diction and understated movement. Johnny was more businesslike in his counsel: Marilyn needed only the right project and producer, and the camera could do the rest by capturing her unusual combination of childlike innocence and luminous sex appeal. So far as the art of acting was concerned, he insisted this was an admirable occupation but one not usually necessary to achieve stardom. In the movies, appearances counted most of all, and they were magically altered by lights and lenses, makeup and camera angles, platforms and costumes. Short actors could appear tall; soft voices could be corrected; a mistake could be rectified simply by repeating the scene. Wonders were performed at the editor’s bench, in the sound booths, in the printer’s laboratory.
There were, then, quite different attitudes held by Marilyn’s two counselors. Natasha emphasized classic diction and understated movement; Johnny said that was all very good but Marilyn should above all keep her figure. Ironically, these different attitudes coincided perfectly with the conflict prevalent throughout Marilyn Monroe’s life—her desire to transcend her background and early experience, and the inclination to exploit the limitations it imposed. Johnny saw what she was; Natasha emphasized what she might become.
Although Marilyn had neither the discipline nor the habit of intellectual focus, she was still eager to supplement her education. One day while she was browsing in a Beverly Hills bookstore with Rupert Allan, she purchased a few art books, from whose pages she clipped reproductions of works by Fra Angelico, Dürer and Botticelli. These she attached to the walls of the kitchen and bedroom at Palm Drive, and by her bedside she set a framed photograph of the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse, about whom Marilyn knew little except the woman’s preeminent place in theater history; Natasha, meanwhile, spoke in reverent tones of Duse as a role model for every serious actress.
Among the books Marilyn scooped up that afternoon was one on the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, whose artistic renderings of human musculature at once fascinated her. Soon she resumed the regimen of physical exercise she had undertaken on Catalina Island, lifting weights to improve her strength and bust line. “She took it all so seriously,” according to Rupert Allan,
that before long she was comparing Vesalius to photographs of other stars and to herself. She insisted, for example, that she didn’t want broad shoulders like Joan Crawford. Of course she also knew that she had a good body, and she longed to know how best to develop and exploit it for her career.
In addition, Marilyn could be seen jogging through the service alleys of Beverly Hills each morning—an activity (like weight lifting) not commonly undertaken by women in 1950.
For a time that spring, claiming that she was harmful to Johnny’s health, Marilyn left Palm Drive and stayed in her official residence at the Beverly Carlton Hotel—a one-room efficiency apartment with cinder-block walls. But her reason for this relocation was not entirely altruistic. Longing to work, she had renewed contact with Joe Schenck and was invited to his home for several evening meetings. In 1950, few starlets were more ambitious than Marilyn, bedazzled by the prospect of glamour and success and willing to dance to the tune of someone able to help achieve them.
In this regard, there is an emotional pattern running through the entire life of Marilyn Monroe like a leitmotif. So limitless was her need for the kind of approbation promised by celebrity, so bereft of the supports of normal life and so primed was she for the acting profession, that she was willing to sacrifice almost anything for it. Although Marilyn Monroe cannot accurately be described as indiscriminate or lewd (much less nymphomaniacal), at times she offered her body as well as her time and attention to a man who might help her.
Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, for one, alluding to her relationship with Schenck, regarded Marilyn as one of the “eager young hustlers” around town. “Almost everybody thought I was trying to hoodwink them,” she said privately in 1955, a pivotal year in the transformation of Marilyn Monroe from an “eager young hustler” to a mature woman. “I guess nobody trusts a movie star. Or at least this movie star. Maybe in those first few years I didn’t do anything to deserve other people’s trust. I don’t know much about these things. I just tried not to hurt anybody, and to help myself.”
