The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Marilyn was notorious for wearing no underwear; Cathy-May's underwear has been stolen, sold or given away. At the end of the play her ex-husband Larry expresses his outrage at her exhibitionism – an allusion to DiMaggio's outrage when Marilyn's skirt flew up to her waist and exposed her panties in The Seven Year Itch. Though no longer married to Cathy-May, Larry thinks he still owns her and asks "Where is your underwear, stupid!!" Obsessed by the need to publicly humiliate and symbolically rape the woman who's dominated him with her sexual power, Larry acts out the violence that Miller would never dare to express. Larry throws her down on the floor and exposes her sexual parts: "With a sweeping gesture he sends her onto her back, legs in the air, and looks under her skirt; she is struggling ineffectually to free herself. You see underwear, Mister? Look, everybody! He is trying to spread her legs apart. . . . Take a look at this! How can this belong to anybody!"17

  Mr. Peters' Connections is more bitter and savage than Miller's previous works about Marilyn, and Peters' response to Cathy-May suggests Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, in which passion degrades man's soul:"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action." Peters realizes that his overwhelming physical desire for Cathy-May has deceived him about the possibility of loving and living with her. Larry's brutal and vengeful anger, her shameless dress and provocative behavior, shatter Peters' idealized image. She's a temptress, if not a slut; she's corrupted by the phony world of the movies and can't really belong to any man. Like a damned soul in a gothic tale, she destroys anyone who gets close to her, but begs men to "pity the monster."

  Miller also alludes to Marilyn in his late story "The Bare Manuscript" (2002), in which Clement, a prize-winning but now blocked novelist, tries to spark his creativity by paying a woman to let him write a story with a felt-tip pen on her naked body. Like Monroe, Clement's wife Lena had an insane parent who was confined to an asylum, and she herself has had several abortions. Subject to violent mood swings, she's confused about her identity and doesn't even understand why she's alive. Despite all these problems, Clement still loves her. In The Misfits, Gay Langland says to Roslyn, "You shine in my eyes." In "The Bare Manuscript," Clement tells Lena, "you glow like a spirit." Clement writes his story as "a kind of paean to her as she once had been" and optimistically wonders – as Miller did when he wrote The Misfits for Marilyn and as Peters does when Cathy-May reappears – "would she recognize herself and be reconciled?"18 Miller's love for Marilyn, and the pain she inflicted, never died.

  IV

  The black comedy Finishing the Picture, Miller's last play and last attempt to portray her character, ended his half-century fascination with Marilyn. Performed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in October 2004, four months before his death in February 2005, it was criticized as too talky, repetitive and undramatic. It never reached Broadway and has not been published, but it does reveal the interesting backstory about the making of The Misfits.

  The play has no cowboys or mustangs, no actors based on Clark Gable or Montgomery Clift. The Marilyn character, who did not appear in "The Misfits" story and took centerstage in The Misfits film, is central to the action but almost entirely silent in Finishing the Picture. Kitty, a dysfunctional actress with a starring role in a movie, is unable to work during the filming. Her erratic behavior threatens to close down the over-schedule and over-budget production. As with After the Fall, Miller denied that the play was about Marilyn. This time, as if to prove his point, he made the heroine a brunette instead of a blonde.

  Kitty speaks a few words offstage in Act One, and doesn't actually appear until two-thirds of the way through the play. She then lies drugged and naked in bed, either silent and stupefied or screaming (like Marilyn) at her husband. She speaks only one more offstage word, an unconvincing "Yes." She's a ghostly presence, stripped down to her elemental weakness, and has to be rehabilitated. As Kitty wanders naked through the hotel corridors, she's rescued and put into the producer's bedroom. All the characters try to get her out of bed and back to work. They all plead with Kitty, who doesn't answer them directly: her responses are implied in their speeches. Everyone sees something different in her striking yet opaque personality and everyone fails to reach her. She has no real identity, and needs pills much more than people.

