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.
In the beginning, Marilyn was skittish as a hunted rabbit. Those first few weeks she stuck close to Delos, even pinching him when someone got too close or brushed up against her. (He didn’t mind.)
Her first scene was from Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy (Marilyn’s choice) which she was scheduled to perform with dark-haired actor Phil Roth. Along with her initials, MM, Marilyn had penciled in PL10757, Phil’s name and number, on the script. She went over her lines alone for days in her suite, wrapped in a bathrobe drinking coffee. Finally she worked up her courage to call Phil and picked up the telephone.
“Hi!” she said, in a soft, baby voice. “This is Marilyn.”
“Marilyn who?” he joked.
“You know,” she hesitated, worried that she’d dialed the wrong number. “Marilyn, that actress from class.”
“Ohhhh, that Marilyn.” Phil invited her over to practice. This would be the first time she’d met with any of them outside class.
By the time she’d climbed the stairs to his fifth-floor walk-up, Marilyn was out of breath. Looking around at his paper-strewn apartment, she said, “You need some woman to clean up this place.” Before they started, she insisted on emptying ashtrays, sweeping the floor, and arranging Phil’s papers in neat little stacks. (She never cleaned her own place, let alone a man’s—housework was acceptable only as a novelty or game.) Perhaps she wanted to endear herself to him, or perhaps she needed to declutter before she could focus. Either way, Roth was charmed.
Despite Malin Studios’ casual atmosphere, Marilyn prepared for her scenes as if they were MGM screen tests, carefully selecting her props and makeup. She once picked a scene to do with Delos from French playwright Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods. (Marilyn was playing a 1920s prostitute with syphilis.) She wore a sheer silk sheath with no bra underneath—just “nipples, smiles and dimples…” She twirled a string of long costume pearls, causing Delos to swing instinctively around his stethoscope. The students laughed; Lee loved it—though Paula Strasberg, his wife, later claimed they looked like “two goddamn pinwheels.” “Gone were the strained efforts of artificial behavior and clichés,” remembered classmate Ed Easty. “She held nothing back. After the scene, Lee whirled around in his seat and demanded from the class, ‘Well, was that scene excellent or not?’ The crowd, not easy with praise, answered yes, yes it was.”
As Marilyn tried new scenes in class, she discovered that she’d been preparing for the Studio all her life. Her work with Michael Chekhov had already familiarized her with Stanislavski’s technique—drawing on personal experiences to channel dramatic emotions. She felt a kinship with these actors, her fellow classmates who suffered through sleep deprivation, bread-and-water diets, and psychoanalysis just to get into character. These were her people—people who followed instinct instead of rules, intuition instead of doctrine. She began to see that there was some crazy magic happening here in Malin Studios and was willing to do anything to belong—even break through her crippling shyness.
“Marilyn came to the Actors Studio with her hat in her hand,” wrote Shelley Winters. “She wanted so badly to connect to the theatre people, serious writers and performers.” But they could be an impenetrable crew. The members themselves could be boisterous and frank, yet as a whole they remained strangely sphinxlike. They socialized and worked and partied in their own magical world. She’d always been a bit of an outcast on the Hollywood circuit, and she didn’t care—but these were people she admired. For her, the doors of the Elmo and Stork Club were flung wide open, but she needed to earn her right to bars like Jim Downey’s, with whiskey shots for five cents apiece.
It’s hard to imagine the world’s most famous woman intimidated by cheap liquor and scrappy kids in undershirts. With their degrees from the New School and Bolshie camaraderie, they had everything Marilyn didn’t—sophistication, formal training, and respect. Most were years younger with far more professional confidence. Those nights taking classes at UCLA would never make up for her dismal education. How could she compete with these sharp ingenues when she felt like last year’s washed-up starlet? Perhaps she should have stayed married, stayed in Hollywood, and faded into her thirties with dignity.
Lee recognized Marilyn’s insecurity and fretted over his new protégée. He urged reluctant Studio members to welcome her into the fold. Like the parent of a shy child, he was always pushing other actors to include her. “We’re her family now,” Lee once said privately to Shelley Winters. “You can be a true-blue sister to Marilyn.” Back in LA Marilyn really had looked up to the older Shelley as a big sister. In 1951, they shared men, minks, swimsuits, Sinatra records, and a rent-controlled apartment in West Hollywood. Marilyn had to borrow a bed from Twentieth’s prop department; the only furniture she’d owned was a white piano. Both were obsessively ambitious, hypersensitive, and preferred work to holidays. To stave off Sunday hangovers they played classical records on Shelley’s Capehart while reading aloud from the album notes. At 12:01 sharp, they’d switch to Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra—enough art for one day.
Shelley had the same sensual, animal intelligence that beguiled and infuriated Hollywood’s directors. Over pastrami on rye at Greenblatt’s Deli, they’d practiced the parted lip smile that became Marilyn’s trademark. Fragile and prone to hysterics, Shelley wept in bathrooms over married men, cried on Marlon Brando’s shoulder, and lost a bottle of placebo Seconals in Elizabeth Taylor’s camel coat. Shelley was sympathetic to Marilyn—she, too, had filled her prescriptions at Schwab’s, walked across Sunset Boulevard to Victor’s and chased benzos with triple gin martinis while terrified bartenders plied her with hors d’oeuvres. Now they were both in New York to perfect their craft.
Marlon Brando was the type to stick a bottle of Chianti in his back pocket, whisk you away on his motorcycle, and carry you up to his lair lit with pyramids of orange incense and candles stuck in Coca-Cola bottles. But underneath the swagger and brass was a man who loved kittens and cried while reading The Little Engine That Could to his nephew. He had a gentle, protective streak—especially with women. Back in Hollywood, he had come to the rescue of a wildly drunk Shelley Winters and sobered her up with onion soup and crackers. (She refused to eat anything unless he allowed her more drinks, so they compromised on wine spritzers.)
Marlon and Marilyn were an obvious match: Both shared an electrifying intensity and a compulsively perfectionist streak. Like Marilyn, he infuriated as often as he bewitched. Much to directors’ chagrin, he was always chewing gum—he’d only pretend to take it out when it came time to film a scene—even a makeout scene. Like Marilyn, Marlon was a compulsive reader—Kant, Rousseau, Locke, Nietzsche, Melville, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and his favorite, Wuthering Heights. They even shared the same breakfast drink: raw eggs whisked in a glass of hot milk.
More important, Marlon had what most celebrities lack: perspective. To prepare for his role as a wounded soldier, he ditched his suite at the Chateau Marmont to stay in a thirty-two-bed ward at a veterans’ hospital in the San Fernando Valley. His refusal to accept special treatment won over the veterans, who included him in their pranks (pillow fights and hypodermic syringes as makeshift water pistols). Marilyn committed to her roles just as obsessively—you’d ask her what time it was and she’d answer in character.
She admired the way Marlon barreled around class pretending to be a chicken, or directing Hedda Gabler as if it were a futuristic Russian dystopia. “While he’s playing a scene, he’s always searching,” Marilyn told Pageant Magazine. “You feel he’s trying to find out about himself. He searches under everything … while he’s talking to you.” She’d call him in the middle of the night (he was usually awake) to discuss scenes from class. What did he think? What did he think Lee thought? Friends like Marlon encouraged her to trust her inner gifts. She knew he was on a similar quest, and his friendship gave her courage. Amy observed, “If Marlon turned up at the Actors Studio and said, ‘Do you want to go to dinner,’ fine. Now what they did after dinner … I don’t think it was planned. If it happened it happened.”
Tentatively, Marilyn started joining her classmates for lunch at Howard Johnson’s, drinks at Jim Downey’s, and of course, the Studio’s notorious parties. Shelley Winters might be running around in Laurette Taylor’s old nightgown or a wrinkled checked shirt thrown over a cocktail dress. Grand theater dame Cheryl Crawford would be there; so would Ben Gazzara, Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, Julie Harris, and Maureen Stapleton. Even notorious recluse William Inge would be poking shyly around. At 2 a.m., they’d pile into Checker cabs—heaps of fur coats “ranging from squirrel to sable”—and taxi to Lee’s apartment on Central Park West. Lee would bring out his records, and they’d sit on the floor listening to opera while his wife served up plates of borscht and pot roast.
This was a dramatic shift from the fizzy, urbane sort of socializing she’d been up to for the past three months with Milton Greene and the Rat Pack. Instead of the Elmo’s red velvet ropes, there was Paul Newman taping up streamers and tossing confetti. Instead of late-night mambos with Capote to the sounds of Count Basie, there were tramp banjo bands (friends of a friend’s) playing “loudly and badly.” Instead of caviar cups and Dom Pérignon, they drank punch-bowl concoctions of cheap wine, vodka, and fruit juice—and all were expected to chip in.
These sorts of parties were new to Marilyn, but she loved them. She loved how all that passion at class spilled into parties. Hollywood parties were all about sex or, even worse, networking. She’d rather stay home with a bottle of wine than brave the glaring emptiness of Doheny Drive. Despite her modeling background and high-octane flash, Marilyn had more in common with these ramshackle bohemians than anyone in LA. But did her colleagues think so, too?
