The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In her presence it was hard to concentrate." In contrast to Sanders, Celeste Holm – who was seven years older than Marilyn and played Bette Davis' friend – failed to see Marilyn's brightness and assumed she'd slept her way into the part: "I saw nothing special about her. I thought she was quite sweet and terribly dumb, and my natural reaction was, 'Whose girl is that?' It was the performance of a chorus girl [she's described in the film as 'a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts']. She was terribly shy. In fact, she was scared to death, because she was playing in a pretty big league, you know, but Joe relaxed her into it."

  Mankiewicz himself saw yet another side of Marilyn's character, and understood her insecurity and self-imposed isolation both on and off the set: "I thought of her, then, as the loneliest person I had ever known. Throughout our location period in San Francisco, perhaps two or three weeks, Marilyn would be spotted at one restaurant or another dining alone. We'd always ask her to join us, and she would, and seemed pleased, but somehow she never understood or accepted our unspoken assumption that she was one of us. She was not a loner. She was just plain alone." It's hardly surprising that Marilyn lacked the confidence to socialize with the fiercely intelligent Bette Davis and the older actors who had experience on the stage. But close contact with these stars made her long to be a serious and respected actress.

  Mankiewicz had an unexpected encounter with Marilyn that revealed that her endless striving for self-improvement, though apparently pretentious and absurd, was actually quite serious and sincere. When he saw her reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet as she waited to rehearse her dumb blonde role in All About Eve, he thought, "I'd have been less taken aback to come upon Herr Rilke studying a Marilyn Monroe nude calendar."9 He asked how she happened to choose that highbrow book, and she naïvely but sweetly explained that "every now and then I go into the Pickwick [Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard] . . . and just look around. I leaf through some books, and when I read something that interests me – I buy the book. So last night I bought this one. Is that wrong?" Realizing that Herr Rilke's advice to an aspiring artist was an instinctively good choice, Mankiewicz assured her that it was not wrong at all.

  Rilke's book, in fact, clearly expresses several themes that were especially meaningful to Marilyn. He emphasized the close connection between art and sex, mind and body, which she'd been trying to understand in her lessons and express in her roles: "artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight." Usually treated as a beddable body rather than as a woman with real feelings, she responded to Rilke's hope that sexual differences could be transcended, that "man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them."

  Marilyn, who saw the world as hostile and (as Holm noted) was "scared to death" on the set, found solace in Rilke's belief that "we have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them." Two poetic passages were also charged with personal meaning for her. The "Sonnet" by the young poet, quoted in the Letters, echoed her own sadness: "Through my life there trembles without plaint, / without a sigh a deep dark melancholy." And, constantly in the process of transformation from Norma Jeane to the persona of Marilyn Monroe, she would have been struck by the famous last line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo": "You must change your life."

  The nude calendar that Mankiewicz mentioned originated in May 1949 when Marilyn was an obscure and occasionally impoverished model. Tom Kelley photographed her perfect body, a modern Venus, in several poses and paid her a modest $50. He sold the pictures for $500 to a company that put them on calendars, sold them throughout America and made a huge profit of $750,000. In the best photo Marilyn is shot sideways (to hide her pubic hair) and from a ladder ten feet above her. Her long wavy blond hair flows from her back-tilted head and mingles with the blood-red waterfall of drapery beneath her. This velvet suggests not only the softness of her skin and voice, but also the folds and texture of the most intimate parts of her body. The outstretched fingers of her left hand seem to claw up to the right corner while her right foot points balletically down to the left. Her legs form a sexually suggestive triangle, and her back arches above her narrow waist and descends to the gentle mound of her buttocks. Her alluring breasts promise pneumatic bliss, and her pink nipples merge with the red velvet. Her body surges and flows in languorous undulations and, with all its sensual weight, is offered, in pure isolation, as an ecstatic end in itself. Marilyn seems to have slipped out of her clothes as easily as she'd slipped into men's beds. She seems ready to respond with erotic compliance and represents, in William Blake's words, the "lineaments of gratified desire." Her friend Nan Taylor, who once saw her get out of the bath, recalled that Marilyn's body was beautiful all over, as perfect in life as it was in the photos.10

  The pose in Kelley's photo seems to have been inspired by François Boucher's portrait of Miss O'Murphy (c.1751), the daughter of an Irish soldier and mistress of King Louis XV of France. This lovely girl, with hands supporting her chin, is sprawled belly down on the ruffled drapery and ample cushions of a velvet sofa. Her legs are spread, her naked bottom is center stage and, with a shamelessly engaging expression, she gazes upwards as if seeking some sort of royal command or divine absolution.

  Always casual about nudity, Marilyn forgot all about the photo. But in March 1952, when she was making Clash by Night and being courted by Joe DiMaggio, someone recognized her as the girl in the calendar and threatened to blackmail Twentieth Century-Fox. The Hollywood studios, in matters ranging from film scripts to actors' private lives, constantly trod the minefield of public opinion. America in the 1950s was (and in many ways still is) a puritanical and rather hypocritical society. Films regularly maintained the sugary fiction that young girls were always innocent and demure, and studios spent heavily on public relations to persuade the public that movie stars had a moral and dignified private life. Actors' contracts contained morals clauses that threatened instant dismissal for scandalous or disgraceful behavior. In 1950, for example, Ingrid Bergman had been publicly condemned and professionally exiled for having an illegitimate child with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

  The discovery of the calendar sent the Fox executives into a panic, and they urged Marilyn to deny that she was the naked model. But Marilyn, intuiting the public's response and acting more wisely, admitted that she'd posed in the nude and gained valuable publicity from the potentially scandalous incident. She defended modeling as honest work, bravely said she was not ashamed of her body and claimed she had needed the cash to avoid repossession of her car (a sacred object in Los Angeles). The public was convinced that she'd had no other means of earning the money, and that economic necessity should prevail over moral values. Often silent and tongue-tied in private, Marilyn won over her audience by answering reporters' questions, like Mae West, with a series of witty ripostes. She defiantly declared, "I've been on calendars, but never on time." Playing on words when asked what she had on, she suggestively replied, "I had the radio on." In a variant of this question, "What do you wear to bed?," she answered, "Chanel No. 5." Marilyn's nude photo achieved even greater fame when, in December 1953, it became the centerfold of the first issue of Playboy.

  Before the nude calendar scandal, and while she was making Love Happy with the Marx Brothers in 1949, Marilyn posed for a second series of less successful nude photos, this time for Earl Moran. Leaning backwards, resting on her extended arms, she tucks her right leg underneath her and stretches her left leg toward the floor. Wearing the bottom of a bathing suit, with her long blond hair flowing sensuously down her back, she sits sideways on a wo
oden case, smiling innocently and baring her breasts.

  IV

  Marilyn played an important part in the transformation and revival of Hollywood in the 1950s. Two historians described the major reasons for the sudden decline of the studios at that time:

  While as late as 1951 Hollywood made nearly 400 feature films, by 1960 only 154 were produced. 'B' films, shorts, and newsreels all disappeared during the fifties. . . . By 1960, when Americans possessed some 50 million TV sets, a fifth of the nation's theaters had closed for lack of business. . . .

  From a record weekly attendance of 82 million in 1946, film audiences alarmingly plummeted to about 36 million by 1950. Labor troubles, higher production costs, adverse court rulings [forbidding studio ownership of theaters], highly publicized anti-communist hearings all hurt the movie industry. . . . [The fifties witnessed] the demise of the old film-making system – the Hollywood of big studios, glamorous stars, formalized plots, packaged dreams, predictable profits.11

  Marilyn's rise to stardom and box-office magnetism helped to halt the radical decline of the studios.

  Marilyn has often been compared to the platinum-blond actress Jean Harlow. But in her colorful public life she was more like Clara Bow, the "It girl" of the 1920s. Bow also came from a desperately impoverished background. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother insane. Sexy, feverishly animated and intensely emotional, she won a beauty contest in her teens and came to Hollywood when she was seventeen. After she became a star, she lived quietly in her Beverly Hills and Malibu houses, and amused herself by playing poker with her servants. But she was flamboyant in public, driving a bright red car filled with seven chow dogs whose coats were dyed to match her flaming red hair.

  In the early 1950s, after those two small roles in first-rate films – All About Eve won Academy Awards for best picture, director, screenplay and supporting actor – Marilyn had more prominent parts in a series of mediocre movies, which, rather surprisingly, vaulted her to stardom. Her performances were more significant than the pictures themselves, and paved the way for her best roles later on.

  Clash by Night (1952) was based on a Broadway play by Clifford Odets that starred Tallulah Bankhead. A left-wing melodrama set in the 1930s, the play showed how poverty and unemployment drive a deceived husband to murder his wife's lover. The film, by contrast, centered on the classic eternal triangle. Barbara Stanwyck betrays her crude but devoted husband, Paul Douglas, in an adulterous liaison with Robert Ryan, but repents and returns home. Stanwyck's disillusioned remark, "Home is where you come to when you run out of places," echoes Robert Frost's lines in "The Death of the Hired Man":"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in." Marilyn plays a tough, independent but essentially sweet girl, who works in a Monterey sardine-canning factory. Fresh, blond and young, in contrast to Stanwyck's dark-haired, bitter and disillusioned character, she looks good in her simple jeans (as she would in The Misfits) and seems engagingly natural. In contrast to the overwrought, tempestuous triangle of the three main characters, she achieves love and happiness with her young husband at the end of the film.

  Robert Ryan, like George Sanders and Joseph Mankiewicz, recalled Marilyn's fear and isolation: "I got the feeling she was a frightened lonely little girl who was trying awfully hard. She always seemed to be so mournful-looking around the set, and I'd always try to cheer her up. She never went out with the rest of us socially after work." The movie's Austrian director, Fritz Lang, who'd made the great German Expressionist film M, analyzed Marilyn's character and was the first to note her inability to memorize her part: "She was a very peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty – I wouldn't say 'star allure' – but, let me say, she knew exactly her impact on men. . . . I don't know why she couldn't remember her lines, but I can very well understand all the directors who worked with her getting angry, because she was certainly responsible for slowing down the work. But she was very responsive." She was a minor if promising actress, but the publicity generated by the nude calendar forced the studio to tolerate her costly and unprofessional behavior. A newsman on the set, concentrating on the hottest story, exclaimed, "We don't want to speak with Stanwyck. We know everything about her. We want to talk to the girl with big tits."12

  Marilyn seemed more at ease on screen in the comedy Monkey Business, her third movie of 1952, but did not get on with the director, Howard Hawks. Physically impressive (like Huston) Hawks was "six-feet-three, broad shouldered, slim-hipped, soft-spoken, confident in manner, conservative in dress, and utterly distinguished overall." Born in Indiana, the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer, Hawks was educated at Exeter and graduated from Cornell in 1917 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps in World War I, and after the war built airplanes and a racing car that won the Indianapolis 500. In 1922 he came to Hollywood, where screenwriter Niven Busch found him impressively distant and formidably frigid: "He gave me his reptilian glare. The man had ice-cold blue eyes and the coldest of manners. He was like that with everyone – women, men, whatever. He was remote; he came from outer space. He wore beautiful clothes. He spoke slowly in a deep voice. He looked at you with these frozen eyes."

