Were they foolish? Many were impressed by their boldness, but few actually believed in them. “I don’t think Milton really knew how powerful these men were,” said their friend Jess Rand. “You could win the battle, but you never won the war.”
Four
Liquor, Literati, Lee Strasberg
“When she came to New York she began to perceive the possibilities of really accomplishing her dream.”
LEE STRASBERG
That winter, an unlikely friendship provided Marilyn with a welcome distraction. Novelist Carson McCullers had been holed up at the Gladstone for months, surviving on coffee, liquor, and cigarettes. At thirty-seven, Carson was eighty-five pounds, half paralyzed, and addicted to alcohol and “pinkies” (pills). Her husband had committed suicide the year before, and she herself had spent time in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where Marilyn would endure her own harrowing ordeal six years later.
Like Marilyn, Carson was dreamily feckless and struggled with practical things such as cooking and laundry—basically born for hotel living with its housekeeping, hors d’oeuvres, and room service. It was freezing that winter, and the two of them often sat in the lobby warming up over double shots of whiskey or cognac. Carson was never without her signature drink—the Sonny Boy, a Thermos of tea and sherry—with a flask of whiskey sloshing around in her purse just in case. On the party circuit she was known as an adorable show-off. She’d brandish her cane, outdrink everyone, then flounce home to drink more—leaving New York’s literati staggering off to sleep.
Through Carson, Marilyn met other prominent writers such as Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. By the time he met Marilyn, Truman was mascot of the ladies-who-lunch set, whispering over shrimp salad at the Plaza Hotel. Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, and C.Z. Guest flocked to him despite his backwoods pedigree. But Marilyn was no WASP-y swan—like Truman, she’d been abandoned by both parents, passed between relatives and foster homes. She was as lovely as Gloria and Babe but irreverent, passionate, and a true artist.
Marilyn and Truman both loathed LA and quickly bonded over their love of Manhattan. They’d stroll down Third Avenue, peering into antique stores, examining garnet rings and grandfather clocks. On a whim they once popped in a palm reader’s shop, then fled at the sight of a beaky lady knitting baby-booties. He’d take her to the Oak Room for drinks and discuss his new project: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Or they’d go to the Waldorf but never P.J. Clarke’s—Dorothy Kilgallen was always in there, as Marilyn put it, “getting bombed.”
Of course, Truman loved Marilyn—her Good Humor giggle, her “dairy-fresh” skin set off by those black slips that were quickly becoming her New York uniform. Both were talkers, charmers, champagne bunnies, and secret workaholics. Truman—a self-declared “horizontal writer”—shared Marilyn’s deceptively louche habits. He’d spend days supine, martini in hand, pounding his Corona typewriter like a drunk Little Lord Fauntleroy. He understood Marilyn’s messy perfectionism: unanswered telephones, tubes of Russian Red lipstick collecting lint in her purse. When you love your work so much, it spills into your life and makes you lose track of pills, appointments, lovers, and friends.
Unlike Marilyn, Truman gossiped—which married producer kept secret girlfriends and quite possibly boyfriends, too. The rumors often involved his “friends” or even Marilyn herself. Babe Paley was convinced that her husband—William S. Paley of CBS News—was sleeping with Marilyn. “She’s awfully jealous of you,” Truman baited with glee, leaning over their table of crab legs and daiquiris.
But Marilyn wasn’t interested in mean-spirited banter. She’d rather dig deep into individual personalities—especially Elizabeth Taylor’s. (“But what is she reeeally like,” she’d press.) She’d wave her hand to hush Truman when he tried to switch back to the sordid bits. “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything all,” she’d chime, with all the sweet sincerity in the world. (Capote would go on to pen a portrait of Marilyn that was druggy, vulgar, blowsy, and inane. Years later he’d boast that his snapshot was the best celebrity piece he ever did. Was he aware that he—like Arthur Miller, Darryl Zanuck, and so many other men to come—was selling her out?)
Through Truman, Marilyn met her first New York drama coach, the renowned Shakespearean actress Constance Collier. Born in 1878, she made her stage debut at three as Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’d started out as a Gaiety Girl before moving on to dramatic theater. By the 1930s she was living in New York, throwing lesbian lunches, holding court like a Parisian salonnière, telling tales of her engagement to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, or nights carousing with Oscar Wilde. Everything about Miss Collier—from her wicked humor to her witchy black wraps and velveteen toques—seemed steeped in Edwardian London, as if she’d stepped off the Apollo stage and right onto Madison Avenue.
