by Lois Banner
As always, Marilyn led a busy life. She continued her singing lessons with Phil Moore, maintained her daily exercise routine, attended her evening course at UCLA, and worked on her acting with Natasha Lytess.13 In mid-March she presented the Oscar for Best Sound Recording to the sound recorder for All About Eve, but she was never again a presenter at the awards celebration, nor did she ever win an Oscar. In a year, a story identifying her as a model in a nude photo would break and the industry would became ambivalent about Marilyn, suspicious of her intentions.
She had also begun studying acting with Michael Chekhov after the Actors’ Lab closed down in 1949, a victim of the anticommunist Tenney Committee of the California state legislature, which accused it of being a Communist front organization. The charges were never proven, but the Lab lost its funding and most of its students. Marilyn had to find an alternative arrangement. She turned to Chekhov, who had a spiritual bent that attracted her. Chekhov had been a student of Stanislavsky’s in Moscow and had adopted his teacher’s memory technique. But it brought painful repressed memories to the surface of his mind, and he broke down.
To heal himself, he turned to quietest religions, especially to Anthroposophy, the spiritual path devised by Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner. Grounded in Christianity, Steiner’s Anthroposophy proposed that a spiritual force permeated the universe, linking nature and man. It had similarities to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science: both were outgrowths of the antimodern, mystical movement at the turn of the century that was a reaction against the age’s secularism and scientism. Unlike Christian Science, however, Anthroposophy doesn’t prohibit its followers from consulting doctors and taking drugs. That was attractive to Marilyn, who felt guilty violating Christian Science strictures as she took drugs for menstrual pain, insomnia, anxiety, weight control, and to counteract the grogginess during the day that was caused by the pills she took at night to sleep. Chekhov and his Anthroposophy gave her a reason to leave Christian Science.14
She also liked the Steiner approach because it included dancing. Many leaders of early-twentieth-century spiritual paths devised dances based on ancient Sufi and Hindu dances. Steiner created slow movements designed to tap into the colors of the universe—what the Hindus call chakras. Steiner called his dance system eurythmy. Chekhov advised his acting students to study dancers as they danced to learn how to control their bodies and to express emotions through them. Exploring external stimuli was also important to him. He respected what he called “atmospheres,” which were feelings that he contended emanate from natural objects, in a kind of elemental animism. In other words, living things possess a vitality that sensitive individuals can access. He called the actor’s projection of spiritual vitality “radiation” and contended that most great actors possessed it.
Imagination and intuition, in Chekhov’s view, are the actor’s real tools, and they can lead the actor in many directions. One is to the written text, as actors intuit and imagine characters’ motivations from the lines the author has given the actor to speak. Another was what Chekhov called the “psychological gesture,” the one movement of a character that encompassed all the rest and would serve to remind the actor of all of them before he went on the stage, like a flower opening in his or her mind.
Like most of Marilyn’s acting teachers, Chekhov regarded Italian actress Eleonora Duse, whose career took form in the 1900s, to be unsurpassed among actors in the modern theater. Marilyn kept a photo of Duse in her bedroom, and there are fascinating parallels between them. Duse projected sadness and vulnerability. She had little formal education, and she read constantly to compensate for this lack of knowledge. As Marilyn later did, she became versed in mystical writings in order to find a spiritual source for her acting. Some claimed a nimbus surrounded her on stage. “Duse knew how to give to her body and her presence a radiance that emanated out to the audience,” wrote actress Eva Le Gallienne.15 Marilyn would also project an aura, both on stage and in photographs.
