Marilyn

by Gloria Steinem

  This guilt about leaving or killing a father figure was also a recurrent theme in her life. After all, a father, unlike a husband and partner, must be left behind as part of a child’s inevitable growth; so to confuse the two is to build in an experience of guilt. Perhaps she had neglected Johnny Hyde during the last month of his life, but she was with him in his last days in the hospital. Seven years later, in 1957, she was still guiltily telling Lena Pepitone, “If I had married him maybe he could have lived. He used to say that I was the only one who could save his life…” In 1960, when Clark Gable died of a heart attack after costarring with Marilyn in The Misfits, Marilyn was publicly blamed again—this time for her lateness and drug problems that had dragged out arduous weeks of filming in the harsh Nevada desert. Those rumors following The Misfits ended in another suicide attempt by Marilyn, one of more than half a dozen such close calls with self-induced death, both purposeful and accidental. Some seemed to be caused by guilt and others by loneliness, some by leaving and others by being left, and at least one by her inability to bear a child, but all reached down to the buried sense of worthlessness within herself.

  Only two recorded incidents betray anger at the father who left her (usually, as her feelings of worthlessness suggested, she somehow felt she deserved to be left). In talking to her longtime friend, columnist Sidney Skolsky, she implicitly admitted she had delayed shooting and kept the whole cast waiting in ways that she knew were physically hard for Gable. “Was I punishing my father?” she wondered aloud to Skolsky. “Getting even for all the years he’s kept me waiting?” Earlier, a New York friend remembered Marilyn’s shocking response to a party-game request for personal fantasies: she said she imagined disguising herself in a black wig, meeting her father, seducing him, and then asking vindictively, “How do you feel now to have a daughter that you’ve made love to?”

  It’s difficult to realize that such dark thoughts could come from the sugary blonde Norman Mailer desired, with her “sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards… A sweet peach bursting before one’s eyes…” Perhaps her need to fulfill this pink-and-white American sex-goddess image was part of the reason she chose Joe DiMaggio for her first lengthy affair after Johnny Hyde, and for the first husband she chose for herself. What better way to gain the love and support she craved than to become the wife of this quiet man whom sportswriters called the “Last Hero”? What could be a better bulwark against her own depressions and insomnia than this handsome stoic who seemed to have no moods?

  “I had thought I was going to meet a loud, sporty fellow,” Marilyn wrote about their first date. “Instead I found myself smiling at a reserved gentleman in a gray suit… I would have guessed he was either a steel magnate or a congressman.” DiMaggio was quiet where Hollywood men were braggers, and yet he still was the center of attention in any gathering. “You learn to be silent and smiling like that from having millions of people look at you with love and excitement while you stand alone,” Marilyn noted. When he informed her in his enigmatic way that he didn’t mind going out once with a girl, but he didn’t like the second date, and seldom lasted for a third, Marilyn took on the challenge.

  The courtship lasted two years. With her usual insecurity, Marilyn continued to have affairs with other men in a way that would have infuriated DiMaggio had he known. The marriage itself lasted barely nine months. DiMaggio was a traditional husband who liked to stay home and watch sports, or go out with the boys. Once in possession of Marilyn, he resented her career, disliked the invasion of his own privacy that their marriage brought about, and was angered by both Hollywood’s sex-movie use of her body and by any immodest clothes in daily life. Even a low-necked dress could set him off, and Marilyn took to wearing Peter Pan collars and dresses that were her usual skintight style, but exposed little bare skin. When he wrote Marilyn letters, he signed them “Pa.”

  “I have to be careful writing about my husband Joe DiMaggio because he winces easily,” Marilyn later wrote. “Many of the things that seem normal or even desirable to me are very annoying to him.” Among those things was Marilyn’s love of learning. She could not get Joe to read any of the books she cared about, or any books at all. She tried, in her words, “everything from Mickey Spillane to Jules Verne.” On his birthday, she gave him a medal engraved with a quote from The Little Prince: “True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.” DiMaggio’s mystified response was, “What the hell does that mean?” She longed to be the pupil, yet she had become the teacher of a student who wouldn’t learn.

