Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Dedicated as he was to the craft of directing for stage and screen, Kazan was also (as he frankly detailed in his published memoirs) most energetically committed to sexual escapades, and he came to the set that day specifically to visit Marilyn, whom he had met casually once before in the company of Johnny Hyde. “She hadn’t even gone out with anyone [since Johnny’s death],” he recalled, “so I wondered if I shouldn’t look the girl up. . . . All young actresses in that time and place were thought of as prey, to be overwhelmed and topped by the male. A genuine interest, which I did have, would produce results.” His randy expectations were quickly fulfilled. She accepted a dinner invitation and soon—while Kazan remained in California directing the film Viva Zapata!—he succeeded in his goal.

  “All during production,” recalled Sam Shaw,

  Marilyn had a big romance with Kazan, and because she was idle much of that spring, she and I and Kazan often drove out to the Fox ranch, where he was directing the picture. Usually we stopped off at some roadhouse or other on the return trip in the evening, had a beer, played the jukebox and danced.

  At such times, Shaw added, no one was a gayer or more congenial friend than Marilyn. “Everybody knows about her insecurities, but not everybody knows what fun she was, that she never complained about the ordinary things of life, that she never had a bad word to say about anyone, and that she had a wonderful, spontaneous sense of humor.”

  Marilyn found Kazan, then forty-two and married, a sympathetic listener (which he called the real “technique of seduction”) and a man of dazzling intelligence. For his part, he considered her “a simple, decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted,” a girl with no knowledge except her own experience, who sought her self-respect through the men she was able to attract—mostly those she allowed to abuse her because their contemptuous attitude to her coincided with hers.

  The affair continued throughout that year. At first, the lovers met in Marilyn’s small apartment, but then she made a down payment on a baby grand piano she had painted white, a replica of the chic instrument that once meant so much to her and her mother on Arbol Drive, and which Grace had eventually sold. This made her single room even more cramped, and so she often spent the night with Kazan at the home of agent Charles Feldman and his wife, the actress and photographer Jean Howard. In the mornings, Kazan simply donned a white robe and drove Marilyn back to the Beverly Carlton, the top of his convertible lowered as they sang and laughed through the morning mists of Cold-water Canyon.

  This may have been the first uncomplicated, satisfying love affair of her life. Marilyn was not deterred by her awareness that there was no possibility of marriage—that fact seemed to free her. As for Kazan: “Marilyn simply wasn’t a wife,” he wrote later. “Anyone could see that.” Rather she was “a delightful companion.”

  The introduction to Feldman through Kazan had an immediate professional benefit. Because Johnny had neglected other clients to devote himself to Marilyn, the William Morris Agency was disinclined to represent her after his death. They did, however, conclude the standard negotiations on her behalf with Fox, but their indifference was plain when, in March, the papers were ready for signing but remained on the Morris desks for three weeks. So it happened that (although the agency continued to receive a portion of her agent commissions), Marilyn went over to the Famous Artists Agency, the company headed by Feldman, a dignified, courtly man who, with a man named Hugh French, managed her career for the next several years.2

  The Fox contract was standard. Marilyn’s salary, guaranteed for forty weeks of the year and paid whether she worked on a film or not, would be $500 a week for the first year, with the studio’s right to renew. Should they choose to do so, she would receive $750 weekly for the second year; $1,250 for the third year; $1,500 for the fourth; $2,000 for the fifth; $2,500 for the sixth; and, if she was still at Fox in 1957, $3,500 weekly for the last year.3

  For seven consecutive years, Marilyn Monroe would be obliged to work only for Twentieth Century–Fox and in whatever roles they assigned. At the end of each year, the studio could unilaterally and without reason cancel the contract and dismiss her; they could at any time loan her out to another company and earn a major profit by so doing (although she would continue to receive only the amount then due from Fox). Furthermore, she was prohibited from accepting any other profitable employment (including theater, radio, television or recordings), even if she was not actively working on a film with Fox. Such were the seven-year contracts to which most actors in the American motion picture business submitted—an indentured servitude that gave all practicable rights to the film companies and few to the performers. This was a procedure that endured until the demise of the studio system itself, a radical overhaul toward which Marilyn Monroe would make a major contribution.

  But when she signed the contract (which took effect May 11, 1951), Marilyn was somehow able to obtain an important privilege. Darryl Zanuck, who still considered Marilyn no great addition to his roster and had simply bowed to gentle pressure from Schenck, Hyde, the Morris office and Skouras, agreed to engage Natasha Lytess as her drama coach, and even to employ her wherever possible with other contract players. Natasha at once went on the Fox payroll at $500 per week (with annual escalations), and Marilyn paid her an additional $250 for private tutorials. And so there was the ironic situation for which Natasha never felt embarrassment, nor Marilyn jealousy: the actress was paid less than the teacher. But she was as indifferent to Natasha’s income as to her own: “I’m not interested in money,” she said. “I just want to be wonderful.”

