The studio announced plans to hold Marilyn to the letter of her old contract. If she resisted, Zanuck vowed to prevent Marilyn from making another picture until August 8, 1958.
So much for Greene’s ability to handle the press. Obviously, the opportunity to put her message across in New York had been badly mishandled. Far from being taken seriously, Marilyn heard herself called “stupid” and “foolish.” She was devastated. So much for Greene’s confidence that the studio would be desperate to make a deal. Twentieth treated Greene as if he had no idea what he was doing—and the fact was, he didn’t. He was a fine photographer but an inept businessman. His intentions may have been decent, but he was out of his element in Hollywood. Marilyn had fired Feldman and Wright, so she could hardly turn to them for advice. That night, she agreed to have dinner with DiMaggio. For a man who hated her career, he got a lot of mileage out of advising Marilyn during her professional crises.
The next morning, following Greene’s instructions, she avoided the costume fitting by having her maid call Billy Gordon, the casting director, to say she was ill. After a talk with the studio attorney, Gordon reached Marilyn by phone late in the afternoon. Pointedly avoiding the subject of How to Be Very, Very Popular, he asked Marilyn how she was feeling.
“A little better.”
“We would like you to come in tomorrow and do the stills on Seven Year Itch.”
“Fine. I would like to start as early as possible.”
On Wednesday, Marilyn worked in the portrait gallery until 4 p.m. and agreed to finish up the next day. She was about to go home when a casting assistant handed her a brown envelope. Inside was a notice to report for a costume fitting at 10:30 the following morning.
Marilyn didn’t know what to do. If she went, she would seem tacitly to accept the studio’s right to put her in another picture. That might destroy her chance to have her own production company. If she failed to report, something considerably worse might happen: She might wreck her career. That might well be the result if Zanuck made good on his threat to keep her off screen for more than three years. Could Marilyn afford to ignore the chorus—including the Hollywood Reporter, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper—all warning that she had been given bad advice? Joe, too, was wary. In the past few days, Greene hadn’t exactly proven himself a competent business partner.
Marilyn didn’t want to do the costume fitting, but she didn’t want to refuse either. She arrived at the studio on Thursday morning, but went directly to her dressing room. The framed photograph of Joe still decorated her dressing table. Assistants did her hair and makeup in anticipation of a 1 p.m. appointment in the portrait gallery. They were nearly finished when the phone rang. Marilyn instructed a helper to tell Billy Gordon that she had stepped out and would return soon. Promising to meet her assistants at the portrait gallery in two hours, Marilyn disappeared.
She never showed up. In tears, Marilyn called the stills department to say she was ill and had to go home. When someone checked her parking space outside the Star Building, the black Cadillac was gone.
Afraid that she was about to flee with Greene, Twentieth ordered Marilyn to report to Nunnally Johnson on Saturday for pre-production work. Zanuck was concerned that if they waited until Monday, Marilyn might be gone; it would be harder to exert pressure on her in New York.
When the studio suspended her for failing to show up on Saturday morning, Marilyn did go to New York. DiMaggio followed soon afterward, taking up residence again with George Solotaire. On January 19, he helped Marilyn move her things to the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street off Park Avenue. Sam Shaw, who knew the owner, had arranged for her to stay there. From the time Marilyn arrived, the small, stuffy apartment hotel, crammed with red velvet furniture, was under siege. Photographers gathered outside the revolving front door. Sometimes they were permitted to photograph Marilyn in a gloomy little room off the lobby.
At the time, the Gladstone was also the temporary home of Carson McCullers. Known as “Choppers” because her cheeks resembled a pair of lamb chops, McCullers was the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and other books. She was physically demonstrative, always hugging and kissing friends and acquaintances, despite a stroke which had left one hand curled up like a hook. She carried a walking stick that she waved tipsily in the air by way of greeting. McCullers drank heavily and gobbled “pinkie tablets,” as she and Tennessee Williams called Seconal. She had attempted suicide and had spent time at the Payne–Whitney psychiatric clinic. Williams once said that McCullers had known so much tragedy that it scared people—himself included—into a kind of indifference toward her. It was, Williams said, as if McCullers were “hopelessly damned” and one could not afford to think about it.
