Marilyn: Norma Jeane (18 page)

Had Marilyn Monroe lived, she still had many plans for that public self. In spite of drugs and depression, in spite of loneliness and a terror of failure that could paralyze her on movie sets, in spite of many near-deaths by overdose before the fatal one, she continued to have meetings and make calls about her professional future.

She hoped to star in a movie on the life of Jean Harlow. She was talking with composer Jule Styne about a musical version of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
which would also star her friend and former lover Frank Sinatra, and with Gene Kelly about another musical to be set during World War I. She had not given up her longtime plan to do the television version of
Rain,
based on the Somerset Maugham story whose heroine is Sadie Thompson, and she was considering the film that later became
What a Way to Go.

All those were possible plans for the near future—risky in the 1960s for a star who was nearing forty, but still possible. But even those choices were ironic. Maugham’s Sadie Thompson was a sexual victim and doomed. Jean Harlow had died before she reached the age Marilyn was then. Her only known long-term idea was included in a
Redbook
interview published shortly before her death. “I’m looking forward to eventually becoming a marvelous—excuse the word marvelous—character actress,” she said with her usual combination of ambition and uncertainty. “I think they’ve left this kind of appeal out of the movies today. The emphasis is on spring love. But people like Will Rogers and Marie Dressier were people who, as soon as you looked at them, you paid attention because you knew: They’ve lived; they’ve learned.”

Those are brave words, but it’s difficult to imagine the later Marilyn with enough personal strength, or enough acting tones beyond her sexual and childlike ones, to convey the lessons of a woman of fifty, much less one of Marie Dressler’s age. Even now, with women’s acting range and age expanded by the feminism that began in the 1970s, long after Monroe’s death, it’s hard to imagine a current Marilyn Monroe crossing those boundaries. Could she have made a Shirley MacLaine-like transition to such roles as the mother in
Terms of Endearment?
Could she now be portraying real women in history with any of the strength of Cicely Tyson or Jane Fonda? Might she have followed the example of Shelley Winters, her contemporary and a roommate when both were starlets, by creating wonderfully frumpy roles, or nurturing new talent and directing plays at the Actors Studio? Could Marilyn have defeated her debilitating addictions and returned to health as Elizabeth Taylor has done? Could she even have found refuge in those few parts that depict aging sex goddesses—roles like those-played by Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
or Lila Kedrova in
Zorba the Greek
?

To follow the acting paths of MacLaine or Fonda, this woman who could not control her own life would have had to make us believe in the personal power of other women. To become fully an actress, Marilyn should have done entire plays on stage; yet she was often so fearful that she forgot her lines, even in the short scenes that moviemaking allows. To kick her addictions to sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and alcohol would have meant admitting them—and the private terrors that made them necessary. To play herself as an aging sex goddess would have required a cruel self-vision and the willingness to act out the fate she feared most.

“Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was,” the young Marilyn had written about her thoughts as both Norma Jeane and Marilyn. “I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

Marilyn at sixty would have been impossible without allowing Norma Jeane to be seen, without allowing her to grow up to conquer her fears. Who was that young girl in the eyes of people who once knew her?

The photographer who fell in love with a quiet, daydreaming girl on that modeling trip up the coast remembered her talking about moving to New York to study law at Columbia.

Why? Norma Jeane told him she wished to do good for people.

Where did this working-class California girl who never finished high school get the idea of becoming a lawyer in New York, where she had never been? She lived in the 1940s, when only a handful of women were lawyers, and Columbia was considered liberal for taking a tiny quota of them; yet this was a career and a city that lived in Norma Jeane’s imagination.

Throughout her life, Marilyn was to disclose many more of these incongruities and surprises.

When she was a twenty-three-year-old starlet described by Groucho Marx as “Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo-Peep all rolled into one,” a photographer was amazed to see her studying her very marked-up copy of
De Humani Corporis Fabrica,
a detailed sixteenth-century study of human anatomy. Paintings of the Titian school that illustrated this study were pinned up in her poor and messy room. Even late in her life, when she was badly abusing her body with prescription drugs and many abortions, she would give friends expert advice on bone and muscle structure.

