CNN - 'Marilyn Monroe' by Barbara Leaming

(CNN) -- To those who think they have heard all there is to hear about Marilyn Monroe, this work might make them think again. Barbara Leaming's book tells a tale of sexual, psychological, and political intrigue of the highest order. This is a compelling portrait of a woman at the center of a drama with immensely high stakes, a drama in which the other players are some of the most fascinating characters from the worlds of movies, theater, and politics.

CHAPTER ONE

On January 16, 1951, a black Lincoln convertible pulled into the driveway at 2000 Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan had just traveled cross-country by train from New York. Miller, tall and lean, had a dark, angular, weathered face and a receding hairline. Kazan, known as Gadget or Gadg to his friends, was small with a large nose and a mop of wavy black hair. The men were in Los Angeles to set up their first film together. Miller had written a screenplay for Kazan to direct, and both had a great deal riding on the venture. But already there was a serious problem. On the train, Kazan had read the most recent draft of The Hook, a story of union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront, and he'd been disappointed by what Miller had accomplished so far. Kazan made it clear that the script needed to be much better.

Greeted at the front door by a servant, Miller and Kazan entered the home of Charles Feldman, a prominent Hollywood agent and independent film producer. He was producing Kazan's latest project, the film of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marion Brando and Vivien Leigh. As Feldman told his friend and investor Joseph P. Kennedy, he believed that Kazan's work had been outstanding. Shooting had been completed before the holidays, but some post-production work remained to be done. Feldman, away on business and anxious to keep the director happy, had offered Kazan the run of his art-filled house. An inveterate collector, Feldman purchased paintings and bibelots in quantity, often sight unseen. The furniture, mostly English antiques and modern pieces, was kept to a minimum to emphasize the Chagalls, Renoirs, and Toulouse-Lautrecs that covered the walls. There were Thai bronze Buddhas. There were Ming and Sui stone heads. There were T'ang and Chou horses and birds.

In the garden, steps led up to a heated swimming pool, beside which Miller set up his typewriter on a glass table. To understand the strain he was under, it is essential to keep in mind that The Hook was not just any screenplay. It was to be the work with which Miller followed Death of a Salesman, which had been a huge success on Broadway in 1949, directed by Kazan. Many critics thought the thirty-three-year-old Miller had written the great American play, and some pronounced it the century's finest drama. There was a price to be paid for acclaim of that magnitude. After the premiere, Miller confided to his producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, that he knew he was going to have a hell of a time topping that. Indeed, there had been moments when Miller wondered whether he would be able to write another play at all.

As Kazan perceived, Miller was not a playwright who invented stories. He needed to find his material in his own life. Yet The Hook was not based on anything Miller had actually experienced. The screenplay did not come out of a crisis that he himself had endured, and as a result he did not completely trust it. Miller began to worry that for a man his age, he had not lived enough. Yet the pressure was on to revise quickly while they pitched to Twentieth, Warner Bros., and Columbia Pictures. Unfortunately, Miller was not like his rival Tennessee Williams, who could work anywhere, under almost any conditions. He was a creature of routine, who found it difficult to write in unfamiliar surroundings.

Adding to the playwright's pressures was the threat of losing Kazan. In a period dubbed by the critic Brooks Atkinson "the Williams-Miller era," Kazan seemed at times to enjoy playing each against the other. Kazan, wavering provocatively between the two, had finally chosen to film A Streetcar Named Desire instead of Death of a Salesman. Afterward, when Williams had had every expectation that Kazan would do his new play, The Rose Tattoo, on Broadway, the director jumped ship at the last minute, going off to Los Angeles for The Hook. Evidently, Kazan was not about to give either playwright reason to take him for granted. Always the director, he controlled people and situations; he didn't like being controlled by them.

Kazan was then probably the most powerful director in America. On Broadway, he had directed three Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. His association with Miller and Williams had earned him a reputation for being a playwright's director, but he was also clearly an actor's director. His work with Marion Brando in the first stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 had broken exciting new ground. In Hollywood, he'd negotiated a six-picture, non-exclusive deal with Twentieth Century-Fox, at the highest per-picture director's salary the studio had ever agreed to pay. Kazan had already won an Academy Award as Best Director for Gentleman's Agreement, but it was Streetcar, on which the advance word was spectacular, that promised to be his watershed. Before that, despite the Oscar, Kazan had confided in Williams that he didn't really know how to make films yet. In Streetcar, Kazan demonstrated the mastery he so often showed on stage. The Hook was particularly important to Kazan, since he needed to follow Streetcar with another great film; that's why the current draft had been such a big disappointment. As it was, the script wasn't going to give either man what he needed.

There was an even greater pressure burdening Kazan. The House Un-American Activities Committee, which since 1938 had been attempting to document the Communist infiltration of American film and theater, was preparing to launch motion picture industry hearings in March. Its investigations had been given new and vigorous life by America's entry into the Korean War in 1950. Having belonged to the Communist Party for about nineteen months between 1934 and 1936, Kazan figured it was only a matter of time before HUAC summoned him. He was visible. He was successful. He was very much in demand. Those qualities made him a prime target for a committee whose raison d'etre, in large part, was publicity. "If they call me, I'll tell them to go fuck themselves," Kazan vowed to Kermit Bloomgarden. If he did that, his Hollywood career would be destroyed. The inevitability seemed to shadow Kazan's every action.

The climate of fear in Hollywood also had an impact on the particular project he and Miller were selling. When they met with Darryl Zanuck in his high-domed office at Twentieth Century-Fox, the production chief turned down The Hook because of its politically sensitive subject matter. Zanuck, though eager to begin Kazan's next film, wouldn't touch Miller's script, concerned as it was with unions and labor. Abe Lastfogel, Kazan's agent at William Morris, left the meeting and went directly to Warner Bros. to try his luck there.