  Soon Marilyn’s marriage degenerated into a classic struggle between her career or interests and her husband’s wishes. For DiMaggio, the marriage sank into a classic conflict between his traditional values and a wife who had a world of her own. His old ulcer acted up. His attempt to isolate Marilyn in his hometown of San Francisco failed. There is some evidence that his anger may have led him to treat her with violence. Natasha Lytess remembered Marilyn phoning “day and night, sometimes in tears, complaining about the way he misused her.” Marlon Brando noted once that Marilyn’s arm was black and blue. Her friend Amy Greene was shocked to see bruises on Marilyn’s back, and Marilyn admitted reluctantly that Joe was the cause. A New York press aide remembers Marilyn phoning her in fear of an angry DiMaggio who could be heard shouting in the background. While they were staying in New York so Marilyn could film The Seven Year Itch DiMaggio seemed to alternate between cold distance in public and anger in private. Back in Hollywood, Marilyn announced to her director, Billy Wilder, that she and Joe were getting a divorce.

  Whether or not there was real violence, which only DiMaggio knows, his pattern of behavior does resemble that of many battering husbands: traditional values, possessiveness, attempts to cut off his wife’s contact with the rest of the world, emotional distance, and anger at disobedience to his wishes. Once he and Marilyn were separated, the second half of the same pattern took over: extreme contrition combined with a firm belief that she still “belonged” to him. Like many such men, he seemed to mistrust what he could possess, and to worship what he could not. DiMaggio began to quiz others about whether or not Marilyn had left him for another man (she had not), had her followed by detectives even after they were legally separated, and stood watching for hours in the shadows outside her doorway. DiMaggio staged a raid on a stranger’s apartment—reportedly with the help of his friend Frank Sinatra—because Joe wrongly believed Marilyn was there with a lover. Later, this famous “Wrong Door Raid” led to a successful suit against Joe DiMaggio and Sinatra. Hal Schaefer, a composer and pianist who was Marilyn’s friend, coach, and eventually lover in that period, learned to regard DiMaggio with fear. “I was not the cause of the breakup,” Schaefer told Monroe biographer Anthony Summers. “It was already broken up, and not because of me. She would have left him no matter what… But DiMaggio couldn’t believe that. His ego was such that he couldn’t believe that.”

  Nonetheless, when Marilyn was put in Payne Whitney Clinic in New York for her drug dependency and depression following her breakup with Arthur Miller, she pleaded with Lee and Paula Strasberg to get her out. They did not help—but Joe DiMaggio did. He seems to have understood her panic at being locked up in an institution, as her grandmother and mother had been, and he got her into a hospital where she could get treatment without locked doors and closed wards.

  Despite their breakup, he remained jealous. His long friendship with Frank Sinatra was broken when Sinatra and Marilyn had an affair. But once he finally gave up ownership of Marilyn, he also continued to be her friend. They talked on the phone and occasionally saw each other in the years following their divorce. Marilyn spoke of him with affection.

  In the end, it was DiMaggio who arranged her funeral. He spent the night before it in a vigil over her casket, and cried openly at the service. He kissed her one last time and said “I love you” over and over again. She was buried with his flowers in her hands.
/>   Arthur Miller was not at the funeral. He had remarried, his wife was expecting a baby, and, as Miller put it, Marilyn was “not really there anymore.” Nonetheless, his marriage to Marilyn had been her last and longest. He filled more of the requirements of an idealized father than the Last Hero had done. Though both DiMaggio and Miller were about a decade older than Marilyn, already fathers, dark-haired as Marilyn’s father-in-the-photograph had been, and widely admired, Arthur Miller was also able to be a teacher in the cultural sense that mattered to Marilyn, and to support her hopes of being a serious actress. It was a long distance from DiMaggio, a man of few words, to a Pulitzer-winning author, and Marilyn seemed eager to make the journey.

