Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  On June 1, 1955, Joe and Marilyn attended the premiere of The Seven Year Itch at Loew’s State Theater in Times Square. Playing a model who has sublet the top-floor apartment of Tom Ewell’s brownstone, Marilyn is funny and fey, at the peak of her comic form. She is a fairy godmother who has come to earth to cure Ewell of his fear of women. Sexual double-entendres abound in the movie, as when Marilyn gets her toe caught in a drain spout when taking a bubble bath and a plumber has to get it out, while trying to avoid seeing her naked body under the bubbles. It’s a wonder that Billy Wilder got the movie past the censors. In addition to the scene in which her skirt billows upward as she stands over the subway grate, in others Ewell’s character fantasizes himself as the masterful men who have sex with beautiful women in famous film scenes, as in the scene with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr passionately embracing on the beach in From Here to Eternity. In one fantasy sequence in The Seven Year Itch Marilyn spoofed Mae West, but Wilder cut the scene from the movie.

  In the film Marilyn cures Ewell of his feeling of impotence by convincing him that women like gentle men—a sentiment she often voices in her movies. “No girl really likes a great big hunk in a fancy striped vest, strutting around like a tiger—giving you that ‘I’m so handsome you can’t resist me’ look. It’s the nervous, shy guy in the corner who is really exciting. He’ll be tender and nice and sweet—and that’s what’s really exciting.”

  The Seven Year Itch premiere was the first public event with Marilyn in full Monroe sexy regalia that Joe attended, and it would be the last. After the premiere, which fell on her birthday, he hosted a party honoring her at Toots Shor’s. During the evening they had an argument, and Sam Shaw took her home. After that dispute, Marilyn and Joe weren’t seen together during the rest of her years in New York, until after she separated from Arthur in the fall of 1960. It appears that she told him firmly that she didn’t want to be married to him.

  Marilyn’s rejection hurt, but Joe wasn’t destroyed; rather, he started working on himself, trying to learn to curb his anger. He underwent therapy; he went to Sicily, to visit his ancestral home, taking Sam Shaw along. He accepted a job promoting the Monette Corporation, which supplied army PX stores throughout the world. He played baseball with the soldiers and talked about the sport with them, resuming the peripatetic life he liked. He dated women who looked like Marilyn and hoped to get her back. But he was now out of Marilyn’s life for a considerable period of time.

  Marilyn began studying at the Actors Studio in the spring of 1955. Elia Kazan, not yet estranged from Lee Strasberg, took her there. In contrast to the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood, the Actors Studio had neither a formal school nor a theater associated with it. It was a workshop at which performing actors endeavored to improve their technique. Along with several other theater people, Elia Kazan had founded it in 1947, but when he became overcommitted directing plays and movies, which he preferred to teaching acting, he brought in Strasberg to head it. Kazan and Strasberg had known each other in the Group Theatre. Since then Strasberg had managed to stay afloat as an actor and teacher, although he hadn’t had much success. The charisma he had within him would burst forth once he took over as head of the Actors Studio.15

  Indeed, the Studio’s prestige soared as Kazan sent actors to it and Strasberg, newly energized, recruited others. Before long, he had applicants for Studio membership undergo a rigorous audition, which he judged. When several wellknown actors didn’t make it, the Studio gained even more prestige. Members met twice a week to perform soliloquies or scenes from plays, after which Strasberg criticized their performances. Another group of actors, many of whom worked in Hollywood, were admitted as observers. They could attend the biweekly sessions, but they usually didn’t perform. In addition, Strasberg held private classes, separate from the workshop. Marilyn never auditioned for the central group. She didn’t trust her acting ability, and she feared failure. She attended the workshop as an observer and joined group classes with Strasberg, although she eventually did soliloquies and scenes from plays in both. She also had individual sessions with Strasberg, a departure from his usual procedure of teaching only in groups. Once she began studying with Strasberg, Marilyn fell under his spell.

