The Genius and the Goddess (27 page)

McCullers served oysters, white grapes, soufflés and champagne on
a black marble table. Virginia Carr noted that "Monroe, who had a
marvelous sense of humor and whom the guests found charming, entertained
the group with an anecdote from her own kitchen. She told with
much cleverness a tale on herself involving some homemade noodles
she had tried to create one night for her husband like his mother [who
was actually born in America] used to make in the 'old country.' The
conglomeration was such a failure that she was afraid she had lost not
only a meal, but a husband."
Judith Thurman added an amusing detail
to Marilyn's story: "it got a little late, the company was arriving, and
the pasta wasn't ready, so she tried to finish it off with a hair dryer."
⁴

Referring to Dinesen by her familiar name, McCullers described
how Miller questioned her rather pedantically about her strange diet
and received a stern rebuke: "Tanya ate only oysters and drank only
champagne. . . . Arthur asked what doctor put her on that diet. . . .
She looked at him and said rather sharply, 'Doctor? The doctors are
horrified by my diet but I love champagne and I love oysters and
they agree with me.' . . . Arthur mentioned something about protein
and Tanya said, 'I don't know anything about that, but I am old and
I eat what I want and what agrees with me.' Then she went back to
her reminiscences of friends in Africa."

McCullers' memoir gives the flavor of this bohemian gathering.
The Southern writer recalled that her own black help reminded
Dinesen of her African servants: "It was a great delight for her to be
with colored people. Ida, my housekeeper, is colored, and so are my
yardmen, Jesse and Sam. After lunch everybody danced and sang. A
friend of Ida's had brought in a motion picture camera, and there
were pictures of Tanya dancing with Marilyn, me dancing with Arthur,
and a great round of general dancing." In McCullers' account Marilyn
seems happy – talking freely, making fun of herself, enjoying the affection
and attention of two eminent ladies.

Thurman mentioned that Tanya "was photographed in New York
with Marilyn Monroe, and that image was more 'typical' of the old
Isak Dinesen: twisted smile, elegant gray suit, head swathed in a turban,
body muffled in a fur." Dinesen's account of Marilyn's appearance
and character shows that she understood, better than McCullers, her
complex and disturbed personality. Using words like "incredibly" and
"unbelievable" to emphasize Marilyn's hyper-reality, but with a
novelist's insight, she compared her to an apparently harmless but
quite dangerous wild animal. "It's not that she is pretty," she said,
"although of course she is almost incredibly pretty – but that she
radiates at the same time unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable
innocence. I have met the same in a lion cub that my native servants
in Africa brought me. I would not keep her."
⁵
Underlying her beauty
and apparent innocence, which fascinated Miller and everyone else,
was the traumatically damaged orphan.

In the spring of 1956 Saul Bellow had spent six weeks next door
to Miller as they waited for their divorces, but he did not
meet Marilyn
until later on. In 1959, when she was in Chicago for the
premiere of
Some Like It Hot
, they dined together at the Ambassador
Hotel. Bellow was intrigued by the details of her life, and admired
the way she dealt with the intrusive demands of publicity. He found
"the star surrounded by an entourage that included a manicurist and
a bodyguard, who left the door open when he went to the bathroom.'
He's not supposed to let me out of his sight,' Monroe explained.
After dinner at the Pump Room, she signed the guest book, 'Proud
to be the guest of the Chicago writer Saul Bellow.' In a star-struck
letter to [his editor Pascal] Covici the next day, Bellow reported:
'Marilyn seemed genuinely glad to see a familiar face. I have yet to
see anything in Marilyn that isn't genuine. Surrounded by thousands,
she conducts herself like a philosopher.'" Bellow, who had an eye for
women and married five times, called her a very witty woman, and
spoke rapturously of the golden glow and luminous incandescence of
her skin. He must have been besotted, indeed blinded, to find Marilyn,
the essence of Hollywood artificiality, as "genuine." In recent years
she'd suffered miscarriages and had several nervous breakdowns. She'd
attempted suicide and made Miller's life a misery. She was more like
the mad philosopher Nietzsche than the conventional Immanuel Kant.
Her friends and colleagues, not Marilyn, had to be philosophical.

After Marilyn's death, with greater insight into her character, Bellow
found her more tragic than amusing: "I always felt she had picked up
some high-tension cable and couldn't release it. She couldn't rest, she
found no repose in anything. She was up in the night, taking pills
and talking about her costumes, her next picture, contracts and money,
gossip. In the case of a beautiful and sensitive creature like that, it was
a guarantee of destruction."

Marilyn had always hero-worshipped Abraham Lincoln and, when
she first met Miller, was fond of comparing him to the upright president.
Lincoln's biographer, the monkey-faced
Carl Sandburg, had left
school at thirteen and tried many proletarian jobs before becoming
a poet and writer. Much anthologized, Sandburg was a beloved if
limited poet, a fixture of the fifties. Robert
Frost, always annoyed,
even infuriated, by the way Sandburg combed his long silky hair
into
his eyes, exclaimed: "You know the way he dresses, that hair of his
and those [string] ties. Everything about him is studied – except his
poetry."
⁶

The eighty-one-year-old Sandburg met Marilyn during the filming
of
Some Like It Hot
in 1958, and again during the shooting of
Let's
Make Love
in 1960, when he came to Hollywood to write additional
dialogue for the biblical epic
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. He liked to
visit her New York apartment and give her informal literary tutorials.
Marilyn established immediate rapport with the poet and enthusiastically
praised his energy and curiosity: "Carl Sandburg, who's in his
eighties – you should see his vitality, what he has contributed. Why,
he could play the guitar and sing at three in the morning," which
suited her insomniac hours. "You can meet Carl Sandburg and he is
so pleased to meet you. He wants to know about you and you want
to know about him. Not in any way has he ever let me down." She
bought a ten-inch bust of Sandburg by the American sculptor Joseph
Konzal and enshrined him in her flat.

Donald Spoto wrote that Sandburg "found her 'warm and plain'
and charmed her by asking for her autograph. 'Marilyn was a good
talker,' according to Sandburg, 'and very good company. We did some
mock playacting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her
a lot of questions. She told me about how she came up the hard way,
but would never talk about her husbands.'" The lonely old man and
lonely young woman were photographed doing invigorating exercises
and drinking champagne.

After her suicide Sandburg was interviewed in
Look
magazine. The
reporter described Sandburg's "longish white hair flapping like skeins
of corn silk" and noted that Marilyn had bonded with the poet by
bleaching her platinum-blond hair "the exact shade" of his. In a string
of reassuring banalities posing as pearls of wisdom, Sandburg said she
was "a great actress," "had a genuine quality" and "had some faith in
me." Though Marilyn "had a hard time with her sleep," he "saw no
signs of despondency" and felt, reasonably enough, that "thirty-six is
just too young to die."
⁷
Unlike Dinesen, Sandburg, ever the aged
smiling public man, ignored the dark side of her personality.

On May 20, 1959 Miller was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the rather formal
ceremony was sparked into life by Marilyn's stunning appearance. A
historian dutifully recorded: "if the award was certainly deserved, the
speech was dependable. Miller, on occasion, managed to be witty
when he spoke, but you could always count on him to be pious in
the last sentence of the first paragraph: 'An honor which the artist
perhaps would not part with, but never truly takes as his own, because
labor freely given and the joyful misery of creating cannot be translated
into a prize.' Nevertheless, his presence was an event: Marilyn
Monroe, then his wife, was in the audience."

Miller, well aware of her habits, arrived on time and without her.
Marilyn came very late and at the very end of the luncheon. She was
placed next to the seventy-eight-year-old Irish writer,
Padraic Colum,
who hadn't minded the empty seat and truthfully claimed that he'd
never heard of Marilyn Monroe. Wearing a very tight and very décolleté
black dress, with three strands of pearls and long white gloves,
she sat demurely among the spectators. She knew she was on display
– all eyes, as always, were riveted on her – and was smiling, charming
and self-possessed. The intellectuals and academicians were tremendously
excited by her presence. Everyone was thrilled to be there and
fought to get near the deity. Abandoning their customary reserve, they
swarmed around her and swooned like a bunch of love-sick schoolboys.
While Miller gave his pious speech, Marilyn quietly stole the
show.

Marilyn also impressed several heads of
state. She curtsied to
Queen
Elizabeth of England and to King Paul of Greece, dazzled
Sukarno
and charmed
Nikita Khrushchev. Sukarno, mad about movies, refused
to attend a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel unless she was there.
Bowing to diplomatic pressure, she turned up on her thirtieth birthday,
June 1, 1956, while filming
Bus Stop
. Throwing her arms around
Sukarno, she exclaimed, "I'm so glad to meet the president of India."
He then explained that he was the president of Indonesia.

Au courant
with the latest gossip, Sukarno asked (four weeks before
her wedding) if she were going to marry Mr. Miller. She shrugged
and giggled; he encouraged her by expressing his approval. Aware of
her publicity value and ignoring the Muslim prohibition of nudity,
Sukarno flattered her by stating, "you are a very important person in
Indonesia [also in India]. Your pictures are the most popular of any
that have ever played in my country. The entire Indonesian population
is interested in my meeting you." The attractive couple were clearly
drawn to each other. Rosten wrote that Marilyn, witty as always,

had been thrilled. She recalled that he was handsome and
courteous despite the fact that "he kept looking down my
dress, you'd think with five wives he'd have enough." She liked
him, she liked his fez [i.e., his Malay cap], she liked his public
admittance of his five (or was it four?) wives, all of whom he
referred to endearingly. In Marilyn's eyes, that was machismo,
romanticism, poetry, and whatever helped explain man's
devotion to women.
⁸

The following year, when Sukarno's life was in danger after an
attempted coup, Marilyn wanted to rescue the dashing hero (and his
harem) by offering him a safe haven in America. Miller, though touched
by her habitual compassion, refused to welcome the volatile leader
into their household.

Twentieth Century-Fox still regarded her as its property. When Nikita
Khrushchev visited the studio in September 1959, president Spyros
Skouras felt the contrast between beauty and the beast would provide
a great photo opportunity. He told Marilyn to wear her tightest, sexiest
dress and invited her to sit at the main table in their lavish commissary.
For the first time in her life Marilyn arrived early, which prompted
Wilder to suggest that Khrushchev ought to direct her next picture.

Khrushchev was a crude, powerful, larger-than-life character, whose
visit had an enormous political impact. Robert Frost admired his homely
proverbs, sense of humor and peasant's smile, and called him "very
good-natured, hearty, jolly, rough in a way, you'd call it coarse." After
the band played "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "The Internationale, "
the studio staged a fake shooting of the musical
Can-Can
, starring
Shirley MacLaine, with no film in the camera. Invoking Soviet puritanism
to condemn the dissolute American society, Khrushchev called
her dance "immoral," fit only for an "insatiable" audience, and added
that "a person's face is more beautiful than his backside."

As the music faded, Darryl Zanuck unexpectedly announced that
the right-wing
Walt Disney "has informed us that he does not think
that premier Khrushchev and his family should go to Disneyland this
evening, as he cannot guarantee their safety." Keen to see that fantastic
place and used to exerting absolute authority, the great dictator was
furious. He seized the opportunity to condemn both America's warmongering
and its dangerous criminals: "Just imagine, I, a Premier, a
Soviet representative . . . told that I could not go. . . . Why not? . . .
Do you have rocket-launching pads there? . . . Or have gangsters taken
hold of the place? . . . If you won't let me go to Disneyland, I'll send
the hydrogen bomb over."
⁹
There was just enough hysteria in his
voice to suggest that if he couldn't see Mickey Mouse he might overreact
and destroy Southern California. Frank Sinatra, trying to defuse
the explosive situation, told
David Niven, who was sitting next to
Khrushchev's sturdy wife, "Screw the cops! Tell the old broad you
and I'll take' em down this afternoon."

The director George Cukor called it "an extraordinary occasion
and you had to find it funny, but [Marilyn] couldn't make any connection
with it." But Marilyn did make a striking connection with
Khrushchev himself, who seemed to find her backside as beautiful as
her face. When Skouras told his oft-repeated story of how he had
progressed from barefoot immigrant to studio head, Khrushchev "countered
that he was the son of a poor coal miner and was now the
head man of the whole Soviet Union. Marilyn thought that a fantastic
reply; like her, Khrushchev was odd man out." Skouras presented her
to Khrushchev "as a great star. The Soviet chairman was obviously
smitten with her, and she in turn liked him for his plainness."
¹⁰