  Like Kitty, the characters are transparently based on real models. Phil Ochsner, the sympathetic producer (played by Stacy Keach), came from the trucking business – just as the real producer, Frank Taylor, came from the publishing business – when his company merged with Bedlam Pictures. (Ochsner in German is a driver of oxen, a precursor to a driver of trucks.) His character is based on both Taylor and Miller. Edna Meyers, Kitty's devoted personal assistant, has an impulsive affair with the widowed Ochsner, which suggests Inge's love affair with Miller. Paul (who has no surname and was played by Matthew Modine) is the screenwriter as well as Kitty's disillusioned and defeated husband.

  Derek Clemson, the director, is obviously based on John Huston. Edna says he's "very macho and doesn't really relate to women." He loves horses and has directed Kitty's first important film (Marilyn's The Asphalt Jungle). He courts danger by losing thousands of dollars when gambling all night and by smuggling Pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico. Terry Case, the cameraman, is based on Russell Metty. He carefully examines Kitty's unfocused eyes, her peculiar stare and characteristically "spooky underwater" look to see if she can perform, then concentrates his lens on her "perfect ass."

  Miller finally retaliates by satirizing Lee and Paula Strasberg. The acting coach Flora Fassinger is dressed entirely in black and hangs several watches around her neck. Egotistical, foolish and inept, she's mainly interested in the size of her hotel suite and her chauffeured limousine. A Tartuffian hypocrite and perfect fraud, she's not only failed to help Kitty, but also confused and depressed her. Flora's husband Jerome, Kitty's New York acting guru, wears a comical cowboy outfit (as Lee actually did) for his cameo appearance in Nevada. He agrees, for a first-class airplane ticket and an exorbitant per diem fee, to try to encourage Kitty. But he repeatedly says he will not take responsibility for her failure to perform. Realizing disaster is imminent, he immediately flies back to New York. Like Flora, Jerome has hurt rather than helped Kitty by cultivating her pathological reliance on him and by making her intensely self-conscious. As Terry Case says, "You had a bird here who naturally sang. Then they started to teach her how to sing, and so naturally she can't sing anymore." By making the Strasbergs absurd, Miller missed the chance to portray their malign influence on Marilyn.

  As Phil Ochsner searches for a solution to their problem, each character suggests a different way to help Kitty. Edna Meyers believes she needs consideration and kindness, Paul thinks she needs love, Derek Clemson appeals to her sense of honor, Terry Case urges toughness and threats, Flora Fassinger wants her to rest, Jerome encourages her with the inspiring example of the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse. (In Timebends, Miller records Marilyn ordering him "to sit down right now and listen to a tape of Lee's lecture on Eleanora Duse.") Ochsner has three choices: rousing Kitty so she can immediately return to work (the entire crew has been summoned and is waiting in the lobby), letting her rest in the hospital for a week or shutting down the picture. Saving the film means saving Kitty–Marilyn. If they shut down the picture she won't be able to get insurance and will never again be able to work. As Paul tells Derek, it might even drive her to suicide:"That would devastate her. It could kill her."

  Miller subjects Kitty's haunted character to intense scrutiny. Derek Clemson says, "She is a case of terminal disappointment. With herself, her husband, the movies, the United States, the world." Alluding to the title of his play of 1994, Miller writes:"She's had a frightful life . . . she's been stepping on broken glass since she could walk." Kitty can never recover from her childhood fears of being exploited, mocked and abandoned: "She has ghosts sitting on her chest; ghosts of things she's done, or [have] been done to her; she can't breathe, can't sleep, can't wake [without] fleeing the hounds of hell."1
9 Life has Kitty by the throat. She thinks she's a fake, wonders if she really exists, and feels as if somebody has got inside her and stolen her identity. Fearful, resentful and angry, she has no one to depend on. She's tormented by a sense of "spiritual outrage" and by the "condition of her soul." Propelled by a monstrous but well justified mistrust of people and taking some kind of "power trip," she tries to humiliate everyone.

  Psychoanalysis, encouraged by her teachers, has also confused and depressed her. She's left two of the best analysts in the country baffled and "talking to themselves." Terry Case bitterly calls her treatment "the world's most expensive fertilizer." Miller doesn't mention that her analysts, like her internist, freely prescribed the addictive pills that killed her. Kitty's character is fully explored, but since she rarely speaks, everything we learn about her comes secondhand from the people around her.

  Insomniac, unpleasant, manipulative, irrational and frightening, Kitty takes no responsibility for herself and allows no one to take responsibility for her. She can't stop blaming people and it's impossible to stop her from destroying herself. All Paul's love cannot help Kitty and all her love for him has, through suspicion and mistrust, turned to hate. Fatalistic and beaten, Paul finally accepts the inevitable and is even relieved that their marriage is finished. In his final speech, he confesses to the character based on Inge:

  She doesn't like me, Edna. And how could she – I didn't save her, I didn't do the miracle I kind of promised. And she didn't save me, as she promised. So nothing moved, you know? It was like we kept endlessly introducing ourselves to one another. I'm afraid of her now – I have no idea what she's going to do next. I wonder if maybe there was just too much hope; we drank it, swam in it. And for fear of losing it didn't dare look inside. A sad story.

  The crisis is temporarily resolved at the conclusion of the play. Kitty goes into the hospital for a week. Phil Ochsner and Edna Meyers, who appear together at the beginning and the end, have a promising future. As in real life, the forest fire, which blackened the skies of California and Nevada and knocked out the power in Reno, has subsided and is now under control. The emergency is over and the sky is clear and bright. Terry Case claims the fire "invigorates the seed buried in the soil" and "makes the seeds germinate." But the analogy between the natural and personal disaster, between putting out the fire and rescuing the actress, seems forced. Marilyn's mental illness was far more complicated than a forest fire. She managed to finish The Misfits, but it was followed by death, not rebirth.

  Brian Dennehy, who acted in several of Miller's plays, said the subject of Finishing the Picture was Marilyn's "incredible stardom and how the actress became a commodity, consumed by everyone around her, including the writer. They used her to achieve success and she could not meet their oppressive demands. Miller didn't fully understand Marilyn's impossible situation, and suffered a terrible strain while trying to portray his own culpability."20

  In his work Miller often returned to the most painful period of his life: his failure to unite the genius and the goddess, intelligence and beauty, fame and celebrity. His three major works on Marilyn amount to a dramatic trilogy – The Misfits, After the Fall and Finishing the Picture. They attempt to understand her character and explain why their marriage failed. They present an increasingly dark view of the actress and portray the high cost of creativity in an exploitative world. In the end, the miracle never happened. But she remained his tragic muse and her character, exalted and tormented, lived on in his work. Like a burnt-out star, her light, though extinct, continues to shine.

  Appendix: Marilyn's Illnesses

  and Hospitalizations

  1930s: tonsillectomy in childhood

  Before 1946: lst and 2nd suicide attempts by gas and by sleeping pills

  June 1946: trench mouth after extraction of wisdom teeth, Las Vegas General Hospital

  June 1946: measles, Las Vegas General Hospital

  late 1940s–1950s: twelve abortions

  December 1950: two plastic surgeries on nose and jaw

  December 1950: 3rd suicide attempt, after Johnny Hyde's death

  Spring 1951: abortion (with Elia Kazan)

  April 28, 1952: appendicitis, Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Los Angeles

  1954: 1st bronchitis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

  November 6–12, 1954: lst endometriosis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

  April 1956: 2nd bronchitis, during shooting of Bus Stop, St. Vincent's, LA

  August 19, 1956: 1st miscarriage (with Miller)

  August 1957: ectopic pregnancy (with Miller), Doctor's Hospital, New York. 4th suicide attempt

  Fall 1958: 5th suicide attempt. Taken to hospital by Paula Strasberg

  December 17, 1958: 2nd miscarriage (with Miller), Polyclinic Hospital, NY. 6th suicide attempt

  June 22–26, 1959: surgery on Fallopian tubes, Lenox Hill Hospital, NY

  August 28–September 4, 1960: drug addiction and nervous breakdown during Misfits, Westside Hospital, LA

  February 7–10, 1961: 7th suicide attempt and nervous breakdown after divorce from Miller, Payne-Whitney, NY; and February 11–March 5, 1961: Neurological Institute, Columbia University Presbyterian Medical Center, NY

  May 1961: 2nd chronic endometriosis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

  June 28–July 11, 1961: gallbladder removed, Polyclinic Hospital, NY —In hospital five times in the last ten months

  July 20, 1962: 3rd chronic endometriosis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

  August 5, 1962: commits suicide by overdose of barbiturates

  Notes

  One: First Encounter

  1 Arthur Miller, FBI file, February 19, 1951, p. 65; Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York, 1987), pp. 308; 303; Mel Gussow, Conversations with Miller (New York, 2002), p. 145.

  2. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York, 1988), pp. 404; 409; Fred Guiles, Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe (1984; Chelsea, Michigan, 1991), p. 173.

  3. Christopher Bigsby, ed., Remembering Arthur Miller (London, 2005), p. 263; Joshua Logan, "Will Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe?," Movie Stars, Real People, and Me (New York, 1978), p. 62; Kazan, Life, pp. 365, 367; 402.

  4. Donald Spoto, Marilyn Monroe (New York, 1993), pp. 461–462; Guiles, Legend, p. 173; Kazan, Life, p. 413.

  A great deal of biographical material about Marilyn has disappeared. Her first husband, James Dougherty, destroyed the 200 letters she wrote to him when he was serving overseas in World War II. Miller's love letters to Marilyn – along with all her papers and her famous Red Diary – mysteriously vanished on the night of her death. Her psychiatrist destroyed all her confessional tapes, made at his request, before he died. There's no trace of Marilyn, despite her intimate relations with John and Robert Kennedy, in the Kennedy Library in Boston. Milton Greene's son (in a conversation with me on December 15, 2007) claimed that the vast archive of Monroe-Greene Productions had been stolen by a Monroe scholar. This loss of valuable evidence has left many unanswered questions about her life as well as many wild conspiracy theories about the cause of her death.

  Two: Marilyn's Traumatic Childhood

  1. Christopher Rand, Los Angeles: The Ultimate City (New York, 1967), p. 140; Marilyn Monroe, My Story (1974;New York, 1976), p. 10; See Maurice Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe: The Uncensored Biography (1960; New York, 1961), p. 5; Monroe, My Story, p. 11.

  2. Natasha Lytess, as told to Jane Wilkie, "My Years with Marilyn," unpublished memoir, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, pp. 9–10; Sidney Skolsky, "Miss Caswell Calling," Don't Get Me Wrong – I Love Hollywood (New York, 1975), p. 221;Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940; New York, 1992), pp. 25–26; Adam Victor, The Marilyn Encyclopedia (Woodstock, New York, 1999), p. 40.

  3. Berniece Baker Miracle and Mona Rae Miracle, My Sister Marilyn (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), p. 7; James Dougherty, The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe (Chicago, 1974), p. 88; André de Dienes, Marilyn Mon Amour (New York, 1985), p. 69; Guiles, Legend, p. 197.

  4. Timothy Hacsi, Second Home: Orpha
n Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 213–214; Leroy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependence, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York, 1997), pp. 104; 108, 119.

  5. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Plays (London, 1954), p. 267; Charles Dickens, "Autobiographical Fragment," in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Triumph and Tragedy (New York, 1952), 1:34;Rudyard Kipling, "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (1888), Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (New York, 1987), p. 43.

  6. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, p. 15; Monroe, My Story, p. 40; Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York, 1964), p. 31.

  7. Eileen Simpson, Orphans: Real and Imaginary (1987; New York, 1990), pp. 14, 165; 30, 25–26; 253.

  8. Wolfson's "Notes on Marilyn Monroe," Margaret Herrick Library, American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; Monroe, My Story, p. 18; Ashby, Endangered Children, p. 118.

  9. Monroe, My Story, pp. 20–21; Hans Lembourn, Diary of a Lover of Marilyn Monroe, trans. Hallberg Hallmundsson (1977;New York, 1979), p. 79; Monroe, My Story, p. 26.

  10. Robert Mitchum, Introduction to Matthew Smith, The Men Who Murdered Marilyn (London, 1996), p. 1; Lena Pepitone and William Stadiem, Marilyn Monroe Confidential (1979; New York, 1980), p. 78; Shelley Winters, Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (New York, 1989), p. 32.