The Genius and the Goddess (17 page)

Miller was particularly susceptible to Marilyn's lively spirit and
devastating charm. He basked in her unqualified adoration, a soothing
contrast to Mary's stern disapproval, unremitting criticism and bitter
vengeance. He'd met Mary at Michigan and married her when he
was twenty-five; he was tortured by shyness in college and felt he'd
never experienced real passion in marriage. Marilyn was only the
second woman he'd ever known intimately. Miller (like Mary) was
rather solemn; Marilyn was funny and her wit released his emotional
constraints and made him relish his life with her. He thought he'd
discovered hidden depths in Marilyn – and in himself. It flattered his
ego to possess the most glamorous movie star in the world. Yet he
believed he could spirit her away from her fame and give her a rooted,
respectable life; that he could teach, protect and take care of her; and
that they could pursue their dramatic careers together.

He called Marilyn "the most womanly woman I can imagine. . . .
She's a kind of lodestone that draws out of the male animal his
essential qualities." There was also, in his passionate turmoil, a strong
irrational element. "Miller was in love," Rosten noted, "completely,
seriously, with the ardor of a man released. His first marriage had
ended badly; now his second chance had come, and it swept him into
channels of newly discovered emotion." When asked if he'd foreseen
the problems that would later destroy his marriage and then Marilyn
herself, Miller replied, "If I had been sophisticated enough, I would
have seen them. But I was not. I loved her."
⁵

When Marilyn came to New York she was lost and looking for a
savior. Confused, friendless and mentally fragile, constantly exploited,
both personally and professionally, she was emotionally needy. She
saw safety in Miller's cautious reserve, security in his personal success.
In contrast to many alcoholic playwrights – O'Neill, Williams, Inge
and Albee – he was sane and sober. Unlike all her other friends, he
didn't want to make money out of her. She had always been attracted
to older, smarter men, especially to those who wore glasses. Always
in search of heroes, she had admired Abraham Lincoln as wise and
good, and now saw Miller as an attractive version of Lincoln himself.
"He's so gorgeous," she told Lee Strasberg's actress-daughter Susan,
"I love to cuddle with him. He's the most beautiful man I've ever
seen. . . . And he's so brilliant. He and your father are the two most
brilliant men in the world" – which is exactly what Miller wanted
to hear. In a dubious compliment, she also said his mind was better
than that of any other man she'd ever known. She was pleased
that he understood and sympathized with her desire to improve
herself. He became her guide, philosopher and friend, and introduced
her, partly through his personal example, to the idea of political
freedom.

Marilyn believed that Miller had the moral stature to absolve her
of her shameful past and the integrity to enhance her self-esteem. In
1950, the year before they met, after a dinner with the Welsh poet
Dylan Thomas, Marilyn refused to accompany Thomas to a party at
Charlie Chaplin's house. Shelley Winters, her roommate at the time,
described her deep-rooted insecurity: "It was a long time before
Marilyn ever felt intelligent enough to mix socially with important
intelligent people, if she ever did. Maybe that feeling is what was
behind her marriage to
Arthur Miller. (If you don't graduate from
high school – marry an intellectual.)"

Marilyn felt that marriage to Miller would make her a better person
and give her a better life. She believed that if she were nothing but
a dumb blonde – and she'd always been seen and typecast in this role
– he would not want to marry her. Kazan, perceptive as always,
explained the feeling of inferiority that only Miller was able to assuage:
"What she needed above all was to have her sense of worth
affirmed. . . . She wanted more than anything else approval from men
she could respect. . . . She deeply wanted reassurance of her worth,
yet she respected the men who scorned her, because their estimate
of her was her own."
⁶

Orson Welles and
Rita Hayworth, another unlikely couple, were
attracted to each other for the same reasons: "Welles had been drawn
to Hayworth because of her sexually iconic quality: conquering her
had boosted his image and his ego. He had courted her by gently
penetrating beyond the goddess and the star and by urging her to
reveal her private hopes, disappointments and dreams. She was attracted
to him because he was the first man who seemed willing to listen
to her and treat her as something other than a sex-object."

