Marilyn Monroe Read online

  By the same author

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  Orson Welles: A Biography

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  Bette Davis: A Biography

  Katharine Hepburn

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  Notes on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  Marilyn as a child (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn at the time her modeling career began (Corbis)

  A Twentieth Century–Fox publicity shot of Marilyn, 1946 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Joe Schenck (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Elia Kazan directing Karl Malden and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1950 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Natasha Lytess (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn arrives at RKO to begin Clash By Night, 1951 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Joe DiMaggio (Baldwin H. Ward/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Darryl Zanuck (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Walter Winchell and Joe Schenck at Ciro’s, 1953 (Corbis)

  Marilyn and Betty Grable report for How to Marry a Millionaire, 1953 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio leaving San Francisco City Hall after their wedding, 1954 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn entertains U.S. troops in Korea (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn poses for photographers during the filming of The Seven Year Itch, 1954 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and her attorney, Jerry Giesler, after the announcement of her divorce from Joe DiMaggio, 1954 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn being driven away after the announcement of her divorce (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Milton Greene in New York, 1955 (Corbis–Bettmann)

  Lee Strasberg (Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn leaving the Actors Studio (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn dances with Truman Capote at El Morocco (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  A 52-foot figure of Marilyn is fixed to the façade of Loew’s State Theater for the premiere of The Seven Year Itch, June 1955 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Joe DiMaggio escorts Marilyn to the premiere of The Seven Year Itch (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Arthur Miller (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn signs autographs at the time of Bus Stop, 1956 (Daily Mirror/Corbis-Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Arthur meet the press after his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 1956 (Daily Mirror/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Arthur at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, with Hugo the basset hound, June 1956 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Arthur celebrate their marriage in a religious ceremony, July 1, 1956 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh welcome the Millers to England, July 1956 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Olivier during filming of The Prince and the Showgirl (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  The Millers and the Oliviers at the London premiere of A View from the Bridge (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn in New York, July 1957 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn leaves the hospital after losing her baby, August 1957 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Billy Wilder on location for Some Like It Hot, 1958 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Arthur, Marilyn and Paula Strasberg on location for Some Like It Hot (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Yves Montand at a party to celebrate the start of shooting on Let’s Make Love, January 1960 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Arthur Miller and John Huston in Ireland, February 1960 (John Springer/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with George Cukor and Yves Montand on the set of Let’s Make Love (John Springer/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Arthur with John Huston on location for The Misfits, 1960 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn leaves Columbia–Presbyterian Hospital, March 1961 (Daily Mirror/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Joe DiMaggio in Florida, March 1961 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio board the plane back to New York, April 1961 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn, Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin watch Frank Sinatra perform in Las Vegas, June 1961 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn with Peter Lawford (Patricia Lawford Stewart/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn sings “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, May 19, 1962 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn poses nude on the set of her final film, Something’s Got to Give, May 1962 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn’s death is announced in Times Square, August 5, 1962 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Joe DiMaggio at Marilyn’s funeral, August 8, 1962 (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan during preparation for After the Fall (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Marilyn blows a kiss (UPI/Corbis–Bettmann)

  Time is short, baby, it betrays us

  as we betray each other.

  —TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  PART ONE

  ONE

  On January 16, 1951, a black Lincoln convertible pulled into the driveway at 2000 Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan had just traveled cross-country by train from New York. Miller, tall and lean, had a dark, angular, weathered face and a receding hairline. Kazan, known as Gadget or Gadg to his friends, was small with a large nose and a mop of wavy black hair. The men were in Los Angeles to set up their first film together. Miller had written a screenplay for Kazan to direct, and both had a great deal riding on the venture. But already there was a serious problem. On the train, Kazan had read the most recent draft of The Hook, a story of union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront, and he’d been disappointed by what Miller had accomplished so far. Kazan made it clear that the script needed to be much better.

  Greeted at the front door by a servant, Miller and Kazan entered the home of Charles Feldman, a prominent Hollywood agent and independent film producer. He was producing Kazan’s latest project, the film of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. As Feldman told his friend and investor Joseph P. Kennedy, he believed that Kazan’s work had been outstanding. Shooting had been completed before the holidays, but some post-production work remained to be done. Feldman, away on business and anxious to keep the director happy, had offered Kazan the run of his art-filled house. An inveterate collector, Feldman purchased paintings and bibelots in quantity, often sight unseen. The furniture, mostly English antiques and modern pieces, was kept to a minimum to emphasize the Chagalls, Renoirs, and Toulouse-Lautrecs that covered the walls. There were Thai bronze Buddhas. There were Ming and Sui stone heads. There were T’ang and Chou horses and birds.

  In the garden, steps led up to a heated swimming pool, beside which Miller set up his typewriter on a glass table. To understand the strain he was under, it is essential to keep in mind that The Hook was not just any screenplay. It was to be the work with which Miller followed Death of a Salesman, which had been a huge success on Broadway in 1949, directed by Kazan. Many critics thought the thirty-three-year-old Miller had written the great American play, and some pronounced it the century’s finest drama. There was a price to be paid for acclaim of that magnitude. After the premiere, Miller confided to his producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, that he knew he was going to have a hell of a time topping that. Indeed, there had been moments when Miller wondered whether he would be able to write another play at all.

  As Kazan perceived, Miller was not a playwright who invented stories. He needed to find his material in his own lif
e. Yet The Hook was not based on anything Miller had actually experienced. The screenplay did not come out of a crisis that he himself had endured, and as a result he did not completely trust it. Miller began to worry that for a man his age, he had not lived enough. Yet the pressure was on to revise quickly while they pitched to Twentieth, Warner Bros., and Columbia Pictures. Unfortunately, Miller was not like his rival Tennessee Williams, who could work anywhere, under almost any conditions. He was a creature of routine, who found it difficult to write in unfamiliar surroundings.

  Adding to the playwright’s pressures was the threat of losing Kazan. In a period dubbed by the critic Brooks Atkinson “the Williams–Miller era,” Kazan seemed at times to enjoy playing each against the other. Kazan, wavering provocatively between the two, had finally chosen to film A Streetcar Named Desire instead of Death of a Salesman. Afterward, when Williams had had every expectation that Kazan would do his new play, The Rose Tattoo, on Broadway, the director jumped ship at the last minute, going off to Los Angeles for The Hook. Evidently, Kazan was not about to give either playwright reason to take him for granted. Always the director, he controlled people and situations; he didn’t like being controlled by them.

  Kazan was then probably the most powerful director in America. On Broadway, he had directed three Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. His association with Miller and Williams had earned him a reputation for being a playwright’s director, but he was also clearly an actor’s director. His work with Marlon Brando in the first stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 had broken exciting new ground. In Hollywood, he’d negotiated a six-picture, non-exclusive deal with Twentieth Century–Fox, at the highest per-picture director’s salary the studio had ever agreed to pay. Kazan had already won an Academy Award as Best Director for Gentleman’s Agreement, but it was Streetcar, on which the advance word was spectacular, that promised to be his watershed. Before that, despite the Oscar, Kazan had confided in Williams that he didn’t really know how to make films yet. In Streetcar, Kazan demonstrated the mastery he so often showed on stage. The Hook was particularly important to Kazan, since he needed to follow Streetcar with another great film; that’s why the current draft had been such a big disappointment. As it was, the script wasn’t going to give either man what he needed.

  There was an even greater pressure burdening Kazan. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which since 1938 had been attempting to document the Communist infiltration of American film and theater, was preparing to launch motion picture industry hearings in March. Its investigations had been given new and vigorous life by America’s entry into the Korean War in 1950. Having belonged to the Communist Party for about nineteen months between 1934 and 1936, Kazan figured it was only a matter of time before HUAC summoned him. He was visible. He was successful. He was very much in demand. Those qualities made him a prime target for a committee whose raison d’être, in large part, was publicity. “If they call me, I’ll tell them to go fuck themselves,” Kazan vowed to Kermit Bloomgarden. If he did that, his Hollywood career would be destroyed. The inevitability seemed to shadow Kazan’s every action.

  The climate of fear in Hollywood also had an impact on the particular project he and Miller were selling. When they met with Darryl Zanuck in his high-domed office at Twentieth Century–Fox, the production chief turned down The Hook because of its politically sensitive subject matter. Zanuck, though eager to begin Kazan’s next film, wouldn’t touch Miller’s script, concerned as it was with unions and labor. Abe Lastfogel, Kazan’s agent at William Morris, left the meeting and went directly to Warner Bros. to try his luck there.

  Meanwhile, Kazan had something else he wanted to do on the Fox lot. Ostensibly, he took Miller to the set of As Young as You Feel to visit the director, Harmon Jones, who had previously worked as Kazan’s film editor. But the real reason was to see a girl he had heard about from Charlie Feldman. The detour offered a way to blow off some of the tension.

  Before Miller and Kazan actually saw her, her name echoed through the studio. “Marilyn!” an assistant shouted frantically while Jones told Kazan about the trouble he’d been having with the twenty-four-year-old actress. She was forever disappearing from the set. Worse, when she returned, her eyes were often swollen from crying, making it difficult to film her. Fortunately, her role was a small one. This was to be her final day, if only Jones could get the shots he needed. She appeared at last, her skin-tight black dress disclosing a body perfect even by Hollywood standards. She had blue-gray eyes, a turned-up nose, and luminous white skin. She wore her fine blonde hair pinned on top of her head.

  Marilyn Monroe was in crisis. When she finished work on this picture, she had no further assignments. After today, she had nothing to do and nowhere to go. A career that meant everything to her might well be over. Though Marilyn was under contract to Twentieth, Darryl Zanuck, who loathed her, was unlikely to pick up her option in May. Though she had signed a three-year contract with the William Morris Agency as recently as December 5, suddenly no one there would take her calls. Marilyn felt as if she were about to fall off the face of the earth.

