After three marriages, three divorces, and a throng of affairs, Johnny Hyde was hopelessly in love. He wanted Marilyn to marry him. She told him she couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be fair. Marilyn knew she could be faithful only to the one man she could love with all her heart.
“The person I wanted to help most in my life—Johnny Hyde—remained someone for whom I could do almost nothing,” Marilyn stated. “He needed something I didn’t have—love. And love is something you can’t invent, no matter how much you want to.” But Hyde was having heart trouble of another kind. He had been hospitalized with a heart attack in 1948 and was popping nitroglycerin tablets to fight off angina. He told Marilyn that his doctor said he didn’t have long to live.
“I’m rich,” Hyde said. “If you marry me you’ll inherit it when I die.”
“I had dreamed of money and longed for it,” Marilyn recalled, “but the million dollars Johnny Hyde offered me meant nothing. ‘I’ll not leave you,’ I told him. ‘I’ll never betray you. But I can’t marry you, Johnny. Because you’re going to get well. And who knows, sometime later I might fall in love.’ He smiled and said, ‘I won’t get well, and I want you to have my money when I’m gone.’ But I couldn’t say yes.”
“He was right. He didn’t get well,” Marilyn said. “A month later he went to the hospital. In the hospital he kept begging me to marry him, not for his sake anymore, but for mine. He wanted to think of me as never having any more hunger or poverty in my life.”
Johnny Hyde died on December 18, 1950. His ex-wife and her children requested that Marilyn be excluded from the funeral held at Forest Lawn. But a heavily veiled blonde with an unusual walk, accompanied by Natasha Lytess, sat in the back of the church sobbing uncontrollably during the service. She later recalled, “When I passed by his coffin I felt such a sadness for Johnny Hyde that I forgot myself. I threw myself on the coffin and sobbed. I wished I was dead with him.
“My great friend was buried,” Marilyn lamented. “I was without his importance to fight for me and without his love to guide me. I cried for nights at a time. I never regretted the million dollars I had turned down. But I never stopped regretting Johnny Hyde—the kindest man in the world.”
Eerily, Johnny Hyde’s generous Christmas presents, which he had purchased for his friends shortly before his fatal heart attack, began arriving right after the funeral. Marilyn received a mink stole. On Christmas Eve, Natasha Lytess arrived at the apartment on Harper and found a note, “I leave my car and fur stole to Natasha.” When Natasha hurriedly entered the apartment she found another note on Marilyn’s bedroom door warning that Lytess’s daughter, Barbara, shouldn’t enter. Lytess burst in to discover that “the room looked like hell on earth. Marilyn was on the bed, her cheeks puffed out like an adder’s.”
Lytess recalled shouting, “Marilyn! What have you done?” and she forced open Marilyn’s mouth, which was caked with capsule residue, and reached in and gouged out “greenish stuff she hadn’t been able to swallow.” Her stomach was pumped, and she recovered in the hospital.
Shortly before his death, Johnny had secured a role for Marilyn in As Young As You Feel, a Paddy Chayefsky story filmed at Fox in January of 1951. Marilyn was twenty-four years old, and it was her twelfth film—the first for Fox under her new contract, which specified that her name appear above the title. When production began in January of 1951 she was still mourning Johnny. “She can’t stop crying,” complained director Harmon Jones. “Every time we need her in front of the cameras she’s crying, and it puffs up her eyes.” When they needed her on the set she was often found by the assistant director off in some dark corner of the soundstage trying to pull herself together. And it was there, in the corner of the stage, that Arthur Miller met Marilyn Monroe.
“From where I stood, yards away, I saw her in profile against a white light,” Miller recalled. “She was weeping under a veil of black lace that she lifted now and then to dab her eyes.” Introduced to Marilyn by Elia Kazan, Miller recalled that when they shook hands “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with her sadness amid all this Hollywood glamour and technology and the busy confusion of a new shot being set up.”
Miller’s wife, Mary, had stayed in Brooklyn while Miller went to Hollywood. Fresh from his Broadway hits Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, Miller had been brought to Hollywood by Charlie Feldman, who was trying to put together a film deal based on The Hook, a screenplay Miller had written about labor strife on the Brooklyn waterfront. Intending to stay as a houseguest at Feldman’s for a week, Miller stayed for a month, having been captivated by “the saddest girl I’ve ever seen.”
Miller saw Marilyn again at one of Feldman’s parties, and the next day she tagged along with Kazan and Miller at a story conference in Harry Cohn’s Columbia studio office. Masquerading as a secretary, Marilyn wore glasses and adopted a prim and businesslike demeanor as she made notations in her steno pad of Miller and Kazan’s meeting with her old nemesis “White Fang.”
“Cohn could hardly keep his eyes from Marilyn,” Miller observed. “Trying to recall where he had seen her, he marched around in front of her hitching up his pants like a Manhattan cab driver getting ready for a fight. He peered at her growling, ‘Wait a minute, I think I know whose goil you were, maybe!’” But he couldn’t quite place the curvaceous secretary, and the production meeting continued with Kazan talking about directing Miller’s screenplay. Miller remembered looking over at Marilyn and finding her staring at him, smiling secretively about her joke on Cohn. “I desperately wanted her,” Miller stated, “and I decided I must leave that night, if possible, or I would lose myself.”
But Miller stayed on. And when he ran out of excuses for not returning to his wife and children, Kazan and Marilyn took Miller to the airport. Many years later he remembered that “her hair hung down to her shoulders, parted on the right side, and the sight of her was something like pain, and I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. With all her radiance she was surrounded by a darkness that perplexed me. I could not yet imagine that in my very shyness she saw some safety, release from the detached and centerless and invaded life she had been given…. When we parted I kissed her cheek and she sucked in a surprised breath, and I hurried backwards toward the plane. I had to escape her childish voracity. I was retreating to the safety of morals, to be sure, but not necessarily to truthfulness. Flying homeward, her scent still on my hands, I knew my innocence was technical merely, and the secret that I could lose myself in sensuality entered me like a radiating force.”
Arthur Miller’s screenplay The Hook was never produced. Cohn became leery of the project when he was warned that Miller was a Marxist. With America’s entry into the Korean conflict, the cold war was heating up, and the world was becoming increasingly divided into armed camps of opposing political and philosophic principles. In a nuclear age the dichotomy grew more perilous as the Western world became encircled by countries that had fallen under Soviet domination.
In the 1950s the Un-American Activities Committee was focusing much of its attention on Hollywood, where it was suspected there was a Commie hidden under every plaster rock. Suddenly, it was no longer fashionable to be a member of the Marxist intelligentsia. The Hollywood HUAC hearings became the great purgative power that separated the hardened Marxist from the dilettante fellow traveler, who was quite willing to jump off the Hollywood Red car at the first stop. There were those who lied and denied, and those who committed suicide. There were those who quickly confessed and named names, like Edward Dmytryk, Clifford Odets, and Miller’s friend Elia Kazan. And there were those who went to jail, and those who remained silent and went underground.
When John and Eunice Murray lost their home on Franklin Street during the Hollywood labor wars, they moved to a small home in Santa Monica Canyon at 431 West Rustic Canyon Road. Norman Jefferies had married the Murrays’ daughter Patricia, and they lived in an upstairs unit of the Murrays’ new home, where, he said, communist cell meetings were held. Jefferies recalled that many of those who attended the meetings were nameless or had party names, but he recognized Dr. Ralph Greenson, Herb Sorrell, and Churchill Murray, who would arrive from Mexico with people Jefferies assumed were Comintern agents.
While Dr. Greenson had always been secretive about his Marxist affiliations, Dr. Hyman Engelberg and his wife Esther had been quite open in their support of communist causes. Dr. Engelberg continued teaching at the People’s Education Center and remained prominent in the activities of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council. In 1947 Engelberg was one of the principal speakers at the ASPC Thought Control Conference in Los Angeles. But with the advent of the HUAC investigations, Engelberg, along with many people who remained loyal to the Communist Party, went underground. The “red scare” had made it scary to be a red.
