by Lois Banner
Schenck, who was wealthy, offered to marry her to give her financial security, but she turned him down. She didn’t love him, and she told him that, after a loveless marriage to Jim Dougherty, she wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t want money; she wanted stardom. Schenck got her a bit part in a Fox film, You Were Meant for Me, but her scenes were cut. She performed in a Fox employee production called “Strictly for Kicks.” But Schenck couldn’t budge Zanuck in his decision not to reinstate her. So he persuaded Harry Cohn, a poker buddy, to give her a six-month contract at Columbia.
When Marilyn started working at Columbia in March 1948, it seemed a windfall. Cohn had his makeup and hair stylists turn her into a glamour girl. He was looking for a backup for Rita Hayworth, his reigning female star, and he briefly thought Marilyn might be the one. Her hairline was lifted through electrolysis to emphasize her widow’s peak, then thought sexy, and to square off her face, giving her a more sophisticated look. Her hair was styled into a smooth pageboy. In photos of her taken during the Columbia period, she looks like a young Lana Turner.
Cohn cast her in a B musical, Ladies of the Chorus, about a mother and daughter burlesque team. These “ladies” are proper; they don’t do the bumps and grinds of burlesque, which the Production Code restricted in films. Striving for perfection even in a small-budget B movie, Marilyn did a stint in a downtown burlesque theater, under the name Mona Monroe. She also went with Bruno Bernard to watch Lili St. Cyr perform. St. Cyr was Bernard’s signature model and a striptease star, who was headlining at the Florentine Gardens. Tall and buxom, with a long statuesque body, St. Cyr brought a new elegance and glamour into striptease, as she did slow movements of her own devising, in contrast to the rowdy striptease performances that predominated in burlesque.39
Marilyn was on time for shooting for Ladies of the Chorus, and she knew her lines.40 She sings effectively and moves gracefully in the production numbers, although she looks more like a “girl next door” than a glamour queen. In one number she leads the chorus in singing, “Every baby needs a da-da-daddy.” With her baby face and her innocent look, it was an eerie tribute to the infantilization of women that was a subtheme of 1950s gender attitudes.
While at Columbia, Marilyn became romantically involved with Fred Karger, her voice coach. Suave and well educated, he composed music, led his own band, and dated stars. He liked her introspective side and her mystical bent, which he thought was the product of her Christian Science faith. When in a deep mood, she would talk for hours about the meaning of life. She told him that she hadn’t used sex to advance her career and that she was faithful to one man at a time. It was an effective, although debatable, statement. Marilyn wanted to marry him, but he refused. He berated her for illogical thinking and excessive ambition, and he didn’t think she would be a good mother for his daughter, Terry. When I interviewed Terry, however, she told me his stance was a rationalization for his preference for domineering women. He never would have married the soft, gentle Marilyn, Terry said, even though Terry adored her. By the end of 1948, Fred broke up with Marilyn. Some authors maintain she was so upset that she attempted suicide, although she claimed in My Story he eventually wanted her back.41
Marilyn had fallen deeply for Fred, in what amounted to her first serious love relationship since her infatuations with Howard Keel and Jim Dougherty. In My Story she contended her sexual response to Fred made her realize she wasn’t a lesbian. She told Elia Kazan their sex life was superb and her sex drive became so strong that the vaginal fluid it produced sometimes stained her dress. She consulted a doctor, who gave her shots to control it.42 Whether she told Kazan the truth or was trying to arouse his interest, her statement disputes the charge that she was frigid. It does not, however, address the issue of her various internal problems with pain.
Fred introduced Marilyn to his family, who adored her and hoped he would marry her. Fred and Terry, along with his sister Mary Short and her two children, lived with Anne Karger, Fred and Mary’s widowed mother. She was a Hollywood grande dame with great sensitivity to others. She had left a career in vaudeville in the 1910s to marry Max Karger, a Hollywood producer, who died several years after their marriage, leaving her with two young children to raise. She was beloved in Hollywood.
The Kargers held Sunday night songfests, at which Fred played the piano and Marilyn sang. They held Thanksgiving and Christmas parties, which Marilyn attended. Marilyn and Anne became close: Marilyn gave her presents on Mother’s Day and birthdays and called her Nana. The family, helping Marilyn with her career, pooled their resources to pay to have a dentist adjust her bite by fitting her with a retainer. She was close to the children, attending their birthday parties and playing games of tag with them. She dubbed Mary Short “Buddynuts,” and she and Patti Karger, Fred’s first wife, played practical jokes together: when Fred married actress Jane Wyman, they put a full-size cutout of the Seven Year Itch Marilyn photo on their lawn. Marilyn was also close to Terry, Fred’s daughter, and she took her to Christian Science services for many years.43
In addition to the Kargers, Marilyn became close to Natasha Lytess, head drama teacher at Columbia, who became her personal acting coach. Natasha had been a member of Max Reinhardt’s acting troupe in Berlin and Vienna. Like many German Jewish actors, including others from the Reinhardt troupe, she immigrated to Hollywood when Hitler rose to power. Natasha claimed to be the widow of German novelist Bruno Frank, another Jewish refugee in Hollywood. Yet most records list Liesl Frank, not Natasha, as Bruno Frank’s widow, and they identify her as working with refugee organizations. No source on Natasha connects her to such work. Donald Wolfe, who studied with Lytess, told me that she was Liesl Frank, living under a different name. But sources on the Hollywood German Jewish refugee community identify Liesl Frank as living at an address different from Natasha’s. Perhaps Natasha was Frank’s mistress, not his wife.
Yet if Natasha was Liesl Frank, her influence on Marilyn would be breathtaking. For Liesl Frank was the daughter of Fritzi Massary, a star of the Berlin and Vienna music hall stages. Liesl Frank’s father was Max Pallenberg, a German actor well known for his portrayal of clowns. Such a background, passed to Marilyn through Natasha, would link her to major European stage traditions.44
When Natasha met Marilyn in 1948, she thought she was hopeless. “She was more than inhibited, more than cramped. She didn’t say a word freely.” It was as though she were disconnected from reality. She wore a low-cut, tight-fitting knitted red dress to their first interview. Her nose had a lump on it, which she attempted to conceal with heavy makeup. “Her voice, a piping sort of whimper, got so on my nerves that I asked her not to speak unnecessarily until we had progressed.” Marilyn speaks in a normal voice in Ladies of the Chorus, filmed soon after she met Natasha; it’s probable that Natasha, who could be harsh, frightened her. But Marilyn persevered; she realized that she needed someone like Natasha to turn her into an actress, someone tough who would devote hours of attention to her.
Natasha taught Marilyn for six years and coached her on twenty-two movies. With a demanding manner, she put people off, but she was crucial to Marilyn’s development as an actress. She also taught Marilyn about literature and art, took her to museums, and introduced her to antiquing as a way to learn the history of design, initiating Marilyn’s lifelong love of the hobby. She gave her a list of two hundred books to read, and Marilyn read them. Marilyn told photographer Anthony Beauchamp, “Miss Lytess made me free. She gave me inner balance and made me understand life. I owe everything to her.” According to syndicated columnist Arnold Arburo, Marilyn and Natasha were inseparable. “They study every free moment between scenes and at night, too.”45
Lytess gave Maurice Zolotow a revealing interview in the form of a memoir, but it was never published. A draft of it, however, is in his papers at the University of Texas. The Marilyn Natasha describes in the memoir, as well as in subsequent interviews with Zolotow and his assistant, Jane Wilkie, is darkly complex. She relates to men through sex, but
she feels guilty about it. Suffering from a “bad-girl” complex, she has little self-respect. She is secretive. “Even an inquiry as to where she might be going on a certain evening would be regarded as unpardonable prying.” She can dissociate from reality, seeming “under water,” impossible to reach. “Only a wild inner faith in herself keeps her going.”46
Marilyn had hugely complicated her life. By the spring of 1948 she was involved with Fred Karger and his family, Joe Schenck, Natasha Lytess, Pat DiCicco, John Carroll, Lucille Ryman, and probably others. Milton Berle contended that he had an affair with her during the filming of Ladies of the Chorus, and Howard Keel maintained that he became re-involved with her that year. According to designer Oleg Cassini she consulted him about a dress he had designed for Gene Tierney, his wife. They had sex, and he invited her to a large party that he and Gene were hosting. Gene was furious. “How could you!” she exclaimed. “How could you invite that little tramp! She’s a nothing!”47
