The Genius and the Goddess (42 page)

Shortly thereafter, however, I received several panicky transatlantic
telephone calls from her. The patient had lost the white
knight and was beside herself with terror and gloom, like a child
who has lost her security blanket. A colleague of mine who saw
her in that interval said that all his interventions were to no
avail and he reluctantly suggested that I cut short my trip and
return. I hated to interrupt my vacation and I doubted whether
my return would be beneficial. Surprisingly, it was. I no sooner
saw her than her anxiety and depression lifted. It then became
possible to work for many months on how she used me as a
good luck charm rather than [as] an analyst.

The talisman, the chess piece, served her as a magical means
of averting bad luck or evil. It protected her against losing something
precious.
¹¹

Turning the "science" of psychoanalysis into a bit of mumbojumbo,
Greenson concluded that the incongruous fetish, a shining
white knight, protected her from "losing something precious" – the
analyst himself. This story seems to be a self-serving fantasy.
Marilyn
did not go in for chess and never mentioned the chess piece, and she
was not clutching it during her performance. If the story were true,
Greenson did not consider that Marilyn might have deliberately lost
the white knight in order to free herself from his bondage. In fact,
as he well knew, the fetish neither averted evil nor protected her
against losing something else that was far more precious – her very
life. His essay never mentioned that the anonymous patient killed
herself while under his care.

DiMaggio flew down from San Francisco to make the
funeral arrangements.
He still loved Marilyn, who looked absolutely ghastly after the
autopsy, and sat up all night in a morbid death watch, gazing into the
open coffin and clasping her fingers in a final farewell. The simple
funeral took place on August 9 in the small Westwood Memorial Park
at 1218 Glendon Avenue, now hidden away behind the tall buildings
on Wilshire Boulevard. The thirty-one mourners were DiMaggio, his
sidekick George Solotaire and Joe, Jr. (in his Marine dress uniform);
Marilyn's half-sister Berniece Miracle; Lee and Paula Strasberg; the
Greensons and their two grown children. From Marilyn's Los Angeles
past were her sometime foster parents, the Knebelcamps; Fred Karger's
mother and sister; and her acting teacher Lotte Goslar. The rest were
all on her payroll: Murray and Newcomb, two lawyers, business
manager and her husband, make-up man with his wife and daughter,
three hairdressers, masseur, secretary, chauffeur and maid. Sinatra and
the Lawfords were particularly excluded. When the Hollywood lawyer
protested that DiMaggio was keeping out a lot of important studio
executives, directors and stars, Joe bitterly said, "Tell them if it wasn't
for them, she'd still be here." When Marilyn's mother (institutionalized
yet again) heard of her death, she also blamed Hollywood and
disingenuously said, "I never wanted her to become an actress."

At the service the Lutheran minister from a Westwood church read
Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want"; John 14: "Let
your heart not be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In
my Father's house are many mansions. . . . I go to prepare a place for
you"; Psalm 46: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help
in trouble. Therefore
will not we fear"; and the especially apt Psalm
139: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." Lee
Strasberg delivered the brief but touching eulogy. To comfort the
mourners he called Marilyn's death an accident, and described her as
"a warm human being, impulsive and shy, sensitive and in fear of
rejection, yet ever avid for life and reaching out for fulfillment. . . .
She had a luminous quality – a combination of wistfulness, radiance,
yearning – to set her apart and yet make everyone wish to be part
of it, to share in the childish naïveté which was at once so shy and
yet so vibrant."
¹²
The coffin was carried across the wide lawn and
placed in crypt 24 in The Corridor of Memories.

Though Marilyn had severed relations with Marianne Kris because
of her "terrible mistake," she made Kris and the Strasbergs the major
beneficiaries of her will, which named the following people:

—Berniece Miracle: $10,000

—Norman and Hedda Rosten: $5,000 (for the education of
their daughter, Patricia)

—Michael Chekhov's widow, Xenia: $2,500 a year

—Marilyn's mother, Gladys Baker: $5,000 a year (from a $100,000
trust fund)

—Marilyn's secretary May Reis: $10,000 plus 25 percent of the
balance (not to exceed $40,000)

—Dr. Marianne Kris: 25 percent of the balance (to be donated
to the psychiatric institution of her choice)

—Lee Strasberg: 50 percent of the balance (in addition to all
Marilyn's personal effects and clothing).

Legal obstacles caused delays for a decade and the first payments were
not made until December 1971. Despite her husband's bequest, the
insatiable Paula claimed that she was owed an additional $22,000 for
"coaching."

Ten years after her death, when Marilyn's estate was finally settled
and her possessions unpacked, they turned out to be a random collection
of cheap and tacky objects, battered by her frequent moves. She
had no interest in material things and left very little money. But her
clothes and cosmetics revealed the two sides of the character she was
always trying and failing to connect:

[There were] books of poetry with underlined passages. A Golden
Globe statuette, cracked, with the lead filling visible. Bone-color
stationery embossed with "Marilyn Monroe." Unmailed letters
dated '59. . . .

A whole room . . . crammed with Marilyn's ordinary furniture.
A gooseneck reading lamp with the paint chipped off. A
plain wooden desk. . . . Plastic dishes. . . .

Stuffed into grocery cartons were black fur outfits, leopard
hats, white mink muffs, ermine coats, double-skin white fox boas
with silk between and piles of heavily beaded professional
gowns. . . . Such stage wardrobe as was worn at the Circus
opening or at President Kennedy's birthday party bore the
theatrical labels:"Marilyn Monroe from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
."
In one box of her personal clothing a moth flew out.

Monroe had two of everything. One set for
the
Marilyn
Monroe, the other for when she was herself. The theatrical makeup
in a black case initialed M.M. held bright greens and blues
for her eyes, not the kind of make-up worn at the supermarket.
Although Marilyn denied she wore bras, she had two sets. For
Marilyn Moviestar she wore décolleté special no-bra bras that
looked like nothing. Her personal brassieres were the simplest
and plainest and poorest.

The offstage dresses went to thrift stores anonymously. The
stage gowns met with a tragedy. A burst pipe spewed raw sewage
onto them.

Marilyn was right: everyone wanted a piece of her. At her death
her possessions seemed intrinsically worthless, but decades later, as
divine relics, they fetched high prices. In October 1999 Christie's
auctioned them off for $13.5 million. Lee Strasberg's second wife, Anna
(who never knew Marilyn), got the money and still earns well over
$2 million a year in licensing fees. As a result the Strasberg Institute
on East 15th Street in New York, now separate from the Actors Studio,
is assured of support. It includes a Marilyn Monroe Theater and Marilyn
Monroe Museum, under the "surveillance" of
Anna Strasberg.

Marilyn fulfilled the American dream of success, but suffered the
American tragedy of losing it all. As Samuel Johnson wrote of such
ephemeral celebrities:"They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall."
¹³
Like famous beauties of the past, she was painted by leading artists,
but her most famous images were deconstructed rather than
commemorated. Willem de Kooning's
portrait is built from modernist
fragments, a fitting evocation of her shattered life. Andy Warhol's
silkscreen print series confirmed her iconic photographic image and
keeps it current. But the real, warm Marilyn is buried under layers
of color. In Warhol's variations the fluffy blonde expression remains
fixed, yet seems to vary from a smile to a grimace, from exuberant
joy to misery and tears.

When the publicist Arthur Jacobs informed Miller of Marilyn's
death, the playwright, wishing to detach himself entirely and relieved
that he was no longer responsible for her, merely said, "It's your
problem, not mine." Asked if he planned to attend the funeral, he
cryptically replied, "She won't be there." Miller, on the East Coast,
did not attend and may not even have been invited, though he and
his children sent flowers. He had suffered enough. His response seemed
callous, but he was determined to protect himself from further pain.

