Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  On Tuesday, February 7, Olivier, Tennant and Rattigan met Marilyn at Sutton Place, after waiting the usual hour and a half. “But then she had us all on the floor at her feet in a second,” recalled Olivier, for whom punctuality was indeed the courtesy of theatrical kings. “She was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined, apart from herself on the screen.”

  Two days later at noon, a press conference was held in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel, where over one hundred fifty reporters and photographers gathered. As if this was to be the announcement of a presidential candidacy or a papal election, the event had something faintly surrealistic about it: not for this group the attitude that “it’s only a movie,” as Alfred Hitchcock so often said. No, this would be more than that: it would be an event uniting a great English classical actor with America’s (indeed, the world’s) greatest sex symbol—an unlikely alliance indeed.

  At last there arrived the solemn, dark-suited Olivier; the quiet, dignified Rattigan; and Marilyn, in a low-cut, black velvet dress designed by John Moore. Only two shoulder straps, thin and frail as cooked spaghetti, kept her from sudden indecency.

  The questions were typically tiresome:

  “Sir Laurence, what do you think of Miss Monroe as an actress?”

  Olivier: “She is a brilliant comedienne, and therefore an extremely good actress. She has the cunning gift of being able to suggest one minute that she is the naughtiest little thing, and the next minute that she is beautifully dumb and innocent.”

  “Marilyn, how do you feel about working with Sir Laurence?”

  “He has always been my idol.”

  “Is it true you want to play The Brothers Karamazov? Do you think you can handle it?

  A flash of irritation crossed her face. “I don’t want to play the brothers. I want to play Grushenka. She’s a girl.”

  “Spell that name ‘Grushenka,’ Marilyn,” someone dared.

  “Look it up,” she snapped.

  The reporters turned back to Olivier, asking two or three more prosaic questions about Hollywood, his salary, his control over American stars.

  And then it happened. As if to smile for a photographer, Marilyn leaned forward and one of the straps of her dress broke. There was a moment of silence, then the popping of enough flashbulbs to blind an army in battle. She smiled, calmly asked for a safety pin and then bent forward while the strap was re-attached to the back of her dress. “Shall I take my coat off, boys?” Olivier asked. “Does anybody care?” The strap broke twice more before the conference was disbanded.

  “The strap breaking was deliberately, brilliantly pre-arranged and carefully maneuvered in advance while she was dressing,” recalled designer John Moore. Eve Arnold, photographing Marilyn that day, agreed: “Before we went downstairs, she said to me, ‘Just wait and see what’s going to happen.’ ” The result was another Monroe coup—and her picture on the front page of several New York dailies. She may never have needed publicists.

  But less risky and risqué photographs were also rendered that winter. Cecil Beaton arrived from London, following her around her apartment with a camera while she romped, squealed with childish delight, leaped onto a sofa, put a flower stem in her mouth and puffed on it as though it were a cigarette. He found her “artless, high-spirited, infectiously gay.”

  Otherwise, for the first two months of the new year, Marilyn continued her wintry New York retreat, touring the streets of Brooklyn Heights with Arthur Miller, visiting the old haunts of writers and artists and listening adoringly as Arthur told stories of his boyhood. That season, according to Sam Shaw (who photographically documented the lovers’ New York itineraries), “Brooklyn became Nirvana to her, a magical place, her true home.” But Nirvana is a fantasy, and magical places are generally restricted to venues like Disneyland. The Monroe-Miller association, which she deemed “heavenly,” had to be lived out firmly on earth, and from the start it was burdened with terrible disadvantages.

  For one thing, Miller was entering on what would be a difficult time in his own creative life—just as Marilyn was about to re-enter her professional life with fresh and astounding success, giving that year the two great performances of her career. The situation was oddly reminiscent of her and Joe. Second, archconservative political groups, operating unchecked and at the instigation of some pressmen and under government sponsorship, were about to make their nastiest skirmishes against Miller.

  “There are all sorts of police gazette stories about Marilyn and her ‘Red Friends,’ ” noted Irving Stein in his corporate notes for MMP on January 6, 1956. Indeed, there were several right-wing writers hostile to anyone like Miller who had even a vaguely liberal spirit, and in 1954 he had been denied a passport to attend a production of one of his plays in Belgium. Columnist Louis Budenz often sniped at Miller, whom he labeled a “concealed communist,” and newsman Vincent X. Flaherty was even sillier: “Teenage boys and girls worship Marilyn. When Marilyn marries a man who was connected with Communism, they can’t help but start thinking Communism can’t be so bad after all!”

  But the most vituperative voice against the playwright belonged to none other than Joe’s buddy Walter Winchell—who was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s friend and eager news-gatherer and the man to whom he regularly wrote friendly notes beginning “Dear John.” On February 12, days after Miller and his wife announced they were soon to be divorced, Winchell broadcast to the nation a story planted by Hoover himself—that “America’s best known blond moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia, several of whom are listed as Red fronters.”

  By this time, Arthur was among the two or three most famous Americans scrutinized (and soon to be indicted) by government subcommittees obsessed with rooting out the threat to national security, for a violent overthrow by Moscow-directed Communists was presumed imminent. Hoover’s men had kept a file on Miller since his college days, when he had liberal social interests: he then supported the American Relief Ship for Spain; he was classified as unfit for World War II military service because of an injury (which seemed unpatriotic to the Bureau); and he was a member of the American Labor party. By 1944, agents were frankly spying on Miller, and in 1947 they found most suspicious his weekly attendance at a seminar of writers organized by an editor at the venerable publishing house Simon & Schuster, where writers gathered to counterattack the extreme right-wing propaganda disseminated by the media.

  Miller’s professional achievements did little to stem the FBI’s surveillance. His first Broadway success, All My Sons (1947), concerned an engine manufacturer who knowingly sells defective parts to the air force; this the FBI labeled “party line propaganda.” In 1948, a savagely Red-baiting newsletter called Counter-Attack openly called Miller a Communist, just as the FBI disapproved of his support for the new state of Israel. Even more absurdly, in 1949 the FBI became drama critics, condemning Death of a Salesman as “a negative delineation of American life . . . and [a play that] strikes a shrewd blow against [national] values.” But most alarming of all for Hoover’s agents was Miller’s support of a Bill of Rights seminar that openly criticized “the police state methods of certain Army and FBI officials.”

  When the Monroe-Miller marriage was subsequently rumored to be inevitable, Winchell went further: “the next stop [for Miller] is trouble. The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena will check into his entire inner circle, which also happens to be the inner circle of Miss Monroe—and all of them are former Communist sympathizers!”

  This sort of nonsensical vilification was common—symptomatic of the paranoia that swept America in the 1950s, washed into homes in regular waves of hysteria by vicious gossips like Winchell. At once the agents of the FBI grabbed their dark glasses and notebooks and began compiling data on the travels of Marilyn and her friends the Greenes, who were for a time seen as potential subversives, too. But government snoops could report only that “Miss Monroe, after completing her next assi
gnment in the motion picture Bus Stop, will return to New York before her scheduled journey to England to make a motion picture with Laurence Olivier.” This they might have taken from Hedda or Louella—or even from those other meticulous but very different agents, the ladies and gentlemen at Arthur P. Jacobs Company, who issued regular statements of Marilyn’s departures, arrivals and professional plans. The only exclusive revelation provided in advance to Washington was erroneous, for they believed her Los Angeles address was to be the Chateau Marmont Hotel; by coincidence, that is where she installed Paula Strasberg during the production of Bus Stop (and where Marilyn had clandestine weekends with Arthur during April and May).

  But neither columnists nor government agents went so far as to see any dark significance in one event that February: on March 12, Norma Jeane Mortensen (as she usually signed herself) at last legally became Marilyn Monroe. “I am an actress and I found my name a handicap,” she testified. “I have been using the name I wish to assume, Marilyn Monroe, for many years and I am now known professionally by that name.”

  There were three other important formalities to certify, and they were quickly dispatched. First, after some grumbling from Milton—delivered, as usual in such delicate matters, through the mediation of Irving Stein—Marilyn assigned to Milton not the fifty-one percent in MMP he had requested, but two percent less, reserving control for herself. Had Time’s editors known this, it would have been their best evidence that she was indeed a “shrewd businesswoman.”

  Second, Marilyn’s agents at MCA (in this matter monitored by chief executive Lew Wasserman himself) urged Greene and Stein to “shoot for the best deal, a quality distributor” for MMP’s forthcoming productions. Wasserman suggested Warner Bros. for the Olivier film. “Be conservative,” Wasserman cautioned Milton, “for if you reach for the moon and miss you will destroy Monroe Productions.” You deal with the distributors, Milton responded to Wasserman in several notes and calls. Good idea, replied Wasserman, adding ominously, “There are already uninvited cooks in the kitchen. Be careful. MMP has the flair for public relations, so we [i.e., Greene, Monroe and Wasserman] will tell the studio what to do.” The cooks, presumably, were studio executives elsewhere offering deals disapproved by Wasserman, whose corporate and political influence at this time (not to say in the decades to come) cannot be overstated.

  Third, there was the matter of Marilyn’s will, which she signed on February 18 and which, as such things do, tells much about her sentiments early that year. Presuming an Estate valued at $200,000 (an arbitrary figure based mostly on hopes for the future), her bequests were: $20,000 to Dr. Margaret Herz Hohenberg; $25,000 to Lee and Paula Strasberg; $10,000 to Mrs. Michael Chekhov; $100,000 to Arthur Miller, “to be paid however is best for him tax-wise”; sufficient cash to cover sanitarium expenses for Gladys Baker Eley for the rest of her life (but not more than a total of $25,000); $10,000 to the Actors Studio; and $10,000 for the education of Patricia Rosten, daughter of Norman and Hedda.1 The signing complete, Irving then asked Marilyn if she had an idea for her tombstone motto: “Marilyn Monroe, Blonde,” she said, tracing lines in the air with a gloved finger and adding with a laugh, “37-23-36.”

  * * *

  Just before she departed for Hollywood and Bus Stop, Marilyn gathered up her courage and prepared to act onstage with Maureen Stapleton in part of the barroom scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. “This was really a brave thing for her,” said Stapleton years later.

  She could have chosen a role that wasn’t too well known, so that her performance could have been criticized only on its own merit. But to do Anna Christie, something that’s been done by a dozen wonderful people—Garbo included! This meant that everyone in a professional audience came with an idea of how it should be done.

  Marilyn was terrifically serious while they rehearsed, added Stapleton, a Broadway leading lady then best known for her success in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo: “I found her intuitive, bright and attentive, though I could see she was absolutely terrified of this new experience.” Once, after concluding a rehearsal at the Studio, they shared a taxicab, arriving first at Marilyn’s apartment. Because they were so emotionally drained, the matter of sharing the fare took on the proportions of a scene from O’Neill himself. “Look,” Stapleton finally said, “if you don’t get out of this cab and go home and just let me pay, I’m finished with you and the scene!”

  Distressed, Marilyn alighted, kept her money and watched the taxi depart. When Maureen entered her apartment soon after, her telephone was ringing. “You really don’t want to do the scene with me, do you?” Marilyn asked, her voice wavering. A few minutes were needed for the reassurance that Maureen was still a good friend and colleague and very much wanted to do the scene with Marilyn.

  The night of the performance, February 17, Marilyn was nervous to the point of collapse, terrified she would stumble or forget her lines as she so often did before a camera. Maureen suggested that Marilyn put a copy of the script on a table, an acceptable custom at Studio workshops. “No, Maureen—if I do it this time I’ll do it for the rest of my life.”

  Anna Christie was a good role for Marilyn, for the character is (thus the text) “a blond, fully developed girl of twenty, handsome but now run down in health and plainly showing all the outward evidences of belonging to the world’s oldest profession.” She comes to a waterfront saloon in New York, sinks wearily into a chair and utters the opening line made immortal by Garbo in the 1931 film version—but spoken that night at the Actors Studio with a breathless urgency that made Anna pathetic as well as hardboiled: “Gimme a whisky—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby.”

  After a friendly exchange with tough Marthy (Stapleton), Anna speaks of her childhood in words O’Neill could have written especially for Marilyn—and which those who attended the performance thought were delivered with almost painful authenticity:

  “It’s my old man I got to meet, honest! It’s funny, too. I ain’t seen him since I was a kid—don’t even know what he looks like. . . . And I was thinking, maybe, seeing he ain’t ever done a thing for me in my life, he might be willing to stake me to a room and eats till I get rested up. But I ain’t expecting much from him. Give you a kick when you’re down, that’s what all men do.”

  Of that evening, Marilyn said not long after,

  I couldn’t see anything before I went onstage. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t remember one line. All I wanted was to lie down and die. I was in these impossible circumstances and I suddenly thought to myself, “Good God, what am I doing here?” Then I just had to go out and do it.

  The result, according to most people present, was astonishing. Anna Sten found her “very deep and very lovely, giving and taking at the same time—and that’s a very rare quality.” Kim Stanley remembered that spectators “were taught never to clap at the Actors Studio, like we were in church, but it was the first time I’d ever heard applause there.” As for Lee and Paula, they were ecstatic, and later at their apartment—while Marilyn wept over what she considered her unworthy performance—they hailed her as the greatest new talent of the decade, which she must have realized was glitteringly hyperbolic. This sort of praise she rightly rejected, but something in her wanted to believe it, and that caused damage enough, as events would soon disclose.

  Robert Schneiderman, on the teaching staff at the Studio at the time, recalled that Marilyn was “often brilliant when she performed [in scene-studies], but when she finished a role she would collapse in tears, although she was told she had been right on target or sustained a character perfectly. Marilyn had low self-esteem but she was really an excellent actress and constantly strove to be better.”

  On February 25, Marilyn returned to Hollywood for the first time in over a year, accompanied by Amy and Milton Greene, their two-year-old son Joshua, and Irving Stein. At Los Angeles International Airport, Marilyn calmly and wittily fielded questions about her new company and, so it seemed, her new life: “When you left
here last year you were dressed differently, Marilyn,” began one reporter. “Now you have a black dress and a high-necked blouse: is this the new Marilyn?” Resting a black-gloved hand on her chin, she needed no time to think: “No, I’m the same person—it’s just a new dress.”

  She and the Greenes then proceeded to a rented house at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, very near the University of California and close to Fox, where the interiors of Bus Stop were scheduled after location shooting in Phoenix, Arizona, and Sun Valley, Idaho. For leasing a nine-room home belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Lushing, MMP paid $950 per month.

  Four days later, however, there was a more serious public appearance, although it, too, had its light moments. On November 21, 1954, a Los Angeles police officer had cited Marilyn for driving along Sunset Boulevard without a license, but because she was in New York she had failed to appear in court that winter. Now that the matter was to be settled, dozens of reporters, photographers and television cameramen greeted her and Irving Stein at the Beverly Hills City Hall.

  “You may have the idea that this is good publicity,” rumbled Judge Charles J. Griffin, warming to his momentary place in the sun.

  “I’m very sorry,” Marilyn replied in a clear voice. “It isn’t at all the kind of publicity I want.”

  “Well,” continued the judge, “it isn’t the type that will win you an Oscar.” He continued somewhat loftily, making a little speech about laws being for everyone, the true nature of democracy—almost everything but an exegesis of the Gettysburg Address. At last, somewhat more gently, he concluded: “I would suggest, Miss Monroe, that in the future I would much rather pay to go and see you perform than have you pay to come and see me.” Irving paid the fifty-five-dollar fine, and they departed. Outside, she could not resist answering a few questions: “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise in there!” she said. “Apparently the judge didn’t know I’ve been away for a year. But don’t get me wrong, boys. I don’t really believe in ignoring traffic citations.”