Marilyn: A Biography (26 page)

A day arrives when Paula Strasberg strikes
with “torrents of love and interest.” She tells Olivier that his
performance is artificial. It will not be long before she is banned
from the set, then sent home from England. (Somehow, Olivier cannot
grow accustomed to Monroe’s habit of walking away from him to
confer with Paula.) Mrs. Strasberg has been struck down, however,
for loyalty on the right front. After this, Paula would be working
with Marilyn for the rest of her life. And Milton Greene would
catch the backed-up cess. From Marilyn’s point of view, she was the
producer of the film, but had no artistic control. Greene had given
all that away to Olivier! One gets a glimpse of her rage, plus the
mode in which Arthur and she have been talking about Milton, right
after Greene announces to the British press
on his own
that
he is ready to set up a British subsidiary of Marilyn Monroe
Productions in order to make films in England. How unaware Milton
must have been of Marilyn’s feelings. Obviously, she had given him
too small a clue.

Miller put in a call to Greene, but his anger
was such that he was shouting into the instrument and all Greene
could hear was an incoherent roar. He recalls his angry reply, “If
you want to talk to me, talk to me. If you’re going to yell, then
I’m not going to listen.” When the roar continued, he slammed down
the receiver.

Doubtless, he could then measure the
beginning of the end of his relation to Marilyn Monroe Productions.
Implicated Greene! He was also forced to serve as Olivier’s
emissary to inform Paula Strasberg that she was exiled. Somewhere
in these embattled weeks, Monroe summons her analyst from New York
and delays production another week.

For a taste of mutual relations just before
the banishment, then we must trust Zolotow. If this glimpse of a
scene is not true, we know it ought to be.

One day when Monroe was being insufferably
slow about everything, Olivier said something about speeding things
up a bit. Mrs. Strasberg said, “You shouldn’t rush Marilyn. After
all, Chaplin took eight months to make a movie.”

Olivier looked from Monroe to Mrs. Strasberg
to Greene. He didn’t say a word. But his expression indicated that
the analogy between Monroe and Chaplin was possibly the most
nauseating remark he had ever heard.

Olivier is wrong. British snobbery is once
again building empires and buggering them. All parties concerned
finish the film in a cloud of detestations and Marilyn makes a
little speech to the cast. “I hope you will all forgive me. It
wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very, very sick all through the picture.
Please — please don’t hold it against me.”

She is introduced to the Queen. It does no
good. She has lost the British press. They sniff and snipe to a
fare-thee-well. She did not have the common touch, she did not know
in the way Winston Churchill did
how to take fish and chips
with Cockneys.

The Millers return to America. The dream that
they were destined for a great and mighty marriage may already have
foundered. One would like a picture of Olivier’s face as he said
goodbye.

* * *

They come back to the Greenes’ apartment on
Sutton Place, and divide their time between New York and Miller’s
farm in Connecticut. The racketing assembly line of daily publicity
shuts down. They begin to have some of the married life Miller once
envisaged. Later he will indicate that this fall, winter, and
spring, plus the summer they had together in Amagansett, was their
happiest time, and if this would clash with the Strasbergs’ view
that the marriage was already hurt in final fashion by the
discovery of Miller’s notebook in Egham, it is better to recognize
that their marriage requires love to enter the service of medicine.
So for a period he will be the most deeply devoted physician of her
life, and she will love him back — in very much the way gentile
girls are supposed to love Jewish doctors. There is so much concern
for healing you! In all of Miller’s early plays is one progressive
theme: social evil derives from minds sickened by inhuman values.
Those minds can best be cured by healing the heart. He loved her
heart. It is significant that Paula Strasberg, interviewed in New
York right after
The Prince and the Showgirl
(which is to
say right after Egham), was sufficiently uninhibited to say, “I
have never seen such tenderness and love as Arthur and Marilyn feel
for each other. How he values her! I don’t think any woman I’ve
ever known has been so
valued
by a man.” It seems Egham had
not blown all the walls just yet.

