Read Marilyn: Norma Jeane Online

Authors: Gloria Steinem

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Actors & Entertainers, #Specific Groups, #Women, #Humor & Entertainment, #Movies, #Biographies, #History & Criticism, #Actors & Actresses, #Movies & Video

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In spite of jokes about Marilyn’s acting talent, plus her own fear of performing, Strasberg was impressed with her ability as a serious dramatic actress. He took her on as a private student and ranked her with Marlon Brando as one of his most talented pupils. Even skeptical peers at Actors Studio applauded her scenes as Anna in Eugene O’Neill’s
Anna Christie;
and, as Kim Stanley remembered, “It was the first time I’d ever heard applause there.”

In spite of Hollywood’s conviction that Marilyn wasn’t smart enough to manage her own career, she astounded the film industry by negotiating as “Marilyn Monroe Productions” a new contract with Twentieth Century-Fox that vastly increased her profit and control. She then chose two films far above grade-B level:
Bus Stop,
with Joshua Logan directing this screen adaptation of a play by William Inge, and
The Prince and the Showgirl,
with Laurence Olivier as her director and costar.

In spite of her reputation for sex, not seriousness, Marilyn chose to marry the playwright Arthur Miller, whose work memorialized ordinary, working people. Some of her Hollywood advisers warned her that Miller’s well-publicized troubles with the House Committee on Un-American Activities might damage her career, but she stood by him and helped to pay the legal costs of his defense.

Indeed, on the East Coast, Marilyn emerged a little from the shell of isolation created first by her childhood and then by Hollywood’s artifice. She experienced more of real life in New York and Miller’s Connecticut farmhouse, and even took some interest in politics in the next few years. “Marilyn was passionate about equal rights, rights for blacks, rights for the poor,” remembered one friend. “She identified strongly with the workers, and she always felt they were her people.” In 1960, she became one of the sponsors of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. When an interviewer asked for her dreams or nightmares, she said, “My nightmare is the H-bomb. What’s yours?” Though she still rarely read newspapers, and seemed to fear the world as a distant and mysterious place, she made an effort to be informed. When she did, her political instincts were interesting. She wrote this note to Lester Markel, then Sunday Editor of
The New York Times:

Lester dear,

… About our political conversation the other day: I take it back that there isn’t
anybody.
What about Rockefeller? First of all he is a Republican like the New York Times, and secondly, and most interesting, he’s more liberal than many of the Democrats. Maybe he could be developed? At this time, however, Humphrey might be the only one. But who knows since it’s rather hard to find out anything about him. (I have no particular paper in mind!) Of course, Stevenson might have made it if he had been able to talk to people instead of professors. Of course, there hasn’t been anyone like Nixon before because the rest of them at least had souls! Ideally, Justice William Douglas would be the best President, but he has been divorced so he couldn’t make it—but I’ve got an idea—how about Douglas for President and Kennedy for Vice-President, then the Catholics who wouldn’t have voted for Douglas would vote because of Kennedy so it wouldn’t matter if he
is
so divorced. Then Stevenson could be Secretary of State! …

Love and kisses, Marilyn

P.S. Slogans for the late ’60s:

“Nix on Nixon”

“Over the hump with Humphrey(?)”

“Stymied with Symington”

“Back to Boston by Xmas—Kennedy”

In
Goddess,
Anthony Summers also reports that Marilyn called one of her press aides to ask why—only weeks after the CIA’s U-2 plane had been shot down by the Soviets—a second story about an American plane trespassing Soviet airspace was treated as minor news. When the aide said perhaps this plane was not spying but doing an oceanic survey, as Washington insisted, the usually patriotic Marilyn said skeptically, “I don’t know… I don’t trust us.”

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1958, Marilyn had ended a nearly two-year hiatus in filmmaking by playing Sugar Kane in Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot.
Marilyn was hesitant about making a new film when she hoped to have a baby and also resisted playing a blonde so out of it that she couldn’t tell Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag from real women. As she told Lena Pepitone, “I’ve been dumb, but not that dumb.” But she took the role partly because Arthur Miller recommended it, and partly because Miller pointed out that they needed the money. It was more of a commercial success than either of the two previous films she had chosen.

