Marilyn: A Biography (22 page)

“Oh, no, I’m not a New Yorker,” the girl
said. “Just got here a few weeks ago.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

“Well, I’m studying at Actor’s Studio.”

“That’s nice.” Mrs. Rosten was impressed.
“Have you been in any plays recently?”

“No, I’ve never done anything for the
stage.”

So it continued. Later, after the women had
become more intimate, Hedda’s husband, Norman, a friend of
Miller’s, would sometimes be her escort.

One evening in late summer of 1955, she
attended a party in Brooklyn Heights given by some of Rosten’s
neighbors. When they reached the house and he introduced her as his
“friend, Marilyn Monroe,” nobody believed him and they went ahead
with their drinking and conversation. Rosten, perhaps frustrated by
the people’s disinterest reintroduced her several times only to get
an unconvinced “Yeah, sure,” from his host and others.

Who in New York could recover from the shock
that Marilyn had made her voyage with a personality as modest, as
uncertain, as vulnerable, and as bereft of social skin as this girl
without guile who told unendurably sad stories of rapes and rebuffs
in childhood. It was natural to see the tenderness embodied in that
talent. How soon must each of her guides in New York have become
convinced that her talent must absolutely not be tampered with by
anybody else, for others would not know how to bring out the best
in her. Yet if she begins three major relations this year in New
York and each of these artists, Greene, Miller, and Strasberg, is
finally devoted to serving her (until the finances of one, the
personal life of the second, and the throttled ambition of the
third have all been invested to the hilt), still each man must
begin to think of how she could in turn serve him. It was
impossible not to. Was there a writer alive in New York that year
who would not have named some one of his literary properties for
which she might be superbly suited as a tenant? Or an actor who
could not begin to put a show together? Or an impresario . . .?
(Even Mike Todd wanted her to ride on a pink elephant in a gala at
Madison Square Garden, and of course she did.) High-mindedness,
self-interest, and the need to protect a talented lady is enough to
turn any artist into a partisan. Of course they go to war with one
another. And she will use each of the three against the other two.
Why should she not? They will all use her. The comedy is that no
one of them is as noble as the dream they share of her potentiality
delivered. It is a cruel comedy, and will yet contribute to costing
her a life.

So we may as well attempt to comprehend them.
There is Greene, the least known in reputation, and probably the
most injured by her. It is certain he takes the largest overt
gamble and comes near to bankruptcy by supporting her through all
of this year in which she makes no films. After she is married
Greene will eventually be inched out, inch by expelled inch, and
Marilyn, under Miller’s guidance, will end the partnership just as
the company is ready to make real money. She will announce to the
press that she sees no reason to give half the proceeds from her
work to Mr. Greene. Still Greene will settle for considerably less
than he could have asked. It is possible that of the three men, he
had the simplest kind of love for her. In any case, he was married,
she was married — it was not a position for infighting. He could
serve as a buffer in her relations with directors, and always
provide her with a poetic glimpse of the future. If he had the kind
of mind that could comprehend her childish glee at the thought of
being seen on a pink elephant in Madison Square Garden – Mike Todd
had made his proposal through Greene – he was also capable of
saying to her toward the end of their partnership, “Some day, when
you’ve had enough of a white picket fence and babies, and want to
make a film again, I’ll tell you who to make it with and this has
nothing to do with me.”

“Who?”

“Make it with Chaplin.”

Of course, Greene was right. It was with
Chaplin she should have made a film. We can see Greene’s vision of
the sort of film it might have been in those photographs he took of
her in black net stockings. No ordinary relation reveals itself
there between photographer and model, rather a mist of glamour,
tenderness, amusement, sex, and subtle sorrow. They would tease
each other for years. “Milton H. Greene,” she would say after
listening to an explanation, “you talk in circles.”

“It’s the way I walk.”

They would laugh, but the relation was
dependent on Marilyn’s belief that he was absolutely selfless in
his devotion. Once Miller was able to underline any evidence of
self-interest, Greene had a position which could only deteriorate,
and did. That, however, was more than a year off. She would yet
make two of her best movies with Greene.

