by Lois Banner
Despite the disaster, My Story is a brilliant piece. In writing it, Hecht said that he had tried to “marry [Marilyn’s] point of view with his vocabulary and style,” and he succeeded. It is Hecht’s most powerful prose writing, superior to his own autobiography, A Child of the Century, published in 1954, the same year as the Empire News story. Hecht captured the cadences of her speech, the depth of her perceptions, and the fissures in her self.
Hecht began his career in Chicago in the late nineteenth century as a journalist for an urban newspaper, roaming the city in pursuit of the human interest stories that were front-page news in that day. He began writing fiction, especially short stories, and was a founder of the school of writers who formed the “Chicago Renaissance.” His work combined urban realism with a lyricism that is both hard-boiled and sentimental. He admired working-class people—and so did Marilyn. In spare, sometimes riveting prose, My Story captures the narrative of a girl from the streets. Irony and paradox, central to modernist writing, permeate the text, as Marilyn is positioned as a character both experiencing life and observing it. Like many Hollywood novels, it’s a picaresque tale, as Marilyn wanders the streets of Hollywood, a cold unwelcoming city, meeting such characters as a raconteur from Texas who tells her about Abraham Lincoln, a soapbox preacher who wants to marry her, and producers who try to bed her. One suspects that Hecht—or Marilyn—made up the Texas talker and the soapbox preacher, but perhaps they were real. It’s also possible, as Lucille Ryman contended, that she walked Hollywood Boulevard to pick up men.
Milton Greene published the Hecht manuscript in 1974 as My Story. How did he come to possess it? The answer is simple. Marilyn took her corrected copy with her when she moved in with the Greenes in Connecticut in late 1954, since she and Greene were talking about assembling a book of his photographs of her combined with a text about her life that she would write. They never did so, and Marilyn left her copy of the autobiography in Connecticut with Greene. Once he and Marilyn split up over the production company, she didn’t see him again. She may have forgotten that he had the manuscript; perhaps she had another copy of it. When asked why he didn’t publish it until 1974 Milton replied that he couldn’t find a publisher until Norman Mailer’s Marilyn biography appeared, in 1973.73 The passages in it that have been criticized as inauthentic, such as the one about her being a Hollywood starlet who was a potential suicide, may have been added by Marilyn herself, when she lived with the Greenes.
Married to Joe DiMaggio, a man about whom she was ambivalent, and involved in a struggle with Darryl Zanuck, who regarded her as a “dumb blonde,” Marilyn showed courage in moving to New York. Until the last minute she wasn’t certain she would do it. But there was the lure of Manhattan, the presence of Arthur Miller, and the production company with Milton Greene. She put off telling Hal Schaefer their affair was over until she had gone east; it must have been hard for her to do it. But her determination to conquer the world was too strong for her to settle down with a musician, no matter how gentle and appealing he was. New York beckoned, and that’s where she chose to go.
Part III
Entr’acte: A Woman for All Seasons
Monroe was an infinity of character and mystery that was impossible for me, or anyone else, to explore, because it was so vast. There is always more and more and more.
Maurice Zolotow, Marilyn Monroe
Chapter 8
The Meaning of Marilyn
As an avatar of her age, Marilyn both reflected and created trends in beauty, sensuality, femininity, and fashion. Her life needs to be explored in terms of those trends, not just in terms of its chronology, which has been my focus thus far. Marilyn’s life constantly spills over a central narrative path into byways with their own chronologies and meanings, as she takes on pseudonyms, wears disguises, pursues many interests, and lives separate lives at the same time. The standard chronological framework of biography doesn’t encompass Marilyn’s life. Thus in this chapter I pause in my central narrative to examine structures of experience and meaning that provide insight into the paradoxical character of Marilyn Monroe.
To avoid confusing the reader, I focus on the events of the time frame I have covered in Part Two—from her 1946 entry into the Hollywood studio system to her 1954 flight from it to New York—although I occasionally go beyond it. During these years Norma Jeane concentrated on creating Marilyn Monroe, her sexualized self-confident alter ego. But other “alters” also emerged: the first was the “sex kitten” Marilyn, the pinup girl who roamed the streets of Hollywood and ingratiated herself with producers. That Marilyn segued into the comic Marilyn, whom I call Lorelei Lee, the persona who joked with ease and was joyous and playful. There was also a glamorous Marilyn, who combined the sculptured quality of the glamour queens of the 1930s like Marlene Dietrich with the more open eroticism of 1940s beauty queens like Rita Hayworth and their sisters on the burlesque and striptease stage.
By the 1950s, however, the word “glamour” was taking on additional meanings, as photographers of partially clothed and nude women hijacked the word to apply to their photographs. At the same time it retained its original meaning as connected to the mystery of elite status or foreign intrigue. Sensitive to nuances, Marilyn created herself in terms of both definitions, to become the “glamour girl” for her age.1
Sometimes Marilyn spiced the characters she played with the open sexuality of Jean Harlow, who electrified the nation in 1929 by wearing no underwear, flaunting her body, and bleaching her hair white blonde, a color that indicated perverse desire.2 Harlow’s antics (plus those of Mae West) brought the strict Production Code of 1934 into being, and its prohibition of open sexuality in films resulted in the appearance of the “fast-talking dames,” who radiated desire and mocked it by engaging in flirtatious and swift repartee with men, rather than in open sex. The Production Board monitored their behavior. Marilyn saw their films in her moviegoing as a child; they were the actresses in the “Promised Land” of her childhood; they helped to enable her to challenge the Production Board. When fan magazine writers said they hadn’t seen anyone quite like Marilyn since Jean Harlow, they were speaking truth.
With these statements as guidelines for what follows, I turn to discrete areas of Marilyn’s life. These areas include her relationship to her times, her varying looks, her concepts of gender, the books she read, and her compulsive sexuality. Throughout, I point to the ways in which Marilyn mixed elements from high culture and low, from the legitimate stage, for example, as well as from burlesque and striptease, which were very popular forms of theater in the 1940s and ’50s. The complexities of Marilyn, her paradoxical nature, are important in understanding her great popularity in her own day—and ever since. I end my entr’acte by analyzing some famous photographs taken of her in which her dramatic, trickster side is in evidence.
As a historian, I have been impressed throughout my work on Marilyn by her deep historical imagination. She knew the history of Hollywood, and it fascinated her. She had lived it; she had been part of it. She had spent her childhood reading the movie magazines, going to movies, visiting the studios, and imaging herself as a Hollywood star. When she came to create herself as Marilyn Monroe, those images were in her mind. It’s not surprising that, in later years, she often said that the photos Richard Avedon took of her in 1958 as the great sirens of Hollywood—Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich—were her favorite photographs. When Simone Signore was friendly with her during the filming of Let’s Make Love, Marilyn told Simone that she preferred these photographs to any of the films she had made. That was undoubtedly an overstatement, but it pointed to Marilyn’s love of history and her creation of herself in history’s terms.
Post–World War Two prosperity in the United States produced a new well-to-do class in cities and suburbs, whose members flocked to elite forms of dance and theater such as ballet and opera. They validated the elegant ballerina and the high-fashion model as beauty ideals. They formed a fan base for Audrey Hep
burn and Jackie Kennedy, the major exemplars of this look. Hepburn was a ballerina turned actress, tall and thin, with a straight body, who often modeled high-fashion clothing in her films. Jackie Kennedy was another elegant type. She was dressed by some of the world’s most famous designers; she brought an aristocratic elegance to her White House world. Her stepcousin and friend, Gore Vidal, said she would have made a wonderful actress.3
At the same time, a populuxe style, based on a populist version of luxury, swept the nation, and Marilyn was its symbol. “Americans reveled in a kind of innocent hedonism,” wrote Thomas Hine. That innocence was reflected in the decoration of household items—from refrigerators to automobiles—in garish colors, often with a curved shape coming to a point. The colors reflected postwar joy and the popularity of Technicolor and Walt Disney’s animated films, shot in glowing colors. The curved shape coming to a point derived from the design of the jet fighter airplane, the new symbol of American power. The most representative product of populuxe was the automobile, which grew ever larger in size. The typical brightly colored model, sometimes in two tones, was trimmed in shiny chrome, with fins on its back sides adapted from airplane wings and shark fins, and bumps on the fenders that served no purpose. They were called Dagmars, after the big-breasted TV performer.4
By elite standards populuxe was vulgar, but it captured the nation’s fancy. Through its version of reality as an amusing fairy tale, it helped the nation cope with its paranoia in the 1950s about the Cold War, the atom bomb, and the totalitarian Communist Soviet Union. When Marilyn radiated glamour and joy, as in the Seven Year Itch photo, she was a symbol of frivolity and fun to the world.
In-demand architect Morris Lapidus created an architecture of joy, based on Coney Island buildings and futurist designs in Hollywood films. Lapidus designed hotels, like the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, with undulating lines. His free-form decorations, looking like squiggles or space ships, were called “woggles.” Architect Wayne McAllister used the “googie” kidney bean shape of Southern California drive-in restaurants in his Las Vegas Sands Hotel, home to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Woogles, googies, and lines coming to points drew on the female body in this era when women emphasized their curves, wore pointy spike heels, and corseted their breasts so that they would jut out in torpedo points.5
This was parody architecture. It incorporated the comic extravagance beloved by Americans, who have often dealt with racial, ethnic, and sexual fears through the mirth of the comedian, while validating themselves and their nation through monumental size: ergo Cinemascope, the huge automobiles of the 1950s, the return of skyscrapers, and the fixation with large breasts. Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns picked up populuxe in their work, which resonated to the forms and features in comic strips, a classic American art that validated and extended the populuxe style. Marilyn became a favorite subject of pop artists, as in Andy Warhol’s famous lithograph of multiple Marilyns. In the spring of 1956, Time magazine described her as “an adolescent daydream, like the ones served up in the comic strips. The cut of the face is Betty Boop, but the shape and the expressions are Daisy Mae.”6 Betty Boop, who looked like Clara Bow, drew from the 1920s flapper, a sexualized adolescent. Daisy Mae, hopelessly in love with L’il Abner, dated from the 1930s and was more mature and voluptuous, wearing a polka-dot peasant blouse that fulsomely displayed her cleavage.
Marilyn’s comic Lorelei Lee expressed these American themes and figures, but she also had roots in Western theatrical traditions. The female comic figure dated from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, from Columbina, the female companion to Harlequin, Pierrot, and the other zanni (clowns) of the Commedia. Playful, shrewd servants, they mocked their superiors. Over time, Columbina became the soubrette, the saucy servant girl of the nineteenth-century stage. All these figures were tricksters, mocking their betters, indulging in childish jokes, deflating conventions.
Marilyn was trained in acting by theater people from Germany, in many cases Jewish, who had fled Hitler for Hollywood. Natasha Lytess came from the German stage, where Commedia dell’Arte clowns appeared in expressionist drama, including that of Max Reinhardt, in whose troupe she performed. Absurd characters, they mocked the horrors of World War One and the dictators that followed, with their brutal fascist and Nazi worlds. The clowns upheld the naivete and wisdom of the fool, existing in an innocent, make-believe world, the land of fairy tales and of the circus, the special habitat of the clown. Max Pallenberg, who perhaps was Natasha’s father, was famed as a clown; Fritzi Massary, who perhaps was her mother, played soubrette roles before becoming a diva. She was famed for her sexy and ironic delivery, which influenced Marlene Dietrich.7
Even if Pallenberg and Massary weren’t Natasha’s parents, she would have known them from her years with Reinhardt’s troupe. Natasha had played clowns in Reinhardt’s theater; she was expert in their techniques when she coached Marilyn in “dumb-blonde” roles like Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Perfer Blondes. Moreover, Michael Chekhov, Marilyn’s drama teacher in Hollywood, was known for his portrayal of clowns, as well as of dramatic characters. And he sent Marilyn to study with famed mime Lotte Goslar, who mostly played clowns in her solo stage performances. These actors and teachers passed the European comic tradition on to Marilyn.
In creating her comic character, Marilyn also drew from traditions of the American musical hall and comedy theater, which both incorporated European traditions and expanded on them. Thus she can’t be understood without examining the women of burlesque and striptease, as well as the “dumb blondes” of stage and screen and the “fast-talking dames” of 1930s films. To begin with, burlesque was an old English stage tradition. It was brought to the United States in the 1860s by the British Blondes, a group of female performers who displayed their legs in tights, did topical reviews, and had women play many of the male roles in their productions. Bawdy, powerful women were typical of burlesque, playing opposite comic men they overshadowed—or in early burlesque, playing the male roles themselves. (Vaudeville, dating from the 1880s, was a cleaned-up version of burlesque.)
By 1929 the audiences for burlesque (and vaudeville) began to decline, due to the popularity of Hollywood films. Striptease was then invented to reinvigorate burlesque by adding nudity to its bawdy sexuality. The stripping women—uniquely American—exhibited curvy bodies, bringing big breasts into vogue, but they also parodied themselves and their inept male partners, as had been typical of the burlesque women. Think of the zany Marx brothers and the other inept grotesque men of the American comic tradition—Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Kops, Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges. These comic men were often partnered with beautiful women who ran circles around them. The impotent man, like the unintelligent female beauty, was a comic type in American entertainment. But stripteasers, in particular, could also be soubrettes, descendants of the saucy servant girls of the nineteenth-century stage. As such, they turned cartwheels and talked baby talk. They were as much comic as erotic.8
Moralists closed down many burlesque houses in the 1930s, but the striptease artists moved upscale to Broadway revues and nightclubs like Ciro’s in Hollywood, as elite audiences took a fancy to them. Yet, whether performed in dives or nightclubs, the strip was always a tease, the nudity was mostly a “flash,” and the bumps, grinds, and shimmies of the stripping women mocked the sex act while mimicking it. Total nudity was rare on the early striptease stage.
Gypsy Rose Lee, who some say invented striptease, called her act a “burlesque of burlesque.” She invented the “literary stripper,” who read passages from high-culture texts and parodied them. Captivating audiences with her wit, Gypsy took off few clothes, while she challenged the myth that sexy women can’t be rational or well read. Lili St. Cyr, whose popularity dated from the 1950s, was as important as Gypsy in the development of striptease, but she was different. She took off her clothes and did much more than a flash; her naked body, which she displayed on stage with impunity, looked like a Greek statue,
representing high-class glamour as well as low-class comedy. She didn’t speak on stage. She survived a complaint lodged against her as obscene; brought to trial, her act was ruled aesthetic, not pornographic. Other strippers had animals in their acts to parody male “animality”: Blaze Starr used a panther. Sally Rand invented the fan dance, in which she manipulated large fans to conceal her nude body and make her “flash” dramatic. Marilyn realized the innovative nature of striptease women in drawing from them to create her alter egos Marilyn Monroe and Lorelei Lee.9
Striptease and burlesque also influenced Marilyn’s movements and costumes directly. Choreographer Jack Cole haunted burlesque houses to find interesting material. He put modified bumps and grinds into Marilyn’s production numbers—dampening them down for the Production Board. Billy Travilla found inspiration in the elaborate costumes that stripteasers often wore when they came on stage, before they removed their costumes piece by piece. As a child growing up in Glendale, not far from downtown Los Angeles, on the way to school he had walked by burlesque houses where striptease artists were performing. Becoming friendly with the artists, he had designed costumes for them.10
Female “dumb-blonde” comics also influenced Marilyn. They can be traced to the 1900s vaudeville theater, when male-female duos were introduced—as comedy teams, as trapeze artists, as dancers—dominated by the men. The women in the pairs didn’t talk; they were “dumb.” In 1910 Harriette Lee of Ryan and Lee modified the formula by talking baby talk and serving as the butt of her partner Ben Ryan’s jokes. Called a female dumbbell, she was a smash hit and was widely imitated. By the 1920s the dumbbell of the 1910s had transitioned into a dark-haired flapper, called a “Dumb Dora.”11
Anita Loos combined “Dumb Dora” with the blonde to create the classic “dumb blonde” in her 1925 novella Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Dark-haired and witty, Loos participated in intellectual New York circles, but she also was friends with Broadway chorus girls. She knew they bedded wealthy men, expecting expensive presents or even marriage in return. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Loos positioned her chorus girls—Lorelei Lee and Dorothy—in the guise of the traditional fool, a historical character to be found in Shakespeare’s plays, who was wise under a mask of stupidity. Loos also made fun of the myth that the chorus girls were “gold diggers” who used their bodies to fleece men. In fact, that’s what they did, but Loos implicitly emphasized that the men deserved what they got.12