Women in Dark Times (17 page)

In fact Weatherby did not need to conceal the true gender identity of Christine from Monroe. ‘People who aren’t fit to open the door for him sneer at his homosexuality,’ she said to him about Montgomery Clift. ‘What do they know about it? Labels – people love putting labels on each other. Then they feel safe. People tried to make me into a lesbian. I laughed. No sex is wrong if there is love in it.’
21
It is now generally accepted that Monroe’s first acting coach, Natasha Lytess, was her lover (Monroe described looking at women as a thrill).
22
She had a secret affair with a black actor: ‘It was like trying to love someone in jail.’
23
Monroe’s famous promiscuity was, therefore, a form of inclusiveness. She crossed borders. She consorted with the nation’s forbidden objects: with blacks, with women, and, as we will see, with Communists and Jews.

At the very least this should suggest that, wherever Monroe belongs – and there is an argument for saying that she never belonged anywhere – it is not in the expected place. If Monroe offers an image of American perfectibility, we should not be surprised to find behind that image, as its hidden companion, a host of other images through which that same (perfectible) America indicts itself – Hollywood as a screaming white mob. To say that Monroe was born on the wrong side of the tracks is an understatement. She spent her childhood moving in and out of foster homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles, living for a few snatched years with her mother, who had reclaimed her before being dragged off, watched by her daughter, to a mental home. When Monroe was sent to an orphanage, aged nine, she protested she was no orphan, since her mother was still alive. ‘She was’, writes her most recent biographer, Lois Banner, ‘illegitimate in an age when it was stigmatised . . . a “charity case” at a time when many Americans regarded taking welfare as a disgrace’, and she had relatives ‘diagnosed as mentally ill in an era that regarded such illness as inherited and almost inevitably degenerative’.
24
Like Salomon, Monroe lives her life under the threatened stigma of degeneration (like Luxemburg, too, in so far as Luxemburg was a ‘cripple’ and a Jew).

Monroe’s story has been told many times, not least by Monroe herself. Although some details have been contested, today it is mostly accepted as true. Paradoxically, however, it is the truth of the story that has allowed it to become part of her façade – the rags-to-riches tale that makes her the embodiment of the American dream. For Monroe, this story is no romance. She is far more precise. In a set of written notes from 1962, she observes ‘the lack of any consistent love and caring. A mistrust and fear of the world was the result. There were no benefits except what it could teach me about the basic needs of the young, the sick and the weak.’
25
‘I have great feeling for all the persecuted ones of the world.’
26
The editor suggests these are notes she prepared for an interview, which would make them seem self-promoting, but they read far more as if she were talking to herself. As early as 1945, she had told Andre de Dienes, one of her first photographers, that if she moved to New York she would go to Columbia Law School and help the poor.
27
It was, for Weatherby, her genuine compassion for the down and out, for the wino in the street – no metaphor: he describes two encounters – which distinguished her from every other celebrity he had ever met.
28
For Monroe, lowliness was a type of licence. It gave you permission to say, or ask, whatever you liked. ‘Don’t be afraid to ask anything,’ she described herself as encouraging her stepchildren with Arthur Miller. ‘After all, I have come up from way down.’
29
No one, nothing, was off limits. ‘Nothing living’, Weatherby wrote, ‘was alien to her.’
30

Most simply, however high her star rose, Monroe never let go of her class roots. ‘I would never have thought that our ordinary lives would have interested someone like her,’ writes Lena Pepitone, her personal maid in the last years of her life, ‘but they did.’ (Although there is a question about Pepitone as reliable source, her comment echoes observations by many others who knew her.)
31
Clearly she spotted in Weatherby a fellow traveller. When she goes after him – ‘I’ve seen you talk to everyone but me’ – charming him, as he had first assumed, is not what she is looking for. Something more like an exposé of the dirty side of Hollywood. ‘You’ve been seeing the famous. Now you ought to see the unknowns, those who are trying to make it. Try Schwab’s’ (the Sunset Boulevard drugstore haunt of movie dealmakers and actors looking for a break).
32
When he returns, horrified at the addiction, failure, poverty and misery on display, she tells him he has graduated: ‘When I starred in my first movie, I went back to Schwab’s. I had the idea that it would help their confidence to see someone who had gotten a break. But no one recognized me and I was too shy to tell anyone. I was a misfit there!’
33
They do not recognise her but they are her audience, the ones by whom she most wants to be seen. She always insisted that it was the people, not the studios, who made her a star.
34
‘She relied,’ wrote Arthur Miller, ‘on the most ordinary layer of the audience, the working people, the guys in the bars, the housewives in the trailers bedevilled by unpaid bills, the high school kids mystified by explanations they could not understand, the ignorant and – as she saw them – tricked and manipulated masses. She wanted them to feel they’d got their money’s worth when they saw a picture of hers.’
35

One of the reasons she hated Hollywood was its raw exploitation. ‘Nobody’, she complained, ‘left anything behind’ – no monuments, no museums – ‘they took it, they grabbed it, and they ran – the ones who made the billions of dollars, never the workers.’
36
She was, we might say, attuned to the cruel disjunction between the finished commodity and the hidden labour it conceals, of which Hollywood’s use of women’s bodies could stand as exemplar and test case. According to Rabbi Robert Goldberg, who converted her to Judaism for her marriage to Arthur Miller, her attraction to Judaism stemmed from her identification with the ‘underdog’ (as well as from its ‘ethical and prophetic ideals and its concept of a close family life’).
37
‘It’s like the Jews are the orphans of the world,’ she said to Strasberg.
38
There is an irony here. According to Strasberg, the Hollywood moguls were predominantly East European Jews trying to escape their past. They were drawn to Monroe because she was ‘as un-Jewish as she possibly could be’.
39

Rarely, however, in her career will Monroe be allowed to get close to the people with whom she most strongly identified.
Clash by Night
of 1951 is an exception. Monroe plays the part of a handler in a fish-canning factory – the opening shot sweeps from sky and sea to the ocean catch being poured into the hold, to Monroe in her factory overalls on the production line. It is the only film in which Monroe appears as a worker, as well as being one of the few Hollywood depictions of factory life. She is a woman who gets her hands dirty and speaks her mind. When her young lover grabs her, she hits him: ‘I suppose you’d beat me up if I was your wife. Let me see you try. Let me see any man try.’ Monroe was terrified of working alongside the famous Barbara Stanwyck who is the lead, but in scene after scene it is on Monroe’s face and body that the camera seems to linger. She is a star in the making who dreams of escaping factory life. Interestingly,
Clash by Night
,
directed by Fritz Lang, exposes the cruelty of this dream towards which the film is wholly cynical (like the Clifford Odets story on which it is based). The projectionist in the local movie theatre, lover of the Stanwyck character, ‘cans’ – his word – movie stars every day. Stars are disposable like the blubber of raw fish. ‘You can’t be too nice to the people you work with,’ Monroe commented to the journalist on the set, ‘else they will trample you to death.’
40

*

One of Monroe’s heroes was Abraham Lincoln. She described a first moment of not feeling lonely in the late forties when, still undiscovered, she was walking the Hollywood streets with Bill Cox, a seventy-seven-year-old man who had befriended her and who could remember Hollywood as a desert with Indians ‘right where we are walking’. He talked to her about his experiences as a soldier in the Spanish
–
American war and about the life of Abraham Lincoln.
41
In fact this was a passion which had started when she first learnt of him as a schoolgirl of fifteen.
42
At moments she would describe Lincoln as her father. Occasionally Clark Gable would be assigned the same role (since she had never known her own father, she could, as she pointed out, pick and choose). In the 1950s such admiration was not typical. At Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration ball, a musical portrait of Lincoln by Aaron Copland – a full orchestral piece with excerpts from a number of his speeches including the Gettysburg Address – was dropped at the last minute as ‘un-American’ (it would have been a jarring note at the glittering, multi-millionaire occasion).
43
Lincoln is, however, crucial to Monroe. Carl Sandburg, his biographer, became an important friend in the last years of her life. In her 1962 notes, she describes Sandburg’s poems as ‘songs of the people by the people and for people’.
44
Monroe, Sandburg commented, was ‘not the normal movie idol’. There was, he said, ‘something democratic about her’.
45
So when the showgirl expostulates to the Balkan Prince in
The Prince and the Showgirl
that he should pay more attention to democracy – ‘General elections are a good thing. Democracy and all that’ – Monroe is, in one sense, playing herself. ‘That’s the funny thing about general elections,’ she comments to him. ‘You never know who is going to win.’ (At moments like this she could be aping Luxemburg.) Needless to say, none of this makes it into
My Week with Marilyn
,
which purports to tell the story of the making of this film.

Being attached to Lincoln, we might say, is a way of reminding America of one of its saving moments, of a strong but permanently threatened liberal version of itself. Lincoln also gets a walk-on part in one of her films,
Let’s Make Love
of 1960
,
mostly forgotten today but one with an unmistakeable radical edge. Yves Montand plays a billionaire who falls in love with an actress, played by Monroe, when he tries to take over a theatre company rehearsing a play in which he has heard he will be viciously satirised (if the film is remembered at all, it is as a minor George Cukor film and for their off-screen love affair). Mistaken for an actor at the rehearsal he gatecrashes, he ends up playing himself on the stage. Among other things, this allows her character to tell him to his face what she thinks of the billionaire who he in fact is – ‘nothing but a rich louse, as soon as he tells a girl his name, he expects her to drop dead of the honour’. When he does eventually reveal the truth, of course she does not believe him. In an attempt to cure him of his ‘delusion’, she tells him of the actor who played Abe Lincoln for so long that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he got shot. Lincoln was of course assassinated at the theatre – for some his mere presence at such a venue was enough to indicate his unfitness for office.
46

Let’s Make Love
,
usually considered one of Monroe’s worst films, is by no means the first in which she plays out on screen something of her early role in real life – the struggling artiste who deserves more. Nor is it by any means the only film in which the line between the theatre of politics and of the movies is so thinly drawn. In this case, the allusion to Lincoln and her character’s utter contempt for money belong together. They both put her on the other side of American power. Interestingly, films where she plays a gold-digger like
Asphalt Jungle
,
How to Marry a Millionaire
,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
Some Like It Hot
are far better known (although two of these are ambiguous: when Sugar Cane falls for the Tony Curtis character in
Some Like It Hot
, she thinks he is the owner of Shell, but he turns out to be another of the down-and-out saxophonists who have littered her love life, and in
How to Marry a Millionaire,
her millionaire turns out to be no such thing). We will pass over for a moment the fact that in
Let’s Make Love
her character ends up of course being seduced by the billionaire. Having fallen for him as an impoverished actor, let’s say she then forgives him for being rich. Mostly, however, richness is shameful and deadly (women drop dead). The stage, on the other hand, is a place of multiple freedoms: the freedom to insult the billionaires of America to their face; the freedom to survive outside the sphere of corruption (indeed to expose it); the freedom to educate yourself. The Marilyn character spends her evenings studying for a high school diploma. She is ‘tired of being ignorant’. ‘The politicians get away with murder,’ Monroe observed to Weatherby, ‘because most Americans don’t know any more about [politics] than I do.’
47
Like the character in her film, only more so, Monroe was tireless in her indictment of the part played by ignorance in a death-dealing world.