The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (25 page)

C
olumbia Pictures was one of the minor Hollywood majors. Once the place of employment of Marilyn's mother and aunt Grace, the studio was located at “Gower Gulch,” the corner of Gower and Sunset Boulevard—at one time the casting corner for cowboy extras. Its ill-conceived lot was a rambling maze of stages, offices, bungalows, and cutting rooms that seemed to be linked by dead-end corridors—a Frankenstein built by a monster, Harry Cohn. A bald, beefy ogre of a man, Cohn had fought his way up to the bottom of the majors with forthright ruthlessness. Hedda Hopper once commented, “You had to stand in line to hate him.” Agents referred to him as “White Fang.”

Columbia may have been on the bottom rung of the majors, but Harry Cohn was in the top echelon of studio lechers. He was noted for inviting attractive starlets aboard his yacht, where careers could be launched or scuttled overnight. When Marilyn arrived at Columbia, Rita Hayworth was Cohn's major star, and he was preparing to launch Kim Novak.

It was Cohn's casting director, Max Arnow, who sent Marilyn to Natasha Lytess, the studio's drama coach. In her unpublished memoirs, Lytess recalls Marilyn appearing twenty-five minutes late at her bungalow
office wearing a knitted wool hip-clinging dress that was cut too low. Lytess referred to it as a “trollop's outfit.” She said of that first meeting, “She was utterly unsure of herself. Unable even to take refuge in her own insignificance.”

When Marilyn first encountered Lytess, she recalled that the woman who opened the bungalow door was “unsmiling and Slavic looking, with large and challenging eyes, thick graying hair, and an emaciated figure that suggested some illness.” The “illness” could be attributed to the human condition. Having lived through two world wars, Lytess had been a refugee for a good portion of her difficult lifetime. Somewhat neurasthenic, she ate like a bird, and her inner hysteria expressed itself in a burning intensity that was at times overwhelming.

Natasha Lytess (née Liesl Massary) tutored her students in a book-lined bungalow that was located next to the Three Stooges' stage. The walls were lined with books, many of them in German and signed by the authors. A photograph of her mother, Viennese operetta diva Fritzi Massary, hung on the wall along with a large autographed photo of Max Reinhardt, with whom she had studied in Austria and Germany and had a brief affair.

Born in 1903 in Vienna, Natasha was the widow of the left-wing Austrian novelist and poet Bruno Frank (
Sturm im Wasserglass
). Bruno and Liesl Frank were among the exiles who fled Nazi Germany, where they had been close friends of Thomas Mann and his wife Katia. In 1925 the Franks had moved next door to the Manns in Herzogpark, Munich. The Manns and the Franks fled to Switzerland in 1933 before journeying to Southern California in 1938, where they were again neighbors in Santa Monica.

A daughter, Barbara, was born to the Franks in 1943, shortly before Bruno became seriously ill. When he died in 1945 in Los Angeles, he left Liesl and the child destitute. Agent Paul Kohner had helped Frank's widow obtain employment as a film actress. Because of her onerous Germanic background, during the war she attempted to take on a Russian identity. Under the professional name of Natasha Lytess she appeared in featured roles in a number of motion pictures, which included
Comrade X
(MGM, 1940),
Once Upon a Honeymoon
(RKO, 1942),
House on Telegraph Hill
(Fox, 1951), and
Anything Can Happen
(Paramount, 1952). Through his friend Max Arnow, Kohner placed Lytess as drama coach at Columbia, where her oasis of knowledge and learning within Cohn's kingdom at Gower Gulch seemed out of place next to the Three Stooges' stage.

For Marilyn, Lytess's bungalow was an asylum in the land of the Philistines. Here was a woman who represented all Marilyn wanted to be—an accomplished actress and a person of knowledge and brilliance. She had known the greats of theater and literature, including many of the distinguished authors and artists whose books and photos lined the bungalow walls. Marilyn immediately perceived in Lytess a knowledgeable mystagogue who could dress up “the cheap clothes she was wearing inside.”

