Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (29 page)

Hyde indeed brought Marilyn to Hornblow and Huston. “But she was just awful,” Hornblow recalled. “She had heard we were looking for someone very sexy, so she had dressed accordingly, over-emphasizing her figure at every point.” Convinced that only her body would land her the role, she seemed to Hornblow “a nervous little girl half scared to death.” She read a few lines for Hornblow and Huston and departed with Johnny.

Huston had already decided on his choice for the role, a blond actress named Lola Albright. But Lucille told Huston that Albright (following her success with Kirk Douglas in a picture called
Champion
) was receiving $1,500 a week; the role of Angela, on the other hand, was a small one paying at most a fifth of that. Why not reconsider Marilyn? Huston was adamant and stalled, testing at least eight other starlets he knew MGM would reject. At the same time, Lucille agreed with Johnny that Marilyn could indeed play Angela “to a ‘T.’ ”

At last Lucille forced the issue. Huston, a flamboyant horse fancier, had a team of Irish stallions he boarded and trained at the Carroll ranch. Accomplished writer and filmmaker though he was, Huston was also a playboy, an inveterate gambler and a notorious roustabout who rarely took his debts seriously. That year he was $18,000 in arrears for payments to the Carrolls. On a Sunday afternoon in September, they invited
Huston out to the ranch, where Carroll said quite bluntly that if Huston did not allow Marilyn another test he would sell the stallions outright and collect the money due. The matter was quickly resolved in Marilyn’s favor.

Next morning, Lucille telephoned the hair designer Sidney Guilaroff and alerted general manager Louis B. Mayer that an important test was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. “For the better part of the next three days and nights we rehearsed,” according to Natasha—and with good results, for Mayer was duly impressed with Marilyn’s reading on the set and said so to Huston and Hornblow, who reluctantly accepted what was virtually a command decision. “She impressed me more off the screen than on,” Huston said. “There was something touching and appealing about her.” Not until Marilyn’s leap to stardom a few years later did Huston express much enthusiasm for her talent as well, and then, typically, he took credit. Some of it, of course, belongs to the gifted cameraman Hal Rosson—who, Marilyn learned, had been briefly married to Jean Harlow.

During the filming of
The Asphalt Jungle
that autumn, Marilyn asked that Natasha be present on the set to coach her. “It was the first evidence I’d seen of her courage,” Natasha said, “for no director takes kindly to the idea of a drama teacher who might interfere with his work. But Huston agreed, and so for the first time I worked exclusively with Marilyn.” The results were impressive not because of, but despite Natasha’s presence. As Huston and Hornblow recalled, Marilyn glanced over toward her coach after each take: a nod or shake of Natasha’s head indicated her approval or dissatisfaction. Had the role been larger, Huston surely would not have endured the intervention, for Natasha made Marilyn self-conscious and exacerbated her anxiety. (In the finished film, at the end of her first scene she may be glimpsed glancing toward her coach as she walks off-camera.) Yet despite her dependence on Natasha, Marilyn’s performance in
The Asphalt Jungle
is remarkable and delineates an important moment of growth in her abilities.

The first of her three brief appearances occurs twenty-three minutes into the story, when, like a napping kitten on a sofa, she glances up to see her Sugar Daddy. Half smiling, half fearful, she asks softly, “What’s
the big idea, standing there and staring at me, Uncle Lon?” As he embraces her before sending her off to bed with a good-night kiss, there is a rueful look on her face, the weariness of a kept woman who has stayed with an older man only for the material benefits. In seventy-five seconds of screen time, Marilyn etched a character both pitiable and frightening.

In her second scene, she played Angela even more naïve and carnal. Wearing a black strapless gown, she is at one moment morose at the thought of being abandoned, then exuberant when she learns she may be sent on a luxurious cruise: “Imagine me on this beach with my green bathing suit,” she says breathlessly to her lover. “Yipes! I almost bought a white one, but it wasn’t quite extreme enough. Don’t get me wrong! If I’d gone in for the
extreme
extreme, I’d have bought a French one! Run for your life, girls, the fleet’s in!” In a single take after one rehearsal, Marilyn assumed the right balance between gold-digging insistence and girlish high spirits.

Moments later, in her final scene, she has her greatest range in the picture. First angry at a policeman’s intrusion, she is then a frightened child, caught in her lies to the police for the alibi she gave her crooked paramour. In two and a half minutes and after only two takes, Marilyn created Angela not as a cartoonlike simpleton but a voluptuary torn between fear, childlike loyalty, brassy self-interest and weary self-loathing.

In
The Asphalt Jungle
, she moved effectively from movie model to serious actress in a brief but crucial role. But perhaps because her character was seen for a total of only five minutes in the picture’s two hours, the name “Marilyn Monroe” appeared onscreen not at the opening but at the end of the picture, eleventh among fifteen. “There’s a beautiful blonde, name of Marilyn Monroe,” wrote Liza Wilson in
Photoplay
, almost alone among reviewers. “She makes the most of her footage.” Otherwise, there was silence over a role Marilyn forever after considered one of her best. “I don’t know what I did,” she told Natasha after completing her last scene, “but I do know it felt wonderful.” Her coach, the sort of mentor who considered explicit praise dangerous for the student’s ego, indicated only that Marilyn had performed competently.

*    *    *

The new year 1950 began with an unsettling admixture of anticipation, pride and disappointment.

Natasha now emphasized gestures. “Body control, body control, body control!” she intoned liturgically, as if she were addressing herself and her own suppressed desires. Meantime, Johnny badgered production supervisors to employ Marilyn wherever possible. In January, she was rushed into a tedious little Mickey Rooney picture at Fox called
The Fireball
, in which she appeared for a few seconds as (of all things) a roller derby groupie.

The assignment was memorable only because she met a Fox studio hairdresser named Agnes Flanagan, a kindly, mothering soul who would many times in the years to come groom Marilyn’s hair. Whereas Johnny Hyde was (at least partly) a father figure, Agnes was more maternal than stern Natasha, and Marilyn often visited the Flanagans and their two children, intermittently attaching herself to them as a family member. As Agnes recalled just before her death in 1985, she had to be careful when telling Marilyn about a piece of clothing or something she admired, for usually the item would appear at her home next day. This prodigality continued right up to 1962, when Marilyn sent Agnes a duplicate of the garden swing she had so admired. Such spontaneous acts of generosity were typical, even when Marilyn’s finances were limited; throughout her life, in fact, she regarded money as something to spend on people she liked.

Roles in two more minor, forgettable pictures followed later that season, at MGM. In
Right Cross
, she spoke less than twenty words and was again uncredited, flashing briefly across the screen as Dusky Le Doux, characterized in the script as “a new model” with the same implication as she was termed a “niece” in
The Asphalt Jungle
. At a cocktail lounge, she is approached by a stranger (played by Dick Powell) who invites her to his apartment for a home-cooked dinner and promises, “If you’re good, I’ll tell you the recipe,” to which she replies sarcastically, “I know the ingredients.”

Then, in early spring, Marilyn was pitchforked into an odd movie that quickly vanished before turning up in Australia years after her death.
Home Town Story
was an industrially financed paean to postwar
American corporate ingenuity. Marilyn appeared briefly as Iris, the receptionist in a newspaper office who has no patience with the unwelcome leering of her boss.

Despite Johnny Hyde’s strong recommendation of her to MGM after these two cameos, production chief Dore Schary did not offer a deal for more work. His excuse was that the studio had Lana Turner under contract and therefore no need of a rival blonde; to colleagues like Lucille Ryman Carroll, he expressed a quaint moral outrage at the Hyde-Monroe affair. By April, Marilyn could count nine movie roles in three years, none of them enough to bring her closer to stardom.
Ladies of the Chorus
was already a forgotten second feature, and
The Asphalt Jungle
, despite some critical acclaim, was too bleak to win much popular favor.

When not studying with Natasha, Marilyn posed for pinups in evening gowns or swimsuits, scoured the trade dailies and was seen in the movie colony’s dinner-party circuit with Johnny, with whom life became increasingly difficult as his health became ever more fragile. Despite this, he refused to limit himself, escorting Marilyn to an endless round of social and corporate events, presenting her proudly as valuable and available talent. More poignantly, Johnny also wanted Marilyn known around town as his fiancée, the desirable young woman he still hoped to marry.

Fearful of displeasing or alienating her, Johnny acted the nervous, benighted lover, taking action perilous in his condition: with the ardor of a twenty-year-old, he was often breathless and in pain after trying to satisfy what he presumed were her sexual needs. However, as she confided to Lucille, Marilyn felt that Johnny might indeed be more disadvantageous than beneficial to her career, and that marriage would effectively ruin her reputation beyond repair. Despite the imprecations of Johnny’s friends, she was unyielding. “It would be ridiculous to pass myself off as Mrs. Johnny Hyde,” she told Rupert Allan flatly, adding, “I’d be taken less seriously than I am now.”

And that was indeed her primary goal: to become more than an agent’s mistress and a curvaceous window-dressing in minor movies. Natasha had taught her that there was a difficult and demanding craft to be mastered if one were to become an accomplished actress; that Marilyn
had to work constantly on clear diction and understated movement. Johnny was more businesslike in his counsel: Marilyn needed only the right project and producer, and the camera could do the rest by capturing her unusual combination of childlike innocence and luminous sex appeal. So far as the art of acting was concerned, he insisted this was an admirable occupation but one not usually necessary to achieve stardom. In the movies, appearances counted most of all, and they were magically altered by lights and lenses, makeup and camera angles, platforms and costumes. Short actors could appear tall; soft voices could be corrected; a mistake could be rectified simply by repeating the scene. Wonders were performed at the editor’s bench, in the sound booths, in the printer’s laboratory.

There were, then, quite different attitudes held by Marilyn’s two counselors. Natasha emphasized classic diction and understated movement; Johnny said that was all very good but Marilyn should above all keep her figure. Ironically, these different attitudes coincided perfectly with the conflict prevalent throughout Marilyn Monroe’s life—her desire to transcend her background and early experience, and the inclination to exploit the limitations it imposed. Johnny saw what she was; Natasha emphasized what she might become.

Although Marilyn had neither the discipline nor the habit of intellectual focus, she was still eager to supplement her education. One day while she was browsing in a Beverly Hills bookstore with Rupert Allan, she purchased a few art books, from whose pages she clipped reproductions of works by Fra Angelico, Dürer and Botticelli. These she attached to the walls of the kitchen and bedroom at Palm Drive, and by her bedside she set a framed photograph of the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse, about whom Marilyn knew little except the woman’s preeminent place in theater history; Natasha, meanwhile, spoke in reverent tones of Duse as a role model for every serious actress.

Among the books Marilyn scooped up that afternoon was one on the Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, whose artistic renderings of human musculature at once fascinated her. Soon she resumed the regimen of physical exercise she had undertaken on Catalina Island, lifting weights to improve her strength and bust line. “She took it all so seriously,” according to Rupert Allan,

that before long she was comparing Vesalius to photographs of other stars and to herself. She insisted, for example, that she didn’t want broad shoulders like Joan Crawford. Of course she also knew that she had a good body, and she longed to know how best to develop and exploit it for her career.

In addition, Marilyn could be seen jogging through the service alleys of Beverly Hills each morning—an activity (like weight lifting) not commonly undertaken by women in 1950.

For a time that spring, claiming that she was harmful to Johnny’s health, Marilyn left Palm Drive and stayed in her official residence at the Beverly Carlton Hotel—a one-room efficiency apartment with cinder-block walls. But her reason for this relocation was not entirely altruistic. Longing to work, she had renewed contact with Joe Schenck and was invited to his home for several evening meetings. In 1950, few starlets were more ambitious than Marilyn, bedazzled by the prospect of glamour and success and willing to dance to the tune of someone able to help achieve them.

In this regard, there is an emotional pattern running through the entire life of Marilyn Monroe like a leitmotif. So limitless was her need for the kind of approbation promised by celebrity, so bereft of the supports of normal life and so primed was she for the acting profession, that she was willing to sacrifice almost anything for it. Although Marilyn Monroe cannot accurately be described as indiscriminate or lewd (much less nymphomaniacal), at times she offered her body as well as her time and attention to a man who might help her.