Marilyn

by Gloria Steinem

  For women, Monroe embodied kinds of fear that were just as basic as the hope she offered men: the fear of a sexual competitor who could take away men on whom women’s identities and even livelihoods might depend; the fear of having to meet her impossible standard of always giving—and asking nothing in return; the nagging fear that we might share her feminine fate of being vulnerable, unserious, constantly in danger of becoming a victim.

  Aside from her beautiful face, which women envied, she was nothing like the female stars that women moviegoers have made popular. Those stars offered at least the illusion of being in control of their fates—and perhaps having an effect on the world. Stars of the classic “women’s movies” were actresses like Bette Davis, who made her impact by sheer force of emotion; or Katharine Hepburn, who was always intelligent and never victimized for long; or even Doris Day, who charmed the world into conforming to her own virginal standards. Their figures were admirable and neat, but without the vulnerability of the big-breasted woman in a society that regresses men and keeps them obsessed with the maternal symbols of breasts and hips.

  Watching Monroe was quite different: women were forced to worry about her vulnerability—and thus their own. They might feel like a black moviegoer watching a black actor play a role that was too passive, too obedient, or a Jew watching a Jewish character who was selfish and avaricious. In spite of some extra magic, some face-saving sincerity and humor, Marilyn Monroe was still close to the humiliating stereotype of a dumb blonde: depersonalized, sexual, even a joke. Though few women yet had the self-respect to object on behalf of their sex, as one would object on behalf of a race or religion, they still might be left feeling a little humiliated—or threatened—without knowing why.

  “I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen,” Marilyn wrote in her unfinished autobiography. “Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.”

  But all that was before her death and the revelations surrounding it. The moment she was gone, Monroe’s vulnerability was no longer just a turn-on for many men and an embarrassment for many women. It was a tragedy. Whether that final overdose was suicide or not, both men and women were forced to recognize the insecurity and private terrors that had caused her to attempt suicide several times before.

  Men who had never known her wondered if their love and protection might have saved her. Women who had never known her wondered if their empathy and friendship might have done the same. For both women and men, the ghost of Marilyn came to embody a particularly powerful form of hope: the rescue fantasy. Not only did we imagine a happier ending for the parable of Marilyn Monroe’s life, but we also fantasized ourselves as the saviors who could have brought it about.

  Still, women didn’t seem quite as comfortable about going public with their rescue fantasies as men did. It meant admitting an identity with a woman who always had been a little embarrassing, and who had now turned out to be doomed as well. Nearly all of the journalistic eulogies that followed Monroe’s death were written by men. So are almost all of the more than forty books that have been published about Monroe.

  Bias in the minds of editors played a role, too. Consciously or not, they seemed to assume that only male journalists should write about a sex goddess. Margaret Parton, a reporter for the Ladies’ Home Journal and one of the few women assigned to profile Marilyn during her lifetime, wrote an article that was rejected because it was too favorable. She had reported Marilyn’s ambitious hope of playing Sadie Thompson, under the guidance of Lee Strasberg, in a television version of “Rain,” based on a short story by Somerset Maugham. (Sadie Thompson was “a girl who knew how to be gay, even when she was sad,” a fragile Marilyn had explained, “and that’s important—you know?”) Parton also reported her own “sense of having met a sick little canary instead of a peacock. Only when you pick it up in your hand to comfort it… beneath the sickness, the weakness and the innocence, you find a strong bone structure, and a heart beating. You recognize sickness, and you find strength.”

  Bruce and Beatrice Gould, editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, told Parton she must have been “mesmerized” to write something so uncritical. “If you were a man,” Mr. Gould told her, “I’d wonder what went on that afternoon in Marilyn’s apartment.” Fred Guiles, one of Marilyn Monroe’s more fair-minded biographers, counted the suppression of this sensitive article as one proof that many editors were interested in portraying Monroe, at least in those later years, as “crazy, a home wrecker.”

  Just after Monroe’s death, one of the few women to write with empathy was Diana Trilling, an author confident enough not to worry about being trivialized by association—and respected enough to get published. Trilling regretted the public’s “mockery of [Marilyn’s] wish to be educated,” and her dependence on sexual artifice that must have left “a great emptiness where a true sexuality would have supplied her with a sense of herself as a person.” She mourned Marilyn’s lack of friends, “especially women, to whose protectiveness her extreme vulnerability spoke so directly.”

  “But we were the friends,” as Trilling said sadly, “of whom she knew nothing.”

  In fact, the contagion of feminism that followed Monroe’s death by less than a decade may be the newest and most powerful reason for the continuing strength of her legend. As women began to be honest in public, and to discover that many of our experiences were more societal than individual, we also realized that we could benefit more by acting together than by deserting each other. We were less likely to blame or be the victim, whether Marilyn or ourselves, and more likely to rescue ourselves and each other.

