Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  In therapy, she was urged to keep a notebook of random thoughts, or a diary, but this she never did, as she confided to friends. Twice Marilyn purchased marble notebooks but they remained blank, for she did not have the necessary, elementary discipline and she was ashamed of what she considered her atrocious spelling and punctuation. But occasonally she scrawled notes on scraps of paper. That year, with the evocations suggested by her analysis and then her drama classes, Marilyn’s jottings show the concerns of her inner work:

  • “My problem of desperation in my work and life—I must begin to face it continually, making my work routine more continuous and of more importance than my desperation.”

  • “Doing a scene is like opening a bottle. If it doesn’t open one way, try another—perhaps even give it up for another bottle? Lee wouldn’t like that. . . .”

  • “How or why I can act—and I’m not sure I can—is the thing for me to understand. The torture, let alone the day to day happenings—the pain one cannot explain to another.”

  • “How can I sleep? How does this girl fall asleep? What does she think about?”

  • “What is there I’m afraid of? Hiding in case of punishment? Libido? Ask Dr. H.”

  • “How can I speak naturally onstage? Don’t let the actress worry, let the character worry.”

  • “Learn to believe in contradictory impulses.”

  More frequently, Marilyn transformed some of her feelings into poems—rhythms might be a better word, images of what she felt and feared in her twenty-ninth year.

  Night of the Nile—soothing—

  darkness—refreshes—Air

  Seems different—Night has

  No eyes nor no one—silence—

  except to the Night itself.

  Life—

  I am of both your directions

  Somehow remaining,

  Hanging downward the most,

  Strong as a cobweb in the wind,

  Existing more with the cold frost

  than those beaded rays

  I’ve seen in paintings.

  “TO THE WEEPING WILLOW”

  I stood beneath your limbs

  And you flowered and finally

  clung to me,

  and when the wind struck with the earth

  and sand—you clung to me.

  Thinner than a cobweb I,

  sheerer than any—

  but it did attach itself

  and held fast in strong winds

  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.

  But unlike many lay poets, Marilyn never took her odes too seriously, as shown by one in particular that has an airy humor and natural gravity worthy of e. e. cummings or William Carlos Williams:

  From time to time

  I make it rhyme,

  but don’t hold that kind

  of thing

  against

  me—

  Oh well, what the hell,

  so it won’t sell.

  What I want to tell—

  is what’s on my mind:

  ’taint Dishes,

  ’taint Wishes,

  it’s thoughts

  flinging by

  before I die—

  and to think

  in ink.

  From the first day they worked together in private sessions in the Strasberg apartment at 225 West Eighty-sixth Street that spring of 1955, Lee gave Marilyn the strongest paternal-professional guidance of her life—a kind of total psychological mentorship that soon provoked the resentment of both Milton Greene and Arthur Miller. Lee fully agreed with and encouraged Marilyn’s resentment of movies in general and Fox in particular, for he believed their abuse of good actors and writers was standard operating procedure. This disaffection was based on his own experience, for in 1945 that studio had denied him the opportunity to direct Somewhere in the Night, which he had co-written with Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Opinionated and pugnacious, Lee had been released from his studio contract and returned to the East Coast, where, according to Susan, life was very difficult for the four Strasbergs (Lee, Paula, Susan and her younger brother, John). “My father was terribly frustrated and had fights with the wrong people, but he also had an ability to inspire others”—which led his former partner Cheryl Crawford to send him acting students. Kazan then asked him to take over the supervision of the Actors Studio from Robert Lewis.

  Because at first she was frightened to speak and participate in open class exercises, Marilyn was invited to the Strasberg home—an emotionally land-mined place, according to Susan, where Paula had subordinated her own career, her wishes and the life of her entire family on the altar of Lee’s supremacy.

  Then seventeen, Susan Strasberg (who had already appeared importantly in two films, Cobweb and Picnic) was about to have a great success on Broadway as Anne Frank. Susan felt an immediate empathy with the frightened, vulnerable Marilyn, “despite the mask of celebrity she put on and took off at will. She told us more than once, ‘Hollywood will never forgive me—not for leaving, not for fighting the system—but for winning, which I’m going to do.’ ” Because Marilyn was soon another member of the Strasberg family—having meals at their kitchen table and often staying overnight—Susan had the chance to see her tough core. Underappreciated by studio executives, Marilyn nevertheless knew how to use her past, combining it with both her beauty and her essential sweetness of spirit to project a childlike attitude that almost everyone found irresistible.

  But Lee and Paula devoted so much time and attention to her that Susan “was convinced there was no love or energy left for me, and I felt guilty for even feeling that way, because I saw how lonely Marilyn was. She really had nobody she felt she could trust completely—not one person.” Lee became Marilyn’s father while Paula became her mother, nursemaid, coach—and keeper of the pills. One night, Marilyn was so desperate for sleep after a Strasberg party that she combined sleeping tablets with one glass too many of champagne: dazed and unable to walk, she crawled to Lee and Paula’s bedroom, scratching at the door while Susan watched, frozen with fear.

