The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Marilyn refused to marry the wealthy Schenck, but agreed to move into his guest cottage. According to a Hollywood columnist, Schenck needed medical assistance to get an erection, which did not last very long. Marilyn was amusing about her role in their urgent arrangement: "It's all very complicated. Sometimes when the doctor comes, I have to synchronize my watch. That's why I'm living in the guest house. This stuff can't wait for a studio limousine to drive me across town." During these years she also spent a lot of time on her knees, servicing movie executives like Harry Cohn in their offices, but this phase of her life came to an end in 1951. After signing her first long-term contract with Fox, she triumphantly declared: "I have sucked my last cock."3

  II

  In 1948, during her six-month contract with Columbia Pictures, Marilyn was sent to their drama coach Natasha Lytess, and began the acting lessons with a series of teachers that would continue until the end of her life. A natural comedienne with a sexy face and figure, Marilyn yearned to be a dramatic actress. She was utterly devoted to all her mentors, most of them of them heavily influenced by Konstantin Stanislavsky's school of "Method" acting, which emphasized the inner truth of the actor's feelings, moods and expressions. Born into a Jewish family in Austria and a former actress in Max Reinhardt's company in Germany, Lytess claimed Franco-Russian descent to dissociate herself from the wartime enemy and connect herself with the Russian acting tradition. Tall, angular, even emaciated, with flashing eyes, short-cropped gray hair, a strong accent and forbidding appearance, Lytess was energetic, volatile and intense. Several biographers have suggested (though there's no evidence for this) that Lytess was the mistress of the German-Jewish émigré novelist Bruno Frank and that he was the father of her young daughter, Barbara.

  Like most of her teachers, Lytess influenced Marilyn's personal as well as her professional life. A devout and submissive disciple, Marilyn became a close friend. When Lytess was desperate for money to pay the mortgage, or risk losing her house, Marilyn sold the mink stole that one of her admirers had given her – the only valuable thing she owned – and gave Lytess $1,000. Marilyn had known real poverty in her youth and was always generous with money. Emphasizing her characteristic openhandedness, Lytess said the self-absorbed actress frequently gave material gifts because "she was unable to give of herself." Marilyn admired her as a teacher, but complained that Lytess was jealous of her boyfriends and behaved as if she were Marilyn's husband. When Lytess wanted to have sex with her, Marilyn passively agreed. "I'd let any guy, or girl," she insouciantly explained, "do what they wanted if I thought they were my friend."

  Like Snively, Lytess had to start from scratch. She recalled, Marilyn's "voice, a piping sort of whimper, got on my nerves" – though Marilyn developed this breathy whisper as her trademark. Lytess encouraged her inhibited pupil "to let go, to say things freely, to walk freely, to feel expansion, to know what it is like to speak with authority." Then, using a sub-aqueous metaphor that would recur in descriptions of Marilyn, she said she wanted her pupil to know "the difference between existing under water and coming alive." She taught Marilyn how to express character and reveal the meaning of a scene, and to understand that acting was best when "the emotion shows, not the words."4 Like Lee Strasberg later on, she urged her pupil to concentrate on herself instead of on the writer's words, on the interpretation of her own role instead of on relating to the other actors.

  Lytess, like Strasberg, also exacerbated Marilyn's self-consciousness, intensified her anxiety and increased her childlike dependence on her teacher. In stressing the actor as an individual, rather than part of an ensemble, she encouraged Marilyn's intense self-concentration, which seemed to her co-workers like narcissism and selfishness. At the same time, Lytess, like many others, was content to enjoy sex with Marilyn without considering Marilyn's feelings. Despite her intense obsession with herself, Marilyn curiously dissociated her body from her emotions and allowed others to have their way with her in exchange for emotional support.

