by Lois Banner
Wolfe, Whitman, and Rilke all criticized the prevailing materialism of capitalist societies and sympathized with workers and peasants, but none was a political radical. Rather, they were vitalists, advising individuals to cultivate an electric energy to empower themselves and their nations. Wolfe and Rilke were influenced by Nietzsche, who called for supermen to rejuvenate the world and hoped for a new ecstatic Dionysianism for both individuals and for the theater, which he viewed as a place of transformation for both actors and audiences.
In addition to poets and writers like Rilke and Wolfe, Marilyn was also attracted to Sigmund Freud, whose theories dominated intellectual and popular thought after World War Two. His belief that a primitive id, seething with base urges, underlay human personality and was controlled only with difficulty by a rational ego made sense after the brutality of the war. His ideas drew from the pessimism about mankind that was a strain in the thinking of Dostoyevsky, Rilke, and Wolfe, although he put forth a specific plan for individuals to come to terms with their neuroses through the process of psychoanalysis. By the time of World War Two, psychoanalysts dominated the psychiatric services offered by the military, and they emerged from the war to fill a majority of posts in clinics and hospitals as well as in the profession of social work.51
Articles in newspapers and magazines praised Freudian psychoanalysts as potential saviors of individuals and the nation, while many Hollywood people underwent psychoanalysis. Prominent European psychoanalysts, fleeing Hitler, had arrived in the United States. Terms such as “libido,” “ego,” and the “unconscious,” taken from Freud’s work, entered the vocabulary. Time celebrated Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as comparable in importance to the Enlightenment’s discounting of religion in favor of rationality, which had formed a cornerstone of the modern worldview.52
For Marilyn, always worried about going insane like her mother, Freud’s ideas offered a way to achieve a balanced mind that might keep her from the incarcerations, continuous baths, and electric shock treatments her mother had endured. There was a messianic quality to Freud, who seemed like a secular prophet. Although she continued to explore mystical alternatives and converted to Arthur Miller’s Judaism, she called Freudianism “her religion.”
Psychoanalysis became a way of life for her, as she consulted therapists even before she left Hollywood for New York. In New York and after she returned to Hollywood in 1961 she entered into a voyage of discovery with them, exploring childhood memories, trying to figure out who she was. As was her way, she went to the top of the Freudian networks, choosing therapists who were close to Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, whom Freud had analyzed himself. She finally consulted Anna Freud herself when she was in London, filming The Prince and the Showgirl. She saw Anna for daily sessions over the course of a week.
She told Anna that she had read Sigmund Freud’s “dream of nudity” in his Interpretation of Dreams in 1947, when she was twenty-one, and that it had impressed her. Freud interpreted the dream of being nude in a public situation, as well as the drive toward nudity itself, as the product of some sort of sexual exposure in early childhood.53 In Marilyn’s case, playing sex games with a young boy, being subjected to Ida Bolender’s attack on masturbation, or being molested by an elderly actor fit this pattern. When Anna and Marilyn played a game of marbles, Marilyn launched the balls one by one toward Anna. Anna concluded from that action and other statements by Marilyn that she desired to have sex with her and that she was afraid of men. The analysis seems overblown, but we don’t know what else happened in their interactions.54
Marilyn’s free-love attitudes, her belief in the beauty of the naked body, and her attitude toward sex as part of friendship continued through her years in Hollywood—and beyond. She continued to justify her displays of her body in reformist terms, claiming that they were a protest against the resurgent Puritanism of the 1950s and its repressive attitudes about sex. Susan Strasberg called Marilyn a hippie, and to Eunice Murray, her companion and housekeeper in 1962, she seemed like a “flower child,” a forerunner of the movement for free relationships and living close to nature that would soon appear.
