Women in Dark Times (20 page)

Seen in this light, Monroe’s suffering takes on a new significance, becomes the tale America does not want to tell of itself. Even her addiction to prescription drugs, which was profound, also belongs here. As Lois Banner relates, the drugs she took – barbiturates and amphetamines – had been given to Second World War soldiers before being heavily marketed to civilians in the aftermath of war. ‘They were’, writes Banner, ‘considered miracle drugs that countered the anxiety and depression from which Americans suffered’ (the seeds of ‘Prozac Nation’ as well as of today’s takeover of the treatment of mental disorder by drug cartels).
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Hollywood was awash with these drugs because of the stress the system induced in its actors. Like so much else about her, Monroe’s drug dependency is, therefore, part of a larger picture, a symptom of more than her own distress. The painful, mostly unspoken legacy of the war was everywhere. According to Banner, one reason the Actors’ Lab did not follow Stanislavsky’s memory explorations as part of their training was because the Lab included Second World War veterans suffering from shell shock for whom it would be too traumatic.
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‘America’, to repeat Miller, ‘was denying its pain, remembering was out.’ (Anticipating Tony Judt, Miller sees a nation’s refusal to remember and reactionary politics as deeply linked.)

Only in one or two films,
Don’t Bother to Knock
(1952) and
Niagara
(1953), is Monroe given the chance to play a part that will expose the darker side of America, the pain it wants to forget. For me, they are two of her best roles (the second, as we will see later, has a significant reprise in her life). Both films turn on the Second World War. In the first, she is a woman driven to murderous hallucinations by the loss of her lover who was shot down in a plane; in the second, she is a woman who tries to pass her husband off as war-traumatised so his murder by her lover can be staged as suicide. As if in these early films, America can offload on to a crazy and/or murderous woman’s sexuality, without let or inhibition, the violence it cannot reckon with in itself. At the end of
Niagara
, the woman will be strangled by her husband, who has managed to survive his own attempted murder by killing her lover instead. But I counted no less than five earlier images where she is lying prone – whether asleep or fainted – splayed out, to all intents and purposes already dead (one stage instruction in the script describes her pretending to be asleep in ‘angelic peace’).
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It is as if the woman whose sexuality is meant to redeem the horrors of history – the woman who is being asked to repair a nation emerging from a war it already wants to forget – owes her nation a death. America is denying its own pain. Who pays the price? This is of course the classic role of the femme fatale
who is always made to answer for the desire that she provokes.
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One of the most discouraging things I found in working on Monroe was to watch Arthur Miller himself diagnose the problem, then fall headlong into it, and then finally punish her for his mistake. ‘You tell the truth, even against yourself,’ Quentin praises Maggie.
‘You’re not pretending to be innocent! Yes, [ . . . ] suddenly there was someone who – would not club you to death with their innocence!’
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Nothing worse, after the carnage of the war, even if America was on the right side, than a nation boasting its innocence to the world. It was this that I. F. Stone had hated about Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration address, with its talk of American democratic freedom which he was sure presaged the next war. Hence too the relish with which McCarthyism then goes about arranging the national distribution of political guilt. Miller’s insight is to bring the McCarthy Committee’s hearings and the legacy of the war into the same dramatic space (just in case you missed it, a concentration camp watchtower shadows the stage and at key moments throughout the drama blazes into life). No false innocence.
After the Fall
is a plea for political and ethical accountability, of which Maggie in those first appearances is the yardstick. But by the end of the play she has degenerated into a drunken, drug-taking wreck ‘beyond understanding’, who plays the victim like nothing else (many were appalled on Monroe’s behalf; James Baldwin stormed out of the theatre on the first night).
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The fact that something of this damaging and damaged portrayal is clearly drawn from the life should not distract us from the cruel reversal of logic at work. ‘You’ve been setting me up for a murder,’ Quentin accuses her after another of her drug-induced suicidal rages. ‘You’re not my victim any more.’
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Now her pseudo-innocence – which was of course Miller’s own projection – is what he has to save himself from. By the time we get to
Timebends
,
this logic is set in something like stone. ‘The play,’ he writes on
After the Fall
, ‘was about how we – nations and individuals – destroy ourselves by denying that that is precisely what we are doing.’
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Defending himself against the charge that the play was about Monroe, which it clearly is, he severs his own insight from his own final, crushing diagnosis of her: ‘All that was left was for her to go on defending her innocence, in which, at the bottom of her heart, she did not believe.’ Innocence, as he puts it, kills.
126
It is a myth, he also acknowledges, which they shared. But at moments like this, he is blaming her for the end of the marriage, for the end of her life (which is not to ignore his sorrow). Punishing her for his own insight, he has turned her into the disease – of peoples and nations – which he, like the rest of America, had set her up to cure.

*

‘Talent’, Monroe says to Richard Meryman in the last interview, ‘is developed in privacy’ (she is citing Goethe).
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‘Fame’, she insists, ‘is not where I live.’
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To read Monroe’s fragments, letters, journals, poems is to realise that, however tormented, she had another life. It is to be struck by the unrelenting mental energy with which she confronted herself. ‘It’s hard’, she wrote as early as 1943 (she was seventeen and well into her first failed marriage), ‘not to try and rationalise and protect your own feelings, but eventually that makes the acceptance of truth more difficult.’
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Long before she entered into psychoanalysis, long before she started reading Freud, she clearly had made Freud’s famous adage to ‘know thyself’ her own (she tells Alan Levy to underline those two words in her interview with him in August 1962).
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‘You try to be true,’ she will later say to Georges Belmont, ‘and you feel it’s on the verge of a type of craziness, but it isn’t really craziness. It’s really getting the true part of yourself out, it’s very hard.’
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‘It’s hard to know where to stop,’ she also said, ‘if you don’t start with the truth.’
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For Monroe, mental life, like acting, was a type of work. ‘I can and will help myself and work on things analytically no matter how painful, if I forget things (the unconscious wants to forget – I will only try to remember)’ she writes in a notebook of 1955, although of course this has the whiff of analytic instruction. Then she adds: ‘Discipline – Concentration. My body is my body every part of it.’
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She is claiming herself, body and soul – on this, she is way in advance of the feminism she will not live to see. ‘I’ve always had a pride’, she tells
Life
in that last interview, ‘that I was on my own.’
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Work was a form of freedom: ‘In my work – I don’t want to obey her any longer and I can do my work as fully as I wish.’ She is referring to one of a number of childhood figures who made her deeply ashamed of herself.
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Her shame of herself sexually, again explicit in these notes, and her investment in her image – however much she hated it,
because
she hated it – are clearly also reverse sides of the same coin. The fact that she famously took a knife to photos she couldn’t stand signals to me not some impossible vanity but that such investment is already, can only ever be, turned against itself. ‘Working (doing my tasks that I have set for myself). On the stage I will not be punished for it.’
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At moments we can watch as the two types of work slide effortlessly into each other on the page: ‘Work whenever possible – on class assignments – and always keep working on the acting assignments . . . must make strong effort to work on current problems and phobias that out of my past has [
sic
] arisen.’
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She was a fierce disciplinarian to the end, which is why the idea of her just losing it in the final years of her life does her scant justice. She never believed that any of her performances were good enough. In fact the discipline and the inner torment are the reverse sides of the same coin. She spends a great deal of her time in a state of fear: fear of failure – by the end of her life, all productions were sheer torment (Harvey Weinstein, the producer of her final unfinished film,
Something’s Got to Give
,
talked of ‘sheer primal terror’)
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– but also fear of something radically unknown:

I love the river – never unmoored

by anything

it’s quiet now

And the silence is alone

except for the thunderous rumbling of things unknown

distant drums very present

but for the piercing of screams

and the whispers of things

sharp sounds and then suddenly hushed

to moans beyond sadness – terror beyond fear
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Many of these fragments are spattered over the page, endless revisions, corrections, bits of text overlapping, or barely adjoining, that can only be read by rotating the page. To describe them as ‘wasted pages’, in the words of one reviewer, is, to say the least, to miss the point.
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This is a mind at work, at once creative and in pieces, a mind rumbling inside itself and then reaching for the light, giving the lie to her own image (this is hardly a woman without a mind). That intimation of ‘things unknown’ is important – it should at least give pause to all those who have rushed to offer the definitive diagnosis of Monroe. Monroe knows that she, that the psyche, is a shape-changer. ‘I am both of your directions . . . I am many stories.’
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‘There are’, she said to Susan Strasberg, ‘a lot of cards in my deck.’ ‘Of course,’ she added, ‘you’ve got to watch out not to get confused.’
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‘You have to learn to believe in the contradictory impulses,’ she commented to Rosten. ‘You know, you want to do one thing and you do another, you learn from that.’
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‘Nothing,’ as she said to Weatherby, ‘is ever repeated in the same way.’ She imported this insight into her craft. ‘She had learned the trick of moving infinitesimally, so that the photographer . . . could easily follow movements that were endlessly changing,’ Eve Arnold observed. ‘For each photographer she would be different . . . using herself and bringing forth different facets of herself.’
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For Monroe, suffering is not a failure, but the springboard for, a way of loosening, something else:

You must suffer –

to loose your dark golden

when your covering of

even dead leaves leave you

strong and naked

you must be –

alive – when looking dead

straight though bent

with wind
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Alive when looking dead, straight though bent with wind. Monroe moves through the contradictions of her inner life (alive when looking dead could also be read as her riposte to the deadly undercurrent of cinema which Laura Mulvey observes, as well as to the killing, frozen adulation of which she herself complained). On the same pages she reports a dream of being operated on by Lee Strasberg: ‘Best finest surgeon cut me open.’ The lines are now the lyrics of a song by American female singer St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, which brilliantly capture how this prospect is as much desire as threat (as in ‘cut me open, please’). Monroe does not shy away from her own violence: ‘Everyone has violence in them. I am violent’ – another ironic rejoinder to the myth of innocence with which she has been so beset. To the immense disappointment of Strasberg and the watching Arthur Miller in the dream, they find nothing but sawdust inside. Monroe is trawling her unconscious. She does not surmount it – for psychoanalysis, no one ever surmounts the unconscious. But nor is she simply its prey. For that reason, I do not find it helpful to present her – or indeed any woman – as either on top of or succumbing to her demons, as though the only options were triumph or defeat (a military vocabulary which could not be further from her own). As with Rosa Luxemburg, as with Charlotte Salomon, Monroe has the courage of her own reckoning with herself. She brings the dark with her wherever she goes. It is no less present when she succeeds than when she fails.

In the process, she brilliantly exposes the façade of mental institutions at the time. In 1961, she was admitted to the notorious Payne Whitney Hospital on the advice of her New York analyst, Marianne Kris. In the secure wing on the sixth floor all the doors were locked and no one could use a phone. When the staff boast of the facilities as ‘home-like’ – wall-to-wall carpeting and modern furniture – she retorts: ‘Well, that any interior decorator could provide – but since they are dealing with human beings, why couldn’t they perceive even the interior of a human being?’ To get herself out, she reprises her own role as the mad woman in
Don’t Bother to Knock
, slams a chair against a cabinet, and sits on the bed with a shard of glass threatening to harm herself unless they let her out: ‘If you’re going to treat me like a nut I’ll act like a nut.’ Earlier she had tried to explain to them that if, as they were encouraging her, she were to ‘sew or play checkers, even cards and maybe knit’, ‘the day I did that they would have a nut on their hands’. (All this from a long letter she wrote three weeks later to her Los Angeles analyst, Ralph Greenson).
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This is surely Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
several years before its time – an analogy I try for the most part to avoid simply because when it is made, as it so often is, the reference is of course to Monroe’s death (they were both blondes and died in the same year), never to her ear for the inner life, to the ‘rumbling of things unknown’, and certainly never, but never, to her wit. Monroe is tapping into things that mostly go untold. In these writings, we can watch the link between her public and private persona, between perfectibility and human misery pulled to breaking point. ‘I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.’ She then elaborates: ‘successful, happy, on time, all that glib stuff.’
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