ES Updates

July 16, 2017July 17, 2017

On the Waterfront: Marilyn and John Garfield

Three years after their encounter on the set of We Were Strangers (see here), Marilyn and John Garfield were early contenders for the lead roles in On the Waterfront, according to Marilyn’s photographer friend, Sam Shaw, who was then developing it as a screenplay. (Director Elia Kazan denied all of this, but Al Ryelander, then a press agent for Columbia Studios, insisted the story was accurate.)

By 1952, Marilyn’s star was rising – but Garfield’s career was destroyed, after he refused to ‘name names’ to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and became the most famous victim of the ‘red-baiting’ era. He died of a heart attack months later, aged 37. Author Robert Knott retold the story, which also touches on Marilyn’s relationships with Kazan and future husband Arthur Miller, in He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield (2003.)

On the Waterfront was released to acclaim in 1954, starring Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. Ironically, the film can be seen as director Elia Kazan’s self-justification for his own decision to name names. One can only imagine how different Marilyn’s subsequent career might have been had she played the role of demure Edie Doyle…

“Shaw gave Monroe the script while she was in New York to take in the Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Monroe read the script and passed it on to her lover, Elia Kazan. Shaw, who called himself a ‘half-assed observer at the Actors Studio,’ had met Kazan on the set of the 1950 film Panic in the Streets. ‘Kazan had heard about my script (before Monroe gave it to him) and wanted to see it,’ Shaw said. ‘I wouldn’t give it to him, because he was involved with Arthur Miller on a similar project, The Hook.’ But after Monroe gave Kazan the script, the director called Shaw. ‘You’ve got an interesting script, but it needs a lot of work,’ he told Shaw. ‘Let Budd Schulberg work on it.’ Shaw, seeing the merit in Kazan’s suggestion, raised $40,000 to pay Schulberg to work on the script. According to Shaw, at this point Jack Cohn turned the script over to Sam Spiegel … Within a year Kazan, Spiegel and Schulberg were preparing the film for Columbia Pictures with Marlon Brando … By that point, neither Shaw nor Garfield were involved in any way.”

February 13, 2017February 13, 2017

Patricia Bosworth Remembers Marilyn

Patricia Bosworth has written acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda. A lifelong member of the Actors Studio, she also wrote ‘The Mentor and the Movie Star‘, a 2003 article about Marilyn and the Strasbergs for Vanity Fair, and appeared in the 2006 PBS documentary, Marilyn Monroe: Still Life.

In her new memoir, The Men In My Life: Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan, Bosworth recalls her acting days. In an extract published by Lithub, she describes an encounter with Marilyn.

“I slid into the backseat, where I found Marilyn Monroe huddled in a corner dreamily puffing on a cigarette. Her bleached blond hair was tousled; she seemed to be wearing no makeup. I noticed there was dirt under her fingernails, but I couldn’t stop looking at her. We were about to pull away from the curb when a voice cried out, ‘Hey Lee, goin’ my way?’ and Harry Belafonte hopped in beside me. We drove uptown in silence.

I knew Marilyn was aware I was looking at her. She was used to being looked at, and she wasn’t self-conscious. She had a mysterious indefinable quality that made her a star and separated her from everyone else. At the moment she appeared to be floating in another world as she puffed delicately on her cigarette and blew the smoke softly out of her mouth. The newspapers were full of stories about her—how she’d left Hollywood and come to New York to be a ‘serious actress,’ how Lee was coaching her at his apartment and letting her observe sessions at the Studio.”

Elsewhere, Bosworth confirms that Tennessee Williams had wanted Marilyn to star in Baby Doll (but Gore Vidal thought she was too old.) Bosworth knew many key figures in Marilyn’s life, including Elia Kazan, Lee and Susan Strasberg – who found her father’s ‘obsession’ with Marilyn disturbing.

As Bosworth admits, Marilyn was part of Lee’s inner circle from which she felt excluded. She was also intimidated by Marilyn’s fame, which nonetheless kept the Actors Studio in the headlines. Lee Strasberg often seemed cold and domineering, but Bosworth considered him ‘a great teacher.’

Bosworth, unlike Marilyn, was born into a life of privilege, and forged a stage career as well as starring alongside Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story. However, her impeccable connections couldn’t save her from family tragedy (her brother and father both committed suicide), and an abusive marriage.

