Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (52 page)

Lee Strasberg, then fifty-four, was born Israel Srulke in 1901 in Poland. He came to America in 1909 and grew up among the immigrants of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a materially poor but culturally rich community. In his early twenties, he trained as an actor with Richard Boleslavski, the Russian director who had worked with Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Then, in 1931 (renaming himself Strasberg), he co-founded the legendary Group Theater with Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman. With the Group, he was actor, producer and director as well as supervisor of training, and here he began to develop an approach to acting which was called The Method. Quitting the Group in 1937 after arguments about The Method’s principles, Strasberg worked independently and 1951 was named artistic director of the Actors Studio, four years after its founding by Kazan, Crawford and Robert Lewis.

The Studio was a place where actors met to explore, a kind of theatrical laboratory where performers tried out characterizations before an audience of colleagues, took chances, made mistakes, were mocked and encouraged by their peers. Most of their work was never seen by the public, but was only by members, for members. With no formal classes, members simply arrived at Strasberg’s twice-weekly sessions (Tuesdays and Fridays from eleven to one), perhaps rehearsing at other times privately with moderators or coaches—or, if they were
among the chosen few, with Strasberg himself at his home, where they were charged the absurdly low price of thirty dollars a month for three sessions each week. Attendance at the Studio sessions was by invitation only, based on an audition before Strasberg.

A short, slight, intense and severe man who was an absolute authoritarian within his domain, Strasberg affected a distant, rather stern manner with many of his students as well as with his opponents (among the latter were other important drama teachers: Herbert Berghof, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler). “We were like converts to a new religion,” said actor Eli Wallach of the Studio’s early days. “We didn’t understand anyone else’s acting except our own. Everyone else was a pagan.” Early members of the Studio (no one was called a student) were in deadly earnest about its superiority, according to Shelley Winters, another attendant from the start. “We were dedicated to the idea of great theater. We all thought we would do Shakespeare plays and marry each other.”

Strasberg himself was something of a sign of contradiction. His legion of admirers and devotees emphasized his ability to dissect a performance down to the smallest gesture and the slightest pause, illuminating every element that helped and hindered true characterization. Less enthusiastic were those who observed his tyrannical manner, his emotional coldness with all but those few favorites, and the intimate nature of some of his improvisations. “He sometimes got into areas that were better left to a psychiatrist,” remembered Anne Jackson, a member who did perform Shakespeare and who married Eli Wallach.

“Lee was enshrined” at the Studio, according to Elia Kazan, who added that for years Strasberg

noticed that actors would humble themselves before his rhetoric and the intensity of his emotion. The more naive and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.

Briefly and synthetically set forth, The Method according to Strasberg was based on several indisputable doctrines.

First, the task of the actor is not merely to imitate but to reproduce
reality through the use of “emotional recall” or “affective memory.” Because of this, the actor’s behavior onstage must be psychologically sound, motivated by a single purpose based on one’s unique personality. To ensure that the character and the play are lifelike and spontaneous, improvisation is encouraged during rehearsals (and even in some cases during performances). And over all these principles is an almost mystical commitment to the art of acting and to the truth that it can reveal.

Because of Strasberg’s emphasis on true emotion based on the actor’s personal history, he urged that anything preventing access to the inner life be confronted forthwith; endorsing psychotherapy, he became a kind of analyst-doctor to his students. After Marlon Brando’s celebrated performance in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and his equally celebrated term of psychoanalysis, the link between acting and therapy was firmly and respectably established. “It made me a real actor,” said Brando, praising Strasberg’s Method (although he also studied with Stella Adler, whose approach was quite different). “The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life in creating the character you’re working on. You learn to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you ever had.”

This angle led to an array of actors subsequently accused of being nothing but jumbles of tics and habits, looking ever more deeply into themselves and overloading performances with personal problems. George C. Scott, who acted in Strasberg’s critically lacerated production of
The Three Sisters
in 1963, derided much of his director’s tactics, his preference for wounded, mannered and dependent performers, and later referred famously to “Lee-you-should-excuse-the-expression-Strasberg.”
⁷

In the days when Kazan was the primary teacher at the Actors
Studio, the emphasis of The Method was on action and emotion, with grave fidelity to the text of the play and the integrity of the character. But with Strasberg’s ascendancy, there was a shift to the dredging and prodding of sense memories and individual history, which led to a certain hyperemotionalism about which Robert Lewis made the apt comment, “Crying, after all, is not the sole object of acting. If it were, my old Aunt Minnie would be Duse!”

Among the most respected opponents of everything Strasberg represented was none other than Laurence Olivier, who believed that acting was a matter of carefully prepared technique and the accumulation of external details from which a character emerges. Reflection on one’s personal history seemed to him inconsistent with the actor’s goal of reproducing not his own but the playwright’s intentions. Once, surrounded by devotees of The Method, Olivier fulminated:

All this talk about The Method, The Method!
What
method? I thought each of us had our
own
method! . . . What they call “the Method” is not generally advantageous to the actor at all. Instead of doing a scene over again that’s giving them trouble, they want to discuss, discuss, discuss. I’d rather run through a scene eight times than waste time chattering away about abstractions. An actor gets a thing right by doing it over and over. Arguing about motivations and so forth is a lot of rot. American directors encourage that sort of thing too much.

He was referring, he said without apologies, to Lee Strasberg. Olivier’s hesitation notwithstanding, Strasberg was not a crackpot who attracted only or even primarily neurotic dependents. Fine actors by the dozens came to Strasberg at the Studio, which in 1955 moved from shabby, cramped quarters on West Fifty-second Street to an abandoned Greek Orthodox church at 432 West Forty-fourth Street, between Ninth and Tenth avenues.

