Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (33 page)

Typically, Natasha produced a deglazed version. “She fell in love with him and he fell in love with her, no doubt about it,” according to Natasha. “They never went to bed that year, but she told me excitedly that this was the sort of man she could love forever.” As for Arthur, he admitted that “if I had stayed, it would have had to have been for her. And I didn’t want to do that. So I just took off and left. But she sure did unsettle me.”

Kazan also knew that the couple had fallen quite chastely in love: of this he was convinced by her rhapsodic talk of Miller even while she was in bed with Kazan. She admired Miller’s work and his ethics, she hung up a photograph of him, she was disturbed by his unhappy marriage to Mary Grace Slattery. “Most people can admire their fathers,” Marilyn wrote in one of her rare letters to him over the next four years, “but I never had one. I need someone to admire.” Replied Miller, “If you want someone to admire, why not Abraham Lincoln? Carl Sandburg has written a magnificent biography of him.” The day she received this letter, she purchased the Sandburg book and a framed portrait of Lincoln. They remained with her for the rest of her life.

Kazan, on the other hand, soon departed—but not before Marilyn told him she thought she was pregnant with his child, which, as it turned out, she was not. “It scared hell out of me. I knew she dearly wanted a child . . . [but] she was so obsessed with her passion for [Arthur] that she couldn’t talk about anything else. . . . Like any other louse, I decided to call a halt to my carrying on, a resolve that didn’t last long.” By summer 1951, the Kazan-Monroe romance was history.

*    *    *

That spring and early summer, Marilyn played the role of a provocative blonde in a film called
Love Nest
—this time she was an ex-WAC who becomes one of many tenants in a Manhattan brownstone owned by a former war buddy, now married. Once again, she was mere embellishment, an item tossed in from left field to brighten a pallid script.

In his column of May 2, Sidney Skolsky duly celebrated her employment, noting that when Marilyn removed her dress to prepare for a shower scene the set was so crowded and quiet “you could hear the electricity.” For another sequence, she walked onto the set wearing the prescribed two-piece polka-dotted bathing suit that had “hardly enough room for the polka dots,” as one wag observed. Leading lady June Haver remembered that “the whole crew gasped, gaped and almost turned to stone.” But Marilyn was less inhibited about nudity than acting, and her scene was at once graceful and seductive. Jack Paar, with whom she had another brief scene, thought her shyness betokened arrogance and selfishness, yet he had to admit that even in a bit part “she grabbed the entire picture.” And reporter Ezra Goodman, otherwise rightly ignoring the nonsense of
Love Nest
, praised Marilyn as “one of the brightest up-and-coming [actresses].”

Yet despite the endorsement of press and colleagues (and Marilyn’s friendships with Schenck and Skouras), Zanuck continued to ignore her potential as a comedienne. She was not advanced to a leading role until later that year, when a Fox stockholder meeting in New York buzzed with talk of the blonde who ignited even a damp comedy like
Love Nest
. Their enthusiasm coincided with a
New York Times
review of
As Young As You Feel:
“Marilyn Monroe is superb as the secretary,” wrote Bosley Crowther. Bit by little bit, her presence was being recognized; eventually even Zanuck would have to defer to popular demand.

She was showing the world the face of a new kind of ingenue, a fully developed woman with the candor of an innocent child taking artless delight in the reality of her own flesh. But her life, both professionally and personally, was stalled. In a way, she was becoming trapped by an image with whose manufacture she had wholeheartedly cooperated since her modeling days. Close relationships had meant mostly sexual relationships: “I knew a lot of people I didn’t like,” she said later of this time,

but I didn’t have any friends. I had teachers and people I could look up to—but nobody I could look over at. I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be somebody was to be—well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.

That autumn, apparently through friends of Natasha Lytess, Marilyn met and began to take supplementary private drama classes with the actor and acting coach Michael Chekhov, nephew of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and a former colleague of Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Then sixty, he was the kindliest mentor-father in her life thus far, and still another of Marilyn’s connections to the Russian tradition so prized by the Actors Lab and Natasha. Highly valued as a teacher in Europe and England, he had worked with such theatrical luminaries as Max Reinhardt, Feodor Chaliapin, Louis Jouvet and John Gielgud. During World War II, Chekhov settled in Hollywood, where, among other movie roles, he was best known for his superb portrait of the elderly psychoanalyst Dr. Brulov in David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock’s
Spellbound
. When he met Marilyn in 1951, he was putting the final touches to his classic book
To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting
, and this became Marilyn’s Bible for the next several years.

