The Genius and the Goddess (9 page)

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.

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 again 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.

Marilyn had spent her early life playing a series of submissive roles
and adapting herself to please other people. She was a dutiful daughter
to her mother, an obedient foster child to Grace Goddard, an enthusiastic
wife to Jim Dougherty, an eager pupil to Natasha Lytess and
Michael Chekhov, a humble disciple to Fred Karger, a devoted mistress
to Joseph Schenck and Johnny Hyde. But after she became a great
star she was no longer the same person. She obliterated her past and
created a new identity, but found it strangely unfamiliar and became
alienated from the face and body that had made her famous. As the
publicity and pressure increased, it became more difficult and more
frightening to live up to her newly created image.

Shelley Winters noted that Norma Jeane didn't look at all like
Marilyn Monroe: "she was invisible when she wasn't wearing her
make-up and glamor outfits. No one, but no one, ever recognized
her." "Marilyn" was created by a cadre of Hollywood people – drama
teachers, voice coaches, make-up artists, costume designers, publicity
men, photographers, screenwriters and directors – who put her
together. In addition to her dental improvements and plastic surgery,
she had her hairline changed and other "work" done to her body.
Her make-up man explained that, paradoxically, her "natural hair
coloring and skin tone were actually improved by making them more
artificial. The more make-up she wore, the more artificial her hair
color, the softer and more natural she looked." As Howard Hawks
remarked, "there wasn't a real thing about her. Everything was
completely unreal." When a model, made up to look like a faithful
replica of Marilyn, arrived in a studio where she was being
photographed, "the copy was more convincing than the real thing:
the Marilyn without make-up, with pale lips, dark-circled eyes, silent
and tense, shrank back at the sight of her mirror image."
⁵

The dream factory stole her real self – that profoundly insecure
little girl, with a hunger for love that could never be appeased – and
replaced it with an artificial goddess, with breathless voice and platinum
hair, voluptuous body and alluring walk. No wonder she found
it strange and disorienting. The more glamorous her public persona
became, the more she searched for her inner being. Recognizing the
fissure in her character, she'd look in the mirror and encourage her
alter-ego to match the ideal by pleading, "Come on, face, give me a
break." She never got used to her new self and wondered, if she
couldn't be herself, who else
could
she be?

The transformation forced her to adopt a new identity. "I always
felt I was a nobody," she said, "and the only way for me to be somebody
was to be – well, somebody else. Which is probably why I
wanted to act." Her two identities and her profession as an actress
allowed the shy exhibitionist to play many different roles. But she
also claimed to be aware of the dangers: "I can be anything they want.
If they expect me to be innocent, I'm innocent. . . . Of course, you
gotta watch out not to get confused."
⁶
Marilyn was in character and
behavior remarkably like another flamboyant performer: Oscar Wilde.
Both were artificial, witty and amusing, and loved performing in
private life. Both were hedonistic, promiscuous and defiantly immoral,
addicted to drugs, recklessly self-destructive and finally devoured by
their public persona.

Marilyn's lifelong quest for self-improvement, her constant attempts
to better her acting and her mind, were her most persistent and most
admirable qualities. In this respect, she was like the young Ben Franklin
and the ambitious young heroes in pursuit of the American Dream:
Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick and Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby.
Hollywood people in general were educated and sophisticated. In
1941, a few years before she broke into films, 57 percent of the movie
colony had gone to college. She was not educated, cultured or intellectual,
but she was clever, witty and bright, and wanted to be socially
at ease.

Marilyn sometimes had difficulty absorbing, or even finding, the
information she was so eager to acquire. After taking an evening
course in art appreciation and literature at UCLA extension school
in 1951, she naïvely said "there was a new genius to hear about every
day. At night I lay in bed wishing I could have lived in the
Renaissance. . . . Of course, if I had lived in the Renaissance I would
be dead by now." When she wanted to find out more about her body,
she bought a reprint of Vesalius' gorgeous, grisly woodcuts, originally
published in 1543, which tore off the human envelope and revealed
the bones and the nervous system. She treated the book as if it were
a popular exercise manual rather than a complex and often incomprehensible
anatomical study that had no practical use.

Marilyn owned 400 books by serious American, English and
European writers, and she must have lost or abandoned many others
during her frequent moves.
⁷
She'd flip through magazines and read
film scripts, but her last secretary,
May Reis, never saw her read
anything but pulp novels by Harold Robbins. Miller confirmed that
"with the possible exception of Colette's
Chéri
and a few short stories,
I had not known her to read anything all the way through." Photos
of her holding
The Brothers Karamazov
and
Ulysses
seemed absurd, but
Christopher Isherwood saw her studying Molly Bloom's monologue
in the last chapter of Joyce's novel. Her reading was haphazard, and
she probably tried to read at least part of the books she acquired by
impulse or intuition. She was entirely serious about improving her
mind, was encouraged and taught by Miller, and wanted to be able
to understand conversations about books.

Marilyn not only read
poetry, but also wrote it to express her
feelings when she was depressed. She often sent her poems, which
resembled the musings of a sentimental teenager, to Miller's college
friend Norman Rosten, who preserved and later published them. In
one poem she identified with a weeping willow tree in a storm: