Marilyn: A Biography (17 page)

In any case, it is the first film which
enables us to speak of her as a great comedian, which is to say she
bears an exquisitely light relation to the dramatic thunders of
triumph, woe, greed, and calculation: she is also a first artist of
the put-on — she dramatizes one cardinal peculiarity of existence
in this century — the lie, when well embodied, seems to offer more
purchase upon existence than the truth. The factoid sinks deeper
roots than the fact. The oncoming desire to inhabit the interior of
the put-on and thereby know one’s own relation to a role (in such a
way that others cannot) will affect a whole generation in the
Sixties. They will rush into the shifting mirrors of the put-on —
it is the natural accompaniment to sexual promiscuity. “I had a
great piece of ass last night,” says the husband to his wife. “You
did?” “No, in fact, I didn’t get laid at all.” In a world where
everyone must lie, the put-on becomes a convention, an oasis, a
watering hole where two liars can rest for a moment in mutual
recognition of the impossibility of reaching any reality across the
burned-out desert. (In the Seventies, America would even be ruled
by a President who could put in a claim to have rediscovered the
political put-on as he folded his hands in prayer when the truce
was signed in Vietnam.)

But she is so early in her put-on, and so
different in her style. Maybe that is the reason Zanuck valued her
lightly — he could just not find her sexual meat and potatoes, not
palpable to him, and he was right! — they may not have been
palpable. She is so special, so suggestive of someone possessed.
She is even reminiscent of a medium who has to go through more and
more arduous emotional labors to locate the spirits of the sexual
séance she would invoke. So to begin to speak of her first triumph
also requires one to speak of the first signs of her future
breakdown. It is in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
that she begins
to be late to the set and to fight with her directors. As time goes
on, one can even suspect she fights with directors in the way a
medium will seek to eliminate those guests who are too hearty or
hostile at a séance, as though she can express her own art only
after she has neutralized more active life forces around her. In an
interview with Zolotow she said, “I do not believe I could ever
take the road of religion, and yet I believe in many things that
can’t be explained by science. I know that I feel stronger if the
people around me on the set love me, care for me, and hold good
thoughts for me. It creates an aura of love, and I believe I can
give a better performance.” With each film she will make from now
on, she will report later for work each day. On
Some Like It
Hot
, her greatest film, there will be days when she answers the
nine o’clock call at four in the afternoon, and Billy Wilder will
suffer with a spasm of his back muscles through the film, while
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon stand around in high heels for hours
and curse her impotently for the delay. Of course, nothing will
waste an enemy’s curse faster than letting him wait. Yet we may as
well go further and assume the real motive to her lateness came
from the instinct of a medium who needed a way to draw on all those
psychic forces not easily available, but forces she is nonetheless
obliged to pick up for her art. The price was a medium’s toll:
insomnia, pills, groundless fears, and the need for a palace guard.
Even before she is a star, she has assistants — her dramatic coach,
her hairdresser, and her makeup man — later there will be others,
and it will become the style of her life. Even before she and
DiMaggio are done with one another, she is close to being mistress
of a coven.

Certainly in their years together DiMaggio is
carrying on a species of exorcism which is doomed to fail. It is
his project to wean her from films and encourage her to retire and
make a family. It is not so impossible as it seems, for she is
still in good enough health to recognize how films strip her of
existence while she is working. She can be aware of what she pays.
All that exuberance on the screen is beginning to leave her empty,
livid, and insomniac. So there are hours when she will listen to
him, and hours when he will almost succeed in his first battle,
which is to get rid of Natasha Lytess, who has disliked DiMaggio on
sight. It is a perfect mutual repulsion. To Natasha, DiMaggio is
interested in Marilyn only as a human being, not an Actress, and
therefore is a vandal. To DiMaggio, Natasha must seem still one
more pretentious European, nervous and bigoted, who will speak only
of art while lifting your uncultured money. Not difficult to
imagine Natasha’s expression when Marilyn mimics the face of
DiMaggio playing cards with George Solotaire, nor any more elusive
to conceive of DiMaggio’s contempt when Marilyn tells him how
Natasha has obtained funds from her for medical operations she did
not have.

How adroitly is Marilyn divided. In this
period it is as if she is looking to live in the two houses of
every opposed desire. She is not only sharing apartments in San
Francisco and Los Angeles with DiMaggio but has also been taking
dramatic lessons in two opposed schools. Natasha has become
indispensable to her on a set, and the first of the means by which
to exasperate a director, because Marilyn looks immediately for
Natasha’s approval whenever a director is satisfied with the take:
if Natasha does not nod, Marilyn will insist on another take.
Powerful Natasha! Still, Marilyn has also been going to school with
Michael Chekhov and manages to keep him apart from Lytess. They
never meet. She maintains Stanislavsky and Coquelin at odds in her.
If she bends over to straighten a stocking in
Monkey
Business
and reveals a leg which could belong to a Petty girl,
it is not because she has been born with just such beautiful legs,
but rather because they are slim enough to put to work, and she has
studied Vesalius on anatomy (and herself in the mirror) long enough
to know how to arch an arch and turn an instep. So she is
comfortable before the still camera in that school of Coquelin
which calls for an energetic heart and a cold mind. (As one weeps
on stage, one is also ready to modulate the sobs and thereby
conduct the audience through
their
emotion.) Natasha, who
has been dramatic coach at a studio, is of course attached to such
technique. On a movie set, an actor must produce quick results — it
is too expensive if he doesn’t. Certainly, young actors, at the
puppet’s end of a production string, have to be able to twitch on
order, a way of saying that they have to be in service to their own
will, which suggests they are obliged to be phony in every relation
but the liaison between their personality and their will. Since an
actor usually recognizes he wishes to become an actor about the
time he becomes dimly aware he has only a small sense of identity,
that in fact if he were a philosopher he could not posit such a
condition as identity, the school of Coquelin offers quick rewards
for such a psychological strait, but deepens the actor’s
uneasiness. Subtly, the technique is encouraging him to become more
skillfully phony. By way of psychoanalytical jargon, it could be
said that actors schooled in Coquelin will find
support
for
their personalities in such techniques: will learn to build an
armor to contain the shapelessness of their psyche (and presumably
even win battles with that armor and so gain identity). Actors in
the Method will act out; their technique is designed, like
psychoanalysis itself, to release emotional lava, and thereby
enable the actor to become acquainted with his depths, then possess
them enough to become possessed by his role. A magical transaction.
We can think of Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.
To be possessed by a role is
satori
for an actor because
one’s identity can feel whole so long as one is living in the role.
Ergo, actors, particularly uneducated actors, tend to prefer the
Method. It is more exciting, more satisfying when it works, and
dispenses to some degree with the need for schooling in manner,
accents, movement, voice and diction, even as Abstract
Expressionism can try to ignore oil painting technique.

Of course, the greatest virtue of the Method
also becomes its professional shortcoming. Method actors find it
more difficult to do meretricious parts since one cannot be
possessed by a role which has no inner life. There is then no
spirit to emerge from a mood and enter you. The worse role, the
more one needs an external style to project. No wonder actors hate
bad roles and worship good playwrights. An actor can only squander
energy in a bad role – he cannot be reimbursed by discovering new
sides of himself as he plays the role. Instead he must consume his
little hoard of identity and tarnish his hard-acquired style by
offering charm to lines which never begin to prove into his
personality. Living with the wrong part is like living with the
wrong mate and having to make love every night. Not hard to imagine
what a tormenting question then has her training become to Marilyn.
She has every need of Natasha, who is sensitive to what Marilyn
must do on the set for results, but Natasha is also too loyal to
the demands of a bad script. Marilyn’s growing instinct is to work
by the Method. In an interview in Redbook years later, she tells of
playing Cordelia to Chekhov’s Lear:

“
I was out of the room for scene seconds.
When I came back in,
I saw a king before me.
Mr. Chekhov did
it without changing a costume or putting on make-up or even getting
out of his chair. I ever saw anything happen so fast in my life. .
. So little was done in so short a period of time that I really
became Cordelia.”

Once the scene is over, she has Chekhov
pounding the table. “They don’t know what they’re doing to you!” he
cries out against that Hollywood which refuses to see her
potential.

No reason for the story not to be a factoid –
except that she possesses the talent to play Cordelia. Like a
doctor who is no better than his patient, she is also no less –
already she must sense her present ability to rise to great roles
in a cast of great actors. And is also perfectly ready, good
democratic talent, to bother Chekhov with her lateness as much as
she will bother others. Once, told by him to drop her lessons
because she keeps throwing his schedule into confusion, she sends a
note:

Dear Mr. Chekhov,

Please don’t give me up yet – I know
(painfully so) that I try your patience.

I need the work and your friendship
desperately. I shall call you soon.

Love,

Marilyn Monroe

So all the while Joe DiMaggio is trying to
get her free of Natasha Lytess as a way to pry her loose from
acting, she is searching more deeply into her profession. She even,
at Mrs. Chekhov’s suggestion, takes lessons in mime for a while.
Since everything, however, must be at odds in her life, she is also
particularly flamboyant in publicity these years. Rare is the week
she does not receive her factoidal award: “The girl most likely to
thaw out Alaska,” of the 7
^th
Division Medical Corps will
choose her as “the girl we would most like to examine.” After
Niagara, she goes to the Miss America contest in Atlantic City and
is photographed with every one of the forty-eight girls. Then
pictures are sent to newspapers in each of the forty-eight states.
A custom fit:
Miss North Dakota with Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn
will soon be seen in
Monkey Business
with Cary Grant
.
She poses with four women in uniform, a WAC, a WAVE, a WAF, and a
SPAR, and dumps a bushel of cleavage into the middle of four plain
(and electrified) ladies in uniform. “Don’t anybody stick a pin in
these balloons,” could be the swallowed thought in her full-mouthed
smile. An army officer tries to kill the picture. (Is he being paid
by the studio?) Naturally, every newspaper rushes to print it.
DiMaggio hates all of this. The suggestion is doubtless arising
among his friends that he does not know how to keep a leash on his
broad. It is as if she steps into a situation where there is
publicity, and cannot restrain herself. A pure fragment of her
personality leaps into power, and overthrows every one of her
demands to be taken seriously. At Camp Pendleton, where she has
gone to entertain Marines (and help convince the studio she can
sing and dance well enough to do Lorelei Lee), she stands out in
all her scantily clad meat before ten thousand gathered men and
says, “I don’t know why you boys are always getting so excited
about sweater girls. Take away their sweaters and what have they
got?” The demon of publicity in her mind is laughing at ten
thousand Marines and ten million men all picturing a bevy of
sweater girls with the sweaters lifted, bare breasts high, oops,
whoops! She is one golden hellion in her rush to get the golden
monkey at the end of the jungle trail, she will even propose, when
Jane Russell and she are invited to press their hands and feet into
the wet cement at Grauman’s Chinese – shades of Valentino – that
they ought to register their breasts in that cement and their
buttocks as well. It is an irony to anticipate Women’s Liberation,
but there is no liberation in the air – she is probably
disappointed when the suggestion is refused.

Yet for all that power which enables her
already to pass through a crowd in a comet of charisma, she is
small and broken and helpless when she meets other actors she will
work with, and only knows how to appeal to them with her
vulnerability, or disarm them with her lack of presence, her
uncertainty, her need to be taken care of. So she will charm Robert
Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Douglas in
Clash by Night
until the late occasion when Douglas bellows, “That blonde bitch is
getting all the publicity.” So she will put herself at the mercy of
Jane Russell, who ends by adoring her (and handing her the film).
So she will put herself in trust to Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall
in
How to Marry a Millionaire
, and Grable — who will be
deposed in this film as the premier blonde at Twentieth Century —
is moved nonetheless to mother her. She is the doe come to the
clearing in the forest, and the hunters lower their rifles. She is
not even necessarily false. She is like a champion who has won the
title with only a few fights. His manners are sweet and
deferential. He does not know how he won, or who can as quickly
take him out with a punch. He has no experience of heights. Even
the kid who brings the sandwiches looks menacing.