Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (30 page)

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.
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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.
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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.