Women in Dark Times (19 page)

‘You know what Communism means? . . . Sure you do, you suffered at the hands of Communism.’

‘Well no, that was war . . . ’

‘War or not, the Communists are the enemies of civilisation, of our free country . . . I’d like to see people like Garfield rotting of cancer in jail.’
81

(John Garfield, a major Hollywood star whose career was destroyed when he refused to name names to the Committee, died at thirty-nine of a heart attack.)

According to Norma Barzman, in 1949 Monroe was stopped one night by a police roadblock checking cars to see if they were on the way to a house of suspected subversives. They were holding a meeting to discuss how to respond to the Committee. She drove out of her way to warn them: ‘I really blew,’ she told them. ‘I said, “Who the hell is this sheriff of yours? Hitler?” ’ Then she added: ‘I hoped there was something kind of behind the scenes worrying about things, not just letting them get away with all the stuff they do to us. A struggling young actress like me knows about that.’
82
Note the parallel she draws between political un-freedom and the world of acting – ‘the stuff they do to us’. Note too how politically assertive she is (‘Who the hell is this sheriff of yours? Hitler?’).

Remember Monroe was told to get Lincoln Steffens’s biography off the set. Such forms of political coercion were endemic in Hollywood. Although Fritz Lang had not been summoned by HUAC, as someone believed to have been a former Communist he had to rely on testimony from Odets before publicity for
Clash By Night
was cleared in 1951.
83
In 1948, Howard Hughes took control of struggling RKO (the studio whose flashing lights Monroe had watched as a child).
The Boy with Green Hair
, then in production, included the line
‘war’s no good for children’, spoken by an orphan. Hughes summoned the ten-year-old boy playing the part and told him to add: ‘ “And that’s why America has gotta have the biggest army, and the biggest navy, and the biggest air force in the world!” You got that boy?’
84
According to Norma Barzman, the boy refused. Hughes then spent 100,000 dollars in a failed attempt to get the lines inserted, after which he gave the film a token release, withdrew it and shelved it for six months so it would lose the advantage of its own pre-release publicity (it went on to be a classic).
85
Near the end of her life Monroe became friends with Frederick Vanderbilt Field who had been imprisoned for lying about his communist involvement. In his memoirs, he describes Monroe praising the revolution in China and expressing her support for racial equality and civil rights.
86
For her suspected links to Communism – she once applied for a visa to go to Russia as the guest of the National Arts Foundation – Monroe was herself trailed by the FBI from 1955 to the end of her life.
87
‘Subject’s views’, a July 1962 file noted, ‘very positively and concisely leftist.’
88

Writing of what McCarthyism had done to the spirit of freedom in America, I. F. Stone cites these lines from Boris Pasternak:

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like our teeth inside our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
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There was, writes Stone, a ‘numbness’ in the national air.
90
‘It’s like you scream,’ says Monroe’s character Roslyn in
The Misfits
, ‘and there’s nothing coming out of your mouth, and everybody’s going around, “Hello, how are you, what a nice day,” and everyone is dying.’
91

Someone screams – a woman; someone else, or rather pretty much everyone else, covers their ears. Or as Monroe put it in one of the fragments of her 1951 notebook, ‘Actress must have no mouth.’
92
Actress must be dumb (there is an ugly social injunction concealed inside the famous epithet). So if a diagnosis is in order, it should be clear by now that Monroe is not the one whom I find it most helpful to think of in terms of being ill. Suffering – without question. One of her great gifts is to distil suffering into a face and body meant to signify pleasure and nothing else. Just doing that much is already to throw a spanner into the cultural works. ‘You see,’ she said in her last interview with
Life
magazine in July 1962, ‘I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.’
93
‘Have a nice day,’ as one might say. Of course Roslyn’s words in
The Misfits
–
‘Hello, how are you, what a nice day’– are words put into Monroe’s mouth by Arthur Miller (more on this later). But Monroe herself was clear that her fame gave her a unique access, culturally and psychically, to what much of America, many Americans, did not want to see: ‘When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way,’ she says in that same interview with
Life
. ‘You’re always running into people’s unconscious.’
94

*

Before she was a film star Monroe was a pin-up and cover girl. It was an art she never relinquished and which she carried over effortlessly into moving film. That is why nearly all of her films feel as if they are about to freeze into stills, threatening to break up the flow of cinema into its component parts. This also makes her the embodiment of cinema in a more disquieting, uncanny sense. As Laura Mulvey has so brilliantly argued, the illusion of movement in cinema, the still images latent to each moment of animation, means that there is death in every frame (
Death 24X a Second
is the title of Mulvey’s book).
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The boundary between animate and inanimate, between life and death, is captured perhaps more perfectly, she suggests, by cinema than by any other art. If Monroe is Hollywood incarnate, we might then also see her – through her power to halt the image in its tracks – as always on the verge of asking cinema, unlike much of the world around her, to pause and ponder the darkest side of itself. You cannot slow down in the rat race. Monroe was never in a hurry. This, I suggest, adds a different gloss to the fact that she famously drove directors and co-stars crazy by being late. ‘I also feel that I’m not in this big American rush, you know,’ she said in her last interview. ‘You got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason.’
96
‘You get there and what’s there when you’re there?’
97
Americans, she also observed, ‘hate silence’: ‘That’s why silence is so hard to achieve in the movies. People want what they want in life – action, noise.’
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‘I could never’, Hecht reports Monroe as stating, ‘be attracted to a man who had perfect teeth.’ The other type of man she told him she had never liked – this chapter of
My Story
is called ‘About Men’ – was ‘the sort that’s afraid of insulting you’, the ones who ‘always end up insulting you more than anybody’. We could say that in sex, as in politics, she liked things to be what they are. She disliked the double-talkers who go on about the situation in India while ‘getting up the courage to get into action’, and even more the Good Samaritan pass-makers who pretend to have a real interest in promoting your career. Most men, she thought, talked too much, not the intellectuals who are ‘full of ideas and information about life’ but the ‘boring ones who talk about themselves’. ‘Such men are a total loss.’ A man can only talk about himself to a woman after they are lovers, when he can ‘confess all his sins and tell her of all the other women he has had’. Only stupid and weak men think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them. ‘A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, provided’ – she adds – ‘there are not too many.’
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This idea of difference – her claim to more than one way of being – is something of a principle. (‘Nothing’, she said to Weatherby, ‘is ever repeated in the same way.’)
100
If Sarah Churchwell is right, as she surely is, that the voice of Monroe in
My Story
reaches us ‘filtered through an all-male coterie of writers, editors, and litigious ex-business partners’ (it was finally published only after her death), in this chapter at least, the men do not come out of it very well.
101

Witty and insightful, as she surely was, this account is of course too glib. We should not confuse it with what sex was for her, in the more unknown and frightening dimension of her life, both before and inside Hollywood. I count myself among those – Gloria Steinem first, Lois Banner most recently – who have no interest in contesting her story that she was abused as a child. Even though this story appears to have been added to the Hecht story very late, she then repeats it to many. The only way of dismissing it then becomes by describing her as an inveterate liar, which many, foremost among them Normal Mailer, do not hesitate to do (Monroe refused to meet Mailer on several occasions – she saw him as ‘too obsessed with power’).
102
Monroe herself was explicit about the ruthless sexual exploitation which accompanied her early days in Hollywood. In fact, we do not need the abuse to pick up the deep discomfort behind Hollywood’s sexual glorification of Monroe, which she both hated and played to. Innocence and naturalness, the two epithets most commonly and routinely applied to her – I have lost count of the number of times – should make us suspicious. Together they offer an image of sex without complexity, depth or pain, something that hovers above the human, which is why it is such a tease and which also suggests another reason why her image seems to have such an intimate proximity to death. Miller himself was not immune to this: her sexuality came to seem, he writes, ‘the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic’.
103
‘She was just
there
,’ Quentin says of Maggie, the unmistakeable Marilyn character in Miller’s
After the Fall
. ‘She was just
there
, like a tree or a cat.’
104

Among other things, this is to rob sex of its history. ‘Imagine my disappointment,’ Steffens writes when he has been travelling around the world in the 1920s in search of revolution in the aftermath of the First World War, ‘to see and hear that sex was the thing.’
105
Corruption has triumphed and sex has substituted for the political dream. At the end of the war he had floated a plan for a general amnesty but ‘the war psychology, which in America was also anti-labor, anti-radical mass psychology, was too strong.’
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With the collapse of radical politics, sex, we could say, steps into the breach. On the last page of his autobiography, as if he had foreknowledge of Monroe, he predicts that cinema, ‘the blindest, most characteristic of our age of machinery’, will incorporate all other art forms.
107
Thus the book Monroe smuggles on to the set of one of her first movies anticipated her life by several decades. She will embody both halves of his prophecy – movies and sex (we can only wonder whether she got to that last page of his book on cinema and the future and what she would have made of it if she did). Monroe also knew and hated the fact that what was at stake was the ascendancy of the machine. ‘Once I slangly asked her how “she cranked up” to do a scene,’ reports Richard Meryman of that last interview. ‘ “I don’t crank anything,” ’ he reports her as replying. ‘ “I’m not a Model T . . . We are not machines however much they want to say we are. We are not.” ’
108

By the time Arthur Miller meets her, the rift Steffens observes between political idealism and sex has become a chasm into which the hopes of radical America have all but disappeared. American culture, he writes looking back in his memoir,
Timebends
, had ‘prized man’s sexuality from his social ideals and made one a contradiction of the other’ (he abandoned a play on the topic because he could not bear the spiritual catastrophe it foretold). ‘We had come together,’ he writes, ‘at a time when America was in yet another of her reactionary phases and social conscience was a dying memory.’
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‘As usual, America was denying its pain, and remembering was out.’
110
This is the frame of their marriage, the frame of her life. In this context, the idea of Hollywood escapism takes on a whole new gloss. Political hope fades and the unconscious of the nation goes into national receivership, with one woman above all others – hence, I would suggest, the frenzy she provokes – being asked to foot the bill, to make good the loss. Miller himself makes no secret or apology for the redemption he sought in her (that they sought in each other). ‘For one moment,’ Quentin says to Maggie in
After the Fall
, ‘like the moon sees, I saw us both unblamed.’
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What is being asked of Monroe? ‘Sex’ is the thing. Monroe’s desire to be educated, Trilling suggests, robbed us of a ‘prize illusion’: ‘that enough sexual possibility is enough everything’.
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Why should a woman with such sexual advantages want anything else? Precisely because she had been so poor, because there was a mental pain in her that no adulator could quite evade (as Trilling puts it, the pain balanced out the ledger of her unique biological gift), Monroe pushes want to the very edge of wanting, to a form of wanting that seems to want nothing but itself. With perfect ambiguity, she once described herself as ‘wanting nothing’.
113
What thwarted dreams are being poured into this woman’s body? You do not have to be a Freudian to know that such idealisation punishes as much as it sets you free. ‘All those people I don’t know,’ she said to Norman Rosten, ‘if they love you that much without knowing you, they can also hate you the same way.’
114
‘Desire is sad,’ the narrator observes in Somerset Maugham’s
Rain.
115
It was a story she loved. Near the end of her life, she had been waiting to play the part of the unredeemed prostitute who exposes the hypocrisy of priestly virtue in a televised version, and was deeply disappointed when it fell through (she had been holding out for Lee Strasberg as director and lost).
116
Maugham had been delighted at the prospect: ‘I am so glad to hear that you are going to play Sadie in the TV production of
Rain
,’ he wrote to her in January 1961. ‘I am sure you will be splendid.’
117