“If you want to,” said Mr. Huston, “but there’s no need.”
I did it again.
When I stood up Mr. Huston said, “You got the part after the first reading. Go fix yourself up with the wardrobe department.”
During the shooting Johnny Hyde was as excited as I was. He kept telling me, “This is it, honey. You’re in. Everybody is crazy about your work.”
When the picture was previewed, all the studio heads went to see it. It was a fine picture. I was thrilled by it. The audience whistled at me. They made wolf noises and laughed happily when I spoke. They liked me very much.
It’s a nice sensation to please an audience. I sat in the theater with Johnny Hyde. He held my hand. We didn’t say anything on the way home. He sat in my room beaming at me. It was as though he had made good on the screen, not me. His heart was happy for me. I could feel his unselfishness and his deep kindness. No man had ever looked on me with such kindness. He not only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane, too. He knew all the pain and all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like that. I wished in all my heart I could love him back. My heart ached with gratitude. But the love he hoped for wasn’t in me. You might as well try to make yourself fly as to make yourself love. But I felt everything else toward Johnny Hyde, and I was always happy to be with him. It was like being with a whole family and belonging to a full set of relations.
Johnny found Marilyn bit parts in a number of films: she was a roller-derby fan in The Fireball, a model who dodges a flirtatious feint from a has-been boxing champ in Right Cross, and a receptionist ogled by her boss in Home Town Story. But it wasn’t until Hyde placed her in the role of Miss Caswell of the “Copacabana School of Dramatic Art” in All About Eve that the dotted line was rolled out for her return to 20th Century-Fox.
Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, and though he never fully understood the special appeal of the starlet, he realized at the preview of Eve that nobody was looking at Bette Davis, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, or Anne Baxter when “strawhead” was on the screen. Zanuck arranged a new screen test for Marilyn, and she was offered a new seven-year contract.
Another person whose star was rising in 1950 was Captain William Parker of the LAPD. Known as “Whisky Bill” to those in the know at Los Angeles Police Headquarters, Bill Parker was an ambitious man who had his eye on the chief’s badge. By 1950, Parker had become the hard-drinking buddy of the hard-drinking interim chief, William Worton. When Worton retired and recommended “Whisky Bill” Parker as his replacement, it raised some ire and eyebrows in City Hall. The powers that be had assumed the chief’s badge would go to Norman Chandler’s favorite, Captain Thad Brown, chief of detectives.
Thad Brown was expected to nose out Parker because Brown was Chandler’s choice. As head of the L.A. Times, Chandler held the power; however, in the summer of 1950 intrigue of the highest Machiavellian order shifted the balance of power from Thad Brown to “Whisky Bill” Parker.
Parker’s friend Lieutenant James Hamilton was assigned by Parker’s mentor, Chief Worton, to be the investigator for the Police Commission. But instead of investigating for the Commission, Hamilton became an investigator of the Commission. It was the five police commissioners, political friends of Chandler, who would ultimately vote on the appointment of the new police chief. In the course of his duties, Lieutenant Hamilton observed Norman Chandler picking up one of the Police Commissioners, Mrs. Curtis Albro, on the steps of the L.A. City Hall. Mrs. Albro, an attractive member of the Southern California social set, was the wife of a prominent Los Angeles businessman.
Sensing an auspicious career move for himself within the power structure of the LAPD, Lieutenant James Hamilton tailed Chandler and Mrs. Albro to a luxurious Malibu beach house and staked out the home until the curvaceous Commissioner Albro left the next morning with Chandler.
Recruiting the assistance of two detectives, Archie Case and James Ahearn, Hamilton put Albro and Chandler under surveillance. Cameras and bugs were installed in the Malibu beach house, and the tide soon changed in the power struggle for the chief’s badge. The detectives assured Hamilton that they had enough evidence to ensure “Whisky Bill’s” appointment. Chandler, however, had already come out with a story in the L.A. Times stating that Thad Brown would be appointed the next chief of police. According to the Times article, three of the five commissioners, including Mrs. Albro, supported Brown.
