The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Johnny Hyde, and so many others kept pressuring him about it. Natasha Lytess also went with Marilyn as part of the deal, and would be getting $750 a week to coach Marilyn—$500 from Fox and $250 from Marilyn. So Marilyn was paying Natasha 50 percent of what Fox paid her that first year, which certainly showed how much value she placed on her work with the acting teacher. Natasha was making quite a bit more money that first year than Marilyn herself.

Another of her early films was Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (made in 1951, though released in 1952), adapted for the screen from an unsuccessful Broadway play by Clifford Odets, who, with the play’s director, Lee Strasberg, and others, had founded the controversial, left-leaning Group Theatre in the 1930s. The play starred Tallulah Bankhead as Mae Doyle, a part assumed by Barbara Stanwyck in the film. Despite her prominent billing, Marilyn’s role was minor. Still, she received excellent notices, among them these words of praise by Alton Cook in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: “The girl has a refreshing exuberance, an abundance of girlish high spirits. She is a forceful actress, too.… She has definitely stamped herself as a gifted new star.… Her role here is not very big, but she makes it dominant.” If Fox’s loaning out of its contract player to RKO was meant to test the waters as to her box-office potential, as has been speculated, the studio got its answer. Thus reassured, Fox set about finding scripts to showcase her obvious charms, pairing her with more established leading men.

Jasper Dies

By the fall of 1951, Marilyn Monroe had moved out of Natasha Lytess’s apartment and begun sharing a home with Shelley Winters in Hollywood. There were no hard feelings, apparently, since the three women remained social together after Marilyn moved in with Shelley. That said, she would have a lot more fun with the thrill-seeking Winters than she ever did with the often maudlin Natasha Lytess. Also, at the suggestion of one of her intimates, Elia Kazan, Marilyn would begin taking additional acting classes with renowned drama teacher Michael Chekhov, known for his acting technique called “The Method.” She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing more than to challenge herself with more complex parts—and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature. He agreed. She had a lot to give, she just needed to sharpen her skills. (It’s not known how Natasha Lytess felt about Marilyn’s second acting teacher.) Kazan also suggested that Marilyn take more classes at UCLA, and she did. She enrolled there for a course in “Backgrounds of Literature,” described as “Historical, social and cultural aspects of various periods with an introduction to the literature, itself.” Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it. This time, though, she caused quite a sensation on campus, unlike her previous experience there when she wasn’t as well known. She would have much preferred to blend in with the other students, but how could she?

At this same time, Marilyn received a telephone call from her half sister Berniece. Berniece’s father, Jasper —who had been married to Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, and who had absconded with her children so many years ago—had died. Even though Marilyn never met him, she did have some knowledge of him. When, as Norma Jeane, she had become old enough to start asking questions about her father, Gladys had told her that he had died in an automobile accident. (Marilyn would later say that she never really believed it. Once, she said, when she pushed the issue, Gladys “went into the bedroom and locked herself in.”) Gladys had kept a photo of Edward Mortenson— Jasper—on her wall, seen by Norma Jeane on the few occasions she would visit. When the young girl finally inquired as to the identity of the man in the picture, Gladys lied and said that he was her father. Marilyn then fell completely under his spell, she would later say, even if he was just a man in a photograph. “It felt so good to have a father, to be able to look at his picture and know I belonged to him,” she later recalled. “And what a wonderful photograph it was. He wore a slouch hat a little gaily on the side. There was a lively smile in his eyes, and he had a thin mustache like Clark Gable. I felt very warm toward the picture.” In fact, Marilyn recalled that looking at that photo of her father was “my first happy time.” She said she spent many nights dreaming of him and fantasizing about the kind of man he might have been if only he’d been in her life.

Now the man Marilyn had spun so many fantasies around was gone. Jasper was the only parent Berniece had ever known. The most Marilyn could do was feel sorry for Berniece’s loss and stash her conflicted feelings about Jasper in her heart—along with all of the other ambivalent feelings she had about her parents.

Soon after Jasper’s death, authorities in Pineville, Kentucky, noted that he was listed on Marilyn’s birth certificate as her father. This gave them a great excuse to be in contact with a movie star. Marilyn was pestered by lawyers in Kentucky for months as to whether she wanted to stake a claim on Jasper’s meager estate, until finally she made it clear—via her own attorney—that she had no such interest. Also at about this time, she hired a robust woman named Inez Melson, with large round glasses and an officious demeanor, as her business manager. She was instructed to try to send money to Gladys on a regular basis—difficult to do since it was always so difficult to keep track of Gladys’s whereabouts. Though she had filed for divorce from John Eley, Gladys was still with him, as far as anyone knew, and the two were traveling across the country together.

One evening, Marilyn received a long-distance collect telephone call from Gladys, though she had no idea from where it originated. Gladys said that she didn’t want to be found, that she felt let down by Marilyn and Berniece, and that the two of them were “very, very disappointing daughters.” She ranted on about how much she loved Marilyn and that she had only given her up because her own mother, Della, had insisted upon it. She wanted to know how much longer Marilyn was going to hold it against her. Then she said that when Marilyn was a couple of years old, she caught “the whooping cough” from her foster brother, Lester, and that Gladys had moved into Ida Bolender’s home and nursed Norma Jeane back to health. “And I stayed there for a whole month with you,” she told Marilyn. “And you’ve never even thanked me for it.” Marilyn had a very vague memory of Ida once telling her about something like that, but she certainly didn’t remember it happening. It was very rare for Gladys to bring up the past. Marilyn thought perhaps it meant that Gladys was showing some improvement, because her memory was quite clear, and she suggested that Gladys return home as soon as possible so that they could discuss it and perhaps work things out between them. “But that’s not possible,” Gladys said, “because there are people telling me what to do, and they have told me not to go back to California under any circumstances. I could be in grave danger there.” Now Gladys’s illness was talking again. The disturbing telephone call ended with her warning Marilyn to be careful. “You’re being watched,” she told her daughter. “You must believe me, Norma Jeane.” Then she hung up.

Marilyn later told Rupert Allan that she cried herself to sleep that night—but not before making sure all of her shades were drawn.

Don’t Bother to Knock

At about this time, Marilyn began work on what would be her most important role to date. Fox boss Darryl Zanuck, always ambivalent about Marilyn Monroe’s film future, was not quite ready to assign her to lead roles in “A” pictures and continued to look for more modest projects, budget-wise, for his contractee. He required her to screen test for Don’t Bother to Knock, which had the following story line: Nell Forbes, recently released from a mental institution, is recommended for a babysitting job by her uncle (Elisha Cook Jr.), the elevator operator in the hotel where the action takes place, while the child’s wealthy parents, Peter and Ruth Jones (Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle), are having dinner. Dressed in a sexy negligee belonging to Mrs. Jones and wearing her jewelry and perfume, Nell begins a flirtatious, at-a-distance, slow dance of seduction for a cynical airline pilot, Jed Towers (Richard Widmark), who occupies a room across the courtyard. After Jed figures out her room number and knocks on the door, Nell invites him in, creating a situation that soon turns dangerous, with Nell alternately threatening to throw herself out the window or kill her young ward, Bunny (Donna Corcoran), now fully awake and terrified. Anne Bancroft, after a busy year acting in a series of TV programs, would make her feature film debut in this movie as Lyn Leslie, a cabaret singer in the hotel’s nightclub and the ex-girlfriend of Jed.