The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Though Marilyn had severed relations with Marianne Kris because of her "terrible mistake," she made Kris and the Strasbergs the major beneficiaries of her will, which named the following people:

  —Berniece Miracle: $10,000

  —Norman and Hedda Rosten: $5,000 (for the education of their daughter, Patricia)

  —Michael Chekhov's widow, Xenia: $2,500 a year

  —Marilyn's mother, Gladys Baker: $5,000 a year (from a $100,000 trust fund)

  —Marilyn's secretary May Reis: $10,000 plus 25 percent of the balance (not to exceed $40,000)

  —Dr. Marianne Kris: 25 percent of the balance (to be donated to the psychiatric institution of her choice)

  —Lee Strasberg: 50 percent of the balance (in addition to all Marilyn's personal effects and clothing).

  Legal obstacles caused delays for a decade and the first payments were not made until December 1971. Despite her husband's bequest, the insatiable Paula claimed that she was owed an additional $22,000 for "coaching."

  Ten years after her death, when Marilyn's estate was finally settled and her possessions unpacked, they turned out to be a random collection of cheap and tacky objects, battered by her frequent moves. She had no interest in material things and left very little money. But her clothes and cosmetics revealed the two sides of the character she was always trying and failing to connect:

  [There were] books of poetry with underlined passages. A Golden Globe statuette, cracked, with the lead filling visible. Bone-color stationery embossed with "Marilyn Monroe." Unmailed letters dated '59. . . .

  A whole room . . . crammed with Marilyn's ordinary furniture. A gooseneck reading lamp with the paint chipped off. A plain wooden desk. . . . Plastic dishes. . . .

  Stuffed into grocery cartons were black fur outfits, leopard hats, white mink muffs, ermine coats, double-skin white fox boas with silk between and piles of heavily beaded professional gowns. . . . Such stage wardrobe as was worn at the Circus opening or at President Kennedy's birthday party bore the theatrical labels:"Marilyn Monroe from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." In one box of her personal clothing a moth flew out.

  Monroe had two of everything. One set for the Marilyn Monroe, the other for when she was herself. The theatrical makeup in a black case initialed M.M. held bright greens and blues for her eyes, not the kind of make-up worn at the supermarket. Although Marilyn denied she wore bras, she had two sets. For Marilyn Moviestar she wore décolleté special no-bra bras that looked like nothing. Her personal brassieres were the simplest and plainest and poorest.

  The offstage dresses went to thrift stores anonymously. The stage gowns met with a tragedy. A burst pipe spewed raw sewage onto them.

  Marilyn was right: everyone wanted a piece of her. At her death her possessions seemed intrinsically worthless, but decades later, as divine relics, they fetched high prices. In October 1999 Christie's auctioned them off for $13.5 million. Lee Strasberg's second wife, Anna (who never knew Marilyn), got the money and still earns well over $2 million a year in licensing fees. As a result the Strasberg Institute on East 15th Street in New York, now separate from the Actors Studio, is assured of support. It includes a Marilyn Monroe Theater and Marilyn Monroe Museum, under the "surveillance" of Anna Strasberg.

  Marilyn fulfilled the American dream of success, but suffered the American tragedy of losing it all. As Samuel Johnson wrote of such ephemeral celebrities:"They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall."13 Like famous beauties of the past, she was painted by leading artists, but her most famous images were deconstructed rather than commemorated. Willem de Kooning's portrait is built from modernist fragments, a fitting evocation of her shattered life. Andy Warhol's silkscreen print series confirmed her iconic photographic image and keeps it current. But the real, warm Marilyn is buried under layers of color. In Warhol's variations the fluffy blonde expression remains fixed, yet seems to vary from a smile to a grimace, from exuberant joy to misery and tears.

  When the publicist Arthur Jacobs informed Miller of Marilyn's death, the playwright, wishing to detach himself entirely and relieved that he was no longer responsible for her, merely said, "It's your problem, not mine." Asked if he planned to attend the funeral, he cryptically replied, "She won't be there." Miller, on the East Coast, did not attend and may not even have been invited, though he and his children sent flowers. He had suffered enough. His response seemed callous, but he was determined to protect himself from further pain.

  Still paternal and protective eighteen months after they parted, Miller "had the feeling, amounting often to tearing guilt, that the divorce had helped her toward her death and that he should have been able to do something to save her." But he later commented that Marilyn's fate seemed predestined: "It had to happen. I didn't know when or how, but it was inevitable."14 Having tried to help her, Miller believed her problems were intractable: "I know now that it wasn't a matter of the individuals around her that brought her to that end. It would have happened even if she hadn't been in movies." Noting a basic contradiction in Marilyn's character, he suggested that she behaved recklessly and, like a real goddess, thought she was immortal:"Marilyn never believed she was going to die. She just kept pushing the boundaries further and further." At other times she felt that she was destined to die as a final tribute to her fans: "[Her] conviction was that she was meant to be a sacrifice and a victim." Miller also observed that the death-haunted Marilyn had always been vulnerable and sad: "Beneath all her insouciance and wit, death was her companion everywhere and at all times, and it may have been that its unacknowledged presence was what lent her poignancy, dancing at the edge of oblivion as she was."15

  Eighteen

  Miller's Tragic Muse

  (1964–2004)

  I

  In 1852, the poet Charles Baudelaire vented his rage against Jeanne Duval, the mistress and muse who'd been tormenting him for the previous ten years. He bitterly wrote how he had learned "To live with a person who shows no gratitude for your efforts, who impedes them through clumsiness or permanent meanness, who considers you as a mere servant, as her property, someone with whom it is impossible to exchange a word about politics or literature, a creature who is unwilling to learn a single thing, although you've offered to teach her yourself, a creature who has no admiration for one and who is not even interested in one's studies." Baudelaire's description of Jeanne was more vituperative than anything Miller ever wrote about Monroe, but it suggests the depths of his degradation and the bitterness of his wounds.

  Miller made his name as an intellectual playwright who used characters and stories to embody his ideas and make moral arguments. A critic has noted that in his early plays – Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge – the wife "is a fine woman who is not in the least sexually interesting." But "Miller's implicit indictment of sex as a wicked influence is remarkably consistent and emphatic." He makes illicit sex "both the root and symptom of his heroes' disorders." After he became involved with Marilyn, his work changed focus and became more autobiographical. For ten years, from 1951 until their divorce in 1961, her willful, passionate, unstable temperament fascinated, inspired and humiliated him. Marilyn was a ready-made tragic muse, whom he knew better than anyone else in the world. Her character and his suffering during their marriage obsessed him for more than fifty years: from their first meeting until the very end of his life. Miller wrote three short stories, a screenplay, a novel and four plays with sad, neurotic heroines. He recreated Marilyn in two of his best works: Roslyn in The Misfits and Maggie in After the Fall (1964). She was also Sylvia in Broken Glass (1994), Cathy-May in Mr. Peters' Connections (1999) and Kitty in his last, still unpublished play, Finishing the Picture (2004).

  Though he had rationally absolved himself of blame, his failure to arrest Marilyn's slide into breakdown and death continued to haunt him. He had repeatedly taken responsibility for her, and finally had to give up. He was able to close this episode in his life, but not in his art. The great division in his dramatic works was
Marilyn's suicide in 1962. In his four autobiographical plays he tried to explain his response to her enchanting and maddening character, to justify his own behavior and to depict the destructive environment of the modern mass-entertainment business.