Of course she knew very much indeed, at least by a kind of streetwise (or studio-wise) savvy, and her words are both a significant self-assessment and a contradiction of the conventional understanding that among her capacities was not the ability to ponder. In 1950, she knew well that she was regarded as an “eager young hustler,” and in some ways she was. But she was also aware that exploitation is usually a two-way street—that she was being used by others. Hollywood is not alone in its network of human manipulation, although there it is often raised to the level of a high art. Johnny adored Marilyn and longed to normalize their relationship, but she was grateful and made herself available to him virtually on demand. Likewise Joe Schenck, soon to prepare the way for her next job, was a beneficiary of her favors. “Joe sponsored women,” said producer David Brown, who began his long and prestigious film career as executive story editor at Fox in 1951. “He prepared them for other men and other lives and possibly even marriage. He took care of them and their careers, and shall we say he asked for a little consideration along the way. Certainly he was an important influence in Marilyn’s career.” In her way Natasha, too, benefited: she was being paid a small stipend by Marilyn, who promised to keep her as personal drama coach on her next films and whose ego, at least, Marilyn gratified by her very dependence.
But there were discommodities to it all. Until late in her life, the energy required to develop and sustain the icon called Marilyn Monroe was so fierce and constant that outside the frontiers of her career she had no friendships, and her life was often barren of female camaraderie. Healthy peer relations require some sense of a responsive self, but Marilyn always considered herself inferior and unworthy; and so—not because she was inordinately selfish—she was separated for much of her life from an important source of human communion. And by a savage irony, this in turn fostered the vicious cycle of what seemed to be her calculated exploitation of others.
As with acquaintances like Agnes Flanagan, just so with agents, directors and producers: Marilyn felt that she had to barter for affection—not only of individuals, but to acquire the endorsement of millions. There were often distressing results to this habit, for at twenty-three she trusted neither the affections of others nor her own talents. This effected an emotional solitude, for she nurtured the highest professional aspirations while doubting her ability to be accepted as a woman on her own terms. The intensity of her desires clashed with her deepest emotional and spiritual needs. She was someone with a vivid inner life whose desire for recognition caused an outer-directed life; in this regard, Marilyn Monroe may indeed be the ultimate movie actress.
Marilyn’s connection to Schenck was valuable, and Johnny Hyde decided to use it for Marilyn’s best advantage. In early April, he took her to meet the writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had just won an Oscar for his screenplay of A Letter to Three Wives and was preparing a new film to be produced by Zanuck. Tentatively titled Best Performance, this would be a piquant, wise and penetrating story about a successful forty-year-old stage actress and her young rival. Sharply amusing and rich in characterization, the script treated the perennial and extraordinary jealousies, fears and ambitions of theater folk. By production time that spring it was called All About Eve.
There was a small but significant role just right for Marilyn, as Johnny knew when he read the script and as Mankiewicz, too, recognized at once: the part of “Miss Caswell,” an alluring novice in the theater, eager, apparently not terrifically talented but willing to ingratiate herself to older gentlemen (like critics and producers) for the sake of her career. A more refined version of The Asphalt Jungle’s Angela, Miss Caswell is referred to as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.” She was to appear briefly in only two scenes, but because her character highlighted that of Eve, it was central to the picture’s concerns.
Mankiewicz had interviewed other actresses but felt Marilyn “had done a good job for John Huston [and had a] breathlessness and sort of glued-on innocence right for the part.” With his approval and Hyde’s powerful support, Marilyn was signed for a week’s work at five hundred dollars. However temporarily, she was back at Fox.
Her two scenes took longer than a month. First there was location shooting in the lobby of the Curran Theater, San Francisco, where outside street sounds necessitated later redubbing of the conversation among herself, George Sanders and Bette Davis; this was followed by a complicated party sequence back at the studio.2 Mankiewicz recalled that Marilyn appeared on the set with a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, but that he had to explain the identity and background of the German poet and his place in literature. Had someone recommended the book to her? No, Marilyn replied: she had read so little that she was confused by how much learning was still ahead of her. “Every now and then I go into the Pickwick [Bookshop, then in Beverly Hills] and just look around. I leaf through some books, and when I read something that interests me, I buy the book. So last night I bought this one.” Then, with almost childlike guilt, she asked, “Is that wrong?” No, he replied, that was much the best way to choose books. It seemed to Mankiewicz that “she was not accustomed to being told she was doing anything right.” Next day, Marilyn sent him a gift copy of the book.
George Sanders, with whom Marilyn had all her dialogue, agreed that she was
very inquiring and very unsure—humble, punctual and untemperamental. She wanted people to like her, [and] her conversation had unexpected depths. She showed an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting. In her presence it was hard to concentrate.
