Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Marilyn told an interviewer that her reply to Chekhov was: ‘I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac. It was all right for the first few years. But now it’s different.’

  Of course, Marilyn used the weapon of her sexuality when she chose, and not least to jolt studio chief Darryl Zanuck from his torpor. Writer Robert Cahn recorded the effect Marilyn achieved one night in 1951.

  ‘The Café de Paris, more simply known as the Twentieth Century-Fox commissary, was crowded with a cheery assemblage of studio bigwigs and freshly manicured salesmen. The visitors were meeting, over highballs and hors d’oeuvres, such marquee names as Susan Hayward, Jeanne Crain, June Haver, Anne Baxter, Gregory Peck, and Tyrone Power. At the bar a weary press agent was asking for his fifth highball when he glanced toward the doorway where Marilyn Monroe, a recently acquired studio starlet, had just arrived. Amid a slowly gathering hush, she stood there, a blonde apparition in a strapless black cocktail gown, a little breathless as if she were Cinderella just stepped from the pumpkin coach. While the long-established female stars silently measured her, young Marilyn Monroe, who has logged less than fifty minutes’ screen time, stole the show. … Finally, as the guests sat down for dinner, the blonde was installed at the head of the No. 1 table, at the right hand of company president, Spyros Skouras.’

  The public had already cast its verdict. Marilyn’s minor screen appearances had brought a torrent of fan mail. Her pictures in pulp magazines had made her the nation’s pinup — ‘Miss Cheesecake of 1951’ to the troops in Germany. Now, the morning after Marilyn took Spyros Skouras by storm, Darryl Zanuck bowed to the pressure. Marilyn’s salary shot up to five hundred dollars a week, and Zanuck issued orders that Marilyn should be given more roles. Thanks to the intervention of her friend, Sidney Skolsky, she was loaned to another studio to make Clash by Night, a sophisticated movie from a play by Clifford Odets. Soon the New York World-Telegram would acclaim her as ‘a forceful actress, a gifted new star.’

  Marilyn had never ceased to cultivate her friends in the publicity office, and now it paid off. That year her picture appeared, with those of other starlets, in Life magazine. In the fall, Roy Craft placed calls to Rupert Allan, the West Coast editor of Look, and to Ted Strauss, his counterpart at Collier’s.

  Rupert Allan, a cultured product of England’s Oxford University, was quickly won over. He waited, as men would almost always wait, as Marilyn finished dressing in her tiny apartment. He watched quizzically as she did exercises for the camera and expounded on her studies of the human anatomy as taught by Florentine doctors. He observed with educated eyes the inexpensive reproductions taped to the wall of Dürer, Fra Angelico, and da Vinci.

  Allan’s interest grew when he espied, beside the bed, a picture of a woman in black, not Sarah Bernhardt or Garbo, but the Italian actress Eleanora Duse. Within days Allan was Marilyn’s counsel on art. He was to become her future press agent and a lifetime friend. In immediate terms, Look granted Marilyn its accolade: her first cover in a nationally respected magazine. It informed the world that this Hollywood actress wished to use her brains.

  The studio told Collier’s Ted Strauss that Marilyn was ‘terrified’ of being interviewed for a major article, and urged that he take her to dinner. Strauss made the pilgrimage to the same apartment, waited, then took her to Romanoff’s. Now he experienced Marilyn’s effect on a roomful of people.

  ‘She was an apparition,’ Strauss remembered. ‘She was in something red, semi-dressed and semi-undressed, with cleavage almost to her navel. We came in down a sort of Ziegfeld Follies staircase, and everything stopped. Everyone there looked — I remember how the lighting made death’s-head sockets of their eyes — like a party in a cemetery. That was not all. I had expected a clichéd little girl on the make. I came away from that dinner so impressed. She was doing what she thought people wanted her to do, but unsure — desperately trying to deal with where she came from. We talked about acting, but she talked as much about children, of having children who would be able to grow their own way.’

  In this year of her film breakthrough, 1951, Marilyn turned twenty-five. She moved out of the apartment she shared with her acting coach, and returned to the secretive personal life she had lived before the very public affair with Johnny Hyde. She usually lived alone, but for some months she had for a roommate a young actress she had met at a charity baseball game a few years earlier. The new friend was Shelley Winters, who shared with Marilyn a history of broken romances, unborn children, and a healthy disrespect for the show business establishment.

