Page 25 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“Marilyn’s hot,” insists Schenck’s pal Johnny Roselli, as he lines up his swing on the golf course. “Really hot. The full package.”

“Sure,” shrugs Harry Cohn. “Send her my way and let’s see if we can use her.”

In March 1948, Cohn signs Marilyn to Columbia. The six-month contract pays $125 a week.

CHAPTER 17

COLUMBIA PICTURES ACTING COACH Natasha Lytess works out of a bungalow office next to the Three Stooges sound stage. Marilyn arrives twenty-five minutes late to their first meeting, wearing a curve-clinging dress that’s cut so low it reveals her bra.

“That is a trollop’s outfit,” declares Lytess, in lightly accented English. Lytess is German but posed as Russian to be more employable as an actress in the United States. Given her Jewish background, she’d fled her native Germany before the Nazis took power.

Despite her own stalled career, which she attributes to the vulgarity of Hollywood and its poorly made films, Lytess’s tutoring ability is unsurpassed. Tall, slim, in her late thirties, with short, cropped hair, she burns with a humorless intensity and an insistence that acting is important work to be taken seriously.

Three walls of her office are lined with wooden bookshelves groaning under the weight of intellectually rigorous novels,plays, and other great works of literature. It is as if a slice of European intelligentsia has been transported to California.

While Marilyn appreciates culture and sophistication, she possesses neither.

Natasha Lytess takes a quick inventory of her new pupil. She is unimpressed. The girl knows nothing about the physical components of acting. She barely moves her lips when she mumbles her words, she has no concept of diaphragmatic breathing, and she has no idea about pace or diction. How did she ever land a contract at Columbia Pictures?

The drama coach recommends daily sessions. At first, Marilyn merely listens to Lytess tell her life story, her flight from Germany to America and the hardships that culminated with her and her young daughter Barbara’s destitution following the death of Barbara’s father. Marilyn nods in sympathy for a life she can understand. Poverty. Destitution. Misery. No father. No husband.

Lytess has Marilyn repeat elocution exercises—“I did not want to pet the dear, soft cat”—making sure to enunciate thet’s and thed’s. Marilyn’s diction becomes clipped and precise and perhaps a little contrived. And, despite her initial doubts, Lytess begins to adore her.

“I want to re-create you,” explains Lytess. “I shall mold you into the great actress that I suspect you can be. But to do so, you must totally submit to me. Do you understand?”

Marilyn nods in agreement.

She suspects there might be another agenda at play when Lytess takes hold of her shoulders and looks into her big blue eyes.

“I want to love you, Marilyn,” she whispers.

“You don’t have to love me, Natasha,” she says with a smile. “You just have to work with me.”

On March 14, 1948, Marilyn is surprised by the depth of her grief for Aunt Ana, who has succumbed to her heart ailments at the age of sixty-eight. After the funeral, Marilyn sits in Natasha Lytess’s office on the lot, her bare feet tucked up under her, weeping into tissues.

“I lay in Aunt Ana’s bed the day after she died, you know,” says Marilyn. “Just for a couple of hours. Then I went to Westwood Memorial Park, where men were digging a grave. Not hers. Someone else’s. And there was a ladder into it. They’re quite deep, you know. So, I asked if I could climb down and lie there, and they said yes. I went down and I lay on the ground, in the earth, looking up at the sky. The ground is cold under your back, but it’s quite a view.”

Marilyn sighs. “I’m left with no one to take my hopes and troubles to. She was the one human being who let me know what love is. She looked after me like one of her own.”

“There will be others,” replies Lytess. “Many, many others …”

“She’s the first person in the world I ever really loved, and she loved me. She was a wonderful human being. She never once hurt me. She couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love.”

Marilyn plucks another tissue from the box and dabs the tears from her eyes.

Lytess speaks up. “There is some good news.”

“Oh?”

“They’re casting for a new musical—Ladies of the Chorus.”

“I’ve taken singing lessons,” Marilyn says.

“Good.” Lytess smiles briefly. “I have put you up for the starring role of Peggy Martin, a young chorus girl in a burlesque show. We start rehearsing for the audition tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 18

FRED “FREDDY” KARGER is a composer and arranger for the Columbia music department.

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