Authors: Barbara Leaming
Kazan was then probably the most powerful director in America. On Broadway, he had directed three Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. His
association with Miller and Williams had earned him a reputation for being a playwright’s director, but he was also clearly an actor’s director. His work with Marlon Brando in the first stage production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
in 1947 had broken exciting new ground. In Hollywood, he’d negotiated a six-picture, non-exclusive deal with Twentieth Century–Fox, at the highest per-picture director’s salary the studio had ever agreed to pay. Kazan had already won an Academy Award as Best Director for
Gentleman’s Agreement
, but it was
Streetcar
, on which the advance word was spectacular, that promised to be his watershed. Before that, despite the Oscar, Kazan had confided in Williams that he didn’t really know how to make films yet. In
Streetcar
, Kazan demonstrated the mastery he so often showed on stage.
The Hook
was particularly important to Kazan, since he needed to follow
Streetcar
with another great film; that’s why the current draft had been such a big disappointment. As it was, the script wasn’t going to give either man what he needed.
There was an even greater pressure burdening Kazan. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which since 1938 had been attempting to document the Communist infiltration of American film and theater, was preparing to launch motion picture industry hearings in March. Its investigations had been given new and vigorous life by America’s entry into the Korean War in 1950. Having belonged to the Communist Party for about nineteen months between 1934 and 1936, Kazan figured it was only a matter of time before HUAC summoned him. He was visible. He was successful. He was very much in demand. Those qualities made him a prime target for a committee whose
raison d’être
, in large part, was publicity. “If they call me, I’ll tell them to go fuck themselves,” Kazan vowed to Kermit Bloomgarden. If he did that, his Hollywood career would be destroyed. The inevitability seemed to shadow Kazan’s every action.
The climate of fear in Hollywood also had an impact on the particular project he and Miller were selling. When they met with Darryl Zanuck in his high-domed office at Twentieth Century–Fox, the production chief turned down
The Hook
because of its politically sensitive subject matter. Zanuck, though eager to begin Kazan’s next film, wouldn’t touch Miller’s script, concerned as it was with unions and labor. Abe Lastfogel, Kazan’s agent at William Morris, left the meeting and went directly to Warner Bros. to try his luck there.
Meanwhile, Kazan had something else he wanted to do on the Fox lot. Ostensibly, he took Miller to the set of
As Young as You Feel
to visit the director, Harmon Jones, who had previously worked as Kazan’s film editor. But the real reason was to see a girl he had heard about from Charlie Feldman. The detour offered a way to blow off some of the tension.
Before Miller and Kazan actually saw her, her name echoed through the studio. “Marilyn!” an assistant shouted frantically while Jones told Kazan about the trouble he’d been having with the twenty-four-year-old actress. She was forever disappearing from the set. Worse, when she returned, her eyes were often swollen from crying, making it difficult to film her. Fortunately, her role was a small one. This was to be her final day, if only Jones could get the shots he needed. She appeared at last, her skin-tight black dress disclosing a body perfect even by Hollywood standards. She had blue-gray eyes, a turned-up nose, and luminous white skin. She wore her fine blonde hair pinned on top of her head.
Marilyn Monroe was in crisis. When she finished work on this picture, she had no further assignments. After today, she had nothing to do and nowhere to go. A career that meant everything to her might well be over. Though Marilyn was under contract to Twentieth, Darryl Zanuck, who loathed her, was unlikely to pick up her option in May. Though she had signed a three-year contract with the William Morris Agency as recently as December 5, suddenly no one there would take her calls. Marilyn felt as if she were about to fall off the face of the earth.
Highlighting Marilyn’s predicament was the fact that she had just had the best year of her professional life. She owed it all to Johnny Hyde, a partner and senior agent at William Morris. For two years, he had worked tirelessly on her behalf. Very much in love with Marilyn, the dwarf-like agent believed in her, and in her dream of being a star, as no one had done before. He was even rumored to have personally underwritten the new contract he had negotiated for her at Twentieth. Before meeting Johnny, Marilyn had briefly been under contract at both Twentieth and Columbia, but neither studio had kept her on. Hyde was determined that things were going to be different this time.
For a while, it seemed they would be. By 1950, Hyde’s efforts had begun to pay off. Marilyn attracted attention in small but showy roles in John Huston’s
The Asphalt Jungle
and Joseph Mankiewicz’s
All About Eve.
It was thanks to Johnny that she had an opportunity to work with the best directors; it was thanks to Johnny that she knew who the best directors were. But just when all that she had been working for finally seemed within her grasp, the fifty-five-year-old Hyde had a fatal heart attack in Palm Springs on December 18. Marilyn had refused to join him there for the weekend. She blamed herself for his death. The day after Hyde’s funeral, Marilyn attempted suicide, swallowing the contents of a bottle of barbiturates. Though a roommate discovered her in time, in the days and weeks that followed she never really came back to life. With no one to fight for her anymore, Marilyn seemed to have given up. In January, she reported for work on
As Young as You Feel
, the last film Johnny had arranged for her, but from the first it was evident that she was merely going through the motions.
Miller and Kazan watched her struggle through a scene. Between takes, she fled to a dark, deserted sound stage littered with office furniture. When Kazan caught up with her, he found her in tears. They had met before, though he assumed she didn’t remember—Marilyn and Johnny had once had dinner with Kazan and Abe Lastfogel, Hyde’s partner at William Morris. Now, Kazan offered consolation for Johnny’s death. Marilyn looked away, far too upset to reply. She returned for another take. When she finished, Miller looked on as Kazan asked her to dinner. Marilyn said no, and the men went off to the studio cafeteria.
So that was it for Marilyn. Her work on the picture was done. There seemed to be nothing left for her at Twentieth. Since Johnny’s death, her phone had rung constantly, but it was always Charlie Feldman or one of the other men in their group, each of them eager to be first to sleep with Johnny’s girl before passing her on to the others. The only sign that anyone else remembered her was a package from Johnny’s family, containing a stack of nude photographs of Marilyn that had been discovered in the top drawer of his bureau. As Marilyn’s recent behavior suggested, part of her just wanted to curl up and die.
But Kazan’s fortuitous arrival indicated that this was no time to indulge in self-pity. Whatever Kazan may have thought, Marilyn knew exactly who he was. As it happened, she had previously encountered him not once but twice. The previous August, Johnny Hyde had taken her to Danny Kaye’s party to welcome Vivien Leigh to Hollywood for
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Kazan, Leigh’s dinner partner, had been very
much the power player in the room that evening. Now, at a moment when Marilyn seemed about to lose everything, the important director had walked into her life. On the Fox lot, Kazan was known to be casting the film
Viva Zapata!
, then being written by John Steinbeck. If Marilyn failed to seize the opportunity, it might not present itself again. It didn’t matter that she was mentally and physically exhausted. Marilyn, through an act of will, pulled herself out of the mists of the depression that had engulfed her. Soon, she was on her way to the studio cafeteria, having decided to find Kazan and say yes to his dinner invitation.
Marilyn began to spend nights in Kazan’s room at Feldman’s, while Miller slept alone in a room down the hall. By day, Miller, powerfully attracted to Marilyn himself, swam laps in the pool in an effort to cool off. Marilyn, appointed “mascot,” accompanied Kazan and Miller on their rounds with
The Hook.
She loved Gadg’s idea of playing a practical joke on Harry Cohn, the production chief at Columbia. Kazan would introduce Marilyn as his private secretary, Miss Bauer, who was there to take notes on Cohn’s reaction to the script. In fact, she and Cohn had met in the past, when he had banned her from the lot after she refused to accompany him on a yacht to Catalina Island. Marilyn’s rage over the incident had festered, and now she welcomed an opportunity to laugh at his expense. Despite her carefully cultivated soft, breathy voice, Marilyn was full of anger. As it turned out, going to Harry Cohn’s office may not have been such a good idea after all; inevitably, the visit reminded Marilyn that without Johnny Hyde’s protection, she faced the loss of yet another studio contract.
By the time Charlie Feldman returned from New York on Sunday, January 21, Marilyn appeared to have lined up a new protector. Feldman had to give the devil her due—she had worked quickly, replacing Johnny with Kazan. Feldman was a bit of a dandy, sporting a Clark Gable mustache and a gold signet ring on his right pinky finger; he had planned to be the first to take Johnny’s girl to bed, but he accepted defeat gracefully. When he drew up a guest list for a buffet dinner party in Miller’s honor, he listed Marilyn simply as Kazan’s girl; that being her current identity, no other name seemed necessary.
All week the house in Coldwater Canyon was a hive of activity in anticipation of Friday night. A dance band was hired. Heaping platters of beef tenderloin, chopped chicken liver, and marinated herring were
ordered from the Hillcrest Country Club. Miller had been having trouble with his wife back in Brooklyn, and Kazan, who also had a wife in the east, had resolved to get him a girl in California. So the party was conceived as what Feldman and his friends called a stag. Feldman put together similar parties for Joe Kennedy’s son Jack when he was in town. Men, whether married or not, came alone. Girls, as they were designated, arrived in their own cars. That way the men would not be required to take them home afterward. Marilyn knew that Feldman’s friends Raymond Hakim and Pat De Cicco, both of whom had also been hounding her since Johnny’s death, would be at the stag. But she had every reason to expect that Kazan’s presence would force them to keep their distance. Hakim was an Egyptian-born film producer, De Cicco a procurer for Howard Hughes and other wealthy men in Hollywood.
Friday arrived and Kazan decided not to take Marilyn to the party after all, claiming to have some business to attend to. In fact, he went off to meet another girl. At the last minute, Miller was assigned to Marilyn as his substitute. She knew precisely what that meant, of course. She had slept with Kazan, then been passed on to the next guy. When Miller called to say he would pick her up, Marilyn, well aware of how these things worked, said it wouldn’t be necessary. She could get to Feldman’s on her own. To her astonishment, the gravel-voiced Miller insisted.
The actress Evelyn Keyes had had dinner with Feldman and Joe Schenck, an executive producer at Fox, two nights previously. In the course of the evening, Feldman invited her to the party for Arthur Miller. Witty, intelligent, well-read, and recently divorced from John Huston, Keyes was very much interested in meeting the author of
Death of a Salesman.
But when Miller appeared on Friday night, there could be no mistaking that he was “totally wrapped up” in Marilyn Monroe. “I don’t think he ever looked my way,” Keyes recalled. Marilyn, as she made her entrance, resembled nothing so much as “the prow of a ship.” She was “all front.” She actually seemed to lean forward as she walked, her breasts “in advance.”
Marilyn must have been nervous coming into that crowded, dimly-lit, music-filled room. She knew that Feldman, Hakim, De Cicco and the other men would all be laughing at her. She knew that it was obvious she had already been passed on. She knew people were saying that she had been foolish to have repeatedly turned down Johnny Hyde’s
proposals of marriage; and in the light of current circumstances, it crossed her mind that perhaps they were right.
Soon, they were seated on a sofa, Miller leaning slightly toward her. Evelyn Keyes observed them there. Miller, utterly absorbed, watched Marilyn as though he were “studying this phenomenon.” After they had talked a while, Marilyn, who believed that men only like happy girls, kicked off her high-heeled shoes and tucked her slender legs under her. Miller told her about his troubles with his wife. Marilyn would not have been surprised if he had asked her to come to his room or to the car. Probably, she would have accepted. Instead, he took her big toe in his fingers and squeezed gently.
Kazan came to the party late, his date having failed to work out. At this point, Marilyn was his to reclaim if he wished. As far as anyone was concerned, she was still Kazan’s girl. Miller had merely been his stand-in. But once Kazan saw Arthur and Marilyn dancing together, he pretended to be weary and asked his friend to see her home. On the way back to her apartment, Miller again made no move to sleep with her, though he desired her very much. Marilyn, accustomed to being pawed by men, interpreted his shyness and awkwardness as a sign of respect. No man, not even Johnny Hyde, had ever treated her like that.
Miller feared where this was headed. Being true to himself meant a great deal to him. He thought of himself as a man of conscience. He thought of himself as a man guided by moral principles. In his notebook, later, he would meditate on the inadequacy of guilt as a basis for morality. He sincerely wanted to do the right thing. How could such a man betray his wife, the mother of his children, the woman who had supported him when he was a struggling writer? Miller, torn, returned to New York the following day.