The relationship with Schenck, however, was more than a passing convenience. Actor Nico Minardos, who was close to Marilyn in late 1952, recalled visiting her in the hospital when she was having a gynecological operation. He blundered into her room to find her locked in the arms of the elderly Schenck.
Joe Schenck lived on to the age of eighty-two. In 1960, when a massive heart attack began his final decline, the star Marilyn was filming Let’s Make Love. At a dinner party given by producer David O. Selznick, there was an angry scene when a guest accused her of heartlessness, of failing to have compassion to visit the dying Schenck.
Rupert Allan, her aide and friend in later years, said the opposite was true. He accompanied Marilyn to see the old man as he lay helpless in his mansion. Other visitors were banished from the sickroom, and Allan, waiting below, still remembered Marilyn’s peals of laughter from the sickroom upstairs. Schenck’s nurse, astounded, said the old man had rallied as soon as he heard Marilyn was coming. On the way home, Marilyn wept. She never saw Joe Schenck again.
Amy Greene, Marilyn’s close friend in the mid-fifties, said, ‘She did give me the impression she slept her way to her start.’ Marilyn talked of this time, said Greene, using an obvious allusion: ‘I spent a great deal of time on my knees.’
By 1948, at twenty-two, Marilyn was being regularly squired around the fashionable Hollywood restaurants and nightclubs. A favourite was Romanoff’s, where Marilyn became close to the owner, ‘Prince’ Mike Romanoff, and his wife, Gloria.
Gloria Romanoff knew Marilyn from the late forties until her death, and held her in great affection. She offered this opinion on how much Marilyn used sex to advance her career: ‘My view would not be a popular one. This was a girl who, early on, probably did whatever was necessary to get rolling in the business. As time passed, Marilyn, I think, became somewhat indifferent to sex. She didn’t have any overwhelming need to be with men, and I think it had a lot to do with those early years.’
The final word on this subject should be Marilyn’s. When British writer W. J. Weatherby asked her whether the stories about the casting couch were true, she responded, ‘They can be. You can’t sleep your way into being a star, though. It takes much, much more. But it helps. A lot of actresses get their first chance that way. Most of the men are such horrors, they deserve all they can get out of them!’
Marilyn would, on occasion, take younger lovers, but the men who mattered to her would from now on almost always be older.
‘Insecurity is what bugs me,’ Marilyn was to say years later. ‘I have always been attracted to older men, because the younger men don’t have any brains, and all they do is try to make a pass, and it isn’t even me they are thinking about. They are horny just because I’m a movie star. Older men are kinder, and they know more, and the ones I’ve known were important in the business, and have tried to help me.’
Marilyn told of having sat at the feet of Joe Schenck, ‘hearing him talk. He was full of wisdom like some great explorer. I also liked to look at his face. It was as much the face of a town as of a man. The whole history of Hollywood was in it.’ Now, in the real world of Hollywood, the men she seriously cultivated would be her seniors, and useful to her career.
Marilyn was looking for teachers. In 1948, when she was hired by Columbia, the first teacher to come her way happened to be a woman. Marilyn grasped the helping hand, and began an intense, strange relationship that would last seven years — longer than any liaison she would have with a man. That summer there was also a male teacher, and a passionate affair she was never able to forget.
6
‘I HAVE A NEW GIRL for you,’ said the voice on the telephone, ‘Her name is —’
Natasha Lytess, head drama coach at Columbia, waited as the studio’s talent chief fumbled through his papers to find the unfamiliar name.
‘Marilyn Monroe,’ he said finally. ‘See what you can do with her.’
It was spring 1948.
Natasha Lytess, herself a former actress, was a scraggy, graying woman of Russian and French ancestry. Many years older than Marilyn, highly strung and sensitive, she had come to the United States as an artistic refugee from Nazi Germany, where she had trained with the Max Reinhardt theater company and been married to the left-wing novelist, Bruno Frank. She now lived alone with her three-year-old daughter in Hollywood, where she had been teaching acting for seven years. She was used to starlets without experience or talent, and at first Marilyn seemed just one more.
