The Genius and the Goddess (18 page)

Capote had called Marilyn a slob in his first essay and he felt
obliged to repeat this in the second. Still trying to define her true
identity, she remarks, "if anybody asked you what I was like, what
Marilyn Monroe was
really
like – well, how would you answer
them? . . . I bet you'd tell them I was a slob." In contrast to all the
other writers who knew her, Capote portrays a Marilyn insecure
about her clothing, confused about her identity, spooked by death,
childishly narcissistic and a vulgar slob. Like many of her "friends,"
Capote exploited her to publicize himself. After her death, when his
drinking increased and his career declined, he turned her into salable
copy.

Marilyn met
Carson McCullers (who was nine years older) in 1954
when they were both staying at the Gladstone, a small, stuffy apartment-hotel
on East 52nd Street, off Park Avenue. She accompanied
McCullers and Tennessee Williams' mother to a party at the St. Regis
Hotel to celebrate the opening of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
in 1955,
and four years later met Williams again at a publicist's dinner party
in Hollywood. McCullers was homely, had had a stroke and lurched
around with a cane. Like Marilyn, she drank heavily and gulped
down barbiturates, tried to kill herself and did time in the Payne
Whitney mental clinic.
Virginia Carr wrote that "according to Carson,
Miss Monroe had wonderfully admirable attributes."
¹⁰
She was capable
of instant rapport and conveyed an instinctive
warmth to the sickly
McCullers.

Like McCullers, the English poet Dame
Edith Sitwell, grotesque
at sixty-six, was a perfect foil for Marilyn's youthful perfection. Strangely
adorned with an elaborate turban, Sitwell was six feet tall, pale-faced
and lank-haired, with a distinct curvature of the spine and a long
curved nose that resembled an anteater's. The daughter of a wealthy
coal magnate, Sitwell claimed descent from the Norman conquerors.
Disdaining her work, the critic
F.R. Leavis remarked that she belonged
"to the history of publicity rather than that of poetry." True to form,
when she visited Hollywood in February 1954 she also wanted to
meet Marilyn.
Life
magazine, mistakenly convinced that the two
women "were born to hate each other, and that their insults to each
other 'would cause a commotion when reported,'" brought them
together. But Sitwell found her serious-minded and pleasantly shy –
that is, suitably intimidated and deferential. They actually had
something in common. Sitwell's shallow pretensions and Marilyn's
naïve search for meaning in life came together as they talked about
the "spiritual doctrines" of the crankish Hungarian anthroposophist,
Rudolf Steiner.

When Sitwell returned to England early in 1955, she was annoyed
to discover that journalists wanted to talk only about Monroe. Ignoring
the fact that
she
was the one who wanted to meet Marilyn (who, of
course, had never heard of her) and irritated that Marilyn had upstaged
her, Sitwell relegated her to the common herd. She imperiously
exclaimed: "I am
not
bringing Miss Marilyn Monroe to England. Is
it supposed that I am a publicity agent or a film agent or a press
agent? . . . Miss Monroe, like a good many other people, was brought
to see me while I was in Hollywood. I thought her a very nice girl,
and said to her as I said to others, that if she came to London she
should let me know and should come to a luncheon party. There the
matter began and ended."
¹¹

Surprisingly enough, they
did
meet again, in October 1956, when
Marilyn was in London making
The Prince and the Showgirl
.
Victoria
Glendinning described their rather prosaic luncheon at the Sesame
Club: "this time Miller and Edith did the talking, while the star sat
and listened. The party was spoiled by the intrusion of overexcited
photographers and journalists." In his account of the same meeting,
Donald Spoto eliminated Miller. He dramatized the encounter and
added the exotic costumes, bountiful alcohol and poignant lines of
poetry:

[Sitwell] welcomed Marilyn to her home [i.e. her club] in October.
Wearing her usual array of rings on each finger, a medieval gown,
a Plantagenet headdress and a mink stole, Dame Edith sat grandly,
pouring hefty beakers of gin and grapefruit juice for herself and
her guest. During several hours one afternoon, they sat discussing
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, whose poems Marilyn
was reading during sleepless nights that season. For Dame Edith,
Marilyn recited lines from one of Hopkins's
Terrible Sonnets
– "I
wake and feel the fell of dark, not day [/ What hours, O what
black hours we have spent / This night"] – saying that she
understood perfectly the poet's mood of despair. "She's quite
remarkable!" pronounced Sitwell soon after.

