Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming Read Free Book Online Page B

sweetly. She strove to give no sign of what she was really thinking. In Kazan’s presence, she consciously played the happy girl, fearful that she might lose his interest again if she did not.
    But her role as the happy girl was far from the truth of Marilyn’s existence as she struggled to make use of the opportunity Skouras had given her. To understand the immense pressure Marilyn was under, it’s important to remember that in her case succeeding in films was much more than a question of simple ambition. It was a life-and-death matter. As far as Marilyn was concerned, life was not worth living if she failed to win the dignity and respect that came with being a star.
    Marilyn might have been given minor roles in a pair of insignificant films, but in her mind everything was at stake. She was convinced that the slightest miscalculation might cause her enterprise to collapse. Therefore, on a film set, Marilyn was terrified of going in front of the camera. She would break out in a rash, vomit, revert to a childhood stammer. She would find a thousand reasons for postponing the moment when she finally had to emerge from her dressing room. The extent to which Marilyn keyed herself up in anticipation of being filmed also accounts for why audiences often couldn’t take their eyes off her. Every time Marilyn appeared in a film, she was excruciatingly focused on making that moment happen. For Marilyn, nothing else mattered. At times, she seemed to be acting in a film of her own. Her role might be modest, her line readings inept, yet she communicated through the sheer intensity of her performance.
    Marilyn’s partner in all this was her acting coach and former roommate, Natasha Lytess. Marilyn had moved to the Beverly-Carlton in search of privacy, but skinny, green-eyed, flamboyant, nervous Natasha became a constant presence there. To account for her temperamental nature, Natasha claimed to be of mixed Russian and French blood. Some people whispered that she was really a German. She was in fact an Austrian Jew, a former actress in Max Reinhardt’s company in Germany.
    Natasha never complained when Marilyn summoned her by telephone after midnight to go over lines. She didn’t seem to mind when Marilyn called her out of her day job as a dramatic coach at Twentieth. She regarded Marilyn as her second daughter and called herself Marilyn’s private director. She encouraged people to think of her as Marilyn’s right arm. Natasha was Marilyn’s teacher, cheerleader, psychiatrist, best friend, handmaiden, slavedriver, and whipping boy, all rolled into one. She told Marilyn that she was too negative. She begged her to discard her insecurity. She implored her to learn to love herself. She informed her that she suffered from a guilt complex. She derided her laziness. She urged her to be strong. She warned her to grow up. When Natasha castigated Marilyn, she insisted that she gave her own daughter the same rough treatment when she misbehaved.
    Marilyn’s relationship with Natasha was passionate, turbulent, caring, over-the-top, and mutually exploitative. The emblem of that relationship was an antique cameo brooch—a woman’s head delicatelyenclosed in gold—that Marilyn gave her at Christmas, 1950, shortly after Natasha had rescued her from her suicide attempt following Johnny’s death. A note in a blue envelope declared Marilyn’s belief that she owed Natasha much more than her life. Natasha planned to collect.
    Natasha had met Marilyn at Columbia Pictures, where she had been assigned to prepare Marilyn to play a burlesque queen in Phil Karlson’s
Ladies of the Chorus.
As a dramatic coach, she was nothing if not critical. She thought Marilyn’s gestures tense, inhibited, and unnatural. She hated Marilyn’s affectation of refusing to move her lips when she spoke. She found Marilyn’s voice so irritating that she asked her to refrain from talking unnecessarily until they had a chance to work together. She had Marilyn slowly read a