  This haughty patrician directed the absurd and labored Monkey Business, in which a chimpanzee in a research lab accidentally concocts an elixir of youth that makes Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers behave like children. Marilyn has the decorative but unrewarding role of Charles Coburn's secretary. In one scene the seventy-five-year-old Coburn "had to chase and squirt Marilyn with a siphon of soda, a moment he approached with glee. Any seeming reluctance, he later explained, was only his indecision about where on Marilyn's . . . um . . . ample proportions to squirt the soda." Despite her small part, Marilyn also caused trouble on this picture and forced Hawks to shoot around her when she failed to show up. The problem, as everyone later discovered, was her infected appendix, which she had removed, in late April 1952, as soon as her work was completed.

  No doctor performing an appendectomy would excise her reproductive organs. But Marilyn, who hoped to have children, taped a pleading note to her abdomen before the operation:

  Dr. Rabwin – most important to Read Before operation. Cut as little as possible. I know it seems vain but that doesn't really enter into it. The fact that I'm a woman is important and means much to me.

  Save please (I can't ask enough) what you can – I'm in your hands. You have children and must know what it means – please Dr. Rabwin – I know somehow you will!

  Thank you – thank you – thank you. For God's sake Dear Doctor No ovaries removed – please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars.

  Thanking you with all my heart.

  Marilyn Monroe.

  The formidable Hawks, mistaking her pain and fear for stupidity, was even more critical than Fritz Lang. Hawks considered Marilyn "'so goddamn dumb' that she was wary and afraid of him. Still, Hawks admitted that she did a fine job in the film and that 'the camera liked her.'" Cary Grant, like Celeste Holm and many other colleagues, was surprised by her meteoric rise to fame the following year: "I had no idea she would become a big star. If she had something different from any other actress, it wasn't apparent at the time. She seemed very shy and quiet. There was something sad about her."13 To the other actors Marilyn could seem ordinary, unresponsive and apparently "dumb," but on camera she seemed to glow.

  In Don't Bother to Knock (1952) Marilyn had a spectacularly unsuitable role that revealed her inability to play a dramatic part. She gave an unconvincingly hysterical performance as a drab, unglamorous, psychopathic babysitter who almost murders the child in her care. In Niagara (1953) she played a beer-hall waitress, a good-time girl married to a psychopath, Joseph Cotton. Oscar Wilde had called Niagara Falls "the second great disappointment of the American bride," but Marilyn managed to complement the orgasmic fortissimo of the cataract. The film was advertised with a poster of a gigantic Marilyn, reclining across the entire width of the Falls, which equated her po
werful sexuality with its immense volume, everlasting duration and uncontrollable force. When she sees some young couples dancing outside her motel room, she puts a record on the phonograph and sings, "Kiss me . . . take me in your arms and make my life perfection. . . . Perfection." The gloomy Cotton, who seems impotent when confronted with Marilyn's seductive sensuality and mocked by the romantic theme of her song, rushes out of their room and smashes the record.

  Marilyn is naked in bed as well as in the shower, and wears a tight, red-hot dress (one man observes) "cut so low you can see her kneecaps." In one scene, as she lies in a hospital bed, a fringe of down shows up on her cheek. Adorned with heavy make-up, she has characteristically pouting lips, half-open mouth and girlish giggle. The camera then follows her and captures, from behind and in a long-shot, her patented sensuous walk. Always fueled by an erotic flame, she stirs the men around her as she moves. But her acting in this melodrama is mannered, uncertain and unconvincing.

  When a Hollywood columnist noted that "her derrière looked like two puppies fighting under a silk sheet," Marilyn, stretching the truth in an amusing remark, defended her natural gait: "I learned to walk when I was ten months old, and I've been walking this way ever since." In a rather stilted statement, almost certainly written by a studio publicist and designed to separate her sleazy character on screen from the respectable Miss Monroe, she tried to dissociate herself from her role: "The girl I played was an amoral type whose plot to kill her husband was attempted with no apparent cost to her conscience. She had been picked out of a beer parlour, she entirely lacked the social graces and she was overdressed, over made-up, and completely wanton. The uninhibited deportment in the motel room and the walk seemed normal facets of such a character's portrayal. I honestly believe such a girl would behave in that manner."14