Marilyn: A Biography (12 page)

Since she is our heroine, it would also be
nice to believe that the secret they concealed from others was an
intellectual companionship. It is possible. Despite her wit, she
was not overbearingly bright, and if intellectual ability is
comparable to weight lifting, she lifted no weight. She may have
wanted to go to law school when she spoke to Dienes, but she did
not have the sort of mind to connect a string of clauses and detect
a flaw in her logic. Nonetheless, she had intelligence – an
artist’s intelligence – and her taste by the end of her career was
close to superb. She must have had a profound sense of what was
whole in people and false, for her own characterizations were sound
– she knew how to enter a scene with the full aura of the character
she played, and so able to suggest everything that had occurred on
just the other side of the scene, the breeze she had smelled, the
doorsill on which she stubbed her toe, the errant whimsy of a
forbidden thought to be concealed, and five distractions
appropriate to the character trailing like streamers. Even this
early she must have seen life as some sort of divine soup of
situations where every aroma spoke of the primacy of mood.
Existence at Twentieth must have confused her profoundly, then, in
this first year when she could hardly locate a logic to the mood of
company streets, studio personnel, and movie sets. Schenck, with
his profound knowledge of studio power and the habits of high movie
executives, producers, and directors, the idiosyncrasies of
technicians, the eccentricities of actors, and the private life of
anyone who aroused her curiosity, had to be her guide into the
shifting lights of the career she had chosen like a great love
affair – the fearful love affair of her life. We can only imagine
how much dedication Schenck saw in her, but that he saw something
must be the assumption, for if he is not in love, why else see this
child so often unless she is truly his protégée, and anointed by
him to receive an old man’s gold – those secrets he is at last
obliged to communicate to another. Of course, we do not have to be
too sentimental. She could have been full confidante, and still act
as mistress to an old man (who could hardly be certified as not a
dirty old man). A whole part of the horror which would be in her
later could first have come from gifts of Schenck – we never know
which curses, evils, frights and plagues are passed into another
under the mistaken impulse we are offering some exchange of
passion, greed, and sexual charge. An old sultan with a thousand
curses on his head is capable of smuggling anything into the mind
and the body of a young woman – less is known about the true
transactions of fucking than any science on earth. We can only
measure where she might have been at the beginning of her
acquaintance with Schenck and at the end. If possession took place,
let us say she was possessed, even diabolically, by the need to
become a star after just one year of knowing him, and if he was
testing her ability to wait for a favor, she passed a grim test –
her option was dropped after the first year at Twentieth. She was
out of work for several months and had to go back to doing jobs as
a model. Schenck finally interceded, not at Twentieth, but at
Columbia with his “fellow pioneer” Harry Cohn. Since she was not
only taken in, but assigned the second lead in a film, as well as
given a dramatic coach, and singing lessons, and much special
attention, Schenck must have called in a fair-sized favor from
Cohn. (Perhaps Schenck kenw where an old body was buried.) She
made, at any rate, a film at Columbia,
Ladies of the Chorus
,
a bad B-film about a young burlesque star (chaste!) daughter of an
older burlesque star (classy) in love with a scion. It came out in
1948 and is the first movie where we can really see her; she sings,
dances, acts, even has a catfight with hair-pullings, slaps,
shrieks, awkward blows reminiscent of girls throwing baseballs –
the film is terrible, but she is not. She is interestingly wooden
in the wrong places (like a faint hint of the wave of Camp to
come), and she sings and dances with a sweet vitality, even does
her best to make one agree it is not absolutely impossible she is
in love with Rand Brooks the scion (who must certainly be the
plainest leading man any ambitious ingénue ever was assigned to
love), but what is most interesting in the comfort of studying this
actress who is to go so far is the odd air of confidence she emits,
a narcissism about her own potentialities so great it becomes a
perfumed species of sex appeal as if a magnificent girl has just
walked into a crowded room and declared, “I’m far and away the most
beautiful thing here.” Of course, she is not. Not yet. Her front
teeth protrude just a fraction (like Jane Russell’s), her chin
points a hint, and her nose is a millimeter too wide and so gives
suggestion of a suckling pig’s snout. Yet she is still close to
gorgeous in her own way, with a sort of I-smell-wonderful look. She
is like a baby everyone loves – how wise are the tunneled views of
one’s own hindsight! But where does this assurance come from? Is it
a product of the cover pictures, some spiritual sable donated to
her by Schenck, or the sum of ignorance, and desperation converted
by alchemy into a starlet’s glow?

