by Donald Spoto
The Actors Lab was a spinoff of the Group Theater in New York. Under its founding directors Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, the Group—and its leading playwright of social protest, Clifford Odets—offered plays championing the plight of the poor, plays with sharply left-wing messages against capitalism. Although after a decade the troupe formally disbanded in 1940, its members continued to be vital forces in the development of American theater, and during the following decade several of the Group’s actors—Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand; J. Edward Bromberg and Roman Bohnen—tutored students, led scene studies and presented plays for Los Angeles students and theatergoers.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact of Marilyn’s exposure to these New York theater people, to the plays studied and presented and to a company of professionals that was somewhat ragtag but dynamic and full of new ideas. Over ten months in 1947, under the tutelage of Phoebe Brand and her colleagues, Marilyn read and studied—however casually, incompletely and irregularly—at least portions of the following plays that had earlier been offered by the Group Theater in New York:
• 1931, by Claire and Paul Sifton, a play first produced in the year of the title, which explored the problems of an unemployed depression laborer and his girlfriend who finally join Communist sympathizers in New York. Marilyn learned that the New York production had starred Carnovsky, Bromberg, Brand and Odets—a quartet she met one evening that June after a reading of the play.
• Night Over Taos (1932) by Maxwell Anderson, about a revolt against land-grabbers. This play had, in addition to the same cast as 1931, an actress named Paula Miller who was soon to marry the play’s original director, Lee Strasberg. The Strasbergs would eventually become the two most influential people in her acting career.
• Men in White (1933) by Sidney Kingsley, about a young doctor’s struggle with idealism; to the same cast as the previous two was added a young actor named Elia Kazan. Marilyn already knew of him because he had been at Fox when she arrived, directing Gentleman’s Agreement. At the Actors Lab, he was spoken of in almost reverential terms, as a genius of the theater and cinema, an accomplished actor, director and producer. Then thirty-eight, he had returned to New York and was co-founding a new school, the Actors Studio. Kazan and the Studio would also be significant in her personal and professional life.
• Awake and Sing! (1935) by Odets, in which the identical cast played a Bronx family struggling to survive the depression; at the finale, the hero becomes a left-wing agitator. Years later, Marilyn recalled that she wept at the play’s “crazy, destroyed family, and especially at the suicide of that kind old grandfather,” who may well have made her think of her own family and of Tilford Hogan.
• Weep for the Virgins (1935) by Nellise Child, in which Phoebe Brand and Paula Miller, under Cheryl Crawford’s direction, played members of a San Diego family trying to escape the drab environment of a fish cannery during the depression.
• The Case of Clyde Griffiths (1936), by Erwin Piscator and Lena Goldschmidt, in which Brand, Carnovsky, Bohnen and Kazan reinterpreted Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy in terms of the American class struggle.
• Golden Boy (1937), in which the same players (again directed by Strasberg) presented Odets’s drama of a man’s choice between a career as a violinist or as a prizefighter.
In her discussions of this play, Phoebe Brand suggested to the students that this career conflict was present in every serious actor, in every serious artist—indeed, in Odets himself, who was torn between the serious demands of writing for Broadway and the lucrative business of writing for Hollywood. “She asked us to read his play Clash by Night, which had starred Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway,” Marilyn recalled. “It was one of the few plays I thought I could do, because there was the part of a girl who reminded me of myself.”
As Marilyn attended class, studied and asked questions, the same themes resurfaced (social discontent and the plight of the disenfranchised poor) and the same names recurred—Odets and the Strasbergs; Cheryl Crawford; and Elia Kazan. For the present, she came to know only Phoebe Brand and her husband, Morris Carnovsky; at the Lab, Carnovsky was habitually late for rehearsals and tutorials while his wife constantly enjoined punctuality on their students.
For Marilyn, a child of the depression, these plays and discussions had a force and relevance unlike the movies she had acted in, had seen produced at Fox or in movie theaters.
