Marilyn: A Biography (24 page)

This is not to suggest that Monroe had become
any innocent victim. It is more to the thesis that she herself puts
into her artistry the transmutations of a sorceress; how
characteristic that on the set she is often a spiritless “sloth”
until she can reach those inspirations she will need for a scene.
It is even a sociological phenomenon that out of progressive acting
groups with left-wing insights upon social problems should come
precisely this species of witchcraft, even if it is never perceived
remotely as such by Strasberg or anyone about him. Nonetheless,
Actor’s Studio is not without comparison to a cavern where
mysteries of acting are invoked in soul-shifting states of
ceremony.

Excellent. We are fortified with a tool to
comprehend a few of her actions in the films she will make through
the last years of her life. They are to be her best films, the
fulfillment of an art — they will also be made with a clanking of
chains, and a molasses-like set of impedimenta to the movement of
schedule, the near-breakdown of director after director, the hatred
of her fellow actors, and an occasional collapse of her methods of
work as those methods become more undisciplined and inchoate to the
eyes of her colleagues with every film. Yet her art deepens. She
gets better. Her subtlety takes on more resonance. By
The
Misfits
she is not so much a woman as a presence, not an actor,
but an essence—the language is hyperbole, yet her effects are not.
She will appear in these final films as a visual existence
different from other actors and so will leave her legend where it
belongs, which is on the screen.

But since
Bus Stop
is the last good
film she makes that does not guarantee a crisis each shooting day
on the set, it is worth a word. In Logan she had a director who
respected her and had the instinct to recognize (with much warning
from Strasberg and Greene) that she must be allowed all of a long
time-consuming meandering way to achieve her effects. Yes, Logan
knew enough to work with Paula Strasberg, and with Milton Greene,
who designed a dangerous chalk-white makeup, “almost a clown
make-up,” for Marilyn’s role as Cherie, a tawdry southern cabaret
singer, chalk-white precisely because she played the role of a girl
who sang until the bars closed and lived on coffee and aspirin. It
became a makeup to give pathos to the character – a talentless
singer who dreamed of a great career.

She was up for the role. She had learned from
Strasberg. Discarding preliminary sketches for her costume, she
chose ratty clothes and looked for ripped stockings out of wardrobe
with crude stitches, she purchased a sad small-town southern
glamour by these funky clothes (a perfect piece of
objectification), and brought to life some physical trappings of
the biography she was to play, Cherie! And thereby began to create
a comic role so sad, so raunchy, so dazzling in its obliviousness
to its own poverty of talent, that some would consider it her
greatest film. For certain, it is the only film she ever made where
she was ready to present a character independent of herself, even
down to accent – it is not Monroe’s voice we hear but the blank
tones of a dumb southern drawl, she communicates continents of
basic ignorance in each gap of the vowels (southern nasalities are
once again off in orbit), and her eyes roll and dart to the
corners, as restless yet as lifeless as agitated marbles each time
she talks about the promiscuities of her past. She has the blank
schizoid fever of poor southern white trash, she is blank before
moral dilemmas, blank before provocation, blank before dread – she
suggests all the death that has already been visited upon the
character in the mechanical hard-remembered way she clicks the
switch for her red spotlight during a song and dance. So
Bus
Stop
becomes a vehicle for Monroe, but the rest of the film
suffers, the crowd scenes might as well have been done by a unit
director from MGM, and much of the atmosphere established by
supporting actors has the hyped-up hokey sound of bit parts in a
stock company too long on the road. It is as if Logan has been able
to direct her, but cannot give credibility to much else except for
one triumphant scene of betrothal between the leading man, Don
Murray, and Monroe at the end, all the better apparently for a
history of feuds and squabbles between them. She becomes savage in
her relations with Don Murray, and in a scene where she is supposed
to slap him, whips the tail of her gown across his face so hard he
suffers several cuts, an unprofessional roughness for which she
prepares to apologize, but cannot. Instead she bursts into tears
and yells at Murray, “Damn it, damn it, damn it – I won’t apologize
to you, no, no.” It is as if the spirits forbid her. Once when
Murray asks her why she continues to talk in a southern drawl after
their work for the day is done, she replies, “Can’t you-all see
ah’m making contact with my character?” Whatever love may be lost
between them is actor’s love.

