J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

At the end of the year, she would very briefly engage the services of new “managers,” Lucille Ryman and John Carroll. However, they weren’t exactly managers. Carroll was a film actor with connections, and Lucille was director of the talent department at MGM—with connections. It’s unclear as to what the terms of the arrangement were—either she was paying them to represent her (unlikely, since she didn’t have much money), or they were taking a percentage of her work (also unlikely, since she didn’t have any). It doesn’t make any difference, really, because they came and went from her life quickly, but not before bearing witness to some unusual moments.

Lucille, Carroll’s wife, has insisted that Marilyn told her and her husband that she was working as a prostitute at this time, having quick sex with men in cars in order to get money for food. “She told us without pride or shame that she made a deal—she did what she did and her customers then bought her breakfast or lunch.” Lucille also said that Marilyn told her she’d been robbed in the small apartment in which she was living and that she was afraid to stay there. Things were so bad, Marilyn told her, she’d have to just continue working the streets. Moreover, she told her that she was raped at nine and had sex every day at the age of eleven. “It was her way of getting us to take her in, and it worked.” They offered to allow Marilyn to live in an apartment they owned.

Marilyn was known to fabricate stories to gain sympathy. One of the problems in sorting through the Marilyn Monroe history is determining what is true and what may be the product of her overworked imagination. In short, as people in her life would begin to understand with the passing of time, one could not ever take everything Marilyn said at face value. At any rate, she did end up living in better conditions by the largesse of this couple. Then, one night in November 1947, something strange occurred. The Carrolls got a frantic telephone call from Marilyn.

“There’s a kid peeping in on me,” Marilyn said, her voice vibrating with urgency.

“What are you talking about?” Lucille said.

“I’m being watched.”

“But how?

“He has a ladder and he’s on it and he’s watching me,” Marilyn continued.

“Marilyn, a ladder would not reach the third floor. You must be dreaming,” Lucille told her.

“But I’m awake. I’m awake .”

This conversation continued until, finally, the Carrolls decided they had no choice but to have her join them at their own home that night. They felt they had their hands full with her and didn’t know what to do about it. “At one point, we thought about it and realized that she was running our lives, calling all the time, crying on the phone,” said Lucille. “We didn’t know what to do. A lot of crazy things were going on… it was too much. She didn’t know how to handle her life… she fell apart. We liked her but we needed her and her craziness out of our lives.”

The Carrolls were about to get their wish, because Marilyn would be out of their lives by the beginning of 1948. In February, they took her with them to a party where she met a businessman named Pat DeCicco, a Hollywood playboy once wed to Gloria Vanderbilt. He was also a friend of Joe Schenck, the sixty-nine-year-old president of 20th Century-Fox. As it happened, Schenck asked DeCicco to find him some models to act as window dressing at a Saturday night poker party at his home. DeCicco asked Marilyn if she would be interested. All she would have to do, she was told, was look pretty and pour drinks for Schenck’s friends, perhaps also give them a few cigars, but that was it. It sounded easy enough and also like a great opportunity, so she agreed. Of course, that’s not all that was going on at the party, as Marilyn found out once she got there. Some of the ladies present—all models and aspiring actresses—were willing and able to give themselves to any of the male guests since most of them were power players in show business. Marilyn, though, stayed close to Schenck. By the time the evening was over, he was mad for her, saying she “has an electric quality… she sparkles and bubbles like a fountain.” The next day, he sent a limousine to pick her up and drive her to have dinner with him. That night, she had sex with him.

“I can’t say that I enjoyed it,” Marilyn later told her movie stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, of her assignation with Schenck. “But I can say that I didn’t feel as if I had any choice.” She said that she felt the whole event had been “very tawdry” and that she felt “terrible about it. It was like giving up my soul.” However, she also allowed that she was starting to understand what she called “the Hollywood game” and she knew she had no choice but to play it if she were ever to make a name for herself in show business. It was a sad realization, she said. “But it’s the truth,” she concluded. She and Schenck continued their relationship off and on for some time, and, by some accounts, eventually she grew quite fond of him.

Schenck persuaded Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn to take a look at Marilyn’s screen test. Cohn wasn’t that interested. However, her test footage started circulating through the studio system, and eventually ended up on the desk of Columbia talent head Max Arnow. Also unimpressed by it, he asked one of the studio’s drama coaches, Natasha Lytess, to take a look. She wasn’t thrilled either—it seemed that no one was impressed. Lytess noted that Marilyn seemed to suffer from a lack self-confidence. However, there was still something interesting about her, Natasha thought. Her quality was difficult to describe, but it had to do with her beauty and vulnerability. She wanted to work with her, believing that “perhaps she has some potential.” Harry Cohn decided to offer Marilyn a six-month contract at $125 a week beginning on March 9, 1948. Suddenly, she was signed to Columbia Pictures.

Natasha

N atasha Lytess, who was thirty-five in 1948, once said that when Marilyn Monroe showed up in her office on March 10, 1948, she was wearing a red wool top and a very short dress that was cut too low. Lytess referred to it as “a trollop’s outfit.” When she met Marilyn, her suspicions about her lack of confidence were confirmed. In fact, she said, she was “unable to take refuge in her own insignificance.” Natasha was a character herself, though. Her pencil-thin figure and pale complexion suggested that something was very wrong with her health. She had dark, menacing eyes. She rarely smiled. She was a serious actress and drama coach— everything she ever said about the acting field was, in her view, of great urgency. She was self-important and judgmental of everyone in her life. That said, she was also thought of as a brilliant teacher. Marilyn needed someone strong in her life at this time—a Grace Goddard who could actually do more than just dream about what it might be like if Norma Jeane could be a star. Natasha had an impressive library of show business books in her cottage office, which Marilyn began to devour. The two women spent endless hours talking about the art of acting and how Marilyn might become better at it. Natasha worked on Marilyn’s diction, her delivery—her style. Actually, some of what Marilyn would learn from Natasha would work against her in the future. The exaggerated way she would enunciate every syllable as well as the way she moved her lips before speaking were unfortunate consequences of her work with Natasha. Marilyn would have to break these habits in years to come. Fine for comedy, this style was not appropriate for dramatic roles.

At the beginning of her work with Natasha, Marilyn was pretty much a clean slate upon which could be painted any artistic vision. “As a person, she was almost totally without fortitude,” Natasha would say of her. “You could say she was someone afraid of her own shadow, so terribly insecure, so socially uncomfortable and shy, and never knowing what to say. She would ask me, ‘What should I say?’