by Lois Banner
The play is misogynist. Quentin’s mother is flawed, and Louise, married to Quentin’s friend Mickey, isn’t much better. The only woman in the play that Quentin appreciates is Helga, a Jewish woman who escaped the concentration camps and came to the United States. She is strong and masculine in type. Inge Morath, Miller’s third wife, was the model for her.
Marilyn reminds me of Barbara Loden, who played Maggie in the premiere production of After the Fall at Lincoln Center in 1964. She followed a life path appropriate for Marilyn, had she lived. Loden was Elia Kazan’s second wife. She was cast as Maggie in the play: Miller and Kazan costumed her to look like Marilyn. The passages about Loden in Kazan’s autobiography could be about Marilyn. A beautiful blonde, Loden tried to become both a Hollywood sex icon and a dramatic actress. Like many beautiful women Kazan had known in Hollywood, she felt she was worthless, given value only by a man’s desire for her. She was ambitious; she could be tough and ruthless. She had no formal education, but she took many lessons: voice, speech, acting, dance.
Then Loden, inspired by the feminism of the 1970s, left mainstream Hollywood to join the independent film community. She wrote the screenplay for the film Wanda and made it in an improvisational manner. It was a success in Europe, and she was acclaimed a heroine of the feminist movement. She plunged into work, writing many screenplays. Giving up feminine clothing, she dressed in the clothes male directors wore in the field: trousers, leather jackets, and boots. She became devoted to an Indian master and meditated regularly. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died two years later, at the age of forty-eight, in 1980.4 Kazan was proud of her transformation.
In the case of Marilyn, people believe what they want to believe. She lives in the fantasies of the national imagination, enshrined in a story with endless possibilities, plots, characters, and events. Marilyn’s life and death have become flexible, plastic representations of a real person and a real event. As an icon of glamour and beauty, she remains celebrated around the world. Her image is endlessly reproduced on posters, photographs, and billboards, on playing cards, umbrellas, and handbags. The Sam Shaw photo of her with her skirt flying up became one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century and remains so in the twenty-first. No one can deny the power of her representation: she is the urblonde who has haunted the American imagination.
Marilyn was a genius at self-creation and at posing in front of the camera. That may be the ultimate act of self-presentation for women in the twenty-first century, driven by technology, visuality, and the homogenization of world cultures. The innocence and sorrow in Marilyn’s eyes, transmitted in her photographs and in movies like Bus Stop and The Misfits, makes us, like the audiences in her own day, want to comfort and protect her. She is the child in all of us, the child we want to forget but can’t dismiss. We want to know what would have happened to her if she had lived longer. To construct any approximation of that future, we need to know as fully as possible about her past—who she was when she was alive.
Photo Section
Figures Marilyn saw in her dreams, from Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, entitled “Witches; Sabbat.” Marilyn told Ralph Roberts the figures in this book replicated figures in her dreams.
Autopsy sketch: this shows the scar above the pubic area from surgery to remove endometriosis.
Della Monroe’s passport photo.
(Courtesy of the Roy Turner Collection)
House of Ida and Wayne Bolender in Hawthorne, California. (Collection of the author)
Grace (left) with Norma Jeane in front of her and Gladys (right) with her niece Geraldine and friends on the beach. (Courtesy of the David Wills Collection)
Grace (left) and Gladys (right) with a young Norma Jeane (right) and Gladys’s niece Geraldine (left). (Courtesy of the David Wills Collection)
Dinner at the Children’s Aid Society Orphanage at about the time Norma Jeane lived there. (Courtesy of Stacy Eubank)
Tall, skinny “ugly duckling” Norma Jeane at age ten. (Courtesy of the David Wills Collection)
Norma Jeane with a double chin.
Norma Jeane and Jim Dougherty’s wedding photo.
(Collection of the author)
Norma Jeane with a friend on Catalina Beach. (Collection of the author)
Norma Jeane at a party for surfers in Malibu.
(Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Association)
Marilyn as an assistant for trick golfer Joe Kirkwood Jr. (Collection of the author)
Marilyn in an employee show, Strictly for Kicks, at Fox, in her guise as a street waif starlet.
(Collection of the author)
Marilyn dancing with Johnny Hyde. (Photographed by Bruno Bernard © Renaissance Road, Inc. Bernard of Hollywood is a trademark of Renaissance Road, Inc.)
