Marilyn: Norma Jeane (11 page)

Whatever the right answer for her may have been, Marilyn was never allowed to find out.

The fifties also shaped her public life. Even Jean Harlow had been allowed more toughness and self-direction in the postsuffrage freedom of the 1920s and 1930s, but Marilyn was rewarded for the childlike compliance, and the big-breasted beauty that symbolized women’s return to home, hearth, childbearing, and togetherness after World War II. Then, women who had tasted independence in the wartime work force were being encouraged to go home and let returning veterans have the jobs; to have children to make up for wartime losses; to be consumers of peacetime goods and keep the factories going. Marilyn was made into a symbol of what a postwar woman should be.

Yet inside all that artifice, there was a unique combination of vulnerability and strength, talent and desperation, fragility and a refusal to give up. If Marilyn Monroe had been easy to imitate, there would have been many more of her by now—and there are none.

Perhaps she wasn’t an actress at all. Perhaps her unique magic—especially the empathy she inspired in women—came from a different kind of talent. “She went right down into her own personal experience for everything, reached down and pulled something out of herself that was unique and extraordinary,” explained John Huston, who directed her. “She had no techniques. It was all the truth, it was only Marilyn. But it was Marilyn, plus. She found things, found things about womankind in herself.”

“I’m just mad about men. If only there was someone special.”

—Marilyn Monroe

E
VEN WHEN SHE WAS
unknown, and certainly after she became an international sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe had the good luck and the bad luck to cross paths with a surprising number of the world’s most powerful men. The fragile framework of her life was almost obscured by the heavy ornaments of their names. For those many people who have been more interested in the famous men than in Marilyn, her story often has become a voyeuristic excuse. Like a gossip column:

Marilyn’s career began when she was discovered by an Army photographer assigned “to take morale-building shots of pretty girls” in a defense plant for
Yank
and
Star and Stripes
magazines and Marilyn was a pretty eighteen-year-old worker on the assembly line. That photographer’s commanding officer, a young captain who spent World War II supervising this kind of morale-building work from his desk in a movie studio, was Ronald Reagan.

More pinup shots of Marilyn were published in magazines like
Laff
and
Titter,
and they caught the attention of Howard Hughes, the actress-collecting head of RKO Studios, as he lay in a hospital recovering from a flying accident. A gossip column report that he had “instructed an aide to sign her for pictures” encouraged a rival studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, to sign her as a starlet. It probably also led to a date between Hughes and Marilyn, from which she emerged with her face rubbed raw by his beard, and the gift of a pin that, she was surprised to learn later, was worth only five hundred dollars.

Marilyn was paid fifty dollars for the nude calendar shots she did under another name, but just one was bought for five hundred dollars once she was an actress and had been identified as the model. The purchaser was an unknown young editor named Hugh Hefner, and that nude greatly increased the appeal of the first issue of
Playboy.
(A year after her death, nude photos taken on the set during her swimming scene in
Something’s Got to Give,
her last and unfinished film, would increase
Playboy’s
sales again.) An original copy of that historic nude calendar also hung in the home of J. Edgar Hoover. Though he accumulated an FBI file on Marilyn, Hoover, whose only known companion for forty years was a male aide, proudly displayed this nude calendar to guests. Originals of that calendar continue to sell for up to two hundred dollars each. For years, a well-known pornographic movie called
Apple Knockers and the Coke Bottle
was also sold on the premise that Marilyn was the actress in it—but she was not.

Of the two most popular male idols of the 1950s, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra, she married one and had an affair with the other. Of the two most respected actors, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier, she had an affair and long-term friendship with the first and costarred with and was directed by the second. She played opposite such stars as Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, and was directed by some illustrious directors: John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Joshua Logan. She costarred and fell in love with Europe’s most popular singing star, Yves Montand. She married one of the most respected American playwrights, Arthur Miller, and acted in a film he wrote for her.

