Women in Dark Times

by Jacqueline Rose

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  ‘Talent’, Monroe says to Richard Meryman in the last interview, ‘is developed in privacy’ (she is citing Goethe).127 ‘Fame’, she insists, ‘is not where I live.’128 To read Monroe’s fragments, letters, journals, poems is to realise that, however tormented, she had another life. It is to be struck by the unrelenting mental energy with which she confronted herself. ‘It’s hard’, she wrote as early as 1943 (she was seventeen and well into her first failed marriage), ‘not to try and rationalise and protect your own feelings, but eventually that makes the acceptance of truth more difficult.’129 Long before she entered into psychoanalysis, long before she started reading Freud, she clearly had made Freud’s famous adage to ‘know thyself’ her own (she tells Alan Levy to underline those two words in her interview with him in August 1962).130 ‘You try to be true,’ she will later say to Georges Belmont, ‘and you feel it’s on the verge of a type of craziness, but it isn’t really craziness. It’s really getting the true part of yourself out, it’s very hard.’131 ‘It’s hard to know where to stop,’ she also said, ‘if you don’t start with the truth.’132 For Monroe, mental life, like acting, was a type of work. ‘I can and will help myself and work on things analytically no matter how painful, if I forget things (the unconscious wants to forget – I will only try to remember)’ she writes in a notebook of 1955, although of course this has the whiff of analytic instruction. Then she adds: ‘Discipline – Concentration. My body is my body every part of it.’133 She is claiming herself, body and soul – on this, she is way in advance of the feminism she will not live to see. ‘I’ve always had a pride’, she tells Life in that last interview, ‘that I was on my own.’134 Work was a form of freedom: ‘In my work – I don’t want to obey her any longer and I can do my work as fully as I wish.’ She is referring to one of a number of childhood figures who made her deeply ashamed of herself.135 Her shame of herself sexually, again explicit in these notes, and her investment in her image – however much she hated it, because she hated it – are clearly also reverse sides of the same coin. The fact that she famously took a knife to photos she couldn’t stand signals to me not some impossible vanity but that such investment is already, can only ever be, turned against itself. ‘Working (doing my tasks that I have set for myself). On the stage I will not be punished for it.’136

  At moments we can watch as the two types of work slide effortlessly into each other on the page: ‘Work whenever possible – on class assignments – and always keep working on the acting assignments . . . must make strong effort to work on current problems and phobias that out of my past has [sic] arisen.’137 She was a fierce disciplinarian to the end, which is why the idea of her just losing it in the final years of her life does her scant justice. She never believed that any of her performances were good enough. In fact the discipline and the inner torment are the reverse sides of the same coin. She spends a great deal of her time in a state of fear: fear of failure – by the end of her life, all productions were sheer torment (Harvey Weinstein, the producer of her final unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give, talked of ‘sheer primal terror’)138 – but also fear of something radically unknown:

  I love the river – never unmoored

  by anything

  it’s quiet now

  And the silence is alone

  except for the thunderous rumbling of things unknown

  distant drums very present

  but for the piercing of screams

  and the whispers of things

  sharp sounds and then suddenly hushed

  to moans beyond sadness – terror beyond fear139

  Many of these fragments are spattered over the page, endless revisions, corrections, bits of text overlapping, or barely adjoining, that can only be read by rotating the page. To describe them as ‘wasted pages’, in the words of one reviewer, is, to say the least, to miss the point.140 This is a mind at work, at once creative and in pieces, a mind rumbling inside itself and then reaching for the light, giving the lie to her own image (this is hardly a woman without a mind). That intimation of ‘things unknown’ is important – it should at least give pause to all those who have rushed to offer the definitive diagnosis of Monroe. Monroe knows that she, that the psyche, is a shape-changer. ‘I am both of your directions . . . I am many stories.’141 ‘There are’, she said to Susan Strasberg, ‘a lot of cards in my deck.’ ‘Of course,’ she added, ‘you’ve got to watch out not to get confused.’142 ‘You have to learn to believe in the contradictory impulses,’ she commented to Rosten. ‘You know, you want to do one thing and you do another, you learn from that.’143 ‘Nothing,’ as she said to Weatherby, ‘is ever repeated in the same way.’ She imported this insight into her craft. ‘She had learned the trick of moving infinitesimally, so that the photographer . . . could easily follow movements that were endlessly changing,’ Eve Arnold observed. ‘For each photographer she would be different . . . using herself and bringing forth different facets of herself.’144

  For Monroe, suffering is not a failure, but the springboard for, a way of loosening, something else:

  You must suffer –

  to loose your dark golden

  when your covering of

  even dead leaves leave you

  strong and naked

  you must be –

  alive – when looking dead

  straight though bent

  with wind145

  Alive when looking dead, straight though bent with wind. Monroe moves through the contradictions of her inner life (alive when looking dead could also be read as her riposte to the deadly undercurrent of cinema which Laura Mulvey observes, as well as to the killing, frozen adulation of which she herself complained). On the same pages she reports a dream of being operated on by Lee Strasberg: ‘Best finest surgeon cut me open.’ The lines are now the lyrics of a song by American female singer St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, which brilliantly capture how this prospect is as much desire as threat (as in ‘cut me open, please’). Monroe does not shy away from her own violence: ‘Everyone has violence in them. I am violent’ – another ironic rejoinder to the myth of innocence with which she has been so beset. To the immense disappointment of Strasberg and the watching Arthur Miller in the dream, they find nothing but sawdust inside. Monroe is trawling her unconscious. She does not surmount it – for psychoanalysis, no one ever surmounts the unconscious. But nor is she simply its prey. For that reason, I do not find it helpful to present her – or indeed any woman – as either on top of or succumbing to her demons, as though the only options were triumph or defeat (a military vocabulary which could not be further from her own). As with Rosa Luxemburg, as with Charlotte Salomon, Monroe has the courage of her own reckoning with herself. She brings the dark with her wherever she goes. It is no less present when she succeeds than when she fails.

  In the process, she brilliantly exposes the façade of mental institutions at the time. In 1961, she was admitted to the notorious Payne Whitney Hospital on the advice of her New York analyst, Marianne Kris. In the secure wing on the sixth floor all the doors were locked and no one could use a phone. When the staff boast of the facilities as ‘home-like’ – wall-to-wall carpeting and modern furniture – she retorts: ‘Well, that any interior decorator could provide – but since they are dealing with human beings, why couldn’t they perceive even the interior of a human being?’ To get herself out, she reprises her own role as the mad woman in Don’t Bother to Knock, slams a chair against a cabinet, and sits on the bed with a shard of glass threatening to harm herself unless they let her out: ‘If you’re going to treat me like a nut I’ll act like a nut.’ Earlier she had tried to explain to them that if, as they were encouraging her, she were to ‘sew or play checkers, even cards and maybe knit’, ‘the day I did that they would have a nut on their hands’. (All this from a long letter she wrote three weeks later to her Los Angeles analyst, Ralph Greenson).146 This is surely Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar several years before its time – an analogy I try for the mos
t part to avoid simply because when it is made, as it so often is, the reference is of course to Monroe’s death (they were both blondes and died in the same year), never to her ear for the inner life, to the ‘rumbling of things unknown’, and certainly never, but never, to her wit. Monroe is tapping into things that mostly go untold. In these writings, we can watch the link between her public and private persona, between perfectibility and human misery pulled to breaking point. ‘I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.’ She then elaborates: ‘successful, happy, on time, all that glib stuff.’147

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  She was a brilliant comedienne. ‘We need her desperately,’ Sybil Thorndike is reported to have announced on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl when she was driving everyone mad by being late. ‘She’s the only one who knows how to act in front of a camera.’148 Even Billy Wilder, likewise maddened, had to concede: ‘She was an absolute genius as a comic actress, with an extraordinary sense of comic dialogue . . . Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.’149 She could not see it. She did not realise that the audience were laughing not because she, Monroe, was ridiculous but at the genius with which she played her part.150 In fact it was her unique talent to play almost every part she performed as if it were a mockery of itself. But it was not what she wanted to be. ‘I had to get out, I just had to,’ she says about the huge commercial success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. ‘The danger was, I began to believe this was all I could do – all I was – all any woman was.’151 Women could do better. It was because Laurence Olivier had insulted her by telling her just to look sexy that, by her own account, she started to be late: ‘If you don’t respect your artists, they can’t work well. Respect is what you have to fight for.’152According to Miller, Olivier was simply jealous and spent most of the time competing with her like a coquette (Thorndike herself had once described him as a ‘bad tempered little bitch’).153 Monroe was scathing about the final cut of the film over which she had forfeited control to him: ‘I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine,’ she wrote in a memorandum to her colleagues including him. ‘Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the brightness you saw in New York.’154 (Clearly he had contrived to reduce the film’s – to reduce her – comic effect.)

  Above all she wanted to be recognised as an actress. ‘I’d like to be a fine actress,’ she is reported as saying to photographer George Barris at the end of her life. ‘I wanted to be an artist, not an erotic freak.’155 ‘I would like to be a fine actress,’ she insisted to Georges Belmont, ‘a true actress, that’s what I mean by fine, a real actress.’156 (Once again she makes her unequivocal plea to the register of truth.) ‘Please don’t make me a joke,’ she says to Meryman. ‘End the interview with what I believe. I don’t mind making jokes but I don’t want to look like one. I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity.’157 She kept a photograph of the famous turn-of-the-century actress Eleanor Duse in her bedroom. This was not mere pretension. Anne Bancroft, who played a nightclub singer in Niagara, said in response to the look in Monroe’s eyes when she is being taken off by the police at the end of the film: ‘It was one of the few times in Hollywood that I felt the give and take that can only come from fine acting.’158 ‘I believe Marilyn is an extraordinary gifted actress,’ wrote Joshua Logan, who directed her in Bus Stop, ‘with a technique for playing comedy which is unique in my experience with comediennes,’ her ability to be pathetic as well as comic making her, he continued, ‘the nearest thing to Chaplin’. (In a recent article, John Banville describes her as ‘one of the twentieth century’s great clowns’.)159 Logan also described her as the nearest thing to Garbo.160 Henry Hathaway, who directed her on Niagara, wanted to cast Monroe opposite Montgomery Clift or James Dean in Of Human Bondage, but Zanuck stopped him. He also tried and failed to cast her as Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, a role she repeatedly expressed a serious desire to play. She was famously mocked for saying this at the first British press call for The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. ‘She had read the book,’ Eve Arnold observed, ‘and had understood the part.’161 Monroe also famously, and increasingly, fluffed her lines. Here too there is a story about control. ‘I just didn’t like the way the scene was going,’ she told an observing journalist on the set of Clash by Night who had watched her do it twenty-seven times on one line. ‘When I liked it I said the lines in the scene perfectly.’162

