The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Her doctors' appointments . . . and her acting lessons were virtually all she had to look forward to. She spent most of her time in her little bedroom, sleeping, looking at herself in the mirrors, drinking Bloody Marys or champagne, talking on the phone, which seemed to be her greatest pleasure. . . .

  I never saw her read a book or a newspaper. Once in a while she would thumb through the pictures of high-fashion models in Vogue. She didn't own a television [which had obsessed DiMaggio], never listened to the radio. Marilyn did seem to enjoy playing jazz and blues records on the small hi-fi set next to her bed.

  The Millers seemed happier in the summer of 1957 in Amagansett, renting a house on the Atlantic shore at the eastern end of Long Island. They spent time riding in a dune-buggy, fishing and swimming, running on the beach and leaning lovingly against each other. Like Paula Strasberg, a friend noticed that "Arthur was so attentive, so concerned. He hung upon her every word. . . . He seemed so concerned for her that, if he could have, he would have physically merged with her and taken on her sadness."3

  II

  In New York, as in England and Hollywood, Marilyn, often accompanied by Miller, continued to meet distinguished writers, heads of state and even royalty. In February 1959, when the seventy-four-year-old Danish author Isak Dinesen – wasted, skeletal and ravaged by syphilis – expressed a desire to meet them, Carson McCullers invited the actress and playwright to lunch at her house in Nyack, New York. Dinesen, keen to secure the Nobel Prize, wanted all the exposure and publicity she could get while in America and felt that Marilyn could easily be exploited for this purpose. McCullers recalled that "Marilyn was very timid and called me three or four times about the dress she was going to wear, and wanting to know if it should be low-cut or not. I said that anything she wore would be beautiful on her. She actually wore a dress cut very low that showed her lovely bosoms. Marilyn sat and listened while [Dinesen] talked."

  McCullers served oysters, white grapes, soufflés and champagne on a black marble table. Virginia Carr noted that "Monroe, who had a marvelous sense of humor and whom the guests found charming, entertained the group with an anecdote from her own kitchen. She told with much cleverness a tale on herself involving some homemade noodles she had tried to create one night for her husband like his mother [who was actually born in America] used to make in the 'old country.' The conglomeration was such a failure that she was afraid she had lost not only a meal, but a husband." Judith Thurman added an amusing detail to Marilyn's story: "it got a little late, the company was arriving, and the pasta wasn't ready, so she tried to finish it off with a hair dryer."4

  Referring to Dinesen by her familiar name, McCullers described how Miller questioned her rather pedantically about her strange diet and received a stern rebuke: "Tanya ate only oysters and drank only champagne. . . . Arthur asked what doctor put her on that diet. . . . She looked at him and said rather sharply, 'Doctor? The doctors are horrified by my diet but I love champagne and I love oysters and they agree with me.' . . . Arthur mentioned something about protein and Tanya said, 'I don't know anything about that, but I am old and I eat what I want and what agrees with me.' Then she went back to her reminiscences of friends in Africa."

  McCullers' memoir gives the flavor of this bohemian gathering. The Southern writer recalled that her own black help reminded Dinesen of her African servants: "It was a great delight for her to be with colored people. Ida, my housekeeper, is colored, and so are my yardmen, Jesse and Sam. After lunch everybody danced and sang. A friend of Ida's had brought in a motion picture camera, and there were pictures of Tanya dancing with Marilyn, me dancing with Arthur, and a great round of general dancing." In McCullers' account Marilyn seems happy – talking freely, making fun of herself, enjoying the affection and attention of two eminent ladies.

  Thurman mentioned that Tanya "was photographed in New York with Marilyn Monroe, and that image was more 'typical' of the old Isak Dinesen: twisted smile, elegant gray suit, head swathed in a turban, body muffled in a fur." Dinesen's account of Marilyn's appearance and character shows that she understood, better than McCullers, her complex and disturbed personality. Using words like "incredibly" and "unbelievable" to emphasize Marilyn's hyper-reality, but with a novelist's insight, she compared her to an apparently harmless but quite dangerous wild animal. "It's not that she is pretty," she said, "although of course she is almost incredibly pretty – but that she radiates at the same time unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence. I have met the same in a lion cub that my native servants in Africa brought me. I would not keep her."5 Underlying her beauty and apparent innocence, which fascinated Miller and everyone else, was the traumatically damaged orphan.

  In the spring of 1956 Saul Bellow had spent six weeks next door to Miller as they waited for their divorces, but he did not meet Marilyn until later on. In 1959, when she was in Chicago for the premiere of Some Like It Hot, they dined together at the Ambassador Hotel. Bellow was intrigued by the details of her life, and admired the way she dealt with the intrusive demands of publicity. He found "the star surrounded by an entourage that included a manicurist and a bodyguard, who left the door open when he went to the bathroom.' He's not supposed to let me out of his sight,' Monroe explained. After dinner at the Pump Room, she signed the guest book, 'Proud to be the guest of the Chicago writer Saul Bellow.' In a star-struck letter to [his editor Pascal] Covici the next day, Bellow reported: 'Marilyn seemed genuinely glad to see a familiar face. I have yet to see anything in Marilyn that isn't genuine. Surrounded by thousands, she conducts herself like a philosopher.'" Bellow, who had an eye for women and married five times, called her a very witty woman, and spoke rapturously of the golden glow and luminous incandescence of her skin. He must have been besotted, indeed blinded, to find Marilyn, the essence of Hollywood artificiality, as "genuine." In recent years she'd suffered miscarriages and had several nervous breakdowns. She'd attempted suicide and made Miller's life a misery. She was more like the mad philosopher Nietzsche than the conventional Immanuel Kant. Her friends and colleagues, not Marilyn, had to be philosophical.

  After Marilyn's death, with greater insight into her character, Bellow found her more tragic than amusing: "I always felt she had picked up some high-tension cable and couldn't release it. She couldn't rest, she found no repose in anything. She was up in the night, taking pills and talking about her costumes, her next picture, contracts and money, gossip. In the case of a beautiful and sensitive creature like that, it was a guarantee of destruction."

  Marilyn had always hero-worshipped Abraham Lincoln and, when she first met Miller, was fond of comparing him to the upright president. Lincoln's biographer, the monkey-faced Carl Sandburg, had left school at thirteen and tried many proletarian jobs before becoming a poet and writer. Much anthologized, Sandburg was a beloved if limited poet, a fixture of the fifties. Robert Frost, always annoyed, even infuriated, by the way Sandburg combed his long silky hair into his eyes, exclaimed: "You know the way he dresses, that hair of his and those [string] ties. Everything about him is studied – except his poetry."6

  The eighty-one-year-old Sandburg met Marilyn during the filming of Some Like It Hot in 1958, and again during the shooting of Let's Make Love in 1960, when he came to Hollywood to write additional dialogue for the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. He liked to visit her New York apartment and give her informal literary tutorials. Marilyn established immediate rapport with the poet and enthusiastically praised his energy and curiosity: "Carl Sandburg, who's in his eighties – you should see his vitality, what he has contributed. Why, he could play the guitar and sing at three in the morning," which suited her insomniac hours. "You can meet Carl Sandburg and he is so pleased to meet you. He wants to know about you and you want to know about him. Not in any way has he ever let me down." She bought a ten-inch bust of Sandburg by the American sculptor Joseph Konzal and enshrined him in her flat.

  Donald Spoto wrote that Sandburg "found her 'warm and plain' and charmed her by asking for her
autograph. 'Marilyn was a good talker,' according to Sandburg, 'and very good company. We did some mock playacting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her a lot of questions. She told me about how she came up the hard way, but would never talk about her husbands.'" The lonely old man and lonely young woman were photographed doing invigorating exercises and drinking champagne.

  After her suicide Sandburg was interviewed in Look magazine. The reporter described Sandburg's "longish white hair flapping like skeins of corn silk" and noted that Marilyn had bonded with the poet by bleaching her platinum-blond hair "the exact shade" of his. In a string of reassuring banalities posing as pearls of wisdom, Sandburg said she was "a great actress," "had a genuine quality" and "had some faith in me." Though Marilyn "had a hard time with her sleep," he "saw no signs of despondency" and felt, reasonably enough, that "thirty-six is just too young to die."7 Unlike Dinesen, Sandburg, ever the aged smiling public man, ignored the dark side of her personality.

  On May 20, 1959 Miller was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the rather formal ceremony was sparked into life by Marilyn's stunning appearance. A historian dutifully recorded: "if the award was certainly deserved, the speech was dependable. Miller, on occasion, managed to be witty when he spoke, but you could always count on him to be pious in the last sentence of the first paragraph: 'An honor which the artist perhaps would not part with, but never truly takes as his own, because labor freely given and the joyful misery of creating cannot be translated into a prize.' Nevertheless, his presence was an event: Marilyn Monroe, then his wife, was in the audience."

  Miller, well aware of her habits, arrived on time and without her. Marilyn came very late and at the very end of the luncheon. She was placed next to the seventy-eight-year-old Irish writer, Padraic Colum, who hadn't minded the empty seat and truthfully claimed that he'd never heard of Marilyn Monroe. Wearing a very tight and very décolleté black dress, with three strands of pearls and long white gloves, she sat demurely among the spectators. She knew she was on display – all eyes, as always, were riveted on her – and was smiling, charming and self-possessed. The intellectuals and academicians were tremendously excited by her presence. Everyone was thrilled to be there and fought to get near the deity. Abandoning their customary reserve, they swarmed around her and swooned like a bunch of love-sick schoolboys. While Miller gave his pious speech, Marilyn quietly stole the show.

  Marilyn also impressed several heads of state. She curtsied to Queen Elizabeth of England and to King Paul of Greece, dazzled Sukarno and charmed Nikita Khrushchev. Sukarno, mad about movies, refused to attend a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel unless she was there. Bowing to diplomatic pressure, she turned up on her thirtieth birthday, June 1, 1956, while filming Bus Stop. Throwing her arms around Sukarno, she exclaimed, "I'm so glad to meet the president of India." He then explained that he was the president of Indonesia.

  Au courant with the latest gossip, Sukarno asked (four weeks before her wedding) if she were going to marry Mr. Miller. She shrugged and giggled; he encouraged her by expressing his approval. Aware of her publicity value and ignoring the Muslim prohibition of nudity, Sukarno flattered her by stating, "you are a very important person in Indonesia [also in India]. Your pictures are the most popular of any that have ever played in my country. The entire Indonesian population is interested in my meeting you." The attractive couple were clearly drawn to each other. Rosten wrote that Marilyn, witty as always,

  had been thrilled. She recalled that he was handsome and courteous despite the fact that "he kept looking down my dress, you'd think with five wives he'd have enough." She liked him, she liked his fez [i.e., his Malay cap], she liked his public admittance of his five (or was it four?) wives, all of whom he referred to endearingly. In Marilyn's eyes, that was machismo, romanticism, poetry, and whatever helped explain man's devotion to women.8

  The following year, when Sukarno's life was in danger after an attempted coup, Marilyn wanted to rescue the dashing hero (and his harem) by offering him a safe haven in America. Miller, though touched by her habitual compassion, refused to welcome the volatile leader into their household.

  Twentieth Century-Fox still regarded her as its property. When Nikita Khrushchev visited the studio in September 1959, president Spyros Skouras felt the contrast between beauty and the beast would provide a great photo opportunity. He told Marilyn to wear her tightest, sexiest dress and invited her to sit at the main table in their lavish commissary. For the first time in her life Marilyn arrived early, which prompted Wilder to suggest that Khrushchev ought to direct her next picture.

  Khrushchev was a crude, powerful, larger-than-life character, whose visit had an enormous political impact. Robert Frost admired his homely proverbs, sense of humor and peasant's smile, and called him "very good-natured, hearty, jolly, rough in a way, you'd call it coarse." After the band played "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "The Internationale, " the studio staged a fake shooting of the musical Can-Can, starring Shirley MacLaine, with no film in the camera. Invoking Soviet puritanism to condemn the dissolute American society, Khrushchev called her dance "immoral," fit only for an "insatiable" audience, and added that "a person's face is more beautiful than his backside."

  As the music faded, Darryl Zanuck unexpectedly announced that the right-wing Walt Disney "has informed us that he does not think that premier Khrushchev and his family should go to Disneyland this evening, as he cannot guarantee their safety." Keen to see that fantastic place and used to exerting absolute authority, the great dictator was furious. He seized the opportunity to condemn both America's warmongering and its dangerous criminals: "Just imagine, I, a Premier, a Soviet representative . . . told that I could not go. . . . Why not? . . . Do you have rocket-launching pads there? . . . Or have gangsters taken hold of the place? . . . If you won't let me go to Disneyland, I'll send the hydrogen bomb over."9 There was just enough hysteria in his voice to suggest that if he couldn't see Mickey Mouse he might overreact and destroy Southern California. Frank Sinatra, trying to defuse the explosive situation, told David Niven, who was sitting next to Khrushchev's sturdy wife, "Screw the cops! Tell the old broad you and I'll take' em down this afternoon."

  The director George Cukor called it "an extraordinary occasion and you had to find it funny, but [Marilyn] couldn't make any connection with it." But Marilyn did make a striking connection with Khrushchev himself, who seemed to find her backside as beautiful as her face. When Skouras told his oft-repeated story of how he had progressed from barefoot immigrant to studio head, Khrushchev "countered that he was the son of a poor coal miner and was now the head man of the whole Soviet Union. Marilyn thought that a fantastic reply; like her, Khrushchev was odd man out." Skouras presented her to Khrushchev "as a great star. The Soviet chairman was obviously smitten with her, and she in turn liked him for his plainness."10

  Natalie Wood, whose parents were Russian and who spoke the language fluently, had prepped Marilyn for her momentous encounter. Natalie taught her to say "We the workers of Twentieth Century-Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and country." The luminaries chatted through an interpreter about The Brothers Karamazov. The eminent pianist Emil Gilels, who'd met Marilyn at Carnegie Hall in October 1955, had urged her to travel to Russia and assured her that everyone there would be delighted to see her. She now seemed eager to accept Khrushchev's invitation to visit his country and have a tête-à-tête in the Kremlin. He promised to take her to the Moscow Art Theater and let her see the Method performed at its sacred source.

  Gratified by her ability to charm, she later told friends that she'd impressed the repulsive, bone-crushing premier, who'd been brought up on Soviet propaganda films featuring the muscular heroines of industrial labor: "He didn't say anything. He just looked at me. He looked at me the way a man looks at a woman. That's how he looked at me. . . . I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He smiled more when he was introduced to me than for anybody else at the whole banquet. . . . He sq
ueezed my hand so long and hard that I thought he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss" the man who was "fat and ugly and had warts on his face and growled."11

  Marilyn had done her share of couch-casting during her early years in Hollywood and knew exactly what it was like to kiss disgusting old men. Even at the peak of her career, her beauty remained a prize to be exhibited and shown off before visiting dignitaries. Marilyn was a touchstone that revealed the character of the writers she met. Unsure of her own identity, she identified with others. She was warmly responsive to those who showed an interest in her, and the most perceptive authors appreciated her human qualities. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov was as handsome and sophisticated as Nikita Khrushchev was coarse and crude. He met Marilyn at a Hollywood party while he was working on the screenplay of Lolita in the spring of 1960, and examined her as if she were one of his exquisite butterflies. Stacy Schiff wrote that "in Vladimir's recollection,' She was gloriously pretty, all bosom and rose' – and holding the hand of [her co-star and current lover] Yves Montand. Monroe took a liking to Vladimir, inviting the [Nabokovs] to a dinner, which they did not attend." But he called her "one of the greatest comedy actresses of our time. She is simply superb."

  Nabokov didn't care about Marilyn's publicity value. But he saw her with a shrewd novelist's eye and imaginatively recreated her in two novels: Ada (1969) and Pale Fire (1962). Ada's absurd lessons from Stan Slavsky satirized Marilyn's rather futile lessons at the Actors Studio. In the title poem of Pale Fire, Nabokov celebrated Marilyn's "bosom and rose" in watery imagery. The last line's "corporate desire" puns on the public lust for her sensual body and on the dominant studio that controlled so much of her life:

  The famous face flowed in, fair and inane:

  The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grain

  Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism,