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
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.”
Just as Johnny had said he had never met anyone like Marilyn, the same was true of her. All of the men she’d known in the past had been disappointments, going all the way back to Wayne Bo-lender, who certainly loved her but ultimately was weak when it came to standing up to his wife, Ida. She couldn’t imagine Johnny being cowed by anyone. He was her protector; she felt safe in his arms. Of course, in that role, he also became a father figure to her. The reasons she sought one are obvious, and he certainly fit the bill. In the end, though, because there were so many different levels to their romance, it was complex, and thus often thorny.
Luckily for Marilyn, Johnny Hyde was as generous as he was supportive. Marilyn always had money as his girl, which was a refreshing change. Finally, she could take a deep breath and focus on her career—as he demanded— rather than on her financial woes. After he set Marilyn up financially, moving her into his new home after he left his wife and children, Hyde began to constantly pester her to marry him. He wasn’t above pulling tricks that she was accustomed to doing herself, such as painting a dark picture of circumstances in an effort to gain sympathy. “I’m dying,” he would tell her. “You know, it’s my heart, Marilyn. I’m going and it’ll be soon. And when I die, you’ll be a very rich woman if you marry me.” Those kinds of pleas from Johnny pretty much fell on deaf ears. Marilyn would sleep with him—he was very nice, and in a way she loved him, even if she wasn’t in love with him—but she wasn’t going to marry him. However, there was another wedding in the family: Gladys’s.
Still working for the William Morris Agency under Johnny Hyde, Bill Davis recalled, “I was in the office with Johnny when Marilyn rushed in looking wild-eyed. I remember she had on a white blouse that was buttoned all the way to the top with long sleeves. And she had on white slacks. The reason I remember this is because it struck me that for someone known as a sex goddess she sure didn’t show much skin in her day-to-day activities.” *
“Johnny, oh, Johnny. I need your help,” Marilyn said, according to Davis’s memory.
“Sure, doll. What’s the problem?”
“My mother has married some loser and I’m very worried about her,” Marilyn said, upset. She sat down in a chair, seeming exhausted. She then said that she wanted Johnny to find out anything he could about John Eley. “I cannot believe my mother would get married,” she said. “Can you even believe it?”
Since Johnny had never met Gladys, he didn’t have an opinion about her marriage. However, he would definitely help Marilyn, he said. And he had the right connections to be successful at it. While she sat before him, he picked up the telephone and hired a private investigator to look into the matter.
A couple weeks later, Gladys wrote to her daughter Berniece, who had just moved to Florida with her husband and child. She explained that Eley was from Boise, Idaho, and had just arrived in California “for work,” though she didn’t specify what kind of employment. She sent a picture of him. “He looks nice enough,” Berniece told Marilyn during a telephone call. “Well, Johnny is looking into it for me,” Marilyn told Berniece. “He’ll get to the bottom of it. I trust him.”
Soon, information from Johnny’s PI began to trickle in about John and Gladys. Apparently, they had met at a bar somewhere in Santa Barbara. Eley had told his friends that he’d “landed Marilyn Monroe’s old lady,” and that he was waiting for the moment when he might meet the screen star. Meanwhile, he was going to try to take care of her mother, whom he described as “the craziest broad you’ve ever met.” He said that Gladys heard voices in her head, talked to herself, and, as he put it to one friend, “scares the shit out of me.” When Johnny Hyde relayed this information to Marilyn, she was angry. “That bastard,” she said. “Is he trying to use my mother to get to me?” Hyde wasn’t sure, but he agreed that it appeared that way. He promised to continue looking into the matter.
A few weeks later, Marilyn received a letter from John Eley, sent to her home. He wrote that he was taking care of her mother but that he needed money to do it. If she cared anything about Gladys, he wrote, then she would not ignore his request and would send him a check for a thousand dollars. She brought the letter to Johnny and asked what she should do. “Well, you can’t give this sonofabitch a thousand bucks, that’s for sure. That’s a lot of money,” Johnny said. It was decided that Marilyn shouldn’t respond to the letter at all. If she did, Johnny reasoned, Eley would believe that he had a communication with her and would not stop with the money requests. All of this was very difficult for Marilyn, and it weighed heavily on her. “I think I’m going to be dealing with this kind of thing for the rest of my life,” she told Johnny Hyde. He smiled at her gently. “You always said you wanted a mother, sweetheart. Well, you got one. We don’t get to choose our mothers, kid.”
Shortly thereafter, Berniece received a letter from Eley. Now he wondered if it would be possible for him and Gladys to move to Florida and live with Berniece and her husband and child. He said that he repaired appliances to make a living and was working out of his truck. His plan was to park his truck in front of the Miracle home; he and Gladys would live with the family as he worked. This sounded like a terrible idea to Berniece. When she told Marilyn about it, Marilyn was also skeptical. She said that she didn’t know what her mother had gotten herself into with John Eley, but she was certain it wasn’t anything good.
She was right.
In about a month’s time, Johnny Hyde’s PI came back with the news: John Eley was a bigamist—he had another wife in Idaho.
