The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  11. Dougherty, Secret Happiness, pp. 37, 45–46; 76; Monroe, My Story, p. 28; Guiles, Legend, p. 331; Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, pp. 78–79.

  12. Letters in James Haspiel, Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend (New York, 1991), pp. 12, 13; 14;Victor, Marilyn Encyclopedia, p. 60.

  13. Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (NewYork,1985), p.14;David Conover, Finding Marilyn:A Romance (New York, 1981), p. 38; Dougherty, Secret Happiness, p. 89.

  Three: A Star is Born

  1. Monroe, My Story, pp. 41, 42;Victor, Marilyn Encyclopedia, p. 279; Guiles, Legend, p. 96.

  2. Michael Conway and Mark Ricci, The Films of Marilyn Monroe (Secaucus, N.J., 1964), p. 10; Edwin Hoyt, Marilyn:The Tragic Venus (New York, 1965), p. 179; Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eisen, The California Dream (New York, 1968), pp. 206; 223.

  3. Peter Bogdanovich, "Marilyn Monroe," Who the Hell's In It: Portraits and Conversations (New York, 2004), p. 484; James Bacon, Hollywood is a Four Letter Town (Chicago, 1976), p. 134; Summers, Goddess, p. 93.

  4. Lytess, "My Years with Marilyn," p. 20; Gloria Steinem, Marilyn (New York, 1986), p. 82; Lytess, "My Years with Marilyn," pp. 2, 5.

  5. Charles Marowitz, The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov (New York, 2004), pp. 214–215; Victor, Marilyn Encyclopedia, p. 53; Marowitz, The Other Chekhov, p. 211.

  6. Monroe, My Story, pp. 77–78; Kazan, Life, pp. 405; 247; Monroe, My Story, pp. 92; 104; Gary Carey, with Joseph Mankiewicz, More About "All About Eve" (New York, 1972), p. 77.

  7. W. R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle (New York, 1949), pp. 56–57; Letters from Joseph Breen to Louis Mayer, October 6 and September 26, 1949, John Huston papers, Herrick Library.

  8. Letter from Sterling Hayden to John Huston, December 26, 1949; Letter from Howard Hawks to Huston, March 27, 1950; Letter from Budd Schulberg to Huston, August 30, 1950, Huston papers, Herrick Library.

  9. Carey and Mankiewicz, More About "All About Eve", p. 75; George Sanders, Memoirs of a Professional Cad (New York, 1960), pp. 70- 71; Kenneth Geist, Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York, 1978), p. 170; Carey and Mankiewicz, More About "All About Eve", pp. 79; 78.

  10. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (1903–08; New York, 1963), pp. 30; 38–39; 69; 61; Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," Translations from the Poetry, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York, 1938), p. 181; Interview with Curtice Taylor, New York, December 10, 2007. Marilyn's topless photo appears in Marilyn Monroe and the Camera, with an interview by Georges Belmont (Boston, 1989), p. 47.

  11. Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties:The Way We Really Were (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), pp. 320, 321, 314.

  12. Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man" (1914), Poetry (New York, 1975), p. 38; Ryan, in Zolotow, Monroe, p. 101; Lang, in Guiles, Legend, p. 193; Graham McCann, Marilyn Monroe (New Brunswick, N.J., 1988), p. 93.

  13. William Wellman, Jr., "Howard Hawks: The Distance Runner, " Focus on Howard Hawks, ed. Joseph McBride (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,1972), p. 8; Niven Busch, in Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, ed. Pat McGilligan (Berkeley, 1986), p. 94; Victor, Marilyn Encyclopedia, p. 186;Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks:The Grey Fox of Hollywood (New York, 1977), pp. 498; 499.

  14. Bacon, Hollywood is a Four Letter Town, p. 145; Pete Martin, "Did Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe?," Pete Martin Calls On (New York, 1962), p. 170; Carl Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe:The Life of an Actress (Ann Arbor, 1986), p. 59.

