Marilyn: Norma Jeane (12 page)

What Marilyn and the real Norma Jeane inside her wanted from men was much more limited and clear, but almost as magical, as what they expected from her. She hoped to learn, not to teach; to gain seriousness not sacrifice it; to trust completely but not to be completely trustworthy; to be protected “inside” while a man took on the world “outside”; to be younger, never older; to be the child and not the parent. In short, she looked to men for the fathering—and perhaps the mothering—that she had never had. She didn’t want the mutual support of a partnership, but the unconditional, one-sided support given to a child.

Jim Dougherty was very aware of his role. When Norma Jeane was told about her illegitimacy before their marriage, she determined to get in touch with her real father—the handsome, idealized man she had known only as a photograph.

“This is Norma Jeane,” Jim remembered her saying in a tremulous voice when she finally got the courage to phone the fantasy stranger she had dreamed of all her childhood. “I’m Gladys’s daughter.”

“Then she slumped and put the receiver back,” Dougherty wrote in his memoir of their marriage. “‘Oh, honey!’ she said. ‘He hung up on me!’

“After that incident,” he explained, “I’d say we were closer than ever. I was her lover, husband, and father, the whole tamale. And when my leave had just about run out and I was getting ready to return to the ship, it was another very emotional experience for her… Each time I left it was a destructive thing that hit her extremely hard. She wanted something,
someone
that she could hold onto all the time. If we were out together, even at the movies, she had a tight grip on my arm or my hand.”

Throughout their marriage, Marilyn called her young husband “Daddy.” Jim’s trips with the merchant marine were not just the sad absences of a partner, but traumatic desertions by a parent. Without those long trips the marriage might have lasted for the reason that many once did: the wife had neither the financial nor the emotional ability to leave. But once she felt deserted, Norma Jeane turned to work in the defense plant where she was to be “discovered”; to brief affairs with other men for warmth and security, and to modeling and acting as a way of living in her fantasies for a few minutes or hours at a time. She felt emotionally separated long before the divorce papers were signed.

When Marilyn fell in love for what she described as the first time, the man was even more clearly a father figure. Freddy Karger was a musician employed by movie studios to do vocal coaching (he was Marilyn’s teacher); a divorced man raising his son (he was not only older but literally a father); a dark, handsome, compact man (like the man in the photograph); and a part of an unusually close household that included his mother, his divorced sister, his sister’s two children, and his own son, all of whom took Marilyn into their hearts (a ready-made family). Indeed, there was the added seduction of the Karger family’s home as a kind of Hollywood salon where anyone from Valentino to Jack Pickford had gathered. It contrasted painfully with Marilyn’s life as a starlet eating on as little as a dollar a day and living in a lonely furnished room. When Karger first brought Marilyn home to dinner, he said to his mother, “This is a little girl who is very lonely and broke.” Marilyn felt taken care of. She fell in love.

Unfortunately, Karger seemed to feel only some combination of sexual attraction and pity for Marilyn—not love. He was almost as rejecting as her absent father had been. She was no masochist in her relationships with men—if anything, she exacted an impossible degree of loyalty and support—but in her obsession for first love and first family combined, she accepted almost anything.

“I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me,” Marilyn wrote, “but his love didn’t seem anything like mine. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. It was sort of true. I tried to know more by reading books. I had a new friend, Natasha Lytess. She was an acting coach and a woman of deep culture. She told me what to read. I read Tolstoy and Turgenev. They excited me, and I couldn’t lay a book down till I’d finished it… But I didn’t feel my mind was improving.”

“‘You cry too easily,’ he’d say. ‘That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your breasts it’s embryonic.’ I couldn’t contradict him because I had to look up that word in a dictionary. ‘Your mind is inert,’ he’d say. ‘You never think about life. You just float through it on that pair of water wings you wear.’”

But the final insult came when Karger said he couldn’t marry her because, should anything happen to him, his son would be left with her. “It wouldn’t be right for him to be brought up by a woman like you,” Marilyn remembered Karger saying. Given the child inside herself and her special kinship with children, that was the ultimate cruelty.

“A man can’t love a woman for whom he feels contempt,” Marilyn explained. “He can’t love her if his mind is ashamed of her.” She tried to leave Freddy Karger but couldn’t stay away. (“It’s hard to do something that hurts your heart,” Marilyn wrote movingly, “especially when it’s a new heart and you think that one hurt may kill it.”) When she finally left for good, Karger, at least in Marilyn’s memory, suddenly became more interested—but it was too late. “I was torn myself and wondered, Could it work?” Karger later said. “Her ambition bothered me to a great extent. I wanted a woman who was a homebody. She might have thrown it all over for the right man.”

She did remain friends for the rest of her life with Freddy’s mother, Anne Karger, just as she later would remain close to Joe DiMaggio’s son, to Arthur Miller’s children and his father, Isadore Miller, long after she was divorced from those two husbands. One of the consistencies of her life was this habit of attaching herself to other people’s families: to Natasha Lytess and her daughter; to Lee and Paula Strasberg and their two children; to poet Norman Rosten, his wife, Hedda, and their daughter; to photographer Milton Greene and his wife, Amy; to Dr. Ralph Greenson, his wife and two children, who took her in as part of her treatment—to every friendly home that crossed her path. The life-style and relatives that came with a particular man seemed to attract her more, and to survive longer, than the man himself.

Freddy Karger added another association to the gossip value of Marilyn’s life. In spite of his professed desire for “a homebody,” he soon married Jane Wyman, newly divorced from Ronald Reagan and the mother of Maureen and Mike Reagan. Karger and Wyman divorced, remarried, and divorced again. While they were married, Marilyn wrote about Karger without naming him, saying only, “He’s married now to a movie star… and I wish him well and anybody he loves well.”

But having learned a painful lesson of unequal love, Marilyn’s next serious affair was a more paternal one. Johnny Hyde, an important agent thirty years her senior, felt much more for Marilyn than she did for him. It was Hyde who helped her get the small but crucial role in John Huston’s
The Asphalt Jungle,
who praised her talents to every important producer in Hollywood, and who made sure she was seen at all the right parties.

To Hyde, she confessed the truth of her emotional numbness after Karger, and he listened to her with kindness and understanding. “Kindness is the strangest thing to find in a lover—or in anybody,” she wrote about Hyde. “No man had ever looked on me with such kindness. He not only knew me, he knew Norma Jeane, too. He knew all the pain and all the desperate things in me. When he put his arms around me and said he loved me, I knew it was true. Nobody had ever loved me like that. I wished with all my heart that I could love him back… You might as well try to make yourself fly as to make yourself love. But I felt everything else toward Johnny Hyde, and I was always happy to be with him. It was like being with a whole family and belonging to a full set of relatives.”

They were an odd couple: a tiny, wizened man considerably shorter than the lush, youthful Marilyn. Later, she would wonder if she had let his looks and age influence her feelings, but she confounded Hollywood cynics by refusing to marry this millionaire who wanted to protect her. She accepted sex without love; at least that brought her the illusion of intimacy. But she drew the line at marriage without love. After Hyde’s death, his family tried to bar her from the funeral, and, far worse, Hollywood gossip blamed Hyde’s heart attack on his feverish work on Marilyn’s career, his constant squiring her to the right parties as well as to the right producers. It was like being accused of killing the father she desperately wanted. Marilyn’s fragile sense of self collapsed, and she attempted suicide (at twenty-four, this was, by her own account, her third attempt). Marilyn’s suicide note left her two prized possessions, a car and a fur stole, to acting coach Natasha Lytess, and it was she who saved the unconscious Marilyn by emptying her mouth of the purplish paste of sleeping pills and getting help.

This guilt about leaving or killing a father figure was also a recurrent theme in her life. After all, a father, unlike a husband and partner, must be left behind as part of a child’s inevitable growth; so to confuse the two is to build in an experience of guilt. Perhaps she had neglected Johnny Hyde during the last month of his life, but she was with him in his last days in the hospital. Seven years later, in 1957, she was still guiltily telling Lena Pepitone, “If I had married him maybe he could have lived. He used to say that I was the only one who could save his life…” In 1960, when Clark Gable died of a heart attack after costarring with Marilyn in
The Misfits,
Marilyn was publicly blamed again—this time for her lateness and drug problems that had dragged out arduous weeks of filming in the harsh Nevada desert. Those rumors following
The Misfits
ended in another suicide attempt by Marilyn, one of more than half a dozen such close calls with self-induced death, both purposeful and accidental. Some seemed to be caused by guilt and others by loneliness, some by leaving and others by being left, and at least one by her inability to bear a child, but all reached down to the buried sense of worthlessness within herself.

Only two recorded incidents betray anger at the father who left her (usually, as her feelings of worthlessness suggested, she somehow felt she deserved to be left). In talking to her longtime friend, columnist Sidney Skolsky, she implicitly admitted she had delayed shooting and kept the whole cast waiting in ways that she knew were physically hard for Gable. “Was I punishing my father?” she wondered aloud to Skolsky. “Getting even for all the years he’s kept me waiting?” Earlier, a New York friend remembered Marilyn’s shocking response to a party-game request for personal fantasies: she said she imagined disguising herself in a black wig, meeting her father, seducing him, and then asking vindictively, “How do you feel now to have a daughter that you’ve made love to?”

It’s difficult to realize that such dark thoughts could come from the sugary blonde Norman Mailer desired, with her “sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards… A sweet peach bursting before one’s eyes…” Perhaps her need to fulfill this pink-and-white American sex-goddess image was part of the reason she chose Joe DiMaggio for her first lengthy affair after Johnny Hyde, and for the first husband she chose for herself. What better way to gain the love and support she craved than to become the wife of this quiet man whom sportswriters called the “Last Hero”? What could be a better bulwark against her own depressions and insomnia than this handsome stoic who seemed to have no moods?

“I had thought I was going to meet a loud, sporty fellow,” Marilyn wrote about their first date. “Instead I found myself smiling at a reserved gentleman in a gray suit… I would have guessed he was either a steel magnate or a congressman.” DiMaggio was quiet where Hollywood men were braggers, and yet he still was the center of attention in any gathering. “You learn to be silent and smiling like that from having millions of people look at you with love and excitement while you stand alone,” Marilyn noted. When he informed her in his enigmatic way that he didn’t mind going out once with a girl, but he didn’t like the second date, and seldom lasted for a third, Marilyn took on the challenge.

The courtship lasted two years. With her usual insecurity, Marilyn continued to have affairs with other men in a way that would have infuriated DiMaggio had he known. The marriage itself lasted barely nine months. DiMaggio was a traditional husband who liked to stay home and watch sports, or go out with the boys. Once in possession of Marilyn, he resented her career, disliked the invasion of his own privacy that their marriage brought about, and was angered by both Hollywood’s sex-movie use of her body and by any immodest clothes in daily life. Even a low-necked dress could set him off, and Marilyn took to wearing Peter Pan collars and dresses that were her usual skintight style, but exposed little bare skin. When he wrote Marilyn letters, he signed them “Pa.”

“I have to be careful writing about my husband Joe DiMaggio because he winces easily,” Marilyn later wrote. “Many of the things that seem normal or even desirable to me are very annoying to him.” Among those things was Marilyn’s love of learning. She could not get Joe to read any of the books she cared about, or any books at all. She tried, in her words, “everything from Mickey Spillane to Jules Verne.” On his birthday, she gave him a medal engraved with a quote from
The Little Prince:
“True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.” DiMaggio’s mystified response was, “What the hell does that mean?” She longed to be the pupil, yet she had become the teacher of a student who wouldn’t learn.

Soon Marilyn’s marriage degenerated into a classic struggle between her career or interests and her husband’s wishes. For DiMaggio, the marriage sank into a classic conflict between his traditional values and a wife who had a world of her own. His old ulcer acted up. His attempt to isolate Marilyn in his hometown of San Francisco failed. There is some evidence that his anger may have led him to treat her with violence. Natasha Lytess remembered Marilyn phoning “day and night, sometimes in tears, complaining about the way he misused her.” Marlon Brando noted once that Marilyn’s arm was black and blue. Her friend Amy Greene was shocked to see bruises on Marilyn’s back, and Marilyn admitted reluctantly that Joe was the cause. A New York press aide remembers Marilyn phoning her in fear of an angry DiMaggio who could be heard shouting in the background. While they were staying in New York so Marilyn could film
The Seven Year Itch
DiMaggio seemed to alternate between cold distance in public and anger in private. Back in Hollywood, Marilyn announced to her director, Billy Wilder, that she and Joe were getting a divorce.