Page 23 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
Harry Cohn is a brute—a powerful brute who has cut her professional pride deeply and pushed her to the brink of failure.
But there was something that would not let me go back to the world of Norma Jeane.
It wasn’t ambition or a wish to be rich and famous.
I didn’t feel any pent-up talent in me. I didn’t even feel that I had looks or any sort of attractiveness.
But there was a thing in me, a craziness that wouldn’t let up.
It kept speaking to me. Telling me. To keep going.
Marilyn has long hoped that Freddy Karger might propose.
He blames his indecision on the welfare of his son.
“It would be all right for me,” Karger says of their potentially marrying, “but I keep thinking of my son. If we were married and anything should happen to me—such as my dropping dead—it would be very bad for him.”
“Why?”
“It wouldn’t be right for him to be brought up by a woman like you,” he said. “It would be unfair to him.”
In return for Marilyn’s unconditional love, Karger commits only to paying her dental bill.
Now that her teeth are bleached and straightened, it’s time to smile and say good-bye. Marilyn gives Freddy Karger an extravagant Christmas gift—a $500 wristwatch engraved 12/25/48 .
“Why didn’t you have it engraved ‘From Marilyn to Freddy with love,’ or something?” Karger asks. He’s very touched by the present.
“Because you’ll leave me someday,” she tells him, “and you’ll have some other girl to love. And you wouldn’t be able to use my present if my name was on it. This way you can always use it, as if it were something you’d bought yourself.”
Karger is emotional over the gift but does nothing to dissuade Marilyn. She cries herself to sleep that night, knowing leaving him is the right decision.
Still, she’ll think of him every time she makes a watch payment—for the next two years.
On December 31, 1948, Marilyn and Natasha Lytess spend New Year’s Eve as guests of Sam Spiegel, a producer as famous for being unaffiliated with any studio as he is for hosting lavish parties in a borrowed house in Beverly Hills.
Anything might happen in the company of the man who in 1946 partnered with Orson Welles to make the Oscar-nominated postwar thriller The Stranger, as his friend Johnny Hyde, vice president of the William Morris Agency, soon discovers.
Hyde, barely five feet tall but one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, is instantly smitten by Marilyn when they meet at the New Year’s Eve party.
He’s sure she’ll be his next great success story. Born in Russia to circus acrobats, Hyde is slight of figure, frail in appearance, and chasing a receding hairline, but the fifty-three-year-old agent has experience steering the careers of major stars like Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, and Bob Hope.
“You’re going to be a great movie star,” Hyde tells Marilyn. “I know. Many years ago, I discovered a girl like you and brought her to Metro—Lana Turner. You’re better. You’ll go farther. You’ve got more.”
“Then why can’t I get a job?” Marilyn asks. “Just to make enough money to eat on.”
“It’s hard for a star to get an eating job,” says Hyde. “A star is only good as a star. You don’t fit into anything less.”
Johnny Hyde is a man in love. He’s also a whirlwind.
Marilyn matches his energy as they lunch at Romanoff’s, dance at Ciro’s, party at the Mocambo and the Troc.
She sits next to him, not uttering a word beyond “Yes, Johnny” or “No, Johnny.” Occasionally, she calls him “Daddy.” Most especially when she wants something.
He leaves his wife and his four sons and rents a house on 718 North Palm Drive, Beverly Hills, and puts Marilyn up at the Beverly Carlton Hotel to distract the press and studio gossipmongers.
Smart and well-read, he buys Marilyn enough volumes to start a personal library, from the Russian greats—Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy—to Marcel Proust and Thomas Wolfe to Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares . She studies, underlining each page, knowing that he will test her afterward.
“Johnny Hyde wants to be my agent!” Marilyn announces to Natasha Lytess.
“He’s buying me out of my contract with Harry Lipton.
He told me so last weekend in Palm Springs.
” He knows that she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, but it doesn’t dissuade him.
“I don’t think it’s wrong to let him love me the way he does.
I do feel sorry for him, but I swear I am never going to lie to him. ”
Johnny knows that I don’t tell lies. He knows I’m not planning to fool him . “The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone,” Marilyn says. It’s hardly her fault if “men sometimes fool themselves.”
On March 2, 1949, Marilyn signs a contract appointing the William Morris Agency as her sole and exclusive representative in film, television, and radio.