The Genius and the Goddess (45 page)

Psychoanalysis, encouraged by her teachers, has also confused and
depressed her. She's left two of the best analysts in the country baffled
and "talking to themselves." Terry Case bitterly calls her treatment
"the world's most expensive fertilizer." Miller doesn't mention that
her analysts, like her internist, freely prescribed the addictive pills that
killed her. Kitty's character is fully explored, but since she rarely speaks,
everything we learn about her comes secondhand from the people
around her.

Insomniac, unpleasant, manipulative, irrational and frightening, Kitty
takes no responsibility for herself and allows no one to take responsibility
for her. She can't stop blaming people and it's impossible to
stop her from destroying herself. All Paul's love cannot help Kitty and
all her love for him has, through suspicion and mistrust, turned to
hate. Fatalistic and beaten, Paul finally accepts the inevitable and is
even relieved that their marriage is finished. In his final speech, he
confesses to the character based on Inge:

She doesn't
like
me, Edna. And how could she – I didn't save
her, I didn't do the miracle I kind of promised. And she didn't
save me, as she promised. So nothing
moved
, you know? It was
like we kept endlessly introducing ourselves to one another. I'm
afraid of her now – I have no idea what she's going to do next.
I wonder if maybe there was just too much hope; we drank it,
swam in it. And for fear of losing it didn't dare look inside. A
sad story.

The crisis is temporarily resolved at the conclusion of the play.
Kitty goes into the hospital for a week. Phil Ochsner and Edna Meyers,
who appear together at the beginning and the end, have a promising
future. As in real life, the forest fire, which blackened the skies of
California and Nevada and knocked out the power in Reno, has
subsided and is now under control. The emergency is over and the
sky is clear and bright. Terry Case claims the fire "invigorates the seed
buried in the soil" and "makes the seeds germinate." But the analogy
between the natural and personal disaster, between putting out the
fire and rescuing the actress, seems forced. Marilyn's mental illness
was far more complicated than a forest fire. She managed to finish
The Misfits
, but it was followed by death, not rebirth.

Brian Dennehy, who acted in several of Miller's plays, said the
subject of
Finishing the Picture
was Marilyn's "incredible stardom and
how the actress became a commodity, consumed by everyone around
her, including the writer. They used her to achieve success and she
could not meet their oppressive demands. Miller didn't fully understand
Marilyn's impossible situation, and suffered a terrible strain while
trying to portray his own culpability."
²⁰

In his work Miller often returned to the most painful period of
his life: his failure to unite the genius and the goddess, intelligence
and beauty, fame and celebrity. His three major works on Marilyn
amount to a dramatic trilogy –
The Misfits
,
After the Fall
and
Finishing
the Picture
. They attempt to understand her character and explain why
their marriage failed. They present an increasingly dark view of the
actress and portray the high cost of creativity in an exploitative world.
In the end, the miracle never happened. But she remained his tragic
muse and her character, exalted and tormented, lived on in his work.
Like a burnt-out star, her light, though extinct, continues to shine.

1930s: tonsillectomy in childhood

Before 1946: lst and 2nd suicide attempts by gas and by sleeping
pills

June 1946: trench mouth after extraction of wisdom teeth, Las Vegas
General Hospital

June 1946: measles, Las Vegas General Hospital

late 1940s–1950s: twelve abortions

December 1950: two plastic surgeries on nose and jaw

December 1950: 3rd suicide attempt, after Johnny Hyde's death

Spring 1951: abortion (with Elia Kazan)

April 28, 1952: appendicitis, Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Los Angeles

1954: 1st bronchitis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

November 6–12, 1954: lst endometriosis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

April 1956: 2nd bronchitis, during shooting of
Bus Stop
, St. Vincent's, LA

August 19, 1956: 1st miscarriage (with Miller)

August 1957: ectopic pregnancy (with Miller), Doctor's Hospital, New
York. 4th suicide attempt

Fall 1958: 5th suicide attempt. Taken to hospital by Paula Strasberg

December 17, 1958: 2nd miscarriage (with Miller), Polyclinic Hospital,
NY. 6th suicide attempt

June 22–26, 1959: surgery on Fallopian tubes, Lenox Hill Hospital, NY

August 28–September 4, 1960: drug addiction and nervous breakdown
during
Misfits
, Westside Hospital, LA

February 7–10, 1961: 7th suicide attempt and nervous breakdown after
divorce from Miller, Payne-Whitney, NY; and February 11–March
5, 1961: Neurological Institute, Columbia University Presbyterian
Medical Center, NY

May 1961: 2nd chronic endometriosis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

June 28–July 11, 1961: gallbladder removed, Polyclinic Hospital, NY
—In hospital five times in the last ten months

July 20, 1962: 3rd chronic endometriosis, Cedars of Lebanon, LA

August 5, 1962: commits suicide by overdose of barbiturates

One: First Encounter

1
Arthur Miller, FBI file, February 19, 1951, p. 65; Arthur Miller,
Timebends
(New York, 1987), pp. 308; 303; Mel Gussow,
Conversations with Miller
(New York, 2002), p. 145.

