But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is she? And who was she before all this came to pass in her adopted name? What was it about her that allowed it to happen? And who are we that love her so much? These questions rise and fall like the sound of distant applause as you read the Christie’s catalogue. And occasional answers can seem to spring from the pictures and descriptions of the objects themselves. The book is a slick and a morbid affair: the clothes are really nothing without Marilyn in them; many of the photographs show her coming out of a film premiere, or sitting hopefully in another tiny apartment. Her possessions, you feel, are there to soften and furnish, to ease and to deepen, the life of a woman who is barely in possession of herself. But without her they seem like tokens of the purest emptiness.
Marilyn’s books and stockings and strings of pearls come to ground you in a vivid life that is gone; her existence was so much about projection and luminous performance that you can hardly bear to imagine the macabre earthiness of her leavings. It’s a bit like contemplating Ophelia’s soaking garments and weedy trophies pulled from the weeping brook; they are cold, modern remnants of desire and the misfortunes of fortune; tokens of the twentieth century’s obsession with the nuances of fame and public death.
Madame Bovary. The Sun Also Rises. The Unnameable. The Fall. Marilyn’s auctioned books are like scripts primed for her long afterlife. And one of the others, Dubliners, contains the story that captures something of the eerie and magical grip that personal effects can hold for the living. Her gloves and candlesticks resemble those in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: rows of framed photographs before a pier glass; we might imagine these objects that once belonged to a beautiful, sad young woman can tell us something strange and true about our own lives. The people who queued to see her things around the world were apt to say such a thing. The eternal-seeming fabulousness of a great movie star – like that of a princess – might serve for a while to transform even the dowdiest of realities. That is the myth, anyway. And Marilyn Monroe was nothing if not a sacrifice to the potency of her own mythology. Even her pet dog’s tag and licence (estimate, $800–1200; final bid, $63,000) become items of great interest, symbolic pieces of the life of someone who has entered into Life. Frank Sinatra gave her the dog. She called it Mafia. Right now a person is looking at the licence and thinking they grasp the meaning of the twentieth century. And who is to say that person is wrong?
Norma Jeane Mortensen was born on 1 June 1926 in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother Gladys Baker was now and again mad, leaving her daughter troubled but free to dream up an alternative life, and to develop her vital allure reading movie magazines. Norma Jeane had a keen sense of how to conquer people’s affections – especially those of men. She wore lipstick. She wore short skirts. She told a sad story of her upbringing. And after a spell modelling and flirting and screwing and practising her walk, waiting in line with the other girls at Schwab’s Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, Marilyn emerged with a brazen sense of how to enliven the Fifties.
Marilyn invented a persona – The Girl – that would at first seem to release her from the bad things of her childhood, but which later became like one of her childhood ghouls, leaning over her, making her all sex, and suffocating her. The Girl was a fiction and a mask – ‘Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one,’ said Groucho Marx – which served to turn a case of ordinary, everyday wishing into a triumph of calculated stardom. There is hardly a single area of Norma Jeane’s life that wasn’t fluffed up to enhance Marilyn’s exotic stature. The Girl, the resulting character, would seem to carry vulnerability and sexual freedom to a new place in the movies, but in real life, in the decompression chamber of overblown ambitions, the person who called herself Marilyn Monroe could only unravel in a miasma of loneliness and uncertainty and pain. And worst of all, even this, her bad times, her suffering, came in the end to add to the myth of her specialness. In her own lifetime she became the patron saint of sex; and afterwards, in her very modern martyrdom, she made us feel that an engulfing sadness does not in any way preclude a giant success. Marilyn’s fans find the combination fatal. And so unfortunately did she.
Encyclopedias exist to bring a constant proliferation of knowledge to rest for a time in one place. Adam Victor’s attempt on the universe of Marilyn Monroe – life, Life, Afterlife, scholarship, clothes, gossip, filmography, addresses, hospitals, drama coaches, superstitions, favourite toys – is truly mind-boggling. It may represent the triumph of detail over proportion, but still, all in all, it serves as a complete concordance to the many Marilyn narratives yet published. Here is a part of the entry on Marilyn’s honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio:
After a night at the budget CLIFTON INN motel in Paso Robles (and a meal in the restaurant of the Hot Springs Hotel, or at the Clifton Inn according to some versions), Joe and Marilyn drove in his dark blue Cadillac to a mountain lodge outside Idyllwild, near PALM SPRINGS, loaned to them for the occasion by Marilyn’s attorney, Lloyd Wright. Here they had the uncommon luxury of two weeks alone together.
The upper-case names have entries to themselves. Just as the Christie’s sale of Marilyn’s knick-knacks did better than adjacent sales of German Art and the Ancient Jewels of Persia, so Victor’s encyclopedia, a mini-Bible of our times, will do better than many a Complete Guide to This and That, or Encyclopedia of the Other.
There are more biographies of Marilyn Monroe than of any other person in the history of show business. Around seven hundred have been published in English alone, with a dozen or so new ones every year. It is even possible to suggest a typology of writings about Marilyn. It starts off with studio biographies written by publicists, and a kind of memoir by the screenwriter Ben Hecht (later published as My Story by Marilyn Monroe), featuring the well-spun tale of Norma Jeane’s abused childhood, and the white piano she saved from her mother’s house – a piano that sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at the Christie’s sale. There were also early biographies by Marilyn’s friends (the columnist Sidney Skolsky, the poet Norman Rosten) and her enemies – Marilyn, the Tragic Venus, based on the incriminating fibs of Hollywood scribe Nunnally Johnson. There have been plenty of biographies by people who worked for Marilyn, by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, her cleaner Lena Pepitone, by a fan called James Haspiel who used to stand outside her apartment, by one or two guys who slept with her, by any numbers of guys who wanted to sleep with her, and by a tittle-tattle lifeguard at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Her half-sister Bernice Miracle wrote a fairly tender little book called My Sister Marilyn. Then to top it all there was The Secret Happiness of Marilyn Monroe by her first husband, James Dougherty.
In fact, you can easily top that too. There has been spurious tome after tome on the subject of her untimely death. Come on down, the Murder Cover-up Theorists. Anthony Summers wrote Goddess, an exhaustive, exhausting and paranoid account of how everyone in the known world wanted Marilyn dead. He also did the actress the supreme disservice of publishing a picture of her on the slab. There have been many of these sensational books, which mainly show how both Kennedys bugged her, buggered her, drugged her, killed her, collaborated with the Mafia, were set up by the Mafia, were punished by (or in league with) the Teamsters, or the Cubans, or the Rat Pack, and that every intelligence agency in the United States was busy tailing Marilyn or burning her phone records or laying plans to snuff her out.
Monroe’s mother blamed her daughter for being born, and the child grew up with a dark memory of people screaming in the hall, of departures and uncertainties, and of men taking advantage of her loneliness and dependence. Even Marilyn seemed to realise that dressing up – going on show – was a way of providing an answer to the gaunt face of her mad mother in the Rockhaven Sanitarium. It might even be possible that Marilyn’s efforts to dispel America’s fears about sex were somehow related to her attempts to dispel her own fear of madness. At any rate her grandmother Della Mae Hogan died in a straitjacket. Gladys lived until the 1980s in a Florida loony bin. And Ma
rilyn presented herself to the world as a beacon of confidence, an angel of sex, while all her life she was troubled with the idea that her mind wasn’t right.
It was Marilyn’s misfortune to think that serious acting could save her from self-doubt. In 1955, after showing America and the world how to relax about sex by allowing her skirt to blow over her head in The Seven Year Itch, Monroe ran away to New York to become somebody else. But The Girl would always follow her. She threw a press conference to reveal ‘the new Monroe’:
Cocktails were served for about an hour as guests awaited a ‘new and different’ Marilyn. Shortly after six, the front door opened and Marilyn blew in like a snowdrift. She was dressed from head to toe in white. A fluttery white mink coat covered a white satin sheath with flimsy, loose spaghetti straps. She wore satin high heels and white stockings. Her long, sparkling diamond earrings were on loan from Van Cleef & Arples.
Marilyn seemed disappointed when people asked what was new about her. ‘But I have changed my hair!’ she protested. Her hair did seem a shade or two lighter. Asked to describe the new colour, Marilyn replied in a child’s voice: ‘Subdued platinum.’ The crowd received Marilyn with good-natured amusement. They responded as though she were one of her comical, ditzy blonde film characters … ‘I have formed my own corporation so I can play the kind of roles I want,’ Marilyn announced … She declared herself tired of sex roles and vowed to do no more. ‘People have scope, you know,’ said Marilyn. ‘They really do.’
This sad tableau is one of a pair. She came to England the following year to star in The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. At the initial press conference one of the straps on her dress broke with suspiciously good timing, whereupon she announced that she would very much like to appear in a film adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. ‘Which one would you play?’ shouted one of the reporters. ‘Grushenka,’ said Marilyn, ‘that’s a girl.’ ‘Spell it,’ said another hack.
Marilyn was cursed – or blessed – with an instinctive ability to intellectualise sex and at the same time to sexualise intellectuals. But in time this would constitute a schism in her everyday life: on the way up she tried to please men who only wanted her for sex, and at her height, at the pinnacle of her New York period, from 1955 until her death in 1962, she tried to please men who thought she was better than that. Fundamentally she swithered between giving and wanting: in time she would surround herself with intellectuals who thought they might harness her vulnerability and somehow turn her into a great actress or a happy person. Yet there was something in the material of her early life that made such achievements very difficult: fulfilment remained but a flickering, costly, benighted dream. In some chiefly unhelpful way she didn’t know who she was.
A dozen years ago I went to look at Marilyn Monroe’s grave. She is buried just beyond Hollywood at a place called Westwood Memorial Park. It was a very quiet place on a hot summer’s day. As I walked over the grass the only real sound was coming from a bell that hung from a branch of a tree over the grave of Natalie Wood. A water sprinkler in the corner of the park made a placid arc over gravestones and shrubs. Not a bad place to live out one’s afterlife, I thought. Down a lane called the Walk of Memory you pass Darryl F. Zanuck and Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Fanny Brice. What I remember most is the atmosphere of the cemetery: the place was more than just a repository of famous bones; a giant investment of common wishes lay deep in the polished stonework. American wishes. The world’s wishes. Yet the only scent that moved through the air was the scent of everyday boredom. It could have been any car park in America: a place where children might play on a vapid afternoon, the sun coming down, the future unknown. Yet in that same atmosphere there was something of America’s allure to the impressionable world – it was a mood that travelled invisibly over the surface of the manicured grass, a liturgy of success, the psalm of America, with Marilyn as its tragic muse. How could we fail to follow that compelling sound to the ends of the earth?
Tony and the Queen
NOVEMBER 2006
Very good monarchs must surely dislike innovation, if only to acknowledge the fact that innovation must surely dislike them. It may be said that Queen Elizabeth II has been especially skilled in this respect, having fought every day since her coronation on 2 June 2 1953, to oppose any sort of change in the habits of tradition and to preserve the British monarchy from the encroaching vulgarity of public feeling.
When people say they love the Queen that is often what they love – her stoical, unyielding passivity – and one has to look to Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to find a monarch who might match her, and even beat her, as an idol of intransigence. ‘The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Woman’s Rights,”’ wrote Victoria in her journals, ‘with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.’ Victoria always had the habit of expressing her views in the third person, and the above was written in 1870, a year, it might help us to remember, when everyday British women were just being allowed by law, for the first time, to keep the money they earned. Being in touch with one’s subjects, female or otherwise, was not seen to be a very necessary part of the job back then, and it might stand as one of the more limpid ironies of monarchy that the sovereigns who are most out of touch are usually the ones most loved.
Nevertheless, one might pity the present queen. Where Victoria only had women’s suffrage and Charles Darwin to rub up against, poor Elizabeth had Princess Diana, and there we entered a whole new phase in the life of an endangered species. There was always a question about how far Queen Elizabeth could go in the twentieth century without coming a cropper due to new waves of populism gone awry, and in Diana Spencer she met the near-hysterical embodiment of that tendency. In her famous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir in 1995, the one where she outed her husband as an adulterer, Diana looked down the camera lens as if she were looking through the sights of an automatic weapon. Here are some examples of how she spoke in that interview about her role within ‘The Firm’:
DIANA: I remember when I used to sit on hospital beds and hold people’s hands, people used to be sort of shocked because they said they’d never seen this before, and to me it was quite a normal thing to do. And when I saw the reassurance that an action like that gave, I did it everywhere, and will always do that.
BASHIR: What was the family’s reaction to your post-natal depression?
DIANA: Well, maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful. And obviously that was daunting, because if you’ve never seen it before how do you support it? …
BASHIR: What did you actually do?
DIANA: Well, I just hurt my arms and my legs; and I work in environments now where I see women doing similar things and I’m able to understand completely where they’re coming from ….
BASHIR: Once the separation had occurred, moving to 1993, what happened during that period?
DIANA: People’s agendas changed overnight. I was now separated wife of the Prince of Wales, I was a problem, I was a liability (seen as), and ‘how are we going to deal with her? This hasn’t happened before.’
BASHIR: Who was asking those questions?
DIANA: People around me, people in this environment, and …
BASHIR: The royal household?
DIANA: People in my environment, yes, yes.
BASHIR: And they began to see you as a problem?
DIANA: Yes, very much so, uh huh.
BASHIR: How did that show itself?
DIANA: By visits abroad being blocked, by things that had come naturally my way being stopped, letters going, that got lost, and various things.
BASHIR: So despite the fact that your interest was always to continue with your duties, you found that your duties were being held from you?
DIANA: Yes. Everything changed after we separated, and life
became very difficult then for me.
BASHIR: Who was behind that change?
DIANA: Well, my husband’s side were very busy stopping me.
Obviously, the elder royals and their familiars had completely missed out on the Oprah-isation of the universe. If they hadn’t, they might have learned the new first rule of successful leadership: enjoy your inscrutability if you must, but don’t ever stand in the way of a confessional heroine. If stopping Diana was something of a thankless task while she was alive, the effort would come to seem suicidal for the British monarchy in the summer of 1997, after Diana died in that Paris tunnel. William Shakespeare himself could scarcely have imagined, in the days after the crash, a royal household with more out-of-touch advisers than the Windsors had on twenty-four-hour call, each of them sharing a gigantic unawareness of the difference between a pest and a mass phenomenon. But it is said that much of the intransigence was coming from the Queen herself, who, despite all her experience, disported herself that summer like a person lumbering in a dark cave. She was somehow unable to see what the infants and the dogs in the street could see, that the old style was unsuited to the virulent new mood – and that if something had to give, or someone, it was most likely going to be the woman whose head appears ready-severed on Britain’s postage stamps.
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