The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  Marilyn Monroe’s words reveal the swoon of a woman who could have any man she wanted, but besides being the president, the power John F. Kennedy seemed to exude intoxicated the legendary movie star and actress, wholly taking her into his spell. Monroe was bewitched well beyond JFK’s sexual hold on her. From Hersh’s book, the transcript of what she said to Dr. Greenson:

  Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can’t afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I’m not talking utopia — that’s an illusion. But he will transform America today like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the thirties. I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt as one of our greatest presidents….

  Included in the footnotes of Hersh’s book is a quote from Hugh Sidey, who was part of the White House press pool the night of the now-infamous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” performance by Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden. Twentieth Century Fox had forbade Monroe to go to New York, because she’d already caused so much trouble during the filming of Something’s Got to Give. Robert F. Kennedy reportedly called the studio and berated a board member for refusing to give permission, even calling him names, but the studio wouldn’t budge. Being JFK’s “soldier,” Marilyn went anyway, and the birthday boy was evidently as overwhelmed as everyone else, according to eyewitness Hugh Sidey. “It was quite a sight to behold, and if I ever saw an appreciation of feminine beauty in the eyes of a man, it was in John F. Kennedy’s eyes at that moment,” Sidey told Seymour Hersh.

  Baseball great Joe DiMaggio, once married to Monroe, was intoxicated by her his entire life. When she died, DiMaggio commissioned Parisian Florist in Los Angeles to deliver flowers to Ms. Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery three times per week, which continued for decades. Buying flowers myself from Parisian Florist back in the 1990s, I met the owners and had them verify the stories that have now become legend.

  Marilyn Monroe’s being proved the power women can have over men, and the lengths we will go to use it, even in the midst of our own struggles to be recognized for our individuality beyond our sex. To separate the two is not only futile but stupid. The problem arises when we’re not allowed to do that which goes beyond being a woman, to get taken seriously for our talents. Any feminist ideal that obliterates one for the other is doomed. We cannot do it and survive whole, because we are most vital in that collision.

  Romantic tales of overwhelming lust and taboo sexual collision between a powerful man and a beautifully seductive woman have been captivating us for centuries. The casting of a dashing bad-boy with overwhelming stature or power over the world in which he lives is the “ultimate aphrodisiac,” to quote Henry Kissinger. It’s indeed about power. Charm and the ability to make a woman feel like she’s the most wanted woman in the world at any given moment is part of the potion. The life-altering and sometimes life-shattering repercussions of entangling yourself with a man of this description can be irresistible. The narrative is too seductive, the adrenaline-pumping highs rationalized as worth it, regardless of the bone-crushing lows.

  Mere mortals are not immune either, though we have much less lofty or name-worthy romances, even if the emotional roller coaster performs the same type of adrenaline jolt.

  Barron was decades older than I, married, wealthy and bored. It was a high-wire act in one respect. He was a well known Wall Street mogul who was recognized wherever we went, the restaurants from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to New York, including the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, which he took me on one day before we had lunch in SoHo. He introduced me to outrageous players, including the infamous Bob Guccione, whose home we attended one night for a lavish party and an exhibition of his legendary art collection. Guccione greeted us with his dogs, his ever-faithful companions. Barron and his wife no longer had a sexual relationship in a very long marriage that was comfortable and cold. We were very discreet. The fun lasted for years.

  This was exactly what I wanted at the time and the first and last such relationship I ever had. I admit to having flirtations with many a married man, though I never acted on any other, even if I could have many times. His children were grown and long gone, something that mattered to me. I may have been scandalously adventurous, but I had no intention of ruining anyone else’s life in the process of having fun, which is the only thing I wanted. I didn’t want his money, and I certainly didn’t want to take him away from his wife, whom we mutually agreed to never discuss. When we were together, it was just us. I always kept my eyes open for other interesting men. I was single.

  Nothing did my Relationship Consultant image more good than getting three-foot tall, massively exotic floral arrangements delivered to my LA Weekly office. Not to ruin your picture of the whole thing, but my “office” was actually a stolen area on the Classified Advertising floor that I partitioned off from everyone else so I could have intimately private conversations with women placing personal ads, which always involved salacious banter.

  Between floral arrangements there were also the limousine pickups late on Thursday, when I’d be whisked off to LAX for weekend trips to Las Vegas. There we’d spend weekends eating lobster and quail eggs, drinking champagne, seeing shows, playing craps and having sex. If you’re picturing Sharon Stone in Casino, standing next to a toad of a man who’s rolling dice at the craps table, that couldn’t be further from the truth. We simply were having the best time and enjoying each other’s company to the maximum extent, with absolutely no strings attached. The sex wasn’t bad either, nor were the dinners with his old Vegas pals, which included some of the original Strip landowners made wealthy when casinos moved in. They told the most outlandish tales.

