Marilyn: A Biography (23 page)

* * *

She has also been introduced to Strasberg.
Cheryl Crawford has brought her to his home, and we can see
Marilyn’s entrance: Jacqueline Susann might as well be presented to
the shade of T. S. Eliot. Before Strasberg’s eyes have passed
Brando and Jimmy Dean, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, David Wayne,
Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley, Viveca Lindfors and Shelley
Winters, Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Monty Clift, Tom Ewell,
Tony Franciosa, Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. In Strasberg’s
eight-room apartment, with high bookshelves rising up to high
ceilings on every wall, editions in German and French and Italian
on sofas, on tables, on the floor, in a house more laden with
theatrical memorabilia than the office of Natasha Lytess, Marilyn
has to be quickly reduced to her familiar idea of the nugatory — an
empty box-office blonde ignorant of acting, theatre, culture, or
technique. Now she is before the man who knows more about the
Method than anyone in New York. He scowls at her.

Zolotow gives a clear description of
Strasberg’s appearance:

He was on the small side and he looked
undistinguished. His cheeks had the dark stubble of men who always
look unshaven. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt and no tie and a
badly fitting rumpled suit. He looked like a harassed small
businessman, a drugstore owner maybe, or a delicatessen store owner
who was on the verge of bankruptcy.

It is a good description as far as it goes,
but it could go further, for it does not communicate Strasberg’s
peculiar force. If he looked exactly like that storekeeper on the
edge of bankruptcy, he had also all the detestation of humanity you
would find in such a man, a dank hostility that seeped out of
Strasberg into every crevice of the ego of the unhappy player
before him. Holding the cross of high theatrical culture overhead,
as if exorcising an incubus, Strasberg could have played the
chaplain in a dungeon mortuary where the services would provide no
music other than his icy voice. Veteran performers went weak at the
thought of performing before Strasberg. For good cause. He
invariably looked as if he had just caught a whiff of some hitherto
buried stink. He would watch a performance at the Studio without a
quiver of emotion, and then in the silence that followed the
discussion of the actors and the class, he would begin (with an air
of annoyance at the simplicity of other opinions) to speak. He
could talk for fifteen minutes on a scene that had taken five, he
could go on for half an hour if the subject was worthy of analysis.
He had one illimitable subject to which he always returned — it was
the elusive question of how an actor might find a route from his
own personality to the part he should play, and it was probably
inconceivable to Strasberg that this process could be faultless. He
would see the flaws in the most superb performance. Chief engineer
of spiritual mechanics, he was able to trace a performer’s
inability to deliver an absolute maximum of emotion at climax to
that faintest slip of concentration which had occurred picking up a
pack of cigarettes some minutes earlier. It is possible there was
no critic of acting in New York so incisive as Strasberg. Watching
a performance at the Studio one could, if left to oneself, retain
no more than some general impressions of excellence, together with
the vague sense there had been some disappointing lack of
excitement one could not quite explain. By the time Strasberg
finished discussion, the separate pieces of the actor’s performance
had been taken apart, and one was no longer confused by the
performance. One knew its faults. It was possible to acquire some
real part of an actor’s culture in those years merely by listening
to Strasberg at the Studio. One would, however, pay for it.
Strasburg was not so much articulate as verbose. He had an
unpleasant gift for presenting his sharpest perceptions in a welter
of banalities. One learned with fatigue. Even as he successfully
demonstrated to actors how to bring life to their performances, he
exuded his own distaste for life; he was like a surgeon of
unremitting gloom who made his incision, collected his fee and
accepted no praise. It was the humiliation of his life that he
could not direct a successful play.

He had had more influence upon actors than
any other personality of the theatre, and had directed his share of
plays, but they never succeeded. The answer might have been simple.
Perhaps no play had ever been written that was sufficiently gloomy
to contain the depressed ego of an actor after he had worked under
Strasberg’s direction for several weeks.

It is part of the excitement of her year in
New York that Strasberg should have been therefore taken with
Marilyn so quickly. He had seen her in films and not been impressed
(which may have been the measure of his inability to look at films,
or his general hostility to movie stars who had not begun in the
theatre), but when she came to him, came modestly forward as
acolyte to savant, his formidable powers of observation opened. He
was, yes, willing to give her private lessons. “It was almost,” he
said later, “as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed,
and when it was pushed a door opened and you saw a treasure of gold
and jewels. It is unusual to find the underlying personality so
close to the surface and so anxious to break out and therefore so
quick to respond.” This quickness, he remarked, was “typical of
great actors.”