  With the Fox contract in place, it was appropriate for the studio to send its prettiest players to the annual rites of spring. Thus it happened that Marilyn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on March 29, where she presented the Oscar for best achievement in sound. She wore a deep lavender off-the-shoulder chiffon gown borrowed from the Fox wardrobe, but as she was preparing to go onstage she noticed a small tear in the fabric. Bursting into tears, she wailed that she could not possibly appear, but an attendant rushed to her side and remedied the situation while other young ladies from Fox doctored her makeup and braced her spirit. Finally, almost speechless with stage fright, Marilyn managed to approach the podium and confer the statuette (coincidentally, to Thomas Moulton, for All About Eve).

  When Elia Kazan wrote in his memoirs of the day he met the lachrymose Marilyn Monroe on the set of As Young As You Feel, he failed to add that he had a companion—playwright Arthur Miller, whose original screenplay The Hook Kazan hoped to direct. This was to be a politically sensitive story of honest Brooklyn waterfront workers revolting against exploitive racketeers. Like Kazan, Miller remembered Marilyn’s subdued manner that January day at the studio. But he also recalled that when they shook hands “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with her sadness amid all this glamour and technology and the busy confusion of a new shot being set up.”4

  Next day, at Kazan’s invitation, Marilyn accompanied the two men on a visit to the office of Harry Cohn, who was considering The Hook for Columbia Studios (and who did not immediately recognize his former contract player). This meeting set in motion a series of events effecting the abandonment of the film, and the reasons for this were important to what soon became an evolving relationship with Arthur Miller.

  At Cohn’s insistence, the script was turned over to Roy Brewer, head of Hollywood’s stagehands union and a personal friend of Joe Ryan, leader of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Soon after, Brewer informed Cohn that he had asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to read The Hook, which was immediately labeled inflammatory and dangerously anti-American (perhaps even treasonous) at a time when the Korean War required problem-free shipping of men and arms to Asia. Brewer also announced that unless Miller’s script was changed to make Communists the villains and anticommunism the dominant theme, every theater receiving a print of The Hook would have its union projectionist ordere
d off the job. In this matter, Brewer himself was the more “anti-American,” the more seditious of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Miller withdrew his screenplay rather than conform to such absurd demands, and this single act of artistic integrity at once won him Marilyn’s admiration.

  Her affinity for the weak was frequently remarked. She felt enormous empathy for crippled children, for whom she had upset her publicists’ tour schedules, and more than once she inconvenienced others by stopping to attend a lame or stray animal. The sight of a homeless drunk on Hollywood Boulevard, the account of a black actor denied admission to a theater or restaurant, the plight of those at the fringes of conventional society (like her mother)—all these brought her to the point of tears and elicited a practical and sometimes monetary response. Now Arthur Miller seemed to her a champion of the lost and wounded, of those without a voice to speak for them, and so he won her esteem. In the soil of such sentiments love would soon take root, but the opportunity for its full flowering would require five years.

  When they met, Marilyn was twenty-five, Arthur ten years older. Born in Harlem in November 1915, he and his family had endured all the hardships of the Great Depression. After working in a warehouse following high-school graduation, he attended the University of Michigan, where he won a play writing award. By the time he met Marilyn, he was married to his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, and had two children. His résumé included a Broadway failure (The Man Who Had All the Luck), a successful novel about anti-Semitism (Focus) and then fame and awards for two successful plays, All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1948). With Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, Miller was considered one of America’s great dramatic talents. Bespectacled, tall and slender, he projected a shy, somewhat diffident manner some confused with that of an intellectual. But Miller’s interests from the 1940s on were never merely (or even primarily) bookish: although committed to certain social and family themes, he was an athletic, outdoor type who enjoyed sports, gardening and carpentry more than conversations about aesthetic theory; that came later, when it was expected of him.

  During the weeks after their first meeting, while Kazan and Marilyn ignited romantic sparks privately, Miller often joined them on visits to writers and composers. The trio browsed through bookstores, packed picnic lunches and drove to the shore and through canyons. Arthur felt “the air around her was charged” and that people in her company were touched “not only by Marilyn’s beauty but by her orphanhood—she had literally nowhere to go and no one to go to.” Forever after, he recalled the apprehension on her face when she read, as if her educational shortcomings would rouse mockery. He felt “something secret . . . a filament of connection” begin to shimmer between them and, disinclined to infidelity, resolved to leave Los Angeles with all dispatch.

  Years later, Arthur Miller’s prose became florid, almost fragrant whenever he recalled his early meetings with Marilyn Monroe. The sight of her in 1951

  was something like pain, and I knew I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. . . . [In] my very shyness she saw some safety, release from the detached and centerless and invaded life she had been given. When we parted [at the airport] I kissed her cheek and she sucked in a surprised breath. I started to laugh at her overacting until the solemnity of feeling in her eyes shocked me into remorse. . . . I had to escape her childish voracity . . . her scent still on my hands. . . . This novel secret entered me like a radiating force, and I welcomed it as a sort of proof that I would write again . . . [She] had taken on an immanence in my imagination, the vitality of a force one does not understand but that seems on the verge of lighting up a vast surrounding plain of darkness.

  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. The
n 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.