That spring, Strasberg hinted that she’d soon play a “tremendous part”—as long as she continued her path of relentless self-inquiry. “Remember,” she wrote, “technical things can be done to deal with your sensitivity and turn it from fear into the proper channels—which is dealing with fear, not running away.” Instead of fleeing from her fears she’d harness them through work and break free from the “constraints and shackles” of the past. She vowed to live in “The Present—whatever it may be—because that’s how it is and it’s so much better.”
* * *
For now, this introspection only boosted her glow. She stopped covering her freckles with camouflage cake and looked years younger for it. She switched out the mink for a shimmery trench worn open over gauzy tops or cream-colored polos. She ditched heavy scarves for floppy black hats, her lashes left bare and blonde as a baby’s.
As the days grew longer, she’d walk the forty blocks home from the Strasberg dinners, once in a sleeveless dress in brown and white stripes and a thick leather belt, a tawny shoulder bag dangling from her arm. She looped scarves of orange chiffon round her throat, daubed her mouth with coral, and unbuttoned her blouses to show off her tan.
In May, she had trunks shipped back from LA: a tangerine tube dress, Japanese tea gowns, blue velvet midis, and boleros in black faille. Taffeta petticoats and frocks trimmed in gold, Bermuda shorts with matching tops in biscuity silk. The black Danskins came out again, and she undulated in them like a gorgeous otter. She began playing with her image more, throwing together unusual outfits. She’d walk to class in stilettos worn with baggy sweaters and slacks, her rumpled hair topped with a gondolier’s hat. She swanned around Broadway in leopard-print leotards paired with black pedal pushers, a man’s white shirt knotted at her breast.
That spring, six teens attached themselves to Marilyn. They were a watchful little flock, standing guard by the Waldorf entrance on East 50th Street, picking her up from acting class, carrying her groceries, dropping off newspapers, fetching prescriptions from the pharmacy. Sometimes they acted as little couriers, running handwritten notes back and forth with Jane Russell, who was living down the block. They christened themselves the Monroe Six and were fiercely protective of their “Mazzie.” At half Marilyn’s age, they were acutely perceptive of her vulnerability and loved her all the more for it.
Jimmy Haspiel was a Bushwick runaway who roamed New York’s streets and rooftops like some 1950s Artful Dodger. He never fit in with the Monroe Six, with their satchels of homework, hot suppers, and after-school jobs. “It frustrated and hurt me a lot. We all converged on Monroe at about the same time, yet I wasn’t allowed in.” Yet Marilyn—lover of wastrels and street urchins, sad tramps and “helpless little ones”—grew closest to Jimmy. In his vagabond background, she saw herself—the orphanage and those dark starlet days surviving on peanut butter and crackers, scrounging for pennies to buy a cake of soap.
Even Marilyn couldn’t resist the hyperbolic worship of a lovestruck teen. She was equal-opportunity when it came to admirers, preferring a cabdriver’s honest wolf whistle to smarmy flattery. Half foundling, half footman, Jimmy Haspiel would usher her to premieres, beating back the clawing crowd, casually looping his arm through hers: “I’ll take you out to the car, Marilyn.” This was just the sort of gallantry Marilyn liked—sweet, playful, and shot through with irony. She hated that red carpet pomp and banter—why not shock the crowd with a greaser escort, a dropout in leather jacket and jeans?
Like a medieval courtier, Haspiel kept watch on the church stoop across the street from the Towers, or crouched in the ledges of display windows at Saks. He often saw her assistant, Peter Leonardi, hauling piles of clothes down the street to the cleaners. Peter, very Hollywood in his chic haircut, black tees, black Wayfarers, and tight blazers. Always sunglasses, even inside. He did odd jobs—hairstylist, bodyguard, courier—in addition to showing Marilyn parts of New York she wouldn’t have otherwise seen. On warm days they’d throw bikes into the back of his banged-up cherry convertible and head to Coney Island. She liked the Bowery, too, and often asked Pete to drive her there. They’d spend the day tramping down Rivington and Delancey, past blood-donor stations and battered saloons, occasionally handing out money to the homeless. “I think one of the pluses in it for her was that they were not looking back at ‘Marilyn Monroe,’” wrote Jimmy Haspiel, who sometimes accompanied them on their trips downtown. “She was able to do something very humane within the boundaries of anonymity, which wasn’t going to be bragged about for the rest of the time by the people to whom it had happened. People-wise, it was just a one-on-one situation: ‘Can I help you out a little bit?’ So Pete would empty his pockets of all the money he had, then he would have to wait until the end of the week when she got her $40 a week spending money allowance.”
On Sundays, Norman Rosten would be parked by the Waldorf, a trunkful of champagne packed on ice and one chilled bottle stashed in the glove compartment. Marilyn would run out in her striped capris, leap over the seat, and grab him for a kiss.
