Marilyn: Norma Jeane (16 page)

In fact, Norma Jeane had been rescued as a toddler from one of these beatings by her grandmother, Delia Monroe, who lived across the street. Delia hated Ida’s razor strop and screamed, “Don’t ever do that again!” Ida Bolender remembered being so embarrassed that she let Delia take her granddaughter to her own house, even though Delia—who had recently returned alone after following her third husband all the way to his engineering job in India—was herself in despair and on the edge of breakdown.

For the rest of her life, Marilyn would insist that she remembered waking from a nap in her grandmother’s bedroom and “fighting for my life. Something was pressed against my face. It could have been a pillow. I fought with all my strength.” There were no other witnesses to any attempt by Delia to smother her own granddaughter, and few have trusted Marilyn’s memory of an event that would have happened when she was barely more than a year old. But perhaps Delia, in her own distress, did believe that only a gentle death could save her daughter’s illegitimate child from a life of pain. Just a few days later, Delia tried to break through the Bolenders’ door in another rage of rescuing. The police took Delia to an asylum. She died there nineteen days later of a heart attack suffered during a manic seizure. Her death would remain a haunting precedent for her daughter, and then for her granddaughter.

Clearly, Norma Jeane could not hope to be rescued by her grandmother, or by her mother, Gladys, who was a semi-stranger she saw only on weekends. To survive, she had to make herself lovable to the Bolenders. Her hunger for attention focused mostly on fantasies of being noticed in the fundamentalist church where the Bolenders went to services twice a week—probably the only place Norma Jeane saw large groups of people.

“No sooner was I in the pew with the organ playing and everyone singing,” the grown-up Marilyn remembered of herself as a little girl, “than the impulse would come to me to take off all my clothes. I wanted desperately to stand up naked for God and everyone else to see. I had to clench my teeth and sit on my hands to keep myself from undressing. Sometimes I had to pray hard and beg God to keep me from taking my clothes off.

“My impulse to appear naked and my dreams about it had no shame or sense of sin in them,” wrote Marilyn. “Dreaming of people looking at me made me feel less lonely.”

When she lived in an orphanage from age nine to age eleven, some nudity was doubtless routine in the girls’ dormitory as well as in the gym and showers of the public school nearby. It may have given her a sense both of belonging and of being an individual. “I think I wanted them to see me naked because I was ashamed of the clothes I wore—the never-changing faded blue dress of poverty,” Marilyn said, recalling the orphanage uniform, a blue skirt and white blouse. “Naked, I was like other girls and not someone in an orphan’s uniform.”

This feeling of being more comfortable with nudity than with clothes, especially around women, lasted for most of her life: women friends, housekeepers, even casual acquaintances and employees have all commented on it. As Natasha Lytess, her acting coach and early roommate, wrote about Marilyn: “She’d come wandering naked from her bedroom and into the bathroom… Then—still without a stitch on—Marilyn would drift in a sort of dreamy, sleepwalking daze into the kitchen and fix her own breakfast.

“When she became a famous star,” Lytess explained, “Marilyn had her own luxury bungalow on the set, with dressing room, bedroom, wardrobe room, and bathroom.

“And she still ambled unconcerned, completely naked, around her bungalow among wardrobe women, makeup girls, hairdressers.

“Being naked seems to soothe her—almost hypnotize her.”

The image of a nude Marilyn Monroe reading, relaxing, or just walking through her own house has been described as titillating or narcissistic by many who have written about her. Indeed, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn’s second and very possessive husband, was angered and confounded by this nonsexual use of nudity, even though only he and one of Marilyn’s women friends might be in the house. But the truth seems much simpler: Marilyn found some odd comfort and sense of being at home with this childhood habit that had brought rare feelings of being alive and belonging to Norma Jeane.

Nonetheless, her nudity in public or around men who were not husbands or lovers was far more purposeful and self-conscious. Even before she was a teenager, she was enjoying and courting the new attention that her developing body brought her, yet there was a sexual motive in it that she didn’t share or understand. It made her feel used, even endangered. “I used to lie awake at night wondering why the boys came after me,” Marilyn remembered. “I didn’t want them that way. I wanted to play games in the street, not in the bedroom. Occasionally, I let one of them kiss me to see if there was anything interesting in the performance. There wasn’t.

“I decided finally that the boys came after me because I was an orphan and had no parents to protect me or frighten them off. This decision made me cooler than ever…”

As a young model and actress, this same wariness and self-protectiveness kept her from posing nude or acting in pornographic movies as many other starlets in need of money had done. Her one fifty-dollar nude modeling job—the calendar that was to become the proud possession of millions of men, from garage attendants to J. Edgar Hoover—was done only in desperation for money, after years of refusing better-paying offers to pose nude, and with the flimsy protection of a phony name. But, for most of her life, her dilemma—as well as her art—was revealing enough to achieve the attention she craved, yet not revealing so much that she could be ridiculed or victimized. It is a dilemma this culture imposes on many women whose beauty is their only power.

Intimately with men, Marilyn used her body as a gift, to gain love and approval. In the 1964 production
of After the Fall,
Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play in which he portrayed their marriage, Maggie, who is Marilyn, takes her clothes off eagerly in front of her new lover, like a child unwrapping a gift she is eager to give to a parent By Marilyn’s own testimony to her friends, her body was not a source of sexual, orgasmic pleasure to her. By the testimony of lovers, she was often generous, loving, and seeking their approval more than her own pleasure. Sex was less a reward to herself than a price she paid gladly. She was still seeking the love, security, and closeness she had missed as a child.

It was this odd and unchallenging offer of sexual pleasure with only childlike warmth asked in return—of a beautiful adult woman, but one with the frail ego of a neglected child—that made her appeal unique: few could resist the animal magnetism of both a helpless child and a sensuous woman. But for Marilyn, all of her own survival needs to prove she was alive, to be noticed, to belong, to be loved, and to work, depended on her body: her “magic friend,” as she described it. Sadly, for anything less than a magic body, the demands were impossible.

From the beginning, Marilyn’s vulnerable body was betraying her. Even the normal maturing that brought such pleasurable notice also brought unusual problems.

“Norma Jeane had so much trouble during her menstrual periods, the pain would just about knock her out,” Jim Dougherty remembered of his teenage bride. A few years later, as a young model and actress who drove to appointments across the long distances of Los Angeles, she would alarm friends by suddenly pulling her old car off the road, jumping out, and doubling over until the spasm of pain passed. This extreme monthly pain that a few women do suffer—and that only with the feminism of the 1970s became the subject of serious medical research—may have been the initial reason for her reliance on drugs. A reporter who gained entry to her studio dressing room in the 1950s counted fourteen different boxes of prescription pills, apparently all of them given by doctors to numb menstrual pain.

When she was twenty-eight and living in Connecticut, her friend Amy Greene—the wife of photographer Milton Greene, who was helping to form Monroe’s film company—insisted on taking Marilyn to a gynecologist friend. The doctor suggested Marilyn consider a hysterectomy. One of Marilyn’s doctors has now diagnosed her problem as endometriosis, a condition in which tissue from the uterine lining implants itself outside the uterus, in severe cases like Marilyn’s pressing painfully on other organs and nerves. There was also damage from many abortions—some butcheries from her early penniless years, and perhaps later. Abortion did not become legal and safe until eleven years after Marilyn’s death. Marilyn, however, refused the idea of a hysterectomy. Childbearing was still something that a woman was either not whole or not marriageable without. “Marilyn was emphatic,” Amy Greene remembered. “She said, ‘I can’t do that. I want to have a child. I’m going to have a son.’”

That desire for a son may have been a way of making up for the past, as well as a patriarchal proof of womanliness. If Marilyn’s confession to at least three women friends was true, her young body had conceived—whether as a result of a second sexual assault or an affair after her first marriage, depending either on Marilyn’s account or the friend’s memory—and she had borne a son who was then put up for adoption by Grace McKee, Norma Jeane’s legal guardian. There is no testimony other than Marilyn’s to that birth, but she told the story out of a convincing fear that “God would punish her” for giving up that child—perhaps by making her incapable of having another.

Other than Marilyn’s words to friends, and her later physical problems, there is little evidence of her dozen or so illegal abortions. But one can imagine her sacrificing contraception and her own safety to spontaneity, magic, and the sexual satisfaction of the man she was with. During her teenage marriage, she had been so ignorant of her own body that her husband had to help her remove a diaphragm. Later, contraception still required an unromantic preparation, and it’s hard to imagine the eager-to-please Norma Jeane asking men to take that responsibility. Marilyn told one of her hairdressers in the mid-1950s that she had tried to solve this dilemma—and the fact that studios rarely hired married starlets, much less those with children—by undergoing a tube-tying operation to be sterilized. A second friend supported that story by remembering that Marilyn said she later had the operation reversed, though that would have been surgically difficult. Whatever the facts of the process, it’s clear that a major theme of her life was an exaggerated version of most women’s struggles to control their reproductive lives. For Marilyn, this process was further pressured by trying to do what the studio said, or what husbands and lovers wanted.

During her marriage to Arthur Miller, when she finally hoped to be pregnant—indeed, when she talked and planned, publicly and privately, about her great desire to have a child—Marilyn’s badly scarred body betrayed her again. One painful ectopic pregnancy had to be ended surgically. A second pregnancy ended in miscarriage. In spite of undergoing a gynecological operation at the age of thirty-three to aid her conceiving, her last rumored pregnancy came too late for the marriage to Miller that she hoped would be completed by a child. It was a pregnancy by a lover, not a husband, and ended in abortion. Her body had conceived only when she herself needed mothering too much to become a mother, or when she would have had to bear a child as fatherless as she herself had been.

There were other surgical operations on this body that was the focus of all her own hopes and millions of public fantasies. As a child, a difficult tonsillectomy had meant lonely time in a hospital ward where she fantasized that her father would save her. As a starlet, she had minor plastic surgery to add cartilage to her jaw and perhaps also to narrow the tip of her nose. Reportedly, other cosmetic procedures were performed at various times. As a twenty-five-year-old star, she underwent an appendectomy and, toward the end of her life, her gallbladder was removed. Including the self-confessed abortions, her body underwent some twenty or more surgical invasions before she died at thirty-six. Perhaps for this reason, she no longer took comfort in nudity or casually revealed her scarred body, even to women friends, in the last months of her life.

She was fearful of doctors. As Amy Greene discovered, Marilyn would not go to the gynecologist’s office alone. But, as usual, she often tried to be gay and entertaining in public about her operations. To photographer George Barris, she credited her gallbladder surgery with keeping down the weight that she often gained between films. Ten years earlier, before undergoing an appendectomy, she had taped a surprise hand-scrawled note to her stomach that was uncovered in the operating room: “
Most important
to Read Before
operation:
”

Dear Doctor,

Cut as little as possible
I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter into it—the fact that I’m a
woman
is important and means much to me. Save please (can’t ask you enough) what you can—I’m in your hands. You have children and you must know what it means—
please Doctor
—I know somehow you will! thank you—thank you—for Gods sakes Dear Doctor No
ovaries
removed—please again do whatever you can to prevent large
scars
. Thanking you with all my
heart.

Marilyn Monroe

But even in the privacy of that operating room, the public’s expectations followed her. A nurse wondered aloud whether Marilyn was “blonde all over,” as Marilyn herself had once joked to the press. Perhaps in response to the nurse’s disillusionment, the bleaching of her pubic hair was later added to her hairdresser’s regular ritual of making her acceptably blonde. Lena Pepitone reported that Marilyn also bleached her pubic hair herself, and once burned herself so painfully that she had to stay in bed with ice packs.

And there were other rituals. She slept in a bra in order to preserve the muscle tone of her breasts, and told a woman friend that she put one on immediately after making love. She was often late for appointments because she completely redid her makeup, and even had her hair shampooed and reset several times, in her nervousness that she look exactly right. She stayed soaking in hot perfumed baths long past the time when she was supposed to be out and dressed. As she wrote, “Sometimes I know the truth of what I’m doing. It isn’t Marilyn Monroe in the tub but Norma Jeane… She used to have to bathe in water used by six or eight other people… And it seems that Norma can’t get enough of fresh bath water that smells of real perfume.” She would call friends for reassurance on the smallest details of what to wear, even whether to shampoo her hair; rehearse and write down subjects for conversation; and agonize nervously for hours before any appointment relating to her life as an actress, or even before meeting a new person. Toward the end, a friend reports, Marilyn was also taking hormone shots to retard aging. And always there were the pills in growing numbers: some to sleep, others to wake up when she was groggy from the first ones, more to calm nervousness, still more to stay alert when the hours of lost sleep took their toll. Toward the end, she was also injecting herself with these same prescriptions to speed or increase their effect.