Actually, they settle into good days and bad
days. Which is the narrative line of marriage. In England he has
been a failure to her. In
After the Fall
, Maggie cries, “You
should’ve gone in there roaring! ’Stead of a polite liberal and
affidavits. . . .” Greene remarked: “She wanted a fuehrer to deal
with Olivier, and got a broker.” No, Marilyn has not wanted
Miller’s insights into the complexity of the artist’s working
situation. So Arthur has been, yes, a failure in England, and at
Egham a traitor. But the marriage can hardly be dead. She is in the
deepest need of a cure. Her illness is made up of all that oncoming
accumulation of ills she has postponed from the past, all that
sexual congress with men she has not loved, and all those
unfinished hours with men she has loved, all the lies she has told,
all the lies told about her, all unavenged humiliations sleeping
like unfed scorpions in the unsettled flesh. Worse! — all
unfinished family insanity, plus her own abused nerves. Plus the
need to come to rest in some final identity. (Even in her last
Life
interview with Meryman, she will say, “My work is the
only ground I’ve ever had to stand on. . . . To put it bluntly, I
seem to have a whole super-structure with no foundation.”) If she
has known the best sexual athletes of Hollywood (that capital of
sex) and Miller at his worst has to be an inhibited householder
from Brooklyn, nonetheless she loves him. He is the first man she
has met upon whom she can found an identity, be Marilyn Monroe, the
wife of Arthur Miller. That alone may provide her such happiness
that she is able for this period at least to grant him that
indispensable fiction for the maintenance of marriage — you are the
best lover I ever had. Of course,
best lover
is its own
happy category. Many a man or woman has a sexual life with oncoming
lovers who appear each in turn the best, one lover for each face of
the sexual best; somehow there are twenty best faces. It would
hardly be unnatural if, feeling some tenderness with him she has
not necessarily known before, she would decide tenderness was, yes,
best, tenderness was best, even as the number of certified sexual
arrivals — call Dr. Kinsey! — may once have been best, or some high
electric discharge into the stratosphere of the shaking sexual
tree, some sweet taste of liberty (the freedom to fuck!), any
category can be best: lips, smell, skin,
whatever
— there is
no standard to keep us from deciding that our present sex is at the
maximum. Of course, we all grow old — that little problem! Still,
we can always carry our sexual past into the present (even as
Miller suggested in
After the Fall
), but then we are able to
succeed at making the present lover equal to the sum of all which
has gone before only if we are also increasing, that is becoming
wiser, wittier, or possessed of more psychic strength. We have to
transcend what is past — in our emotions, at least, if not in our
bodies. Emotion has to work through the sorrow of the past without
self-pity; so, one must find more wealth in the heart — no small
requirement!

But there is small evidence that they were
ever in such a state. Like everything else in Marilyn’s life, she
lived in the continuing condition of a half-lie, which she imposed
upon everyone as an absolute truth — it was that Miller adored her
out of measure. Like a
goddess
. Since Miller was also a man
with such separate needs as the imperative to write well, as well
as to profit from her talents as much as anyone else was
prospering, yes, whenever he emerged as a
separate person
—
fell phrase of romance! — this half-lie or half-truth that he
adored her without limit had to collapse. Where she had claimed an
absolute truth that was ill-founded, now there was an absolute
denial, equally ill-founded. He did not love her at all. He wished
only to use her.

A picture of just such emotional swings is
revealed in her habits at Amagansett. The summer of 1957 is the
period in which he works best as Young Doctor Miller, and often
will get her off sleeping pills, or down to just one or two a
night; sometimes she will even sleep. Restored by the least bit of
rest, there are days when she will have endless energy and show
exquisite sensitivity — at least to his lover’s eye. She has only
to study the petals of a flower to invoke the full appreciation of
his adoring view — “she was able to look at a flower as if she had
never seen one before,” he would say in an interview — and we get a
glimpse of what was most tender and attractive between them in a
quotation Guiles selects for us from Miller’s short story, “Please
Don’t Kill Anything.”

The waves were breaking into the net now, but
they could not yet see any fish. She put her two hands up to her
checks and said, “Oh, now they know they’re caught!” She laughed.
“Each one is wondering what happened!” He was glad she was making
fun of herself even if her eyes were fixed in fear on the submerged
net. She glanced up at her husband and said, “Oh, dear, they’re
going to be caught now.”

