The Genius and the Goddess (28 page)

Natalie Wood, whose parents were Russian and who spoke the
language fluently, had prepped Marilyn for her momentous
encounter. Natalie taught her to say "We the workers of Twentieth
Century-Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and
country." The luminaries chatted through an interpreter about
The
Brothers Karamazov
. The eminent pianist
Emil Gilels, who'd met
Marilyn at Carnegie Hall in October 1955, had urged her to travel
to Russia and assured her that everyone there would be delighted
to see her. She now seemed eager to accept Khrushchev's invitation
to visit his country and have a
tête-à-tête
in the Kremlin. He
promised to take her to the Moscow Art Theater and let her see
the Method performed at its sacred source.

Gratified by her ability to charm, she later told friends that she'd
impressed the repulsive, bone-crushing premier, who'd been brought
up on Soviet propaganda films featuring the muscular heroines of
industrial labor: "He didn't say anything. He just looked at me. He
looked at me the way a man looks at a woman. That's how he looked
at me. . . . I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He smiled more when
he was introduced to me than for anybody else at the whole
banquet. . . . He squeezed my hand so long and hard that I thought
he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss" the man
who was "fat and ugly and had warts on his face and growled."
¹¹

Marilyn had done her share of couch-casting during her early years
in Hollywood and knew exactly what it was like to kiss disgusting
old men. Even at the peak of her career, her beauty remained a prize
to be exhibited and shown off before visiting dignitaries.
Marilyn was a touchstone that revealed the character of the writers
she met. Unsure of her own identity, she identified with others. She
was warmly responsive to those who showed an interest in her, and
the most perceptive authors appreciated her human qualities. The
Russian novelist Vladimir
Nabokov was as handsome and sophisticated
as Nikita Khrushchev was coarse and crude. He met Marilyn
at a Hollywood party while he was working on the screenplay of
Lolita
in the spring of 1960, and examined her as if she were one of
his exquisite butterflies.
Stacy Schiff wrote that "in Vladimir's recollection,'
She was gloriously pretty, all bosom and rose' – and holding
the hand of [her co-star and current lover]
Yves Montand. Monroe
took a liking to Vladimir, inviting the [Nabokovs] to a dinner, which
they did not attend." But he called her "one of the greatest comedy
actresses of our time. She is simply superb."

Nabokov didn't care about Marilyn's publicity value. But he saw
her with a shrewd novelist's eye and imaginatively recreated her in
two novels:
Ada
(1969) and
Pale Fire
(1962). Ada's absurd lessons from
Stan Slavsky satirized Marilyn's rather futile lessons at the Actors
Studio. In the title poem of
Pale Fire
, Nabokov celebrated Marilyn's
"bosom and rose" in watery imagery. The last line's "corporate desire"
puns on the public lust for her sensual body and on the dominant
studio that controlled so much of her life:

The famous face flowed in, fair and inane:
The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grain
Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism,
And the soft form dissolving in the prism
Of corporate desire.
¹²

With poets as wild as Thomas and Behan, addicts as troubled as Capote
and McCullers, eccentrics as strange as Dinesen and Sitwell, intellectuals
as antithetical as Bellow and Sandburg, characters as different as
Khrushchev and Nabokov, Marilyn – always searching for her identity,
her real self – knew how to excite important writers through
her radiant warmth and intuitive sympathy.

Marilyn and Miller had fallen in love despite their great differences
in background, education and experience. Temperamentally they were
miles apart. She was egoistic, mercurial, full of self-doubt; he was
devoted, consistent, secure. Early on, Miller believed he could compensate
for these inequalities by giving her the love and attention she
needed. Though he tried his best, their marriage gradually fell apart.
Attempting to explain the source of their difficulties, Marilyn said
that "when you're both famous, it's a double problem – even when
you're famous in different ways, like Arthur and I were." Her fame
was much greater, yet more illusory and evanescent. Miller needed
an orderly and coherent world, felt he had to be in control of his
life and was accustomed in his first marriage to having his own way.
He wanted privacy and silence; she needed attention and adulation.
Since she was more dominant and inflexible, he had to adjust to her
mode of life. But he was not well suited to be the domestic handler
of a turbulent star and felt vulnerable when subjected to her increasingly
irrational demands.

At first Marilyn tried to be a good wife, converting to Judaism
and performing domestic chores while Miller briefly played the
pasha. But she couldn't be an equal partner in marriage and needed
the kind of unconditional support that a child demands from an
adult. She resented his self-absorption (as he resented her egoism)
and declared, "I think he is a better writer than a husband. I'm sure
writing comes first in his life." She was also disturbed, when married
life seemed to compromise her glamor and make her seem ordinary,
by the disparity between her image on the screen and her
image in private life. She felt she could not be Mrs. Miller and a
sex goddess at the same time. V
ariety
, the trade newspaper, commented
that "the two images began going in different ways when she married
Arthur Miller. It made people say 'Who is she really? We thought
she was someone else.' For box office purposes, it put her in an
image limbo."
¹³

The cook and maid in New York, more sympathetic to Marilyn
than to Miller, both provided an insider's view of the household.
He seemed to ignore Marilyn as they drifted from the passionate
excitement of their first years, through disillusionment and silent
indifference, to anger and hostility.

He stays as far away as he can. Gets up before she does and
usually doesn't say two words to her all day. I don't know what
that man does in that room for so long. Whenever I go in there
to bring him his food, he's just sitting there, staring off into
space.

They sat at the table and ate without speaking for the longest
time. Marilyn looked at her husband admiringly and longingly,
as if she were dying for some attention. He just ate quietly and
did not look at her. . . .

Mr. Miller was the cause of many of her current problems.
As a great intellect and playwright, he was too big a challenge
for her. In trying to win his respect, she had become obsessed
with the "serious dramatic actress" goal.

She still didn't seem to understand Miller's need to be alone, thinking
about his work and staring into space. She admitted that she didn't
know what to do with herself, but complained that he ignored her
and blamed him for her unhappiness: "I'm in a fucking prison, and
my jailer is named Arthur Miller. . . . Every morning he goes into
that goddamn study of his, and I don't see him for hours and hours.
I mean, what the fuck is he doing in there? And there I am, just
sitting around; I haven't a goddamn thing to do."
¹⁴

Marilyn absorbed some of Miller's approaches to drama, and he
taught her how to analyze a script. She also adopted one of Miller's
carpentry metaphors to describe her aims as an actress: "You're trying
to find the nailhead, not just strike a blow." He always valued her
work and acknowledged her exceptional gifts, and dedicated his
Collected Plays
(1957) "To Marilyn." But the intellectual abyss opened
before them as they struggled to find something significant to talk
about. Marilyn said that when they discussed American politics, she
always felt ignorant: "Arthur was always very good at explaining, but
I felt at my age I should have known." As he assumed the role of
teacher, she seemed like a self-conscious and inadequate pupil. She
told friends, "I don't think I'm the woman for Arthur. He needs an
intellectual, somebody he can talk to
¹⁵
. . . . He makes me think I'm
stupid. I'm afraid to bring things up, because maybe I am stupid. Gee,
he almost scares me sometimes." Their mental disparity brought out
the differences in their background and education, and revealed his
unintentionally condescending attitude toward her. Elia Kazan, speaking
for himself as well as for Marilyn, noted that she "expressed revulsion
at [Miller's] moral
superiority toward her and much of the rest
of the world."

While they were married, Marilyn would sometimes be confronted
by her squalid past and treated as if she were still a sluttish starlet.
"There were times," she recalled, "when I'd be with one of my
husbands and I'd run into one of these Hollywood heels at a party
and they'd paw me cheaply in front of everybody as if they were
saying,
Oh, we had her
. I guess it's the classic situation of an ex-whore."
¹⁶
This crude and degrading behavior, which would have made
DiMaggio explode into violence, was tolerated by Marilyn, who felt
guilty, and by Miller, who always avoided confrontation.