Marilyn as the marshal for the Miss America parade.
Marilyn with Natasha Lytess on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Marilyn and Jane Russell at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, fixing handprints in cement.
Marilyn with a broken thumb at the Honolulu airport on the way to Japan. (Collection of the author)
Marilyn performing for American troops in Korea.
Marilyn gives a press conference when she separates from Joe DiMaggio, in front of their Beverly Hills house. To her right is her lawyer, Jerry Geisler.
Marilyn with her white piano.
Marilyn in disguise.
Marilyn with Joe DiMaggio in New York, wearing the black mink coat he gave her.
Marilyn judging a beard-growing contest. (Collection of the author)
Marilyn with Arthur Miller.
The cast of The Misfits. (Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos)
Marilyn with Anne Karger.
(Courtesy of Terry Wasdyke)
Marilyn with Marjorie Plecher, her longtime movie wardrobe person and friend, and wife of Whitey Snyder. (Collection of the author)
A costume test for Something’s Got to Give.
Marilyn with Ella Fitzgerald.
The Rat Pack.
Marilyn with Pat Newcomb, the night of John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration.
Singing happy birthday to JFK in Madison Square Garden.
A party at Arthur Krim’s house after the JFK birthday celebration.
Marilyn in a red sweater.
(Photographed by Bruno Bernard © Renaissance Road, Inc. Bernard of Hollywood is a trademark of Renaissance Road, Inc.)
Marilyn in a yellow bikini.
(Photographed by Bruno Bernard © Renaissance Road, Inc. Bernard of Hollywood is a trademark of Renaissance Road, Inc.)
Nude photo #1. Once Marilyn was identified as the model for these nude photographs, they were put on all sorts of commercial items, including playing cards from the 1950s.
(Golden Dreams and A Nude Wrinkle © Tom Kelley Studios)
Nude photo #2. (Golden Dreams and A Nude Wrinkle © Tom Kelley Studios)
Marilyn in a red dress at Niagara Falls. (Photographed by Bruno Bernard © Renaissance Road, Inc. Bernard of Hollywood is a trademark of Renaissance Road, Inc.)
Marilyn in a gold dress at the Photoplay Awards.
(© Michael Ochs/Getty Images)
Le Taureau (The Bull), a painting by the French artist
Poucette that Marilyn bought in May 1962.
Marilyn with a balalaika. (Photographed by Milton H. Greene, © 2012 Joshua Greene)
Ballerina sitting. (Photographed by Milton H. Greene, © 2012 Joshua Greene)
Japanese photograph. (Courtesy of The Cecil Beaton Archives at Sotheby’s)
Marilyn in the bulrushes in a leopard-skin bathing suit. (Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos)
Acknowledgments
I began this biography nearly ten years ago, when I was a fellow of the Humanities Institute at the University of Canberra in Australia and found the newsletter of the Australian Marilyn Monroe fan club, Glamour Preferred, in the Australian National Library. That newsletter led me to Marilyn Reme
mbered, the Los Angeles fan club. Its members welcomed me and provided me with invaluable information and support. I especially thank fan club members Greg Schreiner, Scott Fortner, Jill Adams, and Harrison Held. David Marshall exchanged much information and many e-mails with me. Roy Turner, a prince among human beings, talked about Marilyn with me and put his inestimable collection about Marilyn’s childhood in my hands. Without Stacy Eubank and her extraordinary collection of Marilyn materials, this book could not have been written.
Mark Anderson provided me with access to the materials in the Marilyn Monroe file cabinets, then in the possession of Millington Conroy, in Conroy’s home in Rowland Heights, California. My association with Mark resulted in MM–Personal, the book we did based on that material—which is now in the hands of Anna Strasberg and the Marilyn Monroe Estate.
My gratitude goes to the staffs of the libraries at which I did research on Marilyn, including those at the American Film Institute; Arizona State University; the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the State University of New York, Stony Brook; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Southern California; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Among the many librarians who assisted me, special thanks goes to Barbara Hall of the Margaret Herrick Library and Ned Comstock of the University of Southern California. Most books written on the history of films acknowledge these two individuals, who are knowledgeable about the nooks and crannies of film history and always supportive of researchers.