  Strasberg’s approach to acting originated with Stanislavsky, as did that of Michael Chekhov and the teachers at the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood. In contrast to both Chekhov and the Hollywood teachers, however, Strasberg emphasized affective memory. He devised exercises for students to enable them to access memories that related to the character they were playing. Believing that using recent experiences might be too traumatic, he established a dividing line of seven years; probing should go on only before those years.

  To prevent the kind of breakdown that Michael Chekhov had experienced while using the affective memory technique, Strasberg had students with fragile egos, like Marilyn, undergo psychoanalysis, working with specialists on traumatic memories. By the spring of 1955 Marilyn was spending a lot of time probing into her past, either with Lee Strasberg or with her psychiatrist, Margaret Hohenberg, who had been Milton Greene’s psychiatrist. Such probing into her past only increased her obsession with her childhood. Given the sexual abuse she had experienced, psychoanalysis may not have been the best technique for her. Many practitioners of Freudian psychoanalysis emphasized the Oedipus complex, defined as the inevitable sexual feelings that boys feel for their mothers and girls for their fathers. Thus many Freudians either downplayed the reality of sexual abuse or viewed it as not especially negative for the child.16

  Strasberg was small, stern, controlled, and devoted to his work. His technique differed from Michael Chekhov’s. Stressing willpower and discipline, he viewed acting as a controlled enterprise and affective memory as a systematic technique. But he was fascinated by neurosis, which he sought to channel into creativity. Raised in an orthodox Jewish family on New York’s Lower East Side, with little formal education, his technique nonetheless resembled that of a Talmudic scholar, vested in the details of interpretation. His critics charged that he “quibbled over interpretations.” His supporters, such as Eli Wallach, called him “a superb diagnostician who can detect your weaknesses.”17

  Like most acting teachers, he devised exercises for relaxation and concentration, as well as improvisations to promote spontaneity. Marilyn was given an exercise in which she had to be a cat, and she spent a week observing a cat before imitating it on the stage. She was superb, according to Studio observers. (That’s not surprising, given the many descriptions of her movements as catlike.) In filming later Hollywood movies, she perplexed other actors by vigorously shaking her hands before beginning a scene. That was a Strasberg exercise to promote relaxation.

  Strasberg was a guru to many Broadway actors, but others found him domineering. Don Murray, Marilyn’s costar in Bus Stop, left the Studio because he didn’t like Strasberg’s approach; Murray found his inspiration in interacting with other actors. Farley Granger preferred a text-based approach, in which an interpretation of the text of a play or a screenplay provides inspiration. Strasberg could be a vicious critic, and some actors—Anthony Quinn and Jack Palance, for example—left the Studio because they found him too harsh. Both transferred to Michael Chekhov’s acting classes in Hollywood. James Dean attended the Actors Studio only once; Strasberg’s grilling incensed him. Marlon Brando called Strasberg ambitious and untalented and stated that he had learned nothing from Strasberg and had gone to the Studio only to meet women, although Strasberg continued to claim him as a student. Elia Kazan, breaking with Strasberg, called Marilyn a “perfect victim/devotee” for Strasberg. Others said that he used Marilyn to bring money and fame to the Studio, or to get back at Twentieth Century–Fox executives who had hired him for a time in the 1940s to direct screen tests and then had let him go.18

  African-American actor Louis Gossett Jr., who studied at the Studio along with Marilyn, didn’t like Strasberg’s Method approach, although he rated Marilyn the most gifted actor in his group. He was deeply impre
ssed when she asked him to do a love scene with her from The Rose Tattoo. “Do you realize that you would be crossing racial barriers and entering forbidden territory?” he asked her. She replied that such barriers meant nothing to her. In the end they didn’t do the scene, but he never forgot her generosity.19