Meanwhile, Kazan had something else he wanted to do on the Fox lot. Ostensibly, he took Miller to the set of As Young as You Feel to visit the director, Harmon Jones, who had previously worked as Kazan's film editor. But the real reason was to see a girl he had heard about from Charlie Feldman. The detour offered a way to blow off some of the tension.

Before Miller and Kazan actually saw her, her name echoed through the studio. "Marilyn!" an assistant shouted frantically while Jones told Kazan about the trouble he'd been having with the twenty-four-year-old actress. She was forever disappearing from the set. Worse, when she returned, her eyes were often swollen from crying, making it difficult to film her. Fortunately, her role was a small one. This was to be her final day, if only Jones could get the shots he needed. She appeared at last, her skin-tight black dress disclosing a body perfect even by Hollywood standards. She had blue-gray eyes, a turned-up nose, and luminous white skin. She wore her fine blonde hair pinned on top of her head.

Marilyn Monroe was in crisis. When she finished work on this picture, she had no further assignments. After today, she had nothing to do and nowhere to go. A career that meant everything to her might well be over. Though Marilyn was under contract to Twentieth, Darryl Zanuck, who loathed her, was unlikely to pick up her option in May. Though she had signed a three-year contract with the William Morris Agency as recently as December 5, suddenly no one there would take her calls. Marilyn felt as if she were about to fall off the face of the earth.

Highlighting Marilyn's predicament was the fact that she had just had the best year of her professional life. She owed it all to Johnny Hyde, a partner and senior agent at William Morris. For two years, he had worked tirelessly on her behalf. Very much in love with Marilyn, the dwarf-like agent believed in her, and in her dream of being a star, as no one had done before. He was even rumored to have personally underwritten the new contract he had negotiated for her at Twentieth. Before meeting Johnny, Marilyn had briefly been under contract at both Twentieth and Columbia, but neither studio had kept her on. Hyde was determined that things were going to be different this time.

For a while, it seemed they would be. By 1950, Hyde's efforts had begun to pay off. Marilyn attracted attention in small but showy roles in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve. It was thanks to Johnny that she had an opportunity to work with the best directors; it was thanks to Johnny that she knew who the best directors were. But just when all that she had been working for finally seemed within her grasp, the fifty-five-year-old Hyde had a fatal heart attack in Palm Springs on December 18. Marilyn had refused to join him there for the weekend. She blamed herself for his death. The day after Hyde's funeral, Marilyn attempted suicide, swallowing the contents of a bottle of barbiturates. Though a roommate discovered her in time, in the days and weeks that followed she never really came back to life. With no one to fight for her anymore, Marilyn seemed to have given up. In January, she reported for work on As Young as You Feel, the last film Johnny had arranged for her, but from the first it was evident that she was merely going through the motions.

Miller and Kazan watched her struggle through a scene. Between takes, she fled to a dark, deserted sound stage littered with office furniture. When Kazan caught up with her, he found her in tears. They had met before, though he assumed she didn't remember -- Marilyn and Johnny had once had dinner with Kazan and Abe Lastfogel, Hyde's partner at William Morris. Now, Kazan offered consolation for Johnny's death. Marilyn looked away, far too upset to reply. She returned for another take. When she finished, Miller looked on as Kazan asked her to dinner. Marilyn said no, and the men went off to the studio cafeteria.

So that was it for Marilyn. Her work on the picture was done. There seemed to be nothing left for her at Twentieth. Since Johnny's death, her phone had rung constantly, but it was always Charlie Feldman or one of the other men in their group, each of them eager to be first to sleep with Johnny's girl before passing her on to the others. The only sign that anyone else remembered her was a package from Johnny's family, containing a stack of nude photographs of Marilyn that had been discovered in the top drawer of his bureau. As Marilyn's recent behavior suggested, part of her just wanted to curl up and die.

But Kazan's fortuitous arrival indicated that this was no time to indulge in self-pity. Whatever Kazan may have thought, Marilyn knew exactly who he was. As it happened, she had previously encountered him not once but twice. The previous August, Johnny Hyde had taken her to Danny Kaye's party to welcome Vivien Leigh to Hollywood for A Streetcar Named Desire. Kazan, Leigh's dinner partner, had been very much the power player in the room that evening. Now, at a moment when Marilyn seemed about to lose everything, the important director had walked into her life. On the Fox lot, Kazan was known to be casting the film Viva Zapata!, then being written by John Steinbeck. If Marilyn failed to seize the opportunity, it might not present itself again. It didn't matter that she was mentally and physically exhausted. Marilyn, through an act of will, pulled herself out of the mists of the depression that had engulfed her. Soon, she was on her way to the studio cafeteria, having decided to find Kazan and say yes to his dinner invitation.

Marilyn began to spend nights in Kazan's room at Feldman's, while Miller slept alone in a room down the hall. By day, Miller, powerfully attracted to Marilyn himself, swam laps in the pool in an effort to cool off. Marilyn, appointed "mascot," accompanied Kazan and Miller on their rounds with The Hook. She loved Gadg's idea of playing a practical joke on Harry Cohn, the production chief at Columbia. Kazan would introduce Marilyn as his private secretary, Miss Bauer, who was there to take notes on Cohn's reaction to the script. In fact, she and Cohn had met in the past, when he had banned her from the lot after she refused to accompany him on a yacht to Catalina Island. Marilyn's rage over the incident had festered, and now she welcomed an opportunity to laugh at his expense. Despite her carefully cultivated soft, breathy voice, Marilyn was full of anger. As it turned out, going to Harry Cohn's office may not have been such a good idea after all; inevitably, the visit reminded Marilyn that without Johnny Hyde's protection, she faced the loss of yet another studio contract.

By the time Charlie Feldman returned from New York on Sunday, January 21, Marilyn appeared to have lined up a new protector. Feldman had to give the devil her due -- she had worked quickly, replacing Johnny with Kazan. Feldman was a bit of a dandy, sporting a Clark Gable mustache and a gold signet ring on his right pinky finger; he had planned to be the first to take Johnny's girl to bed, but he accepted defeat gracefully. When he drew up a guest list for a buffet dinner party in Miller's honor, he listed Marilyn simply as Kazan's girl; that being her current identity, no other name seemed necessary.

All week the house in Coldwater Canyon was a hive of activity in anticipation of Friday night. A dance band was hired. Heaping platters of beef tenderloin, chopped chicken liver, and marinated herring were ordered from the Hillcrest Country Club. Miller had been having trouble with his wife back in Brooklyn, and Kazan, who also had a wife in the east, had resolved to get him a girl in California. So the party was conceived as what Feldman and his friends called a stag. Feldman put together similar parties for Joe Kennedy's son Jack when he was in town. Men, whether married or not, came alone. Girls, as they were designated, arrived in their own cars. That way the men would not be required to take them home afterward. Marilyn knew that Feldman's friends Raymond Hakim and Pat De Cicco, both of whom had also been hounding her since Johnny's death, would be at the stag. But she had every reason to expect that Kazan's presence would force them to keep their distance. Hakim was an Egyptian-born film producer, De Cicco a procurer for Howard Hughes and other wealthy men in Hollywood.

Friday arrived and Kazan decided not to take Marilyn to the party after all, claiming to have some business to attend to. In fact, he went off to meet another girl. At the last minute, Miller was assigned to Marilyn as his substitute. She knew precisely what that meant, of course. She had slept with Kazan, then been passed on to the next guy. When Miller called to say he would pick her up, Marilyn, well aware of how these things worked, said it wouldn't be necessary. She could get to Feldman's on her own. To her astonishment, the gravel-voiced Miller insisted.

The actress Evelyn Keyes had had dinner with Feldman and Joe Schenck, an executive producer at Fox, two nights previously. In the course of the evening, Feldman invited her to the party for Arthur Miller. Witty, intelligent, well-read, and recently divorced from John Huston, Keyes was very much interested in meeting the author of Death of a Salesman. But when Miller appeared on Friday night, there could be no mistaking that he was "totally wrapped up" in Marilyn Monroe. "I don't think he ever looked my way," Keyes recalled. Marilyn, as she made her entrance, resembled nothing so much as "the prow of a ship." She was "all front." She actually seemed to lean forward as she walked, her breasts "in advance."

Marilyn must have been nervous coming into that crowded, dimly-lit, music-filled room. She knew that Feldman, Hakim, De Cicco and the other men would all be laughing at her. She knew that it was obvious she had already been passed on. She knew people were saying that she had been foolish to have repeatedly turned down Johnny Hyde's proposals of marriage; and in the light of current circumstances, it crossed her mind that perhaps they were right.

Soon, they were seated on a sofa, Miller leaning slightly toward her. Evelyn Keyes observed them there. Miller, utterly absorbed, watched Marilyn as though he were "studying this phenomenon." After they had talked a while, Marilyn, who believed that men only like happy girls, kicked off her high-heeled shoes and tucked her slender legs under her. Miller told her about his troubles with his wife. Marilyn would not have been surprised if he had asked her to come to his room or to the car. Probably, she would have accepted. Instead, he took her big toe in his fingers and squeezed gently.

Kazan came to the party late, his date having failed to work out. At this point, Marilyn was his to reclaim if he wished. As far as anyone was concerned, she was still Kazan's girl. Miller had merely been his stand-in. But once Kazan saw Arthur and Marilyn dancing together, he pretended to be weary and asked his friend to see her home. On the way back to her apartment, Miller again made no move to sleep with her, though he desired her very much. Marilyn, accustomed to being pawed by men, interpreted his shyness and awkwardness as a sign of respect. No man, not even Johnny Hyde, had ever treated her like that.

Miller feared where this was headed. Being true to himself meant a great deal to him. He thought of himself as a man of conscience. He thought of himself as a man guided by moral principles. In his notebook, later, he would meditate on the inadequacy of guilt as a basis for morality. He sincerely wanted to do the right thing. How could such a man betray his wife, the mother of his children, the woman who had supported him when he was a struggling writer? Miller, torn, returned to New York the following day.

His departure left Marilyn in a quandary. She told herself that she was in love with Arthur Miller. But it was Kazan who would be staying on at Feldman's. Had the director really passed her on, or would he expect their arrangement to go back to what it had been before that night? Marilyn couldn't wait to see Miller again, but she also didn't want to give up the chance to be cast in one of Kazan's films. She had to decide what to do about Kazan.

* * *

Arthur Miller had gone back to a world that Marilyn could hardly imagine. His life in New York and Connecticut had almost no reality to her. At the same time, Miller can barely have comprehended the world Marilyn came from. He knew nothing of the bleak, impoverished, violent childhood in the Los Angeles area that had fueled her hopes and dreams.

Marilyn wanted to be a movie star so very badly because it was the only way she knew to escape a chaotic, nightmarish existence that constantly threatened to draw her back in. From the time she was a little girl, passed from one grim foster home to another, that dream had given her a reason to go on living. Of course, many children in those circumstances fantasize about a film career. In Marilyn's case, the accident of geography, the fact that she grew up in and around Hollywood, made her dream seem achingly within reach.

Marilyn, then called Norma Jeane Baker, spent her earliest years in Hawthorne, a suburb of Los Angeles. She had been farmed out to a foster family by a sick mother, who was barely able to make ends meet with various low-end jobs in the film industry. Norma Jeane's life had nothing to do with the movies. Because of her foster parents' strict religious beliefs, movies were never mentioned. All that changed, however, when Norma Jeane, aged seven, went to live briefly with her mother, Gladys Baker. Hardly had mother and daughter settled in when Gladys became ill again and had to be hospitalized. Responsibility for Norma Jeane fell on Gladys's best friend, Grace McKee, who worked with her in a film laboratory. It was "Aunt Grace" who first encouraged Norma Jeane to believe that she was destined to be a star like Jean Harlow.

Indeed, Grace was the only person in the child's life who seemed to take any interest in her whatsoever. She was the only person to believe in Norma Jeane. But for all the cheerleading, Grace was in no position to care for a little girl. So Norma Jeane went back to living in a series of foster homes until Grace ran out of families with which to place Gladys's daughter. The Los Angeles Orphans Home, an enclave of red-brick buildings on North El Centro Avenue, was the only remaining option.

On September 13, 1935, Grace led nine-year-old Norma Jeane to the orphanage door. When the child saw the huge black sign with gold lettering, she shrieked that there must be some mistake. She was not an orphan and did not belong here. Grace had to drag her, screaming and kicking, inside. Norma Jeane had endured poverty. She had endured being treated by certain families as little more than an indentured servant. She had endured having no real home of her own. But finding herself locked in an orphanage was another matter entirely. As far as the child was concerned, it meant that she really was no one in the world. And that feeling of utter worthlessness hurt more than anything ever had in her short life.

On the first night, a tearful Norma Jeane was assigned to one of twenty-seven metal beds in a huge dormitory. After the lights went out, she slipped out of bed and went to the window. In the distance, she could see the water tower at the Gower Street studios of RKO Pictures. The sight comforted her, partly because she remembered entering the studio gates with her mother, who had once worked there. But even more, it was a symbol of the glittering fairy-tale kingdom which Grace had often promised she would one day inhabit. In the nights that followed, Norma Jeane made a point of always taking a peek at the water tower before she tried to sleep. At a moment when the sad, lonely little girl was on the brink of utter despair, that sight, and the hope it represented, provided a lifeline.

Almost every weekend, Grace, who had been appointed Norma Jeane's legal guardian, would show up at the orphanage. She brought gifts of lipstick and rouge. Before Norma Jeane was ten, she had grown accustomed to being coiffed and made up by Grace as though she were an adult. Grace, harping on the fact that Norma Jeane resembled a little movie star, regularly took her to the movies -- less for entertainment than for instruction. She inculcated the child with a powerful sense of what her future must be.

Shortly before her eleventh birthday, Norma Jeane went to live in Van Nuys with Grace and her fourth husband, Erwin "Doc" Goddard, a sporadically employed aircraft worker. But the arrangement did not last. Doc, who drank heavily, made sexual advances to Norma Jeane, so Grace shipped the child off to other foster homes. By the time Norma Jeane was twelve, she had been assaulted in at least two of these homes, and possibly others. Time and again, Grace had to find another family to take her in. That in each instance it was the victim, not the victimizer, who was expelled sent a powerful message to Norma Jeane: She had to be punished because somehow she had brought the attack on herself.

Through all this horror, one thing appeared to sustain the poor, abused child. Under Grace's tutelage, she had become completely absorbed by the fantasy of the movies -- a world of glamor and beauty that bore no relation to her own existence. Yet that fantasy seemed attainable, if only because she had spent her entire life within a few dozen miles of Hollywood. And it clearly helped that Grace believed in her to the extent that she did. No matter how dreadful Norma Jeane's day-to-day reality, Grace persisted in her promises that the future would be different: One day Norma Jeane would be a star, and no one would dare mistreat her again.

That fantasy gave Norma Jeane hope, but it also confused her. Grace was sending mixed signals. On the one hand, Grace repeatedly communicated that Norma Jeane had been thrown out of Grace's own and other households because she had behaved provocatively. On the other hand, Grace encouraged her to believe that it was precisely her beauty and sexuality that would eventually win her better treatment. Norma Jeane would later be rewarded for the very behavior that had previously elicited punishment. Further confusing the child was the fact that the abuse she had endured had been her only experience of power. Terrible as those experiences were, they suggested that Norma Jeane had the ability to attract attention in a world that was otherwise indifferent to her. All the talk of becoming a movie star reinforced the child's sense that her sexuality was the one form of power she had.

When Norma Jeane was fifteen, it was Grace -- of all people -- who trod on the dream she had done so much to create. Grace announced that she and Doc were moving to West Virginia and could not take Norma Jeane with them. She offered Norma Jeane a choice: either she married a young man Grace had selected, or she would have to return to the orphanage. The prospective bridegroom was James Dougherty, the twenty-one-year-old son of a former neighbor. Norma Jeane chose marriage, though that meant dropping out of high school before she had completed her sophomore year. On June 19, 1942, three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Norma Jeane Baker married Jimmy Dougherty. She seemed to forget about the movies, apparently forever. Jimmy was a kind, decent man; he gave his young bride so much attention that she didn't seem to mind that her dream had been put aside. Maybe the attention would do after all.

Norma Jeane might well have remained a housewife in the San Fernando Valley for the rest of her life if World War II had not intervened. The young husband left his job at the Lockheed aircraft factory to join the Merchant Marine. In spring 1944, he shipped out. Like many wartime wives, Norma Jeane went to live with her husband's parents and found a job in a defense factory. The Radio Plane Company produced the radio-controlled small airplanes that Army gunners used for target practice. Jimmy's mother was employed as a nurse in the infirmary. Seventeen-year-old Norma Jeane worked on the assembly line, first as a chute-packer, later as a glue-sprayer.

In 1945, Army photographers from the First Motion Picture Unit came to Radio Plane to film women in war work. A young corporal named David Conover spotted Norma Jeane and took her picture. When the results came back from the lab, Conover returned to the factory and told her she was pretty enough to model. That was all Norma Jeane needed to hear; in an instant, her old dream of escape had been reactivated.

Conover asked Norma Jeane to pose again. Her husband was due on shore leave just then, so Norma Jeane put the photographer off until Jimmy had gone back to sea. Dougherty left again in June 1945, just as Norma Jeane celebrated her nineteenth birthday. The moment he was gone, she moved out of her in-laws' house, quit her job, and never looked back.

By the end of the month, Conover had taken a set of pictures of Norma Jeane for Yank magazine. He showed the photographs to a friend, who in turn put her in touch with the Blue Book Modeling Agency in Los Angeles. The agency passed her on to a film agent, who landed her a screen test at Twentieth Century-Fox. A little over a year after Conover first photographed Norma Jeane, she had divorced her husband, signed a contract at Twentieth, and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

On August 26, 1946, Grace accompanied Marilyn to Twentieth. Marilyn was still a minor, so her guardian had to sign the contract as well. Miraculously, everything seemed to be working precisely as Grace had once predicted. In a way, it had all been so easy; from Conover on, everybody had been kind and helpful. Marilyn was confident that she was about to become a movie star at last. In the months that followed, she did whatever Twentieth asked. She worked. She studied. She had her chance, and she applied herself with an earnestness that was disarming. But by the end of the year, Marilyn had had only two bit parts. Worse, when her contract came up for renewal, the studio decided to let her go because production chief Darryl Zanuck thought she was unattractive. On July 26, 1947, when Twentieth notified Marilyn that her option would not be picked up, her film career screeched to a halt. Marilyn could always eke out a living as a magazine model, but that was not the dream Grace had instilled in her. Horribly disappointed, Marilyn was prepared to do anything to get her career moving again.

By the fall of 1947, she had joined countless other starlets, models, and assorted young women on the Hollywood party circuit. Like them, Marilyn hoped to meet someone who could help her get a part in a film. At one of these parties, early in 1948, Marilyn encountered Pat De Cicco. He invited her to one of the town's Saturday-night institutions, Joe Schenck's all-night, high-stakes gin rummy game in Holmby Hills. Marilyn knew exactly who Schenck was. Until only a few months ago, he had been one of her bosses at Twentieth, where he served as an executive producer. Schenck had been board chairman at United Artists in the 1920s and had founded Twentieth Century with Darryl Zanuck in the thirties. When Twentieth merged with Fox in 1935, he had been appointed board chairman.

At sixty-nine, Schenck was said to be one of the richest men in Hollywood. His card games were attended by top studio executives, producers, and directors. De Cicco, Schenck's court jester, provided girls. In exchange for dinner and the chance to meet some of Hollywood's most important players, the women were expected to make themselves available to "Uncle" Joe's friends. When a guest absented himself from the card table, more often than not it was to take a girl of his choice to one of the mansion's many bedrooms.

Marilyn became a regular at Uncle Joe's. Schenck took a special liking to her, and soon she came to be known as "Joe Schenck's girl." She stood behind his chair as he played cards. She served drinks and emptied ashtrays. Before long, Marilyn was at the house several nights a week for dinner. To keep the old man happy, she even briefly moved into the guest cottage in order to be nearby when he wanted her at night. Uncle Joe repaid Marilyn by persuading Harry Cohn to sign her to a six-month contract. She started at Columbia Pictures in March 1948.

At the studio, Marilyn fell in love with Fred Karger, a vocal coach who had been assigned to work with her. Swept away by her feelings, Marilyn informed Uncle Joe that she could no longer live at the estate; she moved to an apartment of her own. Karger, however, was less serious about the relationship than she was. Marilyn desperately wanted to marry, and she was crushed when Karger announced that he didn't feel comfortable with her as a stepmother for his child from a previous marriage. Nonetheless, Marilyn's devotion to Karger meant that she turned down an invitation to spend the weekend on Harry Cohn's yacht, and that killed any chance she might have had of being kept on by Columbia after her contract expired on September 9, 1948.

So Marilyn was back on the party circuit -- except this time she no longer had the protection of being Joe Schenck's girl. When Marilyn attended Uncle Joe's parties, or accompanied him to Palm Springs for the weekend, he was happy to pass her around to friends. There were plenty of men willing to take Marilyn upstairs for half an hour, but no one seemed even remotely interested in casting her in a film. Though Marilyn regularly passed in view of some of Hollywood's best directors and producers, no one guessed her potential. No one suspected she was star material. Most didn't even think she was worth a second look. She appeared indistinguishable from all the other girls. When Marilyn approached Howard Hawks one weekend in Palm Springs, the director made it clear that he saw nothing special about her. He thought she was stupid and told her so. He wasn't even interested in a sexual encounter.

Though Marilyn did her best to play the happy girl, the party circuit was a brutal, degrading, sometimes dangerous business. At times, the men become violent. On one occasion, Marilyn found herself in a bedroom, with two men holding her down while a third tried to rape her. Somehow, she managed to break free, but the incident recalled the sexual assaults she had endured as a child, when Grace taught her to believe that somehow she had provoked the violence. Marilyn had come to these parties seeking help and attention. She had no illusions about what most of the guests expected from her and the other girls. She knew the risk of being attached to no particular man. She knew that once she was no longer Joe Schenck's girl, she was up for grabs -- or, at least, that was the way most men in this milieu perceived her. So on one level Marilyn believed she had brought the incident on herself. But on another she knew better, and she was filled with rage at the men who had done this to her.

Everything changed for Marilyn, however, at Sam Spiegel's New Year's Eve party in Beverly Hills on December 31, 1948. Recently, Marilyn had established herself as one of the producer's "house girls." Spiegel's parties were famous for -- in the words of Orson Welles -- "the best delicatessen and the best whores" in town. Indeed, some of the "house girls" were actually prostitutes hired by Spiegel to entertain his guests; others were starlets who hoped to advance their careers by catering to the needs of Spiegel's rich and powerful friends. An invitation to Spiegel's New Year's Eve gala was one of the hottest tickets in Hollywood. That year, the guests included the directors Otto Preminger, William Wyler, John Huston, Henry Hathaway, Jean Negulesco, Anatole Litvak, and many others.

One prominent guest, Johnny Hyde, was not in the best of moods that night. Two weeks before, his most important female client, Rita Hayworth, had sailed to Europe with Prince Aly Khan; at this point, it looked as if she had no intention of ever coming back. Harry Cohn, who had Hayworth under contract, was fuming. As Hyde entered Spiegel's house on North Crescent Drive, he seemed preoccupied and even a bit melancholy. Then he spotted Marilyn seated on a barstool across the room, and his demeanor changed entirely. Hyde, who had discovered Lana Turner, had a famous eye for beauty. In a room crowded with directors and producers, he looked at Marilyn and saw what not one of them had even remotely perceived: the makings of a great star.

Johnny Hyde was the first person, aside from Grace McKee, who saw Marilyn as she saw herself. But Johnny, unlike Grace, had the power to make Marilyn's dream a reality. And, despite his poor health, he had the will to keep pushing until others saw her as he' did. Johnny's close friendships with many of the most important men in the film industry made it inevitable that eventually he would be able to force one of them to give Marilyn a chance.

The week after Spiegel's party, Hyde invited Marilyn to Palm Springs for a few days. By the time they came back, the little fellow with a taste for tall blondes had fallen hopelessly in love. That was another thing that made Johnny different from anyone Marilyn had ever known in Hollywood. He sincerely cared for her. Certain of his friends and associates laughed that he was obsessed.

Soon, Johnny was taking Marilyn everywhere, in an effort to be certain people saw her. If he had lunch with a client at Romanoff's, more often than not Marilyn would be at his side. If he played poker with the boys, Marilyn would be nearby reading a book. At the card table, he used every opportunity to hint to friends like John Huston and William Wyler that they ought to give the kid a chance. On visits to film studios, Hyde carried a silver film tin containing Marilyn Monroe footage under his arm. "You'll see! They'll all see!" he declared. "This kid has really got it. It's not just her looks, although everybody admits she's a knockout, but she's got the spirit. And she's funny. And a hell of an actress. And what's more important, she wants to do it. She wants to get there and be somebody." Still, no matter how powerful or well-connected Johnny might be, for some time none of his friends was willing to listen.

For her part, Marilyn listened very carefully when Johnny explained his strategy to her. She absorbed all he said. He didn't want to put her in just any film. The kind of "nothing" pictures she had already done would never make her a star. She could appear in a great many such films and still go nowhere. Johnny believed that for Marilyn to realize her dream, she needed a part that would get her noticed. It didn't have to be a large role, just an interesting one, in a picture by an important director.

Finally, Hyde's persistence paid off. With Sam Spiegel's help, he persuaded John Huston to let Marilyn read for a role in his new film. That was the break they had been waiting for. The Asphalt Jungle proved Johnny correct. In due course, some of the very men who had overlooked Marilyn at Hollywood parties were interested in using her. At Johnny's urging, Joseph Mankiewicz viewed a rough cut of Huston's film in early 1950; he promptly offered Marilyn a tiny role in All About Eve. Howard Hawks, once so scornful of Marilyn, fired off a telegram congratulating Huston on his discovery of "the girl." As Johnny never tired of reminding Marilyn, The Asphalt Jungle was the first of her films that mattered.

All About Eve was the second. On the basis of the rushes, Darryl Zanuck agreed to take her back at Twentieth Century-Fox. Hyde negotiated a new seven-year contract that went into effect on May 11, 1950. That same month, the release of The Asphalt Jungle signaled that Marilyn's career had taken off. From here on, Johnny assured her, everything was going to be very different.

But there was a problem. Johnny wanted something in exchange for all that he had done. He wanted Marilyn to be his wife. Marilyn refused. She was perfectly willing to sleep with little Johnny, but she wouldn't consider marriage to a man she did not love. He pleaded; he threatened; he cajoled. He warned that without his help, Marilyn would soon be right back on her ass with all the other girls. Again and again, Johnny threw her out, then took her back in the next day.

By the time All About Eve was released in October 1950, Johnny was gravely ill. A doctor had warned him that his sexual relationship with Marilyn was a strain on his already weak heart. Johnny replied that he would rather die than give her up. Mortified by Marilyn's refusal to marry him, he asked Joe Schenck to try to change her mind. Uncle Joe took a practical approach: He informed Marilyn that Johnny was unlikely to live much longer and urged her to marry for her own good. As Mrs. Hyde, she would inherit his palatial home on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills and much else that he owned.

