The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Marilyn had spent her early life playing a series of submissive roles and adapting herself to please other people. She was a dutiful daughter to her mother, an obedient foster child to Grace Goddard, an enthusiastic wife to Jim Dougherty, an eager pupil to Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov, a humble disciple to Fred Karger, a devoted mistress to Joseph Schenck and Johnny Hyde. But after she became a great star she was no longer the same person. She obliterated her past and created a new identity, but found it strangely unfamiliar and became alienated from the face and body that had made her famous. As the publicity and pressure increased, it became more difficult and more frightening to live up to her newly created image.

  Shelley Winters noted that Norma Jeane didn't look at all like Marilyn Monroe: "she was invisible when she wasn't wearing her make-up and glamor outfits. No one, but no one, ever recognized her." "Marilyn" was created by a cadre of Hollywood people – drama teachers, voice coaches, make-up artists, costume designers, publicity men, photographers, screenwriters and directors – who put her together. In addition to her dental improvements and plastic surgery, she had her hairline changed and other "work" done to her body. Her make-up man explained that, paradoxically, her "natural hair coloring and skin tone were actually improved by making them more artificial. The more make-up she wore, the more artificial her hair color, the softer and more natural she looked." As Howard Hawks remarked, "there wasn't a real thing about her. Everything was completely unreal." When a model, made up to look like a faithful replica of Marilyn, arrived in a studio where she was being photographed, "the copy was more convincing than the real thing: the Marilyn without make-up, with pale lips, dark-circled eyes, silent and tense, shrank back at the sight of her mirror image."5

  The dream factory stole her real self – that profoundly insecure little girl, with a hunger for love that could never be appeased – and replaced it with an artificial goddess, with breathless voice and platinum hair, voluptuous body and alluring walk. No wonder she found it strange and disorienting. The more glamorous her public persona became, the more she searched for her inner being. Recognizing the fissure in her character, she'd look in the mirror and encourage her alter-ego to match the ideal by pleading, "Come on, face, give me a break." She never got used to her new self and wondered, if she couldn't be herself, who else could she be?

  The transformation forced her to adopt a new identity. "I always felt I was a nobody," she said, "and the only way for me to be somebody was to be – well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act." Her two identities and her profession as an actress allowed the shy exhibitionist to play many different roles. But she also claimed to be aware of the dangers: "I can be anything they want. If they expect me to be innocent, I'm innocent. . . . Of course, you gotta watch out not to get confused."6 Marilyn was in character and behavior remarkably like another flamboyant performer: Oscar Wilde. Both were artificial, witty and amusing, and loved performing in private life. Both were hedonistic, promiscuous and defiantly immoral, addicted to drugs, recklessly self-destructive and finally devoured by their public persona.

  II

  Marilyn's lifelong quest for self-improvement, her constant attempts to better her acting and her mind, were her most persistent and most admirable qualities. In this respect, she was like the young Ben Franklin and the ambitious young heroes in pursuit of the American Dream: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick and Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Hollywood people in general were educated and sophisticated. In 1941, a few years before she broke into films, 57 percent of the movie colony had gone to college. She was not educated, cultured or intellectual, but she was clever, witty and bright, and wanted to be socially at ease.

  Marilyn sometimes had difficulty absorbing, or even finding, the information she was so eager to acquire. After taking an evening course in art appreciation and literature at UCLA extension school in 1951, she naïvely said "there was a new genius to hear about every day. At night I lay in bed wishing I could have lived in the Renaissance. . . . Of course, if I had lived in the Renaissance I would be dead by now." When she wanted to find out more about her body, she bought a reprint of Vesalius' gorgeous, grisly woodcuts, originally published in 1543, which tore off the human envelope and revealed the bones and the nervous system. She treated the book as if it were a popular exercise manual rather than a complex and often incomprehensible anatomical study that had no practical use.

  Marilyn owned 400 books by serious American, English and European writers, and she must have lost or abandoned many others during her frequent moves.7 She'd flip through magazines and read film scripts, but her last secretary, May Reis, never saw her read anything but pulp novels by Harold Robbins. Miller confirmed that "with the possible exception of Colette's Chéri and a few short stories, I had not known her to read anything all the way through." Photos of her holding The Brothers Karamazov and Ulysses seemed absurd, but Christopher Isherwood saw her studying Molly Bloom's monologue in the last chapter of Joyce's novel. Her reading was haphazard, and she probably tried to read at least part of the books she acquired by impulse or intuition. She was entirely serious about improving her mind, was encouraged and taught by Miller, and wanted to be able to understand conversations about books.

  Marilyn not only read poetry, but also wrote it to express her feelings when she was depressed. She often sent her poems, which resembled the musings of a sentimental teenager, to Miller's college friend Norman Rosten, who preserved and later published them. In one poem she identified with a weeping willow tree in a storm:

  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.

  In an untitled poem Marilyn, like a mother, tries to give to a doll the love she never had as a child. The orphan wants to have her own baby, but also has to fight off her suicidal impulses:

  Don't cry my doll

  Don't cry

  I hold you and rock you to sleep.