Sanders had the clear impression that Marilyn would be an enormous success because “she so obviously needed to be a star” (very like Eve). But he added that she had little of the social grace often required of the savvy starlet—just as Mankiewicz remembered that she seemed to him at the time the loneliest person he had ever known. On location in San Francisco, the cast and crew invited her to join them for meals or a drink and she was pleased, “but somehow [thus Mankiewicz] she never understood or accepted our unspoken assumption that she was one of us. She remained alone. She was not a loner. She was just plain alone.”
Marilyn’s performance in All About Eve was just what the script required. In her strapless white gown and elegant coiffure, she moved and spoke with a kind of confident, understated seduction. But the role did little more than advance her as a type of appetizing garnish, too brief and too like that of Angela, and she was unremarked by critics. Johnny’s expectation that Zanuck would be persuaded to sign her to a long-term contract was temporarily dashed, for Zanuck still saw nothing remarkable.
Despite the disapproval of his colleagues at the William Morris Agency, Johnny continued to act as if Marilyn were his only client. He placed her in what would be her only commercial, a television spot for motor oil. (“Put Royal Triton in Cynthia’s little tummy,” Marilyn purrs to a service-station attendant.) He also invited journalist Fredda Dudley to feature Marilyn in a Photoplay story, “How A Star Is Born,” published that September. Marilyn was, according to Dudley, “soft-spoken, tentative and liquid-eyed. She looked as wild and terrified as a deer. If anyone moves quickly, she’ll bound over the fence.” Always fearful of interviews and disinclined to press conferences, Marilyn nevertheless realized their necessity. But she never became accustomed to them and avoided questions whenever possible; her shyness and her occasionally recurring stutter disinclined her to impromptu statements even at private parties.
That autumn—“because I wanted to improve my mind and learn how to deal better with people in groups”—she enrolled in a noncredit evening course in world literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. Appearing without makeup and in blue jeans she bought at an Army-Navy store, Marilyn seemed more like a shopgirl than an ambitious studio starlet. Her classmates remembered nothing remarkable about her in class except for the jeans, which were not ordinary apparel for women in 1950. But the instructor, Claire Seay, recalled that Marilyn was attentive and modest; Marilyn enjoyed the course and attended faithfully every Tuesday for ten weeks.
Also that autumn, Marilyn economized by accepting an invitation from Natasha (who now had a modest income from private students) to share her tidy, one-bedroom apartment in an attractive duplex on Harper Avenue, a few steps north of Fountain in West Hollywood. There, Marilyn slept on a living room daybed, helped care for Natasha’s daughter Barbara, read books, studied plays and generally demolished Natasha’s neatness. She also brought along a female chihuahua named Josefa—after Schenck, who had given it to her in June as a gift for her twenty-fourth birthday—and on this tiny creature Marilyn lavished (so it seemed to Natasha) inordinate time, attention and money. “She fed Josefa expensive calf’s liver and bought her a quilt to sleep on. But the dog was never house-trained, there was excrement all over the place, and Marilyn could never face cleaning it up.”
When Natasha complained of this unsanitary mess, Marilyn simply looked hurt: “her eyebrows shifted, her shoulders drooped and there was a look of unbearable guilt on her face. The simplest correction she took for a sentence of damnation.” Contrariwise, as Natasha pointed out to Marilyn, she took exceptionally good care of herself, washing her face constantly to prevent clogged pores, taking long baths and spending what little money she had on monthly trips to the dentist to ensure she had no cavities. “Natasha, these are my teeth!” she cried when asked if these appointments were not excessive.
Nevertheless, because she loved her and because Marilyn “was a channel for what I had to give and the future looked bright for both of us”—an optimism perhaps not warranted by current circumstances—Natasha sustained the inconveniences, coped with Josefa and worked with Marilyn at night on scene-study. Preparing for whatever film role might come next, the two women devised a complex code, a set of hand signals similar to those of a baseball catcher and pitcher. When Marilyn dropped her voice too low there was one gesture from Natasha, another if she thought Marilyn was standing inappropriately for the scene, still another if Marilyn seemed to lose inner poise.
