Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

Perhaps the most important training Chekhov offered was his encouragement that Marilyn move outside her own frame of reference. Enlarge the circle of your interests, he advised her: thus she would more and more be able to assume the psychology of other characters without imposing on them her own viewpoint. This was basic Moscow Art Theatre philosophy, although it would be reworked as something quite different by Lee Strasberg a few years later.

  The exercises were intense, yet oriented toward simple goals. Chekhov asked Marilyn to spread her arms wide, to stand with her legs far apart, to imagine herself becoming larger and larger. She was to say to herself, “I am going to awaken the sleeping muscles of my body. I am going to revivify and use them.” Then she was to kneel on the floor, to imagine herself becoming smaller, contracting as if she were about to disappear. This was followed by stretching exercises, routines to modulate breathing (and therefore natural diction)—all designed to increase her sense of freedom, which Chekhov felt had been much restricted in her.

  Through this new freedom, her teacher said, Marilyn would eventually be emptied of herself and changed—possessed, he said—by a dramatic character. “Merely discussing a character, analyzing it mentally, cannot produce the desired effect of transforming the actor into another person,” he stressed. “Your rational mind will leave you cold and passive. But as you develop an imaginary body [by which he seems to have meant a use of creative imagination and a kind of physical humility] your will and feelings will want to be another character.” But Marilyn was most of all gripped and excited by Chekhov’s sense of “creative individuality,” a sense of imaginative autonomy that would enable her to become more than she had ever been—the transcendence of a limited self for which she had so longed.

  She had not discussed with Chekhov anything of her private life and must, therefore, have felt something like an especial benediction when Chekhov required her to read Death of a Salesman and a week later read from his own manuscript about “artists of such magnitude as Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan and their magic. This is native American as well as human tragedy.”

  Chekhov’s matter and methods seemed to Marilyn quite wonderful—but they were also rarefied, sometimes almost mystical. Inevitably, when asked to report to him on her thoughts and exercises at home, she froze with fear, unable to bear the possibility of disappointing him despite his gentle manner. At this time, her fear of failure became increasingly neurotic, her terror of embarrassing herself and others unreasonable, and she developed the nearly frantic desire to do everything perfectly, as Ida Bolender had once urged.

  In an odd way, then, the seriousness of her intent was having unfortunate side-effects, for whereas Natasha’s unremitting quest for perfection had turned Marilyn’s natural speech into selfconscious and exaggerated diction, Chekhov’s sessions made her even more terrified of presenting herself as unacceptable. He asked her to read a dense book called The Thinking Body, by Mabel Elsworth Todd, and although she tried for several years to understand its teachings and theories on the interconnection between anatomy, psychology and emotions, she felt poorly equipped to comprehend its idiosyncratic language (as have many readers before and since).

  Herein lies one of the most touching paradoxes of Marilyn Monroe’s life and career, for the professional means offered to raise her self-confidence had the opposite effect. She could never quite handle the analytic approach to role-playing to which she was exposed, nor could she reach the intellectual standards others set for her. But Marilyn was so charmingly docile, appealing and grateful for every morsel of education and information, that every influential person tipped the issue into a kind of control, however benevolent. She felt more, not less, intimidated as she worked harder.

  The efforts required made Marilyn ever more selfconscious and unfree in acting and effected a kind of paralysis. Instead of seeking the role within herself, Marilyn was urged by her teachers to seek herself in the role, and in so doing she was thrown back on her own insecurities and insufficiencies. With each project, she became more frightened, an anxiety-ridden performer convinced she could never please teachers or directors—a woman who, if she ate breakfast before coming to work, threw it up before she went on the set.5

  In fact, it was remarkable that in the end she achieved so much with such mediocre scripts. Somehow she found the strength to pass from complete inexperience to mere competence to polished expertise in a specific kind of light comedy in the style of Billie Burke and Ina Claire. But Marilyn’s opportunities were forever limited by the studio system and the roles assigned her, by often well-meaning but overly academic advisers, by her own emotional frailty and finally by poor health. The first, immediate result was an unfortunate and eventually chronic habit of tardiness.