2.
Elia Kazan,
A Life
(New York, 1988), pp. 404; 409; Fred Guiles,
Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe
(1984; Chelsea, Michigan, 1991), p. 173.

3.
Christopher Bigsby, ed.,
Remembering Arthur Miller
(London, 2005), p. 263; Joshua Logan, "Will Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe?,"
Movie Stars, Real People, and Me
(New York, 1978), p. 62; Kazan,
Life
, pp. 365, 367; 402.

4.
Donald Spoto,
Marilyn Monroe
(New York, 1993), pp. 461–462; Guiles,
Legend
, p. 173; Kazan,
Life
, p. 413.

A great deal of biographical material about Marilyn has disappeared. Her first husband, James Dougherty, destroyed the 200 letters she wrote to him when he was serving overseas in World War II. Miller's love letters to Marilyn – along with all her papers and her famous Red Diary – mysteriously vanished on the night of her death. Her psychiatrist destroyed all her confessional tapes, made at his request, before he died. There's no trace of Marilyn, despite her intimate relations with John and Robert Kennedy, in the Kennedy Library in Boston. Milton Greene's son (in a
conversation with me on December 15, 2007) claimed that the vast archive of Monroe-Greene Productions had been stolen by a Monroe scholar. This loss of valuable evidence has left many unanswered questions about her life as well as many wild conspiracy theories about the cause of her death.

Two: Marilyn's Traumatic Childhood

1.
Christopher Rand,
Los Angeles: The Ultimate City
(New York, 1967), p. 140; Marilyn Monroe,
My Story
(1974;New York, 1976), p. 10; See Maurice Zolotow,
Marilyn Monroe: The Uncensored Biography
(1960; New York, 1961), p. 5; Monroe,
My Story
, p. 11.

2.
Natasha Lytess, as told to Jane Wilkie, "My Years with Marilyn," unpublished memoir, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, pp. 9–10; Sidney Skolsky, "Miss Caswell Calling,"
Don't Get Me Wrong – I Love Hollywood
(New York, 1975), p. 221;Raymond Chandler,
Farewell, My Lovely
(1940; New York, 1992), pp. 25–26; Adam Victor,
The Marilyn Encyclopedia
(Woodstock, New York, 1999), p. 40.

3.
Berniece Baker Miracle and Mona Rae Miracle,
My Sister Marilyn
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), p. 7; James Dougherty,
The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe
(Chicago, 1974), p. 88; André de Dienes,
Marilyn Mon Amour
(New York, 1985), p. 69; Guiles,
Legend
, p. 197.

4.
Timothy Hacsi,
Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 213–214; Leroy Ashby,
Endangered Children: Dependence, Neglect, and Abuse in American History
(New York, 1997), pp. 104; 108, 119.

5.
Oscar Wilde,
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895),
Plays
(London, 1954), p. 267; Charles Dickens, "Autobiographical Fragment," in Edgar Johnson,
Charles Dickens: His Triumph and Tragedy
(New York, 1952), 1:34;Rudyard Kipling, "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (1888),
Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling
, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (New York, 1987), p. 43.

6.
Zolotow,
Marilyn Monroe
, p. 15; Monroe,
My Story
, p. 40; Charles Chaplin,
My Autobiography
(New York, 1964), p. 31.

7.
Eileen Simpson,
Orphans: Real and Imaginary
(1987; New York, 1990), pp. 14, 165; 30, 25–26; 253.

8.
Wolfson's "Notes on Marilyn Monroe," Margaret Herrick Library,
American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; Monroe,
My Story
, p. 18; Ashby,
Endangered Children
, p. 118.

9.
Monroe,
My Story
, pp. 20–21; Hans Lembourn,
Diary of a Lover of Marilyn Monroe
, trans. Hallberg Hallmundsson (1977;New York, 1979), p. 79; Monroe,
My Story
, p. 26.

10.
Robert Mitchum, Introduction to Matthew Smith,
The Men Who Murdered Marilyn
(London, 1996), p. 1; Lena Pepitone and William Stadiem,
Marilyn Monroe Confidential
(1979; New York, 1980), p. 78; Shelley Winters,
Shelley II
:
The Middle of My Century
(New York, 1989), p. 32.

11.
Dougherty,
Secret Happiness
, pp. 37, 45–46; 76; Monroe,
My Story
, p. 28; Guiles,
Legend
, p. 331; Spoto,
Marilyn Monroe
, pp. 78–79.

12.
Letters in James Haspiel,
Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend
(New York, 1991), pp. 12, 13; 14;Victor,
Marilyn Encyclopedia
, p. 60.

13.
Anthony Summers,
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe
(NewYork,1985), p.14;David Conover,
Finding Marilyn:A Romance
(New York, 1981), p. 38; Dougherty,
Secret Happiness
, p. 89.

Three: A Star is Born

1.
Monroe,
My Story
, pp. 41, 42;Victor,
Marilyn Encyclopedia
, p. 279; Guiles,
Legend
, p. 96.

2.
Michael Conway and Mark Ricci,
The Films of Marilyn Monroe
(Secaucus, N.J., 1964), p. 10; Edwin Hoyt,
Marilyn:The Tragic Venus
(New York, 1965), p. 179; Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eisen,
The California Dream
(New York, 1968), pp. 206; 223.

3.
Peter Bogdanovich, "Marilyn Monroe,"
Who the Hell's In It: Portraits and Conversations
(New York, 2004), p. 484; James Bacon,
Hollywood is a Four Letter Town
(Chicago, 1976), p. 134; Summers,
Goddess
, p. 93.

4.
Lytess, "My Years with Marilyn," p. 20; Gloria Steinem,
Marilyn
(New York, 1986), p. 82; Lytess, "My Years with Marilyn," pp. 2, 5.

5.
Charles Marowitz,
The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov
(New York, 2004), pp. 214–215; Victor,
Marilyn Encyclopedia
, p. 53; Marowitz,
The Other Chekhov
, p. 211.

6.
Monroe,
My Story
, pp. 77–78; Kazan,
Life
, pp. 405; 247; Monroe,
My Story
, pp. 92; 104; Gary Carey, with Joseph Mankiewicz,
More About "All About Eve"
(New York, 1972), p. 77.

7.
W. R. Burnett,
The Asphalt Jungle
(New York, 1949), pp. 56–57; Letters from Joseph Breen to Louis Mayer, October 6 and September 26, 1949, John Huston papers, Herrick Library.

8.
Letter from Sterling Hayden to John Huston, December 26, 1949; Letter from Howard Hawks to Huston, March 27, 1950; Letter from Budd Schulberg to Huston, August 30, 1950, Huston papers, Herrick Library.

9.
Carey and Mankiewicz,
More About "All About Eve"
, p. 75; George Sanders,
Memoirs of a Professional Cad
(New York, 1960), pp. 70- 71; Kenneth Geist,
Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz
(New York, 1978), p. 170; Carey and Mankiewicz,
More About "All About Eve"
, pp. 79; 78.

10.
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet
, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (1903–08; New York, 1963), pp. 30; 38–39; 69; 61; Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo,"
Translations from the Poetry
, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York, 1938), p. 181; Interview with Curtice Taylor, New York, December 10, 2007. Marilyn's topless photo appears in
Marilyn Monroe and the Camera
, with an interview by Georges Belmont (Boston, 1989), p. 47.

11.
Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak,
The Fifties:The Way We Really Were
(Garden City, N.Y., 1977), pp. 320, 321, 314.

12.
Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man" (1914),
Poetry
(New York, 1975), p. 38; Ryan, in Zolotow,
Monroe
, p. 101; Lang, in Guiles,
Legend
, p. 193; Graham McCann,
Marilyn Monroe
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1988), p. 93.

13.
William Wellman, Jr., "Howard Hawks: The Distance Runner, "
Focus on Howard Hawks
, ed. Joseph McBride (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,1972), p. 8; Niven Busch, in
Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age
, ed. Pat McGilligan (Berkeley, 1986), p. 94; Victor,
Marilyn Encyclopedia
, p. 186;Todd McCarthy,
Howard Hawks:The Grey Fox of Hollywood
(New York, 1977), pp. 498; 499.

14.
Bacon,
Hollywood is a Four Letter Town
, p. 145; Pete Martin, "Did Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe?,"
Pete Martin Calls On
(New York, 1962), p. 170; Carl Rollyson,
Marilyn Monroe:The Life of an Actress
(Ann Arbor, 1986), p. 59.

15.
McCarthy,
Howard Hawks
, pp. 505, 506; Bacall, in Nora
Johnson,
Flashback on Nunnally Johnson
(Garden City, N.Y., 1979), p. 210; Lauren Bacall,
By Myself
(New York, 1978), p. 229; Nunnally Johnson,
Letters
, ed. Dorris Johnson and Ellen Leventhal (New York, 1981), p. 106; Johnson, in Norman Mailer,
Marilyn: A Biography
(New York, 1975), p. 34.

16.
Summers,
Goddess
, p. 90; Guiles,
Legend
, p. 228; Zanuck, in Charles Feldman papers, American Film Institute, Los Angeles.

