by Lois Banner
The Marilyn who taught men to be tender was a figure that assuaged male anxieties in the 1950s. Soldiers returning from the war were plagued with stress disorders, and men in general felt confined by the cult of domesticity and the pressure to conform to corporate life. Fears of impotence and homosexuality were rife, especially after Alfred Kinsey concluded in his 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that forty percent of men had had a homosexual experience and that homosexual latency threatened many more. “In an era of a prevailing fear of male homosexual ‘perversion,’ “Jessamyn Neuhaus wrote, “strong erections in the marital bed were very important.” The tender and sexual Marilyn, often partnered with ordinary men in her films, allowed all men to feel masculine and able to respond sexually to women.31
In one guise Marilyn glorified heterosexuality. She was renowned for saying “I love living in a man’s world, so long as I am a woman in it.” By 1953 Hugh Hefner chose her as his first Playmate in the first issue of Playboy; in 1956 Time magazine called her “an adolescent daydream.” Norman Mailer’s description of her sexuality in his biography of her focused on male problems with sexual performance.
Marilyn was deliverance, a very Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant, and tender that even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin. Marilyn suggested that sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her. Take me, said her smile. “I’m easy. I’m happy. I’m an angel of sex, you bet.”32
Marilyn was savvy about men. “Sometimes I watch adult men,” Marilyn told George Barris. “They act like little boys who have never grown up.” In a conversation with Susan Strasberg about men, Susan said, “I had thought all creative, artistic men were more sensitive, different, until I’d once heard Clifford Odets say, ‘I loved Fay Wray, but God forgive me, I left her because she had no tits.’” Marilyn replied, “Men, they’re all the same … they can’t help it.” She knew; she had the world’s most beautiful tits. Norman Rosten commented, “Marilyn understood the carnal male syndrome,” the power of their penis over them, the sexual response to women they sometimes can’t control and their desire for an ever-ready woman who seems responsive to every touch, immediately orgasmic.33
Marilyn could also be an avenging angel, like the burlesque stars in their “upside-down world of powerful women and powerless men.” That theme is evident in the Seven Year Itch photo. It’s an undertone in How to Marry a Millionaire. It’s there full force in the production numbers in There’s No Business Like Show Business. These numbers were choreographed by Jack Cole, with his camp sensitivity. More than any of her films, however, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes displays Marilyn’s power, as Lorelei and Dorothy triumph over a host of men.
Marilyn most fully illuminates the complex relations between gender, class, and sexuality in her “Diamond’s Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The lyrics of the song Marilyn sings in that number are cynical about love. The reason to have affairs with wealthy men, the lyrics state, is so that the women involved can get the money from them to pay their rent, buy food, and become secure as they age. But the lyrics caution that such men often drop women once they have sex with them, having sampled their wares. Thus women should be cynical and get diamonds from these men, since their money can suddenly be lost in stock market crashes.
Early in the “Diamonds” number, Marilyn playfully opens and closes a fan, using it to tap the shoulders of the male dancers dressed in upper-class ties and tails who dance around her. They add to the riffs on sex and class in the number. The fan invokes the fan dancers of burlesque, but when Marilyn sings an operatic trill, her fan also references eighteenth-century aristocratic women who used fans to flirt. The female ballet dancers wear light pink tutus, with dark veils over their faces, and they swirl around Marilyn, waltzing with the men. Dressed in shocking pink, Marilyn stands out from the ballerinas. She has a narrower skirt and a pouf of fabric on her backside. She is both elegant and sexual, an object of desire and a woman who controls men.
Yet, the scene takes place against a vivid red background, lighted by chandeliers with women tied to them, implying that the action is happening in a brothel, with the bound women suggesting an orgy. Wearing sadomasochistic black leather, they evoke Bettie Page, the innocent girl with black hair and white skin who starred in the day’s underground sadomasochist films. (Page’s biographer calls her the “Dark Angel in the world of bondage and leather” and “the teasing girl-next-door, who is the kitten with a whip.”)34 The reference to Page was an ironic, hidden commentary on the part of Jack Cole, who intended it to add another level to the complexities of gender, sex, and class in the musical number and in the film.