  In July, for example, she was over an hour late for an interview with Robert Cahn, who was writing the first full-length national magazine feature story on Marilyn Monroe (it eventually appeared in Collier’s on September 8, 1951). “She is particularly concerned with looking her best and spends hours at the make-up table,” Cahn wrote. “No matter how much advance notice she is given, she is always late. ‘I’ll be just a minute’ can range from twenty minutes to two hours.” That comment notwithstanding, the article was unexpectedly laudatory and perceptive, thanks to gentle pressure exerted by studio publicist Harry Brand.

  But Cahn also helped enshrine the conventions of the Marilyn myth by buying wholesale the inflated stories given him by Fox and by the actress herself. “She’s the biggest thing we’ve had at the studio since Shirley Temple and Betty Grable,” Brand said at the time.6 He then added some details of his staff’s imaginative concoctions, items calmly put out to the press from time to time to sustain the public’s interest in Fox’s stars: “With Temple, we had twenty rumors a year that she was kidnapped. With Grable, we had twenty rumors a year that she was raped. With Monroe, we have twenty rumors a year that she has been raped and kidnapped.”

  According to Sidney Skolsky, who helped Marilyn and Harry Brand (and later the writer Ben Hecht) create the dramatic legend, the truth was more pedestrian. “How much of the story about her bleak childhood is actually true, I really can’t say,” Sidney said years later in a rare moment of understatement.

  But she was not quite the poor waif she claimed to have been. When I first met her, she was supposed to have lived in three foster homes. As time went on it became five, eight, ten, because she knew it was a good selling point.

  As Skolsky knew, Marilyn didn’t know who she was, but she knew what she ought to be. Aware of the elements of good movie storytelling, she felt her biography, too, should have the elements of a good movie. The following year, this would begin to take the shape of a literary exercise for which she would help provide the basis and Skolsky and Hecht the language.

  In almost storyboard detail, Cahn described Marilyn’s stunning appearance at a studio dinner party, and her placement at the right hand of Spyros Skouras. Her proportions were of course duly noted (five feet, five inches tall, 118 pounds, measurements 37–23–34), but then Cahn discussed her childhood and indicated just how eager audiences were to see more of her.

  Since The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, fan mail for Marilyn was pouring into the Fox Studio at the rate of two or three thousand letters each week—more than for Susan Hayward, Linda Darnell, Betty Grable, June Haver, Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck. Since January, the press department had sent out more than three thousand photographs of her to newspapers. The army newspaper Stars & Stripes proclaimed her “Miss Cheesecake of 1951,” and in Korea servicemen made her pin-up photos the choicest wallpaper. As Marilyn said a few weeks before her death, “The studio didn’t make me a star. If I am one, the people did it.” And, Cahn added, “Like a famous predecessor, Jean Harlow, Marilyn’s name is rapidly becoming the current Hollywood definition of sex appeal. . . . [Fox executives] hope they have another Harlow.” After visiting Marilyn’s apartment, Cahn added that this platinum blonde had real (not studio-manufactured) literary interests: he saw on
her bookshelf volumes of Whitman, Rilke, Tolstoy, Sandburg and Arthur Miller, with bookmarks and notepaper peeping out between the pages.

  At the same time, Rupert Allan was putting final touches to a similar (though much briefer) story for Look magazine. He, too, noted that for their interviews she was

  terribly late. She arrived an hour past schedule, then departed to freshen her makeup and change her clothes. Everything was delayed until she finally settled down, and even then she was nervous as a cat. Marilyn was never happy with herself. A new selfconsciousness had gripped her, and if she picked up a hand mirror, she saw a host of flaws she felt she had to disguise.