It’s difficult to visualize how Marilyn had time for so many involvements, if, in fact, some aren’t fabrications by others. The descriptions of many were crafted years after they supposedly occurred. Yet her kindness and joy, plus her sexual aura and her lilting laugh, could be irresistible. Milton Berle related that, when he took her to nightclubs, she’d sit at the table, wide-eyed, and ask question after question, which she’d follow with comments like “‘Oh! I didn’t know about that!’ There wasn’t anything cheap about her. She was a lady.” According to him, their affair was casual and short-lived.48
When Marilyn’s contract with Columbia came up for renewal in September 1948, Harry Cohn let her go. He didn’t think much of her acting—and she refused to accompany him on his yacht to Catalina unless his wife went along. Marilyn could sometimes be naive; she had mentioned his wife, which Cohn considered insulting, since he kept his philandering separate from her while placing her on a pedestal. Cohn flew into a rage and called Marilyn a “goddamn cunt,” telling her he never wanted to see her again. He had lived up to his reputation for being uncouth. But Marilyn’s refusal to go to Catalina was perhaps wise; Rita Hayworth called him a “monster,” and actress Corinne Calvet had had to fight him off several years earlier when she had made the Catalina trip with him. Max Arnow, Cohn’s assistant, thought Cohn had made a mistake. Marilyn was tested for the lead role in Born Yesterday, the dumb-blonde role of the decade, which went to Judy Holliday. But Cohn refused to even look at Marilyn’s test.49
Soon after Marilyn left Columbia, independent producer Lester Cowan cast her in a cameo role as a sexy blonde in Love Happy, a Marx Brothers film. In a brief scene with Groucho, who plays a private detective, Marilyn says that someone is following her. She walks away, hips swaying. Leering at her backside, Groucho replies, “I can see why.” Marilyn is both sexy and funny in the scene, both a blonde bombshell and a parody of the figure. Her part is small, not much more than a cameo, but you can see the glamorous and sexy Marilyn Monroe emerging in this film.
Letters in the Lester Cowan Papers reveal an unknown side to Love Happy. After testing her, Cowan was so impressed with her that he decided to launch a national campaign featuring her, with cover stories in Life and Look. “I have just signed a young girl who is a real find,” he wrote in early November. “She has the Lana Turner–Ava Gardner type of appeal. She sings and dances better than Betty Grable.” The campaign was to begin in January, with visits to New York and other cities. But nothing happened then. In March Cowan received a telegram from Look. “We have shot final color shots for the cover of the Look article. Entire piece is completed and will be sent east probably tomorrow.” Neither a Look nor a Life cover story on Marilyn appeared. What happened to stop the magazine articles is unknown, although Cowan ran out of funds and didn’t distribute the film for another year.50 In June and July, however, Marilyn toured New York and several midwestern cities, plugging the film.
Did Cowan plan the publicity campaign himself? It’s probable that Marilyn had already met agent Johnny Hyde, a vice president at William Morris, then Hollywood’s premier talent agency. Hyde had the clout to arrange the national tour. An immigrant from Russia as a boy, he’d come to the United States in 1898 with eight members of his Haidabura family. Small and wiry, they formed a renowned vaudeville acrobatic team. Hyde left them in the mid-1920s to work in vaudeville management, before joining the William Morris agency and moving to Hollywood to promote actors there. He was considered one of the best agents in the business, and he had mentored Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner to stardom. David Miller, the director of Love Happy, stated that Hyde brought Marilyn to Lester Cowan’s attention.51
Marilyn and Johnny were first identified as a couple at Sam Spiegel’s 1948 New Year’s Eve party. Spiegel and Hyde were friends. Hyde, in his fifties and with a heart condition, was looking for a purpose to his life—and he fixed on Marilyn. He saw “star power” in her, the possibility of creating another Rita Hayworth or Lana Turner who would adulate him as her mentor. He had, in Hollywood parlance, “discovered” her. He was more than thirty years older than Marilyn, who was twenty-two in 1948.
