Marilyn Monroe (27 page)

That night, Marilyn was seated opposite McCullers’s great friend, Cheryl Crawford. Slim and erect, she had short auburn hair and a strong, forbidding face with thin lips and a tense forehead. She wore a dark, tailored wool suit, with a bit of silk scarf exposed at the throat. She wore sensible, low-heeled shoes. Her voice was deep, rich, and masculine.

Miss Crawford was one of Broadway’s most important producers. Bigelow was her assistant. She had launched the Group Theater with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. Later, she had founded the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. She radiated courage and authority. Clifford Odets called her “a mariner steering for the pole star.” In a business populated by temperamental personalities, she seldom grew angry—”about once every two or three years.”

Tonight, apparently, was such an occasion. Crawford, in a flat Midwestern accent, announced that Marilyn had behaved despicably with a very good friend of hers. She passionately defended Charlie Feldman as a man of tremendous integrity. That, perhaps, was the last name one would have expected to hear in this context, yet Crawford insisted that Marilyn had treated him unfairly. Feldman had had Marilyn in mind when he purchased the film rights to Edward Chodorov’s
Oh, Men! Oh, Women!
, which Crawford had produced in 1953. She told Marilyn that the material would have been perfect for her.

Marilyn tried to tell her side of the story. Milton Greene jumped in. The conversation became so heated that, at one point, Crawford turned to Sam Shaw and said that Greene was “evil and just no good.” When Crawford was dismayed, two long, dark lines at the ends of her mouth curled sharply downward—an emotional Geiger counter.

Marilyn persisted and Crawford listened. She explained why she had left Famous Artists. She argued that Feldman, unwilling to jeopardize his position at Twentieth, hadn’t fought for her hard enough. Her
objections were limited to Feldman as an agent; she insisted she had all the respect in the world for him as a producer. She said that Feldman had more taste than anyone in Hollywood and could always be counted on to hire the best directors, writers, and other talent.

Crawford was won over. At such moments, her face would soften dramatically, the dark creases seeming to disappear. She had a warm smile and a merry laugh. After that, the women enjoyed a long, lively conversation about acting. Crawford, fascinated and impressed, invited Marilyn to accompany her to the Actors Studio. She and Kazan and Bobby Lewis had opened the Studio in 1947 as a private workshop where professional actors and actresses could “stretch their capabilities” and “tackle their limitations.” It was neither a school nor a theater. It was off-limits to the public, and off-limits to anyone casting a show. The point was to be permitted to develop one’s craft in an atmosphere free of commercial pressures. The point was to be encouraged to try things one hadn’t done before. The point was to be allowed to fall flat on one’s face. The Studio was an oasis, a refuge, a sanctuary. Kazan called it “the purest place in the world to work.”

Marilyn accepted and they set a date. In the past month, her dream of reinventing herself had become a cruel and humiliating nightmare. Cheryl Crawford offered Marilyn a whole new chance. In one extraordinary and unexpected moment, everything seemed to have turned around for her again.

SEVEN

A
s Cheryl Crawford ate breakfast in her East 54th Street apartment, she would watch the barges float past on the murky East River. This was probably the last peaceful time of her day. As a Broadway producer, she maintained a frantic schedule. She prepared budgets. She interviewed actors. She attended rehearsals. She had drinks with agents and investors. She strove to be, as Elia Kazan called her, a “helper of talent.”

Seated at a nineteenth-century French desk that had been on stage during
Oh, Men! Oh, Women!
, she crafted letters to her authors. She did not flinch from sharply criticizing new work by friends like Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. Though firm in her own opinions, she recognized that she was not infallible. She struggled to avoid huge mistakes, such as she had made in turning down Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman.
When offered the play by Kazan in 1948, Crawford, to her eternal regret, decided that no one would want to see a drama about an unhappy traveling salesman. Willy Loman struck Crawford as pathetic rather than tragic.

A good portion of Cheryl Crawford’s day was devoted to administrative duties at the Actors Studio. More than once, her financial acumen had been responsible for keeping the institution afloat. She raised funds. She pored over the books. She inspected real estate. She haggled with landlords. She resisted Paula Strasberg’s ceaseless demands of a pay raise for her husband Lee. By and large, Crawford left the creative decisions to her partners.

Crawford took pride in her tranquility in moments of crisis. She
liked to say that at the Group Theater she had played the “WASP shiksa” to Harold Clurman’s and Lee Strasberg’s fiery “Old Testament prophets.” She performed a similar function with Kazan and Bobby Lewis, later with Kazan and Strasberg, at the Studio. She was the cool head, the mediator in moments of passionate dissension.

It was a short walk from Crawford’s apartment to the Gladstone Hotel, off Park Avenue. On Friday, February 4, 1955, she arrived there early. Marilyn simply could not be late to observe her first session at the Actors Studio. The women took a cab crosstown to the Malin Studios on West 46th Street.

Marilyn, wearing her dark mink, black sunglasses, and a black kerchief, took her place in the roomful of intense, mainly young, casually dressed actors. They smoked cigarettes and drank coffee from paper containers. Marilyn, in a corner, slouched in her seat, trying to make herself invisible.

In front, several members of the twice-weekly workshop waited to perform a twenty-minute scene. A canvas film director’s chair facing the makeshift stage remained notably empty. Obviously, no one dared sit there. In front of the vacant chair was a low table, and on it an assistant put a glass of steaming hot tea and two white index cards.

As if on cue, the moderator entered. The hush that fell over the room, the air of expectation, could hardly be attributed to his appearance or manner. He was squat, pale, partly bald, and hook-nosed. He had a crepe neck and a double chin. He took off a black raincoat, flinging it over the back of the canvas chair with thick, pasty-white hands. He wore large spectacles and dark, loose-fitting, priestly clothes. His body was rigid and unmuscled. He sat straight-backed, mouth clenched. A patch of gray fur sprouted on the back of his neck.

He clicked open a gold travel clock and put it on the table. Every now and again, he emitted a peculiar snort that some observers attributed to suppressed rage, others to a chronic sinus condition. He glanced at one of the index cards. In a low-pitched voice, he crisply identified the first of two scenes to be performed.

It was said that the master teacher Lee Strasberg could open inner doors that one scarcely knew existed. Some admirers called him the Rabbi. Some compared him to a psychiatrist or a harshly judgmental Jewish father. Harold Clurman insisted that no one in the world knew
more about acting. Strasberg scrutinized a performance, said Clurman, with the intense concentration of a jeweler studying the inner mechanism of a watch. After the room lights shot on following a workshop performance, he analyzed, criticized, clowned, pontificated, and attacked. He struck poses and gazed into the air for inspiration. Someone compared him to a revivalist preacher. His speech was swift and argumentative.

Strasberg was often unabashedly rude. He was notorious for passing acolytes on the street or in the hall without so much as a nod or a hello. Was he being sadistic, or was he merely shy? He tended to look right through people as if they did not exist.

He was a spellbinding lecturer, who revelled in displays of his own vast learning. His words often failed to make literal sense. “Darling,” he would say, “nothing here can be understood.” Partisans insisted that Strasberg could speak clearly when he wanted to. They claimed he was trying to do something considerably more difficult: communicate with the unconscious mind. He asked oddly personal, often intrusive questions, leading one disgruntled Studio member to groan that Sigmund Freud wasn’t as nosy as Lee Strasberg. Unlike other acting teachers who stressed language and text, Strasberg focused on psychology. He ran his workshops as though they were group therapy sessions.

He taught actors to draw on personal experience. He instructed them to turn inward. He challenged them to probe their own psyches. He pushed them to feel more intensely. He encouraged them to “take a minute,” retrieving a powerful emotional experience related to the scene they were about to perform. “You pick a situation three to five minutes before the actual height of the experience,” said Strasberg. “And you try to remember not what you experienced, not what you felt, but what you saw, what you heard, what you touched, what you tasted, what you smelled, what you experienced kinetically. You try to see the person. You try to hear the voice. You try to touch the fabric. You try to feel the heat.”

Often the experiences summoned up from memory were painful, troubling, explosive. Students were known to rush to the door in tears. Elia Kazan worried that Strasberg’s approach came perilously close to self-hypnosis, and frowned on what he saw as a good deal of “glassy-eyed psychological posturing.” Other critics argued that Strasberg taught actors to present their own response to a dramatic incident rather than the character’s.

He quoted Goethe: “The actor’s career develops in public, but his art develops in private.” He talked of “possibilities of progress” and of “talent in flux.” He railed against commercialism. He warned students not to go Hollywood. He spoke of never having outgrown his youthful idealism. He recalled certain incandescent performances of the 1920s, evoking Jacob ben Ami, John Barrymore, Jeanne Eagels, and Eleonora Duse.

On her first visit to the Studio, Marilyn was in awe—both of the workshop, with its air of unrestrained emotionalism, and of Strasberg himself. After the session, Kazan came over to talk to her. He’d rarely seen her in the three years since his HUAC testimony. Still, they had remained friendly. As recently as three months ago, he’d sent her his love through Sidney Skolsky. At the moment, Kazan was set to begin rehearsals for Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
in five days. After that, he planned finally to direct Williams’s
Baby Doll
(then titled “Mississippi Woman”) at Warner Bros. He was still negotiating with Darryl Zanuck about the picture he owed Twentieth.

Kazan took Marilyn over to meet Strasberg.

By the time Marilyn left the Studio, she was bubbling with excitement. This was a world she had heard a great deal about from Kazan. But it had always been a mystery, existing somewhere “out there.” At last, she had seen the place for herself and it was everything she’d imagined—and more. Above all, Marilyn was enthusiastic about Strasberg. He had mentioned that he also taught acting classes to groups of approximately thirty students, in which he concentrated on basic training in technique. The fee was thirty dollars a month, and Marilyn would be most welcome to join. The possibility intrigued her, but the prospect of working with him in front of others seemed utterly terrifying.