The Fame Lunches Read online

  So I went and wrote a letter to Woody Allen one day in my early twenties. The early, achingly funny, pre-scandalous Woody Allen. After watching Take the Money and Run and Bananas and reading Getting Even, I had fixed on him as my alter ego, somebody who dared to take up space even as he pretended he wasn’t taking up any. He was the perfect non-celebrity for a non-groupie like me. It wasn’t a letter, really; it was a poem, one that I had written in a college writing class. It was, I suppose, a fairly interesting poem as far as such things go, but what I remember about it are the last two lines. “You are my funny man,” I wrote. “You know you can be sad with me.” There it was: I was a nobody who understood the hidden torment of a great comic mind.

  What can I say? The hook took. He wrote me back, complimenting me on my poem and pointing out that if you X-rayed his heart, it would come out black. I had been right all along, it seemed. Desolation Row. I rushed in to show the letter to my mother. I shared everything with her, even my plans to kill her. Now, finally, she would realize who I was, hiding my light under a bushel all these years, this savant whom she mistook for an ordinary girl, one of three daughters. Now she’d see: I was me, which was to say I was more than me. I was the wounded icon by proxy.

  Time passed. I went from publishing movie reviews in the Barnard newspaper to publishing book reviews in various places, such as Commentary and The New Republic, the sorts of magazines where you had to disguise your heart under your brain, where the price of entry was that you sounded as if you had always thought in polished sentences and never, ever sounded as if you were the kind of person who stood in your kitchen staring at the knife in your hand, wondering if you should use it on yourself. I was living near Columbia, on 106th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, no less desperate than I had been when I was living at home, on Park Avenue, when I got a fan letter in the mail. It was the late 1970s, the period of elaborately plebeian stationery. Woody Allen, his name printed in bold red type at the top of a brown sheet of paper that looked as if it were meant to wrap an egg-salad sandwich, had written to tell me that he liked a book piece of mine in The New Republic, about another wounded creature, the writer Jane Bowles. He added that he wondered why I was wasting my talent on book reviews, and I answered, rather primly, that I considered book reviewing to be an art form and well worth my while.

  I did, and I still do, but I knew what he meant. Dare to take up space. He wrote me back and I wrote him again, assuming a correspondence was now in swing, and he replied, not unpromptly. There were promises of getting together for drinks that were always put off, and he continued to send encouraging messages about my writing, but I suppose he never knew what I really wanted from him. I mean, I couldn’t come right out and say save me. I must have come close enough, though, because once there was a phone call from his secretary, offering me the name of a psychiatrist. His psychiatrist, I think it was. But what use was that to me? I had seen virtually every psychiatrist of any repute in New York City, almost as many as I gathered he had. They always threw you back on yourself, when what I wanted was for someone to come and knock on my door and say, “You, Daphne Merkin, are hereby invited to lean your head on my shoulder for ever and ever. You are small and wounded, and I am large and wounded, and together we will create an invulnerable universe.” Or something like that. Needless to say, it never happened.

  I did finally get to have a drink with Woody Allen. It came years later, after I had written a novel, gotten married, become a mother, gotten divorced, done many of the things that are supposed to make you realize life is not particularly amenable to gratifying the wishes of the unhappy child you once were but that there are substitute gratifications to be found. The two of us had never completely lost touch, although there was a long barren period after he had returned one of my more inchoately miserable letters, filled—in those long-ago Smith-Corona days—with x-ed-out typos and splashes of Wite-Out. He had gone and scrawled across it: “I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do … If there’s any way I can help you, please let me know.”

  I guess we were able to meet on slightly more poised footing after I became a movie critic for The New Yorker, alternating a weekly column with Anthony Lane. We had one drink and then another and then lunches every so often. I can’t say it’s changed my life, or even that it’s changed my habit of coming late to everything, although I wish it had. I’m still a desperate character; I’m probably destined to be one until a ripe old age. In fact, it wasn’t so long ago—four or five months ago, to be exact—that I leaned over the table in the fancy Upper East Side restaurant where we were having lunch and told Woody that under my sprightly patter and carefully applied makeup I was feeling depressed. How depressed? he immediately wanted to know. Quite depressed, I said. Did I have trouble getting up in the morning? Lots, I answered. Did I ever stay in bed all day? No, I said, but it was often noon before I got out of my nightgown. But of course I continued to write, he said. I answered that I hadn’t written a word in weeks. He looked quite serious and then gently asked me if I had ever thought about trying shock therapy. Shock therapy? Yes, he said, he knew a friend—a famous friend—for whom it had been quite helpful. Maybe I should try it.

  Sure, I said. Thanks. I don’t know what I had been hoping for—some version of come with me and I will cuddle you until your sadness goes away, not go get yourself hooked up to electrodes, baby—but I was slightly stunned. More than slightly. I understood that he was trying to be helpful in his way, but it fell so far short. We shook hands on Madison Avenue and then gave each other a polite peck, as we always did. It was sunny and cool as I made my way home, looking in at the windows full of bright summer dresses. Shock therapy? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t heard of it or didn’t know people who had benefited from it. Still, how on earth did he conceive of me? As a chronic mental patient, someone who was meant to sit on a thin hospital mattress and stare grayly into space? Didn’t he know I was a writer with a future, a person given to creative descriptions of her own moods? Shock therapy, indeed; I’d sooner try a spa.

  It suddenly occurred to me, as I walked up Madison Avenue, that it might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over the damage done unless you made it worth their while. Indeed, maybe it was time to rethink this whole salvation business. Or maybe I was less desperate, less teetering on the edge, than I cared to admit. Now, that was a refreshing possibility.

  PLATINUM PAIN

  (MARILYN MONROE)

  1999

  Sometimes I think we respond to Marilyn Monroe as strongly as we do not because of her beauty or her body but because of her desperation, which was implacable in the face of fame, fortune, and the love of celebrated men. Every few years, she comes around again, the subject of yet another revelatory book (there are more than a hundred to date) or of a newly discovered series of photographs. Her films continue to be watched and reassessed, her image pilfered by everyone from Madonna to Monica Lewinsky. We will never have enough of Monroe, in part because there is never sufficient explanation for the commotions of her soul, and in part because we will never tire of hearing about the native sadness behind the construction of glamour. The damaged creature behind the pinup, the neglected foster child who became a blond vision in sequins: her story has entered the realm of myth. Its unhappy ending makes her less the exemplary heroine of a fairy tale than its cautionary victim—a glittery example of female entrapment in the male star-making machinery.

  Monroe was, of course, the wiggling embodiment of male fantasies at their most pubescent, all boobs and bottom and wet-lipped receptivity. At the same time, there was something wholesome and aboveboard about her image that invited mental pawing without eliciting accompanying feelings of shame. It’s this unsoiled quality that made her a favorite of American troops stationed in Korea and enabled Norman Mailer to describe her as “the sweet angel of sex” in the opening lines of Marilyn, a biography in the form of a sustained masturbatory reverie
. And yet, as we well know, she was regarded as a troublesome type, both personally and professionally—the sort of woman who would slip away to consort with her demons as soon as you turned your back, and who wasn’t worth the high maintenance she required.

  Monroe’s short, spectacular time on this planet—she died on August 5, 1962, at the age of thirty-six, presumably by her own hand—has prompted greater and more literary examination than, say, the life of Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard. Along with Mailer, the snobbish Diana Trilling weighed in twice (once with a review of Gloria Steinem’s book about the star); Roger Kahn, the author of The Boys of Summer, wrote a book about Joe DiMaggio’s ten-year relationship with Monroe; she has inspired a rarefied academic volume, with footnotes from Foucault and Baudrillard, titled American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic; and she made more than a passing dent on Saul Bellow, who, in a Playboy interview in 1997, described the actress as having “a kind of curious incandescence under the skin.” (This is not to overlook the endless words contributed by those who had access to her, including her half sister, her personal maids, and former lovers such as Yves Montand.)

  Monroe has been treated by writers like an anthropological find, a sort of Truffautian wild child. The tragic circumstances of her death help to account for this fascination, as does the evidence of her quick wit, which always endears populist icons to the intelligentsia. There is, too, the fact of her seeming to be intriguingly unauthored—a multilayered personality in search of a coherent self. She was constantly looking for guidance, whether from dead eminences, such as Dostoyevsky, Yeats, and Marx, or from real-life gurus, who included Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actors Studio, and her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson. One can’t ignore a certain mutual-admiration aspect in this, either: Monroe was one of the few babes to be drawn to brainy men, specifically writers. When she was put in Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for four days in 1961, she was reading Freud’s letters (she had already read Ernest Jones’s biography of him), and she herself was a fluid letter writer who was given to jotting little notes to herself about her mental state. It’s hard to imagine whom she might have taken up with if she had lived for any length of time beyond her failed marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller, but you can be sure it wouldn’t have been Eddie Fisher.

  The mysteries surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s life are many, beginning with the question of who her father was and ending with the disputed events of her death. The central enigma, however, is whether she was an innocent victim or a calculating user. Was she made of fluff or of steel? Two recent additions to the Monroe canon infuse new life into the hydra-headed genre of biography and conspiracy theory that arises around doomed ur-figures such as Monroe and her most famous lover, Jack Kennedy. Barbara Leaming’s biography, Marilyn Monroe, takes a more ambivalent approach to its subject than does The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, Donald H. Wolfe’s account of the forces that plotted to do Monroe in. Leaming, who has written biographies of Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn, portrays a woman who both resisted and exploited her own commodification. Her Marilyn is less a sweetheart than a manipulator—someone who is concerned with the effect of her actions on her public image rather than with the personal fallout from those actions. “Though Marilyn had initiated the divorce,” Leaming writes of Monroe’s decision to leave DiMaggio, her second husband, “she must appear to be as devastated as Joe.” She goes on to detail the cunning scenario that Monroe orchestrated, together with her attorney, for the benefit of journalists waiting outside her house after she served the divorce papers: the actress, holding a pair of white gloves in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, “seemed disoriented as flashbulbs exploded en masse,” “appeared to feel faint,” and “seemed on the verge of collapse.”

  Leaming provides a glimpse of Monroe’s emotionally impoverished childhood, allotting it eight pages of a 464-page book; although she throws the reader a bunch of social-workerish clichés, conceding that Monroe was a “sad, lonely little girl” filled with a feeling of “utter worthlessness,” she is less interested in probing the vicissitudes that shaped Monroe’s development than in condemning its outcome. The “poor, abused child” rapidly becomes a coy, shrewd young woman with a full-blown exhibitionist complex: “She was willing to pose in any and all circumstances.” Leaming writes that the adult Monroe “affected a quality that Joe Mankiewicz once described as her ‘pasted-on innocence’” and censoriously notes that Monroe’s unhappy early years were immediately enlisted as material for her ongoing press campaign: “In interview after interview, Marilyn portrayed herself as a courageous little orphan girl, a sort of modern-day Cinderella, whose childhood has been spent being passed from one foster home to another.”

  But, in truth, it had, hadn’t it? Leaming seems to suffer from a reflexively adverse reaction to her subject’s story that afflicts some of the writers attracted to Monroe. It’s as if the insistent neediness jangling beneath the surface of the actress’s allure were too threatening to contemplate, except from a safe and slightly supercilious distance. Interestingly, it is Wolfe’s account, concerned though it is with the logistical minutiae surrounding Monroe’s death, that delivers the more complex picture of the lost little girl who became, as Nunnally Johnson, the screenwriter for How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), called her, “a lost lady.”

  Monroe was born and died in California, that state beloved of dreamers and drifters—people like Maria Wyeth, in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, who are not “prepared to take the long view.” Monroe’s plight was in essence that of misplacement: an absence of the locating vectors of identity. She started as an illegitimate child without a real home, in Hawthorne, a suburb of Los Angeles, and she ended up alone with her telephone in a newly acquired, barely furnished stucco bungalow on a secluded cul-de-sac in Brentwood. The specter of mental illness haunted Monroe throughout her life: both her maternal grandparents died in mental hospitals, and her mother, Gladys, who suffered from intermittent psychotic episodes, was in and out of state institutions from the time her daughter was very young. Her father was listed as Edward Mortenson, address unknown, but her actual father appears to have been a man named Stan Gifford, whom Monroe tried repeatedly over the years to make contact with, and was always rebuffed.

  Within two weeks of her birth in a charity ward, the infant called Norma Jeane Baker was farmed out to a foster family. She spent the longest period—seven years—with Albert and Ida Bolender, a devout couple who boarded children to supplement Albert’s income as a postman. Even those who cast a cool eye on the heart-wrenching version of Monroe’s beginnings—as does Donald Spoto, whose 1993 biography of Monroe is exhaustively researched—concede that the atmosphere of the Bolender household was austere. Standards of discipline were high, the movies were never mentioned, and God hogged the spotlight. Norma Jeane’s mother contrived to set up a home of her own when her daughter was seven; she rented the upstairs to the Kinnells, a British couple who worked in film. As Wolfe tells it, the adult Monroe recalled—first in an interview with Ben Hecht and again a few weeks before she died—that she was molested by Mr. Kinnell during this brief period, which ended with Gladys’s being institutionalized again. (Other writers have dismissed or ignored this charge, but I’m inclined to believe it, since this was decades before the dawning of recovered memory syndrome.)

  When Norma Jeane was not yet nine, her mother was declared legally incompetent, and Grace McKee, who had become friendly with Gladys when they worked together in a film-cutting laboratory, acted as her guardian. McKee was genuinely fond of her charge and was the first to see star potential in her. But within less than a year she, too, was unable to look after Norma Jeane, and so, on September 13, 1935, the quiet, pretty little girl with blue-green eyes entered the Los Angeles Orphans Home. McKee stayed in close touch with her, buying her presents (which she billed to Gladys), rhapsodizing over her appearance, and overseeing the family situations in which an adolescent Norma Jeane would be placed after she left the orphanage. Gladys em
erged for occasional visits with her daughter, during which she acted dazed and cold, but Norma Jeane’s most stable companions were her glossy daydreams, in which she envisioned “becoming so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed.”

  Monroe herself took a fairly grim view of the forces that propelled her. “Yes, there was something special about me,” she once wrote, “and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl people expect to find dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.” In the event, her scenario proved prescient, but it doesn’t explain Norma Jeane’s rapid and dazzling transformation into “the Monroe.” What, then, does? One might deduce from even a minimal acquaintance with the literature that she was aided by casting couches, by mentors cum lovers (including Johnny Hyde, the William Morris agent; the Twentieth Century Fox executive Joe Schenck; and Spyros Skouras, the CFO of Fox), by cosmetic improvement (she had her nose bobbed and her chin rounded), and by sheer will. Did she sleep her way to the top? The answer seems to be yes and no. She slept with men who could help her, if she happened to like them, and she refused to sleep with men in power—among them Harry Cohn, the lecherous head of Columbia Pictures—whom she disliked. She seems, that is, to have been possessed of a situational sense of integrity. Thus she didn’t agree to marry an ailing Hyde in order to inherit his money, as he suggested she do, not only because she didn’t want to look like a gold digger, but because she wasn’t in love with him.

  The truth, of course, is that no matter how you contrive to get yourself noticed, you can’t sleep your way to mass appeal—to making your presence indelibly felt by audiences sitting in the dark. Although Monroe insured her own life for a paltry three thousand dollars, and the jewelry and furs she left behind were worth less than fifteen hundred, her box-office value was in the millions. When she died, a frantic Cohn, whose expedient definition of good movies was “those that make money,” is supposed to have yelled, “Get me another blonde!” (He was served up Kim Novak.)