‘I was not impressed,’ Lytess said years later. ‘She was inhibited and cramped; she could not say a word freely. Her habit of speaking without using her lips was unnatural, obviously superimposed. Her voice was a piping sort of whimper.’ Lytess, however, set to work on Marilyn, beginning a relationship that she would look back on with ‘pride and frustration, love and fear.’
Marilyn came for her lessons regularly and fairly punctually, and worked with boundless enthusiasm. Lytess strove to get her ‘to let go, to say things freely, to walk freely, to know that relaxation brings authority. These new sensations, to a girl suffering from acute insecurity, were the difference between existing underwater and coming alive.’
For a long time Marilyn told Lytess nothing about her background. Her teacher felt that ‘she was accustomed to hiding everything,’ and sometimes she did not know what to believe. One day, after coming to work for months in smart, expensive clothes, Marilyn arrived in tears. She explained that her last and kindest foster parent, her dear friend, Ana,* had died ‘of malnutrition.’ Lytess blinked, wondered, and decided it was none of her business. She was, by now, deeply attached to her young pupil.
There were those who would say that Natasha and Marilyn had a lesbian relationship. Marilyn’s New York maid, Lena Pepitone, would report Marilyn as having said so herself. ‘Any warmth shown to her, by any person, regardless of sex,’ Pepitone wrote, ‘was welcomed and cherished.’ Marilyn needed to be loved — by anyone who was sincere. Florabel Muir, a veteran Hollywood reporter who knew Marilyn well, also said there was a lesbian relationship with Lytess. Sidney Skolsky, a really close friend, thought the same.
Years later Marilyn herself told W. J. Weatherby, ‘People tried to make me into a lesbian. I laughed. No sex is wrong if there’s love in it.’ Earlier, speaking of her life in 1948, she said the sexual side of relations with men had so far been a disappointment.
‘Then it dawned on me,’ she said, ‘that other people — other women — were different than me. They could feel things I couldn’t. And when I started reading books I ran into the words “frigid,” “rejected,” and “lesbian.” I wondered if I was all three of them. … There were times when I didn’t feel human and times when all I could think of was dying. There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.’
Marilyn decided she was not a lesbian after all, she told writer Ben Hecht, after several months of studying with Natasha Lytess. The moment came as Marilyn landed the first movie role that gave her a chance to talk, sing, and dance, in a low-budget picture called Ladies of the Chorus. Marilyn played the part of a poor girl who rises from poverty to become a star, the first of many roles that would strike an echo of her own real-life experience. She had two songs to sing, ‘Every Baby Needs a Da Da Daddy’ and ‘Anyone Can See I Love You.’
It was while Marilyn was preparing to perform these songs, Lytess would recall, that ‘she opened up, and leaned on me like a child for comfort and advice. One day she told me she was in love.’ Marilyn did not at the time tell Lytess the name of her lover.
That summer of 1948 a young widow named Mary D’Aubrey, living with her mother on Harper Avenue in Hollywood, blundered into a bedroom to find her brother Fred in bed with his new girlfriend. ‘Hi! Can I have some juice?’ was Marilyn’s cheery greeting. Fred Karger was then thirty-two, ten years older than Marilyn, and shakily married to another woman. He was director of music at Columbia Pictures, and an accomplished composer best remembered today f
or the theme of From Here to Eternity. He was the son of Maxwell Karger, one of the founders of M-G-M, and Anne, a Boston Irishwoman of great warmth and vivacity. Max had died long since, and Anne — universally known as Nana — ran a jolly household filled with children and grandchildren. Once, in her salad days, Nana had presided over a virtual salon of early Hollywood, and its gaiety still echoed through the life she lived, in reduced circumstances, at the house on Harper Avenue.
Marilyn had been sent to Fred for musical coaching by the producer of Ladies of the Chorus. Karger recognized a voice that was reedy and untrained, and its owner as someone drowning in insecurity and stage fright. He also saw that she was resolved to drill herself into performing successfully. He took her to his friends’ homes to get Marilyn to sing for an audience, however small. Director Richard Quine recalled Karger playing the piano as Marilyn, screwing up her courage, stood by the mantle to sing ‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home.’
