Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  because John rather than I had invited her out to the ranch one weekend, she thought this was going to be the beginning of an affair with him. She came to me and said, “Lucille, I want to ask if you’ll give John a divorce. I don’t think you love him—if you did you wouldn’t work so hard at your job, and you’d be with him every night instead of going out to shows and screenings. And I think he loves me. He didn’t say he does, but he’s so patient and he helps me so much. He couldn’t do that if he didn’t love me.”

  Lucille’s answer was delivered calmly: if John wanted a divorce he had only to ask for it. When Marilyn went back to John, he explained that his feelings were strictly those of a mentor, that all he wanted was to assist her career and to help her materially. “And the amazing thing,” according to Lucille, “is that Marilyn didn’t seem bothered by this at all. She wasn’t heartbroken, as if a great love were being denied her.” In fact, she may well have been relieved. With such a background as Marilyn had, she was ill equipped to read ordinary social signals, and many of them were subjected to a reading through the lens of her need for masculine acceptance and affirmation.

  After five months of caring night and day for Marilyn, it was clear to the Carrolls that, as Lucille said, “we were in too deep and had to get out.” The social life in which they often included her was soon to provide help in that direction. At a party in February 1948, John introduced Marilyn to a businessman named Pat De Cicco, who was successful with a product called Bon Bons, candy-sized ice cream confections marketed chiefly at movie theaters. De Cicco had become a friend of Fox’s executive producer, Joseph Schenck, whom Marilyn had met briefly on the studio lot.

  Schenck’s Spanish-Italian Renaissance mansion at 141 South Carol-wood Drive was the setting for legendary Saturday-night poker games, to which he and his friends invited attractive young women to keep the highball glasses full and the ashtrays empty. De Cicco asked Marilyn to join him the following Saturday. And so it happened that the former Fox starlet was reintroduced to the present Fox mogul. “I was invited as an ornament,” Marilyn said, “just someone to brighten the party.” And so she did—especially for Schenck, who (as Lucille Ryman Carroll knew within days) “went for Marilyn like a million dollars.”

  Schenck, then sixty-nine, had a long and influential career. He and his brother Nicholas, childhood Russian émigrés to New York, had owned some drugstores and operated amusement parks before their association with Marcus Loew, executive of a theater chain that became the parent company of MGM. Nicholas remained with Loew, but in 1917 Joe became an independent producer, successful with, among others, the films of his wife Norma Talmadge; his brother-in-law, Buster Keaton; and the comic Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle. By 1948, Joe Schenck had been at various times board chairman of United Artists, president of Twentieth Century Pictures and then board chairman of Twentieth Century–Fox, where he was still a major power. Bald, with large features and penetrating gray eyes, Joe Schenck had a severe mouth that belied a keen sense of humor and good business sense, both of which were epitomized by advice he gave a friend: “If four or five guys tell you that you’re drunk, even though you know you haven’t had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little while.” Accustomed to deferential treatment, he could be crude and demanding or gentle and helpful, depending on what opinion he thought someone had of him.

  Marilyn was not the only young woman present that Saturday evening; there were other models, starlets and pretty young things hoping for entrée to a movie career or advancement in it. Besides distributing drinks and cigars, some were willing (not to say expected) to provide more intimate services for one or another of the cardplayers during a break in the game. That evening, Marilyn remained close to De Cicco and tried gracefully to ignore the host’s suggestive glances.

  Next day, a limousine was dispatched to bring Marilyn to a private dinner with Joe Schenck—an invitation she knew it would have been folly to refuse. “What do I do after dinner when he gets around to what he really wants?” she asked Lucille, who suggested the reply she often gave her MGM starlets: “Tell him you’re a virgin, saving yourself for the right man.” Late that night, Lucille was awakened by an agitated Marilyn, whispering into a private phone from Schenck’s home: “He knows I’ve been married! Now what do I tell him?” The evening ended, perhaps predictably, with Marilyn’s submission.

