The Fame Lunches Page 3
Monroe’s mutation from what the critic Richard Schickel calls a “pneumatic starlet” to a bulb-popping Movie Star has something of the epiphanous, dream-factory quality that adheres to the Lana Turner story. One minute you’re just another pretty hopeful, sipping soda at a Schwab’s counter, and in the next everyone wants a piece of you. Or as Cherie, the wannabe “chantoose” that Monroe played in Bus Stop (1956), hypothesized with exquisite simplicity, “You get discovered, you get options, and you get treated with a little respect, too.” Except in real life it never quite happens that way; in Monroe’s case, a good deal of energy was expended on trying to convince people that there was a serious contender inside the bimbo curves—a concept that continues to this day to be treated with a creeping note of disdain.
In Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, Schickel refers to “her thin and unsingular autobiography” and argues that “confession was a vital part of her success.” But it was Monroe’s early life that gave a poignant edge to the bombshell trope—that, in effect, made her such a compelling mix of visible assets and invisible deficits. I’m also unconvinced that, especially when viewed in light of today’s tell-all standards, she ever made much use of the confessional mode. She seems, rather, to have had a fairly well-developed sense of privacy. When she was asked to comment on the breakup of her marriage to Miller, she replied, “It would be indelicate of me to discuss this. I feel it would be trespassing.”
What’s clear is that Monroe believed in her rapport with the public more than she believed in her rapport with Hollywood. Indeed, there were always industry people on whom her charms were lost, who never saw her as anything but the trophy girlfriend she played in All About Eve (1950)—“a graduate of the Copacabana School of the Dramatic Arts.” Darryl F. Zanuck, the production chief at Twentieth Century Fox, where Monroe was first signed to a studio contract, referred to her as “a strawhead.” (According to Leaming, Fox dropped her in 1947, a year after she was signed, because Zanuck “thought she was unattractive.”) John Huston, who directed her in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The Misfits (1961), observed with his cavalier style of non-endorsement that Monroe “impressed me more off the screen than on”; Donald Spoto notes that although Huston took credit in his autobiography for immediately spotting Monroe’s talent, he had initially rejected her for the role of Angela in The Asphalt Jungle and agreed to cast her only after Louis B. Mayer was impressed by a screen test.
Monroe bonded primarily with the camera; her professional conduct was richly unreliable almost from the start. Chronically late and often so flustered that she stammered her lines when she did show up on the set, she required the constant assistance of drama coaches. (Paula Strasberg was eventually paid a queenly salary of three thousand dollars a week for her services, which generally amounted to no more than nodding or shaking her head after a particular take.) Billy Wilder, who directed the actress in The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), resisted what he termed the “cult” of sanctification that blossomed after her death, grouchily observing, “Marilyn Monroe was never on time, never knew her lines.” But he admitted that “for what you finally got on the screen, she was worth it.” Tony Curtis was less charitable: after suffering through retake after retake in Some Like It Hot, he made the notorious observation that kissing Monroe was like kissing Hitler. But Robert Mitchum, who appeared with Monroe in River of No Return (1954), directed by the bullying Otto Preminger, thought that her problems were rooted in a childlike sense of terror rather than in the narcissistic acting out of an indulged nymphette terrible: “Every time a director yelled ‘Action!’ she’d break out in a sweat … I mean it. She was scared.”
There were those who perceived Monroe’s peekaboo brand of magic early on. Groucho Marx was so taken with her signature, hip-wiggling walk when she came in for an interview at the age of twenty-one that he devised a tiny cameo for her in Love Happy (1950). “She’s Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one,” he enthused. Until that time, Monroe had uttered two words—“Hi, Rad!”—in a movie called Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! A few months later, she posed nude for a calendar manufacturer, who had seen a Pabst beer poster of her in a one-piece swimsuit. The photographer, Tom Kelley, nestled his entirely self-possessed model against a red velvet backdrop and proceeded to shoot her in dozens of positions. The most famous picture, titled Golden Dreams, reappeared several years later as Playboy’s first centerfold. By 1952, when the Los Angeles Herald Examiner got wind of this indiscretion, the actress who had seemed to be destined for nothing much was dating a baseball great and was receiving two or three thousand fan letters a week. Somewhere between Love Happy and Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)—where she gave a subtle, nuanced performance in her first leading role, proving her ability to convey the tug of emotion as well as of sex—the ferocity of Monroe’s ambition overcame the obstacles posed by her insecurities. At least for a time.