Lesson turned to love one day when Marilyn phoned to say she was sick. Karger dropped in to see her, and found her, forlorn and hungry, in a cramped one-room apartment. He invited her home to the maternal ministrations of Nana, and an affair began.
Fred’s niece and nephew, Anne and Bennett, still remembered their childhood awe at the strangely different creature their uncle had brought home. ‘There was an old closet where I used to keep my toys,’ said Bennett, ‘and one morning, not knowing she was there, I burst into Fred’s room and she was sitting in front of the mirror nude, putting on her makeup. I hastily went to back out again, but she said to come on in and get my baseball bat and glove.’
Bennett and his eight-year-old sister, Anne, shared a nearby room with bunk beds, and Anne recalled how one day ‘this vision walked in, a beautiful blonde lady. She was very, very fond of children, and she just sort of became part of our group of little friends. She gave me a birthday party, and sat there on the floor and played party games with us. We came to love her very much.’
Marilyn, she of many names, ‘took on a special one for her relationship with the Kargers. They always called her ‘Marl,’ and her generosity toward the children was boundless. At Christmas she arrived to find that Terry, Fred’s daughter by a previous marriage, had more presents than Anne and Bennett. Marilyn quietly left, to return laden with extra gifts. The orphan was doing something that became characteristic, finding a new family and eagerly trying to make it her own. After the affair with Charlie Chaplin, Jr. had ended, Marilyn stayed close to his grandmother. Now she put her trust in Fred’s mother. Nana cooked for her, mended her clothes, and got her off to the studio in the mornings. In years to come, Marilyn always remembered Nana’s birthday, and sent her flowers on Mother’s Day.
Marilyn had found a family, and for the first time she was dizzily in love. At Karger’s urging she moved out of the depressing apartment to a better place, just down the street from the Kargers. The lovers also took a place they could use together, near the studio. Marilyn later told Ben Hecht, ‘A new life began for me … I had always thought of myself as someone unloved. Now I know there had been something worse than that in my life. It had been my own unloving heart. … I even forgot Norma Jeane. A new me appeared in my skin — not an actress, not somebody looking for a world of bright colors. When he said, “I love you” to me, it was better than a thousand critics calling me a great star.’
Marilyn worried about being an interloper in Karger’s marriage, and wept when it finally broke up. At the same time she wanted him for herself, and the want went unfilled.
There was, as Marilyn put it, ‘one cloud in my paradise. I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me. But his love didn’t seem anything like mine. Most of his talk to me was a form of criticism. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. … His cynicism hurt me, too …’
Karger would ask, ‘What’s most important in life to you?’
‘You are,’ Marilyn would say.
‘After I’m gone,’ Karger would say with a smile.
When Marilyn wept he would tell her, ‘You cry too easily. That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your figure, it’s embryonic.’
Nana Karger hoped her son would marry Marilyn. He, meanwhile, was backing off. One night, according to Marilyn, he told her why. ‘It would be all right for me, but I keep thinking of my son. If we were married and anything should happen to me — such as my dropping dead — it would be very bad for him.’
‘Why?’ Marilyn asked.
Karger’s answer was hard. ‘It wouldn’t be right for him to be brought up by a woman like you. It would be unfair to him.’
Marilyn, wounded in the part of her that needed children, tried to leave Karger. For a while they rode that saddest of roller coasters, the breakup that is inevitable, yet seemingly impossible. Marilyn recalled, ‘There was a third and fourth good-bye. But it was like rushing to the edge of a roof to jump off. I stopped each time and didn’t jump, and turned to him and begged him to hold me. It’s hard to do something that hurts your heart.’
Marilyn could not forget Karger. At Christmas 1948 she went to a fashionable jeweler, and bought Karger a $500 watch on the installment plan. She was broke at the time, and would spend two years paying it off. Throughout her life Marilyn reveled in giving engraved gifts and signed photographs, but the watch was marked merely ‘12.25.48.’
‘You’ll have some other girl to love,’ she told Karger. ‘You wouldn’t be able to use my present if my name was on it.’
