It was this odd and unchallenging offer of sexual pleasure with only childlike warmth asked in return—of a beautiful adult woman, but one with the frail ego of a neglected child—that made her appeal unique: few could resist the animal magnetism of both a helpless child and a sensuous woman. But for Marilyn, all of her own survival needs to prove she was alive, to be noticed, to belong, to be loved, and to work, depended on her body: her “magic friend,” as she described it. Sadly, for anything less than a magic body, the demands were impossible.
From the beginning, Marilyn’s vulnerable body was betraying her. Even the normal maturing that brought such pleasurable notice also brought unusual problems.
“Norma Jeane had so much trouble during her menstrual periods, the pain would just about knock her out,” Jim Dougherty remembered of his teenage bride. A few years later, as a young model and actress who drove to appointments across the long distances of Los Angeles, she would alarm friends by suddenly pulling her old car off the road, jumping out, and doubling over until the spasm of pain passed. This extreme monthly pain that a few women do suffer—and that only with the feminism of the 1970s became the subject of serious medical research—may have been the initial reason for her reliance on drugs. A reporter who gained entry to her studio dressing room in the 1950s counted fourteen different boxes of prescription pills, apparently all of them given by doctors to numb menstrual pain.
When she was twenty-eight and living in Connecticut, her friend Amy Greene—the wife of photographer Milton Greene, who was helping to form Monroe’s film company—insisted on taking Marilyn to a gynecologist friend. The doctor suggested Marilyn consider a hysterectomy. One of Marilyn’s doctors has now diagnosed her problem as endometriosis, a condition in which tissue from the uterine lining implants itself outside the uterus, in severe cases like Marilyn’s pressing painfully on other organs and nerves. There was also damage from many abortions—some butcheries from her early penniless years, and perhaps later. Abortion did not become legal and safe until eleven years after Marilyn’s death. Marilyn, however, refused the idea of a hysterectomy. Childbearing was still something that a woman was either not whole or not marriageable without. “Marilyn was emphatic,” Amy Greene remembered. “She said, ‘I can’t do that. I want to have a child. I’m going to have a son.’”
That desire for a son may have been a way of making up for the past, as well as a patriarchal proof of womanliness. If Marilyn’s confession to at least three women friends was true, her young body had conceived—whether as a result of a second sexual assault or an affair after her first marriage, depending either on Marilyn’s account or the friend’s memory—and she had borne a son who was then put up for adoption by Grace McKee, Norma Jeane’s legal guardian. There is no testimony other than Marilyn’s to that birth, but she told the story out of a convincing fear that “God would punish her” for giving up that child—perhaps by making her incapable of having another.
Other than Marilyn’s words to friends, and her later physical problems, there is little evidence of her dozen or so illegal abortions. But one can imagine her sacrificing contraception and her own safety to spontaneity, magic, and the sexual satisfaction of the man she was with. During her teenage marriage, she had been so ignorant of her own body that her husband had to help her remove a diaphragm. Later, contraception still required an unromantic preparation, and it’s hard to imagine the eager-to-please Norma Jeane asking men to take that responsibility. Marilyn told one of her hairdressers in the mid-1950s that she had tried to solve this dilemma—and the fact that studios rarely hired married starlets, much less those with children—by undergoing a tube-tying operation to be sterilized. A second friend supported that story by remembering that Marilyn said she later had the operation reversed, though that would have been surgically difficult. Whatever the facts of the process, it’s clear that a major theme of her life was an exaggerated version of most women’s struggles to control their reproductive lives. For Marilyn, this process was further pressured by trying to do what the studio said, or what husbands and lovers wanted.
During her marriage to Arthur Miller, when she finally hoped to be pregnant—indeed, when she talked and planned, publicly and privately, about her great desire to have a child—Marilyn’s badly scarred body betrayed her again. One painful ectopic pregnancy had to be ended surgically. A second pregnancy ended in miscarriage. In spite of undergoing a gynecological operation at the age of thirty-three to aid her conceiving, her last rumored pregnancy came too late for the marriage to Miller that she hoped would be completed by a child. It was a pregnancy by a lover, not a husband, and ended in abortion. Her body had conceived only when she herself needed mothering too much to become a mother, or when she would have had to bear a child as fatherless as she herself had been.
There were other surgical operations on this body that was the focus of all her own hopes and millions of public fantasies. As a child, a difficult tonsillectomy had meant lonely time in a hospital ward where she fantasized that her father would save her. As a starlet, she had minor plastic surgery to add cartilage to her jaw and perhaps also to narrow the tip of her nose. Reportedly, other cosmetic procedures were performed at various times. As a twenty-five-year-old star, she underwent an appendectomy and, toward the end of her life, her gallbladder was removed. Including the self-confessed abortions, her body underwent some twenty or more surgical invasions before she died at thirty-six. Perhaps for this reason, she no longer took comfort in nudity or casually revealed her scarred body, even to women friends, in the last months of her life.
She was fearful of doctors. As Amy Greene discovered, Marilyn would not go to the gynecologist’s office alone. But, as usual, she often tried to be gay and entertaining in public about her operations. To photographer George Barris, she credited her gallbladder surgery with keeping down the weight that she often gained between films. Ten years earlier, before undergoing an appendectomy, she had taped a surprise hand-scrawled note to her stomach that was uncovered in the operating room: “Most important to Read Before operation:”
Dear Doctor,
Cut as little as possible I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter into it—the fact that I’m a woman is important and means much to me. Save please (can’t ask you enough) what you can—I’m in your hands. You have children and you must know what it means—please Doctor—I know somehow you will! thank you—thank you—for Gods sakes Dear Doctor No ovaries removed—please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars. Thanking you with all my heart.
Marilyn Monroe
But even in the privacy of that operating room, the public’s expectations followed her. A nurse wondered aloud whether Marilyn was “blonde all over,” as Marilyn herself had once joked to the press. Perhaps in response to the nurse’s disillusionment, the bleaching of her pubic hair was later added to her hairdresser’s regular ritual of making her acceptably blonde. Lena Pepitone reported that Marilyn also bleached her pubic hair herself, and once burned herself so painfully that she had to stay in bed with ice packs.
And there were other rituals. She slept in a bra in order to preserve the muscle tone of her breasts, and told a woman friend that she put one on immediately after making love. She was often late for appointments because she completely redid her makeup, and even had her hair shampooed and reset several times, in her nervousness that she look exactly right. She stayed soaking in hot perfumed baths long past the time when she was supposed to be out and dressed. As she wrote, “Sometimes I know the truth of what I’m doing. It isn’t Marilyn Monroe in the tub but Norma Jeane… She used to have to bathe in water used by six or eight other people… And it seems that Norma can’t get enough of fresh bath water that smells of real perfume.” She would call friends for reassurance on the smallest details of what to wear, even whether to shampoo her hair; rehearse and write down subjects for conversation; and agonize nervously for hours before any appointment relating to her life as an actress, or even before meeting a ne
w person. Toward the end, a friend reports, Marilyn was also taking hormone shots to retard aging. And always there were the pills in growing numbers: some to sleep, others to wake up when she was groggy from the first ones, more to calm nervousness, still more to stay alert when the hours of lost sleep took their toll. Toward the end, she was also injecting herself with these same prescriptions to speed or increase their effect.
In between, there was champagne, her favorite drink, and her fairly ordinary taste in food. She played off doctors against each other to get more prescriptions or to take drugs in combinations that few would have approved, but her dependencies were also nurtured and encouraged by many movie executives and doctors. Drugs were a fairly routine way of keeping expensive talent working in the Hollywood of the 1950s and early 1960s. If actors and actresses felt they could not function without them, they were often supplied, or even recommended.
In addition to menstrual pain, Lauren Bacall, who worked with Marilyn, remembers that the early Marilyn was the victim of headaches. Natasha Lytess remembers on their first meeting that Marilyn spoke with a constriction of her voice that seemed to come from nerves. In the mid-1950s, Henry Rosenfeld, a New York businessman who knew her from early in her career until her death, described a Marilyn who “came out in red blotches at the idea of meeting a new acquaintance, such was her fear.” Renee Taylor, one of Lee Strasberg’s private students, remembered Marilyn putting Calamine lotion on her face to soothe a rash that resulted from nerves—sheer fear of performance. When she was trying to become pregnant, she would have false pregnancies, gaining perhaps fifteen pounds every few months to reinforce the hope that she had conceived. By the time of her last and unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give, producer Henry Weinstein remembers a Marilyn who was so fearful that, even when she did arrive at the studio, she might stop by the studio gate and throw up before she was able to enter the soundstage. “Very few people experience terror,” Weinstein explained. “We all experience anxiety, unhappiness, heartbreaks, but that was sheer primal terror.”
The fear of performing might also cause her to pretend to illnesses she didn’t have, a habit that lost the sympathy and tried the patience even of her friends. On that last movie set, for instance, Marilyn insisted she had lost her voice. She forgot, chatted animatedly with a friend, and then guiltily went hoarse again when she realized she had betrayed her own deception. Years earlier, while making River of No Return, she insisted she had broken her leg, though X rays revealed no such thing and doctors politely suggested “perhaps” a sprain. Her large number of colds, viruses, and other minor illnesses included some that were more refuge than real.
Perhaps, whether consciously or not, Marilyn’s hope for comfort through illness was based on a sense memory. When Norma Jeane was a lonely five-year-old living with the Bolenders and came down with whooping cough, her mother moved in with her, nursing her day and night. It was the first and only time in her childhood that she was the center of someone’s complete loving attention. It was a moment of rescue she may have longed to achieve again.
Perhaps, too, Marilyn’s lifetime trouble with sleeping had origins in that terrified memory of waking up from a nap as a child, fighting to keep from being smothered at the hands of her own depressed and desperate grandmother. The prospect of sleep may have come to include the idea of death—the fear of never waking.
Certainly, the grown-up Norma Jeane continued to neglect herself, just as she had been neglected as a child. She could not break the pattern. Alone, without the public pressure of being Marilyn, she sometimes wouldn’t bother to bathe, or wash her hair, or change out of an old bathrobe. She could ignore runs in her stockings, or menstrual stains on her skirt. When the mist of drugs took over, some of this carelessness overlapped into her public life. Singer Eddie Fisher, who was then married to Elizabeth Taylor, remembers Marilyn after her separation from Arthur Miller, at a party at a Nevada gambling casino where Frank Sinatra was performing. “Elizabeth and I sat in the audience,” he recalled, “with Dean and Jeanne Martin and Marilyn Monroe, who was having an affair with Sinatra, to watch his act. But all eyes were on Marilyn as she swayed back and forth to the music and pounded her hands on the stage, her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress. She was so beautiful and so drunk.” A few months later, a guest at Peter Lawford’s beach house, where Marilyn was often a guest during the last two years of her life, described her sad figure “half doped a lot of the time,” oblivious to the spreading bloodstain on her white pants as she lounged on cushions or walked aimlessly on the beach.
The woman who feared most of all becoming a joke, being used or victimized, was succumbing to her greatest fear. Only Norma Jeane would have known the cruel distance between the nightmare of the nonperson she believed herself to be and the dream of the public Marilyn—and that distance was diminishing. She felt “unimportant and insignificant,” her last psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, explained. “The main mechanism she used to bring some feeling of stability and significance to her life was the attractiveness of her body.”
Whenever the public artifice failed and the private Norma Jeane seemed to be her only fate again—when another man she looked to for fathering had abandoned her, when she was criticized or blamed, when she had failed to have a child or otherwise bring reality to her public persona—then depression and hopelessness took over. Marilyn said she had attempted suicide twice before she was nineteen. When she was twenty-four, Natasha Lytess saved her a third time. There were three near-deaths during her marriage to Arthur Miller, and at least two more close calls before the final act.
She was still beautiful and a good actress to the end. The costume tests and outtakes from the unfinished Something’s Got to Give show a luminescence and magic that her imitators can’t capture. Studio executives of that film knew she had just been saved from self-induced death by overdose, accidental or not, but, as one explained callously, “If she’d had a heart attack we’d never get insurance for the production. We don’t have that problem. Medically, she’s perfectly fit.”
And indeed she did appear miraculously free of the usual physical symptoms of addiction. Greenson concluded that, “Although she resembled an addict, she did not seem to be the usual addict.” When she occasionally gave up drugs, she apparently did not experience withdrawal. Lee Strasberg, who had taken her into his family in New York, said he tried to help her sleep without pills by giving her the nurturing she had missed as a child. “She wanted to be held,” he explained. “Not to be made love to but just to be supported, because when she’d taken the pills they’d somehow react on her so that she would want more. We wouldn’t give them to her. That’s why she got in the habit of coming over and staying over. I’d hold her a little and she’d go to sleep.”
But no one can reach back into the past. Only we can love and accept that child in ourselves, and so have the strength to change the pattern.
Perhaps Marilyn could not have achieved that. Perhaps she had been abandoned too early. But she lived in a time when her body was far more rewarded than the spirit inside. Her body became her prison.
Who Would She Be Now?
When you’re famous you… run into human nature in a raw kind of way… It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, But you also like to be accepted for your own sake.
—Marilyn Monroe
IF MARILYN MONROE WERE alive today, she would have been sixty years old on June 1, 1986.
This childlike sex goddess in her sixties is itself a shocking notion.
If we lived through the years of her fame, it forces us to recognize the passage of time in our own lives. If we know her only as a myth, it makes us realize that she was a human being just as perishable as we are. For all of us, imagining Marilyn as she would be today is hard. Her image was so dependent on a sensuous youthfulness that it was bound to self-destruct.
But it would have been much harder for Marilyn. She was terrified of aging. The restriction of her spirit in the airtight prison of b
eauty was so complete that she literally feared aging more than death itself—not the aging of mind and spirit, which all of us might fear as the loss of our unique selves, but the wrinkling of skin and softening of muscle that changes only the external and most interchangeable part of us.
Even youth was not enough. Nothing can be enough if unreality is the measure. “I’m a failure as a woman,” she confided to the head of her movie studio the month before she died. “My men expect so much of me, because of the image they’ve made of me and that I’ve made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much, and I can’t live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman’s. I can’t live up to it.”
Clearly, the public Marilyn could never have survived the game without revealing the lost Norma Jeane.
“This sad bitter child who grew up too fast,” as Marilyn said, “is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine.”
Even such self-destructive behavior as Marilyn’s epic lateness made sense when viewed through the eyes of Norma Jeane. “People are waiting for me,” explained Marilyn. “People are eager to see me. I’m wanted. And I remember the years I was unwanted. All the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the little servant girl Norma Jeane—not even her mother.”
With enough self-knowledge to recognize her own behavior, but not enough self-confidence to change it, Marilyn added. “I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong—and too pleasing… I feel a queer satisfaction in punishing the people who are wanting me now.”
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