The Genius and the Goddess (6 page)

In the fall of 1951 Marilyn began lessons with Michael Chekhov
at the same time as, but secret from, Lytess. The sixty-year-old
Chekhov had impeccable credentials. Nephew of the great Russian
playwright Anton Chekhov, he had worked with Stanislavsky at
the Moscow Art Theater. He was also writing the widely used
book,
To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting
(1953), which became
Marilyn's bible. Chekhov "devoted himself to the fulfillment of the
actor's personality – not only in the profession but also in their personal
lives." Like all her teachers, he practiced a kind of amateur
psychotherapy. He spoke
ex cathedra
and confused her, since she was
obsessed by her own body, by declaring that "our bodies can be either
our best friends or worst enemies. You must try to consider your body
as an instrument for expressing your creative ideas. You must strive
for complete harmony between body and psychology" – though few
actors ever managed to achieve this ideal.

Annoyed by Marilyn's habitual
lateness and absence – which was
caused by nervousness and fear of failure, and would later destroy her
career – Chekhov felt she was not serious and advised her to leave
his classes. Marilyn, suitably chastised, begged for understanding. "Please
don't give up on me yet," she pleaded. "I know (painfully so) that I
try your patience. I need the work [with you] and your friendship
desperately. I shall call you soon."
⁵
After this abject apology, she was
forgiven and continued her classes. Marilyn had also taken lessons,
before she met Lytess, from
Morris Carnovsky and his wife
Phoebe Brand
at the Actors Lab in Los Angeles. She continued to take instruction
in movement and body language, after she left Chekhov, with
the mime artist
Lotte Goslar at the Turnabout Theater in L.A. All
these teachers – as well as Lee Strasberg and
Joshua Logan later on
– were strongly influenced by the ideas of Stanislavsky.

Marilyn's principal teachers were supplemented by a cadre of minor
instructors. Lytess had tried to build up Marilyn's bruised ego and
make her believe she could some day become a star. At the same
time,
Fred
Karger was giving her voice lessons and doing his best to
undermine her self-confidence. He too became an influential mentor,
teaching her about clothing and manners, books and music. He also
sent her to an orthodontist who improved her bite and bleached her
teeth. Separated from his wife, Karger was living with his young son
in his mother's house. Marilyn fell deeply in love with him, and moved
in with the family for several months.

Marilyn said that Karger, preying on her vulnerability and trying
to dominate her, savagely condemned her intellectual and moral weaknesses:
"He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I
knew and how unaware of life I was. . . . 'Your mind isn't developed.
Compared to your breasts it's embryonic.'" He refused to marry her
because, as he insultingly told her, if he died he wouldn't want his
son "to be brought up by a woman like you." Elia Kazan attributed
Karger's hold over Marilyn to his sexual prowess: "Fred was a musician,
scrawny but able in love. She came as many as three times with
him in one go. He was vulgar and coarse and scornful with her. He
said she was no good for anything but fucking. He found her dress
'cheap.' He told her her breasts were too big. He didn't like to sleep
in the same bed with her. He thought her beneath conversation, said
she was stupid and only good for one thing." Marilyn meekly accepted
this treatment, and when Karger finally rejected her, she may have
aborted his child. In 1952 Karger married the actress
Jane Wyman,
recently divorced from Ronald Reagan. Karger and Wyman were also
divorced, but married again in 1961 and four years later divorced
again.

In 1949, despite extensive tuition and several contracts, Marilyn's
career was going nowhere. Her first break came through her new
agent, advocate, protector and lover, Johnny Hyde. As in a Shakespearean
comedy, she loved Karger, but he didn't love her; Hyde loved her,
but she didn't love him. Like Schenck, Hyde was a short, homely
man, much older than Marilyn, who came from a Russian-Jewish
family, had emigrated to America as a boy and worked his way up
to the top. He began as Ivan Haidebura, a child juggler and acrobat
in Loew's vaudeville circuit, and eventually moved to Hollywood.
After his legendary discovery of Lana Turner in Schwab's drugstore,
he became an important executive in the influential William Morris
agency.

