Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe Read online

  There was nobody to recognize Marilyn that night. However, at Columbia, which had just dropped her, a little fan mail trickled in.

  *Ana Lower

  7

  ‘SHE IS MOST DEFINITELY not a child,’ an embittered Natasha Lytess would say in the future. ‘A child is naive and open and trusting. But Marilyn is shrewd. I wish I had one tenth of her ability for business, of her clever knack of promoting what is right for her and discarding what is not.’ In early 1949 Marilyn was again broke, jobless, and losing Fred Luger, the first man to whom she had really given her heart. She was a bruised twenty-three, and the bruises served her well in a way. She wanted to act, and she had learned how to hustle.

  Jimmy Starr, former columnist on the Los Angeles Herald-Express, claimed to know the secret of the Marilyn Monroe walk. ‘She learned a trick of cutting a quarter of an inch off one heel, so that when she walked, that little fanny would wiggle. It worked.’

  It worked for Marilyn one spring day that year, when she was out of a job following abortive ventures as assistant to a magician and a trick golfer, and a session posing nude for a calendar series. By her own account, Marilyn was sitting in Schwab’s drugstore when she heard that a sexy girl was needed for a walk-on part in a Marx Brothers film called Love Happy. Marilyn went to the set, met first the director, then Groucho and Harpo Marx. ‘Can you walk?’ asked the cigar-chomping Groucho. ‘This role calls for a young lady who can walk by me in such a manner as to arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears.’

  Marilyn walked — presumably on one cutoff heel. When she turned, the smoke was positively billowing from Groucho Marx. He called Marilyn ‘Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo-peep all rolled into one,’ and the scene was shot next morning.

  The producer of Love Happy decided to use Marilyn to promote the movie. He pumped up some publicity, portraying her as Hollywood’s very own ‘orphan’ trying to make good, and packed her off on a nationwide promotion tour. So it was that Marilyn made her first trip to New York. Fred Karger was not at the station to see her off.

  A key assignment in New York State was an appearance in front of Photoplay magazine’s ‘Dream House,’ a publicity caper that would simultaneously promote Love Happy and household products. Adele Fletcher, then editor of Photoplay, recalled a stuttering Marilyn asking her to accompany her to the ‘p-p-powder room,’ to help rinse a coffee stain out of her dress. There, as Fletcher worried about the time, her charge stripped off all her clothes (her underwear had also been stained). ‘What’s she so cross about?’ asked the nude Marilyn as a shocked woman departed the restroom clucking in outrage. Marilyn then emerged, dress over damp panties, to push a vacuum cleaner around for the photographers.

  New York had its consolations. Marilyn was interviewed by Earl Wilson, the show business columnist who would become her friend and a key East Coast press connection. At the urging of studio publicity men, he introduced her as the ‘Mmmmmmm Girl.’ Marilyn also met her old lover, photographer André de Dienes, who carried her off for modeling shots at the beach.

  In Manhattan she was taken to El Morocco, then one of the most exclusive nightclubs in the country. Marilyn, who arrived as a humble ‘tourist,’ found herself invited to the ‘right’ side of the club by Henry Rosenfeld, the thirty-eight-year-old millionaire dress manufacturer.

  Marilyn had made a long-term friend. She would join Rosenfeld at his home in Atlantic Beach for trips in his speedboat and for quiet evenings of talk and laughter. In years to come the millionaire would offer sympathy in her crises, find her doctors and psychiatrists, and sort out her finances. Years later, in his office in the Empire State Building, seventy-three-year-old Rosenfeld merely wrinkled a still-boyish face when asked whether he and Marilyn were lovers. He did confide that ‘Marilyn thought sex got you closer, made you a closer friend. She told me she hardly ever had an orgasm, but she was very unselfish. She tried above all to please the opposite sex. Ah, but it wasn’t just sex. She could be so happy and gay. How I remember that laughter!’

  From New York, Marilyn was shunted off to the Midwest to pose as ‘the hottest thing in bathing suits cooling off again.’ Marilyn’s enthusiasm for movie promotion also cooled. She returned to Los Angeles, to a bit part in a western, obtained for her by the man who had christened her, Ben Lyon, and to the discovery that Fred Karger still did not want to marry her. It was now, at a house party in Palm Springs, that she met a man who did. He was also the man whose efforts assured the success of Marilyn Monroe.

  Johnny Hyde, one of the most influential agents in the country, told Marilyn he could make her a star. He was fifty-three, thirty years older than she, and very wealthy. He was also seriously ill with heart trouble, and had less than eighteen months to live. Hyde devoted these months almost wholly to Marilyn.

  Previously, Fred Karger had found a dentist to fix her uneven teeth. Now Hyde arranged cosmetic surgery to erase two tiny unwanted blemishes on Marilyn’s chin.* He hired hairdressers who would from now on regularly bleach her hair, and was reportedly the agent who, according to the story Marilyn later told, persuaded her to have an operation to prevent conception.

  Most important of all, Hyde had access to every potentate in Hollywood. By day he praised Marilyn’s talents; by night he escorted her to the homes of the famous and powerful. By the time he died Hyde had secured Marilyn her first part in a major film and a new contract with the studio that had once spurned her, Twentieth Century-Fox. It ensured a salary of $500 a week for the first movie, and would develop into a deal covering the next seven years, with an eventual salary ceiling of $1,500 a week.

  The major film arranged by Hyde was Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston. Three years earlier Huston had planned a screentest for Marilyn, then canceled it because he thought she was being set up, not for a role, but for sexual exploitation on the casting couch. Now she came to him, thanks to the machinations of three people — Johnny Hyde; her sometime lover Bill Burnside; and her forgiving former hostess, Lucille Ryman. Hyde brought her to a first meeting, then she went off to study a script.

  Marilyn’s coach, Natasha Lytess, said they worked together ‘for the better part of three days and nights’ to prepare for the reading. She came back, again escorted by Hyde, extremely shy — and anxious in an unnecessary way. She arrived with padding stuffed into her already ample bosom, which Huston unceremoniously removed. Her acting, however, easily carried the day. Huston said, ‘Marilyn didn’t get the part because of Johnny. She got it because she was damned good.’

  Johnny Hyde now dismantled his marriage of twenty years and gave himself utterly to Marilyn. Accounts differ as to how she treated him. Scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson, who was close to Hyde, thought him ‘a dear and gentle man more stirred by female beauty than almost anyone I have ever known.’

  Johnson himself was unimpressed with Marilyn. ‘When I saw her at that time,’ he recalled, ‘I took it for granted that she fell into that category of eager young hustlers. It was usually at lunch at Romanoff’s, and when I sat with them from time to time she took little part in the conversation, though both Johnny and I did what we could to include her in what was generally no more than casual gossip. She listened intently, her eyes never left us, as the eyes of most lunchers at Romanoff’s did to see who was coming in, who was with whom. But I’m afraid I can’t remember her ever uttering one word.’

  Gloria Romanoff, whose husband ran that restaurant and who knew Marilyn well, thought Marilyn somewhat indifferent to men. She said, though, that ‘Johnny Hyde was very important to her. She was very touched by his genuine concern. He didn’t exploit her in any way, and normally she was a bit of a target.’

  When Hyde left his wife and bought a sumptuous new home, he had the dining room fitted with four white leather booths and a dance floor at the center. Marilyn called it ‘My own private little Romanoff’s.’ Billy Wilder, who would one day direct her in two movies, recalled meeting Marilyn when he and Sam Spiegel would go to play cards with Johnny Hy
de. ‘She just sat in the back of the room and read a novel,’ he remembered, ‘waiting for Johnny to finish his gin rummy.’

  Marilyn’s silences may have been due to uncertainty about how to behave in exalted company, or just to the shrewd realization that she could trust Hyde to hustle for her. She told director Garson Kanin, ‘Look, I had plenty of friends and acquaintances — you know what I mean, acquaintances? But not one of them, not one of those big shots, ever did a damn thing for me, not one, except Johnny. Because he believed in me. …’

  There was mockery in Hollywood about the affair, not least about the sexual contradiction between Marilyn and the ailing Hyde. Writer James Bacon claimed his own liaison with Marilyn continued while she knew Hyde, and that, between the sheets, she mocked the sick man’s sexual abilities. Then there was a weekend when Marilyn abandoned Hyde in Palm Springs to visit Karger in Los Angeles. Marilyn, talking with Karger himself, said of Hyde, ‘He’s so sweet. I love him dearly. But I don’t feel the way he does.’

  Marilyn would say later that Hyde implored her to marry him, but she told him, ‘I don’t love you Johnny. … It wouldn’t be fair.’ Characteristically, Marilyn seemed uninfluenced by the fact that by marrying Hyde she could have reaped a major share of his fortune. Meanwhile, Hyde went on working feverishly to further her career, then suffered the first of a fatal series of heart attacks.

  Roy Craft, a Fox publicity agent who worked closely with Marilyn, recalled a rather pathetic occasion when an anxious Hyde called from his hospital bed. Craft had organized a magazine photo session in which Marilyn and a young actor, Dale Robertson, would act out the correct etiquette for behavior in a nightclub. Hyde pleaded that the assignment be canceled, for fear it would create the impression that Marilyn was actually involved with Robertson. In deference to Hyde, the studio obliged.

  Marilyn was still living, on and off, with her coach, Natasha Lytess. According to Lytess, Marilyn was dilatory in visiting this sick man who had given up everything for her. One night in December 1950, said Lytess, Hyde phoned to ask, ‘Where is Marilyn, Natasha? I’ve been waiting, waiting. Natasha, never in all my life have I known such cruelty, such selfishness.’

  A week later, after a deathwatch during which Marilyn was present, Johnny Hyde died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. In contrast to her earlier thoughtlessness, she now defied a Hyde family request that she stay away from the funeral, and threw herself sobbing on the coffin. Her New York friends, Amy Greene and Maureen Stapleton, said she was still mourning Johnny half a decade later, still miserable that his children had ‘hated her as a homewrecker.’

  Nunnally Johnson thought that ‘Johnny was the first man who had ever treated her with almost deferential respect, and was also the only person in the world who was seriously concerned about her at all. When Johnny was buried she was again alone in the world.’

  Days after the funeral, at Christmas 1950, Natasha Lytess drove home from work with the persistent feeling that something was wrong. She entered the apartment to find on her pillow a note from Marilyn reading: ‘I leave my car and fur stole to Natasha.’

  Another note, on Marilyn’s bedroom door, asked the reader to make sure Lytess’s daughter did not enter. Natasha burst in to find that ‘the room looked like hell on earth. Marilyn was in bed, undressed, her cheeks puffed out like an adder’s.’

  Lytess said she shouted, ‘Marilyn! What have you done?’ When there was no reply, ‘I jammed her mouth open and reached in and took out a handful of wet, greenish stuff she hadn’t yet swallowed. On the night table was an empty bottle that had contained sleeping pills.’

  Nearly twelve years later the psychiatrists of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center would say of the dead Marilyn: ‘On several occasions in the past, when she was disappointed or depressed, she had taken overdoses of barbiturates and summoned help.’

  If we accept her own account of two suicide incidents before she was nineteen, this was the third. Marilyn was still six months short of her twenty-fifth birthday.

  *Contrary to rumor, there is no evidence that Marilyn ever had the shape of her nose altered.

  8

  ‘SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO be at the studio by seven o’clock in the morning, and she never made it. I lived just across the street, and I had to go and bang on her door. She’d open the door looking a mess, wanting a cigarette,* and I’d say, “Come on, get your ass out of bed.” Sometimes I literally had to push her into the shower.’

  The man charged with getting Marilyn to work was French-born Alain Bernheim — the future producer — who had come to Hollywood in the forties. At the time, he was working with Charles Feldman and Hugh French, who had taken over as Marilyn’s agents on the death of Johnny Hyde. As he and others discovered, Marilyn was a mass of contradictions and a mistress of transformation.

  German actress Hildegard Knef† first encountered Marilyn in a Twentieth Century-Fox dressing room, still only half-awake. She recalled this scene: ‘The sleepy-looking girl, with the transparent plastic shower cap over her white-blonde hair and a thick layer of cream on her pale face, sits down beside me. She digs around in a faded beach bag and takes out a sandwich, a pillbox, a book. She smiles at my reflection in the mirror. “Hi, my name’s Marilyn Monroe, what’s yours?”’

  Knef’s first impression of Marilyn was of ‘a child with short legs and a fat bottom, scuffing over to the makeup room in old sandals.’ An hour and a half later, said Knef, ‘only the eyes are still recognizable. She seems to have grown with the makeup, the legs seem longer, the body more willowy, the face glows as if lit by candles …’

  The two appeared together the same evening at a dinner to announce awards and new discoveries. ‘Now,’ said Knef, ‘she’s wearing a red dress that’s too tight for her; I’ve seen it before in the Fox wardrobe — although it’s too tight, it looks like one of Mum’s old ones dug out of the wardrobe. Eyes half-closed, mouth half-open, hands trembling a little. One glass too many, a child’s first go at the punch. The photographers hold their cameras up high, flash into her cleavage. She leans and stretches, turns and smiles, is willing, offers herself to the lenses. Someone bends forward and whispers into her ear. ‘No, please,’ she says, ‘I can’t.’ The trembling hand knocks over a glass. Finally she stands up, the people snigger, the tight skirt presses her knees together, she trips to the microphone. The walk is absurd and she’s got miles to go; they stare at the dress, wait for it to burst and liberate the bosom, the belly, the bottom. The master of ceremonies roars: “Marilyn Monroe!” She steadies herself on the mike stand, closes her eyes, leaves a long pause in which one hears her amplified breathing — short, panting, obscene. “Hi,” she whispers, and starts the trip back.’

  Asphalt Jungle, Marilyn’s true break into pictures, appeared in June 1950. The tough story of a jewel robbery, of crime and punishment, and of what happens when thieves fall out, it still stands as one of the best of its kind ever made. Marilyn played the young mistress of an aging criminal, a relationship defined — to suit the morality of the day — as ‘niece’ and ‘uncle.’ She was noticed by the reviewers of the New York Post and the Herald Tribune, and The Times included Marilyn in its praise of ‘an unimpeachable performance.’

  In spite of that, Marilyn had little work that she wanted. Her previous year had otherwise been a series of bit parts for the Hollywood sausage machine. Johnny Hyde had arranged a seven-year contract with Fox, but Darryl Zanuck, the man who had once fired her, foisted her off with cameos in forgettable movies. Marilyn, in response, campaigned adroitly on two fronts — the flagrant advance of the sex symbol in public and the creation of the cultured actress in private.

  In 1951, now twenty-five, Marilyn signed on for an adult extension course at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Her subject was literature and art appreciation, with a focus on the Renaissance. She appeared for classes quietly dressed, and hardly anyone knew she was a starlet. To her literature teacher she ‘could have been some girl who had just come from a con
vent.’

  When Marilyn had first met Hildegard Knef she had launched into a barrage of questions about German literature, and happened to be carrying a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry under one arm. Jack Paar, later to become host of the television show Tonight, acted with Marilyn that year in the film Love Nest. When he met Marilyn she was reading Marcel Proust, whom Paar has described as ‘a rather exotic French author much in vogue among the intellectually pretentious of the time.’ Paar called this Marilyn’s ‘act,’ and commented, ‘I fear that beneath the facade of Marilyn there was only a frightened waitress in a diner.’ Paar, himself not best known for cultural devotion, was one of many who underestimated her.

  Quietly, as superficial roles followed one on another, Marilyn worked away at her acting. She made sure that her acting coach, Natasha Lytess, followed her to Fox. Lytess would recall, ‘Her habit of looking at me the second she finished a scene was to become a joke in projection rooms. … The film of the daily rushes was filled with scenes of Marilyn, finishing her dialogue and immediately shading her eyes to find me, to see if she had done well.’

  Marilyn did not consult Lytess when she decided to take separate lessons from Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright, who had studied under Stanislavsky. She played Cordelia to his King Lear in private acting sessions, and became mesmerized by his talent. Shortly before her death, she was still talking of him in interviews as her acting idol, the man ‘who showed me that I really had talent and that I needed to develop it.’

  Once, in the middle of a scene from The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov stopped to ask Marilyn whether she had not been preoccupied with sex while playing her part. Marilyn said no. Chekhov shrewdly replied, ‘I understand your problem with your studio now, Marilyn. You are a young woman who gives off sex vibrations, no matter what you are doing or thinking. And your studio bosses are only interested in your sex vibrations. I see now why they refuse to regard you as an actress. You are more valuable to them as a sex stimulant.’