  15. McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 505, 506; Bacall, in Nora Johnson, Flashback on Nunnally Johnson (Garden City, N.Y., 1979), p. 210; Lauren Bacall, By Myself (New York, 1978), p. 229; Nunnally Johnson, Letters, ed. Dorris Johnson and Ellen Leventhal (New York, 1981), p. 106; Johnson, in Norman Mailer, Marilyn: A Biography (New York, 1975), p. 34.

  16. Summers, Goddess, p. 90; Guiles, Legend, p. 228; Zanuck, in Charles Feldman papers, American Film Institute, Los Angeles.

  17. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939; New York, 1969), pp. 103, 68, 157, 158–159.

  Four: Image and Identity

  1. Daphne Merkin, "Platinum Pain," New Yorker, 74 (February 8, 1999), 72; Arnold Ludwig, "The Real Marilyn," How Do We Know Who We Are?: A Biography of the Self (New York, 1997), pp. 29–31; Summers, Goddess, p. 139.

  2. Miller, Timebends, p. 436; Jack Cardiff, The Magic Hour: The Life of a Cameraman (London, 1996), p. 201; C. David Heymann, "Marilyn," RFK: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy (New York, 1998), p. 310; Cindy Adams, "Marilyn," Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio (Garden City, N.Y., 1980), pp. 258–259.

  3. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 174.

  Her agents, for example, were Harry Lipton at National Artists (1946–48), Johnny Hyde at William Morris (1949–50), Charles Feldman at Famous Artists (1951–55) and Lew Wasserman at Music Corporation of America (1955–62). Miller had the same agent, Kay Brown of MCA, for forty years.

  4. Ezra Goodman, "The Girl with Three Blue Eyes," The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (New York, 1961), p. 233; Richard Meryman, "Fame Can Go By," Life, August 3, 1962, reprinted in Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe, p. 209; Mailer, Marilyn, pp. 204; 174; Guiles, Legend, pp. 283–284.

  5. Winters, Shelley II, p. 108; George Masters and Norma Lee Browning, "To Killer George–Marilyn," The Masters Way to Beauty (New York, 1977), pp. 82–83; Joseph McBride, ed., Hawks on Hawks (Berkeley, 1982), p. 124; de Dienes, Marilyn Mon Amour, p. 129.

  6. Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, p. 9; Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 188; Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, p. 78.

  7. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, p. 92. Christie's auction catalogue, The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe (New York, October 28 and 29, 1999), pp. 346–347, lists books by Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, Freud, Shaw, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, O'Neill, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Greene, Odets, Camus, Tennessee Williams, Ellison, Kerouac, Styron and many others.

  8. Miller, Timebends, p. 241; Sam Shaw and Norman Rosten, Marilyn Among Friends (New York, 1987), p. 191; Norman Rosten, Marilyn: A Very Personal Story (1974; London, 1980) p.55; Christie's, Personal Property, p. 345.

  9. Masters, Masters Way to Beauty, p. 72;Wilder, in Hoyt, Marilyn, p. 156; Charlotte Chandler, Nobody's Perfect. Billy Wilder: A Personal Biography (New York, 2002), p. 182.

  10. Roger Taylor, ed., Marilyn Monroe in Her Own Words (New York, 1983), p. 114; Neil Grant, ed., Monroe: In Her Own Words (New York, 1991), p. 33; Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles (New York, 2007), p. 387; Eunice Murray, Marilyn: The Last Months (New York, 1975), p. 23; Brown, Diana Chronicles, p. 238.

  11. Brown, Diana Chronicles, pp. 384; 6; 290; 200.

  12. Rosten, Marilyn, p. 24; Meryman, "Fame Can Go By," in Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe, pp. 205–206; Brown, Diana Chronicles, p. 387.

