The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In Marilyn's last two films of 1953 she played her typical and most popular incarnation: the gold-digger with a heart of gold. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – based on the book and musical comedy by Anita Loos and directed by Howard Hawks – a dumb blonde and a showgirl, both well endowed, sail to Paris to find rich husbands. In one scene of Gentlemen Marilyn wears a top hat, long black gloves, transparent black stockings, high heels and a gaudy sequined costume cut like a bathing suit. In another, wearing a strapless, floor-length, pink satin gown, with long-sleeved gloves, she steals the show by singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." The best lines in the film – "Those girls couldn't drown. Something about them tells me they couldn't sink" – were cut by the censor.

  In Gentlemen Marilyn has pouting lips, whispery speech and a kittenish way of saying, "don't wowwy" and "get mawwied." She arrives at the ship bound for Cherbourg dressed in a leopard skin cape and muff, and asks, "Is this the way to Europe France?" When introduced to people on the ship, she says, "A pleasure to meet you I'm ever so sure." She's comically obsessed by jewels and money, and there's a long shot of her wiggling her behind while dancing in order to attract rich men. A little boy on the ship, who has a deep voice and uses uncommonly long words, provides an amusing contrast to her character. In a French court, the black-haired Jane Russell, wearing a blond wig, pretends to be Marilyn and imitates her peculiar mannerisms. Her rich but nerdy fiancé, Tommy Noonan, ironically praises her "wonderful willingness to learn." At the end of the movie, in a spirited exchange with Noonan's disapproving father, she seems serious but is not afraid to make fun of herself and allow him to mock her:

  FATHER: They told me you were stupid. You don't seem stupid to me.

  MARILYN: I can be smart when it's important. But most men don't like it. Except Gus. He's always been interested in my brains.

  FATHER: He's not such a fool as all that.

  While making Gentlemen Marilyn formed a rare friendship with her co-star. "Jane Russell, a down-home gal with no pretences or complexes despite her status, welcomed Marilyn at once and gained her confidence personally and professionally. She stuck with her endlessly through rehearsals and privately confided to her about life as the wife of a professional athlete, as Russell's husband, Bob Waterfield, was the Los Angeles Rams' quarterback" – and Marilyn was planning to marry Joe DiMaggio. She needed Russell's crucial support in this demanding role. Under the hot lights and with millions of dollars riding on her performance, she had to dance without losing her breath and, at the same time, hit her musical notes, her camera marks and her key light. Though Gentlemen was one of the most popular musicals of the 1950s, Marilyn felt justly aggrieved that Russell earned $200,000 for the picture and she – the blonde whom the gentlemen preferred – got only $18,000.

  In the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire, three attractive women rent a New York penthouse and plan to trap three millionaires. The script of Millionaire alludes to Betty Grable's husband, the bandleader Harry James, and to Lauren Bacall's husband, "the man in The African Queen," but Marilyn had no husband to enhance her fame. The women's apartment is on Sutton Place, where Marilyn actually lived at the time. She arrives in her first scene wearing a fur muff, drinks her favorite champagne, and is breathy, naïve and excited. Too vain to wear glasses, especially when hunting for a husband, she has only one bit of business, constantly crashing into doors and furniture. The near-sighted joke is not funny. At the end of the movie, she gets on the wrong plane and sits next to David Wayne, who's on his way to unromantic Kansas City. The bespectacled Wayne has been beaten up by the crooked colleague who's stolen his check instead of sending it to the IRS, and Marilyn, for no apparent reason, marries her battered beau.

  All three gold-diggers, including the "brainy" and sophisticated Bacall (who has the best part, but with third billing), are incredibly dumb. This movie suggests that pretty, empty-headed women are irresistibly attractive and desirable. Bacall mistakes the millionaire Cameron Mitchell for a gas-pump attendant merely because he's not wearing a tie. She deceives the elderly William Powell by declaring that she loves him, but cruelly jilts him at the altar to marry the younger Mitchell. The plot is hopelessly contrived, the male characters equally stereotyped, and all the women get married suddenly and unexpectedly. The picture could have been called "How Not to Marry a Millionaire." The forest ranger, Grable's husband, is poor; Wayne's money must be used to pay his huge tax debt; Mitchell is the only rich man.

  In a scene cut from Millionaire, Marilyn is supposed to answer a phone call while having breakfast in bed. For some reason, she became hopelessly confused about the sequence, drank the coffee before it had been poured and answered the phone before it rang. Bacall, though sympathetic to Marilyn, was brutally frank about her faults: "She was really very selfish but she was so sad you couldn't dislike her. You just had to feel sorry for her, her whole life was a fuck-up." Bacall also recorded an incident in which Marilyn was either ironically witty or hopelessly dim. When Bacall brought her little son, Stevie, onto the set, Marilyn asked, "'How old are you?' He said, 'I'm four.' She: 'But you're so big for four. I would have thought you were two or three.'"

  Employing a metaphor that colleagues often used to describe the frequently remote, self-absorbed and almost somnambulistic Marilyn, the screenwriter and producer of the movie, Nunnally Johnson, said Marilyn "is generally something of a zombie. Talking to her is like talking to somebody underwater. She's very honest and ambitious and is either studying her lines or her face during all of her working hours, and there is nothing whatever to be said against her, but she's not material for warm friendship." Johnson also felt she was as unresponsive as "a sloth. You stick a pin in her and eight days later she says 'Ouch.'"15 Despite Marilyn's difficulties, this first Cinemascope picture was a great success and grossed five times its lavish budget of $2.5 million.

  Fox rewarded Marilyn's lucrative success in Gentlemen and Millionaire with a wretched part in River of No Return (1954), a cliché-ridden Western shot in the Canadian Rockies. Marilyn plays a saloon-singer, rigged out in tacky costumes, and sings four songs. She also falls in love with the hero, Robert Mitchum, who'd once worked in a wartime airplane factory with her ex-husband. In a reprise of the dangerous raft scene in Niagara – in which an innocent young woman escapes and the killer, Joseph Cotton, plunges over the falls to his death – Marilyn, Mitchum and his young son, played by Tommy Rettig, fight off outlaws and Indians while negotiating the perils of a treacherous river. While shooting the dangerous raft scene, Marilyn tripped over a rock in the river and tore a ligament. Her ankle swelled up badly, she was put into a cast and hobbled around on crutches for ten days.

  Marilyn had even more trouble with the director Otto Preminger, another authoritarian Viennese, than she'd had with Fritz Lang. Preminger had recently played the brutal commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, which provoked Wilder's remark that he had to be very nice to Preminger because Wilder still had relatives in Germany. A strict disciplinarian, in absolute control of every aspect of the picture, Preminger quickly lost patience with Marilyn. Though she responded best when treated gently, he launched a frontal assault, yelled at her in front of everybody and reduced her to tears. He also insulted her by alluding to her shady past and declaring "she was so untalented that she should stick to her original 'profession.'"

  Another major problem, which persisted throughout Marilyn's career, was her contentious practice of bringing her drama teacher onto the set, relying on her to decide whether a scene was successful or should be reshot, and obeying her instructions instead of the director's. After Preminger had ordered Lytess off the set, he was astonished to find that Marilyn had the power to bring her back. The final showdown came when Lytess tried to extend her authority over another actor. Preminger recalled that the thirteen-year-old Tommy Rettig, who'd always spoken his lines perfectly through many takes with Marilyn, suddenly forgot the words and began to cry. When Preminger asked what was troubling him,

>   his mother said that Miss Lytess talked to Tommy and told him that at the age of fourteen all child actors lose their talent unless they take lessons and learn to use their instrument.

  "Just disappear," I told Miss Lytess. "You will never be on the set again and you are never to talk to this boy." Then I received a wire from Zanuck and he told me how many favors he had done me, giving me extra time on vacation, etc. "And now you must do me one favor. As a personal favor to me, you must let Miss Lytess on the set. She promises she will just watch and not talk to anyone." And so I did, and she was silent, just watched.

  Marilyn was so unhappy about her injured ankle, her mano a mano with Preminger and the poor quality of the movie that she refused to do retakes in the Hollywood studio and simply disappeared. She was not afraid to defy the tyrannical Zanuck, who became apoplectic and complained to her agent Charles Feldman: "This is a crime for someone to hold up the completion of a picture. It's never happened before."16

  By the time she became a major star, Marilyn had developed her full suite of typical mannerisms: her undulating walk, whispery voice, hesitant speech, half-open mouth and quivering upper lip. Her gestures are strikingly similar to those of Faye Greener, the heroine of Nathanael West's Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust (1939), who'd also modeled herself on silent movie stars:

  Faye's affectations were so completely artificial that [Tod] found them charming. . . .

  She lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy, sullen smile. . . .

  [She was] smiling in a peculiar, secret way and running her tongue over her lips. It was one of her most characteristic gestures and very effective. It seemed to promise all sorts of undefined intimacies. . . .

  [All the men watched her] laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair back. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didn't really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to excite her hearers into being uncritical.17

  Marilyn's own day of the locust was fast approaching. She continued to suffer from physical illness as well as extreme insecurity and fear. She was habitually late and kept people waiting even after she arrived on the set, failed to learn or remember her lines and required an excessive number of takes for every scene. All this caused expensive delays in the shooting schedule and overruns in the budget. Her sudden disappearances, dissatisfaction with mediocre roles, fights with directors, interference by her drama teachers and battles over salary enraged the studio executives. All her difficulties in these early movies intensified when she became a star.

  Four

  Image and Identity

  (1950s)

  I

  By 1953, against almost impossible odds, Marilyn had achieved the stardom she longed for. Yet her celebrity intensified her insecurity and unhappiness. The novelist Daphne Merkin wrote that Marilyn's "desperation was implacable in the face of fame, fortune and the love of celebrated men. . . . There is never sufficient explanation for the commotion of her soul" – though the reasons can, in fact, be found. Her wretched background, together with the pressures of life as a movie star, created her mental and emotional chaos. The psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig identified Marilyn's self-destructive personality traits (now all too familiar from the early deaths of so many young actors and singers): fear of rejection, abandonment and betrayal, confusion about her image and identity, emotional chaos, inability to control anger, damaging impulsiveness, lack of self-awareness, feelings of emptiness and suicidal behavior. All these problems made her difficult to deal with. She became impossible when everyone told her she was perfect, an idol who could do no wrong. Ambitious, driven by self-love and narcissism, she was also filled with self-loathing, with "smothering feelings of inferiority"1 that made her feel she did not deserve the success she'd striven to achieve.

  Accustomed to secrecy, she'd learned early on to distrust people: they had rebuffed and abandoned her as a child, seduced and discarded her as an adult. She loved animals, children and old people, who didn't threaten her. When married to Dougherty, she once tried to drag a cow out of the rain and into the house. To Marilyn, the young and the old, as Miller wrote, "were altogether vulnerable and could not wreak harm. But the rest of humanity was fundamentally dangerous and had to be confounded, disarmed by a giving sexuality."

  This deep distrust made her unable to maintain friendships and establish normal contact with her colleagues. Marilyn had a way of protectively withdrawing into herself and cutting herself off from anyone who tried to get close to her. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff described it as "an aura of blank remoteness, of being in another world." Hildi Greenson, her psychiatrist's wife, sometimes "had a feeling she wasn't there because she wasn't paying much attention to you. She'd be very preoccupied with herself." And Miller's sister, Joan Copeland, observed that "she blocked you out if she didn't want you around. She just looked right at you without seeing you."2

  Marilyn hid her toughness and iron ambition beneath a remote and kittenish demeanor, and knew how to use the people who used her. She had an uncanny ability to make people feel sorry for her and, as Sidney Skolsky observed, "everybody wanted to help her. Marilyn's supposed helplessness was her greatest strength." But she also remained trapped in the past. During emotional crises (and there were many) Marilyn would assume the role of helpless orphan and demand sympathetic compensation for childhood injuries. This sense of entitlement ruined her professional and personal relationships, and her role as victim became an excuse for her bad behavior.

  Following the pattern of her rootless childhood, when she lived with the Bolenders, the Goddards and many others, she would move into new foster families – the homes of husbands, teachers, lovers and even doctors. She lived with the families of Jim Dougherty, Natasha Lytess, Fred Karger and (later on) of Joe DiMaggio, her manager Milton Greene, her teacher Lee Strasberg, Arthur Miller and her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, and remained close to the families of her ex-husbands. Fearful of rejection, Marilyn was the victim of her own poor judgment. Many so-called friends convinced her that they were indispensable, and she allowed photographers, agents and movie executives, psychiatrists, publicists and parasites to exploit her and control her life.

  Marilyn cut herself off from her childhood and early adult life by constantly severing relations with family, friends, teachers, lovers, husbands, managers, business partners and studio chiefs.3 The Hollywood journalist Ezra Goodman, who wrote a Time cover story about Marilyn that was too critical to be published, observed that she "has a neat habit of latching onto people, of having them mother and father her, and then dumping them unceremoniously by the wayside when she has done with them. This goes for agents, drama coaches, columnists, lawyers, foster parents and just plain folk. She acquires them – and gets rid of them – in shifts. She likes to change people like other women change hats." But Goodman does not explain the reasons for her behavior. She distrusted people, wanted to reject the exploiters before they rejected her and thought she needed a new entourage for each new phase of her life. "Everybody is always tugging at you," she complained."They'd all like a chunk of you." She moved from Lytess, Karger and Hyde to Greene, Miller and Strasberg, but had no close friends and was all alone when she most needed help.

  Norman Mailer, confirming Goodman's point, detected another significant pattern in her life:

  For years she had obviously been capable of cutting people off. She had dropped Dougherty and Grace Goddard as well as her first agent Harry Lipton; she would speak poorly of DiMaggio in the Miller years, and would soon cut off Greene, and then eventually Miller. . . .

  It is characteristic of her to play leapfrog in love and work. She will start with Miller, then go to DiMaggio, come back to Miller, and pick up a
gain with DiMaggio, just as she will alternate from Lytess to Chekhov back to Lytess and then on to the Strasbergs and the Method again, just as she leaves Hollywood to live in New York to return to Hollywood to leave again and return to die.

  Once Marilyn turned against people, and it didn't take much to trigger her anger, she remained adamantly hostile and cut them out of her life. But (later on) she remained tragically loyal to the doctors who facilitated her drug addiction and the psychiatrists who failed to help her.

  Miller explained why the ever-fearful Marilyn shifted impulsively from naïve optimism to bitter disillusionment with friends:

  She was so extremely sensitive. She had this fear of any involvement which would endanger her personally. People in her situation are either the victim or they're the aggressor, which they can't bear the thought of. As time went on, the process of her relationship with others quickened. A person would appear, a stranger, some new person in her life, and he or she would be a source of hope and confidence. But as she saw it, they were deceitful because they wouldn't admit the selfishness of their motives. It was a closed circle. If they were honest about their intentions and told her that they had some ulterior motive, why they were dead anyway. Neutralized persons, people like Rupert Allan [her homosexual publicist], who made no demands upon her, were okay. She loved [her make-up man] Whitey Snyder. He was a simple, uncomplicated human being. She knew where she stood with Whitey. She could turn to him with complete confidence, always knowing he was predictable. She would always know what he was going to say about anything.4

  The always protean Marilyn wanted to be loved for her real self, but didn't know who her real self actually was. She altered her names from Baker and Mortensen to Dougherty, Monroe, DiMaggio and Miller. She also adopted and abandoned several religions at each new stage of her life. Though a non-believer, she was evangelical with the Bolenders, a Christian Scientist with her mother, Catholic with DiMaggio and Jewish with Miller.