Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

  Remember Monroe was told to get Lincoln Steffens’s biography off the set. Such forms of political coercion were endemic in Hollywood. Although Fritz Lang had not been summoned by HUAC, as someone believed to have been a former Communist he had to rely on testimony from Odets before publicity for Clash By Night was cleared in 1951.83 In 1948, Howard Hughes took control of struggling RKO (the studio whose flashing lights Monroe had watched as a child). The Boy with Green Hair, then in production, included the line ‘war’s no good for children’, spoken by an orphan. Hughes summoned the ten-year-old boy playing the part and told him to add: ‘ “And that’s why America has gotta have the biggest army, and the biggest navy, and the biggest air force in the world!” You got that boy?’84 According to Norma Barzman, the boy refused. Hughes then spent 100,000 dollars in a failed attempt to get the lines inserted, after which he gave the film a token release, withdrew it and shelved it for six months so it would lose the advantage of its own pre-release publicity (it went on to be a classic).85 Near the end of her life Monroe became friends with Frederick Vanderbilt Field who had been imprisoned for lying about his communist involvement. In his memoirs, he describes Monroe praising the revolution in China and expressing her support for racial equality and civil rights.86 For her suspected links to Communism – she once applied for a visa to go to Russia as the guest of the National Arts Foundation – Monroe was herself trailed by the FBI from 1955 to the end of her life.87 ‘Subject’s views’, a July 1962 file noted, ‘very positively and concisely leftist.’88

  Writing of what McCarthyism had done to the spirit of freedom in America, I. F. Stone cites these lines from Boris Pasternak:

  The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like our teeth inside our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.89

  There was, writes Stone, a ‘numbness’ in the national air.90 ‘It’s like you scream,’ says Monroe’s character Roslyn in The Misfits, ‘and there’s nothing coming out of your mouth, and everybody’s going around, “Hello, how are you, what a nice day,” and everyone is dying.’91

  Someone screams – a woman; someone else, or rather pretty much everyone else, covers their ears. Or as Monroe put it in one of the fragments of her 1951 notebook, ‘Actress must have no mouth.’92 Actress must be dumb (there is an ugly social injunction concealed inside the famous epithet). So if a diagnosis is in order, it should be clear by now that Monroe is not the one whom I find it most helpful to think of in terms of being ill. Suffering – without question. One of her great gifts is to distil suffering into a face and body meant to signify pleasure and nothing else. Just doing that much is already to throw a spanner into the cultural works. ‘You see,’ she said in her last interview with Life magazine in July 1962, ‘I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.’93 ‘Have a nice day,’ as one might say. Of course Roslyn’s words in The Misfits – ‘Hello, how are you, what a nice day’– are words put into Monroe’s mouth by Arthur Miller (more on this later). But Monroe herself was clear that her fame gave her a unique access, culturally and psychically, to what much of America, many Americans, did not want to see: ‘When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way,’ she says in that same interview with Life. ‘You’re always running into people’s unconscious.’94

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  Before she was a film star Monroe was a pin-up and cover girl. It was an art she never relinquished and which she carried over effortlessly into moving film. That is why nearly all of her films feel as if they are about to freeze into stills, threatening to break up the flow of cinema into its component parts. This also makes her the embodiment of cinema in a more disquieting, uncanny sense. As Laura Mulvey has so brilliantly argued, the illusion of movement in cinema, the still images latent to each moment of animation, means that there is death in every frame (Death 24X a Second is the title of Mulvey’s book).95 The boundary between animate and inanimate, between life and death, is captured perhaps more perfectly, she suggests, by cinema than by any other art. If Monroe is Hollywood incarnate, we might then also see her – through her power to halt the image in its tracks – as always on the verge of asking cinema, unlike much of the world around her, to pause and ponder the darkest side of itself. You cannot slow down in the rat race. Monroe was never in a hurry. This, I suggest, adds a different gloss to the fact that she famously drove directors and co-stars crazy by being late. ‘I also feel that I’m not in this big American rush, you know,’ she said in her last interview. ‘You got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason.’96 ‘You get there and what’s there when you’re there?’97 Americans, she also observed, ‘hate silence’: ‘That’s why silence is so hard to achieve in the movies. People want what they want in life – action, noise.’98

  ‘I could never’, Hecht reports Monroe as stating, ‘be attracted to a man who had perfect teeth.’ The other type of man she told him she had never liked – this chapter of My Story is called ‘About Men’ – was ‘the sort that’s afraid of insulting you’, the ones who ‘always end up insulting you more than anybody’. We could say that in sex, as in politics, she liked things to be what they are. She disliked the double-talkers who go on about the situation in India while ‘getting up the courage to get into action’, and even more the Good Samaritan pass-makers who pretend to have a real interest in promoting your career. Most men, she thought, talked too much, not the intellectuals who are ‘full of ideas and information about life’ but the ‘boring ones who talk about themselves’. ‘Such men are a total loss.’ A man can only talk about himself to a woman after they are lovers, when he can ‘confess all his sins and tell her of all the other women he has had’. Only stupid and weak men think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them. ‘A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, provided’ – she adds – ‘there are not too many.’99 This idea of difference – her claim to more than one way of being – is something of a principle. (‘Nothing’, she said to Weatherby, ‘is ever repeated in the same way.’)100 If Sarah Churchwell is right, as she surely is, that the voice of Monroe in My Story reaches us ‘filtered through an all-male coterie of writers, editors, and litigious ex-business partners’ (it was finally published only after her death), in this chapter at least, the men do not come out of it very well.101

  Witty and insightful, as she surely was, this account is of course too glib. We should not confuse it with what sex was for her, in the more unknown and frightening dimension of her life, both before and inside Hollywood. I count myself among those – Gloria Steinem first, Lois Banner most recently – who have no interest in contesting her story that she was abused as a child. Even though this story appears to have been added to the Hecht story very late, she then repeats it to many. The only way of dismissing it then becomes by describing her as an inveterate liar, which many, foremost among them Normal Mailer, do not hesitate to do (Monroe refused to meet Mailer on several occasions – she saw him as ‘too obsessed with power’).102 Monroe herself was explicit about the ruthless sexual exploitation which accompanied her early days in Hollywood. In fact, we do not need the abuse to pick up the deep discomfort behind Hollywood’s sexual glorification of Monroe, which she both hated and played to. Innocence and naturalness, the two epithets most commonly and routinely applied to her – I have lost count of the number of times – should make us suspicious. Together they offer an image of sex without complexity, depth or pain, something that hovers above the human, which is why it is such a tease and which also suggests another reason why her image seems to have such an intimate proximity to death. Miller himself was not immune to this: he
r sexuality came to seem, he writes, ‘the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic’.103 ‘She was just there,’ Quentin says of Maggie, the unmistakeable Marilyn character in Miller’s After the Fall. ‘She was just there, like a tree or a cat.’104

  Among other things, this is to rob sex of its history. ‘Imagine my disappointment,’ Steffens writes when he has been travelling around the world in the 1920s in search of revolution in the aftermath of the First World War, ‘to see and hear that sex was the thing.’105 Corruption has triumphed and sex has substituted for the political dream. At the end of the war he had floated a plan for a general amnesty but ‘the war psychology, which in America was also anti-labor, anti-radical mass psychology, was too strong.’106 With the collapse of radical politics, sex, we could say, steps into the breach. On the last page of his autobiography, as if he had foreknowledge of Monroe, he predicts that cinema, ‘the blindest, most characteristic of our age of machinery’, will incorporate all other art forms.107 Thus the book Monroe smuggles on to the set of one of her first movies anticipated her life by several decades. She will embody both halves of his prophecy – movies and sex (we can only wonder whether she got to that last page of his book on cinema and the future and what she would have made of it if she did). Monroe also knew and hated the fact that what was at stake was the ascendancy of the machine. ‘Once I slangly asked her how “she cranked up” to do a scene,’ reports Richard Meryman of that last interview. ‘ “I don’t crank anything,” ’ he reports her as replying. ‘ “I’m not a Model T . . . We are not machines however much they want to say we are. We are not.” ’108

  By the time Arthur Miller meets her, the rift Steffens observes between political idealism and sex has become a chasm into which the hopes of radical America have all but disappeared. American culture, he writes looking back in his memoir, Timebends, had ‘prized man’s sexuality from his social ideals and made one a contradiction of the other’ (he abandoned a play on the topic because he could not bear the spiritual catastrophe it foretold). ‘We had come together,’ he writes, ‘at a time when America was in yet another of her reactionary phases and social conscience was a dying memory.’109 ‘As usual, America was denying its pain, and remembering was out.’110 This is the frame of their marriage, the frame of her life. In this context, the idea of Hollywood escapism takes on a whole new gloss. Political hope fades and the unconscious of the nation goes into national receivership, with one woman above all others – hence, I would suggest, the frenzy she provokes – being asked to foot the bill, to make good the loss. Miller himself makes no secret or apology for the redemption he sought in her (that they sought in each other). ‘For one moment,’ Quentin says to Maggie in After the Fall, ‘like the moon sees, I saw us both unblamed.’111

  What is being asked of Monroe? ‘Sex’ is the thing. Monroe’s desire to be educated, Trilling suggests, robbed us of a ‘prize illusion’: ‘that enough sexual possibility is enough everything’.112 Why should a woman with such sexual advantages want anything else? Precisely because she had been so poor, because there was a mental pain in her that no adulator could quite evade (as Trilling puts it, the pain balanced out the ledger of her unique biological gift), Monroe pushes want to the very edge of wanting, to a form of wanting that seems to want nothing but itself. With perfect ambiguity, she once described herself as ‘wanting nothing’.113 What thwarted dreams are being poured into this woman’s body? You do not have to be a Freudian to know that such idealisation punishes as much as it sets you free. ‘All those people I don’t know,’ she said to Norman Rosten, ‘if they love you that much without knowing you, they can also hate you the same way.’114 ‘Desire is sad,’ the narrator observes in Somerset Maugham’s Rain.115 It was a story she loved. Near the end of her life, she had been waiting to play the part of the unredeemed prostitute who exposes the hypocrisy of priestly virtue in a televised version, and was deeply disappointed when it fell through (she had been holding out for Lee Strasberg as director and lost).116 Maugham had been delighted at the prospect: ‘I am so glad to hear that you are going to play Sadie in the TV production of Rain,’ he wrote to her in January 1961. ‘I am sure you will be splendid.’117

  Seen in this light, Monroe’s suffering takes on a new significance, becomes the tale America does not want to tell of itself. Even her addiction to prescription drugs, which was profound, also belongs here. As Lois Banner relates, the drugs she took – barbiturates and amphetamines – had been given to Second World War soldiers before being heavily marketed to civilians in the aftermath of war. ‘They were’, writes Banner, ‘considered miracle drugs that countered the anxiety and depression from which Americans suffered’ (the seeds of ‘Prozac Nation’ as well as of today’s takeover of the treatment of mental disorder by drug cartels).118 Hollywood was awash with these drugs because of the stress the system induced in its actors. Like so much else about her, Monroe’s drug dependency is, therefore, part of a larger picture, a symptom of more than her own distress. The painful, mostly unspoken legacy of the war was everywhere. According to Banner, one reason the Actors’ Lab did not follow Stanislavsky’s memory explorations as part of their training was because the Lab included Second World War veterans suffering from shell shock for whom it would be too traumatic.119 ‘America’, to repeat Miller, ‘was denying its pain, remembering was out.’ (Anticipating Tony Judt, Miller sees a nation’s refusal to remember and reactionary politics as deeply linked.)

  Only in one or two films, Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) and Niagara (1953), is Monroe given the chance to play a part that will expose the darker side of America, the pain it wants to forget. For me, they are two of her best roles (the second, as we will see later, has a significant reprise in her life). Both films turn on the Second World War. In the first, she is a woman driven to murderous hallucinations by the loss of her lover who was shot down in a plane; in the second, she is a woman who tries to pass her husband off as war-traumatised so his murder by her lover can be staged as suicide. As if in these early films, America can offload on to a crazy and/or murderous woman’s sexuality, without let or inhibition, the violence it cannot reckon with in itself. At the end of Niagara, the woman will be strangled by her husband, who has managed to survive his own attempted murder by killing her lover instead. But I counted no less than five earlier images where she is lying prone – whether asleep or fainted – splayed out, to all intents and purposes already dead (one stage instruction in the script describes her pretending to be asleep in ‘angelic peace’).120 It is as if the woman whose sexuality is meant to redeem the horrors of history – the woman who is being asked to repair a nation emerging from a war it already wants to forget – owes her nation a death. America is denying its own pain. Who pays the price? This is of course the classic role of the femme fatale who is always made to answer for the desire that she provokes.121

  One of the most discouraging things I found in working on Monroe was to watch Arthur Miller himself diagnose the problem, then fall headlong into it, and then finally punish her for his mistake. ‘You tell the truth, even against yourself,’ Quentin praises Maggie. ‘You’re not pretending to be innocent! Yes, [ . . . ] suddenly there was someone who – would not club you to death with their innocence!’122 Nothing worse, after the carnage of the war, even if America was on the right side, than a nation boasting its innocence to the world. It was this that I. F. Stone had hated about Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration address, with its talk of American democratic freedom which he was sure presaged the next war. Hence too the relish with which McCarthyism then goes about arranging the national distribution of political guilt. Miller’s insight is to bring the McCarthy Committee’s hearings and the legacy of the war into the same dramatic space (just in case you missed it, a concentration camp watchtower shadows the stage and at key moments throughout the drama blazes into life). No false innocence. After the Fall is a plea for political and ethical accountability, of which Maggie in those f
irst appearances is the yardstick. But by the end of the play she has degenerated into a drunken, drug-taking wreck ‘beyond understanding’, who plays the victim like nothing else (many were appalled on Monroe’s behalf; James Baldwin stormed out of the theatre on the first night).123 The fact that something of this damaging and damaged portrayal is clearly drawn from the life should not distract us from the cruel reversal of logic at work. ‘You’ve been setting me up for a murder,’ Quentin accuses her after another of her drug-induced suicidal rages. ‘You’re not my victim any more.’124 Now her pseudo-innocence – which was of course Miller’s own projection – is what he has to save himself from. By the time we get to Timebends, this logic is set in something like stone. ‘The play,’ he writes on After the Fall, ‘was about how we – nations and individuals – destroy ourselves by denying that that is precisely what we are doing.’125 Defending himself against the charge that the play was about Monroe, which it clearly is, he severs his own insight from his own final, crushing diagnosis of her: ‘All that was left was for her to go on defending her innocence, in which, at the bottom of her heart, she did not believe.’ Innocence, as he puts it, kills.126 It is a myth, he also acknowledges, which they shared. But at moments like this, he is blaming her for the end of the marriage, for the end of her life (which is not to ignore his sorrow). Punishing her for his own insight, he has turned her into the disease – of peoples and nations – which he, like the rest of America, had set her up to cure.