Taking out her frustrations on her husband, Marilyn emasculated
Miller by subjecting him to both public humiliations and private
abuse. Maureen Stapleton, who acted with Marilyn in the scene from
Anna Christie
, remarked that "Arthur was becoming a lackey. He was
carrying her make-up case and her purse, just doing too much for
her, and I had the feeling that things had gone hopelessly wrong."
Susan Strasberg provided some excruciating details: "In front of other
people, strangers, she treated him terribly – contradicting him in a
combative manner, insulting him. He took it, seething silently. . . .
They were arguing about something, and finally she screamed at him,
'Where's my mink coat? Get me my mink!' As if he were her slave.
Arthur fled from the room to get her coat." Attempting to defend
her behavior, Marilyn declared, "You think I shouldn't have talked to
him like that? Then why didn't he slap me? He should have slapped
me." Marilyn knew she was behaving badly and deserved to be
punished, but Miller merely increased her fury and forfeited her respect
by suppressing his anger and refusing to respond to her insults.

In 1959, between completing
Some Like It Hot
and beginning
Let's
Make Love,
Marilyn expressed her frustration and dissatisfaction by
declaring, "I want to have a real career. I want to act. I want friends.
I want to be happy. I want some respect."
¹⁷
There were many reasons,
apart from her difficulties with Miller, for her unhappiness. She could
not have a child, she drank too much, she took too many pills, she
was not helped by her psychiatrist, she was reclusive, she did not take
advantage of life in New York, she had no close friends to rely on
(except for the pernicious Lee and Paula Strasberg) and she could
not achieve her goal of becoming a serious dramatic actress.

Fond of the Rostens and eager for their company, Marilyn wrote
them (in an undated letter): "Please tell me when you're in town, I'd
love to see you. Come up to my place to rest when you're spending
the day in the city or we could eat or do something – whatever you
want." Rosten had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize in
1940 and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship; he published poetry
in the
New Yorker
and wrote a successful stage adaptation of Joyce
Cary's African novel
Mister Johnson
, but he never quite fulfilled his
early promise. In 1956 Miller helped him revise his play
Mardi Gras
,
which failed in tryouts and never reached New York; but he did write
the screenplay of Miller's
A View from the Bridge
(1962). The two
college classmates drifted apart as Miller's career took off, and Miller
finally broke with his two closest friends: with Elia Kazan for betraying
his friends, and with Rosten for invading his privacy by writing two
books about Marilyn. Toward the end of his life Miller, heaped with
honors and living on his royalties, rather bitterly said that Rosten
"now lived on his pretensions."

The emotional turbulence with Marilyn and his guilt after her
death impeded Miller's writing during his nine-year "silence" between
View from the Bridge
(1955) and
After the Fall
(1964). Apart from the
screenplay of
The Misfits
, he did not complete a major work during
those years. But he could not, and did not, stop writing entirely. In
that relatively fallow time he published a charming children's book,
Jane's Blanket
(1963); five of the stories in
I Don't Need You Any More
(1967); and most of the major contributions to
The Theater Essays of
Arthur Miller
(1978), which ponderously tried to explain and justify
his own work.

After Marilyn's death Norman Mailer wrote one of the most perceptive
accounts of her self-destructive character. Like Sylvia Plath, he
fantasized about her – the very name of Norma Miller was close to
Norman Mailer – and was characteristically frank and amusing about
his dreams and obsessions. "Movie stars fascinate me," he said. "Their
lives are so unlike anyone else's. You could almost postulate they come
from another planet. The way of life of the movie star speaks of
another order of existence. The lack of connection between a movie
star's life and our lives is greater than the points of view we have in
common." The much-married Mailer believed the famous actress
deserved a charismatic writer as a husband. He felt that
he
, and not
Miller, was the appropriately supercharged consort for La Monroe –
"the Stradivarius of sex."