  “Don’t you ever feel anxious? Don’t you have anxiety attacks?” she asked friends in sober moments. When told these were common feelings, sometimes especially in actors, she replied quietly, “But you’re not in my position. When you’re on a film you’ve got to look good in the morning so you’ve got to get some sleep. That’s why I take pills.”

  This habit was, contrary to the usual take on Marilyn, nothing like an attempt at self-destruction; much less was she a psychotic personality. In addition, it must be stressed that she was also doing what very many people did in the 1950s—and perhaps preeminently those in the arts. The abuse of pills was not only the habit of sensitive playwrights like Tennessee Williams and William Inge, and self-indulgent actors like Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift: it was an accepted part of the artistic life. “Our family doctor gave me sleeping pills when I was seventeen,” recalled Susan.

  People mixed champagne and pills all the time, to increase the effectiveness of the pills. As for Marilyn, she had the burdens of her fear, her timidity, her insecurity and her unusually agonizing monthly periods that rendered her literally incapable of moving.

  Marilyn’s use of hypnotics and barbiturates (she never took amphetamines, marijuana or intravenous drugs) had begun innocently enough with Sidney Skolsky’s unlimited free samples. By 1955, the occasional imprudent combination of pills and wine disturbed what little routine she had and made her strident, moody and lethargic next day.

  However embracing of her, the Strasberg family was far from the ideal one for Marilyn. Lee was prone to rages and Paula to hysterical fits and threats of suicide, while by a certain sad irony these gifted, overbearing parents depended—for several years—on the talent, success and income of their daughter for financial survival. “Our household,” Susan said,
“revolved around my father, his moods, his needs, his expectations and his neuroses. He was teaching people how to act, but that was nothing compared to the drama in our house. . . . Our entire family were intimate strangers.” Her brother, Johnny, was convinced that “it was hard for anyone to have a relationship with [Lee] if you weren’t a book, a record, a cat or Marilyn.”

  An unintentionally negligent father, Lee lavished on Marilyn the attention he denied his children: more than once, when Susan approached him to discuss something in her personal life, he replied, “I’m not concerned with that except as it relates to your work.” Marilyn, on the other hand, received private tutorials when she wanted them and gentle nurturing when she was depressed, unhappy or insecure. This Lee did because he seemed genuinely to believe in her raw, untapped talent (not because there was any overt indication that he was in love with her, which he may have been). The strong bond between them was their mutual hunger to be respected by the mainstream from which they had deliberately withdrawn.

  There was another common link, and that was the Russian aesthetic to which Marilyn had been earlier exposed by Carnovsky and Brand, Lytess and Chekhov. The Strasbergian Method and the exercises utilizing Russian plays and poetry were for Marilyn part of a logical continuum that included her association with Arthur Miller, whose left-wing sympathies coincided with those of the Strasbergs. Marilyn’s attraction to the outcast and disenfranchised led her to love the characters in Miller’s recent plays, and even to identify with them. Lee and Arthur were in a way becoming complementary halves of father and lover, teacher and guide. “When I have problems, I like to talk to Lee.” With him, she felt protected, endorsed, welcome for the first time in a circle she respected. Grateful, she lavished gifts on his family—much to the annoyance of Milton, whose allowance to her she freely spent.

  When she began to attend the group sessions at the Studio that summer, Marilyn was at first too frightened to speak. A young aspirant named Gloria Steinem one day asked Marilyn if she could imagine playing a scene before so impressive and confident a group. “Oh, no,” was the reply. “I admire all these people so much. I’m just not good enough. Lee Strasberg is a genius, you know. I plan to do what he says.”

  Those orders sometimes required private rehearsals with classmates. Telephoning one young man to whom she had been assigned for a scene study, Marilyn announced herself:

  “Hi—it’s me, Marilyn.”

  Joking, he asked, “Marilyn who?”

  “You know,” she said quite seriously, “Marilyn? from class?”

  Perhaps it was the humility of the most famous woman in class that made accomplished actresses like Kim Stanley—who that year had a huge success in the lead of William Inge’s play Bus Stop—affirm that “anybody who had any largeness of spirit loved Marilyn. And she won us all. . . . She had something about her that made you love her. She didn’t do anything at first; for a long time she just sat and watched.” Frank Corsaro, a fellow student at the time and later artistic director of the Studio, recalled that Marilyn’s “endeavor to develop herself as an actress was a serious one. She was invariably late, but she listened and observed the critiques with a steadfast gaze.”

  When she did speak, Marilyn had something to say. One day the young playwright Michael Gazzo suggested that a scene written by George Tabori was not quite clear. Marilyn leaned forward intently, then tentatively raised her hand, was recognized by Lee and said in a soft voice that she believed this was the point of the scene: the situation at that moment in the play was unclear to the character; confusion was the dominant “through-line” Lee was after in the rehearsal. He allowed that she was right. On another occasion, a sympathetic interviewer asked her favorite authors. When Marilyn replied that she was reading Kafka’s The Trial, her observation was acute: “I know they say it’s a kind of Jewish thing about guilt—at least that’s what Mr. Arthur Miller says,” she said, “but I think it goes beyond that. It’s really about all men and women—this sense that we’ve fallen or something. I suppose that’s what they mean by Original Sin.” These were not the statements of a dilettante, but of one who discussed what she liked, tried to read critically and to consult interpretive texts.

  By mid-May, Marilyn was a regular observer at the Studio, sitting quietly in the rear of the room. At the same time, a fifty-two-foot-high photo of her was lifted into place over Loew’s State at Forty-fifth and Broadway. “That’s all they’re interested in,” she said ruefully to Eli Wallach as they walked past the theater that was preparing for the premiere of her new film.

  On June 1, she was every inch Marilyn Monroe, attending the premiere of The Seven Year Itch and afterward accepting the applause of an audience that included Grace Kelly, Richard Rodgers, Henry Fonda, Margaret Truman, Eddie Fisher and Judy Holliday. Within the next few weeks, the picture opened across the country, and once again Marilyn was the most popular, most photographed, most documented person in the country—more so even than President Eisenhower. She was also earning a fortune for Fox: Itch was (in the language of Variety) the summer’s hottest ticket, grossing over four and a half million dollars. For this Billy Wilder as producer-director received a half million and a share of the profits, and Marilyn’s agent, co-producer Charles Feldman, received $318,000 and the same additional guarantee. Marilyn, still awaiting her $100,000 bonus (which was eventually paid) had so far received only her weekly salary. Thus Greene and company were negotiating even more fervently with Fox for a new contract—not only because they could not operate much longer without it, could not buy literary properties or set up a production company, but also because they knew Fox, too, had strong incentive to keep their best product and not give cause for litigation.2

  Joe DiMaggio was her escort for the premiere, coincidentally on June 1, Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday, and after the screening he was the host at a party for her at Toots Shor. “We’re just good friends,” she told the press. “We do not plan to remarry. That’s all I care to say.” At the same time, she was redoubling her time with Arthur Miller, taking long walks in lower Manhattan, dining at the Rosten home and, more privately, at the Waldorf. And there Joe tracked her to discuss Arthur. “Marilyn was afraid of Joe,” according to publicist Lois Weber,

  physically afraid. He was obviously rigid in his beliefs. There must have been a great ambivalence in his feelings toward her. . . . There were times she made it clear he had hurt her very badly, maybe even struck her in some jealous rage.

  Rupert Allan’s impressions were identical: “Marilyn told me that Joe had been a great friend to her after the divorce, but that while they were married he had beaten and abused her and believed her unfaithful.” And with this renewed relationship with Joe, Milton Greene was more concerned than ever that Marilyn’s diverse loyalties might sabotage his grand design for a lucrative new contract with Fox.

  Early that summer, one particularly insensitive reporter in the New York press pool observed that Lee Strasberg had supplanted Milton as Marilyn Monroe’s mentor. This caused considerable tension at ensuing meetings of MMP, and around July 1 Milton urged Marilyn to join him and Amy on a trip to Italy. (“How do we meet with Marilyn while Milton is away?” asked Frank Delaney plaintively in a call to Irving Stein.) She could not be persuaded to leave New York, giving both her classes and her regular attendance at Broadway plays as the reason for remaining. She had also accepted an invitation from the Strasbergs to join them for weekends at a rented beach house on Fire Island, not far from Manhattan.

  By this time, Marilyn had come to depend on Lee and Paula. Sometimes as often as twice or three times weekly, she arrived at their apartment in the middle of the night, sleepless and disheveled, complaining that her sleeping pills—for which she was developing a tolerance—were ineffective. That summer her nightmares, loneliness, the awful work of talking over and over in psychotherapy about her childhood, her absent parents, her early marriage, her resentment of Grace Goddard, her time prostituting herself, her resentment against Fox—the re
membrance of all these took a fearful toll on her sensitivity and diminished rather than abetted her confidence.

  In addition, Marilyn was growing ever more suspicious of the Greenes, of her professional relationship with Milton and her personal one with Amy. She felt inferior, she felt ignored in business decisions, she was bored with her own solitude. Milton and his partners could not seem to finalize a deal with Fox, and Marilyn began to wonder if she had erred in leaving Hollywood. All this she poured out to the Strasbergs in the small hours, drinking champagne when Paula offered tea, finding more pills in their cabinets until she finally drifted off to sleep at five or six in the morning.