The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The studios had turned out anti-Axis propaganda during World War II and during the Cold War felt obliged to make anti-communist movies. Paranoid about the Russian threat, the United States government pressured the studio heads to make films that expressed the prevailing political views, and eventually supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's persecution and purges of left-wing writers and actors. In turn the movie industry exerted pressure on writers and directors. Miller and Kazan were prominent players in the 1950s conflict between artists and the government forces that tried to control them.

  II

  Marilyn Monroe had recently advanced her career with small but significant roles in two first-rate films: The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve (both 1950), but she was still playing bit parts in trivial movies. Miller first saw her on the Twentieth Century-Fox set of a fatuous comedy, As Young as You Feel. She had a small stereotyped part as a sexy but inept secretary, with pencil poised above her pad. (Anyone could type, but no one looked liked Marilyn.) Miller recalled that she was talking to Kazan (always on the lookout for a pretty and obliging girl) and weeping about the recent death of her lover, agent and protector Johnny Hyde. She was "telling Kazan that Hyde had died while calling her name in a hospital room she had been forbidden by his family to enter." In fact, Marilyn was shopping in Tijuana when Hyde passed away in Palm Springs on December 18, 1950. Though excluded from the funeral, not the hospital, she managed to bluff her way into the service at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

  Marilyn's clichéd account of the dying Hyde calling for her in the forbidden hospital, like a scene in a B-movie, suggests that she was still publicly grieving about Hyde a month after his death. It's more likely that she was crying about her own career, now more uncertain than ever without Hyde's crucial help, or about her poor performance in her current film. She complained that the director had ignored and insulted her. She may also have been weeping to attract the attention and arouse the sympathy of Kazan and Miller, and to make herself even more appealing to them. If so, she was more convincing in this role than the one in the movie. Miller poignantly recalled that "she was so striking and so terribly sad that the combination struck me"1 – as it was meant to.

  Miller and Kazan had been invited to stay in the lavish home of the attractive, suave Charles Feldman, who'd produced the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Feldman told them, following Hyde's demise, that Marilyn was up for grabs and both men were keenly interested. Miller invited her to a party at Feldman's house and, behaving like a real gentleman, insisted on picking her up instead of letting her come on her own by taxi. He was a good dancer and she was clearly delighted as he whirled her around the room. When they sat down to talk, he gently squeezed her toe – a kind of seductive acupressure – and she took his timid approach as a sign of respect. He told her that his marriage was collapsing, that he'd been terribly unhappy for several years and that he was now completely alienated from his wife. But a man on the make always claims his marriage is unhappy, and he'd gallantly picked her up so he could also take her home. An uninhibited hedonist, always willing, even eager, to sleep with men she liked or she thought could help her, Marilyn probably tried to seduce him that night.

  In his self-serving autobiography, Kazan was more frank and perceptive than Miller himself about his friend's relations with Marilyn. Though Kazan didn't mention that he too was eager to seduce her, he called her "a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood had brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to." Marilyn's sexual humiliations made her especially responsive to Miller's dignified restraint. She confided to Kazan that "Art was shy and this pleased her after all the mauling she'd taken. She said that Art was terribly unhappy in his home life. She'd certainly opened him up." Deeply moved by their first meeting, she gushed poetically to her acting teacher, Natasha Lytess: "It was like running into a tree! You know – like a cool drink when you've got a fever. You see my toe – this toe? Well, he sat and held my toe and we just looked into each other's eyes almost all evening."2 Their gestures and expressions were more meaningful than words.

  Miller was a leading playwright – intelligent, moral and respected; Marilyn (no doubt, unfairly) was considered just another stupid, vulgar and sluttish starlet. Though his father had lost everything in the Depression, Miller grew up in a secure family. Marilyn's broken family had almost nothing to lose, and during the thirties she'd led a miserable life in an orphanage and with a series of harsh foster families. Miller's mother had been forced to sell her lamps, tables and carpets, but had refused to part with her piano – her last connection to the middle class. Marilyn's mother had lost her precious white piano, which her daughter later managed to recover, and placed in the luxurious white décor of a flashy New York apartment. But, like Marilyn, Miller had worked in a humble factory job during the war. He instinctively sympathized with her impoverished background and her desire to escape to a better life.

