The Genius and the Goddess by Jeffrey Meyers Read Free Book Online Page A

Schenck had
been married to Talmadge from 1917 (when she was twenty years
old) to 1934. In 1941 he was convicted for bribing union officials to
prevent strikes, and spent four months in a federal prison in Danbury,
Connecticut.
    Marilyn refused to marry the wealthy Schenck, but agreed to move
into his guest cottage. According to a Hollywood columnist, Schenck
needed medical assistance to get an erection, which did not last very
long. Marilyn was amusing about her role in their urgent arrangement:
"It's all very complicated. Sometimes when the doctor comes,
I have to synchronize my watch. That's why I'm living in the guest
house. This stuff can't wait for a studio limousine to drive me across
town." During these years she also spent a lot of time on her knees,
servicing movie executives like Harry Cohn in their offices, but this
phase of her life came to an end in 1951. After signing her first long-term
contract with Fox, she triumphantly declared: "I have sucked
my last cock." 3
II
    In 1948, during her six-month contract with Columbia Pictures,
Marilyn was sent to their drama coach Natasha Lytess, and began theacting lessons with a series of teachers that would continue until
the end of her life. A natural comedienne with a sexy face and figure,
Marilyn yearned to be a dramatic actress. She was utterly devoted to
all her mentors, most of them of them heavily influenced byKonstantin
Stanislavsky's school of"Method" acting, which emphasized the inner
truth of the actor's feelings, moods and expressions. Born into a Jewish
family in Austria and a former actress in Max Reinhardt's company
in Germany, Lytess claimed Franco-Russian descent to dissociate
herself from the wartime enemy and connect herself with the Russian
acting tradition. Tall, angular, even emaciated, with flashing eyes, short-cropped
gray hair, a strong accent and forbidding appearance, Lytess
was energetic, volatile and intense. Several biographers have suggested
(though there's no evidence for this) that Lytess was the mistress of
the German-Jewish émigré novelistBruno Frank and that he was the
father of her young daughter, Barbara.
    Like most of her teachers, Lytess influenced Marilyn's personal as
well as her professional life. A devout and submissive disciple, Marilyn
became a close friend. When Lytess was desperate for money to pay
the mortgage, or risk losing her house, Marilyn sold the mink stole
that one of her admirers had given her – the only valuable thing she
owned – and gave Lytess $1,000. Marilyn had known real poverty in
her youth and was alwaysgenerous with money. Emphasizing her
characteristic openhandedness, Lytess said the self-absorbed actress
frequently gave material gifts because "she was unable to give of
herself." Marilyn admired her as a teacher, but complained that Lytess
was jealous of her boyfriends and behaved as if she were Marilyn's
husband. When Lytess wanted to have sex with her, Marilyn passively
agreed. "I'd let any guy, or girl," she insouciantly explained, "do what
they wanted if I thought they were my friend."
    Like Snively, Lytess had to start from scratch. She recalled, Marilyn's
"voice, a piping sort of whimper, got on my nerves" – though Marilyn
developed this breathy whisper as her trademark. Lytess encouraged
her inhibited pupil "to let go, to say things freely, to walk freely, to
feel expansion, to know what it is like to speak with authority." Then,
using a sub-aqueous metaphor that would recur in descriptions of
Marilyn, she said she wanted her pupil to know "the difference between
existing under water and coming alive." She taught Marilyn how to
express character and reveal the meaning of a scene, and to understand
that acting was best when "the emotion shows, not the words." 4 Like Lee Strasberg later on, she urged her pupil to concentrate on
herself instead of on the writer's words, on the interpretation of her
own role instead of on relating to the other actors.
    Lytess, like Strasberg, also exacerbated