  In the fall of 1951 Marilyn began lessons with Michael Chekhov at the same time as, but secret from, Lytess. The sixty-year-old Chekhov had impeccable credentials. Nephew of the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, he had worked with Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater. He was also writing the widely used book, To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting (1953), which became Marilyn's bible. Chekhov "devoted himself to the fulfillment of the actor's personality – not only in the profession but also in their personal lives." Like all her teachers, he practiced a kind of amateur psychotherapy. He spoke ex cathedra and confused her, since she was obsessed by her own body, by declaring that "our bodies can be either our best friends or worst enemies. You must try to consider your body as an instrument for expressing your creative ideas. You must strive for complete harmony between body and psychology" – though few actors ever managed to achieve this ideal.

  Annoyed by Marilyn's habitual lateness and absence – which was caused by nervousness and fear of failure, and would later destroy her career – Chekhov felt she was not serious and advised her to leave his classes. Marilyn, suitably chastised, begged for understanding. "Please don't give up on me yet," she pleaded. "I know (painfully so) that I try your patience. I need the work [with you] and your friendship desperately. I shall call you soon."5 After this abject apology, she was forgiven and continued her classes. Marilyn had also taken lessons, before she met Lytess, from Morris Carnovsky and his wife Phoebe Brand at the Actors Lab in Los Angeles. She continued to take instruction in movement and body language, after she left Chekhov, with the mime artist Lotte Goslar at the Turnabout Theater in L.A. All these teachers – as well as Lee Strasberg and Joshua Logan later on – were strongly influenced by the ideas of Stanislavsky.

  Marilyn's principal teachers were supplemented by a cadre of minor instructors. Lytess had tried to build up Marilyn's bruised ego and make her believe she could some day become a star. At the same time, Fred Karger was giving her voice lessons and doing his best to undermine her self-confidence. He too became an influential mentor, teaching her about clothing and manners, books and music. He also sent her to an orthodontist who improved her bite and bleached her teeth. Separated from his wife, Karger was living with his young son in his mother's house. Marilyn fell deeply in love with him, and moved in with the family for several months.

  Marilyn said that Karger, preying on her vulnerability and trying to dominate her, savagely condemned her intellectual and moral weaknesses: "He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. . . . 'Your mind isn't developed. Compared to your breasts it's embryonic.'" He refused to marry her because, as he insultingly told her, if he died he wouldn't want his son "to be brought up by a woman like you." Elia Kazan attributed Karger's hold over Marilyn to his sexual prowess: "Fred was a musician, scrawny but able in love. She came as many as three times with him in one go. He was vulgar and coarse and scornful with her. He said she was no good for anything but fucking. He found her dress 'cheap.' He told her her breasts were too big. He didn't like to sleep in the same bed with her. He thought her beneath conversation, said she was stupid and only good for one thing." Marilyn meekly accepted this treatment, and when Karger finally rejected her, she may have aborted his child. In 1952 Karger married the actress Jane Wyman, recently divorced from Ronald Reagan. Karger and Wyman were also divorced, but married again in 1961 and four years later divorced again.

  In 1949, despite extensive tuition and several contracts, Marilyn's career was going nowhere. Her first break came through her new agent, advocate, protector and lover, Johnny Hyde. As in a Shakespearean comedy, she loved Karger, but he didn't love her; Hyde loved her, but she didn't love him. Like Schenck, Hyde was a short, homely man, much older than Marilyn, who came from a Russian-Jewish family, had emigrated to America as a boy and worked his way up to the top. He began as Ivan Haidebura, a child juggler and acrobat in Loew's vaudeville circuit, and eventually moved to Hollywood. After his legendary discovery of Lana
Turner in Schwab's drugstore, he became an important executive in the influential William Morris agency.

  Kazan, who succeeded Hyde as Marilyn's lover, observed that she gave Hyde "that dazed starlet look of unqualified adoration and utter dependence. Clearly she lived by his protection and was sure of his devotion." Marilyn, then making the difficult transition from orphan and factory worker to model and actress, explained that Hyde "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 with all my heart that I could love him back." But Marilyn was not mercenary. She refused to marry the thrice-divorced Hyde, as she'd refused to marry Schenck, though both elderly wealthy men promised to leave all their money to her. Hyde even asked for a list of friends she trusted and begged them to plead his case with her. Marilyn's sexual demands and Hyde's weak heart were almost certain to finish him off in a short time, but she feared that if Hyde failed to die on cue, she'd be trapped with him. Incurably romantic, despite her promiscuous past, she told Hyde that "if I married you I might meet some other man and fall in love with him. I don't want that ever to happen. If I marry a man I want to feel I'll always be faithful to him – and never love anyone else." Unfortunately, it never worked out this way.

  In December 1950, when Hyde died on schedule, Marilyn suddenly lost his power and protection. Fearing her career would come to an end, she wept for herself as well as for him. Though he left a substantial estate of $600,000, she got nothing. Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed her in All About Eve, described Hyde's relations with Marilyn and how he restored the self-confidence that Fred Karger had nearly destroyed:

  That major force [in her career] was a very important agent named Johnny Hyde – at the time certainly no less than the #2 or #3 power at William Morris. Like most great agents, he was a tiny man. . . . Hyde was a very honest and a very gentle man. He was deeply in love with Marilyn. And more than anyone in her life, I think, provided for her something akin to an honest ego of her own; he respected her. Permitting her, in turn, to acquire a certain amount of self-respect.6

  III

  Shortly before his death, Hyde got Marilyn a small but significant part in her first serious film, The Asphalt Jungle, the first of two excellent pictures she made in 1950. Marilyn was still cast for her sexy looks – in one she plays a criminal's mistress, the other a starlet on the make – but she worked with first-rate material, fine actors and superb directors. John Huston knew how to get the best out of scripts and actors. An incorrigible risk-taker, he was born in 1906 in Nevada, Missouri, south of Kansas City, a town his grandfather had supposedly won in a poker game. The son of the famous stage and screen actor Walter Huston, John had a weak heart and had been an invalid in childhood. But he was a man of wide interests, restless energy and fierce appetites. He had been a teenage boxing champion, had served in the Mexican cavalry, become an actor and playwright on Broadway, and studied painting in Paris. He was an expert fisherman, big game hunter and art collector, and a fine writer and director. He'd made first-rate documentaries under fire in World War II, as well as three brilliant films: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Key Largo (1949). A persuasive and charismatic charmer, he impressed studio executives with his intelligence and won the loyalty of actors by giving them a free hand. Tall and rugged, courtly and eloquent, gambler and raconteur, he had a passion for horses, would marry five times and leave a long trail of mistresses.

  Marilyn was perfectly cast as Angela Phinlay, the blond mistress of a polished but corrupt lawyer, played with waxed mustache and suave manners by Louis Calhern. He's an accomplice of a group of criminals, who plan to pull off a perfect crime, and is supposed to buy the jewels they steal. W.R. Burnett's novel, published only a year before the film was produced, describes Angela as "voluptuously made; and there was something about her walk – something lazy, careless, and insolently assured – that was impossible to ignore." As in many of her best roles, Marilyn's glowing skin and soft, dreamy sensuality contrasts sharply with the hard, striving male characters around her, and she remains rather vague about what's really going on.

  Marilyn makes a powerful impact in three short scenes. In one she kisses Calhern goodnight and waits for him in the bedroom. Then she plans a romantic holiday with Calhern, who intends to steal the jewels and escape with her to Cuba. Finally, bullied and threatened by the police after Calhern has been arrested, she breaks down and admits that she'd provided him with a false alibi. She then apologizes to him as he continues to read a stool-pigeon's confession with apparent nonchalance. He suggests that he'd always expected her to betray him, cynically tells her that she'll take many exotic trips with other men and ironically exclaims, "Some sweet kid."