The 1950s, as Bosworth observes, was a staid, even repressive decade – but the creativity and rebellion of the 60s was already fermenting. She talks about the impact of the anti-communist witch-hunts, both on the artistic community and her own family, and the rampant sexism she constantly endured.

Elizabeth Winder will focus on Marilyn’s New York period directly in her forthcoming book, Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy, but Patricia Bosworth’s account comes from her own experience. For anyone interested in learning more about the bohemian world that women like Bosworth – and Marilyn – helped to define, The Men In My Life is essential reading.

October 15, 2016July 28, 2019

Collaborators: Marilyn, Miller and Kazan

Marilyn and Arthur Miller before their 1956 wedding (Photo by Milton Greene)

Richard A. Schwartz, a Professor Emeritus at Florida International University and author of several books about the Cold War era, has published a new play, Collaborators: Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Beginning with the accidental death of a journalist on the eve of Marilyn’s 1956 wedding to Arthur, the action then looks back to their first meeting five years earlier, when he unsuccessfully pitched a movie to studio head Harry Cohn. Marilyn was casually dating Arthur’s friend and creative partner, Elia Kazan, at the time.

However, it was Arthur she fell for – it has often been rumoured that he continued corresponding with her after returning to his wife and children in New York. Using a split stage, Schwartz imagines what Arthur might have written to her, comparing his inner turmoil with her heady rise to fame (and ongoing association with Kazan.)

The other main strand of the drama is the very different responses of Miller and Kazan to the red-baiting era. Although it’s clear that both had long since left their youthful dabblings with communism far behind and posed no threat to national security, Kazan chose to inform on fellow travellers in the theatre, thereby saving his Hollywood career, while Miller – supported by Marilyn – refused to ‘name names’, and was ultimately vindicated as a liberal hero. Unsurprisingly, their alliance came under strain, and they didn’t work together again until after Marilyn’s death, on the controversial After the Fall.

The Millers’ marriage is portrayed in two scenes: the beginning is represented by Marilyn’s alleged discovery of unflattering comments in Arthur’s journal, during filming of The Prince and the Showgirl; while the end is marked by another heated argument during production of The Misfits. But that omits a long period of relative stability in Marilyn’s otherwise turbulent life. Perhaps Schwartz could have added a further scene to reveal Marilyn’s vulnerability, and show how painful experiences, like her multiple miscarriages, may have caused her depression.

As it is, Schwartz’s portrayal of a self-destructive Marilyn seems to echo Maggie, the suicidal star in Miller’s After the Fall. He is on safer ground with his male protagonists, and the trial scenes are compelling – perhaps because those events are a matter of public record, rather than private conjecture – and with careful revisions to his characterisation of Marilyn, Collaborators could be a genuinely provocative play.

For those interested in learning more about this topic, Barbara Leaming covered it in detail in her 2000 biography of Marilyn, and Ron Briley’s The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan will be published next month.

October 17, 2015July 23, 2019

‘From the First Moment’: Arthur Miller at 100

Arthur Miller was born 100 years ago today. In this extract from her 1960 interview with Georges Belmont for Marie-Claire magazine, Marilyn describes how they first met and what attracted her to him.

“When I met Arthur Miller for the first time, it was on a set, and I was crying. I was playing in a picture called As Young As You Feel, and he and Elia Kazan came over to me. I was crying because a friend of mine had died. I was introduced to Arthur.

That was in 1951. Everything was pretty bleary for me at that time. Then I didn’t see him for about four years. We would correspond, and he sent me a list of books to read. I used to think that maybe he might see me in a movie – there often used to be two pictures playing at a time, and I thought I might be in the other movie and he’d see me. So I wanted to do my best.

I don’t know how to say it, but I was in love with him from the first moment.

I’ll never forget that one day he said I should act on the stage and how the people standing around laughed. But he said, ‘No, I’m very serious.’ And the way he said that, I could see that he was a sensitive human being and treated me as a sensitive human being, too. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s the most important thing.”

June 10, 2015June 28, 2019

World Premiere for Miller’s ‘Hook’

Marilyn poses for photographer Ben Ross, while reading Arthur Miller – shortly after their first meeting in 1951

The Hook, Arthur Miller’s long-buried screenplay about troubled dockers on the New York waterfront – a district still known as Red Hook – is finally being staged at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton (of all places) after more than sixty years on the shelf, Matt Trueman writes in today’s Guardian.

“This is the script – ‘a play for the screen,’ he called it – that indirectly triggers Miller’s summons to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). It sowed the seeds of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his professional split from director Elia Kazan. Without The Hook, he probably wouldn’t have written The Crucible or A View from the Bridge, nor would Kazan have made On the Waterfront. It might be the most influential film never made.

Don’t think staging it is an exercise in theatrical history, though. Sixty-six years on, The Hook is unnervingly prescient. Its focus is the exploited workforce and union corruption in New York’s docks. ‘It talks about the living wage, zero-hours contracts and industrial communities on the brink of enormous change,’ says director James Dacre, adamant that he wouldn’t programme it otherwise. ‘Why here? Why now?'”

This play is of special interest to Marilyn fans, because Miller originally pitched it as a movie to Columbia’s Harry Cohn in 1951, during his first visit to Hollywood with director Elia Kazan. Marilyn, who was then dating Kazan, even accompanied them to a meeting with Cohn, disguised as a secretary.

As noted in Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, Marilyn’s attendance was intended as revenge on the tyrannical Cohn, who had fired her in 1948 after she rejected his sexual advances. Cohn, furious at his humiliation, dismissed The Hook as communist propaganda.

In 1954, Kazan would direct an Oscar-winning film with a very similar theme for Columbia: On the Waterfront. By then, Kazan had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named several colleagues as communists, in what many (including Miller) saw as a self-serving bid to save his own career.

In his own testimony before HUAC in 1956, Miller admitted to having attended a few communist meetings many years before, but refused on principle to name others. Marilyn stood by her husband, and he was acquitted in 1958.

September 24, 2014July 2, 2019

Deconstructing Heymann’s ‘Joe and Marilyn’

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum adds to the mounting criticism of C. David Heymann’s posthumously-published Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love.

The article includes an acknowledgement to ES Updates: ‘Marilyn Monroe fan sites saw through this right away. The British blogger Tara Hanks wrote this in July, several weeks before the Newsweek piece appeared.’

Furthermore, Ryan Chittum has investigated some of Heymann’s controversial sources:

“Heymann claimed to have talked to Lotte Goslar, Monroe’s mime teacher, for the book. But Goslar died in 1997. Susan Strasberg, another source, died in 1999. Monroe’s makeup artist, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder, whom Heymann cites two-dozen times, died in 1994. Yankees legend Bill Dickey died in 1993, and gossip columnist Doris Lilly died in 1991.

These supposed interviews fit a pattern, as Johnston noted in Newsweek: Quotes and new information attributed to dead sources who can’t say whether Heymann ever actually talked to them.

In the book, Heymann extensively quotes Robert Solotaire, whose father George was a good friend of Joe DiMaggio’s, discussing DiMaggio’s supposed use of prostitutes and his tiffs with Monroe, among other titillating anecdotes. Robert Solotaire died in 2008. Benjamin Solotaire, Robert’s son, tells me the quotes were made up.

‘He would never have shared such intimate details about what Joe said,’ Benjamin says. ‘My father said that George, my grandfather, would look away when having dinner with Joe and Marilyn whenever they were being affectionate. My father continued respecting that privacy. And the quotes just aren’t the way dad spoke. They are too crass and detailed for him.’

‘It is bothersome to me and my family that these made-up, embarrassing quotes are attributed to my father,’ he continued. ‘George and dad were great friends of Joe and would never have tarnished his or Marilyn’s reputation.'”

Chittum also mentions Dr Judd Marmor, a psychiatrist who briefly treated Marilyn. Heymann previously quoted him in his pulped biography of Barbara Hutton, claiming the heiress had an affair with his patient, James Dean. But Dean’s biographer, Val Holley, also approached Dr Marmor, who rightly refused to discuss his former patient with any author. Marmor died in 2003.

In Joe and Marilyn, Heymann claimed that Dr Marmor revealed confidential details about Marilyn’s relationship with Elia Kazan; and that Marilyn was then treated for a year Dr Rose Fromm, which – as the Newsweek article has already established – is untrue.

“Fromm’s appearance in Chapter 3 allowed Heymann to fill in lurid details about Monroe’s youth, including a supposed sexual incident with ‘Roxanne Smith,’ a ‘pretty and well developed’ sixth-grade classmate, whose existence, ‘despite the best efforts of the dozens of biographers who have written about Marilyn Monroe over the years,’ had never been reported until Heymann came along. These and many other anecdotes and quotes from Monroe’s childhood, including details about her sex life with her first husband, come from Fromm in vivid detail 50 years after the fact (Heymann wrote that Fromm ‘kept notes on her meeting with MM, and these notes were made available to the author’).”

Finally, Ryan Chittum challenges Simon & Schuster, who published Joe and Marilyn, to answer these charges:

“You can’t libel the dead, as biographer Kitty Kelley noted in that Post story, and Heymann made a living off of that. But Simon & Schuster looked the other way.

It continues to do so. Johnston says the book’s editor, Emily Bestler, hung up on him when he started asking about Heymann’s fabrications, and that Simon & Schuster declined to talk to him. Bestler did not respond to my requests for comment, and Simon & Schuster and CBS Corporation declined to comment on questions Johnston and I have raised. “Thank you for checking in on this again before you go to press. Once again, we will have no response to Mr. Johnston’s article in Newsweek, nor any comment on your questions,” says Adam Rothberg, Simon & Schuster’s senior vice president of corporate communications.

That doesn’t cut it.

Simon & Schuster and CBS need to answer questions about whether Bestler actually had the book factchecked, and if so, how that process went so wrong. They need to talk about why they haven’t recalled books that have been so thoroughly discredited. They also need to say why they signed someone like Heymann in the first place.”

September 16, 2014June 11, 2019

Cameron Mitchell Honoured in Pennsylvania

Marilyn with Cameron Mitchell in ‘How to Marry a Millionaire’

Actor Cameron Mitchell (1921-1994), who played Tom Brookman in How to Marry a Millionaire, will be honoured in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, beginning with a screening of the 1953 comedy on September 27 at the Zion Church, Glen Rock, reports YDR.com. The event will be sponsored by the Glen Rock Historic Preservation Society, with proceeds earmarked for the Cameron Mitchell Scholarship Fund.

Mitchell was born in Pennsylvania. He served as a bombardier during World War II, and was a founding member of the Actor’s Studio. In 1949, he appeared as Happy Loman in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

According to The Unabridged Marilyn, Mitchell was heading to the Fox Commissary with Marilyn when they met Miller, and salesman director Elia Kazan, in December 1950. (However, most accounts place Marilyn’s first meeting with Miller slightly later, in early 1951, on the set of As Young As You Feel – her first role under a new studio contract. Her agent and boyfriend, Johnny Hyde, had died in December, and as Miller and Kazan have both recalled, Marilyn was still grieving.)

‘As you know her, you find out she’s no goddamn gold-plated birdbrain. She’s a serious dame,’ Mitchell said of Marilyn. ‘At the time I first met her, she was on a big psychiatry kick. She was studying Freud, Menninger, that kind of thing.’

April 15, 2014June 28, 2019

Liz Smith on Kazan, Miller, and Marilyn

Liz Smith, ‘the grande dame of dish’, has shared her thoughts on Elia Kazan’s recently-published letter about Marilyn in her latest syndicated piece – and it’s a doozy. You can read it in full here.

“The cruel irony/P.S. to this is that Kazan, after years of estrangement with Arthur Miller, would collaborate with him again, mounting one of (I think) the worst moments in American theater history — Miller’s play After the Fall. This was Miller’s confession/denunciation of Monroe as a castrating, self-destructive witch, from whom he had to escape. That Monroe was two years dead and unable to defend herself appeared of no interest to her ex-husband or her ex-lover. Miller’s pretense that the ‘Maggie’ of his play was not Monroe — or his version of her — compounded the insult. Marilyn’s good friend, author James Baldwin, walked out of After the Fall, so furious was he over Miller’s characterization of her. (The star, Barbara Loden was costumed, bewigged and given the appropriate Monroe-like gestures, in case anybody didn’t quite get it.)

THOSE who disliked Arthur Miller — and there were many — found some satisfaction in the fact that After the Fall was his last success. He would wallow in epilogue and various variations on Marilyn for the rest of his life.

Miller’s inactivity as a writer — except for his tedious screenplay for The Misfits — was often blamed on Marilyn. He himself said it. But right after the Miller/Monroe divorce, columnist Max Lerner opined that it was less likely that Monroe had constricted Miller, but that he had sought her out precisely because he had run out of material.

Several weeks before her death, an interviewer faced Marilyn with Lerner’s observation. Did she have a comment? She paused, and then said: ‘If I answer, will you promise to repeat my quote in its entirety?’

The writer said yes.

Marilyn replied: ‘No comment.’

This is the only thing Marilyn Monroe ever said criticizing a husband — or anybody else in public life for that matter. She was, as Kazan noted, ‘not vicious.’ And it is an indication of her agony, being blamed for the failures of a man she literally saved; standing with him and risking her own career as he was grilled by The House Un-American Activities Committee, in the matter of his youthful communist flirtations.

Miller and Kazan left that Marilyn out of After the Fall.”

April 10, 2014April 2, 2019

Elia Kazan’s Private Letters

The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, due to be published on April 22, has been excerpted in the Hollywood Reporter. One of the letters, written to wife Molly in 1955, is a confession of his affair with Marilyn four years earlier, while she was filming As Young As You Feel.

“In one sense it’s true to say that it meant nothing. On the other hand it was a human experience, and it started, if that is of any significance, in a most human way. Her boy friend, or ‘keeper’ (if you want to be mean) had just died. His family had not allowed her to see the body, or allowed her into the house, where she had been living. She had sneaked in one night and been thrown out. I met her on [director]Harmon Jones’ set. Harmon thought her a ridiculous person and was fashionably scornful of her. I found her, when I was introduced, in tears. I took her to dinner because she seemed like such a touching pathetic waif. She sobbed all thru dinner. I wasn’t ‘interested in her’; that came later. I got to know her in time and introduced her to Arthur Miller, who also was very taken by her. You couldn’t help being touched. She was talented, funny, vulnerable, helpless in awful pain, with no hope, and some worth and not a liar, not vicious, not catty, and with a history of orphanism that was killing to hear. She was like all Charlie Chaplin’s heroines in one.

I’m not ashamed at all, not a damn bit, of having been attracted to her. She is nothing like what she appears to be now, or even appears to have turned into now. She was a little stray cat when I knew her. I got a lot out of her just as you do from any human experience where anyone is revealed to you and you affect anyone in any way. I guess I gave her a lot of hope. She is not a big sex pot as advertised. At least not in my experience. I don’t know if there are such as ‘advertised’ big sex pots. She told me a lot about [Joe DiMaggio] and her, his Catholicism, and his viciousness (he struck her often, and beat her up several times). I was touched and fascinated. It was the type of experience that I do not understand and I enjoyed (not the right word) hearing about it. I certainly recommended her to Tennessee’s attention. And he was very taken by her.”

Kazan had first met Marilyn a year before, at a screening of A Streetcar Named Desire with Johnny Hyde (the aforementioned ‘keeper’.) Hyde died in December 1950. Kazan came to Hollywood with Arthur Miller in 1951, which is when their affair began. However, he has written elsewhere that even then, she was attracted to Miller.

Their relationship lasted a few months, until Kazan returned to New York. They remained friends afterward, and a letter from Kazan to Marilyn was auctioned on Ebay a few years ago.

Miller and Kazan fell out when the director co-operated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, at the height of the ‘red scare’ which ruined many careers in the movie and theatre world. While married to Miller, Marilyn tried to reconcile them.

During their affair, Marilyn naturally hoped Kazan would consider her for a future role. But he rejected her for the lead in Baby Doll (1955), though author Tennessee Williams thought her a perfect choice. He also refused to cast her in Wild River (1960), after Twentieth Century-Fox offered her the part.

Marilyn bore no grudges, though, and wrote in a 1961 letter to her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, that Kazan ‘loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep when I was in great anguish.’

Barbara Loden in ‘After the Fall’ (1964)

Ironically, Miller and Kazan would reunite after her death to collaborate on After the Fall, a controversial, thinly-veiled account of Miller’s private demons, including a self-destructive character based on Marilyn.

December 26, 2013June 28, 2019

‘Artie, Gadge and Marilyn’ in North Jersey

Artie, Gadge, Marilyn and HUAC is a new play by Thom Molnyneaux, based on the love triangle between Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and MM, and set against the background of the infamous ‘red-baiting’ era.

The play’s first public reading (with actress Lee Ann Hoover playing Monroe) will take place on December 27 (tomorrow night), at 8 pm in The Becton Theatre on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson in Teaneck, North Jersey.