by Adam Braver
She wiggles her toes, trying to keep her foot from falling asleep.
Mr. Strasberg takes the stage, pulling up a director’s chair and sitting. He leans back, relaxed and slouching, his elbows resting on the wooden arms. In his black suit, he almost disappears into the scrim. One sock scrunches down, a bare shin visible below the pant cuff. Still, his posture is confident. His body wide open. Today, he begins, he would like to remind everybody that theater is a creative art, and just because it uses a script, that does not make it an interpretative art. He peers at the group through his thick-framed glasses. Your art, he continues, demands a fresh, original, spontaneous experience with what you’re dealing with, not an imitation of someone else’s experience. He thrusts his hands out, then pulls them back in, folding them over his heart. And, he continues, what you will all be challenged with as creative actors is how to consciously stimulate the creative process, which usually takes place unconsciously. We want you as actors to stimulate your entire being beyond the external means of voice, gestures, speech. You will stimulate it with your own thoughts, sensations, sensitivities, experiences, and emotions—you will fuse completely with the life that has to be created on the stage. Or another way of thinking about it: when something is happening to the character, something is happening to the actor.
She moves to the edge of the chair, her arms now unfolded, rubbing her knee with the heel of her palm. She has let herself be constructed like one of those brilliant back-lot sets, where the façade is as lifelike and elegant and perfect as one can imagine, but to walk behind it is to see plywood sheets and two-by-four braces. She needs to remember that she is not that façade, no matter how much she has allowed herself to be built that way.
Strasberg stands near the conclusion of his lecture. The next class will be a series of scenes to be workshopped. He points out two students, who purse their lips and nod affirmatively. She can’t imagine standing on the stage in front of all these people. There’s still too much to learn. But it doesn’t bother her, not being ready. For once, she doesn’t feel as if she’s in any hurry.
She likes the smell of New York. The way it smells of the street, carried low and thick, trapped between buildings, rising from the subway vents. It’s the smell of ideas, of commitments. The smell of frustration and sweat. And she finds it inspiring. It reminds her to work harder. To remember that ideas need roots. That they’re not all dandelion clocks, immediately scattered into the horizon by the breath that just spoke them.
It’s funny how a place can feel like home. And though she’s been a Southern California girl her whole life, in many respects the epitome of it, New York feels like the place she was supposed to be born into. And she considers buying a house in Brooklyn. Imagines never going back to California again. And what was something of an ongoing flirtation with Arthur Miller for several years has turned serious. They see each other regularly. Trying to keep it quiet. Not make an issue of it. They read together. Talk. Bicycle in Central Park. On the Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. And she loves that he recognizes that she has a New York soul. That he wants to nurture it. Refine it. And she thinks he might be the first real man Marilyn Monroe has ever known.
It’s an idea Lee Strasberg has, and it’s all his. He sits with her and some other students in Childs Restaurant. Square in the middle. He leans in to Marilyn, telling her that he’s serious, it is the role for her. And she says it’s impossible to hear anything, between all the chatter and the sizzling grill, not to mention the way the sound bounces off the white tiles. Again, he repeats, it’s the role for her. “Tell me, Mr. Strasberg,” she says, moving in. “Tell me the role for me.”
He scoots even closer, his lips almost touching her ear. “Lady Macbeth,” he says. “Lady Macbeth.”
“Lady Macbeth?”
“Lady Macbeth.”
She drums her fingers on the table. Pulls away, and looks at him. Smiling and shaking her head. “Oh, come on now,” she says. “I haven’t even done a scene in the lab.”
“But you will be ready.” Already it’s hard for him to keep it in, so much so that others at the table ask what’s going on. Strasberg blurts it out. And, looking right at Ben Gazzara, who’s taking a bite of his sandwich, Strasberg says he should play Macbeth. He doesn’t even notice that Gazzara, with his mouth full, nearly chokes.
