Marilyn: A Biography (13 page)

* * *

It is a choppy period. Her agent, Lipton,
describes her as moving around like “a flea on a griddle.” In this
period before her affair with [her former singing coach Fred]
Karger, she rents a little haunted house against the warnings of
friends and leaves it soon after — it is interesting to suppose
that promiscuity helps to summon a few ghosts, some spirits in her,
and she has an experience or two in the house we will not soon hear
about. Earlier, living in Burbank, an off-duty cop who had met her
on the street and been attracted cut through a screen door to enter
her apartment. Marilyn’s screams bring neighbors and he flees, but
in her mind it must be shades of the wrath of Jim Dougherty, who is
now a cop as well. Then she is befriended by John Carroll the actor
and his wife Lucille Ryman the talent scout. They take her in to
live with them. Soon enough she attracts a teen-aged Peeping Tom
who brings a ladder to her third-story window. She must be living
in the fear of violence, yet she almost breaks up the marriage —
Carroll, who played supporting actors and occasional leads, has a
strong resemblance to Clark Gable — and Marilyn walks around in a
robe with nothing beneath. Finally, as Guiles reports,

Marilyn took Miss Ryman aside one day and
said, “Lucille, I want to have a little talk with you. You don’t
love John. If you did, you wouldn’t be off working all the time. I
think I’m in love with him.” This announcement, Miss Ryman asserts,
caught her completely by surprise. Whether or not Marilyn had been
encouraged by Carroll to get the matter into the open is unclear,
but she then asked, “Would you divorce him so we can marry?”

When Miss Ryman recovered from her shock, she
asked Marilyn what had prompted all of this, and Marilyn is said to
have answered, “No one who is that good to me could not be in love
with me.” Miss Ryman then terminated the discussion, saying, “If
John wants a divorce, he can have it.”

No divorce resulted from this confrontation
and the crisis passed with no one outside the Ryman-Carroll
household observing any special melancholy in Marilyn.

The haunted house comes after this, then the
Bel Air Hotel, the Beverly Carlton, next a motel, and then the
Studio Club again. Now begins her affair with Karger, and then she
lives with Natasha, who tells her not to go out on so many dates
because men “were interested in her as a human being and not as an
actress.” She also tells her to put on underwear, for Marilyn wears
nothing beneath her dress, as if her skin is the true undergarment.
Then she is dropped by Columbia and makes the rounds. Her agent
gets her a bit in
Love Happy
with Groucho Marx. She has a
classic moment — the famous undulating movement of her hips is now
unveiled for the first time on film. It is an uproarious moment in
the movie — the wild call of a strange girl’s ass to Groucho Marx —
he engorges his cigar in a leer.

“What seems to be the problem?” he
inquires.

“Men keep following me all the time.” She
exits, Mae West in one swinging pocket, Jean Harlow in the other.
It is uproarious, but she may have been desperate. Twice hired,
twice fired, and she is approaching the age of twenty-three —
Elizabeth Taylor, who is four years younger, is already famous. So
she puts everything she knows of provocation, exaggeration, and the
nascent art of Camp into the swing — “Take me from behind, I’m
yours,” say her undulating hips. A blonde with an anal bent is
looking for the towers of power: no wonder Karger abjured her as
high explosive.

But it is a Faustian contract she has made.
The well-known agent Johnny Hyde will see her in
Love Happy
at a private screening and meet her soon after, then put in a call
to Lipton to take over her management. Her future career will be
designed by Hyde and he will bring her to the attention of every
major studio executive in Hollywood before he dies, she will go to
New York on a publicity tour for
Love Happy
and receive a
very good reception from the press considering she is an unknown
starlet with thirty seconds in a film, she will splash in the
papers with three ice cream cones in each hand on a very hot June
day beaming at New York, but back in Hollywood over years to come
she will be branded as a freak, a sexual gargoyle, a joke, a hip
slinger, a tail switcher, a tart who “throws sex in your face,”
yes, of course she would pay for keeping that walk in future years
when executives would not believe she was a serious actress and
cast her in roles which were slowly killing her, yes, a Faustian
contract — it can hardly be the first she has made.

It is in this period that she is photographed
by Tom Kelley for nude calendar shots, and according to Zolotow’s
interview with him Kelley thought she was “graceful as an otter,
turning sinuously with utter naturalness. All her constraint
vanished as soon as her clothes were removed. [Kelley] remembers
the experience as extraordinary in its intensity.” She signed the
release Mona Monroe. The photographer said, “I can tell you this.
Marilyn Monroe has more sexual vibrations than any woman I ever
shot.” Looking at the prints, we see her body is in superb
condition. Ah, those dumbbells at Catalina. She is paid fifty
dollars, which she needs for the installment on her car, and
probably treats it as a buried episode. What is more significant
now is the interest Johnny Hyde has begun to take in her.

He is one of the biggest agents in town, one
of the “best-loved” and “best-respected.” Hyde was “wonderfully
compact,” as Elia Kazan would describe him, “short but nothing soft
or small about him, nothing wasted in his body, and he had good
manners. He was one of the few important men in Hollywood who had
class.”

She has a first meeting with Hyde at the
Racquet Club in Palm Springs. “We had some drinks and we talked. .
. . He listened to me when I talked. . . . He said I would be a
very big star. I remember laughing and saying it didn’t look like
it because I couldn’t make enough to pay my telephone bill. He said
he had discovered Lana Turner and other stars and that I had more
than Lana and it was a cinch I would go far.” He had standards for
comparison. Some of his other stars were Betty Hutton and Bob Hope,
Esther Williams and Rita Hayworth. He had managed Al Jolson. Studio
heads like Darryl Zanuck and Dore Schary, Don Hartman of Paramount
and Jack Warner, were even cronies when they were not disputing
with him over contracts, for he was close friends with his clients,
and “golfed with them, counseled them on money problems and marital
difficulties, wrangled with studio executives for them.” He even
drank with them.

Since he was the son of a Russian acrobat who
had a vaudeville act with the modest title of Nicholas Haidabura
Imperial Russian Troupe, and grew up on vaudeville stages as Johnny
Haidabura until the name was changed to Hyde, he had no more
education than Marilyn. Yet everyone agreed he had good taste — we
need only conceive what a distillation of acrobatic exercises went
into retaining taste after years in Hollywood! So she was drawn to
him — for his mind. He was one of the very few men who could teach
her more about Hollywood than Joe Schenck. He was also fifty-three.
She was thirty years younger and still not altogether out of love
with Karger, whom she would use as a confidant during her affair
with Hyde as if still attempting to impress the singing coach, but
then Karger would hardly be attracted to her ability to rise in the
world when that was the trait in Marilyn which had first made him
uneasy. If he ever saw her as Sister Carrie, he was perfectly
willing to let Hyde play Hurstwood. And the agent, small doubt
about it, was disastrously in love with her. He had a family of
four sons and a beautiful wife, Mozelle Cravens, “an ingenue he had
liberated from Republic Pictures westerns.” If he had also a
history of affairs with many of his female clients, his wife, if
not enchanted, nonetheless seems to have managed to accept the
principle that a creative agent like a psychoanalyst or a talent
coach has to get into the guts of the talent in order to express
his own talent. So for years he had been half a husband but a good
one. Marilyn exploded this arrangement. Since he was forever taking
her to Romanoff’s or Chasen’s to help publicize her, their affair
was advertised before it may even have existed. Hyde was a sick man
with a very bad heart. If he knew Marilyn for a year, his heart was
so bad toward the end of the year that his chauffeur had to carry
him up the stairs to his bedroom. In the earlier months of their
relationship, however, when he was merely gambling with his heart
rather than mortgaging its roots, there was no studio executive who
had not been alerted to the incandescent possibilities and
unlimited future of Marilyn Monroe. Since she was a girl with an
unsuccessful B-movie to her credit, plus one burst of thirty
seconds in
Love Happy
, plus snippets in
A Ticket to
Tomahawk
, the gossip must have doubled. What a monumental
experience the girl had to be in bed, reasoned top executives, if
Johnny Hyde could lose his judgment. So word of the affair began to
intensify. Mozelle Hyde heard. “I’m a tolerant person, but there is
always a limit. I remember once Jimmy (my son) was down in the
cellar looking over some old things of his father’s and he found
Marilyn’s nude calendar . . . brought it upstairs.” (Since
Marilyn’s posing for nudes was still unknown, the discovery of her
photographed nakedness in Mozelle’s husband’s cellar papers must
have seemed like obsession with a slut to the wife.) Mozelle
finally confronted him. Hyde simply told her, “It’s happened and I
can’t do anything about it.” So the wife filed for divorce. Johnny
Hyde asked Marilyn to marry him.

She wouldn’t. It is one of the mysteries of
motivation in her life. He would be, even after the settlement, a
millionaire; Marilyn had no money. He respected her, and she must
have needed respect in those years the way a terminal patient cries
for opiates — to marry him would be to live in the atmosphere of
his respect. He was also a great teacher, able to instruct her in
the strategy of choosing roles. Already, his manner was refining
her manner. (She will be curiously refined and special as Miss
Caswell in
All About Eve
, a role he will obtain for her.)
And he adores her. Love as well as respect is being offered to her.
He will be a father. He will even die for her. His last arguments
for marriage are close to a beggar’s art. He cannot live long, he
assures her, his death is a matter of months. She will not be
trapped with an invalid, no, he will be dead, and she will have his
name and his resources, and she will make him happy for a little
while. Still, she refuses. She loves him, but she is not in love
with him. As if he knows that he is only a month or two away from
his death, his professional time is devoted more and more to her
future; he must anticipate all the difficulties ahead. He arranges
a new contract at Twentieth for her. It is again for seven years,
but now she will start at $750 a week. At least her finances will
be secured and she will be active in film. He induces her to have
plastic surgery. The bulb at the tip of her nose is subtly reduced
— farewell to W. C. Fields — and a minor deficiency of her jawline
is corrected with cartilage. Since the protrusion of her teeth has
been taken care of by an orthodontist selected by Karger, her face
is now in final altered form, and has reached the stage where she
can launch an attack on a major career without any fundamental flaw
of feature. And Hyde, with his heart wearing out, his thin body
losing weight, and his fingertips pinching him warnings of the next
and final heart attack, is still trying to induce her to marry him,
yet having conversations with his business manager about how to
leave Marilyn one-third of his estate if she won’t. He dies
abruptly, sooner than he expects, and she is specifically not
invited to his funeral by the family, no, it is worse than that.
She has been living with him in the house he bought after
separating from his wife, and in the hours after his death, a
lawyer representing Johnny Hyde’s family calls and tells her to
move out, personal belongings and all of her body pelf — out! But
ministers dispute when kings die. Some of Hyde’s friends and
associates encourage her to go to the funeral. As they file past
the coffin, she throws herself across him and screams, “Wake up,
please wake up, oh my God, Johnny, Johnny.” She is led to the rear
of the church. She is alone again with the wrath of Hollywood on
her head, a blonde who killed a good man. In the immediate future
she will pay for not marrying him.

By now it is no more than a game of
intellectual speculation to wonder why she did not. If she had been
calculating in many an act of her life, and well able to anticipate
oncoming forces in her career, she had also, as Arthur Miller would
remark, a kind of selflessness, even saintliness, from time to
time, and it was possible, he thought, that one need look for no
more motive than that she did not love Johnny Hyde and had too much
respect for love. Money, said Miller, was never real to her, and so
never a motive.

As one thinks of her, it seems true that
money could solve nothing but petty embarrassments and aggravate
her purest problem. It is always the dislocation of her identity to
which we return, and the paradox of Johnny Hyde’s devotion is that
she adored him because he could shape her career and so be equal to
furnishing the house of her identity. That was why she could hardly
marry him. As his widow she would have to shift that identity for
another, be then a merry widow, and a black widow, a woman known as
Mrs. Hyde. What an obsession is identity! We search for it, because
the private sensation when we are in our own identity is that we
feel sincere as we speak, we feel
real
, and this little
phenomenon of good feeling conceals an existential mystery as
important to psychology as the
cogito ergo sum
— it is
nothing less than that the emotional condition of feeling real is,
for whatever reason, so far superior to the feeling of a void in
oneself that it can become for protagonists like Marilyn a
motivation more powerful than the instinct of sex, or the hunger
for position or money. Some will give up love or security before
they dare to lose the comfort of identity.