The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “He made it pretty clear to her from the very beginning that he would bust his hump for her,” said Bill Davis. “It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t suggested. It was clear. I was actually in their presence shortly after they met and heard him say to her, ‘You will be the biggest thing in this town if you just give me a little time to work some business out for you.’ She just smiled and acted sort of coquettish. I remember thinking that she was just another empty-headed floozy, which was reductive, I know. But that’s how she struck me. She didn’t seem like she had any brains. All I ever heard from her was ‘Yes, Johnny’ and ‘No, Johnny’ and ‘Anything you say, Johnny.’ He would berate her and she would be fine with it. Sometimes she called him ‘Daddy.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh, his wife is gonna just love this.’ ”

  During this promotional tour, a friend named Bill Purcel, who lived in Nevada and whom Marilyn met when she was there for her divorce, received a troubling telephone call from her. She was crying. “I can’t stand the constant picture taking,” she told him. “I’m going to throw acid on my face,” she threatened, “if that’s what it will take to get them to stop!” She seemed as if she were on the edge of a breakdown, and she wasn’t even that famous yet. “She had no privacy and some of the photographers were rude and demanding,” Purcel recalled, “as though she owed them something.” Marilyn understood that having her picture taken was part of her job, but during this tour she felt as if even her small amount of fame was too oppressive. Eventually, she rebounded.

  Johnny would say that he fell madly in love with Marilyn at the very moment they met and would remain devoted to her for the next year. She never felt the same about him. However, he was so smart, so interesting, and, of course, so powerful she felt drawn to him. Hyde encouraged Marilyn to dig even deeper into the craft of acting than she had already done with Natasha. He wanted her to expand her intellectual scope by reading Turgenev and Tolstoy. She couldn’t get enough of both writers. She also enjoyed both volumes of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. Steffens (1866–1936) was one of the world’s first celebrity journalists to challenge the status quo. He was so controversial in his attacks on political corruption that President Theodore Roosevelt coined a term for it—“muckraking.” Johnny also suggested novels by Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust as well as specific books about moviemaking. She devoted herself to doing whatever he asked of her in this regard. When he gave her Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares, she read it as a textbook because she knew she would be quizzed on its specifics. That was fine with her. She had a voracious appetite for knowledge and couldn’t wait to discuss with Johnny whatever book he had recommended. “You’ve been through so much,” he told her, echoing what Natasha Lytess kept telling her. “You should draw on that for your acting.” Hyde’s advice was pretty much what Stanislavsky had in mind with his book.

  Johnny didn’t want Marilyn to waste a second of her day. For instance, she had a habit of talking on the phone for hours. That had to end, he said. “He wanted her every waking moment to be devoted to doing something progressive for her career,” said Marybeth Hughes, a beautiful blonde actress who once dated Hyde. “Once you got into Johnny’s whirlwind, your life was no longer your own. Most women couldn’t take it. Most women didn’t think it was worth the high drama he brought into their lives. You had to be pretty strong to be with Johnny Hyde.”

  Just as Johnny had said he had never met anyone like Marilyn, the same was true of her. All of the men she’d known in the past had been disappointments, going all the way back to Wayne Bo-lender, who certainly loved her but ultimately was weak when it came to standing up to his wife, Ida. She couldn’t imagine Johnny being cowed by anyone. He was her protector; she felt safe in his arms. Of course, in that role, he also became a father figure to her. The reasons she sought one are obvious, and he certainly fit the bill. In the end, though, because there were so many different levels to their romance, it was complex, and thus often thorny.