“Our bodies can be either our best friends or worst enemies,” said Chekhov to Marilyn on their first meeting. “You must try to consider your body as an instrument for expressing creative ideas. You must strive for complete harmony between body and psychology.” Doubtless some of the ideas Chekhov expounded were reminiscent of Natasha’s slightly breathless emphasis on feeling with the body what she felt in her soul. But with Chekhov there was a difference: whereas Natasha always seemed impatient with Marilyn (because of her own repressed libidinous anger), Chekhov took time and put Marilyn through a series of quiet exercises radically different from the atmosphere of a movie set or a session with Natasha. Her body, he said—that instrument considered merely an object by so many—must be converted into a sensitive membrane, a conveyor of nuanced images, feelings and impulses of the will.

Perhaps the most important training Chekhov offered was his encouragement that Marilyn move outside her own frame of reference. Enlarge the circle of your interests, he advised her: thus she would
more and more be able to assume the psychology of other characters without imposing on them her own viewpoint. This was basic Moscow Art Theatre philosophy, although it would be reworked as something quite different by Lee Strasberg a few years later.

The exercises were intense, yet oriented toward simple goals. Chekhov asked Marilyn to spread her arms wide, to stand with her legs far apart, to imagine herself becoming larger and larger. She was to say to herself, “I am going to awaken the sleeping muscles of my body. I am going to revivify and use them.” Then she was to kneel on the floor, to imagine herself becoming smaller, contracting as if she were about to disappear. This was followed by stretching exercises, routines to modulate breathing (and therefore natural diction)—all designed to increase her sense of freedom, which Chekhov felt had been much restricted in her.

Through this new freedom, her teacher said, Marilyn would eventually be emptied of herself and changed—
possessed
, he said—by a dramatic character. “Merely discussing a character, analyzing it mentally, cannot produce the desired effect of transforming the actor into another person,” he stressed. “Your rational mind will leave you cold and passive. But as you develop an
imaginary body
[by which he seems to have meant a use of creative imagination and a kind of physical humility] your will and feelings will want to be another character.” But Marilyn was most of all gripped and excited by Chekhov’s sense of “creative individuality,” a sense of imaginative autonomy that would enable her to become more than she had ever been—the transcendence of a limited self for which she had so longed.

She had not discussed with Chekhov anything of her private life and must, therefore, have felt something like an especial benediction when Chekhov required her to read
Death of a Salesman
and a week later read from his own manuscript about “artists of such magnitude as Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan and their magic. This is native American as well as human tragedy.”

Chekhov’s matter and methods seemed to Marilyn quite wonderful—but they were also rarefied, sometimes almost mystical. Inevitably, when asked to report to him on her thoughts and exercises at home, she froze with fear, unable to bear the possibility of disappointing him despite his gentle manner. At this time, her fear of failure
became increasingly neurotic, her terror of embarrassing herself and others unreasonable, and she developed the nearly frantic desire to do everything perfectly, as Ida Bolender had once urged.

In an odd way, then, the seriousness of her intent was having unfortunate side-effects, for whereas Natasha’s unremitting quest for perfection had turned Marilyn’s natural speech into selfconscious and exaggerated diction, Chekhov’s sessions made her even more terrified of presenting herself as unacceptable. He asked her to read a dense book called
The Thinking Body
, by Mabel Elsworth Todd, and although she tried for several years to understand its teachings and theories on the interconnection between anatomy, psychology and emotions, she felt poorly equipped to comprehend its idiosyncratic language (as have many readers before and since).

Herein lies one of the most touching paradoxes of Marilyn Monroe’s life and career, for the professional means offered to raise her self-confidence had the opposite effect. She could never quite handle the analytic approach to role-playing to which she was exposed, nor could she reach the intellectual standards others set for her. But Marilyn was so charmingly docile, appealing and grateful for every morsel of education and information, that every influential person tipped the issue into a kind of control, however benevolent. She felt more, not less, intimidated as she worked harder.

The efforts required made Marilyn ever more selfconscious and unfree in acting and effected a kind of paralysis. Instead of seeking the role within herself, Marilyn was urged by her teachers to seek herself in the role, and in so doing she was thrown back on her own insecurities and insufficiencies. With each project, she became more frightened, an anxiety-ridden performer convinced she could never please teachers or directors—a woman who, if she ate breakfast before coming to work, threw it up before she went on the set.
⁵

In fact, it was remarkable that in the end she achieved so much with
such mediocre scripts. Somehow she found the strength to pass from complete inexperience to mere competence to polished expertise in a specific kind of light comedy in the style of Billie Burke and Ina Claire. But Marilyn’s opportunities were forever limited by the studio system and the roles assigned her, by often well-meaning but overly academic advisers, by her own emotional frailty and finally by poor health. The first, immediate result was an unfortunate and eventually chronic habit of tardiness.

In July, for example, she was over an hour late for an interview with Robert Cahn, who was writing the first full-length national magazine feature story on Marilyn Monroe (it eventually appeared in
Collier’s
on September 8, 1951). “She is particularly concerned with looking her best and spends hours at the make-up table,” Cahn wrote. “No matter how much advance notice she is given, she is always late. ‘I’ll be just a minute’ can range from twenty minutes to two hours.” That comment notwithstanding, the article was unexpectedly laudatory and perceptive, thanks to gentle pressure exerted by studio publicist Harry Brand.

But Cahn also helped enshrine the conventions of the Marilyn myth by buying wholesale the inflated stories given him by Fox and by the actress herself. “She’s the biggest thing we’ve had at the studio since Shirley Temple and Betty Grable,” Brand said at the time.
⁶
He then added some details of his staff’s imaginative concoctions, items calmly put out to the press from time to time to sustain the public’s interest in Fox’s stars: “With Temple, we had twenty rumors a year that she was kidnapped. With Grable, we had twenty rumors a year that she was raped. With Monroe, we have twenty rumors a year that she has been raped and kidnapped.”

According to Sidney Skolsky, who helped Marilyn and Harry Brand (and later the writer Ben Hecht) create the dramatic legend, the truth was more pedestrian. “How much of the story about her bleak childhood is actually true, I really can’t say,” Sidney said years later in a rare moment of understatement.

But she was not quite the poor waif she claimed to have been. When I first met her, she was supposed to have lived in three foster homes. As time went on it became five, eight, ten, because she knew it was a good selling point.

As Skolsky knew, Marilyn didn’t know who she was, but she knew what she ought to be. Aware of the elements of good movie storytelling, she felt her biography, too, should have the elements of a good movie. The following year, this would begin to take the shape of a literary exercise for which she would help provide the basis and Skolsky and Hecht the language.

In almost storyboard detail, Cahn described Marilyn’s stunning appearance at a studio dinner party, and her placement at the right hand of Spyros Skouras. Her proportions were of course duly noted (five feet, five inches tall, 118 pounds, measurements 37–23–34), but then Cahn discussed her childhood and indicated just how eager audiences were to see more of her.

Since
The Asphalt Jungle
and
All About Eve
, fan mail for Marilyn was pouring into the Fox Studio at the rate of two or three thousand letters each week—more than for Susan Hayward, Linda Darnell, Betty Grable, June Haver, Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck. Since January, the press department had sent out more than three thousand photographs of her to newspapers. The army newspaper
Stars & Stripes
proclaimed her “Miss Cheesecake of 1951,” and in Korea servicemen made her pin-up photos the choicest wallpaper. As Marilyn said a few weeks before her death, “The studio didn’t make me a star. If I am one, the people did it.” And, Cahn added, “Like a famous predecessor, Jean Harlow, Marilyn’s name is rapidly becoming the current Hollywood definition of sex appeal. . . . [Fox executives] hope they have another Harlow.” After visiting Marilyn’s apartment, Cahn added that this platinum blonde had real (not studio-manufactured) literary interests: he saw on her bookshelf volumes of Whitman, Rilke, Tolstoy, Sandburg and Arthur Miller, with bookmarks and notepaper peeping out between the pages.