Charlotte Salomon, I would suggest, was one step ahead. She does not just proclaim her accountability but embodies viscerally the knowledge she calls for – in the meshing of her voices, in the wild promiscuity of her colours and lines which leaves no piece of the world in its proper shape. Painting against terror, she leaves no aesthetic, ethical, psychological stone unturned. If the world is to change, then something has to be relinquished, to vanish and dissolve. ‘She did not have to kill herself like her ancestors,’ but ‘in order to love life still more, one should once have died.’ In the midst of the war, she produces a work which, out of – or rather from deep within – the surrounding darkness, gives us a glimpse of what you might need to do to create a different world. We still have everything to learn from her vision.
3
Respect
Marilyn Monroe
Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control.
Marilyn Monroe interviewed by Richard Meryman,
Life, 3 August 1962
Actress must have no mouth.
Fragments – Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe
We are going through the Straits of Dire. It’s rough and choppy but why should I worry I have no phallic symbol to lose.
Marilyn Monroe to Norman Rosten,
Marilyn – A Very Personal Story
What do we see when we look at Marilyn Monroe? She was luminous. On that much everyone seems to agree. Hers was not the flawless matte beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. There was no flattening wash over her face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly could not stand her, had to concede that every time she appeared in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lit up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed, Susan Strasberg that she ‘seemed to flicker like a flame giving off a nimbus of light’).1 It is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the 2011 movie My Week with Marilyn, however well Michelle Williams performed her part, could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what it was, in the aura that surrounds her, she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked. Luminousness, notably in relation to women, can be a cover – in Hollywood, its own most perfect screen. Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding (no other actress is defined in quite these terms). Of what, then, was she the decoy? What does she allow us, and allow us not, to see? Monroe herself knew the difference between seeing and looking. ‘Men do not see me,’ she is reported as having once said. ‘They just lay their eyes on me.’2
In this chapter, I will be arguing that Marilyn Monroe was a foil – the ‘perfect’ foil – for a post-war America in flight from itself. Feminism has long written about the beauty trap as a form of violence against women. But we hear less about how female beauty can be used to hide from view the other forms of cruelty and injustice which a society blithely perpetuates. My argument is that no woman on screen has performed that role so effectively, or with such sentient, critical self-awareness, as Marilyn Monroe.
In the summer of 1960 in Reno, the Manchester Guardian journalist Bill Weatherby found himself her confidant. He couldn’t fully understand why. He thought it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her. He had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last completed film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her as saying, ‘to everyone but me.’3 In fact he could not forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. ‘Not having fallen for Eisenhower’s charm,’ he writes, ‘I was determined not to succumb to Marilyn Monroe’s.’4 Oddly, he seems to have succeeded. Charmed never seems quite right, even when they start to meet regularly if intermittently in New York over the last two years of her life. The understanding between them was that these were private conversations (he did not publish his version, transcribed from memory after each meeting, until 1976). It is of course a cliché – as well as one of the most well-tried seduction lines in the book – for a man to suggest he is interested not in a woman’s body but in her mind. Weatherby, however, is genuinely interested in her thoughts. ‘She made thinking seem’, he writes, ‘like a serious, deliberate process.’ ‘Some people’, he then hastens to add, ‘who never got over seeing her as a dumb blonde will assume that I am implying she found thinking difficult . . . Quite the opposite,’ he insists. ‘She gave thinking her serious attention.’5 As we will see, Monroe’s written fragments, poems, diaries and notebooks, slowly released over the past years, have given us the opportunity to look into the mind of a woman who was meant not to have one. ‘In times of crisis,’ she wrote in a set of 1962 notes, ‘I try to think and use my understanding.’6 ‘We human beings,’ she said in her last interview, ‘are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.’7 Like so many of the women in this book, and with no less urgency, thinking was where Monroe went in search of freedom.