  After his initial interview with Marilyn, Strasberg decided she had great talent, although he realized her lack of self-confidence. He was gentle with her. He taught her privately at first, until she had the nerve to enter his group classes and then the biweekly sessions of the entire membership. Strasberg realized that Marilyn’s sweetness masked a deep rage, and he worked with her to bring it to the surface in order to deal with it. Her rage was so great that she used scatological language with him to express it. (Susan Strasberg heard them yelling at each other in private sessions.) Marilyn soon came to idolize Strasberg as a guru and father figure. She offered herself sexually to him, but he refused her, realizing that a sexual relationship might contaminate their work.20

  By this point Marilyn had given up trying to find her father, but she still felt bitter over his rejection. In a fantasy game played one night at a party, Marilyn said she wanted to disguise herself, meet her father, and seduce him. It was a powerful fantasy of revenge and punishment, one that may have contributed to the sadomasochist elements in her relationships with men, as she alternately played the victim and the persecutor. Elia Kazan had warned her years earlier about involvements with powerful men. But Kazan hadn’t recognized that Marilyn might herself play the sadist, not simply the masochist. That’s what she did in her marriages to Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio.

  The Studio was always in debt, and salaries were often in arrears. Marilyn donated money to the Studio; paid Paula Strasberg, Lee’s wife and a former actress, a huge sum to coach her; and gave Lee ten thousand dollars for a trip to Japan to study Kabuki and Noh theater. She gave Paula the pearls the emperor of Japan had given her when she had visited Japan with Joe in 1954. She gave Susan an expensive Chagall print and John a Thunderbird car. Although Marilyn was generous to many people throughout her life, the generosity she displayed toward the Strasbergs indicates how much she felt they’d improved her skills.

  From the time she was a child, giving her possessions to other children at the orphanage, her generosity was boundless—from giving money to crew members on her films to pay doctors’ bills, to gifts to friends. She gave Natasha Lytess a fur coat, an automobile, and a down-payment on a house; Patricia Newcomb, her publicity agent during the last two years of her life, received a fur coat, an automobile, and the emerald earrings that Sinatra had given Marilyn. She was so generous that her assistants, such as Whitey Snyder, didn’t praise items she possessed for fear the items would arrive at their houses the next day. After a shopping spree, she often gave many of the clothes she had bought to others along with her.

  Marilyn captivated everyone she met in New York. Her spirits were high and her charm irresistible. Her presence created a stir in the New York arts scene. Actress Elaine Dundy remembered Marilyn’s impact at the tea that Tennessee Williams held for his mother at the St. Regis Hotel in March 1955, after the opening of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Everyone important in the arts scene was there. Marilyn was late. When she made her entrance, a buzz rippled through the crowd, and everyone stopped what they were doing, “freeze-framed with their drinks, hors d’oeuvres, or cigarettes halfway to their mouths.” A path cleared, and Marilyn walked through. She wore a simple black silk slip dress with thin shoulder straps and nothing on underneath it. (It was a Norell-Moore design that she owned in multiple copies and often wore.) Her skin was a luminous alabaster with pearly blue and rose tints. Dundy had never seen such skin tones outside of paintings by Old Masters. Marilyn was more beautiful in the flesh than on film.21

  Marilyn had many friends in New York; the portrayal of her as a loner with few friends is inaccurate. She had met Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote when they were in Hollywood writing screenplays, and she saw Capote in New York that spring. He liked to make friends with iconic women: Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy were among his friends. He gave them advice. Homosexual in orientation, he didn’t try to seduce them. Marilyn and Truman spoke a private language, filled with sexual gossip. He was witty, campy, and bawdy. He based Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s partly on Marilyn. Monroe and Capote went dancing at the Copacabana. Standing five feet eight inches tall in heels, she towered above him, as he was only five feet three inches in height. She danced with him barefoot. Marilyn was also seen in nightclubs with Jack Cole and composer Harold Arlen.22