  Later, she told Lucille and a few other confidantes that this was the first of many times she had to kneel before an executive, a position not assumed in prayerful supplication. She wanted desperately to work, to succeed as a movie star, and she accepted the fact that sometimes employment conditions are negotiated privately, not in an agent’s office. “Marilyn spoke quite openly of her affair with Schenck,” recalled Amy Greene, later a close friend. “He helped her career and she provided what she was asked to provide.”

  Inveterate womanizer though he was—and Marilyn was but one of many conquests—Joe Schenck did not toss her aside, and in fact she grew quite fond of him. Although he had an agreement with Zanuck not to press for girlfriends to be given preferential treatment, Schenck called his poker buddy Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Studios. In late February, Marilyn arrived at Cohn’s office at the corner of Sunset and Gower. One of the most feared and disliked men in the history of Hollywood, Cohn had been responsible for molding the career of a dancer named Margarita Cansino, who became Rita Hayworth. He was willing to offer Marilyn a six-month contract at one hundred twenty-five dollars a week beginning March 9. There was, however, one condition—and not the one she at first expected.

  The following week, her hairline was permanently heightened by electrolysis and, after several applications of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, the basic brown of Marilyn’s cheaply dyed blond hair was entirely stripped away. The mirror showed her a woman more and more like the favored star of her childhood, Jean Harlow. “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” Harlow asked rhetorically, gazing in a hand mirror in the 1932 film Red Headed Woman—and then she turned to the camera, smiled and replied, “Yes, they do!”

  Harry Cohn was no gentleman, but he preferred Marilyn blond. Having approved her new look, he dispatched her to three studio offices. After Max Arnow in the Talent Department had compiled a page of statistics on this latest contract player and the men in publicity had arranged for some trial photographs, Marilyn arrived at the cozy cottage of Columbia’s drama coach, a formidable lady named Natasha Lytess who had interests far more serious than dying hair.

  1. The on-screen emblem, the studio advertising and the lot’s marquee always identified the company as “20th Century—Fox,” but for legal reasons the contracts, documents and stationery had to designate it as “Twentieth Century—Fox.” In 1984, the hyphen which since 1935 had marked the merger was removed.

  2. Among the most popular contract players were Don Ameche, Anne Baxter, Alice Faye, Henry Fonda, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, Gregory Peck, Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney and Loretta Young; directors included Henry Hathaway, Elia Kazan, Anatole Litvak, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Otto Preminger.

  3. Among the best-known Zanuck films up to 1946: The House of Rothschild, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road and How Green Was My Valley.

  4. Years later, Snyder summarized the process of making up Marilyn Monroe: a light base, then a highlight under the eyes and out, over and across the cheekbones. This was followed by a toning to the eyeshadow, running lightly out toward the hairline, an outline in pencil round the eyes, brows slightly pointed to widen her forehead, a toning underneath the cheekbones, and delicate shadings according to costume and lighting. Lipstick colors varied; later, CinemaScope presented fresh challenges.

  5. The American title refers to farmers’ shouts when they goad mule teams—the equivalent of the standard “giddy-up!” for horses.

  6. Perhaps thinking of her initials and her self-appointed sobriquet as “the Mmmmm Girl,” Marilyn wrongly
stated (on Edward R. Murrow’s television interview Person to Person in 1955) that her first lines in any film were “Mmmmm” in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!, “but they were cut.”

  7. She had, of course, traveled outside California several times.

  8. No records have survived of the class assignments or scene studies at the Actors Lab, and Marilyn never listed those few in which she appeared.

  9. Several students routinely undertook the same role, each of them appearing in repertory so that different performances could be later compared in class discussions. Other film actors who occasionally appeared at Bliss-Hayden were Veronica Lake, Jon Hall, Doris Day, Craig Stevens and Debbie Reynolds.

  10. After its 1940 premiere, one New York critic wrote that “joke after tired joke is laboriously lifted from its sarcophagus and spun out of its winding sheet until the stage is crowded with verbal mummies” (New York Post, Nov. 16, 1940).