  In 1972, the tenth anniversary of her death and the birth year of Ms., the first magazine to be published by and for women, Harriet Lyons, one of its early editors, suggested that Ms. do a cover story about Marilyn called “The Woman Who Died Too Soon.” As the writer of this brief essay about women’s new hope of reclaiming Marilyn, I was astounded by the response to the article. It was like tapping an underground river of interest. For instance:

  Marilyn had talked about being sexually assaulted as a child, though many of her biographers had not believed her. Women wrote in to tell their similar stories. It was my first intimation of what since has become a documented statistic: One in six adult women has been sexually assaulted in childhood by a family member. The long-lasting effects—for instance, feeling one has no value except a sexual one—seemed shared by these women and by Marilyn. Yet most were made to feel guilty and alone, and many were as disbelieved by the grown-ups around them as Marilyn had been.

  Physicians had been more likely to prescribe sleeping pills and tranquilizers than to look for the cause of Monroe’s sleeplessness and anxiety. They had continued to do so even after she had attempted suicide several times. Women responded with their own stories of being overmedicated, and of doctors who assumed women’s physical symptoms were “all in their minds.” It was my first understanding that women are more likely to be given chemical and other arm’s-length treatment, and to suffer from the assumption that they can be chemically calmed or sedated with less penalty because they are doing only “women’s work.” Then, ads in medical journals blatantly recommended tranquilizers for depressed housewives, and even now, the majority of all tranquilizer prescriptions are written for women.

  Acting, modeling, making a living more from external appearance than from internal identity—these had been Marilyn’s lifelines out of poverty and obscurity. Other women who had suppressed their internal selves to become interchangeable “pretty girls”—and as a result were struggling with both lack of identity and terror of aging—wrote to tell their stories.

  To gain the seriousness and respect that was largely denied her, and to gain the fatherly protection she had been completely denied, Marilyn married a beloved American folk hero and then a respected int
ellectual. Other women who had tried to marry for protection or for identity, as women often are encouraged to do, wrote to say how impossible and childlike this had been for them, and how impossible for the husbands who were expected to provide their wives’ identities. But Marilyn did not live long enough to see a time in which women sought their own identities, not just derived ones.

  During her marriage to Arthur Miller, Marilyn had tried to have a child—but suffered an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage—and could not. Letters poured in from women who also suffered from this inability and from a definition of womanhood so tied to the accident of the physical ability to bear a child—preferably a son, as Marilyn often said, though later she also talked of a daughter—that their whole sense of self had been undermined. “Manhood means many things,” as one reader explained, “but womanhood means only one.” And where is the self-respect of a woman who wants to give birth only to a male child, someone different from herself?

  Most of all, women readers mourned that Marilyn had lived and died in an era when there were so few ways for her to know that these experiences were shared with other women, that she was not alone.

  Now women and men bring the past quarter century of change and understanding to these poignant photographs taken in the days just before her death. It makes them all the more haunting.

  I still see the self-consciousness with which she posed for a camera. It makes me remember my own teenage discomfort at seeing her on the screen, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into love and approval. By holding a mirror to the exaggerated ways in which female human beings are trained to act, she could be as embarrassing—and as sad and revealing—as a female impersonator.

  Yet now I also see the why of it, and the woman behind the mask that her self-consciousness creates.

  I still feel worried about her, just as I did then. There is something especially vulnerable about big-breasted women in this world concerned with such bodies, but unconcerned with the real person within. We may envy these women a little, yet we feel protective of them, too.

  But in these photographs, the body emphasis seems more the habit of some former self. It’s her face we look at. Now that we know the end of her story, it’s the real woman we hope to find—looking out of the eyes of Marilyn.

  In the last interview before her death, close to the time of these photographs, Patricia Newcomb, her friend and press secretary, remembers that Marilyn pleaded unsuccessfully with the reporter to end his article like this:

  What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

  Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.

  Norma Jeane

  You could buy a sackful of old Bread… for twenty-five cents. Aunt Grace and I would stand in line for hours waiting to fill our sack. When I looked up at her, she would grin at me and say, “Don’t worry, Norma Jeane. You’re going to be a beautiful gal when you grow up. I can feel it in my bones.”

  —from the unfinished autobiography of Marilyn Monroe

  ONE CLOUDY SUNDAY IN 1962, Marilyn Monroe sat down for an interview with photojournalist George Barris in the patio of her house in Brentwood, California.

  Wrapped in a light blue terry-cloth robe and sipping champagne, she was about to supply the personal text for the photographic book that was to be their mutual project that summer. She wanted to set the record straight.

  “Lies, lies, lies, everything they’ve been saying about me is lies,” she said sadly. “This is the first true story; you’re the first one I’ve told it to,” she insisted to Barris, as she had to others. “I’ll tell you all about my childhood, career, marriages and divorces, and what I want out of life.” Just as Marilyn seemed to have told more than one man that her first sexual pleasure had been with him, she also offered her life to reporters whom she liked. It was one of the many small ways she sought approval.