  Hush hush I'm pretending now

  I'm not your mother who died.

  Help help

  Help I feel life coming closer

  When all I want is to die.

  "A Sorry Song" describes her struggle to emerge from depression and pain after trying to kill herself:

  I've got a tear hanging over

  my beer that I can't let go.

  it's too bad

  I feel sad

  When I got all my life behind me.

  If I had a little relief

  From this grief

  Then

  I could find a drowning

  straw to hold on to.

  it's great to be alive

  They say I'm lucky to be alive

  it's hard to figure out

  when everything I feel – hurts!8

  If Marilyn's great strength was a desire to learn, her great personal and professional fault was chronic lateness. One of her make-up men, who had to put up with her whims, complained that "if I was two minutes late she was furious, though she thought nothing of keeping others waiting for hours and days." Billy Wilder, who suffered terribly from her lateness on the set, made many bitter cracks about it. "If she wanted to go to school," he said, "she should go to railroad engineering school and learn to run on time." But she didn't have the normal sense of time, didn't distinguish early from late, and was often puzzled (or pretended to be) when colleagues became irritated or enraged by her behavior.

  The reasons for her lateness were practical and psychological, self-indulgent and egoistic. She began to suffer from insomnia, took sleeping pills and had a hard time getting up in the morning. Early calls at the studio were for her almost impossible. It took her an inordinately long time to prepare her face to meet the faces that she'd meet: to bathe, dress, put on her make-up and create a glamorous look. Despite all her coaching, she always felt she was never properly prepared. She was afraid that she might not know her lines (the unforgivable
sin of acting), might give a poor performance or might not look her best. When she was chided for keeping everyone waiting, she justified her behavior by saying, "I've been waiting all my life."9

  Her lateness became an assertion of power that confirmed her status as a star. Her behavior as an operatic diva tested the patience of the director and endurance of the studio executives, yet proved that they would put up with anything to have her in their film. The more difficult she was, the more indecisive and dilatory, the more desirable she seemed. She became the center of attention when she was not there as well as when she was. She made everybody wonder – as if they were an audience waiting for her appearance on stage – where she was and when she would arrive. She wanted people to be keen to see her, to make her feel that she was desperately wanted. She could always play the orphan card, and felt a strange satisfaction in punishing the people who'd once rejected her. Unaware of or ignoring the intense hostility she aroused by her selfish and costly behavior, she confessed that "It makes something in me happy to be late. People are waiting for me. People are eager to see me. I remember all the years I was unwanted, all the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the little servant girl, Norma Jeane – not even her mother." Her lateness was a display of power and form of revenge for past humiliations and neglect. It forced the studio to spend millions of extra dollars on the movie that they'd refused to spend on her.

  Marilyn also enhanced her status and displayed her power by creating (in the absence of any real friends) her own paid courtiers, palace guard and personal support group. The members of her entourage – which included drama coach, publicist and manager, masseur and make-up man, hairdresser and driver, secretary and maid – acted as her babysitter, nanny, governess and minder, as her companion, confidante, comforter and confessor. Oblivious of the impression she made, she claimed that "I feel stronger if the people around me on the set love me. It creates an aura of love, and I believe I can give a better performance." But she created more animosity than affection, expected too much from people and was frequently disappointed.

  There are some intriguing similarities between the lives and characters of Marilyn and Evita Perón (1919–52). Both came from poor backgrounds; were illegitimate outcasts, rejected by their fathers. Each began as a model, became a singer, dancer and actress, and made some terrible movies early in her career. They recreated themselves as blondes and became national idols. They slept their way to the top, replacing mistresses and wives, and discarding protectors when they were no longer needed. They were sexually involved with the president of the country, and Evita actually realized Marilyn's dream of becoming First Lady. They fulfilled the fantasies of the masses, who adored them, and inspired crowds to respond with hysterical adoration. They died early, in their mid-thirties, and were mourned by millions.

  The life of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was born the year before Marilyn's death and also died at the age of thirty-six, was also remarkably like Marilyn's. Like Marilyn, Diana seemed normal and happy until she was thrown into the cauldron of publicity and overwhelming fame, and had great trouble adjusting to her new image and identity. "Before Diana was famous," Tina Brown observed, "she was an uninteresting schoolgirl – nice, polite, uninquiring, uninspiring. What made her change was being royal, rich, famous, watched, desired." Just as Marilyn became a star in the particular Hollywood environment, a world with its own strange rules and behavior, so Diana was even more abruptly swallowed up into a closed and ritualized family who tormented and ultimately rejected her. Unable to escape unscathed from the obsessive attention of the media, both women became angry and abusive, physically and mentally ill, depressed and suicidal. They exerted tremendous power over other people, but could not control their own lives.

  Both women were poorly educated and, in Diana's words, believed they were "thick." Aware of their intellectual limitations, they often wanted a quick conversational fix. Marilyn asked her doctor, "how can I learn something about the most famous philosophers in a few hours? I'm going to a party tonight and I want to be able to hold my own." Diana asked a clever friend, "I'm sitting next to [the French president] Mitterrand at lunch in fifteen minutes. Quick! Give me something to say."10 Both expected their so-called friends, as well as their elusive lovers, to be constantly available on the phone, and when suffering from insomnia would often wake them in the middle of the night. They never seemed to get enough love from their romantic attachments.

  To compensate for her lack of affection, Diana, like Marilyn, employed "a squadron of brisk apparatchiks whose job [was] to answer" her whims and keep her spirits up. Just as Marilyn had her masseurs, drama teachers and psychiatrists, so the New Age Diana, desperately in search of salvation, hired "the celebrity servant class of healing therapists, astrologers, acupuncturists, hairdressers, colonic irrigationists, aromatherapists, shoe designers, and fashion therapists." Both women had a profound sympathy for poor, sick and outcast people, but could alienate and enrage as well as charm and seduce everyone else. Like Marilyn, Diana, "so genuinely compassionate with strangers, was capable of being cruelly dismissive of people closest to her."

  Both women summoned up "the best of the nation's image makers to help them create her alternative reality."11 Marilyn helped revive a declining Hollywood, Diana revived the increasingly unpopular royal family. Both encouraged and cooperated with the media, which then invaded their private lives and made them miserable. Norman Rosten described Marilyn's dilemma:

  Individuals who make up the crowd regress, and they can be unpredictable, even violent. They follow her, wait in doorways, shout at her, leap after her into taxis, keep watch on the street below her window. They send letters – imploring, demanding, weeping, threatening – the mad or bewitched seekers. They ask for autographs, money, photos, articles of her clothing. They propose marriage or trysts, find her phone number and use obscenities.

  Marilyn noted how intrusive and offensive the crowd could be: "People you run into feel that, well, who is she – who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel [your] fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature – and it won't hurt your feelings – like it's happening to your clothing." After creating an elaborate public image, both women had to hide and disguise themselves to avoid the threatening mob.

  Marilyn and Diana hid their intense distress behind a radiant image and, with a star's natural ability, conveyed a public impression that was quite different from the way they actually felt. Both became weary of their demanding and oppressive public persona. As the princess exclaimed, "Let's face it, even I have had enough of Diana now – and I am Diana."12 Paradoxically, both extraordinarily desirable women were often rejected and frequently alone. The fatal car crash on Marilyn's wedding day, when she was pursued by reporters in a high-speed car chase, seemed to foreshadow the similar accident that killed Diana in 1997.

  III

  Hollywood movies, governed by the moralistic Production Code, depicted sexual and social life the way it was supposed to be, not as it really was. Criminals were always punished, embraces led to marriage, sex was chaste. On screen, open-mouthed kisses were proscribed and married couples were not allowed to share the same bed. In 1953, the year Marilyn became a star, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, a book which tore away the puritanical façade to reveal the difference between conventional morality and actual sexual practices. People who took their ideas about sex from movies must have felt their own behavior was somehow wrong. So they were relieved and delighted to discover, as Kinsey showed, that in the early 1950s more than half of American women had lost their virginity before marriage, that a quarter of married women had committed adultery and that most women actually liked sex. His scientific study unexpectedly sold 250,000 copies. His enlightening and liberating views were widely discussed in the press and paved the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

  Marilyn's rise to prominence coincided with Kinsey's revelations.
A free spirit whose personal behavior seemed to match her image on the screen, she reinforced Kinsey's belief that it was all right to do anything (between consenting adults) that provided sexual pleasure. Wittily outrageous in her last interview, she declared, "I think that sexuality is only attractive when it's natural and spontaneous. . . . I never quite understood it – this sex symbol – I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! . . . If I'm going to be a symbol of something I'd rather have it [be] sex than some other things they've got symbols of !"

  It's sadly ironic that Marilyn herself did not live to see the sexual revolution and suffered greatly for being its symbol. She'd experienced intense sexual pleasure with Jim Dougherty and with Fred Karger in the mid-1940s; but by the 1950s, under the stress of promiscuous sex and stardom, she'd become frigid. In the late 1940s, when she was modeling and trying to break into movies, she rarely had natural and spontaneous sex. Instead, she was a prostitute, in cars on shady side-streets, in return for small amounts of money to buy food. It's astonishing – after all her acting lessons and her brief appearances in movies – that she would not only sell her body for the price of a meal, but would also risk humiliation and shame, predatory pimps and police, robbery and beating, sadism and sodomy, venereal disease and pregnancy.

  When selling herself, or with romantic liaisons and long-time lovers, Marilyn, always eager to please, meekly agreed to men's demands to have sex without contraceptives and got pregnant again and again. She later made the horrifying confession that she'd had as many as twelve abortions. The Hollywood screenwriter Ivan Moffat, who knew about this from personal experience, wrote that "in 1951 there was no question of anyone getting an abortion without extreme difficulty, danger and great cost." In these sleazy surgeries Marilyn repeatedly risked severe pain, hemorrhage, infection, puncture of her womb, permanent injury and even death.