Women in Dark Times (16 page)

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Charlotte Salomon does not therefore claim any moral privilege from the world she so devastatingly portrays. Indeed if she had, she would not have been able to paint it. In the epilogue of
Doctor Faustus
, the narrator questions whether he has truly held himself apart from his country’s guilt, whose defeat he has alternately dreaded and fervently desired: ‘No I would not have wished it – and have had to wish it nonetheless’ (this very thought sends the letters he is writing on the page ‘skittering out of control’).
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Was he right? Worse, did he really manage to keep himself apart from his nation’s sins?
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‘The two main protagonists [Leverkühn and Zeitblom],’ Mann later writes of the genesis of his novel, ‘had too much to conceal, namely, the secret of their being identical with each other.’
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Mann of course was an exile. He escaped. But, his novel tells us, you escape from nothing. Later he describes the book as ‘a radical confession’: ‘From the beginning that has been the shattering thing about the book.’
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At the end of the war, Mann, who had been resident in the United States since the Anschluss of 1938, was invited to address the Library of Congress. He called his speech ‘Germany and the Germans’. It is generally acknowledged as one of the most extraordinary statements made by a German about the war:

To play the part of judge, to curse and damn his own people in compliant agreement with the incalculable hatred that they have kindled, to commend himself smugly as ‘the good German’ in contrast to the wicked, guilty Germany over there with which he has nothing in common – that too would hardly befit one of German origin. For anyone who was born German
does
have something in common with German destiny and German guilt . . . 

There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt and ruin. For that reason, it is quite impossible for one born there simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany and to declare: ‘I am the good, the noble, the just Germany in the white robe; I leave it to you to exterminate the wicked one.’ Not a word of all that I have just told you about Germany or tried to indicate to you came out of alien, cool, objective knowledge, it is all within me, I have been through it all.
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After seeing the German typescript ten days before his brother delivered the address, Heinrich Mann wrote to him that these words ‘would justify any author’s life’.
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Throughout this chapter, the issue has been freedom as an ideal with the highest internal as well as external price. ‘Why’, asks Mann in his speech, ‘must the German urge for liberty always be tantamount to inner enslavement?’ Liberty is only liberty when a people is ‘internally free and responsible to itself’ (there is no freedom without inner freedom).
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What then should be the outcome of the war? Mann’s reply is startling. It turns out that Goethe once expressed the wish for a German diaspora: ‘ “Like the Jews,” he said, “the Germans must be transplanted and scattered over the world!” ’
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Only in this way would ‘the good that lies inside them’ develop ‘fully and to the benefit of all nations’.
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Thus Jewishness – belonging nowhere and everywhere – becomes the clarion call for a new world. (How much further, we might ask, can the German go out of himself than an identification with the Jew?) After the catastrophe of this war, Mann concludes, surely we might take the first tentative steps towards a world in which the ‘national individualism of the nineteenth century will dissolve and finally vanish’.
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Charlotte Salomon, I would suggest, was one step ahead. She does not just proclaim her accountability but embodies viscerally the knowledge she calls for – in the meshing of her voices, in the wild promiscuity of her colours and lines which leaves no piece of the world in its proper shape. Painting against terror, she leaves no aesthetic, ethical, psychological stone unturned. If the world is to change, then something has to be relinquished, to vanish and dissolve. ‘She did not have to kill herself like her ancestors,’ but ‘in order to love life still more, one should once have died.’ In the midst of the war, she produces a work which, out of – or rather from deep within – the surrounding darkness, gives us a glimpse of what you might need to do to create a different world. We still have everything to learn from her vision.

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Respect

Marilyn Monroe

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control.

Marilyn Monroe interviewed by Richard Meryman,

Life
, 3 August 1962

Actress must have no mouth.

Fragments – Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe

We are going through the Straits of Dire. It’s rough and choppy but why should I worry I have no phallic symbol to lose.

Marilyn Monroe to Norman Rosten,

Marilyn – A Very Personal Story

What do we see when we look at Marilyn Monroe? She was luminous. On that much everyone seems to agree. Hers was not the flawless matte beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. There was no flattening wash over her face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly could not stand her, had to concede that every time she appeared in
The Prince and the Showgirl
, she lit up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed, Susan Strasberg that she ‘seemed to flicker like a flame giving off a nimbus of light’).
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It is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the 2011 movie
My Week with Marilyn
,
however well Michelle Williams performed her part, could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what it was, in the aura that surrounds her, she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked. Luminousness, notably in relation to women, can be a cover – in Hollywood, its own most perfect screen. Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding (no other actress is defined in quite these terms). Of what, then, was she the decoy? What does she allow us, and allow us not, to see? Monroe herself knew the difference between seeing and looking. ‘Men do not see me,’ she is reported as having once said. ‘They just lay their eyes on me.’
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In this chapter, I will be arguing that Marilyn Monroe was a foil – the ‘perfect’ foil – for a post-war America in flight from itself. Feminism has long written about the beauty trap as a form of violence against women. But we hear less about how female beauty can be used to hide from view the other forms of cruelty and injustice which a society blithely perpetuates. My argument is that no woman on screen has performed that role so effectively, or with such sentient, critical self-awareness, as Marilyn Monroe.