From the first, McCullers and Marilyn adored each other. There was “a sort of natural sympathy” between the skinny, tomboyish, slightly stooped novelist and the voluptuous movie star.
Though living in Victorian splendor, Marilyn was broke. For several weeks, she had been forbidden to cash her paychecks; now there were no checks at all. Greene doled out forty dollars a week in spending money, as well as paying her rent and other expenses, including her mother’s fees at the mental institution. Soon, a letter came demanding a promissory note for the nearly $20,000 that Feldman had advanced. Feldman’s attorney seemed to enjoy declaring that he understood Marilyn was in no position to pay back the money at this time.
The funds Greene had predicted would pour in after they announced Marilyn Monroe Productions never materialized. Threats of a lawsuit scared off investors. Greene did have one lead, however—Henry Rosenfeld, a dress manufacturer from the Bronx. That month Rosenfeld happened to be out of town on business. Rather than wait, Greene asked Marilyn to accompany him to Boston, where she could charm the wealthy businessman. It was a throwback to the days when she had to sing for her supper. It was a reminder of all that she had hoped to put behind her.
When Marilyn told Joe about the trip, he insisted on coming along. On January 23, he drove her to Boston. Greene traveled separately. The last thing Greene needed was DiMaggio in the middle of his business, but Joe left no choice. Joe’s brother Dom and his wife lived in Wellesley, a Boston suburb. The night before the meeting, the two couples dined in town. A reporter approached their table in the private back room of a restaurant.
“Is this a reconciliation?” he asked Joe, who turned hopefully to Marilyn.
“Is it, honey?”
“No, just call it a visit.”
Rosenfeld was very taken with Marilyn, but he simply was not the major investor Greene desperately needed. He declined to bankroll Marilyn Monroe Productions. At length, all Greene managed to wheedle out of Rosenfeld was some cash to help pay her hotel bills. In the end, Greene had asked Marilyn to flash her thousand-watt personality for nothing more than rent money. Afterward, she and Joe drove back to New York. Greene returned to Connecticut in defeat.
That evening, Joe carried Marilyn’s bags into the Gladstone. He was a happy man, having just learned of his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. A reporter asked Marilyn if she and DiMaggio were getting back together. This time, to Joe’s delight, Marilyn pointedly avoided saying no. “It’s not immediate.”
For obvious reasons, Marilyn grew disenchanted with Greene. Joe, for his part, urged her to return to California. Greene worried about holding onto Marilyn, particularly when she expressed doubts about his lawyers, and asked Sam Shaw to reassure her. Informing Greene that Feldman was his friend, Shaw refused to intercede, and in fact told Marilyn that from a business perspective, she had been better off with Feldman. He also offered an important piece of advice. In light of the past few weeks, he recommended that Marilyn stay out of the press until The Seven Year Itch was released. Otherwise, the public might get bored with her. Marilyn instantly saw Sam’s point. Greene disagreed, unwilling to give up the spotlight. On Monday, January 31, she and Greene had an argument in the car on the way from Connecticut to the city.
By this time, Marilyn had very nearly given up. The dream that had sustained her for so many years was almost dead. She’d managed to become a movie star, yet she had utterly failed to win the respect she was after. Greene had by no means clarified matters; his efforts had ended in embarrassment and fiasco. Perhaps Joe was right. Perhaps she ought to go back to Los Angeles. Perhaps it was time to accept that she was never going to get what she wanted.
