The Genius and the Goddess (7 page)

George Sanders – like Chekhov, Schenck and Hyde – was born
in Russia. He was attracted to Marilyn and falsely accused by his
current wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, of having an affair with her. But he
admired her character, and emphasized her insecurity, her professional
standards and her intellectual curiosity: "She was very beautiful and
very inquiring and very unsure – [as if] she was somebody in a play
not yet written, uncertain of her part in the overall plot. . . . She was
humble, punctual and untemperamental. She wanted people to like
her. . . . I found her conversation had unexpected depths. She showed
an interest in intellectual subjects which was, to say the least, disconcerting.

In her presence it was hard to concentrate."
In contrast to Sanders,
Celeste Holm – who was seven years
older than Marilyn and played
Bette Davis' friend – failed to see
Marilyn's brightness and assumed she'd slept her way into the part:
"I saw nothing special about her. I thought she was quite sweet
and terribly dumb, and my natural reaction was, 'Whose girl is
that?' It was the performance of a chorus girl [she's described in
the film as 'a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts'].
She was terribly shy. In fact, she was scared to death, because she
was playing in a pretty big league, you know, but Joe relaxed her
into it."

Mankiewicz himself saw yet another side of Marilyn's character,
and understood her insecurity and self-imposed isolation both on and
off the set: "I thought of her, then, as the loneliest person I had ever
known. Throughout our location period in San Francisco, perhaps
two or three weeks, Marilyn would be spotted at one restaurant or
another dining alone. We'd always ask her to join us, and she would,
and seemed pleased, but somehow she never understood or accepted
our unspoken assumption that she was one of us. She was not a loner.
She was just plain
alone
." It's hardly surprising that Marilyn lacked
the confidence to socialize with the fiercely intelligent Bette Davis
and the older actors who had experience on the stage. But close
contact with these stars made her long to be a serious and respected
actress.

Mankiewicz had an unexpected encounter with Marilyn that
revealed that her endless striving for self-improvement, though apparently
pretentious and absurd, was actually quite serious and sincere.
When he saw her reading
Rilke's
Letters to a Young Poet
as she waited
to rehearse her dumb blonde role in
All About Eve
, he thought, "I'd
have been less taken aback to come upon Herr Rilke studying a
Marilyn Monroe nude calendar."
⁹
He asked how she happened to
choose that highbrow book, and she naïvely but sweetly explained
that "every now and then I go into the Pickwick [Bookshop on
Hollywood Boulevard] . . . and just look around. I leaf through some
books, and when I read something that interests me – I buy the book.
So last night I bought this one. Is that wrong?" Realizing that Herr
Rilke's advice to an aspiring artist was an instinctively good choice,
Mankiewicz assured her that it was not wrong at all.

Rilke's book, in fact, clearly expresses several themes that were
especially meaningful to Marilyn. He emphasized the close connection
between art and sex, mind and body, which she'd been trying
to understand in her lessons and express in her roles: "artistic experience
lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy,
that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and
the same yearning and delight." Usually treated as a beddable body
rather than as a woman with real feelings, she responded to Rilke's
hope that sexual differences could be transcended, that "man and
maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other
not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come
together
as human beings
, in order simply, seriously and patiently to
bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them."

Marilyn, who saw the world as hostile and (as Holm noted) was
"scared to death" on the set, found solace in Rilke's belief that "we
have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it
terrors, they are
our
terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them." Two poetic passages
were also charged with personal meaning for her. The "Sonnet" by
the young poet, quoted in the
Letters
, echoed her own sadness:
"Through my life there trembles without plaint, / without a sigh a
deep dark melancholy." And, constantly in the process of transformation
from Norma Jeane to the persona of Marilyn Monroe, she would
have been struck by the famous last line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of
Apollo": "You must change your life."