The majority would ensure Brown’s appointment, but shortly after Parker and Hamilton revealed to Norman Chandler the compromising surveillance gathered by the two detectives, Mrs. Albro suddenly died. While her mysterious death was mourned by high society, low society persuaded Chandler’s friends on the Police Commission to vote unanimously for “Whisky Bill” Parker as the new police chief.
In an act of noblesse oblige, Parker promoted Hamilton and made him captain of the newly formed Intelligence Unit. The two detectives Archie Case and James Ahearn were also promoted and became Hamilton’s key lieutenants. Later they would serve dutifully under Captain Daryl Gates, who was to be appointed Hamilton’s successor when Bobby Kennedy arranged for Hamilton’s executive position within the National Football League in 1963.
Parker served as chief for sixteen years, from 1950 until his untimely death in 1966. He was buried wearing the badge.
31
Red Scare
Well, we were Reds, and we sure were scared.
—Sylvia Thompson
After three marriages, three divorces, and a throng of affairs, Johnny Hyde was hopelessly in love. He wanted Marilyn to marry him. She told him she couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be fair. Marilyn knew she could be faithful only to the one man she could love with all her heart.
“The person I wanted to help most in my life—Johnny Hyde—remained someone for whom I could do almost nothing,” Marilyn stated. “He needed something I didn’t have—love. And love is something you can’t invent, no matter how much you want to.” But Hyde was having heart trouble of another kind. He had been hospitalized with a heart attack in 1948 and was popping nitroglycerin tablets to fight off angina. He told Marilyn that his doctor said he didn’t have long to live.
“I’m rich,” Hyde said. “If you marry me you’ll inherit it when I die.”
“I had dreamed of money and longed for it,” Marilyn recalled, “but the million dollars Johnny Hyde offered me meant nothing. ‘I’ll not leave you,’ I told him. ‘I’ll never betray you. But I can’t marry you, Johnny. Because you’re going to get well. And who knows, sometime later I might fall in love.’ He smiled and said, ‘I won’t get well, and I want you to have my money when I’m gone.’ But I couldn’t say yes.”
“He was right. He didn’t get well,” Marilyn said. “A month later he went to the hospital. In the hospital he kept begging me to marry him, not for his sake anymore, but for mine. He wanted to think of me as never having any more hunger or poverty in my life.”
Johnny Hyde died on December 18, 1950. His ex-wife and her children requested that Marilyn be excluded from the funeral held at Forest Lawn. But a heavily veiled blonde with an unusual walk, accompanied by Natasha Lytess, sat in the back of the church sobbing uncontrollably during the service. She later recalled, “When I passed by his coffin I felt such a sadness for Johnny Hyde that I forgot myself. I threw myself on the coffin and sobbed. I wished I was dead with him.
“My great friend was buried,” Marilyn lamented. “I was without his importance to fight for me and without his love to guide me. I cried for nights at a time. I never regretted the million dollars I had turned down. But I never stopped regretting Johnny Hyde—the kindest man in the world.”
Eerily, Johnny Hyde’s generous Christmas presents, which he had purchased for his friends shortly before his fatal heart attack, began arriving right after the funeral. Marilyn received a mink stole. On Christmas Eve, Natasha Lytess arrived at
the apartment on Harper and found a note, “I leave my car and fur stole to Natasha.” When Natasha hurriedly entered the apartment she found another note on Marilyn’s bedroom door warning that Lytess’s daughter, Barbara, shouldn’t enter. Lytess burst in to discover that “the room looked like hell on earth. Marilyn was on the bed, her cheeks puffed out like an adder’s.”
Lytess recalled shouting, “Marilyn! What have you done?” and she forced open Marilyn’s mouth, which was caked with capsule residue, and reached in and gouged out “greenish stuff she hadn’t been able to swallow.” Her stomach was pumped, and she recovered in the hospital.
Shortly before his death, Johnny had secured a role for Marilyn in As Young As You Feel, a Paddy Chayefsky story filmed at Fox in January of 1951. Marilyn was twenty-four years old, and it was her twelfth film—the first for Fox under her new contract, which specified that her name appear above the title. When production began in January of 1951 she was still mourning Johnny. “She can’t stop crying,” complained director Harmon Jones. “Every time we need her in front of the cameras she’s crying, and it puffs up her eyes.” When they needed her on the set she was often found by the assistant director off in some dark corner of the soundstage trying to pull herself together. And it was there, in the corner of the stage, that Arthur Miller met Marilyn Monroe.
“From where I stood, yards away, I saw her in profile against a white light,” Miller recalled. “She was weeping under a veil of black lace that she lifted now and then to dab her eyes.” Introduced to Marilyn by Elia Kazan, Miller recalled that when they shook hands “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with her sadness amid all this Hollywood glamour and technology and the busy confusion of a new shot being set up.”
Miller’s wife, Mary, had stayed in Brooklyn while Miller went to Hollywood. Fresh from his Broadway hits Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, Miller had been brought to Hollywood by Charlie Feldman, who was trying to put together a film deal based on The Hook, a screenplay Miller had written about labor strife on the Brooklyn waterfront. Intending to stay as a houseguest at Feldman’s for a week, Miller stayed for a month, having been captivated by “the saddest girl I’ve ever seen.”
Miller saw Marilyn again at one of Feldman’s parties, and the next day she tagged along with Kazan and Miller at a story conference in Harry Cohn’s Columbia studio office. Masquerading as a secretary, Marilyn wore glasses and adopted a prim and businesslike demeanor as she made notations in her steno pad of Miller and Kazan’s meeting with her old nemesis “White Fang.”
“Cohn could hardly keep his eyes from Marilyn,” Miller observed. “Trying to recall where he had seen her, he marched around in front of her hitching up his pants like a Manhattan cab driver getting ready for a fight. He peered at her growling, ‘Wait a minute, I think I know whose goil you were, maybe!’” But he couldn’t quite place the curvaceous secretary, and the production meeting continued with Kazan talking about directing Miller’s screenplay. Miller remembered looking over at Marilyn and finding her staring at him, smiling secretively about her joke on Cohn. “I desperately wanted her,” Miller stated, “and I decided I must leave that night, if possible, or I would lose myself.”
But Miller stayed on. And when he ran out of excuses for not returning to his wife and children, Kazan and Marilyn took Miller to the airport. Many years later he remembered that “her hair hung down to her shoulders, parted on the right side, and the sight of her was something like pain, and I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. With all her radiance she was surrounded by a darkness that perplexed me. I could not yet imagine that in my very shyness she saw some safety, release from the detached and centerless and invaded life she had been given…. When we parted I kissed her cheek and she sucked in a surprised breath, and I hurried backwards toward the plane. I had to escape her childish voracity. I was retreating to the safety of morals, to be sure, but not necessarily to truthfulness. Flying homeward, her scent still on my hands, I knew my innocence was technical merely, and the secret that I could lose myself in sensuality entered me like a radiating force.”
Arthur Miller’s screenplay The Hook was never produced. Cohn became leery of the project when he was warned that Miller was a Marxist. With America’s entry into the Korean conflict, the cold war was heating up, and the world was becoming increasingly divided into armed camps of opposing political and philosophic principles. In a nuclear age the dichotomy grew more perilous as the Western world became encircled by countries that had fallen under Soviet domination.
In the 1950s the Un-American Activities Committee was focusing much of its attention on Hollywood, where it was suspected there was a Commie hidden under every plaster rock. Suddenly, it was no longer fashionable to be a member of the Marxist intelligentsia. The Hollywood HUAC hearings became the great purgative power that separated the hardened Marxist from the dilettante fellow traveler, who was quite willing to jump off the Hollywood Red car at the first stop. There were those who lied and denied, and those who committed suicide. There were those who quickly confessed and named names, like Edward Dmytryk, Clifford Odets, and Miller’s friend Elia Kazan. And there were those who went to jail, and those who remained silent and went underground.
When John and Eunice Murray lost their home on Franklin Street during the Hollywood labor wars, they moved to a small home in Santa Monica Canyon at 431 West Rustic Canyon Road. Norman Jefferies had married the Murrays’ daughter Patricia, and they lived in an upstairs unit of the Murrays’ new home, where, he said, communist cell meetings were held. Jefferies recalled that many of those who attended the meetings were nameless or had party names, but he recognized Dr. Ralph Greenson, Herb Sorrell, and Churchill Murray, who would arrive from Mexico with people Jefferies assumed were Comintern agents.
While Dr. Greenson had always been secretive about his Marxist affiliations, Dr. Hyman Engelberg and his wife Esther had been quite open in their support of communist causes. Dr. Engelberg continued teaching at the People’s Education Center and remained prominent in the activities of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council. In 1947 Engelberg was one of the principal speakers at the ASPC Thought Control Conference in Los Angeles. But with the advent of the HUAC investigations, Engelberg, along with many people who remained loyal to the Communist Party, went underground. The “red scare” had made it scary to be a red.
Arthur Miller observed, “Jews were embracing Catholicism, socialists were joining the Communist witch-hunt with no regard for its civil liberties implications, and lifelong pacifists were banging the cold war drums.” Though much of Miller’s writing had its inspiration in Marxism, he began to have doubts about Stalinism. He commented that in the early fifties he began to question “whom or what was I writing for. I needed the benediction of something or someone, but all about me was mere mortality. I had always assumed I was writing in the service of some worthy cause in which I no longer believed.”
It was at this juncture in his life, when the absolutes of Stalinism failed him, that he met Marilyn. He stated, “Even after those few hours with Marilyn she had taken on an immanence in my imagination—the vitality of a force one does not understand, but that seems on the verge of lighting up a vast surrounding plain of darkness…. A youth was rising from a long sleep to claim the feminine blessing that was the spring of his creativity, the infinite benediction of woman, a felicity in the deepest heart of man as needful as the sky.”
In other words, Arthur was dropping Stalinism like a hot kartofl, and embracing Marilyn Monroe.
In his memoir, Timebends, Miller states that after he had last seen Marilyn in 1951, occasionally he got notes from her that “warmed my heart.” They were written “in strangely meandering slanted handwriting that often curled down margins and up again on the other side of the paper, using two or three different pens with a pencil thrown in. She talked about hoping we could meet again when she came east on business, and offered to come without any excuse if I gave h
er some encouragement. I wrote back a muddy, formal note saying that I wasn’t the man who could make her life happen as I knew she imagined it might, and that I wished her well. Still, there were parched evenings when I was on the verge of turning my steering wheel west and jamming the pedal to the floor.”
Though public perception was that Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller didn’t become romantically involved until her move to New York in the mid-fifties, there were secret rendezvous and occasions when Miller did jam the pedal to the floor—times when Marilyn jetted to the East Coast and met Miller at their hideaway in Sandsfield, Massachusetts, near Richard Widmark’s old farm.
The two plays Miller wrote after he had first met Marilyn, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, reflect an acute personal crisis that the author went through between 1950 and 1955, which paralleled the collapse of his marriage. Marilyn is an identifiable character in both plays. She is the spirit of Abigail in The Crucible and Catharine in A View from the Bridge. Though critics prefer to underline the political overtones of The Crucible, the play’s central concern is the guilt of a married man, John Proctor, who has betrayed his wife in having an affair with Abigail, a young servant girl. The love triangle and the problem of guilt repeat themselves in A View from the Bridge—between Eddie Carbone, his wife, and their young ward Catharine.
In the introduction to the 1957 edition of his collected plays, which is dedicated “To Marilyn,” Miller wrote that both The Crucible and A View from the Bridge are concerned with “the awesomeness of a passion which, despite its contradictions, despite the self-interest of the individual it inhabits, despite every kind of warning, despite even the destruction of the moral beliefs of the individual, proceeds to magnify its power over him until it destroys him.”
As for Marilyn, she told Louella Parsons that Arthur Miller attracted her “because he is brilliant. His mind is better than that of any other man I’ve known. And he understands and approves my wanting to improve myself.”
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 26