The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

On March 14, 1948—just a week after Marilyn signed with Columbia—her beloved Aunt Ana passed away from heart disease. She was sixty-eight. Oddly, she was buried in an unmarked grave at Westwood Memorial Park, though a small plaque was put on it a few years later. It’s been published in the past that Marilyn did not attend the services, that she was too busy with her budding career. This is not true, according to her half sister Berniece’s memory. Marilyn would never have missed Ana’s funeral. Actually, she and Grace and Doc Goddard had a private viewing of Ana’s body, and then a tearful Marilyn slipped away before the other mourners arrived. She later said of Ana, “She was the one human being who let me know what love is.” Ana left a book for Marilyn called The Potter, along with a note: “Marilyn, dear, read this book. I don’t leave you much except my love. But not even death can diminish that, nor will death ever take me far away from you.”

Marilyn Monroe would say that she was “miserable” after the death of Ana because, as she put it, “I was left without anyone to take my hopes and my troubles to.” It was probably fortunate that she had her career to turn to at this time, as she began working on a low-budget musical, her first film for Columbia, Ladies of the Chorus. In it she had a leading role in which she sang two solo numbers—“Every Baby Needs a Da Da Daddy” and “Anyone Can See I Love You”—as well as two duets with Adele Jergens. There was also a certain amount of dancing involved in her work in this film, a real challenge for Marilyn. This was a strange little movie, just an hour long, and it took only ten days to film, but Marilyn was surprisingly good. Her singing voice was a revelation. However, when released later in the year, the film did nothing for Marilyn’s career. She would be dropped from Columbia soon after its release, much to her disappointment. “I went to my room and lay down on my bed and cried,” she recalled. “I cried for a week. I didn’t eat or talk or comb my hair. I kept crying as if I were at a funeral burying Marilyn Monroe. I hated myself for having been such a fool and having had illusions about how attractive I was. I got out of bed and looked in the mirror. Something horrible had happened. I wasn’t attractive. I saw a coarse, crude-looking blonde.”

Marilyn moved into a double room at the Hollywood Studio Club in June 1948, where she paid twelve dollars a day for room and board. She needed to save money—things weren’t going as well as she had hoped—and this seemed like the best way to do it. She didn’t like the place, though, because it reminded her of the orphanage. She was dating a man named Fred Karger, who was the musical supervisor of Ladies of the Chorus, and it wasn’t going well.

Though these were dark days, Marilyn tried to keep a stiff upper lip. She had been relegated to doing TV commercials by the end of the year and felt that perhaps her movie career was over. Short-lived and over. “But there was something that wouldn’t let me go back to the world of Norma Jeane,” she recalled. “It wasn’t ambition or a wish to be rich and famous. I didn’t feel any pent-up talent in me. I didn’t even feel that I had looks or any sort of attractiveness. But there was a thing in me, like a craziness that wouldn’t let up. It kept speaking to me.”

“You never know when you’ll get that big break,” Natasha always told Marilyn. “And when it happens, you’ll know it.” Indeed, “it” would happen for Marilyn at the end of the year when she attended a New Year’s Eve party at the home of movie producer Sam Spiegel. During the course of the evening, she was introduced to a William Morris agent named Johnny Hyde. In the instant she extended her hand to shake his, a major shift took place in her world… and things would never again be the same.

Johnny Hyde

Marilyn 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