For the past two decades, Miss Collier had been coaching Vivien Leigh, Greta Garbo, and both Hepburns. Marilyn would never resemble the Katharines and the Audreys, with their finespun cheekbones and aristocratic chins, their respectable measurements and invisible cleavage, the ones who cast an admiring hush at award ceremonies, graciously accepting their Oscars in mellow tones. They were never breathless or overexcited, never needed colonics to squeeze into their dresses, were never side-eyed by Zsa Zsa Gabor or slut-shamed by Joan Crawford. (Nor did they inspire Jerry Lewis to crawl onstage at the Redbook Film Awards, baying like a teenage monkey.) With her pancake face and sugar lisp, Marilyn couldn’t play patrician if she tried. Her soft-serve figure was too ripe to glide into English riding jodhpurs. She’d look better snapped in a polyester frock pouring coffee at Howard Johnson’s or draped in showgirl boas handing out poker chips at the Lido. Could Miss Collier accept a starlet into her rarified fold?
“She had seen none of Marilyn’s movies,” wrote Truman, who loved to push together polar opposites, then watch them combust or fall in love. “She really knew nothing about her except that she was some sort of platinum sex-explosion who had achieved global notoriety; in short, she seemed hardly suitable clay for Miss Collier’s stern classical shaping. But I thought they might make a stimulating combination.”
This time Truman got it right—it was love at first sight. Perhaps it was her music hall past, but Constance adored Marilyn immediately. (According to Amy Greene, she once tried to seduce Marilyn at a dance.) She fawned over her, called her “my special problem,” and compared her talent to a fluttering butterfly. Marilyn’s technical training was irrelevant to her—what mattered was that “flickering intelligence … like a hummingbird in flight.” At nearly eighty, Miss Collier’s eyesight was weak, and all she could see of Marilyn was her fuzzy blonde halo—a blur of bright butter glittering in the gloom.
For her part, Marilyn loved Miss Collier, just as she loved all “tough old grannies.” Even her murky parlor—oil rich and dark as the Tintoretto paintings she adored. Between lessons at Miss Collier’s and nightcaps with Carson in the Gladstone lobby, Marilyn found solace in Victorian gloom, a welcome tonic to Hollywood’s saccharine flash.
They worked on Ophelia—Constance thought she was made for the role: “I was talking to Greta last week, and I told her about Marilyn’s Ophelia, and Greta said yes, she could believe that because she had seen two of her films, very bad and vulgar stuff, but nevertheless she had glimpsed Marilyn’s possibilities. Actually, Greta has an amusing idea. You know that she wants to make a film of Dorian Gray? With her playing Dorian, of course. Well, she said she would like to have Marilyn opposite her as one of the girls Dorian seduces and destroys. Greta!”
Marilyn longed to meet Collier’s celebrated femmes, especially Katharine Hepburn. “I’d love to just call her up,” she confessed to Capote. But she was insecure—she was still just a movie star, not a real actress, not yet. In a matter of days, this would change.
* * *
On February 1, Carson McCullers took Marilyn to a dinner party hosted by Paul Bigelow. A self-dubbed “professional catalyst,” Bigelow was known for making things happen, and could be a powerful ally for Marilyn if he liked her. Theater producer Cheryl Crawford would also be attending, another potential advocate and a close friend of Carson’s. Thin-lipped and flinty, Cheryl was Broadway’s hard-tack captain. She’d done Porgy and Bess, Brigadoon, and Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo. Most importantly, Cheryl was a founder of the Actors Studio, the prestigious workshop based on the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski. Shelley Winters, Marlon Brando, and Maureen Stapleton were all members, and Marilyn hoped to join them.
Still skittish around such high-powered figures, she begged Milton to meet her for moral support. After her recent spate of bad publicity, Marilyn was wary of how she came off and was sensitive to any slight or snark. Broadway often looked down on Hollywood types, especially comedy blondes with kitschy-vamp walks. How would Cheryl—in her masculine ascots, close-cropped hair, and sensible shoes—respond to a starlet like her? Worse yet, Cheryl was a close friend of Charlie Feldman’s, the agent Marilyn had split with in December. Marilyn wanted to bail on the party, but Carson McCullers bucked her up with double whiskeys by the fire. Liquor-warmed and bundled up, they set off for Paul’s home on East 54th, a skinny brownstone crammed between the Elmo and a prosthetic-limb shop.
As luck would have it, Marilyn was seated opposite Cheryl Crawford, who immediately started questioning her about her dealings with Feldman. When Milton piped up in Marilyn’s defense, Cheryl lashed back, calling him “evil and just no good.”
With Milton stunned into silence, Marilyn was forced to speak for herself: Feldman hadn’t fought hard enough for the creative input she needed and was miffed when she wasn’t satisfied with less. As a woman who’d clawed her way up in a field ruled by men, Cheryl could sympathize.
Somehow, the unthinkable had happened—Marilyn had melted the implacable Cheryl Crawford. After dinner, the two women huddled up in a happy chat about acting. Cheryl vowed to advance Marilyn’s career. They made a date for the following day. Cheryl would take Marilyn to observe her first session at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
At nine thirty-five the next morning, Cheryl met Marilyn at the Gladstone Hotel. They took a crosstown cab to West 46th—Cheryl in tailored wool, Marilyn in her mink, sunglasses, and black scarf—and slipped in through the back entrance. Marilyn lowered her dark glasses in awe—it was as if she had stepped into an unfinished cathedral. Perched attentively on rickety-crammed chairs, this group looked more French Resistance than Chateau Marmont. There was Marlon Brando in his tight-rolled white tee and loafers, Jack Lord in a dark pullover and fluffy pompadour, Kim Stanley and Anne Jackson in simple skirts and blouses in creams and blacks. They sat in rapt attention, lit cigarettes, and drank coffee in a ritual hush, all in thrall to their mentor, Lee Strasberg.
Cigarettes ashed out and coffee went cold while Lee stalked the room in his billowy blazers—like some seductive monk beguiling his flock with the promise of enlightenment. He spoke of the “choice” of art and “the supreme essence of feeling.” The actor creates her own imaginary realities; she must inhabit the role to coax it to life. Actors, not directors, force scenes into being, and the actor creates with her own flesh and blood. He stressed feeling over reason, urging his students to look endlessly inward. “If you start with logic,” Lee warned, “you might as well give up.” This was the validation she’d been desperately searching for. Far from Hollywood’s glitterati in a cold little room on West 46th Street, Marilyn had finally found her Shangri-la.
Immediately, Marilyn arranged a meeting with Lee. Within days, she was dining at his home on Central Park West. She left the meeting with clear goals—and, perhaps more importantly, structure. One of Lee’s requirements for his students was therapy, a task Marilyn embraced wholeheartedly—she’d been deep into Freud for years. Five times a week she saw Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, a Hungarian psychiatrist with blonde braids wrapped in a crown round her head. Three nights a week Strasberg coached her alone in his Midtown apartment—she was still too shy to attend regular workshops. Marilyn’s days went from haphazard to highly scheduled, and the aimless anxiety of the previous weeks began to dissipate.
Already, Marilyn was far from the lost little girl she’d been in LA. She had a suite in Manhattan, supportive friends, two renowned acting coaches, and a good-natured analyst who looked like a buxom milkmaid. She had house calls from stylist Richard Caruso, crates of unopened Chanel No 5, and Seventh Avenue dressmakers churning out slips by the dozen. She had dinners at Sardi’s, cocktails with Capote, and wintry nightcaps with Carson McCullers. She had plans to play Ophelia and had an entrée into the Actors Studio. She had her own production company. She had Milton Greene and the creative alliance of her dreams.
The press, however, continued to obsess over what she didn’t have: a husband. As late as March the press was more concerned with DiMaggio’s comings and goings at the Gladstone than with Marilyn’s acting plans. “Let’s face it,” Photoplay proclaimed. “There is no substitute for being loved. Absorbing work is not sufficient.” Back in Hollywood Marilyn was thought of as a rambunctious, misbehaving child. Studio lackeys belittled her to hide how shaken they really were. She’d worked them into a frenzy—they had no idea what she’d do next or what she had brewing out East. Marilyn may have risked it all, but Zanuck and his cronies were far more frightened than she was.
Women who veer off course are dangerous. They disrupt status quo, rattle power structures to their brittle cores. They might have expected this from Katharine Hepburn, a swaggery baritone rebel who could drink with the boys in her trousers and fedoras. But Marilyn belonged to men—she was their chirpy little bird, cheap and easy as baby powder. What do you do when Miss Cheesecake goes rogue, divorces a national hero, and defies the most powerful men in Los Angeles? Zanuck and his team were the closest you could come to sultans and kings. By cracking the fortress of Studio Hollywood, Marilyn had struck an early blow at the patriarchy itself.
Like it or not, the world was changing, the backlash poised and ready to strike. Tactics ranged from warning and fearmongering to outright humiliation, with studio-controlled magazines like Motion Picture leading the charge: “The truth may well be that thousands of housewives, living unspectacularly in little towns across the land have found more genuine peace of mind than Marilyn Monroe knows at this moment … or may ever know.”
How did Motion Picture know what brought Marilyn peace of mind? And did those thousands of “unspectacular” housewives breathe a collective sigh of relief?
Five
Infatuation
“I think Marilyn knows exactly where she’s going—and that’s forward. It’s just possible that she’ll turn out to be not only the sexiest but smartest blonde of our time.”
EARL WILSON
After months of hibernation, Marilyn’s spirit was beginning to rouse. She needed to be seen again but not by the tabloids’ flashes and hacks. No more press conferences with their cheap quips and sound bites. This time she’d do it her way, but she needed the right venue, the perfect backdrop for her own potent glow. A place rich with history, where Dorothy Parker and Bob Benchley swilled scotch and passed out over plates of roast partridge. Those first frigid months of ’55, Marilyn’s real coming out happened slowly, smokily, in a former speakeasy called the 21 Club.
