His mother, Miss Edwina, held court on the roof, in her garden-party frock and bonnet swathed in flowers. Gore Vidal and Truman Capote milled around clutching highballs, teacups, and cucumber sandwiches. Writer Elaine Dundy described the moment Marilyn arrived.
At that moment a buzz and a rustle ripped through the crowd. Everybody stopped what they were doing, freeze-framed with their drinks, hors d’oeuvres or cigarettes halfway to their mouths. They were all looking in one direction. A path had been cleared, and walking through it was Marilyn Monroe. She was wearing what anyone else would have called an underslip, a simple, unadorned black silk slip with thin shoulder straps and clearly nothing under it. Her skin was a luminous alabaster with pearly blue and rose tints such as I have never seen outside paintings by the Old Masters. She was more astonishingly beautiful in the flesh than on celluloid and we all stared silently in our reverence.
Eventually the party started up again. By then I had worked my way around to her part of the room and was rewarded with the following tableau vivant: blonde Marilyn was seated in an armchair. On one of its arms perched Carson McCullers, her brown hair chopped short and uneven as if she’d taken an ax to it, her body fierce in tomboy tension and twisted like a pretzel. Sitting in a chair on the other side of Marilyn-In-Her-Slip was Edwina-Williams-In-Her-Hat. They were conversing with each other, all three with heads inclined. The Three Fates, I decided; Beauty, Brains and Motherhood. Whose destiny were they spinning out at that very moment?
Eddie was waiting at the Gladstone when Marilyn staggered back, collapsing by the fire in a threadbare chair. He took one last shot of her drifting to sleep in white fox fur. She slept upright in the lobby that night while bats beat their lullaby in the rafters above.
As their week together drew to a close, Marilyn grew quieter, more reflective. She took off her peach Pucci dress and wrapped herself in a white terry bathrobe. Without a word she stepped onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and stared out at the Manhattan skyline. “Eddie’s shutter just kept clicking, and rolls of 35 mm film filled up,” wrote Robert Stein. “He never asked her to pose. She hardly knew he was there.”
This was a Marilyn the world hadn’t seen yet—alone, withdrawn but dazzlingly happy.
Eddie’s photos of Marilyn are infused with some quiet magic, which Robert Stein attributes to the resemblance between photographer and subject. “In their days together,” wrote Stein, “despite their disparity in looks, I could see Eddie and Marilyn were much alike. Like Marilyn, Eddie was given to self-parody to mask the pain of being defenseless against daily living and, like her, desperate to make full use of the gifts such an open nature provides. Just as Marilyn dreaded looking less than perfect in front of the cameras and was always late, so Eddie obsessed over what he did behind the camera and would let no one else develop or print his pictures.… They both were somehow more directly connected to life than the rest of us, and more vulnerable. Each held on to an ideal of Art as if it were life itself, and, as it turned out for both of them, it was. Marilyn’s movies and Eddie’s pictures made those who saw them feel more alive but at the same time fear for their safety, sensing the price that would have to be paid for their luminous openness.”
But it was Marilyn’s luminous openness that made her such a hit in New York. For the first time, she felt accepted, welcomed. Unlike glassy, judgmental Hollywood, New York embraced her quirks and creativity, and she couldn’t imagine going back. “If I close my eyes and picture LA,” she said at this time, “all I see is one big varicose vein.”
* * *
After months of lying low, Milton was anxious to stir up publicity for Marilyn. The fans should see for themselves that their star had not dimmed, that she wasn’t in exile cowering under the thumb of the mighty Darryl Zanuck. They needed a stunt, a spectacle, with all the razzle-dazzle Marilyn deserved. This could be tricky—her contract with Fox forbade paid appearances except for charity events. Mike Todd would soon be hosting a Ringling Bros. gala to raise funds for the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation. With a celebrity guest list, Madison Square Garden location and Milton Berle as ringmaster, this could be the perfect high-profile debut. As a longtime supporter of charities, Marilyn leaped at the chance to appear in the circus—riding an elephant, preferably a small, female one, with a rhinestone saddle and pink bow on its tail.
The fitting at Brooks Costume Company was a disaster. She’d been given a charcoal bodice to match the elephant’s skin, but Marilyn hated charcoal and demanded a black one. Besides, it was too tight—the seams dug into her flesh and hurt. Tailors and seamstresses bustled around her. Costume fitter Mary Smith was there, so was Dick Shepherd, Milton Greene, Eddie Feingersh and Robert Stein. Reporter H.D. Quigg slipped in, eager to brag about seeing Marilyn naked. Half-dressed, humiliated, and surrounded by gawkers, Marilyn began to cry.
“At the costume fitting she arrived as the Star,” wrote Stein, who was alarmed by Marilyn’s sudden outburst, “until the Other abruptly emerged and burst into tears of frustration.” What Stein misidentified as some schizoid fit was really a normal reaction to being poked, prodded, sewn up, and stripped in a roomful of gaping men. She might as well be back in the Fox wardrobe room with the bitchy wardrobe assistants, tape measures, straight pins, and scratchy fabrics. It all felt like one giant step backward—she’d tottered around in five-inch heels, tripped on her train, and had fallen smack on her million-dollar ass. She hadn’t put her career on the line to be cut up into cheesecake again.
On March 31, she prepared to ride her elephant through Madison Square Garden. Backstage, Milton donned his dinner jacket and pinned her into the black velvet bodice. Stagehands frantically painted the elephant pink while someone hoisted Marilyn onto its back and pushed her into the crowd of 8,000 raucous fans.
“The place went absolutely ape,” Amy Greene told Photoplay. “I have never experienced anything like the hysteria and the din that came out of those mouths all the way up the stands. I’m telling you, I had goosebumps. Everyone cheered her, and when I looked up toward the balcony, it was the strangest sight. All I could see were the open mouths, right up to the rafters.”
Everything worked beautifully. The elephant was tender and tame, pausing to bow at the cheering audience. (Milton: “Afterwards she talked about how sweet and nice the elephant was. She called it a ‘sweet baby.’”) Marilyn smiled and waved in spangled glory, all the while bleeding from a straight pin that had punctured her thigh.
With its fishnet tights and heaps of cleavage, Marilyn’s costume was far more revealing than the halter necks and thin robes that had enraged Joe last year. Yet Joe seemed unruffled. In fact, when the elephant stopped in front of his box, Joe beamed “as if to let everyone know that Marilyn is still the one girl in his life.” Bedecked in her feathered can-can outfit, Marilyn waved from her perch. She was, quite literally, on top of the world.
The tide was beginning to turn—Marilyn had been wooing the press spectacularly. Journalists reported “peace offerings” from Zanuck, including dramatic roles in Anastasia and The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing. “If true,” predicted one reporter, “it seems that Marilyn’s revolt has begun to reap dividends.”
Milton and Amy basked in the glow of Marilyn’s wild triumph. It was as if they were all rebel teenagers, thumbing their noses at Hollywood. “It was like a cannon had been shot in Old Madison Square Garden,” remembers Amy Greene. “It was a moment in all our lives that we were David and Goliath—and we were loving every minute of it.”
Seven
Ingenue
“Marilyn was a field of wild flowers, a gamboling puppy in the backyard, a pink sunset in June. She was glorious, and we had to look.”
MARLON BRANDO
Marilyn’s pink elephant entrance had the effect she’d been hoping for. “It was international coverage,” explained Amy. “Newspapers, magazines—nothing that was printable at that point didn’t carry a huge picture of her. So now Zanuck is freaking out. The stockholders are saying, ‘Darryl, this lady is looking good, why isn’t she making pictures?’”
She soon caught the attention of Edward R. Murrow, an award-winning journalist who’d taken down McCarthy. He wanted Marilyn for his TV series, Person to Person, and arranged to meet with her and Milton at the Ambassador Hotel. Ed talked shop with Milton, lit Marilyn’s cigarettes, joked about the fast one she’d pulled on Zanuck and crew. Marilyn beamed in her marten fur. Ed’s show, with its massive audience, was a chance to launch her dream into the world.
But when Murrow and his crew descended on the Greenes’ home for filming, something shifted. Marilyn watched the technicians rush around the living room, fiddling with their cables and cameras. Milton looked on anxiously—he recognized the look of panic flickering across her face. He hoped they’d finish up the preparations in time for a quick rehearsal to ease Marilyn’s nerves. “I took her for a ride on my motorcycle to distract her,” he said. “We talked, and she was nervous. That comes off on the show—a certain kind of nervousness that she’s trying to shake off.”
Even her outfit—a straight wool skirt and white short-sleeved sweater—seemed stiff and awkward. It didn’t suit Marilyn at all—nor was it remotely typical of her easy style. She’d had use for those sorts of plainer outfits in Connecticut, but in the city she’d been living in black slips and bathrobes. She gave subsequent interviews on her own louche terms—in a suite at the Waldorf wearing nothing but a robe. Needless to say, those interviews were far more successful.
At the time it seemed novel to film her en famille, but the whole setup cast her as a dependent little girl. In spite of her closeness with the Greenes, she was still their guest. It would have been bold and unnatural for her to march around the house like she owned the place. In Weston, Amy reigned as a confident queen—it was her domain, not Marilyn’s. Amy jumped in whenever Marilyn faltered—and that day Marilyn faltered a lot. She sat mutely on the couch, looking to the Greenes for cues and approval, stroking the dog’s fur when she saw Amy petting it. Everything seemed to go wrong—even Ed Murrow’s opening question—“How’s Marilyn as a houseguest; does she clean up after herself…?”—was infantilizing. How could she answer a question like that? Marilyn sighed, raising a sweet but exasperated eyebrow.
In Murrow’s defense, it was a valid question. Marilyn was about as domesticated as a baby cheetah—and just as rare in a Connecticut country home. But it wasn’t a cheetah Marilyn resembled that day—more like a plasticky, petrified doll, eyes darting under a thick fringe of panicky lashes. Gone was the usual witty minx who could catch a reporter’s banter and throw it right back at them. In fact, Marilyn seemed less like herself and more like those delightful ditzes Lorelei Lee and The Girl from The Seven Year Itch. At a time when everyone was waiting with bated breath for the “New Marilyn” to emerge, this was the worst possible outcome.
What happened? Milton, too, seemed mysteriously off. During rehearsals with Ed he’d been bright and talkative, but withdrawn and tentative today during filming. Marilyn and Milton could be moody and changeable, just as likely to dash out of a party as to rush to it. Amy called it “Russian gloom,” and it surfaced in them both, especially Milton, who could be strangely—though charmingly—absent. They had similar insecurities—the shyness, the childhood stutters—and they dealt with them in different ways. Milton would detach into blasé coolness, while Marilyn would lapse into fuzzed-out vagaries. Like many creative types, they were too dreamy to be sharp. Why chain yourself to the moment when you could be slipping in and out of Technicolor?
During cocktail parties or interviews, Marilyn was always clutching at a connection—frantic for something genuine, something substantial to say. She’d never be snappy and pert like Amy, nor would she ever get the hang of small talk. For Marilyn, words were much more than surface banter. That’s why she rehearsed so much for her roles—going over the lines until they became her own. If you changed a line (as directors often do) she couldn’t snap back and adjust; she was already too invested. She’d never be an ad-libber or improv comic—words were too weighted, too important for that.
Marilyn was at her best in the long-form interviews she gave later in life—where she could dig deep into subjects and steep in them. But short interviews and rapid-fire press conferences put her on the spot. She saw them as miniature confrontations, and protected herself with evasive quips.
