Marilyn Monroe (5 page)

For the most part, however, the relationship was keyed to Kazan’s needs. Marilyn accompanied him to business meetings at Feldman’s, waiting contentedly beside the pool until the men were done. She drove up to Santa Barbara with Kazan on February 15 for the test preview
of Streetcar.
The following evening, after dinner at Feldman’s, she and Kazan went on to Joe Schenck’s. In poor health, Schenck had been recuperating in Hawaii when Johnny Hyde passed away. By the time he returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn, to his dismay, had already taken up with Kazan.

A stack of letters from Miller was accumulating next to his photograph on the shelf above Marilyn’s bed. She read by the light of a small, goose-necked lamp. Arthur remained unhappy at home, where he and his wife were on very bad terms. Mary, a lapsed Catholic, was appalled that he might so much as think about sleeping with another woman. And in Los Angeles, he had certainly been tempted. He could say nothing to convince his wife to give him, and the marriage, another chance. She simply refused to believe anything he said.

Yet he had no plans to return to Los Angeles. Roy Brewer demanded that Miller change the union racketeers in his script to Communists. If Miller refused, Brewer threatened to call a strike of projectionists in order to prevent
The Hook
from ever being screened in the United States. Miller abruptly withdrew his script, refusing to make changes that struck him as absurd. Communists, he argued, were virtually nonexistent on the Brooklyn waterfront. He may also have been motivated by his own sensitivity to being subpoenaed by HUAC, Brewer having threatened to launch an investigation of both Miller and Kazan. It seemed to Kazan that the prospect filled Miller with panic.

Though Miller had never been a Communist Party member, he had attended several Communist writers’ meetings in 1947. As Miller later disclosed to his attorney, he worried that some of the people who saw him there might have assumed he actually belonged to the Party during that period. Thus, if Miller testified truthfully that he had not been a Party member, there were individuals who, in the belief they were telling the truth, might come forward to say he was lying. He could find himself jailed for perjury. On the other hand, if Miller spoke frankly of his association with the Communist writers, HUAC would require him to establish credibility as a patriot by identifying others who had attended the meetings. That, as a matter of conscience, Miller would not do. As an unfriendly witness—that is, one who declined to name names—he could find himself held in contempt of Congress and imprisoned.

It may be that Kazan, accustomed as he was to being master of his own fate, had arrived in Hollywood with a politically provocative script like
The Hook
as a way of taking charge, of deliberately causing a subpoena to be issued. The gesture would have been very much in keeping with his insolent, abrasive character. As it was, he was furious when Miller withdrew his script. Kazan had turned down Tennessee Williams’s play in order to work on
The Hook.
He had already devoted a good deal of time and effort to the project. He expected Miller to put up a fight.

Miller preferred to write a new drama. His moral crisis over Marilyn Monroe provided fresh material. As he once said, he could not write about anything he understood completely; if an experience was finished, he couldn’t write it. He worked in his smoke-filled, third-floor study from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Posters for
Death of a Salesman
and
All My Sons
adorned the walls. A small bookcase overflowed with books. Children’s voices—the Millers had a small son and daughter—drifted in from other rooms. Frequently, Miller went back to work at night.

In the months after returning from California, he started two plays, both featuring a wayward husband. The first drew on a true story Miller had heard on the Brooklyn waterfront as he researched
The Hook.
It tells of a married longshoreman who permits two brothers, Italians who have entered the country illegally, to live with him. One brother falls in love with the longshoreman’s orphaned niece, also living in the apartment. The longshoreman, filled with incestuous desire for the young woman, betrays both men to the immigration authorities. That makes
him a pariah in his community. When Miller had first heard the story several months previously, it hadn’t particularly seized his imagination. What did it have to do with him? But now, like the longshoreman, he had been stirred by illicit desire. He hadn’t acted on that desire, but he felt guilty all the same. He was part of a sexual triangle, one of two men drawn to the same woman. He knew what it was to think of another man with a woman he himself yearned for. He knew what it was to think of oneself as a betrayer. Yet still the material didn’t jell and Miller put “An Italian Tragedy” aside. He would return to it several years later.

Marilyn, whom Miller had known for only a few days, hovered in his thoughts. She remained as much of a fantasy for him as he did for her. In a second work-in-progress, Miller wrote about a Marilyn-like woman of free and open sexuality. Lorraine, as he called her, bids men to abandon their wives and children, but those who are drawn to her come to an unhappy end. One character leaves his wife for Lorraine, who, faithless, later does the same to him. Another husband, protective of his social position, condemns himself to the safety of a cold and loveless marriage.

After six weeks as Feldman’s houseguest, Kazan planned to fly home on February 23. Before he left, he made arrangements to shoot
Viva Zapata!.
He agreed to report no later than May 7, with shooting to begin twenty-one days after that. He persuaded Twentieth to pay for his wife, Molly, their four children, and a nanny to come to the location. Obviously, the presence of his family would limit Kazan’s ability to carry on with Marilyn.

As the time approached for Kazan to go, Marilyn panicked. She had spent all this time with him, but he had not offered her a role in his new film. Frantic to maintain a connection, she made an uncharacteristic misstep. Marilyn told Kazan that she was pregnant. As though quickly realizing that that was the last thing in the world a married man would want to hear, she tried to reassure him. Marilyn insisted he mustn’t worry, whatever that might mean. Later, she wrote to say that she had miscarried. Nonetheless, faced with precisely the sort of trouble he wanted to avoid, Kazan returned to New York determined to mend his ways and be faithful to Molly. Alone again, Marilyn had little choice but to look ahead. Two months had passed since she tried to take her own life following Johnny’s death, and now she still had to figure out how to go on by herself.