All I could think of was this far, far away place called New York, where actors and directors did very different things than stand around all day arguing about a closeup or a camera angle. I had never seen a play, and I don’t think I knew how to read one very well. But Phoebe Brand and her company somehow made it all very real. It seemed so exciting to me, and I wanted to be part of that life. But I’d never even been out of California.7
To the staff at the Lab, Marilyn seemed shy and self-conscious. According to Phoebe Brand, “she did all her assignments conscientiously” but made no great impression:
I remember her for her beautiful long blond hair. . . . I tried to get through to her and find out more about her, but I couldn’t do it. She was extremely retiring. What I failed to see in her acting was her wit, her sense of humor. It was there all the time—this lovely comedic style, but I was blind to it.8
The Actors Lab was Marilyn’s first introduction to acting as a disciplined and demanding enterprise requiring serious application. Her two roles at Fox had been throwaways, and as she knew from observing others in production, film actors had to remember only a line or two of dialogue at a time. Whereas a day on a movie set could extend to ten or even twelve hours (and the work-week to six days in 1947), the actual working time was brief. Actors were late, lights had to be readjusted, cameras were temperamental, script rewrites were demanded: in such a collaborative medium, executives were delighted if a day’s work produced four minutes of finished film. (The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had worked in Hollywood, once described movie-making as an enterprise in which very many people stand around for a very long time, doing absolutely nothing.)
Practitioners of stagecraft, on the other hand, read, memorized and broke down scenes for analysis, discussed them with the director and designer and, it seemed to Marilyn, generally immersed themselves in a much less lucrative and far more demanding profession. “Movie stars were paid better, and of course the people at the Actors Lab made no secret of how much they resented that,” Marilyn said, adding that she felt a conflict very like that in Odets’s Golden Boy: should she aim for the art or the stardom?
Because she did not want to return to modeling (much less to any other job), Marilyn would not have been able to attend classes at the Actors Lab—much less to feed, clothe and house herself after she was dropped from the Fox roster—were it not for a chance encounter with a generous couple in early August.
This occurred at an annual celebrity golf tournament at the Cheviot Hills Country Club, just across the boulevard from Fox. For the event, pretty young contract players were invited to carry actors’ clubs and bags, making themselves agreeable to the likes of Henry Fonda, James Stewart, John Wayne and Tyrone Power. Two weeks before her contract expired that summer, Marilyn was one of the caddies sent over with the compliments of Twentieth Century–Fox.
She was assigned to John Carroll, a handsome, six-foot-four-inch, forty-two-year-old film actor whose virile good looks were often compared to those of Clark Gable or George Brent. Carroll, a wealthy man who had made wise investments, was married to Lucille Ryman, director of the Talent Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her responsibilities included finding new men and women with star potential (she had signed up Lana Turner, June Allyson and Janet Leigh), then obtaining good scripts for them and supervising their drama, dance, fencing and diction classes at the studio. The Carrolls were also known and admired for helping (with both counsel and cash) several young, impecunious apprentices who showed some promise of movie talent.
Years
later, Lucille clearly recalled that Marilyn wore a tight sweater and white flared shorts to the tournament—but that she was unable to manage Carroll’s heavy golf bag and simply carried a few clubs, occasionally striking attractive poses for the benefit of the attending press. Along with Marilyn’s obvious allure and her evident awareness of it, Lucille Ryman saw a certain childlike simplicity, “the look of a lost waif.” Her sexiness, her delight in herself and her ability to attract attention were somehow neither offensive nor impertinent. “She was such a cute little number,” according to Lucille. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this poor little child, this stray kitten.’ ”
At the end of the day, everyone gathered for drinks round the club bar, and finally Marilyn—the object of considerable male attention—quietly announced to the Carrolls that she had no transportation home, and that she had not eaten since the previous day. Because Lucille had to leave the club to attend a play downtown that evening with a studio colleague, she suggested that John and Marilyn ought to go out for supper before he drove her home.
Which they did, according to Lucille. Later, John told his wife the dialogue that accompanied his delivery of Marilyn to her apartment. This was not at Nebraska Avenue, but at a seedy place in Hollywood to which she had moved in June. She invited him to come in, but he replied that he was tired after the long day and eager to return home.
“But how can I thank you if you don’t come in?” Marilyn asked. John understood the offer but declined it.
“She made a play for him very quickly,” according to Lucille, “but there was one very important quality about John she didn’t take into account: he did not like such overt behavior.”
Lucille did not think Marilyn was right for MGM: “She was cute and sexy, but she didn’t have the leading lady quality that Mr. Mayer was signing up in 1947.” Nevertheless, Lucille and John occasionally helped young actors find a start in the business, and so they invited her to dinner in early September. Marilyn told them how serious she was about her career and how much she loved the Actors Laboratory; she added that she was an orphan with no money, and that she had to leave Nebraska Avenue when her Aunt Ana went into a hospital and new tenants took over the house.
Marilyn then added quite calmly that she put all her money into classes, rent and auto maintenance, and that she got food by offering herself for quick sex with men in cars on side streets near Hollywood or Santa Monica Boulevard. “She really did this for her meals,” according to Lucille. “It wasn’t for cash. She told us without pride or shame that she made a deal—she did what she did, and her customer then bought her breakfast or lunch.” This period of her life she also discussed a few years later with her acting teacher Lee Strasberg: “Marilyn was a call girl . . . and her call-girl background worked against her.”
Before the Carrolls could comment, Marilyn told them that she was terrified of returning to her little apartment. Attempting to cash her last Fox paycheck, she had asked a Hollywood policeman if a local bank might help, although she had no account there. He asked her name and telephone number and cashed the check himself for her; money in hand, she thanked the policeman and left. That night, the same man broke into her apartment and tried to attack her; he fled by a rear door only when Marilyn shrieked so loudly a neighbor came to the front. “I don’t know,” Marilyn concluded. “I have to have a place to sleep. And I have to eat and have a car and pay my way at class. I suppose I’ll have to go on working the Boulevard.” She paused again. “I’ve decided to change my name. To Journey Evers.”
The Carrolls were authentic Good Samaritans, and at once they took action. They lived most of the time at their Granada Hills horse-breeding ranch in the San Fernando Valley, but they also had a top-floor apartment in town at the El Palacio, an elegant Spanish structure at the northeast corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Fountain Avenue. So that Marilyn could continue to attend classes and be available for auditions when Harry Lipton called—without having to “work the Boulevard”—the Carrolls invited her to live rent-free in the apartment’s second suite. As Lucille recalled, “She said she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven, all of which she later admitted was untrue. It was a way of getting us to take her in, to keep her off the streets of Hollywood, and it worked.” Marilyn Monroe was a vulnerable soul, to be sure; but she was also savvy enough to know which tales evoked a sympathetic reaction from this or that person.
According to their records, the Carrolls gave her cash all that September (eighty dollars on September 2; fifty on the fifteenth; another eighty on the twenty-sixth and seventy-five on the twenty-seventh). That autumn, they asked their representative, Albert Blum, to draw up a letter of agreement. They would pay to “Journey Evers, also known as Norma Jeane Dougherty” the regular sum of one hundred dollars weekly “for personal management.” Should she find employment through Blum or the Carrolls, she could repay the money and ten percent would be duly paid to her agent Harry Lipton. Gladys’s daughter had never known such generous support.