So began her introduction to the technology
of the Method, her immersion into “justification,”
“objectification,” “adjustment,” “concentration,” “contact,” and
“mood,” a two-hour lesson twice a week until she was ready for the
ordeal of showing herself in his school where, good modest high
school girl, she would sit in a class of thirty and never say a
word. Assigned to do a scene with an actor named Phil Roth, Guiles
gives the dialogue of a phone call:

“
Hi!” the soft voice came through. . .
“This is Marilyn.”

As a joke, Roth recalled later to Strasberg,
he pretended to draw a blank. “Marilyn who?”

In case she dialed a wrong number, she
explained, “You know,
Marilyn
. The actress from the
class.”

“
Oh!
That
Marilyn,” Roth said. And
Marilyn showed up a little later, breathing heavily from
five-flights climb to his walk-up apartment. She glanced about the
littered room, looking troubled. “You need some woman to look after
this place,” she said, and . . . before beginning their assignment
together, she swept the floor, put all the papers in neat stacks,
and emptied the ash trays.

She is not only learning still another way to
exercise her profession, she is also immersed in a role – she is
the nice kid in New York who helps fellow actors with their
apartments. What a wistfulness she must feel in this period at all
those lives she has missed. She contains so many ages within
herself. Fearful glimpses must already exist of middle age and a
condition near to madness – she is approaching thirty – but since
to look like a high school girl is her fundamental costume these
days how much more she must retain of all those fragments of life
held over from the unfinished relations of her childhood.

Meanwhile she continues to work with
Strasberg in private, does exercises, improvisations, scenes from
plays. With his encouragement a pattern begins to emerge. He is
slowly seducing her over to the idea of deserting films (except as
a way of making money) and working in the theatre. The keel of the
comedy is laid — if she works in the theatre, quite possibly he can
direct her. It is certain she needs him. As the year goes on, he
encourages her further. Deeper and deeper she goes — into
psychoanalysis at his bidding. And Strasberg grooms her for a
performance of
Anna Christie
at the Studio. May we assume he
is more gentle with Marilyn than with most? She begins to work with
Maureen Stapleton for her debut at the Studio, and confesses to
Stapleton that with her tiny voice she is afraid she will not be
able to project. Then there is a phone call from Milton Greene, and
Marilyn goes into the next room to take it. Soon Maureen Stapleton
is able to hear every word through the walls. Marilyn is shouting.
She hangs up, she comes back. “Honey,” says Maureen, “you don’t
have to worry about projection. You could project through steel
walls.”

Still, it is a huge test to play at the
Studio, and a fair exhibit of her courage, for she will expose the
unshielded surface of her extrasensory and full perceiving skin to
the critical spite of highly skilled actors who have worked for
years with none of her recognition. By Strasberg’s report of the
occasion, she played Anna with high sensitivity. He later said,
perhaps a little generously, that despite the considerable talents
of Maureen Stapleton, Marilyn walked away with the scene. He
“foresaw a long and rewarding career for her on the stage.” Arthur
Miller, who had discussed the role with her in her apartment at the
Waldorf Towers, was now also impressed with her talent. It has
indeed been a big year for her in New York — she has gathered the
admiration of fathers and peers. There has been only one flaw in
her work. She can exhibit every emotion but anger. Nothing of the
near-violent anguish of Garbo has shown in Monroe’s Christie. Just
the pain. It is as if she calls on a part of herself that has
nothing to do with acting when she is feeling rage. Even if her
hostility will soon be visible everywhere in her professional
relations, it is not amenable to art. Nor does Strasberg appear to
have discussed that with her. Perhaps he thinks it premature, since
already he has been obliged to suffer from comic returns. The day
after her success at the Studio in
Anna Christie
, Monroe
wakes up with laryngitis. The unspoken thoughts of the audience
seem to have strangled her after all. Whether Strasberg knows it or
not, the timetable for a debut on stage must be revised.

* * *

Still, the first sixty days of 1956 are
splendid. The year begins with Twentieth signing its contract with
Milton Greene; she can now do William Inge’s
Bus Stop
for
Joshua Logan. Miller leaves his house in Brooklyn and moves to
Manhattan. He is preparing to go to Reno for a divorce. Soon after,
she does
Anna Christie
at the Studio, and presents herself
in full décolleté at a press conference with Sir Laurence Olivier.
Greene has bought the rights to
The Sleeping Prince
by
Terence Rattigan, already played in London by Olivier and Vivien
Leigh and now to be called
The Prince and the Showgirl
.

Monroe is going to co-star with Olivier! She
has worked her portage from
River of No Return
. Asked to
speak about her at the press conference, Olivier offers: “An
extremely extraordinary gift of being able to suggest one moment
that she is the naughtiest little thing and the next that she’s
perfectly innocent — the audience leaves the theatre gently
titillated into a state of excitement,” a most English and elegant
taking of the sensual pulse, and Marilyn in her black velvet sheath
cut low enough for either breast to be ready to pop loose, breaks a
shoulder strap — nobody takes a press conference away from her! She
succeeds in getting such a great majority of the questions that she
looks to divert attention back to Olivier for fear he will be
miffed. He probably is, and the questions of the press are hostile.
She is grilled on the breaking of her shoulder strap — has that
been a stunt? She is also asked to spell Grushenka. Yet she is
certainly beautiful again. Gone for this hour is any high school
girl.

She is also in full regalia when she returns
to Hollywood in March 1956, Milton and Amy Greene in tow, to meet a
huge turnout of press at the airport. Since her lessons with
Strasberg must cease while she is away, Logan has been talked into
accepting Paula Strasberg as her dramatic coach. That is the end of
a job for Natasha Lytess. Natasha has been kept on salary as head
drama coach at Twentieth while Marilyn was gone, but she has not
heard a word. Now, according to Zolotow, Marilyn is “deathly afraid
of Natasha Lytess, afraid Miss Lytess would do something to her.”
But let us take the quotation in full. It is long and once again
under suspicion as a factoid, but true or false, it does open an
insight into the nature of Monroe’s acting.

Miss Lytess had made no threats but Monroe
was terrified — terrified, perhaps, of the projection of her own
guilt. . . . Until Bus Stop went into production, Natasha believed
she would continue at Monroe’s side, then she received a lawyer’s
letter notifying her that her services would not be required any
longer. The studio took her off the payroll. It must be a mistake!
Natasha tried to get Monroe on the phone, but Monroe was never
there when she called. Natasha made no secret of her bitterness. “I
did more for her than a daughter,” she said, “with just a motion of
her fingers, she could have told them she wanted me to stay at the
studio even if she didn’t want me herself on this picture. So this
is my reward for sitting with her until midnight and two
a.m.
night after night, trying to teach her to become an
actress.”

Much has been made of this cruelty by
detractors of Monroe (of whom there were enough at the Studio) and
for years she had obviously been capable of cutting people off. She
had dropped Dougherty and Grace Goddard as well as her first agent
Harry Lipton; she would speak poorly of DiMaggio in the Miller
years, and would soon cut off Greene, and then eventually Miller;
she was not a woman to be loyal to a relationship that was done.
Still, there seems something excessive in the end of Lytess, as if
Marilyn is sufficiently terrified not to want her within physical
range at the studio. Perhaps a hint can be found in Natasha’s
memoirs, where she makes her own extraordinary remark that Monroe
had need of her the way “a dead man needs a coffin.” It is a
statement to throw light into the darkest corners of acting, for
beyond the Method, and its sense memory and justification, is
magic, incantation, spell, and necrophilia. In the depths of the
most merry and roistering moments an actor can have on stage there
is still the far-off wail of the ghoul. For a good actor is a
species of necrophile – he makes
contact
with the character
he is playing, inhabits a role the way a ghoul invests a body.
Indeed, if the role is great enough, the actor must proceed through
a series of preparatory acts not unrelated to magical acts of
concentration, ritual, and invocation. The very exercise of “sense
memory” – perhaps the deepest procedure of the Method – required
the evocation within oneself of all the details, impressions, and
finally the senses of an experience that was past; one was
literally attempting to reincarnate experience as a way of
preparing to reincarnate the spirit of a role; so the dialogue
between a drama coach and an actor, if serious enough, bore little
relation to teacher and pupil, or coach and athlete, and more was
like the psychic life between witch and wanton. It was as if
Monroe’s fear of Lytess was the legitimate fright one could feel at
daring to replace one’s first witch with another, and it is certain
that in the movies she will now make Paula Strasberg will be
detested fully as much as Lytess ever was by most of the actors and
crew, a small dowdy dumpling of a woman, described with cruelty by
more than one associate as a black mushroom (for she was often
dressed in a big black hat and black squat shapeless gown), and
there is no doubt that in her fierce, even greedy, attachment to
Monroe’s welfare (and Monroe’s money) she gives fierce services for
fierce pay, and keeps others off Monroe or at least jolted away
from dealing with her directly, a black-clothed body of a sorceress
to intercept all cess, good and bad. She is always the most
detested figure on a set and the butt of the most picayune and
mean-spirited gossip. Even when she is praised, one can feel ovens
of lividity behind the remark. Josh Logan speaks: “A warm Yiddisher
Mama with words of advice and caution pouring from her in torrents,
all out of love and interest,” and we flee such love and interest.
It is hard sell on a witch.