  According to Lee Strasberg, Monroe read the part of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at the Actors Studio more powerfully than any actress he had ever heard. It is worth looking at this. The role would have allowed her to bring home to male-dominated America a few home truths. Like the character she wanted to play in Somerset Maugham’s Rain, like Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Christie has been a prostitute. When she returns to her Irish father, Chris Christofferson, who lives on a barge on the Boston waterfront, she falls in love with a sailor, Mat Burke, whom the two of them rescue from drowning when his steamer is wrecked. Burke falls for her as a ‘rale, dacent woman’, unlike the whores he has frequented from port to port. On the point of marrying him against the wishes of her father, she turns on them both as they quarrel about her future: ‘You was going on’s if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see? – cepting myself. I’ll do what I please, and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do! I aint asking either of you for a living.’163 ‘Decent, who told you I was?’164 When she then tells them both the truth about her past, Burke threatens to kill her – there is no woman in the world, he says, with the rottenness in her that she has. He will change his mind. Convincing him that she is no longer that woman, she gets to rewrite her role in life (she also points out that he has been as guilty of rottenness as the whores he so hates). It is an extra­ordinary play – Garbo had played the screen version – because the woman manages to defend her own right to freedom and makes the man take back his projections in the same breath (innocence and guilt tracking back in the opposite direction from everything we have seen so far in relation to Monroe). I think it is no coincidence that the prostitute in Rain and the lead in Anna Christie are the two roles she most wanted near the end of her life. She wanted to play the part of a woman who told the world, who told men, the truth.

  That is why so much hung finally on The Misfits, which is where this chapter began. Miller wrote the screenplay to give her the chance she longed for. He genuinely believed that, drawing on her as he saw her, he had created her first serious role. He did not reckon with the problem that this was his vision, not hers (although there was some collaboration between them, she complained to Norman Rosten that the heroine was too passive).165 Nor with the effect on her of so dangerously crossing the border between life and fiction, of turning her definitively into a piece of her own, or rather his own, art. This could not have been further from the method of acting in which she believed, and for which she strove: ‘You find out what she’s like,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘the person you’re playing. I mean what she means to you. How you’re like her and not like her.’166 She wanted to act not herself, but – like and unlike – beyond herself; she wanted to become somebody else.

  In The Misfits, the character of Roslyn speaks the truth – although ‘speaks’ is not quite the right word – in a brute world of mustang hunters who are lost men. They are the misfits of post-war America. Only she can see how their violence is not the antidote to the poison of the nation, but its restaging in the desert, the place to which they wrongly believe they have escaped. She offers them 200 dollars to set the mustangs free. When Gay asks her to give him a reason to stop what he has been doing, she is enraged: ‘A reason! You, sensitive fella? So full of feelings? So sad about our wife, and t
he bombs you dropped and the people you killed . . . You could blow up the whole world, and all you’d ever feel is sorry for yourself !’ Then, as they are retying the mustangs, she runs off and shouts at them from a distance:

  Man! Big man! You’re only living when you can watch something die! Kill.

  Everything, that’s all you want! Why don’t you just kill yourself and be happy?

  In the screenplay she screams these first lines from forty yards away (Miller’s directions are precise), then runs back towards them and speaks these next lines directly into Gay’s face:

  You. With your God’s country. Freedom! I hate you!

  You know everything except what it feels like to be alive. You’re three sweet dead men.

  Going against the screenplay, Huston does not bring her back into close-up for these words but keeps her writhing and screaming at a distance, so when Gay says, ‘She’s crazy,’ the camera tells him he is right.

  According to Pepitone’s account, she was furious that she was refused the chance to explain – too dumb to explain anything – reduced to a screaming, crazy fit.167 She could not bear that her character was not allowed to be mentally equal to the ethical task she is allowed, only screaming, to perform. Like Anna Christie, she wanted to get her point across. It is, it could have been, one of the most radical moments in her film career, where she offers up her diagnosis, explains what’s wrong with America, the dangers beneath the illusion of innocence and perfection – men who only feel alive when killing, guilty men home from the war who would blow up the whole world and feel only sorry for themselves. This is freedom, this is God’s country.