“I signalled to her if she turned too soon, or if a turn had been ‘empty’ because it hadn’t been motivated by proper thought about herself and the character.” Marilyn found the emphasis on motivation and thought confusing, for Natasha seemed to require an intellectual process her student found intimidating. John Huston never spoke of motivation, Marilyn said, nor did Joe Mankiewicz. But Natasha insisted that no real acting—like the craft practiced at the great Moscow Art Theatre—was possible without considerable mental effort.
And so to the application of this exercise, attempting to understand a character’s motivation and its conjunction with something in her own past, Marilyn applied herself with much fervor. It was a development that prepared her for important instruction later—and also for a decade’s worth of argument with film directors, who were generally hostile to such introspection. More significantly, this approach was an unwise counsel: Marilyn was already an introspective, sensitive, shy and insecure young woman who constantly second-guessed herself. Over the next four years, much of the spontaneity necessary for her to give a convincing performance would be siphoned away by an excess of analysis.
Studying at school and at home, Marilyn found time for occasional visits to Joe Schenck while ignoring Johnny Hyde for several weeks that autumn. She telephoned Johnny occasionally but did not visit, and this carelessness offended even Natasha, who threatened to deliver her personally to Palm Drive if she did not see the ailing Johnny. By November he was working on her behalf mostly by phone from his bed, to which he was now restricted by heart disease. However Johnny felt, he devoted himself completely to opening possibilities for Marilyn; with such efforts he still hoped to make her Mrs. Hyde, even on his death-bed.
But it was not only Joe Schenck who occupied Marilyn’s time and attention. Ambitious to meet everyone who could help her, she went to the legendary Schwab’s Drugstore, at 9024 Sunset Boulevard, to meet the movie reporter Sidney Skolsky.3
Just over five feet tall, Skolsky was a bright, energetic man of Russian Jewish descent with the gift of recognizing talent; he was, in other words, rather like Johnny Hyde. Born in 1905, he had worked as a New York press agent in the 1920s for, among others, impresario Earl Carroll, for whose nightclub entrance he invented the famous illuminated motto, “Through these portals walk the most beautiful women in the world.” Skolsky then became an entertainment reporter—first for the New York Daily News, then for William Randolph Hearst’s syndicated newspapers, which included the New York Post and the Hollywood Citizen-News. Settling in Los Angeles permanently as a movieland reporter, he coined the word “beefcake” to describe male “cheesecake,” invented the phrase “sneak preview” and devised the idea of private screenings for the press before public premieres. “He had a tendency to latch onto blond ladies like Betty Grable, Carole Lombard and Lana Turner, whom he dubbed The Sweater Girl,” recalled Skolsky’s daughter, Steffi Sidney Splaver.
Skolsky’s Hollywood news column went deeper than those by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, for he regularly provided readers with inside information about the technique and business of filmmaking, not merely with tidbits of gossip about movie stars’ lives and loves. Hypochondriacal, fearful of everything from dogs and cats to swimming, Skolsky also suffered from mysterious depressions. “Marilyn found a kindred soul in my father,” Steffi added. “They were both like frightened puppies, both brighter than they knew, and of course Marilyn had a weakness for fatherly, intellectual Jewish men.”
Later a sometime movie producer (of, for example, The Jolson Story and The Eddie Cantor Story) and always a man who had enormous influence with studio publicists, Skolsky was a colorful eccentric who maintained a comfortable office on Schwab’s mezzanine, whence he regarded the action below, the arrivals and departures of customers famous and unknown, like Florenz Ziegfeld regarding the stage from his tower-office above the theater. The reason for the drugstore setting was elementary: Schwab’s quietly provided their pill-addicted tenant with whatever compounds he required or wished to sample. Throughout the 1950s, drugs later known to be perilously habit forming were far more readily available than subsequently, there was no stigma attached to continual use, nor was there (as subsequently) strict government regulation of dangerous barbiturates, amphetamines and narcotics. Skolsky received mail and telephone calls at Schwab’s, where—because driving a car was on his list of phobias—he could easily find someone he knew to squire him around town. It was widely known, for example, that among his chauffeurs was no less a star than Marlene Dietrich, who knew the importance of Sidney Skolsky’s friendship.
When not hitchhiking or testing new prescriptions, Skolsky could often be found at his favorite studio, Twentieth Century—Fox, where he managed to obtain free lunches and haircuts and where he counted among his confidants senior Fox publicists like Harry Brand and Roy Craft. “Do you think I’ll ever get my picture in one of these magazines?” Marilyn asked Sidney coyly one afternoon at Schwab’s. He knew well that this was already a past achievement, but he also sensed her sincerity and saw a touching vulnerability beneath it.
“From then on we were friends,” Skolsky wrote years after her death.
She was always seeking advice, [although] Marilyn was wiser than she pretended to be. She was not the ordinary blond actress-starlet you could find at any major studio. . . . She appeared kind and soft and helpless. Almost everybody wanted to help her. Marilyn’s supposed helplessness was her greatest strength.
Although Skolsky’s attachment to Marilyn was beyond question and widely known (by his wife and children and soon by all Hollywood), the relationship never crossed the boundary of platonic, paternalistic friendship.
“He had confidence in me from the start,” Marilyn said. “I used to talk with him for long periods at a time. I always felt I could trust him, tell him anything.” And so she could. The day they met, she told Sidney how she had been compared to Jean Harlow, that as long as she could remember Harlow had been set before her as an exemplar and ideal. Sidney thought this was neither an impertinent aspiration nor an impossible goal. He had known Harlow and recognized immediately that the two women had a rare combination of ambition and humility, typified by their statements, even at the height of their fame, that they wanted to become actresses.
Meanwhile, Johnny Hyde’s time at home seemed to improve his health a bit, especially after Marilyn visited him in late November. On December 5, after more than a year of representation by Johnny without the usual written client-agent agreement, Marilyn signed the standard form of the Screen Actors Guild contract with the William Morris Agency for three years. Two days later, Johnny told Marilyn that he had used every influence, called in every personal and studio debt at Fox, and had at last arranged a screen test for her there. At stake was not only a six-month deal, a role in a picture called Cold Shoulder and perhaps one or two others, but also very possibly a long-term studio contract.
Marilyn was thrilled. At once she raced to tell Sidney, who gave her three sleeping tablets so that the anxiety of preparing would not exhaust her before the test. Then she began to work with Natasha, who read the short scene she was to play, judged it rubbish, sighed and set to work molding a credible performance.
On December 10, dressed in the same flattering sweater-dress she had worn in The Fireball, Home Town Story and All About Eve, Marilyn enacted the short, dramatic scene as a gangster’s moll. Richard Conte was the actor drafted to play the tough; years later, he recalled that she was completely focused and intense, and that Natasha stood nearby for encouragement.
“I came to tell you that you can’t stay here, Benny,” Marilyn said, facing the camera, her voice tense with panic appropriate to the scene. “If these gorillas find you here, what happens? You can’t take such a chance!” Conte’s character, apparently believing she has led him into a trap, raises his hand to strike her. “Go ahead,” Marilyn responds in a tremulous voice, “It won’t be the first time I’ve been worked over today. I’m getting used to it.” A moment later, with the camera catching the glint of real tears in her eyes, the scene fades.
As it happened, Fox never produced Cold Shoulder, and Johnny was told that at the moment there was only one small role that Zanuck considered suitable for Marilyn—that of a secretary in a comedy called As Young As You Feel, scheduled for production the following month. The offer was accepted.
It was Johnny’s last deal. On December 16, he left with his secretary for a rest in Palm Springs, and, at his request and with his money, Marilyn continued on to Tijuana with Natasha for Christmas shopping. Without waiting for the twenty-fifth, Marilyn spent almost all her available cash on a gift she saw Natasha admiring—an ivory cameo brooch framed in gold. Then, while they were on this expedition, Johnny suffered a massive heart attack and an ambulance rushed him back to Los Angeles. When Marilyn finally caught up with him, on the evening of Monday, December 18, he had been dead several hours.
Johnny Hyde had no opportunity to resolve with Marilyn the bitter tension that underlay his unrequited love, and she had no chance to express her gratitude. “I don’t know that any man ever loved me so much,” she said in 1955. “Every guy I’d known seemed to want only one thing from me. Johnny wanted that, too, but he wanted to marry me, and I just couldn’t do it. Even when he was angry with me for refusing, I knew he never stopped loving me, never stopped working for me.”