The film comes out to reviews that take her
seriously for the first time as an actress, but to her pain she is
not even nominated for an Academy Award. (The prize goes that year
to Ingrid Bergman for
Anastasia
– the heart of Hollywood has
decided to forgive Bergman for Rossellini.) However, Miller comes
out of Reno soon after shooting to join her in New York. They are
getting ready to marry.

It is, of course, an orgy of publicity. Who
could prevent it? The newspapers shift their new predictions for
the date of the nuptials from edition to edition, and even Miller’s
“No comment” becomes a headline on his return from Reno. Now there
are fifty variants on one fertile idea: the Great American Brain is
marrying the Great American Body. Because Marilyn is taking up the
faith (Reformed Synagogue), the
New York
Post
, whose
base of readership is suburban liberal, trade union, middle class
and — in the absence of other sheets — progressive, goes in for
tooth-sucking analyses of the wedding to come, plus an interview
with Arthur Miller’s mother. “She opened her whole heart to me,”
said Mrs. Miller, who then told how Marilyn was learning to make
gefilte fish, borscht, chicken soup with matzoh balls, chopped
liver, tsimis, potato pirogen — Marilyn is obviously going to have
to come her way from Dougherty’s carrots and peas.

Now the House Un-American Activities
Committee provides an interruption to their plans for marriage.
Looking for publicity, they summon Miller as a witness to explain
why he was not granted a passport in 1954. That is an old case,
which has been brought up again only because Miller is re-applying
for a passport; he desires to go to England for the making of
The Prince and the Showgirl
and has been quietly negotiating
with the State Department, who act as if they are prepared to
refuse him again (under the terms of a regulation ready to deny
passports to people “supporting Communist movements” — although by
1956 that has become an embarrassing power). It is four years since
the peak of the McCarthy days and, next to testing a new hydrogen
bomb, Miller and Marilyn are the most newsworthy item in America.
Everybody in Washington understands that the Un-American Activities
Committee, which has been altogether out of the news, now hopes to
regain some of its lost attention by being able to cite Arthur
Miller for contempt should he refuse to testify. Since publicity is
a subcommittee angel, they are naturally slavish in their secret
respect for Marilyn. So they also offer a secret deal: if Miss
Monroe will pose for a picture with Chairman Walter of the
Committee, Miller’s difficulties may begin to disappear. Miller
refuses. He is even warned by his lawyers not to tell anyone. Who
will believe such farce?

In the meantime, the hearings are given
headlines. Marilyn endears herself to everyone from liberal
Democrats to the
Daily Worker!
She tells the press her
fiancé will win. There is a newsreel clip that shows her in the
midst of an interview at this time on a lawn outside a Washington
home, and she is never more beautiful. She looks in love. It could
be said, if we are to invest in the logic of sentiment, that she
looks deeply in love as she slowly replies out of a profound and
pretty confusion to the questions which are asked of her. She seems
bemused, as if thinking of pleasant hours with Miller rather than
of the questions besieging her now. Of course, she is probably on
sedation. We must live in two lives whenever we think of her one
life.

It is still a year in which a movie star can
be persecuted in the press for open left-wing associations, and so
the suggestion that her fortune is committed to Miller’s fortune
gives her status as a heroine. She is beginning to capture the
imagination of America’s intellectuals; grudgingly, they are
obliged to contemplate the remote possibility that she is not so
much a movie star as a major figure in American life — of a new
sort! Of course, they will not move too far in this direction until
her death. But since European intellectuals are agog at this new
portrait — America persecuting its outstanding author and most
attractive movie star in a neo-McCarthian wholly sophomoric
hysteria, et cetera — the State Department quietly intervenes,
Chairman Walter quietly breaks his wind, and Miller and Monroe have
held their first fort. He gets the passport. They can be married
and go to England to make the movie with Olivier.

So Marilyn is indoctrinated by Rabbi Robert
Goldberg from the environs of New Haven on some general tenets and
theory of Judaism (for two hours!), embraces the faith, enters the
fold, and is told there is no afterlife. (What is the pride of
Reformed Judaism if it is not the absence of an afterlife?) A
double-ring ceremony takes place in Katonah at the home of Kay
Brown, Miller’s literary agent, and follows by two days the
unscheduled civil ceremony in White Plains, which had been quickly
arranged on Friday evening after an horrific press conference on
early Friday afternoon at Miller’s farm in Connecticut. That was
when Myra Sherbatoff of
Paris-Match
was killed chasing their
newsworthy automobile, and four hundred people by Zolotow’s
estimate (he was there) gathered around Milton Greene to hear how
they would be given twenty minutes for newsreels, twenty for still
photographers, thirty for reporters, a technological ceremony for
the stifling midday landlocked heat of a Connecticut farm in the
end of June.

“Give him a kiss, Marilyn,” sing the
photographers.

“One shot of the lovebirds, please.”

One nightmare. Yet we have pictures of the
day, and she looks happy. Death, press hysteria, Congress, and
religious vows soon to come — it is all part of the
tohu-bohu
(if we are to use a good Hebrew word) of what has
always been her public life.

Still, how beautiful they look in their
wedding pictures. Staid Arthur Miller has been a scandal to his
friends ever since he came back from Reno, for he and Marilyn sit
in entwinement for hours. Like Hindu sculpture, their hands go over
one another’s torsos, limbs, and outright privates in next to full
view of company, a questionable activity to perform in front of
cynics, but it is as if the hero and heroine will each declare to
the world that no matter the extent of
her
sexual
scholarship and
his
meager schooling, they meet as equals in
the godly art. They are lovers, and that is the only law of balance
in sexual thermodynamics. They will immolate the past with the heat
of the present. He buys her a gold wedding ring and inscribes it,
“
A to M, June 1956. Now is Forever
.” It is a fervent
response to whatever sentiments of confidence he hears pounding in
his heart.

There is in retrospect a dialogue on the
wedding day of Quentin and Maggie in
After the Fall
.

maggie: . . . you said we have to love what
happened, didn’t you. Even the bad things.

quentin: Sweetheart — an event itself is not
important; it’s what you took from it. Whatever happened to you,
this is what you made of it, and I love this!

A few lines later Maggie says, “There’s
people who’re going to laugh at you.”

quentin: Not any more, dear, they’re going to
see what I see. . . .

maggie: What do you see? Tell me!
[
Bursting out of her
] ’Cause I think . . . you were ashamed
once, weren’t you?

quentin: I see your suffering, Maggie; and
once I saw it, all shame fell away.

maggie: You . . . were ashamed?

quentin [
with difficulty
]: Yes. But
you’re a victory, Maggie, you’re like a flag to me, a kind of
proof, somehow, that people can win.

It is his rallying cry. One can hardly remain
a left-wing writer if one does not believe that the people who are
coming up from the bottom have enough goodness to win, have enough
moral wherewithal to deserve to win, yes, she is his living
testament, for she — his blessed heroine — is up from the people.
So she becomes the affirmation to replace all lost left-wing
certainties.

Of course, Miller, like many a playwright
before him, is too complex a man to remain in one consistent piece.
He is also a
practical
poet and much immersed in studies of
money coming in and money going out. There is more to life than
affirmations of passion and sexual vaults over the past. Miller is
always asking Greene about Marilyn Monroe Productions, its details,
its plans, its financing, its projects, its difficulties, until
Greene says to him, “Be a husband! Leave the corporation to Marilyn
and me.” No, there is no quick love between Miller and Milton, nor
much more between Miller and the Strasbergs. Lee Strasberg will
give Marilyn away at the double-ring wedding, but Arthur, still
keeping his opinion to himself, does not approve of Actor’s Studio,
nor Strasberg’s mode of teaching that makes actors “secret people,”
and “makes acting secret [when] it’s the most communicative art
known to man.” (Never has the inborn antipathy of the progressive
mind for the dialectical hitch been more in evidence!) We can be
witness to a small part of their first meeting. It is at
Strasberg’s home before the marriage, and one can anticipate
Marilyn’s excitement. But it all goes wrong. Marilyn begins to talk
of a special record – Woody Herman playing Stravinsky – which Lee
Strasberg has let her hear. Arthur wishes to share this pleasure,
and Strasberg puts it on. A marvelous record, says Arthur, where
can one purchase it? Can’t be done, Strasberg assures him. The
record is one of a kind. Arthur looks at it. It has a commercial
label. May be hard to find, Arthur suggests, but not one of a kind.
Most certainly is, says Strasberg, ending the discussion. It is
evident to Miller that Strasberg is trapped in a boast he must have
made on another occasion to Marilyn that the Woody
Herman-Stravinsky record was unique. No, no quick love between
Miller and Strasberg.