On Chekhov’s recommendation Marilyn read Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body, and it influenced her. Todd was a professor of physiotherapy at the Teachers College at Columbia University and an innovator in therapeutic dance. In The Thinking Body, published in 1937, Todd discusses the relationships between muscles and bones and suggests exercises and visualizations to promote relaxation. Todd’s system parallels that of present-day movement systems like Pilates. As in this system, Todd’s approach is geared toward reorienting breathing and control of movement to the diaphragm and the pelvis and away from the spine.16
Marilyn also liked Todd’s work because it resonated to that of Andreas Vesalius, the sixteenth-century physician who is considered to be the founder of modern anatomy. Marilyn found a reprint of Vesalius’s work De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) in a bookstore. With its artistic engravings of medical school professors dissecting the corpse of a prostitute in a sixteenth-century medical school, it offered a unique way to learn human anatomy, one that appealed to Marilyn, with her idiosyncratic mind. Marilyn studied it. From Todd and Vesalius she concluded that movement should be generated from inside the body’s frame, not from outside it. In 1961 she talked about Vesalius with Joan Greenson, the daughter of psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, who was fascinated by the way Marilyn moved from the inside of her skeleton rather than from outside it. “It was as if her inner movement would start and then her body would go along with it.” Joan described the movement as feline, catlike.17
Ballerina Margot Fonteyn met Marilyn in the early 1950s and was also impressed by her undulating movement when she walked. “Whereas people normally move their arms and head in conversation,” Fonteyn wrote, “those gestures, in Marilyn Monroe, were reflected throughout her body, producing a delicately undulating effect like the movement of an almost calm sea. It was in no way an affected ‘wiggle,’ as some writers have suggested.” Fonteyn must not have seen Marilyn’s movies in which the wiggle is featured, although her comment indicates that Marilyn moved differently in different situations. Bruno Bernard contended that Lili St. Cyr also had an undulating walk.18
Chekhov sent Marilyn to study mime with Lotte Goslar, another German immigrant from the European theater in Hollywood. Famed as a clown, Goslar had electrified audiences in Europe and the United States with hilarious and pathetic portrayals of such figures as a young ballerina refusing to obey her teacher and a talent show contestant playing a violin with her feet. She thought that Marilyn was a gifted comic, especially in the small and telling human touches that she brought to her characters in her films. In Goslar’s class Marilyn did brilliantly in an exercise in which the students portrayed the aging process from infancy to old age. They became friends, and Marilyn often had Goslar go to her sets when she was filming to help her with her performance. Every year she called Goslar on Christmas Eve, the night when Goslar’s beloved husband had died, to express her devotion to her mime teacher. That considerate gesture was typical of Marilyn.19
Chekhov told Marilyn that she could make a fortune by performing sexually for the camera; he’d picked up her sexual vibes. When he asked her why she was studying with him, since he specialized in dramatic roles and mostly taught from the classic plays of the Western theatrical tradition, she responded, “I want to be an actress, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisical [sic]. It was all right for the first years. But now it’s different.” Chekhov had inspired her to regard acting as a sacred calling performed by transformed beings who electrified audiences and changed their lives, rather than simply performing for them.
That point of view marked a significant shift in her attitude toward acting. She often told the story of playing Cordelia to Chekhov’s Lear in one of their sessions, in which he suddenly became Lear, transfoming himself. That experience enabled her to bring a transcendent sense to her interpretation of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter. She was becoming convinced that practicing Chekhov’s mysticism in her acting was the way to find her true self, the calm, transcendent
center that she, like all human beings, possessed. Finding that center—the goal of most mystical spiritualities—had become Marilyn’s goal. Putting Chekhov’s technique together with Lee Strasberg’s Method technique eventually became her method of acting.
Chekhov told actor Jack Larson that she was the most gifted young actress in Hollywood. She made friends with him and his wife, Xenia, and she often visited them. Marilyn told Ralph Roberts, later her personal masseur, that she listened to conversations at dinner parties at the Chekhov home between Kazan, Clifford Odets, Ben Hecht, and other New Yorkers. In retrospect those conversations seemed to her as though they had happened in a fairy tale: it’s possible, of course, they never occurred. Her relationship with the Chekhovs also had a practical side: Marilyn found a secretary for a time in their neighbor Betty Rosenthal. Marilyn’s career was growing to the point that she couldn’t handle the practical demands on her, even with the help of Grace and Doc Goddard, who by 1951 were doing her taxes and overseeing her business affairs.20
During the early 1950s, besides working on her acting and her interior self, Marilyn also promoted her career, becoming masterful at publicity. She went to Hollywood cocktail parties because journalists attended them and a clever self-presentation might get a line in a gossip column. George Sanders, who played the cynical Broadway columnist in All About Eve, approached her at a party when he was drunk and made a pass at her. Sanders’s wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, publicly raked Marilyn over the coals for bad behavior. Her display of anger resulted in several lines for Marilyn in fan magazine columns, which was to her benefit. But she found the parties boring, and she didn’t make small talk easily. She felt she had to do it. “Going out socially,” she wrote, “was the hardest part of my campaign to make good.”21
Photographer Philippe Halsman watched her force herself to overcome her lack of confidence. “I sensed the fear and tension inside her every time she came face to face with a man she did not know. She was deathly afraid of not being liked, and she had to win over everyone in a room.” Halsman concluded, “Her very weakness is her strength.” Part of her strategy was to arrive late and make an entrance. She wore a black or a bright red dress, molded to her body, cut very low, nearly exposing her nipples. “As soon as I could afford an evening gown, I bought the loudest one I could find. It was a bright red low cut gown and it infuriated half of the women in the room because it was so immodest. I was sorry in a way to do this, but I had a long way to go, and I needed a lot of advertising to get there.”22
Marilyn worked on her publicity with the Fox publicity department, but she kept control over it. In her early career she always cultivated the publicists, whom she called “the boys” and her “buddies.” “They howl and growl at you ninety percent of the time,” she said, but “if you try to understand their jobs and their problems they will devote a lot of attention to you.” She could be a pal to men, as she had been with Miller, Kazan, and Shaw. She often quarreled with Harry Brand, head of publicity at Fox. One of Brand’s assistants who heard those disagreements concluded that Marilyn “understood the American public better than did Harry Brand, who was one of the great figures of Hollywood publicity.”23
Brand assigned the sympathetic Roy Craft to her as a personal publicist. Craft had worked for both Life and Look, and he had connections to those magazines, which he used on Marilyn’s behalf. Craft accompanied her to parties and on publicity tours, often consulting with her. He stated that Marilyn was a superb publicist. Her quips and “newsmaking frivolities,” he said, were often her own ideas. “They just happened to her. She was a literate, perceptive gal, and she didn’t need anyone to dream up her stunts. She was vivacious, funny, with a rich sense of humor.” His major complaint was that when they traveled together she sometimes stayed in women’s bathrooms redoing her makeup and hair for so long that he had to send waitresses to bring her out. “She is a beauty with brains,” wrote Peer Oppenheimer. “She calculates her actions carefully. She is responsible for her own success.” In 1952 Aline Mosby concluded that at the beginning of her movie career she looked too much like a “girl-next-door” type, before she found a sexy look. Most of her publicity, Mosby contended, she had done herself.24
She was also friendly with journalists. “She knew all the newspaper men and photographers,” Sidney Skolsky said, “and she always made herself available to them.” Marilyn had enchanted Louella Parsons at Joe Schenck’s dinner parties, and Louella always remained loyal to her. Columnist Sheilah Graham hadn’t liked Marilyn when she interviewed her in 1949, but within two years her attitude changed. Considerably more relaxed, Marilyn was now fey and funny. Her terrible childhood was always present in interviews, according to Graham, but she didn’t talk a lot about herself, as most stars did. “She asked about your problems and your interests,” Graham stated. She was “extremely appealing.”25
Marilyn used her body to attract reporters. According to Joe Hyams, “She would knock your knees under the table; vamp you from time to time.” To charm journalist Jim Henaghan, she went beyond a sexual approach. When he first interviewed her in the spring of 1949, he thought she was too naive to make it to the top. By 1950 she had changed. She now used a sexual approach. She stood up and turned around so that her buttocks faced him. She asked him if her skirt was tight enough. Henaghan thought, “This little animal is learning.” A year later, she showed up at his Malibu house. She talked about her terrible childhood, gaining his sympathy. Then they went to a bar and played skee-ball: that was the Marilyn who liked being a “buddy” to men. Henaghan gave her his BB gun and told her that it was the most precious possession a boy could give to a girl. Marilyn treasured it; he became a friend. He taught her, she said, how to broil a steak “to a man’s taste” and how to make a salad of ice-cold lettuce with a vinaigrette dressing.26
She gave journalist Mike Connolly a photo of herself and signed it: “To Mike—I’d like to have you on my team.” Connolly, who wrote a column for the Hollywood Reporter, admired her wit. At a party he overheard someone telling her a risqué story. Marilyn moved away, and Connolly asked if she was annoyed. Innocent-eyed, Marilyn replied, “‘No, I’m angry with myself because I didn’t get the point.’ Then she gave it away. She winked at me!” Connolly was indeed won over to her team.27
Her greatest success among the journalists was becoming close to Sidney Skolsky, who had been a Broadway publicist before becoming a columnist and whose columns were as important as those of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Even before Johnny Hyde died, Marilyn had brought Sidney into her camp. The two of them met frequently and dreamed up publicity stunts. Like Marilyn, he was an insomniac, so he didn’t mind if she phoned him late at night, which was her practice with close friends. She drove him to appointments. When her mood was bleak, she drove with him in her convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Barbara. With the sun on her face and the wind blowing her hair, in control of a masculine machine, she felt free.
When she telephoned Sidney, she called herself Miss Caswell, the name of the character she played in All About Eve. According to Steffi Skolsky, Sidney’s daughter, her father and Marilyn were drawn to each other because their personalities were similar. Both were dramatic and secretive, neurotic and paranoid.28 A recently discovered letter from Sidney to Marilyn dated April 1952 suggests they were more than friends, as Sidney writes of “the intensity and fierceness” of his love for her and calls her “sweet sunshine” and “an infinitely beautiful being.” As she did with so many others, Marilyn had swept Sidney away.
Sidney was short, hardly five feet tall. He was another Marilyn friend raised in a poor New York Jewish family who was a political liberal. He had been converted to that stance by playwright Clifford Odets, now in Hollywood after his years with the Group Theatre in New York.29 In his columns Skolsky presented himself as a man of the people, who was closer to young actors and Schwab’s drugstore than to nightclubs and stars. A graduate of New York University, he wrote columns for the New York Post and
the Hollywood Citizen News, which were syndicated nationwide. He ended every interview he did with a female star by revealing what she wore to bed. Like Marilyn, Sidney was fascinated by Jean Harlow. A producer of biopics as well as a reporter, he spent years trying to do one on Harlow, with Marilyn playing Harlow. He often discussed it with Marilyn, but it was never made.
Determined to end the hiatus in her career in the spring of 1951, as Zanuck hesitated to cast her in any films, Marilyn engaged in several sexy stunts. She became the talk of the Fox lot when, assigned to do a promotional photo, she slowly walked the six blocks from the Fox wardrobe department to the still department, barefoot and wearing a see-through negligee. She caused a near-stampede on the lot, as phones rang in every office to announce her progress and the men in those offices rushed to the windows and the sidewalks to watch her, sometimes following her. So startling was the walk and the response to it that fan magazines featured stories about it.
In late March she vamped Spyros Skouras, the head of the New York office, when he visted the Fox studio in Hollywood for a conclave to introduce movie theater owners nationwide to forthcoming Fox films. A banquet was held at the studio commissary, fancied up as the Café de Paris, with all the Fox stars and starlets present. Marilyn was the hit of the evening. She arrived late, wearing a tight, strapless black cocktail dress, making the grand entrance she had perfected at Hollywood parties. Out-of-towners clustered around her to ask her what new films of hers they could order. (Aside from As Young as You Feel, there weren’t any.) Cameras clicked; flashbulbs popped. Skouras took Marilyn’s arm and escorted her to the head table, where she sat next to him for the rest of the evening. He ordered Zanuck to stop hesitating over her contract and cast her in sexy-blonde parts. But he brushed off her request for dramatic roles. He is supposed to have said to her, “You make money only with your tits and ass. Your talent is located above your waist and below your navel.”30