Marilyn admired in Miller all the qualities that she herself lacked:
his intellect and culture, his strength and self-discipline, his shrewdness
about money and simple way of life. Each one wished to enter
the other's world: Miller wanted to write screenplays; Marilyn wanted
to become a serious stage actress. He fondly saw them working side
by side and drawing inspiration from each other. Marilyn, who'd
always wanted to have children, even imagined – while she was making
Bus Stop
and he was in Nevada – that she'd give up her career and
settle down as a housewife and mother. She said, "when I married
Miller, one of the fantasies I had in my mind was that [through him]
I could get out of Marilyn Monroe," a creature invented by the studio.
Expressing an unrealistic hope, she told him: "I hate [Hollywood], I
don't want it anymore, I want to live quietly in the country and just
be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself anymore."
⁷

Despite her psychological traumas and sexual scars, their completely
different backgrounds, religion and family life, education, tastes and
interests, the inhibited Miller and free-spirited Marilyn fell in love.
They idealized each other and formed what seemed to be a satisfying
complement of mind and body. Their marriage began with
physical attraction and the secret thrill of adultery, with a common
interest in acting and the theater, with their mutual fame and the
narcissistic magnetism of one celebrity for another.

Many playwrights – Eugene O'Neill,
Clifford Odets, John Osborne
and Harold Pinter, for example – would marry, and divorce, actresses.
Several friends, both at the time and with hindsight, thought Miller
was making a terrible mistake. Kazan – confirming the set-designer
Boris Aronson's devastating question: "That's a wife?" – was astonished
by Miller's proposal: "He couldn't be thinking of marrying her!
Marilyn simply wasn't a wife. Anyone could see that," except his naïve
and inexperienced friend. Miller himself quoted
Marcello Mastroianni,
who'd appeared in his plays in Italy. Adopting a cavalier attitude, the
actor asked him: "'But so much trouble over a woman?' 'Why? What
would you do?' 'I would . . . take a walk.'"

The photographer
Arnold Newman, brutally frank when interviewed
on a television documentary, called Marilyn "the worst woman
you'd ever want to get mixed up with; the most unhappy and with
the most problems. A very troubled woman." Miller, with more than
a touch of arrogance, thought he could get away with what no intellectual
had ever dared to do. The actor
Brian Dennehy explained
Miller's feelings: "Of course Marilyn was not a promising wife, but
that didn't matter. She was Helen of Troy, every man's dream. She
had a compelling personality and tremendous energy, was powerful
beyond reason and hypnotized everyone. Nobody was immune to
her, and Arthur was enthralled. He fell madly in love with her and
with the idea of her.
⁸

When Marilyn moved to New York she said she wanted to educate
herself, and Manhattan intellectuals were happy to oblige. Celebrities
become ecstatic at the sight of other celebrities, though a movie
star's fame always trumps a
writer's. The local literati, eager to bask
in her reflected glory, all wanted to meet her. They soon learned the
art of being with and being seen with her – the celebrity dance of
being famous together. She had never known any other society but
lower-class Hawthorne and Hollywood, and was pleased by all the
attention she was getting from prominent people in the cultural
capital of America.

Marilyn was twenty-eight years old, emotionally vulnerable but
pretty and charming, and everyone wanted to know what she was
really
like. Was she beautiful or vulgar? Genuine or artificial? Sexy or
sluttish? Witty or just dim-witted? Voracious publicists and magazine
editors looking for sure-fire copy encouraged incongruous, absurd
and potentially contentious encounters between Marilyn and highbrow
authors she'd never read – nor even heard of. They hoped the
beasts would chew each other up and that blood would be shed.
Instead, she established a natural affinity with many writers who were,
like herself, eccentrics and outsiders, heavy drinkers and drug-takers,
physically ill and mentally unstable. She desperately longed for
"someone to take me out who doesn't expect anything from me."
She felt more at ease with the homosexuals
Truman Capote and
Tennessee Williams. Later on she found
Montgomery Clift, her costar
in
The Misfits
, a perfect companion. He had no sexual designs on
her, no perilous pounce. Filled with self-doubt and neurotic fears,
dependent on painkillers and alcohol, he was, Marilyn observed, "the
only person I know who's in worse shape than me."

Christopher Isherwood had introduced Marilyn to the notoriously
drunken and obstreperous Dylan Thomas in April 1950, when she
was still playing bit parts in films. Thomas declared that he'd come
to Hollywood "to touch the titties of a beautiful blond starlet," and
Marilyn was well qualified to satisfy his fantasies. But when Thomas
came to dinner at the flat she was sharing with Shelley Winters, he
sensed Marilyn's vulnerability and behaved with unusual propriety.
Though he joked with and teased Shelley,

he was quiet and respectful to Marilyn. Marilyn was so sure
things were bound to go awry that I think she unconsciously
made things happen to get the waiting over with. I saw her do
this time and time again. Dylan Thomas seemed aware that
behind the eyelashes and platinum hair and terrific body, there
was a fragile and sensitive girl. . . . He was obviously a horny
Welshman, but he never once made any kind of pass at Marilyn.
Not even a verbal one. I don't think it was because her looks
didn't turn him on; he was obviously mad about platinum-blond
starlets. I think this poet sensed that she very badly needed not
to be thought of as just a tits-and-ass cutie.

She met the Irish playwright
Brendan Behan – also notorious for
his heavy drinking and outrageous behavior – when he was in New
York in 1960 during the successful run of
The Hostage
. He sent her
a respectful tribute, clipped to her copy of
The Misfits
: "For Marilyn
Monroe – a credit to the human race, mankind in general and
womankind in particular."
⁹
At the beginning and end of her career,
she managed to inspire the sympathy and tame the lust of the two
Celtic poets.

Capote had met Marilyn through
John Huston when she was
working on
The Asphalt Jungle
, and she contacted him when she came
to New York. Marilyn made dramatic appearances at El Morocco, the
Colony and the Plaza Oak Room with Capote and kicked off her
high-heeled shoes while dancing with him so she wouldn't be a head
taller than her dwarfish consort. A photographer captured Marilyn,
in a black dress and with bare arms, turning her eyes to the camera
and smiling naturally. Capote – bespectacled and balding, his hair
messed up, tie and collar awry, two buttons tightly buttoned on his
gray pin-striped suit – holds Marilyn by the wrist. He seems to have
trouble keeping up with her and his mouth hangs open like a fish
gasping for air.

Two years older than Marilyn, Capote shared her dependence on
drink and drugs. Ever the publicity hound, he styled himself her friend
and said he wanted Marilyn (not Audrey Hepburn) to play Holly
Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. With typically disparaging wit he
declared that her marriage to Miller would be the
Death of a Playwright
.
After Marilyn's death he wrote two crude, self-serving and denigrating
essays about her in
The Dogs Bark
(1973) and
Music for Chameleons
(1980).

In his chapter on "Marilyn Monroe," he calls her "just a slob, really"
and describes her vulgar mannerisms: "her slippery lips, her overspilling
blondness and sliding brassiere straps, the rhythmic writhing
of restless poundage wriggling for room inside roomless décolletage
– such are her emblems." Indifferent to her charm, he loathes the
lush femininity that her public so admired. He concludes, with pop-psychology
and bogus religious imagery, that "she is stained, and
illuminated by, the stigmata of orphan-thinking"; that the depth of
her anxiety, "her frequent sore-throated indispositions, her nibbled
nails, her damp palms, her Japanese-like fits of giggling induces a
butter-hearted sympathy." Capote clearly saw the orphan's desperate
desire to be liked, but felt no compassion for her wounded spirit.

An outrageous liar who liked to smear straight men, Capote used
his second essay on Marilyn to spread obscene scandal about Errol
Flynn. In Capote's malicious tale, Marilyn claims that she saw Flynn
publicly playing a piano with his prick. Flinging more mud at Flynn,
Capote falsely claimed that in 1943 he had had a one-night stand
with the handsome Flynn. The title of this essay, "A Beautiful Child,"
comes from Marilyn's sometime acting teacher Constance Collier,
who rightly said, "This beautiful child is without any concept of discipline
or sacrifice." Capote has Marilyn exclaim, "I like to dance naked
in front of mirrors and watch my titties jump around." When she
confronts a dimly lit mirror and he asks, "What are you doing?,"
she cryptically replies, "Looking at Her." But he doesn't connect the
two mirror scenes, nor understand that she looked into the mirror
in search of herself. Though her tits were reassuringly real, her identity
was not.