Marilyn: A Biography (35 page)

There seems next to nothing of such evidence,
and we have all the counterproof of Marilyn’s instability, and all
the real likelihood that she had taken too many barbiturates and
was labored over for hours by frantic medicos trying to save her
life, which certainly accounts more simply for many of the curious
discrepancies. (They might well, for instance, have removed her
brassiere in order to give artificial respiration. As simply, to
hide the gap in time, Mrs. Murray could have indulged in
window-breaking and drape-pulling.) Of course, it is also possible
a stomach pump was used to remove evidence of what did kill her.
Yet to press further upon the small likelihood of murder is to
stand in danger of a worse loss. In all this discussion of the
details of her dying, we have lost the pain of her death. Marilyn
is gone. She has slipped away from us over the edge of the horizon
of the last pill. No force from outside, nor any pain, has finally
proved stronger than her power to weigh down upon herself. If she
has possibly been strangled once, then suffocated again in the life
of the orphanage, and lived to be stifled by the studio and choked
by the rages of marriage, she has kept in reaction a total control
over her life, which is perhaps to say that she chooses to be in
control of her death, and out there somewhere in the attractions of
that eternity she has heard singing in her ears from childhood, she
takes the leap to leave the pain of one deadened soul for the hope
of life in another, she says good-bye to that world she conquered
and could not use. We will never know if that is how she went. She
could as easily have blundered past the last border, blubbering in
the last corner of her heart, and no voice she knew to reply. She
came to us in all her mother’s doubt, and leaves in mystery.

* * *

The police will soon arrive. One of the cops
knows Jim Dougherty and phones to give the news. Dougherty looks at
his wife — it is four in the morning, they have been married for
sixteen years, and Marilyn as a subject of conversation is
altogether taboo. Now Dougherty says, “Say a prayer for Norma Jean.
She’s dead.”

Across Los Angeles, Ralph Roberts wakes up at
3 a.m. with the unendurable impression that Marilyn is gone. A girl
is sleeping beside him. Roberts has attempted to speak to Marilyn
that afternoon, and Greenson has answered the phone. Trying to
quiet himself out of the intolerable sense of displacement Greenson
has given to his relation with Marilyn, Roberts has gone out
drinking that night, has picked up the girl, taken her home, and
finally gone to sleep beside her. Now he is in the unbearable
condition of finding himself obsessed by the presence of one woman
while lying next to another, and the pain of this hour may be
engraved forever on his psyche since there is almost never a night
that passes in the next ten years when he does not awaken again at
three in the morning.

DiMaggio will take care of the funeral, and
invites no Sinatras, no Lawfords, no Kennedys.

Lee Strasberg will give the eulogy:

Others were as physically beautiful as she
was, but there was obviously something more in her, something that
people saw and recognized in her performances and with which they
identified. She had a luminous quality — a combination of
wistfulness, radiance, yearning — that set her apart and yet made
everyone wish to be part of it, to share in the childish naïveté
which was at once so shy and yet so vibrant.

Arthur Miller will not come. He will give his
eulogy in
After the Fall
. It will prove one more misery to
Miller, for he will be accused of cheapening her image. Miller’s
only crime is to have failed to have foreseen that no production
can offer the presence of Marilyn. If she had been alive, it might
have been her greatest role and Miller’s greatest play, for in the
pain of that relation, he had come his own distance from the man
who puffed on his pipe while looking as monumental as the master of
all Meerschaum.

* * *

Now she is dead, and how do we say
good-bye?

In that happy summer of 1955, when she was
first going with Miller and the future might even be sweet, she was
sitting once on the beach with Norman Rosten when teen-agers in
premature appreciation of films by Bergman not yet made came up to
surround her,

first in wide circles around our party, then
moving in closer, and finally about fifty worshipers converged on
the umbrella under which she demurely sat.

“
Hey, Marilyn, I saw all your
movies!”

“
You’re my favorite!”

“
You look terrific!”

“
Marilyn, let me kiss you!”

She shook their hands. They brought stones
for her to autograph. The boys circled her tightly, the girls
screamed, and a kind of panic set in. They reached for her with
wild little cries, touching her, uttering pleas, begging favors
while she laughed, fended them off. . . . Finally, the only escape
was the water, and with an apprehensive wave, she started swimming.
With a barrage of cheers, fifty tanned young bodies plunged in
after her and gave chase. . . .

“
Hey,” she called to me faintly, “get me
out of here!”

I managed to plow through to her side,
shouting at the kids, “Beat it, get moving, go on home!” I struck
at them blindly, furiously, and seizing her by the arm, started
swimming out into deeper water. I threatened the hardier ones who
followed. They watched, grinning, as we plodded on.

Suddenly Marilyn stopped, “I can’t swim any
more,” she pleaded.

“
What do you mean, you can’t?”

“
I’m not a good swimmer even when I’m
good,” she said. . . .

She was breathing hard, her chin just above
water. “Listen,” I said. “Can you float? Try it. Take a deep
breath, and lean back.”

She tried, but swallowed water and began to
cough. I circled her, puffing a bit, and attempted to get her to
lie back on the water. “Boy, what a way to go!” she gasped,
clutching me. . . .

How else would we be saved if not by a
Hollywood ending? The roar of a motorboat on the sound track. Real
boat on wide-screen water. This crew-cut kid snaked up alongside,
idled the motor. We both grabbed the side. I climbed into the boat,
and there was the problem of hauling M. over the side. She . . .
was not then or had she ever been a thin slip of a girl. I finally
pulled her up, and she fell heavily into the boat.

I looked at her as she lay exhausted, her
legs curled up, her pink toes gleaming in the sun. The boy pilot
also regarded her . . . forgetting the wheel and executing two
tight circles before I realized what was happening. I shouted at
him, and she said, “Don’t be nervous. It’s a wonderful
weekend!”

Yes. Maybe it was more wonderful than Rosten
knew. For if she had begun to find a little happiness with Miller,
she must with her natural fear of happiness have also been living
in fear of some unnamed disaster to come. Now it seemed to have
come, and she was still alive. She was going to remain alive and
happy until Mr. Dread was at the door again. Once, across the
years, she sent Rosten a postcard with a color photograph of an
American Airlines jet in the sky, and on the back, in the space for
message, she put down, “Guess where I am? Love, Marilyn.”

Rosten wrote: “I have my own idea but am
keeping quiet about it.” Let us not hope for heaven so quickly. Let
her be rather in one place and not scattered in pieces across the
firmament; let us hope her mighty soul and the mouse of her little
one are both recovering their proportions in some fair and gracious
home, and she will soon return to us from retirement. It is the
devil of her humor and the curse of our land that she will come
back speaking Chinese. Goodbye, Norma Jean. Au revoir, Marilyn.
When you happen on Bobby and Jack, give the wink. And if there’s a
wish, pay your visit to Mr. Dickens. For he, like many another
literary man, is bound to adore you, fatherless child.

The writer contracted for a preface and
discovered after reading Fred Lawrence Guiles’ book
Norma
Jean
that he wished to do a biography. The wish came, however,
almost too late. In a polluted and nihilistic world, one clings to
professionalism, so the work was done with the private injunction
to finish a text in the allotted time, even though the preface
crept up to forty thousand, fifty-five thousand, seventy, and
finally ninety thousand words. It is a biography now, a
novel
biography as described, indeed a species of novel, for
a formal biography can probably not be written in less than two
years since it can take that long to collect the facts — princes
have to be wooed, and close friends of the subject disabused of
paranoia. For a work done in greater haste, one does better to
claim that no new errors of fact have been willingly introduced,
and that other than recapitulating the errors of former writers,
one has also brought along a few of their investigations. So, once
again, it is right to make acknowledgment to Maurice Zolotow for
the bright pictures he paints in
Marilyn Monroe
(Harcourt
Brace, 1960) when he is at his best, and to Fred Lawrence Guiles
for the thousands of details his work,
Norma Jean
(McGraw-Hill, 1969) provides. Indeed, the facts of this book have
been based in the main on his book. Obviously, one must think
Guiles is accurate for the most part (a few small errors have been
discovered), but indeed one has to hope so — our own chronology
rests on his. Acknowledgment of a greater order is, however,
certainly due. For one could never have undertaken this biography
if
Norma Jean
did not exist, and any reader who has become
interested in Monroe’s life on the basis of reading my book is well
advised to go next, and with considerable reward, to Guiles’
devoted study. Hundreds of episodes and interesting details await
him.

Some other books need hardly be mentioned.
Ben Hecht’s opus printed weekly in the
Empire News
of London
from May 9 to August 1, 1954, caters to British journalism at its
worst, and that is equal to making sauce flambé for decayed fish.
Yet these pieces offer insight to future students of Monroe, since
she has had to provide Hecht with some of the flavor of those
flaming factoids, and so gives us an insight into herself at her
worst. (A warden of spiritual economy could even claim that the
intake of her sleeping pills may have been a material counterweight
to the poisons of publicity she had helped to promote.)

Books by Sidney Skolsky,
Marilyn
(New
York, 1954), by Pete Martin,
Will Acting Spoil Marilyn
Monroe?
(New York, 1956), and by Joe Franklin and Laurie
Palmer,
The Marilyn Monroe Story
(New York, 1953), were out
of print or not available, and therefore never used.
The Story
of The Misfits
by James Goode (Bobbs-Merrill, 1963) had
exhaustive minutiae on details of making the film, but a paucity of
insight. Edward Charles Wagenknecht’s anthology,
Marilyn, A
Composite View
(Chilton Book Co., 1969) proved an uxorious
selection perhaps too much devoted to her image to serve it
(although the quotation from Diana Trilling was found in those
pages). A comprehensive listing of all of Marilyn’s films with
photographs, cast lists, credits, reviews, and an introduction by
Mark Harris is found in
The Films of Marilyn Monroe
, edited
by Michael Conway and Mark Ricci with a tribute by Lee Strasberg
(The Citadel Press, 1964). It is a useful and amusing book. Then
Marilyn, The Tragic Venus
, by Edwin P. Hoyt (Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, 1965) was discovered only after this text was locked in
page proofs. That work would have provided a few interesting lights
on what proves to be, according to Hoyt, a bona fide affair with
Joe Schenck. (This is lately and obliquely confirmed by a story an
agent told Larry Schiller. George Seaton, then a young producer
wishing to interview Marilyn for a possible bit in a film — the
year is 1947 — asked her to come see him at three o’clock. Marilyn
said, “I can’t come to your office at three o’clock because every
day at three o’clock I go to Mr. Schenck’s office. But don’t worry,
I’m always done with Mr. Schenck by three twenty. I’ll be at your
office at three twenty.”) Since Hoyt interviewed many publicity
people in the middle echelons of several studios,
The Tragic
Venus
also offers considerable, if insubstantial, material on
her long affair with Frank Sinatra, which was given little emphasis
in my work, but would certainly have been developed further if the
material had been then available. (Indeed, gossip in favor of
Sinatra went so far as to suggest Marilyn played at having an
affair with Bobby Kennedy in order to make Sinatra jealous — for he
was then engaged to Juliet Prowse.) Other gossip, however, would
suggest that Marilyn and Sinatra merely found each other useful,
even helpful, for each other’s careers, and so delighted in going
out together, and receiving publicity together.

Finally, there is a book
Marilyn — An
Untold Story
by Norman Rosten, which will be published by New
American Library about the time this work appears, and one awaits
it with real interest. The fine and intimate accounts of Marilyn as
a house guest, and Marilyn near drowning, have been taken from a
few pages of
An Untold Story
which were seen in
manuscript.

Another source, offered through the
generosity of Pat Newcomb, was the opportunity to hear Marilyn
talking casually on tape, no small bonus.

There were interviews in modest depth with
Miss Newcomb, Elia Kazan, Eli Wallach, Lee Strasberg, Arthur
Miller, Milton and Amy Greene, André de Dienes, Hedda and Norman
Rosten, Marjorie Stengel, Ralph Roberts, Gardner Cowles, and a
phone conversation with Jim Dougherty to verify the accuracy of
Guiles’ account of his marriage to Marilyn. (Dougherty was much
impressed with that accuracy.) There were also conversations with
people who wished to remain anonymous. That another fifty
interviews could have been undertaken in Hollywood with profit is
indisputable, but the pressure of time made such a trip impossible.
Besides, it was the author’s prejudice that a study of Marilyn’s
movies might offer more penetration into her early working years in
film than a series of interviews with movie people who had
considered her something of a joke while alive and now in
compensation might be pious. So thanks may be offered instead to
Harold Lager of Twentieth Century-Fox, Elizabeth Marchese of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Michael Mindlin of Warner Brothers, Jason
Squire and David Chasman of United Artists, Stanley Schneider of
Columbia Pictures, Douglas Patterson of Films, Inc., and Judith
Riven of Grosset & Dunlap for their cooperation in making
available twenty-four of her thirty films. It is the author’s hope
that under these chosen circumstances he has been able to give a
portrait of Marilyn which is reasonable in its proportions, and
interesting in its estimations, even if it can hardly be depended
upon to have contributed much original material to the facts.