As filming The Misfits came to some kind of ending in November – nobody, least of all Monroe, was happy with the film – Weatherby declined an offer from two set photographers to visit the Grand Canyon and headed off instead to New Orleans. Race integration was due to begin and a social explosion was expected in the city. This drama – ‘in reality instead of in a movie’, as he puts it – will, he thought, be a way of getting Hollywood and Monroe out of his head.8 But it was not to be that simple. At an integration party which he oddly describes as ‘secret as a Resistance party in Paris during the German occupation’, he became the lover of Christine, a young black man – although he told Monroe that Christine was a woman – who will end up a follower of Malcolm X.9 Monroe, it turns out, is the only white star who has ever interested Christine. In fact ‘she’ identified with her: ‘ “She’s been hurt. She knows the score,” ’ Weatherby reports Christine as saying. ‘ “I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what comes out of her movies. She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never could identify with any other white movie star. They were always white people doing white things.” ’ White people doing white things would be a fairly accurate description of most of Monroe’s films. When Weatherby is incredulous, Christine gets mad. ‘ “Look, us Negroes don’t appear in movies as anything but symbols, Uncle Toms, because white audiences aren’t supposed to be able to identify with Negroes. Well, what they can’t do, we can’t do either.” ’10
Christine has put her finger on the pulse of cinema. What matters is whom it allows – or rather invites – you to be. Christine refuses the invitation because it is not reciprocal: no white person identifies with a ‘Negro’. We are talking about the turn of the 1960s, about New Orleans, a bitterly segregated city where – hard to imagine now – partygoers arriving at a building for the blind can be watched from the window of the house of the federal judge opposite as they are separated into black and white because ‘they couldn’t see to segregate themselves’.11 Christine has blown the lid off Hollywood, the delusion it offers, the false democracy of a world in which it appears that everyone can see and be seen, that everyone can become anyone else. If Monroe is an emblem of that delusion – she makes her way to the top from nowhere – she also exposes the ruthlessness and anguish at its core. All at once, Weatherby understands the link between Hollywood and the deep racist South of America. Both hold their stereotypes on a leash. ‘Blacks’, he states, ‘had been more rigidly typed than Monroe.’12 ‘When I saw the angry white mob outside a school, yelling at two little black girls in their best dresses,’ he continues, ‘I imagined a fantasy in which these faces were in Hollywood, representing what Marilyn – and Betty Grable and the rest – had to contend with.’13 This is to turn fantasy, as it is usually associated with Hollywood, on its head. The manufacturer of dreams has turned into the ugly wicked witch. Weatherby’s analogy is not as strange as it might seem. In her 1950 study of Hollywood, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker compared the film moguls to Southern plantation owners treating their actors as slaves.14
More simply, Hollywood trashes it
s stars – especially its women: ‘Marilyn . . . Betty Grable and the rest.’ As we will see, Monroe more or less consistently hates the roles she is assigned, most of all Some Like It Hot, her best-loved film. No woman on earth, she complained, would be so dumb as not to see that the two drag artists, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were men (the director, Billy Wilder, clearly agreed with her, filming in black and white since colour, he recognised, would have been a giveaway). Monroe is a would-be breakout artist. ‘If I hadn’t become popular,’ she says to Weatherby, ‘I’d still be a Hollywood slave.’15 Likewise, the civil rights movement is a struggle to break free of being ‘typecast’ – a refusal to accept the allotted, Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black identifies with Marilyn Monroe.
Christine is not alone. James Baldwin, it turns out, also identified with Monroe, as he told Weatherby when introduced to him by Tennessee Williams (according to Richard Gott, Weatherby was part of the gay underworld of the civil rights movement, and the only white pallbearer at Baldwin’s funeral).16 Nor is Bill Weatherby the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of seemingly odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembers a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around its ankles’.17 Philippe Halsman who photographed her twice for Life magazine in 1949 and 1952 noticed on his second visit a corner bookcase filled with books, including The Negro in American Literature.18 And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella Fitzgerald, the owner received a personal call from Monroe who offered to take a front table every night if he did. As Monroe promised him, the press went wild and Fitzgerald, by her own account, never had to play a small jazz club again.19 Fitzgerald never forgot. Monroe was, she said later, ‘an unusual woman – a little ahead of her time’.20
In fact Weatherby did not need to conceal the true gender identity of Christine from Monroe. ‘People who aren’t fit to open the door for him sneer at his homosexuality,’ she said to him about Montgomery Clift. ‘What do they know about it? Labels – people love putting labels on each other. Then they feel safe. People tried to make me into a lesbian. I laughed. No sex is wrong if there is love in it.’21 It is now generally accepted that Monroe’s first acting coach, Natasha Lytess, was her lover (Monroe described looking at women as a thrill).22 She had a secret affair with a black actor: ‘It was like trying to love someone in jail.’23 Monroe’s famous promiscuity was, therefore, a form of inclusiveness. She crossed borders. She consorted with the nation’s forbidden objects: with blacks, with women, and, as we will see, with Communists and Jews.
At the very least this should suggest that, wherever Monroe belongs – and there is an argument for saying that she never belonged anywhere – it is not in the expected place. If Monroe offers an image of American perfectibility, we should not be surprised to find behind that image, as its hidden companion, a host of other images through which that same (perfectible) America indicts itself – Hollywood as a screaming white mob. To say that Monroe was born on the wrong side of the tracks is an understatement. She spent her childhood moving in and out of foster homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles, living for a few snatched years with her mother, who had reclaimed her before being dragged off, watched by her daughter, to a mental home. When Monroe was sent to an orphanage, aged nine, she protested she was no orphan, since her mother was still alive. ‘She was’, writes her most recent biographer, Lois Banner, ‘illegitimate in an age when it was stigmatised . . . a “charity case” at a time when many Americans regarded taking welfare as a disgrace’, and she had relatives ‘diagnosed as mentally ill in an era that regarded such illness as inherited and almost inevitably degenerative’.24 Like Salomon, Monroe lives her life under the threatened stigma of degeneration (like Luxemburg, too, in so far as Luxemburg was a ‘cripple’ and a Jew).