Some may find it surprising to think of Marilyn as a rebel, since she is often identified as quintessentially feminine and not very smart, qualities not usually associated with rebellion. Yet she held radical views on sex, class, and race. She identified with Lorelei Lee’s statement in the lyrics of a song from Gentlemen that she was “the little girl from Little Rock” who “came from the wrong side of the tracks.” She often declared her solidarity with working-class people, the nation’s dispossessed. She made friends with the salesladies at Jax; with Amy and Milton Greene’s housekeeper, Kitty Owens; and with the makeup artists, hairstylists, and grips on her films. In How to Marry a Millionaire Monroe is one of three “gold-digging” women trying to snag a wealthy man, but the moral of the film is that ordinary men, who work at construction jobs and eat in diners, are preferable to wealthy men and their upper-class ways. In that film Betty Grable ends up with a forest ranger and Monroe with a man being pursued by IRS agents for tax evasion. Lauren Bacall’s construction worker boyfriend, whom she rejects as too poor, turns out to be a millionaire, although he prefers to live like a laborer.
In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn is hilarious as a television model selling a toothpaste promoted by ridiculous copy and called Dazzledent, a product of a Madison Avenue that has gone mad. In this guise she implicitly critiques the materialist fantasies that underpin capitalist consumption. Marilyn’s statement “I don’t want to be wealthy; I just want to be wonderful” reverberates through her star text. In her films she is a working-class working woman, usually a showgirl or a model. She sometimes gets the millionaires in her films, but sometimes she doesn’t. She allowed Hollywood to commercialize her body, selling her “as one might sell a refrigerator or a car,” but she rebelled against it in the end. Her nude calendar photos sold in the millions of copies and the image was affixed to everything from playing cards to serving trays and sold in souvenir shops, but she made no money from it because she had signed the rights away to Tom Kelley. “I don’t look at myself as a commodity,” she stated, “but I’m sure a lot of people have.”35 She was caught in a bind of her own making. She had done what was required of her to become a superstar, but she had also become an object, ratifying capitalism’s connection between sexuality and sales.
Marilyn has also been interpreted as a symbol of whiteness, especially in the work of Richard Dyer. In this interpretation she represents the White Goddess of the Western imagination, a transhistorical figure posed against the presumed animal nature of black people. That theme, made epic in the 1933 film King Kong, resonates in The Creature from the Black Lagoon. As in King Kong, the dark creature abducts a white woman and takes her to his lair before he is tracked down and captured.36
Little hard evidence supports the racist interpretation of Marilyn, although it might have originated in a racist dynamic powerful in the movie business—an industry based on the profit motive, which catered to the nation’s prejudices. The parade of blonde Marilyn clones that followed her as dumb-blonde bombshells in 1950s films as the Civil Rights movement expanded gives it some credence. On the other hand, producers copied each other, and they may have been trying to replicate Fox’s success with the sexy Marilyn at a time that the industry thought it could reenergize itself throug
h emphasizing sexy women. Racism was strong in the film business, but it was declining by the mid-1950s as the Civil Rights movement gained the moral high ground.37
Marilyn didn’t participate in the Civil Rights protest, but she supported it. The egalitarian attitudes of the Bolenders toward race, her first foster parents, influenced her. She dated a black man during her early years in Hollywood, and she identified with the hero of Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson, a young Nigerian man who is destroyed by British colonialism. To her he represented innocence killed by the “bad guys.” She stated that it was “‘them’ against ‘us’ everywhere.” She also had a fan base among blacks. Black newspapers advertised her movies and chronicled her career, comparing her to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. They wrote about her friendships with Sammy Davis Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald.
When I interviewed Larry Grant, an African-American man who had been one of her guards during her performances at military bases in Korea in 1954, I asked him if Marilyn represented a racist white woman to blacks. My question confused him, as if it were irrelevant to him. She was a beautiful woman, he said, and she was kind to me when I served as her guard. There were men of color everywhere she performed in Korea, he said, and they all loved her.38
In June 1955, escorted by Joe DiMaggio, she attended a benefit for Sammy Davis Jr. at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The audience was composed primarily of African-Americans. Joe and Marilyn entered the auditorium separately, at different times. The audience went wild, giving each of them a standing ovation. James Baldwin was a fan of Marilyn. He recognized the childhood abuse visited on her and called her a “slave” of the Hollywood system. Many blacks responded to her version of her childhood and saw her as a victim of the system as much as they.39
In her book on whiteness in Hollywood films, British scholar Diane Negra identifies a category of actors and movie characters she calls “white ethnics.” She includes poor whites in that category. Given Marilyn’s background, she fits in this grouping. By the 1950s Eastern Europeans, Jews, and Mediterranean peoples were moving into the middle class, and older definitions of them as nonwhite were breaking down. From this perspective Marilyn could be viewed as an emblem of ethnic cohesion, a bridge between minorities, especially given her marriages to Joe DiMaggio, a symbol of Italian-American social mobility, and to Arthur Miller, who was Jewish. When she married him in 1956, she converted to Judaism. She identified with Jews as a dispossessed group.40
Marilyn’s politics were to the left, in keeping with the politics of many of her foster parents and her identification with the working class. In My Story Marilyn states that she read Lincoln Steffens’s autobiography on the set of All About Eve and liked his discussion of oppression and resistance. When Joe Mankiewicz heard she was reading Steffens, he told her she could get into trouble if studio executives found out. Harry Brand cautioned her: “We don’t want anyone investigating our Marilyn.” She hid the book under the bed in her apartment and read it at night by the light of a flashlight. She was observed reading other radical literature on the sets of her films.41
In 1949 writer Norma Barzman and her husband, screenwriter Ben Barzman, both members of the Communist Party, had scheduled a meeting of Communist sympathizers at their house in the Hollywood Hills to discuss how to respond to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attack on freedom of speech. As they waited for their guests, a young blonde woman in a convertible drove up their driveway and waved them over to speak to her.
The woman, they realized, was Marilyn Monroe. She told them that two policemen at the end of the street were watching their house. They were stopping everyone driving onto the street and questioning them. She had been driving up the road to a friend’s house, and she had been stopped. She spoke to Norma and Ben in her blend of metaphor and reality. “I’m glad I stopped in on you guys. I’m real glad there’s people like you trying to figure out ways of not getting pushed around. I don’t care what you are. I’m glad that somebody’s minding the store.”42
As usual she identified with the exploited. Within a few years, she would become a dedicated leftist, supporting even the Communist struggle against capitalist imperialism. In the spring of 1960 she wrote to Lester Markel, a friend of hers who was a New York Times editor, supporting Castro in Cuba. By the year she died, she had subscriptions to The Nation and I.F. Stone’s Weekly, both radical publications. In February 1962, she visited the members of the “Hollywood Twenty” who were living in Mexico City. She talked about her support for the Civil Rights struggle, while praising the Communist leaders of China for bringing equality to a hierarchical society.43
Marilyn strove to develop the intellectual skills that would enable her to understand the world around her. She’d missed early chances to develop them, since she’d spent a lot of her time in school fantasizing about being a star. Everyone who knew her well verified her intelligence and her ability to understand the books she read. Paradoxically, the classic “dumb-blonde” figure always read ponderous books—and got them mixed up. That was a characteristic of the type from Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on. The perfectionist Marilyn strove for accuracy in portraying her blonde figure, but her drive for knowledge was real. “Did you know you were born under the same sign as Rosalind Russell, Judy Garland, and Rosemary Clooney?” she was asked. She replied, “I know nothing of these people. I was born under the same sign as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen Victoria, and Walt Whitman.”44
In her 1947 Photoplay article “How to Be a Star,” which featured Marilyn, author Fredda Dudley stated that learning was essential to Hollywood success, since all good acting was based on intelligence and knowledge. She advised aspiring actors to read important plays and biographies of great actors and to attend college for a year or two. Marilyn met literate people in Hollywood, including Natasha Lytess, Johnny Hyde, Elia Kazan, Sam Shaw, and Michael Chekhov. They taught her about art and literature and suggested books to read. Photographers such as Andre de Dienes and Bruno Bernard, who had a Ph.D. in criminal psychology from the University of Kiel in Germany, had done the same.45
As early as 1948 Clarice Evans, Marilyn’s Studio Club roommate, was impressed by the number of books she owned. When Philippe Halsman photographed her at her apartment in 1952, he counted two hundred books on her bookshelves. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was on the nightstand by her bed. Sidney Skolsky, who went to bookstores with her, noted that she bought books on self-improvement and psychology, the latest plays, books of poetry, and everything on Abraham Lincoln. In conversation she referred to the books she had read: she talked to Jane Russell for hours about philosophers. Russell reported that Plato, Saint Paul, and the Book of Revelations were among her favorites. Marilyn had a large collection of art books given to her by a writer named Bob Russell, a secret friend of hers.46
She wasn’t always a diligent reader, but she got the gist of a book. When she browsed the shelves in Pickwick’s bookstore, she’d find an interesting paragraph in a book, memorize it, and then go on to find another book. Elia Kazan recommended Emerson to her, and Michael Chekhov recommended Rudolph Steiner. When she met Edith Sitwell in Hollywood in 1954, they discussed Steiner and his eurythymic dancing. Sitwell had attended a Steiner dance group in London, and she described those dances to Marilyn as attempts to connect with Mother Earth.47
After she became a star, Marilyn consulted experts in fields that interested her, including religion, literature, and, interestingly, the stock market. Meeting her early in her Hollywood years, actor Cameron Mitchell had assumed she was an airhead who carried large volumes around with her without knowing what was in them. Then they engaged in a discussion of Freud, and she demonstrated an in-depth knowledge of his theories. Mitchell’s opinion of her changed. In later years, when Lee Strasberg wanted an opinion of a new movie or play, Marilyn was someone he consulted.48
In her reading Marilyn liked romantic writers who dealt with ethical and spiritual issues and had a broad sweep. The German expatriates
in Hollywood read Dostoyevsky and Rainer Maria Rilke. Following their lead, Marilyn didn’t read fluffy fiction; she read the heavyweights—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac. Poets were her favorites: Whitman, Keats, Shelley, Yeats. They appealed to her poetic imagination, as she aestheticized reality. She liked the poetic novelist Thomas Wolfe. When reporter William Bruce interviewed her, he mentioned that he had heard she was a fan of Wolfe. In response, she plied him with questions about Wolfe’s work, even his obscure novels. “I am a great fan of Thomas Wolfe,” she told Hedda Hopper. She said to journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, “If you want your ear talked off, mention novelist Thomas Wolfe to me. I’ve practically memorized his books.” She even read his collected letters to his mother.49
Many of the authors she liked—Wolfe, Whitman, and Dostoyevsky—created sweeping landscapes and had broad imaginations. Her favorite book was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which young intellectuals in Hollywood and New York were reading. Like Dostoyevsky, Rilke adored Russia, with its vast reaches of unpopulated territory. He felt that “aloneness” was important to artistic production and personal satisfaction. His central theme was the need for the artist to examine the interior self in order to find an aesthetic vision to provide motivation. He’d given up on Christianity and although he hadn’t found a system to replace it, he counseled young writers to regard the process of writing as akin to sex, replete with passion and daring. Such internal exploration was similar to what Stanislavsky was recommending to actors. In his way Rilke was a rebel who advised his readers to disregard convention and live free lives. Influenced by Swedish feminist Ellen Key, he wanted women and men to become more like each other.50
Whitman and Wolfe also penned their work on broad canvases. Whitman wrote about the “Body Electric” in his famed poem “I Sing the Body Electric” from Leaves of Grass. It’s sensual and lusty, with a love for the physicality and spirituality of both men and women. In Whitman’s imagination, they leap over gender boundaries as they do a dizzying dance in his poem, although in the end the male is active and the woman exudes a “divine nimbus.” Wolfe’s work encompassed the history of the United States, as his heroes moved from the South to New York, leaving a decaying agricultural society for a decadent urban environment.