Along with Albert Schweitzer and Einstein, Abraham Lincoln was her hero. She had written an essay on him in junior high school, and, as the famous Marilyn, she sought out his biographer, Carl Sandburg. Until the end of her life, she displayed a portrait of Lincoln in each place she lived, and usually a copy of the Gettysburg Address as well.

Volumes of Shelley, Whitman, Keats, and Rilke accompanied her on movie sets where she played the classic dumb blonde. So did novels by Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce, and books on history and mysticism. Often the contrast was too much for observers. Jack Paar was sure Marilyn was putting on an “act” when she read Proust. “I fear that beneath the facade of Marilyn, there was only a frightened waitress in a diner,” Paar wrote acidly. When Joe Mankiewicz saw her reading Rilke’s
Letter to a Young Poet
while waiting to rehearse her famous dumb blonde role in
All About Eve,
he would have been “less taken aback,” as he put it, “to come upon Herr Rilke studying a Marilyn Monroe nude calendar.” When he asked her who had recommended Rilke, she said, “Nobody. You see, in my whole life, I haven’t read hardly anything at all. I don’t know where to begin. So what I do is, every now and then I go into the Pickwick, and just look around. I leaf through some books, and when I read something that interests me… So last night, I bought this one. Is that wrong?”

Marilyn might not read a book straight through, but she dipped into a book until she connected with a passage, or until she had a sense of the sincerity of the author. As her third husband, Arthur Miller, has testified, she had an odd ability to absorb the essence of a writer’s message.

Whether out of self-deprecation or self-vision, she could laugh along with those who made fun of her intellectual pursuits. At a New York press conference, she announced plans to make better movies, perhaps “one of the parts in
The Brothers Karamazov
by Dostoyevski.” When reporters ridiculed her, Marilyn agreed, “Honey, I couldn’t spell any of the names I told you.”

On the other hand, something in her could rebel against her own image of being more body than mind. When a drama coach told her he felt “sex vibrations” when she read Chekhov she told him angrily, “I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.” When a well-known astrologer innocently asked if she, as a Gemini, knew she had been born under the same sign as Rosalind Russell, Judy Garland, and Rosemary Clooney, Marilyn looked him straight in the eye and said: “I know nothing of these people. I was born under the same sign as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen Victoria, and Walt Whitman.”

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

But she was interested. She exercised judgment and wasn’t over reverential. And she never gave up.

Most of her biographers have belittled or ridiculed her efforts at self-education. In the words of Norman Mailer, for instance, “Uneducated (that familiar woe of a beautiful blonde), she was also cultureless…”

And perhaps she was—as Marilyn. Perhaps that intense curiosity was Norma Jeane trying to set herself free.

Who might Norma Jeane be now? There are other clues:

She loved the out-of-doors, was one of the best players on the orphanage Softball team, and skied the first time she tried. Had girls been more encouraged in sports—and had Marilyn’s tight dresses and helpless mannerisms not immobilized her later on—she might have been an amateur who took great pleasure in athletics. A young male friend remembered a twenty-year-old Norma Jeane who mastered the difficult art of tandem surfing, and who enjoyed it even in the chilly water of Malibu winters. Yet that healthy, hardy Norma Jeane turned into the sleepless, mincing, pale Marilyn Monroe whose famous sexy walk was said to be aided by wearing very high-heeled shoes, with one heel a quarter-inch lower than the other.

Like many who feel voiceless and victimized themselves, Norma Jeane had a profound empathy with animals. In her experience, they suffered even more than she did. Tippy, the small dog who was the only living thing that belonged to her in childhood, strayed too often into a neighbor’s garden. One morning when Norma Jeane was five, she found her dog. It had been killed by the vengeful neighbor. One of the few stories her mother remembered about her own father was his snatching a kitten out of his daughter’s hands in a rage, and throwing it against the wall to kill it. Jim Dougherty loved to hunt. It was a source of revulsion to her that he sometimes asked her to clean or cook game. In one terrifying incident, a deer he had shot and put in their car regained consciousness. Norma Jeane pleaded with him, but could not keep him from strangling it.

Given these memories and her own terror of being unprotected, she tried to protect animals. Once she even suggested bringing a cow into the small apartment where she lived with her young husband; all because she couldn’t bear to see the animal standing in the rain.

Later, as Marilyn, she usually took pets with her—a dog, or at least a parakeet—wherever she lived. In New York, she went to a park each week where two boys caught pigeons to sell at the market, and paid fifty cents each to set them all free. When Arthur Miller wrote the film script of
The Misfits
and a short story called “Please Don’t Kill Anything,” he focused on this empathy with all living things. The movie portrayed her as a sad young divorcee who tries to save wild horses from being captured and sold for killing. In the short story, she was a young wife who throws a fisherman’s catch back into the sea.

This feeling for animals and nature is one of the few connections between the lives of Norma Jeane and Marilyn. One can imagine their coming together in a devoted sixty-year-old who runs shelters for abandoned animals, or supports wildlife preserves, or simply enjoys living on a ranch where animals are born and raised.

Norma Jeane was shy, introspective, a daydreamer. By all accounts, she could retreat to her own imagination and remain absorbed for hours at a time. It was the habit of a lonely child who makes her own company, but it was also the habit of an artist who imagines abstract scenes of beautiful colors and forms.

When acting coach Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, lent her a sketch pad, Marilyn produced surprisingly good drawings with no training. “In one,” Susan remembered, “with quick, round lines depicting a feline sensual grace and movement, she had done a self-portrait. The other was of a little Negro girl in a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles.”

Norma Jeane, the teenage wife, is remembered by her husband as dressing in immaculate white, with a ribbon in her hair; washing her face as many as fifteen times a day; eating healthy foods; and “keeping that tiny apartment clean, grocery shopping… [She] liked to cook.”

Years later, Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood reporter, wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio: “You could find Marilyn by following the trail of her stockings, her bra, her handkerchief, and her handbag, all dropped as she went. He was always trying to train her. And he could not. They reached a point where they could not speak without screaming.”

And, of course, Marilyn was taking more and more sleeping pills, washing them down with champagne. The girl who found pleasure in health and orderliness never grew into a woman.

Norma Jeane had a special connection with children. When she was left with Jim Dougherty’s two small nephews to feed, bathe, and entertain for weeks on end, she took great pleasure in singing songs, reading them the funny papers, and making them feel happy and secure.

But she was clear then that “the thought of having a baby stood my hair on end. I could see it only as myself, another Norma Jeane in an orphanage. Something would happen to me. Jim would wander off. And there would be this little girl in the blue dress and white blouse living in her ‘aunt’s’ home, washing dishes, being last in the bath water on Saturday night.”

As Marilyn, she retained her special connection with children. “To understand Marilyn best,” Arthur Miller used to say, “you have to see her around children. They love her; her whole approach to life has their kind of simplicity and directness.” She became a sister to the children of many of her friends, and stayed close to her three stepchildren—DiMaggio’s son, Miller’s son and daughter—long after those marriages were over. Pictures of her stepchildren were found in her bedroom after she died. But as Marilyn, she was convinced she had to give birth to a baby in order to be a real woman.

When she suffered two miscarriages while married to Arthur Miller, the press made much of this anomaly: the sex goddess who could not bear children. Marilyn’s efforts to work with children and give money to orphanages were seen only as her desperate longing to have a biological child. But, as her twelve or thirteen abortions testify, she was able to conceive a child, but may have preferred to remain one.

None of her observers or biographers seem to have considered the possibility that she might have needed to nurture the lost little girl inside herself first before giving birth to someone else. Only then would she have the strength and sense of self to nurture other children.

But women are supposed to give birth to others, not themselves. Sadly, Marilyn believed that, too.