TWO

A
t the Beverly-Carlton, flower deliveries accumulated outside Marilyn’s door. The blinds remained shut all day, as Marilyn rarely got out of bed before 5 p.m. The phone rang constantly. Hardly had Kazan gone back to New York when all the men started calling again for dates. There was one invitation Marilyn could not refuse, however. She agreed to let Joe Schenck take her dancing at the Trocadero. Uncle Joe had something he wanted to say. He sent a studio limousine for her that night.

Large and bald with a poker face, Schenck was said to resemble Buddha. Lines and shadows were deeply etched around his eyes and bulbous nose. His face seemed always to be twisted in a frown. He and Marilyn were on the dancefloor when he made his pitch. He reminded Marilyn of her circumstances. He said she’d been a fool to turn down Johnny’s marriage proposals. He pointed out that in recent weeks she had been wasting her time on a married man.

He urged her not to be just a scalp on a man’s belt. He warned her not to allow herself to be used as a spittoon or an ashtray. He stressed that his own situation had changed recently; he was old and in poor health. He alluded to his impotence and said he would understand if as his wife she wanted to sleep with other men. His only stipulation was that Marilyn not have the same fellow twice in a row. In short, Uncle Joe was asking Marilyn to marry him. When he died, which seemed likely to happen soon enough, Marilyn would inherit everything. Marilyn, stunned by the offer, said she needed time to make up her mind.

Back at the Beverly-Carlton, she spent days considering what to
do. Of course, Schenck had totally missed the point of her affair with Kazan. It wasn’t marriage she had been hoping for; she certainly hadn’t expected him to leave his wife. All Marilyn wanted was a part in Kazan’s new film. But Schenck would never have understood that. He didn’t think she was star material. He’d always thought her dreams unrealistic. Fond as he was of Marilyn, Uncle Joe, unlike Johnny, had never believed in her. He was utterly sincere in the conviction that the best thing that could happen to her was marriage to a wealthy man.

His offer was certainly very tempting. Marilyn still had not heard from the studio or her agents. No one in either place would see her or take her calls. There were no film assignments on the horizon. The way things stood, all she had to look forward to was the termination of her contract. The William Morris Agency was doing nothing for her. As far as Abe Lastfogel seemed to be concerned, now that Johnny Hyde was dead Marilyn didn’t exist. Though she wrote to both Kazan and Miller in New York, she really had no idea whether she would ever see either of them again.

For all that, Joe Schenck’s marriage proposal only reminded Marilyn of what she had really wanted all along. It brought into sharp focus what her struggle had always been about. Money and security, the things Hyde and now Schenck offered, were never really what she was after. The whole point of getting involved with Johnny, Kazan, or any of the other men in her life had been to help her reach a goal. She wanted to be a person in her own right.

Johnny had often compared Marilyn to Rita Hayworth, but there was a fundamental and revealing difference. Hayworth had been pushed by a father, then by a husband, to pursue a film career that she herself had never really wanted. By contrast, the only person driving Marilyn was herself, and she did so relentlessly. In the end, Marilyn turned down Uncle Joe. Being an important man’s wife was never what she’d wanted. If it had been, she would have married Johnny.

Marilyn had chosen her dream over marriage. But she was left to face the probability that she was about to lose the means to realize that dream. She wasn’t on any producer’s casting list. Darryl Zanuck had sent down word that she was “just a freak” and that he didn’t want to waste time on her. For Marilyn, it was no longer a question of being cast in good films by the best directors; the issue was whether she would be assigned
to any films at all. In Kazan’s absence, Marilyn decided that she had to abandon Johnny’s plan temporarily. She had to find some way around Zanuck. She had to get Twentieth to put her in a film—any film. Otherwise, there wasn’t a chance that her contract would be renewed.

Marilyn was smart. Though she had rarely said a word at all those endless business lunches Hyde had required her to attend, she had listened carefully. She had often heard him remark that when he wanted something at Twentieth, it could be useful to play the studio’s two top men against each other. She’d heard Charlie Feldman and others speak along the same lines. The key to doing deals at Twentieth was to keep in mind that the production chief and the president were fiercely at odds.

Spyros Skouras had been president of Twentieth since 1942, yet he spent little time in Hollywood. The Old Greek, as he was known, preferred to run the business from New York, where he put in sixteen-hour days. A gigantic world map, with bright red stars to indicate Fox offices, was fixed to the wall behind his desk. A framed photograph of his beak-nosed wife, Saroula, dark hair piled on top of her head, leaned against the map on a side table littered with other, smaller family photographs. In front of his desk were a pair of beige club chairs and a large globe. Skouras, a bald, stocky, square-shouldered immigrant, always wore a conservative blue suit with a crisp white linen handkerchief in the breast pocket. His oversized eyeglasses had thick, shiny, black frames. He had a meaty face, with prominent eyebrows and a broad nose. He had coarse, mottled skin and deep, dark creases in his forehead. Impatient, always in a hurry, he was perpetually drumming thick fingers on the slab-like marble desktop. In a Turkish bath that adjoined his office, two masseurs, one on either side, would pound and knead the muscles of his bear-like body while Skouras dictated correspondence in mangled English to a secretary who perched behind a screen. The Old Greek was famous for the ability to fall asleep at will, awakening in a minute or two visibly refreshed, though some business associates believed the whole thing was just an act. He was prone to take a nap when people started to say anything he didn’t want to hear.