Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (21 page)

Her unemployment did not leave her idle, however. Since January, the studio had been sending some of its young actors over to the modest quarters of the Actors Laboratory (on Crescent Heights Boulevard, just south of Sunset), where playwrights, actors and directors from Broadway had a California showcase for their work. In January, Marilyn had seen at the Actors Lab a one-act play by Tennessee Williams called
Portrait of a Madonna
, in which Hume Cronyn directed his wife, Jessica Tandy; much revised and expanded, the play opened in New York the following December as
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Throughout 1947, Marilyn attended informal classes, read plays and studied scenes with an impressive group of experienced actors from New York. This contact was crucial not only for her exposure to the theater and some of its most controversial and intelligent exponents: her time at the Actors Lab also introduced her to social and political issues that later determined several important choices in both her career and her personal life. “It was as far from
Scudda-Hoo
as you could get,” she said later. “It was my first taste of what real acting in real drama could be, and I was hooked.”

Most important, these months evoked new aspects of her maturing character that would constantly be threatened throughout her life. In Marilyn Monroe there was a deep conflict, for she was torn between the performer’s desire for approval and acceptance and a craving for learning and serious artistic achievement. Ashamed of her aborted schooling, she was always attracted to educated men and women from whom she might learn about literature, the theater, history and social issues. In addition, there was in her nature a deeply felt concern for the poor, the weak, the abandoned and disenfranchised—people with whom she always identified both in life and in stories. All these longings and concerns came together in 1947 through the actors she met at the Lab and the kind of drama they championed.

The Actors Lab was a spinoff of the Group Theater in New York. Under its founding directors Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, the Group—and its leading playwright of social protest, Clifford Odets—offered plays championing the plight of the poor,
plays with sharply left-wing messages against capitalism. Although after a decade the troupe formally disbanded in 1940, its members continued to be vital forces in the development of American theater, and during the following decade several of the Group’s actors—Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand; J. Edward Bromberg and Roman Bohnen—tutored students, led scene studies and presented plays for Los Angeles students and theatergoers.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of Marilyn’s exposure to these New York theater people, to the plays studied and presented and to a company of professionals that was somewhat ragtag but dynamic and full of new ideas. Over ten months in 1947, under the tutelage of Phoebe Brand and her colleagues, Marilyn read and studied—however casually, incompletely and irregularly—at least portions of the following plays that had earlier been offered by the Group Theater in New York:

•
1931
, by Claire and Paul Sifton, a play first produced in the year of the title, which explored the problems of an unemployed depression laborer and his girlfriend who finally join Communist sympathizers in New York. Marilyn learned that the New York production had starred Carnovsky, Bromberg, Brand and Odets—a quartet she met one evening that June after a reading of the play.

•
Night Over Taos
(1932) by Maxwell Anderson, about a revolt against land-grabbers. This play had, in addition to the same cast as
1931
, an actress named Paula Miller who was soon to marry the play’s original director, Lee Strasberg. The Strasbergs would eventually become the two most influential people in her acting career.

•
Men in White
(1933) by Sidney Kingsley, about a young doctor’s struggle with idealism; to the same cast as the previous two was added a young actor named Elia Kazan. Marilyn already knew of him because he had been at Fox when she arrived, directing
Gentleman’s Agreement
. At the Actors Lab, he was spoken of in almost reverential terms, as a genius of the theater and cinema, an accomplished actor, director and producer. Then thirty-eight, he had returned to New York and was co-founding a new school, the Actors Studio. Kazan and the Studio would also be significant in her personal and professional life.

•
Awake and Sing!
(1935) by Odets, in which the identical cast played a Bronx family struggling to survive the depression; at the finale, the hero becomes a left-wing agitator. Years later, Marilyn recalled that she wept at the play’s “crazy, destroyed family, and especially at the suicide of that kind old grandfather,” who may well have made her think of her own family and of Tilford Hogan.

•
Weep for the Virgins
(1935) by Nellise Child, in which Phoebe Brand and Paula Miller, under Cheryl Crawford’s direction, played members of a San Diego family trying to escape the drab environment of a fish cannery during the depression.

•
The Case of Clyde Griffiths
(1936), by Erwin Piscator and Lena Goldschmidt, in which Brand, Carnovsky, Bohnen and Kazan reinterpreted Theodore Dreiser’s novel
An American Tragedy
in terms of the American class struggle.

•
Golden Boy
(1937), in which the same players (again directed by Strasberg) presented Odets’s drama of a man’s choice between a career as a violinist or as a prizefighter.

In her discussions of this play, Phoebe Brand suggested to the students that this career conflict was present in every serious actor, in every serious artist—indeed, in Odets himself, who was torn between the serious demands of writing for Broadway and the lucrative business of writing for Hollywood. “She asked us to read his play
Clash by Night
, which had starred Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway,” Marilyn recalled. “It was one of the few plays I thought I could do, because there was the part of a girl who reminded me of myself.”

As Marilyn attended class, studied and asked questions, the same themes resurfaced (social discontent and the plight of the disenfranchised poor) and the same names recurred—Odets and the Strasbergs; Cheryl Crawford; and Elia Kazan. For the present, she came to know only Phoebe Brand and her husband, Morris Carnovsky; at the Lab, Carnovsky was habitually late for rehearsals and tutorials while his wife constantly enjoined punctuality on their students.

For Marilyn, a child of the depression, these plays and discussions had a force and relevance unlike the movies she had acted in, had seen produced at Fox or in movie theaters.

All I could think of was this far, far away place called New York, where actors and directors did very different things than stand around all day arguing about a closeup or a camera angle. I had never seen a play, and I don’t think I knew how to read one very well. But Phoebe Brand and her company somehow made it all very real. It seemed so exciting to me, and I wanted to be part of that life. But I’d never even been out of California.
⁷

To the staff at the Lab, Marilyn seemed shy and self-conscious. According to Phoebe Brand, “she did all her assignments conscientiously” but made no great impression:

I remember her for her beautiful long blond hair. . . . I tried to get through to her and find out more about her, but I couldn’t do it. She was extremely retiring. What I failed to see in her acting was her wit, her sense of humor. It was there all the time—this lovely comedic style, but I was blind to it.
⁸

The Actors Lab was Marilyn’s first introduction to acting as a disciplined and demanding enterprise requiring serious application. Her two roles at Fox had been throwaways, and as she knew from observing others in production, film actors had to remember only a line or two of dialogue at a time. Whereas a day on a movie set could extend to ten or even twelve hours (and the work-week to six days in 1947), the actual working time was brief. Actors were late, lights had to be readjusted, cameras were temperamental, script rewrites were demanded: in such a collaborative medium, executives were delighted if a day’s work produced four minutes of finished film. (The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had worked in Hollywood, once described movie-making as an enterprise in which very many people stand around for a very long time, doing absolutely nothing.)

Practitioners of stagecraft, on the other hand, read, memorized and broke down scenes for analysis, discussed them with the director and designer and, it seemed to Marilyn, generally immersed themselves in a much less lucrative and far more demanding profession. “Movie stars were paid better, and of course the people at the Actors Lab made no secret of how much they resented that,” Marilyn said, adding that she felt a conflict very like that in Odets’s
Golden Boy:
should she aim for the art or the stardom?

Because she did not want to return to modeling (much less to any other job), Marilyn would not have been able to attend classes at the Actors Lab—much less to feed, clothe and house herself after she was dropped from the Fox roster—were it not for a chance encounter with a generous couple in early August.