  Huston achieved a strikingly original film despite the censorship in force at the time. The moralistic movie Production Code drained a lot of originality and interest from the eccentric cast of characters.

  The lubricious mastermind of the robbery, Dr. Riedenschneider, expertly played by Sam Jaffe, is caught by the police while watching young girls dance at a roadside café. In a letter of October 6, 1949 to the studio head Louis Mayer, the censor Joseph Breen insisted that Riedenschneider had to be one-dimensional and must "be played as a pitiful character trying to recapture his youth, not at all as a lecherous man." As the studio made concessions on these issues, Breen did all he could to cramp Marilyn's physical assets and sexy style. "It is mandatory," he wrote, "that the intimate parts of the body – specifically the breasts of women – be fully covered at all times." There must be no "indication that [Calhern] follows her into the bedroom, or any more definite suggestion of intimacy."7 So, after saying goodnight to her sugar-daddy, Marilyn sways down the hallway to the alluring bedroom, leaving her nocturnal adventures to the spectators' imagination.

  The star of the film, the hard-drinking Sterling Hayden, an ex- Marine and highly decorated war hero who'd fought the Nazis as a special commando alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, is another tough man in the story. The Asphalt Jungle, as its title suggests, is an urban crime film, but Huston loved horses and often brought them into climactic moments. Hayden's character comes from a Kentucky horse farm, which his family has lost after his father's death, and he hopes to get enough money from the robbery to buy it back. Badly wounded in a shootout with Calhern's henchman and accompanied by his gun moll, Hayden drives all the way back to the family farm and dies in the paddock as the horses gather mournfully around him. When the film was completed Hayden gratefully told Huston that working with him had been "a pleasure, a privilege and an education all in one."

  Two other professionals, praising the film, noted Marilyn's fine performance. The director Howard Hawks wrote that "Jungle is beautifully done and I envy you for it. The girl is a real find." The writer Budd Schulberg told Huston that the performances reflected "a hard-eyed and hardly ever sentimental conception of what your people were. . . . Calhern was really on the spot, trying to hide naked nerves with charm; and with Hayden you went farther into an understanding of violence than I have seen on the screen before. . . . The thought processes of the little kept blonde were for once accurate."8

  In 1950 Marilyn also played Miss Caswell, the mistress of another wicked smoothie, George Sanders, in All About Eve. It was written and directed by the intelligent, sophisticated Joseph Mankiewicz. Deliberately using Marilyn's sexpot image, Mankiewicz gave a cynical but accurate history of her couch-casting and two-bit roles: "For the most part she auditioned a great deal, afternoons, in executive offices. She also functioned agreeably as a companion for corporate elder statesmen visiting from the east, and on hostess committees for sales conventions. Occasionally, she was squeezed into old Betty Grable costumes and used as a dress extra for unimportant bits in some films." As a useful antidote to all the bewildering Russian theories she'd half absorbed from Lytess, Chekhov and Carnovsky, Mankiewicz advised Ma
rilyn to "put on some more clothes and stop moving your ass so much." (She ignored this advice and attracted considerable attention by moving her ass more than ever in Niagara.) In All About Eve she was, for once, given a few good lines. Commenting on a producer she's been advised to cultivate at an elegant party, Marilyn disdainfully asks, "Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?" But most of all she is a naïve and stunning blonde, a moral and visual contrast to the dark-haired, cunning and ruthless actresses at the center of the film.

  George Sanders – like Chekhov, Schenck and Hyde – was born in Russia. He was attracted to Marilyn and falsely accused by his current wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, of having an affair with her. But he admired her character, and emphasized her insecurity, her professional standards and her intellectual curiosity: "She was very beautiful and very inquiring and very unsure – [as if] she was somebody in a play not yet written, uncertain of her part in the overall plot. . . . She was humble, punctual and untemperamental. She wanted people to like her. . . . I found her conversation had unexpected depths. She showed an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting.