Marilyn: Norma Jeane (17 page)

In between, there was champagne, her favorite drink, and her fairly ordinary taste in food. She played off doctors against each other to get more prescriptions or to take drugs in combinations that few would have approved, but her dependencies were also nurtured and encouraged by many movie executives and doctors. Drugs were a fairly routine way of keeping expensive talent working in the Hollywood of the 1950s and early 1960s. If actors and actresses felt they could not function without them, they were often supplied, or even recommended.

In addition to menstrual pain, Lauren Bacall, who worked with Marilyn, remembers that the early Marilyn was the victim of headaches. Natasha Lytess remembers on their first meeting that Marilyn spoke with a constriction of her voice that seemed to come from nerves. In the mid-1950s, Henry Rosenfeld, a New York businessman who knew her from early in her career until her death, described a Marilyn who “came out in red blotches at the idea of meeting a new acquaintance, such was her fear.” Renee Taylor, one of Lee Strasberg’s private students, remembered Marilyn putting Calamine lotion on her face to soothe a rash that resulted from nerves—sheer fear of performance. When she was trying to become pregnant, she would have false pregnancies, gaining perhaps fifteen pounds every few months to reinforce the hope that she had conceived. By the time of her last and unfinished film,
Something’s Got to Give,
producer Henry Weinstein remembers a Marilyn who was so fearful that, even when she did arrive at the studio, she might stop by the studio gate and throw up before she was able to enter the soundstage. “Very few people experience terror,” Weinstein explained. “We all experience anxiety, unhappiness, heartbreaks, but that was sheer primal terror.”

The fear of performing might also cause her to pretend to illnesses she didn’t have, a habit that lost the sympathy and tried the patience even of her friends. On that last movie set, for instance, Marilyn insisted she had lost her voice. She forgot, chatted animatedly with a friend, and then guiltily went hoarse again when she realized she had betrayed her own deception. Years earlier, while making
River of No Return,
she insisted she had broken her leg, though X rays revealed no such thing and doctors politely suggested “perhaps” a sprain. Her large number of colds, viruses, and other minor illnesses included some that were more refuge than real.

Perhaps, whether consciously or not, Marilyn’s hope for comfort through illness was based on a sense memory. When Norma Jeane was a lonely five-year-old living with the Bolenders and came down with whooping cough, her mother moved in with her, nursing her day and night. It was the first and only time in her childhood that she was the center of someone’s complete loving attention. It was a moment of rescue she may have longed to achieve again.

Perhaps, too, Marilyn’s lifetime trouble with sleeping had origins in that terrified memory of waking up from a nap as a child, fighting to keep from being smothered at the hands of her own depressed and desperate grandmother. The prospect of sleep may have come to include the idea of death—the fear of never waking.

Certainly, the grown-up Norma Jeane continued to neglect herself, just as she had been neglected as a child. She could not break the pattern. Alone, without the public pressure of being Marilyn, she sometimes wouldn’t bother to bathe, or wash her hair, or change out of an old bathrobe. She could ignore runs in her stockings, or menstrual stains on her skirt. When the mist of drugs took over, some of this carelessness overlapped into her public life. Singer Eddie Fisher, who was then married to Elizabeth Taylor, remembers Marilyn after her separation from Arthur Miller, at a party at a Nevada gambling casino where Frank Sinatra was performing. “Elizabeth and I sat in the audience,” he recalled, “with Dean and Jeanne Martin and Marilyn Monroe, who was having an affair with Sinatra, to watch his act. But all eyes were on Marilyn as she swayed back and forth to the music and pounded her hands on the stage, her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress. She was so beautiful and so drunk.” A few months later, a guest at Peter Lawford’s beach house, where Marilyn was often a guest during the last two years of her life, described her sad figure “half doped a lot of the time,” oblivious to the spreading bloodstain on her white pants as she lounged on cushions or walked aimlessly on the beach.