In the spring of 1949 Hyde left his wife and children. He rented a house in Beverly Hills; Marilyn lived there sometimes, but she kept her own apartment, paying for it out of her own earnings. Johnny became her mentor. As she waited for the Love Happy tour to happen, he took her to industry “in” places, like Romanoff’s, Ciro’s, and the Brown Derby. Important studio people stopped by their table, exchanging confidences. Marilyn rarely spoke, but she learned a lot. Johnny often counseled her. He told her that to become a star she had to become a presence, to dominate the gossip columns as well as the screen. He told her to watch silent films, especially Charlie Chaplin’s. The most expressive acting ever done was in silent films, he said, when actors had to use their bodies and their eyes to express emotion and couldn’t retreat behind a screen of words.52
Career-wise, Marilyn floated that spring, living mostly on fees from modeling. In March Johnny bought her contract from Harry Lipton and had her sign with William Morris. He took her to meet Nunnally Johnson, a major writer at Twentieth Century–Fox, especially close to Zanuck, but Johnson wasn’t impressed by her. He thought she was a call girl passing as a starlet. In April she had more success when the eminent photographer Philippe Halsman chose her as one of seven starlets featured in a Life story about starlets and their acting skills. He shot the reaction of each in several situations: meeting a monster, hearing an inaudible joke, kissing an irresistible man. Except for the kissing photo, Marilyn wasn’t effective. She was painfully shy and wooden in movement. Halsman thought that her desire to be provocative and her fear of exposing too much of her body were waging a tug of war.53
Perhaps Marilyn sensed his reaction. In May she decided to pose in the nude—a startling action. The Production Code—and middle-class opinion—condemned nudity as immoral. But Marilyn was already indulging in it in private, even as she was creating her sexualized persona for the screen. Women were flaunting half-clothed bodies in burlesque and on TV screens. The TV star Dagmar, who led a dance band, became a household name when bumps on the front fenders of the day’s flashy cars became known as Dagmars, in a subtle reference to her large breasts. In 1948 the publication of the Alfred Kinsey study on male sexuality, based on ten thousand respondents, caused a national sensation, since it suggested that the actual sex practices of people behind closed doors weren’t Puritan at all.
Marilyn had confidence in her body, but that confidence could conflict with her prudery, a legacy of her upbringing. Tony Curtis, a contract player whom Marilyn dated a few times, remembered that she wore see-through blouses that caused men to stop and stare. She continued to parade herself at the studio commissaries at lunch, now distinguishing herself by wearing no underwear under her tight skirts. When journalists Jim Henaghan and Sheilah Graham separately interviewed her that spring, each noticed her sluttish clothing—tight skirts, no bra, breasts hanging out—which contrasted with her a
ffect: she seemed a scared rabbit. Confident before the still camera, indulging in free love in private, with a mesmeric appeal when she summoned it up, she had a long way to go in charming these movie columnists. She baffled Graham by carrying a large book containing Freud’s works to her interview with her.
In early May she learned that her mother had married John Stewart Eley, an electrician. That must have stunned her, sparking her toward rebellion, leading her to further displays of her body that her mother wouldn’t like. She tried to be generous to Gladys, but they had a love-hate relationship made more complex by Marilyn’s periodic attempts to meet Stanley Gifford, who she thought was her father, and his refusals to see her.
Marilyn claimed that she posed in the nude because she needed money—to get her repossessed car back, to stop credit agencies from hounding her. Marilyn was usually in debt during these years. The fee for posing nude—fifty dollars—was much higher than for posing in a bathing suit. She might have asked Johnny Hyde for money, but he was in Europe, attending Rita Hayworth’s wedding to Prince Aly Khan. Besides, Marilyn took pride in supporting herself.
Marilyn had posed topless for Earl Moran, and she had posed for Bruno Bernard and Laszlo Willinger in her yellow bikini. Photographer Andre de Dienes, famous for his nudes, had asked her to pose in the nude, but she had refused. Now she agreed to pose nude for Tom Kelley, a photographer with a modest reputation for his work with nudes. Marilyn sometimes made decisions impulsively, on the spur of the moment. But once her mind was made up, she usually didn’t retreat.