Still, Marilyn said no. It wasn't money that Marilyn wanted in life but respect; and who would respect a girl if she married a man she didn't love just to be sure she inherited his estate? Yet even as Marilyn said all this, she could not quite bring herself to accept that Johnny really was about to die. And she certainly didn't think it would happen so soon. Two months later, all at once Marilyn was alone. Yet again, her career screeched to a halt. Yet again, she had no one to turn to. For a time, it seemed to Marilyn that without Johnny she was helpless. Everything good that had happened recently -- the films with Huston and Mankiewicz, the new studio contract -- had been due to his connections. Marilyn had paid attention to all that Johnny had said. She understood his plan for her. But on her own, Marilyn had no access to the A-list directors Johnny insisted she needed in order to become a star.

When she and Kazan saw Arthur Miller off at the airport in January of 1951, there was not really any question of what Marilyn must do next. Whatever her feelings for Miller, she knew that Kazan was her main chance. Marilyn was prepared to hold onto Kazan in whatever way she could.

* * *

The Beverly-Carlton on West Olympic Boulevard had a reputation as a good second-rate hotel where screenwriters took up residence when the studio was not paying the bill. Across the street, an annex offered four apartments on the second floor. Marilyn moved there when Arthur Miller went to New York. She gave no explanation to her roommate and dramatic coach, Natasha Lytess, who guessed that Marilyn required privacy because she was seeing a new man.

The bed, which dominated the tiny studio apartment, was actually a fold-out sofa covered in a nubby beige fabric. Marilyn almost never made it up as a sofa. There were plump, block-shaped bolsters along one gray wall beneath a large unframed mirror. Two low, light wood bookcases, crammed with books and pictures, served as a headboard. On one shelf was the slender red edition of Death of a Salesman that Miller had given her. There was a copy of Focus, his novel about anti-Semitism. There was a copy of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, a play which Miller had recently adapted for Broadway. Directly over the place where Marilyn slept on a tufted, white satin comforter, a black-and-white photograph of Miller's gaunt face leaned against some books on the lower shelf. She expected him to return soon.

Harry Cohn, nervous about the politics of Miller's screenplay, had submitted it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for review. He also consulted the labor leader Roy Brewer, of the International Alliance of Stage Employees. In sending The Hook out to be vetted, Cohn was almost certainly motivated less by patriotism than by economics. Films that were politically suspect, whether by virtue of their content or of the leftist backgrounds of the people who made them, ran the risk of being boycotted by patriotic and religious groups. The image of pickets at the box office was enough to put off any studio executive. Presumably, Roy Brewer could advise Miller and Kazan on potential problems in the script. Brewer was soon to testify at HUAC on the Communist conspiracy to seize control of the Hollywood labor unions.

Marilyn believed that Miller had gone to New York solely in order to finish The Hook. He had been unable to concentrate in Los Angeles. He worked best in a swivel chair at the cluttered desk in his cozy study in Brooklyn or in the ten-by-twelve-foot shack he had built with his own hands on his country property in Connecticut, where he had written Death of a Salesman. The moral crisis that, in reality, had sent Miller rushing back to New York would only have made him more attractive to Marilyn. She loved that he hadn't tried to sleep with her, though he clearly wanted to. She was drawn to him precisely because he was a man of conscience. She longed to have someone to look up to. As a moral figure, he seemed capable of absolving her of all she was ashamed of in her past. If he could love her, perhaps she really was worthy of respect. Marilyn, pretending it came from Harry Cohn's secretary, sent a telegram instructing Miller to finish his screenplay and return to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, she slept with Kazan, who remained in town during February to work on A Streetcar Named Desire. Their sexual relationship did not end now that she had become preoccupied with Arthur Miller. In a curious way, it actually seemed to have intensified. Kazan was precisely the kind of director Johnny had said Marilyn needed. But if she pushed too hard, she might lose him. Kazan had fled once before, when he passed her on to Miller. This time, she had to keep his interest. And in the light of the fact that he knew how much she cared for Miller, she had to prevent his ego from being twisted out of joint; it certainly wouldn't do for a man to think the only reason she was sleeping with him was to get a film role.

Instead of hiding how she felt about Kazan's friend, however, Marilyn talked about it openly and at length. She and Kazan endlessly discussed Miller. She created the impression that in Arthur's absence, Kazan provided a vital link to his world. In a way, of course, he did. She told him what Arthur had said about being unhappy at home, and asked Kazan to help him. On at least one occasion, she even talked about Miller as Kazan made love to her. Miller, evidently, was in both their minds as they tangled on that bed. Afterward, Kazan found himself looking into Miller's eyes on the bookshelf over Marilyn's pillow. It may be that, perceiving the intensity of the men's relationship, Marilyn talked on about Miller because she knew that was the sort of thing Kazan wanted to hear. But why, if she loved Miller, did she leave his photograph in view? Making love under Miller's watchful eyes was every bit as much a gesture on her part as it was on Kazan's. For all of her calculation, perhaps Marilyn, too, was turned on by the idea of the triangle.

Back in New York, Kazan had a wife and children whom he had no intention of leaving. Studio publicity described him as "an ardent family man." Nonetheless, in Los Angeles he went about openly with Marilyn. He told himself that their relationship was not serious. He told himself that he took a European attitude to such matters. Marilyn was great fun, Kazan believed, but she wasn't cut out to be anybody's wife.

Usually, she played a happy girl for him. Yet there were times when she just couldn't bring off the act anymore. There were times when, he sensed, she clung to him as if he were all she had. Kazan, for his part, certainly didn't want any trouble. His marriage had nearly broken up over an affair with the actress Constance Dowling. Though he carried on with many girls, he did not want anything like that to happen again. He made a point of never telling a girl he loved her. Still, Marilyn discovered that Kazan could be tender and compassionate. He was a man of powerful silences. He might say nothing, yet he made his presence strongly felt. One night when she was in despair, Kazan held her in his arms, gently rocking her to sleep.

For the most part, however, the relationship was keyed to Kazan's needs. Marilyn accompanied him to business meetings at Feldman's, waiting contentedly beside the pool until the men were done. She drove up to Santa Barbara with Kazan on February 15 for the test preview of Streetcar. The following evening, after dinner at Feldman's, she and Kazan went on to Joe Schenck's. In poor health, Schenck had been recuperating in Hawaii when Johnny Hyde passed away. By the time he returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn, to his dismay, had already taken up with Kazan.

A stack of letters from Miller was accumulating next to his photograph on the shelf above Marilyn's bed. She read by the light of a small, goose-necked lamp. Arthur remained unhappy at home, where he and his wife were on very bad terms. Mary, a lapsed Catholic, was appalled that he might so much as think about sleeping with another woman. And in Los Angeles, he had certainly been tempted. He could say nothing to convince his wife to give him, and the marriage, another chance. She simply refused to believe anything he said.

Yet he had no plans to return to Los Angeles. Roy Brewer demanded that Miller change the union racketeers in his script to Communists. If Miller refused, Brewer threatened to call a strike of projectionists in order to prevent The Hook from ever being screened in the United States. Miller abruptly withdrew his script, refusing to make changes that struck him as absurd. Communists, he argued, were virtually nonexistent on the Brooklyn waterfront. He may also have been motivated by his own sensitivity to being subpoenaed by HUAC, Brewer having threatened to launch an investigation of both Miller and Kazan. It seemed to Kazan that the prospect filled Miller with panic.

Though Miller had never been a Communist Party member, he had attended several Communist writers' meetings in 1947. As Miller later disclosed to his attorney, he worried that some of the people who saw him there might have assumed he actually belonged to the Party during that period. Thus, if Miller testified truthfully that he had not been a Party member, there were individuals who, in the belief they were telling the truth, might come forward to say he was lying. He could find himself jailed for perjury. On the other hand, if Miller spoke frankly of his association with the Communist writers, HUAC would require him to establish credibility as a patriot by identifying others who had attended the meetings. That, as a matter of conscience, Miller would not do. As an unfriendly witness -- that is, one who declined to name names -- he could find himself held in contempt of Congress and imprisoned.

It may be that Kazan, accustomed as he was to being master of his own fate, had arrived in Hollywood with a politically provocative script like The Hook as a way of taking charge, of deliberately causing a subpoena to be issued. The gesture would have been very much in keeping with his insolent, abrasive character. As it was, he was furious when Miller withdrew his script. Kazan had turned down Tennessee Williams's play in order to work on The Hook. He had already devoted a good deal of time and effort to the project. He expected Miller to put up a fight.

Miller preferred to write a new drama. His moral crisis over Marilyn Monroe provided fresh material. As he once said, he could not write about anything he understood completely; if an experience was finished, he couldn't write it. He worked in his smoke-filled, third-floor study from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Posters for Death of a Salesman and All My Sons adorned the walls. A small bookcase overflowed with books. Children's voices -- the Millers had a small son and daughter -- drifted in from other rooms. Frequently, Miller went back to work at night.

In the months after returning from California, he started two plays, both featuring a wayward husband. The first drew on a true story Miller had heard on the Brooklyn waterfront as he researched The Hook. It tells of a married longshoreman who permits two brothers, Italians who have entered the country illegally, to live with him. One brother falls in love with the longshoreman's orphaned niece, also living in the apartment. The longshoreman, filled with incestuous desire for the young woman, betrays both men to the immigration authorities. That makes him a pariah in his community. When Miller had first heard the story several months previously, it hadn't particularly seized his imagination. What did it have to do with him? But now, like the longshoreman, he had been stirred by illicit desire. He hadn't acted on that desire, but he, felt guilty all the same. He was part of a sexual triangle, one of two men drawn to the same woman. He knew what it was to think of another man with a woman he himself yearned for. He knew what it was to think of oneself as a betrayer. Yet still the material didn't jell and Miller put "An Italian Tragedy" aside. He would return to it several years later.

Marilyn, whom Miller had known for only a few days, hovered in his thoughts. She remained as much of a fantasy for him as he did for her. In a second work-in-progress, Miller wrote about a Marilyn-like woman of free and open sexuality. Lorraine, as he called her, bids men to abandon their wives and children, but those who are drawn to her come to an unhappy end. One character leaves his wife for Lorraine, who, faithless, later does the same to him. Another husband, protective of his social position, condemns himself to the safety of a cold and loveless marriage.

After six weeks as Feldman's houseguest, Kazan planned to fly home on February 23. Before he left, he made arrangements to shoot Viva Zapata!. He agreed to report no later than May 7, with shooting to begin twenty-one days after that. He persuaded Twentieth to pay for his wife, Molly, their four children, and a nanny to come to the location. Obviously, the presence of his family would limit Kazan's ability to carry on with Marilyn.

As the time approached for Kazan to go, Marilyn panicked. She had spent all this time with him, but he had not offered her a role in his new film. Frantic to maintain a connection, she made an uncharacteristic misstep. Marilyn told Kazan that she was pregnant. As though quickly realizing that that was the last thing in the world a married man would want to hear, she tried to reassure him. Marilyn insisted he mustn't worry, whatever that might mean. Later, she wrote to say that she had miscarried. Nonetheless, faced with precisely the sort of trouble he wanted to avoid, Kazan returned to New York determined to mend his ways and be faithful to Molly. Alone again, Marilyn had little choice but to look ahead. Two months had passed since she tried to take her own life following Johnny's death, and now she still had to figure out how to go on by herself.