“Hi, I’m Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “You might not remember me, but we met in California.”
As if she possibly could have forgotten meeting Marilyn Monroe.
Visiting LA the year before, Susie had been crashing the Fox lot with her friend Steffi Skolsky, when she’d stumbled on Cukor’s Show Business set. She’d watched in awe as Marilyn danced and sang, “We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave.…” And it was hot, crushingly hot, no breeze, palm fronds sticky and unmoving—or, as Paul Newman might put it, “just another lousy day in paradise.” Dozens of cameramen crowded the humid room. DiMaggio stood stone-faced, wiping his brow with a spotless starched handkerchief. In her limp brown hair and sickly dull skin, Susie felt self-conscious and puny. Then Marilyn slipped on the slick floor. She looked embarrassed and lost—almost desperate. And though Marilyn was a megawatt star, Susie felt sorry for her.
Later, she wandered upstairs in a trance, straight into Marilyn’s dressing room. “Come on, face, give me a break,” Marilyn sang to herself in the mirror, wiping off lipstick and flesh-toned pancake. She glanced up at Susie. “Sorry, I look like shit,” she said with a sigh, not at all angry at her little intruder. When she realized Susie was only a girl, she gasped, “Oops, sorry,” covering her mouth with a manicured hand.
In platform heels and a Carmen Miranda headdress, Marilyn towered over little Susie, who was barely five-one. In full makeup, she seemed larger than life. But now she was touchable, smaller, and far more beautiful.
“It didn’t seem possible,” Susie recalled. “Was this vibrant, shimmering mermaid who somehow managed to undulate on her high heel—this clear-eyed, normal-size girl—the same overblown, sexy, exotic creature I’d met a little over a year ago in Hollywood?” It’s as if this were the real Marilyn in her natural habitat, unleashed from Hollywood’s gaudy zoo.
After dinner, Lee lit his pipe and put on a Vivaldi record. Paula started the dishes, Johnny slinked off to his room, and Susie joined Marilyn in the huge study, which looked out onto Central Park. She watched Marilyn browse the bookshelves in awe—books on science, psychology, art, anthropology, politics, music, dance, costume, customs. Books in French, German, and Italian (Lee taught himself all three as a child). He even had books in languages he couldn’t read—such as Japanese—and translators who made house calls when he felt like learning them. “God, has he actually read all these?” Marilyn exclaimed, visibly impressed. “These damned books,” Paula grimaced. “We’ll have the greatest library in the world, and starve to death!”
Marilyn nestled on the floor next to the mirrored fireplace wall as Lee bombarded her with questions: Who was the actress she most admired? (Eleonora Duse.) Which poets did she love most? (Whitman, Dickinson.) Was she interested in psychology? (Yes!) He wanted to get to the white hot core of things, just like Marilyn did.
Susie followed Marilyn into the kitchen and found her scanning Paula’s little shelf of books on tarot, diet, astrology, and Catholic metaphysics. Much to Susie’s surprise, Marilyn asked about her acting career—what parts had she done since they’d met in California? Oh, and did Susie know they were both Geminis? Paula beamed from her station at the sink, silently plunging dishes into soapy water.
Just then, Susie remembered something Marilyn had told her the previous year in California. “I really admire your father,” Marilyn whispered, her lips hot and close to Susie’s ear. “I’m going to come to New York and study acting with him. It’s what I want to do more than anything.”
“Sure you are,” Susie had thought as she walked away. “There’s about as much chance of that as a snowstorm in July in Hollywood.”
* * *
They grew to know each other cautiously, making the first shy overtures in the kitchen as Paula stirred pots of red cabbage and brisket. Marilyn would lean statuesque against the wall, Susie perched on a stool, elbows propped on the counter. Still in her school uniform of V-neck sweater and Peter Pan collar, bobby socks, and white buck shoes, crinoline peeking out of her circle skirt. They’d trade beauty tips. Marilyn admired Susie’s hair—she always wanted to have silky locks like that. Susie confessed she’d give anything for “two more inches of leg,” and Marilyn passed on Amy’s trick of matching her heels to her stockings—black with black, nude with nude. (Susie immediately went shopping.) Marilyn taught her how to lighten her hair with lemon and beer: “If it doesn’t work, you can always drink it. Once you’re legal of course,” she added with a wink.
It wasn’t just makeup tips. Even this early, Susie could sense that Marilyn took control of her own image, her own destiny, in ways that she hadn’t seen before. Years later she would channel her own Marilyn moments—once shocking a photographer by demanding to go over proofs herself. “Well,” Susie would say with a sniff, “Marilyn does it.”
At sixteen, Susie longed to grow up and slip into Marilyn’s stilettos. (Only Cuban heels allowed.) Like many teens, her concept of Marilyn was wrapped in poeticism. She fantasized about being Marilyn the way she imagined being Anna Karenina; Mary, Queen of Scots; or Queen Elizabeth. Yet for all her star power, Marilyn was oddly accessible. “She wasn’t distant like Greta Garbo, haughty and pretentious like Joan Crawford, or foreign like Ingrid Bergman. I felt like she could be any friend of mine, or me.”
Most women Marilyn’s age would have taken a maternal attitude toward Susie. But Marilyn related to her as an equal. “She had this kind of innocence and fun,” remembered Susie. The two were co-conspirators at Sunday brunches—two teenagers slipping away from the adult table. Those crisp afternoons they’d float through Lee’s study, staring idly out the window at Central Park, all clear blue sky and budding trees. While lounging in Paula’s room, they found a beat-up copy of the Kama Sutra and decided to “rehearse” on the floor in their skirts. Marilyn was the man: “Boy, this is a switch.”
They leaped up on hearing Lee’s footsteps. “Education Interruptus,” Marilyn said. But the major lesson was that even in this era of doomed femmes and cast-iron virgins, sex could be breezy—even fun.
Another Sunday a young student approached Marilyn—all shaky, as if he were meeting the queen or walking a plank. He presented her with a cocktail ring, which she held to her eye for inspection. Instead of a stone, it had a miniature portrait of her infamous nude calendar.
“Oh, Susie,” she cried, “look what they’ve done.”
Susie gave the student a black look—how dare he upset Marilyn?
“See,” Marilyn moaned, “they’ve smudged my eye.”
In the buttoned-up world of the fifties, Marilyn was fun and unfettered. Shopping with Marilyn was pure joy, and Susie loved to watch her scamper round the dressing rooms in underwear or less. Everyone has a version of “that time Marilyn got naked in the fitting room of Saks.” But for Susie, it was a revelation: “Listen, in a day and age when we were wearing girdles, she talked about sex as if it were something natural and normal.
“She knew in the fifties when very few of us did that the answer to her happiness wasn’t in furs or minks or fame, it was inside. She was a gutsy, courageous lady. She made that journey inward, which is dangerous. She stood up before the women’s movement did. She broke away from the Hollywood Studio. She stood up to the McCarthy committee. She risked a lot.”
* * *
Gradually, Marilyn became part of the Strasberg family, even spending the night in Johnny’s room (he’d be banished to the couch). Both shy, they circled each other warily like teen alley cats. “He was the only boy in America not happy to have Marilyn Monroe sleeping in his bed,” Susie said of her disgruntled little brother.
Of course, they fell in love with Marilyn—not just her beauty and talent but her childlike naturalness, her easy grace in accepting favors, flattery, or a frozen hot chocolate from Serendipity. She was more fun to compliment than anyone in the world—she’d smile and say “Gee, thanks!” and look like you’d made her day. People who are good at taking compliments are generally good at giving them, and Marilyn tended to compliment Susie far more than Susie ever praised Marilyn. “I love your lipstick, Susie, where did you buy it?” she’d say, or “People respect you, Susie, that’s so wonderful.”
“Because she was so much needier than I was,” said Susie, who envied the way her parents doted on Marilyn, “she got a certain kind of attention that of course I didn’t get.” But Marilyn was remarkably healthy in some ways, aware of her desires, interior and otherwise. Thanks to her keen emotional intelligence, she had the ability to communicate her needs, approaching directors for extra takes, or requesting help from her drama coaches when she needed it.
Marilyn tended to get what she wanted without really asking—an ice cream sundae, house calls from hairdressers, tailors at midnight, script changes, late passes, doctor’s notes. This could be an infuriating quality to behold. It’s easy to call her needy, princessy—but she gave as much as she got and more. Mikomoto pearls to Paula, a Thunderbird for Johnny, bags of clothes and attention for Susie, endless funding for the Actors Studio. On a smaller scale, she knew what you needed before you knew it yourself—a cigarette, a tête-à-tête in the powder room, a sweater, or simply to be left alone.
Ultimately, Susie did get to the bottom of why Marilyn fascinated her father and everyone else: “She permitted us to see her angels and demons without fear.” It was this vulnerability that was so bewitching—and, of course, what made her a perfect match for Strasberg and the Method.
Hollywood was shocked by Marilyn’s attachment to Lee—what was their precious pinup doing with the king of “mumbleschool” acting? “She is being taught acting by the kind of people who don’t believe in underarm deodorants,” ranted Billy Wilder. “These are the kind of people who believe in sitting on the floor when there are six comfortable chairs in the room. They are making her throw away everything she has and be ashamed of herself. Her success is she can’t act. She’s going through a whole evolution and if she takes it seriously it is the end of Monroe. She will lose her male audience. She will become a Julie Harris, and she will lose everything of her own and make herself ugly and lose the healthy admiration of the crowd in the bleachers. I don’t know who to blame—Lee Strasberg or Milton Greene. Who is Milton Greene anyhow?”
The press didn’t know what to make of it either. Soon enough, her nemesis Dorothy Kilgallen was snarking in her columns, hinting that Lee Strasberg was replacing Milton Greene.
“Milton Greene was not my Svengali,” Marilyn snapped. “I’m nobody’s slave and never have been.… Now they write that Lee Strasberg is my Svengali. But why shouldn’t I have a coach? Why shouldn’t I try to improve myself? I want to accomplish certain things. I am ambitious. Is it a crime to better yourself? It’s good to study with different teachers and you’ll find something to learn in each of them. I studied privately with Michael Chekhov as I am now studying with Lee Strasberg. And I am learning.”
To the outside world, it often looked like Marilyn was being controlled, manipulated by Lee the hypnotic guru or Milton the lovable puppeteer. No one would acknowledge that at last, Marilyn was remarkably in control of her own life and making her usual informed, empowered decision to learn from the best.
“You see,” she explained, “not only didn’t I have any acting experience, but I worked in pictures where I was directed by directors who had never directed before. I had directors so stupid all they can do is repeat the lines of the script to me like they’re reading a timetable. So I didn’t get help from them. I had to find it elsewhere.”
In the hands of talented, sensitive directors Marilyn flourished, but many were fussy tyrants who scrambled over angles and lights, squeezed in shots, and cut just before six o’clock to save money. Other than themselves, they were most impressed with lavish sets, prizing fancy light fixtures, and spray-painted lions over quality acting. When Marilyn committed to a role she insisted on getting each shot right—no matter what the director said. Her concerns were giving each shot her best, each day learning more about her craft. “I believe in learning and developing myself,” she said firmly. Her pursuit of knowledge was one of the most touching things about her.
This yearning went beyond dedication to art. Marilyn sought out mentors first for guidance—then for love. It’s undeniable that she blurred boundaries, with midnight phone calls, correspondence that read like love letters, and transatlantic flights.
But neediness and confidence are not mutually exclusive. Marilyn needed love—but she certainly didn’t need anyone’s approval. For the most part, she kept her own counsel, often going against expert advice. Marilyn trusted her own talent and intuition more than she ever trusted anyone else—not her husbands, not Milton Greene, not even Lee.
* * *
Whether it was her career, her love life, or a book she was reading, Marilyn made up her own rules as she went along. In class she was highly professional but always a little bit playful and flirtatious. Even Eli Wallach hesitated to do scenes with her, concerned that “people might talk.” This puzzled Marilyn—an actor such as Eli fretting over gossip? She’d been shrugging off public opinion for years. When she reached out to Lou Gossett about doing that scene from The Rose Tattoo, he was stunned. “Do you realize you’d be crossing racial barriers and entering forbidden territory?” Marilyn dismissed his concerns. They never did the scene, but Lou never forgot Marilyn’s courage.
Ultimately, the Studio respected her for pushing the limits. After all, theirs was an ethos based on rawness, risk, and emotional honesty. “Monty Clift, Kim Stanley, Gerry Page, Marlon, Jimmy Dean,” wrote Susie Strasberg, “they were closer to crazy than sensible. None of them had a nodding acquaintance with sensible.” Slowly, Marilyn began to realize this was exactly where she belonged.
Her way of seeing things was always startlingly original—and her classmates appreciated her quirky logic and quick mind. They began to listen and perk up when she spoke. “Wellllll,” she’d sigh in her cheruby bird tones, answering tentatively but earnestly with a light flicker of her brow. At first she’d hesitate, worried she might embarrass herself or say the wrong thing. “In an early observation,” wrote the actor Gary Vitacco-Robles, “Marilyn watched Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton perform and was moved to tears by their emoting until Strasberg delivered thirty minutes of sharp criticism. Marilyn panicked and second-guessed her own judgment about acting.” But gradually she began speaking up, even daring to disagree with her friends. When newbie Earle Hyman performed his first scene at the Studio, Eli Wallach criticized his work for being unclear. The room went silent until Marilyn raised her hand. “Well, I don’t know, Lee, but it seems to me that life is sometimes unclear.”
Before long, Marilyn was joining the crowd for after-class drinks at Jim Downey’s. “I enjoy the people here,” she told a reporter that spring. “They love their work, they listen, and they look you in the eye.” Her new friends were touched by how happy she was to be included.
Marilyn had surprised them. Many found they could relax around her; she was so at ease with the complexities of human experience and its endless range of emotion. That’s what made her such a compelling actress and such a delightful friend. They knew that underneath the sex goddess was a brilliant baby animal—alert, responsive, and eager to learn.
“I think we all respected the fact that the best-known woman in America wanted to learn more about her craft,” wrote Ben Gazzara. “She committed herself to get better,” said Lou Gossett. “She was rubbing elbows with Estelle Parsons, Peggy Feury, Lee Grant, Kim Stanley, Eva Marie Saint—people who raised the bar—and she was raising the bar with them.”
Lou rated Marilyn the best actor in the class. “If she had stayed, she would’ve had Oscars and Tonys and everything else. That’s how natural she was.”
* * *
Their respect gave her confidence—more confidence than all the awards and Hollywood contracts in the world. Perhaps she really could be a great dramatic actress—America’s Eleonora Duse with a back-lot past and candy fluff hair.
If Marilyn’s hopes were high, Lee’s were even higher. One day that spring Marilyn joined Lee, Michael V. Gazzo, and Ben Gazzara for lunch at a Ninth Avenue diner. They chattered over tables crammed with ketchup bottles and creamers, tuna on rye, and wax-paper cones of cold tap water cradled in stainless steel. Marilyn sipped coffee in her black polo coat while Lee chattered on about a future class project: Macbeth.
“You see,” he explained, his sandwich untouched and cut neatly in two, “Lady Macbeth’s control over her husband has never been made completely clear.” Only Marilyn could do it believably—have a man like Macbeth so utterly in her thrall. He thought Ben would work well with Marilyn and threatened to cast him as the lead.
Marilyn beamed, but Ben nearly spat out his coffee. “Marilyn was delightful,” he wrote years later. “She spoke in an adorable little whisper, which worked very well for the movies, but Lady Macbeth would be strutting her stuff on a large stage, and it was doubtful that Marilyn would ever be heard past the second row. That didn’t deter Lee. He obviously had a mad, fatherly crush on Marilyn and thought he could help her do just about anything.”