  In fact, Marilyn and Miller had first met in 1950 just after her attempted suicide over the death of Johnny Hyde. Together with Elia Kazan, Miller had visited the set of As Young as You Feel, a movie featuring Marilyn that was directed by a friend of Kazan’s. When they went in search of her, they found her alone in a studio warehouse, weeping over Hyde’s death. Miller never forgot that.

  That same week they met at a party, sat on a sofa, and talked. He was a quiet, strong, un-Hollywood man who wrote very good plays about very ordinary people, and who took seriously Marilyn’s desire to improve herself. She told Natasha Lytess, with whom she was then living, “It was like running into a tree! You know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.” Marilyn never forgot that meeting either.

  But Miller was still married then, and they only corresponded briefly. It wasn’t until after Marilyn had met, married, and divorced Joe DiMaggio and moved to New York to study acting, that her courtship with Miller really began. She read the books he recommended, practiced cooking, adopted his friends and his country life-style, and began to call him “Art,” “Poppy,” or “Pa.” Miller supported her studies at the Actors Studio, in spite of his misgivings about her growing dependence on the Strasbergs. He was touched by her profound connection to children and to nature, and even defended her sexual way of dressing that DiMaggio had detested. “Miller was in love,” wrote his friend Norman Rosten, “completely, seriously, with the ardor of a man released.” Before their marriage in the summer of 1956, Marilyn spent a good deal of time learning about Judaism. Miller himself was not religious, but she wanted to be part of his family’s tradition. “I’ll cook noodles like your mother,” she told him on their wedding day. On the back of a wedding photograph, she wrote: “Hope, Hope, Hope.”

  For Marilyn, the first disillusionment came on their honeymoon trip to London for the long filming of The Prince and the Showgirl. She had been having her usual problems with insomnia, lateness, dependence on sleeping pills, and terror of performing. The problems were probably made worse by what she felt was director and costar Laurence Olivier’s condescension toward her. He had been warned by Joshua Logan that Marilyn needed support not criticism, but he was critical nonetheless and accused the nervous Marilyn of not even being able to count. Arthur Miller took on the challenging role of shoring up Marilyn’s confidence, interpreting her to her colleagues, and just getting her to work: he joined Milton Greene, Marilyn’s new partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions, and acting coach Paula Strasberg in a three-way tug of war over her professional life. But Miller was also trying to use this five-month stay in London as a time to write. Marilyn was shocked to find notes about her that Miller had been keeping, as if she herself were only grist for his writerly mill. Furthermore, the notes were very critical.

  “It was something about how disappointed he was in me,” Marilyn later explained to Lee and Paula Strasberg. “How he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. That his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch and that he [Arthur] no longer had a decent answer to that one.”

  For Marilyn, who believed that trust had to be total and love unconditional—that to love a man, she had to trust him completely, as a child trusts a parent—this betrayal was unforgivable. For Miller, the content of the note itself betrayed the beginning of his understanding that her flattering, childlike, worshipful attitude had a terrible cause.

  The first bloom was off their marriage when they returned, but they managed a fairly calm existence in their New York apartment, a quiet summer stay in a rented Long Island beach cottage, and the establishment, mostly with Marilyn’s money, of a farm in Connecticut near the one where Miller had lived with his first wife.

  But there was also a painful ectopic pregnancy, followed by more than one dangerous overdose of sleeping pills from which Miller had to rescue her, and the beginning of his long slide into a caretaking role that required cajoling, scheduling, explaining, worrying about Marilyn’s pill-taking habits, and supplying emotional support. In a world that equates womanliness with dependency on a man, he might be forgiven for finding Marilyn’s extreme dependency extremely appealing—but now he was paying the price.

  When Lena Pepitone joined their New York household as a personal maid to help with Marilyn’s wardrobe, she saw two people who were so polarized that Miller rarely emerged from his study or ate meals with his wife. Marilyn’s schedule of sleeping late, acting lessons, and psychiatrist’s appointments seemed to exist on a separate planet. Even their going together to a movie was treated by Marilyn as a rare and cherished treat.

  Her extreme disorganization and sensitivity must have been hard to take: she was almost always late, drank Bloody Marys for breakfast, sipped champagne the rest of the day, and felt hurt if Miller’s parents came to dinner and spoke Yiddish in her presence (being left out of conversations at the dinner table, Marilyn explained to Lena, made her feel like Norma Jeane again, the foster child who was an outsider in other people’s families). On the other hand, Arthur Miller’s emotional distance and routine of isolated work or hardy country weekends must have seemed dull and difficult to her, too. Even their rare parties betrayed their differences. Marilyn loved to dance, as Norman Rosten and many others have recorded, but Rosten observed that Miller required “a few drinks” before he even attempted “an eerie loping foxtrot” perilously off-balance. In Strawhead, the 1986 “memory play” that Norman Mailer wrote about Marilyn as another evidence of his obsession, he ridicules Arthur Miller’s failure to make a pass at Marilyn when they first met in 1950 (Marilyn herself seems to have appreciated Miller’s attitude), but he does seem closer to the mark when he portrays Miller as a pipe-smoking, slightly boring country squire, and gives him such imaginary lines of dialogue as: “Nothing like taking a bath in water that comes through pipes you threaded yourself.”

  Norma Jeane, the child who had dreamed of beautiful colors, who longed for gaiety and music, had chosen a father instead of a partner. She had married a worthy man who loved contemplative silence and lived in a world of black and white.

  For all Miller’s worthiness, and for all his impossible burden of shoring up Marilyn’s weak identity, he could be amazingly insensitive, too. There is a glimpse of that in his reply to Fred Guiles, one of Marilyn’s more careful biographers. When Guiles asked Miller if Marilyn’s final depression might have been partly due to the fact that Inge Morath Miller, his new wife, was about to give birth—after all, Marilyn herself had been depressed and attempted suicide once because of her own inability to “complete” their marriage by bearing a child—Miller dismissed that idea as a “red herring.” “She knew I was a father before; she knew the children,” Miller replied. “She knew it wasn’t anything wrong with me that kept us from having children.”

  Perhaps the simplest explanation of the end of their marriage came from Dr. Ralph Greenson, who interviewed Arthur Miller when he first took Marilyn as a patient. Dr. Greenson found in him “the attitude of a father who had done more than most fathers would do, and is rapidly coming to the end of his rope.”

  Greenson advised Miller that his wife needed unconditional love and devotion, that anything less was unbearable to her. But the advice was impossible to follow, or too late, or b
oth. Marilyn turned to Yves Montand, her costar of that period, for the attention and reward of a new affair. Arthur Miller turned more and more inside himself. By the time The Misfits, his writer’s gift to her, was being filmed, they were emotionally and physically separate. The marriage had lasted slightly more than four years.

  Two of Marilyn’s patterns during those years were with her long before the marriage and long after it: her compulsive use of sex as a way of getting childlike warmth and nurturing, and her inability to find much adult pleasure or sexual satisfaction for herself. Though her marriage to Miller may have been her most supportive relationship with a man, both personally and professionally, it didn’t change the past of the neglected Norma Jeane. Even on her honeymoon in London, she may have had an affair with a photographer, and later, she certainly turned even more desperately to Montand. Dr. Greenson’s notes conclude that Marilyn “found it difficult to sustain a series of orgasms with the same individual.” That incompleteness could have been the reason why Greenson believed that Marilyn feared and yet was drawn into “situations with homosexual coloring.” Perhaps. But by her own testimony, she didn’t find sexual satisfaction in affairs with either men or women. Her sexual value to men was the only value she was sure of. By exciting and arousing, she could turn herself from the invisible, unworthy Norma Jeane into the visible, worthwhile Marilyn. She could have some impact, some power, some proof she was alive. The very compulsion to do that seems to have kept her from accepting her real self enough to find sexual pleasure of her own.