(Secret) Marilyn

Victim of the studio system or collaborator?

Icon or simple working-class girl? f9uVti6l|lL iHojfte&'d life was driven by contradictions.

For the first time, she confesses to the

collusion and the confusions and reveals

a nuanced and often shocking self-knowledge

"Fw me, U the, detenikj cud putkidivtkj, I mini mikl" -

S

o much fantasizing has been spun about Mari­lyn Monroe since her death, of an overdose, in August 1962—so much rhapsodizing involving words like iconic—superstar—goddess—and yet more vulgarly, sex goddess—that it's impossible to avoid noting that "Marilyn Monroe" was a highly calibrated creation, if not a concoction, of the aggressive Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox, in the 1950s; but in equal measure "Marilyn Monroe" was a public performance sustained, not always successfully, by a sometimes desper­ate but always self-aware young woman who perceived herself, like her mother, as working class; of that class of economically disenfranchised Americans who, in the era of the Great Depression, had no choice but to grow up quickly and to exploit whatever skills or talent they had. It isn't traditional to think of a "goddess" as desperate for

employment—in the realm of (mostly male) mythologiz-

ing of the female, very little has been acknowledged of the woman initially driven by economic necessity who con­tinues lo work, work, work—as a means of self-definition, self-justification and self-respect.

In Fragments, a miscellany of letters, diary jot­tings, drafts of poems and random and uncensored observations—believed to contain "every available text, excepting her technical notes on acting" written by Marilyn Monroe—the demystified "Marilyn Monroe" is revealed. Long after Monroe had become, in the public eye, the iconic "Marilyn Monroe"—well into her mid-30s, near the end of her tragically foreshortened life—the actress was relentlessly self-critical and obsessed with improving the quality of her work; like any autodidact she was desperate to educate herself by reading.

Apart from the months during her (wo pregnancies, both of which ended in miscarriages (in 1957 and 1958, when she was married to Arthur Miller), Monroe was working steadily from 1945 (as a model) through (he spring of 1962 (on the banal and ill-fated sex farce Something's CM to (live, from which she was fired). When she divorced her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, and fled Hollywood, in 1954, to enroll as a student in (he Actors Studio in New York City, it was Monroe's hope to become a stage actress who might per­form Chekhov and Shakespeare, and she was willing to submit to the disci­pline of acting exercises as if she were an unknown actress with her profes­sional life yet before her.

How poignant it seems to us that Monroe should appeal to Lee Stras-berg, head of the Actors Studio, as to a savior:

Dear Lee,

I'm embarrised to start this, but thank you for understanding and having changed my life—even though you changed it I still am lost—I mean I can't get myself together—I think its because everything is pulling against my concentration—everything one does or lives is impossible almost.

You once said, the first time I heard you talk at the actors studio that "there is only concen­tration between the actor and suiside." As soon as I walk into a scene I lose my mental relaxation for some reason,—which is my concentration....

Its just that I get before camera and my concentration and every­thing I'm trying to learn leaves me. Then I feel like I'm not existing in the human race at all.

Love, Marilyn

She was born Norma Jeane Baker on June 1, 1926 in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County General Hospital to an unmarried Hollywood film cutter named Gladys Pearl Baker (later Mon­roe); her father was never identified. Like a child in one of the crueler faiiy tales of Grimm, Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe would seek throughout her life this elusive father—she would call men whom she loved "Daddy" in a succes­sion of always-hopeful and always-flawed relationships that would culminate with the most fairy-tale of lovers—the very president of the United States, in 1961, less than a year before her death.

Her mother, though intermittently and teasingly present in her life as a child, was elusive in another, more insid­ious way: Gladys seems to have suffered

MARILYN IN PICTURES

from the condition now called bipolar disorder; she was frequently suicidal and had to be hospitalized; she could not form any attachment to Norma feane and so placed her daughter in a succession of foster homes, as well as, for a while, the Los Angeles County orphanage, where—ironically—because little Norma Jeane had a mother, she couldn't be considered for adoption like the oilier children.

As it was Norma feane Baker's fan­tasy to live with her mother and to be one day united with her unknown father, so it was Marilyn Monroe's fan­tasy to suppose that the director of the Actors Studio might transform not just the outward circumstances of her always-turbulent life but its inner dimensions as well.