Reactions were mixed when the interview aired on Person to Person. Reporter Richard Heller thought Marilyn presented “beautifully, modestly and with her famous smile charming as ever.” Others weren’t so kind, gleefully snarking about the “same old Marilyn.” Milton and Marilyn had hoped to convince the naysayers that they had the upper hand, that MMP would win this battle with Fox. For the second time that year, they fell short.
To make matters worse, Amy had made such an impression on screen that one headline read FORGET MARILYN, WHAT ABOUT AMY GREENE? Hollywood director Jean Negulesco called the next day, offering Amy the lead in Bonjour Tristesse. Amy was kind enough to dismiss these offers and brush off the attention, crediting her performance to what she called The Ed Murrow Effect: “I was terrific because I was making googly eyes at this wonderful man.”
Negulesco was one of the few directors Marilyn actually trusted. He’d directed her in Millionaire and immediately recognized her sensitivity and intelligence. He took her to long dinners where they’d discuss Matisse, Chagall, Braque, and Gauguin, and lent her books such as The Old Man and the Sea and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. He even painted her portrait on oil canvas, a special gift that she kept by her bed at the Gladstone. That this man was now offering roles to Amy must have struck Marilyn as a terrible blow.
The next hit came when Milton shot down an NBC offer for $2 million and six TV shows. “I turned it down because I knew she didn’t belong on television,” Milton insisted years later. “She belonged in cinema. Really, I turned it down because I believed in her.”
He didn’t explain his reasoning to Marilyn, nor did he consult her before answering no. “She turned to me and said, ‘You don’t think I can do it.’ I said, ‘No, you can do it. But you belong in cinema, not television. Cinema—period.’ So then she agreed, because I had turned down 2 million bucks for myself, so what kind of a bastard could I be? But she felt, after I turned down the TV thing, that I didn’t believe in her as an actress. That’s why she turned to Lee Strasberg and leaned on him so much.”
Her trust in Milton permanently rattled, Marilyn threw herself into working with Lee, who’d been coaching her privately for weeks. She’d been making excellent progress, impressing him with her openness and keen emotional sensors. With Lee, she never stuttered or stammered. He found her incisive and articulate, never ditsy. “I find her quite brilliant,” gushed Lee, already enraptured with Marilyn’s potential. “It’s rare to find that underlying personality so close to the top and so anxious to get out, so quick to respond. It was almost as if a person was waiting for a button to be pushed, and you push it and a door opens, and you see gold and jewels and so on.” Lee was convinced she was ready to take the next step—classes at the formidable Malin Studios.
It was time to dive deep into acting again.
* * *
By 1955, Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio had become the inner sanctum of quality acting, whether you admitted it or not. Thanks to members such as Brando and Dean, the industry’s “sweatshirt school of acting” went mainstream—not just on Broadway but in Hollywood, too. Lee wanted to expand, bring his bohemian little tribe into the future. Most of all, he wanted Marilyn, who seemed to drop from floaty Hollywood Candyland into the dusty rooms of Malin Studios at just the right moment. He already loved her.
Whether his students would was another matter. Clannish and bohemian, they clung to T-shirt-and-jeans exclusivity, a reverse hauteur just as rarified as Hollywood’s glitter. “Becoming a member of the Actors Studio was more important than getting a job in Hollywood, even more important than getting good reviews on Broadway,” said Ben Gazzara. “To get into the Actors Studio was the max. When Marilyn and people like that were invited in without the rigorous auditions that we youngsters had to go through we resented that, quite frankly.” They wept when Lee announced Marilyn’s impending arrival, worried that this was the beginning of the end. Was Lee—dazzled as he was by celebrity—about to sell out?