The woman who feared most of all becoming a joke, being used or victimized, was succumbing to her greatest fear. Only Norma Jeane would have known the cruel distance between the nightmare of the nonperson she believed herself to be and the dream of the public Marilyn—and that distance was diminishing. She felt “unimportant and insignificant,” her last psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, explained. “The main mechanism she used to bring some feeling of stability and significance to her life was the attractiveness of her body.”

Whenever the public artifice failed and the private Norma Jeane seemed to be her only fate again—when another man she looked to for fathering had abandoned her, when she was criticized or blamed, when she had failed to have a child or otherwise bring reality to her public persona—then depression and hopelessness took over. Marilyn said she had attempted suicide twice before she was nineteen. When she was twenty-four, Natasha Lytess saved her a third time. There were three near-deaths during her marriage to Arthur Miller, and at least two more close calls before the final act.

She was still beautiful and a good actress to the end. The costume tests and outtakes from the unfinished
Something’s Got to Give
show a luminescence and magic that her imitators can’t capture. Studio executives of that film knew she had just been saved from self-induced death by overdose, accidental or not, but, as one explained callously, “If she’d had a heart attack we’d never get insurance for the production. We don’t have that problem. Medically, she’s perfectly fit.”

And indeed she did appear miraculously free of the usual physical symptoms of addiction. Greenson concluded that, “Although she resembled an addict, she did not seem to be the usual addict.” When she occasionally gave up drugs, she apparently did not experience withdrawal. Lee Strasberg, who had taken her into his family in New York, said he tried to help her sleep without pills by giving her the nurturing she had missed as a child. “She wanted to be held,” he explained. “Not to be made love to but just to be supported, because when she’d taken the pills they’d somehow react on her so that she would want more. We wouldn’t give them to her. That’s why she got in the habit of coming over and staying over. I’d hold her a little and she’d go to sleep.”

But no one can reach back into the past. Only we can love and accept that child in ourselves, and so have the strength to change the pattern.

Perhaps Marilyn could not have achieved that. Perhaps she had been abandoned too early. But she lived in a time when her body was far more rewarded than the spirit inside. Her body became her prison.

When you’re famous you… run into human nature in a raw kind of way… It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, But you also like to be accepted for your own sake.

—Marilyn Monroe

I
F MARILYN MONROE WERE
alive today, she would have been sixty years old on June 1, 1986.

This childlike sex goddess in her sixties is itself a shocking notion.

If we lived through the years of her fame, it forces us to recognize the passage of time in our own lives. If we know her only as a myth, it makes us realize that she was a human being just as perishable as we are. For all of us, imagining Marilyn as she would be today is hard. Her image was so dependent on a sensuous youthfulness that it was bound to self-destruct.

But it would have been much harder for Marilyn. She was terrified of aging. The restriction of her spirit in the airtight prison of beauty was so complete that she literally feared aging more than death itself—not the aging of mind and spirit, which all of us might fear as the loss of our unique selves, but the wrinkling of skin and softening of muscle that changes only the external and most interchangeable part of us.

Even youth was not enough. Nothing can be enough if unreality is the measure. “I’m a failure as a woman,” she confided to the head of her movie studio the month before she died. “My men expect so much of me, because of the image they’ve made of me and that I’ve made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much, and I can’t live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman’s. I can’t live up to it.”

Clearly, the public Marilyn could never have survived the game without revealing the lost Norma Jeane.

“This sad bitter child who grew up too fast,” as Marilyn said, “is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine.”

Even such self-destructive behavior as Marilyn’s epic lateness made sense when viewed through the eyes of Norma Jeane. “People are waiting for me,” explained Marilyn. “People are eager to see me. I’m wanted. And I remember the years I was unwanted. All the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the little servant girl Norma Jeane—not even her mother.”

With enough self-knowledge to recognize her own behavior, but not enough self-confidence to change it, Marilyn added. “I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong—and too pleasing… I feel a queer satisfaction in punishing the people who are wanting me now.”