  Highlighting Marilyn’s predicament was the fact that she had just had the best year of her professional life. She owed it all to Johnny Hyde, a partner and senior agent at William Morris. For two years, he had worked tirelessly on her behalf. Very much in love with Marilyn, the dwarf-like agent believed in her, and in her dream of being a star, as no one had done before. He was even rumored to have personally underwritten the new contract he had negotiated for her at Twentieth. Before meeting Johnny, Marilyn had briefly been under contract at both Twentieth and Columbia, but neither studio had kept her on. Hyde was determined that things were going to be different this time.

  For a while, it seemed they would be. By 1950, Hyde’s efforts had begun to pay off. Marilyn attracted attention in small but showy roles in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve.

  It was thanks to Johnny that she had an opportunity to work with the best directors; it was thanks to Johnny that she knew who the best directors were. But just when all that she had been working for finally seemed within her grasp, the fifty-five-year-old Hyde had a fatal heart attack in Palm Springs on December 18. Marilyn had refused to join him there for the weekend. She blamed herself for his death. The day after Hyde’s funeral, Marilyn attempted suicide, swallowing the contents of a bottle of barbiturates. Though a roommate discovered her in time, in the days and weeks that followed she never really came back to life. With no one to fight for her anymore, Marilyn seemed to have given up. In January, she reported for work on As Young as You Feel, the last film Johnny had arranged for her, but from the first it was evident that she was merely going through the motions.

  Miller and Kazan watched her struggle through a scene. Between takes, she fled to a dark, deserted sound stage littered with office furniture. When Kazan caught up with her, he found her in tears. They had met before, though he assumed she didn’t remember—Marilyn and Johnny had once had dinner with Kazan and Abe Lastfogel, Hyde’s partner at William Morris. Now, Kazan offered consolation for Johnny’s death. Marilyn looked away, far too upset to reply. She returned for another take. When she finished, Miller looked on as Kazan asked her to dinner. Marilyn said no, and the men went off to the studio cafeteria.

  So that was it for Marilyn. Her work on the picture was done. There seemed to be nothing left for her at Twentieth. Since Johnny’s death, her phone had rung constantly, but it was always Charlie Feldman or one of the other men in their group, each of them eager to be first to sleep with Johnny’s girl before passing her on to the others. The only sign that anyone else remembered her was a package from Johnny’s family, containing a stack of nude photographs of Marilyn that had been discovered in the top drawer of his bureau. As Marilyn’s recent behavior suggested, part of her just wanted to curl up and die.

  But Kazan’s fortuitous arrival indicated that this was no time to indulge in self-pity. Whatever Kazan may h
ave thought, Marilyn knew exactly who he was. As it happened, she had previously encountered him not once but twice. The previous August, Johnny Hyde had taken her to Danny Kaye’s party to welcome Vivien Leigh to Hollywood for A Streetcar Named Desire. Kazan, Leigh’s dinner partner, had been very much the power player in the room that evening. Now, at a moment when Marilyn seemed about to lose everything, the important director had walked into her life. On the Fox lot, Kazan was known to be casting the film Viva Zapata!, then being written by John Steinbeck. If Marilyn failed to seize the opportunity, it might not present itself again. It didn’t matter that she was mentally and physically exhausted. Marilyn, through an act of will, pulled herself out of the mists of the depression that had engulfed her. Soon, she was on her way to the studio cafeteria, having decided to find Kazan and say yes to his dinner invitation.

  Marilyn began to spend nights in Kazan’s room at Feldman’s, while Miller slept alone in a room down the hall. By day, Miller, powerfully attracted to Marilyn himself, swam laps in the pool in an effort to cool off. Marilyn, appointed “mascot,” accompanied Kazan and Miller on their rounds with The Hook. She loved Gadg’s idea of playing a practical joke on Harry Cohn, the production chief at Columbia. Kazan would introduce Marilyn as his private secretary, Miss Bauer, who was there to take notes on Cohn’s reaction to the script. In fact, she and Cohn had met in the past, when he had banned her from the lot after she refused to accompany him on a yacht to Catalina Island. Marilyn’s rage over the incident had festered, and now she welcomed an opportunity to laugh at his expense. Despite her carefully cultivated soft, breathy voice, Marilyn was full of anger. As it turned out, going to Harry Cohn’s office may not have been such a good idea after all; inevitably, the visit reminded Marilyn that without Johnny Hyde’s protection, she faced the loss of yet another studio contract.

  By the time Charlie Feldman returned from New York on Sunday, January 21, Marilyn appeared to have lined up a new protector. Feldman had to give the devil her due—she had worked quickly, replacing Johnny with Kazan. Feldman was a bit of a dandy, sporting a Clark Gable mustache and a gold signet ring on his right pinky finger; he had planned to be the first to take Johnny’s girl to bed, but he accepted defeat gracefully. When he drew up a guest list for a buffet dinner party in Miller’s honor, he listed Marilyn simply as Kazan’s girl; that being her current identity, no other name seemed necessary.