Away from the Greenes’ country home, which she now used more as a weekend retreat, Marilyn spent most of her time in New York City. She was exploring, seeking the pulse of that seething town, avidly striving to become a New Yorker herself. In the process she made myriad acquaintances and a few real friends. One of them, improbably, turned out to be one of her own fans — a sixteen-year-old boy.
Late the previous year, when Marilyn was in New York to shoot the skirt-blowing scene for Seven Year Itch, a crowd of hundreds had gathered each night to see her emerge from the St Regis Hotel. One evening the crowd included Jim Haspiel, a youngster who had left home at the age of fifteen and who was now living from hand to mouth, moving from furnished room to furnished room. He idled away a good deal of his time at the movies and, as he put it, he was expecting to see the Marilyn of the screen, ‘the oversized, over-everything lady from Niagara.’ When the flesh-and-blood Marilyn emerged, Haspiel was surprised that she seemed so small — she was five foot six according to her passport application — and by the fact that she had big ears. The youth knew at once that he wanted to meet her, and he was there when Marilyn returned two hours later.
When Marilyn emerged from her car she was surrounded by fans taking pictures or begging for her autograph. Then Haspiel, who had neither camera nor paper, asked for a kiss. ‘The word “No” was all over her face,’ Haspiel remembered, ‘and I said, “C’mon, just here on the cheek,” and a couple of people in the crowd went “Oh-h-h,” and she gave in, and she did kiss me.’ The next night Marilyn refused a kiss even to an eight-year-old boy, muttering that ‘Joe’ would not like it. For Haspiel it meant that something had drawn her to him, and events proved him right.
In those days Marilyn was followed everywhere in New York by a gaggle of persistent fans known as the Monroe Six, whose ages ranged from fourteen to thirty. They at first kept lonely, individual vigils outside apartments and office buildings, waiting for their heroine. Then, as they grew to know each other, they joined forces. Haspiel sometimes tagged along with the Six, but never became one of them. He was a loner, and came to believe Marilyn liked him for it.
After Marilyn’s death a brown manila envelope would be found in her room, containing pictures of her ‘children.’ The photographs inside were those of Joe DiMaggio’s son, Arthur Miller’s children — and Jim Haspiel. In life, she had singled him out for a singular intimacy.
Marilyn quickly gave the sixteen-year-old her trust. He was welcomed to her New York apartment and accepted as a backseat companion as she zoomed around New York by cab. For many months, though, Marilyn did not even know his name. She never asked him, and he forgot to introduce himself until so long afterward that it seemed superfluous. It was not till a year later, in the middle of a conversation, that Marilyn suddenly called him ‘Jimmy.’ He concluded that she had finally asked members of the Monroe Six to brief her on the youngster who had never bothered to tell her his name. In hindsight, Haspiel came to think she liked him for his audacity, and because she saw in the solitary, obstinate adolescent the orphan that was her image of herself.
Haspiel’s friendship with Marilyn was conducted on the run, and many of his anecdotes are based on taxi journeys. Marilyn, he discovered, was impatient with a certain kind of New York pushiness. When she waited after handing a cab driver the fare, he said, ‘You’re Marilyn Monroe, and you expect change?’; she made a point of extracting every last dime. Having made her point, she then gave a large tip.
Young Haspiel’s feeling for Marilyn verged on infatuation. Once she rebuffed him as he started to follow her into a cab. She wanted to travel alone, and thrust a twenty-dollar bill at him to pay for his own taxi. He rejected the money and, in pique, slammed the door in her face.
‘I was quite wrong, of course,’ Haspiel says. ‘But I think what separated me from the others for her was that, in her world of sycophants, I sometimes answered back.’
Marilyn’s correspondence files, located in 1986, contain letters between the star and her young friend. Haspiel’s story was undoubtedly truthful. By middle age, married and with two teenage sons, Haspiel would have become probably the world’s most erudite student of Marilyn, the owner of a massive collection of photographs, many of them taken with a five-dollar camera he acquired thirty years ago.
Haspiel’s Marilyn is one that few saw, a woman who hardly ever wore makeup, who hated dressing up in normal life, who ‘ran around the streets of New York in bobby-sox.’ He watched as Marilyn wobbled off on her brand-new English bicycle for rides in Central Park, or on excursions to Nathan’s hot-dog emporium in Coney Island. He helped as she did her shopping at Whelan’s, a favorite drugstore at 93rd Street and Lexington Avenue. In this real world, Haspiel thought, Marilyn was most at ease.
Haspiel also saw that Marilyn was more than an apprentice New Yorker. She was on the mission of self-improvement that Hollywood had debased and delayed. When Haspiel offered her the New York Post, a tabloid, to read some columnist’s tidbit about herself, Marilyn turned it down in disdain. She devoured instead the New York Times, even the Wall Street Journal. That summer, another visitor to Marilyn’s apartment observed the coffee table strewn with books: Emerson’s Essays, Edith Hamilton’s Greek Mythology, the letters of George Sand, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Michael Gorchakov’s How Stanislavsky Directs. The last title reflected the goal that Marilyn held in deadly earnest — her determination to become a serious actress.
*In his memoirs, published in 1974, Berle claimed to have had an affair with Marilyn in 1948, during the making of Ladies of the Chorus.
18
IN LATE APRIL 1955, three weeks after her appearance on television with Milton and Amy Greene, Marilyn slipped quietly into the chapel of the Universal Funeral Home on New York’s Lexington Avenue. She was there for the funeral of the British actress, Constance Collier, who had died at the age of seventy-seven. Marilyn sat next to the writer, Truman Capote, whom she had met a few weeks earlier at the El Morocco nightclub. Capote remembered her dressed all in black, ‘gnawing an already chewed-to-the-nub thumbnail … periodically removing her spectacles to scoop up tears bubbling from her blue-grey eyes.’ She told Capote, ‘I hate funerals. I don’t want a funeral — just my ashes cast on waves by one of my kids, if I ever have any. …’
Marilyn had been introduced to Constance Collier by Truman Capote, and had taken acting lessons from the legendary actress in the weeks before she died. Collier, who spent her last years training American actors, offered this snap verdict on Marilyn: ‘Oh, yes, there is something there. She is a beautiful child. I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has — this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence — could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight; only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever, is mad. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that’s wandering through her like a jailed spirit. …’ Even as Collier died, Marilyn was seeking a liberator for her talent. She found him in Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio, the New York theater workshop that had become the most influential institution of its kind in the world. Its alumni of the fifties included Marlon Brando, James Dean, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, Steve McQueen, Shelley Winters, Maureen Stapleton, and Tom Ewell, Marilyn’s co-star in Seven Year Itch. Their teacher, Strasberg’s recent biographer notes, has been called rabbi by some, pope by others, guru, god or genius, fake, charlatan, or the Ultimate Shrink.
Strasberg, aged fifty-three when Marilyn came to New York, had been born into poverty in a Jewish ghetto in Poland. He came to America with his family as a boy and was deeply involved in theater by the time he turned twenty-one. His revelation, and the guiding light he would show to generations of American actors, was the Stanislavsky Method, the science of acting that has been called
the ‘total immersion system.’ It held that actors must break away from the banal through intense exploration of their scenes and themselves. They must seek motivation in every act and phrase, draw on their own personal experience, their own past pain and joy, to communicate with the audience. Self-analysis was thus obligatory, and Strasberg, an ardent student of psychology, encouraged his students to undergo psychoanalysis.
In the muddle that was Marilyn, Strasberg was to discover a creature of dangerous potency. She would find a teacher, a priest for her personality, and a new dependency.
Marilyn had met Strasberg’s wife and daughter on a set in Hollywood, and had talked longingly of one day studying at the feet of the master. Now, in March 1955, Marilyn found herself seated opposite producer Cheryl Crawford, one of the co-founders of the Actors Studio. She talked of her interest in becoming a serious actress, and Crawford promised to help. The very next day Marilyn was sitting opposite Strasberg in his cluttered, book-lined apartment at Broadway and 86th Street. After a brief conversation he agreed to take her on as a private pupil; full membership in the Studio was reserved for those who already had stage experience. The first lessons would be at home because, as Strasberg saw at once, Marilyn was ‘the kind who had emotional problems.’
As Marilyn described her past (it was now that she told Strasberg she had once been a call girl), he noticed that she was very nervous. She was literally stammering in her fright. Nevertheless, the new teacher enthused.
Strasberg would recall, ‘I saw that what she looked like was not what she really was, and what was going on inside was not what was going on outside, and that always means there may be something there to be worked with. It was almost 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.’
In the end, no hyperbole was too much for Strasberg to use in describing Marilyn. He said of her presence: ‘She was engulfed in a mystic-like flame, like when you see Jesus at the Last Supper and there’s a halo around him. There was this great white light surrounding Marilyn.’
In 1955, though, Strasberg did not flatter Marilyn with overblown phrases. He offered instead months of grueling exercises and hard work. In the mecca of American acting, all were equal and none were stars. Marilyn would appear in baggy sweater and jeans, without makeup, and seek out the most obscure place in the room. Actor Kevin McCarthy hardly noticed her at first, as they sat side by side watching a badly acted scene from Chekhov’s Three Sisters. When he did recognize her, he observed Marilyn’s disconcerting ability to switch her Monroe persona from ‘off’ to ‘on,’ from obscurity to the white light of Strasberg’s perception.
‘This tousled piece of humanity was sitting on my right,’ McCarthy remembered, ‘looking like nothing. Then, fifteen minutes later, after I’d interrupted the scene with some fairly rude comments, I looked again. I realized that a breathing, palpitating Marilyn Monroe had developed out of that nothing … I remember looking and thinking, “My God, it’s her” — she’d just come to life.’
Marilyn was quickly befriended by Eli Wallach, then just back from London and acting in Teahouse of the August Moon. Wallach, who like McCarthy would one day act with her in The Misfits, was also struck by the phenomenon of Marilyn’s instant metamorphosis. In the street heads would turn to stare or ogle whereas a moment before everyone had passed her by. ‘I just felt like being Marilyn for a moment,’ Marilyn would murmur.
Wallach was bemused by the contradictions in her. In the summer of 1955, when Seven Year Itch was about to open in New York, he sat watching with Marilyn as workmen erected a forty-foot-high poster of the famous skirt scene. Only the bottom half, showing her legs and upper thighs, was in place. As a huge crane lowered the cutout image of her torso into position, Marilyn mused, ‘That’s the way they think of me, with my skirt over my head.’
Wallach said, ‘She didn’t seem to mind. She accepted it.’
Sometimes the Strasberg acting sessions seemed intellectually beyond Marilyn. One of her colleagues, Frank Corsaro, came to call himself ‘Marilyn’s translator.’ He said, ‘She didn’t know what Lee was talking about half the damn time.’
Acting coach Peggy Feury disagreed, saying, ‘Marilyn was so bright about acting. Her trouble was only that she’d get so scared she wasn’t going to be able to do it, and so tied up in knots, that then everyone thought she was dumb.’
Some work came more naturally to Marilyn than to others. Asked in improvisation class to make believe she was a kitten, she excelled. Marilyn had borrowed a kitten, watched it for hours, then undulated to perfection. The challenge for Marilyn was to overcome the terror, the abject stage fright, that accompanied the actual speaking of dialogue in front of an audience.
Outside the Studio, Marilyn’s thirst for security was now accommodated by Lee and Paula Strasberg. As she spent more and more time in the city, and less with the Greenes in Connecticut, the orphan by vocation allowed herself to be taken to the bosom of yet another family. She was permitted total freedom of access to the Strasberg home. In a bustling New York Jewish household, Marilyn became Paula Strasberg’s third child. She spent holidays at the family’s weekend place on Fire Island.
Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, herself an actress at the age of seventeen, sometimes shared a room with Marilyn. From her bed, Susan would watch in awe as the famous body, soon to be thirty years old, was prepared for the day. At night Susan would watch as Marilyn ‘would kick off her shoes and dance in the middle of the room alone, if no one was willing to dance with her.’
Once, when the guest said she envied people who could draw, Susan lent her a sketchpad and pen. Marilyn’s facility in drawing came as a surprise. ‘I saved two of her sketches,’ Susan said. ‘In one, with quick, round lines depicting a feline sensual grace and movement, she had done a self-portrait. The other was of a little Negro girl in a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles.’ Marilyn called this drawing ‘Lonely.’ A number of her drawings have survived, amateurish in execution, but showing wit and sensitivity. One of an elegant woman holding a glass of champagne, she called, ‘Oh, What the Hell!’
Over the years Marilyn repaid the Strasberg hospitality with her own whimsical generosity. She paid Lee Strasberg’s traveling expenses for a trip to the Soviet Union. She gave her Thunderbird car to Strasberg’s son, John, on his eighteenth birthday. At fund-raising events for the Studio, Marilyn’s very presence raised many thousands of dollars.
In her last will, Marilyn bequeathed all her personal effects to Strasberg. Dresses, furs, film awards, books, letters, even her underwear, would one day be delivered to the Strasberg home in New York. As an unexpected windfall, Strasberg was later to inherit the rights to one of Marilyn’s films, The Prince and the Showgirl. Many of her personal belongings would remain, jealously guarded, in the care of Strasberg’s second wife, Anna.
There is no doubt Marilyn brought greater renown to the Studio and greater wealth to Strasberg personally. His occasional habit of bringing to the Studio people who were famous personalities, qualified by fame as much as by acting skill, paid off handsomely. Critics have assailed Strasberg as an opportunist, and his own son said, ‘The greatest tragedy was that people, even my father in a way, took advantage of her. They glommed on to her special sort of life, her special characteristics, when what she needed was love. My parents did give her some love, but it was inextricably linked with the acting.’
Also mentioned in Marilyn’s will would be a New York couple who could never be accused of taking advantage of her. The poet Norman Rosten and his wife, Hedda, gave Marilyn uncomplicated privacy and companionship, and perhaps the longest association of pure friendship in her entire life. It began, utterly by chance, on a rainy day in the spring of 1955.
Norman Rosten was seated at his desk at home in Brooklyn Heights, when a friend, photographer Sam Shaw, called to ask if he could drop in. He and a companion had been caught in a downpour in nearby Prospect Park.
Minutes later Rosten was watching Shaw tramp up the stairs followed by a drenched figure in a camel’s-hair coat. Shaw mumbled an introduction, and Rosten thought he caught the name ‘Marion.’ The girl picked up a volume of poems Rosten had written for his daughter Patricia, and sat silently reading. It was later, when Hedda Rosten asked what she did for a living, that she timidly offered her name, Marilyn Monroe.
Rosten and his wife, almost alone among Marilyn’s Eastern friends, had no concern with anyone but the private Marilyn. ‘We really didn’t give a damn who she was,’ Rosten said, ‘and she did step out of her stereotype in real life. With us she was thoroughly enchanting, such an odd human being. …’
Throughout the summer of 1955, and sporadically for the next seven years, Marilyn enjoyed privacy with the Rostens. They kept a few of her notes and letters, rare windfalls, since they were from a woman who did not often correspond. After that first meeting Marilyn wrote from the Waldorf-Astoria:
Dear Norman,
It feels a little funny to be writing the name ‘Norman’ since my own name is Norma and it feels like I’m writing my own name almost, however —
First, thanks for letting Sam and me visit you and Hedda on Saturday — it was nice. I enjoyed meeting your wife she was very warm to me — However, again — Thanks the most for your book of poetry — which I spent all Sunday morning in bed with. It touched me very much — I used to think that if I had ever had a child I would have wanted only a son — but after ‘Songs for Patricia’ — I know I would have loved a little girl as much — but maybe the former feeling was only Freudian anyway or something —