Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (53 page)

6
. One day that February, she was leafing through an issue of
Variety
and found an advertisement taken by RCA for two of her songs from
There’s No Business Like Show Business
. Alongside the titles was her portrait in a circle, with a phonograph arm placed provocatively, like a hand, across her upper, unclothed chest. She burst out laughing.

7
. Among scores of famous actors at the Studio for various lengths of time: Anne Bancroft, Marlon Brando, Ellen Burstyn, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Sally Field, Ben Gazzara, Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Jackson, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Estelle Parsons, Sidney Poitier, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters and Joanne Woodward.

Chapter Fifteen

F
EBRUARY
–D
ECEMBER
1955

T
HE IDEA
, Lee Strasberg and Margaret Hohenberg told Marilyn, was that her confused childhood, her inability to sustain friendships, her suspicion that others wanted only to use and discard her, her obsession with pleasing others—all these need not destroy her: they might yet become part of the vocabulary and technique of a new art. As she had said,

I had teachers and people I could look up to—but nobody I could look over at. I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be somebody was to be—well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.

But there was too much pressure on her to succeed, too many goals set before her, too much business responsibility to bear. Where there should have been space and time to learn about herself—which was her reason for quitting Hollywood in the first place—now there was only urgency.

This was evident almost at once, for Marilyn became agitated, tense and unable to sleep. A doctor was summoned, she was given sedatives and barbiturates and told not to maintain quite so busy a schedule of therapy, meetings and outings for the next few weeks. Then, on February 28, 1955—just days after Marilyn had begun psychotherapy—Irving
Stein came to her suite at the Gladstone for a business meeting: they discussed the best ways to continue discussions concerning a new contract with Fox, and Marilyn said she would have to discuss everything with Joe DiMaggio. “It seemed to me,” Stein wrote in his corporate notes,

that [the] entire tone of our conference changed with Milton’s arrival. Her attention was diverted from me and directed to Milton. She scarcely looked at me and seemed reserved in her answers, as though she were editing them for Milton’s benefit. This [was] especially so in answering questions involving Joe D. . . . Conference extremely unsatisfactory from time Milton came. . . . [I] telephoned the doctor, [who] asked me to again impress on Marilyn the necessity for cutting down on her activities.

The notations are significant from several viewpoints.

First, Marilyn’s meetings with Dr. Hohenberg put into a new perspective her relationship with Milton, whom she loved, needed and respected. But sharing his therapist also put a new turn in the game, for now she had to please both the man who was supporting her and helping her to define a new career and the woman who was helping him. She was once again in a position of subordination, forced into the role of grateful child bound to please. That this conflict became intense, evoking all kinds of muddy confusions, was revealed in her agitation and sleeplessness. That the “tone of the conference changed with Milton’s arrival” suggests Marilyn also feared that he was discussing her in his sessions with Hohenberg just as she was discussing him. The further complication was the sometime presence of Joe. Fearing Milton’s resentment of this, she was “editing [her answers] for Milton’s benefit.” Dangerous weeds of suspicion were sprouting in what was to have been the new field of her career.

Second, resorting to medication, which only clouded her mind when she sought clarity, was an easy balm but complicated her therapy and disconnected her from those with whom she was to collaborate in serious matters. Margaret Hohenberg seems to have been uninformed of these drugs, although it would have been unlikely for her not to see their effects and to inquire appropriately. There is no evidence the therapist worked in consultation with one of Marilyn’s physicians (a
Dr. Shapiro) who was simply summoned by her to provide sedative tablets for a famous patient he was told was in some kind of crisis.

From this time to the end of Marilyn’s life, there would be just such a lack of communication between therapists and internists—some of them more benevolent, better qualified, less manipulative than others, but all of them acting independently. Each saw Marilyn Monroe as his or her responsibility; each had a proud, proprietary claim; each readily assumed the superior role from which Marilyn, in her quest for independence and maturity, ought to have been freed. But she was, after all, simply too valuable a patient.

Third, at the age of twenty-nine she had behind her only the many experiences of life in the business of entertainment, not much of which helped her to grow up, and all of which sent her reeling back on her appearance, her prettiness, the dedication to surface glamour.

“My problem,” she said at the time,

is that I drive myself. But I do want to be wonderful, you know? I know some people may laugh about that, but it’s true. . . . I’m trying to become an artist, and to be true, and [I] sometimes feel I’m on the verge of craziness. I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard. There are times when I think, “All I have to be is true.” But sometimes it doesn’t come so easily. I always have this secret feeling that I’m really a fake or something, a phony. . . . Joe understands this. He’d had a very difficult time when he was young, too, so he understood something about me and I understood something about him, and we based our marriage on this.

And then Marilyn added that her feelings of inadequacy sprang from the old, impossible identification of one’s best work with
perfection
—the goal set before her from the days of the Bolenders to the days of moviemaking and now, in the move to serious acting:

My one desire is to do my best, the best that I can from the moment the camera starts until it stops. That moment I want to be perfect, as perfect as I can make it. . . . Lee says I have to start with myself, and I say, “With
me?”
Well, I’m not so important! Who does he think I am, Marilyn Monroe or something?

As those last sentences indicate, she was perhaps saved from desperation not by therapy but by her extraordinary ability to cut through the anxiety with a leavening humor, a gentle self-mockery and an awareness that “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed not the deepest part of the self she sought and perceived she was becoming.

For a time, Marilyn sought relaxation in reading and museums. One afternoon in early March, she scoured shops in lower Manhattan and returned to her hotel with two sacks of books, among them Shaw’s
Letters to Ellen Terry
and
Letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell
, Richard Aldrich’s biography of his wife Gertrude Lawrence, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
and a copy of the typescript for Noël Coward’s comedy
Fallen Angels
, which was on Broadway that year with Nancy Walker and Margaret Phillips.

Continuing her interest in matters cultural, Marilyn and Joe dined with Sam Shaw and his wife several times that season, and after Marilyn mentioned her interest in poetry Sam arranged a meeting with the poet and novelist Norman Rosten and his wife, Hedda. Thus began a close friendship that lasted until her death, with Norman acting as a kind of New York cultural mentor and Hedda, eventually, as Marilyn’s Manhattan secretarial assistant. The Rostens were initially attracted to her, Norman recalled, because of her simplicity and honesty. Looking nothing like the movie star, she arrived at the Rostens’ Brooklyn home with Sam, who mumbled her name in such a way it sounded like “Marion.” Hedda asked her guest’s occupation, and when she said she was preparing for classes at the Actors Studio, Hedda asked what plays she had done.

“Oh, I’ve never been on the stage. But I have done some movies.”

“What was your movie name?”

And, as Norman Rosten remembered, “in a timid voice” came the reply: “Marilyn Monroe.” Not long after, Norman took Marilyn to a Rodin exhibit, where she was deeply moved by
The Hand of God
, a depiction of lovers emerging and embracing in the curved shelter of an enormous palm.

Yet Marilyn’s timidity had its obverse in her full awareness of the effect and meaning of her stardom. “When she came to visit us in Brooklyn Heights,” Norman Rosten said years later, “she always insisted on helping out with the dishes. She wanted very much to be
regarded as a regular person, one of the family, you might say. But she never could quite let you forget that she was a movie star.” There were, at such times, gently melodramatic sighs, unexpected withdrawals into a dreamy silence, prolonged sessions before Hedda’s mirror, adjusting makeup and letting it be known how important her appearance was to her and, presumably, to everyone present. This co-existed with another presentation, that of the scrubbed, disguised Marilyn preferring to go unrecognized as she walked the streets of Manhattan.

That spring, Milton decided that Marilyn’s status required a more elegant venue than the Gladstone Hotel. The actress Leonora Corbett, who had appeared on the London stage in the 1930s and then in the first New York production of Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
, was seeking a six-month tenancy for her one-bedroom suite on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf Towers, and a deal was hastily made. Soon the Rostens and the Shaws joined the Greenes in a champagne toast to Marilyn’s fashionable new address.

There was another reason for celebration, although one not clear to anyone but Marilyn. As it happened, Norman Rosten had been a college classmate of Arthur Miller, and quite by chance Marilyn had been reunited with the playwright through the Rostens. Since their introduction four years earlier, Miller had written the prize-winning play
The Crucible
, based on the Salem witch trials of 1692—a situation he linked with the tawdry investigations of so-called subversive activities in the 1950s. Soon to open in autumn 1955 was
A View from the Bridge
.

A year younger than Joe, Miller was to turn forty that year; Marilyn was twenty-nine. His life was in some turmoil, although this was belied by his placid manner. Like Joe, his tall, gaunt frame and apparent humorlessness gave him a certain grave authority; like Joe and Jim, he was athletic and loved the outdoor life of hunter and fisherman. But Miller also represented for Marilyn the serious theater to which she was devoting her new life.

While he admitted his somewhat faddish youthful dabbling in Communist social theory, Arthur had come to it late, after other writers (Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Ignazio Silone, among others) had abandoned mid-twentieth-century Russian Marxism as intellectually and socially sterile. Miller was much regarded in the 1950s as
the dramatic conscience of American society, for his work was plainly concerned with moral and social issues affecting families after the war. But he was no cool theorist; American playwrights tend not to be. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Robert Anderson and later David Mamet, John Guare, David Rabe and August Wilson (to name but a few) write not academic theses but works rooted in memory and feeling, plays for actors and audiences that provide affective understanding of recognizable human dilemmas.

In this regard, Arthur’s first wife was more of an intellectual and a theorist. Mary Grace Slattery was a liberal Catholic and an editor intensely interested in the politics of the thirties, forties and fifties. She provided her husband with creative stimulus as well as economic support, working during the early years of their marriage as a waitress until he was firmly established. (It has even been suggested that from the experiences of
her
father, an insurance salesman, came the inspiration for
Death of a Salesman
.)

But as he detailed later in his autobiography, the demands of Arthur’s work that year were ineluctably linked to Marilyn’s reappearance in his life, “and the resulting mixture of despair for my marriage and astonishment with [Marilyn] left little room for concentration” on preparing for forthcoming productions. Only two or three quiet suppers with the Rostens and one or two evenings alone with Marilyn were necessary for their friendship to develop into a love affair. “It was wonderful to be around her,” he said years later. “She was simply overwhelming. She had so much promise. It seemed to me that she could really be a great kind of phenomenon, a terrific artist. She was endlessly fascinating, full of original observations, [and] there wasn’t a conventional bone in her body.”

But this did not mean Joe DiMaggio was out of the picture; for perhaps the only time in her life, that spring Marilyn maintained simultaneous intimacies—with the man who had been her husband and the man who was about to be. The trick was to keep each unaware of her schedule with the other, and this required some slick negotiating.

However thrilling his new love, Miller feared that he “might be slipping into a life not my own,” which was an anxiety well founded. He knew not quite what he wanted, for while he did not wish to terminate his marriage to Mary Grace Slattery—however troubled and unsatisfying it had become—“the thought of putting Marilyn out of my
life was unbearable.” Marilyn found herself in something of a quandary, too. She was not at all ready to give up a grand passion simply because the man was married. At the same time, she was reevaluating everything in her past, and although Arthur was physically attractive, intellectually stimulating and parentally tender, and although she desired him perhaps more completely than any man before, Marilyn had no intention of encouraging a divorce.