  The germ of After the Fall came from Miller's unfinished play of 1951, An Italian Tragedy. Quentin, the autobiographical hero, has recently had an adulterous adventure that makes him realize how much he hates the restrictions of married life. His wife (based on Mary Slattery) refuses to forgive him and insists that he suppress his adulterous desires. He wants to remain married, but doesn't want to give up his newfound erotic ecstasy. The heroine, Lorraine (based on Marilyn), is a precursor to Maggie in After the Fall. She is naïve, sexy, insecure, self-destructive and fatal to men who get involved with her. In Timebends Miller described Lorraine in rather vague and contorted prose:

  With her open sexuality, childlike and sublimely free of ties and expectations in a life she half senses is doomed, she moves instinctively to break the hold of respectability on the men until each in his different way meets the tragedy in which she has unwittingly entangled him. . . . Like a blind, godlike force, with all its creative cruelty, her sexuality comes to seem the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature. . . . She has no security of her own and no faith, and her liberating promise is finally illusory.1

  After the Fall was Miller's first full-length play in eight years. Starting with the Lorraine character and writing furiously, he had no clear idea of where he was going. His first draft amounted to 5,000 pages, which he drastically cut down to the final version of 180 pages. Even so, it seemed a work in progress. Jason Robards, who appeared as Quentin, thought Miller gave a terrible reading when he first presented it to the cast.

  The play, directed by Elia Kazan, opened in New York in January 1964. The work reunited Miller with the man who'd directed his early works and had once been his closest friend, and their collaboration reopened old wounds and continued their old quarrel. Miller clearly based the character of Mickey, who's named names, on Kazan. In his director's notes Kazan analyzed Mickey's character – and exalted his own: "Mickey: The Guiltless Man (as vs. Quentin). A great and natural hedonist, full of energy and pleasure . . . because he is not crippled with puritanism and consequent guilts." He is "troubled, talking to himself, arguing it out with himself. He's still trying, and will be for years, to figure out whether he did right or did wrong." To make matters even more incestuous, Miller was relying on Kazan, the man who had slept with Marilyn while Miller himself was still shyly courting her, to direct the play. Kazan had casually dropped Marilyn, while Miller had let himself in for five hellish years of marriage. In a further twist of fate, Kazan's wife had died in December 1963, leaving him free to marry his mistress, Barbara Loden – who was cast as Maggie. Kazan seemed to be taking possession of Marilyn all over again. But the play had been chosen to be the opening production of the new Lincoln Center Repertory Company, and Kazan certainly had an unusually intimate understanding of the play. So Miller and Kazan, who needed each other, managed to overcome their personal and political animosity.

  The intensely personal nature of Miller's material demanded a new dramatic technique. He cast the story of his autobiographical hero Quentin and the disintegration of his relationship with Maggie in the form of a confession. This sometimes confusing method was a new departure for Miller. The play portrayed his own consciousness and conflicts, and attempted to heal his damaged psyche. He wrote that "the action takes place in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin. . . . With stream-of-consciousness evocations of characters, abrupt disappearances, and transformations of time and place, the play often verged on montage" – a combination of disparate elements intended to form a unified whole.2 The Listener, whom Quentin addresses with the free associations of a psychoanalytic patient, is God, his own conscience and the audience in the theater.

  Act One sets out the social context of Quentin's life and the historical events that provide the backdrop of his mind: the financial ruin of his father in the Depression, the effects of the Holocaust and the destruction of innocent people's lives in the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. Quentin and Holga (an idealized character based on Miller's third wife, the Austrian photographer Inge Morath) visit an extermination camp, whose tower rises above the set. In Act Two Miller focuses on the failures of Quentin's first marriage to Louise (Mary) and of his second marriage to a popular singer, Maggie (whose name suggests DiMaggio and is clearly modeled on Marilyn).

  The critics, then and now, have obsessively focused on Maggie and neglected Louise, a complex character who vividly reveals the moral and sexual conflicts in Miller's first marriage. If Maggie is the id, Louise is a savagely critical superego, urging her husband to rise above his baser instincts and filling him with guilt. Suggesting that his first wife was even more self-righteous than he was, Miller told Kazan that Quentin "made Louise the custodian of his conscience and just to look at her sometimes in her rectitude arouses his sense that he is guilty." In a hectoring tone that condemns Quentin's behavior, Louise moves from self-effacement to self-assertion. His disloyalty provokes her to insist on her own individuality and worth:

  I did contribute; I demanded nothing for much too long. . . .

  The moment I begin to assert myself it seems to threaten you. I don't think you want me to be happy.

  She also defends her right to be valued as an intelligent woman:

  The way you behave toward me. I don't exist. People are supposed to find out about each other. I am not all this uninteresting. Many people, men and women, think I am interesting. . . .

  I don't intend to be ashamed of myself any more. I used to think it was normal, or even that you don't see me because I'm not worth seeing. But I think now that you don't really see any woman.

  This last speech is highly ironic in view of Quentin's passion for Maggie, but it also suggests Louise's tragedy, her sense of loss and betrayal. Quentin feels (like Miller when describing this real-life episode in Timebends) that he might as well have extramarital sex if Louise damns him for merely thinking about it. Louise admits, "I did overreact, but it's understandable. You come back from a trip and tell me you'd met a woman you wanted to sleep with." To which Quentin defensively replies, "And for damn near a year you looked at me as though I were some kind of monster who could never be trusted again."3

  Miller tried to integrate the major economic, historical and political themes with the intensely personal ones through the character inspired by Inge Morath, who had endured the difficult and dangerous war years. As a child she "moved to Germany with her parents, Protestant liberals and research scientists. At the outbreak of World War II she was studying languages at Berlin University. When Morath refused to become a Nazi supporter, she was assigned to forced labor, assembling airplane parts at Tempelhof airport, a site that was repeatedly bombed by the Allies. She escaped from Tempelhof when an air raid blew open the gate, and found her way through war-torn Europe back to her family in Austria." Inge had close relatives in Nazi ministries, and had also been a courier for those involved in the unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler in July 1944. But she was not Jewish and was not a survivor of the camps.

  The most poorly integrated material in the play came from Miller's experience as he was writing it. In a weirdly jarring and intimate revelation about Inge's first child with Miller – their son Daniel, born in the fall of 1962 – Holga mentions that he had Down's Syndrome and was immediately placed in an institution: "I had a child . . . and it was an idiot, and I ran away." In fact, it was Miller – not Inge – who ran away. Right after Daniel was born, Miller told the producer Robert Whitehead: " 'He isn't right.' . . . Arthur was terribly shaken – he used the term 'mongoloid.' . . . 'I'm going to have the baby put away.'"4 Daniel was placed in the Southbury Training School, near Roxbury, a home for the mentally retarded. Inge visited him weekly for the next forty years. Miller never did.

  The relation of social responsibility to personal (espe
cially survivor's) guilt is a dominant theme in Miller's plays from All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, through The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, to After the Fall. At the beginning of his early novel Focus (1945), the hero, Newman, is awakened in the middle of the night when a woman, assaulted by a drunken man, cries out for help. Hearing her Puerto Rican accent and assuming she's a prostitute, Newman ignores her scream and does not try to help her. Focus anticipates the theme of Albert Camus' The Fall (1956), which in turn influenced both the title and theme of After the Fall. In Camus' novel the confessional narrator is walking along the Seine late at night: "I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound – which, despite the distance, seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence – of a body striking the water. . . . I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it suddenly ceased. . . . I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no one."

  The Fall discusses the burden of guilt in a world where it is no longer possible to be innocent and where there is no redemption for the guilty. The novel blends the theological fall of man, the physical fall of the drowning woman and the moral fall of the narrator, who (like Newman) refuses to help her. Thinking about himself and Marilyn when discussing the moral choice in Camus' novel, Miller wondered how far a man could be responsible for someone else's life: "what if he had attempted to rescue her, and indeed managed to, and then discovered that he had failed in his mission – to overcome his own egoism which his action may even have expressed; that there were innumerable complications about rescuing somebody as a pure act of love?"