  Chapter Eight

  FEBRUARY 1948–MAY 1949

  THE WAS LIKE AN EXPLOSION always happening or about to happen—the most volatile woman I’ve ever known,” said journalist Jane Wilkie about Natasha Lytess, Marilyn Monroe’s drama coach for six years.

  In 1948, Natasha was about thirty-five, tall and thin, with gray-streaked, short-cropped brown hair; angular and hyperkinetic, she sometimes resembled a frantic stork on the lookout for trouble. Born in Berlin (not Russia, as she claimed to avoid anti-German sentiment when she emigrated), Natasha had studied with the great director Max Reinhardt, acted in repertory theater and married the novelist Bruno Frank. With the rise of the Nazis, the couple moved to Paris and thence to America, where they joined a throng of refugee artists, many of whom settled in Los Angeles.1 During World War II, Natasha had small roles in two Hollywood films, worked with Samuel Goldwyn’s contract players as a drama coach and then accepted the offer of a similar position at Columbia Studios. Her husband returned to Germany in 1947, leaving her with their infant daughter to raise alone.

  Autocratic and severe, Natasha impressed executives and actors alike, often intimidating them with her language fluency, her knowledge of the arts and literature and her stern correction of young actors she considered inferior to those she had known abroad. However accurate her assessment of their limitations, her condescending tone with players could hardly be justified: her general demeanor suggested that she might have been an exotic baroness, exiled in Hollywood.

  Natasha’s personality was perhaps best typified by handwritten letters to friends and students, in which her sentences were littered with words underlined and exclamation points scattered like comic-strip punctuation. Everything was a matter of the gravest significance, and in private sessions with actors, just as in meetings with producers and directors, she brooked neither argument nor opposition. On the studio lot, her name evoked respect but not warm sentiments, and her austere, spinsterish demeanor was abrasive to men and women alike. Only the begrudging admiration of Harry Cohn and the insistence of a few immigrant directors kept her on the payroll; had the contract players voted, she might have been back at MGM, begging for uncredited roles as a foreigner of undetermined origin.

  But her manner only veiled a searing disappointment. Natasha had aspired to a great stage career, but in Los Angeles there had been only film work (and not much of that) and her accent and somewhat forbidding appearance limited the available roles. As a result, her subsequent position as drama coach meant she had to abandon hopes for herself and work for the success of younger, more attractive and less talented actors. From the first day, there were danger signals in her relationship with Marilyn.

  In unpublished interviews and memoirs of her years as Marilyn’s teacher and occasional housemate, Natasha spoke with barely concealed bitterness—and not only because of the tangled and unhappy finale of their relationship. From their introduction, she resented Marilyn’s beauty and appeal even while she admired and tried to refine it. This conflict was attended by the most poignant development, for very soon the teacher was desperately in love with her student—a nearly fatal passion for Natasha, but a neat convenience for Marilyn, who knew instinctively how to turn another’s devotion to her own best advantage while ignoring or deflecting whatever sexual advances she disfavored.

  On their first meeting (March 10, 1948), Marilyn was captivated by Natasha’s experience and erudition, recognizing a woman from whom she could learn very much indeed. She told Natasha about her time at the Actors Lab, and Natasha responded with a little lecture on the Moscow Art Theatre, on the great actor and theoretician Konstantin Stanislavsky, and on Anton Chekhov’s influence on modern drama. “Not very much of what she said that day stayed with me,” according to Marilyn.

  She was like a waterfall, pouring out impressions and images. I just sat there watching her expressive hands and flashing eyes, and listening to her confident voice speak about the Russian soul. She told me what she’d been through and made clear how much she knew. But she gave me the impression I was something special, too.

  For her part, Natasha was not so impressed:

  Marilyn was inhibited and cramped, and she could not say a word freely. Her habit of barely moving her lips when she spoke was unnatural. The keyboard of the human voice is the gamut of emotion, and each emotion has its corresponding shade of tone. All this I tried to teach Marilyn. But she knew her sex appeal was infallible, that it was the one thing on which she could depend.

  “There were days,” Marilyn said later, “when I couldn’t figure out why she kept me on as a student, because she made me feel so shallow and without talent. Very often it seemed that to her I was one of the hundred neediest cases.”

  By pointing out only Marilyn’s deficiencies, Natasha paradoxically contributed to Marilyn’s conviction that her body, her sexual allure

  and prowess were her chief (indeed, her only) resources. Moreover, between teacher and student there was a wide cultural gap, one that Natasha exploited in order to exert a kind of psychological control over Marilyn—a subtle mechanism not at all uncommon in the disappointed lover. Thus the dynamics of a complicated Pygmalion-Galatea relationship were at once set in place.

  “I took her in my arms one day,” Natasha said, “and I told her, ‘I want to love you.’ I remember she looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have to love me, Natasha—just as long as you work with me.’ ” Both women were being honest, but only one would feel the agony of a hopeless passion. Natasha’s pain could have sprung straight from the pages of a Russian novel, for her love had a tragic quality; she could neither satisfy nor sever it. “She was in love with me and she wanted me to love her,” was all Marilyn later said on the matter.

  Not long before her death, Natasha spoke more freely:

  I wish I had one-tenth of Marilyn’s cleverness. The truth is, my life and my feelings were very much in her hands. I was the older [woman], the teacher, but she knew the depth of my attachment to her, and she exploited those feelings as only a beautiful younger person can. She said she was the needy one. Alas, it was the reverse. My life with her was a constant denial of myself.

  Natasha was correct. Dependent on Natasha though she appeared to be, Marilyn had an independence and a strength as well, an ingrained ambition that overcame countless disappointments, lonelinesses and setbacks. The sad truth is that Natasha Lytess was more profoundly dependent on Marilyn and Marilyn’s need of her, and therein may lie the reason why she endured six years of emotional crisis. Even as she was doomed to frustration, Natasha loved so deeply she could not bring herself to the action that would have freed her—separation from Marilyn.

  As it happened, their first week of acting and voice lessons coincided with Ana Lower’s death from heart disease on March 14; she was sixty-eight and had been in miserable health for over two years. Four days later she was cremated, and her ashes were interred at the Westwood Memorial Park, near the home Ana and Norma Jeane had shared. According to James Dougherty, Marilyn was not present at the final tribute: she was so afraid to miss a class with Na
tasha that she said nothing about Ana’s death. Only much later did she tell her mentor that Grace’s aunt was “the one human being who let me know what love is”—words that must have been agony for Natasha to hear.

  Gladys Monroe Baker with two-year-old Norma Jeane: Santa Monica Beach (1928).

  Baby Norma Jeane Baker (center) with her foster mother, Ida Bolender, Hawthorne, California, summer of 1926. (From the collection of Eleanor Goddard)

  Norma Jeane Baker, age three (1929).

  Grace Atchinson McKee and Ervin Goddard on their wedding day, 1935. (From the collection of Eleanor Goddard)

  Norma Jeane Baker, age fifteen, with her classmates: ninth grade, Emerson Junior High School, Los Angeles, June 1941. (From the collection of Gladys Phillips Wilson)

  Norma Jeane Baker’s wedding to James Dougherty, Los Angeles (June 1942). (Photo by Axel Fogg)

  First appearance as a model, age nineteen (1945). (Photo by David Conover; copyright by T. R. Fogli)

  Posing for a magazine ad (1946). (Photo by André de Dienes)

  Posing for artist and photographer Earl Moran (1946). (From the collection of Mickey Song)

  With agent Johnny Hyde, Palm Springs (1949). (From the collection of Mickey Song)

  With drama coach Natasha Lytess (1949).

  As “Miss Cheesecake of 1951,” with Edward G. Robinson. (From the collection of Mickey Song)