My thanks goes to fellow Marilyn biographers who have given me support on this project: John Gilmore, Michelle Morgan, and Carl Rollyson. Above all, Anthony Summers gave me access to his many interviews of Marilyn friends and associates. This act of generosity on his part has inestimably strengthened my understandings in this book. I thank Hap Roberts of Salisbury, North Carolina, for giving me access to “Mimosa,” Ralph Roberts’s unpublished memoir, as well as other Roberts papers.
I am also grateful to Valerie Yaros, historian at the Screen Actors Guild, for providing me with addresses and other information, and to the doctors I consulted, all M.D.s, King Reilly, Robert Siegal, Carrie Rickard, Rebecca Kuhn, and Rosemary Rau-Levine. I also thank Robert Wood, Peter Loewenberg, Joshua Hoffs, and Elyn Saks, all practicing psychoanalysts, for leading me through the intricacies of psychiatric theory. I thank Amanda Gustin and Leslie Pitts of the Mary Baker Eddy Library at the First Christian Science Church in Boston for providing me information about Ana Lower and Norma Jeane Baker, Bob and Jenna Herre for their information about the Goddard family, and Twentieth Century–Fox for giving me access to the legal and production files on Marilyn Monroe. I thank David Wells and Susan Bernard for their many kindnesses to me.
During the years I have worked on this book, I have made many friends among the individuals I interviewed. Many led me to other friends and associates of Marilyn. I especially thank Meta Shaw Stevens and Edie Marcus Shaw, Patricia Rosten Filan, Patricia Lawford Stewart, Michael Selsman, and Noreen Nash. Arthur Verge, whom I knew as a scholar, turned out to be a lifeguard who knew Tommy Zahn and Dave Heiser—who were close to the Kennedys and knew Marilyn. Lary May of the University of Minnesota, a fine film scholar, helped me to understand the Hollywood film industry—as did my USC colleagues Steven Ross, Vanessa Schwartz, and Rick Jewell. Lynn Sacco of the University of Tennessee explained the history and multiple meanings of incest to me. Sioux Oliva and Jill Fields gave me support at many moments when my energy was flagging, as did Adele Wallace and Jean Melley, who read my manuscript with great sensitivity and flair. As always, Alice Echols and Elinor Accampo were scholarly cicerones to me, while the University of Southern California provided me with research funds and sabbaticals so that I could write this book.
My daughter, Olivia Banner, edited my manuscript at a crucial moment, improving it greatly. My son, Gideon Banner, taught me many truths about acting, as I watched him turn himself from an actor of modest talent to a star performer who has acted on Broadway and has long starred in the Blue Man Group at the Astor Theater in New York. I found out through him that one can learn the art of acting through dedication and the right teachers. That insight was crucial to my understanding of Marilyn.
I am grateful to my husband, John Laslett, for his loyalty, and to my agent, William Clark, for his nurturing support and hard bargaining. I thank Kathy Belden for her fine editing and encouragement and Bloomsbury USA for all they have done for me and my book. I thank the individuals who have served me as researchers and assistants: Karin Huebner, Lila Myers, Victoria Vantoch, and Lisa Raymond.
Manuscript Collections Consulted and List of Abbreviations
AFI
American Film Institute
Charles Feldman Papers
AMPAS
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Margaret Herrick Library
David Benedit-Zeitlin, Lester Cowan, Katharine Hepburn, Hedda Hopper, John Huston, Guido Orlando, Louella Parsons, and Sidney Skolsky papers.
Ronald Davis Oral Interviews, conducted for his book The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993).
Donald Spoto, oral interviews for his Marilyn Monroe biography, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). (DS)
Clipping files, Marilyn Monroe, Marie Wilson, Sheree North, George Arliss, Shelley Winters.
AS
Anthony Summers interviews (possession of Anthony Summers) for his book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Macmillan, 1985).
ASU
Arizona State University
Peter Lawford, Ted Schwartz, Jimmy Starr collections; James Spada collection, interviews for his book, Peter Lawford, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (New York: Bantam, 1991).
BL
British Library
Laurence Olivier Papers
CUO
Columbia University Oral History Project: History of Hollywood Films
Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger interviews
DFI
Danish Film Institute
Donald Spoto Collection
LC
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Henry Brandon, Anna Freud, Marianne Kris, and Joseph Rauh papers
LMU
Loyola Marymount University
Files from the Arthur Jacobs agency office
“MIMOSA”
Ralph Roberts’s unpublished memoir of Marilyn Monroe, unpaginated manuscript.