  Miller's feelings for Marilyn – romantic infatuation compounded with adulterous guilt – were conflicted from the start. He believed that with no place to go and no one to go to she needed his protection. He noted her childish voracity (which would one day destroy him) and desperately wanted to help and possess her, but felt he had to leave Hollywood immediately or "lose himself" and his old life for ever. Thus began a long inner struggle between his fierce attraction to Marilyn, made up of lust and pity, and his need to maintain his moral stature and role as a faithful husband. Like the dignified Emil Jannings, bewitched by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, he eventually found her sexuality irresistible.

  Miller later described Marilyn's traumatic background, which would make her difficult, and finally impossible, to live with:"she had a crazy mother. That is not a good start; her mother was quite mad. She was a paranoid schizophrenic who ended up spending half her life in an institution. The mother tried to kill her three times and [Marilyn] was convinced that she was a worthless creature because she was illegitimate." Marilyn constantly sought sympathy by exaggerating her miserable childhood. In fact, her grandmother (not her mother) may have tried to kill her once (not three times). But Miller was moved by her sad account. As the cowboy Bo tells Cherie (played by Marilyn) in Bus Stop: "I like ya like ya are, Cherie, so I don't care how you got that way."

  Kazan – himself blissfully free of bourgeois scruples – carefully observed Miller struggling between Marilyn's liberating sexuality and his own intolerable remorse. He was subject, Kazan wrote, to that "domestic peril which results when certain ties of restraint that a middle-class man has always lived with are snapped. . . . He respected the moral law, but he must also have found it constricting to a suddenly reawakened side of his nature: the life of the senses." Miller had sought relief from his problems in psychoanalysis, but his sessions with the analyst intensified rather than relieved his repression, and made him distraught and ill. His life, he told Kazan, "seemed to be all conflict and tension, thwarted desires, stymied impulses, bewildering but unexpressed conflicts. 'What a waste!' he cried. . . . He had sex on his mind, constantly. He was starved for sexual release." After ten years of marriage, "Art was on the verge of something disruptive, and [his wife] Mary could only wait and prepare to apply moral sanctions when the inevitable happened."3

  Though married and with children himself, Kazan – a charismatic seducer – was consistently unfaithful to his wife. While Miller gently held Marilyn's toe, the lusty Greek boldly took her to bed and grabbed all the rest. At Feldman's house she spent her nights with Kazan while Miller, tortured by jealousy, writhed alone in a nearby room and faced the contented couple over breakfast the next morning. Kazan later revealed that during their liaison, early in 1951, Marilyn became pregnant by him and had a miscarriage. Toward the end of her life, Marilyn had fond memories of her old lover and recalled, "Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew and believe me, he has known many. But he loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish.
He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with Lee Strasberg." Ironically, Marilyn's sexual relations with Kazan intensified Miller's bond with his friend, made her seem more desirable than ever, and stimulated Miller to take her from him.

  In the midst of all this sexual rivalry, Marilyn took a cameo part in the protracted but futile negotiations with Cohn over The Hook. Kazan thought it would be amusing for her to reprise her movie role as secretary, equipped with heavy spectacles and stenographer's pad, and accompany Kazan and Miller to Cohn's office. In 1948, as a young starlet under contract to Columbia, she had to have sex with Cohn. As all three men lusted after her, with Miller the odd man out, the sexual tension was palpable.

  A few of the love letters that Miller wrote to Marilyn, after he returned to New York and she remained in Hollywood, have survived. Sensing her vulnerability and her essential innocence (despite her sordid past), he sent paternal advice about how to protect herself while advancing her career: "Bewitch them (the public) with this image they ask for, and I hope and almost pray you won't be hurt in this game, nor ever change." Kazan recalled a rapturous letter of 1951 in which Miller confessed that before he left Hollywood Marilyn had given him his long-sought sexual fulfillment:

  He felt extra fine and had been thinking joyous thoughts. . . . He was a young man again, in the grip of a first love, which was – happily – carrying him out of control. He didn't read like the constricted man I'd known. I remembered the lovely light of lechery in his eyes as he was dancing with Marilyn in Charlie Feldman's softly lit living room. I hadn't known he had it in him, that light in his eyes. I'd really done something for my friend, something he could not have done for himself.4

  Egocentric and self-satisfied as ever, Kazan was proud of his role as go-between and felt as if he, not Marilyn, had fired up and liberated Miller.

  Two

  Marilyn's Traumatic Childhood

  (1926–1946)

  I

  "Family breakdown," a social historian observed, "is truly a feature of Los Angeles . . . a city of loneliness." Marilyn grew up in the lower depths of Hollywood during the Depression, in the world of unattainable hopes and shattered illusions that Nathanael West satirized in Miss Lonelyhearts. Born into an impoverished family, who went in for bigamous marriages and petty crime, she was subjected to a fatal mixture of fundamentalist religion and sexual molestation. Both made her feel sinful and guilty, polluted and ashamed.

  Marilyn's maternal grandfather, Otis Monroe, worked for the Mexican National Railway and lived just across the Texas border, in Piedras Negras, about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio. Otis died of tertiary syphilis in an insane asylum. His wife Della (according to Marilyn's autobiography, ghostwritten by Ben Hecht), "had also been taken off to the mental hospital in Norwalk [part of Los Angeles] to die there screaming and crazy. And her brother had killed himself." Marilyn's mother, Gladys Monroe, was born in Mexico in 1902. It's not clear why Della didn't cross the border to give birth in the United States.

  Extremely good-looking and eager to escape from her ghastly family, Gladys married a businessman, John Baker, when she was only fourteen, in 1917. She had a son, Jack, that year, and a daughter, Berniece, in 1919. The following year, Jackie fell out of a car and became permanently crippled. (He died at the age of fourteen.) The couple were divorced in 1921, Baker took the children to be brought up by relatives in his native Kentucky, and Gladys soon lost touch with them. She married her second husband, Martin Mortensen – a handsome, religious man, with a steady job – in October 1924, but left him, after only four months, in February 1925. In September she became pregnant with Marilyn, who did not find out that her two siblings existed until the end of her life.

  These stark facts reveal Gladys' troubled background: broken families, unwanted pregnancies, lost children and a history of insanity, all of which would recur in Marilyn's life. But Gladys was a good-time girl – fond of dancing and drinking (during the Prohibition era), attractive to men and sexually promiscuous. By the time she was twenty-three, she'd been divorced twice, had two children and been abandoned by the father of her third child.

  Gladys had a low-level, mechanical job in the movie business, where she gossiped about the stars and longed for their glamorous way of life. She worked as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries, a lab that developed and printed the daily scenes, or rushes. They were viewed in the studio the next morning and showed the progress of the movie. Another lab where she worked, the RKO film-cutting room, was housed in a small, one-story, low-roofed cottage with thick cement walls. Editors perched on high stools, wearing white cotton gloves, running strips of film from one spool to another, winding and unwinding them, snipping away frames and gluing them to other pieces of film. There were no windows or air-conditioning, and the room was uncomfortably warm. A large red no smoking sign warned that the celluloid film was inflammable.

  Marilyn's father was the handsome, mustachioed, philandering lab supervisor, Stanley Gifford. He jilted Gladys on Christmas Eve, when she told him she was pregnant, and did not acknowledge the child nor offer to help. Marilyn said that "he walked off and left her . . . without ever seeing me,"1 and never recovered from the stigma of illegitimacy and the wound of rejection. She was born Norma Jeane Baker, in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, and named for the popular actress Norma Talmadge. In 1926, in the era of silent films, Ramon Novarro appeared in Ben Hur and John Barrymore in Don Juan.

  Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, which portrayed the wounded spirit of the Lost Generation who'd fought in the Great War. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work Marilyn admired, died; and Queen Elizabeth II, whom Marilyn would meet, was born.

  In her twenties, when Marilyn was a promising movie star, she hired a private detective to track down her mysterious, elusive and long-sought father. Her friend and confidante, Natasha Lytess, recalled that "he owned a dairy farm near Palm Springs and she wanted me to drive there with her. . . . She wanted him to love her immediately, and she tried to look her prettiest." When they arrived and Natasha phoned the house for her, Gifford "was incredibly rude and horrible. His voice was common, pinched, with a mid-western nasal quality. He said he was married and had a family and didn't want to know anything about this girl Marilyn Monroe. And when I turned the receiver over to Marilyn, she said she wanted nothing from him, but only to see him for the first time, to talk to him. He refused. He was filthy in his conversation with her."

  In another version of this story, Marilyn drove out to Palm Springs with the gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky. On this occasion her father, more reasonable in his refusal, spoke to her and acknowledged his paternity, but he did not want to get involved with her, admit he'd behaved badly or make any emotional reparations. He said,"Marilyn, I'm married. I have children. I don't want you to start any trouble for me now, like your mother did years ago." After finding her father, Marilyn hoped that he would accept her and love her, but instead of achieving a healing reconciliation, her visit reopened old wounds and made her embittered. Abandonment and then rejection by her father taught her early on that men were selfish and irresponsible. But she was compelled to repeat her mother's mistakes. Like Gladys, she married in her mid-teens, and later became pregnant and was jilted.

  Marilyn always believed, with good reason, that her birth disgraced Gladys and her mother didn't want her, that she got in Gladys' way and interfered with the carefree life she wished to lead. Marilyn also claimed that her grandmother, Della Monroe, tried to smother her in her crib when she was a year old. It's difficult to believe that a helpless infant could resist an adult who tried to smother her, or remember an incident, however traumatic, that occurred at such an early age. But Della was insane and the baby was unwanted, and shortly afterward Norma Jeane's grandmother was confined in an insane asylum. Marilyn may have been told about the episode later on, or this memory, real or imagined, may have emerged during her extensive psychoanalysis.

  Gladys could not take care of her b
aby when she was working. She therefore paid foster parents, Albert and Ida Bolender, five dollars a day for Norma Jeane's board and lodging, from her birth until the fall of 1933. Albert had a secure job and steady income as a postman, and never lost a day's work during the Depression. The Bolenders lived in Hawthorne, on the same street as Norma Jeane's crazy grandmother, a working-class district near what is now Los Angeles International Airport. The modest bungalows had front porches, weed-filled vacant lots stood between the houses and the graveled streets turned to mud after a rainstorm. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Raymond Chandler described a similar place, reeking of poverty and decay. A character lives in "a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard."

  The Bolenders, fundamentalists who loved Jesus, were devout members of the United Pentecostal Church, and loyal followers of the flamboyant, fraudulent but extremely popular evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson. When off duty Albert turned out little tracts on salvation from his own printing press. The Bolenders were resolutely opposed to smoking, drinking, card-playing and frivolous entertainments. Ida taught Norma Jeane to vow, in a little jingle during her nightly prayers, "I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell, or give alcohol while I live. From all tobacco I'll abstain, and never take God's name in vain." Ida also warned her, with threats of fire and brimstone, that even minor transgressions would send her straight to Hell: "If the world came to an end with you sitting in the movies, do you know what would happen? You'd burn along with all the bad people. We are churchgoers, not moviegoers."2