In the summer of 1960 in Reno, the
Manchester Guardian
journalist Bill Weatherby found himself her confidant. He couldn’t fully understand why. He thought it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her. He had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on
The Misfits
,
which would be Monroe’s last completed film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her as saying, ‘to everyone but me.’
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In fact he could not forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. ‘Not
having fallen for Eisenhower’s charm,’ he writes, ‘I was determined not to succumb to Marilyn Monroe’s.’
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Oddly, he seems to have succeeded. Charmed never seems quite right, even when they start to meet regularly if intermittently in New York over the last two years of her life. The understanding between them was that these were private conversations (he did not publish his version, transcribed from memory after each meeting, until 1976). It is of course a cliché – as well as one of the most well-tried seduction lines in the book – for a man to suggest he is interested not in a woman’s body but in her mind. Weatherby, however, is genuinely interested in her thoughts. ‘She made thinking seem’, he writes, ‘like a serious, deliberate process.’ ‘Some people’, he then hastens to add, ‘who never got over seeing her as a dumb blonde will assume that I am implying she found thinking difficult . . . Quite the opposite,’ he insists. ‘She gave thinking her serious attention.’
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As we will see, Monroe’s written fragments, poems, diaries and notebooks, slowly released over the past years, have given us the opportunity to look into the mind of a woman who was meant not to have one. ‘In times of crisis,’ she wrote in a set of 1962 notes, ‘I try to think and use my understanding.’
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‘We human beings,’ she said in her last interview, ‘are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.’
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Like so many of the women in this book, and with no less urgency, thinking was where Monroe went in search of freedom.

As filming
The Misfits
came to some kind of ending in November – nobody, least of all Monroe, was happy with the film – Weatherby declined an offer from two set photographers to visit the Grand Canyon and headed off instead to New Orleans. Race integration was due to begin and a social explosion was expected in the city. This drama – ‘in reality instead of in a movie’, as he puts it – will, he thought, be a way of getting Hollywood and Monroe out of his head.
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But it was not to be that simple. At an integration party which he oddly describes as ‘secret as a Resistance party in Paris during the German occupation’, he became the lover of Christine, a young black man – although he told Monroe that Christine was a woman – who will end up a follower of Malcolm X.
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Monroe, it turns out, is the only white star who has ever interested Christine. In fact ‘she’ identified with her: ‘ “She’s been hurt. She knows the score,” ’ Weatherby reports Christine as saying. ‘ “I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what comes out of her movies. She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never could identify with any other white movie star. They were always white people doing white things.” ’ White people doing white things would be a fairly accurate description of most of Monroe’s films. When Weatherby is incredulous, Christine gets mad. ‘ “Look, us Negroes don’t appear in movies as anything but symbols, Uncle Toms, because white audiences aren’t supposed to be able to identify with Negroes. Well, what they can’t do, we can’t do either.” ’
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Christine has put her finger on the pulse of cinema. What matters is whom it allows – or rather invites – you to be. Christine refuses the invitation because it is not reciprocal: no white person identifies with a ‘Negro’. We are talking about the turn of the 1960s, about New Orleans, a bitterly segregated city where – hard to imagine now – partygoers arriving at a building for the blind can be watched from the window of the house of the federal judge opposite as they are separated into black and white because ‘they couldn’t see to segregate themselves’.
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Christine has blown the lid off Hollywood, the delusion it offers, the false democracy of a world in which it appears that everyone can see and be seen, that everyone can become anyone else. If Monroe is an emblem of that delusion – she makes her way to the top from nowhere – she also exposes the ruthlessness and anguish at its core. All at once, Weatherby understands the link between Hollywood and the deep racist South of America. Both hold their stereotypes on a leash. ‘Blacks’, he states, ‘had been more rigidly typed than Monroe.’
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‘When I saw the angry white mob outside a school, yelling at two little black girls in their best dresses,’ he continues, ‘I imagined a fantasy in which these faces were in Hollywood, representing what Marilyn – and Betty Grable and the rest – had to contend with.’
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This is to turn fantasy, as it is usually associated with Hollywood, on its head. The manufacturer of dreams has turned into the ugly wicked witch. Weatherby’s analogy is not as strange as it might seem. In her 1950 study of Hollywood, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker compared the film moguls to Southern plantation owners treating their actors as slaves.
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More simply, Hollywood trashes its stars – especially its women: ‘Marilyn . . . Betty Grable and the rest.’ As we will see, Monroe more or less consistently hates the roles she is assigned, most of all
Some Like It Hot
,
her best-loved film. No woman on earth, she complained, would be so dumb as not to see that the two drag artists, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, were men (the director, Billy Wilder, clearly agreed with her, filming in black and white since colour, he recognised, would have been a giveaway). Monroe is a would-be breakout artist. ‘If I hadn’t become popular,’ she says to Weatherby, ‘I’d still be a Hollywood slave.’
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Likewise, the civil rights movement is a struggle to break free of being ‘typecast’ – a refusal to accept the allotted, Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black identifies with Marilyn Monroe.

Christine is not alone. James Baldwin, it turns out, also identified with Monroe, as he told Weatherby when introduced to him by Tennessee Williams (according to Richard Gott, Weatherby was part of the gay underworld of the civil rights movement, and the only white pallbearer at Baldwin’s funeral).
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Nor is Bill Weatherby the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of seemingly odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembers a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around its ankles’.
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Philippe Halsman who photographed her twice for
Life
magazine in 1949 and 1952 noticed on his second visit a corner bookcase filled with books, including
The Negro in American Literature.
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And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella Fitzgerald, the owner received a personal call from Monroe who offered to take a front table every night if he did. As Monroe promised him, the press went wild and Fitzgerald, by her own account, never had to play a small jazz club again.
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Fitzgerald never forgot. Monroe was, she said later, ‘an unusual woman – a little ahead of her time’.
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