Chapter Fifteen
THE IDEA, Lee Strasberg and Margaret Hohenberg told Marilyn, was that her confused childhood, her inability to sustain friendships, her suspicion that others wanted only to use and discard her, her obsession with pleasing others—all these need not destroy her: they might yet become part of the vocabulary and technique of a new art. As she had said,
I had teachers and people I could look up to—but nobody I could look over at. I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be somebody was to be—well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.
But there was too much pressure on her to succeed, too many goals set before her, too much business responsibility to bear. Where there should have been space and time to learn about herself—which was her reason for quitting Hollywood in the first place—now there was only urgency.
This was evident almost at once, for Marilyn became agitated, tense and unable to sleep. A doctor was summoned, she was given sedatives and barbiturates and told not to maintain quite so busy a schedule of therapy, meetings and outings for the next few weeks. Then, on February 28, 1955—just days after Marilyn had begun psychotherapy—Irving Stein came to her suite at the Gladstone for a business meeting: they discussed the best ways to continue discussions concerning a new contract with Fox, and Marilyn said she would have to discuss everything with Joe DiMaggio. “It seemed to me,” Stein wrote in his corporate notes,
that [the] entire tone of our conference changed with Milton’s arrival. Her attention was diverted from me and directed to Milton. She scarcely looked at me and seemed reserved in her answers, as though she were editing them for Milton’s benefit. This [was] especially so in answering questions involving Joe D. . . . Conference extremely unsatisfactory from time Milton came. . . . [I] telephoned the doctor, [who] asked me to again impress on Marilyn the necessity for cutting down on her activities.
The notations are significant from several viewpoints.
First, Marilyn’s meetings with Dr. Hohenberg put into a new perspective her relationship with Milton, whom she loved, needed and respected. But sharing his therapist also put a new turn in the game, for now she had to please both the man who was supporting her and helping her to define a new career and the woman who was helping him. She was once again in a position of subordination, forced into the role of grateful child bound to please. That this conflict became intense, evoking all kinds of muddy confusions, was revealed in her agitation and sleeplessness. That the “tone of the conference changed with Milton’s arrival” suggests Marilyn also feared that he was discussing her in his sessions with Hohenberg just as she was discussing him. The further complication was the sometime presence of Joe. Fearing Milton’s resentment of this, she was “editing [her answers] for Milton’s benefit.” Dangerous weeds of suspicion were sprouting in what was to have been the new field of her career.
Second, resorting to medication, which only clouded her mind when she sought clarity, was an easy balm but complicated her therapy and disconnected her from those with whom she was to collaborate in serious matters. Margaret Hohenberg seems to have been uninformed of these drugs, although it would have been unlikely for her not to see their effects and to inquire appropriately. There is no evidence the therapist worked in consultation with one of Marilyn’s physicians (a Dr. Shapiro) who was simply summoned by her to provide sedative tablets for a famous patient he was told was in some kind of crisis.
From this time to the end of Marilyn’s life, there would be just such a lack of communication between therapists and internists—some of them more benevolent, better qualified, less manipulative than others, but all of them acting independently. Each saw Marilyn Monroe as his or her responsibility; each had a proud, proprietary claim; each readily assumed the superior role from which Marilyn, in her quest for independence and maturity, ought to have been freed. But she was, after all, simply too valuable a patient.
Third, at the age of twenty-nine she had behind her only the many experiences of life in the business of entertainment, not much of which helped her to grow up, and all of which sent her reeling back on her appearance, her prettiness, the dedication to surface glamour.
“My problem,” she said at the time,
is that I drive myself. But I do want to be wonderful, you know? I know some people may laugh about that, but it’s true. . . . I’m trying to become an artist, and to be true, and [I] sometimes feel I’m on the verge of craziness. I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard. There are times when I think, “All I have to be is true.” But sometimes it doesn’t come so easily. I always have this secret feeling that I’m really a fake or something, a phony. . . . Joe understands this. He’d had a very difficult time when he was young, too, so he understood something about me and I understood something about him, and we based our marriage on this.
And then Marilyn added that her feelings of inadequacy sprang from the old, impossible identification of one’s best work with perfection—the goal set before her from the days of the Bolenders to the days of moviemaking and now, in the move to serious acting:
My one desire is to do my best, the best that I can from the moment the camera starts until it stops. That moment I want to be perfect, as perfect as I can make it. . . . Lee says I have to start with myself, and I say, “With me?” Well, I’m not so important! Who does he think I am, Marilyn Monroe or something?
As those last sentences indicate, she was perhaps saved from desperation not by therapy but by her extraordinary ability to cut through the anxiety with a leavening humor, a gentle self-mockery and an awareness that “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed not the deepest part of the self she sought and perceived she was becoming.
For a time, Marilyn sought relaxation in reading and museums. One afternoon in early March, she scoured shops in lower Manhattan and returned to her hotel with two sacks of books, among them Shaw’s Letters to Ellen Terry and Letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Richard Aldrich’s biography of his wife Gertrude Lawrence, James Joyce’s Ulysses and a copy of the typescript for Noël Coward’s comedy Fallen Angels, which was on Broadway that year with Nancy Walker and Margaret Phillips.
Continuing her interest in matters cultural, Marilyn and Joe dined with Sam Shaw and his wife several times that season, and after Marilyn mentioned her interest in poetry Sam arranged a meeting with the poet and novelist Norman Rosten and his wife, Hedda. Thus began a close friendship that lasted until her death, with Norman acting as a kind of New York cultural mentor and Hedda, eventually, as Marilyn’s Manhattan secretarial assistant. The Rostens were initially attracted to her, Norman recalled, because of her simplicity and honesty. Looking nothing like the movie star, she arrived at the Rostens’ Brooklyn home with Sam, who mumbled her name in such a way it sounded like “Marion.” Hedda asked her guest’s occupation, and when she said she was preparing for classes at the Actors Studio, Hedda asked what plays she had done.
“Oh, I’ve never been on the stage. But I have done some movies.”
“What was your movie name?”
And, as Norman Rosten remembered, “in a timid voice” came the reply: “Marilyn Monroe.” Not long after, Norman took Marilyn to a Rodin exhibit, where she was deeply moved by The Hand of God, a depiction of lovers emerging and embracing in the curved shelter of an enormous palm.
Yet Marilyn’s timidity had its obverse in her full awareness of the effect and meaning of her stardom. “When she came to visit us in Brooklyn Heights,” Norman Rosten said years later, “she always insisted on helping out with the dishes. She wanted very much to be regarded as a regular person, one of the family, you might say. But she never could quite let you forget that she was a movie star.” There were, at such times, gently melodramatic sighs, unexpected withdrawals into a dreamy silence, prolonged sessions before Hedda’s mirror, adjusting makeup and letting it be known how important her appearance was to her and, presumably, to everyone present. This co-existed with another presentation, that of the scrubbed, disguised Marilyn preferring to go unrecognized as she walked the streets of Manhattan.
That spring, Milton decided that Marilyn’s status required a more elegant venue than the Gladstone Hotel. The actress Leonora Corbett, who had appeared on the London stage in the 1930s and then in the first New York production of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, was seeking a six-month tenancy for her one-bedroom suite on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf Towers, and a deal was hastily made. Soon the Rostens and the Shaws joined the Greenes in a champagne toast to Marilyn’s fashionable new address.
There was another reason for celebration, although one not clear to anyone but Marilyn. As it happened, Norman Rosten had been a college classmate of Arthur Miller, and quite by chance Marilyn had been reunited with the playwright through the Rostens. Since their introduction four years earlier, Miller had written the prize-winning play The Crucible, based on the Salem witch trials of 1692—a situation he linked with the tawdry investigations of so-called subversive activities in the 1950s. Soon to open in autumn 1955 was A View from the Bridge.
A year younger than Joe, Miller was to turn forty that year; Marilyn was twenty-nine. His life was in some turmoil, although this was belied by his placid manner. Like Joe, his tall, gaunt frame and apparent humorlessness gave him a certain grave authority; like Joe and Jim, he was athletic and loved the outdoor life of hunter and fisherman. But Miller also represented for Marilyn the serious theater to which she was devoting her new life.
While he admitted his somewhat faddish youthful dabbling in Communist social theory, Arthur had come to it late, after other writers (Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Ignazio Silone, among others) had abandoned mid-twentieth-century Russian Marxism as intellectually and socially sterile. Miller was much regarded in the 1950s as the dramatic conscience of American society, for his work was plainly concerned with moral and social issues affecting families after the war. But he was no cool theorist; American playwrights tend not to be. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Robert Anderson and later David Mamet, John Guare, David Rabe and August Wilson (to name but a few) write not academic theses but works rooted in memory and feeling, plays for actors and audiences that provide affective understanding of recognizable human dilemmas.
In this regard, Arthur’s first wife was more of an intellectual and a theorist. Mary Grace Slattery was a liberal Catholic and an editor intensely interested in the politics of the thirties, forties and fifties. She provided her husband with creative stimulus as well as economic support, working during the early years of their marriage as a waitress until he was firmly established. (It has even been suggested that from the experiences of her father, an insurance salesman, came the inspiration for Death of a Salesman.)
But as he detailed later in his autobiography, the demands of Arthur’s work that year were ineluctably linked to Marilyn’s reappearance in his life, “and the resulting mixture of despair for my marriage and astonishment with [Marilyn] left little room for concentration” on preparing for forthcoming productions. Only two or three quiet suppers with the Rostens and one or two evenings alone with Marilyn were necessary for their friendship to develop into a love affair. “It was wonderful to be around her,” he said years later. “She was simply overwhelming. She had so much promise. It seemed to me that she could really be a great kind of phenomenon, a terrific artist. She was endlessly fascinating, full of original observations, [and] there wasn’t a conventional bone in her body.”
But this did not mean Joe DiMaggio was out of the picture; for perhaps the only time in her life, that spring Marilyn maintained simultaneous intimacies—with the man who had been her husband and the man who was about to be. The trick was to keep each unaware of her schedule with the other, and this required some slick negotiating.
However thrilling his new love, Miller feared that he “might be slipping into a life not my own,” which was an anxiety well founded. He knew not quite what he wanted, for while he did not wish to terminate his marriage to Mary Grace Slattery—however troubled and unsatisfying it had become—“the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable.” Marilyn found herself in something of a quandary, too. She was not at all ready to give up a grand passion simply because the man was married. At the same time, she was reevaluating everything in her past, and although Arthur was physically attractive, intellectually stimulating and parentally tender, and although she desired him perhaps more completely than any man before, Marilyn had no intention of encouraging a divorce.
Quite the contrary: she urged him not to end his marriage on her account. For the present, she would be content to have him as occasional lover. This edge of detachment, perhaps predictably, made Arthur Miller all the more ardent a pursuer. But the truth is that he needed as much endorsement as Marilyn, for he was in the first throes of a terrible struggle with right-wing ideologues out to destroy him for being (so they thought) a Communist sympathizer who advocated overthrow of the government, a man whose life’s work, daring to be critical of certain hoary myths about American supremacy, was treasonous. “I had lots to do,” Marilyn told Amy later. “I was preparing for a new stage in my career. But Arthur didn’t have much to look forward to. In a way, I felt sorry for him.” And in a way she may have empathized with his contest for freedom, the right to criticize and the desire for artistic expression without interference from authorities: these were, after all, trademarks of her own relationship with Fox.
Political storms were gathering darkly on the horizon. Miller had a temporary break in his friendship with Kazan, who cooperated with authorities asking the names of those who had once belonged to fashionable left-wing groups interested in things Russian and particularly in the historic and cultural roots of the Russian Revolution; Miller refused to follow Kazan’s lead. Not at all interested in the tricky webs of intrigue, Marilyn was nonetheless sympathetic to his plight, although she also avoided taking sides—Kazan or Miller—and how might Strasberg, that champion of Russian-based acting theories, regard the matter?
Her admiration and support of Kazan remained firm. At the premiere of his new film East of Eden on March 9, an event benefiting the Actors Studio, she and Marlon Brando volunteered as ushers. Two weeks later, she and the Greenes attended the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Kazan. Both works stirred considerable controversy.
Not every event did, however. Opening night of the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden, on March 30, was a benefit for the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation. Among all the stars who turned out none was more visible or roaringly approved by the eighteen thousand spectators than Marilyn: in a little scenario designed by impresario Mike Todd (with Milton Greene supervising), she made a grand entrance in a tight, sexy outfit of feathers and spangles, riding atop an elephant painted shocking pink. “It meant a lot to me because I’d never been to the circus as a kid,” she told the nation a week later.
The forum for that comment was Marilyn’s interview with Edward R. Murrow, whose television program Person to Person offered an apparently casual visit with celebrities. After weeks of preparing for the technical challenges of broadcasting a live show from the Greene home in Connecticut, the interview was at last scheduled for April 8. But as airtime drew near, Marilyn became distraught, believing that her light makeup and simple outfit made her look wan and dowdy alongside petite, dark-haired Amy. When a CBS cameramen tried to calm her, saying she looked fabulous and that millions of Americans would fall in love with her on the spot, Marilyn became very nearly paralyzed with fright: this was unlike a soundstage; there was no rehearsal, no possibility of a retake. But then the producer said quietly to Marilyn, “Just look at the camera, dear. It’s just you and the camera—just you two.” And with that she was reassured and made an admirably unaffected presence.
When Murrow asked the purpose of MMP, Marilyn replied directly that she wished “primarily to contribute to help making good pictures. . . . It’s not that I object to doing musicals and comedies—in fact, I rather enjoy them—but I’d like to do dramatic parts, too.” She also thanked those who had contributed so much to her career, singling out John Huston, Billy Wilder, Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov. Marilyn’s appearance at the time was thought unglamorous and awkward, perhaps because she was such a refreshing change from the prevalent artifice: she answered questions briefly and unselfconsciously, never taking the spotlight for herself or jockeying to be the segment’s star.
As for Milton, his time during 1955 was divided between his photographic studio, where he tried to conduct business as usual, and meetings with Irving Stein, Frank Delaney and Joe Carr, his accountant. MMP desperately needed cash for such basic operating expenses as Marilyn’s hotel and support, as well as “seed money” for whatever project they hoped to realize. To Milton fell the responsibility of finding wealthy patrons, which was a futile endeavor. And so it became all the more necessary to recognize the white truce flag waved toward him by the men at Fox. Throughout 1955, the terms of the new contract between MMP and Fox were painstakingly negotiated.
From early April, with Marilyn’s presence in New York more widely known, she was besieged with requests for appearances. The Arthur P. Jacobs Company, headed by the man of that name, had a public relations staff in New York and Los Angeles and was signed as Marilyn’s publicity consultants. Jacobs and his colleagues on both coasts—John Springer, Lois Weber, Rupert Allan, Patricia Newcomb—constantly sorted through literally hundreds of demands each week for Marilyn’s presence at interviews, benefit appearances, charity appeals and award dinners.
But because Marilyn insisted on her regular hours with Dr. Hohenberg and her private sessions with Strasberg, she strictly limited both her meetings with reporters and the photo sessions necessary to keep her before the public. An exception was made for photographer Eve Arnold, whose images of Marlene Dietrich had so impressed Marilyn. “Imagine what you could do with me!” she told Arnold. Charming photos were taken of her as an autodidact, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses; conversely, Arnold presented another aspect of her—in a leopard skin, crawling through muddy marsh grass like a primal, predatory animal.
A week later, Arnold took the contact sheets for approval. Later, she recalled that Marilyn opened the door of her hotel suite wearing nothing but a diaphanous black negligée—even though she was granting an interview to a very proper British lady from a foreign magazine.
The search for identity could be a surprisingly ambiguous adventure, and in a way the closer Marilyn got the harder it was to grasp. Sometimes, she had to dress formally for business and social engagements, and Amy Greene often assisted her in selecting the proper additions to her frugal wardrobe. Shopping with Amy or with Hedda Rosten, Marilyn wore dark glasses, a scarf or a hat, no makeup—but disguised though she was, she wanted desperately to be recognized. She had, therefore, to take certain measures. As Norman Rosten recalled, Marilyn hired a limousine to take her shopping, drawing the shades to ensure that when she stopped, passersby would know that someone who mattered was about to alight.
Just so, Amy Greene recalled a day of shopping in Fifth Avenue’s department stores. Marilyn began as usual in her incognito mode, completely unrecognized by customers and clerks. But as they went through stores and aisles, Marilyn gradually put aside—piece by piece—the outfit she wore, until finally she tore off her wig and dark glasses, rushed into a dressing room and emerged as Marilyn Monroe, to the astonishment and excitement of everyone at Saks Fifth Avenue. Discarding the camouflage was a twofold gesture: Marilyn wished to remove the disguise, the mask that hid her from her public, and to emerge as herself. But what she then revealed was in fact the manufactured Marilyn about whom she had such ambivalent feelings. Without that, she feared she had no real identity; trying to escape her false persona, she was simultaneously afraid of losing it. Similarly, Susan Strasberg and a friend recalled Marilyn angry and withdrawn when a taxicab driver did not recognize her.
That same season, Stanley Kauffmann was editing a book of Sam Shaw’s photographs of Marilyn during The Seven Year Itch. “She wore a sweatshirt and slacks. There was a bit of a belly. The knees were slightly knocked. Her hair looked tired.” But when Kauffmann showed her a photo he wished included, of her looking tired after a long day on the set, Marilyn was adamant in her refusal. “When people look at me, they want to see a star.”1
* * *
Around this time, Marilyn began to refer to herself in the third person. Susan Strasberg recalled walking with her when she noticed a group of fans awaiting her return at the Waldorf. “Do you want to see me be her?” she asked Susan. Momentarily confused, Susan then saw something remarkable:
She seemed to make some inner adjustment, something “turned on” inside her, and suddenly—there she was—not the simple girl I’d been strolling with, but “Marilyn Monroe,” resplendent, ready for her public. Now heads turned. People crowded around us. She smiled like a kid.
Similarly, Sam Shaw could never forget Marilyn repeatedly speaking of herself in the third person. Referring to a scene in Itch or to a photo of herself, she said time and again, “She wouldn’t do this. . . . Marilyn would say that. . . . She was good in this scene.” Truman Capote wrote of finding Marilyn sitting for a long while before a dimly lit mirror. Asked what she was doing, Marilyn replied, “Looking at her.” Eli Wallach, walking with her one evening on Broadway, recalled Marilyn without makeup or distinctive clothes, suddenly stopping traffic and attracting attention. “I just felt like being Marilyn for a minute,” she said, and there was the magnetism. It was as if an image flashed through her mind—a daydream of someone glamorous, remote and almost half-forgotten named Marilyn Monroe—and for a moment she reassumed that image. But she knew that Marilyn Monroe was only a part of herself; thus she could associate with “Marilyn Monroe,” but she rarely identified with her. She had cooperated in the creation of the image and was willing to present what agents, producers, directors and the public wished. Danger, emotional confusion, a crack in relationships: these occurred only when she tried to steer her life’s course entirely by the chart of fame mapped out for Marilyn Monroe, with no reference to the deeper, private self within.
In therapy, she was urged to keep a notebook of random thoughts, or a diary, but this she never did, as she confided to friends. Twice Marilyn purchased marble notebooks but they remained blank, for she did not have the necessary, elementary discipline and she was ashamed of what she considered her atrocious spelling and punctuation. But occasonally she scrawled notes on scraps of paper. That year, with the evocations suggested by her analysis and then her drama classes, Marilyn’s jottings show the concerns of her inner work:
• “My problem of desperation in my work and life—I must begin to face it continually, making my work routine more continuous and of more importance than my desperation.”
• “Doing a scene is like opening a bottle. If it doesn’t open one way, try another—perhaps even give it up for another bottle? Lee wouldn’t like that. . . .”
• “How or why I can act—and I’m not sure I can—is the thing for me to understand. The torture, let alone the day to day happenings—the pain one cannot explain to another.”
• “How can I sleep? How does this girl fall asleep? What does she think about?”
• “What is there I’m afraid of? Hiding in case of punishment? Libido? Ask Dr. H.”
• “How can I speak naturally onstage? Don’t let the actress worry, let the character worry.”
• “Learn to believe in contradictory impulses.”
More frequently, Marilyn transformed some of her feelings into poems—rhythms might be a better word, images of what she felt and feared in her twenty-ninth year.
Night of the Nile—soothing—
darkness—refreshes—Air
Seems different—Night has
No eyes nor no one—silence—
except to the Night itself.
Life—
I am of both your directions
Somehow remaining,
Hanging downward the most,
Strong as a cobweb in the wind,
Existing more with the cold frost
than those beaded rays
I’ve seen in paintings.
“TO THE WEEPING WILLOW”
I stood beneath your limbs
And you flowered and finally
clung to me,
and when the wind struck with the earth
and sand—you clung to me.
Thinner than a cobweb I,
sheerer than any—
but it did attach itself
and held fast in strong winds
life—of which at singular times
I am both of your directions—
somehow I remain hanging downward the most,
as both of your directions pull me.
But unlike many lay poets, Marilyn never took her odes too seriously, as shown by one in particular that has an airy humor and natural gravity worthy of e. e. cummings or William Carlos Williams:
From time to time
I make it rhyme,
but don’t hold that kind
of thing
against
me—
Oh well, what the hell,
so it won’t sell.
What I want to tell—
is what’s on my mind:
’taint Dishes,
’taint Wishes,
it’s thoughts
flinging by
before I die—
and to think
in ink.
From the first day they worked together in private sessions in the Strasberg apartment at 225 West Eighty-sixth Street that spring of 1955, Lee gave Marilyn the strongest paternal-professional guidance of her life—a kind of total psychological mentorship that soon provoked the resentment of both Milton Greene and Arthur Miller. Lee fully agreed with and encouraged Marilyn’s resentment of movies in general and Fox in particular, for he believed their abuse of good actors and writers was standard operating procedure. This disaffection was based on his own experience, for in 1945 that studio had denied him the opportunity to direct Somewhere in the Night, which he had co-written with Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Opinionated and pugnacious, Lee had been released from his studio contract and returned to the East Coast, where, according to Susan, life was very difficult for the four Strasbergs (Lee, Paula, Susan and her younger brother, John). “My father was terribly frustrated and had fights with the wrong people, but he also had an ability to inspire others”—which led his former partner Cheryl Crawford to send him acting students. Kazan then asked him to take over the supervision of the Actors Studio from Robert Lewis.
Because at first she was frightened to speak and participate in open class exercises, Marilyn was invited to the Strasberg home—an emotionally land-mined place, according to Susan, where Paula had subordinated her own career, her wishes and the life of her entire family on the altar of Lee’s supremacy.
Then seventeen, Susan Strasberg (who had already appeared importantly in two films, Cobweb and Picnic) was about to have a great success on Broadway as Anne Frank. Susan felt an immediate empathy with the frightened, vulnerable Marilyn, “despite the mask of celebrity she put on and took off at will. She told us more than once, ‘Hollywood will never forgive me—not for leaving, not for fighting the system—but for winning, which I’m going to do.’ ” Because Marilyn was soon another member of the Strasberg family—having meals at their kitchen table and often staying overnight—Susan had the chance to see her tough core. Underappreciated by studio executives, Marilyn nevertheless knew how to use her past, combining it with both her beauty and her essential sweetness of spirit to project a childlike attitude that almost everyone found irresistible.
But Lee and Paula devoted so much time and attention to her that Susan “was convinced there was no love or energy left for me, and I felt guilty for even feeling that way, because I saw how lonely Marilyn was. She really had nobody she felt she could trust completely—not one person.” Lee became Marilyn’s father while Paula became her mother, nursemaid, coach—and keeper of the pills. One night, Marilyn was so desperate for sleep after a Strasberg party that she combined sleeping tablets with one glass too many of champagne: dazed and unable to walk, she crawled to Lee and Paula’s bedroom, scratching at the door while Susan watched, frozen with fear.
“Don’t you ever feel anxious? Don’t you have anxiety attacks?” she asked friends in sober moments. When told these were common feelings, sometimes especially in actors, she replied quietly, “But you’re not in my position. When you’re on a film you’ve got to look good in the morning so you’ve got to get some sleep. That’s why I take pills.”
This habit was, contrary to the usual take on Marilyn, nothing like an attempt at self-destruction; much less was she a psychotic personality. In addition, it must be stressed that she was also doing what very many people did in the 1950s—and perhaps preeminently those in the arts. The abuse of pills was not only the habit of sensitive playwrights like Tennessee Williams and William Inge, and self-indulgent actors like Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift: it was an accepted part of the artistic life. “Our family doctor gave me sleeping pills when I was seventeen,” recalled Susan.
People mixed champagne and pills all the time, to increase the effectiveness of the pills. As for Marilyn, she had the burdens of her fear, her timidity, her insecurity and her unusually agonizing monthly periods that rendered her literally incapable of moving.
Marilyn’s use of hypnotics and barbiturates (she never took amphetamines, marijuana or intravenous drugs) had begun innocently enough with Sidney Skolsky’s unlimited free samples. By 1955, the occasional imprudent combination of pills and wine disturbed what little routine she had and made her strident, moody and lethargic next day.
However embracing of her, the Strasberg family was far from the ideal one for Marilyn. Lee was prone to rages and Paula to hysterical fits and threats of suicide, while by a certain sad irony these gifted, overbearing parents depended—for several years—on the talent, success and income of their daughter for financial survival. “Our household,” Susan said, “revolved around my father, his moods, his needs, his expectations and his neuroses. He was teaching people how to act, but that was nothing compared to the drama in our house. . . . Our entire family were intimate strangers.” Her brother, Johnny, was convinced that “it was hard for anyone to have a relationship with [Lee] if you weren’t a book, a record, a cat or Marilyn.”
An unintentionally negligent father, Lee lavished on Marilyn the attention he denied his children: more than once, when Susan approached him to discuss something in her personal life, he replied, “I’m not concerned with that except as it relates to your work.” Marilyn, on the other hand, received private tutorials when she wanted them and gentle nurturing when she was depressed, unhappy or insecure. This Lee did because he seemed genuinely to believe in her raw, untapped talent (not because there was any overt indication that he was in love with her, which he may have been). The strong bond between them was their mutual hunger to be respected by the mainstream from which they had deliberately withdrawn.
There was another common link, and that was the Russian aesthetic to which Marilyn had been earlier exposed by Carnovsky and Brand, Lytess and Chekhov. The Strasbergian Method and the exercises utilizing Russian plays and poetry were for Marilyn part of a logical continuum that included her association with Arthur Miller, whose left-wing sympathies coincided with those of the Strasbergs. Marilyn’s attraction to the outcast and disenfranchised led her to love the characters in Miller’s recent plays, and even to identify with them. Lee and Arthur were in a way becoming complementary halves of father and lover, teacher and guide. “When I have problems, I like to talk to Lee.” With him, she felt protected, endorsed, welcome for the first time in a circle she respected. Grateful, she lavished gifts on his family—much to the annoyance of Milton, whose allowance to her she freely spent.
When she began to attend the group sessions at the Studio that summer, Marilyn was at first too frightened to speak. A young aspirant named Gloria Steinem one day asked Marilyn if she could imagine playing a scene before so impressive and confident a group. “Oh, no,” was the reply. “I admire all these people so much. I’m just not good enough. Lee Strasberg is a genius, you know. I plan to do what he says.”
Those orders sometimes required private rehearsals with classmates. Telephoning one young man to whom she had been assigned for a scene study, Marilyn announced herself:
“Hi—it’s me, Marilyn.”
Joking, he asked, “Marilyn who?”
“You know,” she said quite seriously, “Marilyn? from class?”
Perhaps it was the humility of the most famous woman in class that made accomplished actresses like Kim Stanley—who that year had a huge success in the lead of William Inge’s play Bus Stop—affirm that “anybody who had any largeness of spirit loved Marilyn. And she won us all. . . . She had something about her that made you love her. She didn’t do anything at first; for a long time she just sat and watched.” Frank Corsaro, a fellow student at the time and later artistic director of the Studio, recalled that Marilyn’s “endeavor to develop herself as an actress was a serious one. She was invariably late, but she listened and observed the critiques with a steadfast gaze.”
When she did speak, Marilyn had something to say. One day the young playwright Michael Gazzo suggested that a scene written by George Tabori was not quite clear. Marilyn leaned forward intently, then tentatively raised her hand, was recognized by Lee and said in a soft voice that she believed this was the point of the scene: the situation at that moment in the play was unclear to the character; confusion was the dominant “through-line” Lee was after in the rehearsal. He allowed that she was right. On another occasion, a sympathetic interviewer asked her favorite authors. When Marilyn replied that she was reading Kafka’s The Trial, her observation was acute: “I know they say it’s a kind of Jewish thing about guilt—at least that’s what Mr. Arthur Miller says,” she said, “but I think it goes beyond that. It’s really about all men and women—this sense that we’ve fallen or something. I suppose that’s what they mean by Original Sin.” These were not the statements of a dilettante, but of one who discussed what she liked, tried to read critically and to consult interpretive texts.
By mid-May, Marilyn was a regular observer at the Studio, sitting quietly in the rear of the room. At the same time, a fifty-two-foot-high photo of her was lifted into place over Loew’s State at Forty-fifth and Broadway. “That’s all they’re interested in,” she said ruefully to Eli Wallach as they walked past the theater that was preparing for the premiere of her new film.
On June 1, she was every inch Marilyn Monroe, attending the premiere of The Seven Year Itch and afterward accepting the applause of an audience that included Grace Kelly, Richard Rodgers, Henry Fonda, Margaret Truman, Eddie Fisher and Judy Holliday. Within the next few weeks, the picture opened across the country, and once again Marilyn was the most popular, most photographed, most documented person in the country—more so even than President Eisenhower. She was also earning a fortune for Fox: Itchwas (in the language of Variety) the summer’s hottest ticket, grossing over four and a half million dollars. For this Billy Wilder as producer-director received a half million and a share of the profits, and Marilyn’s agent, co-producer Charles Feldman, received $318,000 and the same additional guarantee. Marilyn, still awaiting her $100,000 bonus (which was eventually paid) had so far received only her weekly salary. Thus Greene and company were negotiating even more fervently with Fox for a new contract—not only because they could not operate much longer without it, could not buy literary properties or set up a production company, but also because they knew Fox, too, had strong incentive to keep their best product and not give cause for litigation.2
Joe DiMaggio was her escort for the premiere, coincidentally on June 1, Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday, and after the screening he was the host at a party for her at Toots Shor. “We’re just good friends,” she told the press. “We do not plan to remarry. That’s all I care to say.” At the same time, she was redoubling her time with Arthur Miller, taking long walks in lower Manhattan, dining at the Rosten home and, more privately, at the Waldorf. And there Joe tracked her to discuss Arthur. “Marilyn was afraid of Joe,” according to publicist Lois Weber,
physically afraid. He was obviously rigid in his beliefs. There must have been a great ambivalence in his feelings toward her. . . . There were times she made it clear he had hurt her very badly, maybe even struck her in some jealous rage.
Rupert Allan’s impressions were identical: “Marilyn told me that Joe had been a great friend to her after the divorce, but that while they were married he had beaten and abused her and believed her unfaithful.” And with this renewed relationship with Joe, Milton Greene was more concerned than ever that Marilyn’s diverse loyalties might sabotage his grand design for a lucrative new contract with Fox.
Early that summer, one particularly insensitive reporter in the New York press pool observed that Lee Strasberg had supplanted Milton as Marilyn Monroe’s mentor. This caused considerable tension at ensuing meetings of MMP, and around July 1 Milton urged Marilyn to join him and Amy on a trip to Italy. (“How do we meet with Marilyn while Milton is away?” asked Frank Delaney plaintively in a call to Irving Stein.) She could not be persuaded to leave New York, giving both her classes and her regular attendance at Broadway plays as the reason for remaining. She had also accepted an invitation from the Strasbergs to join them for weekends at a rented beach house on Fire Island, not far from Manhattan.
By this time, Marilyn had come to depend on Lee and Paula. Sometimes as often as twice or three times weekly, she arrived at their apartment in the middle of the night, sleepless and disheveled, complaining that her sleeping pills—for which she was developing a tolerance—were ineffective. That summer her nightmares, loneliness, the awful work of talking over and over in psychotherapy about her childhood, her absent parents, her early marriage, her resentment of Grace Goddard, her time prostituting herself, her resentment against Fox—the remembrance of all these took a fearful toll on her sensitivity and diminished rather than abetted her confidence.
In addition, Marilyn was growing ever more suspicious of the Greenes, of her professional relationship with Milton and her personal one with Amy. She felt inferior, she felt ignored in business decisions, she was bored with her own solitude. Milton and his partners could not seem to finalize a deal with Fox, and Marilyn began to wonder if she had erred in leaving Hollywood. All this she poured out to the Strasbergs in the small hours, drinking champagne when Paula offered tea, finding more pills in their cabinets until she finally drifted off to sleep at five or six in the morning.
Nineteen fifty-five, in many ways a year of valuable discovery and precious learning, was also the time when Marilyn swallowed too many pills and too much champagne. Amy recalled this as a time when Marilyn was constantly on and off a diet, on and off pills. “One day she gave me a bottle of sleeping pills and asked me to keep these for her: if she asked for them, I was to give her an argument. I told her she’d come to the right person. But soon she cajoled and begged me, and Milton insisted I give her the pills.”
As usual at that time, such drugs were not difficult to obtain, and physicians kept Marilyn and Milton supplied. “Miltowns [a popular tranquilizer] were handed out like candy,” as Amy recalled. It seemed everyone had unlimited supplies of pills—and soon Milton was as much a wreck because of them as Marilyn. Pharmaceutical companies gave doctors free pills, and some doctors gave too many free samples to patients, keeping them frequent visitors to their offices. “It was an awful cycle,” Amy added. “Milton’s brother was a doctor, and we had tons of pills—anything we wanted, uppers, downers, it was all available.”
In this regard, Marilyn’s time with Hohenberg seems to have been unfruitful. The more anxious Marilyn became, the more separate she felt from Milton and resentful of him and his therapist, as Irving Stein and Frank Delaney noted in separate memoranda throughout the year. How could Milton function when she could not? How could he, too, take pills and visit Hohenberg and yet dispatch his tasks? How deeply and how long would she feel disengaged from others, from life? Inner work invariably endures a dark and painful period, a classic night of senses and spirit, but Marilyn could not find any sustaining light or hope during that year that had promised to be so golden.
One weekend that summer at the Strasberg beach house, Marilyn stood naked in the moonlight while Susan, sharing her room, watched fascinated, admiring the resiliency, buoyancy and glow of Marilyn’s skin. “I wish I were like you,” said Susan.
“Oh, no, Susie,” Marilyn replied. “I wish I were like you! You’re about to play a great part on Broadway—Anne Frank—and people have respect for you. No, no—I have none of those things.”
That same summer, Marilyn surprised the town of Bement, Illinois, by accepting an invitation to celebrate their centenary, to open an art show and to speak about her favorite president, Lincoln, of whom a new bust was to be unveiled. To accompany her and to document the journey, she invited photographer Eve Arnold, who recalled that Marilyn “had a great sense of showmanship and self-promotion,” and this apparently negligible summertime event in rural America was not to be slighted. “I’m going to bring art to the masses!” she said with a laugh.
The trip took her away from New York for just one day. The citizens of Bement were beside themselves with adoration, taking amateur snapshots and obtaining autographs of the great movie star, and Marilyn loved it all. According to Arnold, Marilyn always knew instinctively where the camera was placed, played to it, made love to it, got proof of her existence from the still photo, not the movie’s flickering image. In the presence of the camera as a worshipful audience, a transformation occurred automatically: Marilyn’s breasts were thrust forward, her abdomen was drawn in, her rear end swiveled, a smile and a glow illuminated her face. Her skin, as Susan had remarked, had something like a translucent glow, and a fine mist of down on her face captured a kind of halo, a nimbus of light round her: photographs seemed to canonize her, to offer a creature almost ethereal as well as sensual.
She was experienced enough to know just how much she needed great photographers like Greene and Arnold, those who memorialized her in images, supporting the myth and illusion that propelled people into theaters. “She was pleased if you liked her most recent motion picture,” recalled John Springer of the Jacobs office, “but if you talked about her recent magazine cover or photo layout, she really came alive with pleasure.” And so she did in Bement, smiling, waving, meeting grandmothers, holding infants in arms—always aware of the beloved camera but also of the people who would cherish her, perhaps forever after.
Returning to New York and to weekends with the Strasbergs and the Greenes, Marilyn saw more of Arthur Miller, just as A View from the Bridge was preparing for its premiere. This she attended at the Coronet Theater on September 29, when she met the playwright’s parents for the first time. Not long after, Marilyn sat in the kitchen of Isadore and Augusta Miller’s Brooklyn home, wearing no makeup and only a plain gray skirt and a high-collared black blouse. “This is the girl I’m going to marry,” Arthur told his parents. No one thought he was very serious, for there had not yet been any open talk of divorcing Mary Grace.
Marilyn also visited Norman and Hedda Rosten. At their beach house she was once mobbed to the point of near-drowning when swimmers besieged her, but she laughed off the event, ever grateful for the attention. Champagne and caviar, prized because they were not the stuff of waifdom and orphanages, became her favorite foods that year. And poetry, however dense, nourished her immediately, even before someone began to offer an exegesis or she consulted a critical text. Rosten remembered her reading aloud with great feeling a selection from Yeats, making the words her own, as she did a photo opportunity or a movie role:
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright. . . .
When she finished, her host added, there was in the room almost a reverential hush no one dared interrupt. There seemed to be a tacit understanding not only of Yeats’s wisdom but of the words’ aptness for her who had just read them.
That autumn, there were scenes from plays by Anton Chekhov at the Actors Studio, and Lee loaned Marilyn several recordings of Tchaikovsky, Scriabin and Prokofiev—all of it adding to Marilyn’s established love for Russian culture. In these interests Arthur indulged and encouraged her, and so when she learned that season that her much-loved Michael Chekhov had died in California, Marilyn asked Arthur to read aloud with her some passages from The Brothers Karamazov, as a kind of private memorial. Chekhov had been the first to encourage her to undertake the role of Grushenka, and that evening Arthur promised to write a screenplay of the novel for her.
Expanding this cultural predilection, she went to hear the Russian pianist Emil Gilels at Carnegie Hall on October 11. When introduced, he said to Marilyn, “You must visit Russia one day. Everyone there would like to see you.”
“I would love to,” Marilyn replied, “and some day I will. Right now I’m reading Dostoevsky.”
In fact she had already made a fateful decision that very season. During her visit to Bement, Carleton Smith of the National Arts Foundation had asked if she would like to travel to Moscow to lead a contingent of American artists discussing an exchange of Western and Russian culture. No time was necessary for Marilyn to accept, and at once she took the necessary step of applying for a Russian visa. But the typical bureaucratic delays intervened—and a good thing, for she could not at this time abandon MMP and the growing prospects for an imminent deal and a return to work.
At the same time, Marilyn was known as the companion of Arthur Miller, whose every statement was attended by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Beginning in 1955, a formidable file on Marilyn Monroe also began to accumulate in Washington—records of which she was never aware. They comprise a ludicrous waste of paper.
As documents later declassified revealed, the FBI, the CIA and the office of the attorney general were in 1955 vigilant to the point of obsession regarding the travels of those thought to be dangerous to the national interest by virtue of past Communist sympathy—which was sometimes all but “proven” by anyone’s affinity for Russian culture. Marilyn’s FBI file meticulously tracked her departure from Hollywood, her relocation with the Greenes in Connecticut, her friendship with Arthur Miller, her studies at the Actors Studio and her request to travel to Russia. J. Edgar Hoover demanded that every attempt by Marilyn to leave the country be carefully monitored—travels with or without Miller, and on whatever apparently personal business. The nation just might be thick with Russian spies masquerading as movie stars.3
At the same time, Marilyn’s relationship with Arthur had effectively ended all rumors of a reconciliation with Joe. “I expect our divorce to become final within about a month,” he told reporters glumly when he arrived in Paris that summer. The final decree dissolving the marriage became effective October 31, 1955. “I never should have married him,” Marilyn told Amy Greene. “I couldn’t be the Italian housewife he wanted me to be. I married him because I felt sorry for him, he seemed so lonely and shy.” She “felt sorry” for Arthur, too, and these feelings—however much based on her wish to be needed, not merely desired—are important elements toward understanding why she contracted marriages that seemed unsuited to her talent and temperament.
In the autumn, Marilyn’s lease at the Waldorf Towers expired, and MMP took another half-year lease for her at 2 Sutton Place. From here she went to classes and therapy as usual but also intensified her theatergoing: during 1955 and early 1956 season she saw, among other plays, Paul Muni in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind; Susan Strasberg in The Diary of Anne Frank; and Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night (about which there were brief but fruitless discussions for her to play in a film version). Escorted by Marlon Brando—with whom she was often seen at theaters, restaurants and returning late to Sutton Place—she also attended several film premieres, among them a December gala for The Rose Tattoo.
At a benefit supper after that screening, Marilyn was introduced to an actress she had recently seen onstage—but one she was in no hurry to meet. In October, she had attended the opening night of George Axelrod’s first comedy after The Seven Year Itch, a farce called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (which was being presented even as the author was writing the screenplay for Bus Stop). The leading lady of Rock Hunter was Jayne Mansfield, a buxom, platinum blonde manufactured to capitalize on Marilyn.
More to the point, the play was an hilarious satire on the idea of an American screen goddess named Rita Marlowe who forms her own production company. “You all start out by saying you want to write about the real me,” says Rita to a journalist, “the shy lonely girl I really am. But then you always end up by writing the same old things. How I don’t wear underpants. My divorce . . .” The play, from first scene to last, was a pièce-à-clef about Marilyn Monroe.
As the curtain rises, Rita Marlowe has just divorced a legendary sports figure named Bronk Brannigan, a character prone to violent assertions of his rights over Rita. She is attended by her masseur, just as Marilyn regularly engaged her good friend, the actor and physical therapist Ralph Roberts, for such treatments. Similarly, there are references throughout the play to the major professional players in Marilyn’s life: Sidney Skolsky, the William Morris Agency, Charles Feldman, MCA, Billy Wilder and Darryl Zanuck—and the journalist without experience who joins forces with Rita is a clear reference to Milton Greene, novice producer. There is also a playwright named Michael Freeman—a double of Arthur Miller—who has written a work called No Hiding Place Down Here(which has a plot satirizing A View from the Bridge).
Marlowe (an obvious annexation of the names Marilyn and Monroe) is a silly, empty-headed cipher who dresses scantily both at home and work and has pretensions to act absurdly inappropriate roles (Joan of Arc, for example). Rita is also considering a neorealistic film script based on a play about a psychiatrist and a hooker—at which point Axelrod was getting dangerously close to the documentary genre.
All sexual energy, Rita cannot remember the name of a magazine from one moment to the next, but her stupidity does not prevent a happy ending: a playwright in Hollywood and the journalist transplanted there both return to New York, rejecting the artifice and regaining their souls in the bargain. The play, which ran successfully for 444 performances, did not strike Marilyn as amusing as it did theater audiences. With no further comment, she said flatly to Axelrod several months later, “I saw your play.” He did not ask her to elaborate.
* * *
As the year drew to an end, there was a major snowfall in New York and wild flurries of activity in the offices of Milton Greene and of his attorneys. For one thing, Frank Delaney left the services of Milton and MMP when he sensed Marilyn’s inexplicable loss of confidence in him. Irving Stein added Delaney’s duties to his own.
On another issue, Marilyn’s occasional hairdresser Peter Leonardi falsely claimed that she and Milton had promised to set him up in business at his own salon; he brought the matter to deposition and then foolishly tried to bribe a settlement out of court by taking as hostage several of Marilyn’s fur coats. Irving Stein’s corporate notes from October 6 through November 9, when the matter was resolved, record significantly that the entire matter—more reminiscent of a Feydeau farce than a serious corporation—was to have been adjudicated not by attorneys or police, but by Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hohenberg. Stein referred to her in his notes as “Marilyn’s psycho.”
The influence of Dr. Hohenberg on the day-to-day decisions of Marilyn’s business life seems to have grown like Topsy: “Milton telephoned to say the psychiatrist vetoed Marilyn’s seeing Peter [Leonardi] . . . and that Marilyn should not submit to the demands of everyone who insisted upon seeing her.” Why it should have been necessary for Greene or anyone else to obtain Dr. Hohenberg’s approval, or even to involve her in business and legal matters, is not easy to know, but that she made herself virtually indispensable to Milton and Marilyn was obvious. And that they were in no position to act independently—much less to regulate their mutual, increasing reliance on barbiturates—further suggests that perhaps they required treatment other than what Margaret Hohenberg was prepared to provide.
But the principals of Marilyn Monroe Productions were to end 1955 and begin 1956 in good spirits, whatever the attendant psychological problems. After all the fussing and feuding between Fox and MMP—much of it merely keeping lawyers and agents busy with reams of paper—a contract was ready for Marilyn to sign.
Its principal provisions provided at last the tardy bonus for Itch, plus $100,000 per upcoming film and $500 weekly during production for maid service and other expenses. She had to appear in only four films for Fox over the next seven years, and they would be projects whose subject, director and cinematographer she could approve; she could make one picture at another studio for each she made with Fox; and she could record, be heard on radio and appear on a half-dozen television programs annually; she would also have the benefits of a tax shelter, for her own corporation would pay out her salary.4 In regular monthly checks to MMP, Fox would pay Marilyn a gross annual salary of $100,000, and Milton would receive $75,000.
The year ended as it began, with a champagne party—this one held privately and quietly, at the Greenes’ home as midnight tolled on December thirty-first. To make it altogether a happy new year, they had just decided on the company’s first two projects ahead, each based on a play. Marilyn was to appear in a film of William Inge’s Broadway hit Bus Stop for Fox, and with Laurence Olivier in a movie version of Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince, to be produced in London.
“I’m beginning to understand myself now,” she said that season. “I can face myself more, you might say. I’ve spent most of my life running away from myself, but after all, I’m a mixture of simplicity and complexes.” There would be ample and dramatic opportunities offstage, during the coming year, for all this to be tested.
1. For all the boldness and the ambiguity of her adoption of disguises, there was still the fundamental crisis of identity, to which Marilyn even referred jokingly. When Susan Strasberg once said she was in conflict about something and that she felt she had another voice clamoring inside her head, Marilyn remarked, “You have only one voice? I have a whole committee!”
2. However much Hollywood marketed Marilyn and sex, it continued to reward elegance: the Oscars in 1953 and 1954 were handed to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. Even later, her extraordinary work in Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl was ignored by colleagues: Marilyn, who had the temerity to have spent a year away from Hollywood, was not even nominated for an Academy Award.
3. Curiously, however—perhaps because it had to be done with the express approval of the attorney general—there was no extensive security check conducted on Marilyn during 1955.
4. At the time, the top corporation tax was fifty-three percent, while the top personal income tax was eighty-eight percent.