  13. Meryman, "Fame Can Go By," in Rollyson, Marilyn Monroe, p. 211; The Ivan Moffat File, ed. Gavin Lambert (New York, 2004), p. 260; Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York, 1985), p. 543.

  Beginning with Jim Dougherty (1942), there were (in approximate order) lovers when she was a model: David Conover (1944) and André de Dienes (1946); breaking into movies: the actor John Carroll, Natasha Lytess, Fred Karger, Joseph Schenck, Harry Cohn, Johnny Hyde (all 1948); leading up to her second marriage:Tony Curtis (1949), Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller (both 1951), Nico Minardos and Joe DiMaggio (both 1952), Billy Travilla and Milton Greene (both 1953); after her second divorce: the voice coach Hal Schaefer and Frank Sinatra (both 1954); before marrying Miller: Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner and the wealthy New York businessman Henry Rosenfeld (all 1955); after Miller:Yves Montand (1960), Charles Feldman and the Mexican actor José Bolaños (both 1961), John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy (both 1962).

  14. Halsman, in Marilyn Monroe: A Composite View, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (Philadelphia, 1969), p. 64; Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, p. 179; Mailer, Marilyn, p. 102; Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, p. 144; Steinem, Marilyn, p. 157.

  15. Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side
of Camelot (Boston, 1997), p. 104; Randall Riese and Neil Hitchens, The Unabridged Marilyn: Her Life from A to Z (New York, 1987), p. 476; de Dienes, in Goodman, Fifty Year Decline, p. 224; Masters, Masters Way to Beauty, p. 69.

  16. Travilla, Minardos and Carmen, in Summers, Goddess, pp. 82–83; 69; 204.

  Five: Joe DiMaggio

  1. Monroe, My Story, pp. 125; 126; Gay Talese, "The Silent Season of a Hero," Esquire, 66 (July 1966), 43; Summers, Goddess, pp. 99–100; Mailer, Marilyn, p. 134.

  2. Roger Kahn, Joe and Marilyn (1986; New York, 1988), p. 280; The Indianhead: 2nd U.S. Infantry Division (Korea), February 25, 1954, pp. 2–3; Photographer and Marilyn, in Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, pp. 265–266; 223; Pepitone, Monroe Confidential, pp. 32–33.

  3. Victor, Marilyn Encyclopedia, p.138; Letter from Ben Hecht to Gregson Bautzer, August 11, 1954; Letter from Rose Hecht to Marilyn's lawyer Loyd Wright, June 2, 1954; Jeffrey Meyers, Somerset Maugham:A Life (New York, 2004), p. 247; Letter from Rose Hecht to Ken McCormick, June 7, 1954; Letter from McCormick to Rose Hecht, July 30, 1954, Newberry Library, Chicago.

  4. Barbara Leaming, Marilyn Monroe (New York, 1988), p. 87; George Barris, Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words: Marilyn Monroe's Revealing Last Words and Photographs (1995; New York, 2001), p. 106; Kahn, Joe and Marilyn, p. 284.

  5. Compare George Axelrod's play, The Seven Year Itch (New York, 1953), p. 87, in which Ewell imagines a man covering his wife with kisses: "Inwardly, downwardly, pulsating, striving, now together, ending and unending, now, now, now!" and Hemingway's "Fathers and Sons" (1933), Short Stories (New York, 1953), p. 497, in which Nick Adams makes love to the Indian girl Trudy: "tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended."

  6. Censored lines, in Yona McDonough, All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader (New York, 2002), p. 57. The first two photos are reproduced in this book; the third in Playboy, December 2005, p. 78.

  7. Dougherty, in Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 84;Wilder, in Earl Wilson, "Marilyn: Mad and Marvelous," The Show Business That Nobody Knows (Chicago, 1971), pp. 297–298;Wilder, in McCann, Marilyn Monroe, pp. 100-101.

  8. Pete Martin Calls On, p. 184; Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, p. 228; Talese, "Silent Season of a Hero," p. 45.

  9. Richard Ben Cramer, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (New York, 2000), p. 373; Miracle, My Sister Marilyn, p. 161; Leaming, Marilyn Monroe, p. 379.

  10. Gussow, Conversations with Miller, p. 146; Pete Martin Calls On, pp. 174; 157.

  11. Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York, 1983), p. 284; Guiles, Legend, p. 218; Goodman, Fifty Year Decline, pp. 219–220.

  12. Wagenknecht, ed., Marilyn Monroe, p. 156; Pete Martin Calls On, pp. 186; 160; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1943), p. 443; Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, p.46.

  13. Lytess, "My Years with Marilyn, "p.6;Robert Stack, Straight Shooting (New York, 1980), p. 184.

  14. Letter from Ray Stark to Charles Feldman, December 1, 1953; Letters to Feldman, June 21 and 29, 1954; Letter from Jack Gordean to Feldman, July 1954; Samuel Shaw to Feldman, as recorded by Feldman's secretary Grace Dobish, April 2, 1955, Charles Feldman papers, American Film Institute.

  15. Mailer, Marilyn, p. 172; Phone talk with Joshua Greene, December 15, 2007; Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, pp. 242–243.

  16. Joseph Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (1988; New York, 1990), p. 352; Letter from Darryl Zanuck to Charles Feldman, April 14, 1955, American Film Institute; Guiles, Legend, pp. 261; 309.

  Six: Miller's Path to Fame

  1. Matthew Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller ( Jackson, Miss., 1987) p. 185; Miller, Timebends, p. 4; Martin Gottfried, Arthur Miller: His Life and Work (New York, 2003) pp. 5; 8.

  2. Miller, Timebends, p. 113; Roudané, Conversations with Arthur Miller, p. 311; Miller, Timebends, p. 213.

  3. Roudané, Conversations with Arthur Miller, pp. 13–14; E.M. Halliday, John Berryman and the Thirties:A Memoir (Amherst, Mass., 1987), pp. 132–133; Bigsby, Remembering Arthur Miller, p. 249.

  4. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, p. 264; Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan: A Biography (New York, 2005), p. 228; Gottfried, Arthur Miller, p. 65.

  5. Gottfried, Arthur Miller, pp. 114; 241–242; Miller, Timebends, p. 202.

  6. Mary McCarthy, "The American Realist Playwrights" (1961), Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1962 (New York, 1963), p. 225; Brater, Arthur Miller, p. 53; Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness," Three Great Tales (New York, [1960]), p. 270; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York, 1987), p. 48.

  7. Interview with Curtice Taylor; Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (New York, 1974), p. 247; Robert Lewis, Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life (New York, 1984), p. 221.

  8. Kazan and Nan Taylor, in Gottfried, Arthur Miller, pp. 150; 162; Miller, Timebends, pp. 194; 278–279.

  Seven: Secret Courtship

  1. Miller, Timebends, p. 356; Kazan, Life, p. 438; Interview with Joan Copeland, Amagansett, New York, November 12, 2007 and Copeland, in Gottfried, Arthur Miller, p. 246.

  2. Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow:A Biography of the Imagination (New York, 1991), p. 87; Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography (Boston, 1995), p. 289; Gottfried, Arthur Miller, p. 282; Miller, Timebends, p. 378; Letters from Sondra Bellow to Jeffrey Meyers, January 29 and February 3, 2008.

  3. Saul Bellow, "Brothers' Keepers," New Republic, 114 (January 7, 1946), 30; Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller, pp. 242, 287; Gottfried, Arthur Miller, p. 286; Letter from Miller to Bellow, June 2, 1956, University of Chicago Library.

  4. Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller:A Playwright's Life and Works (London, 2005), p. 68; Conversation with Mary Slattery Miller, Brooklyn, New York, September 5, 1998.

  5. Steinem, Marilyn, p.102; Rosten, Marilyn, p.33; Bigsby, Remembering Miller, p. 262.

  6. Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, p. 73;Winters, Shelley II, p. 34; Kazan, Life, p. 407.

  7. Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, Volume 2 (New York, 2006), p. 256; Jonathan Kobal, People Will Talk (New York, 1985), p. 613; Miller, Timebends, p. 379.

  8. Kazan, Life, pp. 178, 415; Miller, Timebends, p. 536; Newman, in Marilyn Monroe: Still Life, American Masters video, 2006; Interview with Brian Dennehy, Woodstock, Conn., December 17, 2007.

  9. Mailer, Marilyn, p. 85; Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad, and Me (New York, 2005), p. 217 (Joshua Logan, Colin Clark and Wallach all favored the cute tripartite title ending with "and Me");Winters, Shelley II, pp. 31; 34; Christie's, Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe, p. 69.

  10. Truman Capote, "Marilyn Monroe," The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places (New York, 1973), pp. 378–379;Truman Capote, "A Beautiful Child," Music for Chameleons (1980; New York, 1981), pp. 229; 235, 241; 244;Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), p. 439.

  11. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932; London, 1963), p. 64; John Lehmann, A Nest of Tigers: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and Their Times (London, 1968), pp. 247–248; John Pearson, Façade: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (London, 1967), pp. 437–438.

  12. Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (London, 1981), p. 322; Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 376; Glendinning, Edith Sitwell, p. 305; Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of (New York, 1965), pp. 221, 223;Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn, p. 186.

  Eight: New York and the Actors Studio

  1. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright (New York, 1981), p. 197; Susan Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, p. 31.

  In his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me (New York, 1994), p. 85, Brando wrote:"After I had some success, Lee Strasberg tried to take credit for teaching me how to act. He never taught me anything."

  Strasberg made his late film debut in Godfather II (1974) and gave an excellent performance as the aging Jewish mobster, Hyman Roth.

  2. Marowitz, Michael Chekhov, p. 216; Strasberg
, in Conway and Ricci, Films of Marilyn Monroe, p. 7; Adams, Lee Strasberg, pp. 256–257.

  3. Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe, p. 249; "Arthur Miller," Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, Third Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York, 1967), pp. 211–212; Interview with Joan Copeland; Adams, Lee Strasberg, p. 255.

  4. Eugene O'Neill, "Anna Christie," Three Plays (New York, 1949), p. 83; Kazan, Life, p. 713; Kobal, People Will Talk, pp. 140; 699.

  5. Susan Strasberg, Marilyn and Me, pp. 79, 85; Lee Strasberg, in Chandler, Nobody's Perfect, p. 182; Tom Wood, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), p. 153.

  6. Kazan, Life, pp. 539–540; Adams, Lee Strasberg, p. 278; Maugham, in Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 453.

  7. Guiles, Legend, p. 268; Gussow, Conversations with Miller, pp.146–147, and Miller, Timebends, p. 420.

  8. Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me (New York, 1996), p. 85; Paula, in Alice McIntyre, "Making The Misfits or Waiting for Monroe or Notes from Olympus," Esquire, 55 (March 1961), 75; Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, pp. 102, 103.

  9. Adams, Lee Strasberg, p. 271; Susan Strasberg, Bittersweet (New York, 1980), p. 156; Guiles, Legend, pp. 284, 316.

  10. Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey (New York, 1993), p. 246.

  11. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, p. 355; Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, pp. 55–56; 65.

  12. Interview with Don Murray, Santa Barbara, California, January 10, 2008.

  13. Letter from Spyros Skouras to Buddy Adler, April 30, 1956, Skouras papers, Stanford University Library;Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, p. 66.

  Nine: Betrayal and Guilt

  1. Sylvia Plath, in the opening paragraph of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963), describes the execution of the Rosenbergs, which foreshadows her heroine's electro-shock treatments: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. . . . The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick. . . . I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves."