Marilyn: A Biography (15 page)

Now when Twentieth learns from her lips that
she has, yes, posed in the nude, a novelist has a right to invent
the following dialogue. “Did you spread your legs?” asks a studio
executive.

“No.”

“Is your asshole showing?”

“Certainly not.”

“Any animals in it with you?”

“I’m alone. It’s just a
nude
.”

“You are going to deny you ever took those
pictures. Some other blonde did the job. Somebody who has the
misfortune to look like you.”

She asks Sidney Skolsky for advice. A gossip
columnist is a master plumber. He can gauge the likelihood of
future news leaks. The story can no longer be contained, must be
his judgment. So she tells the truth to Aline Mosby, which is to
say she passes on the living factoidal truth: “In 1949 she was just
another scared young blonde struggling to find fame in the magic
city and all alone . . . She posed, stretched out on crumpled red
velvet, for the artistic photo three years ago, because ‘I was
broke and needed the money!’”

Clash by Night
does superb business
and her name gets the most prominent billing on the marquee
(although she has only the fourth lead). No storm breaks. In 1951 a
movie star could hardly be discovered in the nude (for money) and
survive, but she is an orphan in the land of Christ. Within a short
time, studio executives who have been screaming at her are signing
requisitions for Publicity to buy calendars and give them to the
press.

She is clear. She is a phenomenon. There are
mysterious properties to publicity. “Quantity changes quality,”
Engels once wrote, by way of indicating that one apple is a taste
and one hundred crates of apples is the beginning of a business.
(Of course, a million crates is one finger of a conglomerate with
insurance, the Mafia, ski equipment, and the space industry –
farewell to Engels!) We can leave it that a starlet in the lower
depths of an option contract who receives more publicity than any
star has performed some equivalent of breaking through the sound
barrier. The influence of controls is reversed. When the news
breaks two months later that she has only pretended to be an orphan
(and in fact has a mother who is very much alive in a mental
hospital and is even a charity ward of the state while Marilyn is
making $750 a week), the tone of the new exposure, arranged by the
studio as an exclusive to Erskine Johnson, the Hollywood
correspondent, is hardly savage:

Marilyn Monroe – Hollywood’s confessin’
glamour doll who made recent headlines with the admission that she
was a nude calendar cutie – confessed again today.

Highly publicized by Hollywood press agents
as an orphan waif who never knew her parents, Marilyn admitted she
is the daughter of a one-time RKO studio film cutter, Gladys Baker,
and said, “I am helping her and want to continue to help her when
she needs me.”

Said Hollywood’s new glamour queen:
“Unbeknown to me as a child, my mother spent many years as an
invalid in a state hospital. . . . I haven’t known my mother
intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her, I
have contacted her.”

And the gap in her charitable instincts is
covered. She has Gladys moved from a state institution to a private
nursing home. Marilyn’s business manager, Inez Melson, is made her
guardian.

In the moral arithmetic of publicity, to be
an orphan is a plus, while girls indifferent to their mothers’
welfare obviously lose points. It is hard to think of a story which
could damage her more. Yet she gets out free. She has already burst
out of all standard frames of reference for publicity. Quantity
changes quality! She is now the secret nude of America’s dream life
– secret precisely because it has been so public! Our heroine has
been converted from some half-clear piece of cheesecake on the hazy
screen of American newspapers (where focus always shifts) to
another kind of embodiment altogether, an intimate, real as one’s
parents, one’s family, one’s enemies, sweethearts and friends. She
is now part of that core of psychological substance out of which
one concocts one’s life judgments. (George Wallace is such a figure
today.) Marilyn had become a protagonist in the great American soap
opera. Life is happy for her one hour, tragic the next; she can now
appear innocent or selfish, wronged or wrongdoer — it no longer
matters. She has broken through the great barrier of publicity —
overblown attention — and is now
interesting
; she is a
character out there in the national life, alive, expected, even
encouraged, to change each week. The spirit of soap opera, like the
spirit of American optimism, is renewal; God give us a new role
each week to watch, but a role that fits the old one. Because that,
Gawd, is how we learn!

What deeper or more wonderful motivation can
there be to her affair and marriage with DiMaggio? It will occupy
her center of publicity for the next three years, and she will meet
him after the story of the nude calendar has hit the wire services.
Or is it just before? As with everything else about her, there is a
double image to most of the facts.

She has a strange relationship with DiMaggio
— strange because it cannot possibly be as mundane as she will
later present it — and it is virtually undocumented, although
choking in factoids. DiMaggio never gives much to an interview, and
her version of him, when married to Miller, is spiteful, even
reminiscent of the way she has already dismissed Dougherty. Yet
DiMaggio will always be there when she needs him, and is probably
her closest friend in the months before she dies. Certainly he is
the first of the bereaved at her funeral. The enigma that remains
is of their sex life. Was it a marriage whose good humor depended
on the speed with which they could make love one more time, and lie
around in the intervals suffering every boredom of two people who
had no cheerful insight into the workings of the other’s mind; or
was it a failure of tenderness (and soon a war of egos monumentally
spoiled) between an Italian man and an Irish girl (by way of Hogan)
who had been built to mate with one another, and would therefore
have been able to thrive in any working-class world where marriage
was designed for cohabitation rather than companionship.

These speculations belong to gossip unless we
recognize that if it has not been sexual attraction, or some
species of natural suitability, that brings them together, then her
motivation is more than a little suspicious, and even suggests she
has grown ruthless in the years since Ana Lower’s death. While
accounts of their first date excite a factoidal rhetoric with only
the smallest resonance of reality – “There’s a blue polka dot
exactly in the middle of your tie knot. Did it take you long to fix
it like that?” she is supposed to say after a silent dinner, while
he is supposed to blush in silence and shake his head – still the
tempo of their subsequent meetings takes on acceleration in
proportion to her recognition of his fame. She knows nothing about
ballplayers when she meets him — she might as well be the belle of
Puerto Rico being introduced to Stein Eriksen — she is merely
relieved, she confesses, that he did not have “slick black hair and
wear flashy clothes.” Instead he was “conservative, like a bank
vice-president or something.” (To someone as protean as herself,
dignity would be indispensable in a man, a node of reference by
which to measure her own spectrum of movie star manners, good and
bad.) It is only over the next few weeks that she comes to learn he
has been the greatest baseball player of his time, the largest
legend in New York since Babe Ruth. With her capacity to measure
status — she has passed already in her life from microcosmos of the
social world into macrocosmos, there is not too much a headwaiter
need do before she can detect by the light in his eye that he is
feeling the unique and luminous spinelessness of a peasant before a
king. She is on a date with an American king — her first. (The
others have been merely Hollywood kings.)

On the movie sets, as items appear in the
gossip columns about whom she is dating, the stagehands and grips
are more cordial than ever before. Proud and scornful hierarchy of
the working class, tough, cynical, contemptuous and skilled, they
have never as a collective group been remotely as friendly before.
That opens her domain. She has already risen from freak to secret
nude of the national dreamlife. Now she can rise again, be queen of
the working class. For DiMaggio’s wife is beyond reproach. When he
comes to visit her on the set of
Monkey Business
, a picture
is taken of Cary Grant and himself with Marilyn between. When the
photo is printed in the papers, Cary has been cut out of the
photograph. The publicity department at Twentieth is announcing the
public romance of the decade. Down in Washington, ambitious young
men like Jack Kennedy are gnashing their teeth. “Why is it,” they
will never be heard to cry aloud, “that hard-working young Senators
get less national attention than movie starlets?”

Within the studio, there must be grudging
recognition at last that they have some sort of genius on their
hands. She is not only going to survive her own millions of
calendar nudes but will sell tickets to her films right off those
barber shop and barroom walls. Every time a man buys gas at a
filling station and goes in to wash his hands, her torso will be up
next to the men’s room door. Soon the story of her mother will come
out and fail to hurt her — the public is too interested in the
progress of romance with DiMaggio to wish to lose her. And she
plays the situation with all the aplomb of a New York Yankee. For
the longest period she will refuse to admit they are more than
“friends.” No denial is more calculated to keep a rumor alive.
There is even the possibility that her interest in DiMaggio begins
right out of her need to play counterpoint in public relations.
Mosby’s wire-service story on the nude calendar has gone out on
March 13, 1952, and Zolotow has her witnessing her first baseball
game on March 17 when DiMaggio is playing in some special
exhibition (since he is now retired), an event which would
therefore have to take place almost immediately after their first
meeting, although Guiles, whose chronology is more dependable, does
not have them introduced until April. Either way, the supposition
reinforces itself that she certainly had a good practical motive
for continuing to see DiMaggio.

* * *

His relation to her is obviously simpler to
comprehend. If it is necessary to speak of her varieties of beauty,
then a thousand photographs are not worth a word. Doubtless she is,
when alone with him, nothing less than the metamorphosis of a woman
in one night, tough in one hour and sensitive in another (at the
least!), but she has also the quality she will never lose, never
altogether, a species of vulnerability that all who love her will
try to describe, a stillness in the center of her mood, an animal’s
calm at the heart of shyness, as if her fate is trapped like a
tethered deer. At her best, she has to be utterly unlike other
women to him, eminently more in need of protection, for she is so
simple as to live without a psychic skin.

If at this point her personality seems to
have bubbled up into the effervescence of a style that will present
her in one paragraph as wholly calculating only to offer next a
lyric to her helplessness (of which the best glimpses have been
caught in old newsreels), the answer is both, yes, both are true,
and always both, she is the whole and double soul of every human
alive. It is, if we would search for a model, as if an ambitious
and sexual woman might not only be analogous in her particular ego
and unconscious life to Madame Bovary, let us say, but rather is a
woman with two personalities, each as complex and inconsistent as
an individual. This woman, then, is better seen as Madame Bovary
and Nana all in one, both in one, each with her own separate
unconscious. Of course, that is a personality which is not
seriously divided. One unconscious could almost serve for Nana and
Bovary both. It is when Nana and Joan of Arc exist in the same
flesh, or Boris Karloff and Bing Crosby, that the abysses of
insanity are under the fog at every turn. And there is Monroe with
pictures of Eleonora Duse and Abraham Lincoln on her wall, double
Monroe, one hard and calculating computer of a cold and ambitious
cunt (no other English word is near) and that other tender animal,
an angel, a doe at large in blonde and lovely human form. Anyone
else, man or woman, who contained such opposite personalities
within his body would be ferociously mad. It is her transcendence
of these opposites into a movie star that is her triumph (even as
the work she does will eventually be our pleasure), but how
transcendent must be her need for a man ready to offer devotion and
services to
both
the angel and the computer. How large a
requirement for DiMaggio to fill. The retired hero of early high
purpose too early fulfilled, he is now a legend without purpose.
Yet he is not forty and adulation is open to him from everyone. How
natural to look for a love where he can serve.

Of course, he is a hint too vain for the
prescription. Somewhat further along in their affair, when Marilyn
is making
Niagara
and is high on the elation that she has
been given the lead in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, they spend
a few days together in New York. Zolotow gives a good description
of their social differences:

At Shor’s, Joe’s friends sat with them and
talked about the 1952 pennant races. She was bored. She wanted to
see the new plays. She wanted to go to the Metropolitan Museum and
to visit the hot jazz spots, like Eddie Condon’s. Joe didn’t care
for theatre, music, art. His world was the world of sports, his
cronies were sports-loving men like George Solotaire, men who lived
in a closed masculine world of gin rummy, sports, betting, money
talk, inside jokes.