Strasberg was himself far too fine an actor not to realize (and on occasion to admit) that great acting, like every true craft or art, has something ineffably mysterious about it—that in great acting, the actor virtually vanishes behind the role; that actors can indeed utilize their own frailties to create a character—and that good actors will directly and invariably do so. Attracted especially to the young, to stars, to the
ill and to the emotionally frail, he took on with especial concern those with acute sensitivities. He also insisted—and here he was often on dangerous ground—that some students were not good candidates for The Method unless they underwent a systematic unblocking of feelings, a prolonged and parallel exploration of hitherto hidden mines of the past—specifically, through psychoanalysis.

This was the enterprise that he enjoined on Marilyn Monroe, making it a condition of her dramatic training when she visited him in early February 1955. “My father wanted,” according to his daughter Susan,

to arouse everything undealt with, everything repressed about her past, and to tap all her explosive energy. To bring all that up, he said she’d have to work on it in a formal, professional setting. . . . Marilyn was drawn to my father because although she had little formal education, she understood human nature and at once agreed with his suggestion. Human nature, especially her own, fascinated her. They were really destined to meet and work together.

Marilyn agreed, for she wanted everything in her life to begin afresh. Without knowing it, Natasha Lytess was from that day dropped forever from her life and career.

Marilyn, Lee said, simply had to open up her unconscious. In a general way, this was sage advice, and it had a certain intellectual allure for her; in other regards, it was disastrous. Any depth work must be undertaken in a person’s own time and rhythms, not under duress, not out of respect for a guru, not as an object lesson or as a passport to a tangible goal. Marilyn’s early life was a tangle of loss, deprivation and abuse, some of it acknowledged, some not so. And while certain people are crippled, severely limited by not confronting repressed feelings and memories, others cannot or will not do so except at enormous personal pain. It is axiomatic that each inner life has its own integrity, that there are guidelines but no absolute rules for attaining psychological health and maturation. Accordingly, there are concomitant risks when an inappropriately enforced system of exercises or a formula of exploration is enjoined on someone too vulnerable or impressionable to make an independent judgment. And this was the clear and present danger when Marilyn set off to seek a psychiatrist of whom Lee Strasberg would approve—and who, she also needed to be sure, would not alien-ate
her from Milton Greene and their new business venture.

Her choice was no surprise. Within two weeks, Marilyn began three, four and often five times a week to travel from her sixth-floor suite at the Gladstone to 155 East Ninety-third Street, to the consulting room of a psychotherapist named Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, who for several years had been treating Milton Greene.

“Milton did more than recommend Hohenberg to Marilyn,” according to Amy. “He actually brought her to Hohenberg, although he was at first skeptical because he thought that as two women they wouldn’t get along.” A large, stout fifty-seven-year-old Hungarian immigrant whose white hair was bound in tight braids, Margaret Herz Hohenberg began a rigorous course with her new patient. She had studied medicine in Vienna, Budapest and Prague, worked in hospitals for the insane and then specialized in psychoanalysis before coming to New York in 1939 and beginning private practice. “I like talking to her” was all Marilyn said to Amy.

The year 1955 was therefore to be the year in which “Marilyn Monroe,” the glamorous, sexy, Technicolor star, was indeed put aside; neglected, too, was the image of Jean Harlow that had been so controlling an element. The replacement was almost a female version of Brando, as Marilyn affected the theatrical fashion of the serious actor she aspired to become: on the sidewalks and streets of New York, she wore blue jeans and plain trousers, sweatshirts and only the merest touch of makeup, if any at all. But within there was only a chrysalis, something still childlike. No longer presenting to the world a painted face, a manufactured product, she wished somehow to be (as it is called) a real person, and to do so, she started as if with a clean slate.

Even in this enterprise, Marilyn was somehow stymied, for in place of artifice there was a new, subtler peril. She now thought that she was independent, that she was doing something for herself and by herself alone, not to please others. This was the most poignant illusion of all.

1
. Giesler blithely informed the press that this was standard vague legal diction and could refer to anything as “common as political differences.”

2
. Skolsky agreed with this blunt assessment: “Joe DiMaggio bored Marilyn. His life-style added up to beer, TV, and the old lady—the wife who ran third to
Gunsmoke
or
The Late Show
and a can of beer, night after night after night. She couldn’t settle for that—not even with an all-American hero.”

3
. Accounts differ: Sinatra maintained he waited in a car nearby, and he went to court to protest the evidence of private eye Philip Irwin.

4
. The so-called Wrong Door Raid was widely reported in the press on November 6 and 7, although Sinatra’s representatives were at the time able to keep his and DiMaggio’s names out of the stories: see UPI and AP wire-service reports for those dates. But
Confidential
magazine (vol. 3, no. 4 [September 1955]) broke every detail of the story, and it is both interesting and important to note that the State of California later instituted an investigation of the magazine’s methods, practices and results. The result of the inquiry, presumably much to DiMaggio’s and Sinatra’s chagrin, cleared
Confidential
and in fact stated that they were “quite zealous in checking out and documenting their reports to the public. . . . As well, the activities of detectives [engaged by the magazine] were well within the rigorous code of regulations prescribed by the state for their business.” See the
New York Times
, March 2, 1957, p. 19.

5
. Feldman advanced Marilyn money to buy story rights for a project never realized; to pay Natasha; to pay her attorneys; and to commission an original screenplay.