“I want to learn,” she added after a pause. “I want to learn so badly. I read and study as much as I can, because I want to grow as a person.”
Before Maurice left, Marilyn read him some of her cityscape poems. She told him that she’d “fallen in love” with Brooklyn, that she wanted to buy a little brownstone there and travel West only to make pictures. “New York is my home now,” she said. “I love it here. I’ll never live in Hollywood anymore.”
When Zolotow asked if New York had changed her, she answered quickly and firmly: “Oh, yes. I have found freedom and independence, and I don’t intend to let them slip away.”
* * *
Marilyn was blossoming. Her hopes soared like the blurry spiked spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Lee had her constantly thinking, observing, and expanding. She studied the animals at the Central Park Zoo, their movements and gestures. The slow lope of the bison, the sun bear’s hot claw—black matte as if it had been manicured. The thick, wet lashes of a giraffe; the sad little capuchin monkeys with their furrowed blonde brows. She liked the sea lions—they’d bark and splash and gaze up like puppies, beadlets of water glistening on their crested, canine heads. But it was a lioness named June who Marilyn grew attached to and seemed to tame within an hour. Every so often June would creep to the edge of her cage, swishing her tawny tail, and Marilyn would stick her hand through the iron bars and pet the dark tuft of fur at its tip.
A chill crept up, the sun dropped and glowed pink against the blackening gate. The zookeeper clanged a bell and called, “Closing in ten minutes.” Marilyn lingered, clinging to the lion’s cold cage. Something about June’s weary glamour touched Marilyn. She hated to leave her. “She’ll be all alone in the dark,” she cried on the phone to Susie that night. “She’ll be lonely.”
Marilyn has often been compared to daffodils, hummingbirds, kittens, wrought-iron butterflies. But it was the writer Karen Blixen who saw Marilyn as one of the baby lion cubs she’d cuddled so many times in Kenya, exotic, adorable, and, she wrote, utterly terrifying: “I would not keep her.”
Compelled to delve deep in her own traumatic past, Marilyn spent nights in her bathrobe smoking in bed, gouging her memory for clues. She scribbled stories—of switches, churches, and aprons—her frantic slant filling sheet after sheet of starchy white paper, pausing to flip through Freud’s letters or Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Self-discovery and acting were two quests that defined Marilyn’s life, and under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, they became intertwined forever.
She first approached her therapist with wary self-consciousness. “I’m afraid to ever say anything,” Marilyn wrote, “for fear she will think I am trying to flatter her.” But she quickly began to trust Dr. Hohenberg and even examined her reasons for not having trusted in the past. With her customary bravery, Marilyn addressed the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a child, and the foster mother who hadn’t believed her. “I will not be punished,” she wrote, “or be whipped/ or be threatened/ or not be loved/ or sent to the hill to burn with bad people/ or ashamed/ exposed and known and seen/ or ashamed of my sensitive feelings/ SO WHAT/ they are reality. My body is my body, every part of it.”
“It’s much better to know reality,” she wrote, urging herself to face things clearly, “and to have as few illusions as possible. I can and will help myself and work on things analytically no matter how painful.” Her flaws, she discovered, were her greatest gifts. “My sensitivity is so strong—much deeper and stronger than that of Susie’s.… Do not be afraid of my sensitivity.… I can and will channel it.” She learned to embrace her quirkiest qualities, even the “crazy thoughts.” Through therapy and work with Lee she explored her neuroses, owning them with confidence and authority. Gradually, she began to see herself for who she really was—an intelligent, ambitious, complicated woman on the verge of something great.
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.