He started to explain, but she quickly went
on, “I know it’s all right as long as they’re eaten. They’re going
to eat them, aren’t they?”

“
They’ll sell them to the fish stores,” he
said softly, so the old man at the winch wouldn’t hear. “They’ll
feed people.”

“
Yes,” she said, like a child reassured.
“I’ll watch it. I’m watching it,” she almost announced to him. But
in her something was holding its breath.

We are finally dealing with the root of human
comedy, and it is tragic. She is a girl who cannot bear the death
of one little fish — she is thus genuinely sensitive to the
expiration of life, to the instant when it stirs intimations, which
go to the root of her divine nerves — yet she is ready to kill
herself before she can allow his will to influence her will.

During years to come when her suicide
attempts will be not infrequent, he will come to recognize that her
desire to kill herself would kill him almost as effectively in the
eyes of society. “I’m all the evil in the world, aren’t I?” Quentin
says to Maggie in the middle of just such an attempt. “A suicide
kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!”

Of course, Miller is not without his own
purchase on contradiction. He is a masterpiece of love and thrift,
generosity and pinch. If he comes to her as a man bursting with the
desire to offer his love to someone who has need of it, she must
know all the pleasure of a thief who rips off a consummate miser.
What a treasure in the hoard! For the first time in her life she
can live in a milieu which adores her, adores her twice, first as a
star, and then because she has chosen Arthur and so prefers
intelligentsia and the theatre to capitalists, professional sports,
or Hollywood. Moreover, there are the near to unlimited funds of
his attention — it is such a special and loving attention. She has
the most talented slave in the world. And she has full need to
manipulate a slave after a life in which her nerves have been
pulled by the imperatives of others.

That, however, is only one side of Miller. He
is also ambitious, limited and small-minded, an intellectual who is
often scorned by critics outside the theatre for his intellectual
lacks. Nor has he developed to meet such criticisms. Rather, he has
reinforced his old walls. He has virtually a terror of the kind of
new experience that might open his ideas; so she is enough new
experience to last him for a lifetime.

If these limitations have cut off his work
even before he has come to live with her, the inability to do much
writing in their first year together sets early patterns that will
later hurt him. (Of course, the fact that he is still being
harassed by congressional committees is no help to his work,
either.) But from the beginning it is her money which they live on.
From her work. In such a condition, it is natural to toady to her.
Can anything be worse for him? He begins to develop the instincts
of a servant. Since he is already full of the middle-class nose for
petty increments of power, the vacuum in his own creative force has
to be filled by becoming a species of business manager, valet, and
in-residence hospital attendant. He manages too much. She, with her
profound distrust of everyone about her, begins to suspect him. Has
he married her because he can’t write anymore? Is his secret
ambition to become a Hollywood producer? Or does he want to use her
as a meal ticket? Such mean suspicions warm up the dynamos of all
throttled insanity. Over and over, through the good months at
Amagansett, she will plunge into sudden depressions. They are
inexplicable to him. What he cannot recognize as he comes to grips
with the full incalculable complexity of a woman is that he is just
as much of an enigma to her, and unlike him she sickens before
mysteries. They do not offer new literary lines of work, but are
connotative of the pit.

In Amagansett they also discover she is
pregnant. By the sixth week she is in such pain they rush to New
York for an operation. It is announced that the pregnancy is
tubular. But there is ambiguity even about this. The question
remains whether her pregnancies were tubular or hysterical. Greene
claims she once had a fearful abortion that made it impossible for
her to be pregnant. Miller, in an interview, said she could not,
but then later in the same interview thought she did have a tubular
pregnancy. It is a confusion that she may even have disseminated
herself and it persists. What may be the best explanation, from a
friend who knew Marilyn well, is that she had had many abortions,
perhaps so many as twelve! And in cheap places — for a number of
these abortions came in the years she was modeling or a bit player
on seven-year contracts — thus her gynecological insides were
unspeakably scarred, and her propensity for tubular pregnancies was
increased. Since her periods were unendurable — “the pain was so
great she would writhe on the floor” — a doctor began to inhibit
her menstruation with a drug that anticipated the Pill, and for
such duration not able to become pregnant, she would “in hysterical
compensation think she was. Can you conceive what a frightful mess
this had to make of her?”