Natasha’s attitude toward Marilyn was deeply contradictory. On the one hand, she resented her own dependence on this girl, whom she thought so vulgar and inferior. On the other hand, Natasha spotted something unique in Marilyn, something she believed that she, the teacher, could shape and create. Natasha gave Marilyn books to read: Rilke, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. She made her listen to recordings of Schubert and Brahms. Natasha, confident that she already was somebody, seemed angry that the world no longer treated her as it should.
Marilyn, by contrast, was struggling to become somebody. She wasn’t trying to regain her rightful place; she was trying to discover it.
For Love Nest and Let’s Make It Legal, Marilyn insisted on working out her entire performance—every word, gesture, breath, and eye movement—before she even met the director and other actors. She prepared for these small roles as though she had the lead. Natasha discovered early on that Marilyn had an instinct for recognizing when she was doing something right. At the same time, she could detect any kind of falseness in her own performance. It wasn’t something Marilyn had learned; she couldn’t really explain it. But an alarm just seemed to go off inside her when she finally discovered the correct approach.
Marilyn was a perfectionist—but at immense psychological cost. Sensing that something was wrong didn’t mean that Marilyn had any idea of how to fix it. Even if Natasha had been tempted, she would never have suggested that something Marilyn did was good just to make her feel better. Marilyn might have sensed her dishonesty, and that would have been fatal to the partnership. Marilyn was determined to keep working until she got things right; when she didn’t, which was quite often, a sense of desperation pervaded the room.
One consequence of all this pressure was Marilyn’s increasing dependency on drugs. She haunted the prescription counter at Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood. She couldn’t sleep, so she took barbiturates. She felt drowsy, so she took amphetamines. From the time Marilyn began to menstruate, she had suffered severe monthly pain, which doctors later attributed to the presence of endometrial tissue in areas other than the uterus, a condition called endometriosis. As she grew older, not only did the pain increase, but she built up a tolerance to medication, driving her to ever larger doses. She experimented with different kinds of pills. More and more, a diet of painkillers, tranquilizers, and stimulants left Marilyn perilously on edge.
In these months, the photograph of Arthur Miller remained on the bookshelf over Marilyn’s bed, a reminder of why she drove herself so hard. She told herself that Arthur might see one of her movies in New York. She imagined he would go to the theater for the other half of a double bill and see her movie by chance.
Miller wrote to Marilyn that, though he wished her the best, he just wasn’t the man to make her life work out as she hoped. He suggested that if she needed someone to look up to, she would be better off choosing Abraham Lincoln. The suggestion, whether he knew it or not, hinted at his own ambivalence. Miller bore a distinct physical resemblance to Lincoln. He had poured out his troubles to Marilyn, and no matter how he tried to put her off, somehow she remained serenely confident that it was only a matter of time before he would leave his wife for her.
Marilyn continued to discuss Miller with Kazan. As she worked on the director for a role, she persisted in feeding him details of her troubled relationship with Miller. Even at a time when Arthur had retreated from Marilyn’s life, the triangle remained a big part of their affair.
After two weeks of rehearsal in Los Angeles, Kazan went off to shoot Viva Zapata! on location in Brownsville and Del Rio, Texas. His family was due to join him as soon as school let out. Marilyn had previously been scheduled to begin a third picture at Twentieth after Let’s Make It Legal, but at the last minute, the film was called off. Though the cancellation had nothing to do with Marilyn, geared up as she was, the change of plans upset her terribly. In this state of mind, she turned up suddenly in Brownsville before Mrs. Kazan and the children arrived.
Kazan had problems of his own just then; it had been widely rumored that he was about to be called by HUAC. He would be asked the so-called Big Question—had he ever been a Party member? Though he had long ago repudiated his connection with the Party, he would then be asked to submit to the ritual humiliation of identifying other Communists. If for whatever reason Kazan declined, he faced not only a jail sentence but also the prospect of being blacklisted in the movie industry. Still, the feeling on the set of Viva Zapata! was that Kazan, so tough and brash, would refuse to submit.
After Marilyn arrived, it seemed to the actor Anthony Quinn that Kazan was trying to “negotiate a bizarre little love triangle” consisting of Marilyn, Kazan himself, and Marlon Brando. In the beginning, it was no secret that Marilyn was there to be with Kazan. But soon the director appeared to throw her at Brando, or so it seemed to Quinn, who suspected that Kazan, in the interest of heating up the situation, wanted to “cross swords with Marlon over his protégée.”
This wasn’t how Marilyn had hoped to find herself on a Kazan set. She had wanted to appear in a film of his, not simply to watch him direct. Nonetheless, the entire experience thrilled her. The chance to observe Kazan and Brando at work whetted her appetite for a whole different level of filmmaking. On location, Marilyn saw for herself how good Kazan was, and she went home more determined than ever to work with him.
In Los Angeles, Kazan picked up with Marilyn again. She made certain of that. Though his wife and children were installed in a beach house at Malibu, Marilyn often accompanied Kazan to the Fox ranch, where some additional scenes were being shot. Afterward, accompanied by Kazan’s friend, the magazine photographer Sam Shaw, they would go to roadhouses to play the jukebox, drink beer, and dance. Shaw, who shot the stills on Zapata, was to become Marilyn’s close, lifelong friend.
Marilyn seemed to be having fun, but underneath the happy-girl mask she was frantic about Twentieth’s failure to give her a new assignment. Had she done something wrong? Had she already blown her chance? What Marilyn didn’t know was that the studio was considering a request from RKO to borrow her. Meanwhile, Marilyn was desperate to be doing something to advance her career.
In the absence of the prestigious roles Johnny had prescribed, Marilyn decided to get attention in some other way. Day after day, she turned up at the Fox publicity office, eager for any assignment. She wanted to talk to reporters. She wanted to be photographed. She was willing to pose in any and all circumstances. Posing for still photographs never caused Marilyn the sort of anxiety that going in front of a motion picture camera invariably did. When the studio publicity people had nothing for her, she danced attendance on the show-business columnist Sidney Skolsky, who had an “office” in Schwab’s drugstore. Marilyn enlisted Skolsky’s help in preparing sympathetic stories about her to feed to the press. Skolsky frequently mentioned “the Monroe” in his own columns and encouraged his colleagues to do the same.
Touched by Marilyn’s efforts to get publicity, Kazan asked Shaw to take some pictures for her portfolio. Shaw protested that photographing pretty girls wasn’t his line, but Kazan insisted. Marilyn turned up for the shoot in a black gaberdine suit, stiletto heels, and a cute little white beret. Shaw, uncomfortable with the assignment, decided to do the pictures as a satire. He photographed Marilyn, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, reading Vernon Louis Parrington’s thick tome on the history of American literature. When Kazan saw what Shaw had done, he was outraged. “You son of a bitch!” Kazan barked. “That’s a satirical thing. You’re making fun of the kid!” Kazan, almost in spite of himself, seemed really to care about her.
Kazan took his family home on August 11. There was a last-minute censorship crisis over A Streetcar Named Desire, and he needed to be in New York. The remaining post-production work on Zapata could wait until he returned to Los Angeles. While in the east, Kazan met up with Miller, who was once again in crisis. That month, As Young as You Feel had its premiere in New York. Seven months had passed since Miller and Kazan had first
glimpsed Marilyn on the Fox sound stage. Almost seven months had passed since Miller had decided to resist his attraction to her and go back to his wife. Miller told Kazan that he had done everything he could to save his marriage, but that it was no use. After California, Arthur felt that Mary had shown no willingness to forgive. According to Miller, their household, across the East River in Brooklyn Heights, remained a harsh, cold, loveless place.
When Marilyn heard about Arthur’s decision, she rushed to New York to see him. But it was no good. At the last minute, he called off their meeting. He had decided to try yet again with his wife. Marilyn, hurt and humiliated, spent some time at her hotel with Kazan. She flew back to Los Angeles in the morning. By the time she got back, she had filed away the whole Miller episode as something that wasn’t going to happen. The fantasy that such a man was going to swoop into her life and fall in love with her appeared to have ended. Marilyn had her work to occupy her. Hardly had she returned to Hollywood when exciting new developments demanded her full attention. Indeed, it appeared that Marilyn’s efforts were finally about to pay off.
Suddenly, Marilyn seemed to be making progress on several fronts at once. On August 21, Twentieth officially agreed to loan Marilyn out to RKO, where she was to appear in Clash by Night, a screen adaptation of Clifford Odets’s play. Marilyn’s assignment was a major breakthrough in two ways. She would be working with Fritz Lang, the director of such classics as Metropolis, M, and Fury, and she would receive star billing, though in fact she was to have only a supporting role as a worker in a fish-canning factory. For the first time, her name would appear above the title, along with those of Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan.
Two weeks after the contracts for the loan-out were signed, Collier’s magazine published the first full-scale profile of Marilyn Monroe. The article, “1951’s Model Blonde,” was an extraordinary achievement for a young actress who, after all, had yet to do a single starring role. From the first, she discovered that she was confident and at ease with reporters in a way that she simply never was on a film set. For the Collier’s profile, in the issue of September 8, 1951, Marilyn carefully crafted the story that she would repeat to reporters all that fall. In interview after interview, Marilyn portrayed herself as a courageous little orphan girl, a sort of modern-day Cinderella, whose childhood had been spent being passed from one foster home to another. She painted her youth in the darkest possible tones, leaving readers with the impression that both her mother and father were dead. That last point would soon come back to haunt her, but the immediate effect of all this was to make Marilyn Monroe immensely sympathetic to the public.
The Collier’s profile and the many newspaper and magazine pieces that followed encouraged people to root for Marilyn. Readers who had never even seen Marilyn in a film wanted her to succeed in Hollywood, allowing the fairy tale she’d spun to have a happy ending. It quickly became apparent from Marilyn’s fan mail at Twentieth that her one-woman publicity campaign was working. Through her own shrewd efforts, she had attracted a huge following that was entirely out of proportion to the small roles she had played to date. Had Twentieth made a mistake in loaning Marilyn out for her first film with star billing? On the basis of all the publicity, even Darryl Zanuck began to wonder.
When Marilyn wasn’t preparing for her upcoming film with Natasha, she worked with a second acting teacher, Michael Chekhov. Terrified that she couldn’t possibly get through the assignment at RKO alone, she requested permission for Natasha to accompany her. Marilyn’s self-reliance in matters of publicity contrasted sharply with her utter dependence on her dramatic coach. Lang permitted Marilyn to bring her on one condition: that Natasha refrain from going over Marilyn’s lines at home. He didn’t want Marilyn’s interpretation of the role to be locked in before she had an opportunity to work with the director and the other actors.
This arrangement was a problem from the start. Lang, attempting to direct Marilyn, initially had no idea that Natasha stood directly behind him. It was a strange sight, almost comical: The director grimly studied Marilyn from his canvas chair as a wraithlike woman with flashing eyes gestured behind his back. Marilyn and Natasha had worked out a code that Natasha compared to the signals between a catcher and a pitcher in baseball. After a take, as Lang clarified what he wanted, Marilyn, barely listening, would surreptitiously glance over his shoulder. Even when Lang wanted to move on to the next setup, if Natasha failed to nod, Marilyn insisted on another take. It took a while before the director figured out what was going on, but when he did he angrily banished Natasha.
Marilyn—an odd combination of fear and ferocity—reacted with horror. She was painfully insecure about her abilities, and believed she needed Natasha to keep going. She was convinced she just couldn’t do it alone. Yet she was ready to fight for what she needed, and she was prepared to shut down the production if she didn’t get her way. She refused to work without her dramatic coach. Eventually, Jerry Wald, the head of RKO, negotiated a compromise. Natasha could return to the set, but under no circumstances was she to send hand signals to Marilyn.
Word of the trouble Lang was having with Marilyn drifted back to Twentieth, where Zanuck, under pressure from Skouras, was thinking of giving her her first real starring role. The film was Roy Baker’s Don’t Bother to Knock, in which Marilyn would play a beautiful psychotic, reflecting Zanuck’s perception of her as sexually dangerous and not a little mad. His view was based on the talk in Hollywood that somehow Marilyn had been responsible for Johnny Hyde’s death. Some of Johnny’s friends, the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson for instance, liked to say that Johnny had died like a man. Others remarked that poor Johnny, unable to stay away from Marilyn, had screwed himself to death.
Zanuck was by no means convinced that Marilyn was ready—if she ever would be ready—to carry a film. He insisted that she take a screen test. If she did well, she could have the part of Nell, the babysitter who nearly murders a child because she believes it poses an obstacle to her love affair. For the moment, the screen test became the focus of Marilyn’s existence. She worked round the clock with Natasha to prepare. On the day of the test, Marilyn, terrified of going through the ordeal alone, sneaked Natasha onto the set.
The test, as it turned out, was a success. Zanuck quickly threw another obstacle in her path. Citing the test as evidence that Marilyn didn’t need a coach, he refused to allow Natasha on the set of Don’t Bother to Knock, telling Marilyn that it would lead to chaos if every actor or actress demanded special coaching from the sidelines. He insisted that Marilyn was quite capable of acting in a film under the sole guidance of the director. “You have built up a Svengali,” he wrote to her in a memo, “and if you are going to progress with your career and become as important talent-wise as you have publicity-wise then you must destroy this Svengali before it destroys you.”
Natasha was in an exceedingly awkward position. What happened at RKO had been of little concern to her. She worked for Twentieth, Johnny Hyde having arranged for her to be hired when he negotiated Marilyn’s contract. Darryl Zanuck was Natasha’s boss, and she did not want to be in any sort of trouble with him. His references to her as Marilyn’s Svengali were alarming. She did not want to risk her job by being seen to interfere between Marilyn and her director.
At first, Marilyn agreed to work without her coach, but repeatedly she rushed off the set to call Natasha’s office. They reviewed scenes together before Marilyn actually performed them. Meanwhile, Marilyn barraged Zanuck with letters imploring him to allow her to have Natasha. Finally, Natasha received the call she had been dreading. The production was well under way when Marilyn announced that she would not work another day without her coach. Zanuck, with a good deal of film already in the can, had little choice but to agree. Natasha was ordered to report to the Western Avenue stage at once.
Roy Baker, pale and slight, was directing his first film in Hollywood, after having made I’ll Never Forget You for Fox in England. He was clearly irritated by Natasha, whom he re
garded as Marilyn’s security blanket. Natasha took Marilyn aside and reminded her of the difficult position she had put her in. In view of Baker’s resentment, they must tread carefully. If the director was displeased with their work, Natasha would be crucified.
In the days that followed, Marilyn repeatedly blew her lines. Though she gave the appearance of having come to the set unprepared, in fact, the truth was the very opposite. Marilyn resembled a student who has studied too hard for a crucial test. She knew her lines perfectly well, but when it was time to deliver them, she just blanked out. One had to wonder why Marilyn persisted in putting herself through this anguish. The answer was that her drive to be effective on screen was every bit as strong as her fear and insecurity.
On the last day of filming, Marilyn appeared utterly unfamiliar with the scene she was supposed to be working on. The more the director shouted, the worse she seemed to tense up. Finally, Marilyn announced that she had to confer with Natasha. Baker, exasperated, pointed out that he was quite capable of providing all the help she required. Marilyn, in front of everyone, replied that he wasn’t. Baker permitted Marilyn to work with her coach. They shot the scene and it was perfect. Then he marched to the telephone and arranged for Natasha to be dismissed.
These problems notwithstanding, Marilyn’s first starring role turned out to be not so bad after all. The consensus at the studio was that she was pretty enough, and that somehow all the frenzy on the set had fed into the unstable character Marilyn portrayed. Zanuck, pleased with Marilyn’s performance, decided to look around for another dramatic role for her. Meanwhile, she was given minor assignments in Edmund Goulding’s We’re Not Married, Henry Koster’s O. Henry’s Full House, and Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business.
Marilyn Monroe Page 5