His estranged wife and children asked that Marilyn be excluded from the services at Forest Lawn, but she and Natasha—both veiled and giving stellar performances—convinced guards that they were family servants. An hour after everyone had departed, Marilyn stepped quietly to the graveside, reached out to the flower-covered bier and plucked a single white rose, which for years she kept pressed and preserved in the pages of a Bible. Contrary to the established account that she became frenzied at the ceremony, shouting Johnny’s name and throwing herself on the casket, Marilyn was in fact the picture of dignified grief, as even Natasha admitted. “I saw something in her I had not before that afternoon,” Natasha recalled. “Remorse, perhaps—repentance, a terrible sense of loss—call it what you will.”
Marilyn sat a long while at the cemetery until, at twilight, attendants gently asked her to leave. During the next month, at work and at home, she frequently broke down weeping, grieving as much for herself as for indefatigable, lovestruck Johnny. Without his dedication to her welfare, without his protection and adoration she felt the terrible loss of an ally, a father and a tender friend. There had been sudden absences and abrupt changes in her life before—her mother’s departures, her move into the orphanage, her arranged marriage, the death of Ana Lower and of the dog Josefa late that autumn—but nothing cut so deeply as Johnny’s passing.
Within days (hours, Marilyn once claimed), she received a call from Joe Schenck, offering his condolences—and, should she require it, his home, where guest quarters awaited her pleasure (and, presumably, his). “Joe Schenck was mad for her,” said Sam Shaw. A New York photographer often commissioned to design advertisements for Fox productions and to take still photos on the set, Shaw met Marilyn soon after Johnny’s death. “Long before she was a major star, Joe Schenck was her benefactor. If she was hungry and wanted a good meal, or sad and wanted a good cry, she called him.”
One morning around Christmastime, Natasha found Marilyn asleep, a bottle of pills from Schwab’s at her bedside. She then noticed a residue of a gelatin capsule at the corner of Marilyn’s mouth and, fearing the worst, became hysterical, which at once roused the sleeping beauty. Without a drink of water, Marilyn explained, she had tried to take a single pill and had then fallen asleep while it slowly dissolved in her mouth.
“Natasha often accused me of overreacting,” Marilyn later told Milton Greene. “But this time she took the prize. I never went along with all that romantic stuff about following your loved one into the grave. I remember that when Johnny died I felt miserable, I felt guilty, and I had a lot of feelings to sort through—but, oh baby, I sure didn’t want to die.” And then she added with a radiant, grateful smile, “The fact is, he had made certain that I had nothing to die for.”
And much to live for, she might have added. Johnny had arranged for Marilyn a unique holiday gift she much anticipated: an agreement, through Fox publicist Harry Brand, that the studio would present her as their promising young actress in a New Year’s Day movie-star feature in Life magazine. Wearing a black dress and long black gloves, she had been photographed in profile, a deep décolletage justifying the caption “Busty Bernhardt.” Her future is assured, ran the accompanying two-sentence caption, for “just by standing still and breathing she can bring men running from all directions. And after small but pungent roles in Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, her studio is convinced she will be a fine dramatic actress too.”
Those words had been written by Johnny, expressing his faith and her hope. But in their offices on Pico Boulevard, Zanuck and his colleagues were not in fact planning to make Marilyn Monroe a “fine dramatic actress.” After all, why should a busty blonde aspire to anything like the level of Bernhardt?
1. Greene’s time would come later. Meanwhile, for Life magazine’s issue of October 10, 1949, Philippe Halsman photographed seven starlets and an ex-model for a photoessay called “Eight Girls Try Out Mixed Emotions.” Marilyn, incorrectly described as having appeared in only Love Happy, was captured “seeing a monster . . . hearing a joke . . . embracing a lover . . . tasting a drink.” Only the laugh looks credible; only Marilyn had a subsequent career.
2. For the lobby sequence, Marilyn (with the approval of Zanuck and Mankiewicz) chose an item from her own wardrobe, a tightly woven sweater-dress that had also shown her figure to good advantage in The Fireball and Home Town Story.
3. In his memoirs, Skolsky claimed in 1975 that he first met Marilyn at a studio drinking fountain; her account of going directly to Schwab’s to meet him was supported by Natasha Lytess, Lucille Ryman Carroll and Rupert Allan (and, earlier, by Skolsky himself).