Still paternal and protective eighteen months after they parted,
Miller "had the feeling, amounting often to tearing guilt, that the
divorce had helped her toward her death and that he should have
been able to do something to save her." But he later commented that
Marilyn's fate seemed predestined: "It had to happen. I didn't know
when or how, but it was inevitable."
¹⁴
Having tried to help her, Miller
believed her problems were intractable: "I know now that it wasn't a
matter of the individuals around her that brought her to that end. It
would have happened even if she hadn't been in movies." Noting a
basic contradiction in Marilyn's character, he suggested that she behaved
recklessly and, like a real goddess, thought she was immortal:"Marilyn
never believed she was going to die. She just kept pushing the boundaries
further and further." At other times she felt that she was destined
to die as a final tribute to her fans: "[Her] conviction was that she
was meant to be a sacrifice and a victim." Miller also observed that
the death-haunted Marilyn had always been vulnerable and sad:
"Beneath all her insouciance and wit, death was her companion everywhere
and at all times, and it may have been that its unacknowledged
presence was what lent her poignancy, dancing at the edge of oblivion
as she was."
¹⁵

In 1852, the poet
Charles Baudelaire vented his rage against Jeanne
Duval, the mistress and muse who'd been tormenting him for
the previous ten years. He bitterly wrote how he had learned "To
live with a person who shows no gratitude for your efforts, who impedes
them through clumsiness or permanent meanness, who considers you
as a mere servant, as her property, someone with whom it is impossible
to exchange a word about politics or literature, a creature who
is unwilling to learn a single thing, although you've offered to teach
her yourself, a creature who
has no admiration for one
and who is not
even interested in one's studies." Baudelaire's description of Jeanne
was more vituperative than anything Miller ever wrote about Monroe,
but it suggests the depths of his degradation and the bitterness of his
wounds.

Miller made his name as an intellectual playwright who used characters
and stories to embody his ideas and make moral arguments. A
critic has noted that in his early plays –
Death of a Salesman
,
The
Crucible
and
A View from the Bridge
– the wife "is a fine woman who
is not in the least sexually interesting." But "Miller's implicit indictment
of sex as a wicked influence is remarkably consistent and
emphatic." He makes illicit sex "both the root and symptom of his
heroes' disorders." After he became involved with Marilyn, his work
changed focus and became more autobiographical. For ten years, from
1951 until their divorce in 1961, her willful, passionate, unstable
temperament fascinated, inspired and humiliated him. Marilyn was a
ready-made tragic muse, whom he knew better than anyone else in
the world. Her character and his suffering during their marriage
obsessed him for more than fifty years: from their first meeting until
the very end of his life. Miller wrote three short stories, a screenplay,
a novel and four plays with sad, neurotic heroines. He recreated
Marilyn in two of his best works: Roslyn in
The Misfits
and Maggie
in
After the Fall
(1964). She was also Sylvia in
Broken Glass
(1994),
Cathy-May in
Mr. Peters' Connections
(1999) and Kitty in his last, still
unpublished play,
Finishing the Picture
(2004).

Though he had rationally absolved himself of blame, his failure to
arrest Marilyn's slide into breakdown and death continued to haunt
him. He had repeatedly taken responsibility for her, and finally had
to give up. He was able to close this episode in his life, but not in
his art. The great division in his dramatic works was Marilyn's suicide
in 1962. In his four autobiographical plays he tried to explain his
response to her enchanting and maddening character, to justify his
own behavior and to depict the destructive environment of the modern
mass-entertainment business.

The germ of
After the Fall
came from Miller's unfinished play of
1951,
An
Italian Tragedy
. Quentin, the autobiographical hero, has recently
had an adulterous adventure that makes him realize how much he
hates the restrictions of married life. His wife (based on Mary Slattery)
refuses to forgive him and insists that he suppress his adulterous desires.
He wants to remain married, but doesn't want to give up his newfound
erotic ecstasy. The heroine, Lorraine (based on Marilyn), is a
precursor to Maggie in
After the Fall
. She is naïve, sexy, insecure, self-destructive
and fatal to men who get involved with her. In
Timebends
Miller described Lorraine in rather vague and contorted prose:

With her open sexuality, childlike and sublimely free of ties and
expectations in a life she half senses is doomed, she moves instinctively
to break the hold of respectability on the men until each
in his different way meets the tragedy in which she has unwittingly
entangled him. . . . Like a blind, godlike force, with all
its creative cruelty, her sexuality comes to seem the only truthful
connection with some ultimate nature. . . . She has no security
of her own and no faith, and her liberating promise is finally
illusory.
¹

After the Fall
was Miller's first full-length play in eight years. Starting
with the Lorraine character and writing furiously, he had no clear
idea of where he was going. His first draft amounted to 5,000 pages,
which he drastically cut down to the final version of 180 pages. Even
so, it seemed a work in progress. Jason Robards, who appeared as
Quentin, thought Miller gave a terrible reading when he first presented
it to the cast.

The play, directed by Elia Kazan, opened in New York in January
1964. The work reunited Miller with the man who'd directed his
early works and had once been his closest friend, and their collaboration
reopened old wounds and continued their old quarrel. Miller
clearly based the character of Mickey, who's named names, on Kazan.
In his director's notes Kazan analyzed Mickey's character – and exalted
his own: "Mickey: The Guiltless Man (as vs. Quentin). A great and
natural hedonist, full of energy and pleasure . . . because he is not
crippled with puritanism and consequent guilts." He is "troubled,
talking to himself, arguing it out with himself. He's still trying, and
will be for years, to figure out whether he did right or did wrong."
To make matters even more incestuous, Miller was relying on Kazan,
the man who had slept with Marilyn while Miller himself was still
shyly courting her, to direct the play. Kazan had casually dropped
Marilyn, while Miller had let himself in for five hellish years of
marriage. In a further twist of fate, Kazan's wife had died in December
1963, leaving him free to marry his mistress,
Barbara Loden – who
was cast as Maggie. Kazan seemed to be taking possession of Marilyn
all over again. But the play had been chosen to be the opening production
of the new Lincoln Center Repertory Company, and Kazan
certainly had an unusually intimate understanding of the play. So
Miller and Kazan, who needed each other, managed to overcome
their personal and political animosity.

The intensely personal nature of Miller's material demanded a new
dramatic technique. He cast the story of his autobiographical hero
Quentin and the disintegration of his relationship with Maggie in
the form of a confession. This sometimes confusing method was a
new departure for Miller. The play portrayed his own consciousness
and conflicts, and attempted to heal his damaged psyche. He wrote
that "the action takes place in the mind, thought, and memory of
Quentin. . . . With stream-of-consciousness evocations of characters,
abrupt disappearances, and transformations of time and place, the play
often verged on montage" – a combination of disparate elements
intended to form a unified whole.
²
The Listener, whom Quentin
addresses with the free associations of a psychoanalytic patient, is God,
his own conscience and the audience in the theater.

Act One sets out the social context of Quentin's life and the historical
events that provide the backdrop of his mind: the financial ruin
of his father in the Depression, the effects of the Holocaust and the
destruction of innocent people's lives in the Communist witch-hunts
of the 1950s. Quentin and Holga (an idealized character based on
Miller's third wife, the Austrian photographer Inge Morath) visit an
extermination camp, whose tower rises above the set. In Act Two
Miller focuses on the failures of Quentin's first marriage to Louise
(Mary) and of his second marriage to a popular singer, Maggie (whose
name suggests DiMaggio and is clearly modeled on Marilyn).

The critics, then and now, have obsessively focused on Maggie and
neglected Louise, a complex character who vividly reveals the moral
and sexual conflicts in Miller's first marriage. If Maggie is the id,
Louise is a savagely critical superego, urging her husband to rise above
his baser instincts and filling him with guilt. Suggesting that his first
wife was even more self-righteous than he was, Miller told Kazan
that Quentin "made Louise the custodian of his conscience and just
to look at her sometimes in her rectitude arouses his sense that he is
guilty." In a hectoring tone that condemns Quentin's behavior, Louise
moves from self-effacement to self-assertion. His disloyalty provokes
her to insist on her own individuality and worth:

I did contribute; I demanded nothing for much too long. . . .

The moment I begin to assert myself it seems to threaten
you. I don't think you
want
me to be happy.

She also defends her right to be valued as an intelligent woman:

The way you behave toward me. I don't exist. People are supposed
to find out about each other. I am not all this uninteresting.
Many people, men
and
women, think I
am
interesting. . . .

I don't intend to be ashamed of myself any more. I used to
think it was normal, or even that you don't see me because I'm
not worth seeing. But I think now that you don't really see any
woman.

This last speech is highly ironic in view of Quentin's passion for
Maggie, but it also suggests Louise's tragedy, her sense of loss and betrayal.
Quentin feels (like Miller when describing this real-life episode in
Timebends
) that he might as well have extramarital sex if Louise damns
him for merely thinking about it. Louise admits, "I did overreact, but
it's understandable. You come back from a trip and tell me you'd met
a woman you wanted to sleep with." To which Quentin defensively
replies, "And for damn near a year you looked at me as though I were
some kind of monster who could never be trusted again."
³

Miller tried to integrate the major economic, historical and political
themes with the intensely personal ones through the character
inspired by Inge Morath, who had endured the difficult and dangerous
war years. As a child she "moved to Germany with her parents,
Protestant liberals and research scientists. At the outbreak of World
War II she was studying languages at Berlin University. When Morath
refused to become a Nazi supporter, she was assigned to forced labor,
assembling airplane parts at Tempelhof airport, a site that was repeatedly
bombed by the Allies. She escaped from Tempelhof when an air
raid blew open the gate, and found her way through war-torn Europe
back to her family in Austria." Inge had close relatives in Nazi
ministries, and had also been a courier for those involved in the
unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler in July 1944. But she was not Jewish
and was not a survivor of the camps.

The most poorly integrated material in the play came from Miller's
experience as he was writing it. In a weirdly jarring and intimate
revelation about Inge's first child with Miller – their son
Daniel, born
in the fall of 1962 – Holga mentions that he had Down's Syndrome
and was immediately placed in an institution: "I had a child . . . and
it was an idiot, and I ran away." In fact, it was Miller – not Inge –
who ran away. Right after Daniel was born, Miller told the producer
Robert Whitehead: " 'He isn't right.' . . . Arthur was terribly shaken
– he used the term 'mongoloid.' . . . 'I'm going to have the baby put
away.'"
⁴
Daniel was placed in the Southbury Training School, near
Roxbury, a home for the mentally retarded. Inge visited him weekly
for the next forty years. Miller never did.

The relation of
social responsibility to personal (especially survivor's)
guilt is a dominant theme in Miller's plays from
All My Sons
and
Death of a Salesman
, through
The Crucible
and
A View from the Bridge
,
to
After the Fall
. At the beginning of his early novel
Focus
(1945), the
hero, Newman, is awakened in the middle of the night when a woman,
assaulted by a drunken man, cries out for help. Hearing her Puerto
Rican accent and assuming she's a prostitute, Newman ignores her
scream and does not try to help her.
Focus
anticipates the theme of
Albert Camus'
The Fall
(1956), which in turn influenced both the
title and theme of
After the Fall
. In Camus' novel the confessional
narrator is walking along the Seine late at night: "I had already gone
some fifty yards when I heard the sound – which, despite the distance,
seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence – of a body striking
the water. . . . I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going
downstream; then it suddenly ceased. . . . I was still listening as I stood
motionless. Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no
one."

The Fall
discusses the burden of guilt in a world where it is no
longer possible to be innocent and where there is no redemption for
the guilty. The novel blends the theological fall of man, the physical
fall of the drowning woman and the moral fall of the narrator, who
(like Newman) refuses to help her. Thinking about himself and Marilyn
when discussing the moral choice in Camus' novel, Miller wondered
how far a man could be responsible for someone else's life: "what if
he had attempted to rescue her, and indeed managed to, and then
discovered that he had failed in his mission – to overcome his own
egoism which his action may even have expressed; that there were
innumerable complications about rescuing somebody as a pure act of
love?"

Before his fall from grace, Miller believed he could sustain his love
for Marilyn.
After the Fall
portrays the death of their love. The play
has essentially the same biblical theme as Milton's
Paradise Lost
: the
loss of prelapsarian innocence; the curse of sin, guilt and death; the
possibility of salvation. Holga, the resister and survivor of cosmic evil,
ultimately redeems Quentin. His mother also suggests the theme of
salvation by alluding to Christ's words in John 8:12: "I am the light
of the world" and by twice telling her son, you are "a light in the
world!"
⁵