The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Torn between a desire for self-improvement and a habit of self-indulgence, Marilyn seemed an unlikely candidate for this stern tuition. Since she never came to the set on time and couldn't learn her lines, even for a brief movie scene, she seemed to lack the necessary discipline to become a stage actress, memorize three hours of dialogue and give eight performances a week. But Strasberg, delighted to secure such a prominent disciple, bent the credulous Marilyn to his will.

  The Studio, located in a deconsecrated Greek Orthodox church with a worn brick façade on West 44th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, offered several kinds of acting classes. A key part of the discipline was the public presentation of a scene and open discussion and critique of the students' work. Each week at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays about a hundred actors would gather to watch two or three of their colleagues act a scene and then explain what they were trying to achieve. Anyone in the audience could comment on or even severely criticize the performance, and at the end Strasberg, the presiding deity, would pass final judgment. Susan Strasberg wrote that Marilyn got special treatment. She "would observe at the studio, work with him at home, sit in on the private classes, and eventually do the exercise work and scenes with the other students."1 He taught her movement, breath control and projection, and directed her in short scenes.

  Strasberg believed, or pretended to believe, in Marilyn's dramatic talent and told her she could transform herself from playing trivial parts in mediocre movies to performing tragic roles on stage. He even said that she could play Lady Macbeth or Cordelia in King Lear. Though savage with other actors, he praised her excessively and convinced her that "she was capable of towering achievements, that her motion picture work barely scratched the surface of her latent and untapped talent." Though there was no sign of this genius, even after years of tuition, Strasberg ranked her with Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse. After her death, he categorically declared that had she lived, "without a doubt she would have been one of the really great actresses of the stage." It is far more likely that he believed Marilyn could help him compensate for his failure in Hollywood and revive his own theatrical career. His biographer wrote that "The Method was known inside the profession. Kazan's movies brought it to national attention. Marilyn made the Studio a household word."2

  The essential principles of Stanislavsky's Method were rather abstract and confusing, especially to a dreamy, uneducated novice like Marilyn. Maurice Zolotow described Stanislavsky's key terms: "Justification requires the Method actor to find some emotional, logical, or factual reason for every action he performs. Objectification is relating oneself to the physical objects, the props, in a scene. Concentration is the immersion of oneself in the story to such an extent that one achieves a trance-like state, existing entirely in terms of the make-believe world." Another basic concept was "sense memory," the idea that the actor would recall a past experience in his life, translate it into an emotional state and use it to create the character he was playing on stage. But the self-absorbed Marilyn could only be harmed by getting herself into a deeper "trance-like state" and recalling dangerous memories.

  Arthur Miller regarded the Method as essentially hostile to the words of the playwright, and felt it encouraged the actors' hermetic egoism and cryptic inwardness:

  [Strasberg is] a force which is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it's the most communicative art known to man. . . .

  The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions . . . that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, and the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever. . . . Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted The Seagull.

  Joan Copeland, who knew Marilyn at the Actors Studio, thought she was innately a Method actress and that her work revealed how intensely she was driven by inner demons. Marilyn herself believed that Strasberg's teaching was therapeutic, and helped her (as she vaguely said) to "deepen my understanding of my way to approach myself."3 It was dangerous to tell the emotionally unstable Marilyn, who tended to worship her teachers, to use her pain and use her past. In ordinary life, she couldn't face her pain and tried to suppress her past. When under pressure to perform, she regressed into her childhood stutter.

  It was difficult for Marilyn to reveal her inner self and courageous of her to face the criticism of other actors. In February 1956, after studying with Strasberg for a year, she finally appeared with Maureen Stapleton and played the title role in the opening scene of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie (1921). (Greta Garbo had played Anna in the early sound version of 1930, which had drawn huge crowds with the famous slogan: "Garbo talks.") Anna's past history is revealed in the course of the play. After the death of her mother, Anna had been abandoned by her father and sent to live with relatives. Seduced by a cousin when she was sixteen, she had run away and become a prostitute. In this opening scene the young Anna comes to New York to meet her father, whom she's not seen since childhood and who's been responsible for all her misery.