But Marilyn does. She’s aware of how ludicrous this all sounds, and the impression it leaves at the table. Since she first arrived, the suspicion that Lee Strasberg would find any way to make use of her reputation has been whispered between classes, never fully hushed when Marilyn walks by. In Childs Restaurant, cramped between her colleagues, she tries to force a smile, one that shows the ridiculousness of the idea, making sure all can see, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. It’s hard for her to pull off convincingly. While she knows she’s nowhere near ready for that kind of role, and that the idea truly is silly, she does want to believe she could play Lady Macbeth in the near future. She wants to believe that maybe this is the life she was meant to lead.
When they talk privately, Strasberg continues to reinforce the idea that it’s all there inside her, every emotion it takes to make a role real. She’s lived it all. Felt it. All those painful years of her childhood were not a pure waste. He just needs to get her to the point where she can access those memories, and teach them how to become her characters. He says he knows it’s there. Her core is a gift. A talent. One that can’t be taught, only coached. And, if she’ll learn, she’ll be able to play any role. Any role. And she asks, “Do you really think Lady Macbeth?” and he answers, “Any role.”
To hasten the process and the training, Strasberg sets Marilyn up to see a psychiatrist to help her dredge through all of that past. He explains that Marianne Kris, whose office is in his building, is a true Freudian, in fact a very close friend of Anna Freud. Dr. Kris’s father was not only a collaborator with Sigmund Freud, he also served as the pediatrician to the Freud family. In short, Dr. Kris truly understands the science of repressed emotions, and its relationship to making art.
Together, acting as a family, he says, they will be able to undo what Hollywood has done.
Spring 1956: Central Park West, New York City
You sit on the couch. Sometimes more than twice a week. Sometimes daily. In a typically dark paneled room, you feel equally dark, only defined as a penumbra. And the therapist asks you how you’re feeling. She checks her notes, bringing them under the light. How is the sense of loneliness today? There’s a pause. You hear the ticking clock. It punches at you. And you try not to smile. A bus roars by beneath the window. Once you answer her with a degree of confidence and positivity (Actually, I’m doing okay today), and she says something about masks and subterfuges, and that sometimes when we don’t feel lonely we are, in fact, at our loneliest.
She calls you Marilyn (Well, Marilyn; So, Marilyn; And . . . Marilyn). Today she says it’s important to confront another piece of the past. And you say, “Where should we start?” and she answers, “Well, Marilyn, where would you like to start?” And you want to say, Some pills would be good, but it might be misconstrued, and not be taken for a laugh but instead as one more scribble on the notepad, a subject for future discussion. And she’s just looking at you, pushing the top of her pen against her lips, denting them white, while her crossed stockinged legs never move, as though they’ve been lacquered shut. And before she can say, Well, Marilyn again, you lean forward, pushing your hands into the cushions, and you say, “That’s kind of difficult, you know?” and she pushes the pen even harder into her lower lip, and then says, “I don’t know. Perhaps you’ll explain it to me, Marilyn.”
And here’s where you’re caught, in a kind of vast no-man’s-land set between definable borders. And you live there, sort of like a visitor who’s read the brochures, a tourist who knows more of the facts and the histories than the actual residents do but has no real claim to firsthand experience. And you’re tempted to use that metaphor, but you’re lousy at metaphors (night
classes at UCLA may have given you the appreciation but not the ability), and what you ought to say is that if the doctor is trying to get you to talk about Norma Jeane, then you can without a doubt talk about Norma Jeane. Aren’t you her biographer, for God’s sake? You can rattle off the series of foster homes, stays with relatives, and the way the world turned a blind eye to her, making her want to be seen all the more. You can detail it. Perform it. Make it truer than it was. But now it’s nothing more than that. Norma Jeane was ended years ago. You might even say that, if you didn’t know the knee-jerk response would be, “And how does that make you feel?” to which you’d have to reply, “You should ask Norma Jeane.” And that kind of response, it seems, would get you nowhere.
One time you intimated that Norma Jeane had been ended on a specific day. It just kind of slipped out when you were going on about what it felt like the first time you modeled in front of the camera, on your lunch break at the Radioplane factory. And you talked about how you’d felt your entire body kind of cracking open in front of the lens, but it wasn’t a breaking sensation, instead one that oozed. And you slipped into a metaphor by saying it was as though you were seeing color for the first time, and that, in a weird way, you sort of saw yourself three-dimensionally, the way others began to see you, specifically the factory men who suddenly went big eyed and insisted on walking you to your car and stared at your chest beneath a sweater too small for you while sweet-talking you from all angles. That day, posing before the camera, you saw her too. And along with the factory men, you too wanted to walk her to her car. Make sweet-talk and check out her body. That was the day, you let it slip, when Norma Jeane was ended. “Now we’re getting to the place where we want to be,” the doctor said. And you looked at her with utter confidence and assurance, as though the roles had been switched, and said, “No we’re not. Not at all.”
Ulysses
Leaves of Grass
Madame Bovary
Notes from Underground
Paradise Lost
The Prophet
Death in Venice
Swann’s Way
Anna Karenina . . .
She stops you there. But your mind is racing, trying to picture the bookshelf, the nightstand, and the syllabus. She leans forward, legs still crossed. She draws in a breath through her nose that is startlingly loud. “This is my question,” she begins. Her hands are clasped, the right is massaging the left. “Do you think,” she asks, “that your purpose for reading all these books, for taking the night classes at UCLA, is, in part, a way for Norma Jeane to prove or to demonstrate that she can rise above her upbringing?” There’s a temptation to challenge the fallacy of the question, that there’s even a Norma Jeane that exists to prove anything. Or that Norma Jeane could ever rise above her upbringing, because in fact she can’t, she ended (or was ended). But that kind of talk sounds too crazy, even for a therapist’s office, and so you just shake your head. “No,” you reply, “I just really like to read.”
She seems interested in you. She even seems to like you. Maybe that’s why you keep coming back? And at first it was supposed to be about your acting and training. A way to touch all the emotions inside you. Wade through the damage. Remember what it all felt like. And there always seemed to be a slight contradiction, in that it never quite made sense actually to heal any of the past, because that pain was the very thing you needed to draw on. This process has seemed to be more about locating and accessing. But as you’ve continued, and she identifies this central theme of loneliness, she’s altered the plan, because she honestly thinks she can fix you. She wants to make it all go away. She doesn’t want you to access it. She wants you to come to terms with it. Then it will have no power over you. Lose its effect. And though it’s tempting, that’s not quite what you signed up for. This was supposed to be about acting. Plus, and more importantly, if she actually opened you up, scooped out all the muck, then you know where you’d end up—at Norwalk State Hospital, taking your place in the line of women who came before you. No question. So you have to keep it controlled. End the things that need to be ended. And make sure there isn’t really a past. Just a few biographical details, and some residual emotions to bring before the camera. Still, you like having someone who cares. Someone who seems to really want to help you, and not just take from you. And so you keep the appointments. Always show up on time. Give just enough to make it seem real. And, in a way, kind of look forward to it. Because it’s nice to know there’s a person who wants to hear what you have to say, and is interested in it. And because of that trust, you try to be mindful that even if the things you say aren’t always entirely factual, they’re always truthful.
“Sex,” she says. “Should we talk about sex?”
“Do we have to?”
“Does that make you uncomfortable?”
“Sex!?”
“No,” she says with a smile (betraying what’s always supposed to be a professionally stone-faced expression). “I meant talking about it.”
