Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  And so to the application of this exercise, attempting to understand a character’s motivation and its conjunction with something in her own past, Marilyn applied herself with much fervor. It was a development that prepared her for important instruction later—and also for a decade’s worth of argument with film directors, who were generally hostile to such introspection. More significantly, this approach was an unwise counsel: Marilyn was already an introspective, sensitive, shy and insecure young woman who constantly second-guessed herself. Over the next four years, much of the spontaneity necessary for her to give a convincing performance would be siphoned away by an excess of analysis.

  Studying at school and at home, Marilyn found time for occasional visits to Joe Schenck while ignoring Johnny Hyde for several weeks that autumn. She telephoned Johnny occasionally but did not visit, and this carelessness offended even Natasha, who threatened to deliver her personally to Palm Drive if she did not see the ailing Johnny. By November he was working on her behalf mostly by phone from his bed, to which he was now restricted by heart disease. However Johnny felt, he devoted himself completely to opening possibilities for Marilyn; with such efforts he still hoped to make her Mrs. Hyde, even on his death-bed.

  But it was not only Joe Schenck who occupied Marilyn’s time and attention. Ambitious to meet everyone who could help her, she went to the legendary Schwab’s Drugstore, at 9024 Sunset Boulevard, to meet the movie reporter Sidney Skolsky.3

  Just over five feet tall, Skolsky was a bright, energetic man of Russian Jewish descent with the gift of recognizing talent; he was, in other words, rather like Johnny Hyde. Born in 1905, he had worked as a New York press agent in the 1920s for, among others, impresario Earl Carroll, for whose nightclub entrance he invented the famous illuminated motto, “Through these portals walk the most beautiful women in the world.” Skolsky then became an entertainment reporter—first for the New York Daily News, then for William Randolph Hearst’s syndicated newspapers, which included the New York Post and the Hollywood Citizen-News. Settling in Los Angeles permanently as a movieland reporter, he coined the word “beefcake” to describe male “cheesecake,” invented the phrase “sneak preview” and devised the idea of private screenings for the press before public premieres. “He had a tendency to latch onto blond ladies like Betty Grable, Carole Lombard and Lana Turner, whom he dubbed The Sweater Girl,” recalled Skolsky’s daughter, Steffi Sidney Splaver.

  Skolsky’s Hollywood news column went deeper than those by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, for he regularly provided readers with inside information about the technique and business of filmmaking, not merely with tidbits of gossip about movie stars’ lives and loves. Hypochondriacal, fearful of everything from dogs and cats to swimming, Skolsky also suffered from mysterious depressions. “Marilyn found a kindred soul in my father,” Steffi added. “They were both like frightened puppies, both brighter than they knew, and of course Marilyn had a weakness for fatherly, intellectual Jewish men.”

  Later a sometime movie producer (of, for example, The Jolson Story and The Eddie Cantor Story) and always a man who had enormous influence with studio publicists, Skolsky was a colorful eccentric who maintained a comfortable office on Schwab’s mezzanine, whence he regarded the action below, the arrivals and departures of customers famous and unknown, like Florenz Ziegfeld regarding the stage from his tower-office above the theater. The reason for the drugstore setting was elementary: Schwab’s quietly provided their pill-addicted tenant with whatever compounds he required or wished to sample. Throughout the 1950s, drugs later known to be perilously habit forming were far more readily available than subsequently, there was no stigma attached to continual use, nor was there (as subsequently) strict government regulation of dangerous barbiturates, amphetamines and narcotics. Skolsky received mail and telephone calls at Schwab’s, where—because driving a car was on his list of phobias—he could easily find someone he knew to squire him around town. It was widely known, for example, that among his chauffeurs was no less a star than Marlene Dietrich, who knew the importance of Sidney Skolsky’s friendship.

  When not hitchhiking or testing new prescriptions, Skolsky could often be found at his favorite studio, Twentieth Century—Fox, where he managed to obtain free lunches and haircuts and where he counted among his confidants senior Fox publicists like Harry Brand and Roy Craft. “Do you think I’ll ever get my picture in one of these magazines?” Marilyn asked Sidney coyly one afternoon at Schwab’s. He knew well that this was already a past achievement, but he also sensed her sincerity and saw a touching vulnerability beneath it.

  “From then on we were friends,” Skolsky wrote years after her death.

  She was always seeking advice, [although] Marilyn was wiser than she pretended to be. She was not the ordinary blond actress-starlet you could find at any major studio. . . . She appeared kind and soft and helpless. Almost everybody wanted to help her. Marilyn’s supposed helplessness was her greatest strength.

  Although Skolsky’s attachment to Marilyn was beyond question and widely known (by his wife and children and soon by all Hollywood), the relationship never crossed the boundary of platonic, paternalistic friendship.

  “He had confidence in me from the start,” Marilyn said. “I used to talk with him for long periods at a time. I always felt I could trust him, tell him anything.” And so she could. The day they met, she told Sidney how she had been compared to Jean Harlow, that as long as she could remember Harlow had been set before her as an exemplar and ideal. Sidney thought this was neither an impertinent aspiration nor an impossible goal. He had known Harlow and recognized immediately that the two women had a rare combination of ambition and humility, typified by their statements, even at the height of their fame, that they wanted to become actresses.

  Meanwhile, Johnny Hyde’s time at home seemed to improve his health a bit, especially after Marilyn visited him in late November. On December 5, after more than a year of representation by Johnny without the usual written client-agent agreement, Marilyn signed the standard form of the Screen Actors Guild contract with the William Morris Agency for three years. Two days later, Johnny told Marilyn that he had used every influence, called in every personal and studio debt at Fox, and had at last arranged a screen test for her there. At stake was not only a six-month deal, a role in a picture called Cold Shoulder and perhaps one or two others, but also very possibly a long-term studio contract.

  Marilyn was thrilled. At once she raced to tell Sidney, who gave her three sleeping tablets so that the anxiety of preparing would not exhaust her before the test. Then she began to work with Natasha, who read the short scene she was to play, judged it rubbish, sighed and set to work molding a credible performance.

  On December 10, dressed in the same flattering sweater-dress she had worn in The Fireball, Home Town Story and All About Eve, Marilyn enacted the short, dramatic scene as a gangster’s moll. Richard Conte was the actor drafted to play the tough; years later, he recalled that she was completely focused and intense, and that Natasha stood nearby for encouragement.

  “I came to tell you that you can’t stay here, Benny,” Marilyn said, facing the camera, her voice tense with panic appropriate to the scene. “If these gorillas find you here, what happens? You can’t take such a chance!” Conte’s character, apparently believing she has led him into a trap, raises his hand to strike her. “Go ahead,” Marilyn responds in a tremulous voice, “It won’t be the first time I’ve been worked over today. I’m getting used to it.” A moment later, with the camera catching the glint of real tears in her eyes, the scene fades.

  As it happened, Fox never produced Cold Shoulder, and Johnny was told that at the moment there was only one small role that Zanuck considered suitable for Marilyn—that of a secretary in a comedy called As Young As You Feel, scheduled for production the following month. The offer was accepted.

  It was Johnny’s last deal. On December 16, he left with his secretary for a rest in Palm Springs, and, at his request and with his money
, Marilyn continued on to Tijuana with Natasha for Christmas shopping. Without waiting for the twenty-fifth, Marilyn spent almost all her available cash on a gift she saw Natasha admiring—an ivory cameo brooch framed in gold. Then, while they were on this expedition, Johnny suffered a massive heart attack and an ambulance rushed him back to Los Angeles. When Marilyn finally caught up with him, on the evening of Monday, December 18, he had been dead several hours.

  Johnny Hyde had no opportunity to resolve with Marilyn the bitter tension that underlay his unrequited love, and she had no chance to express her gratitude. “I don’t know that any man ever loved me so much,” she said in 1955. “Every guy I’d known seemed to want only one thing from me. Johnny wanted that, too, but he wanted to marry me, and I just couldn’t do it. Even when he was angry with me for refusing, I knew he never stopped loving me, never stopped working for me.”

  His estranged wife and children asked that Marilyn be excluded from the services at Forest Lawn, but she and Natasha—both veiled and giving stellar performances—convinced guards that they were family servants. An hour after everyone had departed, Marilyn stepped quietly to the graveside, reached out to the flower-covered bier and plucked a single white rose, which for years she kept pressed and preserved in the pages of a Bible. Contrary to the established account that she became frenzied at the ceremony, shouting Johnny’s name and throwing herself on the casket, Marilyn was in fact the picture of dignified grief, as even Natasha admitted. “I saw something in her I had not before that afternoon,” Natasha recalled. “Remorse, perhaps—repentance, a terrible sense of loss—call it what you will.”

  Marilyn sat a long while at the cemetery until, at twilight, attendants gently asked her to leave. During the next month, at work and at home, she frequently broke down weeping, grieving as much for herself as for indefatigable, lovestruck Johnny. Without his dedication to her welfare, without his protection and adoration she felt the terrible loss of an ally, a father and a tender friend. There had been sudden absences and abrupt changes in her life before—her mother’s departures, her move into the orphanage, her arranged marriage, the death of Ana Lower and of the dog Josefa late that autumn—but nothing cut so deeply as Johnny’s passing.

  Within days (hours, Marilyn once claimed), she received a call from Joe Schenck, offering his condolences—and, should she require it, his home, where guest quarters awaited her pleasure (and, presumably, his). “Joe Schenck was mad for her,” said Sam Shaw. A New York photographer often commissioned to design advertisements for Fox productions and to take still photos on the set, Shaw met Marilyn soon after Johnny’s death. “Long before she was a major star, Joe Schenck was her benefactor. If she was hungry and wanted a good meal, or sad and wanted a good cry, she called him.”

  One morning around Christmastime, Natasha found Marilyn asleep, a bottle of pills from Schwab’s at her bedside. She then noticed a residue of a gelatin capsule at the corner of Marilyn’s mouth and, fearing the worst, became hysterical, which at once roused the sleeping beauty. Without a drink of water, Marilyn explained, she had tried to take a single pill and had then fallen asleep while it slowly dissolved in her mouth.

  “Natasha often accused me of overreacting,” Marilyn later told Milton Greene. “But this time she took the prize. I never went along with all that romantic stuff about following your loved one into the grave. I remember that when Johnny died I felt miserable, I felt guilty, and I had a lot of feelings to sort through—but, oh baby, I sure didn’t want to die.” And then she added with a radiant, grateful smile, “The fact is, he had made certain that I had nothing to die for.”

  And much to live for, she might have added. Johnny had arranged for Marilyn a unique holiday gift she much anticipated: an agreement, through Fox publicist Harry Brand, that the studio would present her as their promising young actress in a New Year’s Day movie-star feature in Life magazine. Wearing a black dress and long black gloves, she had been photographed in profile, a deep décolletage justifying the caption “Busty Bernhardt.” Her future is assured, ran the accompanying two-sentence caption, for “just by standing still and breathing she can bring men running from all directions. And after small but pungent roles in Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, her studio is convinced she will be a fine dramatic actress too.”

  Those words had been written by Johnny, expressing his faith and her hope. But in their offices on Pico Boulevard, Zanuck and his colleagues were not in fact planning to make Marilyn Monroe a “fine dramatic actress.” After all, why should a busty blonde aspire to anything like the level of Bernhardt?

  1. Greene’s time would come later. Meanwhile, for Life magazine’s issue of October 10, 1949, Philippe Halsman photographed seven starlets and an ex-model for a photoessay called “Eight Girls Try Out Mixed Emotions.” Marilyn, incorrectly described as having appeared in only Love Happy, was captured “seeing a monster . . . hearing a joke . . . embracing a lover . . . tasting a drink.” Only the laugh looks credible; only Marilyn had a subsequent career.

  2. For the lobby sequence, Marilyn (with the approval of Zanuck and Mankiewicz) chose an item from her own wardrobe, a tightly woven sweater-dress that had also shown her figure to good advantage in The Fireball and Home Town Story.

  3. In his memoirs, Skolsky claimed in 1975 that he first met Marilyn at a studio drinking fountain; her account of going directly to Schwab’s to meet him was supported by Natasha Lytess, Lucille Ryman Carroll and Rupert Allan (and, earlier, by Skolsky himself).

  Chapter Ten

  JANUARY 1951–MARCH 1952

  ON JANUARY 5, 1951, the lease on Natasha’s Harper Avenue apartment expired. She chose to buy a small house in Hollywood, and so Marilyn moved again to the Beverly Carlton, to be closer to Fox, she said, and to have more privacy. But Natasha was unaware of the complexities of mortgages and bank loans, and soon she was a thousand dollars short of the cash needed to close her deal. When Marilyn learned this, she arrived at Natasha’s door with the money next day. “It wasn’t until much later that I learned how she had gotten it,” Natasha said. “She had sold a mink stole Johnny Hyde had given her. It was the one really good thing she owned,” and the only item that had any material or sentimental value. The money was like the Christmas cameo—a gift for someone who, despite the complex intensity of the relationship, was a mother to Marilyn.

  That year, Marilyn Monroe met three men who would be variously important to her: a famous director; a playwright who for the moment passed only quickly across the horizon of her life; and a drama teacher who affirmed both her attraction to the Russian artistic traditions and to the playwright. Before these introductions, however, she again gave one of her most effective performances: the attempt to contact her long-lost father.

  Within two weeks of Johnny’s death, the incident that had first occurred with Jim Dougherty was repeated. Marilyn telephoned Natasha one morning. “She said she had just learned the identity of her natural father,” Natasha recalled, unaware of the earlier telephone call in Dougherty’s presence, “and she wanted me to drive with her to visit him.” And so Marilyn set out with her surrogate mother, apparently to meet her real father. They drove down toward Palm Springs and then further into the desert before Marilyn asked Natasha to stop the car at a service station while she telephoned ahead to assure a welcome. She returned and told Natasha they must return to Los Angeles: her father, she said, had refused to see her. But as with Jim, there were no details; Natasha could not recall a name for this man, and there was no verification of any contact then or later. In a way, the day fulfilled its purpose: Natasha showered Marilyn with more gentle attention, gave her more time for preparing the role she was to begin, made her feel like a welcome and secure child.1

  Almost at once, life moved at an accelerated and intensified pace. But despite her Fox contract (at last ready for her signature that spring), Marilyn’s movie work was still confined to a series of stereotyped dumb-blonde roles. Her fame increased and her allure was more widely celebrated, but s
he was essentially a sexy ornament, tossed into roles any pretty starlet might have performed equally well. The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve and brief appearances in a trio of minor pictures in 1951 suggested talent as well as seductiveness. But neither Hollywood nor America was much interested in the conundrum of a beautiful young woman who might have more to offer than physical charms.

  As Young As You Feel neatly summarized the problem, and the production of it made her miserable. Based on a story by Paddy Chayefsky, the picture concerns a sixty-five-year-old businessman forced into retirement who impersonates the active, elderly president of the parent company in order to change the system of age discrimination. This was the first time her name appeared before the title (sixth in a list), but nothing else was remarkable as Marilyn undertook the role of Harriet, a seductively distracting secretary. Allan Snyder as usual did her makeup and was a calming presence; “she was frightened to death of the very public that thought her so sexy,” he said at the time. “My God, if only they knew how hard it was for her!” Especially in this case, for nothing could compensate her disappointment over the silliness of the role in a picture that benefited no one.

  That January she was depressed about more than the death of Johnny Hyde, which most people saw as her only grief. “She can’t stop crying,” complained director Harmon Jones to his friend Elia Kazan, whose fame as a stage director and co-founder of the Actors Studio had now extended to Hollywood with his films of Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. “Every time I need her,” Harmon continued, “she’s crying. It puffs up her eyes!” Marilyn had to be sought out in some dark corner of the soundstage, where she sat in utter dejection, perhaps more for her life’s prospects than for Johnny.