But even the self-absorbed Sitwell could not miss Marilyn's profound
unhappiness and insecurity. She told reporters that the mild-mannered
actress had known great poverty and reminded her of a teenage child
who had been forced to fend for herself. Sitwell's final judgment was
both naïve about Marilyn's recklessly self-destructive sexual life (the
virginal poet lacked carnal knowledge) and, with hindsight, poetically
precious about her tragic death: "She was very quiet and had great
natural dignity (I cannot imagine anyone who knew her trying to
take a liberty with her) and was extremely intelligent. She was also
exceedingly sensitive. . . . In repose, her face was at moments strangely,
prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost – a little spring-ghost,
an innocent fertility-daemon, the vegetation spirit that was
Ophelia." Sitwell gave Marilyn a photo of herself by Philippe Halsman,
wearing her elaborate hairdo and huge jeweled rings on several spidery
fingers. Marilyn later said, "I expected her to be a real English snob,
but she wasn't. She was what my mother would have called a Lady.
A grand lady, strong enough to stand up to men."
¹²
Marilyn and Edith
got on well, but completely misunderstood each other's characters.
The publicists were wrong to assume that Marilyn would clash rather
than sympathize with literary and political celebrities. Though some
of them tried to use her, most sensed her vulnerability and admired
her sincerity and goodwill.

Just as Marilyn was confused about her own identity, and let herself
be used as a studio property, a piece of "talent" to be traded or
exploited, she did not fully understand or accept her limitations as
an actress. She had a natural gift for comedy and extraordinary photogenic
qualities that made her so striking on film. These were her great
strengths, but because they came naturally she did not value them,
and could not enjoy her spectacular fame as a movie star. Full of
anxiety about the future, and worried that she'd lose her appeal when
she lost her looks, she decided to give up almost everything she had
achieved and try for an impossible goal: to be a serious stage actress.
At the end of 1954 she joined the
Actors Studio to study the "Method"
under Lee Strasberg, the most influential drama teacher of his time.
At this turning point in her life, Marilyn's choice was unwise. Strasberg's
teaching, with its emphasis on the actor's inner responses to the role,
and his advice that she should undergo psychoanalysis, had a decidedly
negative effect on her professional and personal life.

Strasberg had emigrated to America as a child in 1909, and had
grown up in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New
York. He studied with two of Stanislavsky's disciples, and founded the
left-wing
Group Theater with Kazan in 1931. His career in Hollywood
was brief and disappointing. He spent the postwar years directing
trivial screen tests at Fox, which fired him in 1947. In 1951, four years
after the Actors Studio was founded, he became its artistic director.
He had some famous and charismatic students – Marlon Brando,
James Dean and Paul Newman – and their spectacular success made
the Method popular with aspiring actors.

Short, thin, intense and extremely critical, Strasberg was stern and
distant with his pupils. Like Natasha Lytess, Michael Chekhov and
Fred Karger, he was an authoritarian personality who advocated discipline,
structure and willpower. A biographer wrote that "Strasberg
was revered and deeply feared by the actors. To suffer his wrath,
whether it be a masked, stoical iciness or a shrill, maniacally enraged
outburst, was each actor's nightmare; to be approved by him, the
dream. The limitless power vested in him by these actors for their
spiritual life or death was awesome."

Torn between a desire for self-improvement and a habit of self-indulgence,
Marilyn seemed an unlikely candidate for this stern tuition.
Since she never came to the set on time and couldn't learn her lines,
even for a brief movie scene, she seemed to lack the necessary discipline
to become a stage actress, memorize three hours of dialogue
and give eight performances a week. But Strasberg, delighted to secure
such a prominent disciple, bent the credulous Marilyn to his will.

The Studio, located in a deconsecrated Greek Orthodox church
with a worn brick façade on West 44th Street, between Ninth and
Tenth Avenues, offered several kinds of acting classes. A key part of
the discipline was the public presentation of a scene and open discussion
and critique of the students' work. Each week at 11 a.m. on
Tuesdays and Fridays about a hundred actors would gather to watch
two or three of their colleagues act a scene and then explain what
they were trying to achieve. Anyone in the audience could comment
on or even severely criticize the performance, and at the end Strasberg,
the presiding deity, would pass final judgment.
Susan Strasberg wrote
that Marilyn got special treatment. She "would observe at the studio,
work with him at home, sit in on the private classes, and eventually
do the exercise work and scenes with the other students."
¹
He taught
her movement, breath control and projection, and directed her in
short scenes.