Still, the photographer (whether tender
friend, romantic dalliance, or some part of giggles in bed with Amy
and Marilyn) had to be outmatched by the playwright. Marilyn was
not indifferent to status, and Miller was her equal and more. For
Broadway was dominated by the presence of two playwrights,
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Of course, that is a species
of critical mystery if one compared their work, but Marilyn was not
about to. Williams had already done
The Glass Menagerie
,
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
Summer and Smoke
,
Camino
Real
,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and had a literary style as
comprehensive in its influence on the theatre of the Fifties as had
been Hemingway’s influence on the novel, while Miller had only a
workmanlike style, limited lyrical gifts, no capacity for
intellectual shock, and only one major play to his credit. If there
were some who applauded
All My Sons
,
The Crucible
, or
A View from the Bridge
, there were many who had not. He was
a major playwright on the basis of
Death of a Salesman
. Of
course, that play had given a deeper emotional experience to New
York theatregoers than any other work since the war, and he was the
only American playwright of stature who was not homosexual in his
themes or his life. He was also much respected in Europe, where the
inferiority of his style to Williams’ would be less evident in
translation. For that matter, he was revered by the whole
hard-working half of the American theatre that was left wing and
had voyaged from Odets and the Group Theatre to Actor’s Studio
while looking for a hero. Miller was the only candidate remotely
available. He had dignity, looked the part, spoke in leftist
simples that might conceivably be profound, was reminiscent of such
tall spare American models of virtue and valor as Lincoln and Gary
Cooper, and so could certainly serve as a major figure for the
Jewish middle class of New York (who were the economic bedrock of
Broadway). From that point of view, Williams was merely a distiller
of exotic perfumes, a theatrical occult, whereas Miller knew how to
compose drama out of middle-class values. No one else in that
period did. So his audiences recovered long sought for echoes of
Ibsen and O’Neill. They could encounter their own middle-class
sense of themselves, study their devotion to values imposed from
without (which is the aching core of middle-class life-allegiance
to an identity one did not request). When Miller began to strip his
characters of their values, the audience, particularly at
Death
of a Salesman
, experienced a sensation of unique emotional
power; their minds — in a year when no one was yet familiar with
the phenomenon — were blown. The phrase is used up today but the
sensation then was not. It gave life.

So he had done it once, and in a way no one
ever forgot. Even people who did not like
Salesman
found to
their horror that the play made them weep. But he had not done it
with equal power before, nor been able to do it again in
The
Crucible
and in
A View from the Bridge
. His creative
life had become first cramped, then wholly constipated, and the
early years of the Fifties turned out a discouraging period in
which every description of him as a theatrical giant must have left
Miller feeling like a giant in chains. The good and great work
would simply not come. He remained locked in Brooklyn in a marriage
of fifteen years’ duration whose best life had long cooled, and was
maintained as the first prominence in the American theatre more
from the drama critics’ patriotic need to insist upon a
heterosexual than from any natural right to hold the post against
the ever oncoming new productions of Tennessee. If Miller was ever
disturbed by the thought that he might be an overrated or expired
talent, he had then much to lose, for his idea of himself after
Salesman
had become immense. (Had he been an actor, such
loftiness of presence would have always had him cast as the Admiral
or the President.) He was sufficiently pontifical to become the
first Jewish Pope, he puffed upon his pipe as if it were the bowl
of the Beyond, and regaled sophisticated New York dinner partied
with tedious accounts of his gardening and his well-digging, he was
a Hamsun and Rolvaag of the soil, a great man! – one had to listen.
Of course, by such measure he was an enigma, for his verbal ideas
were banal, his processes of reasoning while not disagreeable were
nonetheless not remarkable. His best intellectual presence was in
his boyish grin, which for a great man was disarming. But he had no
new work. The stinginess for which he was famous – find the witness
to testify that Miller had ever picked up a check – now seemed to
have become a species of creative thrift. He was tight, he was tied
up, he was abstemious – an artist in a time of such orderliness and
depression can feel he has nothing to write about. Experience
repeats itself with the breath of a turnip.

