2. MARILYN MONROE ASCENDENT

Marilyn Monroe starring in The Asphalt Jungle with Sterling Hayden (1950)

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by Norman B. Schwartz

Because she was so convincing as the quintessential blonde bimbo, many to this day conclude that Marilyn Monroe must have been one. She was not. Neither was she the latter-day saint, the innocent victim of an exploitive society as has so often been depicted in present-day heliography.

Norman Jeane Mortenson, the name on her birth certificate, died in 1962 when she was thirty-six years old. In all the years since, she has rarely been given credit for her intelligence and ambition or the intense years of study and hard work that prepared her for her eventual success.

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Born in 1928, the illegitimate daughter of a film laboratory technician, who had been dragonized as a paranoid schizophrenic and institutionalized when Norma Jeane was only six, Marilyn was first brought up by her mother’s closest friend and then shuttled off to distant relatives, twelve foster homes, and an orphanage. She never knew her father.

During the Second World War, when she was sixteen and married to a merchant seaman who was off fighting in the Pacific, she joined other women at the Radiophone factory in Los Angeles, spraying paint on target drones. There, she was discovered on the assembly line by a Signal Corps cameraman doing a story about the women on the Homefront. Her-girl-next- door good looks soon became one of the preferred pinups cherished by servicemen on battlefields worldwide.

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By 1946, only eighteen years old, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers and had been signed by Twentieth Century Fox with the standard six-month starlet contract with an option to renew. The studio changed her name. As the newly created Marilyn Monroe had never acted, Fox enrolled her in the Actors’ Laboratory Theater, a school in Hollywood run by former Leftist members of The Group Theater, a revolutionary New York company, the first ensemble in the United States to use the Russian Stanislavski’s internal techniques in the Broadway theater. When the theater disbanded in 1940, many of its best actors went west and found work as character actors in wartime Hollywood films.

At the Lab, Marilyn studied with Morris Carnovsky, his wife, Phoebe Brand, and J. Edgar Bromberg; all three had been card-carrying members of the CPUSA, the Communist Party of the United States, their careers about to be cut short during the blacklisting days of the House un-American Activities Committee.

The Lab, as Marilyn was first to acknowledge, was to be her first artistic home. Its irresistible atmosphere of art and politics gave her “the first taste of what real acting in real drama could be, and I was hooked.” She remained addicted for the rest of her life.

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When Fox chose not to renew her short contract, she did what many an aspiring actress did; she moved from acting to modelling job, from benefactor to benefactor until she signed another short $150-a-week contract with Columbia Pictures. There, in March of 1948, she met a woman who was to enormously influence on her early life—her first long-term coach and confidante, the Berlin-born refugee Natasha Lytess (1913–1964). Natasha had been a student of the great German director Max Reinhardt and appeared in many of his European plays. In America, where she could utilize her mannish looks and heavy accent, she had only played minor roles in films and Broadway.

Natasha’s greatest claim to fame was not to be an actress but a mentor in the days when all the major studios hired drama coaches whose job was to teach young contract players elocution, proper posture, and, most importantly, how to kiss before the camera. Natasha seemed to have an exceptional talent for developing potential blonde sex symbols, among them the Dutch actress Mamie Van Doren, the B-movie femme fatale Ann Savage, and Marilyn herself. Natasha began the transformation of MM from the shy young girl who was too timid to do scenes in acting class into the screen-burning bombshell who would one day make her both famous and notorious.

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But Marilyn aspired to be taken seriously as an actress. She enrolled in a class given by one of the most brilliant Russian emigres then working in Hollywood— Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright, who had been one of Stanislavski’s first pupils at the Moscow Art Theater school before emigrating to Dartington Hall in England and then the United States.

Best remembered today as the elderly psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Chekhov had inspired many—among them, the young Mexican Irish character actor Tony Quinn—but, as was so often to be the case with her instructors, he only terrified MM. She found the Russian a formidable presence, a difficult and eccentric taskmaster, and was constantly late to class—a pattern to be repeated many times afterward on set, location, and in her private life.

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Ironically enough, while she was still relatively unknown, she had also gained another reputation (deserved or not) for being one of those “available” young actresses who was always ready “to go out” with someone important who might further her career.

The first among many would be Johnny Hyde (ne Ivan Haidabura,) then Vice President of William Morris, one of Hollywood’s most important talent agencies. Johnny paid for the plastic surgery (nose and chin) that he felt was a prerequisite for a successful career and found her got her a much better-paying, long-term seven-year contract at her old studio, Twentieth Century Fox. Somewhere along the line, Nick Schenck, invited her to live as a permanent resident at his guest house.

At Fox, Marilyn caught the attention of and began sleeping with Elia Kazan, an import from the New York theater who had been one of the studio’s contract directors. Although he was then married to writer Molly Day Thatcher in New York, Kazan often found such willing companions as Marilyn when he worked temporarily on the coast. When his Warner Bros. film Streetcar Named Desire previewed to audiences in 1951 in Santa Barbara, MM went along as Kazan’s arm candy.

In those years, Kazan, ever ready to share his girls with others, introduced the voluptuous starlet to another East Coast visitor to Lotus Land, his friend, the New York playwright Arthur Miller, whose play Death of a Salesman Kazan had directed on Broadway. After a brief affair, Miller never forgot Marilyn and would one day marry her.

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On the other hand, Kazan took a less adoring view of his companion despite his talent for discovering young actors. In his 1988 autobiography, A Life, he writes about her candidly without the usual sentimentality or canonization that later became the accepted view of her unsettled life. He judged her then as just another “Hollywood party girl” on constant call to accompany and “entertain” their superiors, and never once imagined she would one day become a star, let alone an actress. Despite what others thought of her, Marilyn believed in herself.

By 1956, she had become a major star repeating the role of the eternal dumb blonde in a series of hit films: How to Marry a Millionaire and The Seven Year Itch. Much to her fan’s dismay, at the height of her career, she announced that she would abandon Hollywood to go east at Lee Strasberg’s invitation to study Method acting at the Actors Studio in New York. There, Lee’s wife, Paula Miller, became her on-set coach, ready to take over that maternal and nurturing role in the actress’s life that Natasha Lytess had once provided.

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Much has been made over the years about what some consider Lee’s misguided influence. He, too, had fallen in love with her. We have no proof that it was sexual. Still, those who observed them together saw how emotionally attached he had become, watching over, protecting, and encouraging her to try roles once considered beyond her ability. Strasberg predicted, much to the amazement of others at the Actors Studio, that she would one day be able to play one of the great Russian heroines—Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov.

Marilyn did not live long enough to attempt his prediction. Whether or not she could have or would have become the great American actress her mentor prophesized will always remain conjecture.

When she died in 1962, her life was both an artistic and professional catastrophe, her detractors began pointing out her deficiencies as an actress. In one of her last performances in John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), which her husband Arthur Miller had written for her, she plays a former stripper filing for divorce in Reno, Nevada. It is undoubtedly a competent, professional job, but in no way up to the standard of her Studio contemporaries Kim Stanley or Geraldine Page. Marilyn’s acting often seems calculated and over-coached, lacking in the shining quality Marilyn had above all others—her spontaneity and naturalness.

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For those who now detract her and point out her inadequacies, there are many astonishing acting moments in her earlier films worth studying and admiring: her childish delight at the air-conditioner in The Seven Year Itch; in All About Eve the deer-in-the-headlights way she concentrates intensely, obviously unable to understand a word of what Bette Davis and George Sanders are talking about at the foot of the staircase; the effervescence and charm she displays playing against the clockwork precision of Laurence Oliver, her co-star and director in The Prince and the Showgirl. While he is acting, often over-acting, she is.

Notwithstanding what others might have thought about her then, watching her at her best today, we see that after years of study and practice, Marilyn arrived at her goal: she had indeed become an actress. If not in the likeness of her idol Eleanor Duse, she was one of the world’s best light comediennes—a skill, some would argue, much harder to achieve than tragedienne.

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of the magazine with a view to Centre House Press publishing the entire collection of essays in book form in spring 2026