Marilyn’s Method

The Strasberg relationship started the first few months of 1955, when, according to Butler, Marilyn met theatrical producer and cofounder of the Actors Studio Cheryl Crawford at a New York dinner party. As Butler writes in The Method, “Crawford took a liking to Monroe and brought her to the Actors Studio. Soon Monroe began studying with Strasberg at Malin Studios . . .” Eventually, Marilyn would take private classes from the charismatic teacher, and the Strasbergs became like family to her. As Martin Landau says about Lee in a Marilyn documentary, “Who better to put that badge on her but the high priest.”

The “high priest,” Strasberg, had cocreated the Group Theatre in New York City in 1931, alongside director and drama critic Harold Clurman and Crawford. He joined the Actors Studio in 1948—which had been founded by director Elia Kazan, Crawford, and actor, director, and teacher Robert Lewis—and took over as director in 1951. Though it’s hard to sum up succinctly, Strasberg’s methods included improvisation, dance, sense memory, and affective memory, wherein an actor digs into real-life past memories to provoke an individual, emotional, and honest response. Strasberg encouraged therapy to aid or alleviate some of the more challenging aspects of his methods, and Marilyn herself was in psychoanalysis. This digging could uncover intense past trauma, and some people around her were concerned.

Starting in 1948, and up until Bus Stop, Marilyn’s drama coach was the Berlin-born Natasha Lytess (who had studied under Max Reinhardt). They worked together for many years, with Lytess so devoted to Marilyn’s work and Marilyn to her that eventually Marilyn became her main pupil. Speaking about Lytess on Edward R. Murrow’s television program Person to Person, Marilyn said, “she helped me very much from the very beginning.” But, for various reasons, and much to Lytess’s disappointment, Marilyn replaced her with Paula Strasberg.

Another important and significant influence on Marilyn during her Lytess years was one of Stanislavski’s “most brilliant” students from the Moscow Arts Theatre—Michael Chekhov. Nephew of Anton Chekhov and Oscar-nominated for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Michael Chekhov inspired her enough to devote a chapter to him in her posthumously published memoir, My Story:

Though Lytess worked with Marilyn on Henry Hathaway’s magnificent Niagara, it’s interesting to think of Chekhov’s teachings and the dreamy, though very physical, quality Marilyn expressed here. It’s an extraordinary performance—a delirious creation—often under-discussed in terms of her acting, I think, because Marilyn became so iconic because of it. Her character, Rose Loomis, is writ so large that she was on par with a wonder of the world—Niagara Falls. She wasn’t the film’s lead, but she was undoubtedly its star—a fever dream who burns so brightly in her hot pink dress, with her teetering walk and red lips, that her spirit hovers over the movie even after she’s killed two-thirds of the way through.

Marilyn plays Rose as a simultaneous fantasy, symbol, and human being. She is paradoxical—a femme fatale and a victim. She also feels like a representation of the sublimated desires of the film’s heroine, the sweet but darkly curious Jean Peters, who is enduring a rather disappointing vacation (and, apparently, marriage) with her husband (Casey Adams). Peters is enthralled by the toxic Loomis marriage (Joseph Cotten plays Marilyn’s husband, George), pulled in first by Marilyn’s unearthly gorgeousness and sexuality and then by Cotten’s corrosive jealousy and unhappiness. When you see Rose emerge from her cabin in that radiating pink dress to play her favorite record, “Kiss”—a song that becomes the film’s haunted refrain—she’s beautiful but eerie, nearly a conjuring of Peters’s fascination.

As visible and as gorgeous as Marilyn’s adulterous Rose is, she is ultimately enigmatic, and you don’t have one simple read on her being just “bad.” It is Marilyn’s visage, her movements, and her sexiness mixed with threat and fear that make Hathaway’s Technicolor noir even more surreal and powerful. She matches it, is propulsive, and the movie wouldn’t have reached its level of crazy lyricism without her.

Hathaway thought she was superb. A director notoriously tough on actors, he considered her “marvelous to work with, very easy to direct and terrifically ambitious to do better.”

Bus Stop director Joshua Logan witnessed those ambitions, though he almost didn’t. In his memoir, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, he wrote: “I nearly missed one of the high spots of my directing life because I had fallen for the popular Hollywood prejudice about Marilyn Monroe.”

With Bus Stop, Marilyn was, as usual, hard at work. And she was taking risks. She worked on an Ozark accent while inventing (with help from Greene) the bolder look of her character, Chérie. Her face was layered with extra pale, almost clown-like makeup because her character barely saw the sun (Logan claims that he had to fight with producers to convince them to keep this look). She also rejected typically sleek Hollywood showgirl clothes—going for more tattered attire, something a woman who sings at a club called the Blue Dragon Café in Phoenix, Arizona, might wear. As Logan recounted, Marilyn said, “You and I are going to shred it up, pull out part of the fringe, poke holes in the fishnet stockings, then have ’em darned with big, sprawling darns. Oh, it’s gonna be so sorry and pitiful and it’ll make you cry.” He continued, “I was beginning to feel that she had always been brilliant. No one seemed to have listened to her before.”

The look gives her a mixture of vulnerability and strength, too, as she rushes by in these skimpy outfits, trying to hold her ground and escape from the hollering virginal cowboy Beauregard (Don Murray). Bo sees her onstage, decides precisely who she is, and will not hear anything to the contrary. He pursues her to the point of kidnapping, supposedly comically, but Chérie is so embarrassed and anxious that through her you feel how disturbing it all is. It’s a strange movie, fascinatingly so, and though it’s hard to reckon with Bo changing so quickly by the end, Marilyn is so powerful, so moving, that even the odd happy ending has a tinge of heartbreak. Heartbreak because this character has been knocked around so much in life that when Bo calms down and sees how awful his behavior is, it’s clear she has never experienced a man being this nice to her.

Marilyn’s eyes are often filled with hope—but also doubt, and uneasiness—and you are right there with her, you feel it pouring so honestly out of her. As Butler writes in The Method, about an especially compelling moment from the film: “Monroe’s face is squashed against her forearm, about as unglamorous as she could be. But Monroe stays there, Chérie’s every conflicted thought rippling over her face. It’s acting in the true Method mold: idiosyncratic, emotionally driven, and somewhat cryptic.”

Considering Chérie among Rose and Roslyn, you can see that all of these characters are fighting, in various ways, to just be themselves. Roslyn, Rose, Chérie—they all were, at one time or another, put on a pedestal and then knocked off, and they probably didn’t want to be put on that pedestal in the first place. They all have a rage inside too, whether it is actively expressed, as with contemptuous Rose, who has a lover attempt to murder her husband, or bottled up and ready to erupt, as in the righteous indignation of Roslyn’s “Murderers!” speech and when Chérie, infuriated and fed up, yells at Bo: “I hate you, and I despise you!”

Marilyn showed different dimensions as part of who these women were, not just what men want to see, not just the goddess, provoking various feelings and actions—from curiosity to love to murder. What these women are thinking and doing is of keen interest to viewers—and whether Bo believes she’s an “angel” or Guido thinks she’s “crazy” or George Loomis thinks she’s a “tramp,” it’s almost as if these women have had to live without privacy, to always be onstage, to be archetypes (all three characters were performers as well), something Marilyn could surely relate to.

Marilyn’s Roslyn, and that riveting long shot where she unleashes such a raw anger that she seems electrified by the results, feel like a culmination of this anger and frustration. This could have been a moment of acting that Stanislavski called “perezhivanie”—something Butler describes in The Method as occurring when “an actor is so connected to the truth of a role, and has so thoroughly entered into the imaginary reality of the character, that they feel what the character feels, perhaps even think what the character thinks.”

In the thick of it here, one feels that Marilyn is connected to the moment purely—and after reading about how tough this production was, this doesn’t seem surprising. The Misfits—such a haunting movie when it was released and even more so now—and especially Monroe’s performance feel not just meta but radical. She’s screaming at these cowboys as if she needs to awaken the dead.

When writer James Goode, who spent time on the set of The Misfits and wrote a book about the storied production (The Making of “The Misfits”), talked to Monroe, she said: “Goethe says a career is developed in public, but talent is developed in private or silence. It’s true for the actor. To really say what’s in my heart, I’d rather show than to say. Even though I want people to understand, I’d much rather they understand on the screen. If I don’t do that, I’m on the wrong track or in the wrong profession.”

She was certainly in the right profession. Her talent was developed by everything she learned, felt, and created. And there was a natural inner luminosity there too—a magic that the camera loves. She was a true artist. She made herself, and in doing so, she minted a method of her own.