Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  I used to write poetry sometimes but usually I was depressed at those times. The few I showed it to — (in fact about two people) — said that it depressed them — one of them cried but it was an old friend I’d known for a long time.

  I hope to see you again.

  So anyway thanks

  And my best to Hedda and Patricia and you —

  Marilyn M.

  ‘She liked poetry,’ Rosten recalled. ‘It was a shortcut for her. She understood, with the instinct of a poet, that it led directly into the heart of experience.’

  In 1952, drunk on whisky with Robert Slatzer in the hotel at Niagara Falls, Marilyn had sat scribbling what Slatzer called ‘herniated sonnets.’ Now, in the upholstered hush of her room at the Waldorf-Astoria, she was trying her hand at poetry again.

  The experiments grew from her evenings with the Rostens, who often held informal poetry readings. Two favorites were Walt Whitman, whose work Marilyn had long liked, and W. B. Yeats, a new discovery for her. At the Rosten readings, each person in turn would take a book of verse and read aloud the poem on whatever page fell open. Marilyn came to read, of all things, Yeats’ ‘Never Give All the Heart.’ Rosten says, ‘She read rather slowly, softly, as if in class, low but breathless’:

  Never give all the heart, for love

  Will hardly seem worth thinking of

  To passionate women if it seem.

  Certain, and they never dream

  That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

  For everything that’s lovely is

  But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

  Oh, never give the heart outright,

  For they, for all smooth lips can say,

  Have given their hearts up to the play.

  And who could play it well enough

  If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

  He that made this knows all the cost,

  For he gave all his heart and lost.

  There was a silence when Marilyn finished. Rosten said, ‘She had thought poets were mystical, somehow separate and apart from ordinary people. I tried to disabuse her of that idea. …’ Soon, Marilyn was tentatively sending Rosten her own efforts, including these lines:

  Life —

  I am of both your directions

  Existing more with the cold frost

  Strong as a cobweb in the wind

  Hanging downward the most

  Somehow remaining

  those beaded rays have the colors

  I’ve seen in paintings — ah life

  they have cheated you … .

  thinner than a cobweb’s thread

  sheerer than any —

  but it did attach itself

  and held fast in strong winds

  and sin(d)ged by (?) leaping hot fires life — of which at singular times

  I am both of your directions

  somehow I remain hanging downward

  the most

  as both of your directions pull me.

  For Marilyn 1955 was a year of exploration — of herself, of acting, and of arts she had never had time for in the past. Sometimes she would ‘borrow’ Rosten from his wife to escort her to a play or concert. Once at Carnegie Hall, they were invited to meet the Russian pianist, Emil Gilels. He kissed Marilyn’s hand and said she should visit the Soviet Union. Marilyn told him, as she had been telling all and sundry for some time now, that she was currently reading Dostoyevsky.

  When the press spotted Rosten as Marilyn’s companion, gossip columns soon hinted at an affair. Rosten, who was happily married, said the idea never seriously occurred to him. ‘With Marilyn, you’re not talking about going to bed with a woman, you’re talking about going to bed with an institution. Who can handle that? And how awful to be one!’

  Scrawled lines given by Marilyn to poet Norman Rosten in the mid-fifties. She was still capable of poking fun at herself.

  The Rostens saw a Marilyn who liked to be domestic, so long as household work was occasional entertainment rather than necessity. She would boast of her skill at doing the dishes, the legacy, she said, of childhood slavery in foster homes. Marilyn the cook used her new friends as guinea pigs. Rosten recalled good stews and bouillabaisse, and disastrous salads drowned in vinegar. He said ‘her color schemes’ (peas and carrots), if not striking, managed to be consistent. She once offered to ‘tone down’ a spicy dish by using a hair dryer!

  The Rostens’ daughter, Patricia, who was then eight, had a child’s-eye memory of a new acquaintance who ‘was fun to be with because she broke the rules, and children love being around grown-ups who can get away with that. When Marilyn touched me or hugged me I felt a warmth and softness (dare I use the word “maternal” in relation to her?) that was very reassuring. It was not unlike falling into that champagne-colored quilt that graced her bed.’

  Once Marilyn surprised Patricia in her bedroom, her nose in the enormous makeup box. ‘She plunked me down at her vanity mirror,’ Patricia remembered, ‘and said she would show me how to do the job right. I watched her skillful hands transform my kid’s face into something that even I might have called glamorous. She made my eyelids glimmer, my cheekbones appear accentuated, and my mouth rosy with color. She also arranged my hair, lifting it off my shoulders into an elegant French twist. “Why,” I thought, “I could pass for seventeen.” Then, proud of her handiwork, she happily took me by the hand back to the living room to show me off to the grown-ups.’

  Sometimes the Rostens invited Marilyn to their rented summer place on Long Island. An excursion in her company could be anything but peaceful. Rosten tells of one weekend, when Marilyn had spent a while sitting demurely on the beach, in bathing suit, straw hat and sunglasses, shaded by an umbrella.

  ‘Slowly, imperceptibly,’ said Rosten, ‘as though the news had spread by some sort of telepathy, a group of young people appeared in swim attire and, before we were aware of it, closed us in a circle. They stared at Marilyn, unbelieving, as at a mirage. They came up to her, uttering little cries of joy, reaching out to touch her. They began crowding, their enthusiasm getting out of control as she moved back, a reflex of fear now in her eyes.

  ‘I was struck by this double effect: love of the crowd and the need of the adulation, and at the same time a nameless fear. She laughed nervously, abruptly broke from the circle, and ran toward the water about fifty yards away. The youthful admirers cheered and chased after her into the water. She began swimming out, calling for me to follow. I was a little scared, especially when the noisy kids surrounded her while I tried to push them away …’

  Suddenly, Marilyn began to splutter and swallow water. ‘I’m not a good swimmer even when I’m good,’ she gasped, her aquatic prowess with Tommy Zahn, the surfing champion of a decade earlier, apparently a thing of the past. She and Rosten were rescued by the crew of a passing speedboat. Its driver, a boy in his teens, then drove round and round in circles, staring transfixed at the exhausted female in his boat, until Rosten told him to snap out of it.

  In other situations Marilyn had compassion for those who recognized her. Once, disguised in a bandanna and dark glasses, she and a male companion stopped at a gas station on the East Side Drive. The station attendant conferred with his mate, then announced, ‘I just bet my friend here ten dollars that you’re Marilyn Monroe.’

  Marilyn’s companion replied, ‘No, she’s not, though she’s often mistaken for her.’

  They were about to drive off when Marilyn cried, ‘My God, he’s paying his friend the ten dollars.’ She called the attendants back, took off her glasses, and said, ‘Give him back the money. I am Monroe.’

  Jim Haspiel, the fan turned friend, went Christmas shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue with Marilyn at the end of that first year in New York. She had ‘disguised’ herself with a silk kerchief tied under the chin, an Ivy League cap, dark glasses, and hormone cream, instead of makeup, all over her face. It fooled no one, for when Haspiel left for a few minutes, after arranging with Marilyn to rejoin her at the men’s tie counter,
he returned to find that ‘eight’ salesmen were waiting on her, and ‘about two hundred and fifty’ customers were thronging around. The rest of the store was virtually empty.

  Marilyn made her way through the crowd to Haspiel and whispered, ‘Please don’t say my name, I don’t want anyone to know it’s me.’ Haspiel decided she had lived so long in the crowd she didn’t see it anymore. Others might suspect Marilyn thrived on the recognition — when it was convenient.

  Norman Rosten concluded that Marilyn reveled in being female, accepted it for the power it gave her. ‘She sensed the difference in sexual psychology between men and women,’ Rosten believed, ‘and would never censure a man for beating the woman to the draw, so to speak. We could lust after her, dream of possessing her, but no one would be hurt. She could be alluring and warm, and yet had the courage to battle alone against male-dominated Hollywood power — and win.’

  Months after they first met, toward the end of 1955, Marilyn asked Rosten to take her to the Rodin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two pieces fascinated her,’ said Rosten, ‘Pygmalion and Galatea and The Hand of God.’

  The Hand of God, in white marble, depicts a great curving hand holding a man and a woman locked in passionate embrace. ‘They are together and apart,’ the poet remembered. ‘The woman’s hair streams from the stone. Marilyn walked around and around that small white miracle, her eyes wide as she removed her dark glasses.’

  In her year of limbo in New York, Marilyn began telling friends that she had found her love. She was, certainly, close to achieving another ambition: she had America’s foremost playwright on the hook, and soon it would be just a matter of reeling him in.

  19

  ARTHUR MILLER RARELY TALKED willingly about Marilyn Monroe during her lifetime, and in the years that followed declined interviews pending the writing of his autobiography He corresponded courteously during the writing of this book, but said, ‘When I have something to say about Marilyn I will do it on my own typewriter.’

  His position was entirely reasonable, especially given that he lived in a glare of banal publicity for half a decade. However, thanks partly to his and Marilyn’s own statements in 1956, when their romance was at full flood, we can now reconstruct the courtship that led to one of the most bally-hooed marriages of its time.

  When Marilyn settled in New York, Arthur Miller was about to turn forty. She was twenty-nine. He still lived in Brooklyn, where he had been raised, with Mary, his wife of fifteen years, and two children not yet into their teens.

  Although America knew Miller only as a playwright, he believed fervently in the value of hard physical work, not least as vital grounding for his plays about the common man. At one point of his life Miller made a point of working a few weeks each year in a factory. He would say, ‘Anyone who doesn’t know what it means to stand in one place, eight hours a day, doesn’t know what it’s all about. It’s the only way you can learn what makes men go into a gin mill after work and start fighting. You don’t learn about those things in Sardi’s.’

  Miller had little time for such after-theater night spots or for the fashions of New York City. When he absolutely had to buy a new suit he delighted in announcing that he had found it on sale. He was partial to stout shoes with thick leather soles, and liked to say that he bought just one pair for each play he wrote. His favorite uniform, when not in town, was a windbreaker and khaki pants.

  Not being in town was, by 1955, becoming a preoccupation with him. After his first success, with All My Sons, Miller had bought four acres, cheap, in Connecticut. He worked steadily for six weeks building himself a work shack, then sat in it during the next six weeks fashioning the play that won a Pulitzer Prize, Death of a Salesman.

  Since 1950, when he had first met Marilyn in Hollywood, Miller had produced three more plays. The Crucible, based on the Salem witch trials of two hundred and fifty years ago, came in 1953, when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigation of imagined communism was at its most pernicious. A View From the Bridge, about a man who betrays the illegal immigrant suitor of his daughter, appeared in 1955, the year Marilyn came East.

  Arthur Miller was a man who for some time had been able to say, ‘I have the name. They have to listen when I talk.’ He was not enormously rich but he had money. He would say, ‘You live fruitfully in tension. To create, and I don’t only mean writing, is to be under tension. Paradise is a state of inertia where nothing happens. It is a form of death. The tension is necessary. Once it’s over, you drop dead in six months.’

  Marilyn arrived in New York when the vital tension had gone from Miller’s personal life. His marriage was in the doldrums. The wife who had worked to keep him in the early days, who had borne his children, and corrected his manuscripts, was no longer enough. They were headed for divorce, he was to say a year later, ‘Marilyn or no.’

  Miller told a Time reporter in 1956, ‘I didn’t know a thing about Marilyn coming to New York until I read about it in the papers.’ There had been no contact between them since their encounter in late 1950, but neither had forgotten.

  Miller’s memory was of a young woman at a Hollywood cocktail party, ‘so terrified she couldn’t speak a word, just stood there mute but refusing to engage in the vacuous small talk.’ He said he had gained Marilyn’s confidence, then seen her for about eight hours over three days. She had told him of her ‘smothering feelings of inferiority, her inability to make any real friends, the fact that people thought of her only in terms of an inviting body and nothing else.’

  Miller was struck by Marilyn’s ‘sensitivity and feeling and grasp of reality,’ and he told her he thought she should come to New York and learn how to act. When he left California, she poured out her troubles in letters, and he responded — for a while. Then, as he plunged into writing his next play, the letters stopped.

  Author and critic Maurice Zolotow, who knew both Miller and Marilyn, thought the encounter in Hollywood haunted Miller and influenced his work from then on. In both The Crucible and View From the Bridge, Zolotow noted the themes of the eternal triangle, of unfaithfulness in marriage, and of an older man’s love for a young girl. Miller himself, though not till years later, would write that View From the Bridge ‘was expressing a very personal preoccupation … not at all apart from my own psychological life. …’

  Fellow playwright, Clifford Odets, said after reading The Crucible, which Miller wrote following his first meeting with Marilyn, ‘No man would write this play unless his marriage was going to pieces.’

  At all events, sometime in April 1955, when Marilyn had ridden her pink elephant, appeared on national television, and discovered Lee Strasberg, Miller reached out for the girl from Hollywood.

  According to Marilyn the reunion occurred at another party, for theater people in New York. She was drinking vodka and orange, and Miller made the approach. They talked for a while and parted at the end of the evening. Miller held out for two weeks, then called Paula Strasberg of the Actors Studio, to ask for Marilyn’s phone number. They met at the home of a mutual friend, poet Norman Rosten, who had been to the University of Michigan with Miller, and the affair began.

  The couple managed a remarkable feat. They met for the best part of a year without being discovered by the press. Miller, who had been borrowing his son’s bicycle for a long time, went out and bought a new one for himself. It was English, with gears, as Marilyn’s was, and the two of them would pedal unnoticed around Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay or Coney Island, places where no gossip columnist lay in wait. They ate in corners of obscure restaurants.

  Peter Leonardi, Marilyn’s assistant that year, said later, ‘I was with her morning, noon, and night for weeks, and I never even heard the name “Miller.”’

  In the summer of 1955 Marilyn gave a dinner party for friends who were in on the secret. Miller recalled that ‘she did nothing else for two days. I never saw anyone so worried about a simple meal. Actually the whole thing was overdone, too formal, too meticulous, too manicured. She worked h
erself into a frazzle about the whole affair.’

  On another occasion Marilyn was more true to her usual chaotic form. Maureen Stapleton, her colleague at the Actors Studio, remembered an evening when Marilyn, hurrying home from rehearsal, announced that she had to prepare a roast for Miller and some friends. Unfortunately, she had forgotten that the meat would take hours to cook, so dinner was served at an hour when most people were going to bed.

  Miller, whose presence had long been nurtured, but only as a photograph at Marilyn’s bedside, was now a day-to-day reality. He indeed looked, as journalists had long chorused, like a whiskerless version of the man in the other picture that accompanied her everywhere — Abraham Lincoln. Years later, asked what one thing she was most grateful to Miller for, Marilyn would say, ‘He introduced me to the importance of political freedom in our society.’ Miller was a man who liked to talk social theory for hours, a pipe gripped between his teeth or, when pipeless, swiveling a cigarette from tooth to tooth, like a gun. Marilyn listened.

  A close friend of the couple said, ‘Aside from personal attraction — and that’s the biggest aside in history — a lot of what interested her in Arthur was this: here was a man with a whole structure of social ideas clarified by a great deal of reading.’

  It was only twelve months since Marilyn had tried in vain to persuade Joe DiMaggio to read ‘everything from Mickey Spillane to Jules Verne.’ On DiMaggio’s birthday Marilyn had given him a gold medal for his watch chain, inscribed with a quotation from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.’ Perplexed, DiMaggio had asked, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ With Arthur Miller the roles were neatly reversed; Marilyn was asking the questions.

  She did admire Miller’s intellect, as she had years earlier, but soon she would also insist, ‘I’m in love with the man, not his mind. The Arthur Miller who attracted me was a man of warmth and friendliness. Arthur has helped me adjust myself. I’ve always been unsure of myself. Arthur has helped me overcome this feeling.’