  Winters noticed Marilyn’s extreme insecurity. She craved attention so much that she pursued her friend everywhere, even into the bathroom. ‘When you went to the John,’ Winters had said, ‘she’d think you’d disappeared and she’d been left alone. She’d open up the door to see if you were still there. She was a little child.’

  On Sunday mornings the two young women would sit listening solemnly to classical music, promptly changing over to Sinatra or Nat King Cole as soon as the clock struck noon. One day, as they perused the photographs of single actors in the Academy Players’ Directory, they bemoaned the frustrations of love. Shelley Winters remembered Marilyn musing, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be like men and just get notches in your belt and sleep with the most attractive men and not get emotionally involved?’

  The outcome was that each sat down to list the famous men they would like to have taken to bed. Marilyn’s list, according to Winters, included Zero Mostel, Eli Wallach, Charles Boyer, Jean Renoir, Lee Strasberg, Nick Ray, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Harry Belafonte, Yves Montand, Charles Bickford, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Laughton, Clifford Odets, Dean Jagger, Arthur Miller, and Albert Einstein.

  After Marilyn’s death Shelley Winters would see among Marilyn’s effects a framed photograph of Einstein inscribed: ‘To Marilyn, with respect and love and thanks, Albert Einstein.’ She drew what seemed the obvious conclusion. Another friend of Marilyn, a man who was on the original target list, put this little matter in perspective.

  Actor Eli Wallach later worked with Marilyn, but denied that he was ever a lucky victim. He gleefully took responsibility, however, for the signed Einstein portrait. It was Wallach who gave it to Marilyn, as an ‘in’ joke, after Marilyn gave him a book of Einstein’s letters. Wallach wishes future historians well when they come to analyze the handwriting on the photograph.

  Of the seventeen men on Marilyn’s list, she would know nine, and three would indeed be her lovers. One, almost certainly, enjoyed her favors the year she made the list.

  On a warm day in 1951 photographer Jean Howard, the former wife of Marilyn’s agent, Charlie Feldman, came to Feldman’s house in Coldwater Canyon. As she left, she recalled, ‘I noticed this little blonde girl sitting by the pool. I didn’t know who she was, but offered her some Coca-Cola, which she declined. Charlie was holding a meeting with Elia Kazan that day, and Marilyn was waiting for them.’

  Elia Kazan — ‘Gadge’ to his friends — was already, at forty-one, a towering figure of the American stage and screen. He was both actor and director, and that year saw one of his great triumphs, A Streetcar Named Desire. Born in a suburb of the Turkish city of Istanbul, he was now an uncompromising New Yorker. He talked disparagingly of Hollywood, but had discovered it was a necessary evil for a leading film director. In 1951 he had long been married to playwright Molly Thatcher, and had four children. Kazan declined to discuss Marilyn Monroe for this book, but others support the longstanding rumor of their affair.

  Photographer Milton Greene learned of the relationship direct from Marilyn, and actor Eli Wallach knew about it. Alain Bernheim, then working for Marilyn’s agent, was drawn into its secrets. He recalled that ‘Streetcar had been nominated for several Academy awards, but Marilyn could not go to the ceremony with him because he was married. So he parked her with me, and said he’d join us later in some little dub in Beverly Hills. So I found myself spending hours in
the dark in a little piano bar with Marilyn Monroe, waiting till Gadge was free.’

  Another agent, Milt Ebbins, remembered a hilarious event at another stage of the affair. He went to a business meeting with Kazan at his room in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and was astounded when Marilyn walked in wearing only half of Kazan’s pyjamas — the top half.

  As he sat with Marilyn on the night of the Academy Awards, Alain Bernheim was startled in a very different way. ‘It was extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Marilyn was coming out with everything Kazan had told her, as though the ideas were her own. I knew Kazan well, and I knew it all came from him. She had swallowed whole, virtually memorized, everything he had to say about love, acting, and politics.’

