The Genius and the Goddess
Page 23
And the soft form dissolving in the prism
Of corporate desire.12
With poets as wild as Thomas and Behan, addicts as troubled as Capote and McCullers, eccentrics as strange as Dinesen and Sitwell, intellectuals as antithetical as Bellow and Sandburg, characters as different as Khrushchev and Nabokov, Marilyn – always searching for her identity, her real self – knew how to excite important writers through her radiant warmth and intuitive sympathy.
III
Marilyn and Miller had fallen in love despite their great differences in background, education and experience. Temperamentally they were miles apart. She was egoistic, mercurial, full of self-doubt; he was devoted, consistent, secure. Early on, Miller believed he could compensate for these inequalities by giving her the love and attention she needed. Though he tried his best, their marriage gradually fell apart. Attempting to explain the source of their difficulties, Marilyn said that "when you're both famous, it's a double problem – even when you're famous in different ways, like Arthur and I were." Her fame was much greater, yet more illusory and evanescent. Miller needed an orderly and coherent world, felt he had to be in control of his life and was accustomed in his first marriage to having his own way. He wanted privacy and silence; she needed attention and adulation. Since she was more dominant and inflexible, he had to adjust to her mode of life. But he was not well suited to be the domestic handler of a turbulent star and felt vulnerable when subjected to her increasingly irrational demands.
At first Marilyn tried to be a good wife, converting to Judaism and performing domestic chores while Miller briefly played the pasha. But she couldn't be an equal partner in marriage and needed the kind of unconditional support that a child demands from an adult. She resented his self-absorption (as he resented her egoism) and declared, "I think he is a better writer than a husband. I'm sure writing comes first in his life." She was also disturbed, when married life seemed to compromise her glamor and make her seem ordinary, by the disparity between her image on the screen and her image in private life. She felt she could not be Mrs. Miller and a sex goddess at the same time. Variety, the trade newspaper, commented that "the two images began going in different ways when she married Arthur Miller. It made people say 'Who is she really? We thought she was someone else.' For box office purposes, it put her in an image limbo."13
The cook and maid in New York, more sympathetic to Marilyn than to Miller, both provided an insider's view of the household. He seemed to ignore Marilyn as they drifted from the passionate excitement of their first years, through disillusionment and silent indifference, to anger and hostility.
He stays as far away as he can. Gets up before she does and usually doesn't say two words to her all day. I don't know what that man does in that room for so long. Whenever I go in there to bring him his food, he's just sitting there, staring off into space.
They sat at the table and ate without speaking for the longest time. Marilyn looked at her husband admiringly and longingly, as if she were dying for some attention. He just ate quietly and did not look at her. . . .
Mr. Miller was the cause of many of her current problems. As a great intellect and playwright, he was too big a challenge for her. In trying to win his respect, she had become obsessed with the "serious dramatic actress" goal.
She still didn't seem to understand Miller's need to be alone, thinking about his work and staring into space. She admitted that she didn't know what to do with herself, but complained that he ignored her and blamed him for her unhappiness: "I'm in a fucking prison, and my jailer is named Arthur Miller. . . . Every morning he goes into that goddamn study of his, and I don't see him for hours and hours. I mean, what the fuck is he doing in there? And there I am, just sitting around; I haven't a goddamn thing to do."14
Marilyn absorbed some of Miller's approaches to drama, and he taught her how to analyze a script. She also adopted one of Miller's carpentry metaphors to describe her aims as an actress: "You're trying to find the nailhead, not just strike a blow." He always valued her work and acknowledged her exceptional gifts, and dedicated his Collected Plays (1957) "To Marilyn." But the intellectual abyss opened before them as they struggled to find something significant to talk about. Marilyn said that when they discussed American politics, she always felt ignorant: "Arthur was always very good at explaining, but I felt at my age I should have known." As he assumed the role of teacher, she seemed like a self-conscious and inadequate pupil. She told friends, "I don't think I'm the woman for Arthur. He needs an intellectual, somebody he can talk to15. . . . He makes me think I'm stupid. I'm afraid to bring things up, because maybe I am stupid. Gee, he almost scares me sometimes." Their mental disparity brought out the differences in their background and education, and revealed his unintentionally condescending attitude toward her. Elia Kazan, speaking for himself as well as for Marilyn, noted that she "expressed revulsion at [Miller's] moral superiority toward her and much of the rest of the world."
