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PAUL: Do you believe Marilyn was savvy and calculating enough with her image to consciously project both innocence and sexuality onto the screen, yet be able to keep them a short distance apart? Or do you think it was a natural, effortless gift that required no deliberate action on her part? John Huston said, “There wasn’t one single deliberate thing about it.” JOHN: Huston wasn’t correct in that. Marilyn struggled hard to project a persona she had evolved. I am personally of the belief that this persona afforded her a kind of suit-of-armor that disallowed intrusion into her psyche from the outside. The fact that this persona was so universally applauded is secondary to the purpose of its creation. Now, this is where Lytess and Black Bart come in (Paula Strasberg was called Black Bart at Fox because she always swathed herself in black). They did not “brow-beat” Marilyn or try to coach her into something other than what Marilyn believed right for Marilyn. The two coaches were that — coaches to reassure Marilyn and to help her keep her persona intact — the one she acted through. Lytess and Strasberg rode shotgun for the bucks, not for the love of it, though Lytess often proposed her love for Marilyn, and Marilyn would reply “I only want a coach...” Marilyn’s talents were innate, like Dean’s, innate to the individual, born with it, you can’t go out and learn it. Jimmy could handle Jimmy, Marilyn couldn’t handle Marilyn (which is why she was two hours in the dressing room before disappearing; she didn’t want to be pitched in with a group of others who were eager for her presence, and, as I’ve said before, she was scared of a group, of having no one to back her up. At that time, before her big time pictures, she was, yes, a promising starlet but she was timid beyond belief, so wholly unsure of herself, painfully self-conscious around others; hated parties, hated groups, spent half her time alone — often in pain and taking drugs for the pain. Plus at the dressing room hideout, she might very well have been bleeding again and afraid to present herself). She had a magic face, a magic smile and, like Bettie Page, a magic radiance that the camera adored. It wasn’t really “a measure of control” as much as simply being a photogenic wonder– which is what Marilyn was. The fear of social situations was not a “lingering” malaise; it stayed a part of her throughout her life. PAUL: Did you talk to Natasha Lytess or cull material on her views from other sources? Lytess’ comment in the memoir about Marilyn’s talent being all “bound up in the girl’s wretched upbringing,” Lytess seemed to have nailed one of Marilyn’s central obstacles: the wounds and scars left behind on Monroe by an atrociously dysfunctional childhood.
PAUL: With all the penetrating and candid views on Marilyn, as expressed by yourself and many others in the memoir, I am in awe of the sad complexity and poignancy of the person that was Monroe. It finally becomes clear that what Marilyn had, in front of the camera, was not taught to her. JOHN: It was much like Jimmy Dean, a kind of ethereal, organic and almost otherworldly talent. Marilyn in front of the camera was a phenomena — albeit a hard one to get at but once you had it you had pure gold. Nobody could teach that to anyone. Nobody could teach Al Jolson or Frank Sinatra to sing like Jolson or Sinatra. No one could teach Jimmy to do what Jimmy did, nor Marilyn to do what Marilyn did. The term “otherworldly” is pretty accurate. The shooting stars don’t just flash into our orbit very often and when they do they explode. Introduction
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JOHN::
She spent much time with Marilyn and Marilyn lived with her a couple of
times when she had no other place to go or didn’t know what to do about
getting a place to settle into. Marilyn needed someone to take charge of
her life, to place it in another’s hands. Then things would be okay. It
is the way Fox fucked her so badly with terrible contracts. Zanuck wanted
her to believe she had no spine or will and he, Zanuck, would be her
savior. Zanuck — master of all he surveyed. 
