When Olivier, Rattigan, and Jay Kanter arrived at Sutton Place it was Milton Greene who answered the door. Marilyn was hiding in the bedroom, terrorized. It took Milton two hours to coax her out while the men waited in the parlor. Laurence, a stickler for punctuality, let it slide.
He hadn’t met her, but he was already beguiled by her—in screen tests she’d been so adorable, so witty and attractive. Not only did he desire Marilyn, he needed her. They were both bewitched by the idea of each other. At fifty, Olivier feared sliding into a rut and hoped to refresh his career and image. He wanted her sexy glamour; she wanted his gravitas. “One thing was clear to me,” he recalled years later. “I was going to fall most shatteringly in love with Marilyn. She was adorable, so witty, and more physically attractive than anyone I could imagine. Look at that face—she could be five years old!”
After a quiet summer and even quieter fall, Marilyn was seen about town again. She attended an Anne Frank performance with Laurence Olivier and brought him backstage to a starstruck Susie Strasberg. She made a sparkly splash at The Middle of the Night premiere in white ermine coat, long black dress, and dangling diamond earrings. Kim Novak was particularly impressed, turning around at intermission and craning her neck to stare. Milton wined and dined Olivier, taking him out for fancy nights on the town with Amy and Marilyn. “It was a happy time,” recalls Amy. “Larry adored Milton; Larry adored me; and he and Marilyn were totally flirtatious with each other. She giggled a lot—she’d always be leaning towards him like teeheeheeeheeeeheee. They were openly flirting. He’d pay her crazy compliments, or tease her, like ‘The tip of your nose is funny,’ and she’d slap him and giggle. She loved it. She would light a cigarette and he’d be up lighting the cigarette for her. Or she’d be drinking champagne, and he’d say, ‘Oh, my dear, your glass is empty’ and get up very gallantly. I mean, honey—it’s Olivier.”
On February 9, Marilyn, Rattigan, and Olivier held a press conference at the Plaza Hotel to announce MMP’s hottest new project. It was official: Marilyn had earned the respect of “the greatest actor in the English-speaking world.” She had taken control of her career, and was about to make the two most important films of her life.
Over 200 reporters swarmed their table. They immediately started with the same tired themes. “One question put to Marilyn was did she still want to play The Brothers Karamazov,” recalled one journalist. “She said, ‘I never intended to play The Brothers Karamazov. I want to play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov.’ Another reporter asked her nastily, ‘How do you spell Grushenka?’ Thinking he had trapped her and that she was too stupid to know. And she, with a very superior smile and a twinkle in her eyes, said, ‘You can look it up in the book.’ At that the reporters laughed and their questions were less sarcastic, less loaded, less angled to make a patsy—a fall girl—of her.”
Olivier praised Marilyn as a “brilliant comedienne,” lighting her cigarettes in his courtly manner, affably taking a backseat to let her shine. They made a handsome, elegant couple: he in his Savile Row suit and pocket square, Marilyn in black, her hair swept up at the sides with bobby pins, accentuating the cameo curves of her neck. Sometimes she’d drape a tuxedo coat over her shoulders, or lean intimately close to the reporters, chin cupped in her velvet-gloved hand. Elsa Maxwell noted with approval that Marilyn didn’t imitate Olivier’s “clipped British tones,” speaking instead with her own “quiet naturalness.”
But Elsa thought she got the clothes “all wrong” for the occasion. Marilyn had chosen a skintight slip, which looked especially vampy in the clear light of day. In the middle of the press conference, one spaghetti strap broke, causing a gasp in the crowd then uproar. “I need a safety pin,” Marilyn yelped. After a few minutes of mass scrambling, a reporter procured a pin and handed it to Marilyn, who spent the rest of the conference holding her dress up with both hands “just so the press won’t be disturbed.”
Amy insists that it wasn’t a publicity stunt: “I saw the strap, and it sure as hell wasn’t loose when she left the dressing room. She was mincing and posing as she always did, with one shoulder always perched higher than the other—then the strap just popped. It wasn’t that she cut the strap, but she was secretly pleased.”
Accident or not, Marilyn had upstaged Olivier. He seemed to take it in stride, but Amy saw it as a turning point: “At that point in time, I think Larry realized he may have made a mistake. Because it was going to be a circus.”
