by Donald Spoto
Marilyn’s first leading role, as the psychotic baby-sitter in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952).
Recovering from her appendectomy (1952).
Preparing for the interior closeups in River of No Return (1952).
As the nearsighted Pola in How To Marry a Millionaire, with David Wayne (1953).
With Betty Grable at a premiere (1953).
With Jane Russell at Grauman’s Chinese, after immortalizing their hand and footprints in the theater’s forecourt (1953).
Joe and Marilyn: wedding day, San Francisco (1954).
Singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” for the troops in Korea (February 1954). (Photo by Ted Cieszynski)
Arriving at an army outpost in Korea to entertain troops (February 1954). (Photo by Sakamoto; copyright by T. R. Fogli)
With her good friend and makeup artist Allan Snyder, on the set of There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). (From the collection of Allan Snyder)
Recording for RCA Records (1954).
Lexington Avenue, New York: filming The Seven Year Itch (1954). The actual skirt-blowing shots were eventually recreated in the Hollywood studio.
On location in New York for The Seven Year Itch—a shot arranged for the press but not included in the film (1954). (From the collection of Chris Basinger)
The daily tutorials in breathing and diction had an immediate and not entirely felicitous effect on Marilyn’s speech and her subsequent reading of lines before the camera. Because Natasha had a mania for clarity, she forced Marilyn to repeat every speech until each syllable fairly clicked and then to move her lips before speaking. She was especially fierce on the sharpness of final dentals, and so Marilyn had to recite over and over such sentences as “I did not want to pet the dear, soft cat” until every “d” and “t” was unnaturally stressed and each word distinct from the preceding and the following.
Unfortunately, this exercise quickly ossified into a strained and affected manner of on-screen speech it would take years (and eventually a new coach) to overcome. The exaggerated diction, the lip movements before and during her lines, the overstated emphasis on each syllable—all the verbal tics and peculiarities for which Marilyn Monroe was often vilified by critics—owed to the tutelage of Natasha Lytess. And although it would soon be evident that Natasha’s method could work well for comic roles, her next drama coach would have to work double time to relax Marilyn’s speech patterns for serious, more mature parts. In life, however, there was nothing of the breathless, slightly overwrought sensibility that characterized Marilyn’s speech on screen.
As do many forlorn and unrequited lovers, Natasha seized every opportunity to be near the object of her devotion, forming, training and influencing her beyond the exigencies of film acting technique. “I began to feed her mind,” she said years later, adding that she introduced Marilyn to the works of poets and composers. According to Natasha, Marilyn was indeed no intellectual, but was rather “a mental beachcomber, picking the minds of others and scooping up knowledge and opinions.” Natasha provided a cultural stimulation Marilyn had never known. But emotionally the two women were ever at cross-purposes, locked in a collusion of half-met needs.
By late spring of 1948, Marilyn was receiving a regular studio paycheck; still, the Carrolls continued their allowance to her so that she could have extra private sessions with Natasha. And by this time, as Lucille recalled, Marilyn had resigned her avocation as a boulevard hooker. On June 9, Lucille arranged for Marilyn to live at the Studio Club, 1215 North Lodi Street in Hollywood, a two-minute walk from the Los Angeles Orphans Home. A Spanish-Moorish complex with an open courtyard and palm trees in profusion, the Club was a residential hotel for young women aspiring to careers in the arts, and the superintendents managed it like a college dormitory or a branch of the YWCA. There were strict curfews, and gentlemen could visit only in the open atrium-style public lounge. Lucille paid in advance the three-hundred-dollar rent for six months, and Marilyn moved into room number 334.2
With her salary and allowance, she treated herself to a new Ford convertible for which she arranged monthly payments; an expensive, cumbersome professional hair dryer; a commodious supply of cosmetics; books; a phonograph and recordings of classical music. “I felt like I was living on my own for the first time,” she said later. “The Studio Club had rules, but the women in charge were nice, and if you came home after they locked the doors at ten-thirty, a smile and apology would usually be enough to satisfy them.” The supervisors were, in other words, too smart to ask the right questions.
But Columbia had no such reticence in inquiring about fees spent on contract players who were paid but not working on pictures. Talent department chief Max Arnow was often the first to receive calls from the studio’s accountants, and he received one in June relative to Marilyn Monroe. Within days, Arnow told Natasha there would be one less student on her roster by the end of the month, for they would not subsidize her private classes at the studio. “Please don’t do this,” Natasha pleaded. “She’s doing well. She loves the work, and I’m sure I can build her up for you.” That same day, Natasha rang producer Harry Romm, who was producing a B-picture called Ladies of the Chorus. Yes, Romm said, a major role was still uncast.
By early July, after an impressive audition at which she sang one of the film’s songs, Marilyn was hired; the picture was made on the cheap in ten days. She had the role of Peggy Martin, a chorus girl whose mother (played by Adele Jergens) tries to dissuade her from marrying a handsome socialite—a union that can only end in disaster, mother insists, just as hers once did because of “class differences.” In the tradition of Hollywood’s democratic approach to everything including romantic musicals, the one-hour picture ends happily with the triumph of true love (if not of narrative honesty or social reality).
With her long, flowing and silky hair redyed a glistening blond and styled like Rita Hayworth’s, Marilyn brightened a dull and cliché-ridden script. Although Natasha’s supervision had rendered her speech too deliberate and her gestures so overrehearsed they frequently seemed mechanical, Marilyn seemed to glow—especially in scenes with her leading man (Rand Brooks) whose character’s nervousness merely encourages her to take charge of the situation. A raised eyebrow, a sudden drop in voice and there was a strong undertow of feminine wiles to her characterization. Especially in her two songs (“Anyone Can See I Love You” and “Everybody Needs a Da-da-daddy”), Marilyn revealed she had more talent than the film required. For the first time, she sang in a film—and very well, too, with a mellow, slightly smoky quality, an intriguing fusion of girlish innocence and womanly enterprise.
Her fellow players liked her, and there was talk around the lot that Marilyn was someone to watch at work. According to Milton Berle, who met her that year, there was no phony artifice about her, no airs or affectation. She wanted very much to be a star, he recalled, “but first of all she wanted to be somebody to herself.” Adele Jergens agreed that Marilyn was fiercely earnest about Ladies of the Chorus, eager to make herself agreeable by arriving on the soundstage early with her lines word-perfect for every shooting call. “She told me very tearfully she had lost her mother, and that, just like the chorus girls of the story, she knew what social ostracism was like. Marilyn was the sort of girl you instinctively wanted to protect, even though she obviously had brains and probably didn’t need much protection.”
In this Jergens was quite correct, for during rehearsals for Ladies of the Chorus, Marilyn had met and speedily fallen in love with the studio’s music arranger and vocal coach, Fred Karger. Ten years older, Karger at thirty-two was a handsome, blond-haired lothario, placid and polite with colleagues but since his recent divorce bitter toward women. Some provided him with fawning comfort, however, and at that time he lived comfortably in a rambling house with his mother, his young daughter, his divorced sister and her children—an extended family to which Marilyn quickly became attached. To Natasha, Marilyn confided that “the only security I hope for is to be married, and Freddy is the m
an of my dreams.”
On September 9, 1948, with Ladies of the Chorus completed, Marilyn’s contract at Columbia expired and no renewal was offered—a repudiation Cohn and Arnow may well have regretted the following month, when she received a favorable notice in the trade publication Motion Picture Herald. “One of the bright spots [in Ladies of Chorus] is Miss Monroe’s singing,” wrote critic Tibor Krekes. “She is pretty and, with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise”—hardly a rave, but nevertheless a gratifying first review that did not alter Cohn’s decision. His major star was Rita Hayworth, just as Fox had Betty Grable and MGM had Lana Turner; none of them was listening to Harry Lipton or Lucille Ryman when they spoke of a potentially sensational new movie star named Marilyn Monroe with unusual qualities and the determination to have them recognized. “Under Marilyn’s baby-doll, kitten exterior, she [was] tough and shrewd and calculating,” was Lucille’s assessment. But this was not enough to get her career moving at a more rapid rate. No one saw her comic potential, no one assessed her instinctive flair—perhaps partly because of the cliché about attractive young blondes.
There was, then, a second hiatus in her career, without prospects of advancement. According to Lucille, this encouraged Marilyn in an ingenious but eventually futile scheme to quit the Studio Club forever and to move in with the Kargers, the better to abet her prospects of marriage—not to replace employment, but in fact to work for it within the sunnier atmosphere of a loving family. Therefore when Fred drove her home after their first date, she directed him not to the Studio Club but to a grimy, flea-infested Hollywood tenement (recently abandoned by another Columbia starlet); this, she said gloomily, was all she could afford. Briefly, the plot worked, and for three weeks she lived with the Kargers on Harper Avenue, south of Sunset Boulevard.
This deception, like those she tried with the Carrolls, was another little scenario, the invention of a shrewd young woman who was quickly learning when to adopt a dramatic pose: if it was lacking at key moments, Marilyn would provide it from the present or contrive it from the past. But there is also something slightly pathetic about such conduct, and touchingly childlike about her longing to be part of a family. Fred’s mother and sister liked her enormously, and this affection she exploited, attaching herself again to a surrogate family and helping with chores to prove she would be a good wife for Fred and stepmother to his daughter.
But soon the Studio Club rang up Columbia’s talent department to ask her whereabouts, and the next afternoon Fred delivered her back to the Club. “He said that because I lied about this, he couldn’t trust me with anything,” Marilyn said later. “He didn’t think I would be a good example to the children in his family. It made me feel pretty rotten.” Given Marilyn’s psychological needs and Karger’s refusal to meet them, both of them seem to have overreacted. The event did not prevent their romance from lasting until the end of 1948, but Karger thenceforth insisted that marriage to Marilyn was not in his plans.3 “This made her miserable,” according to Natasha. “Many times after she had been with him there were tears in her eyes.” Predictably (indeed, wisely), Natasha’s advice was that Marilyn ought to end the liaison.
Whereas Karger’s emotional distance kept the affair essentially physical and limited Marilyn’s expectations, he did not at all restrain himself professionally in his efforts on her behalf. In addition to vocal training, he advised her on wardrobe and etiquette, counsel she immediately followed. That winter, Fred also took her to the orthodontist Dr. Walter Taylor and paid for the correction of an overbite, and at the same time her teeth were bleached: they had looked fine for modeling photos, but movie cameras were another matter. By the end of the year, after she had worn corrective braces and retainers, the contour of her upper jaw was more even and her smile brighter. For this improvement, Marilyn offered herself to Fred all the more importunately. He accepted her embraces but continued to reject any talk of matrimony.
But for all the specific assistance, there remains the brutal paradox that the Monroe-Karger affair was characterized by an abusive quality that was sadly consistent with her history. She confided to Natasha at the time (and three years later to director Elia Kazan) that Karger was constantly critical of her, that he derided her wardrobe and speech and said that her only real talent emerged when she was in bed. Because Karger’s low appraisal coincided with her own, she was drawn to him almost obsessively. Ever longing to reverse his estimation, to prove herself decent and worthy of love, she effectively debased herself, begged for endorsement and always made herself sexually available. And the more he acted the superior with a lightly veiled contempt, the more she tried to win him over. Father figure, lover and artistic mentor, Karger offered everything Marilyn thought she longed for. Remote and condescending, he was also the familiar man of her life history. In this regard (just as with Dougherty), she became a little girl eager to ingratiate herself, to please, to win the love of a protective older man. Likewise, Natasha—who so patiently longed for her—was the woman from whom Marilyn desired maternal support; in the cases of both Karger and Lytess, however, the relationships were doomed by almost immeasurable inequality of feeling. Marilyn loved Fred far more than he desired her, while Natasha desired Marilyn much more than she was loved in return.
Thanks to the Carrolls, Marilyn’s unemployment that autumn of 1948 did not mean penury. But they did insist that she continue her lessons with Natasha (for which they paid) and that she audition for roles at the Bliss-Hayden Theater.
On her way to one tryout in October, a fortuitous accident occurred. Never a particularly cautious or observant driver, she smashed into the rear of a car on Sunset Boulevard and immediately a crowd gathered. Neither she nor the other driver was injured, but Marilyn—wearing red spiked heels and a red-and-white polka-dot sundress two sizes too small—caused a minor sensation. Among the bystanders was a former Associated Press cameraman named Tom Kelley, then an independent photographer noted for superb work that often included Hollywood’s most photogenic models. When Marilyn said she was late for an important meeting and had no money for a taxi, Kelley gave her five dollars and his business card. She thanked him, called Harry Lipton to deal with the accident and raced off to her appointment. The meeting with Kelley augured more favorably than the audition, which did not have a happy outcome.
Nor did her affair with Fred Karger, which by Christmas was seriously foundering. “Marilyn was beginning to see how she was hurting herself with him,” Natasha said a few years later. “She was in love with somebody who was treating her miserably, as a convenience. All the time, she was so nice to his family and to his daughter. Marilyn would have loved to marry him, even though he was impossible. She thought love would change him. I hoped she would somehow be distracted from this relationship.”
Natasha’s wish was granted, but not as she expected. At a New Year’s Eve party given by producer Sam Spiegel, Marilyn was introduced to Johnny Hyde, executive vice-president of the William Morris Agency and one of Hollywood’s most powerful representatives. Before the night was over, Hyde was besotted, and not with liquor. During the first week of January 1949, he prevailed on Marilyn to accompany him on a short vacation to Palm Springs, where he spoke of her career prospects and took her to bed. From that night, Johnny Hyde was desperately in love. But Marilyn was not, and when she next saw Natasha and told her the news, her teacher shrugged and muttered the old French idiom—Un clou chasse l’autre: One man goes and another takes his place.
Karger’s successor could not have been more different. That season, Marilyn was twenty-two, Johnny Hyde, fifty-three. Born Ivan Haidabura in Russia, he emigrated to America at the age of ten with his family, a troupe of acrobats. Never strong in childhood and often an unwell young man with various cardiopulmonary ailments, Johnny became an agent in New York and proceeded to Hollywood in 1935, where he succeeded as an astute developer and manager of talent; among his many clients were Lana Turner, Betty Hutton, Bob Hope and Rita Hayworth. Barely five feet tall, with sha
rp features, thinning hair and a generally sickly appearance, he was nothing like a glamorous industry denizen. He was nonetheless very much respected and wielded considerable influence. Although a husband and father, Johnny was never deterred from a brief romance or a quick conquest—even by a serious heart condition for which, by his fifties, he was under weekly medical observation.
From the night he met Marilyn, Johnny Hyde became a victim of a fierce sexual obsession for this new, formidably young mistress. For her part, Marilyn loved Johnny as if he were her lost father. She learned from him, and, especially since she was not progressing with Harry Lipton, she wanted to benefit from Johnny’s representation—a shift easily accomplished when Hyde bought out her Lipton contract. Within weeks, Johnny was devoting virtually his entire professional and personal time to her.
Before spring turned to summer 1949, Johnny left his family. Determined to make Marilyn the second Mrs. Hyde, he brought her from the Studio Club to live with him in a rented house at 718 North Palm Drive, Beverly Hills. To avoid press problems, however, she agreed to maintain a tiny one-room apartment at the modest Beverly Carlton Hotel, 9400 Olympic Boulevard, where she received mail and professional notices. According to Elia Kazan and Natasha Lytess, Marilyn insisted that she would not marry him although she continued to manifest her gratitude sexually. Her rejection of his proposal and concomitant offer of wealth only made him more persistent: “I’m not going to live long, Marilyn,” he told her repeatedly. “Marry me and you’ll be a very rich woman.” This did not alter her decision, for according to her own code she would not wed someone with whom she was not in love. Also, in refusing Hyde’s offer of marriage Marilyn was the more realistic partner, foreseeing the contumely that would otherwise have been directed at her: she would be called a gold digger, not only romancing for her career but even marrying a man known to be gravely ill.