We must picture this tall and timid hero of
middle-class life, as guarded in his synapses as a banker, when he
is visited by the return of a dream, a blonde and indescribable
movie star as wild in reputation as the buried dynamos of American
life (of which he has seen so little), and she is as delightful in
her presence, as funny, as changeable, as interesting, and as
remarkable as any adolescent dream of a heavenly blonde: Yet this
blonde heaven wants him. There is a touching passage in
After
the Fall
which may give the flavor of this period:

quentin: I’m glad you called; I’ve often
thought about you the last couple of years. All the great things
happening to you gave me a secret satisfaction for some reason.

maggie: Maybe ’cause you did it.

quentin: Why do you say that?

maggie: I don’t know, just the way you looked
at me. . . . Like . . . out of your
self
. Most people, they
. . . just look
at
you.

A little later she tells him he is “like a
god.” Other men would have laughed at her, she says, or “tried for
a quick one.”

quentin [
to Listener
]: Yes! It’s all
so clear — the honor was that I hadn’t tried to go to bed with her!
She took it for a tribute to her “value,” and I was only afraid!
God, the hypocrisy!

He would be inhuman if he did not have
sufficient ambition to recognize that a marriage to Monroe would be
theatrically equal to five new works by Williams. Besides, there
was all of the experience of her life to enrich his own literary
experience, a diamond mine for any playwright looking for another
big play.

Still, how she must have terrified him. Where
his work was not conspicuously innocent of sex, he tended to be a
hint puritanical; he came out of that long line of Jewish
middle-class lore which sees any heavy commitment to passion as a
dire transaction. If he was thrilled by her, he must also have been
shivered with her reputation. How many times had he not heard
tales? “She was chewed,” he would also write in
After the
Fall
, “and spat out by a long line of grinning men! Her name
floating in the stench of locker rooms and parlor-car cigar smoke!”
Yes, if he is a repository of dignity, he is also no fool. He knows
she offers him not a gift but a gamble. If they marry, he will be a
target of envy and evil talk; if they fail, an object of ridicule.
A man who has lost confidence in his creative power sees ridicule
as the broom that can sweep him to extinction. It is not easy for
an artist with the psychology of poverty to move into what may be a
cornucopia of possibilities or equally a maelstrom.

Probably she, in turn, could not be excited
more by his caution. She is not unlike a handsome actor who runs
away from eager women all day only to go out and buy his sex that
night. It has to be a novelty to desire a man who is not certain he
wants her. Shades of Fred Karger, a pure male thrust of desire must
rise in her at the thought she is the seducer. Plus all the joy of
being able to educate another. For how well she can do this we have
a clue in the seduction of Tony Curtis in
Some Like It Hot
–
never does she look happy in a sex scene. So, for all of a year,
does she chase Miller until he is caught, and it is a sweet history
of walks and long talks in modest Brooklyn. But then such modesty
of means in Miller has to appeal to her enormously. In her reaction
against Hollywood, the streets of Brooklyn Heights speak of the
gentility of an easier nineteenth century. With her awareness of
mood, how keenly must history come into her pores on the lavender
hue of Victorian brownstones at twilight and the muffled cry of the
foghorn up from the harbor — it is a year in which Miller will
begin to believe that he can dare to end his marriage, separate
from his children, and find a hope of love with her, yet it must
also be evident that gaiety and depression shift in her psyche like
the loud wisps on each and every chop of wind, and he has not only
a mistress but a new child who is utterly dependent upon him. In
all misers must live the outsize fear of squandering their
substance for too little — how happy must Miller feel at the
discovery he can give his best to a woman of large possibilities
greater perhaps than his own — it is the supposition one seems able
to extract from the happiness of his face on the day they are
married.