Marilyn: A Biography (2 page)

It may be fair to quote another woman whose
life ended in suicide: “A biography is considered complete if it
merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well
have as many as one thousand.” The words are by Virginia Woolf. In
its wake, the materials of any biographer come begging with his
credentials.

* * *VII

But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens the
entire problem of biography? The question is whether a person can
be comprehended by the facts of the life, and this does not even
begin to take into account that abominable magnetism of facts. They
always attract polar facts. Rare is the piece of special evidence
in any life that is not quickly contradicted by other witnesses. In
a career like Monroe’s, where no one can be certain whether she was
playing an old role, experimenting with a new one, or even being
nothing less than the
true
self (which she had spent her
life trying to discover), the establishing of facts dissolves into
the deeper enigma of how reality may appear to a truly talented
actor. Since the psychological heft of a role has more existential
presence than daily life (and in fact the role creates
real
reactions in everyone who sees it), so the twilight between reality
and fantasy is obliged to become more predominant for a great actor
than for others. Even if a few of the
facts
of Monroe’s life
can be verified, therefore, or, equally, if we learn the sad fact
that Monroe reminiscing about her past at a given moment is not
being accurate — to say the least! — how little is established. For
an actor lives with the lie as if it were truth. A false truth can
offer more reality than the truth that was altered.

Since this is a poor way to establish
history, the next question is whether a life like hers is not
antipathetic to biographical tools. Certainly the two histories
already published show the limitations of a conventional approach.
The first, by Maurice Zolotow,
Marilyn Monroe
, written while
she was still alive, is filled with interesting psychoanalytical
insights of the sort one can hear at a New York coffee table when
two intelligent people are analyzing a third, but much of the
conversation is reamed with overstressed anecdotes. For here is a
feature writer who has included in his source material the work of
other feature writers and so develops a book with facts embellished
by factoids (to join the hungry ranks of those who coin a word),
that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a
magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a
product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority. (It is
possible, for example, that Richard Nixon has spoken in nothing but
factoids during his public life.)

So Zolotow’s book is able to make another
biographer wistful. If a few of his best stories were true, how
nice they might be for one’s own use; but one cannot depend on them
entirely. Some of them were written by Marilyn, which is to say, by
Marilyn as told to Ben Hecht, a prodigiously factoidal enterprise
printed as Sunday supplement pieces in 1954. Hecht was never a
writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his
prose, and Marilyn had been polishing her fables for years. No ream
of authors contributes more to the literary smog that hangs over
legend than Marilyn ben Hecht.

The other book,
Norma Jean
, by Fred
Lawrence Guiles, seems more accurate, and is certainly more
scrupulous, as close to the facts of its subject as Carlos Baker’s
book may have been for Hemingway, a work of sources and careful
chronology, a reporter’s job of love since in journalism the labor
of cross-checking is equal to love. Therefore it is a biography of
much estimable value for verifying the events of her life. Yet her
personality remains mysterious. The facts live, but Marilyn is
elusive. So the final virtue of
Norma Jean
is that a great
biography might be constructed some day upon its foundations,
although it might have to contend with the notion that exceptional
people (often the most patriotic, artistic, heroic, or prodigious)
had a way of living with opposites in themselves that could only be
called schizophrenic when it failed. That was a theory developed
while studying astronauts, and it seemed suitable for Marilyn, and
so most interesting, for what had a movie star like Monroe in
common with an astronaut? One has to speak of transcendence. But
transcendence was precisely the enigma which faced every
psychohistorian, for it was a habit as much as a miracle, yet a
mystical habit, not amenable to reason – it assumed that something
in the shape of things respected any human who would force an
impossible solution up out of the soup, as if the soup itself were
sympathetic to the effort. By the logic of transcendence, it was
exactly in the secret scheme of things that a man should be able to
write about a beautiful woman, or a woman to write about a great
novelist – that would be transcendence, indeed! The new candidate
for biographer now bought a bottle of Chanel No. 5 – Monroe was
famous for having worn it – and thought it was the operative
definition of a dime-store stink. But he would never have a real
clue to how it smelled on her skin. Not having known her was going
to prove, he knew, a recurrent wound in the writing, analogous to
the regret, let us say of not having been alone and in love in
Paris when one was young. No matter how much he could learn about
her, he could never have the simple invaluable knowledge of knowing
that he liked her a little, or did not like her, and so could have
a sense that they were working for the same god, or at odds.

If the temptation, then, to undertake such a
work of psychohistory was present, he still knew he was not
serious. It would consume years, and he was not the type to bed
down into the curious hollow of writing about a strange woman whose
career had so often passed through places where he had lived at the
same time. One of the frustrations of his life was that he had
never met her, especially since a few people he knew had been so
near to her. Once in Brooklyn, long before anyone had heard of
Marilyn Monroe – she had been alive for twenty years but not yet
named! – he had live in the same brownstone house in which Arthur
Miller was working on
Death of a Salesman
and this at just
the time he was himself doing
The Naked and the Dead
. The
authors, meeting occasionally on the stairs, or at the mail box in
the hall, would chat with diffidence as they looked for a bit of
politics or literary business to mouth upon – each certainly
convinced on parting that the other’s modest personality would
never amount to much. In later years, when Miller was married to
Monroe, the playwright and he movie star lived in a farmhouse in
Connecticut not five miles away from the younger author, who, not
yet aware of what his final relation to Marilyn Monroe would be,
waited for the call to visit, which of course never came. The
playwright and the novelist in conscience condemn the playwright
for such avoidance of drama. The secret ambition, after all had
been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so
well suited to bring out the best in her as himself, a conceit
which fifty million other men may also have held – he was still too
untested to recognize that the foundation of her art might be able
to speak to each man as if he were all of male existence available
to her. It was only a few marriages (which is to say a few
failures) later that he could recognize how he would have done no
better than Miller and probably have been damaged further in the
process. In retrospect, it might be conceded that Miller had been
made of the toughest middle-class stuff – which, existentially
speaking, is tough as hard synthetic material.

So there would be then no immense job on
Monroe by himself, no, rather a study like this bound to stray
toward the borders of magic. For a man with a cabalistic turn of
mind, it was fair and engraved coincidence that the letters in
Marilyn Monroe (if the “a” were used twice and the “o” but once)
would spell his own name leaving only the “y” for excess, a
trifling discrepancy, no more calculated to upset the heavens than
the most minuscule diffraction of the red shift.

Of course, if he wished to play anagrams, she
was also Marlon Y. Normie, and an unlimited use of the letters in
el amor
gave Marolem Mamroe, a forthright Latin sound
(considerably better than Mormam Maeler). But let us back off such
pleasures. It is possible there is no instrument more ready to
capture the elusive quality of her nature than a novel. Set a thief
to catch a thief, and put an artist on an artist. Could the
solution be nothing less vainglorious than a novel of Marilyn
Monroe? Written in the form of biography? Since it would rely in
the main on other sources, it could hardly be more than a long
biographical article – nonetheless, a
species
of novel ready
to play by the rules of biography. No items could be made up and
evidence would be provided when facts were moot. Speculation
had
to be underlined. Yet he would never delude himself that
he might be telling a story which could possibly be more accurate
than a fiction since he would often be quick to imagine the
interior of many a closed and silent life, and with the sanction of
a novelist was going to look into the unspoken impulses of some of
his real characters. At the end, if successful, he would have
offered a literary hypothesis of a
possible
Marilyn Monroe
who might actually have lived and fit most of the facts available.
If his instincts were good, then future facts discovered about her
would not have to war with the character he created. A reasonable
virtue! It satisfied his fundamental idea that acquisition of
knowledge for a literary man was best achieved in those imaginative
acts of appropriation picked up by the disciplined exercise of
one’s skill. Let us hasten, then, to the story of her life. Magic
is worked by the working.

* * *

She was born on June 1, 1926 at 9:30 in the
morning, an easy birth, easiest of her mother’s three deliveries.
As the world knows, it was out of wedlock. At the time of Marilyn’s
first marriage to James Dougherty, the name of Norma Jean Baker was
put on the marriage license (Baker by way of her mother’s first
husband). On the second marriage to Joe DiMaggio, the last name
became Mortenson, taken from the second husband. (Even the middle
name, Jean, was originally written like Choreanne for Corinne).
There is no need to look for any purpose behind the use of the
names. Uneducated (that familiar woe of a beautiful blonde), she
was also cultureless — can we guess she would not care to say
whether Rococo was three hundred years before the Renaissance, any
more than she would be ready to swear the retreat of Napoleon from
Moscow didn’t come about because his railroad trains couldn’t run
in the cold. Historically empty, she was nonetheless sensitive — as
sensitive as she was historically empty — and her normal state when
not under too much sedation was, by many an account, vibrant to new
perception. It is as if she was ready when exhilarated to reach out
to the washes of a psychedelic tide. So, talking to one publicity
man, it would seem natural in the scheme of things that her last
name was Baker — maybe that sounded better as she looked at the
man’s nose. Another flack with something flaccid in the look of his
muscles from the solar plexus to the gut would inspire Mortenson.
Since it was all movie publicity, nobody bothered to check. To what
end? Who knew the real legal situation? If the mother, Gladys
Monroe Baker, had been married to Edward Mortenson, “an itinerant
lover,” he had already disappeared by the time Marilyn was born;
some reports even had him dead of a motorcycle accident before
Norma Jean was conceived. There may also have been some question
whether Gladys Monroe was ever divorced from the first husband,
Baker, or merely separated. And the real father, according to Fred
Guiles, was C. Stanley Gifford, an employee of Consolidated Film
Industries, where Gladys Baker worked. A handsome man. Shown a
picture of him by her mother when still a child, Marilyn described
him later “wearing a slouch hat cocked on one side of his head. He
had a little mustache and a smile. He looked kind of like Clark
Gable, you know, strong and manly.” In her early teens, she kept a
picture of Gable on her wall and lied to high school friends that
Gable was her secret father. Not too long out of the orphanage
where she had just spent twenty-one months, then veteran of
numerous foster homes, it is obvious she was looking for a sense of
self-importance, but we may as well assume something more
extravagant: the demand upon a biographer is to explain why she is
exceptional. So, in that part of her adolescent mind where fantasy
washes reality as the ego begins to emerge, it is possible she is
already (like Richard Nixon) searching for an imperial sense of
self-justification. Illegitimate she might be, but still selected
for a high destiny — Clark Gable was her secret father. That she
would yet come to know Gable while making
The Misfits
(know
him toward the end of her life down in the infernal wastes of that
psychic state where the brimstone of insomnia and barbiturates is
boiled, her marriage to Miller already lost, her lateness a disease
more debilitating than palsy), what portents she must have sensed
playing love scenes at last with the secret father, what a
cacophony of cries in the silence of her head when Gable was dead
eleven days after finishing the film. But then omens surrounded her
like the relatives she never had at a family dinner. If her
footprints fit Valentino’s about the time she became a star, so too
was a bowl of tomato sauce dropped on her groom’s white jacket the
day of her first wedding, and down she was turned, down a hall with
no exit in City Hall in San Francisco just before she married Joe
DiMaggio, little fish of intimation too small for a biographer to
fry, but remembered perhaps when a woman reporter was killed
chasing after her in a sports car the day she was getting married
to Miller. (And Marilyn was having her period that day.) What a
vision of blood! — a woman smashed and dead on the day she is
joining herself to the one man she may be convinced she does love.
It is not sedative for a young woman whose sense of her own sanity
can never be secure: she has no roots but illegitimacy on one side
and a full pedigree of insanity on the other. Her grandfather
Monroe (who would naturally claim to be descended from President
Monroe) had spent the last part of his life committed to a state
asylum. Monroe’s wife, Marilyn’s grandmother, Della Monroe
Grainger, a beauty with red hair and green-blue eyes, had insane
rages on quiet suburban semi-slum streets in environs of Los
Angeles like Hawthorne, and was also committed to a mental hospital
before she died. So was Marilyn’s mother in an asylum for most of
Marilyn’s life. And the brother of the mother killed himself. When
the wings of insanity beat thus near, one pays attention to a
feather. The most casual coincidence is obliged to seem another
warning from the deep. So must it have been like opening the door
to a secret room (and finding that it looks exactly as envisioned)
to know that the director of her first starring movie
Don’t
Bother to Knock
(about a girl who was mad), should have the
name of Baker.