“She was like a waterfall pouring out impressions and images,” Marilyn observed. “I just sat there watching her expressive hands and flashing eyes, and listening to her confident voice. She told me what she had been through and made clear how much she knew. But she gave me the impression I was something special too.”

Lytess was forty-four when they met, Marilyn only twenty-one. Marilyn's needs were obvious, but she was too young to realize Lytess's needs, which were germane to their relationship. Natasha's own youthful ambition for a great career as an actress had been subverted by world calamity. She had been denied both a career and the gift of beauty and lithesome grace so generously bestowed on the neophyte in the “trollop's outfit” who had knocked on her door.

They began with basics: speech and breathing. “Marilyn was inhibited and cramped, and she could not say a word freely,” Natasha reflected. “Her habit of barely moving her lips when she spoke was unnatural. The keyboard of the human voice is the gamut of emotion, and each emotion has its corresponding shade of tone. All this I tried to teach Marilyn.”

Natasha was embittered by her own circumstances, and her restless brilliance found an outlet in controlling and dominating her students. Sensing Marilyn's special qualities and eagerness to learn, Lytess found the perfect subject. In a transference of needs, they became locked in an intense working relationship that was destined to burn out under Hollywood's acetylene sun within seven years. The devotee's rite of passage would inevitably lead to the casting out of the sibylline oracle who had perceived a goddess—and a meal ticket.

 

In mid-March Marilyn received a call from Grace Goddard, who told her that Aunt Ana had died. Though Ana had been ill for several years with heart disease, the news came as a terrible shock. “She changed my whole life,” Marilyn said. “She was the first person in the whole world I ever
really loved and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her. It was called ‘I Love Her.' She never hurt me, not once. She couldn't. She was all kindness and all love. She was good to me.”

Ana Lower's death became a source of deep grief that Marilyn seldom discussed. It was a private grief expressed in frequent visits to Ana Lower's grave site at the Westwood Cemetery. The Atchinson family had purchased the first burial plot sold (#5) at Westwood Memorial Park, and Ana Atchinson Lower's ashes were interred close to the Chapel of the Palms, where, many years later, mourners would gather around Marilyn's casket.

According to Bebe Goddard, Marilyn attended Ana Lower's services on March 18, 1948, with Doc and Grace Goddard. Jim Dougherty and his second wife, Patricia, were at the viewing in the chapel but didn't attend the funeral. In her will, Aunt Ana left Marilyn the black baby grand piano, the last tangible vestige of Gladys's dream. Having no place to put it in her one-room apartment in Hollywood, Marilyn put the piano in storage until the day she could afford a place large enough to keep it.

Many years later Arthur Miller recalled that he and Marilyn were once looking out at the New York skyline from their Fifty-Seventh Street apartment, and apropos of nothing they had been discussing, Marilyn began talking about Aunt Ana, and how terrible the shock of her death had been: “I went and lay down in her bed the day after she died…just lay there for a couple of hours on her pillow. Then I went to the cemetery and these men were digging somebody's grave and they had a ladder into it, and I asked if I could get down there and they said sure, and I went down and lay on the ground and looked up at the sky from there. The ground is cold under your back, but it's quite a view.”

After Aunt Ana died, Marilyn often turned to Lytess for guidance. “She opened up, and leaned on me like a child for comfort and advice,” Lytess recalled. “One day she told me she was in love, and that ‘Freddy' was the man of her dreams.”

“Freddy” was Fred Karger, a composer and arranger who had been working in the Columbia music department when Marilyn first met him during that limbo in her career between the Fox and Columbia contracts. Ten years older than Marilyn, Freddy Karger was quite different from any other man she had met, and for the first time in her life she fell hopelessly in love.

Karger was a handsome man with dark wavy hair who bore a slight resemblance to Jack Kennedy. His soft, sardonic smile betrayed intelli
gence and sophistication beneath an intriguing reserve. He had been raised in the new-money atmosphere of old Hollywood; his father, Max Karger, was one of the founding fathers of the Metro Company, which later became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His mother, Anne Karger, was a warm and gregarious woman of Irish Catholic heritage.

When Marilyn canceled a date with Karger because she wasn't feeling well, he decided to pay her a visit and discovered she was living in a dark, depressing room off Hollywood Boulevard. When he realized that the cause of her illness was hunger compounded by a sense of failure, he invited her to come home with him for dinner. Since his divorce he had lived in his mother's apartment on Harper Avenue, not far from Schwab's and the Sunset Strip. When he brought Marilyn home, Karger told his mother, “This is a little girl who's very lonely and broke.”

“Nana” Karger, who had the motherly warmth of Aunt Ana, and even bore a resemblance to her, was instinctively drawn to Marilyn, or “Maril,” as Nana called her. They maintained a close friendship until the day Marilyn died.

Through the efforts of Freddy Karger, Marilyn was accepted as a resident at the Studio Club on June 3, 1948. Located at 1215 North Lodi Street, the residence hotel for women was only blocks away from Columbia Studios, and she was an official resident in room 334 until March 13, 1949. The four-story Moorish-style building had bright, well-furnished rooms, and there were parlors in which residents could receive guests, an excellent restaurant, and a spacious patio with a fountain set amid tropical foliage. Founded by Mary Pickford in 1915 and operated by the YWCA, the Studio Club was intended as a wholesome home away from home for young women seeking careers in Hollywood.

For Marilyn the Studio Club was a “safe house” where she often sought refuge, but like a cat, she always had another home or two in reserve. During the brief time she was officially a resident at the Studio Club, she also stayed at Joe Schenck's, the Kargers', and Natasha Lytess's, and she was a frequent guest at the Hollywood Hills apartment of Bob Slatzer, who had returned from Ohio to pursue his screenwriting career.

The corny-copia of B-movie scripts being prepared for production at Columbia were routinely sent by Max Arnow to Lytess, who would spot contract players into auditions for bit parts. When Lytess read
Ladies of the Chorus
, she saw an opportunity for Marilyn to play one of the chorus girls. Upon reading the script, Marilyn focused on a featured part—Peggy
Martin, a chorus girl who proves to be the love interest for the leading man, Rand Brooks.

There were several factors that ultimately led to Marilyn's being cast for the part. When Lytess learned that the part was still uncast, she asked the producer to wait for Marilyn to audition. While Lytess worked with Marilyn on her portrayal, Freddy Karger was recruited to prepare her for the two songs she was to sing, “Anyone Can See I Love You,” and “Everybody Needs a Da-Da-Daddy.” But the most important factor in the casting of Marilyn Monroe in
Ladies of the Chorus
was Marilyn Monroe. She was cast because of her impressive audition. Filmed in July 1948,
Ladies of the Chorus
suffered from a cliché-ridden script riddled with banal dialogue. Nevertheless, Marilyn glowed on the screen, and her obvious talent rose above the mediocrity of the material.

“Marilyn Monroe is cute and properly naive,” the
Hollywood Reporter
reviewer stated. Tibor Krekes in the
Motion Picture Herald
commented, “One of the bright spots is Miss Monroe's singing. She is pretty and, with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise.”

But despite her standout performance on the screen, her career at Columbia was scuttled when she refused to perform off-camera for “White Fang.”

Warned by Lytess, Marilyn did her best to avoid Harry Cohn, but shortly before her option for renewal fell due the inevitable occurred. Marilyn received a call from casting director Max Arnow requesting her to come to his office at 4
P.M.
Under the impression that Mr. Arnow wouldn't have called her himself unless it was important, Marilyn spent the day bathing and fixing her hair. She felt that this must be her big chance for a good part in a major film. She told herself, “I mustn't act overeager or start babbling, or grin with joy. I must sit quietly and have dignity every minute.”

When she arrived at the casting director's office at exactly 4
P.M.
, she was surprised to find that Mr. Arnow wasn't there. “But his secretary smiled at me and told me to go inside and wait for him,” she recalled.