Marilyn was the first Hollywood crossover to descend the steps of Malin Studios, bringing with her an unwelcome breeze of balmy LA air. Twice a week she’d walk down Broadway and into an old theater building, the heavy door clanging behind her. She’d slip into a metal chair in the back row. Lee would be pacing, booming about conscious preparation or imaginary realities. There was Ellen Burstyn, with her tremulous voice that always seemed ready to break into tears. Patricia Neal with her elegant pageboy and lazy-moon eyes. Thirty-year-old Paul Newman sat and smoked in a white T-shirt and loafers, feet propped on his chair like a teenager, a look of intense engagement on his chiseled face.
With their casual clothes, intense looks, and deli coffee in white paper cups, the Studio crowd could be chilly and insular. They spoke almost in riddles, their banter strung with Leeisms and their own inside references. Their arcane language bewildered some but attracted Marilyn, who always favored the byzantine over the simple. But she was shy, in a class full of extroverts. Would they ever accept her?
Marilyn knew what it was like to be on the outs. Back in LA, she’d attempted to join Charles Laughton’s Shakespeare group. She showed up twice, too paralyzed to participate, painfully insecure about her lack of education. But at twenty-eight, Marilyn was no longer the starlet-on-training-wheels in a too-tight halter lugging around a dictionary. Taking the leap into the Actors Studio was nothing. She’d already put everything on the line by fleeing Hollywood and breaking her contract with Fox. Marilyn would not languish—not in a marriage, not even in a book that was unfulfilling, and certainly not in her career. She’d sooner be in peril than a slump.
To take the focus off her looks, Marilyn dressed down in a loose men’s crewneck, wore no makeup, and covered her hair in a white kerchief. Along with her purse, she carried a Thermos that looked like it had come from a child’s lunch box.
Those first few weeks she barely spoke, sitting quietly in the back, camel coat slung round her shoulders. “She was so modest, so attentive,” recalled one Studio member, “that she could have been some girl who had just come from a convent.” Thanks to her humility, most of Lee’s students liked her in spite of themselves. She even won over the skeptical Gazzara: “Everyone seemed to like her too—including me.”
What would it really be like to work with Marilyn Monroe, who already had a reputation for being a diva? Her chronic lateness had been grudgingly accepted in LA, but Lee locked the doors at eleven sharp. And while Marilyn loved New York, she never would adapt to its frenzied pace. “Busy” for her meant maybe one meeting in the afternoon and a party later that night. She had to do everything at her own pace—and that usually meant spending hours priming for a meeting and the rest of the afternoon collapsed in recovery.
Luckily, Lee understood Marilyn’s internal logic: “Darling, you don’t have to be on time for anything. Be early.” He enlisted the help of Studio actor Delos Smith, who happily became her male lady’s maid. He’d arrive to find her inevitably in the bath, soaking in perfumed bath oil. (She’d had to bathe in dirty water as a child when she lived with her foster families, so Delos allowed her this luxury.) When she finally would emerge from the tub, she’d never dry off and dress—she’d wrap herself in a towel and lie in bed for at least thirty more minutes. After that, it was impossible to get her up. Eventually, Delos cracked the code of How to Get Marilyn Out of Bed. The key was to sneak into the bed while she was still bathing. So when she’d stagger from bath to bed, poised to fling herself under the covers, she’d see Delos lying in the sheets, shoes and all. That was usually enough incentive to keep her out of the bed—with no other choice than to get dressed and eventually go to Malin Studios.
It makes sense that Marilyn’s first Studio friend was this bearded boho iconoclast. Delos saw past Marilyn’s Hollywood varnish. “At home, she lost all that star glamour. Her clothes were unkempt, I don’t know what the maid was doing all that time.” He found her eccentricities endearing, beguiling as a child’s. As tokens of friendship and gratitude, she’d give Delos crazy little gifts such as labels clipped from her Maximillian mink coat or thirty-five-cent makeup mirrors. Once she quietly slipped a pair of airplane booties in his pocket.
