Women in Dark Times (21 page)

*

She was a brilliant comedienne. ‘We need her desperately,’ Sybil Thorndike is reported to have announced on the set of
The Prince and the Showgirl
when she was driving everyone mad by being late. ‘She’s the only one who knows how to act in front of a camera.’
148
Even Billy Wilder, likewise maddened, had to concede: ‘She was an absolute genius as a comic actress, with an extraordinary sense of comic dialogue . . . Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.’
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She could not see it. She did not realise that the audience were laughing not because she, Monroe, was ridiculous but at the genius with which she played her part.
150
In fact it was her unique talent to play almost every part she performed as if it were a mockery of itself. But it was not what she wanted to be. ‘I had to get out, I just had to,’ she says about the huge commercial success of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
. ‘The danger was, I began to believe this was all I could do – all I was – all any woman was.’
151
Women could do better. It was because Laurence Olivier had insulted her by telling her just to look sexy that, by her own account, she started to be late: ‘If you don’t respect your artists, they can’t work well. Respect is what you have to fight for.’
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According to Miller, Olivier was simply jealous and spent most of the time competing with her like a coquette (Thorndike herself had once described him as a ‘bad tempered little bitch’).
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Monroe was scathing about the final cut of the film over which she had forfeited control to him: ‘I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine,’ she wrote in a memorandum to her colleagues including him. ‘Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the brightness you saw in New York.’
154
(Clearly he had contrived to reduce the film’s – to reduce her – comic effect.)

Above all she wanted to be recognised as an actress. ‘I’d like to be a fine actress,’ she is reported as saying to photographer George Barris at the end of her life. ‘I wanted to be an artist, not an erotic freak.’
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‘I would like to be a fine actress,’ she insisted to Georges Belmont, ‘a true actress, that’s what I mean by fine, a real actress.’
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(Once again she makes her unequivocal plea to the register of truth.) ‘Please don’t make me a joke,’ she says to Meryman. ‘End the interview with what I believe. I don’t mind making jokes but I don’t want to look like one. I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity.’
157
She kept a photograph of the famous turn-of-the-century actress Eleanor Duse in her bedroom. This was not mere pretension. Anne Bancroft, who played a nightclub singer in
Niagara
,
said in response to the look in Monroe’s eyes when she is being taken off by the police at the end of the film: ‘It was one of the few times in Hollywood that I felt the give and take that can only come from fine acting.’
158
‘I believe Marilyn is an extraordinary gifted actress,’ wrote Joshua Logan, who directed her in
Bus Stop
, ‘with a technique for playing comedy which is unique in my experience with comediennes,’ her ability to be pathetic as well as comic making her, he continued, ‘the nearest thing to Chaplin’. (In a recent article, John Banville describes her as ‘one of the twentieth century’s great clowns’.)
159
Logan also described her as the nearest thing to Garbo.
160
Henry Hathaway, who directed her on
Niagara
, wanted to cast Monroe opposite Montgomery Clift or James Dean in
Of Human Bondage
, but Zanuck stopped him.
He also tried and failed to cast her as Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
,
a role she repeatedly expressed a serious desire to play. She was famously mocked for saying this at the first British press call for
The Prince and the Showgirl
in 1956. ‘She had read the book,’ Eve Arnold observed, ‘and had understood the part.’
161
Monroe also famously, and increasingly, fluffed her lines. Here too there is a story about control. ‘I just didn’t like the way the scene was going,’ she told an observing journalist on the set of
Clash by Night
who had watched her do it twenty-seven times on one line. ‘When I liked it I said the lines in the scene perfectly.’
162

According to Lee Strasberg, Monroe read the part of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at the Actors Studio more powerfully than any actress he had ever heard. It is worth looking at this. The role would have allowed her to bring home to male-dominated America a few home truths. Like the character she wanted to play in Somerset Maugham’s
Rain
, like Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
,
Anna Christie has been a prostitute. When she returns to her Irish father, Chris Christofferson, who lives on a barge on the Boston waterfront, she falls in love with a sailor, Mat Burke, whom the two of them rescue from drowning when his steamer is wrecked. Burke falls for her as a ‘rale, dacent woman’, unlike the whores he has frequented from port to port. On the point of marrying him against the wishes of her father, she turns on them both as they quarrel about her future: ‘You was going on’s if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see? – cepting myself. I’ll do what I please, and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do! I aint asking either of you for a living.’
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‘Decent, who told you I was?’
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When she then tells them both the truth about her past, Burke threatens to kill her – there is no woman in the world, he says, with the rottenness in her that she has. He will change his mind. Convincing him that she is no longer that woman, she gets to rewrite her role in life (she also points out that he has been as guilty of rottenness as the whores he so hates). It is an extra­ordinary play – Garbo had played the screen version – because the woman manages to defend her own right to freedom and makes the man take back his projections in the same breath (innocence and guilt tracking back in the opposite direction from everything we have seen so far in relation to Monroe). I think it is no coincidence that the prostitute in
Rain
and the lead in
Anna Christie
are the two roles she most wanted near the end of her life. She wanted to play the part of a woman who told the world, who told men, the truth.

That is why so much hung finally on
The Misfits
,
which is where this chapter began. Miller wrote the screenplay to give her the chance she longed for. He genuinely believed that, drawing on her as he saw her, he had created her first serious role. He did not reckon with the problem that this was his vision, not hers (although there was some collaboration between them, she complained to Norman Rosten that the heroine was too passive).
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Nor with the effect on her of so dangerously crossing the border between life and fiction, of turning her definitively into a piece of her own, or rather his own, art. This could not have been further from the method of acting in which she believed, and for which she strove: ‘You find out what she’s like,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘the person you’re playing. I mean what she
means
to you. How you’re like her and not like her.’
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She wanted to act not herself, but – like and unlike – beyond herself; she wanted to become somebody else.

In
The Misfits
, the character of Roslyn speaks the truth – although ‘speaks’ is not quite the right word – in a brute world of mustang hunters who are lost men. They are the misfits of post-war America. Only she can see how their violence is not the antidote to the poison of the nation, but its restaging in the desert, the place to which they wrongly believe they have escaped. She offers them 200 dollars to set the mustangs free. When Gay asks her to give him a reason to stop what he has been doing, she is enraged: ‘
A reason!
You, sensitive fella? So full of feelings? So sad about our wife, and the bombs you dropped and the people you killed . . . You could blow up the whole world, and all you’d ever feel is sorry for
yourself 
!’ Then, as they are retying the mustangs, she runs off and shouts at them from a distance:

Man! Big man! You’re only living when you can watch something die! Kill.

Everything, that’s all you want! Why don’t you just kill yourself and be happy?

In the screenplay she screams these first lines from forty yards away (Miller’s directions are precise), then runs back towards them and speaks these next lines directly into Gay’s face:

You. With your God’s country. Freedom! I hate you!

You know everything except what it feels like to be alive. You’re three sweet dead men.

Going against the screenplay, Huston does not bring her back into close-up for these words but keeps her writhing and screaming at a distance, so when Gay says, ‘She’s crazy,’ the camera tells him he is right.

According to Pepitone’s account, she was furious that she was refused the chance to explain – too dumb to explain anything – reduced to a screaming, crazy fit.
167
She could not bear that her character was not allowed to be mentally equal to the ethical task she is allowed, only screaming, to perform. Like Anna Christie, she wanted to get her point across. It is, it could have been, one of the most radical moments in her film career, where she offers up her diagnosis,
explains
what’s wrong with America, the dangers beneath the illusion of innocence and perfection – men who only feel alive when killing, guilty men home from the war who would blow up the whole world and feel only sorry for themselves. This is freedom, this is God’s country.

I think this left her with nowhere to go. It does not seem a coincidence that this was her last completed film.

Monroe’s art is, however, far from exhausted by this moment in what was, by any standards and despite her own misgivings, her brilliant career. She still has much to tell us, among many other things, about men, as sexual and political creatures both. In the words of Ella Fitzgerald, she was a woman a little ahead of her time. She was a consummate performer. We need to allow Monroe as much her affirmation as her despair. She is another woman who, in her unique way, is telling us that the two are inseparable. To get a sense of the first, a good place to begin might be the number ‘After you get what you want you don’t want it’ from
There’s No Business Like Show Business
–
one of the rare moments when Hollywood seems to acknowledge the infinite, insatiable nature of the desire it promotes
.
Despite the most stringent copyright controls from Fox Studios, who still seem to think they own her, it is easily available on YouTube.

II

THE LOWER DEPTHS

4

Honour-bound

Shafilea Ahmed, Heshu Yones and Fadime Sahindal

Foolish men,

That e’er will trust their honour in a bark

Made of so slight, weak bulrush as is woman,

Apt every minute to sink it.

John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi
, 1612–13

I gave voice. I lent face.

Fadime Sahindal, address to members of Swedish Parliament organised by Violence Against Women network, 20 November 2001

It is late July 2012, and outside Chester Crown Court a group, mainly women, is waiting for the proceedings to begin. Unlike me, they have been there every day since the beginning of the trial of Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed, who are charged with murdering their daughter, Shafilea Ahmed, nine years ago. They do not attend court regularly – in fact most of them have not attended a trial before. But something about this case has gripped them. When I ask them, they are convinced that the parents are guilty. This indeed will be the verdict of the jury, who find that the parents had murdered their daughter after she swallowed bleach in Pakistan and then ran away in order to avoid an arranged marriage. Their confidence rests on the plausibility of the chief prosecution witness – Shafilea’s sister, Alesha – on the fact that she spoke in the witness box with such calm, from behind a curtain so she could not see her parents while speaking. They were equally certain that Shafilea’s other sister, Mevish, was lying. Like their brother, Junyad, and against the evidence of her own diary, which described the murder, Mevish had spoken out on her parents’ behalf (she insisted her diary was fiction).

At least one of the women also told me that Alesha herself was bound to be sent to jail after the trial as she had been behind an armed robbery of her own family – ‘not very nice’ – she was sure to go down ‘for a long time’. It was this robbery that fractured the hitherto preserved family unity that had covered over the truth for so many years. Mevish Ahmed had also been involved in stealing money from the home several years before. As if both sisters, despite their conflicting testimonies, had felt the need to violate the abusive sanctity of the home, which might also have been their way of declaring its criminality to the world. In fact, shortly after Shafilea was killed, a police bug had recorded the mother ordering her children to act as if they didn’t understand, should anyone question them as to why Shafilea had disappeared. But there had been insufficient evidence for a prosecution until, once the robbery had neatly got the police back inside the house, Alesha Ahmed told them that she had watched her parents murder her sister.