Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  From this time to the end of Marilyn’s life, there would be just such a lack of communication between therapists and internists—some of them more benevolent, better qualified, less manipulative than others, but all of them acting independently. Each saw Marilyn Monroe as his or her responsibility; each had a proud, proprietary claim; each readily assumed the superior role from which Marilyn, in her quest for independence and maturity, ought to have been freed. But she was, after all, simply too valuable a patient.

  Third, at the age of twenty-nine she had behind her only the many experiences of life in the business of entertainment, not much of which helped her to grow up, and all of which sent her reeling back on her appearance, her prettiness, the dedication to surface glamour.

  “My problem,” she said at the time,

  is that I drive myself. But I do want to be wonderful, you know? I know some people may laugh about that, but it’s true. . . . I’m trying to become an artist, and to be true, and [I] sometimes feel I’m on the verge of craziness. I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard. There are times when I think, “All I have to be is true.” But sometimes it doesn’t come so easily. I always have this secret feeling that I’m really a fake or something, a phony. . . . Joe understands this. He’d had a very difficult time when he was young, too, so he understood something about me and I understood something about him, and we based our marriage on this.

  And then Marilyn added that her feelings of inadequacy sprang from the old, impossible identification of one’s best work with perfection—the goal set before her from the days of the Bolenders to the days of moviemaking and now, in the move to serious acting:

  My one desire is to do my best, the best that I can from the moment the camera starts until it stops. That moment I want to be perfect, as perfect as I can make it. . . . Lee says I have to start with myself, and I say, “With me?” Well, I’m not so important! Who does he think I am, Marilyn Monroe or something?

  As those last sentences indicate, she was perhaps saved from desperation not by therapy but by her extraordinary ability to cut through the anxiety with a leavening humor, a gentle self-mockery and an awareness that “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed not the deepest part of the self she sought and perceived she was becoming.

  For a time, Marilyn sought relaxation in reading and museums. One afternoon in early March, she scoured shops in lower Manhattan and returned to her hotel with two sacks of books, among them Shaw’s Letters to Ellen Terry and Letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Richard Aldrich’s biography of his wife Gertrude Lawrence, James Joyce’s Ulysses and a copy of the typescript for Noël Coward’s comedy Fallen Angels, which was on Broadway that year with Nancy Walker and Margaret Phillips.

  Continuing her interest in matters cultural, Marilyn and Joe dined with Sam Shaw and his wife several times that season, and after Marilyn mentioned her interest in poetry Sam arranged a meeting with the poet and novelist Norman Rosten and his wife, Hedda. Thus began a close friendship that lasted until her death, with Norman acting as a kind of New York cultural mentor and Hedda, eventually, as Marilyn’s Manhattan secretarial assistant. The Rostens were initially attracted to her, Norman recalled, because of her simplicity and honesty. Looking nothing like the movie star, she arrived at the Rostens’ Brooklyn home with Sam, who mumbled her name in such a way it sounded like “Marion.” Hedda asked her guest’s occupation, and when she said she was preparing for classes at the Actors Studio, Hedda asked what plays she had done.

  “Oh, I’ve never been on the stage. But I have done some movies.”

  “What was your movie name?”

  And, as Norman Rosten remembered, “in a timid voice” came the reply: “Marilyn Monroe.” Not long after, Norman took Marilyn to a Rodin exhibit, where she was deeply moved by The Hand of God, a depiction of lovers emerging and embracing in the curved shelter of an enormous palm.

  Yet Marilyn’s timidity had its obverse in her full awareness of the effect and meaning of her stardom. “When she came to visit us in Brooklyn Heights,” Norman Rosten said years later, “she always insisted on helping out with the dishes. She wanted very much to be regarded as a regular person, one of the family, you might say. But she never could quite let you forget that she was a movie star.” There were, at such times, gently melodramatic sighs, unexpected withdrawals into a dreamy silence, prolonged sessions before Hedda’s mirror, adjusting makeup and letting it be known how important her appearance was to her and, presumably, to everyone present. This co-existed with another presentation, that of the scrubbed, disguised Marilyn preferring to go unrecognized as she walked the streets of Manhattan.