Kazan, who succeeded Hyde as Marilyn's lover, observed that she
gave Hyde "that dazed starlet look of unqualified adoration and utter
dependence. Clearly she lived by his protection and was sure of his
devotion." Marilyn, then making the difficult transition from orphan
and factory worker to model and actress, explained that Hyde "not
only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane, too. He knew all the pain and
all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and
said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like
that. I wished with all my heart that I could love him back." But
Marilyn was not mercenary. She refused to marry the thrice-divorced
Hyde, as she'd refused to marry Schenck, though both elderly wealthy
men promised to leave all their money to her. Hyde even asked for
a list of friends she trusted and begged them to plead his case with
her. Marilyn's sexual demands and Hyde's weak heart were almost
certain to finish him off in a short time, but she feared that if Hyde
failed to die on cue, she'd be trapped with him. Incurably romantic,
despite her promiscuous past, she told Hyde that "if I married you I
might meet some other man and fall in love with him. I don't want
that ever to happen. If I marry a man I want to feel I'll always be
faithful to him – and never love anyone else." Unfortunately, it never
worked out this way.

In December 1950, when Hyde died on schedule, Marilyn suddenly
lost his power and protection. Fearing her career would come to an
end, she wept for herself as well as for him. Though he left a substantial
estate of $600,000, she got nothing.
Joseph Mankiewicz, who
directed her in
All About Eve
, described Hyde's relations with Marilyn
and how he restored the self-confidence that Fred Karger had nearly
destroyed:

That major force [in her career] was a very important agent
named Johnny Hyde – at the time certainly no less than the
#2 or #3 power at William Morris. Like most great agents, he
was a tiny man. . . . Hyde was a very honest and a very gentle man.
He was deeply in love with Marilyn. And more than anyone in
her life, I think, provided for her something akin to an honest
ego
of her own; he respected her. Permitting her, in turn, to
acquire a certain amount of self-respect.
⁶

Shortly before his death, Hyde got Marilyn a small but significant
part in her first serious film,
The Asphalt Jungle
, the first of two excellent
pictures she made in 1950. Marilyn was still cast for her sexy
looks – in one she plays a criminal's mistress, the other a starlet on
the make – but she worked with first-rate material, fine actors and
superb directors. John Huston knew how to get the best out of scripts
and actors. An incorrigible risk-taker, he was born in 1906 in Nevada,
Missouri, south of Kansas City, a town his grandfather had supposedly
won in a poker game. The son of the famous stage and screen
actor Walter Huston, John had a weak heart and had been an invalid
in childhood. But he was a man of wide interests, restless energy and
fierce appetites. He had been a teenage boxing champion, had served
in the Mexican cavalry, become an actor and playwright on Broadway,
and studied painting in Paris. He was an expert fisherman, big game
hunter and art collector, and a fine writer and director. He'd made
first-rate documentaries under fire in World War II, as well as three
brilliant films:
The Maltese Falcon
(1941),
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948) and
Key Largo
(1949). A persuasive and charismatic charmer,
he impressed studio executives with his intelligence and won the
loyalty of actors by giving them a free hand. Tall and rugged, courtly
and eloquent, gambler and raconteur, he had a passion for horses,
would marry five times and leave a long trail of mistresses.

Marilyn was perfectly cast as Angela Phinlay, the blond mistress of
a polished but corrupt lawyer, played with waxed mustache and suave
manners by
Louis Calhern. He's an accomplice of a group of criminals,
who plan to pull off a perfect crime, and is supposed to buy the
jewels they steal.
W.R. Burnett's novel, published only a year before
the film was produced, describes Angela as "voluptuously made; and
there was something about her walk – something lazy, careless, and
insolently assured – that was impossible to ignore." As in many of her
best roles, Marilyn's glowing skin and soft, dreamy
sensuality contrasts
sharply with the hard, striving male characters around her, and she
remains rather vague about what's really going on.

