by Lois Banner
The Hollywood lesbian and bisexual culture of the 1950s was hidden from public view because of the era’s homophobia. The Production Code forbade any reference to homosexuality in films. Lesbian and gay stars contracted heterosexual “white” romances and marriages to hide their orientation. It was an open secret that Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were lovers. When Boze Hadleigh interviewed Barbara Stanwyck, known to be bisexual, she denied the charge, stating that only European actors crossed sex lines. Joan Crawford is also widely identified as bisexual—in My Story Marilyn charged that Crawford had made a pass at her. Evidence places Marilyn near the group of lesbians, called “The Sewing Circle,” which formed around Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Both were close to Salka Viertel, a refugee actress from Berlin whose Hollywood home was a center for German and Austrian refugees. Bruno and Liesl Frank often attended Viertel’s gatherings.66
Both Marlene and Salka had acted in Max Reinhardt’s productions in Berlin in the early 1920s, placing them close to Natasha Lytess, who was also a member of the troupe. The Hollywood refugee community wasn’t that large. Nor were the lesbian groups connected to it. It’s reasonable to assume that Natasha knew Salka, Marlene, and Greta, all of whom had begun their careers in the Berlin theater at a time when Berlin had a reputation for sexual experimentation and residents who were “connoisseurs of sexuality in all its forms and manifestations.” As John Baxter wrote, “It was common knowledge in the industry that Salka, Greta, and Marlene, plus Gloria Swanson, Janet Gaynor, and Barbara Starr, were part of a huge underground lesbian and bisexual element in Hollywood.”67
Marilyn acknowledged her bisexual impulse and rumors about it circulated throughout her career. When W. J. Weatherby asked her about it, she replied obliquely, “No sex is wrong if there’s love in it.” Women were attracted to Marilyn, and Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were open about her attractiveness to them. Marlene stated that she found Marilyn so fresh “that she’d like to bite her.” Greta stated that she wanted to do a film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in which she would play Dorian Gray and Marilyn would play one of the young women he seduces. When Marilyn traveled to New York in 1954, she told a reporter that Marlene was a close friend; she made the same statement to W. J. Weatherby, although Marlene denied it.68
An interview with Natasha Lytess was published in the British tabloid The People and other European tabloids in the summer of 1962, shortly before Marilyn’s death. When I first read it, I thought it was a hoax. Then I found letters about it in the Guido Orlando Papers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. Letters between Orlando and Lytess discuss his negotiations to set up the interview, and there are letters from him to various European tabloid editors and their replies to him as he negotiated with them to publish the interview. An internal memo in the Arthur Jacobs Papers at Loyola Marymount University warns about the imminent Natasha Lytess story, which it validates as accurate. Lytess, living in Rome, was broke, and Orlando, finding her by accident, convinced her that he could make her a lot of money if she did it. In the end, she realized $25,000.69
Orlando was a failure as a press agent in the United States, but he was a success in Europe. He was, however, known for perpetrating hoaxes. Thus he kept a low profile in marketing Lytess’s story. His friend, journalist Bernard Valery, the Paris correspondent for the New York Daily News, taped the interview with Lytess during twelve hours and then had it transcribed, producing a manuscript of five hundred pages. Unfortunately, the manuscript isn’t in Orlando’s papers.70
In the interview in The People, Natasha describes an affair between Marilyn and Howard Hughes. Marilyn was living with her, and Hughes sent dozens of yellow roses to both of them. He also had a limousine take them to fine restaurants, after which he came to their apartment and spent the night with Marilyn. Natasha contended that she taught Marilyn everything she knew about sex, especially after she found a pile of books on sex techniques by Marilyn’s bed, including an Asian one, probably the Kama Sutra. Natasha taught her the French ways of making love, especially the intricacies of oral sex. Natasha and Marilyn lived together as husband and wife, although Marilyn often simply wanted to be held. She was like a child in her need for physical affection.71
Marilyn often went naked in their apartment. Being naked seemed to soothe her. She went naked in the studio among female employees—wardrobe women, hairdressers, and makeup artists. Natasha thought her body was the one part of Marilyn’s self that had become what she wanted it to be. Natasha encouraged her to copy Mae West’s way of walking, a strut that was witty as well as sensual. What does sensual mean? Marilyn asked. “It means being able to enjoy things with your body,” Natasha answered. “Like you eat a luscious fruit, you taste the colors with your eyes, and the perfume with your nose, and the sweetness with your tongue. You revel in it—like being made love to by a wonderful man.”
In evaluating this source, it is important to realize that Natasha essentially directed Marilyn on every picture she made from Clash by Night through The Seven Year Itch, including Don’t Bother to Knock, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, There’s No Business Like Show Business, and River of No Return. It was Natasha who decided what Marilyn would do with her body, face, and voice. Having figured it out, she had Marilyn mimic her. “I worked with her on every gesture, every breath, every movement of the eyes,” Natasha said. Natasha didn’t like theories of acting; she wanted to be in control. Despite Marilyn’s assertion that Natasha wasn’t her Svengali, the older woman stood behind the directors on Marilyn’s films and relayed what Marilyn should do through hand and eye signals.
From Clash by Night on, Natasha Lytess was on the set with her, directing her from the sidelines. Natasha defended herself against attacks by stating that she didn’t like doing it, because she made enemies of powerful studio directors, and their animosity damaged her career. But Marilyn insisted on it, because she needed a tough woman to challenge the tough male directors. Sidney Skolsky was on Natasha’s side. Marilyn can be standing still on a set, Sidney wrote, “and at the same time going off in all directions. She needs someone on the set showing special interest.”72
Ultimately, Marilyn came to resent Natasha’s controlling personality and her dictatorial ways. She had become Natasha’s puppet, and she realized it. She went to other acting teachers—first Michael Chekhov and then Lee Strasberg—to figure out how to do it on her own. Natasha was responsible for her early acting success in films, but Marilyn knew that she needed to find a way toward self-motivation. Chekhov and Strasberg gave her that way.
Chapter 6
Marilyn Ascending, 1951–1954
In early January 1951, Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller traveled from New York to Los Angeles by train, bound for Hollywood to pitch Miller’s screenplay “The Hook,” about Brooklyn dockworkers, to studio heads. They’d become close when Kazan directed the Broadway productions of Miller’s All My Sons in 1947 and Death of a Salesman in 1949. Both were the sons of immigrants; both were college graduates who had become leftist social critics committed to the theater. They shared a fascination with the working class; both often wore blue jeans, T-shirts, and lumberjack jackets. They considered themselves soul mates, brothers under the skin.
Yet Kazan had another reason for the trip. He wanted to introduce his best friend to the Hollywood sex scene, which he knew from previous visits to Hollywood to direct films for Darryl Zanuck, including Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and Panic in the Streets (1950). He knew about Sam Spiegel’s mansion and Pat DiCicco, with his book containing the names and phone numbers of starlet party girls. His taste veered to beautiful blondes—a fixation that began in high school, when they rejected him because he was scrawny and ethnic looking. All was changed once he had the charisma of fame. His infidelities strained his marriage, but his wife put up with them. Miller, by contrast, remained faithful to his wife, although Kazan suspected that he was tired of his marriage and had fantasies about
bedding beautiful women.1
In this frame of mind they encountered Marilyn, who had reentered the party scene after Johnny Hyde died. They met her when they visited the set of As Young as You Feel, being directed by Harmon Jones, a Kazan protégé. Upset about Hyde’s death, she was crying softly in a corner of the set. Miller went over to console her. When he shook her hand, a jolt went through him. Marilyn’s magic was working. A week later they met again at a party at the home of Charles Feldman, a top agent and player in both elite Hollywood and its sexual side, who was a longtime Wolf Pack denizen. Pat DiCicco and Raymond Hakim, another playboy, were guests at the party, as were a number of Hollywood starlets, including Marilyn, and several Hollywood power brokers. This party was about sex, not just having a good time.2
In Miller’s memoir, Timebends, Marilyn symbolizes Hollywood to him as a place of pleasure and danger, with a sexuality both freeing and cloying. Using vaginal metaphors, he characterized it—and Marilyn—as “a contradictory mixture of certain scents. A sexual damp, I have called it, the moisture in the clean creases of a woman’s flesh, combined with a challenging sea-salt smell, the exciting sea air surrounding a voyage on water and the dead ozone inside a sound stage.”3 Miller can be ambiguous in his autobiography, particularly when he uses these sorts of literary flourishes. But he combines his memory of the past with his critical intelligence in the present, “bending time,” in a manner that is both masterful and self-indulgent.
That Marilyn fell for Miller isn’t surprising. He was an esteemed intellectual and a key player on Broadway, which was already a mecca to her. On top of this, he didn’t seem to mind her checkered past—whatever version she told him. Kazan, chasing another woman, had Miller deal with Marilyn the evening of Feldman’s party. As a “party girl,” she drove her car to parties and back home the next day, or took cabs, placing no burden on the men. But Arthur insisted on driving her. He respected her, sometimes rare among the Hollywood men she knew. And he looked like Abraham Lincoln, an idol of hers. They danced at the party, and they talked for much of the night. They may have gone for a drive on Mulholland Drive, stopping to look at the lights of the city. They didn’t have sex, she told Natasha. Marilyn sensed that Miller was different from the Hollywood men she knew.
After they met, Miller, Kazan, and Marilyn formed a threesome. They went to bookstores and walked on the beach, laughing and joking. Over dinner at an Italian restaurant, Miller and Kazan argued over the relative merits of Botticelli and Leonardo. Marilyn had never heard of these Renaissance artists. Intimidated by the conversation, she enrolled that month in a course on art and literature at UCLA’s extension branch, open to all comers.4 The three of them also played a prank on Harry Cohn, head of Columbia. When Miller and Kazan met with him to pitch “The Hook,” Marilyn went along. They called her Miss Bauer and passed her off as their secretary. Cohn did a double take when he saw Marilyn, but he kept quiet. He didn’t buy “The Hook”; no producer did. It was too leftist for that era. In 1953 Cohn would produce On the Waterfront, an anticommunist version of “The Hook,” in which the labor unions are corrupt and an informant is the hero. Kazan, anticommunist by then, would direct it.
Arthur was getting in too deep with Marilyn. He wasn’t willing to compromise his marriage; he had to leave. He abruptly took a plane back to New York. Arthur was Jewish, with a large puritan streak and a lot of free-flowing guilt. He was also introspective and romantic enough to store Marilyn in his dreams and work out his fixation on her in his writing—which he did in subsequent plays. They didn’t have sex, although he deeply desired her. When he left, he wrote that he had “the smell of her on his hands.”5
Marilyn and Elia began an affair even before Miller left, whether because of simple desire or an erotic triangle between Miller, Kazan, and Marilyn, with Marilyn in the middle, putting sex into the relationship between Elia and Arthur—which obviously was homoerotic to begin with. Marilyn said that her affair with Kazan lasted for several years. She contended that he fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. Kazan implies in his autobiography that for him it was simply an extramarital fling. According to him, he and Marilyn mostly talked about Miller, whose photo was on her nightstand.
Yet in a 1951 letter to Marilyn, Kazan expresses deep affection. No matter where they are, he says, she will always be with him and he will always try to see her. He gives her advice: stop feeling worthless and don’t settle for second best in a man. Stay away from abusive men. (The reference is to Johnny Hyde and Fred Karger.) Don’t moon over Art or me. Find a worthy man to marry. Stop taking taxis to parties. Drop Pat DiCicco and Natasha Lytess. Read Ralph Waldo Emerson on self-reliance. The letter suggests that Kazan valued Marilyn and wanted her to become independent and strong.
Once Johnny Hyde died in December 1950, the pressure was off Zanuck to cast Marilyn in a film. The William Morris agents, now her official representatives, didn’t press her case because they agreed with the Hyde family that she had been responsible for Johnny’s death by overtaxing his weak heart. She turned to Charles Feldman, who was head of the Famous Artists Agency. He was friends with Zanuck, and she knew him through Kazan and DiCicco. Perhaps he could pressure Zanuck into drawing up the contract. So long as the Morris agents got their commission, they didn’t mind Feldman’s involvement. Then in January 1951 Zanuck honored a promise to Johnny Hyde by casting Marilyn in the small role of a sexy secretary in As Young as You Feel. She met Arthur Miller on the set of that movie. Then Zanuck hesitated, stalling on her contract, not casting her.
During the spring of 1951, while waiting for Zanuck to make up his mind, Marilyn drove to the Fox ranch in the San Fernando Valley to visit Kazan, who was directing Viva Zapata! there. Photographer Sam Shaw, the stills photographer on the movie, a New Yorker who didn’t drive, sometimes went with her. They became close friends; he would play a major role in her life. He found Marilyn’s sense of joy, as well as her “tremendously sincere desire for the arts,” irresistible. She never complained or spoke negatively about anyone. Her humor was hilarious and spontaneous. One could never predict what she was going to say: she could be at the same time smiling, reflective, sad, and bursting with fun, until her sadness suddenly took over, and she became melancholy for a time. But she always bounded back.6
Born to a Jewish family on New York’s Lower East Side, Sam was a populist who photographed dockworkers, jazz musicians, and ordinary people, as well as film stars. He also took documentary photographs, compiling photographic essays on the harshness of working-class life.7 An autodidact with knowledge of literature, music, and art, he liked to teach others. Marilyn was an apt pupil, eager to learn. She liked to listen to informed people talk; she learned a lot that way. She liked Sam’s politics and his identification with ordinary people.
Sam was gregarious, with an eclectic taste in people: he was close to avante-garde filmmakers as well as to Joe DiMaggio, soon to become a major figure in Marilyn’s life. Sam liked to help others; he introduced Marilyn to photographers Eve Arnold and Richard Avedon and talked her up at Life. She became close to Sam’s wife, Anne, and their daughters, Meta and Edith. When in New York, Marilyn visited them. They became another of her families, the series of good foster families she chose to become part of both representing her childhood experience and trying to erase her negative memories.8
Marilyn shared an apartment briefly with Shelley Winters that spring. Actress Diane Ladd, close to Shelley, told me that spirituality and politics brought them together. Shelley had a spiritual side, and she found Marilyn intuitive to the point of being psychic. Like Shelley, Marilyn believed in justice and fair play. The insecure and domineering Shelley, a leftist since she joined a union as a teenager working at a dime store, compelled her friends to attend political events with her, especially rallies protesting anticommunist violations of civil liberties. In line with their populist views, Marilyn and she went to a Henry Wallace rally together. Wallace, a leftist and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, was the Progressiv
e Party candidate in the election of 1948.9
Shelley was a “dumb-blonde bombshell” at Universal, as Marilyn was at Fox. According to Ladd, “tits and ass” girls like them had to hide their politics and their spiritual beliefs, otherwise they would be laughed out of town. Shelley was aware of Marilyn’s shyness: she didn’t have the nerve to attend Shelley’s acting class with the formidable British actor Charles Laughton. But she exhibited more self-assurance than the out-spoken Shelley when she negotiated a rock-bottom price on a fur coat they both wanted. That was Marilyn: unable to do the simplest things and then able to do things that even bold people like Shelley couldn’t do. Shelley, who identified with Marilyn to the point that she claimed Marilyn patterned herself after her, tells of Marilyn meeting Laurence Olivier at her apartment and of their cooking dinner for Dylan Thomas when each was in Hollywood.10
There is also Shelley’s story that, listening to music one Sunday, they each made a list of men they desired. It began when Marilyn said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be like men and just get notches in your belt and sleep with the most attractive men and not get emotionally involved?”11 Going through the Actor’s Directory, each compiled a list of men. Shelley’s was composed of young actors, but Marilyn’s was of older men—Arthur Miller, directors Nick Ray and John Huston, scientist Albert Einstein—in line with her tendency to date and marry older men. (“Men, like wine, improve with age,” she once said.) According to Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s last psychiatrist, she was proud of her older male conquests: Joe Schenck, Johnny Hyde, Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller.12