MM–PERSONAL
Book on Marilyn by Lois Banner and Mark Anderson, based on the materials in Marilyn Monroe’s file cabinets, in possession of Anna Strasberg, Lee Strasberg’s third wife.
NL
Newberry Library, Chicago
Ben Hecht Papers; Marilyn Monroe files
NYPL
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Clippings files: Marilyn Monroe, Paula Strasberg, Lee Strasberg
Collections: Lotte Goslar and Gypsy Rose Lee
RR
Ralph Roberts Papers, in possession of Hap Roberts, Salisbury, North Carolina
RT
Roy Turner Papers—in possession of Lois Banner
SE
Stacy Eubank Collection; mss. for her book, “Holding a Good Thought for Marilyn,” a collection of letters, press clippings, and other written memorabilia in possession of Eubank.
SU
Stanford University—Special Collections
Spyros Skouras Papers: files on Twentieth Century–Fox, Darryl Zanuck
SUNY-STONY BROOK
State University of New York, Stony Brook, Special Collections
C. David Heymann, oral interviews for his biography of Robert Kennedy, C. David Heymann Collection
UCLA
> University of California at Los Angeles—Speciall Collections
Ralph Greenson Papers, Twentieth Century–Fox Legal Files, Twentieth Century–Fox Production Files
USC
University of Southern California
Constance McCormick Collection, clippings files
Warner Brothers Archives
UT
University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center
Norman Mailer, files for his books Marilyn: A Biography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973); Of Women and Their Elegance (New York: Simon & Schuster 1980).
Arthur Miller Collection
Maurice Zolotow, files for his book Marilyn Monroe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960).
VILLANI
Antonio Villani, unpublished interviews for his video, “Hold a Good Thought for Me,” GS
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Lois Banner
Marilyn Monroe Estate—file cabinets
Scott Fortner
Patricia Rosten Filan
Greg Schreiner
Letters and documents sold at auction, information from catalogs or at auction houses. (Items are on view before they are sold.)
ABBREVIATIONS
AS Anthony Summers
AV Antonio Villani
DS Donald Spoto
GS Greg Schreiner
JK John Kobal
LB Lois Banner
MZ Maurice Zolotow
RT Roy Turner
SE Stacy Eubank
List of Interviewees
Allan Abbott, Jill Adams, Richard Baer, George Barris, Susan Bernard, Sylvia Barnhart, Larry Billman, Malcolm Boyd, William Carroll, George Chakiris, Millington Conroy, Patricia Cox, Bennett Daubrey, Janet Desrosiers, Molly Dunne, Felice Early Ingersoll, John Everson, Sondra Farrell, Audrey Franklin, Kayley Gable, John Gilmore, Eric Goddard, Kirk Goddard, Johnny Grant, Larry Grant, Cathy Griffin, Joshua Greene, Betsy Hammes, Jenna and Robert Herre, James Haspiel, Boze Hedleigh, Dave Heiser, Diana Herbert, Joshua Hoffs, Cheryl Howell Williams (interviewed by Stacey Eubank), Kathleen Hughes, Don Ingersoll (interviewed by Victoria Vantoch), Arthur James, Nancy Bolender Jeffrey, Jay Kanter, Douglas Kirkland, Bill Knoedelseder, Diane Ladd, Jack Larson, Robert Litman, A. C. Lyles, Roberta Linn, Alice Marshak, Marion Marshall, Phyllis McGuire, Jeanne Martin, John Miner, Don Murray, Joe Naar, Noreen Nash, Dolores Nemiro, Patricia Newcomb, Larry Newman, Gloria Pall, Hap Roberts, Carl Rollyson, Gloria Romanoff, Patricia Rosten Filan, Stanley Rubin, Barbara Rush, Gus Russo, Lawrence Schiller, Cami Sebring, Michael Selsman, Meta Shaw Stevens, Edith Shaw Marcus, Thomas Sobeck, Mickey Song, Tanya Samura, Hal Schaefer, Steffi Skolsky Slaver, James Spada, Anna Strasberg, David Strasberg, John Strasberg, Daniel Stewart, Patricia Lawford Stewart, Anthony Summers, Patricia Traviss, Arthur Verge, Terry Wasdyke, Gladys Wilson