Things happened quickly that September. On the twenty-first, Lucille noticed a casting call for a student performance of the 1940 comedy Glamour Preferred, to be performed at the Bliss-Hayden Miniature Theater (later the site of the Beverly Hills Playhouse) on Robertson Boulevard. She immediately telephoned Lila Bliss and her husband Harry Hayden, who welcomed Lucille’s protégés to classes and allowed them to perform onstage without charge because Lucille occasionally brought one of the students over to MGM. The Haydens met Marilyn and days later cast her (with considerable aptness, in light of her invitation to John Carroll) in the supporting role of a Hollywood starlet whose seduction of a glamorous leading man is foiled by the man’s sensible and superior wife.
The month’s run of this amateur production was scheduled to begin on October 12, but rehearsals were stymied by Marilyn’s chronic lateness and her apparent inability to memorize lines. As Lucille learned after a long discussion with her, both problems arose from the girl’s fear of dressing ineptly (she changed clothes several times before leaving the apartment), from a dread of looking unacceptable (she retouched her makeup for hours) and from her terror of failure. In fact she knew the dialogue perfectly, but she stuttered and paused so much that she threw the other student players into total confusion. Marilyn finally managed to stumble her way through two performances which were mercifully unreviewed by the Los Angeles press.9 A few years later, she said that it was a terrible play in any case, and that she only took the role from a sense of obligation to the Carrolls. Her statement did not justify her tardiness, but her critical assessment was on the mark: Glamour Preferred had sunk from sight after an original Broadway run of eleven performances; it has (but for Bliss and Hayden) vanished into oblivion.10
As the autumn passed, the Carrolls found themselves indulgent surrogate parents to Marilyn, who was now begging to spend weekends with them at their ranch so she would not be alone. Lucille and John valued some privacy, however, and they had many tasks as their ranch expanded. One evening Lucille arrived at the apartment to find Marilyn hovering over an array of twenty-five brassieres, for which she had spent an entire week’s allowance. Into each bra Marilyn was packing a wad of tissue, so that her breasts would seem to protrude more perkily. “I sat her down,” Lucille remembered, “and told her this was all very silly.” Marilyn’s reply was simple: “But this is all anyone ever looks at! When I walk down Hollywood Boulevard, everyone will notice me now!”
In November, the Carrolls received a telephone call at the ranch one Friday evening. Marilyn said in a nervous whisper that a teenage Peeping Tom had climbed a ladder and was looking through her bedroom window. The Carrolls knew that no ladder would reach to the third floor, that this was simply Marilyn’s ploy to avoid loneliness and to join them at the ranch. But her recent mention of walking down Hollywood Boulevard alarmed them as much as the fantasy about a Peeping Tom, and Lucille feared that their little stray kitten might become a permanent alleycat; that never having known the secure l
ove of a father at home, Marilyn might seek endlessly for affirmation from men who wanted nothing more than a few moments with her body. At twenty-one she was still drifting, even as she longed for professional and personal stability, and so by December Lucille welcomed Marilyn every weekend at Granada Hills.
At the same time, Marilyn sought constantly to have the Carrolls’ devotion reaffirmed, to be reassured they would not abandon her, for they were indeed surrogate parents. But her conduct was not always apposite. Around the Carroll home she dressed scantily, slept nude with her door open and generally scandalized John Carroll’s mother, who was also visiting. By early 1948, as Lucille Ryman Carroll summarized the situation years later,
Marilyn had become a problem for us. She called me at my office, and John at the studio, as often as four times a day, even though we repeatedly asked her not to. We were in a trap we had unwittingly stepped into. Finally, we had no control over her: she controlled us.
Part of the control was exercised in her blunt disregard for schedules (her own and others’) and her occasional affectation of a mysterious and elusive attitude. After waiting hours for her to arrive at the ranch on several Friday evenings, the Carrolls received a call: “This weekend I’m going to be with some people,” she said vaguely. There was no need for mystery: “Being with some people,” according to Lucille, “meant she was going to be with a photographer for two or three days. The following Monday we found her room littered with photos of herself she studied day and night.”
But then Marilyn got the strange idea that her life with the Carrolls was about to alter dramatically. “Somehow,” according to Lucille,