  Strasberg chose this scene, with its clear and psychologically risky parallels with Marilyn's own life, believing that her remembrance of the past would strengthen her performance. Marilyn had also been deserted by her father, been abused by men as a child and worked as a prostitute. In the play Anna says:

  They had to send me to the hospital. It was nice there. I was sorry to leave it, honest! . . .

  It's my Old Man I got to meet. . . . I ain't seen him since I was a kid – don't even know what he looks like. . . .

  He ain't never done a thing for me in my life. . . . But I ain't expecting much from him. Give you a kick when you're down, that's what all men do.

  Kazan described the Actors Studio's rather hostile and resentful attitude toward Marilyn: "The older members had seen that their leader held this movie star, a surprisingly modest girl of modest talent, in awe. They'd believed that he had praised her far beyond her due and no matter how uncertain her work. And that he'd enjoyed his power over her. His raves about her talent they'd considered to be mistaken." But Marilyn gave a surprisingly successful performance. Anna Sten, a Russian actress who'd appeared in Stanislavky's Moscow Art Theater, enthusiastically recalled, "I only ever saw her do one thing at the Studio, when she did Anna Christie, and everyone is still talking about it, how magnificent she was." Kim Stanley, an intense, Method-trained stage actress, agreed that Marilyn "was wonderful. We were taught never to clap at the Actors Studio, like we were in church and all that, but it was the first time I'd ever heard applause there."4 Marilyn may have been impressive, but the actors also clapped because they knew Strasberg would be watching and wanted their public approval. Despite their praise, she never repeated this brief triumph. The result of her year's work at the Actors Studio was not a stage career, but a return to the same mediocre movies in Hollywood. From then on she would have all the Strasbergs' pretentious baggage, and would usually be accompanied by either Lee or Paula as her coach.

  II

  Strasberg also taught his daughter Susan, who nevertheless felt that her father neglected her and focused on Marilyn. He wisely told Susan to use her natural gifts and follow her intuitive instincts: "What are you doing, darling? You are lyrical; for God's sake, don't act lyrical. . . . A wonderful actor with no training is better than a bad actor with all the training in the world." Yet he gave the opposite advice to Marilyn. She, too, was a natural actress who followed her instincts and was spontaneously funny without realizing how funny she was. Though Strasberg recognized that "she was already a real actress, but she didn't know it," he forced her to adhere slavishly to his theories. Billy Wilder later explained how the Method had inhibited and nearly extinguished her instinctive spontaneity: "Before going to the Actors Studio she was like a tightrope walker who doesn't kn
ow there's a pit down there she could fall into. Now she knows about the pit, and she's more careful on the tightrope. She's self-conscious."5

  Marilyn sought the training at the Actors Studio to improve her skills, but instead of gaining poise and self-confidence she became completely dependent on Lee and his wife Paula. Kazan, a close observer of both guru and disciple, emphasized Strasberg's lust for power and the gross flattery he devised to gain control of his precious acquisition: "The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee's power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found the perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe. . . . He encouraged her beyond her gifts in the direction of goals she was not equipped to reach. . . . He soon had her spellbound, feeding her the reassurance of worth she most craved." A minor but significant incident occurred when Strasberg ignored her. It showed how Marilyn, aware of her subservience but too frightened to break away, hung on Strasberg's every word and could be shattered by his silence: "My 'Pope' . . . caused me to run right to my shrink when he didn't say hello in the elevator. That set me back months in analysis. I figure he's unseeing and unhearing me because I'm such a terrible actor. I'm not even worthy of saying hello to."

  Once Marilyn had become Strasberg's disciple, he influenced all her decisions and persuaded her to reject an important role in a television drama. She'd always wanted to play the prostitute in Somerset Maugham's powerful story "Rain"; and Maugham himself, "touched and pleased by her desire to be his Sadie [Thompson], said she would be 'splendid.'"6 But when the executives would not allow Strasberg, who had no experience on television, to direct the adaptation of the story, she withdrew from the project. Marilyn also wanted to appear in John Huston's film biography, Freud, but again withdrew when Freud's daughter Anna, a friend of her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, didn't want the picture to be made.

  Marilyn's mentors and manipulators, Natasha Lytess and the Strasbergs, had a great deal in common. In their doomed effort to turn her into a dramatic actress, they exploited her financially, invited her into their homes, made her dependent upon them, controlled her life, came into fierce conflict with her directors, and aroused the hatred of her husbands and friends. When Miller married Marilyn, he realized that she was pathetically reliant on the Strasbergs and tolerated them to avoid conflict with her. "Lee becomes a guru," Miller said, "and unless he is there, [she] can't move. I never blasted him to Marilyn because she needed him. I recognized that dependency and as long as she got something out of it, I never said anything. We just didn't discuss him." After their marriage broke up, Miller was more critical of Strasberg's lust for power and damaging theories:

  Strasberg's approach was to force his domination rather than to free up somebody to do without him. . . . She was so vulnerable that she couldn't recover from it. She became more and more addicted to that dependency. . . . She had a natural gift, and she didn't live long enough to absorb any teaching without crippling that gift. . . .

  Marilyn, a natural comedienne, seemed distracted by half-digested, spitballed imagery and pseudo-Stanislavskian parallelisms that left her unable to free her own native joyousness. She was being doused by a spurious intellection that was thoroughly useless to her as an acting tool.7

  Paula Strasberg, who coached Marilyn on her movie sets while Lee ran the Actors Studio in New York, was even more meddling and intrusive. Most established actors did not need a coach; if they did, they took private lessons in the coach's studio. Insecure as ever, Marilyn defied convention by bringing Paula on to the set and into head-on conflict with the directors. Instead of building Marilyn's confidence in her own decisions, Paula – for her own selfish reasons – made her more insecure than ever.

  The young Colin Clark, son of the distinguished art historian Sir Kenneth Clark and on the scene during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, described Paula as "short and plump, with brown hair pulled back from a plain, round, expressive face. She has big brown eyes which are usually hidden by big dark glasses – like her protégée. Her clothes are also brown and beige – bohemian but expensive. Her influence over Marilyn Monroe seems to be total. Marilyn Monroe gazes at her continuously and defers to her at all times, as if she was a little Jewish Buddha." For her services, Paula charged Marilyn the extortionate fee of $2,500 a week plus expenses.

  Paula earned her keep by putting Marilyn through absurd exercises and by inflating her ego with outrageous praise. To release the tension in her body and loosen her up, she made Marilyn practice a daily ritual of shaking her hands as if trying to detach them from her wrists. Paula did not try to control Marilyn's habitual lateness, but actually encouraged and even justified her prima donna behavior: "What I tell her is, 'You are the one who gets on the screen, not the others, who make the movie. You are the star! Only amateurs watch production costs – that already makes a Grade-B movie.'" Colin Clark explained the secret of Paula's hold over Marilyn – "total, abject sycophancy, continual flattery, blatant pandering" – and described how Paula melodramatically created expectations that her pupil could not possibly fulfill. She would tell her: "All my life, I have prayed on my knees . . . for God to give me a great actress. And now He has given me you, and you are a great actress, Marilyn. You are."8

