Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  Marilyn is wearing a white halter dress with a pleated skirt that is now one of the most recognizable costumes in Hollywood history. As they stand on a subway grating, a train passes underneath, causing the Girl’s skirt to fly up, revealing her panties. “Isn’t it delicious?” she squeals.

  The special-effects man, Paul Wurtzel, had been positioned under the sidewalk grating along with a giant fan, and on cue he would turn on the machine, causing a blast of air to sweep up the pleats of her dress. Marilyn’s exhibitionist side took over, and she thoroughly enjoyed doing take after take as the gusts of cool air blew her skirt up, sometimes above her knees, sometimes to the waist, and at times over her head. Her panties were exposed. The cameras rolling, the photographers clicking, the crowd cheering, “Higher! Higher!” she turned this way and that, smiling and posing.

  DiMaggio stood watching the exhibition with Winchell. Wilder looked over at him: DiMaggio’s face, rigid with tension, had gone white. “He had the look of death,” Wilder observed. “What the hell is going on here?” DiMaggio rasped. He turned away and headed back to the hotel.

  When Marilyn returned from the location, exhausted, in the early morning, they argued terribly. Guests in neighboring rooms could hear them shouting at each other through the walls. The following day Marilyn had bruises on her arms that had to be covered with makeup—caused by DiMaggio either roughing her up or grabbing her tightly with passion and despair.

  They continued to be seen together for a few remaining nights in Manhattan—although rumors of their inevitable breakup were already circulating. They were photographed with tense smiles at the Stork Club, having drinks with Milton and Amy Greene. Amy noticed the bruises on Marilyn’s arms. But when a journalist got a moment with Marilyn alone and asked her if there was trouble in her marriage, she filtered reality: “Everything’s fine with us. A person’s life is more important than any career.”

  In reality she was starting to find out that DiMaggio didn’t fit into her future plans. They loved each other deeply, but she was discovering that wasn’t enough. A woman like Marilyn needed to be stimulated and excited. She was interested in everything and always yearning to learn about new things. DiMaggio was content sitting in front of the television watching sports; he liked Marilyn being there. It wasn’t necessary to make every day an exploration, an event. But Marilyn was burning with unrealized potential. She had to find some way to develop and release it.

  * * *

  Naturally Marilyn became closer to Milton Greene, who had always recognized her as an exceptional human being and singular talent—at the moment, that was oxygen to her. With her marriage unraveling, Marilyn needed a champion more than anything else.

  Greene himself wanted to expand his creativity by branching out into the movie world. In his vision he saw himself forming a company with Marilyn. In late 1954 it seemed that anything was possible for her.

  * * *

  Back in Los Angeles, Marilyn began talking to Joe about a divorce—although she was wounded by it. She informed him that they would no longer share a bedroom in the house. DiMaggio kept thinking that she wouldn’t go through with it, and, in her fear of being alone and unloved, she continued to give mixed signals, sleeping with him the night that she filed for divorce, and even on the night the divorce was actually granted. It was a way for Marilyn to assure herself that his love would remain solid—and through the years she’d turn to him again and again. Through triumphs and tragedies, affairs, movies, and even another marriage, she never let DiMaggio go completely—and he continued to hold on to her.

  On October 6, on the arm of celebrity lawyer Jerry Geisler, a very tearful Marilyn announced to a mob of reporters that she was filing for divorce. Geisler would handle Marilyn in what she planned to be a very quick, friendly, and uncontested divorce from DiMaggio.

  DiMaggio was in fact devastated. His obsession with Marilyn exploded publicly and embarrassingly weeks after she filed for divorce on November 5, 1954. As his confusion, passion, and anger muddled, he was determined to prove that Marilyn was having an affair with her vocal coach from Fox, Hal Schaefer.

  If DiMaggio had caught Marilyn in an adulterous situation he could have used the evidence to stop the divorce proceedings. Years later Schaefer admitted to a relationship: “Being in love with me was not permanent in any fashion with Marilyn. It was very difficult for her to hold on to anything. Because of her childhood she was standing on sand all the time. She didn’t have any foundation.”

  DiMaggio was convinced that they were using the apartment of Marilyn’s friend Sheila Stewart for trysts. While he was having dinner with Frank Sinatra, the two cooked up a harebrained scheme. The plan was to break into the apartment where they believed the couple were staying and catch them in the act of making love.

  The two powerful celebrities had two detectives, Barney Ruditsky and Phil Irwin (and possibly a few other hired men), meet them at the apartment—to knock down the door. It sounded like an explosion. What turned this crime of passion into “theater of the absurd” was that the four men smashed into the wrong apartment, that of a fifty-year-old neighbor, Florence Kotz, who was fast asleep in her bed and later described it as a “night of terror.”

  Embarrassing as it was all around, it only cemented further Marilyn’s reputation as a woman who could drive men mad. Two powerhouses, Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, had been embroiled in an escapade provoked by a preoccupation with her romantic activities. “The wrong door raid,” as it came to be known, only fanned the flames of the public’s burning fascination with the love life of Marilyn Monroe.

  Marilyn continued making plans to form an independent film production company with Milton Greene. She took off, leaving a series of forgettable scripts originally intended for her. “I’m leaving Hollywood and coming to New York,” Marilyn declared. “I feel I can be more myself there. After all, if I can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all?”

  TWELVE

  MARILYN INC.

  Wearing a brunette wig and traveling under the name Zelda Zonk, on December 23, 1954, Marilyn flew back to New York with the express intention of reinventing herself. For the time being she would be staying with Milton and Amy Greene.

  Milton Greene’s home in Connecticut had a barn he had converted to a studio for himself. Greene fixed it up for Marilyn to stay in. It was a perfect place for her to find temporary refuge. Since it was separate from the main house, she had the security of a nearby family who she felt cared for her and were trying to help her—sometimes she babysat for Greene’s one-year-old son, Joshua (she would play with him for hours)—and yet she had the privacy, the alone time she needed. She walked in the woods for hours every day. It was the first time she had ever lived in an organized home, and Marilyn found herself fascinated by the ordered way Amy Greene ran the house: The beds were made, meals were prepared, the dishes were done. “They’re the only real family I’ve ever known,” she gushed.*

  But Marilyn was not so immersed in her life in Connecticut that she was not thinking about her career. One night Tennessee Williams came over and announced to Marilyn, “I’m finishing a new play called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I want you to play Maggie.” The play was a lusty southern drama, and Marilyn loved the idea of playing the sexually frustrated Maggie, who is constantly trying to seduce her impotent (latent homosexual) husband so that they can produce an heir and get a big share of his dying father’s inheritance. For several weeks she talked of nothing else. Knowing her inability to get anywhere on time, in addition to her extreme nervousness in public, Milton talked her out of live theater. “I don’t think you could do this, kiddo,” he said. “You’re a movie star.”

  * * *

  Greene had his lawyers, Frank Delaney, Irving Stein, and Lloyd Wright, go over Marilyn’s old contract with Fox. (These lawyers would only be paid sporadically. Marilyn was again broke—and was expected to remain so until Marilyn Monroe Productions was official and was actually bringing in a profit.) The legal
team felt there were enough loopholes to get Marilyn out of it. There was another contract with Fox that Charles Feldman had drawn up but Marilyn had never signed. “You can’t have two contracts at the same time, both invalid,” Greene declared.

  On January 7, 1955, Marilyn and Milton officially launched Marilyn Monroe Productions at a press cocktail party, held in the Upper East Side apartment of the lawyer Frank Delaney. Eighty handpicked journalists and celebrity friends attended, along with wealthy businessmen whom Greene hoped might become investors.

  Being the main asset of the company that bore her name, the “new” Marilyn, in white satin, looked every inch the movie star that defined the old Monroe. Marilyn was the president of Marilyn Monroe Productions, owning 51 percent of the shares of her own company. The remaining shares belonged to Milton Greene, who would act as vice president. “It feels wonderful being incorporated!” Marilyn exclaimed.