This occurred at an annual celebrity golf tournament at the Cheviot Hills Country Club, just across the boulevard from Fox. For the event, pretty young contract players were invited to carry actors’ clubs and bags, making themselves agreeable to the likes of Henry Fonda, James Stewart, John Wayne and Tyrone Power. Two weeks before her contract expired that summer, Marilyn was one of the caddies sent over with the compliments of Twentieth Century–Fox.

She was assigned to John Carroll, a handsome, six-foot-four-inch, forty-two-year-old film actor whose virile good looks were often compared to those of Clark Gable or George Brent. Carroll, a wealthy man who had made wise investments, was married to Lucille Ryman, director of the Talent Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her responsibilities included finding new men and women with star potential (she had signed up Lana Turner, June Allyson and Janet Leigh), then obtaining good scripts for them and supervising their drama, dance, fencing and diction classes at the studio. The Carrolls were also known and admired for helping (with both counsel and cash) several young, impecunious apprentices who showed some promise of movie talent.

Years later, Lucille clearly recalled that Marilyn wore a tight sweater and white flared shorts to the tournament—but that she was unable to manage Carroll’s heavy golf bag and simply carried a few
clubs, occasionally striking attractive poses for the benefit of the attending press. Along with Marilyn’s obvious allure and her evident awareness of it, Lucille Ryman saw a certain childlike simplicity, “the look of a lost waif.” Her sexiness, her delight in herself and her ability to attract attention were somehow neither offensive nor impertinent. “She was such a cute little number,” according to Lucille. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this poor little child, this stray kitten.’ ”

At the end of the day, everyone gathered for drinks round the club bar, and finally Marilyn—the object of considerable male attention—quietly announced to the Carrolls that she had no transportation home, and that she had not eaten since the previous day. Because Lucille had to leave the club to attend a play downtown that evening with a studio colleague, she suggested that John and Marilyn ought to go out for supper before he drove her home.

Which they did, according to Lucille. Later, John told his wife the dialogue that accompanied his delivery of Marilyn to her apartment. This was not at Nebraska Avenue, but at a seedy place in Hollywood to which she had moved in June. She invited him to come in, but he replied that he was tired after the long day and eager to return home.

“But how can I thank you if you don’t come in?” Marilyn asked. John understood the offer but declined it.

“She made a play for him very quickly,” according to Lucille, “but there was one very important quality about John she didn’t take into account: he did not like such overt behavior.”

Lucille did not think Marilyn was right for MGM: “She was cute and sexy, but she didn’t have the leading lady quality that Mr. Mayer was signing up in 1947.” Nevertheless, Lucille and John occasionally helped young actors find a start in the business, and so they invited her to dinner in early September. Marilyn told them how serious she was about her career and how much she loved the Actors Laboratory; she added that she was an orphan with no money, and that she had to leave Nebraska Avenue when her Aunt Ana went into a hospital and new tenants took over the house.

Marilyn then added quite calmly that she put all her money into classes, rent and auto maintenance, and that she got food by offering herself for quick sex with men in cars on side streets near Hollywood or Santa Monica Boulevard. “She really did this for her meals,” according to Lucille. “It wasn’t for cash. She told us without pride or
shame that she made a deal—she did what she did, and her customer then bought her breakfast or lunch.” This period of her life she also discussed a few years later with her acting teacher Lee Strasberg: “Marilyn was a call girl . . . and her call-girl background worked against her.”

Before the Carrolls could comment, Marilyn told them that she was terrified of returning to her little apartment. Attempting to cash her last Fox paycheck, she had asked a Hollywood policeman if a local bank might help, although she had no account there. He asked her name and telephone number and cashed the check himself for her; money in hand, she thanked the policeman and left. That night, the same man broke into her apartment and tried to attack her; he fled by a rear door only when Marilyn shrieked so loudly a neighbor came to the front. “I don’t know,” Marilyn concluded. “I have to have a place to sleep. And I have to eat and have a car and pay my way at class. I suppose I’ll have to go on working the Boulevard.” She paused again. “I’ve decided to change my name. To Journey Evers.”