The Genius and the Goddess
Page 14
Marilyn believed that Miller had the moral stature to absolve her of her shameful past and the integrity to enhance her self-esteem. In 1950, the year before they met, after a dinner with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Marilyn refused to accompany Thomas to a party at Charlie Chaplin's house. Shelley Winters, her roommate at the time, described her deep-rooted insecurity: "It was a long time before Marilyn ever felt intelligent enough to mix socially with important intelligent people, if she ever did. Maybe that feeling is what was behind her marriage to Arthur Miller. (If you don't graduate from high school – marry an intellectual.)"
Marilyn felt that marriage to Miller would make her a better person and give her a better life. She believed that if she were nothing but a dumb blonde – and she'd always been seen and typecast in this role – he would not want to marry her. Kazan, perceptive as always, explained the feeling of inferiority that only Miller was able to assuage: "What she needed above all was to have her sense of worth affirmed. . . . She wanted more than anything else approval from men she could respect. . . . She deeply wanted reassurance of her worth, yet she respected the men who scorned her, because their estimate of her was her own."6
Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, another unlikely couple, were attracted to each other for the same reasons: "Welles had been drawn to Hayworth because of her sexually iconic quality: conquering her had boosted his image and his ego. He had courted her by gently penetrating beyond the goddess and the star and by urging her to reveal her private hopes, disappointments and dreams. She was attracted to him because he was the first man who seemed willing to listen to her and treat her as something other than a sex-object."
Marilyn admired in Miller all the qualities that she herself lacked: his intellect and culture, his strength and self-discipline, his shrewdness about money and simple way of life. Each one wished to enter the other's world: Miller wanted to write screenplays; Marilyn wanted to become a serious stage actress. He fondly saw them working side by side and drawing inspiration from each other. Marilyn, who'd always wanted to have children, even imagined – while she was making Bus Stop and he was in Nevada – that she'd give up her career and settle down as a housewife and mother. She said, "when I married Miller, one of the fantasies I had in my mind was that [through him] I could get out of Marilyn Monroe," a creature invented by the studio. Expressing an unrealistic hope, she told him: "I hate [Hollywood], I don't want it anymore, I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself anymore."7
Despite her psychological traumas and sexual scars, their completely different backgrounds, religion and family life, education, tastes and interests, the inhibited Miller and free-spirited Marilyn fell in love. They idealized each other and formed what seemed to be a satisfying complement of mind and body. Their marriage began with physical attraction and the secret thrill of adultery, with a common interest in acting and the theater, with their mutual fame and the narcissistic magnetism of one celebrity for another.
Many playwrights – Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, John Osborne and Harold Pinter, for example – would marry, and divorce, actresses. Several friends, both at the time and with hindsight, thought Miller was making a terrible mistake. Kazan – confirming the set-designer Boris Aronson's devastating question: "That's a wife?" – was astonished by Miller's proposal: "He couldn't be thinking of marrying her! Marilyn simply wasn't a wife. Anyone could see that," except his naïve and inexperienced friend. Miller himself quoted Marcello Mastroianni, who'd appeared in his plays in Italy. Adopting a cavalier attitude, the actor asked him: "'But so much trouble over a woman?' 'Why? What would you do?' 'I would . . . take a walk.'"
The photographer Arnold Newman, brutally frank when interviewed on a television documentary, called Marilyn "the worst woman you'd ever want to get mixed up with; the most unhappy and with the most problems. A very troubled woman." Miller, with more than a touch of arrogance, thought he could get away with what no intellectual had ever dared to do. The actor Brian Dennehy explained Miller's feelings: "Of course Marilyn was not a promising wife, but that didn't matter. She was Helen of Troy, every man's dream. She had a compelling personality and tremendous energy, was powerful beyond reason and hypnotized everyone. Nobody was immune to her, and Arthur was enthralled. He fell madly in love with her and with the idea of her.8
III
When Marilyn moved to New York she said she wanted to educate herself, and Manhattan intellectuals were happy to oblige. Celebrities become ecstatic at the sight of other celebrities, though a movie star's fame always trumps a writer's. The local literati, eager to bask in her reflected glory, all wanted to meet her. They soon learned the art of being with and being seen with her – the celebrity dance of being famous together. She had never known any other society but lower-class Hawthorne and Hollywood, and was pleased by all the attention she was getting from prominent people in the cultural capital of America.
Marilyn was twenty-eight years old, emotionally vulnerable but pretty and charming, and everyone wanted to know what she was really like. Was she beautiful or vulgar? Genuine or artificial? Sexy or sluttish? Witty or just dim-witted? Voracious publicists and magazine editors looking for sure-fire copy encouraged incongruous, absurd and potentially contentious encounters between Marilyn and highbrow authors she'd never read – nor even heard of. They hoped the beasts would chew each other up and that blood would be shed. Instead, she established a natural affinity with many writers who were, like herself, eccentrics and outsiders, heavy drinkers and drug-takers, physically ill and mentally unstable. She desperately longed for "someone to take me out who doesn't expect anything from me." She felt more at ease with the homosexuals Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Later on she found Montgomery Clift, her costar in The Misfits, a perfect companion. He had no sexual designs on her, no perilous pounce. Filled with self-doubt and neurotic fears, dependent on painkillers and alcohol, he was, Marilyn observed, "the only person I know who's in worse shape than me."
Christopher Isherwood had introduced Marilyn to the notoriously drunken and obstreperous Dylan Thomas in April 1950, when she was still playing bit parts in films. Thomas declared that he'd come to Hollywood "to touch the titties of a beautiful blond starlet," and Marilyn was well qualified to satisfy his fantasies. But when Thomas came to dinner at the flat she was sharing with Shelley Winters, he sensed Marilyn's vulnerability and behaved with unusual propriety. Though he joked with and teased Shelley,
he was quiet and respectful to Marilyn. Marilyn was so sure things were bound to go awry that I think she unconsciously made things happen to get the waiting over with. I saw her do this time and time again. Dylan Thomas seemed aware that behind the eyelashes and platinum hair and terrific body, there was a fragile and sensitive girl. . . . He was obviously a horny Welshman, but he never once made any kind of pass at Marilyn. Not even a verbal one. I don't think it was because her looks didn't turn him on; he was obviously mad about platinum-blond starlets. I think this poet sensed that she very badly needed not to be thought of as just a tits-and-ass cutie.
She met the Irish playwright Brendan Behan – also notorious for his heavy drinking and outrageous behavior – when he was in New York in 1960 during the successful run of The Hostage. He sent her a respectful tribute, clipped to her copy of The Misfits: "For Marilyn Monroe – a credit to the human race, mankind in general and womankind in particular."9 At the beginning and end of her career, she managed to inspire the sympathy and tame the lust of the two Celtic poets.
Capote had met Marilyn through John Huston when she was working on The Asphalt Jungle, and she contacted him when she came to New York. Marilyn made dramatic appearances at El Morocco, the Colony and the Plaza Oak Room with Capote and kicked off her high-heeled shoes while dancing with him so she wouldn't be a head taller than her dwarfish consort. A photographer captured Marilyn, in a black dress and with bare arms, turning her eyes to the camera and smiling naturally. Capote – bespectacled and balding, his hair me
ssed up, tie and collar awry, two buttons tightly buttoned on his gray pin-striped suit – holds Marilyn by the wrist. He seems to have trouble keeping up with her and his mouth hangs open like a fish gasping for air.
Two years older than Marilyn, Capote shared her dependence on drink and drugs. Ever the publicity hound, he styled himself her friend and said he wanted Marilyn (not Audrey Hepburn) to play Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. With typically disparaging wit he declared that her marriage to Miller would be the Death of a Playwright. After Marilyn's death he wrote two crude, self-serving and denigrating essays about her in The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980).
In his chapter on "Marilyn Monroe," he calls her "just a slob, really" and describes her vulgar mannerisms: "her slippery lips, her overspilling blondness and sliding brassiere straps, the rhythmic writhing of restless poundage wriggling for room inside roomless décolletage – such are her emblems." Indifferent to her charm, he loathes the lush femininity that her public so admired. He concludes, with pop-psychology and bogus religious imagery, that "she is stained, and illuminated by, the stigmata of orphan-thinking"; that the depth of her anxiety, "her frequent sore-throated indispositions, her nibbled nails, her damp palms, her Japanese-like fits of giggling induces a butter-hearted sympathy." Capote clearly saw the orphan's desperate desire to be liked, but felt no compassion for her wounded spirit.
An outrageous liar who liked to smear straight men, Capote used his second essay on Marilyn to spread obscene scandal about Errol Flynn. In Capote's malicious tale, Marilyn claims that she saw Flynn publicly playing a piano with his prick. Flinging more mud at Flynn, Capote falsely claimed that in 1943 he had had a one-night stand with the handsome Flynn. The title of this essay, "A Beautiful Child," comes from Marilyn's sometime acting teacher Constance Collier, who rightly said, "This beautiful child is without any concept of discipline or sacrifice." Capote has Marilyn exclaim, "I like to dance naked in front of mirrors and watch my titties jump around." When she confronts a dimly lit mirror and he asks, "What are you doing?," she cryptically replies, "Looking at Her." But he doesn't connect the two mirror scenes, nor understand that she looked into the mirror in search of herself. Though her tits were reassuringly real, her identity was not.
Capote had called Marilyn a slob in his first essay and he felt obliged to repeat this in the second. Still trying to define her true identity, she remarks, "if anybody asked you what I was like, what Marilyn Monroe was really like – well, how would you answer them? . . . I bet you'd tell them I was a slob." In contrast to all the other writers who knew her, Capote portrays a Marilyn insecure about her clothing, confused about her identity, spooked by death, childishly narcissistic and a vulgar slob. Like many of her "friends," Capote exploited her to publicize himself. After her death, when his drinking increased and his career declined, he turned her into salable copy.
Marilyn met Carson McCullers (who was nine years older) in 1954 when they were both staying at the Gladstone, a small, stuffy apartment-hotel on East 52nd Street, off Park Avenue. She accompanied McCullers and Tennessee Williams' mother to a party at the St. Regis Hotel to celebrate the opening of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, and four years later met Williams again at a publicist's dinner party in Hollywood. McCullers was homely, had had a stroke and lurched around with a cane. Like Marilyn, she drank heavily and gulped down barbiturates, tried to kill herself and did time in the Payne Whitney mental clinic. Virginia Carr wrote that "according to Carson, Miss Monroe had wonderfully admirable attributes."10 She was capable of instant rapport and conveyed an instinctive warmth to the sickly McCullers.
Like McCullers, the English poet Dame Edith Sitwell, grotesque at sixty-six, was a perfect foil for Marilyn's youthful perfection. Strangely adorned with an elaborate turban, Sitwell was six feet tall, pale-faced and lank-haired, with a distinct curvature of the spine and a long curved nose that resembled an anteater's. The daughter of a wealthy coal magnate, Sitwell claimed descent from the Norman conquerors. Disdaining her work, the critic F.R. Leavis remarked that she belonged "to the history of publicity rather than that of poetry." True to form, when she visited Hollywood in February 1954 she also wanted to meet Marilyn. Life magazine, mistakenly convinced that the two women "were born to hate each other, and that their insults to each other 'would cause a commotion when reported,'" brought them together. But Sitwell found her serious-minded and pleasantly shy – that is, suitably intimidated and deferential. They actually had something in common. Sitwell's shallow pretensions and Marilyn's naïve search for meaning in life came together as they talked about the "spiritual doctrines" of the crankish Hungarian anthroposophist, Rudolf Steiner.
When Sitwell returned to England early in 1955, she was annoyed to discover that journalists wanted to talk only about Monroe. Ignoring the fact that she was the one who wanted to meet Marilyn (who, of course, had never heard of her) and irritated that Marilyn had upstaged her, Sitwell relegated her to the common herd. She imperiously exclaimed: "I am not bringing Miss Marilyn Monroe to England. Is it supposed that I am a publicity agent or a film agent or a press agent? . . . Miss Monroe, like a good many other people, was brought to see me while I was in Hollywood. I thought her a very nice girl, and said to her as I said to others, that if she came to London she should let me know and should come to a luncheon party. There the matter began and ended."11
Surprisingly enough, they did meet again, in October 1956, when Marilyn was in London making The Prince and the Showgirl. Victoria Glendinning described their rather prosaic luncheon at the Sesame Club: "this time Miller and Edith did the talking, while the star sat and listened. The party was spoiled by the intrusion of overexcited photographers and journalists." In his account of the same meeting, Donald Spoto eliminated Miller. He dramatized the encounter and added the exotic costumes, bountiful alcohol and poignant lines of poetry:
[Sitwell] welcomed Marilyn to her home [i.e. her club] in October. Wearing her usual array of rings on each finger, a medieval gown, a Plantagenet headdress and a mink stole, Dame Edith sat grandly, pouring hefty beakers of gin and grapefruit juice for herself and her guest. During several hours one afternoon, they sat discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, whose poems Marilyn was reading during sleepless nights that season. For Dame Edith, Marilyn recited lines from one of Hopkins's Terrible Sonnets – "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day [/ What hours, O what black hours we have spent / This night"] – saying that she understood perfectly the poet's mood of despair. "She's quite remarkable!" pronounced Sitwell soon after.
But even the self-absorbed Sitwell could not miss Marilyn's profound unhappiness and insecurity. She told reporters that the mild-mannered actress had known great poverty and reminded her of a teenage child who had been forced to fend for herself. Sitwell's final judgment was both naïve about Marilyn's recklessly self-destructive sexual life (the virginal poet lacked carnal knowledge) and, with hindsight, poetically precious about her tragic death: "She was very quiet and had great natural dignity (I cannot imagine anyone who knew her trying to take a liberty with her) and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive. . . . In repose, her face was at moments strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost – a little spring-ghost, an innocent fertility-daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia." Sitwell gave Marilyn a photo of herself by Philippe Halsman, wearing her elaborate hairdo and huge jeweled rings on several spidery fingers. Marilyn later said, "I expected her to be a real English snob, but she wasn't. She was what my mother would have called a Lady. A grand lady, strong enough to stand up to men."12 Marilyn and Edith got on well, but completely misunderstood each other's characters. The publicists were wrong to assume that Marilyn would clash rather than sympathize with literary and political celebrities. Though some of them tried to use her, most sensed her vulnerability and admired her sincerity and goodwill.
Eight
New York and the Actors Studio
(1954–1956)
Just as Marilyn was confused about her own identity, and let herself be used as a studio property, a piece of "talent" to be traded or exploited, she did not fully understand or accept her limitations as an actress. She had a natural gift for comedy and extraordinary photogenic qualities that made her so striking on film. These were her great strengths, but because they came naturally she did not value them, and could not enjoy her spectacular fame as a movie star. Full of anxiety about the future, and worried that she'd lose her appeal when she lost her looks, she decided to give up almost everything she had achieved and try for an impossible goal: to be a serious stage actress. At the end of 1954 she joined the Actors Studio to study the "Method" under Lee Strasberg, the most influential drama teacher of his time. At this turning point in her life, Marilyn's choice was unwise. Strasberg's teaching, with its emphasis on the actor's inner responses to the role, and his advice that she should undergo psychoanalysis, had a decidedly negative effect on her professional and personal life.
Strasberg had emigrated to America as a child in 1909, and had grown up in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York. He studied with two of Stanislavsky's disciples, and founded the left-wing Group Theater with Kazan in 1931. His career in Hollywood was brief and disappointing. He spent the postwar years directing trivial screen tests at Fox, which fired him in 1947. In 1951, four years after the Actors Studio was founded, he became its artistic director. He had some famous and charismatic students – Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman – and their spectacular success made the Method popular with aspiring actors.
Short, thin, intense and extremely critical, Strasberg was stern and distant with his pupils. Like Natasha Lytess, Michael Chekhov and Fred Karger, he was an authoritarian personality who advocated discipline, structure and willpower. A biographer wrote that "Strasberg was revered and deeply feared by the actors. To suffer his wrath, whether it be a masked, stoical iciness or a shrill, maniacally enraged outburst, was each actor's nightmare; to be approved by him, the dream. The limitless power vested in him by these actors for their spiritual life or death was awesome."