Strasberg believed, or pretended to believe, in Marilyn's dramatic
talent and told her she could transform herself from playing trivial
parts in mediocre movies to performing tragic roles on stage. He even
said that she could play Lady Macbeth or Cordelia in
King Lear
.
Though savage with other actors, he praised her excessively and
convinced her that "she was capable of towering achievements, that
her motion picture work barely scratched the surface of her latent
and untapped talent." Though there was no sign of this genius, even
after years of tuition, Strasberg ranked her with Sarah Bernhardt and
Eleanora Duse. After her death, he categorically declared that had she
lived, "without a doubt she would have been one of the really great
actresses of the stage." It is far more likely that he believed Marilyn
could help him compensate for his failure in Hollywood and revive
his own theatrical career. His biographer wrote that "The Method
was known inside the profession. Kazan's movies brought it to national
attention. Marilyn made the Studio a household word."
²

The essential principles of Stanislavsky's Method were rather abstract
and confusing, especially to a dreamy, uneducated novice like Marilyn.
Maurice Zolotow described Stanislavsky's key terms: "
Justification
requires the Method actor to find some emotional, logical, or factual
reason for every action he performs.
Objectification
is relating oneself
to the physical objects, the props, in a scene.
Concentration
is the immersion
of oneself in the story to such an extent that one achieves a
trance-like state, existing entirely in terms of the make-believe world."
Another basic concept was "sense memory," the idea that the actor
would recall a past experience in his life, translate it into an emotional
state and use it to create the character he was playing on stage. But
the self-absorbed Marilyn could only be harmed by getting herself
into a deeper "trance-like state" and recalling dangerous memories.

Arthur Miller regarded the Method as essentially hostile to the
words of the playwright, and felt it encouraged the actors' hermetic
egoism and cryptic inwardness:

[Strasberg is] a force which is not for the good in the theater.
He makes actors secret people and he makes
acting secret, and
it's the most communicative art known to man. . . .

The problem is that the actor is now working out his private
fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning
of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors
Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the
framework for his emotions . . . that the analysis of the text, and
the rhythm of the text, and the verbal texture, is of no importance
whatever. . . . Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had
perverted
The Seagull
.

Joan Copeland, who knew Marilyn at the Actors Studio, thought
she was innately a Method actress and that her work revealed how
intensely she was driven by inner demons. Marilyn herself believed that
Strasberg's teaching was therapeutic, and helped her (as she vaguely
said) to "deepen my understanding of my way to approach myself."
³
It
was dangerous to tell the
emotionally unstable Marilyn, who tended
to worship her teachers, to use her pain and use her past. In ordinary
life, she couldn't face her pain and tried to suppress her past. When
under pressure to perform, she regressed into her childhood stutter.

It was difficult for Marilyn to reveal her inner self and courageous
of her to face the criticism of other actors. In February 1956, after
studying with Strasberg for a year, she finally appeared with
Maureen
Stapleton and played the title role in the opening scene of
Eugene
O'Neill's
Anna Christie
(1921). (Greta Garbo had played Anna in the
early sound version of 1930, which had drawn huge crowds with
the famous slogan: "Garbo talks.") Anna's past history is revealed in the
course of the play. After the death of her mother, Anna had been
abandoned by her father and sent to live with relatives. Seduced by
a cousin when she was sixteen, she had run away and become a prostitute.
In this opening scene the young Anna comes to New York to
meet her father, whom she's not seen since childhood and who's been
responsible for all her misery.

Strasberg chose this scene, with its clear and psychologically risky
parallels with Marilyn's own life, believing that her remembrance of
the past would strengthen her performance. Marilyn had also been
deserted by her father, been abused by men as a child and worked
as a prostitute. In the play Anna says:

They had to send me to the hospital. It was nice there. I was
sorry to leave it, honest! . . .

It's my Old Man I got to meet. . . . I ain't seen him since I
was a kid – don't even know what he looks like. . . .

He ain't never done a thing for me in my life. . . . But I ain't
expecting much from him. Give you a kick when you're down,
that's what all men do.

Kazan described the Actors Studio's rather hostile and resentful
attitude toward
Marilyn: "The older members had seen that their
leader held this movie star, a surprisingly modest girl of modest talent,
in awe. They'd believed that he had praised her far beyond her due
and no matter how uncertain her work. And that he'd enjoyed his
power over her. His raves about her talent they'd considered to be
mistaken." But Marilyn gave a surprisingly successful performance.
Anna Sten, a Russian actress who'd appeared in Stanislavky's Moscow
Art Theater, enthusiastically recalled, "I only ever saw her do one
thing at the Studio, when she did
Anna Christie
, and everyone is still
talking about it, how magnificent she was."
Kim Stanley, an intense,
Method-trained stage actress, agreed that Marilyn "was wonderful. We
were taught never to clap at the Actors Studio, like we were in church
and all that, but it was the first time I'd ever heard applause there."
⁴
Marilyn may have been impressive, but the actors also clapped because
they knew Strasberg would be watching and wanted their public
approval. Despite their praise, she never repeated this brief triumph.
The result of her year's work at the Actors Studio was not a stage
career, but a return to the same mediocre movies in Hollywood. From
then on she would have all the Strasbergs' pretentious baggage, and
would usually be accompanied by either Lee or Paula as her coach.

Strasberg also taught his daughter Susan, who nevertheless felt that
her father neglected her and focused
on Marilyn. He wisely told
Susan to use her natural gifts and follow her intuitive instincts: "What
are you doing, darling? You
are
lyrical; for God's sake, don't
act
lyrical. . . .
A wonderful actor with no training is better than a bad actor with
all the training in the world." Yet he gave the opposite advice to
Marilyn. She, too, was a natural actress who followed her instincts
and was spontaneously funny without realizing how funny she was.
Though Strasberg recognized that "she was already a real actress, but
she didn't know it," he forced her to adhere slavishly to his theories.
Billy Wilder later explained how the Method had inhibited and nearly
extinguished her instinctive spontaneity: "Before going to the Actors
Studio she was like a tightrope walker who doesn't know there's a
pit down there she could fall into. Now she knows about the pit,
and she's more careful on the tightrope. She's self-conscious."
⁵

Marilyn sought the training at the Actors Studio to improve her
skills, but instead of gaining poise and self-confidence she became
completely dependent on Lee and his wife Paula. Kazan, a close
observer of both guru and disciple, emphasized Strasberg's lust for
power and the gross flattery he devised to gain control of his precious
acquisition: "The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more
total was Lee's power over them. The more famous and the more successful
these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found the
perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe. . . . He encouraged her
beyond her gifts in the direction of goals she was not equipped to
reach. . . . He soon had her spellbound, feeding her the reassurance
of worth she most craved." A minor but significant incident occurred
when Strasberg ignored her. It showed how Marilyn, aware of her
subservience but too frightened to break away, hung on Strasberg's
every word and could be shattered by his silence: "My 'Pope' . . .
caused me to run right to my shrink when he didn't say hello in the
elevator. That set me back months in analysis. I figure he's unseeing
and unhearing me because I'm such a terrible actor. I'm not even
worthy of saying hello to."

Once Marilyn had become Strasberg's disciple, he influenced all
her decisions and persuaded her to reject an important role in a television
drama. She'd always wanted to play the prostitute in Somerset
Maugham's powerful story
"Rain"; and Maugham himself, "touched
and pleased by her desire to be his Sadie [Thompson], said she would
be 'splendid.'"
⁶
But when the executives would not allow Strasberg,
who had no experience on television, to direct the adaptation of the
story, she withdrew from the project. Marilyn also wanted to appear
in John Huston's film biography,
Freud
, but again withdrew when
Freud's daughter Anna, a friend of her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson,
didn't want the picture to be made.

Marilyn's mentors and manipulators, Natasha Lytess and the
Strasbergs, had a great deal in common. In their doomed effort to
turn her into a dramatic actress, they exploited her financially, invited
her into their homes, made her dependent upon them, controlled her
life, came into fierce conflict with her directors, and aroused the hatred
of her husbands and friends. When Miller married Marilyn, he realized
that she was pathetically reliant on the Strasbergs and tolerated
them to avoid conflict with her. "Lee becomes a guru," Miller said,
"and unless he is there, [she] can't move. I never blasted him to
Marilyn because she needed him. I recognized that dependency and
as long as she got something out of it, I never said anything. We just
didn't discuss him." After their marriage broke up, Miller was more
critical of Strasberg's lust for power and damaging theories: