John Huston

John Huston is both an influential director in Marilyn Monroe’s career and a witness whose judgments change under the pressure of her performances. He first approaches her as a studio product whose appearance might be useful despite what he considers a lack of acting ability. Yet the audition for The Asphalt Jungle and the work that follows leave him with a more complicated impression: he cannot easily distinguish instinct from technique, or vulnerability from control. Years later, on The Misfits, his initial contempt again collides with Monroe’s force as a performer, and his respect becomes explicit.

Identity and First Impressions

Huston directs The Asphalt Jungle, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, and has considerable authority over the casting of Angela, a young woman connected to Louis Calhern’s character. Before Marilyn Monroe auditions, he is already considering another performer, a brunette he believes better matches the screenplay. I. E. Shinn, Monroe’s agent, calls on her behalf just before auditions begin. Shinn presents her not merely as a beautiful young woman but as an actress of exceptional promise, and argues that Angela could be the role that reveals her potential.

Huston’s response exposes the assumptions shaping his first impression. He treats Shinn’s claims skeptically and regards Monroe’s looks as more immediately useful than her acting. When she arrives for the audition in a white rayon dress, she is visibly nervous: she speaks almost in a whisper and holds a thick script with trembling hands. She has read the entire screenplay and describes its unsettling sympathy for criminals, but Huston teases her about her pronunciation of Dostoevsky. The exchange leaves Shinn angry, while Monroe blushes at the joke. Huston sees an attractive, ordinary-seeming young woman, not the obvious star Shinn has promised.

That judgment is not simply an artistic assessment. Huston’s attention is repeatedly drawn to Monroe’s body, and he privately reduces her possible value to her appearance. After the audition, his assistant assumes he will reject her as unsuitable for Angela. Huston watches Monroe and Shinn leave, then remarks on her figure. The decision that follows is therefore made through the same objectifying gaze that has framed his doubts: the film role goes to Monroe not because Huston has already recognized her ability, but because her physical presence has made an impression he cannot dismiss.

The Asphalt Jungle: A Role Comes Into Focus

The audition becomes more unsettling once Monroe performs. Rather than directing her attention toward the assistant reading Calhern’s lines, she addresses Huston, drawing him into the scene as Angela’s older lover. The choice makes the exchange feel intimate, and Huston later recalls being unsure whether she was acting or whether the scene had become something real. He does not emerge from the audition with a clear theory of her talent. His response is less a settled verdict than an awareness that the performance has unsettled his command of the room.

During rehearsals, Monroe initially struggles. After a sleepless night, she arrives tense, speaks in a strained voice, and cannot reliably recall lines she has memorized. Huston watches her and wonders whether he has made a serious mistake in casting her. The difficulty has a specific cause: she refused capsules offered by Cass Chaplin, remained awake and anxious, and suffered through the next working day. On the following night she accepts them, sleeps deeply, and returns to work. The sequence places Huston’s uncertainty beside Monroe’s precarious working conditions, rather than reducing her inconsistency to a fixed inability.

A change comes when Monroe recognizes Louis Calhern as Mr. Pearce, the man who had cared for her in childhood. The recognition gives her a way into Angela: she becomes gentle, seductive, languid, and trusting, as if the character’s relationship has suddenly acquired personal meaning. Calhern notices the change, and Huston notices it too. At the end of the day he asks what has happened to her performance. Monroe is delighted but cannot explain the shift, even to herself. Huston’s later recollection of the audition as containing the beginnings of her genius and madness gives the scene a retrospective weight, but at the time he remains unable to name exactly what he has witnessed.

Directing, Projection, and the Star Image

Huston’s filmmaking becomes part of Monroe’s education. She attends rehearsals and scenes even when she is not required on set, watching how other actors approach their parts. She believes that work among gifted performers can teach her, and that a great director can help her learn to direct herself. From Huston she takes a principle about cinema: a scene’s importance lies not only in what is put into it, but in what comes out on film. The camera does not simply record a performer’s intentions; the image can outlast and alter them.

Angela’s apparent emptiness makes that principle especially legible. Monroe considers that the character’s seeming lack of depth may instead allow viewers to project their own interpretations onto her. Angela might be manipulating the older man or seeking his destruction; the uncertainty itself gives the part its charge. Monroe’s carefully watched performance complicates Huston’s earlier assumption that a beautiful actress without conventional technique has little to offer. The very quality he might have dismissed as blankness can become a screen onto which an audience supplies meaning.

That emerging public image also exists within a commercial system that has already circulated Monroe’s likeness beyond her control. A nude calendar photograph made under the name Mona Monroe becomes a scandal when a reporter identifies the model as the rising star Marilyn Monroe. She had sold the image rights for fifty dollars when she urgently needed money, and later objects to its further publication without being able to stop it. Huston’s early attention to her body belongs to this wider pattern of turning her appearance into an asset. His eventual recognition of her acting does not erase that gaze; the novel holds the two facts together, showing how artistic opportunity and bodily commodification can operate at once.

The Misfits: Conflict and Recognition

Eleven years after the audition, Huston directs Monroe in The Misfits, which he regards as the final film of her career. The earlier encounter has not made him an uncomplicated admirer. He remembers launching her with The Asphalt Jungle, but she is wary when they meet again: his aged, whiskey-marked appearance and the forceful manner in which he takes her hands discourage the affectionate greeting she had imagined. Huston recalls her career with the distant, skeptical attention of a father toward a rejected child, and invokes the old audition in a way that reduces her casting to her body. Monroe understands the insult and feels revulsion.

Huston’s own account is blunt about his starting position on The Misfits. He has debts and needs the work; Monroe is already attached to the project. He says he had not respected her as an actress, had seen few of her films, and expected her to be unreliable. He also presents himself as impatient with suicidal neuroticism and rejects the idea that his treatment of Monroe caused her to collapse. These claims are not neutral facts about her condition: they reveal the hardness with which he enters the production and his resistance to responsibility for its effects. The gap between this self-description and his later praise makes the change in his judgment especially significant.

During the desert filming near Reno, Huston calls Monroe’s attention to him, then approaches and takes her by the wrist when she does not respond. Monroe strikes and scratches him, then retreats to her trailer. A few minutes later she returns to the set with her makeup and hair restored, smiling and performing as Roslyn. The shift is not presented as proof that her distress was an act. Instead, it shows her asserting a boundary between herself and the character: she can play Roslyn’s care for troubled men without being identical to Roslyn or consenting to Huston’s treatment of her. The performance resumes, but its meaning has changed for those watching.

Huston’s most direct reversal comes when he sees the dailies of Monroe and Clark Gable. He is astonished by the scene’s emotional force and tells Monroe that her work is exceptional, describing the encounter between her character and Gable’s as convincingly human rather than merely sexual. He had mocked and doubted her; now he takes her hands and thanks her. Their exchange retains some of the old sparring, but the central fact is his recognition. Huston’s arc does not turn him into a consistently considerate director. It makes his revised artistic judgment visible: the performer he once reduced to her body has produced work he cannot explain away as prettiness or accident.