  But on this day, there was an added motive. The “lies” she referred to were news reports that she was depressed, suffering from deep feelings of inferiority, and incapable of working. Having been fired from a Hollywood sex comedy called Something’s Got to Give for lateness, absence, illness, and a spaciness that rendered unusable even some of the footage she did finish, she was now fighting for her professional life. “My work is the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on,” she had told a magazine writer that final summer. “To put it bluntly, I seem to be a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.”

  Now Marilyn was using this interview to tell Hollywood she was not “unemployable.” She was putting up a cheerful front. “I am not a victim of emotional conflicts,” she protested to Barris. “I’m human, we all have our areas, we all feel a little inferior, but who ever admits it?”

  Settling into a wicker chair with her champagne glass in hand, she began to respond to questions—and also to tell a familiar story.

  “Yes, it’s true I was born an illegitimate child,” she began, tucking her bare feet underneath her. To Barris, she looked amazingly young and beautiful; a decade younger than the thirty-sixth birthday she had just celebrated. “I also spent most of my childhood in and out of foster homes, and to top it off I landed in an orphanage, even though my mother was and still is alive.

  “My father never married my mother,” she went on. “I guess that’s what broke her heart… When you love a man and tell him you’re going to have his child and he runs out on you, it’s something a woman never gets over. I don’t think my mother ever did…

  “You know, my mother was a very attractive woman when she was young,” she said proudly, digressing from a chronology that seemed to depress her. “But she used to tell me her mother—that was my grandmother Delia Monroe—was the real beauty in the family. She came from Dublin, Ireland, where all the girls are pretty. My grandfather came from Scotland. I remember my mother spoke with a slight Scotch brogue, but it sounded nice, sort of musical…

  “No, I never knew my father. My mother once told me he died in an accident when I was quite young. In fact, he left my mother when he heard from her that I was on the way. It must have hurt my mother very, very much. It could even drive some women out of their mind… My mother had a nervous breakdown and had to be sent to the hospital for a rest when I was only five years old. That’s what caused me to spend my childhood in and out of foster homes.”

  Marilyn put her champagne glass down and was silent. However familiar the story she was telling, the emotion of it was getting to her.

  “What happened next in my life, I don’t think I can ever forget,” she said as if to herself. “My mother’s best girlfriend at this time, Aunt Grace, was my legal guardian, and I was living in her home. But when she remarried all of a sudden, the house became too small, and someone had to go… One day she packed my clothes and took me with her in her car. We drove and drove without her ever saying a word.

  “When we came to a three-story red-brick building, she stopped the car and we walked up the stairs to the entrance. I saw this sign, and the emptiness that came over me, I’ll never forget. The sign read: LOS ANGELES ORPHANS’ HOME.

  “I began to cry. ‘Please, please don’t make me go inside. I’m not an orphan, my mother’s not dead. I’m not an orphan—it’s just that she’s sick in the hospital and can’t take care of me. Please don’t make me live in an orphans’ home!’

  “I was crying and protesting—I still remember they had to use force to drag me inside that place.

  “I may have been only nine years old, but something like this, you never forget. The whole world around me just crumbled.

  “I later learned that the day Aunt Grace had taken me to the orphans’ home, she cried all morning. She also did promise me that as soon as she could, she would take me out of that place. She used to come and visit me often, but when a little girl feels lost and lonely and that nobody wants her, it’s something s
he never can forget as long as she lives.”

  Marilyn had been in her own world, but now she suddenly returned. “I let him out so he could feel free to run around… but he’s been so quiet, it’s not like him…,” she said, looking around her.

  It took Barris a few moments to understand that she was talking about her white poodle, Maf, a gift given to her by a woman friend so that Marilyn would have company when she emerged from hospital psychiatric treatment in New York a year before. Only when the small dog had been called from a corner of the garden and hugged with great affection did Marilyn settle down again.

  “They say you soon forget the bad things in your life, and only remember the good ones,” she continued, picking up her champagne glass again. “Well, maybe for others it’s that way, but not for me…

  “When I was about eight years old, I lived in this foster home that took in boarders. There was this old man they all would cater to, he was the star boarder. One day I was upstairs on the first floor where his room was, putting some towels in the hall linen closet. His door was open and he called me into the room. I went into the room, and he immediately bolted the door. He asked me to sit on his lap and he kissed me and started doing other things to me. He said, ‘It’s only a game!’

  “He let me go when the game was over.

  “When he unlocked the door, I ran to my foster mother and told her what he did to me. She looked at me, shocked… then slapped me across the mouth and shouted at me, ‘I don’t believe you! Don’t you dare say such things about that nice man!’