The Genius and the Goddess (19 page)

Strasberg's approach was to force his domination rather than to
free up somebody to do without him. . . . She was so vulnerable
that she couldn't recover from it. She became more and
more addicted to that dependency. . . . She had a natural gift,
and she didn't live long enough to absorb any teaching without
crippling that gift. . . .

Marilyn, a natural comedienne, seemed distracted by half-digested,
spitballed imagery and pseudo-Stanislavskian parallelisms
that left her unable to free her own native joyousness. She was
being doused by a spurious intellection that was thoroughly
useless to her as an acting tool.
⁷

Paula Strasberg, who coached Marilyn on her movie sets while
Lee ran the Actors Studio in New York, was even more meddling
and intrusive. Most established actors did not need a coach; if they
did, they took private lessons in the coach's studio. Insecure as ever,
Marilyn defied convention by bringing Paula on to the set and into
head-on conflict with the directors. Instead of building Marilyn's
confidence in her own decisions, Paula – for her own selfish reasons
– made her more insecure than ever.

The
young Colin Clark, son of the distinguished art historian Sir
Kenneth Clark and on the scene during the making of
The Prince
and the Showgirl
, described Paula as "short and plump, with brown
hair pulled back from a plain, round, expressive face. She has big
brown eyes which are usually hidden by big dark glasses – like her
protégée. Her clothes are also brown and beige – bohemian but expensive.
Her influence over Marilyn Monroe seems to be total. Marilyn
Monroe gazes at her continuously and defers to her at all times, as
if she was a little Jewish Buddha." For her services, Paula charged
Marilyn the extortionate fee of $2,500 a week plus expenses.

Paula earned her keep by putting Marilyn through absurd exercises
and by inflating her ego with outrageous praise. To release the
tension in her body and loosen her up, she made Marilyn practice a
daily ritual of shaking her hands as if trying to detach them from her
wrists. Paula did not try to control Marilyn's habitual lateness, but
actually encouraged and even justified her prima donna behavior:
"What I tell her is, '
You
are the one who gets on the screen, not the
others, who make the movie. You are the star! Only amateurs watch
production costs – that already makes a Grade-B movie.'" Colin Clark
explained the secret of Paula's hold over Marilyn – "total, abject sycophancy,
continual flattery, blatant pandering" – and described how
Paula melodramatically created expectations that her pupil could not
possibly fulfill. She would tell her: "All my life, I have prayed on my
knees . . . for God to give me a great actress. And now He has given
me you, and you are a great actress, Marilyn. You are."
⁸

Paula combined parasitic servility with strict demands that Marilyn
slavishly follow her orders. In 1956, after Marilyn had suddenly
dismissed Natasha and refused to see her, Paula replaced her as coach
in
Bus Stop
. Like Natasha, she fed on her pupil's insecurity, insisted
that Marilyn look to her rather than to the director for approval and
demanded many takes if she was not satisfied with the scene. Lee,
defending Paula, admitted her bulldog tenacity and crude quest for
power: "They didn't want Paula there. It is a fact that they tried to
get rid of her. However, she spoke right up. She let them know what's
what. Paula wasn't shy. It wasn't easy to get rid of Paula. . . . With
herself as the front and everybody crawling through her to get to
Marilyn, she had developed security and confidence. She was emerging
as an overpowering entity." Susan loyally declared that the directors,
not Paula, were vain and self-seeking: "their overbearing egos had
been threatened by my mother's presence, fearing she would get the
credit they wanted." It's significant that Paula developed security and
confidence while Marilyn became increasingly
insecure and afraid.

Miller, usually more frank and honest when talking to Marilyn's
biographer
Fred Guiles in 1967 than he was in his autobiography
Timebends
in 1987, bitterly criticized Paula's domination as well as her
appalling lack of qualifications:

Marilyn's feelings were very ambivalent about Paula. Paula represented
to her in a very real sense her own mother who wasn't
there. Paula was a real kook. She was nutty as a fruitcake . . .
but Paula was out in the world functioning. Both Lee and Paula
by this time had moved in on Marilyn. They had taken her over,
at least her career. . . .