  That spring, Milton decided that Marilyn’s status required a more elegant venue than the Gladstone Hotel. The actress Leonora Corbett, who had appeared on the London stage in the 1930s and then in the first New York production of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, was seeking a six-month tenancy for her one-bedroom suite on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf Towers, and a deal was hastily made. Soon the Rostens and the Shaws joined the Greenes in a champagne toast to Marilyn’s fashionable new address.

  There was another reason for celebration, although one not clear to anyone but Marilyn. As it happened, Norman Rosten had been a college classmate of Arthur Miller, and quite by chance Marilyn had been reunited with the playwright through the Rostens. Since their introduction four years earlier, Miller had written the prize-winning play The Crucible, based on the Salem witch trials of 1692—a situation he linked with the tawdry investigations of so-called subversive activities in the 1950s. Soon to open in autumn 1955 was A View from the Bridge.

  A year younger than Joe, Miller was to turn forty that year; Marilyn was twenty-nine. His life was in some turmoil, although this was belied by his placid manner. Like Joe, his tall, gaunt frame and apparent humorlessness gave him a certain grave authority; like Joe and Jim, he was athletic and loved the outdoor life of hunter and fisherman. But Miller also represented for Marilyn the serious theater to which she was devoting her new life.

  While he admitted his somewhat faddish youthful dabbling in Communist social theory, Arthur had come to it late, after other writers (Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Ignazio Silone, among others) had abandoned mid-twentieth-century Russian Marxism as intellectually and socially sterile. Miller was much regarded in the 1950s as the dramatic conscience of American society, for his work was plainly concerned with moral and social issues affecting families after the war. But he was no cool theorist; American playwrights tend not to be. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Robert Anderson and later David Mamet, John Guare, David Rabe and August Wilson (to name but a few) write not academic theses but works rooted in memory and feeling, plays for actors and audiences that provide affective understanding of recognizable human dilemmas.

  In this regard, Arthur’s first wife was more of an intellectual and a theorist. Mary Grace Slattery was a liberal Catholic and an editor intensely interested in the politics of the thirties, forties and fifties. She provided her husband with creative stimulus as well as economic support, working during the early years of their marriage as a waitress until he was firmly established. (It has even been suggested that from the experiences of her father, an insurance salesman, came the inspiration for Death of a Salesman.)

  But as he detailed later in his autobiography, the demands of Arthur’s work that year were ineluctably linked to Marilyn’s reappearance in his life, “and the resulting mixture of despair for my marriage and astonishment with [Marilyn] left little room for concentration” on preparing for forthcoming productions. Only two or three quiet suppers with the Rostens and one or two evenings alone with Marilyn were necessary for their friendship to develop into a love affair. “It was wonderful to be around her,” he said years later. “She was simply overwhelming. She had so much promise. It seemed to me that she could really be a great kind of phenomenon, a terrific artist. She was endlessly fascinating, full of original observations, [and]
there wasn’t a conventional bone in her body.”

  But this did not mean Joe DiMaggio was out of the picture; for perhaps the only time in her life, that spring Marilyn maintained simultaneous intimacies—with the man who had been her husband and the man who was about to be. The trick was to keep each unaware of her schedule with the other, and this required some slick negotiating.

  However thrilling his new love, Miller feared that he “might be slipping into a life not my own,” which was an anxiety well founded. He knew not quite what he wanted, for while he did not wish to terminate his marriage to Mary Grace Slattery—however troubled and unsatisfying it had become—“the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable.” Marilyn found herself in something of a quandary, too. She was not at all ready to give up a grand passion simply because the man was married. At the same time, she was reevaluating everything in her past, and although Arthur was physically attractive, intellectually stimulating and parentally tender, and although she desired him perhaps more completely than any man before, Marilyn had no intention of encouraging a divorce.

  Quite the contrary: she urged him not to end his marriage on her account. For the present, she would be content to have him as occasional lover. This edge of detachment, perhaps predictably, made Arthur Miller all the more ardent a pursuer. But the truth is that he needed as much endorsement as Marilyn, for he was in the first throes of a terrible struggle with right-wing ideologues out to destroy him for being (so they thought) a Communist sympathizer who advocated overthrow of the government, a man whose life’s work, daring to be critical of certain hoary myths about American supremacy, was treasonous. “I had lots to do,” Marilyn told Amy later. “I was preparing for a new stage in my career. But Arthur didn’t have much to look forward to. In a way, I felt sorry for him.” And in a way she may have empathized with his contest for freedom, the right to criticize and the desire for artistic expression without interference from authorities: these were, after all, trademarks of her own relationship with Fox.

  Political storms were gathering darkly on the horizon. Miller had a temporary break in his friendship with Kazan, who cooperated with authorities asking the names of those who had once belonged to fashionable left-wing groups interested in things Russian and particularly in the historic and cultural roots of the Russian Revolution; Miller refused to follow Kazan’s lead. Not at all interested in the tricky webs of intrigue, Marilyn was nonetheless sympathetic to his plight, although she also avoided taking sides—Kazan or Miller—and how might Strasberg, that champion of Russian-based acting theories, regard the matter?

  Her admiration and support of Kazan remained firm. At the premiere of his new film East of Eden on March 9, an event benefiting the Actors Studio, she and Marlon Brando volunteered as ushers. Two weeks later, she and the Greenes attended the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Kazan. Both works stirred considerable controversy.

  Not every event did, however. Opening night of the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden, on March 30, was a benefit for the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation. Among all the stars who turned out none was more visible or roaringly approved by the eighteen thousand spectators than Marilyn: in a little scenario designed by impresario Mike Todd (with Milton Greene supervising), she made a grand entrance in a tight, sexy outfit of feathers and spangles, riding atop an elephant painted shocking pink. “It meant a lot to me because I’d never been to the circus as a kid,” she told the nation a week later.

  The forum for that comment was Marilyn’s interview with Edward R. Murrow, whose television program Person to Person offered an apparently casual visit with celebrities. After weeks of preparing for the technical challenges of broadcasting a live show from the Greene home in Connecticut, the interview was at last scheduled for April 8. But as airtime drew near, Marilyn became distraught, believing that her light makeup and simple outfit made her look wan and dowdy alongside petite, dark-haired Amy. When a CBS cameramen tried to calm her, saying she looked fabulous and that millions of Americans would fall in love with her on the spot, Marilyn became very nearly paralyzed with fright: this was unlike a soundstage; there was no rehearsal, no possibility of a retake. But then the producer said quietly to Marilyn, “Just look at the camera, dear. It’s just you and the camera—just you two.” And with that she was reassured and made an admirably unaffected presence.

  When Murrow asked the purpose of MMP, Marilyn replied directly that she wished “primarily to contribute to help making good pictures. . . . It’s not that I object to doing musicals and comedies—in fact, I rather enjoy them—but I’d like to do dramatic parts, too.” She also thanked those who had contributed so much to her career, singling out John Huston, Billy Wilder, Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov. Marilyn’s appearance at the time was thought unglamorous and awkward, perhaps because she was such a refreshing change from the prevalent artifice: she answered questions briefly and unselfconsciously, never taking the spotlight for herself or jockeying to be the segment’s star.

  As for Milton, his time during 1955 was divided between his photographic studio, where he tried to conduct business as usual, and meetings with Irving Stein, Frank Delaney and Joe Carr, his accountant. MMP desperately needed cash for such basic operating expenses as Marilyn’s hotel and support, as well as “seed money” for whatever project they hoped to realize. To Milton fell the responsibility of finding wealthy patrons, which was a futile endeavor. And so it became all the more necessary to recognize the white truce flag waved toward him by the men at Fox. Throughout 1955, the terms of the new contract between MMP and Fox were painstakingly negotiated.

  From early April, with Marilyn’s presence in New York more widely known, she was besieged with requests for appearances. The Arthur P. Jacobs Company, headed by the man of that name, had a public relations staff in New York and Los Angeles and was signed as Marilyn’s publicity consultants. Jacobs and his colleagues on both coasts—John Springer, Lois Weber, Rupert Allan, Patricia Newcomb—constantly sorted through literally hundreds of demands each week for Marilyn’s presence at interviews, benefit appearances, charity appeals and award dinners.