  Fox—hearing of Marilyn’s new production company—was in a dither. They released a statement saying that she was still very much under contract with them. They claimed ownership of Marilyn and took responsibility for her success.

  Marilyn did not want to cut ties with Fox completely. In her mind her company and an agreement with Fox could coexist. She tried to clarify her intentions: “I’ve never said I won’t make pictures for 20th Century-Fox. I think The Seven Year Itch is the best picture I ever made. I love working with Billy Wilder, and I learned a lot from him. I need somebody to help me, and he gave me great help.”

  * * *

  For the time being Marilyn moved into the Gladstone Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side, and began to take some acting classes with Constance Collier, the seventy-seven-year-old English stage and screen actress who had also coached Audrey Hepburn and Vivien Leigh.* She would return to the Greene’s house on weekends. But her ambition was to study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and she was already making plans to become part of the classes there.

  At the urging of Elia Kazan, Marilyn joined the Actors Studio, where she would learn the Method, a technique developed by Strasberg based on the teachings of Russian theater innovator Konstantin Stanislavsky. Founded in 1947 by Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, it was a place where professional and aspiring actors could study the art of acting. It was now run by Strasberg.

  The basic philosophy of Method acting is “sense memory,” meaning that actors should call up a memory from their own life experience to re-create the same emotional state as the character they are playing. Strasberg encouraged actors to be introspective. He would ask: “What would motivate me, the actor, to behave the way the character does?” This was the serious approach to acting that Marilyn had been craving. All along she had had the feeling that there were better ways for her to dredge up deeper-felt performances, to become a more nuanced actress—by incorporating emotions from her personal history into her characterizations, now she felt she had found them.

  The Actors Studio was a nonprofit organization that was supported by contributions and benefits. It was a prestigious establishment. Actors who belonged to the studio at one time or another were Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, James Dean, and Marilyn’s friend Shelley Winters, among many others.

  It was stars like these that gave the studio its prestige. Imagine what a name like Marilyn Monroe could do by being associated with the Actors Studio—the nation’s greatest celebrity giving up everything to come and study with Lee Strasberg! He wanted her as a student, to help her accomplish her dreams, but he also had one eye on the amount of publicity and money her name would bring to the school.

  Since this style of acting relied on understanding past experiences and behavior, psychoanalysis was recommended. That is not to suggest that Marilyn started psychoanalysis for the sole reason of improving her acting—being analyzed was all the rage at the time—but it certainly was one of the motivating factors. Therapy, she thought, would unlock her mind and slowly free her of the torments of her past.

  On the recommendation of Milton Greene, she started seeing Dr. Margaret Hohenberg—who had been his analyst for several years—five times a week.

  Going into deep therapy did indeed open up a terrifying can of worms in Marilyn. With Hohenberg she explored her lack of self-esteem, her obsessive need for the approval of others, her fear of being used and abandoned, and her inability to have lasting relationships. The hurt, isolation, sexual abuse, abandonment, and humiliation were brought to the surface and would become a defining factor in her work, relationships, and life: It would eat away at what little confidence and self-worth she had, and ultimately destroy her.

  From this point on, both Lee Strasberg and his wife, Paula—a plump, dramatic, anxious woman who had once been an actress and believed in the Method—would play very important roles in Marilyn’s life. When Strasberg first met Marilyn, he was struck by this already extraordinarily popular movie star’s burning desire to be a serious actress. He was taken by her intelligence, charisma, and questioning mind.

  Marilyn had almost no confidence in herself, so she found people to have it for her. With her substantial beauty and special qualities, it wasn’t difficult to find friends, photographers, agents, and lovers who gave varying degrees of encouragement. When one of them did something that she perceived as a slight or an insult, she left them and found someone else to foster her belief in her worth.

  Almost immediately Strasberg began devoting himself to Marilyn. And she, always on the lookout for a mentor who instilled faith, looked to Strasberg as a father-figure Svengali. Studying with Strasberg would improve her acting, but it also slowly destroyed any kind of work ethic she had.

  All that mattered now was giving the most perfectly nuanced and real performance possible—to hell with schedules, direction, or even written lines. It would also worsen her fear of the camera and her ability to perform in any kind of professional manner. From now on Marilyn demanded even more from herself. Every time she stepped in front of a movie camera (which would become less and less frequent), it became pure torture.

  * * *

  Marilyn soon became a surrogate daughter to Lee and Paula, which upset the balance of the Strasberg family. Lee and Paula already had two children, their seventeen-year-old daughter, Susan, who was already making a name for herself as an actress, and a younger teenage son, Johnny. Often Marilyn would stay for dinner after her private class.

  Along with the Greenes, the Strasbergs became her second adopted family in New York. In stark contrast to the outwardly structured and relatively calm life she lived in Connecticut, the Strasbergs’ Manhattan apartment was filled with emotional chaos and fractured egos that led to fighting and dysfunction. Marilyn’s presence added to this because Strasberg had been more or less neglectful of his two children when they were growing up. Now they saw him treat Marilyn as if she were his only child.

  “Come over whenever you like,” she was told. Soon Marilyn was going to their apartment very often. Even though this was a hopeful period in Marilyn’s life, her darkness always found its way to the surface—and she would try to quelch it with her sleeping medications and champagne.

  Before long Marilyn was showing up at the Strasbergs’ apartment in the middle of the night, zonked out on sleeping pills, her hair a mess, haphazardly dressed in mismatched clothing—mumbling that she couldn’t sleep. Paula might make some tea for her, and later Johnny would give her his bed while he slept on the couch. Lee would cradle Marilyn’s head, singing her lullabies, stroking her blond locks. “She didn’t get hugged at all when she was a child,” he’d murmur to his daughter, Susan, who sometimes watched, confused and hurt, from the doorway. Her father had never treated her like that, and she would feel resentful.

  Susan had already costarred in the movie version of Picnic and had recently been cast in the lead role in the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. But even she paled in comparison to Marilyn, and would admit that she sometimes felt jealous of her. Others who were close to the family say it was Marilyn w
ho was envious of Susan, who was already being taken seriously as an actress.

  As a new member of a dysfunctional family, Marilyn indulged her own dysfunctions. The psychotherapy was stirring up her demons, and she let them roam free through the Strasberg household. One night, coming home from the theater, Susan witnessed a heavily drugged Marilyn emerge from her brother’s bedroom, where she had been sleeping. Her body was exposed through a flimsy, open robe. She watched as the nation’s most adored star crawled sluggishly on all fours, like an injured animal, across the hallway floor toward her parent’s room. She slumped in front of the bedroom door mumbling, “Lee, Lee.” It was such a disturbing sight: Dear, sweet, delightful Marilyn—so charming during the day—driven by her demons to this pathetic state at night. Eventually Lee came out, half asleep himself, and walked Marilyn back to his son’s empty bedroom. Susan stayed in the shadows at the end of the hallway, watching.

  Some, like Susan, wondered if there might be sexual feelings between Marilyn and Strasberg. Marilyn understood the reaction she caused in the men who came in contact with her. Almost all of them felt her sexual pull. She wasn’t ashamed of sex and on occasion would offer herself to the men in her life who were important to her—she didn’t view it as something wrong, as long as it was of her choosing. Sometimes it was as if it were an act she felt was needed to get out of the way so they could get down to the relationship they were supposed to have with her. It might be a way of connecting them even more strongly to her, making them more devoted. Other times it was a way of rewarding them with an especially satisfying prize for being kind. Most friends agree that Lee Strasberg turned her down, but that didn’t stop her from teasing him, flirting with him. That was inherent in Marilyn.

  At first, she was too shy and afraid to attend classes at the Actors Studio and continued to study privately with Lee at his apartment. Over time she worked up the courage to attend sessions at the Actors Studio on Tuesdays and Fridays.