  Most relationships with married men end, which was what I’d always expected. For us it began the night he and I met for dinner and he started on this soliloquy about what it would be like being his wife and what he’d expect of me. I was sure my heart stopped for just a split second; my brain definitely froze, paralyzed, in absolute shock. This was not what I wanted, and there was no way it was going to happen. I just stared at him as he laid it all out, not really looking at me at all. He was obviously going through his own thing, admitting to himself out loud that this is what he was now contemplating. At some point, I got up to pee and try to breathe again, and when I returned we finished the bottle of wine and dinner, then left. Things quickly unraveled after that, even if it didn’t really end for months and months. I just got busier and busier. We quit traveling, then it all just dwindled… out.

  I guess everyone’s got to try things like this or maybe fantasize about them, but the truth is, the complications are really uncontrollably inconvenient. I know this may sound terribly tedious, but anyone getting involved with a married person with children at home deserves to have his or her head examined. There are all sorts of open marriages that exist today, even if they’re not declared. Once was more than enough for me. I got lucky, though, because we had a blast and didn’t hurt anyone but ourselves, because you can’t have a long-term fun- and fuck-buddy without mourning the amputation of the attachment, even if you’re the one who whacks it off.

  Living in Los Angeles, there were many rich men to enjoy. It’s a miracle I even lived through the 1980s. On one of the most bizarre nights, among many spent partying, a millionaire spied me in an upscale bar with my girlfriends, and started sending me champagne. It ended with me in his Jaguar that night, though nothing happened, because I was his twenty-four-hour project. When he dropped me at home, much to my chagrin, the instructions for the next day were that I was to wear a see-through blouse with no bra. It was a test, but I complied. The next day we spent toge
ther, along with his blond Labrador retriever, in the hills of the beautiful Pepperdine University campus, as this gorgeous but very lonely man spun a yarn about who I really was and what I deserved, including that I should never be in a bar, and that he was the man to take me ’round the world. It was a fantasy day that I seemed to watch from outside my body as he performed for me, giving me life advice to take into my next chapter, which he felt would be wiser after his counsel. We never took our clothes off and didn’t see each other again.

  Watching men be men is what I spent thirty years devouring.

  The “trapped American housewife” story finally broke into the open in 1962, after the Pill freed women, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s was in full swing in the White House, though the media wasn’t talking. At the time, McCall’s was reportedly the fastest growing women’s magazine. The world was in upheaval, but in McCall’s, there was “no mention of the world beyond the home,” again according to Betty Friedan’s exhaustive research. Their readers were judged to be “housewives, full time.”

  When Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique blew the lid off of the American myth of the happy housewife who needed nothing beyond home, it foreshadowed the launch of the modern feminist revolution that would open a path to feminism breaking out in 1972, which introduced Gloria Steinem, the cultural daredevil of our time.

  Feminists took back what the pre-WWII heroine had begun, before the postwar era stuck women back in their traditional role. Feminists of the 1970s, led by Steinem, again reclaimed power that included intelligence and education, as well as encouraging the abilities a woman had to create exactly what she wanted by doing something to earn it.

  Back in 1939, according to Friedan’s research and films of the times, the “New Women” heroines “were almost never housewives.” In January of that year, Redbook published “A Dream to Share,” where the husband and wife were partners in life. The story of women in 1939, according to the magazine, was that “if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man.”

  In 1939 we had Scarlett O’Hara, who scandalized the South in every way possible, including by being a good businesswoman, but even after everything falls apart, she comes back repeatedly, living her life her way. There was also The Women, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Hedda Hopper and other talented, accomplished actresses. There were wives but also women who had jobs, lives and individual strengths. It’s the story of a wife, played by Shearer, who is losing her husband to a hot single girl, played by Joan Crawford, who has sex with him and is trying to get him to leave his wife. Shearer throws him out when she finds out, because she has no intention of allowing it or turning her head the other way. She also won’t make allowances for some sexual appetite that she’s supposed to suffer through as her husband beds another woman, even if she’s dependent financially.

  Fast forward to 1959 and Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, with Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Mercedes McCambridge. Here’s the IMDB description, though I’ve added the names of the cast: “The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable (Hepburn) dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine (Taylor). What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane; now Mrs. Venable wants Catherine lobotomized (Montgomery Clift plays the doctor) to cover up the truth.”

  In 1956, Inherit the Wind featured Lauren Bacall as a shadow of her 1944 To Have and Have Not self. If Kinsey had seen Bacall make her screen debut in that earlier film, her classic line to Bogart, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow,” might have set him to work a lot earlier than 1953. This time around, in 1956, she plays a woman who falls in love with rich bad-boy Robert Stack, while Rock Hudson pines for her, with Dorothy Malone playing what Hollywood now called the “nymphomaniac.” The role, with all sorts of warning signals about what happens to an unmarried girl who likes sex, landed Malone an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Bacall gets slugged around and has a miscarriage, but at least she ends up with another man to take care of her.

  Butterfield 8, 1960, has Elizabeth Taylor playing a good-time girl who falls for married man Laurence Harvey, while Eddie Fisher pines for her. Taylor ends up dead. Sex with a married man kills. Funny how that’s never the case for men in these films.

  In His Girl Friday, released in 1940, Rosalind Russell is an ace reporter, with her boss Cary Grant also her ex-husband who just can’t let her go. Russell had what was considered only a man’s job by the time the 1950s rolled around, and was single with no children in sight. She was also the heroine.

  This all illustrates, at least to me, what happened to women’s roles, which had taken off with vigor in the 1920s, when we got the vote, and stayed strong on screen throughout the pre-censorship era until WWII ended. The history of women in film tells an important story about the world in which our greatest screen icons grew up and which shaped their lives and their choices. Digesting this at a time when some are decrying feminism, talking about a post-feminist era when we still don’t have equal pay or equal power in media, corporations or politics, we should make sure we remember the lessons from women’s history already there for us to see.

  Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is a message in an era when women are bailing out, even when they can afford not to do so. Progress can be overturned, as it surely was in the mid-twentieth century, when the feminine mystique took hold after WWII and a half-century of women working and producing next to men.

  By the mid-1950s, career housewives were told they needn’t be concerned with the world, because only children and home were important. In a March 2013 article in New York magazine titled “The Retro Wife,” meant to rebut the urgent need for women to keep pressing for progress, the main female subject of the piece says, “I want my daughter to be able to do anything she wants… But I also want to say, ‘Have a career that you can walk away from at the drop of a hat.’” The privilege of being a woman who only wants to do what she wants when she wants is the very definition of bailing on what women have already built. It’s a position that rejects leadership at a time when we need female leaders more than ever, which also means women must inspire men to step up to help this manifest. Who a woman partners with either makes leadership possible or not, with America’s role in the world hanging in the balance.

  Hillary Rodham Clinton graduated from Wellesley in 1969. She was thirteen years old when Jacqueline Kennedy entered the White House, never imagining that she would one day refer to swimming with “my friend Jackie,” as she did in her memoir, Living History. Clinton’s heroine was Eleanor Roosevelt, someone who is left out of the conversation at this point in feminist history, but is foundational to it. When Hillary Clinton decided to change her life and move to Arkansas to be with the love of her life, Bill Clinton, it was Eleanor she heard in her head. Hillary writing in Living History: “I knew it was time for me — to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt — to do what I was most afraid to do.”

  You’re not going to find two women who were more different in the White House than Jackie and Eleanor. Of course, the marriages of all three of these women are something else, but the women themselves are far more interesting to contemplate in a country that still pays women less than men for the same job, while being seen around the world as a beacon of female freedoms.

  Hillary Clinton learned from both women. It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous line that a woman in political life must “develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide,” which became a “mantra” for Mrs. Clinton as she “faced one crisis after another,” again quoting from Living History.

  One prophetic warning from Jacqueline Kennedy reverberates, which Mrs. Clinton chose to include in Living History. Hillary said Jacqueline Kennedy “spoke frankly about the peculiar and dangerous attractions evoked by charismatic politicians.” She warned Hillary that, like Jack, Bill Clinton had “personal magnetism that
inspired strong feelings in people.” It was obvious to Mrs. Clinton that “she meant that he might also be a target.” Mrs. Kennedy warned, “He has to be very careful. Very careful.”

  I can’t help but wonder what Jackie and Hillary thought in terms of the role both Jack and Bill played in setting themselves up as willing targets for “peculiar and dangerous attractions.” This was inherently dangerous, especially for a president, but that’s obviously part of the thrill. As for “peculiar,” I think I’ve proven to you by now that this isn’t all that odd for a wide spectrum of men, regardless of class or stature. There is no such thing as “very careful” in today’s modern era, which hangs on the risk of who has more to lose.

  Upon leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton was more popular than any man in politics, looking very much like the only woman in history on the ramp to becoming the first viable female presidential candidate of the United States. She got close in 2008, which I chronicle in my book The Hillary Effect. Her years at the State Department have only sealed her prowess as the most powerful woman on the scene today. She was the first person at State to make women a priority in our diplomatic mission, something that she started as first lady when she went to China to speak to women there and declared “human rights are women’s rights.”

  Growing up watching Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy must have been something for a girl moored in midwestern religious traditionalism and clearly affected by politics early on, no doubt because of the opportunities growing for women. An accomplished woman, Clinton’s own career as a lawyer included a 1974 stint on the impeachment inquiry staff, advising the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings. Hillary Rodham gave up her own ambitions to move to Arkansas and marry William Jefferson Clinton, whom she simply knew was headed for the presidency.