Broken dress straps were nothing. Working with Marilyn meant weeks of skipped alarms, wardrobe fiascos, line edits, late-night tears, and frantic phone calls. How would his British, by-the-book stoicism clash with her voluptuous lawlessness? But with Marilyn, it was always the unexpected that worked like a charm. “I’ve lived long enough to know that life doesn’t always stick to the rules,” wrote Elsa, who’d been watching from the rafters with glee. “The perfectly impossible and absolutely ridiculous keep happening all the time.”
* * *
Thrilled as she was to work with Olivier, preparing for Anna Christie was a bigger priority. Like Eleonora Duse, Marilyn acted straight from her core. She had a habit of throwing up on set before film takes. Sometimes she’d get migraines or embarrassingly trembly hands. “A stage role is totally different,” Lee assured her. “You’re on the stage; you have the lights; the audience is dark; nobody talks. You remember all those technicians and everybody standing around smoking and laughing back in Hollywood? You were very much aware of all that distraction.” On the stage she’d have that curtain of protective velvet that only comes up when you’re ready for it. But was Marilyn up to the intense immediacy of the stage?
On February 17, Marilyn was finally ready for her Studio debut. She woke up that morning with a pounding heart and a horrible case of laryngitis (“I could only croak and whisper”). Malin Studios was packed that night. Paula fanned herself in the front row, draped in black shawls and a long golden chain laden with good luck trinkets. “I’m going to have a heart attack,” she groaned to anyone who would listen. But if anyone was having a heart attack that night, it was Marilyn: “I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t remember one line. All I wanted to do was lie down and die. I was in these impossible circumstances and I suddenly thought to myself ‘Good God what am I doing here?’ Then I just had to go out and do it.” After blacking out backstage from anxiety, Marilyn shot all her nervy vulnerability into the scene. “So far I’m less shy on the stage than I’ve ever been in front of a camera,” she would tell Pete Martin weeks later. “I have less trouble remembering my lines.”
“Her painful nervousness lent a tension to the scene that seemed right. Everybody who saw that says that it was not only the best work Marilyn ever did,” Ellen Burstyn remembers. “It was some of the best work they’d ever seen at the Studio, and certainly the best interpretation of Anna Christie anybody ever saw. She achieved real greatness in that scene.”
Applause is traditionally a faux pas in the churchlike solemnity of Malin Studios. But this time Marilyn received a standing ovation. She immediately burst into tears.
* * *
January and February were landmark months for Marilyn. She’d won her yearlong battle with Fox. She’d soon be working with dream directors Josh Logan and Laurence Olivier. She was once again the Press Darling—only this time for her talent, not her breathy voice and bombshell curves. She’d proved to the world her merit as an actress—and with Anna Christie, she’d proved it to herself. It made sense that Cecil Beaton, photographer to Picasso, Greta Garbo, and Queen Elizabeth, was now seeking her out.
On the designated date of February 19, Cecil paced his Japanesque suite at the Ambassador. He’d been chasing Marilyn for weeks—would this elusive blonde butterfly ever show up? Assistant Ed Pfizenmaier still remembers the moment Marilyn breezed through the door: an hour late, bag flung over her shoulder with two black dresses and a pile of makeup. “She came in the door,” he said, “and the first thing she did was discard her shoes, which I couldn’t believe. So immediately Cecil and I looked at each other with big eyeballs, and we could tell for some reason this was going to be a good day. I kind of adore someone who throws her shoes off and gets right into it,” he added. “In other words, she wanted to work.”
“We started out very proper with the legs to the side and everything else,” said Ed. “And then suddenly all hell broke loose and she did her own thing. Romping and twisting and throwing her body around. She finally wound up half on the floor and half on the sofa. Cecil and Marilyn were just laughing, howling at each other.”
For the third time that year, Marilyn clicked with a photographer who really got her. Cecil delighted in Marilyn’s childlike aura, relishing the paradox of her whimsical glamour. To him she was a “Rhine maiden,” an “innocent sleepwalker,” an “abandoned sprite,” an “overexcited child asked downstairs for tea.” Cecil wrote in his diary, “I was so impressed by her sort of gaiety and variety of moods that I just wanted to catch that.… I just found myself so in sympathy, so amused and so delighted that all I could do was run around clicking in her wake.”
The hours flew by without a single break. Marilyn flounced and frolicked, puffed on a daisy like a cigarette, played with a plastic bluebird, sipped ginger ale from an old-fashioned champagne coupe. In the span of one photo shoot—with no costume changes—Marilyn demonstrated her impressive range. She could play the vampiest vamp, then shift back into soft fawn mode with the baby bird at her cheek. (“Dostoevsky knew what he was doing,” Beaton observed. “Marilyn knows what she is doing too. She would be a good Grushenka.”) Thanks to her diet of raw steak and champagne, she’d toned up and was—according to Amy—slim as a “noodle.” Winter walks in the city had brightened her eyes and perked up her skin. She’d never looked so refined, so soft-focus pretty.
“She did everything he wanted her to do,” recalled Ed, “from laying down in the bed swathed in a sheet and him standing over shooting straight down at her. In those days we had 10,000 watt bulbs shining off the ceiling … and she was just like a purring lion under those lights. I don’t know if it was one of her better days, or a good day or what, you know you hear so many bad reports, the sensationalism, but I certainly didn’t experience any of that. And I think the photographs, Beaton’s photographs, show it, that’s the proof of the pudding. When you look at them, everyone remarks she looks so happy, gay, healthy, and everything. Contrary to what everyone says that she was difficult and hard to work with, I found her just a delight to work with, not difficult at all—I don’t know where people come from—we just had a magnificent time.”
The feeling was mutual. Marilyn adored the experience, and treasured one of Beaton’s photos as her all-time favorite: She’s lying in bed on her back, eyes wide, lips parted, clutching a pink carnation in one hand. Cecil wrote an article about it months later and gave Marilyn a copy along with the carnation photo. She framed it in a triptych, and kept it bedside for the rest of her life.
* * *
All along, Marilyn’s goal had been director approval. Now that she had her pick, who would she choose for Bus Stop? “Milton and Marilyn and I made a list of the twelve directors she would work with,” remarked Amy, who was part of the decision as well. “She made it a point that she would no longer work with directors who were on the lot and had nothing better to do.”
“One of the directors we had on the list was Charles Chaplin,” explained Amy, “which of course everyone at Twentieth fell down kicking and screaming over. But I’ve got news for you: He would have been wonderful with Marilyn and vice versa. But that was also Milton—Milton saw nothing but heights for this woman—he shot much higher than she even in her wildest fantasies. His dreams for her were beyond her scope.”
Eventually they agreed on Josh Logan: one of the rare Hollywood directors who understood the Method and respected it. He’d studied at the Moscow Theater with Stanislavski and was no stranger to insomnia and hospitalizations. He even tolerated Paula, who was now part of the package and Marilyn’s on-set acting coach. Best of all, Josh had also directed on Broadway—most recently Picnic and South Pacific. “You can’t forget, at this time Marilyn was in love with New York, was in love with New York theater, and Logan was a superstar there,” explained Amy. “So again she started with ‘I don’t think I can; this man won’t see me; why would he want to work with me, etc.’ Then Milton arranged a meeting with Josh, who was a fine Southern gentlemen. Josh was thrilled with the idea that Marilyn would talk to him.”
From the moment he met Marilyn, Logan was impressed. “I had no trouble communicating with her, understanding her, or getting her to understand me,” he said. Having worked in Hollywood and New York, he immediately understood Marilyn’s frustrations. “They were making fun of her, teasing and baiting a delicate and intelligent animal. They refused to see that she wasn’t dumb, she wasn’t an animal, but a highly intuitive artist. Everyone thinks she’s stupid, and she’s not. She has a brain far above the normal person, and she has developed the powers she was born with far above most people even with formal education.”
Despite that winter’s flurry of excitement, Marilyn still had time for the Monroe Six. When Jimmy Haspiel’s birthday approached, the Six presented her with a card and envelope already stamped and addressed. “All you have to do, Mazzie,” they explained, “is sign the card and put it in a mailbox, it’s for Jimmy’s birthday next week.”
Marilyn was caring and generous, but no master of the ordinary—signing a card wouldn’t be enough. Instead of giving Jimmy an impersonal birthday greeting, she invited him to join her on a cab ride through town. “Well, the taxicab came to a halt at the curb of 58th Street, and the moment had arrived. I remember I looked into her face and said, ‘So long,’ and as I added the words ‘Norma Jean,’ I turned my face away from hers, unexpected emotions overtaking me, and I couldn’t actually look at her! I had already opened the cab door for my escape, and as I was rising out of the cab, I heard a sort of whispered ‘Jimmy’ behind me, and my body, which was in motion leaving the cab, reversed the motion. As I sat back down into the seat, Marilyn put her arms around me and hugged me very tightly, whispered into my ear, ‘Happy Birthday, Jimmy,’ and then she kissed me.”
Decades later Jimmy Haspiel reflected on the cab ride: “What had happened was that instead of being ordered to do something, like with the card from the Six, it had to actually come from her, or it wouldn’t have been real for her.” That was Marilyn—impulsive, adorable, and always authentic—like a winsome “happy birthday” hot and sweet in your ear.
* * *
By the last week of February, Marilyn was preparing to bid New York good-bye. Production for Bus Stop was scheduled for early March. Inevitable, unavoidable Hollywood was calling, with its stage sets, swimming pools, and fraught memories. This time she couldn’t resist.
She wasn’t the least bit nervous about her future projects. She wasn’t intimidated by working with Sir Laurence Olivier, or by Kim Stanley’s stellar performance in the Broadway version of Bus Stop. “It doesn’t bother me in the least,” she told Pete Martin. “It’ll be two different characterizations by two different people, and I’m looking forward to it. Maybe I feel this way because I’ve gotten older inside. Remember, I said inside, not outside. I’d like to think of my life as having started right now. Somebody asked me when I was born and I said, ‘Just recently, in New York.’”
Days before her departure, she visited dress designer John Moore. “I’ll be back,” she promised him, “when the picture is over. New York is my home now. Hollywood is just a place to work in.”
On February 22, Marilyn met Elsa Maxwell for lunch at Waldorf Towers. This was a special occasion—a sort of good-bye interview—and Elsa had set white calla lilies on the black lacquered table, ordered oysters, caviar, and several bottles of Dom Pérignon. Someone got wind that Marilyn was dropping by, so Elsa spent the morning fielding phone calls and barring the door from curious men. “One by one they had discovered they simply had to see me about something important,” she chuckled. “Not at all curiously, the only time they had free was midday. True to form, she arrived over an hour late. She wore the same improper clothes she had worn to her press conference with Olivier, the low-cut black velvet suit with the dress supported by tiny shoulder straps, dangling earrings and with her blonde hair flying … I wanted to say, ‘Oh, Marilyn, my dear, those clothes! They’re not right for noonday!’”
Self-described as “short, fat, and dumpy,” the seventy-three-year-old Elsa Maxwell had little in common with Marilyn on the surface. But her “laugh at yourself before anyone else can” motto was straight out of Marilyn’s book. Brash, luxe, and extravagantly feminine, Elsa hoarded bottles of Joy just like Marilyn. (She’d even roamed the fields of Grasse with Jean Patou himself, coining Joy “the costliest perfume in the world.”) Like Marilyn, Elsa was born poor, and like Marilyn, she felt like she was uneasy with marriage, feeling instead that she “belonged to the world.” Marilyn adored Elsa’s flamboyance, her pet skunks and pink piglets, her etiquette books with advice such as “Serve the dinner backward, do anything—but for goodness sake, do something weird.”
Elsa had been rooting for Marilyn since the very beginning. Fiercely loyal, she loathed Marilyn’s rival Jayne Mansfield almost as much as she loathed Elvis Presley and Nikita Khrushchev. She admired the way Marilyn pushed through her fear and was looking forward to crowing over her victory: “She’s exciting because in spite of having the guts (no politer word will do) to gamble on herself the way aggressive business executives do, she’s still shy and uncertain.… In a world today there are far too few exciting people. Everybody wants to play it safe, to get as much as they can for as little as possible. It’s good to meet someone who tilts at windmills—or movie titans—who risks everything rather than be swept away on a golden tide.” Two “desperately serious” court jesters, beating back the golden tide one lunch at a time.
The next day, Norma Jean Baker officially changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
* * *