17.
Nathanael West,
The Day of the Locust
(1939; New York, 1969), pp. 103, 68, 157, 158–159.

Four: Image and Identity

1.
Daphne Merkin, "Platinum Pain,"
New Yorker
, 74 (February 8, 1999), 72; Arnold Ludwig, "The Real Marilyn,"
How Do We Know Who We Are?: A Biography of the Self
(New York, 1997), pp. 29–31; Summers,
Goddess
, p. 139.

2.
Miller,
Timebends
, p. 436; Jack Cardiff,
The Magic Hour: The Life of a Cameraman
(London, 1996), p. 201; C. David Heymann, "Marilyn,"
RFK: A Candid Biography of Robert F. Kennedy
(New York, 1998), p. 310; Cindy Adams, "Marilyn,"
Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio
(Garden City, N.Y., 1980), pp. 258–259.

3.
Spoto,
Marilyn Monroe
, p. 174.

Her
agents, for example, were Harry Lipton at National Artists (1946–48), Johnny Hyde at William Morris (1949–50), Charles Feldman at Famous Artists (1951–55) and Lew Wasserman at Music Corporation of America (1955–62). Miller had the same agent, Kay Brown of MCA, for forty years.

4.
Ezra Goodman, "The Girl with Three Blue Eyes,"
The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood
(New York, 1961), p. 233; Richard Meryman, "Fame Can Go By,"
Life
, August 3, 1962, reprinted in Rollyson,
Marilyn Monroe
, p. 209; Mailer,
Marilyn
, pp. 204; 174; Guiles,
Legend
, pp. 283–284.

5.
Winters,
Shelley II
, p. 108; George Masters and Norma Lee Browning, "To Killer George–Marilyn,"
The Masters Way to Beauty
(New York, 1977), pp. 82–83; Joseph McBride, ed.,
Hawks on Hawks
(Berkeley, 1982), p. 124; de Dienes,
Marilyn Mon Amour
, p. 129.

6.
Strasberg,
Marilyn and Me
, p. 9; Spoto,
Marilyn Monroe
, p. 188; Strasberg,
Marilyn and Me
, p. 78.

7.
Zolotow,
Marilyn Monroe
, p. 92. Christie's auction catalogue,
The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe
(New York, October 28 and 29, 1999), pp. 346–347, lists books by Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, Freud, Shaw, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, O'Neill, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Greene, Odets, Camus, Tennessee Williams, Ellison, Kerouac, Styron and many others.

8.
Miller,
Timebends
, p. 241; Sam Shaw and Norman Rosten,
Marilyn Among Friends
(New York, 1987), p. 191; Norman Rosten,
Marilyn
:
A Very Personal Story
(1974; London, 1980) p.55; Christie's,
Personal Property
, p. 345.

9.
Masters,
Masters Way to Beauty
, p. 72;Wilder, in Hoyt,
Marilyn
, p. 156; Charlotte Chandler,
Nobody's Perfect. Billy Wilder: A Personal Biography
(New York, 2002), p. 182.

10.
Roger Taylor, ed.,
Marilyn Monroe in Her Own Words
(New York, 1983), p. 114; Neil Grant, ed.,
Monroe: In Her Own Words
(New York, 1991), p. 33; Tina Brown,
The Diana Chronicles
(New York, 2007), p. 387; Eunice Murray,
Marilyn: The Last Months
(New York, 1975), p. 23; Brown,
Diana Chronicles
, p. 238.

11.
Brown,
Diana Chronicles
, pp. 384; 6; 290; 200.

12.
Rosten,
Marilyn
, p. 24; Meryman, "Fame Can Go By," in Rollyson,
Marilyn Monroe
, pp. 205–206; Brown,
Diana Chronicles
, p. 387.

13.
Meryman, "Fame Can Go By," in Rollyson,
Marilyn Monroe
, p. 211;
The Ivan Moffat File
, ed. Gavin Lambert (New York, 2004), p. 260; Peter Manso,
Mailer: His Life and Times
(New York, 1985), p. 543.

Beginning with Jim Dougherty (1942), there were (in approximate order) lovers when she was a model: David Conover (1944) and André de Dienes (1946); breaking into movies: the actor John Carroll, Natasha Lytess, Fred Karger, Joseph Schenck, Harry Cohn, Johnny Hyde (all 1948); leading up to her second marriage:Tony Curtis (1949), Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller (both 1951), Nico Minardos and Joe DiMaggio (both 1952), Billy Travilla and Milton Greene (both 1953); after her second divorce: the voice coach Hal Schaefer and Frank Sinatra (both 1954); before marrying Miller: Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner and the wealthy New York businessman Henry Rosenfeld (all 1955); after Miller:Yves Montand (1960), Charles Feldman and the Mexican actor José Bolaños (both 1961), John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy (both 1962).