I had no respect for Paula's ability as a dramatic coach. She
didn't know any more about acting than a cleaning woman out
in the foyer. In this sense, she was a phony, a hoax, but she was
successful in making herself necessary to people like Marilyn,
she created this tremendous reputation . . . She could cater to
the vanities of actresses, to people in the theatre. She had this
ability.
⁹

When Marilyn came to New York, partly to seek out Miller, he
was at the apex of the intellectual and cultural world and she was a
complete outsider. Awed by both Miller and the Strasbergs, she naturally
felt more insecure than ever. Encouraged by Lee Strasberg and
following the current fashion, she went into Freudian analysis. Instead
of being helped by this treatment, she became deeply disturbed when
probing her troubled unconscious. She had wanted to put her old
life behind her, but when she tried to explore the depths of her character
and "free" herself for the Method, she dredged up troubling
memories of her hideous childhood and her years of sexual degradation
in Hollywood. Reliving these experiences undermined her
precarious balance, and eventually led to nervous breakdowns and
suicide attempts.

Marilyn's psychiatrists continued her deep involvement with
European immigrants: Schenk and Hyde, Lytess and Chekhov, Kazan
and Strasberg, Lang and Preminger, Wilder and Cukor. The first of
her three analysts, Dr.
Margaret Hohenberg, was recommended by
her patient Milton Greene, and felt no conflict of interest in treating
both intricately involved people at the same time. A tall, heavy, fifty-seven-year-old
Hungarian immigrant, with white hair braided around
her head, Hohenberg had been trained in Budapest, Vienna and Prague.
Beginning in 1955, she saw her famous patient five times a week in
her office on East 93rd Street. In 1956 she was flown to England, at
great expense, to soothe Marilyn when a crisis erupted during the
making of
The Prince and the Showgirl
. The following year, when
Marilyn severed relations with Greene, she stopped seeing Hohenberg.

Hohenberg was succeeded by Dr.
Marianne Kris, who also spoke
with a strong accent and whose office was conveniently located in
Lee Strasberg's apartment building at 135 Central Park West. The
daughter of Freud's friend Oskar Rie, a pediatrician, she had earned
a medical degree, married the art critic Ernst Kris and become a
member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. She had been analyzed
by Freud himself and worked with his daughter Anna, and was forced
to flee Austria after the Nazi invasion in 1938. The New York critic
Diana Trilling, who began to see Kris after twenty years of
psychotherapy, praised the doctor while expressing the patient's typical
dependence on and adoration of the analyst: "Although a refugee
from Austria, she employed her new language with exactness and elasticity.
. . . I never lay on a couch; we talked facing each other, our
facial expressions part of our understanding of what was going on.
She was a most remarkable woman, warmhearted, large-minded, sensitive,
sensible, imaginative, a great unraveler of emotional knots. She
looked wise and she was wise. Her very calm was therapeutic."
¹⁰
Trilling also criticized her for intervening in her personal life and
giving her bad advice. Kris, later on, would make some terrible mistakes
with Marilyn.

In December 1955, on behalf of
Marilyn Monroe Productions, Greene
negotiated a new and infinitely better contract with Fox, and Marilyn
finally got the compensation she deserved. She agreed to make four
movies with the studio in the next seven years, and (most unusually)
had approval of the script, director and cinematographer. She would
earn $100,000 plus a percentage of the profits for each film, receive
an annual retainer of an additional $100,000 and have a weekly
allowance of $500 while filming. Greene would also be paid $75,000
a year as her producer.

The studio discussed the possibility of remaking the classic German
film,
The Blue Angel
(1930), with Marilyn playing Marlene Dietrich's
role,
Spencer Tracy as her co-star and George Cukor as the director.
In the screen version of Heinrich Mann's novel, the nightclub singer
Lola Lola teases, taunts, seduces, degrades, betrays and destroys the
dignified but horribly repressed Professor Unrat. This would have
been a great picture for Marilyn. But when Tracy felt Marilyn was
using him to strengthen her negotiating position with the studio, he
withdrew and the project collapsed.

Marilyn, allowed to make one independent picture a year, completed
Bus Stop
and
The Prince and the Showgirl
in partnership with Greene
before their company fell apart. An absurd incident during the shooting
of
Bus Stop
in March 1956 revealed how Greene consistently put his
own interests before those of his fragile star: "Marilyn suddenly fell
from a six-foot ramp. Dazed and in momentary shock before writhing
in pain, she lay very near to Milton, who as usual was constantly
taking still photographs of every scene. 'He just kept clicking away
with his camera without moving to help her,' as [the screenwriter]
George Axelrod recalled. 'I was a photographer before I was a producer,'
was Milton's reply."

Joshua Logan, the eminent director of
Bus Stop
, had made his name
on Broadway as the director of
Annie Get Your Gun
,
Mister Roberts
and
South Pacific
. In 1955 he directed the screen version of
Picnic
, by
the playwright William Inge, who also wrote
Bus Stop
. Logan, who'd
grown up in Texas and graduated from Princeton, had two special
qualifications for working with Marilyn. At the age of twenty-three
he had spent a year in Moscow studying with Stanislavsky, and in
1940 he'd had a mental breakdown and spent a year in a psychiatric
hospital.

Strasberg's teaching made Marilyn passionately interested in the
godfather of the Method. Logan recalled that "she talked constantly
of Stanislavsky, and she wanted to know all about my studying with
him in Moscow. She wanted to know all about the way actors lived
and acted there. How Stanislavsky talked to them and they talked to
him – intimate details." Marilyn both amused and irritated Logan by
the absurdity of her half-digested psychoanalytical jargon. He wrote
that "sometimes she acted as though she had discovered something
that no one else knew. Words like 'Freudian slip' and 'the unconscious'
and 'affective memory' would appear in her conversation at the oddest
time. If they didn't fit in, she made them fit." Logan also described
Marilyn's rather pretentious exchange with her co-star
Don Murray:
"'Don, you made a Freudian slip about a phallic symbol. You see, you
were thinking unconsciously of a snake. That's why you said "scaly"
[instead of "white"]. And a snake is a phallic symbol. Do you know
what a phallic symbol is, Don?' 'Know what it is?' he said. 'I've got
one!'"
¹¹

Murray recalled that Marilyn was emotionally frail, and became more
and more so as the movie progressed. (While making the picture she
also spent a week in the hospital with bronchitis.) Everyone was always
very worried about whether she'd break down in a scene and whether
Logan would be able to finish the movie. The tall, youthful-looking,
little known, twenty-six-year-old Murray was appearing in his first film,
but he had to help
Marilyn
perform. Her year of studying the Method
made it more difficult for her to act in a movie. After she kept missing
her marks on the set, Logan told Murray, "when you're standing close
to her, hold her and move her onto the marks" – and Murray had to
guide the superstar throughout the picture.

Marilyn, who had a very short concentration span and couldn't
remember more than a sentence at a time, would often say the wrong
word or fail to complete her lines. There were many takes for every
scene (especially when Paula signaled her dissatisfaction), and Murray
had the daunting task of having to be at his best for every one of
them. Since Marilyn was unable to sustain an entire scene, they were
shot in short pieces and had to be spliced together by the film editor,
Bill Reynolds. The professionals in Hollywood, recognizing what
Reynolds had achieved, nominated him for an Academy Award.

Murray recalled that they also had problems with censorship. Marilyn
showed too much cleavage in her fish-net costume and the designer
had to put on a chiffon frill to cover up her bust top. And Marilyn's
open-mouthed kisses had to be cut. Kissing scenes (Murray said) were
never sexy for him or other actors. The technical aspects, the need
to watch the lights and avoid shadows on your face, drained away all
the potential excitement. In one intense scene the camera caught a
trail of saliva coming out of Marilyn's mouth, but Logan couldn't
bear to shoot it yet again and reluctantly allowed the drool to remain
in the picture.

Marilyn once lost her temper and got into a fight with Murray.
In an emotional moment, he had to grab her and tear off a piece of
her tawdry costume. After speaking the line, "Give me back my tail,"
she unintentionally knocked him off his mark, bounced off his chest
and fell flat on her back. When Murray, dropping his cowboy accent,
asked, "Are you all right, Marilyn?" she angrily replied, "Can't you
improvise?" She then slapped him with a piece of spangled cloth, cut
him over the eye and stormed off the set. Murray, who'd been incredibly
patient with her, became furious and wanted to tell her off. But
Logan, desperate to get through the film, stopped him on the way to
her dressing room. Alluding to Scipio Africanus, Logan told him,
"Remember the Roman general who won the war by avoiding battles."
Later on, Murray was astonished when her make-up man, Whitey
Snyder, said it had been her "best-behaved movie."