Marilyn Monroe (6 page)

Darryl Zanuck had little respect for Skouras. Privately, he regarded him as a fool. The production chief prided himself on excluding Skouras from creative decisions, revelling in his power to decide which projects were made and which were not. Calling himself a “one-man
show,” he made it a point of honor never to send Skouras a script. Zanuck sent finished films to New York, where Skouras, alternating between puffs on his cigar and a sip of Scotch, watched them late at night in his screening room. As long as the firm’s chief executive officer remained in New York focused on business matters, Zanuck was content.

That March, Skouras came to Los Angeles for the annual sales conference. Five days of screenings culminated in an exhibitors’ luncheon at the studio commissary, where theater owners mingled with Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Anne Baxter, and other stars. Zanuck, known as “the Coast,” was in attendance, of course, but this was very much New York’s show.

Skouras, hoarsely muttering “Won’erful! Won’erful!” as he liked to do, worked the room. He was brilliant with exhibitors. The connection was direct and intense. His eyes shot open. His greeting was electric. He gave them a bear-hug. He kissed them on both cheeks. He inquired about their wives and children by name. He told them about the infestation of Mediterranean worm that had destroyed the family vineyard when he was a boy. He reminded them that he himself had started out in motion pictures as co-owner of a St. Louis theater with his brothers Charlie and George.

After drinks and hors d’oeuvres, Skouras had taken his place at the main table when there was a fuss at the door. All heads turned as Marilyn Monroe burst in, more than an hour late. She appeared to have been sewn into her chiffon and satin black strapless cocktail gown. Someone said that she looked like Cinderella in flight from the pumpkin coach. Marilyn’s air of helplessness and bewilderment masked a fierce determination to force the issue of her contract. This was her moment to attract Skouras’s attention, and she put on quite a show.

Joe Schenck, also at the main table, watched with the others as Marilyn wiggled toward the first available chair. It was at a table of Midwestern exhibitors. From where Skouras sat he could not hear the conversation, but the theater owners’ excitement was palpable.

“And what pictures are you going to be in, Miss Monroe?” one theater owner shouted.

“You’ll have to ask Mr. Skouras,” Marilyn replied in a wispy voice, at once childlike and seductive.

Skouras, who recognized Marilyn from
The Asphalt Jungle
and
All

About Eve
, demanded to know the same thing. Marilyn Monroe did not have an assignment, Schenck informed him. And her contract was about to come up for renewal. Within seconds, Marilyn was seated to Skouras’s right at the main table. Within minutes, Skouras announced that her option was to be picked up. Within hours, he was dining with her at Uncle Joe’s. Within days, he ordered studio executives to find new projects for her.

Her first assignment was a small part in
Love Nest
, to be directed by Joseph Newman. As Marilyn knew only too well, it was hardly comparable to the assignments Johnny had secured on her behalf. And it was hardly the sort of film that would get her attention. But at least she had a role, and at least her contract was going to be renewed. With no one looking out for Marilyn at William Morris, Twentieth managed to get away without giving her the yearly raise Johnny had negotiated. She received no credit for the year she had worked and, in effect, she began a new seven-year contract all over again.

Still, Marilyn had cause to rejoice. She had found an important protector at Twentieth. She had bought another year before her option came up again. She had provided herself with another chance to realize her dream. This time, she intended to make full use of the opportunity. During the next twelve months, Marilyn would do everything necessary to transform herself into a star.

Kazan’s resolve to be faithful to his wife proved short-lived. When he returned to Los Angeles after two months, he began to see Marilyn again. Marilyn was thrilled. Though he had failed to cast her in
Viva Zapata!
, perhaps there would be a role for her in some future Kazan picture. Marilyn had not forgotten Johnny’s plan. She was aware that she could be given a great many assignments like
Love Nest
and still not get the attention she needed to become a star. So while it was certainly a triumph to have had her option picked up, Marilyn did not allow herself to be complacent. Either in a Kazan film or by some other means, Marilyn was determined to get herself noticed. The question was, how?

On May 7, Marilyn accompanied Kazan to dinner at Charlie Feldman’s. A great deal had changed since the agent had seen her last.

Feldman had certainly never been known to take a professional interest in Marilyn. As far as he’d been concerned, Marilyn had simply been Joe Schenck’s girl or Johnny Hyde’s girl or Gadg Kazan’s girl. She’d been the girl Charlie and his friends had briefly been competing for. But tonight, when she appeared at the house with Kazan, Feldman looked at her with new eyes.

Feldman had heard about Marilyn’s new studio contract which, as it happened, was to be finalized in four days. He had heard about her triumph at the sales conference. Most importantly, he had heard about Spyros Skouras’s decree that assignments must be found for her. Marilyn was just completing her first such assignment and was already set to begin another,
Let’s Make It Legal
, in June. Skouras, as Feldman knew well, was a powerful ally.

Skouras’s professional interest in Marilyn intrigued Feldman, as Johnny’s sexual obsession had once made Charlie and his pals want to go to bed with her. For the first time, Feldman regarded Marilyn as someone he would be interested in signing up for Famous Artists, Inc. He made a mental note to send one of his agents to visit Marilyn on the set at Twentieth in order to remind her that she was being poorly served by William Morris.

Feldman’s new attitude was a measure of the astonishing degree to which Marilyn had turned her circumstances around. She was flattered by his attentions, but she was also wary. From the first, Feldman had two strikes against him. He was one of the men who’d hounded Marilyn in the weeks after Johnny’s death, and he was a close personal friend of Darryl Zanuck’s. As far as Marilyn was concerned, Feldman’s relationship with the production chief meant that he wasn’t to be trusted. For the moment, however, Marilyn carefully kept her reservations to herself. She smiled sweetly. She strove to give no sign of what she was really thinking. In Kazan’s presence, she consciously played the happy girl, fearful that she might lose his interest again if she did not.

But her role as the happy girl was far from the truth of Marilyn’s existence as she struggled to make use of the opportunity Skouras had given her. To understand the immense pressure Marilyn was under, it’s important to remember that in her case succeeding in films was much more than a question of simple ambition. It was a life-and-death matter. As far as Marilyn was concerned, life was not worth living if she failed to win the dignity and respect that came with being a star.

Marilyn might have been given minor roles in a pair of insignificant films, but in her mind everything was at stake. She was convinced that the slightest miscalculation might cause her enterprise to collapse. Therefore, on a film set, Marilyn was terrified of going in front of the camera. She would break out in a rash, vomit, revert to a childhood stammer. She would find a thousand reasons for postponing the moment when she finally had to emerge from her dressing room. The extent to which Marilyn keyed herself up in anticipation of being filmed also accounts for why audiences often couldn’t take their eyes off her. Every time Marilyn appeared in a film, she was excruciatingly focused on making that moment happen. For Marilyn, nothing else mattered. At times, she seemed to be acting in a film of her own. Her role might be modest, her line readings inept, yet she communicated through the sheer intensity of her performance.

Marilyn’s partner in all this was her acting coach and former roommate, Natasha Lytess. Marilyn had moved to the Beverly-Carlton in search of privacy, but skinny, green-eyed, flamboyant, nervous Natasha became a constant presence there. To account for her temperamental nature, Natasha claimed to be of mixed Russian and French blood. Some people whispered that she was really a German. She was in fact an Austrian Jew, a former actress in Max Reinhardt’s company in Germany.