  Paula combined parasitic servility with strict demands that Marilyn slavishly follow her orders. In 1956, after Marilyn had suddenly dismissed Natasha and refused to see her, Paula replaced her as coach in Bus Stop. Like Natasha, she fed on her pupil's insecurity, insisted that Marilyn look to her rather than to the director for approval and demanded many takes if she was not satisfied with the scene. Lee, defending Paula, admitted her bulldog tenacity and crude quest for power: "They didn't want Paula there. It is a fact that they tried to get rid of her. However, she spoke right up. She let them know what's what. Paula wasn't shy. It wasn't easy to get rid of Paula. . . . With herself as the front and everybody crawling through her to get to Marilyn, she had developed security and confidence. She was emerging as an overpowering entity." Susan loyally declared that the directors, not Paula, were vain and self-seeking: "their overbearing egos had been threatened by my mother's presence, fearing she would get the credit they wanted." It's significant that Paula developed security and confidence while Marilyn became increasingly insecure and afraid.

  Miller, usually more frank and honest when talking to Marilyn's biographer Fred Guiles in 1967 than he was in his autobiography Timebends in 1987, bitterly criticized Paula's domination as well as her appalling lack of qualifications:

  Marilyn's feelings were very ambivalent about Paula. Paula represented to her in a very real sense her own mother who wasn't there. Paula was a real kook. She was nutty as a fruitcake . . . but Paula was out in the world functioning. Both Lee and Paula by this time had moved in on Marilyn. They had taken her over, at least her career. . . .

  I had no respect for Paula's ability as a dramatic coach. She didn't know any more about acting than a cleaning woman out in the foyer. In this sense, she was a phony, a hoax, but she was successful in making herself necessary to people like Marilyn, she created this tremendous reputation . . . She could cater to the vanities of actresses, to people in the theatre. She had this ability.9

  When Marilyn came to New York, partly to seek out Miller, he was at the apex of the intellectual and cultural world and she was a complete outsider. Awed by both Miller and the Strasbergs, she naturally felt more insecure than ever. Encouraged by Lee Strasberg and following the current fashion, she went into Freudian analysis. Instead of being helped by this treatment, she became deeply disturbed when probing her troubled unconscious. She had wanted to put her old life behind her, but when she tried to explore the depths of her character and "free" herself for the Method, she dredged up troubling memories of her hideous childhood and her years of sexual degradation in Hollywood. Reliving these experiences undermined her precarious balance, and eventually led to nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts.

  M
arilyn's psychiatrists continued her deep involvement with European immigrants: Schenk and Hyde, Lytess and Chekhov, Kazan and Strasberg, Lang and Preminger, Wilder and Cukor. The first of her three analysts, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, was recommended by her patient Milton Greene, and felt no conflict of interest in treating both intricately involved people at the same time. A tall, heavy, fifty-seven-year-old Hungarian immigrant, with white hair braided around her head, Hohenberg had been trained in Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Beginning in 1955, she saw her famous patient five times a week in her office on East 93rd Street. In 1956 she was flown to England, at great expense, to soothe Marilyn when a crisis erupted during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl. The following year, when Marilyn severed relations with Greene, she stopped seeing Hohenberg.

  Hohenberg was succeeded by Dr. Marianne Kris, who also spoke with a strong accent and whose office was conveniently located in Lee Strasberg's apartment building at 135 Central Park West. The daughter of Freud's friend Oskar Rie, a pediatrician, she had earned a medical degree, married the art critic Ernst Kris and become a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. She had been analyzed by Freud himself and worked with his daughter Anna, and was forced to flee Austria after the Nazi invasion in 1938. The New York critic Diana Trilling, who began to see Kris after twenty years of psychotherapy, praised the doctor while expressing the patient's typical dependence on and adoration of the analyst: "Although a refugee from Austria, she employed her new language with exactness and elasticity. . . . I never lay on a couch; we talked facing each other, our facial expressions part of our understanding of what was going on. She was a most remarkable woman, warmhearted, large-minded, sensitive, sensible, imaginative, a great unraveler of emotional knots. She looked wise and she was wise. Her very calm was therapeutic."10 Trilling also criticized her for intervening in her personal life and giving her bad advice. Kris, later on, would make some terrible mistakes with Marilyn.