Marilyn: A Biography (16 page)

That is a world which can take on dimensions
of risk in Hemingway, or pathos in Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. It is
also a world where women can be mothers, sisters, angels, broads,
good sports, sweethearts, bitches, trouble, or
dynamite
, but
are always seen at a remove, as a class apart. It is a world of men
whose fundamental habit is to live with one another and compete
with one another. Their habit is not homosexual but fundamental.
Its root is often so simple as having grown up in a family of
brothers, or known more happiness with their father than their
mother — the days of their lives have been spent with other men.
Women are an emotional luxury. Of course, like all luxuries they
can be alternately ignored and coveted, but it is false to the
whole notion of that world, and impossible to understand DiMaggio,
if it is not seen that the highest prize in a world of men is the
most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her
heart loyal to you. Sexual prowess is more revered than any
athletic ability but a good straight right. It is precisely because
women are strange and difficult, and not at all easy, that they are
respected enormously as trophies. It is part of the implicit comedy
of DiMaggio’s relations with Monroe that he would expect her to
understand this. There is a story of a very tough man, told in New
York bars, who revered his wife and lived with her for twenty
years, and at the end of that time she said, “Why don’t you ever
tell me you love me?” He grunted and said, “I’m
with
you,
ain’t I?” Women who can live with such men obviously have to
comprehend their code. It is as if DiMaggio expects her to
understand, with of course never a word being said, that he has not
arrived at his eminence in Toots Shor’s along with Hemingway and
one or two select sports writers and gamblers because he is dumb or
gifted or lucky but because he had an art that demanded huge
concentration, and the consistent courage over the years to face
into thousands of fast balls any of which could kill or cripple him
if he were struck in the head, and closer than such danger, engaged
his ego in the perilous business of each working day being booed or
cheered depending on how he passed the daily test of pressure. If
he had been a New York Yankee, and therefore in the highest part of
that sporting establishment honored by the corporation, the
diocese, and the country club; if DiMaggio with his conservative
clothes and distinguished gray hair was a considerable distance
from the athlete who gets up in the morning with his head axed by a
hangover and blows his nose to get the sexual gunk of the night
before out of his nostril hairs (which act excites him to give no
farewell kiss to the garlic and bourbon breath of the sleeping
sweaty broad of the night before), then stumbles out in white shirt
and tie into early morning sunlight to take his place at a
communion breakfast, and get up on his feet in his turn with other
ballplayers and prizefighters to tell the parochial kids how to
live, cleanly, that is, as Americans; if DiMaggio has too much
class to be part of this hogpen of whole hypocrisy (he is a Yankee
and the best), still he has all the patriotism and punctilious
social behavior that is still required of great athletes in the
early Fifties: his propriety has to reinforce the romantic image he
must hold of himself and his love for her. His communion to her,
his gift to her, is that he loves her. He’s there, isn’t he? He
will certainly be her champion in any emergency. He will die for
her if it comes to that. He will found a dynasty with her if she
desires it, but he does not see their love as a tender wading pool
of shared interests and tasting each other’s concoctions in the
kitchen. He is, in fact, even more used to the center of attention
than she is, and probably has as much absorption in his own body,
for it has been his instrument just so much as her anatomy has
become her instrument, and besides, the body of a professional
athlete is part of the capital of a team, and numbers of trainers
have spent years catering to it. Indeed, the one of her associates
he likes the most is Whitey Snyder, her makeup man, who looks like
a cross between Mickey Spillane and a third-base coach. DiMaggio
can understand and get along with the man who helps her to keep her
professionalism in shape. The easiest thing he can understand in
her world is Snyder talking about how he does her face: “Marilyn
has makeup tricks that nobody else has and nobody knows. Some of
them she won’t tell me. She has discovered them herself. She has
certain ways of lining and shadowing her eyes that no other actress
can do. She puts on a special kind of lipstick; it’s a secret blend
of three different shades. I get that moist look on her lips for
when she’s going to do a sexy scene by first putting on the
lipstick and then putting a gloss over the lipstick. The gloss is a
secret formula of Vaseline and wax . . .” It is like listening to a
trainer hint at the undisclosed blends of a super-liniment, or an
athlete describe how he bandages himself, but, finally, DiMaggio
cannot have the same respect for movie people that he has had for
athletes who pass tests. He has discovered the wheel. They are
people with false identity. Phony.

And she has to be suffering all the anguish
of living with a man who will save her in a shipwreck or learn to
drive a dog team to the North Pole (if her plane should crash
there) but sits around the apartment watching television all night,
hardly talks to her, is not splendidly appreciative of her cooking
yet resentful when they eat in restaurants, acts like a maiden aunt
when she gets ready to go out in the world with a swatch of bare
bosom, and, incredible pressure upon her brain, wishes to end her
movie career! She needs, ah, she needs a lot. No heroic man of
hard-forged and iron identity (with both his souls wed into
narrow-minded strictures and athletic grace), no, she needs a
double soul a little more like her own, a computer with circuits
larger than her own, and a devil with charm in the guise of an
angel, something of that sort she certainly needs, but
wholly
devoted to her. Because the keel of her identity has
at last been laid — she is her career, and her career is herself.
No lover can shift this truth — as quickly let a wife ask Thomas
Alva Edison to abjure his laboratory! She will never get what she
needs in the full proportion of her needs — never enough creative
service to satisfy taste and tender wit — a man who can anticipate
that if she claims to love anemones they must still not be too
violet, a slave of exquisite sweetness who will foresee appetites
and develop them by art and surprise, someone who — full lament of
a woman — someone who will bring her
out
! Instead she has
DiMag, worth the front page of the New York
Daily News
every
time he smiles. DIMAG SMILES!

So their affair goes on, they fight, have
reconciliations, fight again. They separate, and they love each
other more on the phone. He will be in New York and she will make a
film. He will come to San Francisco and she will go to New York.
They reunite in Los Angeles, or she goes to visit his restaurant at
Fisherman’s Wharf. They surreptitiously move clothes into each
other’s apartments — then tell the newspaper world they are still
only friends. For near to two years it goes on. He wishes to marry,
but she is uncertain, then he will go away for a few weeks in
disgust, or refuse to accompany her to a function where she most
certainly wants him along. On one night in 1953 when she is given a
Photoplay
magazine award, DiMaggio is so outraged by the cut
of her dress that Sidney Skolsky has to take her to the dinner.
Joan Crawford will be equally censorious: “Sex plays a tremendously
important part in every person’s life,” are her words to columnist
Bob Thomas. “People are interested in it, intrigued with it. But
they don’t like to see it flaunted in their faces. She [Miss
Monroe] should be told that the public likes provocative feminine
personalities; but it also likes to know that underneath it all,
the actresses are ladies.”

Is this the voice of DiMaggio in Miss
Crawford’s mouth? “I think the thing that hit me the hardest,” said
Marilyn, now offering an exclusive reply to Louella Parsons, “is
that it came from her. I’ve always admired her for being such a
wonderful mother — for taking four children and giving them a fine
home. Who, better than I, know what it means to homeless little
ones?”

She is also shaming DiMaggio. He, too, is
being cruel to the homeless little one. Yet is it possible he is
the one responsible for the fact that she has never been more
attractive than in these years? She looks fed on sexual candy.
Never again in her career will she look so sexually perfect as in
1953 making
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, no, never — if we are
to examine a verb through its adverb — will she appear so fucky
again. It is either a reflection of her success at the studio, or
the secret of her sex with DiMaggio, and that is one secret she is
not about to admit. She will look more subtle in future years, more
adorable, certainly lovelier, more sensitive, more luminous, more
tender, more of a heroine, less of a slut — but never again will
she seem so close to a detumescent body ready to roll right over
the edge of the world and drop your body down a chute of pillows
and honey. If all this kundalini is being sent out to an anonymous
human sea, her sex flowing forever on a one-way canal to the lens
and never to one man, it is the most vivid abuse of kundalini in
the history of the West, and makes her indeed a freak of too
monumental proportions. It is easier to comprehend her as a woman
often void of sex in the chills and concentration of her career,
but finally a woman who has something of real sexual experience
with her men, for she tends to take on the inner character of the
lover she is with, something of his expression. In the best years
with DiMaggio, her physical coordination is never more vigorous and
athletically quick; she dances with all the grace she is ever going
to need when doing
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, all the grace
and all the bazazz — she is a musical comedy star with panache!
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend! What a surprise! And sings so
well Zanuck will first believe her voice was dubbed, and then will
finally go through the reappraisal, ulcerous to the eye of his
stomach, of deciding she may be the biggest star they have at
Twentieth, and the biggest they are going to have. Yes, she is
physically resplendent, and yet her face in these years shows more
of vacuity and low cunning than it is likely to show again — she is
in part the face DiMaggio has been leaving in her womb. “Take the
money,” he says to her on one occasion when she is talking about
her publicity, and something as hard and blank as a New York Yankee
out for a share of the spoils is now in her expression.

* * *

Still, she is a wonder in
Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes
. The play has run for two years on Broadway, and the
part of Lorelei Lee has been minted by Carol Channing. It is
analogous to the difficulty Gertrude Lawrence is to face in making
The Glass Menagerie
after Laurette Taylor. Yet
Gentlemen
becomes the best picture Monroe has made so far.
She comes into the film looking like a winner, and leaves as one —
not inconceivable that DiMaggio has put a sense of victory into
her. If she has had her first acting lesson not six years before,
and never been near to working on a New York stage, it has no
significance before her grasp of cinema. She inhabits the frame
even when she is not on. Just as she had once preempted the art of
the still photographer and painted herself into the lens, now she
preempts the director. In this film, and in
Some Like It
Hot
, to a lesser degree in
The Seven-Year Itch
or
Bus
Stop
or
The Misfits
, it is as if she has been the secret
director. The picture has been set by the tone of her personality,
set just so fully, let us say, as Ingmar Bergman leaves his mood on
every scene. But Bergman at least has a mood that is suitable to
such impressment on material; he lives in the vapors of evening and
the hour of the wolf: all the hoarded haunted sorrows of
Scandinavia drift in to imbibe the vampires of his psyche — he is
like a spirit vapor risen out of the sinister character of film
itself. She, however, is merely a sexpot on a romp, there with Jane
Russell in the Battle of the
Bulge
(as a columnist with
ineluctable newspaperese is bound to put it), a young actress
enjoying herself immensely in a film, or so it seems, and yet a
species of musical comedy history is being made, for her
personality infuses every corner of the film as if she has even
picked the scenery to work for her. Of course, she has not, she has
merely accommodated herself to the background and the costumes, but
how she steeps herself in the existence of that film, how she lives
in harmony with Jane Russell. Never have two women gotten along
together so well in a musical. So the movie rises above its
pretext, its story, its existence as a musical, even its music, and
becomes at its best a magic work, yet it is a comic bubble without
weight or solemnity, another piece of spun sugar come up out of
everything banal in entertainment. She must be the first embodiment
of Camp, for
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
is a perfect film in
the way early Sean Connery–James Bond films were perfect. In such
classics of Camp, which would arrive ten years later and more, no
actor was ever serious for an instant, nor any situation ever
remotely believable — the art was to sustain non-existence,
counter-existence, as if to suggest that life cannot be
comprehended by a direct look — we are not only in life but to the
absurd side of it, attached to something else as well — something
mysterious and of the essence of detachment. So in
Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes
, she is a sexual delight, but she is also the
opposite of that, a particularly cool voice which seems to say,
“Gentlemen: ask yourself what really I am, for I pretend to be
sexual and that may be more interesting than sex itself. Do you
think I have come to you from another place?” She could even be a
visitor who has studied the habits of humans — the unhappy
suspicion crosses our head that if she were a saint or a demon we
would never know.