When Prince Rainier of Monaco was looking for a wife to carry on the royal line, Aristotle Onassis thought Monaco’s fading tourism might be boosted if the new princess were also glamorous and famous. He asked George Schlee, longtime consort of Greta Garbo, for suggestions. Schlee asked Gardner Cowles, scion of the publishing family and publisher of
Look
magazine, who came up with the name of Marilyn Monroe. Cowles actually hosted a dinner where Marilyn, newly divorced from Joe DiMaggio, and Schlee were guests, and Marilyn said she would be happy to meet the Prince (“Prince Reindeer,” as she jokingly called him). But plans for “Princess Marilyn” were cut short when Prince Rainier announced his engagement to Grace Kelly. Marilyn phoned Grace with friendly congratulations: “I’m so glad you’ve found a way out of this business.”

The CIA may have considered using an acquaintance between Marilyn and President Sukarno of Indonesia for foreign-policy purposes. In 1956, at Sukarno’s request, she had been invited to a diplomatic dinner during his visit to California. He was clearly taken with her. There were rumors that they saw each other afterward, though Sukarno, who liked to brag about his sexual conquests, didn’t brag about Marilyn. Later, when a coup against his regime in Indonesia seemed imminent, Marilyn tried unsuccessfully to persuade poet Norman Rosten and Arthur Miller, by then her husband, to “rescue” Sukarno by offering him a personal invitation of refuge here. “We’re letting a sweet man go down the drain,” she protested, with characteristic loyalty to anyone in trouble. “Some country this is.” In 1958, according to a CIA officer in Asia, there was a plan to bring Marilyn and Sukarno together in order to make him more favorable to the United States, but the plan was never fulfilled.

At the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, a close-up of Marilyn in
Some Like It Hot
was shown on sixteen giant movie screens simultaneously, and applauded by forty thousand Soviet viewers each day. When Premier Nikita Khrushchev made his famous visit here later that year and Marilyn was one of the stars invited to a large Hollywood luncheon for him, he seemed to seek her out. Other introductions waited while he held Marilyn’s hand and told her, “You’re a very lovely young lady.” She answered: “My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greetings. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.” Though Marilyn refused to disclose this exchange, it was overheard and published. As she was boarding the plane to New York, the reporters applauded her, as if thanking her for thawing the Cold War a little. Marilyn was very touched by that. “Khrushchev looked at me,” she later said proudly, “like a man looks at a woman.”

As part of her quest for education, Marilyn sought out writers and intellectuals: Truman Capote and Carl Sandburg were among her acquaintances. (She was “a beautiful child” to Capote. Sandburg said: “She was not the usual movie idol. There was something democratic about her. She was the type who would join in and wash up the supper dishes even if you didn’t ask her.”) As part of their quest for popularity, writers and intellectuals sought out Marilyn. Drew Pearson, the most powerful of Washington columnists, got her to write a guest column in the summer of 1954. Edward R. Murrow chose her for one of his coveted televised “Person to Person” interviews. Lee Strasberg, serious, Stanislavsky-trained guru of the Actors Studio, took her on as a pupil, ranked her talent with that of Marlon Brando, and seemed impressed by her fame. (“The greatest tragedy was that people, even my father in a way, took advantage of her,” said his son, John Strasberg. “They glommed onto her special sort of life, her special characteristics, when what she needed was love.”)

Another writer and intellectual who wanted to meet Marilyn was Norman Mailer. “One of the frustrations of his life,” Mailer explained, characteristically referring to himself in the third person in
Marilyn,
the biography of her he wrote a decade after her death, “was that he had never met her… The secret ambition, after all, had been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so well-suited to bring out the best in her as himself…” In this lengthy “psychohistory” of Marilyn, he finds significance in the fact that her name was an (imperfect) anagram of his, and describes her as “a lover of books who did not read… a giant and an emotional pygmy… a sexual oven whose fire may rarely have been lit…” What he does not say is that Marilyn did not want, to meet him. Although—or perhaps because—she had read his work, she refused several of Mailer’s efforts to set up a meeting, “formal or otherwise,” through their mutual friend, Norman Rosten. “She resisted his approach,” wrote Rosten. “She was ‘busy,’ or she ‘had nothing to say,’ or ‘he’s too tough.’” Under Rosten’s continuing pressure, she finally issued Mailer an invitation to a party—at a time when he couldn’t come—but nothing more private. Though Mailer quotes from Rosten’s slender book about Marilyn, he omits the account of his own rejection.

Marilyn was flattered by attention from serious men, but she also had standards. “Some of those bastards in Hollywood wanted me to drop Arthur, said it would ruin my career,” she explained after her public support and private financial aid with legal fees had helped Arthur Miller survive investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “They’re born cowards and want you to be like them. One reason I want to see Kennedy win is that Nixon’s associated with that whole scene.” While in Mexico, where she went in the last months of her life to buy furnishings for her new home in Los Angeles, she met Fred Vanderbilt Field, a member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family and known as “America’s foremost silver-spoon Communist,” who was living there in exile. He and his wife found her “warm, attractive, bright, and witty; curious about things, people, and ideas—also incredibly complicated… She told us of her strong feelings about civil rights, for black equality, as well as her admiration for what was being done in China, her anger at red-baiting and McCarthyism, and her hatred of J. Edgar Hoover.”

As an actress, she often objected to playing a “dumb blonde,” which she feared would also be her fate in real life, but she might have accepted the “serious actress” appeal of playing Cecily, a patient of Sigmund Freud. After all, the director of this movie was John Huston and the screenwriter was Jean-Paul Sartre, who considered Marilyn “one of the greatest actresses alive.” Ironically, Dr. Ralph Greenson, a well-known Freudian who was Marilyn’s analyst in the last months of her life, advised against it, because, he said, Freud’s daughter did not approve of the film. Otherwise, Marilyn would have been called upon to enact the psychotic fate she feared most in real life, and to play the patient of a man whose belief in female passivity may have been part of the reason she was helped so little by psychiatry.

The paths of these men in Marilyn’s life also crossed in odd ways. Robert Mitchum, Marilyn’s costar in
River of No Return,
had worked next to her first husband, Jim Dougherty, at an aircraft factory, and heard him discuss his wife, Norma Jeane. Elia Kazan, with whom Marilyn once had an affair, later directed
After the Fall,
Arthur Miller’s play that was based on his marriage to Marilyn. At a post-play party, Kazan and Miller could be heard comparing intimate notes on Marilyn while being served supper by Barbara Loden, the young actress who played the part of Marilyn and to whom Kazan was later married.

Most famous of all these famous men was Jack Kennedy, with whom Marilyn was linked both before and during his presidency, and Bobby Kennedy, with whom she was linked while he was attorney general. In the absence of the rare and unwonted witness to an affair, the evidence to most private romances is hearsay or one-sided. But Marilyn told many friends of both affairs, and was seen at parties, arriving and leaving hotels, on the beach at Malibu with Jack, and at the home of Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Law-ford with Bobby. The unanswered questions about her death, books and televisions shows on possible conspiracies, right-wing and left-wing motives for her “murder”—these have assured that Marilyn’s name will be linked with the Kennedys for all the years she is remembered. Partly because of them, there seems to be more interest in her death than in her life.

Marilyn appealed to these men who were friends and strangers, husbands and lovers, colleagues and teachers, for many different reasons: some wanted to sexually conquer her, others to sexually protect her. Some hoped to absorb her wisdom, while others were amused by her innocence; many basked in the glory of her public image, but others dreamed of keeping her at home. “She is the most womanly woman I can imagine,” Arthur Miller said before their marriage. “… Most men become more of what they are around her: a phony becomes more phony, a confused man becomes more confused, a retiring man more retiring. She’s kind of a lodestone that draws out of the male animal his essential qualities.”

Norman Mailer’s opinion was even more sweeping. She “was every man’s love affair with America,” he explained in
Marilyn.
“… The men who knew the most about love would covet her, and the classical pimples of the adolescent working his first gas pump would also pump for her… Marilyn suggested sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her.” She was a magical, misty screen on which every fantasy could be projected without discipline or penalty, because no clear image was already there.