Natasha never complained when Marilyn summoned her by telephone after midnight to go over lines. She didn’t seem to mind when Marilyn called her out of her day job as a dramatic coach at Twentieth. She regarded Marilyn as her second daughter and called herself Marilyn’s private director. She encouraged people to think of her as Marilyn’s right arm. Natasha was Marilyn’s teacher, cheerleader, psychiatrist, best friend, handmaiden, slavedriver, and whipping boy, all rolled into one. She told Marilyn that she was too negative. She begged her to discard her insecurity. She implored her to learn to love herself. She informed her that she suffered from a guilt complex. She derided her laziness. She urged her to be strong. She warned her to grow up. When Natasha castigated Marilyn, she insisted that she gave her own daughter the same rough treatment when she misbehaved.

Marilyn’s relationship with Natasha was passionate, turbulent, caring, over-the-top, and mutually exploitative. The emblem of that relationship was an antique cameo brooch—a woman’s head delicately
enclosed in gold—that Marilyn gave her at Christmas, 1950, shortly after Natasha had rescued her from her suicide attempt following Johnny’s death. A note in a blue envelope declared Marilyn’s belief that she owed Natasha much more than her life. Natasha planned to collect.

Natasha had met Marilyn at Columbia Pictures, where she had been assigned to prepare Marilyn to play a burlesque queen in Phil Karlson’s
Ladies of the Chorus.
As a dramatic coach, she was nothing if not critical. She thought Marilyn’s gestures tense, inhibited, and unnatural. She hated Marilyn’s affectation of refusing to move her lips when she spoke. She found Marilyn’s voice so irritating that she asked her to refrain from talking unnecessarily until they had a chance to work together. She had Marilyn slowly read a book to a lamp, emphasizing the first and last letter of each word. Marilyn, who adored working with Natasha, never missed a session.

When Harry Cohn failed to renew Marilyn’s contract, she rushed to Natasha’s apartment in despair. Marilyn hardly knew her coach, but she had no other friends and nowhere else to go. Marilyn was crying and Natasha guessed that she might be about to try something foolish. Natasha asked Marilyn to do her a favor. She asked her to promise that for the next twenty-four hours she would not be afraid. Years afterward, Natasha traced the start of their friendship to that moment.

Their working sessions exploded with emotion. Both women were totally invested in Marilyn’s ability to become a star, and Marilyn was often in tears. Natasha never tired of reminding her that she had picked her up when she was nothing and given her life. Constantly she reiterated that her lessons were more valuable than anything money could buy. She frequently complained that she was humiliated when people gave her credit for Marilyn’s sexy mannerisms. It hurt Marilyn when, as she often did, Natasha treated her as though she were an imbecile.

Natasha’s attitude toward Marilyn was deeply contradictory. On the one hand, she resented her own dependence on this girl, whom she thought so vulgar and inferior. On the other hand, Natasha spotted something unique in Marilyn, something she believed that she, the teacher, could shape and create. Natasha gave Marilyn books to read: Rilke, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. She made her listen to recordings of Schubert and Brahms. Natasha, confident that she already was somebody, seemed angry that the world no longer treated her as it should.

Marilyn, by contrast, was struggling to become somebody. She wasn’t trying to regain her rightful place; she was trying to discover it.

For
Love Nest
and
Let’s Make It Legal
, Marilyn insisted on working out her entire performance—every word, gesture, breath, and eye movement—before she even met the director and other actors. She prepared for these small roles as though she had the lead. Natasha discovered early on that Marilyn had an instinct for recognizing when she was doing something right. At the same time, she could detect any kind of falseness in her own performance. It wasn’t something Marilyn had learned; she couldn’t really explain it. But an alarm just seemed to go off inside her when she finally discovered the correct approach.

Marilyn was a perfectionist—but at immense psychological cost. Sensing that something was wrong didn’t mean that Marilyn had any idea of how to fix it. Even if Natasha had been tempted, she would never have suggested that something Marilyn did was good just to make her feel better. Marilyn might have sensed her dishonesty, and that would have been fatal to the partnership. Marilyn was determined to keep working until she got things right; when she didn’t, which was quite often, a sense of desperation pervaded the room.