Marilyn: Norma Jeane (10 page)

Marilyn could also be overly grateful for small favors and kindnesses from women. Even the head of the orphanage, where she had felt abandoned and used like a servant, was remembered with lifelong gratitude for putting powder on the little girl’s face and telling her she had lovely skin—a motherly attention for which Norma Jeane was starving. Only Ana Lower, however, the elderly, childless woman whose gentle faith and loving acceptance had been lavished on Norma Jeane as a teenager, and who remained a presence in Marilyn’s life until she died in 1948, really met Marilyn’s standard for unconditional love. Marilyn never forgot or failed to praise this Aunt Ana who was almost the only member of her chosen family whom Marilyn never rejected. But later, no one, woman or man, was able to support Marilyn enough to satisfy the neediness of the past Norma Jeane.

Ethel Dougherty, the mother-in-law with whom she lived when her husband, Jim Dougherty, first joined the merchant marine, was a temporary refuge, but she expected Norma Jeane to play a wifely role for which the young girl was far from ready. Emmeline Snively, the head of her first modeling agency, was a professional mentor; but, perhaps understandably, she limited herself to that. Several women agents took risks and helped Marilyn at the beginning of her career, but women were not the most powerful figures in Hollywood. Some of the starlets who were her contemporaries might have been her friends, but Marilyn had a hard time overcoming her isolation from peers. They may have been put off by her neediness as well as the problem of competing for parts. Shelley Winters remembers the early Marilyn as a “shy, very pretty blonde girl [who] used to sit in the corner and watch us working actresses at lunch. Her name was Norma Jeane Something. She rarely spoke to us, and when she did, she would whisper. We would shout back at her, ‘What did you say?’ and that would scare her more. She always wore halter dresses one size too small and carried around a big library book like a dictionary or encyclopedia,” Even when Shelley Winters was Marilyn’s roommate for a brief period, her extreme insecurity was both an appeal for help and a burden. “When you went to the John,” Shelley explained, “she’d think you’d disappeared and she’d been left alone. She’d open up the door to see if you were still there. She was a little child.”

Natasha Lytess, Marilyn’s acting coach in her early Hollywood years, was a mentor and mother figure. She regarded Marilyn as a piece of clay to be molded, and even took her to live in her home with her young daughter, but she pinned her own professional hopes so firmly to Marilyn that her pupil’s independence didn’t seem to be her goal. According to rumors of the time as well as Lena Pepitone’s memory of a confession by Marilyn, Lytess may have loved and tried to possess her sexually as well. “Marilyn had looked up to her,” Lena explained in her own memoirs, “and when she made her advances, Marilyn simply accepted them as part of her training… Marilyn needed to be loved—by anyone who was sincere.” As Lena remembered Marilyn saying, “I let Natasha, but that was wrong. She wasn’t like a guy. You know, just have a good time and that’s that. She got really jealous about the men I saw, everything. She thought she was my husband. She was a great teacher, but that part of it ruined things for us. I got scared of her, had to get away.”

Even as a star, Marilyn appealed to the protective instincts of women as well as men. Jane Russell, Marilyn’s costar in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
described her as “a dreamy girl. She’s the kind liable to show up with one red shoe and one black shoe… I’d find out when we’d take a break at eleven that she hadn’t had any breakfast and forgot she was hungry until I reminded her. She once got her life so balled up that the studio hired a full-time secretary-maid for her. So Marilyn soon got the secretary as balled up as she was and she ended up waiting on the secretary instead of vice versa.”

This difficulty in exerting authority over her own life, much less over others, is one that many women have experienced. A lack of self-confidence, a feeling of being unsuited to power, is the emotional training that helps to keep any less-than-equal group in its place. Because Marilyn was disorganized and vulnerable in the extreme, she exaggerated a “femininity” that appealed to men’s sexuality and women’s protectiveness. Natalie Wood said of Marilyn as an actress, “When you look at Marilyn on the screen, you don’t want anything bad to happen to her. You really care that she should be all right… happy.” As Dame Sybil Thorndike, who acted with Marilyn and Laurence Olivier in
The Prince and the Showgirl,
said, “She has an innocence which is so extraordinary, whatever she plays, however brazen a hussy, it always comes out as an innocent girl. I remember Sir Laurence saying one day during the filming: ‘Look at that face—she could be five years old.’”