That inner little girl had been created by the mother who was a victim herself; by the father who left his out-of-wedlock child without ever looking back; by foster homes and an orphanage; by that man who, she claimed, sexually attacked her at the age of eight; by all those adults and children alike who treated her as different, an outsider.

Even so, that sad internal Norma Jeane was tenacious. After modeling jobs brought money and approval for her external self, she still tried to keep some real identity. A hairdresser assigned by the modeling agency to bleach and straighten her curly, light-brown hair remembered having to calm her great fears that she would look too “artificial,” too different from “the real me.” A young photographer who fell in love with her during a modeling trip up the coast discovered that he was really with a shy nineteen-year-old who read her Christian Science prayer book before lunch and refused his gentle, persuasive attempts to get her to pose nude. (“Don’t you understand,” she told him with her odd mix of shyness and ambition, “I’m going to be a great movie star someday?”) Only after she had been traveling for days, insisting on separate rooms, did Norma Jeane let him make love to her. A blizzard produced the storybook situation of two people at a lodge, with only one room available, and Norma Jeane finally gave in.

“She was lovely and very nice,” the photographer admitted years later, “but finally it was something she allowed me to do to her.”

The shy girl began to disappear inside a created image. Emmeline Snively had warned Norma Jeane that there wasn’t “enough upper lip between the end of your nose and your mouth,” and suggested she “try smiling with your upper lip drawn down.” Remembering this, the new Marilyn practiced in front of the mirror and developed that quivering, self-conscious, improbable smile that was to become a trademark. The studio supplied a new name: “Marilyn” to remind moviegoers of the musical star, Marilyn Miller. “Monroe,” her family name, was added to be alliterative Hollywood-style.

Starlets were photographed for endless cheesecake shots. The new Marilyn obliged by posing in everything from bathing suits to well-placed magazine covers. Starlets were also asked to dress up parties and decorate the arms of studio executives. Norma Jeane stood mutely among people much richer and better educated than she—until she could stand it no more. “As soon as I could afford an evening gown,” Marilyn remembered, “I bought the loudest one I could find. It was a bright red low-cut dress, and my arrival in it usually infuriated half the women present. I was sorry in a way to do this, but I had a long way to go and I needed a lot of advertising to get there.”

In return for help from agents and studio executives, she gave in sexually again. Referring to the variety of lovemaking that men who are old or powerful or fond of degrading women seem to prefer, Marilyn later confessed to her New York friend Amy Greene: “I spent a great deal of time on my knees.”

Actresses were supposed to have dramatic but acceptable life histories. That’s when Marilyn began her lifelong habit of tailoring the truth. A mother living in a mental institution was shameful (and perhaps didn’t express Marilyn’s real feeling of being completely orphaned) so she first told interviewers her mother was dead. Illegitimacy was also unacceptable. She simply said her father had been killed in an accident.

A sexy actress is supposed to take great pleasure in sensuality. The new Marilyn developed her trademark voice and suggestive, playful quotes. That kind of sexual pretension became very intimate indeed with faked pleasure to please even her own lovers. “Marilyn must have been frustrated almost all of the time,” said one musician who loved her. “I think she [thought] that she was
supposed
to have sex with a man, because that was something she could do, that she could give.”

By the time she had become a star, this artificial creation of a woman called Marilyn Monroe had become so complete and so practiced that she could turn it on or off in a minute. Actor Eli Wallach is one of many colleagues who remember her walking down the street completely unnoticed, and then making heads turn in sudden recognition by assuming her famous mannerisms. “I just felt like being Marilyn for a moment,” she would explain.

In her later years, she even spoke of herself in the third person in the disconcerting manner of politicians. “Remember, you’ve got Marilyn Monroe, you’ve got to use her,” she told a scriptwriter on her final and unfinished film.

Like the shy fortune-teller who manipulated the machinery from within the Wizard of Oz, the young Norma Jeane both manipulated and was concealed by the artifice of Marilyn.