Women in Dark Times (18 page)

It is something of a truism for psychoanalysis that one member of a family can carry the unconscious secrets of the whole family, can fall sick as it were on their behalf. My question is: for whom or what in 1950s and early 1960s America was Marilyn Monroe carrying the can? This is not the same question as: what or even who killed her? Or: did she commit suicide? Questions that I see as a diversion and to which in any case I strongly believe we can offer no definitive reply. Rather I am interested in what she, unknowingly – but also, crucially for my argument, knowingly – is enacting on behalf of post-war America. ‘Perhaps,’ wrote Cecil Beaton, ‘she was born just the post-war day we had need of her.’
48
He is most likely talking of the First World War – Monroe was born in 1926. But she is also the child of the Second World War, which comes to its end exactly as her star begins to rise. This is a moment when patriotism, to cite Weatherby, was ‘an excuse not to think’.
49
He is alluding to McCarthyism and the Cold War. When another radical journalist, I. F. Stone, listens to that inaugural address by Eisenhower in 1953, what he hears behind its rhetoric of freedom is the drumbeat of war (although Eisenhower was reluctant to send troops to the region, the build-up to Vietnam will start under his watch). Stone is appalled that, along with the musical tribute to Abraham Lincoln, a passage from an earlier version on ‘teaching with integrity’ had been dropped from the address, which, he observes, contained no trace of a plea for academic freedom or civil liberty of any kind.
50
One of Eisenhower’s first moves as president was to appoint Charles Erwin Wilson, the head of General Motors, as Secretary of Defense. ‘What is good for General Motors’, he famously pronounced, ‘is good for the country and what is good for the country is good for General Motors.’
51
‘No Administration’, comments Stone, ‘ever started with a bigger, more revealing or more resounding pratfall.’
52

To say that Monroe was attuned to this is again an understatement. In 1950, a mere starlet with a walk-on part in Joseph Mankiewicz’s
All About Eve
, she takes the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, the original muck-raking journalist, on to the set.
All About Eve
is another of her films about the lengths to which an actress will go to make good. Steffens is famous for having taken the lid off city hall corruption (‘Hell with the Lid Lifted’ was the title of a famous despatch from Pittsburgh). His heroes were beggars, prostitutes and thieves. The world Steffens exposes is that of
The Asphalt Jungle
, the other Monroe film of the same year, where she plays the almost-child lover of Alonzo Emmerich, a pillar of society who shoots himself when he is exposed as a crook. He famously describes crime as merely a ‘left-handed form of human endeavour’, although giving him that name and having him shoot himself suggests the problem is not wholly American and in any case can be got rid of.

Like Monroe, Steffens detested ignorance above all else. He preferred the honesty of crooks to that of good, ignorant men who ‘sincerely believe things are as they seem and truthfully repeat to you the current lies that make everything look all right’.
53
The malaise went deep into the very heart of the nation: ‘There was something wrong in our ends as well as our beginnings,’ he wrote, ‘in what we are after as well as what is after us.’
54
He is writing in the 1930s but already, for Steffens, the power of the moneyed oligarchy meant that democracy in America was effectively dead. He was one of the first American writers to expose the political dangers of a credit-driven economy to which we can trace our economic crisis today: ‘There [is] indeed such a thing in America as sovereignty, a throne, which, as in Europe, had slipped from under the kings and the president and away from the people too. It was the unidentified seat of actual power, which, in the final analysis, was the absolute control of credit.’
55
When Weatherby interviews playwright Clifford Odets, in the throes of despair about what he sees as the collapse of political hope, Odets asks, ‘What’s the problem?’ and then answers his own question: ‘In America, I won’t talk about the rest of the world – the problem is “are peace and plenty possible together with the democratic growth to use them?” ’
56
Can you have democracy and growth or does a moneyed economy by definition wrest control from the people? This problem has not gone away. We are living one of its most acute phases right now.

Of course Monroe wanted money. She was angry that she was paid so much less than her co-star Jane Russell in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
: ‘After all I am the blonde and it is
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
,’ she quipped on set by way of complaint.
57
She was also reported to be livid when she heard of the one million dollar contract Elizabeth Taylor signed for
Cleopatra
in 1959
.
But she wanted money to free herself, to stop herself, in Weatherby’s word, being ‘typed’. In 1954, she broke her contract with Twentieth Century Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck, leaving Hollywood for New York to set up her own film company with Milton Greene (making sure she controlled 51 per cent of the stock). It was a scandal – although the project was short-lived, she had taken on the moguls and won. Fox agreed to give her script and director approval on all her films and to pay her one hundred thousand dollars per film.
58
She will win against them again at the end of her life, when they offer her a renegotiated one million dollar contract having fired her from
Something’s Got To Give.
59
A recently discovered letter of 1961 shows that she never gave up on her dream of independence. At a time when the Hollywood studios were more or less writing her off, she wrote to Lee Strasberg – the head of the Actors Studio, which she had been attending since leaving Hollywood for New York in 1954 – that she and her attorneys were planning to set up an independent production unit. ‘I’ll never tie myself to a studio again,’ she said to Weatherby, ‘I’d rather retire.’
60
She wanted her fair share. She wanted some money to stop bigger money from controlling her fate. But she never, as many have attested, wanted money for itself. ‘It does not take long for money to make plain its impotence,’ observes the narrator in Theodore Dreiser’s famous 1900 novel
Sister Carrie
, perhaps the earliest exposure of the curse of celebrity, and one of the many books Monroe owned.
61