Monroe’s story has been told many times, not least by Monroe herself. Although some details have been contested, today it is mostly accepted as true. Paradoxically, however, it is the truth of the story that has allowed it to become part of her façade – the rags-to-riches tale that makes her the embodiment of the American dream. For Monroe, this story is no romance. She is far more precise. In a set of written notes from 1962, she observes ‘the lack of any consistent love and caring. A mistrust and fear of the world was the result. There were no benefits except what it could teach me about the basic needs of the young, the sick and the weak.’25 ‘I have great feeling for all the persecuted ones of the world.’26 The editor suggests these are notes she prepared for an interview, which would make them seem self-promoting, but they read far more as if she were talking to herself. As early as 1945, she had told Andre de Dienes, one of her first photographers, that if she moved to New York she would go to Columbia Law School and help the poor.27 It was, for Weatherby, her genuine compassion for the down and out, for the wino in the street – no metaphor: he describes two encounters – which distinguished her from every other celebrity he had ever met.28 For Monroe, lowliness was a type of licence. It gave you permission to say, or ask, whatever you liked. ‘Don’t be afraid to ask anything,’ she described herself as encouraging her stepchildren with Arthur Miller. ‘After all, I have come up from way down.’29 No one, nothing, was off limits. ‘Nothing living’, Weatherby wrote, ‘was alien to her.’30
Most simply, however high her star rose, Monroe never let go of her class roots. ‘I would never have thought that our ordinary lives would have interested someone like her,’ writes Lena Pepitone, her personal maid in the last years of her life, ‘but they did.’ (Although there is a question about Pepitone as reliable source, her comment echoes observations by many others who knew her.)31 Clearly she spotted in Weatherby a fellow traveller. When she goes after him – ‘I’ve seen you talk to everyone but me’ – charming him, as he had first assumed, is not what she is looking for. Something more like an exposé of the dirty side of Hollywood. ‘You’ve been seeing the famous. Now you ought to see the unknowns, those who are trying to make it. Try Schwab’s’ (the Sunset Boulevard drugstore haunt of movie dealmakers and actors looking for a break).32 When he returns, horrified at the addiction, failure, poverty and misery on display, she tells him he has graduated: ‘When I starred in my first movie, I went back to Schwab’s. I had the idea that it would help their confidence to see someone who had gotten a break. But no one recognized me and I was too shy to tell anyone. I was a misfit there!’33 They do not recognise her but they are her audience, the ones by whom she most wants to be seen. She always insisted that it was the people, not the studios, who made her a star.34 ‘She relied,’ wrote Arthur Miller, ‘on the most ordinary layer of the audience, the working people, the guys in the bars, the housewives in the trailers bedevilled by unpaid bills, the high school kids mystified by explanations they could not understand, the ignorant and – as she saw them – tricked and manipulated masses. She wanted them to feel they’d got their money’s worth when they saw a picture of hers.’35
One of the reasons she hated Hollywood was its raw exploitation. ‘Nobody’, she complained, ‘left anything behind’ – no monuments, no museums – ‘they took it, they grabbed it, and they ran – the ones who made the billions of dollars, never the workers.’36 She was, we might say, attuned to the cruel disjunction between the finished commodity and the hidden labour it conceals, of which Hollywood’s use of women’s bodies could stand as exemplar and test case. According to Rabbi Robert Goldberg, who converted her to Judaism for her marriage to Arthur Miller, her attraction to Judaism stemmed from her identification with the ‘underdog’ (as well as from its ‘ethical and prophetic ideals and its concept of a close family life’).37 ‘It’s like the Jews are the orphans of the world,’ she said to Strasberg.38 There is an irony here. According to Strasberg, the Hollywood moguls were predominantly East European Jews trying to escape their past. They were drawn to Monroe because she was ‘as un-Jewish as she possibly could be’.39
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Rarely, however, in her career will Monroe be allowed to get close to the people with whom she most strongly identified. Clash by Night of 1951 is an exception. Monroe plays the part of a handler in a fish-canning factory – the opening shot sweeps from sky and sea to the ocean catch being poured into the hold, to Monroe in her factory overalls on the production line. It is the only film in which Monroe appears as a worker, as well as being one of the few Hollywood depictions of factory life. She is a woman who gets her hands dirty and speaks her mind. When her young lover grabs her, she hits him: ‘I suppose you’d beat me up if I was your wife. Let me see you try. Let me see any man try.’ Monroe was terrified of working alongside the famous Barbara Stanwyck who is the lead, but in scene after scene it is on Monroe’s face and body that the camera seems to linger. She is a star in the making who dreams of escaping factory life. Interestingly, Clash by Night, directed by Fritz Lang, exposes the cruelty of this dream towards which the film is wholly cynical (like the Clifford Odets story on which it is based). The projectionist in the local movie theatre, lover of the Stanwyck character, ‘cans’ – his word – movie stars every day. Stars are disposable like the blubber of raw fish. ‘You can’t be too nice to the people you work with,’ Monroe commented to the journalist on the set, ‘else they will trample you to death.’40
Women in Dark Times Page 12