Marilyn makes a powerful impact in three short scenes. In one she
kisses Calhern goodnight and waits for him in the bedroom. Then
she plans a romantic holiday with Calhern, who intends to steal the
jewels and escape with her to Cuba. Finally, bullied and threatened
by the police after Calhern has been arrested, she breaks down and
admits that she'd provided him with a false alibi. She then apologizes
to him as he continues to read a stool-pigeon's confession with apparent
nonchalance. He suggests that he'd always expected her to betray him,
cynically tells her that she'll take many exotic trips with other men
and ironically exclaims, "Some sweet kid."

Huston achieved a strikingly original film despite the censorship
in force at the time. The moralistic movie
Production Code drained
a lot of originality and interest from the eccentric cast of characters.

The lubricious mastermind of the robbery, Dr. Riedenschneider,
expertly played by
Sam Jaffe, is caught by the police while watching
young girls dance at a roadside café. In a letter of October 6, 1949
to the studio head Louis Mayer, the censor
Joseph Breen insisted that
Riedenschneider had to be one-dimensional and must "be played as
a pitiful character trying to recapture his youth, not at all as a lecherous
man." As the studio made concessions on these issues, Breen
did all he could to cramp Marilyn's physical assets and sexy style. "It
is mandatory," he wrote, "that the intimate parts of the body –
specifically the breasts of women – be fully covered at all times."
There must be no "indication that [Calhern] follows her into the
bedroom, or any more definite suggestion of intimacy."
⁷
So, after
saying goodnight to her sugar-daddy, Marilyn sways down the hallway
to the alluring bedroom, leaving her nocturnal adventures to the
spectators' imagination.

The star of the film, the hard-drinking
Sterling Hayden, an ex-
Marine and highly decorated war hero who'd fought the Nazis as a
special commando alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, is another
tough man in the story.
The Asphalt Jungle
, as its title suggests, is an
urban crime film, but Huston loved horses and often brought them
into climactic moments. Hayden's character comes from a Kentucky
horse farm, which his family has lost after his father's death, and he
hopes to get enough money from the robbery to buy it back. Badly
wounded in a shootout with Calhern's henchman and accompanied
by his gun moll, Hayden drives all the way back to the family farm
and dies in the paddock as the horses gather mournfully around him.
When the film was completed Hayden gratefully told Huston that
working with him had been "a pleasure, a privilege and an education
all in one."

Two other professionals, praising the film, noted Marilyn's fine
performance. The director
Howard Hawks wrote that "
Jungle
is beautifully
done and I envy you for it. The girl is a real find." The writer
Budd Schulberg told Huston that the performances reflected "a hard-eyed
and hardly ever sentimental conception of what your people
were. . . . Calhern was really on the spot, trying to hide naked nerves
with charm; and with Hayden you went farther into an understanding
of violence than I have seen on the screen before. . . . The thought processes
of the little kept blonde were for once accurate."
⁸

In 1950 Marilyn also played Miss Caswell, the mistress of another
wicked smoothie,
George Sanders, in
All About Eve
. It was written
and directed by the intelligent, sophisticated Joseph Mankiewicz.
Deliberately using Marilyn's sexpot image, Mankiewicz gave a cynical
but accurate history of her
couch-casting and two-bit roles: "For the
most part she auditioned a great deal, afternoons, in executive offices.
She also functioned agreeably as a companion for corporate elder
statesmen visiting from the east, and on hostess committees for sales
conventions. Occasionally, she was squeezed into old Betty Grable
costumes and used as a dress extra for unimportant bits in some films."
As a useful antidote to all the bewildering Russian theories she'd half absorbed
from Lytess, Chekhov and Carnovsky, Mankiewicz advised
Marilyn to "put on some more clothes and stop moving your ass so
much." (She ignored this advice and attracted considerable attention
by moving her ass more than ever in
Niagara
.) In
All About Eve
she
was, for once, given a few good lines. Commenting on a producer
she's been advised to cultivate at an elegant party, Marilyn disdainfully
asks, "Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?" But most
of all she is a naïve and stunning blonde, a moral and visual contrast
to the dark-haired, cunning and ruthless actresses at the center of the
film.