The nude calendar that Mankiewicz mentioned originated in May
1949 when Marilyn was an obscure and occasionally impoverished
model.
Tom Kelley photographed her perfect body, a modern Venus,
in several poses and paid her a modest $50. He sold the pictures for
$500 to a company that put them on calendars, sold them throughout
America and made a huge profit of $750,000. In the best photo
Marilyn is shot sideways (to hide her pubic hair) and from a ladder
ten feet above her. Her long wavy blond hair flows from her back-tilted
head and mingles with the blood-red waterfall of drapery beneath
her. This velvet suggests not only the softness of her skin and voice,
but also the folds and texture of the most intimate parts of her body.
The outstretched fingers of her left hand seem to claw up to the
right corner while her right foot points balletically down to the left.
Her legs form a sexually suggestive triangle, and her back arches
above her narrow waist and descends to the gentle mound of her
buttocks. Her alluring breasts promise pneumatic bliss, and her pink
nipples merge with the red velvet. Her body surges and flows in
languorous undulations and, with all its sensual weight, is offered, in
pure isolation, as an ecstatic end in itself. Marilyn seems to have slipped
out of her clothes as easily as she'd slipped into men's beds. She seems
ready to respond with erotic compliance and represents, in William
Blake's words, the "lineaments of gratified desire." Her friend Nan
Taylor, who once saw her get out of the bath, recalled that Marilyn's
body was beautiful all over, as perfect in life as it was in the photos.
¹⁰

The pose in Kelley's photo seems to have been inspired by
François
Boucher's portrait of Miss O'Murphy (c.1751), the daughter of an
Irish soldier and mistress of King Louis XV of France. This lovely
girl, with hands supporting her chin, is sprawled belly down on the
ruffled drapery and ample cushions of a velvet sofa. Her legs are
spread, her naked bottom is center stage and, with a shamelessly
engaging expression, she gazes upwards as if seeking some sort of
royal command or divine absolution.

Always casual about nudity, Marilyn forgot all about the photo.
But in March 1952, when she was making
Clash by Night
and being
courted by Joe DiMaggio, someone recognized her as the girl in the
calendar and threatened to blackmail
Twentieth Century-Fox. The
Hollywood studios, in matters ranging from film scripts to actors'
private lives, constantly trod the minefield of public opinion. America
in the 1950s was (and in many ways still is) a puritanical and rather
hypocritical society. Films regularly maintained the sugary fiction that
young girls were always innocent and demure, and studios spent heavily
on public relations to persuade the public that movie stars had a moral
and dignified private life. Actors' contracts contained morals clauses
that threatened instant dismissal for scandalous or disgraceful behavior.
In 1950, for example,
Ingrid Bergman had been publicly condemned
and professionally exiled for having an illegitimate child with the
Italian director Roberto Rossellini.

The discovery of the calendar sent the Fox executives into a panic,
and they urged Marilyn to deny that she was the naked model. But
Marilyn, intuiting the public's response and acting more wisely,
admitted that she'd posed in the nude and gained valuable publicity
from the potentially scandalous incident. She defended modeling as
honest work, bravely said she was not ashamed of her body and
claimed she had needed the cash to avoid repossession of her car (a
sacred object in Los Angeles). The public was convinced that she'd
had no other means of earning the money, and that economic necessity
should prevail over moral values. Often silent and tongue-tied in
private, Marilyn won over her audience by answering reporters' questions,
like Mae West,
with a series of witty ripostes. She defiantly
declared, "I've been on calendars, but never on time." Playing on
words when asked what she had on, she suggestively replied, "I had
the radio on." In a variant of this question, "What do you wear to
bed?," she answered, "Chanel No. 5." Marilyn's nude photo achieved
even greater fame when, in December 1953, it became the centerfold
of the first issue of
Playboy
.

Before the nude calendar scandal, and while she was making
Love
Happy
with the Marx Brothers in 1949, Marilyn posed for a second
series of less successful nude photos, this time for
Earl Moran. Leaning
backwards, resting on her extended arms, she tucks her right leg
underneath her and stretches her left leg toward the floor. Wearing
the bottom of a bathing suit, with her long blond hair flowing sensuously
down her back, she sits sideways on a wooden case, smiling
innocently and baring her breasts.

Marilyn played an important part in the transformation and revival
of Hollywood in the 1950s. Two historians described the major reasons
for the sudden decline of the studios at that time:

While as late as 1951 Hollywood made nearly 400 feature films,
by 1960 only 154 were produced. 'B' films, shorts, and newsreels
all disappeared during the fifties. . . . By 1960, when Americans
possessed some 50 million TV sets, a fifth of the nation's theaters
had closed for lack of business. . . .

From a record weekly attendance of 82 million in 1946, film
audiences alarmingly plummeted to about 36 million by 1950. Labor
troubles, higher production costs, adverse court rulings [forbidding
studio ownership of theaters], highly publicized anti-communist
hearings all hurt the movie industry. . . . [The fifties witnessed] the
demise of the old film-making system – the Hollywood of big
studios, glamorous stars, formalized plots, packaged dreams,
predictable profits.
¹¹

Marilyn's rise to stardom and box-office magnetism helped to halt
the radical decline of the studios.

Marilyn has often been compared to the platinum-blond actress
Jean Harlow. But in her colorful public life she was more like
Clara Bow,
the "It girl" of the 1920s. Bow also came from a desperately
impoverished background. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother
insane. Sexy, feverishly animated and intensely emotional, she won a
beauty contest in her teens and came to Hollywood when she was
seventeen. After she became a star, she lived quietly in her Beverly
Hills and Malibu houses, and amused herself by playing poker with
her servants. But she was flamboyant in public, driving a bright red
car filled with seven chow dogs whose coats were dyed to match her
flaming red hair.

In the early 1950s, after those two small roles in first-rate films –
All About Eve
won Academy Awards for best picture, director,
screenplay and supporting actor – Marilyn had more prominent parts
in a series of mediocre movies, which, rather surprisingly, vaulted her
to stardom. Her performances were more significant than the pictures
themselves, and paved the way for her best roles later on.

Clash by Night
(1952) was based on a Broadway play by Clifford
Odets that starred Tallulah Bankhead. A left-wing melodrama set in
the 1930s, the play showed how poverty and unemployment drive a
deceived husband to murder his wife's lover. The film, by contrast,
centered on the classic eternal triangle.
Barbara Stanwyck betrays her
crude but devoted husband,
Paul Douglas, in an adulterous liaison
with
Robert Ryan, but repents and returns home. Stanwyck's disillusioned
remark, "Home is where you come to when you run out
of places," echoes Robert Frost's lines in "The
Death of the Hired
Man":"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They
have to take you in." Marilyn plays a tough, independent but essentially
sweet girl, who works in a Monterey sardine-canning factory.
Fresh, blond and young, in contrast to Stanwyck's dark-haired, bitter
and disillusioned character, she looks good in her simple jeans (as she
would in
The Misfits
) and seems engagingly natural. In contrast to the
overwrought, tempestuous triangle of the three main characters, she
achieves love and happiness with her young husband at the end of
the film.

Robert Ryan, like George Sanders and Joseph Mankiewicz, recalled
Marilyn's fear and isolation: "I got the feeling she was a frightened
lonely little girl who was trying awfully hard. She always seemed to
be so mournful-looking around the set, and I'd always try to cheer
her up. She never went out with the rest of us socially after work."
The movie's Austrian director,
Fritz Lang, who'd made the great
German Expressionist film
M
, analyzed Marilyn's character and was
the first to note her inability
to memorize her part: "She was a very
peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty – I wouldn't say 'star
allure' – but, let me say, she knew exactly her impact on men. . . . I
don't know why she couldn't remember her lines, but I can very well
understand all the directors who worked with her getting angry,
because she was certainly responsible for slowing down the work. But
she was very responsive." She was a minor if promising actress, but
the publicity generated by the nude calendar forced the studio to
tolerate her costly and unprofessional behavior. A newsman on the
set, concentrating on the hottest story, exclaimed, "We don't want to
speak with Stanwyck. We know everything about her. We want to talk
to the girl with big tits."
¹²