“With the roof down, visible as hell, she was a blinking buoy, a sweet-sounding siren, a magnetic field,” Norman wrote. “People waved and shouted from passing cars as we crossed the 59th Street Bridge. ‘Hi Marilyn!’ ‘Hello Marilyn!’ ‘Hey, good luck!’ ‘Is that you, Marilyn? Love you!’ And she waved back sipping champagne from a paper cup.”
“Cheer up,” she said, laughing at Norman’s grimace. “They won’t hurt us.”
In June, she bought a black Cadillac convertible. She loved her car, but she was what Jimmy called a California driver—pulling out into the wrong lane to swing around traffic, making wide turns at the busiest intersections. Whenever she hailed a cab, she’d point and say, “I’m going that way,” never east, west, uptown, or downtown. At night she’d pile in friends and drive to Chez Vito or Gino’s. She even drove herself down Broadway to catch The Skin of Our Teeth premiere. At dusk you might find her in the Waldorf garage, lounging in her car, feet propped on the dash, hair pulled back, face slathered in hormone cream.
Jimmy caught these moments with his five-dollar camera—jumping into Rosten’s convertible while clutching a copy of Confidential magazine, or hair ruffled in a pompadour, laughing and begging him not to aim “right up her nose.” That spring, Jimmy snapped a shot of her driving down Lexington past the Mayflower Coffee Shop: top down, shades on, laughing at the wheel. This soon became Marilyn’s favorite; she demanded that he lend her the original color slide. “We argued for weeks until I got it back,” Jimmy remembered. “I think that is why she liked this particular picture so much, because it defined her as a very real person.”
Jimmy’s snapshots capture a sense of joyous freedom unique to this time in Marilyn’s life. That spring, she surged with energy—acting classes, Broadway plays, interviews, and therapy sessions. She woke up at seven—even on Sundays—and took early-morning bike rides alone in Central Park. When her energy flagged, she’d stop by Dr. Max Jacobson’s Upper East Side office for “miracle tissue regenerator” shots: amphetamines, animal hormones, bone marrow, B-vitamins, and human placenta.
The camera adored her like never before—during midnight walks in the park with Sam Shaw, dashing to the Stork Club for a quick drink with Joe, or stalking down the aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, half an hour late for Constance Collier’s funeral, dressed like a vampy abbess. Her black dress hung suspiciously loose—Capote thought it looked borrowed—her blonde head was covered by a black chiffon scarf. She wore silk stockings, pumps, and saucer-size sunglasses. (“Are false lashes funeral appropriate?”) The black enhanced what Capote called her “vanilla-pallor.” Never before had she looked this starkly sexy.
“Oh, baby,” she told Truman, squeezing into the back row. “I’m so sorry.”
* * *
With the Seven Year Itch premiere right around the corner, publicity cranked at full blast. Her white-halter image went up on 46th and Lexington, right across from the Howard Johnson’s where she lunched with Eli. They’d get burgers and watch workmen hoist a gargantuan Marilyn over the Trans-Lux Theatre. She went up in pieces—the forty-foot cutout was too heavy to move at once—and at first all you saw were slingbacks and legs under a flutter of white skirt. Marilyn gazed out the window, observing the workmen lower her cutout torso onto an expanse of hip and thigh. “That’s the way they think of me,” she mused in her matter-of-fact way. “With my skirt over my head. I told Twentieth Century Fox that I want to play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov,” she confided, her mind drifting back to winter when she’d been the butt of so many jokes. “They all laughed, but none of them have read the book. I call them 19th Century Fox.”
“Marilyn knew a great deal more about the Dostoyevsky masterpiece than people who were joshing her about becoming a longhair,” Earl Wilson wrote, once again leaping to her defense. He reported that she was winning over highly esteemed directors, playwrights, and actors, including Clifton Webb, who saw Marilyn out and about on Broadway: “She likes to talk about the theater, and the kind of thing that makes people tick. She is intense and completely straightforward. She reads all the time. She is in complete control of her career.”
“Marilyn should have a show written just for her,” declared playwright George Abbott. “With that personality, she’s entitled to it.” She even charmed the reclusive William Motter Inge, who wrote A Loss of Roses specifically for her. “Every word the character speaks,” he explained, “I’ve composed as coming from Marilyn’s lips.”
“I was present at an Actors Studio party,” Earl wrote, “where she stole the show completely. And I witnessed something that shows she is respected as an actress around Broadway. ‘Could I get your autograph?’ asked Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild, who has directed and employed the greatest stars, including Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes. I transmitted the message to Marilyn. She inscribed a card, ‘Love and Kisses,’ and then her name, and when I mentioned who he was, she said ‘I should get his autograph!’ And he gave her one of the most glowing messages I’ve ever seen. It said: ‘Dear Marilyn: We need you for our Shakespeare Theater. Yours admiringly, Lawrence Langer. PS-For ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’” Later, Wilson asked Langner when he’d last asked for an actress’s autograph. It had been forty-seven years ago: from Zena Dare in London, 1908.
With heavyweight dramatists backing Marilyn up, it grew harder and harder to make her into a joke. She thought of Fox, Zanuck, and all the other men who’d cut her down. This time, the joke would be on them.
That spring, Marilyn wrote this on the Waldorf’s crispy white stationery: “Not a scared little girl anymore.”
Ten
Shangri-la
But will he look like this when he is dead oh unbearable fact inevitable yet sooner would I rather his love die than/ or him?
MARILYN MONROE
January 1951. Thirty-six-year-old Arthur Miller was still basking in the glow of his newly won Pulitzer. Death of a Salesman took him to Hollywood for the first time, where he and Elia Kazan were house-sitting for Charlie Feldman. Beverly Hills was miles away from Miller’s humble writer’s life in Brooklyn Heights, full of clanking typewriters and chain-linked fences, with his progressive, bespectacled wife Mary Slattery and three children cozily installed in the Little Red Schoolhouse. Now he was plopped in a Spanish Colonial mansion surrounded by swimming pools, Renoirs, Vuillards, Bonnards, Modiglianis, and streams of ingénues trailing clouds of money and Arpège.
Arthur set his Corona by Feldman’s pool—officially he was here to work. The plan was to edit his screenplay The Hook, then shop it around the studios with Kazan. Their first stop was Twentieth Century Fox, where Kazan hoped to run into one of his girlfriends. They dropped in on the set of As Young As You Feel, where a young blonde actress was rehearsing a scene. “That’s Marilyn Monroe,” Kazan whispered, nudging Arthur. “Fair game and easy prey,” he grinned, staring straight ahead. As if to confirm, Marilyn shot him a look, eyes brimming with tears. Maybe it was her honest tears, or the way she swayed in her dress of black openwork lace, but something struck Arthur, triggering a protective response that would last for a decade.
Of course she recognized Arthur Miller—the literary Lincoln and working man’s Hemingway. He fished; he hunted; he even boxed. He certainly looked the part, with his corncob pipe, lumberjack plaids, and Brandoesque tees. Arthur’s quiet reserve and lanky grace appealed to Marilyn, who preferred the congressman to the dandy, the simple tie and jacket to the chichi dinner suit. Instead of swooning over Tony Curtis, she liked her sixty-something acting coach or Jawaharlal Nehru. Her ideal man had the soul of Thomas Wolfe and the heart of Abraham Lincoln, masculine without bravado. No wonder she was lonely and dateless. There weren’t many Wolfes and Lincolns in this town of flashy cads and clammy bullies.
The next day, Feldman threw a party in absentia for Miller, with an orchestra, lavish buffet tables, and a fully stocked bar in each room. “I asked Art to cover for me,” wrote Kazan, who was working late that night and unable to pick up Marilyn. “When he called to tell her he’d pick her up she said no, she’d take a taxi and meet us at Feldman’s. Art wouldn’t allow it—he’d come and pick her up. Again she demurred. I said don’t worry about it, she’s used to that, but Art insisted. And the first thing that impressed Marilyn about her future husband was that he refused to let her come to the party in a taxi. How little these glamour girls expect out of life.”
Within minutes, they were dancing together. Arthur rarely flirted with women and usually required a few stiff drinks before he could force out a greeting, much less a fox-trot. But the orchestra and the moonlit pool, the heady scent of perfume mixed with amaryllis—even the dizzying proximity to celebrity—disarmed him. Best of all was this dazzlingly warm-blooded creature, fresh and alive in his arms. He shivered, thrilled to know that he could in fact “lose himself in sensuality.”
By the time Kazan showed up, the spark was obvious. “When I arrived, I could see that need had met need, and the lovely light of desire was in their eyes. I watched them dance. Art was a good dancer—and how happy she was in his arms.”
Not everyone was so pleased. Catty observations abounded from men and women alike. “She looks like the prow of a ship,” snarked one, nodding at Marilyn’s cleavage. “In this roomful of actresses and wives of sybaritic men,” wrote Arthur, “all striving to dress and behave with an emphatically ladylike reserve, Marilyn Monroe seemed almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in the aviary, if only because her dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along with her and it was the best body in the room. The female resentment that surrounded her at Feldman’s approached the consistency of acrid smoke.” He watched her dance with another man, transfixed by her intoxicating mix of boldness and vulnerability. Clutching her drink, eyes half shut, he was suddenly struck by how fragile she was. Actress Evelyn Keyes seemed to read his mind. “They’ll eat her alive,” she said softly and took another sip of scotch.
Perhaps that’s why Marilyn avoided these parties. She rarely danced and usually hid in the kitchen for an hour or two before slipping out early to chat on the phone with Sidney Skolsky. But tonight she stayed late, curled up on the couch, legs folded under her dress. Arthur slowly began to caress her foot, and held her little toe. She was touched by the gesture’s tender audacity. All her life she wanted to be protected, not seduced.
She also wanted to be understood. Maybe it was the toe-holding, or the way he’d insisted on picking her up for the party, but Marilyn trusted Arthur. She found herself talking, mostly about Hollywood, its daily brutalities and exploitation. The cigarette girls and sinister men and garish laughter settling out in a haze of cigars and liquor around Calabasas pools. The humiliating “dates” she forced herself to endure because she’d spent her last dime on acting lessons and couldn’t afford dinner. Arthur listened for hours without revulsion or judgment, washing all those ugly little acts clean away. He simply nodded and squeezed her toe tighter. After all, even he knew that “to survive in this velvet jungle of Hollywood, one had to reckon with wolves.”
* * *
They spent the next few days teaming around as a threesome—Miller, Monroe, and Kazan—browsing Hollywood’s secondhand shops, driving around the Canyons, picnicking on Malibu beach, strolling the Santa Monica Pier. Marilyn even crashed their business meeting with the tyrannical Harry Cohn. With cat eyeglasses and a stenographer’s pad, she passed unrecognized as their personal secretary. (This was her secret revenge on the lecherous Cohn, who’d promised Columbia’s good roles if only she’d join him in bed.) Cohn rejected The Hook, but they had a good laugh at his expense.
Driving through the Canyons, head flung back, sandwiched between those two talented men, Marilyn’s affections began to transfer to Arthur. She wasn’t that crazy about Kazan anyway. It was one of those breezy little flings so common in Hollywood—more like a friendly favor—kind of like taking someone to lunch with your agent or passing along an important phone number. But Marilyn was Hollywood’s ultimate freak of nature—a romantic—who’d somehow emerged from years of abuse with her ideals unscathed.
“Her romantic innocence was something you did not usually run across in the picture business,” wrote Maurice Zolotow. “The goings on behind the walls of some Hollywood homes are like scenes that may be observed in the violent wards of psychiatric institutions. You have the Don Juans and the nymphomaniacs who bounce like ping pong balls.…” Men still ruled the business, from moguls such as Zanuck to the talent scouts who promised bit parts in musicals or electrolysis and rhinoplasty in exchange for sex. But Arthur had grown up simply, worked as a dishwasher, and barely mentioned his Pulitzer. He had looked into her eyes and held her toe, and that impressed Marilyn more than all the yachts in Malibu, all the Cadillacs in Beverly Hills.
For Arthur, this had been an out-of-body experience, like he’d been plucked from Brooklyn Heights and dropped straight into Candyland. The past three days had hardly seemed real.
Their goodbye had all the trappings of a film noir romance, including a dramatic airport farewell witnessed by Kazan. Marilyn wore a straight camel skirt and white silk blouse, her blonde hair brushed over her left brow. Panic set in as Arthur waited to board, and he felt fated to protect this angelic creature with her “radioactive core.” Grimly determined to stay faithful to his wife, he kissed Marilyn’s forehead and flew to New York, the scent of her Nivea cream on his hands.
* * *
For the entire ten years that Arthur knew Marilyn, he was running—away from her, toward her, but always running, and running for his life. When he returned to his life back on 155 Willow Street, he wrote to Kazan of his desire for Marilyn, and his “situation at home,” which seemed to grow worse and worse. In one particularly theatrical plea, Arthur begged Kazan to take “one last look at her.” (Kazan was more than happy to oblige.) Two days later he wrote Kazan again—this time for Marilyn’s address.
Their correspondence was exploratory, confessional, and on Miller’s part, fraught with guilt. When she wrote of her need for a role model, Arthur suggested Lincoln, and recommended Carl Sandburg’s recent biography. Marilyn dashed to Martindale’s books and lugged back six volumes, with a copy of Miller’s Focus thrown in for good measure. Eventually his letters dwindled, but she kept them in a stack on her nightstand, right next to her portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
* * *
Years passed. Arthur threw away Marilyn’s letters. But his dreams of her crept back, as much as he tried to keep them at bay. Marilyn surfaced in his work, his reading habits, his correspondence with friends. He couldn’t shake her, this “whirling light” that never left him. Not even four years later, in the spring of 1955, when he spotted her at a New York party, standing alone sipping vodka and orange juice.
He approached her tentatively, gingerly, asked about her work at the Studio, told her a little about his new play. Much had changed. In three years Marilyn had gone from starlet on the verge to full-blown movie star. She’d married the ultimate celebrity athlete and was now newly separated. As usual, her life was moving at warp speed.