According to Ben Hecht, Monroe said that Lincoln Steffens’s autobiography excited her ‘more than any other [book] I had read’.
62
We need to imagine her being excited by this book at the exact moment when the world, for very different reasons, is about to be excited by her, when she is on the verge of gaining access to one of the strongest citadels of American power. When Mankiewicz spotted Monroe reading Steffens on his set, he warned her not to go around raving about him in case she was branded a radical (the studio, Paramount, also removed his name when she put him first on a publicity stunt list of the ten greatest men in the world). Like her love of Abraham Lincoln, this passion was not an anomaly in her political life. Another hero was Albert Einstein, who represented for her, writes Rabbi Goldberg, ‘the great scientist-humanist-Jew-socialist-dissenter’.
63
As early as the 1940s, she had supported the Henry Wallace campaign (he would eventually become Roosevelt’s vice-president), working as an usher for at least one Progressive Party rally. Her 1962 notes praise Eleanor Roosevelt for ‘her devotion to mankind’.
64

According to Hecht, she told him that she carried on reading Steffens secretly, hiding the second volume under her bed – ‘the first underhand thing I’d ever done since my meeting with little George in the tall grass.’
65
Hecht’s
My Story
, which also purports to be based on conversations with Monroe, has often been dismissed as unreliable, but Lois Banner credits it as a source (we might indeed ask why on earth he would want to make up such an anecdote).
66
Undercover journalism is furtive, like illicit sex. The celebrated exposer of America’s guilty secrets initiates Monroe into the 1950s. It is a bit of a girl thing; Steffens is also Norine’s favourite writer in Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
.
67
With this crucial difference: Monroe is not a Vassar girl. Unlike Norine, she has no education. She is educating – she never stops educating – herself. ‘Of the cruelties directed at this young woman,’ wrote Diana Trilling after Monroe’s death, ‘even by the public that loved her, it seems to me that the most biting and unworthy of the supposedly enlightened people who were particularly guilty of it, was the mockery of her wish to be educated, or thought educated.’
68

Monroe was a reader. It was a habit that began with the Christian Science Reading Rooms she frequented as a child (she later described them as ‘little libraries’ to her half-sister, Berniece Miracle).
69
Natasha Lytess, her first acting coach, gave her two hundred books to read and she did.
70
She read Dostoyevsky and Plato, Walt Whitman, Shelley and Keats. She introduces herself to the German actress Hildegard Knef, who had arrived on Broadway after the Second World War, by telling her she is reading Rilke.
71
Famously photographed by Eve Arnold reading
Ulysses
– a photo often wrongly dismissed as staged –
she also performed Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy at the Actors Studio to the intense admiration of those who had gathered there to hear her (she is most likely reading that soliloquy in the photo as she is clearly at the end of the book). In 1949 she somewhat confused journalist Sheilah Graham by arriving at an interview scantily dressed and clutching a large volume of Freud’s works (most likely A. J. Brill’s 1938 edition of his basic writings, which was Freud’s main entry into American culture at the time).
72
According to actor Cameron Mitchell, who met her early in her career, she had an in-depth knowledge of Freud.
73
In one of her last letters to Ralph Greenson, her Los Angeles psychoanalyst at the end of her life, as well as alluding to Milton, she writes about the autobiography of Sean O’Casey as well as Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud. At the end of
Fragments
, we are given a double-page spread of books from her collection (rather than, say, costumes and jewellery, which we might expect, as were on display in London in March 2012).

Monroe was educating herself. For a woman who was treated as pure surface, Monroe looked behind the visible scene. In a black notebook dated around 1955, she tells herself it is better to ‘know reality (or things as they are than not to know and to have as few illusions as possible) – Train my will now.’
74
This form of scrutiny was also political. In fact she surrounded herself with people who saw it as their task to rip the cover off national self-deceit. Looking back, her friend Norman Rosten will define the 1950s as one of ‘cowardice on a national scale’, when ‘strong citizens fell before the rhetoric of pigmies’.
75
She had of course her own brush with McCarthyism, when Arthur Miller was summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and she spoke out on his behalf. He was offered a deal if she would pose with Chairman Walter of the sub-committee. Miller refused but it is generally agreed that it was the announcement of their impending marriage which led the committee to back down.
76
‘I knew perfectly well why they had subpoenaed me,’ Miller later observed to director Richard Eyre. ‘It was because I was engaged to Marilyn Monroe. Had I not been, they’d never have thought of me. They’d been through the writers long before and they’d never touched me. Once I became famous as her possible husband, this was a great possibility for publicity. When I got to Washington, preparing to appear before that committee, my lawyer received a message from the chairman saying that if it could be arranged that he could have a picture, a photograph taken with Marilyn, he would cancel the whole hearing. I mean, the cynicism of this thing was so total, it was asphyxiating.’
77

Monroe herself reports that a corporation executive told her that either he named names or ‘I was finished . . . “Finished,” they said, “You’ll never be heard of.” ’
78
According to one account, it was the fact of Miller breaking a Writers Guild strike to alter the script of
Let’s Make Love
that was for her the beginning of the end of their marriage (she felt he had betrayed the cause).
79
But even before all of this, Monroe had experience of what was to come. In 1949, the left-leaning Actors’ Lab in Hollywood, which she was part of before joining Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York, was shut down for being a suspected Communist front.
80
Darryl Zanuck, head of Fox, with whom she had had some of her worst clashes, was a rabid anti-Communist. Hildegard Knef described him pausing in mid-stream of a monologue to greet her when she had been summoned to a party at his house: