Marilyn: A Biography (10 page)

His first impression of the model who arrived
was that she was beautifully made up. He thought there was
something particularly clean and agreeable about her. “Not a whore,
absolutely not, a nice young girl,” he said. She had not been there
five minutes before he was asking her if she would pose in the
nude.

She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure. She was
married, after all. Separated from her husband, but married. Now,
Dienes was full of concern. She was precisely that Girl of the
Golden West he had been looking for — he had actually been humming
Puccini as he thought of his project — but the trip had to be
innocent. They could take pictures and make love against splendid
backgrounds where Indians had once lived. But nobody must be
hurt
. So he asked more questions, even got himself invited
to dinner on some future date. When Norma Jean now excused herself
from this interview long enough to go to the bathroom — his
proposition must have made her nervous — he looked into her model’s
box to study the costumes she had brought to his studio. There was
only a bathing suit. He took pictures of her that day in the
bathing suit, and sent flowers to her home before he came to
dinner, laid siege to Ana Lower or Gladys, he is not sure whom he
met, “a fine lady and not young,” and assured her of his regard for
Norma Jean. She in turn said grace before the meal and assured him
that Norma Jean’s marriage was over, and he would hurt nothing.

So the photographer took off in a car with
his model for a month in the West, and went up to Oregon and down
to the Mojave, through Yosemite and above San Francisco in the
redwood country, wandering to no plan, searching under desert sun
for old mining towns and driving north into the snows. He did not
sleep with her at first, he was not able to. She liked him, and she
posed beautifully in all the clothes he had brought for the trip,
but at night they took separate cabins. Since she traveled with a
Christian Science prayer book, she prayed at lunch. In Yosemite
there were only outdoor latrines, and she confessed to him that she
was afraid of the bears when she left her cabin in the middle of
the night. Each morning they got up at five to be on the road
early, but they did not make good time, for she was often carsick.
Her hours passed in a state of dreaminess that left her oblivious
of the environment, and this began to irritate him. Once he scolded
her for never cleaning the dust off the dashboard. Still, he was
very fond of her, and determined to get her to bed.

One evening, as they headed into the
mountains, there was a snowstorm, and when he stopped at a lodge,
there was only one bedroom open. They would have to share it. She
asked him to drive on in the snow. He obeyed. They drove for
several hours in a near blizzard before coming to another lodge. It
too had only one room available. He was in an Hungarian fairy tale.
“Norma Jean, I will sleep in the lobby, and you take the room. But
we cannot go on.” She laughed and said they could share the room.
So he became her lover. “She was lovely and very nice, but finally
it was something she allowed me to do to her.” Since Hungarians are
sometimes known for making love more elaborately than the Irish, it
is possible Dienes had variations to offer that Dougherty might
have looked upon as debased. While today one has to look into the
highest ranks of the Republican Party before finding an American
who is not polymorphous perverse, it was then 1946 and Norma Jean
might have been surprised at such kinds of sexual variety.
Certainly she did not give back any caress more tangible than
gratitude. André de Dienes hardly cared. Her gratitude was what he
was listening to. She had never, no, never, not before. . . . He
was the first man, but for her husband, and with her husband, she
had never, no, never. . . . It snowed and they stayed in bed.
Dienes was in love. For the rest of the trip, he would photograph
her all day and sleep with her all night. He would study her as she
became lost in a study of mushrooms growing beneath a tree — was
she comparing them to differences she had now discovered in the
penis of the husband and the lover? Did she wonder at God’s
design?

Or, did he ever photograph her in the nude?
The answer is he tried. They fought about it. Once she even leaped
out of the car while they were parked, and ran away a distance and
screamed, “I won’t! I won’t! Don’t you understand? I’m going to be
a great movie star someday.” After a while he gave up a little. He
did not want to jar the edges of this idyll. Besides, they were
going to get married. He had never been as happy in his life. Even
when she forgot to lock the trunk of the car and half his
photographic equipment, all of her new clothes that he had
purchased, and most of his exposed film had been stolen, he settled
for photographing her in dungarees.

They would have a few conversations he still
remembers. Once she even spoke of going back to New York with him
to study law at Columbia. “Why?” She wished to do good for people.
And he in his turn, photographing her one day in the desert, said
with passion, “You are going to go on and on and you will be very
famous and have many pictures taken, and I will end as a hermit in
a cave.” And she laughed and said, “André, you are very sweet.”

They came back to Los Angeles. They were
engaged. Business took him to New York. In his studio there the
walls were plastered with pictures of her. His friends thought him
crazy. “She is not that remarkable,” they would tell him.

When he went back to Los Angeles, she was
changed. He spied on her and discovered she was going out with
other men. Their engagement was broken. For years he claims to have
hated her, but from time to time would find himself accepting
assignments to photograph her again, as at Jones Beach in 1950 when
he took “the sexiest picture I ever made.” Sometimes they would
make love when they saw each other again, which was not often, and
became more infrequent every year. Still, in this same year, 1949,
unable to rid his mind of the idea that they might still be
married, he went back to Los Angeles in order to be near her. But
she would not see him often. He would hate her again.

The last time he saw her was in 1961. On
impulse, he called her at the Beverly Hills Hotel and she asked him
to come over. It was her birthday and she was alone, and drinking
champagne when he arrived. Her mood was low. She was recovering
from an operation for “internal troubles, female troubles,” and the
studio, she confessed, was trying to tell her she was insane. He
thought, on the contrary, she had become “a fine, intelligent
woman.” They drank champagne for hours, and his mood entered into
the sweet and awesome depths of what they might yet be able to do
for one another again. After a long while, he tried to make love to
her.

“André,” he reported her to say, “do you wish
to kill me? I have this operation! You must not be selfish.” He
left soon after, but he had a sudden rage at the thought of being
betrayed, and tiptoed back, and waited on the porch of her bungalow
at the Beverly Hills Hotel in the dark. No telephone calls came to
her, just as there had been none that afternoon of her birthday,
and none came now. At nine o’clock, she turned out the lights and
went to sleep, and no lover came to replace him. After another
hour, Dienes tiptoed away and never saw her again, not alive. And
now he lives in a house which may be something like a cave, still a
bachelor and more of a hermit and not as attached to the idea of
sex every night as once he was, a vigorous man of middle height,
still full of a workingman’s energy and with eyes that blazed so
clearly they were remembered as blue when in fact they were brown.
A rugged hint of something like the features Harpo Marx might have
had if he had been craggier and had not died too young is in the
photographer’s face. “That is the truth as it happened to me,” said
Dienes in his accent, “and I tell it to you all.”

* * *

What he did not know is that in the last
years of her life she never rented an hotel suite that did not have
two exits. So she may not have gone to sleep early that birthday
night in 1961, but on the contrary, have slipped out on him. The
riddle of her personality is with us, in any case, as we hear this
story, for the question of her sincerity is almost insurmountable.
Of Dienes it is hard not to believe that he is telling the truth,
and indeed it is as if the experience is still there in all of his
senses and has never altered. But we can hardly know if she was
serious about marrying him, or drifted through the month, and was
more delighted than not when it was done. Again, as with Dougherty,
the truth may be an actor’s truth, where she felt every emotion
Dienes assumed she felt, but it was her role and not her identity
he was given.

That is confusion enough, but it is confusion
limited by supposing she told the truth to Dienes, and he was only
the second man in her life. What if she were lying? She will yet
become so superb an actress, and she is obviously so creative
already that it must have been small effort for her to encourage
him to fall in love with her. One must act toward a goal, and
intensifying his love keeps the play alive. So we cannot ignore the
possibility that when it comes to sex she is as consummate a liar
as she will be with publicity — for that matter, it is hard for
actors not to tell a lie: the premise of their improvisation
becomes thereby purer. For it is not always easy to know if we are
telling the truth. The lie, however, being definite, offers a
foundation for a part, offers a
script
. Thus the lie gives
substance to an actor’s personality. So the biographer who cocks
his ears like any bright dog at the remark to Dienes that she has
never had an orgasm before (since this offers some clarity into her
relations with Dougherty) is left later to contend with information
that she says the same thing to one or two other men and so opens
the question of whether something of the sort was offered to many.
Indeed, she may have had many a lover before Dienes, or one or two,
at any rate, we know nothing about.

Let us return then to the little of which we
can be certain. She is young, she is lovely, she is clean, she is
likable, she is dreamy and energetic by turns. She is capable of
getting into love affairs and getting out of them. Yet she is still
painfully shy, remote from herself. So she can be tender, yet
cold-blooded — her love tends to end when the role ends. So she is
more and more single-minded about a career, as if not only sanity
but life depends on this. Finally, she is a girl of nineteen
possessed of a witch’s skill in relation to the eye of a camera.
Mushrooms are growing in the forest and she stares at them. The
camera catches her. She is there to be caught. So her love affair
with Dienes speaks also of her love for the still camera. She will
yet use cheesecake as a lever to open the vaults of power in the
movie studios, and they are doors guarded by ogres. Thus she is,
with everything else, and all her lies, a princess with a wand to
wave. Let us assume she is stroking her wand in that sweet month
with Dienes and even loves him a little as the equerry whose
service would refine her magic.

With this much clarity, we can still tell her
story. The facts will not grow simpler. To her own lies will be
added the ten thousand lies initiated by everyone’s separate
self-interest on a movie set. A mat of factoids awaits us. So the
time is even approaching when the narrative must touch fewer events
if we are to follow her at all. Still, our history now brought to
the edge of her entrance into movie life, we may as well enjoy one
more situation where we can have no certainty of who reverses the
truth. It is just about our last glimpse of Dougherty and a good
one. Back in Los Angeles after the divorce, he is obliged to pay
for parking tickets she gets on her car because it is still
registered in his name. He comes to see her.

Dougherty’s version is by way of Guiles: “Are
you happy?” he decides to ask by way of greeting.

The question seemed to have caught her by
surprise. Jim recalls that she considered it for a minute or two,
and then said, “I guess I should be. During the day, I’m fine. But
sometimes in the evening, well, I wish there was someone to take me
out who doesn’t expect anything from me. You know what I mean?”

Jim knew what she meant and wondered if she
would ask him now to take her out or wait a few days and call him
up. The idea that she would drop him as a husband because he was in
her way and then talk about her loneliness angered him. He brought
up the matter of the parking tickets. . . .

“
I’ll pay the tickets,” she said without
hesitation. “In installments like everything else. . . .”

Finally, Jim got up to leave. As he stood in
her doorway, she said, “We could go out sometime. I know I’d like
that.”

Jim said, “Okay. Sometime. Goodbye,
Norma.”

“
Goodbye, Jim,” she said. And Jim
Dougherty walked down the stairs and out of her life.

Monroe’s version, as told to Arthur Miller,
is that when her final divorce papers had to be signed, Dougherty
asked for a meeting at a bar, and there told her he wouldn’t sign a
thing unless she went to bed with him one more time. Another man
can offer the charity of assuming Dougherty wanted a fighting
chance — only a true lover dares to make a bet on the very last of
his hopes. Of course, a woman might reject the charity by remarking
that Dougherty still didn’t feel paid for his three hundred bucks.
According to Miller, Monroe never told the end of the story. We do
not know how she got the signature. As for the versions — they
offer their conflict. We can take the word of an actress or a
narcotics cop. The life of a literary sleuth is no neater than a
precinct detective’s.