But what is there to say? You’ve always felt sexual. Even as a little girl. Your sexuality has been an essence of your being for as long as you can remember, as much a part of you as any other bodily function. But maybe the mistake you’ve made is to confuse it with sex, and that always seems to be a little disappointing because you realize that fucking (is it okay to use that word?) really bears little relationship to expressing the sexuality that you feel within yourself. And maybe that’s because the feeling is so personal, and while over the years all these boys and men who’ve seen your sexuality have tried to get to it, to touch it, to own it, in a strange way it’s as though having sex is the very moment when your sexuality completely turns itself off. It may be crude to say, but you understand how a whore can take it day in and day out without feeling a thing.
She asks, “Would you describe this as a fear of intimacy?”
“No,” you say. “Maybe a fear of having no intimacy.”
“I want to get back to that idea about ‘the whore.’”
“I thought you might.”
“I’m wondering if you’re telling me that having sexual relations makes you feel like a prostitute?”
“Not at all.”
“Perhaps you can clarify. For my benefit.”
You lean back on the couch. The room is tightening. Suddenly it takes all your effort to sit still. Didn’t you indicate you really didn’t want to talk about this when she brought it up? Isn’t this really her entrée into a discussion about repression? About your cousin Buddy feeling you up when you were living in his house? Old Man Goddard playing grab-ass? The boys at school? The slow march into the diagnosis that you’ve shut yourself down sexually in order to protect yourself from those painful memories? But again (and this is what you can’t say), this is not an issue. Those all went with Norma Jeane. And you have no objection to borrowing those emotions if they will help with a future role. But the doctor’s looking at you as though she expects you to talk, and so you’ll tell her a story that a photographer once told you. That as a side project, an art project, he was taking pictures of whores along the Tijuana border. And in a motel room, he asked one of the women if he could shoot her just on the bottom sheet, since, up to that point, she would pose only on top of the covers. And she looked at him. Stiffened. Shook her head. And actually wagged her finger. No, the whore had said. Above the sheet is for the customers. Underneath the sheet is for me.
Marilyn. She keeps saying that name. (Marilyn. Marilyn. Marilyn. Marilyn. Marilyn.) She says, “Marilyn, we mustn’t lose sight of why you’re here. We want to alleviate those feelings of loneliness. Find ways to control and mitigate those moments of desperation that are liable to drop in on you unexpectedly. And to that end we need to focus on the triggers, Marilyn. What are those triggers, be they issues of abandonment or sexual assault, that are lying like mines waiting to explode inside of you? And how can you learn not to fear them? It’s about developing the tools to accept them.”
“That last one’s no
t a question, is it?”
“What I’m saying is that we have to get inside. Continue to go deep into Marilyn, and root out those elements of her past.”
You’re careful not to smile. You don’t want to offend, because, again, you kind of like her, and you like that she likes you. But it does make you want to smile every time she talks about Marilyn and Marilyn’s past. Maybe it’s because Marilyn’s past is no more than a few years old? Maybe because there are entire payrolls dedicated to making Marilyn’s past? Or that that past is a work-in-progress being created on a regular basis in this very office? And that just like Norma Jeane, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you predict, Marilyn will cease to exist, and with her will go all that past?
When you first came to New York, you used the pseudonym Zelda Zonk to avoid attention when making reservations. It isn’t difficult to imagine sitting in this office in a few years, digging at the dirt, trying to pull up the roots of Zelda’s past, listening to Zelda Zonk being reminded that when we don’t feel lonely we are, in fact, at our loneliest.
Spring 1956: The Actors Studio, New York City
She’ll be doing her first scene at the Actors Studio in less than an hour. She waits alongside the stage, trying not to let the anticipation get the better of her. The piece is from Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie, a two-person scene, in which she’s cast as Anna Christie opposite Maureen Stapleton’s Marthy Owen. As he always does, Mr. Strasberg continues to emphasize that the scene, as with all those at the Studio lab, is about process and experimentation, and that it should not be thought of as “performing” or “auditioning”—the lab is a “protected environment.” Still, she feels the eyes of critics studying her. And while she knows some of them might be curious to see how much she’s really learned, she suspects most want to confirm she’s learned nothing at all.