A year or so later, after fending off Marilyn for months, Karger would marry actress Jane Wyman, former wife of President-to-be Ronald Reagan. He would later divorce Wyman, then remarry her in 1961, a year before Marilyn’s death. Even then, Marilyn had not let go of the memory. Her friend, Sidney Skolsky, recalled, ‘The only bitchy thing I ever saw Marilyn do occurred one night at Chasen’s restaurant. As we approached the checkroom, there was an event taking place in the large private party room. … Marilyn and I were told that the Fred Karger and Jane Wyman wedding party was in the room. Marilyn said she had to go in and congratulate Fred. She knew this would burn up Jane Wyman. She boldly crashed the reception and congratulated Fred. As Marilyn and Jane were pretending they didn’t know the other was in the same room, the tension in the atmosphere would have been as easy to cut as the wedding cake.’
Perhaps the best estimate of Marilyn’s feeling for Fred Karger comes from Patti, the wife he was married to at the time of his affair with Marilyn. She acknowledged without bitterness that, ‘She deeply wanted him. I think her love was very profound.’ Vi Russell, who was best friend to Karger’s sister and virtually a member of the family, said, ‘I don’t think she ever got over Fred. After him, she could never believe a man could love her. But then she never believed in herself. How could anyone love her when she could not love herself?’
Fred Karger too, it seems, did not forget. In later years he was to call his former wife Patti, highly distraught, saying that Marilyn had just appeared to him in a dream. Karger died seventeen years after Marilyn, on the exact anniversary of her death.
In New York, in the mid-fifties, Marilyn would talk with remorse about her time with Fred Karger. The remorse was, not least, for the children she had not borne. In her months with Karger, Marilyn said, she had more than once made the now-familiar journey to the abortionist.
Natasha Lytess, the drama coach, told Marilyn that Karger was not worth her tears. She soon moved with her child into the apartment that Marilyn had taken to be near the Karger family. Neither of the women had much money, and the younger Kargers were bemused by the atmosphere of the place: two lonely women living in an apartment almost devoid of furniture, with Marilyn sleeping on a mattress on the floor. During the past months, Marilyn’s acting hopes had collapsed again.
Jonie Taps, the executive assistant to Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn, took a call from Cohn the day his boss first saw rushes of Marilyn’s scenes in Ladies of the Chorus. ‘W
hat did you put that fat pig in the picture for?’ yelled Cohn. ‘What’re you doing, fucking her?’ In September, when Marilyn’s contract ended, Cohn failed to renew it. Old Joe Schenck again tried to come to the rescue, but this time he was unsuccessful.
According to Marilyn she lost favor with Harry Cohn because she rebuffed his sexual advances. She claimed that Cohn enticed her into his office, promised her a cruise on his yacht, then tried to have sex with her on the spot. She refused, she said. When Cohn threatened her, saying, ‘This is your last chance,’ she walked out.
Fred Karger recalled accompanying Marilyn to Cohn’s office in a last-ditch attempt to persuade the studio chief to extend her contract. Marilyn, whose mother and last foster parent were ardent Christian Scientists, had recently been going to church a good deal with Fred Karger’s daughter. Now, on the way to see Cohn, she telephoned her Christian Scientist practitioner for guidance.
The guidance did not help. Cohn stuck to his decision, and Marilyn had been fired again.
In October of that year, 1948, Marilyn had some consolation. The film she had made at Columbia, Ladies of the Chorus, made its undistinguished debut. It was terrible, but Karger had worked well, and Marilyn received her first review. ‘One of the brightest spots is Miss Monroe’s singing,’ wrote Tibor Krekes of the Motion Picture Herald. ‘She is pretty, and with her pleasing voice and style, shows promise.’
That month, with members of the Karger family, Marilyn went to see herself in a public showing for the first time. Ladies of the Chorus was playing at the Carmel Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard — which in later years was to show only pornographic movies. Fred Karger’s niece, Anne, recalled that ‘she was like a little child. She sat hunched in her seat so low that she could just see the screen. She came dressed in a big coat and wearing dark glasses.’