Marilyn

by Lois Banner

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

  He that made this knows all the cost,

  For he gave all his heart and lost.

  Rosten found the poetry Marilyn wrote dark and menacing, like many of her favorite poems by others. In her poems she was being abandoned. She was a doll in a carriage pushed by a stranger. She was frightened by life and attracted to death. Something so terrible was going to happen that it was better to die and avoid it. She wrote a poem about her own up-and-down nature that expressed her dual self, happy and sad, rational and irrational, strong and weak, calling herself strong as a cobweb, although more often slanting downward, heavy with the cold frosts, cheated by life.28

  Friends in Hollywood complained that she didn’t contact them; Jane Russell, for one, was hurt that Marilyn didn’t keep in touch. That inattention gave rise to the myth that she dropped people with ease and made new friends when it suited her. But she was overwhelmed by the time needed to keep up with the many people she knew. Dropping some was a matter of busyness, not meanness, on her part. The only person she dropped without a word was Natasha Lytess. That’s understandable. She didn’t want rumors of lesbianism to reappear.

  Once in New York, Marilyn again established a number of power centers in her life. There were the Greenes, who were supporting her financially until she signed a new contract with Fox. The salary she had received from Twentieth Century–Fox had never been enough for her to save much money. The cost of maintaining her was high: she needed to look glamorous so that Fox executives wouldn’t realize that her finances were shaky and hold out longer. Arthur Miller was another power center for her, although they were keeping their relationship secret. She also saw Marlon Brando and Henry Rosenfeld, the clothing magnate she’d met in New York on the Love Happy tour in 1948. He sometimes gave her money. Patricia Rosten, Hedda and Sam’s daughter, remembered Marilyn and her mother coming back from Rosenfeld’s factory carrying piles of clothing.29

  The Strasbergs and their children, Susan and John, constituted a third power center in Marilyn’s life in New York. Marilyn became so dependent on Lee and Paula that Susan and John felt usurped by her. She was often at their apartment. Lee was obsessed with his work, but Paula was a quintessential Jewish mother who provided food and counseling to actors down on their luck. Sunday brunch at the Strasbergs’ was de rigueur for Broadway actors, as was their New Year’s Eve party, to which everyone from famous artists to struggling actors was invited. Paula had been a member of the Group Theatre and a Broadway actress when she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She named names; as a result, Broadway producers wouldn’t hire her. She acted out her unhappiness through her body, becoming very overweight. To hide her weight, she wore expensive black silk muumuus, with gold chains around her neck, and sometime a peaked black hat on her head to protect her skin from the sun. Many actors adored her. Her defenders thought she looked dramatic; her detractors found her ridiculous. Marilyn coined the nickname Black Bart for her, taking it from a character that actor Basil Rathbone, tall and easily menacing-looking, had played.30

  Paula was devoted to Lee, while he was cool toward her, had affairs, and threw rages. Dramatic and emotional, she sometimes threatened suicide. When the eighteen-year-old Susan became a Broadway star with her performance as Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956, Paula commandeered Susan’s salary to support the family and to fund Lee’s obsession with buying books on the theater. As Lee’s fame spread and he became in demand, Paula took over classes of his and cut back on her domestic activities. Like Lee, she became close to Marilyn, and she praised her to the skies for her acting, her beauty, her sweetness—whatever she could think of.

  Marilyn now had the Strasbergs, Greenes, Shaws, and Rostens—in addition to Arthur—to lean on. Most received calls in the middle of the night. A chronic insomniac, Marilyn often said that her telephone was her best friend. She tried to control her pill intake, and sometimes she could; but she was hooked. Amy Greene said that when Marilyn lived with them, she would give Amy the sleeping pills and ask her to dole them out to her, but she would invariably demand them back. Susan Strasberg said that after Marilyn became close to her parents, she sometimes took a taxi to their apartment in the middle of the night and Lee would hold her and rock her gently until she went to sleep and then carry her into John’s bedroom and put her into his bed. When Marilyn was there, John slept on the living room couch. John remembered a night when he was sixteen when Marilyn crept into the living room where he was sleeping and started to stroke him. In a haze of drugs, she seemed unconscious of what she was doing. He was both terrified and appalled at what seemed like a sexual approach, but he managed to get her back to her bed before anything happened.31

  In June Marilyn moved from the Gladstone Hotel to a penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria, which Norman sublet at a bargain price from a friend. She remained there through the fall, when she moved to an apartment on Sutton Place that Milton owned. While at the Waldorf, she scrawled diary fragments on the hotel’s stationery—thoughts and memories that, in Ralph Roberts’s words, “seemed to be constantly swirling like sea-drift and wind-drift inside her head.” She wrote of her fear that any praise for her acting was meant for someone else. She had darker fantasies. One was that Lee was a surgeon who was going to cut her open. She didn’t mind since Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, her psychiatrist, had diagnosed the case and given her an anesthetic. The operation was to cure her of the disease from which she suffered—“whatever the hell it is.” When Lee made the incision, however, he found nothing but sawdust inside—like the stuffing of a Raggedy Ann doll.32

  She wrote in a fragment that she had to remember that her body was her own; no one else possessed it. Then she had a dream of a repulsive man who was crowding her in an elevator and panicking her. Does that mean I’m attached to him, she wondered? She wrote that she was afraid of Peter. She probably meant Peter Leonardi, who had been her hairdresser the previous year. She had become close to him, but he sued her because, he said, she had promised to buy him a beauty salon and had reneged. The fear, she thought, reflected her belief that he was a homosexual who wanted to become a woman and take her over. Why did she always feel subhuman, she asked? The statement repeats the one in My Story in which she connected her fear of being subhuman to her fear that she was lesbian. Being engulfed by someone, taken over by them—her fears had a paranoid edge. She told Ralph Roberts about a recurrent dream she had of drowning in quicksand, slowly being sucked down into its morass. And she still dreamed about monsters. On the surface Marilyn seemed joyful, but her deep fears were still there.33

  During the summer of 1955 she spent weekends with the Strasbergs in their cottage on Fire Island, a barrier island off Long Island where New York artists and writers vacationed. As always, fans approached Marilyn, creating attention that she both welcomed and feared. “They can get scary, almost like they want to take home a part of you as a souvenir,” Marilyn said to Susan Strasberg. When Susan, who shared a bed room with Marilyn on Fire Island, was in Hollywood filming the movie Picnic, actress Eileen Atkins shared the room with Marilyn. Lee hoped that Atkins’s self-confidence might rub off on Marilyn. Indeed, the two actresses walked the beach together and stayed up late talking.34

  One weekend Marilyn drew two portraits. One was of a sad child in a raggedy dress, with a black face. The second was of a sexy woman with a catlike face. Who was the girl with the black face? “Maybe it’s a self-portrait.” Marilyn said. Who was the woman with the cat face? Marilyn said this figure illustrated her motto: “Life is wonderful, so what the hell!”35 That cynical attitude reflected Marilyn’s fear of going insane, leading her to both contemplate suicide and do whatever she wanted before the black cloud of irrationality might descend on her.

  In August Marilyn spent a day in Bement, Illinois. One of the famed debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas had been held in Bement, and the town put on a Land of Lincoln festival every August. Tom Chaltham of Bement had studi
ed with Marilyn at the Actors Studio, and Carlton Smith, director of the National Arts Foundation, lived there: they persuaded her to attend the festival because of her love for Lincoln.36 Smith also invited her to join a delegation to Russia to promote intercultural exchange under the auspices of the foundation. She applied for a visa to travel to the Soviet Union, but she never went. The visa application, in addition to her connection to Arthur Miller, initiated FBI surveillance of her that would continue for the rest of her life.

  In Bement she gave a short speech on Lincoln and judged a beard-growing contest among men who hadn’t shaved for six months. Eve Arnold went along to photograph her. Arnold was concerned about her, since she was suffering from a kidney infection. But Marilyn was so conditioned by years of doing “cheesecake” photos that she reacted automatically when a camera appeared. She thrust her breasts forward, swiveled her bottom, and assumed her smile. Marilyn Monroe was “on.”37

  In late August 1955 Michael Chekhov died. She went to Hollywood for his funeral, held in a tiny Russian Orthodox chapel. In September Eve Arnold did her first major shoot of Marilyn in a deserted playground near her home on Long Island, as Marilyn posed on the playground equipment, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in one of the photos and slithering through tall reeds in a muddy marsh in another, wearing a leopard-skin bathing suit and looking like a newly created Eve. Arnold’s photos were an example of the drama that could emerge when Marilyn was photographed by a brilliant photographer.

  In October Marilyn asked Elia Kazan to cast her in the title role in Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll, which Kazan was to direct. He rejected her as too old (she was twenty-nine); but that was only part of his reason. He didn’t want to deal with her neuroses; he never directed her. He stated in his autobiography that he considered her to be a good comedienne, but not much more. Kazan was as tough as the other Hollywood directors.38 That same month, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? opened on Broadway. It was a spoof on Marilyn, starring Jayne Mansfield. Despite her deep sensitivity, Marilyn didn’t seem to mind it. Its author, George Axelrod, had written both the play on which The Seven Year Itch was based and the screenplay for the Hollywood version. He also wrote the screenplay for William Inge’s Bus Stop. The film version of Bus Stop would be one of Marilyn’s greatest successes.

  From the spring through the fall of 1955, Marilyn spent time with Arthur in her penthouse suite in the Waldorf Towers, high above the noise and confusion of the city. They avoided being seen in public together, although they went bicycle riding in Brooklyn, away from reporters. Arthur had always loved bicycling for the sense of freedom it gave, and Marilyn had similar feelings. It became a favorite activity of theirs.

  Having put off their love for four years, it was infused with intensity. “She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.” And “she was endlessly fascinating, without a conventional bone in her body.” Arthur was being swept away by a current he couldn’t control. Before she moved to New York, he was often dour, which was reflected in his stern Abraham Lincoln look, partly a product of his unhappiness in his marriage. But Marilyn liked the way he looked—like a perfect father figure.

  Just as Lincoln had freed the slaves, Marilyn decided, Arthur could free her from Hollywood and from Marilyn Monroe, her creation that had become an albatross. And Marilyn decided that because of his genius, Arthur was an ideal candidate for fatherhood. His genes would counteract whatever was defective in hers. Feeling embattled, guilty about breaking up his marriage, they indulged the fantasy that they would create a perfect marriage, a model for the ages.39

  In a diary fragment, Marilyn wrote about Arthur: “He is the only person that I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses about—but he is the only other human being that I trust as much as myself.” In plainer language, she told Susan Strasberg, “He’s so gorgeous. I love to cuddle with him. And he’s so brilliant.” Fleur Cowles answered attacks on him as unattractive: “Many sophisticated New York women coveted him. That crag of a man had a strange appeal to women.”40

  During that summer Arthur spent time with the members of a juvenile gang in Brooklyn, collecting background for a play he was writing about such gangs. He spent evenings with Marilyn in her penthouse. Yet he wondered if Marilyn and the gang members were that different. The gang members were trying to gain respect from a world that scorned them; Marilyn was trying to win a similar respect in Hollywood.

  Perhaps Arthur felt some connection to Marilyn because of Hollywood’s low estimation of her dramatic abilities. His reputation as a playwright was slipping. The critics had panned The Crucible as well as his most recent works, an adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and his one-act version of A View from the Bridge. The Crucible had especially angered the anticommunist forces because it implicitly attacked the House Un-American Activities Committee, one of its power centers, for its practice of requiring individuals to name names of Communists they knew before they would have any hope of being let off—exactly the same practice that had been used at the witch trials. The anticommunist forces, which had so far left Miller alone, were now considering investigating him. They stopped his funding from New York City for his play on New York gangs, and he never finished it.

  Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio was granted in October, and Arthur separated from his wife that month. Marilyn attended the opening of A View from the Bridge, and she met his mother, Augusta (Gussie), there. She and Arthur seemed more comfortable being linked together publicly. Meanwhile, Frank Delaney was negotiating a new Fox contract for her that would recognize MMP and guarantee her a measure of creative input into her films. Such production companies weren’t unusual. What was unique about Marilyn’s was that she insisted her name be used in its title, even though the IRS might suspect that the corporation was a front for her to avoid taxes and investigate her tax returns. (In fact, that did happen.) But Marilyn was adamant. She wanted everyone to realize that she had created a company, that she wasn’t a “dumb blonde.” She was the president of the company, with fifty-one shares—she insisted on that—and Milton had forty-nine.

  Reporters who interviewed her in the spring of 1955 were impressed by her knowledge of incorporation, investments, and contracts. She had done her homework in the months since she had seemed like a dunce in the January press conference at the Delaney apartment. Earl Wilson found her serene, confident, and highly professional when he interviewed her in April. She engaged in a detailed discussion of business matters with him. Then he asked to take a photo of her. She sighed, took off her glasses, and became the sexy Marilyn.41

  Even during these halcyon days of MMP, Marilyn and Milton didn’t always agree. NBC offered them three million dollars to do six dramas of their choosing; Marilyn was to star in two. Milton turned the offer down on the grounds that television wasn’t right for her. Marilyn was furious—until Milton persuaded Laurence Olivier to play opposite her in The Sleeping Prince, an adaptation of a play in which Olivier had starred along with his wife, Vivien Leigh. The film version was renamed The Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn was thrilled; Olivier was the world’s greatest actor. Acting opposite him would surely demonstrate her ability to do drama. She acceded to his demand that he direct the film as well as star in it. Unfortunately, she didn’t listen to Lee Strasberg’s qualms about him; Olivier was opposed to the Method approach. That disagreement would cause many problems during filming.

  The negotiations with Fox weren’t easy, since the studio contended that Marilyn was bound by the seven-year contract she had signed in 1951, which, they maintained, would apply until 1958. They challenged the argument that it had been voided by their failure to observe some of its clauses, and they fought over every clause in the new contract. Milton’s money wasn’t endless, and Marilyn had no money of her own, aside from the salary from Fox, which she wa
s returning to the studio. If she cashed any of the Fox checks, she would be implicitly giving in to them. Then in June The Seven Year Itch opened. It was a smash hit, and money poured into the studio coffers. It appeared that Marilyn was going to win her struggle. The negotiations, however, continued for the next six months. Zanuck was unwilling to capitulate until Spyros Skouras and the Fox board of directors in New York told him he had to. With the success of The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn had become very valuable financially to Fox. She had to be given what she wanted.

  The contract was signed on the last day of the year, to take advantage of tax laws. Marilyn won almost completely. She had achieved legitimacy for MMP, as well as approval over director and cameraman: she was to give the studio a list of those she approved, from which the studio would make the final choice. She would keep stipends paid to her for work outside Twentieth Century–Fox; her salary would be $100,000 per picture; and she was to make one film for Fox for every film she made for her production company during the seven years of the contract, up to four films. She didn’t receive script approval, but it didn’t seem that important at the time. Its absence would later return to haunt her.

  Milton also landed her the starring role in Bus Stop, to be produced under MMP, working with Fox. It had been a hit on Broadway, with Kim Stanley in the star role of Cherie, the tawdry dance hall singer pursued by Bo, an unsophisticated cowboy. It was a coup for Marilyn to be chosen over Stanley for the movie part. But there was a problem with the conception of MMP, which would later surface. Milton thought of it as his corporation, with Marilyn his major star. He wanted other performers, such as Marlon Brando, to join them. Marilyn liked that idea, as long as she remained in control. And worried about money, Milton wanted her to continue in her blonde-showgirl roles, which were guaranteed moneymakers. On the other hand, Joshua Greene told me that Milton had secured an option on The Brothers Karamazov, and he planned to make it Marilyn’s next film.42