In December 1961, in a lime of acute psychological distress in the aftermath of her third, failed marriage—with Arthur Miller—Monroe's plea to Stras-berg has an air of desperation:

...for years I have been snuggling

lo find some emotional security with

little success.... Only in the last several

months...do I seem to have made a

modest beginning My overall

progress is such that I have hopes of finally establishing a piece of ground for myself to stand on, instead of the quicksand I have always been in. But Dr. Greenson agrees witJi you, that for me to live decently and produc­tively, I must work! And work means not merely performing profession­ally, but to study and truly devote myself. My work is the only trust­worthy hope I have....

Fans of Marilyn Monroe would be astonished to know that, throughout her Hollywood career, Monroe was never able to establish herself with the studios as an "A-level" actress like her contemporaries Jane Russell, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day; always she was "B-level," no mat­ter the excellence and versatility of her work. At the time of this letter Monroe was hoping to break free of the studio's hold on her and to establish an indepen­dent production company with the help of her friend Marlon Brando as well as Strasberg, but, like a previous attempt seven years before, this seems to have come to nothing. (It was Monroe's bad luck to have lived in an era when actors, like musicians and professional athletes,

had not yet acquired the power to nego­tiate their own contracts; two decades later, Monroe would have had a career like Madonna's.)

Many of the most telling passages of Fragments have to do with her bid to bet­ter understand the art of acting and are seemingly notes taken by Monroe at the Actors Studio, intercalated with often chiding asides to herself:

To overcome the difficulties Remember the fear is always there and will be in your case. But there is something you can do about it technically wliich by only making the effort, by carrying out the technical exercises....

Stassberg said...You must start lo do things out of strength...by not looking for strength but only looking & seeking technical, ways and means.

This is the strategy of the profes­sional, the artist's mantra—one doesn't have to depend upon the vicissitudes of emotion or inspiration; one doesn't have to depend upon the limitations of one's own self. It isn't a coincidence that a photograph (concluded an. page 154)

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(continued from page 73) taken of Monroe in 1955 shows her read­ing Michael Chekhov's To the Actor with schoolgirl avidity.

Monroe's emotional state was always charged, often perilous yet, through an immersion in work, and in the craft of the stage, which is a shared community, she understood that she could—maybe— help herself. What Monroe most feared was lapsing into the sort of chronic inca­pacity for life to which her mother as well as her mother's mother seemed to have succumbed—a family curse that obsessed the actress throughout her life.

In a surreal dream of being anesthe­tized and operated upon by both Lee Strasberg and her New York analyst Mar­garet Ilohenberg, of which she writes in April 1955, Monroe discovers that there is "nothing" inside her:

Strasberg is deeply disappointed bill more even—academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. lie thought there was going to be so much—more than he had ever dreamed possible in almost any­one but instead there was absolutely nothing—devoid of eveiy human liv­ing feeling thing—the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust— like out of a raggedy aim doll.... Dr. II is puzzled because suddenly she realizes that this is a new type case.... The patient (pupil...) existing of complete emptiness....

In February 1961, when the sup­port of the Actors Studio as well as an intense five-times-weekly psychoanaly­sis seemed to have failed her, Monroe suffered one of the worst breakdowns of her life and was involuntarily committed to the Payne Whitney Clinic. She reflects with a wry sort of detachment that belies the hurt, humiliation and rage she must have felt:

There was no empathy at Payne-Whitney—it had a very bad effect—they asked me after putting me in a "cell" (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed depressed patients (except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't comitted). The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn't happy there.... I answered: "Well, I'd have to be nuts if I like it here."

The sympathetic reader may wish to read between the lines of Monroe's expla­nation of what would seem to have been hysterical behavior:

I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had never broken any­thing in my life.... It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass—so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly

on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them "if you are going to treat me like a nut I'll act like a nut." I admit the next thing is corny but I really did it in the movie [Don't Bother to Knock] except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn't let me out I would harm myself—the furthest thing from my mind at that moment since you know Dr. Grecnson I'm an actress and would never intention­ally mark or mar myself.

The first entry in Fragments consists of several typed, single-spaced pages dat­ing from 1943, when Monroe—then Norma Jeane Baker—was married to a young merchant marine named James Dougherty. She had married the son of neighbors of her foster family in Los Angeles a little over two weeks after her Kith birthday, in 1942, to prevent being shipped back to the Los Angeles County orphanage, where she would have been more or less incarcerated until she was 18. Dougherty seems to have been unfaithful to her, or so the young wife imagined; the prose fragment is startlingly self-aware, as analytical as the letters of Monroe's maturity, and as preoccupied with the ongoing riddle of her own being:

...the secret midnight meetings the fugetive glance stolen in others company the sharing of the ocean, moon & stars and air aloneness made it a romantic adventure which a young, rather shy girl who didnt always give that impression because of her desire to belong & develope can thrive on—I had always felt a need to live up to that expectation of my elders having been not in a pre­cocious manner an unusually mature child for my age—and at 10, 11, 12, & 13 when my closer companions were all persons of 4 to 6 yrs....

For someone like me its wrong to go through thorough self analisis—I do it enough in thought generalities enough.

Its not to much fun to know your­self to well or think you do—everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls.

Soon after writing this melancholy let­ter, the young and quasi-abandoned wife of fames Dougherty began working at the Radio Plane Company, where—as in a seemingly benign fairy tale or a B-level Hollywood romance—she was discovered by a photographer for Yank magazine; soon the very photogenic Norma Jeane became a model for a prominent Hol­lywood agency and was encouraged to bleach her brunette hair platinum blonde with such gratifying results that, soon afterward, in 19-16, she became a "starlet" at Twentieth Century Fox and was rechristened with the magical name "Marilyn Monroe."

Monroe's much-publicized second marriage, to foe DiMaggio, lasted only from January 1954 to October 195-1. By this time the "starlet" had become a "star"—as a consequence of lurid nationwide advertising for the film Niag­ara, which was a box-office success like other "Marilyn Monroe" movies of that decade: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seve7i. Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, Monroe's overall biggest hit.

Written by Arthur Miller, Monroe's last completed film, The Misfits (1961), is a far more subtle and notable achievement than any of the frothy "dumb blonde" films that made Monroe famous, but it received mixed reviews and did poorly at the box office. Seeing this elegiac film today, the viewer is struck by how Mari­lyn Monroe, amid a cast of mostly men, and women with no pretensions of glam­our, is eerily, almost morbidly "feminine" in her absurdly tight-fitting clothes and painful-looking stiletto heels, a species of female impersonator. It's as if the woman one day to be honored by piayboy as the "Sexiest Woman of the 20th Century" had been encased in femininity as in a strait-jacket that scarcely allowed for breath and that eventually killed her.

The failure in 1960 of Monroe's mar­riage to Arthur Miller seemed to have precipitated her mental and physical deterioration in the brief period pre­ceding her death. Of that era, when Monroe's dependency upon prescription drugs—barbiturates, amphetamines— increased, and when Monroe entered into ill-fated relationships with both John Kennedy and his brother Robert, there is no record in fragments, as if Monroe had ceased writing these therapeutic messages to herself; nowhere in this mis­cellany of "texts" are there allusions to Monroe's drug addiction, her conver­sion to Judaism for Arthur Miller, her disastrous love affairs and the collapse of her movie career. On August 17, 1962, a winsomely beautiful Marilyn Monroe appeared for the last time on the cover of Life; sometime in the night of August 5, Marilyn Monroe died in the bedroom of her smallish house in Brentwood, of an apparent drug overdose.

Like all serious artists, Marilyn Monroe lived—lives—in her art. Fugitive pieces like those of Fragments will resonate most with those who know her extraordinary films. Here is a female artist for whom work was salvation, or might have been if circumstances had been slightly different; if, for instance, Monroe had remained in New York at the Actors Studio, preparing for a stage career, and had not returned to Hollywood, in 1960, to make The Misfits. In an interview of 1959, as if in rueful acknowledgment of her impend­ing fate, Monroe said, "I guess I am a fantasy"—a luminous phantom in the lives of others.

HAVE HOPES OF FINALLY ESTABLISHING A PIECE OF

GROUND FOR MYSELF TO STAND ON, i INSTEAD OF QUICKSAN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN."