by Donald Spoto
Roles in two more minor, forgettable pictures followed later that season, at MGM. In Right Cross, she spoke less than twenty words and was again uncredited, flashing briefly across the screen as Dusky Le Doux, characterized in the script as “a new model” with the same implication as she was termed a “niece” in The Asphalt Jungle. At a cocktail lounge, she is approached by a stranger (played by Dick Powell) who invites her to his apartment for a home-cooked dinner and promises, “If you’re good, I’ll tell you the recipe,” to which she replies sarcastically, “I know the ingredients.”
Then, in early spring, Marilyn was pitchforked into an odd movie that quickly vanished before turning up in Australia years after her death. Home Town Story was an industrially financed paean to postwar American corporate ingenuity. Marilyn appeared briefly as Iris, the receptionist in a newspaper office who has no patience with the unwelcome leering of her boss.
Despite Johnny Hyde’s strong recommendation of her to MGM after these two cameos, production chief Dore Schary did not offer a deal for more work. His excuse was that the studio had Lana Turner under contract and therefore no need of a rival blonde; to colleagues like Lucille Ryman Carroll, he expressed a quaint moral outrage at the Hyde-Monroe affair. By April, Marilyn could count nine movie roles in three years, none of them enough to bring her closer to stardom. Ladies of the Chorus was already a forgotten second feature, and The Asphalt Jungle, despite some critical acclaim, was too bleak to win much popular favor.
When not studying with Natasha, Marilyn posed for pinups in evening gowns or swimsuits, scoured the trade dailies and was seen in the movie colony’s dinner-party circuit with Johnny, with whom life became increasingly difficult as his health became ever more fragile. Despite this, he refused to limit himself, escorting Marilyn to an endless round of social and corporate events, presenting her proudly as valuable and available talent. More poignantly, Johnny also wanted Marilyn known around town as his fiancée, the desirable young woman he still hoped to marry.
Fearful of displeasing or alienating her, Johnny acted the nervous, benighted lover, taking action perilous in his condition: with the ardor of a twenty-year-old, he was often breathless and in pain after trying to satisfy what he presumed were her sexual needs. However, as she confided to Lucille, Marilyn felt that Johnny might indeed be more disadvantageous than beneficial to her career, and that marriage would effectively ruin her reputation beyond repair. Despite the imprecations of Johnny’s friends, she was unyielding. “It would be ridiculous to pass myself off as Mrs. Johnny Hyde,” she told Rupert Allan flatly, adding, “I’d be taken less seriously than I am now.”
And that was indeed her primary goal: to become more than an agent’s mistress and a curvaceous window-dressing in minor movies. Natasha had taught her that there was a difficult and demanding craft to be mastered if one were to become an accomplished actress; that Marilyn had to work constantly on clear diction and understated movement. Johnny was more businesslike in his counsel: Marilyn needed only the right project and producer, and the camera could do the rest by capturing her unusual combination of childlike innocence and luminous sex appeal. So far as the art of acting was concerned, he insisted this was an admirable occupation but one not usually necessary to achieve stardom. In the movies, appearances counted most of all, and they were magically altered by lights and lenses, makeup and camera angles, platforms and costumes. Short actors could appear tall; soft voices could be corrected; a mistake could be rectified simply by repeating the scene. Wonders were performed at the editor’s bench, in the sound booths, in the printer’s laboratory.
There were, then, quite different attitudes held by Marilyn’s two counselors. Natasha emphasized classic diction and understated movement; Johnny said that was all very good but Marilyn should above all keep her figure. Ironically, these different attitudes coincided perfectly with the conflict prevalent throughout Marilyn Monroe’s life—her desire to transcend her background and early experience, and the inclination to exploit the limitations it imposed. Johnny saw what she was; Natasha emphasized what she might become.
Although Marilyn had neither the discipline nor the habit of intellectual focus, she was still eager to supplement her education. One day while she was browsing in a Beverly Hills bookstore with Rupert Allan, she purchased a few art books, from whose pages she clipped reproductions of works by Fra Angelico, Dürer and Botticelli. These she attached to the walls of the kitchen and bedroom at Palm Drive, and by her bedside she set a framed photograph of the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse, about whom Marilyn knew little except the woman’s preeminent place in theater history; Natasha, meanwhile, spoke in reverent tones of Duse as a role model for every serious actress.
Among the books Marilyn scooped up that afternoon was one on the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, whose artistic renderings of human musculature at once fascinated her. Soon she resumed the regimen of physical exercise she had undertaken on Catalina Island, lifting weights to improve her strength and bust line. “She took it all so seriously,” according to Rupert Allan,
that before long she was comparing Vesalius to photographs of other stars and to herself. She insisted, for example, that she didn’t want broad shoulders like Joan Crawford. Of course she also knew that she had a good body, and she longed to know how best to develop and exploit it for her career.
In addition, Marilyn could be seen jogging through the service alleys of Beverly Hills each morning—an activity (like weight lifting) not commonly undertaken by women in 1950.
For a time that spring, claiming that she was harmful to Johnny’s health, Marilyn left Palm Drive and stayed in her official residence at the Beverly Carlton Hotel—a one-room efficiency apartment with cinder-block walls. But her reason for this relocation was not entirely altruistic. Longing to work, she had renewed contact with Joe Schenck and was invited to his home for several evening meetings. In 1950, few starlets were more ambitious than Marilyn, bedazzled by the prospect of glamour and success and willing to dance to the tune of someone able to help achieve them.
In this regard, there is an emotional pattern running through the entire life of Marilyn Monroe like a leitmotif. So limitless was her need for the kind of approbation promised by celebrity, so bereft of the supports of normal life and so primed was she for the acting profession, that she was willing to sacrifice almost anything for it. Although Marilyn Monroe cannot accurately be described as indiscriminate or lewd (much less nymphomaniacal), at times she offered her body as well as her time and attention to a man who might help her.
Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, for one, alluding to her relationship with Schenck, regarded Marilyn as one of the “eager young hustlers” around town. “Almost everybody thought I was trying to hoodwink them,” she said privately in 1955, a pivotal year in the transformation of Marilyn Monroe from an “eager young hustler” to a mature woman. “I guess nobody trusts a movie star. Or at least this movie star. Maybe in those first few years I didn’t do anything to deserve other people’s trust. I don’t know much about these things. I just tried not to hurt anybody, and to help myself.”
Of course she knew very much indeed, at least by a kind of streetwise (or studio-wise) savvy, and her words are both a significant self-assessment and a contradiction of the conventional understanding that among her capacities was not the ability to ponder. In 1950, she knew well that she was regarded as an “eager young hustler,” and in some ways she was. But she was also aware that exploitation is usually a two-way street—that she was being used by others. Hollywood is not alone in its network of human manipulation, although there it is often raised to the level of a high art. Johnny adored Marilyn and longed to normalize their relationship, but she was grateful and made herself available to him virtually on demand. Likewise Joe Schenck, soon to prepare the way for her next job, was a beneficiary of her favors. “Joe sponsored women,” said producer David Brown, who began his long and prestigious film career as executive story editor at Fox in 1951. “He prepared
them for other men and other lives and possibly even marriage. He took care of them and their careers, and shall we say he asked for a little consideration along the way. Certainly he was an important influence in Marilyn’s career.” In her way Natasha, too, benefited: she was being paid a small stipend by Marilyn, who promised to keep her as personal drama coach on her next films and whose ego, at least, Marilyn gratified by her very dependence.
But there were discommodities to it all. Until late in her life, the energy required to develop and sustain the icon called Marilyn Monroe was so fierce and constant that outside the frontiers of her career she had no friendships, and her life was often barren of female camaraderie. Healthy peer relations require some sense of a responsive self, but Marilyn always considered herself inferior and unworthy; and so—not because she was inordinately selfish—she was separated for much of her life from an important source of human communion. And by a savage irony, this in turn fostered the vicious cycle of what seemed to be her calculated exploitation of others.
As with acquaintances like Agnes Flanagan, just so with agents, directors and producers: Marilyn felt that she had to barter for affection—not only of individuals, but to acquire the endorsement of millions. There were often distressing results to this habit, for at twenty-three she trusted neither the affections of others nor her own talents. This effected an emotional solitude, for she nurtured the highest professional aspirations while doubting her ability to be accepted as a woman on her own terms. The intensity of her desires clashed with her deepest emotional and spiritual needs. She was someone with a vivid inner life whose desire for recognition caused an outer-directed life; in this regard, Marilyn Monroe may indeed be the ultimate movie actress.
Marilyn’s connection to Schenck was valuable, and Johnny Hyde decided to use it for Marilyn’s best advantage. In early April, he took her to meet the writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had just won an Oscar for his screenplay of A Letter to Three Wives and was preparing a new film to be produced by Zanuck. Tentatively titled Best Performance, this would be a piquant, wise and penetrating story about a successful forty-year-old stage actress and her young rival. Sharply amusing and rich in characterization, the script treated the perennial and extraordinary jealousies, fears and ambitions of theater folk. By production time that spring it was called All About Eve.
There was a small but significant role just right for Marilyn, as Johnny knew when he read the script and as Mankiewicz, too, recognized at once: the part of “Miss Caswell,” an alluring novice in the theater, eager, apparently not terrifically talented but willing to ingratiate herself to older gentlemen (like critics and producers) for the sake of her career. A more refined version of The Asphalt Jungle’s Angela, Miss Caswell is referred to as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.” She was to appear briefly in only two scenes, but because her character highlighted that of Eve, it was central to the picture’s concerns.
Mankiewicz had interviewed other actresses but felt Marilyn “had done a good job for John Huston [and had a] breathlessness and sort of glued-on innocence right for the part.” With his approval and Hyde’s powerful support, Marilyn was signed for a week’s work at five hundred dollars. However temporarily, she was back at Fox.
Her two scenes took longer than a month. First there was location shooting in the lobby of the Curran Theater, San Francisco, where outside street sounds necessitated later redubbing of the conversation among herself, George Sanders and Bette Davis; this was followed by a complicated party sequence back at the studio.2 Mankiewicz recalled that Marilyn appeared on the set with a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, but that he had to explain the identity and background of the German poet and his place in literature. Had someone recommended the book to her? No, Marilyn replied: she had read so little that she was confused by how much learning was still ahead of her. “Every now and then I go into the Pickwick [Bookshop, then in Beverly Hills] and just look around. I leaf through some books, and when I read something that interests me, I buy the book. So last night I bought this one.” Then, with almost childlike guilt, she asked, “Is that wrong?” No, he replied, that was much the best way to choose books. It seemed to Mankiewicz that “she was not accustomed to being told she was doing anything right.” Next day, Marilyn sent him a gift copy of the book.
George Sanders, with whom Marilyn had all her dialogue, agreed that she was
very inquiring and very unsure—humble, punctual and untemperamental. She wanted people to like her, [and] her conversation had unexpected depths. She showed an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting. In her presence it was hard to concentrate.
Sanders had the clear impression that Marilyn would be an enormous success because “she so obviously needed to be a star” (very like Eve). But he added that she had little of the social grace often required of the savvy starlet—just as Mankiewicz remembered that she seemed to him at the time the loneliest person he had ever known. On location in San Francisco, the cast and crew invited her to join them for meals or a drink and she was pleased, “but somehow [thus Mankiewicz] she never understood or accepted our unspoken assumption that she was one of us. She remained alone. She was not a loner. She was just plain alone.”
Marilyn’s performance in All About Eve was just what the script required. In her strapless white gown and elegant coiffure, she moved and spoke with a kind of confident, understated seduction. But the role did little more than advance her as a type of appetizing garnish, too brief and too like that of Angela, and she was unremarked by critics. Johnny’s expectation that Zanuck would be persuaded to sign her to a long-term contract was temporarily dashed, for Zanuck still saw nothing remarkable.
Despite the disapproval of his colleagues at the William Morris Agency, Johnny continued to act as if Marilyn were his only client. He placed her in what would be her only commercial, a television spot for motor oil. (“Put Royal Triton in Cynthia’s little tummy,” Marilyn purrs to a service-station attendant.) He also invited journalist Fredda Dudley to feature Marilyn in a Photoplay story, “How A Star Is Born,” published that September. Marilyn was, according to Dudley, “soft-spoken, tentative and liquid-eyed. She looked as wild and terrified as a deer. If anyone moves quickly, she’ll bound over the fence.” Always fearful of interviews and disinclined to press conferences, Marilyn nevertheless realized their necessity. But she never became accustomed to them and avoided questions whenever possible; her shyness and her occasionally recurring stutter disinclined her to impromptu statements even at private parties.
That autumn—“because I wanted to improve my mind and learn how to deal better with people in groups”—she enrolled in a noncredit evening course in world literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. Appearing without makeup and in blue jeans she bought at an Army-Navy store, Marilyn seemed more like a shopgirl than an ambitious studio starlet. Her classmates remembered nothing remarkable about her in class except for the jeans, which were not ordinary apparel for women in 1950. But the instructor, Claire Seay, recalled that Marilyn was attentive and modest; Marilyn enjoyed the course and attended faithfully every Tuesday for ten weeks.
Also that autumn, Marilyn economized by accepting an invitation from Natasha (who now had a modest income from private students) to share her tidy, one-bedroom apartment in an attractive duplex on Harper Avenue, a few steps north of Fountain in West Hollywood. There, Marilyn slept on a living room daybed, helped care for Natasha’s daughter Barbara, read books, studied plays and generally demolished Natasha’s neatness. She also brought along a female chihuahua named Josefa—after Schenck, who had given it to her in June as a gift for her twenty-fourth birthday—and on this tiny creature Marilyn lavished (so it seemed to Natasha) inordinate time, attention and money. “She fed Josefa expensive calf’s liver and bought her a quilt to sleep on. But the dog was never house-trained, there was excrement all over the place, and Marilyn could never face cleaning it up.”
Nevertheless, because she loved her and because Marilyn “was a channel for what I had to give and the future looked bright for both of us”—an optimism perhaps not warranted by current circumstances—Natasha sustained the inconveniences, coped with Josefa and worked with Marilyn at night on scene-study. Preparing for whatever film role might come next, the two women devised a complex code, a set of hand signals similar to those of a baseball catcher and pitcher. When Marilyn dropped her voice too low there was one gesture from Natasha, another if she thought Marilyn was standing inappropriately for the scene, still another if Marilyn seemed to lose inner poise.
“I signalled to her if she turned too soon, or if a turn had been ‘empty’ because it hadn’t been motivated by proper thought about herself and the character.” Marilyn found the emphasis on motivation and thought confusing, for Natasha seemed to require an intellectual process her student found intimidating. John Huston never spoke of motivation, Marilyn said, nor did Joe Mankiewicz. But Natasha insisted that no real acting—like the craft practiced at the great Moscow Art Theatre—was possible without considerable mental effort.