That very childlike quality gave her the license to upset marriages. Her focus on Yves Montand at the expense of his wife, Simone Signoret, was not the first time Marilyn had decided that a particular woman was not “worthy” of a man, and thus had gone after him with no guilt.

But Marilyn had a protective side, too. She tried to keep others, especially women who were not sexual competitors, from feeling as hurt or abandoned as she had been. When she was asked to pose for photographs in front of Betty Grable’s dressing-room door in a publicity effort to present her as the successor to Grable, she refused. Marilyn didn’t want to be hurtful by making Grable feel that she was finished. When the press tried to drum up a feud between Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as rival sex goddesses, they both remained friendly and supportive of each other. When the Mocambo, an important Los Angeles nightclub, was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn “personally called the owner,” as Ella Fitzgerald remembers gratefully, “and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him—and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status—that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night… And after that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”

She was also generous in a spontaneous way to people like Lee and Paula Strasberg, whose work she helped support, and to Lena Pepitone, on whom she pressed lavish gifts of cash, money for a warm winter coat, and holidays for Lena’s family at Arthur Miller’s Connecticut farmhouse. She gave personal gifts to hairdressers and others who worked for her, even making sure to keep Chivas Regal on hand for the cleaning woman. She played big sister to the Rostens’ daughter, Patricia, and introduced her to looking prettier with makeup, much as the head of the orphanage had once done for Norma Jeane. Indeed, Norman Rosten’s poems for his daughter impressed Marilyn so much that she modified her earlier obsession with having a son. “Thanks the most for your book of poetry—which I spent all Sunday morning in bed with,” she wrote to Rosten. “I used to think if I had ever had a child I would have wanted only a son—but after
Songs for Patricia
—I know I would have loved a little girl as much—but maybe the former feeling was only Freudian anyway…” In her will, Marilyn left money to be used for Patricia’s education.

After her marriage to Miller was over and she had returned to California, her last psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, invited Marilyn to a birthday party for his daughter, Joan, to whom Marilyn was also becoming an older sister. “Surprise for our guests: Marilyn was invited and she came!” Dr. Greenson told Norman Rosten, who recorded his story. “After an initial shock, several boys took turns dancing with her,” Greenson went on, “and soon all of them were on line. It didn’t look too promising for the local girls. And no one was dancing anymore with an especially attractive black girl who, until Marilyn arrived, had been the most popular on the floor. Marilyn noticed this, and went over to her. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you do a step I’d love to do, but don’t think I know how. Would you teach it to me?’ Then she turned to the others and called out, ‘Everybody stop for a few minutes! I’m going to learn a new step,’ Now, the point is, Marilyn knew the step, but she let this girl teach it to her. She understood the loneliness of others.”

Norman Rosten himself remembered Marilyn’s concern when she came to pick him up at a Los Angeles hotel where he was staying on a business trip and found him “chatting with an attractive girl at the switchboard. She brought up the subject later. ‘I want you to stay away from that girl,’ she said. ‘You’re happily married.’ I glowered in my Humphrey Bogart manner: ‘So what about it?’ She said, ‘So don’t go flirting with these chicks. I’ll call your wife.’ She was serious. She had this protectiveness toward women she liked.” And Marilyn liked Rosten’s wife, Hedda, a lot.

As Ella Fitzgerald concluded, “She was an unusual woman—a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”

But Marilyn was also a woman of the fifties. She took women as a group no more seriously than she took herself, and only connected with the same kind of problems that many men of that era would also take seriously: race discrimination, loneliness, poverty. Her empathy with strong women, and her willingness to develop strength in herself, was blocked by her assumptions of what a woman should be. “A woman needs to… well, to
support
a man, emotionally I mean,” Marilyn explained often, in different ways. “And a man needs to be strong. This is partly what it means to be masculine or feminine. I think it’s terribly important to feel feminine, to act feminine… Men need women to be feminine.” This belief gave her a dangerous permission to remain dependent that even her various psychiatrists may have reinforced. Apparently they did not challenge Freudian assumptions of female passivity, penis envy, and the like. “I will not discuss psychoanalysis, except to say that I believe in the Freudian interpretation,” Marilyn explained. She added, with an irony she couldn’t have known, “I hope at some future time to make a glowing report on the wonders that psychiatrists can do for you.”

When she did accept authority in women, especially on “unfeminine” matters, she seemed to do so with pleasure and surprise. Marilyn once enrolled in an art and literature course at UCLA in her despair over being uneducated. “The teacher was a woman,” she noted. “I was depressed by this at first because I didn’t think a woman could teach me anything. But in a few days I knew differently. She was one of the most exciting human beings I had ever met. She talked about the Renaissance and made it sound ten times more important than the Studio’s biggest epic. I drank in everything she said.” But when her association with such women was longer, they ran the risk of becoming mother figures who were objects of nearly impossible hunger and expectation. Paula Strasberg, the wife of acting teacher Lee Strasberg, was her on-set acting coach during Marilyn’s later movies. For better or worse, she seems to have tried to supply undiluted and even uncritical support. Olivier, who also directed
The Prince and the Showgirl,
insisted that he personally heard Paula telling Marilyn, “You haven’t yet any idea of the importance of your position in the world. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time, of any time—you name it. You can’t think of anybody, I mean—no, not even Jesus—except you’re more popular.” Olivier concluded that “Paula knew nothing; she was no actress, no director, no teacher, no adviser, except in Marilyn’s eyes. For she had one talent: she could butter Marilyn up.” If he was right, Marilyn’s need for a champion on the set may have deprived her of real teaching. Nonetheless, Dame Sybil Thorndike defended Marilyn’s talent and ability: “We need her desperately. She’s the only one of us who really knows how to act in front of a camera.”

Whatever the professional worth of the support Paula supplied, she was finally banished when she was unable to negotiate Marilyn back into her role in
Something’s Got to Give,
the last and unfinished film, from which Marilyn was humiliatingly fired.

From the beginning to the end of her life, Marilyn also had a defensive fear of women who were jealous of her: classmates who had snubbed her for being more attractive to boys, Hollywood matrons who jealously guarded their husbands, or actresses like Joan Crawford who first offered Marilyn condescending advice on deportment and clothes, then criticized her publicly as unladylike when she didn’t take it. Even Berneice Miracle, Gladys’s daughter by her first marriage and Marilyn’s lost half sister, was seen as competitive in a different way. Though Marilyn was ecstatic over meeting this unknown relative when they finally found each other in the 1950s, she also felt Berneice had had the advantage of being raised with her real father. “At least you lived with relatives,” Marilyn said to her when Berneice talked of difficulties in her childhood.

By the very end of Marilyn’s life, there were only two women she was close to and saw regularly: Patricia Newcomb, her press assistant who was also a friend and surrogate younger sister, and Jeanne Carmen, an actress neighbor to whom Marilyn confessed her troubles with insomnia, with work, with men. Even now, Patricia Newcomb continues to guard Marilyn’s privacy, and Jeanne Carmen, interviewed recently for a British television special on Marilyn’s death, still wondered with tears in her eyes whether she could have saved Marilyn’s life by visiting her that last evening.

Of the women whom Marilyn knew as a very young child, her mother’s mother died in a mental hospital; her own mother has spent most of her life institutionalized as well; Ana Lower died of a stroke (although Marilyn apparently believed she died of malnutrition); and Grace McKee died a suicide. The teachers of her earliest lessons on femaleness offered life examples that were sad or tragic.

But Marilyn was also shaped by forces that are still familiar, and that were even stronger in the 1950s.

As with most women, the decision to have or not have children was the major undercurrent of her life. It was not easy for young women of the 1950s to resist the pressure to be mothers early—not even technically easy, with no pill, no legal abortion, and no tradition of expecting men to be responsible for contraception. There is strength in the fact that Marilyn resisted that pressure, and at least tried to give birth to herself; there is sadness in her inability to have a child when that was finally possible within a marriage and within Marilyn’s own life as an actress. Would raising a child have helped to heal the wounded Norma Jeane inside? Had Marilyn been nurtured enough to nurture a child? She herself wasn’t sure. “I’ve got to make some decisions soon,” Marilyn had told Norman Rosten while she was still married to Arthur Miller. “Should I do my next picture or stay home and try to have a baby again? That’s what I want most of all, the baby, I guess, but maybe God is trying to tell me something, I mean with all my pregnancy problems. I’d probably make a kooky mother, I’d love my child to death. I want it, yet I’m scared.”