It is certainly a great deal to write about
so indifferent a film. Her acting is valiant, and knows enough to
be modest where the script is hopeless. Her taste is instinctive –
she knows when to duck. But there is no reason to believe she will
ever be an actress. Harry Cohn with his cruel wise nose for success
drops her option after six months, and one cannot find fault. She
emerges from
Ladies of the Chorus
only because we know she
will emerge – the best thing to be said about her acting is that
she blurs the edges of a wholly unreal story.

* * *

Ladies of the Chorus
must have
disappeared from memory two weeks after anyone saw it. Except for
Marilyn. A part of her may have gained confidence after this film.
Her roommate at the Studio Club is supposed to have asked her once,
“If fifty per cent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no
talent and should give up, what would you do?”

“If one hundred per cent told me that, all
one hundred per cent would be wrong.” It is a line to come out of
the inner life of an artist, and so the dialogue is remotely
conceivable.

However, we do not need more evidence than
the film itself. She is just interesting enough to be fascinating
to herself on the screen, for of course she will view it with every
ambition of the blood. Her performance is bound to take her through
an experience as large as watching Garbo or Pola Negri. The
absorption must be equal to a fix of heroin; she can relax some of
the tightest tensions of the long effort to locate identity. If
there had been a question in her mind about a film career, we can
assume it was less after
Ladies of the Chorus
. Besides, the
plot was kind enough to underline her own myth: she was a working
girl who would rise from the chorus and marry a son of high
society. Of course, her life at this time was not without its
parallel. She was now in love with Fred Karger (who had been her
singing coach on the film), and his mother, Anne Karger, while not
wealthy, must have seemed like the nearest Hollywood equivalent to
landed gentry. In the years of silent pictures, as the widow of Maz
Karger who had helped to found Metro, she had kept open house, and
could speak of the stars who had come often to her home, Nazimova
among others. (One can hear Marilyn saying
Nazimova
in a
voice that would anticipate Jackie Kennedy.) Even that syndrome of
destiny, Valentino, with his feet that fit Marilyn’s, and his death
that followed her birth, had been there to visit Anne Karger. How
it must have appealed to Marilyn to meet the hostess, and how
delighted was Anne Karger with Marilyn who, if being groomed by
Fred Karger for second lead in
Ladies of the Chorus
, was yet
without enough money to eat. How that appealed to a good cook like
Anne Karger! The love affair between her son and Marilyn would end
(despite Marilyn’s and Anne Karger’s little efforts to make it a
marriage), but the sense is offered of a family whose good ties are
so close that Karger chooses to move back in with his mother and
six-year-old son after a divorce from his wife. He is by general
description a man of some musical culture and the best of good
manners. It is obvious he cared enough for Marilyn to cultivate her
possibilities. He gave her evenings of dining in restaurants with
candlelight by the sea and good wine for the table, they went to
dance in some of the better clubs on Sunset Strip, and took trips
to the desert – shades of André de Dienes! – but in all his care,
and in all the skill with which he taught her the rudiments of
music and voice, he also appears wary of any passion that offers
too much heat, and more than a little distrustful of all women
after the smash of his marriage. Besides, he is ashamed of Marilyn.
Perhaps no other one of her lovers is ever ashamed of her. We need
only conceive of the magnitude of some of her innocent remarks. If
her blinders had hooks, they would be big enough to be living on
the edge of boborygimous thunder. It is a love affair not
unreminiscent of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, or Charles
Francis Eitel and Elena Esposito, except that the passion is on
Marilyn’s side. We even can suspect half of her love affair is with
Anne Karger. If she needed both a mother and a father, it was a
mother she needed first, and marrying into the Karger family would
have suited her most intimidating psychological needs as perfectly
as a superb vehicle will resuscitate an aging actress. Marilyn
would have had a base for the career to come. This was, however,
precisely what Karger did not need. He wanted a mother for his
six-year-old son. So there is reason to believe he thought her not
only too ambitious, but too sexual at this point. One can only
offer a set of quotes from Marilyn ben Hecht fished right out of
Factoidal Gulch, but there is always the hope it may be equal at
least to a poor translation. Who knows? It is, at any rate,
something like the portrait Marilyn wished to give to the Karger
affair in later years.

“
A new life began for me. I moved from the
Studio Club where I was living to a place nearer his house so he
could stop on the way to work or home from work.”

Sex on the way to work was the imprimatur of
devotion in a Hollywood affair. More than one Hollywood star would
yet brag of early morning blow jobs fresh as milk while having his
studio lunch in the commissary, but those were slave affairs.
Marilyn, looking for marriage, had to be more formidable. In this
memoir she suggests (or is it Ben Hect? – factoids, like amoebae,
have no family line to trace) that Karger finally insulted her
mortally by suggesting that if he dropped dead (keeping up with the
need to make love to her?) it would be bad for his boy.

“Why do you say that?”

“Don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t see.”

“Don’t you see it wouldn’t be right for him
to be brought up by a woman like you…”

“You hate me,” she said.

All we can see is Ben Hect pic-plunking his
ten fingers on the keys, but if we cut across the dialogue to the
terminal fact – which is that Karger soon wed Jane Wyman after
always making it clear he did not want to marry Marilyn – we can
assume her narcissism, ineptitude, and huge ambition were a poor
combination for a sensitive man. Meanwhile, her sexuality remains
an enigma. It is the fashion by now (for the legend since her death
was so fashioned) to see her as not really interested in sex nearly
as much as the early publicity would promise. The testimony of a
few of those who made love to her in later years suggests she was
more likely to sleep with her brassiere on (for fear her breasts
would sag) than to lie in abandon on an orgiastic bed, and there
are all the stories of her curious innocence about sex – once after
going to bed with Marlon Brando she said next morning to Milton
Greene, “I don’t know if I do it the right way,” but then which of
us does know? Every certainty in sex is followed by the recognition
it is a plateau and there are peaks above. Sooner or later we all
reveal our innocence about sex in a candid remark.

While it is true that numbers of her friends
testify to just such innocence, to her sensitivity, her
vulnerability (which of course is hardly a sexual constraint), and
to the gentle nakedness of her nerves, her inability to protect
herself, there is a common denominator to all such descriptions –
they surround her only after she has come to New York and has had
the modulating influences of life with the Greenes, the Strasbergs,
and Arthur Miller. By then she was certainly enough of an actress
to take on any new persona and keep it – a role of sexual modesty
was at the least wise to reduce general resentment of her. Besides,
whole parts of her psyche had been wounded, bruised, crushed,
lacerated, amputated, thickened, and killed by then – the inside of
her heart must have looked like a club-fighter’s face – and she may
have been just a little on the other side of sex. The question of
biography before us now, however, is whether she was innocent in
the early years of her career, as the last legend would claim, and
that is hard to tell. While an actor’s face and body can be the
human equivalent of Potemkin’s village, and glamour no more than a
measure of the distance from the glow of the flesh to sentiments of
sewer gas in the womb, not every woman who is transcendently sexual
on the screen must therefore be transcendently frigid in bed. It is
simpler to assume that sexual attraction is finally based on
something in sex itself, or that for some years, at any rate, there
is the power to find some sexual return in a phallus or vagina as
well as in a mirror or a lens. The point is that Marilyn’s private
life in these first years is all but buried. Her secretiveness is
commented upon frequently. Natasha Lytess, who became her dramatic
coach at Columbia for
Ladies of the Chorus
and stayed in
that relation for seven years (until precisely the end of
The
Seven-Year Itch
), was also a species of housemother, since
Marilyn, when down on her luck, would sometimes live with her. “I
dared not ask her the simplest question about her life,” Lytess
would write. “Even an inquiry as to where she might be going on a
certain evening would be regarded as unpardonable prying.” A
“veiled look” would come into her eyes. (Indeed, how frustrating a
veiled look must be to a dramatic coach.) It is just about
legitimate to wonder if it is the same expression Marilyn will show
in
Niagara
when thinking of her adulterous lover. But then
Natasha Lytess’ first impression on meeting Marilyn is of a girl
who was vulgar, artificial, and dressed like a “trollop.” Lytess is
writing out of the bitterness of being dropped after seven years in
favor of Paula Strasberg, and has as well all the prejudices of a
much cultivated European émigré reduced to giving dramatic lessons
when once she has known and worked for Reinhardt — indeed her
studio cottage at Columbia is formidable with books and a large
photograph of the incomparable Max! No two women could seem less
compatible — Lytess is, for example, calculating about money, where
Marilyn will be generous, yet they form a team. Lytess will soon
discover Marilyn’s willingness to be serious about acting, and the
power of her ambition, but it is worth something that she first
sees Marilyn as the next thing to a whore because it is also the
way others saw her, and the news photos and cheesecake we have of
her over the next years show a young blonde who is unmistakably
tougher, more sensual in her sexual display than the later Marilyn.
It is worth reminding ourselves that if she presented herself this
way, men, and Hollywood men to the fore, would so tend to react to
her. If she is also a hint vacuous in many a photo of this period,
well many a whore has had the same vacant look, indeed part of her
vast attractiveness to the world, soon to be so evident, would come
from precisely that expression which was ready to suggest sexual
pleasure and love could be taken in separate doses, and with
separate people. The need of the high-density technological society
will soon be for less family and more inter-connection in sex.
Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human
communication, and the technological society is built on expanding
communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive
properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater
promiscuity. But we are talking of a sex queen, so let us
force-feed sociology no more. It is simpler to make the novelistic
assumption that she probably had a sex life of some promiscuity in
this period. The argument has already been advanced more than once
that a good actor can be the equal of a movie projector and a
screen; if the projector is his will and the screen his skin, a
total display of sexual energy can mean no more than that the
energy within is void, we know that, but it is finally a British
mode of acting, cold as its derivation from Coquelin. There is also
the Method, which would have the actor become what he is playing,
be possessed, be even the spirit of Priapus if an erection is
called for in the subtext of the script, so it seems likely that if
she were shy, withdrawn, nervous, and wholly insecure in many an
interview, she may have been also on some secret catlike search
through sex in these less recorded years and had many a one-night
stand while searching for experience, communication, actor’s
enrichment, and identification — a pretty way to put it. The
legends that derive from the harshest sexual gossip have her saying
to her lawyer as she signs the papers for a big contract, “Well,
that’s the last cock
I
suck.” The biographer can immediately
ask, “Which contract, which lawyer?” and indeed the same story has
been told about other actresses — one can better ask about which
Hollywood star it has not been told — but the real measure of the
broad and ugly stories about her is to be found in the huge
resentment she aroused once she began, when successful, to give
trouble at Twentieth Century-Fox. We anticipate a period still some
years away, but part of the explanation for that vast rage may have
been in the knowledge (of the most complacent cigar-smoking studio
executives) that she was a girl who once could be had — at least by
some. It is all supposition here. One can hardly stand up in
literary court with a hundred signed affidavits of one-night
stands. Let us leave it that Ana Lower died in this year, 1948,
which could certainly have kicked Marilyn loose of Norma Jean’s
last restraints, and her roommate Clarice Evans of the Studio Club
testifies that she had more dates than any other girl at the
dormitory and never spoke about them. The best evidence,
force
majeure
, is still in her photographs — she looks in these years
like the most popular blonde in the most expensive brothel in
Acapulco, and while the look is manufactured, it is easier to
assume the raw material partakes of existence than that it does not
exist, and her sex is altogether synthetic. The likelihood and the
tragedy is that these are the years when she is giving more of
herself than she will get back, and for too little, so that later
when she is in love she will be able to offer less and must demand
much more — at the least we know that she cultivates her sexual
sweetmeats in the sexlands of swamp and plague.