The Genius and the Goddess by Jeffrey Meyers

with her. He thought her beneath conversation, said
she was stupid and only good for one thing." Marilyn meekly accepted
this treatment, and when Karger finally rejected her, she may have
aborted his child. In 1952 Karger married the actressJane Wyman,
recently divorced from Ronald Reagan. Karger and Wyman were also
divorced, but married again in 1961 and four years later divorced
again.
    In 1949, despite extensive tuition and several contracts, Marilyn's
career was going nowhere. Her first break came through her new
agent, advocate, protector and lover, Johnny Hyde. As in a Shakespearean
comedy, she loved Karger, but he didn't love her; Hyde loved her,
but she didn't love him. Like Schenck, Hyde was a short, homely
man, much older than Marilyn, who came from a Russian-Jewish
family, had emigrated to America as a boy and worked his way up
to the top. He began as Ivan Haidebura, a child juggler and acrobat
in Loew's vaudeville circuit, and eventually moved to Hollywood.
After his legendary discovery of Lana Turner in Schwab's drugstore,
he became an important executive in the influential William Morris
agency.
    Kazan, who succeeded Hyde as Marilyn's lover, observed that she
gave Hyde "that dazed starlet look of unqualified adoration and utter
dependence. Clearly she lived by his protection and was sure of his
devotion." Marilyn, then making the difficult transition from orphan
and factory worker to model and actress, explained that Hyde "not
only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane, too. He knew all the pain and
all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and
said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like
that. I wished with all my heart that I could love him back." But
Marilyn was not mercenary. She refused to marry the thrice-divorced
Hyde, as she'd refused to marry Schenck, though both elderly wealthy
men promised to leave all their money to her. Hyde even asked for
a list of friends she trusted and begged them to plead his case with
her. Marilyn's sexual demands and Hyde's weak heart were almost
certain to finish him off in a short time, but she feared that if Hyde
failed to die on cue, she'd be trapped with him. Incurably romantic,
despite her promiscuous past, she told Hyde that "if I married you I
might meet some other man and fall in love with him. I don't want
that ever to happen. If I marry a man I want to feel I'll always be
faithful to him – and never love anyone else." Unfortunately, it never
worked out this way.
    In December 1950, when Hyde died on schedule, Marilyn suddenly
lost his power and protection. Fearing her career would come to an
end, she wept for herself as well as for him. Though he left a substantial
estate of $600,000, she got nothing.Joseph Mankiewicz, who
directed her in All About Eve , described Hyde's relations with Marilyn
and how he restored the self-confidence that Fred Karger had nearly
destroyed:
    That major force [in her career] was a very important agent
named Johnny Hyde – at the time certainly no less than the
#2 or #3 power at William Morris. Like most great agents, he
was a tiny man. . . . Hyde was a very honest and a very gentle man.
He was deeply in love with Marilyn. And more than anyone in
her life, I think, provided for her something akin to an honest ego of her own; he respected her. Permitting her, in turn, to
acquire a certain amount of self-respect. 6
III
    Shortly before his death, Hyde got Marilyn a small but significant
part in her first serious film, The Asphalt Jungle , the first of two excellent
pictures she made in 1950. Marilyn was still cast for her sexy
looks – in one she plays a criminal's mistress, the other a starlet on
the make – but she worked with first-rate material, fine actors and
superb directors. John Huston knew how to get the best out of scripts
and actors. An incorrigible risk-taker, he was born in 1906 in Nevada,
Missouri, south of Kansas City, a town his grandfather had supposedly
won in a poker game. The son