  But because Marilyn insisted on her regular hours with Dr. Hohenberg and her private sessions with Strasberg, she strictly limited both her meetings with reporters and the photo sessions necessary to keep her before the public. An exception was made for photographer Eve Arnold, whose images of Marlene Dietrich had so impressed Marilyn. “Imagine what you could do with me!” she told Arnold. Charming photos were taken of her as an autodidact, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses; conversely, Arnold presented another aspect of her—in a leopard skin, crawling through muddy marsh grass like a primal, predatory animal.

  A week later, Arnold took the contact sheets for approval. Later, she recalled that Marilyn opened the door of her hotel suite wearing nothing but a diaphanous black negligée—even though she was granting an interview to a very proper British lady from a foreign magazine.

  The search for identity could be a surprisingly ambiguous adventure, and in a way the closer Marilyn got the harder it was to grasp. Sometimes, she had to dress formally for business and social engagements, and Amy Greene often assisted her in selecting the proper additions to her frugal wardrobe. Shopping with Amy or with Hedda Rosten, Marilyn wore dark glasses, a scarf or a hat, no makeup—but disguised though she was, she wanted desperately to be recognized. She had, therefore, to take certain measures. As Norman Rosten recalled, Marilyn hired a limousine to take her shopping, drawing the shades to ensure that when she stopped, passersby would know that someone who mattered was about to alight.

  Just so, Amy Greene recalled a day of shopping in Fifth Avenue’s department stores. Marilyn began as usual in her incognito mode, completely unrecognized by customers and clerks. But as they went through stores and aisles, Marilyn gradually put aside—piece by piece—the outfit she wore, until finally she tore off her wig and dark glasses, rushed into a dressing room and emerged
as Marilyn Monroe, to the astonishment and excitement of everyone at Saks Fifth Avenue. Discarding the camouflage was a twofold gesture: Marilyn wished to remove the disguise, the mask that hid her from her public, and to emerge as herself. But what she then revealed was in fact the manufactured Marilyn about whom she had such ambivalent feelings. Without that, she feared she had no real identity; trying to escape her false persona, she was simultaneously afraid of losing it. Similarly, Susan Strasberg and a friend recalled Marilyn angry and withdrawn when a taxicab driver did not recognize her.

  That same season, Stanley Kauffmann was editing a book of Sam Shaw’s photographs of Marilyn during The Seven Year Itch. “She wore a sweatshirt and slacks. There was a bit of a belly. The knees were slightly knocked. Her hair looked tired.” But when Kauffmann showed her a photo he wished included, of her looking tired after a long day on the set, Marilyn was adamant in her refusal. “When people look at me, they want to see a star.”1

  * * *

  Around this time, Marilyn began to refer to herself in the third person. Susan Strasberg recalled walking with her when she noticed a group of fans awaiting her return at the Waldorf. “Do you want to see me be her?” she asked Susan. Momentarily confused, Susan then saw something remarkable:

  She seemed to make some inner adjustment, something “turned on” inside her, and suddenly—there she was—not the simple girl I’d been strolling with, but “Marilyn Monroe,” resplendent, ready for her public. Now heads turned. People crowded around us. She smiled like a kid.

  Similarly, Sam Shaw could never forget Marilyn repeatedly speaking of herself in the third person. Referring to a scene in Itch or to a photo of herself, she said time and again, “She wouldn’t do this. . . . Marilyn would say that. . . . She was good in this scene.” Truman Capote wrote of finding Marilyn sitting for a long while before a dimly lit mirror. Asked what she was doing, Marilyn replied, “Looking at her.” Eli Wallach, walking with her one evening on Broadway, recalled Marilyn without makeup or distinctive clothes, suddenly stopping traffic and attracting attention. “I just felt like being Marilyn for a minute,” she said, and there was the magnetism. It was as if an image flashed through her mind—a daydream of someone glamorous, remote and almost half-forgotten named Marilyn Monroe—and for a moment she reassumed that image. But she knew that Marilyn Monroe was only a part of herself; thus she could associate with “Marilyn Monroe,” but she rarely identified with her. She had cooperated in the creation of the image and was willing to present what agents, producers, directors and the public wished. Danger, emotional confusion, a crack in relationships: these occurred only when she tried to steer her life’s course entirely by the chart of fame mapped out for Marilyn Monroe, with no reference to the deeper, private self within.