  Rupert’s article was a great success. He and his colleagues added fourteen photos of Marilyn (reading, weight lifting and jogging as well as posing for stills from her films) and he proclaimed that she had “the brightest star potential among blondes since Lana Turner.” In Skolsky’s column a week later, the comparison with Turner continued, to which he added the comment that Marilyn had Joan Crawford’s intelligence and social power. (This was dubious praise at best, since Crawford never finished fifth grade, made no pretense of anything other than what is called street wisdom, and was to most people more intimidating than lovable.7)

  That summer Marilyn appeared in what she may have considered her unlucky thirteenth film, Let’s Make It Legal—perhaps the most arid, humorless pictures of her career despite its presentation as a comedy. In the altogether unnecessary, brief role of a blond gold digger, she appeared for less than two minutes but had third billing after the title credits. “Nothing happened easily for Marilyn,” recalled Robert Wagner, another young Fox supporting player in the picture who would have better fortune later. “It took a lot of time and effort to create the image that became so famous.” In Let’s Make It Legal, there was much effort but little effect.

  Because they liked her and had to make a virtue of necessity, F. Hugh Herbert created the role and I. A. L. Diamond the script with special attention to Marilyn’s personal history. Another character first describes her as “the girl who won a beauty contest as Miss Cucamonga and has a contract to model. She’s down here [in Los Angeles] posing for cheesecake and trying to better her life,” which she does by chasing a handsome plutocrat on the golf course—shades of John Carroll. Then, in her final seconds onscreen, she is nothing so much as Joe Schenck’s dinner guest: the setting is a men’s poker party, and Marilyn pours drinks and wins the game; the ambitious model has made herself agreeable to those in power. In each scene she wears some of Fox’s most revealing outfits, and although her role is but a decorative one, she provides the comedy’s only light moments. So agreed the critics, who for the most part found the story “indifferent” but Marilyn “amusing.”

  There was nothing droll about the next picture (her fourth in 1951), an adaptation of Clifford Odets’s play Clash by Night, directed by the formidable German immigrant Fritz Lang. For this, Marilyn was loaned out to RKO since Fox had no immediate plans for her. The scenario of Clash by Night, set among fishermen and canneries in Monterey, California, tells of an unhappily married woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who, after an affair with a theater projectionist (Robert Ryan), returns to her fisherman husband (Paul Douglas). Marilyn was cast as Peggy, a girl who works as a sardine packer and is engaged to Stanwyck’s brother (Keith Andes).

  According to a letter of acknowledgment from the film’s producer Jerry Wald to Sidney Skolsky, Marilyn landed the part only because Skolsky championed her to the point of manic coercion. For this browbeating, Wald was forever grateful: Marilyn attracted moviegoers to this stark and static picture and her performance enlivened an otherwise sordid, dreary business.

  Her success was not achieved easily, however, and the production was an ordeal for her and her colleagues. To begin with, as Sidney and Natasha clearly recalled, Marilyn was so nervous during production that—as with the radio show—she vomited before almost every scene, and red blotches appeared on her hands and face. Only powerful determination drove her onto the set. “Hold a good thought for me,” she whispered time and again to her coach and her patron as she went, shivering with fright, to film a scene.

  Marjorie Plecher, who supervised her wardrobe on Clash by Night (and who later became Mrs. Allan Snyder), recalled that Marilyn’s quest for perfection led many to think of her as difficult. “Every element had to be just so—not only in her performance, but also in wardrobe and props. She didn’t think the costume jewelry engagement ring given her for the part was right, but she liked mine—so that’s the one she wore in the picture.”

  Marilyn required all the goodwill she could muster. Fritz Lang, who did not suffer actors’ idiosyncrasies easily (much less the frail or unfamous), summarized the young co-star tout court as “scared as hell to come to the studio, always late, couldn’t remember her lines and was certainly responsible for slowing down the work.” Most of all, Lang resented the interference of Natasha, a daily presence on location and in the studio. “She fought Lang to have me there,” according to Natasha. “I was glued to her, working in her tiny dressing room all day long. She was so nervous she missed many of her lines, and then Lang took her on like a madman.”

