However, since Johnny appeared unmoved, Natasha spelled it out for him. “She’s hearing voices,” she told him.
Johnny wasn’t surprised by Natasha’s news. It was as if he already knew about Marilyn’s “voices.” Perhaps she had already confided in him about them. He certainly didn’t throw his hands in the air and surrender, as Natasha had fantasized. Instead, he was immediately concerned for Marilyn and wanted to do something to help her. “Johnny thought of doctors as magicians,” explained a coworker of his. “He was like most everybody else in the business back then. If an actor couldn’t shoot a scene, the first person to call was a doctor.”
Whether to treat the flu or an anxiety attack, Johnny knew that barbiturates had become a staple in the world of filmmaking. As it would happen, he would be the first to introduce Marilyn to a brand-new reality, one formed by barbiturates. He believed that such drugs could make his girlfriend’s world feel like a safer place to her. He also thought, as did many people at that time, that there was no downside to these pharmaceuticals. He viewed them as a portal to happiness and fulfillment and saw the fact that they were almost exclusively accessible to the rich and powerful as evidence of their effectiveness. Perhaps he was using as a measure of the effectiveness of drugs the example of the brilliant career of Judy Garland, who for the past decade had been like an ATM for Metro: deposit drugs—uppers, downers, whatever—and out comes money, and lots of it.
At Johnny’s behest, studio doctors began prescribing drugs to Marilyn on a regular basis. She happily took them. They helped, at least in the short term. Her anxieties were decreased. The voices became softer and bothered her less. Of course, there was one problem with the new reality being entered by Marilyn Monroe. It wasn’t real.
“She’d worked hard and, it seemed, had been working hard on herself for some time,” John Huston would later say. “I remember the audition was interesting because the scene was supposed to be on a couch and we had no couch there, so she laid on the floor for the reading. She wasn’t happy with the audition, though, and asked if she could do it again. I said, of course. Do it as many times as you like. She didn’t know it, but she had the part before she even said one word.
“I just knew she was right for it before I even saw her audition for it. She was so vulnerable, so sweet, so willing, you just melted in her presence. I remember thinking, how can anyone not cast her in any movie? She was perfect for the part in
Of course, Marilyn would make sure Natasha was on the set with her every day. In fact, there’s a moment in the movie where Marilyn can be seen glancing off set, presumably at Natasha for direction.
“I don’t know what I did,” Marilyn said when she finished her work on
Years later, Marilyn Monroe noted that she first saw the finished movie with Johnny at her side, holding her hand. They didn’t speak on the way home, both lost in thought about the magnitude of her achievement. “His heart was happy for me,” she recalled. “I could feel his unselfishness and deep kindness. No man had ever looked on me with such kindness. He not only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane. He knew all the pain and all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like that,” she concluded. “I wished with all my heart that I could love him back.”
In January, Marilyn filmed another awful movie that Johnny Hyde had secured for her, another bit part, this one in a roller-derby film,
Johnny Hyde’s rationale for having Marilyn make brief appearances in such terrible movies was that he hoped if she were seen enough onscreen, MGM might actually offer her a contract. That didn’t happen, though. In the meantime, Marilyn would end up spending most of her free time posing for ads, pinups, and photo essays—anything to make a living while she waited to break into what she was finding to be a very tough business.
Meanwhile, Johnny continued to squire Marilyn around town. Ironically, the power had shifted in their relationship. She had gone into it feeling that she needed him. Now, a year later, he was acting as if he needed her, and he seemed to want to do whatever he could think of to keep her happy lest she walk out on him. True,
In April of 1950, Johnny Hyde took Marilyn to meet writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was getting ready to mount a new film for Darryl Zanuck at Fox. It was
The story of