Everything seemed to point to Marilyn’s imminent departure when, on the evening of Tuesday, February 1, Sam Shaw escorted her to a dinner party given by Paul Bigelow. Greene invited himself along. Known in theatrical circles as “the fabulous Bigelow,” their host was the devoted companion of Carson McCullers’s cousin Jordan Massee. Tennessee Williams called Bigelow a “fantastic and rare character.” Bigelow called himself a “professional catalyst.” He liked to put people together, to make exciting things happen.
That night, Marilyn was seated opposite McCullers’s great friend, Cheryl Crawford. Slim and erect, she had short auburn hair and a strong, forbidding face with thin lips and a tense forehead. She wore a dark, tailored wool suit, with a bit of silk scarf exposed at the throat. She wore sensible, low-heeled shoes. Her voice was deep, rich, and masculine.
Miss Crawford was one of Broadway’s most important producers. Bigelow was her assistant. She had launched the Group Theater with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. Later, she had founded the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. She radiated courage and authority. Clifford Odets called her “a mariner steering for the pole star.” In a business populated by temperamental personalities, she seldom grew angry—”about once every two or three years.”
Tonight, apparently, was such an occasion. Crawford, in a flat Midwestern accent, announced that Marilyn had behaved despicably with a very good friend of hers. She passionately defended Charlie Feldman as a man of tremendous integrity. That, perhaps, was the last name one would have expected to hear in this context, yet Crawford insisted that Marilyn had treated him unfairly. Feldman had had Marilyn in mind when he purchased the film rights to Edward Chodorov’s Oh, Men! Oh, Women!, which Crawford had produced in 1953. She told Marilyn that the material would have been perfect for her.
Marilyn tried to tell her side of the story. Milton Greene jumped in. The conversation became so heated that, at one point, Crawford turned to Sam Shaw and said that Greene was “evil and just no good.” When Crawford was dismayed, two long, dark lines at the ends of her mouth curled sharply downward—an emotional Geiger counter.
Marilyn persisted and Crawford listened. She explained why she had left Famous Artists. She argued that Feldman, unwilling to jeopardize his position at Twentieth, hadn’t fought for her hard enough. Her objections were limited to Feldman as an agent; she insisted she had all the respect in the world for him as a producer. She said that Feldman had more taste than anyone in Hollywood and could always be counted on to hire the best directors, writers, and other talent.
Crawford was won over. At such moments, her face would soften dramatically, the dark creases seeming to disappear. She had a warm smile and a merry laugh. After that, the women enjoyed a long, lively conversation about acting. Crawford, fascinated and impressed, invited Marilyn to accompany her to the Actors Studio. She and Kazan and Bobby Lewis had opened the Studio in 1947 as a private workshop where professional actors and actresses could “stretch their capabilities” and “tackle their limitations.” It was neither a school nor a theater. It was off-limits to the public, and off-limits to anyone casting a show. The point was to be permitted to develop one’s craft in an atmosphere free of commercial pressures. The point was to be encouraged to try things one hadn’t done before. The point was to be allowed to fall flat on one’s face. The Studio was an oasis, a refuge, a sanctuary. Kazan called it “the purest place in the world to work.”
Marilyn accepted and they set a date. In the past month, her dream of reinventing herself had become a cruel and humiliating nightmare. Cheryl Crawford offered Marilyn a whole new chance. In one extraordinary and unexpected moment, everything seemed to have turned around for her again.
PART TWO
SEVEN
As Cheryl Crawford ate breakfast in her East 54th Street apartment, she would watch the barges float past on the murky East River. This was probably the last peaceful time of her day. As a Broadway producer, she maintained a frantic schedule. She prepared budgets. She interviewed actors. She attended rehearsals. She had drinks with agents and investors. She strove to be, as Elia Kazan called her, a “helper of talent.”
Seated at a nineteenth-century French desk that had been on stage during Oh, Men! Oh, Women!, she crafted letters to her authors. She did not flinch from sharply criticizing new work by friends like Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. Though firm in her own opinions, she recognized that she was not infallible. She struggled to avoid huge mistakes, such as she had made in turning down Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. When offered the play by Kazan in 1948, Crawford, to her eternal regret, decided that no one would want to see a drama about an unhappy traveling salesman. Willy Loman struck Crawford as pathetic rather than tragic.
A good portion of Cheryl Crawford’s day was devoted to administrative duties at the Actors Studio. More than once, her financial acumen had been responsible for keeping the institution afloat. She raised funds. She pored over the books. She inspected real estate. She haggled with landlords. She resisted Paula Strasberg’s ceaseless demands of a pay raise for her husband Lee. By and large, Crawford left the creative decisions to her partners.
Crawford took pride in her tranquility in moments of crisis. She liked to say that at the Group Theater she had played the “WASP shiksa” to Harold Clurman’s and Lee Strasberg’s fiery “Old Testament prophets.” She performed a similar function with Kazan and Bobby Lewis, later with Kazan and Strasberg, at the Studio. She was the cool head, the mediator in moments of passionate dissension.
It was a short walk from Crawford’s apartment to the Gladstone Hotel, off Park Avenue. On Friday, February 4, 1955, she arrived there early. Marilyn simply could not be late to observe her first session at the Actors Studio. The women took a cab crosstown to the Malin Studios on West 46th Street.
Marilyn, wearing her dark mink, black sunglasses, and a black kerchief, took her place in the roomful of intense, mainly young, casually dressed actors. They smoked cigarettes and drank coffee from paper containers. Marilyn, in a corner, slouched in her seat, trying to make herself invisible.
In front, several members of the twice-weekly workshop waited to perform a twenty-minute scene. A canvas film director’s chair facing the makeshift stage remained notably empty. Obviously, no one dared sit there. In front of the vacant chair was a low table, and on it an assistant put a glass of steaming hot tea and two white index cards.
As if on cue, the moderator entered. The hush that fell over the room, the air of expectation, could hardly be attributed to his appearance or manner. He was squat, pale, partly bald, and hook-nosed. He had a crepe neck and a double chin. He took off a black raincoat, flinging it over the back of the canvas chair with thick, pasty-white hands. He wore large spectacles and dark, loose-fitting, priestly clothes. His body was rigid and unmuscled. He sat straight-backed, mouth clenched. A patch of gray fur sprouted on the back of his neck.
He clicked open a gold travel clock and put it on the table. Every now and again, he emitted a peculiar snort that some observers attributed to suppressed rage, others to a chronic sinus condition. He glanced at one of the index cards. In a low-pitched voice, he crisply identified the first of two scenes to be performed.
It was said that the master teacher Lee Strasberg could open inner doors that one scarcely knew existed. Some admirers called him the Rabbi. Some compared him to a psychiatrist or a harshly judgmental Jewish father. Harold Clurman insisted that no one in the world knew more about acting. Strasberg scrutinized a performance, said Clurman, with the intense concentration of a jeweler studying the inner m
echanism of a watch. After the room lights shot on following a workshop performance, he analyzed, criticized, clowned, pontificated, and attacked. He struck poses and gazed into the air for inspiration. Someone compared him to a revivalist preacher. His speech was swift and argumentative.
Strasberg was often unabashedly rude. He was notorious for passing acolytes on the street or in the hall without so much as a nod or a hello. Was he being sadistic, or was he merely shy? He tended to look right through people as if they did not exist.
He was a spellbinding lecturer, who revelled in displays of his own vast learning. His words often failed to make literal sense. “Darling,” he would say, “nothing here can be understood.” Partisans insisted that Strasberg could speak clearly when he wanted to. They claimed he was trying to do something considerably more difficult: communicate with the unconscious mind. He asked oddly personal, often intrusive questions, leading one disgruntled Studio member to groan that Sigmund Freud wasn’t as nosy as Lee Strasberg. Unlike other acting teachers who stressed language and text, Strasberg focused on psychology. He ran his workshops as though they were group therapy sessions.
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