  For Marilyn, the connection with Kazan no doubt meant a strong infusion of radical politics. Kazan had once been a member of the Communist Party. In 1952, within a year of meeting Marilyn, to the fury of friends and colleagues, he would testify about his past associates before Congress’ Committee on Un-American Activities.

  When Rupert Allan visited Marilyn at home for his Look article, he had noticed a photograph beside her bed. It showed two men, one of whom he recognized at once as Elia Kazan. Asked to identify the other one, a tall fellow, Marilyn replied, ‘I’d rather not say, for the moment.’

  Allan had failed to recognize Arthur Miller.

  Marilyn had met Miller in December 1950, in the company of Elia Kazan, just a few days after her suicide gesture over the death of Johnny Hyde. She was working on her part as a secretary in As Young as You Feel and feeling very low indeed. She would appear for scenes, then wander off to some corner to be alone with her thoughts.

  Arthur Miller was then thirty-five, ten years older than Marilyn, a rumpled man with dark hair, toweringly tall. Newspapermen usually labeled him ‘gaunt,’ though on occasion his bespectacled face could seem rounded and quite gentle. The son of a garment manufacturer, he had been born into a comfortable New York family living on 112th Street, in what was then a pleasant part of Harlem. Then the Depression turned the Millers’ world upside-down. The family was forced to move to a little frame house in Flatbush, and Miller’s father never did recover his former affluence. ‘Art,’ as the family called him, grew up doing odd jobs. He was a flop as a coat salesman, then did a brief stint as a crooner on a small Brooklyn radio station. The jobs helped pay for his education, which eventually took him to the University of Michigan. An old football injury kept him out of active service in World War II, though he spent a year as a fitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  When Miller met Marilyn he was married, with two children, to a willowy brunette a year younger than himself. This was Mary Slattery, his girlfriend from college days. They had married in 1940, and Mary worked as a proofreader at a publishing house — Harper’s — while Miller was trying to get his start as a freelance writer. During this period Miller espoused radical causes and included Communists among his friends, associations that would one day bring down on his head the wrath of a congressional committee.

  It was a conversation with his mother-in-law, about a woman who had turned in her own father to the authorities for supplying faulty parts to the government in wartime, that gave Miller the spark for his first successful play. In 1947 All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and two years later Death of a Salesman brought him a Pulitzer Prize and lasting fame. By Christmas 1950, when he came to Hollywood with his friend, Elia Kazan, to discuss a movie about labor racketeering, Arthur Miller was America’s most celebrated playwright.

  From a variety of sources, including fragments provided by both of them, these were the beginnings of Miller’s romance with Marilyn. According to Cameron Mitchell, a young actor who had appeared in the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, he was walking to lunch with Marilyn one day when she suddenly stopped short. A few yards away, leaning against the wall of a sound stage, were two men — Kazan and Miller. Miller, a gangling giant of a man, had caught her eye, and she asked Mitchell who he was. Mitchell made perfunctory introductions.

  The chance meeting, it seems, soon had Miller watching Marilyn at work on the set of As Young as You Feel. Then, with Kazan in tow, he sought her out in her dressing room. She was not there, and the director of the movie, a friend of Kazan’s, warned Miller that she had withdrawn into herself since the death of Johnny Hyde.

  According to Miller, the two men eventually found Marilyn in a nearby studio warehouse. Marilyn later recalled that she was weeping when they found her.

  Marilyn and Miller met again later the same week, at a party given by Charlie Feldman, Marilyn’s agent and Kazan’s neighbor. According to Natasha Lytess, Marilyn turned up afterward at 4:00 A.M., wanting to talk. ‘I’d seldom seen her so contented,’ Lytess recalled, ‘She took off her shoe and wiggled her big toe. “I met a man, Natasha,” she said. “It was Bam! You see my toe? This toe? He sat and held my toe. I mean I sat on the davenport, and he sat on it too, and he held my toe. It was like running into a tree! You know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.”’

  Miller wrote to Marilyn within days, with a reading proposal. ‘If you want someone to admire, why not Abraham Lincoln?’ Marilyn, as the world could hardly fail to know, admired Lincoln already. Her idolatry had started, she said, in junior high school, when her essay on Lincoln was judged the best in the class. By happy coincidence, Arthur Miller had attended Abraham Lincoln High School. Five years later, before her marriage to Miller, Marilyn would enthuse to Joshua Logan, director of Bus Stop, ‘Doesn’t Arthur look wonderfully like Abraham Lincoln? I’m mad for him!’

  ‘He attracted me because he is brilliant,’ Marilyn would tell the then queen of columnists, Louella Parsons. ‘His mind is better than that of any other man I’ve ever known. And he understands and approves my wanting to improve myself.’

  Natasha Lytess recalled that immediately after the first meeting with Miller, ‘I could tell Marilyn was in love with him. It wasn’t anything big, but it showed in the way she acted.’ A year later a friend spotted the picture of Miller beside Marilyn’s bed, the same one Look’s Rupert Allan had seen. This visitor recognized the photograph and reported afterward that ‘Marilyn squealed. She said other people who had been in the room had never recognized him. Marilyn gave the impression there was a great attraction between them. But she said he was married and she didn’t think anything would come of it.’ Later, when reporters came visiting, Marilyn would hide the picture by turning it face down. This, of course, merely aroused curiosity — and prompt recognition when the picture was examined.

  Actress Maureen Stapleton, who worked with Marilyn in New York five years later, said, ‘Marilyn told me she decided on Arthur long, long before they were married. She didn’t come to New York and the Actors Studio just because she wanted to be a great artiste. That fellow didn’t have a leg to stand on once she made up her mind. She’d decided on Arthur — and she got him.’

  In 1951, however, Miller stayed with his wife and children in New York. Marilyn, in Hollywood, continued to face the challenges she had made for herself. In his long first letter to her, Miller had written: ‘Bewitch them with this image they ask for, but I hope and almost pray you won’t be hurt in this game, nor ever change. …’

  On New Year’s Eve, 1951, the telephone rang in the home of Associated Press writer Jim Bacon, who had now been seeing Marilyn sporadically for three years. She was calling with a plea: ‘I don’t want to stay at home alone on New Year’s Eve, Jim. Can I go to a party with you?’ Bacon, who was married, said his wife would not appreciate it.

  At the other end of the line, the small voice of that year’s Miss Cheesecake said, ‘Oh, I understand,’ and hung up.

  There would be many lonely holidays for the girl who had dreamed the hardest.

  *She had stopped smoking by the mid-fifties.

  †Hollywood changed it to ‘Neff.’

  9

  ‘I WANT YOU TO talk with this girl,’ said Fox publicity director, Harry Brand. ‘We�
��re grooming her — or maybe I should say she’s grooming herself — to be the sexiest thing in pictures since Jean Harlow.’ It was January 5, 1952, and Darryl Zanuck’s fixer supreme was giving lunch to columnist Hy Gardner.

  Brand had a tip for Gardner, the careful seeding of a major coup in spoof publicity. ‘There’s only one thing we’re a little worried about,’ he confided. ‘When things were real rough, Marilyn posed in the raw for a local photographer, and the pictures now adorn a calendar like September Morn’s torso, only more so. I’d show you the shots but our legal department has them stashed away in the vault.’

  On this tantalizing note Marilyn made her entrance, ready to hold court with the visiting columnist. Brand had laid the groundwork for the Calendar Caper, a story that would unfailingly win headlines for months, even years, to come.

  The authorized version of the calendar story goes this way. In 1949, when she was twenty-three, Marilyn, broke and out of a job, had posed in the nude for photographer Tom Kelley. He eventually sold the pictures to the Western Lithograph Company for a calendar series, and three years later — to the supposed embarrassment of Marilyn, her studio, and the producer of the moment — someone happened to match the face of the new Fox star with the face and body hanging on garage and barbershop walls all over the United States.

  In the early fifties nice girls did not pose nude, and soon the press was howling at the doors of Twentieth Century-Fox. Studio fingers were supposedly on the panic button. There was talk of canceling Marilyn’s contract and withdrawing her current movie, Clash by Night, and Marilyn herself was reportedly in tears. Then Marilyn suggested she should admit having posed nude, but emphasize that she had done so only out of dire need, when she had no money to pay the rent. This pitiful tale should arouse public sympathy and turn shameful scandal into triumphant publicity.