Arthur Miller observed, “Jews were embracing Catholicism, socialists were joining the Communist witch-hunt with no regard for its civil liberties implications, and lifelong pacifists were banging the cold war drums.” Though much of Miller’s writing had its inspiration in Marxism, he began to have doubts about Stalinism. He commented that in the early fifties he began to question “whom or what was I writing for. I needed the benediction of something or someone, but all about me was mere mortality. I had always assumed I was writing in the service of some worthy cause in which I no longer believed.”
It was at this juncture in his life, when the absolutes of Stalinism failed him, that he met Marilyn. He stated, “Even after those few hours with Marilyn she had taken on an immanence in my imagination—the vitality of a force one does not understand, but that seems on the verge of lighting up a vast surrounding plain of darkness…. A youth was rising from a long sleep to claim the feminine blessing that was the spring of his creativity, the infinite benediction of woman, a felicity in the deepest heart of man as needful as the sky.”
In other words, Arthur was dropping Stalinism like a hot kartofl, and embracing Marilyn Monroe.
In his memoir, Timebends, Miller states that after he had last seen Marilyn in 1951, occasionally he got notes from her that “warmed my heart.” They were written “in strangely meandering slanted handwriting that often curled down margins and up again on the other side of the paper, using two or three different pens with a pencil thrown in. She talked about hoping we could meet again when she came east on business, and offered to come without any excuse if I gave her some encouragement. I wrote back a muddy, formal note saying that I wasn’t the man who could make her life happen as I knew she imagined it might, and that I wished her well. Still, there were parched evenings when I was on the verge of turning my steering wheel west and jamming the pedal to the floor.”
Though public perception was that Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller didn’t become romantically involved until her move to New York in the mid-fifties, there were secret rendezvous and occasions when Miller did jam the pedal to the floor—times when Marilyn jetted to the East Coast and met Miller at their hideaway in Sandsfield, Massachusetts, near Richard Widmark’s old farm.
The two plays Miller wrote after he had first met Marilyn, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, reflect an acute personal crisis that the author went through between 1950 and 1955, which paralleled the collapse of his marriage. Marilyn is an identifiable character in both plays. She is the spirit of Abigail in The Crucible and Catharine in A View from the Bridge. Though critics prefer to underline the political overtones of The Crucible, the play’s central concern is the guilt of a married man, John Proctor, who has betrayed his wife in having an affair with Abigail, a young servant girl. The love triangle and the problem of guilt repeat themselves in A View from the Bridge—between Eddie Carbone, his wife, and their young ward Catharine.
In the introduction to the 1957 edition of his collected plays, which is dedicated “To Marilyn,” Miller wrote that both The Crucible and A View from the Bridge are concerned with “the awesomeness of a passion which, despite its contradictions, despite the self-interest of the individual it inhabits, despite every kind of warning, despite even the destruction of the moral beliefs of the individual, proceeds to magnify its power over him until it destroys him.”
As for Marilyn, she told Louella Parsons that Arthur Miller attracted her “because he is brilliant. His mind is better than that of any other man I’ve known. And he understands and approves my wanting to improve myself.”
As she listened to conversations between Kazan and Miller, it dawned on Marilyn that she often had no idea what they were talking about. “There was no hiding from it,” she said. “I was terribly dumb. I didn’t know anything about painting, music, books, history, geography. I didn’t even know anything about sports or politics.” And in the fall of 1951 she enrolled at UCLA in an art history class and began reading the classics as well as buying books about Freud and his disciples. “I promised myself I would read all the books and find out about all the wonders there are in the world,” she stated. “And when I sat among people I would not only understand what they were talking about, I’d be able to contribute a few words.”
Much to Natasha Lytess’s annoyance, at the suggestion of Elia Kazan, Marilyn began taking separate acting classes with Michael Chekhov, nephew of the great playwright. Chekhov had studied under Stanislavsky in Moscow. Marilyn told him, “I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac. It was all right for the first years. But now it’s different.” Chekhov, who had a great appreciation of Marilyn’s talent, responded, “But Marilyn, you are a young woman who gives off sex vibrations, no matter what you are doing or thinking. Unfortunately, your studio bosses are only interested in your sex vibrations.”
Kazan was also interested in her sex vibrations, and he later acknowledged that he had an affair with Marilyn after his friend Arthur Miller returned to New York.
When Marilyn had signed with Fox, she insisted that the contract include a provision for Natasha Lytess, who was put on salary at the studio as a drama coach. Lytess guided Marilyn through her brief role in Let’s Make It Legal, which was filmed in April. Though the film was a flop, Marilyn was not. She was luscious and vivacious and knew how to get laughs. Though her special appeal was still lost on Zanuck, the public was beginning to keep an eye out for her.
With her steady income, Marilyn became generous to a fault. She paid for Lytess’s expensive dental bills and helped her buy a house on Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills. Marilyn sold the mink stole Johnny Hyde had given her to help make the down payment. In the fall of 1951, when the studio option was renewed and her paycheck rose to five hundred dollars a week, Marilyn hired business manager Inez Melson to look after her finances and take care of her mother, who was transferred from the state institution in Norwalk to the more comfortable country-club atmosphere of Rockhaven Sanitarium in Verdugo, California. A portion of Marilyn’s income was set aside each month toward her mother’s care, and Inez was appointed the conservator.
Hiring a private investigator, Marilyn tracked down her father, Stan Gifford. She hadn’t spoken to him since he hung up on her in 1944. Her father had retired from Consolidated and purchased a dairy farm in Hemet, a desert community south of Riverside, where he lived with his third wife and several children.
Marilyn hoped her father would be happy to hear from his daughter. Driving out to Hemet with Marilyn, Lytess had a foreboding that Stan Gifford wouldn’t necessarily be overjoyed by a visit from his illegitimate daughter—even if she happened to be Marilyn Monroe.
“You could be hurt by this,” Lytess tried to warn her.
“After all these years, I’m sure he’s not the same man who walked out on my mother and refused to talk to me,” Marilyn responded. “You agree that I must see him, don’t you? Tell him who I am and everything?”
Believing that Marilyn was determined to see her father in any case, Lytess remained silent and made no further attempt to dissuade her.
Stopping at a gas station near Riverside, Lytess persuaded Marilyn to telephone first, reminding her that Gifford was a married man with children: “You can’t just arrive without calling,” she advised. As Marilyn dialed the number written on a scrap of paper she held in her trembling hand, Lytess said a silent prayer.
Mrs. Gifford answered the phone. She wanted to know who was calling.
“This is Marilyn…the little girl he knew years ago—Gladys Baker’s daughter. He’s sure to know who I am.”
Marilyn was asked to wait, and Lytess observed her trembling in silence, her head thrown back with her eyes closed in the pain and anxiety of the emotional wound endured for a lifetime.
Mrs. Gifford returned to the phone with the message, “He doesn’t want to see you. He suggests you see his lawyer in Los Angeles if you have some complaint. Do you have a pencil?” Marilyn slowly hung up and walked back to the car and slumped over the wheel in tears. There was nothing Lytess could say or do that could comfort her.
Gifford’s stepdaughter, Susan Reimer, now a nurse in Hemet, was nine years old at the time and vividly recalls the incident when Marilyn called the house in 1951. It caused a furor, and when she asked her mother about the caller, she was told, “We’re not supposed to tell. It was Marilyn Monroe.” Susan’s half sister Lorraine stated, “I heard all my life that Stan was Marilyn’s father. It’s something the family always talked about. It was always told to me as fact.”
On the long drive back to Los Angeles, Marilyn remained locked in a brooding silence.