While they were married, Marilyn would sometimes be confronted by her squalid past and treated as if she were still a sluttish starlet. "There were times," she recalled, "when I'd be with one of my husbands and I'd run into one of these Hollywood heels at a party and they'd paw me cheaply in front of everybody as if they were saying, Oh, we had her. I guess it's the classic situation of an ex-whore."16 This crude and degrading behavior, which would have made DiMaggio explode into violence, was tolerated by Marilyn, who felt guilty, and by Miller, who always avoided confrontation.
Taking out her frustrations on her husband, Marilyn emasculated Miller by subjecting him to both public humiliations and private abuse. Maureen Stapleton, who acted with Marilyn in the scene from Anna Christie, remarked that "Arthur was becoming a lackey. He was carrying her make-up case and her purse, just doing too much for her, and I had the feeling that things had gone hopelessly wrong." Susan Strasberg provided some excruciating details: "In front of other people, strangers, she treated him terribly – contradicting him in a combative manner, insulting him. He took it, seething silently. . . . They were arguing about something, and finally she screamed at him, 'Where's my mink coat? Get me my mink!' As if he were her slave. Arthur fled from the room to get her coat." Attempting to defend her behavior, Marilyn declared, "You think I shouldn't have talked to him like that? Then why didn't he slap me? He should have slapped me." Marilyn knew she was behaving badly and deserved to be punished, but Miller merely increased her fury and forfeited her respect by suppressing his anger and refusing to respond to her insults.
In 1959, between completing Some Like It Hot and beginning Let's Make Love, Marilyn expressed her frustration and dissatisfaction by declaring, "I want to have a real career. I want to act. I want friends. I want to be happy. I want some respect."17 There were many reasons, apart from her difficulties with Miller, for her unhappiness. She could not have a child, she drank too much, she took too many pills, she was not helped by her psychiatrist, she was reclusive, she did not take advantage of life in New York, she had no close friends to rely on (except for the pernicious Lee and Paula Strasberg) and she could not achieve her goal of becoming a serious dramatic actress.
Fond of the Rostens and eager for their company, Marilyn wrote them (in an undated letter): "Please tell me when you're in town, I'd love to see you. Come up to my place to rest when you're spending the day in the city or we could eat or do something – whatever you want." Rosten had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize in 1940 and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship; he published poetry in the New Yorker and wrote a successful stage adaptation of Joyce Cary's African novel Mister Johnson, but he never quite fulfilled his early promise. In 1956 Miller helped him revise his play Mardi Gras, which failed in tryouts and never reached New York; but he did write the screenplay of Miller's A View from the Bridge (1962). The two college classmates drifted apart as Miller's career took off, and Miller finally broke with his two closest friends: with Elia Kazan for betraying his friends, and with Rosten for invading his privacy by
writing two books about Marilyn. Toward the end of his life Miller, heaped with honors and living on his royalties, rather bitterly said that Rosten "now lived on his pretensions."
The emotional turbulence with Marilyn and his guilt after her death impeded Miller's writing during his nine-year "silence" between View from the Bridge (1955) and After the Fall (1964). Apart from the screenplay of The Misfits, he did not complete a major work during those years. But he could not, and did not, stop writing entirely. In that relatively fallow time he published a charming children's book, Jane's Blanket (1963); five of the stories in I Don't Need You Any More (1967); and most of the major contributions to The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1978), which ponderously tried to explain and justify his own work.
After Marilyn's death Norman Mailer wrote one of the most perceptive accounts of her self-destructive character. Like Sylvia Plath, he fantasized about her – the very name of Norma Miller was close to Norman Mailer – and was characteristically frank and amusing about his dreams and obsessions. "Movie stars fascinate me," he said. "Their lives are so unlike anyone else's. You could almost postulate they come from another planet. The way of life of the movie star speaks of another order of existence. The lack of connection between a movie star's life and our lives is greater than the points of view we have in common." The much-married Mailer believed the famous actress deserved a charismatic writer as a husband. He felt that he, and not Miller, was the appropriately supercharged consort for La Monroe – "the Stradivarius of sex."
Mailer revealed how he planned to seduce Marilyn, replace Miller and write a work especially for her: "I lived five miles away from him in Connecticut, so I kept waiting for the moment for Miller to pick up the phone and say: why don't you come over to dinner? The call never came. . . . I just would have tried to make her fall in love with me. . . . I would have thought of writing a play in which she would star."18 Rosten explained that Mailer's devious stratagem was foiled when Miller, suspecting the base motives of his would-be rival, froze him out: "Miller didn't want to set anything up with Mailer. He just didn't like the idea. Miller is a rabbi, and he didn't want this strange guy powering in. He wasn't a buddy of Mailer's, and they'd always had a vague sort of animosity toward each other ever since the late forties in Brooklyn Heights. . . . Miller didn't want to risk his bride being contaminated by Mailer or – while I didn't say it then – maybe getting fucked by Mailer."
In his idiosyncratic book on Marilyn, Mailer suggested that Miller – whom he loathed and mocked – did not satisfy her. He also conceded that he himself did not have the patience and tolerance to support and protect her, and that he and Marilyn would have torn each other apart. (He'd once stabbed one of his wives; Marilyn might have stabbed him.) Describing himself, Mailer wrote: "One of the frustrations of his life was that he had never met her. . . . The secret ambition, after all, had been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so well suited to bring out the best in her as in himself. . . . It was only a few marriages (which is to say a few failures) later that he could recognize that he would have done no better than Miller and probably been damaged further in the process."19
IV
Throughout her adult life Marilyn was plagued by serious physical illness and often incapacitated by pain. She was hospitalized twenty-four times and (apart from her early abortions) had at least twelve operations (see Appendix). Despite the physical hardships, illness had a certain appeal for Marilyn, who seemed to enjoy hiding out in hospitals and having a kind of medical holiday. Once there, the star patient had a kind of careless freedom, a comfortable routine with no responsibilities, and received from the doctors and nurses all the protection, care and lavish attention she never had in childhood. Nevertheless, when still pale and weak, she was mobbed by fans and forced to smile at the crowd as she left the hospital.
Marilyn's difficulties with Miller and with her colleagues, as well as her addiction to drugs, can best be understood in their medical context. The fear and insecurity when she was awake caused insomnia at night. At two or three in the morning, when she had a lot to drink but couldn't sleep, she'd get on the phone and wake up friends who were asleep. She started to take sleeping pills in the early 1950s. Her main suppliers were two men she thought were her friends: the journalist Sidney Skolsky, who had an office in Schwab's drugstore and could get whatever drugs he wanted without prescriptions, and Milton Greene, who later succumbed to catastrophic addictions. During the day Benzedrine and Dexedrine suppressed her appetite, kept her awake and induced a mild euphoria. At night, barbiturates – sedatives and hypnotics like Seconal and Nembutal – eventually put her to sleep. As her tolerance increased, she took as many as twenty pills a day, and would pierce the capsules with a pin to speed up the effect. Susan Strasberg, a sympathetic friend, gave a horrific account of Marilyn dragging herself on all fours through the family's apartment after she'd overdosed, And whimpering for help: "She had taken too many sleeping pills one night after drinking champagne, and awakening groggy and dazed, needing help and unable to stand up, she had crawled on her hands and knees to my parents' doorway, scratching at it with her fingernails. . . . I hid so she wouldn't have to know that I had seen her that way, helpless and vulnerable."
Marilyn had sloppy habits (which disturbed both DiMaggio and Miller), especially when there were servants to pick up after her. The sharp-eyed Billy Wilder described the chaotic back seat of her prized Cadillac convertible: "There [are] blouses lying there and slacks, dresses, girdles, old shoes, old plane tickets, old lovers for all I know, you never saw such a filthy mess in your life. On top of the mess is a whole bunch of traffic tickets." But dirtiness, especially in a woman who spends most of the day beautifying herself, was a sure sign of mental illness. When depressed she even went out in public with menstrual stains on the back of her dress.
Marilyn's most persistent medical problems were gynecological, most probably the result of her dozen illegal abortions. These back-alley procedures may have caused infections and adhesions that either prevented pregnancy or led to miscarriages. She also had endometriosis, a condition found in 10 to 15 percent of women from their mid-twenties to mid-forties, in which the tissue lining the uterus grows unnaturally outside the womb, scarring and distorting the ovaries and Fallopian tubes. It causes painful coitus, agonizing periods, severe bleeding, and infertility from either spontaneous abortion or ectopic pregnancies (when conception occurs in the Fallopian tube instead of in the uterus). Marilyn had operations for endometriosis in November 1954, May 1961 and July 1962, but the surgeons in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles were unable to correct the problem.
In the summer of 1956, soon after marrying Miller, Marilyn sent a panicky and surprisingly clinical letter to the Rostens. She described her symptoms, mentioned the risks she'd been taking (despite her delicate condition) and asked their advice instead of rushing to her doctor:
I think I've been pregnant for about three weeks or maybe two. My breasts have been too sore to even touch – I've never had that in my life before, also they ache – also I've been having cramps and slight staining since Monday – now the staining is increasing and pain increasing by the minute.
I did not eat all day yesterday – also last night I took 4 whole ambutal sleeping pills – which was by actual count really 8 little ambutal sleeping pills.
Could I have killed it by taking all the ambutal on an empty stomach? (except I took some sherry wine also).
What shall I do?
If it is still alive I want to keep it.20
Though Marilyn wanted a child more than anything else in the world, she worried that it might damage her career and feared she would not be a good mother. Susan Strasberg, another confidante, noted Marilyn's anxiety about having the baby she dearly wanted – but whose life she was willing to risk by her addictions: "How would she have patience for a child twenty-four hours a day? Then there was her fear of the pain of childbirth and what it might do to her body. She'd insinuated that her ina
bility to conceive now might be a punishment."
Marilyn's recurrent mental breakdowns were closely connected to her gynecological ailments, and her joy in marriage was tragically overshadowed by her inability to have a child. She did conceive three times when married to Miller, but could not carry the baby to term. She had her first miscarriage (shortly after her letter to the Rostens) on August 19, 1956, while making The Prince and the Showgirl, and had an ectopic pregnancy – which caused severe abdominal pains, sent her into a hospital and had to be aborted – on August 1, 1957, shortly before starting Some Like It Hot. Despite her doctors' warnings, she continued to drink alcohol and take as many as four barbiturates a day. As Miller feared, she suffered her second miscarriage on December 17, 1958, soon after completing Some Like It Hot.
Marilyn believed that having a child would compensate for her abortions, provide the family she never had, redeem her womanhood, prove herself as a wife and mother, and strengthen her bond with Miller. Her abortions, which had sacrificed unwanted babies, now prevented her from having one with the husband she loved. She had failed in the most elemental biological act and, as her long-suppressed religious feelings emerged, clearly saw this failure as retribution for the sins of her past. Her inability to have a child intensified her psychological problems, her depression, her dependence on drugs and her feelings of worthlessness, and irreparably damaged her marriage.
Marilyn punished herself and tried to commit suicide after her second and third loss. Miller was home during her first attempt and heard her strange respiration: "There is a word to describe her breathing when she was in trouble with the pills. The diaphragm isn't working. The breathing is peaceful, great sighs. It took an awfully long time before I knew what was coming on." Despite the delay, he rushed her to the hospital in time for the doctors to pump her stomach and save her life. The attempts to kill herself, strangely enough, seemed to test Miller's love and bring them closer together: "After she was revived, she would be extremely warm and affectionate to me because I had saved her."21