Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  Peter Bogdanovich, who would go on to become a successful director, encountered Marilyn there and sneaked a few glances. He kept doing so. “She was so extraordinarily wrapped up in every syllable that Lee Strasberg was uttering, not as a student but as a worshipper,” Bogdanovich recalled. “She looked like her life depended on understanding everything he was saying. I’ve never seen such kind of desperation, actually. It was touching.”

  Marilyn was older than most of the actors in the class, and they did their best to appear uninterested in this superstar among them. They considered themselves serious actors—Marilyn was merely a glitzy film personality.

  THIRTEEN

  NEW YORK ACTRESS

  Away from the pressures of actually making movies, Marilyn enjoyed being a movie star. Exhilarated and recharged by all that was happening to her in New York, March 1955, would become one of the highest-profile months of Marilyn’s life. The photojournalist Ed Feingersh followed her around for a week in New York, capturing her in her hotel suite putting on makeup before attending the theater, being fitted for a costume for a charity event at Madison Square Garden (where she would ride a pink elephant), and taking a Manhattan subway. It was Feingersh who shot the famous photo of Marilyn dabbing Chanel No. 5 between her breasts.

  * * *

  The perfect event that connected Marilyn with the Actors Studio was the world premiere of East of Eden, which had been directed by Elia Kazan and would introduce James Dean to the moviegoing public. The special screening was to be a fund-raiser for the Actors Studio.

  Marilyn agreed to be one of the celebrity ushers at the benefit premiere on March 9. Other ushers would include Carol Channing, Eva Marie Saint, and Jayne Meadows. The initial price for a seat at the screening ranged from $50 to $150. But when it was announced that Marilyn Monroe would be an usher, tickets were scalped for three times as much.

  The night of the East of Eden premiere was charged with excitement, crowds lining the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of Marilyn. After the screening Marilyn’s devoted teenage fan James Haspiel waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of Marilyn as she exited the theater to go to the afterparty. At exactly midnight, the doors reopened and one could see about a dozen policemen with a tousled blonde head in the middle. “It was no small task getting Marilyn across that jammed street,” Haspiel recalled. “I remember more than one person suddenly pirouetting out of the crowd, screaming hysterically, ‘I touched her!’”

  One of the notables attending the afterparty was Arthur Miller. He managed to break through the throngs that surrounded Marilyn that evening and spoke to her very briefly. Through the years they had both kept a line of communication open with notes and letters, maintaining a little flicker of hope that they might one day be able to pick up where they had left off. Later that evening Miller asked Paula Strasberg for Marilyn’s number.

  * * *

  In April, Marilyn subleased an apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, and Miller came to see her there. Milton Greene was still very much a part of her life, but Manhattan was becoming her real home, and she spent less time in Connecticut now. Miller and Marilyn were meeting regularly, and—even though she had the most recognizable face on earth—they managed to keep it a secret: Marilyn had become a master of disguises.

  * * *

  A line could be drawn through Marilyn’s life, separating it before her move to New York and after. This was her Renaissance period. Her experience of living in New York City, the people she would meet, the encounters she would have, the knowledge she would acquire would change her forever. As low and desperate as her evenings could be, she managed to face some days with curiosity and exhilaration. Marilyn would usually take a taxi to the Actors Studio classes and her private lessons with Strasberg. She would go around town with a kerchief over her hair and a plain polo coat. Often she would wear jeans and “sensible shoes.”

  When the weather was good and she wasn’t too exhausted, she would walk back to her hotel. It delighted her that often when she walked down the street, guys would whistle at her. “You know she had a walk,” Marilyn’s press agent, Rupert Allan, noted. Often they didn’t recognize her as Marilyn Monroe—and that especially pleased her. She realized she didn’t have to be painted and groomed to get men’s attention. “She loved it. Never with any vanity. She just thought it was a tribute to her sex.”

  Marilyn loved to tell the story about the time when—while she was in a taxi on her way to class—she noticed the driver kept looking at her in the rearview mirror. When he dropped her off he finally said to her, “You know, you’re a helluva lot prettier than Marilyn Monroe because you don’t use so much makeup.”

  * * *

  It took many months of observing classes, but Marilyn finally worked up the courage to perform a scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie in front of a live audience. The role was that of a woman who had been left by her sailor father on a farm owned by relatives. Ultimately she flees from the family, which treats her cruelly, and eventually becomes a prostitute. She would be performing the scene with the much-respected actress Maureen Stapleton, who would be playing Marthy—an older waterfront woman she meets in a bar.

  One of the rules at the Actors Studio was that after a scene the audience was expected not to applaud. Yet after Marilyn’s performance the packed house broke out into spontaneous applause. They were astonished at her skill and her depth. Lee Strasberg himself observed, “It was wonderful. The luminous quality that she had on the screen was, oddly enough, not reduced but in some strange way enlarged in life.”

  When she wasn’t in class or seeing her psychiatrist, she’d spend hours walking the streets, browsing the museums, cafés, and theaters. New York was an adventurous new place to her, and Marilyn never grew tired of exploring the city. Before the move she was often too shy and fearful to venture out, but the complexity, mystery, and earthy charms of Manhattan invigorated her.

  She loved everything about New York—the fleeting encounters, the mysteries, each exchange of information with a stranger. In Los Angeles it had always been about networking and climbing and trying to make a connection that might lead to the next break. In New York she learned how to live just for its own sake—there was no need always to be selling herself; she could be herself and let people take it or leave it.

  In the evenings she’d go out, glammed up in her movie-star-persona, with Milton Greene discreetly, protectively hovering in the background. She had discovered the New York theater scene, and she loved going to Broadway shows; she was fascinated to observe great actors carve out fully sustained performances in the course of one evening—and being able to re-create it night after night. These were real actors to her. During 1955 she saw shows like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which Tennessee Williams had originally offered Marilyn as a vehicle for her Broadway debut), Inherit the Wind, Damn Yankees, Teahouse of the August Moon, and many others. Rex Harrison was surprised and a little chagrined to find Marilyn in his dressing room after a performance of My Fair Lady. Harrison couldn’t stop himself from staring at Marilyn, who was “doing wondrous things while looking at herself in two mirrors simultaneously.”

  * * *

  The sight of Marilyn, lost in her own thoughts, staring into a mirror, was not an unusual one. Often at the studio she’d be discovered sitting naked before her dressing-room mirror “fascinated [by] her own beauty.” Once Truman Capote, left at a dinner table in a Chinese restaurant while Marilyn lingered in the ladies’ room, finally went to see what was keeping her. He found her gazing dreamily into the mirror. “What are you doing?” Capote demanded. “Looking at Her,” Marilyn responded. (The Rostens, too, would notice her staring at the mirror, perfecting her makeup, wanting to—needing to—present “Marilyn Monroe” at times, even in relaxed, casual situations.)

  One of her press agents explained: “When she goes to the powder room to wash her hands I have to send someone in to hand her out. She’s just standing there before the mirror, transfixed, as if trying to believ
e the beautiful dame staring back really is Marilyn Monroe.” Natasha Lytess also remembered Marilyn’s relationship with her looking-glass: “She was naked all day long! And I’m not exaggerating! After breakfast … she spent all her days before her mirror, and she put on makeup like a very important surgery.”

  Actually Marilyn’s preoccupation with her reflection was a form of narcissism without vanity. It wasn’t so much that she was in love with the image she saw staring back; rather, she was checking for what was wrong with it, perfecting the reflection, doing her best to live up to the mythological creature she had become. That was the only part of herself she could solidly identify. Her beauty was all she had to shield herself. “She was never happy with herself,” the press agent Rupert Allan noted. “Give her a mirror and she saw all the flaws. And she’d try to disguise them.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in an attempt to woo her back to work, Fox bought the rights to Bus Stop, the critically acclaimed Broadway play by William Inge. Darryl Zanuck was pulling out his hair over her absence. Every month that went by was another month the studio would suffer the loss of the enormous profits her movies brought in. As he had with The Seven Year Itch, he was tempting her back by acquiring the rights to a successful Broadway play with a meaty part for her—that of an uneducated saloon singer who becomes the obsession of a naive cowboy.

  * * *

  “Why do you speak about love? All I could see now is the power she offered me,” Arthur Miller wrote in After the Fall. When Miller left Marilyn in Los Angeles in 1951, without having had sex with her, he said: “I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing.” Now he was ready to walk into that doom.

  By the late summer of 1955 Arthur Miller and Marilyn were secretly in the beginning stages of a full-fledged romance—although he was still married. At last they had a chance to explore the strong feelings that stirred when they first met in 1951. They were both going through great personal changes; it was the perfect time for Miller and Marilyn’s initial attraction to blossom.

  As Marilyn was taking root in New York City, Arthur Miller was turning forty. His approaching midlife most certainly had an effect on his growing desire to have Marilyn in his life. His marriage had been passionless and static. For the most part he viewed the last few years with Mary Slattery Miller as settling for conformity—for the midcentury idea of what a man should be—a monogamous family man with a devoted wife with a spotless reputation. But it was a cold home they lived in, without passion, without satisfaction. When the writer Jeffrey Meyers confronted Mary Slattery Miller about being repeatedly characterized as “a dull, boring, sexless wife who had been cast off when someone better turned up,” she replied simply, “Maybe I was.”

  Miller had always felt secure and even superior in his talent—but his life was lacking in sexuality. Now his ego was stoked by being loved by the world’s greatest symbol of beauty and sex. Miller was no longer in love with his wife, and Marilyn represented the last gasp of a middle-aged man trying to experience carnal delights.

  He was also drying up artistically. Marilyn was a compelling woman. Miller looked to her not only to fulfill him personally but to reboot him creatively. “She was full of the most astonishing turns and revelations about people,” he said. To him the free-spirited and uninhibited Marilyn offered the kind of adventurous freedom and pleasure he had been denying himself his entire life: She would be both a lover and a muse.

  To Marilyn, Miller represented an open door leading to a safe place. Miller was considered one of America’s finest playwrights, a great left-wing progressive thinker, and a New York intellectual. He was a god in her eyes. To her he was the right love in the right moment—exactly what she needed while she was struggling to be taken seriously by the public and her critics and Hollywood (her enemies).

  His name and reputation would become a shield against the jokes that were aimed at her, a guard against the derogatory comments that people made about her. If a man like Miller respected or even—dare she think—loved her, the public, the industry, and the world would regard her as more than a vacuous sexual ornament. “He treated me as a human being,” Marilyn would say. “He was a very sensitive human being, and he treated me as a sensitive person also.”

  * * *

  Arthur Miller would say that he and Marilyn “slept with the sword of guilt between them.” Presumably he felt guilt for abandoning his wife and family. But he also felt guilt for being involved with a woman with Marilyn’s sexual history, which Miller viewed as shameful.

  “I keep trying to teach myself to lose you. But I can’t learn yet,” he said to her.

  “Why must you lose me?” she asked, bewildered, stung.

  He already knew about her reputation for playing the Hollywood sexual game when he met her at Charles Feldman’s party. Then Johnny Hyde had just died, and she went straight into a relationship with Elia Kazan. She also let Miller know she was available. He had heard about other men, too. “I can hate every man you were ever with but I can’t hate you,” Miller wrote to her. Marilyn’s past promiscuity was the real sword between them.

  Her sexual history stained all the good Miller saw in her, and she instinctively felt his guilt.

  A letter from Marilyn to Miller is revealing: “It’s doubly difficult to understand that you, the most different, most beautiful human being, chose me to love.” Miller’s shame made her feel unworthy of him.

  But because they were living in the moment, it was easy for Miller to temporarily block out Marilyn’s past and for her to block out his shame. She blinded herself to the problematic nature of a relationship with Miller. For instance, in the beginning Miller seemed to be tenderly teaching Marilyn about the ways of the world, trying to fill in the gaps in her lack of formal education. Eventually, though, it became apparent that he viewed Marilyn as intellectually beneath him.* “There is a danger for an artist of becoming a man who sees his role as teaching others and pronouncing judgment on one and all,” Elia Kazan stated.

  * * *

  Miller started bringing Marilyn to spend time with his family in Flatbush. “She wanted to be part of our family,” Miller’s sister, the actress Joan Copeland, observed. “My mother made it comfortable for her, and my dad did. I did. So now she was in heaven because she had a nice boyfriend, she had a father, and a girlfriend. So it made her feel like an ordinary person. A real person who has a family.”

  “When she’d come to my parents’ place in Brooklyn,” Copeland continued, “all the kids in the neighborhood would gather outside the house. They’d bring chairs and stools to stand on and get a good look at Marilyn as she was coming and going. They’d wait for her to come out. My mother would come to the door and yell, ‘Go away, children. Go away!’ She’d try to scare them away. Marilyn loved it.”

  * * *

  During this time Miller was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Like most of the people with whom Marilyn was surrounding herself now, Miller was a left-wing thinker. Years before, he had attended some meetings with other writers who identified themselves as communists and supported communist ideology. Because of those meetings Miller was a suspected communist. It’s hard to convey how much fear there was of communism in America, or “the Red Scare,” as it was called in the 1940s and 1950s. Many careers were ruined simply because one was suspected of attending meetings of the Communist Party. Since America was at such odds with Russia, the country lived in a state of fear of anything and anyone associated with communism.

  If you were targeted and brought before the committee, one of the things you were expected to do in order to save yourself was to identify other people you saw at meetings or whom you suspected of having ties to the Communist Party. This Miller refused to do, which only made him more of an honorable man in Marilyn’s eyes.*

  * * *

  In early 1956, 20th Century-Fox announced to the press that Marilyn would soon be returning to Hollywood to resume her career and make a movie fo
r them. With Marilyn staying away for one year, Fox finally realized that they would have to give in to some of her demands.

  Her salary was raised from a weekly check to one hundred thousand dollars per film. She would also be allowed to make one movie a year away from Fox with other studios. Remarkably, she would be contracted to make only four movies for Fox over the next seven years (an indication of how profitable her movies had been).

  Most important to her, Marilyn was given director approval—meaning that if Fox was unable to sign a director she approved of, she didn’t have to appear in the film. But one major concession Marilyn was unable to get under her new contract was script approval.

  The fact that Marilyn was given director approval for her movies was quite revolutionary. No female star up to this point had had so much creative control with her studio. Other stars noted her victory with admiration, and Marilyn set a precedent for their own negotiations in the coming years.

  She signed the contract on December 31, 1955. Marilyn’s first movie under her new Fox contract would be Bus Stop, which would be made in conjunction with Marilyn Monroe Productions. What was most gratifying to Marilyn was that it demonstrated that the dumb blonde was not so dumb after all. “There is persuasive evidence that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,” Time proclaimed.

  Although Marilyn had demonstrated her power, which was gratifying, it came at a cost. The male-dominated film industry would never forgive Marilyn for her victory. The notion that she had dared to break away and make demands only made her seem ungrateful, impertinent, demanding, and unreasonable. The result was that what she wanted most from her studio—respect as a performer—was not granted. In that way it was not really a victory. If anything, the movie industry now disliked her more than ever for not playing the game by their rules.