  But especial kindness was extended to Marilyn by Barbara Stanwyck, an actress already well established and willing to be patient with an anxious newcomer touted as a potential star. “She wasn’t disciplined and she was always late,” according to Stanwyck, “but there was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once.” When reporters, newsmen and visitors came to watch filming of Clash by Night, Marilyn was the object of their attention: “We don’t want to talk to [Stanwyck or the two leading male actors],” Lang recalled hearing more than once. “We want to talk to the girl with the big tits.” Proud as ever of her body, Marilyn was nonetheless resentful that the press wanted only pictures and spicy anecdotes about her life and her boyfriends: she much preferred to discuss her career, a topic the reporters resolutely avoided as if it were tangential. Robert Ryan recalled that this journalistic attitude depressed her and made her fearful that she would certainly not last very long as a serious apprentice.

  Released in 1952, Clash by Night earned Marilyn several favorable notices. Alton Cook, writing in the New York World-Telegram & Sun, rightly proclaimed her performance in Clash by Night worthy of citation: “a forceful actress [and] a gifted new star, worthy of all that fantastic press agentry. Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” And so she did, investing Peggy’s few scenes with a combination of brash carnality and skewed masochism: when her fiancé threatens her (not entirely playfully) with strangulation, she punches his jaw. The gesture gives him and the audience second thoughts about this submissive sexpot.

  * * *

  Before 1951 was history, Marilyn was back at her home studio. Theatrical exhibitors had seen a rough cut of Lang’s film, and word quickly circulated at Fox that their loaned-out player ought not to be so lightly assessed or casually employed. In the New York office, studio stockholders asked Spyros Skouras when Fox would put Marilyn in a new picture; he, in turn, put the same question to Zanuck. At last the issue had to be faced.

  In fact, there was a dramatic property available—an adaptation of a Charlotte Armstrong thriller about an unstable young woman who lost her lover in a wartime airplane crash. Released after several years in an asylum, she is hired as a baby-sitter in a hotel. There, she is pushed to the brink of madness again when she fantasizes that a rude, exploitive hotel guest (played by Richard Widmark) is her dead beloved: he tries to push his advantage with her and the poor girl spins out of control, endangering herself and the child in her care.

  This was Marilyn Monroe’s first leading part in a serious feature film.8 Finally titled Don’t Bother to Knock after much studio dithering, it was the project to prove that Marilyn Monroe could tackle and succeed in something other than a pretty comprimario role. And so she did, despite a script threaded with clichés, a production budget that must have established a new low in
Hollywood and a director even more contemptuous of Marilyn than Lang (the Englishman Roy Baker, who snarled unintelligible orders when he was not downing mugs of strong tea).

  Zanuck required a screen test before formally assigning the role. “Natasha, I’m terrified,” Marilyn said breathlessly, arriving at her coach’s home without warning late one night. Filled with her typically conflicting feelings of longing and terror, she threw herself on Natasha’s patience, and they worked with only brief intervals for two days and nights. “I didn’t think she was ready for so demanding a role,” Natasha admitted years later, “but she made such a beautiful test that even Zanuck had to write her a glowing note.” She was even more impressive in the film, which was shot rapidly and in continuity. Baker printed the first take of every scene despite Marilyn’s protests; hence Don’t Bother to Knock, as completed in early 1952, represents Marilyn’s acting in flashes of astonishing improvisation. “Actually, I had very little to do,” Natasha added. “She was terrified of the entire project, but she knew exactly what the role required and how to do it. I simply tried to infuse her with some confidence.”

  From her first appearance, entering through the revolving door of a New York hotel, Marilyn’s portrait of Nell Forbes is that of a fearful doe, unsure of herself and her place in society. Wearing a plain gray dress, black cardigan and matching tam, she has a dislocated glance and demeanor, as if she were a war orphan or a displaced child. Everything about her appearance is muted, her hair scarcely brushed, only a touch of makeup on her face: there is nothing glamorous about this woman, only the beauty of marred porcelain.

  In the hotel suite where she cares for a young girl, she pours on cologne, then tentatively clips on her employer’s earrings and bracelet. Gazing in a mirror, she slowly smiles—but her pleasure turns to fear when the noise of an airplane draws her to the window; she gazes out, a tear gliding down her cheek; a haze of memories overcomes her. In these close-ups, as in extreme long shots when Widmark watches her across the hotel courtyard, Marilyn acts with the surest of gestures, her hands and shoulders poised with the right balance of fear and expectation.