The Genius and the Goddess (10 page)

I stood beneath your limbs
and you flowered and finally clung to me
and when the wind struck with . . . the earth
and sand – you clung to me.

In an untitled poem
Marilyn, like a mother, tries to give to a doll
the love she never had as a child. The orphan wants to have her own
baby, but also has to fight off her suicidal impulses:

Don't cry my doll
Don't cry
I hold you and rock you to sleep.
Hush hush I'm pretending now
I'm not your mother who died.

Help help
Help I feel life coming closer
When all I want is to die.

"A Sorry Song" describes her struggle to emerge from depression
and pain after trying to kill herself:

I've got a tear hanging over
my beer that I can't let go.
it's too bad
I feel sad
When I got all my life behind me.

If I had a little relief
From this grief
Then
I could find a drowning
straw to hold on to.
it's great to be alive
They say I'm lucky to be alive
it's hard to figure out
when everything I feel – hurts!
⁸

If Marilyn's great strength was a desire to learn, her great personal
and professional fault was chronic lateness. One of her make-up men,
who had to put up with her whims, complained that "if I was two
minutes late she was furious, though she thought nothing of keeping
others waiting for hours and days." Billy Wilder, who suffered terribly
from her lateness on the set, made many bitter cracks about it. "If
she wanted to go to school," he said, "she should go to railroad engineering
school and learn to run on time." But she didn't have the
normal sense of time, didn't distinguish early from late, and was often
puzzled (or pretended to be) when colleagues became irritated or
enraged by her behavior.

The reasons for her lateness were practical and psychological, self-indulgent
and egoistic. She began to suffer from insomnia, took
sleeping pills and had a hard time getting up in the morning. Early
calls at the studio were for her almost impossible. It took her an inordinately
long time to prepare her face to meet the faces that she'd
meet: to bathe, dress, put on her make-up and create a glamorous
look. Despite all her coaching, she always felt she was never properly
prepared. She was afraid that she might not know her lines (
the
unforgivable
sin of acting), might give a poor performance or might
not look her best. When she was chided for keeping everyone waiting,
she justified her behavior by saying, "I've been waiting all my life."
⁹

Her lateness became an assertion of power that confirmed her status
as a star. Her behavior as an operatic diva tested the patience of the
director and endurance of the studio executives, yet proved that they
would put up with anything to have her in their film. The more difficult
she was, the more indecisive and dilatory, the more desirable she
seemed. She became the center of attention when she was
not
there
as well as when she
was
. She made everybody wonder – as if they
were an audience waiting for her appearance on stage – where she
was and when she would arrive. She wanted people to be keen to
see her, to make her feel that she was desperately wanted. She could
always play the orphan card, and felt a strange satisfaction in punishing
the people who'd once rejected her. Unaware of or ignoring the
intense hostility she aroused by her selfish and costly behavior, she
confessed that "It makes something in me happy to be late. People
are waiting for me. People are eager to see me. I remember all the years
I was unwanted, all the hundreds of times nobody wanted to see the
little servant girl, Norma Jeane – not even her mother." Her lateness
was a display of power and form of revenge for past humiliations and
neglect. It forced the studio to spend millions of extra dollars on the
movie that they'd refused to spend on
her
.

Marilyn also enhanced her status and displayed her power by
creating (in the absence of any real friends) her own paid courtiers,
palace guard and personal support group. The members of her
entourage – which included drama coach, publicist and manager,
masseur and make-up man, hairdresser and driver, secretary and maid
– acted as her babysitter, nanny, governess and minder, as her
companion, confidante, comforter and confessor. Oblivious of the
impression she made, she claimed that "I feel stronger if the people
around me on the set love me. It creates an aura of love, and I believe
I can give a better performance." But she created more animosity
than affection, expected too much from people and was frequently
disappointed.

There are some intriguing similarities between the lives and characters
of Marilyn and
Evita Perón (1919–52). Both came from poor
backgrounds; were illegitimate outcasts, rejected by their fathers. Each
began as a model, became a singer, dancer and actress, and made some
terrible movies early in her career. They recreated themselves as
blondes and became national idols. They slept their way to the top,
replacing mistresses and wives, and discarding protectors when they
were no longer needed. They were sexually involved with the president
of the country, and Evita actually realized Marilyn's dream of
becoming First Lady. They fulfilled the fantasies of the masses, who
adored them, and inspired crowds to respond with hysterical adoration.
They died early, in their mid-thirties, and were mourned by
millions.

The life of
Diana, Princess of Wales, who was born the year before
Marilyn's death and also died at the age of thirty-six, was also remarkably
like Marilyn's. Like Marilyn, Diana seemed normal and happy
until she was thrown into the cauldron of publicity and overwhelming
fame, and had great trouble adjusting to her new image and identity.
"Before Diana was famous,"
Tina Brown observed, "she was an
uninteresting schoolgirl – nice, polite, uninquiring, uninspiring. What
made her change was being royal, rich, famous, watched, desired."
Just as Marilyn became a star in the particular Hollywood environment,
a world with its own strange rules and behavior, so Diana was
even more abruptly swallowed up into a closed and ritualized family
who tormented and ultimately rejected her. Unable to escape
unscathed from the obsessive attention of the media, both women
became angry and abusive, physically and mentally ill, depressed and
suicidal. They exerted tremendous power over other people, but could
not control their own lives.

Both women were poorly educated and, in Diana's words, believed
they were "thick." Aware of their intellectual limitations, they often
wanted a quick conversational fix. Marilyn asked her doctor, "how can
I learn something about the most famous philosophers in a few hours?
I'm going to a party tonight and I want to be able to hold my own."
Diana asked a clever friend, "I'm sitting next to [the French president]
Mitterrand at lunch in fifteen minutes. Quick! Give me something to
say."
¹⁰
Both expected their so-called friends, as well as their elusive lovers,
to be constantly available on the phone, and when suffering from
insomnia would often wake them in the middle of the night. They never
seemed to get enough love from their romantic attachments.

To compensate for her lack of affection, Diana, like Marilyn,
employed "a squadron of brisk apparatchiks whose job [was] to answer"
her whims and keep her spirits up. Just as Marilyn had her masseurs,
drama teachers and psychiatrists, so the New Age Diana, desperately
in search of salvation, hired "the celebrity servant class of healing therapists,
astrologers, acupuncturists, hairdressers, colonic irrigationists,
aromatherapists, shoe designers, and fashion therapists." Both women
had a profound sympathy for poor, sick and outcast people, but could
alienate and enrage as well as charm and seduce everyone else. Like
Marilyn, Diana, "so genuinely compassionate with strangers, was
capable of being
cruelly dismissive of people closest to her."

Both women summoned up "the best of the nation's image makers
to help them create her alternative reality."
¹¹
Marilyn helped revive
a declining Hollywood, Diana revived the increasingly unpopular royal
family. Both encouraged and cooperated with the media, which then
invaded their private lives and made them miserable. Norman Rosten
described Marilyn's dilemma:

Individuals who make up the crowd regress, and they can be
unpredictable, even violent. They follow her, wait in doorways,
shout at her, leap after her into taxis, keep watch on the street
below her window. They send letters – imploring, demanding,
weeping, threatening – the mad or bewitched seekers. They ask
for autographs, money, photos, articles of her clothing. They
propose marriage or trysts, find her phone number and use
obscenities.

Marilyn noted how intrusive and offensive the crowd could be:
"People you run into feel that, well, who is she – who does she think
she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel [your] fame gives them some kind
of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know,
of any kind of nature – and it won't hurt your feelings – like it's
happening to your clothing." After creating an elaborate public image,
both women had to hide and disguise themselves to avoid the threatening
mob.

Marilyn and Diana hid their intense distress behind a radiant image
and, with a star's natural ability, conveyed a public impression that was
quite different from the way they actually felt. Both became weary
of their demanding and oppressive public persona. As the princess
exclaimed, "Let's face it, even I have had enough of Diana now –
and I
am
Diana."
¹²
Paradoxically, both extraordinarily desirable women
were often rejected and frequently alone. The fatal car crash
on
Marilyn's wedding day, when she was pursued by reporters in a high-speed
car chase, seemed to foreshadow the similar accident that killed
Diana in 1997.

Hollywood movies, governed by the moralistic Production Code,
depicted sexual and social life the way it was supposed to be, not as
it really was. Criminals were always punished, embraces led to marriage,
sex was chaste. On screen, open-mouthed kisses were proscribed and
married couples were not allowed to share the same bed. In 1953,
the year Marilyn became a star,
Alfred Kinsey published
Sexual Behavior
in the Human Female
, a book which tore away the puritanical façade
to reveal the difference between conventional morality and actual
sexual practices. People who took their ideas about sex from movies
must have felt their own behavior was somehow wrong. So they were
relieved and delighted to discover, as Kinsey showed, that in the early
1950s more than half of American women had lost their virginity
before marriage, that a quarter of married women had committed
adultery and that most women actually
liked
sex. His scientific study
unexpectedly sold 250,000 copies. His enlightening and liberating
views were widely discussed in the press and paved the way for the
sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Marilyn's rise to prominence coincided with Kinsey's revelations.
A free spirit whose personal behavior seemed to match her image
on the screen, she reinforced Kinsey's belief that it was all right to
do anything (between consenting adults) that provided sexual pleasure.
Wittily outrageous in her last interview, she declared, "I think that
sexuality is only attractive when it's natural and spontaneous. . . . I
never quite understood it – this sex symbol – I always thought symbols
were those things you clash together! . . . If I'm going to be a symbol
of something I'd rather have it [be] sex than some other things they've
got symbols of !"

It's sadly ironic that Marilyn herself did not live to see the sexual
revolution and suffered greatly for being its symbol. She'd experienced
intense sexual pleasure with Jim Dougherty and with Fred
Karger in the mid-1940s; but by the 1950s, under the stress of promiscuous
sex and stardom, she'd become frigid. In the late 1940s, when
she was modeling and trying to break into movies, she rarely had
natural and spontaneous sex. Instead, she was a prostitute, in cars on
shady side-streets, in return for small amounts of money to buy food.
It's astonishing – after all her acting lessons and her brief appearances
in movies – that she would not only sell her body for the price of
a meal, but would also risk humiliation and shame, predatory pimps
and police, robbery and beating, sadism and sodomy, venereal disease
and pregnancy.

When selling herself, or with romantic liaisons and long-time lovers,
Marilyn, always eager to please, meekly agreed to men's demands to
have sex without contraceptives and got pregnant again and again.
She later made the horrifying confession that she'd had as many as
twelve
abortions. The Hollywood screenwriter
Ivan Moffat, who knew
about this from personal experience, wrote that "in 1951 there was
no question of anyone getting an abortion without extreme difficulty,
danger and great cost." In these sleazy surgeries Marilyn repeatedly
risked severe pain, hemorrhage, infection, puncture of her womb,
permanent injury and even death.

Orson Welles remarked that almost everyone in Hollywood had
slept with her. When the photographer
Larry Schiller argued with
Mailer about their book on Marilyn, Schiller tried to settle the dispute
by claiming, "At least I fucked her and you didn't." Apart from the
men she bedded while married to Dougherty, street clientele, casual
pick-ups, movie moguls and the legions who claimed to or may actually
have been her sexual partners, she had two dozen significant
lovers (including three husbands) during the last twenty years of her
life.
¹³
Marilyn's apparently superficial and transparent character was
actually quite ambiguous. She was naïve and innocent as well as flirtatious
and seductive, unaware of conventional morality as well as
completely indifferent to it, in love with her companions as well as merely
distracted by them. She was at the same time Henry James' disingenuous
and daring Daisy Miller and James Joyce's earthy and funny,
unfaithful and sexually voracious Molly Bloom.