J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Johnny Hyde

M arilyn Monroe had met a wide assortment of characters in her last couple of years in show business circles, but nobody like Johnny Hyde. At fifty-three, he was barely five feet tall, of slight build with a receding hairline, not especially handsome. His head was set too close to his shoulders and he had a thin nose and not enough space between his eyes. There was something about his physical presence that seemed frail and sickly—and indeed he had a heart condition that was serious enough to require weekly visits to a cardiologist. The Russian son of a circus acrobat, he was a study in contradictions, not the least of which was that despite his unimpressive appearance and unwell demeanor, he was an extremely powerful person. Well-respected in the industry, he was manic when it came to his show business pursuits. The entertainment business was always foremost in his mind. “Everyone knew that Johnny lived and breathed show biz,” one of his friends once said. Quite a few actresses owed their careers to this man, women like Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, and Betty Hutton. He also represented Bob Hope.

When Johnny met Marilyn, it was as if his world suddenly stopped spinning. He’d never laid eyes on anyone so beautiful, and he knew he had to have her. “He was an interesting guy,” said Bill Davis, who, as a young man of seventeen, worked for the William Morris Agency and often directly under Hyde. “Smart as a whip. Aggressive. Passionate. A ladies’ man, even if he wasn’t a looker. He fell hard for Marilyn from the very beginning, sending gifts and love letters to where she was living and really coming on strong. I imagine it would have been tough for her to ignore him or rebuff him because, after all, he was a powerful man. She was in trouble. She needed help with her career.”

“I have it in my power to make you a star,” Johnny told her shortly after meeting her. “And I don’t mean a contract player, either. A star!”

“When I first mentioned my acting hopes to Johnny Hyde, he didn’t smile,” Marilyn would recall. “He listened raptly and said, ‘Of course you can become an actress!’ He was the first person who ever took my acting seriously and my gratitude for this alone is endless.” This was hyperbole on her part, but she made her point with it.

“From my understanding, it was a straight out deal between them,” said Bill Davis. “She said she wanted to be in movies. He said he could make it happen. He was influential in the business. Meeting him was, I think, probably the best thing that had happened to her up to that time. There were dozens of starlets who wanted to sleep with him just for the chance to have him in their corners. Of course, she had to have sex with the guy. I mean, he had to get something out of it, too.… That’s the way it worked.”

In January 1949, Marilyn found herself in Palm Springs with Johnny. It was there that they consummated their relationship, despite the fact that he was married. Power being the greatest aphrodisiac, Marilyn was actually attracted to him and didn’t just sleep with him to get ahead in her career—though it didn’t hurt. A month after she had sex with him, she found herself doing a cameo appearance in a silly Marx Brothers movie called Love Happy. It was a United Artists low-budget, stolen-diamond backstage romp that is significant only as the final film appearance of the legendary Marx Brothers.

The promotional tour Marilyn would embark on to promote Love Happy (when the movie would finally be released during the summer) was more noteworthy than the film itself. She had an opportunity to visit major cities and generate a great deal of press for herself. “I was on screen less than sixty seconds,” she recalled, with typical Marilyn hyperbole, “but I got five weeks work… going on the tour which promoted the film in eight major cities. I felt guilty about appearing on the stage when I had such an insignificant role in the film, but the audiences didn’t seem to care.” During this time, she became known as “The Mmmmm Girl.” The PR line had to do with the notion that some people can’t whistle, so when they see Marilyn all they can do is say “Mmmmm.” No such utterance would be forthcoming, however, for Love Happy . Certainly, with his many resources, Johnny Hyde could do better for his best girl than “sixty seconds” in a Groucho Marx movie.

“He made it pretty clear to her from the very beginning that he would bust his hump for her,” said Bill Davis. “It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t suggested. It was clear. I was actually in their presence shortly after they met and heard him say to her, ‘You will be the biggest thing in this town if you just give me a little time to work some business out for you.’ She just smiled and acted sort of coquettish. I remember thinking that she was just another empty-headed floozy, which was reductive, I know. But that’s how she struck me. She didn’t seem like she had any brains. All I ever heard from her was ‘Yes, Johnny’ and ‘No, Johnny’ and ‘Anything you say, Johnny.’ He would berate her and she would be fine with it. Sometimes she called him ‘Daddy.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh, his wife is gonna just love this.’ ”

During this promotional tour, a friend named Bill Purcel, who lived in Nevada and whom Marilyn met when she was there for her divorce, received a troubling telephone call from her. She was crying. “I can’t stand the constant picture taking,” she told him. “I’m going to throw acid on my face,” she threatened, “if that’s what it will take to get them to stop!” She seemed as if she were on the edge of a breakdown, and she wasn’t even that famous yet. “She had no privacy and some of the photographers were rude and demanding,” Purcel recalled, “as though she owed them something.” Marilyn understood that having her picture taken was part of her job, but during this tour she felt as if even her small amount of fame was too oppressive. Eventually, she rebounded.

Johnny would say that he fell madly in love with Marilyn at the very moment they met and would remain devoted to her for the next year. She never felt the same about him. However, he was so smart, so interesting, and, of course, so powerful she felt drawn to him. Hyde encouraged Marilyn to dig even deeper into the craft of acting than she had already done with Natasha. He wanted her to expand her intellectual scope by reading Turgenev and Tolstoy. She couldn’t get enough of both writers. She also enjoyed both volumes of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. Steffens (1866–1936) was one of the world’s first celebrity journalists to challenge the status quo. He was so controversial in his attacks on political corruption that President Theodore Roosevelt coined a term for it—“muckraking.” Johnny also suggested novels by Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust as well as specific books about moviemaking. She devoted herself to doing whatever he asked of her in this regard. When he gave her Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares , she read it as a textbook because she knew she would be quizzed on its specifics. That was fine with her. She had a voracious appetite for knowledge and couldn’t wait to discuss with Johnny whatever book he had recommended. “You’ve been through so much,” he told her, echoing what Natasha Lytess kept telling her. “You should draw on that for your acting.” Hyde’s advice was pretty much what Stanislavsky had in mind with his book.

Johnny didn’t want Marilyn to waste a second of her day. For instance, she had a habit of talking on the phone for hours. That had to end, he said. “He wanted her every waking moment to be devoted to doing something progressive for her career,” said Marybeth Hughes, a beautiful blonde actress who once dated Hyde. “Once you got into Johnny’s whirlwind, your life was no longer your own. Most women couldn’t take it. Most women didn’t think it was worth the high drama he brought into their lives. You had to be pretty strong to be with Johnny Hyde.”