The contradictory versions of Monroe’s ascension are matched only by the varied explanations of her free fall into personal chaos and professional disfavor. (She was fired from her last film, which was called, appropriately, Something’s Got to Give.) Depending on whom one is inclined to believe, she was either destined for suicide all along (having made four previous attempts at it) or aided and abetted in her self-destruction by everyone around her. Neither view really satisfies: the former seems too briskly dismissive, the latter too puffy with melodrama. If Monroe were a fictional character, I would conjecture that what killed her was fatigue, brought on by extreme insomnia and a lack of resilience. “Life,” as Samuel Butler once wearily remarked, “is one long process of getting tired,” and in Monroe’s case the process was accelerated. By the end, it took her so long to get going that during the shooting of The Misfits she often had to be made up while she was still lying in bed.
In The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe, Wolfe asserts that the actress was the victim of foul play—a “premeditated homicide.” Such conspiracy theories are easy to laugh off, and they’re hard to follow in the richness of their speculations unless one is a buff or a complete obsessive. But, except for the hairiest, visitor-from-Mars variety, they usually have valid issues attached to them, and in the instance of Monroe’s passing there are some curiously dangling threads. These include time-line problems—an unexplained lag of several hours between the moment she died and the moment the police were called, during which period her house might have been ransacked—and several puzzling forensic phenomena, such as a number of bruises on her body and the stunning amount of drugs in her bloodstream, which have been attributed to a “hot shot.”
Wolfe builds on the material that appeared in Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (1985), a spellbinding saga written by the journalist Anthony Summers, who concludes that Bobby Kennedy showed up at Monroe’s residence on the day she died, though he isn’t finally convinced that any malfeasance occurred. Wolfe adds some crucial interviews, particularly with Jack Clemmons, the first LAPD officer to arrive at the Monroe residence after her internist, Hyman Engelberg, called with the news of her suicide. Wolfe goes further than Summers, yet there’s a steady purposiveness to his account; it feels like honorable work, not the effusions of a crackpot. The pivotal detail for Wolfe and other conspiracists is that Monroe, according to Robert Slatzer, a journalist who claimed to have been briefly married to her, was threatening to hold a press conference in order to rat on Jack and Bobby Kennedy after they dumped her. Whether you credit Slatzer’s version or not (Spoto, for one, doesn’t), the welter of incriminatingly replayed scenes and darkly knowing anecdotes begins to fuse together into a menacing set of possibilities.
Was a frightened Monroe invited to a Lake Tahoe lodge co-owned by Frank Sinatra and the mobster Sam Giancana the weekend before she died, drugged, and sexually assaulted on camera to ensure her silence about the Kennedys? Was she accidentally done in by Ralph Greenson, the overinvested and eerily controlling analyst, who, in an effort to revive her, injected her with adrenaline
, accidentally hitting a rib instead of her heart? Or was it Bobby Kennedy’s henchmen, brought in to deal with Monroe and to steal a red journal in which she had jotted down top-secret political information that she was privy to, who offed her? Or perhaps the housekeeper did it—Eunice Murray, a bizarre, loitering character whom Monroe had just given notice to. The amassing of documentation only confuses the reader, and yet, in Monroe’s case, such theories have an emotional logic that goes beyond their literal substance: The Monroe that Wolfe portrays is an unclaimed yet invaluable object that everyone had a proprietary eye on. In the gap between her lack of self-regard and her charismatic dependency on others, there was ample space for the kind of exploitation that could shade imperceptibly into very real danger.
Finally, it’s no accident that in Leaming’s biography Elia Kazan is said to have “called her the gayest girl he had ever known,” while in Wolfe’s book Arthur Miller describes himself as being captivated by “the saddest girl I’ve ever seen.” Monroe was both, and perhaps the greatest tragedy of her life is that the depressive swings in her personality weren’t taken seriously enough—weren’t treated, as the doctors at Payne Whitney apparently thought they should have been, as manifestations of a recurrent bipolar mood disorder. Instead, she was persistently categorized as an upper-middle-class neurotic, whose problems could be solved psychodynamically, with five-times-a-week therapy sessions and with endless tranquilizers and sleeping pills—Nembutal, Amytal, and chloral hydrate, among others. This seems regrettable, especially considering Monroe’s unself-pitying attitude toward depression, which she expressed in a letter to Greenson about a doctor at Payne Whitney: “He asked me how I could possibly work when I was depressed … He actually stated it more than he questioned me, so I replied, ‘Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had been depressed when they worked sometimes?’ It’s like saying a ball player like DiMaggio couldn’t hit a ball when he was depressed. Pretty silly.”
One assumes that both Greenson and Marianne Kris, her New York City analyst, meant well by her; certainly Greenson, who consulted with Anna Freud on how best to deal with Monroe, was available to her by phone in the wee hours of the morning and in person, often at a moment’s notice. But all those who came into Monroe’s presence ended up ceding their boundaries, as if offering more of themselves would make Monroe think more of herself. It didn’t work, didn’t prevent her “night terrors” from taking big chunks out of her. “Last night I was awake all night again,” she wrote to Greenson about a year before she died. “Sometimes I wonder what the nighttime is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me—it all seems like one long, long horrible day.”
Unlike other survivors of difficult childhoods, such as Joan Crawford, Monroe doesn’t seem to have been toughened by experience, and remained intensely vulnerable to loss. (She never got over her breakup with Miller or the two miscarriages she suffered during her marriage to him.) Still, at times she understood herself better than the experts did. In a 1955 note to herself she wrote, “My problem of desperation in my work and life—I must begin to face it continually, making my work routine more continuous, and of more importance than my desperation.” It’s customary to say that Hollywood destroyed Monroe, but in fact she might have been happier if she had been able to embrace her career and comfortably inhabit her stardom, as Elizabeth Taylor did, instead of holding the costume of celebrity at arm’s length and finding it full of holes. In her last interview, with the Life reporter Richard Meryman, she pointed out that fame, like caviar, “wasn’t really for a daily diet, that’s not what fulfills you.”
In the end, Monroe retained the mind-set of a waif, looking for the sort of unconditional embrace from men that only a child comes by naturally, from his or her parents. What she needed was larger than sex, although she continually sought refuge in that easy place: it was a permanent fixing of things gone wrong, an undoing of her history. The stalwart DiMaggio, whom she nicknamed Slugger, loved her with the sort of potato love that might have made her strong if she had been able to take it in—and if he had been able to accept her with all her glamour-puss trappings instead of being enraged by them. “It’s no fun being married to an electric light,” he growled. Yet it strikes me that it was Arthur Miller—who comes off badly in many accounts of Monroe’s life, and emerges least well in Leaming’s biography, where he is painted as a pious, unself-aware careerist—who comprehended the desolation that drove her, the “relief” she sought from what he called her “detached and centerless and invaded life.” Whether or not Miller wrote The Misfits out of a genuine artistic impulse or with an eye to creating a vehicle for his wife that would enhance his dwindling reputation, the role of Roslyn captures the bleakness that yawned beneath the lush persona, spreading emptiness. “The trouble is,” Monroe says at the start of the movie to a sympathetic Thelma Ritter, “I always end up back where I started. I never had anybody much.”
I can see why Monroe’s genius—at least as far as men are concerned—is said to reside in stills, where she doesn’t appear anxious and promises the kind of sexual fulfillment you don’t need to buy but have only to ask for. She has also been widely acclaimed for her deft touch as a comedienne, in films like The Seven Year Itch and How to Marry a Millionaire. And there is indeed something innately humorous about the cognitive dissonance she inspires—the way her physical impact rubs up against her shy, self-effacing side, which is reflected in the Kewpie-doll voice and what one of her co-stars called “those famous liquid eyes.” But I find her most interesting to watch in unfunny movies, like Don’t Bother to Knock, Bus Stop, and The Misfits, where the dissonance is all but gone and, in its place, distress flickers around her like a penumbra, a halo of misery above her light hair. Give me, she says; I need you. Her eyes widen, her teeth glisten, her lips do that strange quivering thing which suggests, by some unconscious association of orifices, that she is yearning to take the male spectator inside her. And what about the female spectator? We sense her panic, and we wonder if anyone so beautiful—“gleaming there, so pale and white,” as Don Murray gushes when he first spots her in Bus Stop—has ever conveyed so much loneliness. When she’s not sending out that huge, delighted, and delight-inducing smile of hers, she looks inconsolable.
LOCKED IN THE PLAYGROUND
(MICHAEL JACKSON)
2003
It is a late Monday afternoon, the unseasonably benign weather has suddenly turned cold, winter jabbing us in the ribs, and I am sitting in my shrink’s office, talking about Michael Jackson’s recent arrest on child-molestation charges. All that raving pathology thrust once again into the glare of the headlines, his face caught in that creepy, deer-in-the-headlights mug shot, and everyone looking on, snickering and ogling, horrified and fascinated at the same time. That mixture of fame and fragility, which always seems to bring on the wolves.
I find myself feeling protective on his wounded, weird behalf—or, perhaps, on my own wounded, weird behalf. I am discussing how vulnerable he is, how skinless. I say that I don’t believe—on the instinctive level, where we all make such assessments all the time—he is a pedophile and that he strikes me as presexual. Which is not to say that he’s transcendently sane, like, say, Mr. Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver (although one might argue that Jackson is more like the Beaver himself, which is to say that if television were reality and Beaver Cleaver didn’t have to grow up, things might never have gone so awry). When the shrink nods, I don’t know whether to interpret his nod as a sign of assent or simply an indication that he is listening to me as I dedicate my fifty minutes to the analysis of Michael Jackson by proxy. I wonder aloud whether Jackson has ever sought psychiatric help: What exactly is wrong with him, in clinical terms?
I talk about him as though he were an invisible sidekick, representing the parts of me that I have learned to hide—the infantile wishes and regressive longings that swim under the surface of adult life. Only in Jackson’s case, he has been hiding in plain sight for years, what w
ith the wigs, the false lashes, the makeup, the shades, the Halloween getups, the parasol, the surgical masks. Peekaboo, I see you. He puts me in mind of a children’s book my daughter used to love when she was very little, a book that began “Jesse Bear, what will you wear? What will you wear in the morning?” I always paused right before “morning,” and she would always fill the word in, wobbling over the r in “morning” so that it came out “maw-ning.” I think part of the allure of Jesse Bear was that it seemed as though he could begin all new again every day. Simply by deciding what kind of clothes he wanted to wear, he could decide who he wanted to be. If only it were that simple.
In watching Jackson’s increasingly Houdini-like efforts to break out of the prison of who he inexorably is, we see the painful no-exit dilemma we are all stuck with as chronologically finished products—grown-ups by any other name. On the one hand, Jackson’s increasingly bizarre efforts to crawl out of his own skin reveal what we have suspected all along—that personal identity is an imperfect construct, one that is wobbly and full of glitches. Its center is fragile and in psychological extremis often as not begins to show fissures. As we’ve watched Jackson’s combination of self-destructive and self-fetishizing impulses play out, what has been no less vividly exposed are the limitations of a given identity—even in these cosmetically transformational, “anything is possible” times. The cultural zeitgeist of personal omnipotence—epitomized by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s trajectory from a humble Austrian background to the governorship of California—makes it easy to forget that the delicate construction we call a “self” is not an infinitely malleable object.