She was incensed when a number of states banned a book of nude photographs by Bruno Bernard as pornographic. She detested the Production Board and its rulings and continued to challenge it directly and subtly, as she did in the photo shoot for The Seven Year Itch. “She has a genius for falling into poses which flirt with the Johnston office regulations,” Jack Wade wrote in Modern Screen, referring to Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, which ran the Production Board. “I love to do things the censors won’t pass,” Marilyn stated. She parodied her desires and drives. At a party in New York people played a game in which they composed epitaphs for their tombstones. Marilyn punned the word “lay” to describe both sex and a minstrel song: “Here lies Marilyn. No lies. Only lays.”55
As she constructed her sexy persona, she dispensed with wearing underwear. She told many people, as she had told Jim Dougherty, that she had stopped wearing it to avoid bulges in her skin-tight clothing. It’s probable that she copied the behavior from Jean Harlow, who was known for not wearing underwear.
Marilyn had a drive to expose her body. She told her psychiatrist Marianne Kris that the drive was sometimes overwhelming when she was in public. In 1956 Sidney Skolsky stated that Marilyn wore panties and bras—mostly black in color—much more frequently than she admitted. But when she took her clothes off to try on clothing in dressing rooms, she usually was wearing no undergarments. On a visit to Atlantic City with Joe DiMaggio to see Skinny D’Amato, Joe’s friend who ran the 500 Club, she went shopping for clothes with Skinny’s wife, Bettyjane, who hardly knew her. When she took off her clothing in the dressing room to try on clothing she’d selected, she wasn’t wearing underwear. When the salesladies objected, she bought all the clothes she’d tried on. Bettyjane was shocked.56
Roy Craft, the Fox publicity agent assigned to Marilyn, tried to never let her out of his sight because of her “striptease” inclinations. “She wears no panties,” he said, and “when she sees a photographer on the lot, she lifts her skirt and falls into a cheesecake pose.” He worried about “bottomless” photos. When Joe Schenck heard about this, he gave Marilyn two dozen panties monogrammed with the initials MM.
Sometimes prudish and sometimes outrageous, Marilyn rationalized her sexual behavior through free-love ideas. She shocked the nation, according to journalists, with statements like “Sex is part of life, it’s part of nature—and I’d rather go along with nature.” She told her friend Henry Rosenfeld she believed that sex brought people together and enhanced friendships. When she and Joe DiMaggio reconnected after she separated from Arthur Miller in 1960, she was thrilled that Joe finally agreed to an open relationship, in which they would be special friends to each other but would have sexual liaisons with other people with impunity. She had been wanting that concession from him for a long time.57
Marilyn considered fidelity and children essential elements of a loving marriage, one that was working. She never nested with DiMaggio, but she did so for a number of years with Arthur Miller. He was persuaded by her views on nudity and nature that she was in the vanguard of a new sexual rebellion that would undermine the Puritanism he now viewed as a central part of the anticommunist movement. Liberating people from conservative views on sex might inspire them to become more liberated in their political views in general.
When she lived alone, Marilyn often went naked in her home or threw a white terry-cloth robe over her nude body. Her bare skin pleased her. She said, “If you have a beautiful body, why not show it?” According to James Bacon, she lost all her insecurities when “she was flaunting that magnificent body.” Photographer Anthony Beauchamp noticed her transformation after she put on her skimpy yellow bikini for their photo shoot in 1950. Being uncovered seemed to release her “sparkling personality.” As soon as she discarded her clothes, she became animated; she talked with a delightfully un
conscious sense of humor, and with almost flamboyant self-assurance. Both Lucille Ryman and Natasha Lytess remarked on her love of going nude. Jean Negulesco maintained that the only way Marilyn felt truly comfortable was nude.58
She sometimes exposed herself when posing for male photographers or in costume fittings with male designers—but this action could work against her. Milton Greene and Billy Travilla were both nonplussed when she showed off a breast to greet them on first meeting them. “Wait a minute!” Milton said.59 In the early 1950s she sat for George Hurrell, who had created the glamour look of the 1930s. Unlike most photographers who shot Marilyn, he wasn’t impressed by her. When she came out of the dressing room, she let the robe she was wearing fall “all of a sudden,” he said, revealing her nude body beneath it. It was exactly what Harlow had done when he had photographed her in the early 1930s. He wondered if Marilyn had copied Harlow or had thought the action up herself. He implied that she was a bad copy of the original.60
One day she and Susan Strasberg came across a copy of the Kama Sutra on the bookshelves in the Strasbergs’ apartment in New York. Marilyn exclaimed, “Oh! My goodness! This is the classic dirty book!” Then she added, “Only it’s not dirty because it’s oriental and they’re very classy about this sort of thing, not puritanical, like Americans. It’s got hundreds of drawings of all the positions of how to do it, make love, that is.” Like children playing a game, Marilyn and Susan acted out the positions, fully clothed. Finding it difficult to twist into the more complicated ones, Marilyn joked, “The highest number I ever got to is sixty-nine.” Susan asked her what she meant, and Marilyn replied, “Never mind.” Susan was only seventeen years old. She commented, “Marilyn acted as if sex were natural, nothing to be ashamed of, as if it was actually fun.”61
But there is an ugliness to some of Marilyn’s behavior with nudity—a way in which it seems compulsive, not rebellious or free. There was the episode in Warrensburg, New York, when she went there in July 1949 with Adele Whiteley Fletcher of Photoplay and took off her clothes in front of a Warrensburg resident in the public bathroom. The first time she visited Robert Mitchum at his home in Hollywood she walked to the fireplace and lifted up her skirt to warm herself. Even the rebellious Mitchum was shocked, since she wasn’t wearing underpants.62 Such exhibitionism may have been meant to seduce or simply show off, but as she grew older its compulsive edge showed. Marilyn gave nude interviews to journalists, and in public she wore the black mink coat Joe had given her for Christmas in 1953 with nothing on underneath it. Holding it closed to cover herself, she would suddenly flash it open to give a glimpse of her body to friends and sometimes strangers. Dan St. Jacques, a New York policeman, often encountered her in 1955 at Rikers coffee shop, on Fifty-seventh Street, near Times Square, as she took a break on one of her nighttime walks in Midtown. One night she asked him to escort her home. Then she leaned over him, and he realized that she had nothing on under the coat.63
When she posed for photographers, she sometimes exposed her genitals. In the fall of 1955, photographer Eve Arnold arrived at Marilyn’s apartment in New York to show her the proof sheets from photos that Arnold had taken of her. A reporter was waiting in the living room to interview Marilyn. Marilyn asked the reporter if she could comb her hair. The reporter said yes, and Marilyn began combing her pubic hair. The reporter fled.64 Marilyn the prankster may have done this to play a crude joke. Yet it reflects the schisms in her persona. She was an abused child whose early sexualization led her to inappropriate behavior as an adult.
Reporter Julia Paul chastised Marilyn publicly for that behavior. “She is giving photographers whim wham poses. Asked to raise her skirt a little higher for cheesecake art, time and time again she has embarrassed the lensmen by forgetting that she doesn’t have any lingerie on,” Paul stated. “Marilyn is simply going too far.”65 These incidents of exposing herself were episodic. Reporters normally didn’t mention them. Indeed, when Marilyn pulled her dress high in an interview with Jon Whitcomb for Cosmopolitan magazine, the paragraphs he wrote about her exposure of her genitals were excised from the published article. This behavior reflected only a part of a complex individual who was in the public eye, and interviewers and photographers tried to overlook it. Her innocent look offset it, as did the comic character she created who spoofed femininity and sex.
Once she married Arthur Miller, the news media became fixated on her relationship with his children and on her struggle to have children of her own. Her miscarriages became national news. Once again the nation was focusing on her body, this time in a new way. In an article in Photoplay, Dorothy Manning articulated an attitude toward Marilyn that influenced her: “The final step on this road to becoming known as a woman and an actress first and a sex symbol second, will be when she becomes a mother.”66 She had articulated her desire for a child in the unpublished ending to her autobiography. It was slowly becoming a fixation for her by 1956, when she married Miller.
Three photographs taken of Marilyn between her move to New York in December 1954 and her journey to Hollywood to do Bus Stop in the spring of 1956 illuminate her complexities. The first photograph is from the “ballerina sitting,” taken in December 1954 by Milton Greene. Eve Arnold took the second photo in September 1955. Marilyn sat for the third photo in February 1956 for the British photographer Cecil Beaton. I call it the “Japanese photo” because she is posed against a wall hanging with a Japanese figure on it. All these photos tell dramatic stories. They relate to Marilyn’s drive for elegance, her desire during her New York years to become a denizen of high culture. But steeped in irony and satire, they also parody that drive, showing Marilyn as a paradoxical being, not someone to be slotted into one category.
Most fashion photographers—including eminent photographers like Greene and Beaton—were gentle, unlike tough Hollywood producers and directors. Often involved with the feminized world of fashion, they weren’t macho. Some were homosexual, but many weren’t. Marilyn didn’t have to remember lines for them or watch for key lights or marks on the floor. Producers weren’t there enforcing time constraints. Marilyn had a lot of control in these situations. She was so good at posing that she often set the pace, and the photographer followed her lead. She influenced them in other ways. As Marilyn told W. J. Weatherby, “I’ve sometimes tried to charm critics, give the impression that I’m really attracted to them, and it works. With journalists and photographers generally. Experienced as they are, they’re not beyond being wooed.”67
Her energy as a model was huge. Richard Avedon, who photographed her for Harper’s Bazaar in 1954 and on a number of occasions in later years, stated that “she gave more to the still camera than any actress—any woman—I’ve ever photographed.” Sometimes their sittings would go on all night, Avedon said. He would be exhausted and Marilyn, with endless energy, would say, “Let’s try one more time.” Obsessed with looking perfect, she would pore over the contact photos, looking for an “honest picture.”68
Greene took the ballerina photo in his spacious Lexington Avenue studio, which contained the many props he had collected over the years. In the photo, Marilyn perches on a chair in front of what appears to be a barre—the dancer’s practice rod—holding what appears to be a long tutu (the classic ballerina dress) in front of her. Her breasts are popping out of a strapless top, her feet are bare, her fingernails and toenails are red, and her hair is tousled.
Her appearance burlesques the hauteur of the ballerina, a 1950s icon of sleek female elegance who had become the ideal of young girls throughout the nation, who flocked to ballet classes. Dating from the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, the ballerina still slicked back her hair, usually dark in color; stuffed her feet into toe shoes; had little body fat; held her body straight as a rod; and rarely smiled. In the photos Marilyn seems to humanize and mock the ballerina, looking like the sensual woman that a ballerina could never be. Looking sad in several of the ballerina photos, Marilyn draws on the classic clown, combining comedy with tragedy to resembl
e Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The white garment that Marilyn holds in front of her wasn’t actually a tutu; it was a petticoat removed from an Anne Klein dress that Amy Greene had given her. When the dress turned out to be too small for Marilyn, Milton Greene had her hold the petticoat over her body. Thus another interesting incongruity was added to the photo.69
The second photo I have chosen to show Marilyn as a trickster was taken in September 1955, by Eve Arnold. Marilyn is slithering through the tall grass and mud of a marsh, wearing a leopard-skin bathing suit. One immediately thinks of Moses in the bulrushes, the abandoned child found by the pharaoh’s daughter in the biblical tale. Arnold shot the photo on a deserted playground near her house on Long Island. She and Marilyn arrived there just at five o’clock, a time photographers call the “magic hour,” when the light turns golden as the sun begins to set. In the photo Marilyn seems to be a primeval creature, an Eve for the ages, hardly a comic woman or a “fast-talking” blonde. Yet Arnold remembered that the idea of a “leopard in the bulrushes” appealed to Marilyn’s tremendous sense of fun.
Arnold did, indeed, give Marilyn a different look, as she had requested when they met at the party for John Huston in New York in 1952. It’s not the same as Marlene Dietrich without makeup on a deserted soundstage—Arnold’s photo that initially impressed Marilyn—but it does show her in a new light. As Arnold described it, Marilyn was in control, setting the style and pace. Arnold followed, “just praying that my reflexes would be fast enough to accommodate to Marilyn’s antics.” The result was a brilliant photograph.70