  She became close to actors at the Actors Studio, and she went with them to neighborhood bars and cafes after class. Eli Wallach became like a brother; she called him Teacake, since he was playing on Broadway in The Teahouse of the August Moon. She was also friends with his wife, actress Anne Jackson. She babysat their children, and she sometimes went dancing with Wallach. He was sexually attracted to her, but he hid his feelings, because he didn’t want to drive her away. After Broadway shows were over for the night, actors would gather at Downey’s on Broadway to drink and talk, and Marilyn sometimes went with them. The walls of Downey’s were lined with photos of Broadway actors, and Marilyn wanted her photo to be among them. In order to qualify, though, she needed to appear in a Broadway play. One night Wallach snuck her on stage as a Japanese woman in a crowd scene in Teahouse. That participation was considered sufficient. Her photo soon hung on the wall at Downey’s.23

  Marilyn saw Marlon Brando. They went to dinner and sometimes wound up in bed. According to Susan Strasberg, Marilyn had a small apartment on the East Side that she kept a secret. She practiced her lines, read scripts and books, and entertained secret friends there. One of them was Warren Fisher, a publicist with the Arthur Jacobs agency, who she often met for drinks on Fridays at the St. Regis Hotel. She also became friendly with Leonard Lyons, an influential New York columnist who took Sidney Skolsky’s place in her life. He introduced her to novelists and dramatists, all the right people.24

  When she lived at the Gladstone, she became friends with other celebrities who lived there, including novelist Carson McCullers, who chronicled the dark Gothic behaviors in the South. Marilyn was also friendly with Gloria Vanderbilt, who was living there while divorcing symphony conductor Leopold Stokowski. She and Gloria had much in common: Hollywood, modeling and acting, and a previous relationship with Pat DiCicco. Once Gloria left the Gladstone, she married film director Sidney Lumet. They lived in an upscale East Side apartment and threw parties Marilyn attended. To remain incognito, she wore slacks, a baggy sweater, and no makeup when she went out. She told Gloria that Joe DiMaggio frightened her. She may have felt close to Gloria, who had been physically abused by Pat DiCicco after she married him. Joe had similarly abused Marilyn.25

  As always, Sam Shaw introduced her to new people. He took her to Brooklyn to meet Norman and Hedda Rosten, who had been friends of Arthur Miller and his first wife, Mary, ever since they all attended the University of Michigan. Marilyn was attracted by the Rostens’ nurturing natures and their casual lifestyle. She attended the poetry readings they held in their Brooklyn Heights apartment and went with them to neighborhood restaurants and movie theaters. The similarity in the names Norma and Norman intrigued her.26 She called Norman Rosten, Sam Shaw, and Eli Wallach her brothers. She gave them nicknames: Norman was Claude, for the actor Claude Raines, whom she thought he resembled; Sam Shaw was Sam Spade, a popular detective in crime stories; and Eli Wallach was Teacake.

  Marilyn and Norman bonded over their love of poetry. She read and wrote poetry, and she memorized verses from poets she liked. She especially liked poems about the promise and perils of love, as well as elegies about the omnipresence of death: Eros and Thanatos, love and death, were two sides of the same coin to her, as they often are in European literature. Norman wrote: “She understood, with the instinct of a poet, that [poetry leads] directly to the heart of experience. She knew the interior floati
ng world of the poem with its secrets, phantoms, and surprises. And somewhere within her she sensed a primary truth: that poetry is allied with death. Its intoxication and joy are the other face of elegy. Love and death, opposite and one, are its boundary—and were hers.”27

  A poem by William Butler Yeats that she read at one of the Rostens’ gatherings was especially meaningful to her: it articulated how dangerous love could be. Like the lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám that she had recited to Jane Russell during the filming of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it advised an individual in love to stay independent. According to Rosten, Marilyn was always afraid of love. The Yeats poem is titled “Never Give All the Heart.”

  Never give all the heart, for love

  Will hardly seem worth thinking of

  To passionate women if it seem

  Certain, and they never dream

  That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

  For everything that’s lovely is

  But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

  O never give the heart outright,

  For they, for all smooth lips can say,

  Have given their hearts up to the play.

  And who could play it well enough