  Luckily for Marilyn, Johnny Hyde was as generous as he was supportive. Marilyn always had money as his girl, which was a refreshing change. Finally, she could take a deep breath and focus on her career—as he demanded—rather than on her financial woes. After he set Marilyn up financially, moving her into his new home after he left his wife and children, Hyde began to constantly pester her to marry him. He wasn’t above pulling tricks that she was accustomed to doing herself, such as painting a dark picture of circumstances in an effort to gain sympathy. “I’m dying,” he would tell her. “You know, it’s my heart, Marilyn. I’m going and it’ll be soon. And when I die, you’ll be a very rich woman if you marry me.” Those kinds of pleas from Johnny pretty much fell on deaf ears. Marilyn would sleep with him—he was very nice, and in a way she loved him, even if she wasn’t in love with him—but she wasn’t going to marry him. However, there was another wedding in the family: Gladys’s.

  Gladys Marries

  While Marilyn Monroe was navigating delicate terrain with Natasha Lytess and Johnny Hyde, her mother, Gladys, was involved in her own little romantic escapade. Surprisingly enough, sometime in April 1948 she ran off and married a man named John Stewart Eley. Marilyn was thunderstruck by the news. Certainly, Gladys was not emotionally equipped to be in a marriage with anyone, yet she had once again done the unexpected by taking a husband. “But who is this guy?” Marilyn asked Grace Goddard. “I have no idea,” Grace said, according to a later recollection. “Oh, no. Now, I’m really worried,” Marilyn said. Marilyn immediately felt that she was at fault. However, she wasn’t even sure where Gladys had been, and it was thus difficult to monitor her. Grace told Marilyn that it was impossible for Marilyn to have a career in show business and also be responsible for her impulsive and troubled mother. “She has to live her life,” Grace said. “Oh, my God,” was all Marilyn could say in response.

  Still working for the William Morris Agency under Johnny Hyde, Bill Davis recalled, “I was in the office with Johnny when Marilyn rushed in looking wild-eyed. I remember she had on a white blouse that was buttoned all the way to the top with long sleeves. And she had on white slacks. The reason I remember this is because it struck me that for someone known as a sex goddess she sure didn’t show much skin in her day-to-day activities.” *

  “Johnny, oh, Johnny. I need your help,” Marilyn said, according to Davis’s memory.

  “Sure, doll. What’s the problem?”

  “My mother has married some loser and I’m very worried about her,” Marilyn said, upset. She sat down in a chair, seeming exhausted. She then said that she wanted Johnny to find out anything he could about John Eley. “I cannot believe my mother would get married,” she said. “Can you even believe it?”

  Since Johnny had never met Gladys, he didn’t have an opinion about her marriage. However, he would definitely help Marilyn, he said. And he had the right connections to be successful at it. While she sat before him, he picked up the telephone and hired a private investigator to look into the matter.

  A couple weeks later, Gladys wrote to her daughter Berniece, who had just moved to Florida with her husband and child. She explained that Eley was from Boise, Idaho, and had just arrived in California “for work,” though she didn’t specify what kind of employment. She sent a picture of him. “He looks nice enough,” Berniece told Marilyn during a telephone call. “Well, Johnny is looking into it for me,” Marilyn told Berniece. “He’ll get to the bottom of it. I trust him.”

  Soon, information from Johnny’s PI began to trickle in about John and Gladys. Apparently, they had met at a bar somewhere in Santa Barbara. Eley had told his friends that he’d “landed Marilyn Monroe’s old lady,” and that he was waiting for the moment when he might meet the screen star. Meanwhile, he was going to try to take care of her mother, whom he described as “the craziest broad you’ve ever met.” He said that Gladys heard voices in her head, talked to herself, and, as he put it to one friend, “scares the shit out of me.” When Johnny Hyde relayed this information to Marilyn, she was angry. �
��That bastard,” she said. “Is he trying to use my mother to get to me?” Hyde wasn’t sure, but he agreed that it appeared that way. He promised to continue looking into the matter.

  A few weeks later, Marilyn received a letter from John Eley, sent to her home. He wrote that he was taking care of her mother but that he needed money to do it. If she cared anything about Gladys, he wrote, then she would not ignore his request and would send him a check for a thousand dollars. She brought the letter to Johnny and asked what she should do. “Well, you can’t give this sonofabitch a thousand bucks, that’s for sure. That’s a lot of money,” Johnny said. It was decided that Marilyn shouldn’t respond to the letter at all. If she did, Johnny reasoned, Eley would believe that he had a communication with her and would not stop with the money requests. All of this was very difficult for Marilyn, and it weighed heavily on her. “I think I’m going to be dealing with this kind of thing for the rest of my life,” she told Johnny Hyde. He smiled at her gently. “You always said you wanted a mother, sweetheart. Well, you got one. We don’t get to choose our mothers, kid.”

  Shortly thereafter, Berniece received a letter from Eley. Now he wondered if it would be possible for him and Gladys to move to Florida and live with Berniece and her husband and child. He said that he repaired appliances to make a living and was working out of his truck. His plan was to park his truck in front of the Miracle home; he and Gladys would live with the family as he worked. This sounded like a terrible idea to Berniece. When she told Marilyn about it, Marilyn was also skeptical. She said that she didn’t know what her mother had gotten herself into with John Eley, but she was certain it wasn’t anything good.

  She was right.

  In about a month’s time, Johnny Hyde’s PI came back with the news: John Eley was a bigamist—he had another wife in Idaho.

  Fifty Bucks for Nudity?

  By May 1949, it appeared that Marilyn had reached an emotional impasse with Johnny Hyde. He still wanted to marry her and was becoming insistent about it. However, she would not be bullied into matrimony, and was just as adamant in her position. Earlier, he had taken an apartment for her at the Beverly Carlton on Olympic Boulevard in Beverly Hills, now the Avalon Hotel, while she was living with him in his home. It was just for the sake of appearances. However, by May she was living in it, and determined to pay her own rent and expenses. She needed to do something to generate income on her own, though. “I was never kept,” she would say in 1962, looking back on this time. “I always kept myself. I have pride in the fact that I was on my own.” In a few months, Johnny would arrange for her to make a brief appearance in a dreadful movie called A Ticket to Tomahawk. Again, it would not amount to much. When her car was repossessed, she knew she needed to take action.

  One day, while searching through her business cards hoping that one might inspire her to seek work, she saw one given to her by a man named Tom Kelley. Marilyn had met him under strange circumstances. Back in October (of 1948), she was on her way to an audition when she became involved in a minor automobile accident. One witness at the scene was Kelley, who, as it turned out, was a former employee of Associated Press, having worked for that news-gathering organization as a cameraman. Marilyn told him she had an important audition and, because of the accident, no way to go to it, and no money for a cab either. He felt sorry for her and gave her five bucks and his business card. That was the last time she thought about him, until now finding that card.

  Rather than call Tom Kelley, Marilyn decided to simply appear unannounced at his studio in Hollywood. After a brief conversation with her, Kelley told her that a model he was about to shoot for an ad for Pabst beer had called in sick. Would Marilyn like the job? Of course. He then shot a few rolls of film of Marilyn playing with a beach ball. They shook hands, he gave her a few bucks, and she left.

  Two weeks later, on May 25, Tom called Marilyn to tell her that the mock poster that had been produced for the beer campaign was a hit with Pabst and had somehow gotten into the hands of a person who manufactured calendars in Chicago. He wanted her to pose nude. It would be discreet but, definitely… nude. She thought it over, but not for long because she really didn’t have a problem with it. Thus, two nights later, Marilyn found herself writhing around on a red velvet drape, posing, preening, and pouting while arching her back to make even more obvious two of her greatest assets. Meanwhile, Tom Kelley snapped away. The photos that resulted are extremely tame by today’s standards, but still she didn’t want to be acknowledged as having posed for them, which is why she signed the release “Mona Monroe.” She was paid just fifty dollars. (A great Marilyn Monroe quote comes to mind: “I don’t care about money. I just want to be wonderful.”) Years later, she would describe the experience as “very simple… and drafty!” And that was the end of it, as far as she was concerned.

  For now. *

  PART FOUR

  Stardom

  Unwelcome Visitors

  Marilyn Monroe’s bad-luck streak in films would finally be over by the end of 1949 when she made a career-altering trip to Culver City, home of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM, or Metro, as it was known by the cognoscenti, was the jewel in the crown of the studios constituting the motion picture industry of the day. It would be for this studio that Marilyn was cast in a new film to be directed by John Huston—The Asphalt Jungle, based on the novel by W. R. Burnett. Finally, Johnny Hyde had come through for her by arranging a meeting with Huston and Arthur Hornblow, the producer. Unfortunately, Marilyn thought she almost blew the audition by dressing too provocatively for the reading of the script. She knew her character was supposed to be sexy and thought she should dress the part. It was too much. It made her look as if she were relying on her body and not her acting skill to land the role. She was very nervous; the audition did not go well. Still, she was called back for a screen test. She fared much better in it, thanks to the concentrated effort she gave to preparing with Natasha Lytess. Louis B. Mayer was impressed with the result, and she was cast in the role.

  This was a big career move for Marilyn, and of course there was a certain amount of anxiety about it. Even Johnny Hyde—unflappable in his belief in Marilyn—had some misgivings. “You have to break down and cry in this,” he told her. “Do you think you can do it?”

  “But you’re the one who said I’m a star,” she told him. “Are you saying you don’t think I can do it?”

  “I do,” he told her. “But I’m just worried. Let’s continue to have Natasha work on this.”

  It was when Natasha began coaching Marilyn on the actual script for The Asphalt Jungle that something so alarming happened it caused her to contact Johnny directly. A woman who had been a friend and young student of Natasha’s explained how the events unfolded. “As Natasha explained it to me, the scene she was working on with Marilyn involved her character being happy and chatting about an upcoming trip. Then there was a knock on the door and she became frightened. [In the script] a bunch of men entered, and threatened her with prison if she didn’t confess to having lied about something. One evening Natasha arrived at Marilyn’s apartment to work on the scene. But Marilyn wouldn’t answer the door. Natasha had seen Marilyn’s lights on as she walked up, but after knocking on the door and waiting a few minutes, she saw the lights turn off. Natasha persisted, calling out Marilyn’s name until, finally, the lights were turned back on and the door was answered.

  “Marilyn said she had been hearing men outside her door all evening, and when there was a knock at the door, she just snapped and became unglued.”

  At first, Natasha brushed off the event, believing that Marilyn was attempting to create in her real life the fear she needed to exhibit in the film. Yet as the evening went on, Marilyn would often stop their work and tell Natasha that she was hearing voices… and to listen to see if she, too, could hear them. The source continued, “She’d ask, ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear that?’ Natasha would just reprimand her. She thought she was trying to make excuses for having forgotten her lines. However, before th
e session was over, Natasha began to feel that Marilyn was really on her way to having some kind of a breakdown.”

  A few evenings later, Natasha requested a meeting with Johnny Hyde.

  By this time, Natasha believed that Johnny was using Marilyn for his own personal pleasure, and also to gain bragging rights about her in the Hollywood community. Natasha, having admitted her own strong romantic feelings for Marilyn, would have been happy to see him out of Marilyn’s life. She believed Marilyn didn’t really need Johnny anyway. She felt that if she continued to work with her, she could be the one to build Marilyn’s career. Marilyn’s new reputation as a fine actress would surely, in Natasha’s mind, generate work for her in major films. Moreover, Johnny’s presence in Marilyn’s life threatened to dilute Natasha’s importance. How would it look if he were the one ultimately credited with Marilyn’s success? What would happen if Marilyn felt he was more important to her than Natasha? It was in this climate of fear, insecurity, and jealousy that Natasha operated. “She wanted Johnny to back off,” continued her friend and student. “I think she hoped he would see Marilyn as spoiled goods if he knew she was losing her mind, then she [Natasha] could have Marilyn to herself again.”