In 1960, Marilyn made
Let’s Make Love
with Yves Montand, a film notable mainly for the affair between its costars. Though Arthur Miller continued working on the script of
The Misfits
for his wife, the shaky marriage had essentially dissolved by the time that final film of hers was made. Marilyn’s insecurity made her mistrust everyone. She had been furious at Billy Wilder for giving out public stories about her private lateness and difficulty in working on
Some Like It Hot;
at Yves Montand for treating casually in person and in print an affair she had hoped would replace her disintegrating marriage to Miller; and at Miller himself for his inability to make her feel secure and for creating a role she felt was one more variation on a dumb blonde.

Lena Pepitone described Marilyn’s unhappiness with that role in
Misfits,
particularly the way she persuades Clark Gable and his friends not to sell for killing the wild horses they have just rounded up. “I convince them by throwing a fit, not by explaining anything. So I have a fit. A screaming crazy fit. And to think,
Arthur
did this to me… If that’s what he thinks of me, well, then I’m not for him and he’s not for me.” Fairly or not, she felt used one more time, and perhaps she was. Renee Taylor, who along with Marilyn was one of Lee Strasberg’s private students, was impressed with Marilyn’s work and called her “a real actress. Not once did I see in a movie—except perhaps
Bus Stop
—the range and talent she demonstrated in class no matter how nervous she was.” Taylor recalls her drenched in sweat, so terrified was she of performing live.

Now Marilyn had come to mistrust not only her talent but her own body. It had not produced the child she wanted so badly during her marriage to Arthur Miller. It was beginning to age. She began to fear that she could neither perform roles that didn’t depend on her body nor continue to do well in those that did.

In her depression, even money gained a new and symbolic importance. Elizabeth Taylor was getting one million dollars for
Cleopatra
from the same studio that paid Marilyn only $100,000 a picture. She raged about that. In
Something’s Got to Give,
a dubious sex comedy that was a price of her return to Hollywood, she wrongly suspected competition from Cyd Charisse, even convincing herself that Charisse was lightening her hair in order to upstage Marilyn. When assured her costar would have darker hair, not blonde, Marilyn said suspiciously, “Her
unconscious
wants it blonde.” By now, she told a friend that she also mistrusted Lee Strasberg for his failure to deliver a television project they had planned, and even for his encouragement of her dreams of being a serious actress. After all, her sex films had been far more financially successful than her more serious ones. Perhaps she should have stuck with that security.

Most of all, Marilyn could not overcome the isolation that had been her norm since childhood. Years before, during filming
of All About Eve,
Joe Mankiewicz had observed her on that busy set and on location, eating dinner alone, drinking alone, refusing invitations out of insecurity. “She was not a loner,” Mankiewicz observed. “She was just plain
alone
.”

She still was. Because she hadn’t experienced certainty as a child, she both craved it and seemed unable to create it.

In her attempts to find support and affection, she returned to some echo of the days when, according to her confession to Lena Pepitone, she’d had an early and naive affair with acting coach Natasha Lytess. “I’d let any guy, or girl, do what they wanted if I thought they were my friend.” She went from a public affair with Frank Sinatra to private ones with the still-loyal Joe DiMaggio, with a Mexican screenwriter, perhaps even with her New York masseur and her chauffeur, probably also with men in public life—but none could shore up her fragile sense of self or deliver the security she was missing.

And now, for the first time, even her work was gone. She had been fired from and was trying hard to get rehired for a sex comedy, the very kind of movie she once tried to put behind her. Along with many published rumors that she had become simply unemployable, there were others almost equally hurtful once her last movie was shut down. Norman Rosten, a New York poet who welcomed Marilyn into his family and remained her friend for the last seven years of her life, wrote about “rumors of her coworkers bitterly blaming Marilyn for taking away their jobs. This reaction deeply wounded her,” Rosten explained. “She had always felt a strong kinship with working people, from the taxi driver to the grip man on the set; she felt they were her friends, and now they were publicly accusing her of betraying them.”

As her interview with George Barris made clear, she was fighting against such “lies” and the media that was publishing them. “Those whom she trusted, the media people who always defended her, were ready to dethrone her,” Norman Rosten explained. “Marilyn was down, the count had begun.”

In the weeks after her death, there were many public testimonies to her talent and magic. Even Darryl Zanuck, her former boss at Twentieth Century-Fox who had been skeptical of her talents, said, “Nobody discovered her; she earned her own way to stardom.”

If Marilyn had been able to write the script, she would have thanked ordinary moviegoers. “I want to say that the people—if I am a star—the people made me a star,” she said many times in many ways, “no studio, no person, but the people did.”

Among Women

“Nobody’s ever gonna marry me now, Lena. What good am I? I can’t have kids. I can’t cook. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?”

“Millions of men,” I answered.

“Yeah, but who would love me? Who?”

—conversation between Marilyn Monroe and Lena Pepitone

I
N 1957, DALIA LEEDS, A
young Israeli woman who had married an American and moved to New York, began taking her newborn son for an outing each day near her apartment. On a bench in the small park at the end of East Fifty-seventh Street, she often noticed a solitary woman wearing sunglasses, a kerchief over hair curlers, and, in spite of the spring weather, a fur coat over jeans. Unlike other regulars there, she didn’t bring a book or a child or a friend. She just sat watching the children play.

After a few days, the woman introduced herself to Dalia as “Mrs. Miller” and asked if she could hold the baby. A stranger wanting to hold her son seemed peculiar at first, but Mrs. Miller was shy and gentle. Soon they had struck up an odd friendship, and chatted each day about children, New York, and their mutual feelings of being a little alone. Dalia’s temporary isolation in a new country, speaking a foreign language, seemed to connect to a permanent shyness and loneliness in her American friend.

“She talked mostly about children,” Dalia remembered some thirty years later. “She was very curious about being pregnant, about what you fed a child, how you diapered it—everything. She wondered if I got bored just sitting there, being a mother, and I explained that I always brought a book to the park. When she discovered that I also went to school in the afternoons, she wanted to know who took care of the baby and how I could do both. I explained about baby-sitters. We laughed about having six children. She never confided in me about what difficulties she was having, but she very much wanted to have a child.

“I invited her to my house for coffee, but she never came. She would just ask each day if she would see me tomorrow. Even after the other mothers there realized that this was Marilyn Monroe—her voice gave her away, I think, or just taking off her sunglasses—we tried to respect her privacy. She would play with the kids, hold them in her lap, and they adored having her. I think the park became a cozy place for her.

“One day in June, she told me that she wanted me to know I wouldn’t be seeing her. She was going away for the summer with her husband, and hoped she would come back the next year—but she never did. I decided I would never trust gossip magazines again—she was so different from her image. Not a sexpot, not glamorous, but just an ordinary woman who was shy, curious, and lonely.”

Because she was responding to another human being, not to celebrity or symbols, there is a trustworthiness about the impressions of this thoughtful young Israeli. There is also an honesty about Marilyn’s attitude toward an unknown woman she could easily have impressed by revealing her public identity, but chose instead to learn from. Indeed, Marilyn seemed to value and be fascinated by encounters with women who were not competitive or sexually jealous of her, and therefore could be used as friends and teachers. Lena Pepitone, a young Italian woman whom she employed as a maid in New York in the fall of that same year, described in her memoir Marilyn’s odd combination of friendship, curiosity, and envy, and her constant questioning and interest in Lena’s two sons, her husband, her daily life, her family in Italy—everything. Marilyn seemed to be trying desperately to learn how to live in a family, to have friends, to be a wife and mother, and still have another identity; to be an ordinary woman. Perhaps because she had been deprived of mothering, which is the deepest way all of us learn as children about what a female human being can be, this basic knowledge was what Marilyn hungered for most. But she also had been deprived of any primary connection in her earliest years, and so constantly looked for someone to cure the past. Since only we can do that for ourselves, Marilyn’s search usually began with impossibly high hopes and ended in disillusionment. There were always women to whom Marilyn looked for learning and protection. But she turned to men more. Objectively, they were more powerful in the world. Subjectively, a totally absent father could be more idealized than a semi-present and very disillusioning mother. Nonetheless, women were her nurturers. Grace McKee, her legal guardian and the most consistent person in her childhood, made extraordinary sacrifices for a little girl who was only the daughter of a friend. Marilyn writes with love and empathy about “my Aunt Grace” in her unfinished autobiography, and especially appreciates her taking on the legal responsibility, against all advice from her friends, for a little girl whose “heritage” was very suspect once her real mother had entered a mental institution. Perhaps because of those high expectations, Marilyn felt betrayed by the teenage marriage Grace arranged for her in some combination of desperation and goodwill. Years later, Marilyn told several friends that she had borne a son as the result of a rape by a foster father, and that Grace had forced her to give up the baby for adoption. Whether that story was true or a parable made up by Marilyn to express Norma Jeane’s emotion of being sexually exploited and emotionally deprived, it is significant that Grace—who did her best, but could not turn the clock back and become a rescuing mother—is described as the betrayer.

BOOK: Marilyn: Norma Jeane
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