The Genius and the Goddess (44 page)

Later in life, despite a happy third marriage and successful career as
a playwright, Miller, as if probing a wound, returned to his obsession
with the ideal and real Marilyn. His marriage to Inge Morath
inspired his exploration of the holocaust theme in
After the Fall
,
Incident at Vichy
(1965),
Playing for Time
(1980) and
Broken Glass
(1994).
But the last play is also a vehicle for exploring his relationship with
Marilyn. In
Broken Glass
she reappears as Sylvia Gellburg, Miller
himself is the model for Sylvia's husband, Phillip, and Ralph Greenson
is portrayed as Harry Hyman (whose surname is the first name of
Marilyn's internist, Hyman Engelberg). The title of the play refers to
Kristallnacht
(the Night of the Broken Glass) on November 9–10,
1938, when the Nazi government encouraged mobs throughout
Germany to burn synagogues, break the windows of Jewish stores
and ransack Jewish homes. On that violent night 30,000 Jews were
arrested and sent to concentration camps. A newspaper photograph,
showing elderly bearded Jews forced to crawl on their hands and
knees and to scrub filthy gutters with toothbrushes, has traumatized
Sylvia. She suffers from a psychosomatic illness that has paralyzed
both legs.

Dr. Greenson was in his early fifties when he treated Marilyn.
Dr. Hyman is "in his early fifties, a healthy, rather handsome man,
a determined scientific idealist." Greenson received his medical education
in Berne; Hyman got his medical degree in Heidelberg. Both
doctors see patients in their homes and use extremely unconventional
methods. Hyman, like Greenson, admits, "I don't know. I'm
out of my depth! I can't help you." But Hyman is actually in love
with Sylvia – a warm, buxom woman with a strong body and beautiful
(though inert) legs – and openly expresses his sexual desire for
her. He excites her by ecstatically declaring, "I haven't been this
moved by a woman in a very long time," that "Your body strength
must be marvelous. The depth of your flesh must be wonderful."
Though Sylvia has not slept with her impotent husband in twenty
years, Hyman tells her, "I want you to imagine we've made love"
and kisses her on the mouth. One scene ends as she "lets her knees
spread apart."
¹⁵

Like Marilyn, Sylvia is hypersensitive to the suffering of others and
fears she'll be put away in an insane asylum. Her paralysis is a way
to harm both herself and her husband. At one point Miller conflates
Phillip Gellburg's authoritarian behavior at his grandmother's funeral
with DiMaggio's imperious behavior at Marilyn's funeral. Hyman's
wife describes him as "a dictator, you know. . . . He stands outside
the funeral parlor and decides who's going to sit with who in the
limousines for the cemetery. 'You sit with him, you sit with her.' And
they obey him like he owned the funeral!"

Like Miller with Marilyn, Gellburg realizes that Sylvia is "trying
to destroy me!" Thoroughly disillusioned with the pernicious doctor
(as Miller was with Greenson), he screams at Hyman, "Since you
came around she looks down at me like a miserable piece of shit!"
At the end of
Broken Glass
Gellburg, looking into the mirror of
unbroken glass, begs Sylvia "not to blame me anymore."
¹⁶
In a dramatization
of what might have happened to Miller himself if he'd stayed
with Marilyn, Gellburg dies, Sylvia walks – and recovers at his
expense.

Marilyn makes a startling appearance as Cathy-May, the eponymous
hero's dead lover, in Miller's little-known late play,
Mr. Peters' Connections
(1999). Harry Peters, a retired airline pilot, turns up in an abandoned
New York nightclub. As people from his past appear and disappear,
he tries to bring together the strands of his experience and make
sense of his life. Cathy-May appears twice, with and without clothes,
and seems more vivid to him when dead than when she was alive.
Miller's italicized descriptions, interwoven with his characters'
comments, portray her as sexually alluring and irresistible, as well as
naïvely self-deprecating: "
Cathy-May comes to him; she is naked, in high
heels; a big smile breaks onto his face as she approaches. She is giggling
. Ah
yes, how proud of your body." In her second appearance she's dressed
in virginal white and even more seductive and alluring than when
naked: "
Cathy-May enters. She is in a tight white miniskirt, transparent
blouse, carries a white purse. . . . and wears a dog collar
. . . . Case I get
lost" – though it's not clear where she lives and to whom she belongs.

When Peters sees her, his passion flares up once again. Cathy-May's
ex-husband Larry (crudely based on DiMaggio) and Peters' brother
Calvin both respond, as Miller himself did, with gustatory and almost
orgasmic lust: "She's juicy. A prime sirloin. A ripe pomegranate. A
Spanish blood orange. An accordion-pleated fuck. . . . She looks
perfect. With a white angora sweater. And pink plastic spike-heel shoes.
A little on the pudgy side but not too fat . . . just . . . you know,
perfect." Cathy-May, a lost soul who has no identity or real life of
her own, merely exists as Peters' sexual fantasy. He remembers that
she'd once loved him, but she's now forgotten all about him. He
wonders if her past anger has subsided and if, under the right conditions,
their love could have succeeded. Despite her tarted up appearance,
Peters insists "she's not really a common slut."

Marilyn was notorious for wearing no underwear; Cathy-May's
underwear has been stolen, sold or given away. At the end of the play
her ex-husband Larry expresses his outrage at her exhibitionism – an
allusion to DiMaggio's outrage when Marilyn's skirt flew up to her
waist and exposed her panties in
The Seven Year Itch
. Though no longer
married to Cathy-May, Larry thinks he still owns her and asks "Where
is your underwear, stupid!!" Obsessed by the need to publicly humiliate
and symbolically rape the woman who's dominated him with her
sexual power, Larry acts out the violence that Miller would never
dare to express. Larry throws her down on the floor and exposes her
sexual parts: "
With a sweeping gesture he sends her onto her back, legs in
the air, and looks under her skirt; she is struggling ineffectually to free herself
.
You see underwear, Mister? Look, everybody!
He is trying to spread
her legs apart
. . . . Take a look at this! How can this belong to
anybody!"
¹⁷

Mr. Peters' Connections
is more bitter and savage than Miller's previous
works about Marilyn, and Peters' response to Cathy-May suggests
Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, in which passion degrades man's soul:"The
expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action." Peters realizes
that his overwhelming physical desire for Cathy-May has deceived
him about the possibility of loving and living with her. Larry's brutal
and vengeful anger, her shameless dress and provocative behavior,
shatter Peters' idealized image. She's a temptress, if not a slut; she's
corrupted by the phony world of the movies and can't really belong
to any man. Like a damned soul in a gothic tale, she destroys anyone
who gets close to her, but begs men to "pity the monster."

Miller also alludes to Marilyn in his late story "The
Bare Manuscript"
(2002), in which Clement, a prize-winning but now blocked novelist,
tries to spark his creativity by paying a woman to let him write a
story with a felt-tip pen on her naked body. Like Monroe, Clement's
wife Lena had an insane parent who was confined to an asylum, and
she herself has had several abortions. Subject to violent mood swings,
she's confused about her identity and doesn't even understand why she's
alive. Despite all these problems, Clement still loves her. In
The Misfits
,
Gay Langland says to Roslyn, "You shine in my eyes." In "The Bare
Manuscript," Clement tells Lena, "you glow like a spirit." Clement
writes his story as "a kind of paean to her as she once had been"
and optimistically wonders – as Miller did when he wrote
The Misfits
for Marilyn and as Peters does when Cathy-May reappears – "would
she recognize herself and be reconciled?"
¹⁸
Miller's love for Marilyn,
and the pain she inflicted, never died.

The black comedy
Finishing the Picture
, Miller's last play and last attempt
to portray her character, ended his half-century fascination with
Marilyn. Performed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in October
2004, four months before his death in February 2005, it was criticized
as too talky, repetitive and undramatic. It never reached Broadway
and has not been published, but it does reveal the interesting backstory
about the making of
The Misfits
.

The play has no cowboys or mustangs, no actors based on Clark
Gable or Montgomery Clift. The Marilyn character, who did not
appear in "The Misfits" story and took centerstage in
The Misfits
film,
is central to the action but almost entirely silent in
Finishing the Picture
.
Kitty, a dysfunctional actress with a starring role in a movie, is unable
to work during the filming. Her erratic behavior threatens to close
down the over-schedule and over-budget production. As with
After
the Fall
, Miller denied that the play was about Marilyn. This time, as
if to prove his point, he made the heroine a brunette instead of a
blonde.

Kitty speaks a few words offstage in Act One, and doesn't actually
appear until two-thirds of the way through the play. She then lies
drugged and naked in bed, either silent and stupefied or screaming
(like Marilyn) at her husband. She speaks only one more offstage
word, an unconvincing "Yes." She's a ghostly presence, stripped down
to her elemental weakness, and has to be rehabilitated. As Kitty wanders
naked through the hotel corridors, she's rescued and put into the
producer's bedroom. All the characters try to get her out of bed and
back to work. They all plead with Kitty, who doesn't answer them
directly: her responses are implied in their speeches. Everyone sees
something different in her striking yet opaque personality and everyone
fails to reach her. She has no real identity, and needs pills much more
than people.

Like Kitty, the characters are transparently based on real models.
Phil Ochsner, the sympathetic producer (played by Stacy Keach), came
from the trucking business – just as the real producer, Frank Taylor,
came from the publishing business – when his company merged with
Bedlam Pictures. (
Ochsner
in German is a driver of oxen, a precursor
to a driver of trucks.) His character is based on both Taylor and Miller.
Edna Meyers, Kitty's devoted personal assistant, has an impulsive affair
with the widowed Ochsner, which suggests Inge's love affair with
Miller. Paul (who has no surname and was played by Matthew Modine)
is the screenwriter as well as Kitty's disillusioned and defeated husband.

Derek Clemson, the director, is obviously based on John Huston.
Edna says he's "very macho and doesn't really relate to women."
He loves horses and has directed Kitty's first important film (Marilyn's
The Asphalt Jungle
). He courts danger by losing thousands of dollars
when gambling all night and by smuggling Pre-Columbian artifacts
from Mexico. Terry Case, the cameraman, is based on
Russell Metty.
He carefully examines Kitty's unfocused eyes, her peculiar stare and
characteristically "spooky underwater" look to see if she can perform,
then concentrates his lens on her "perfect ass."

Miller finally retaliates by satirizing Lee and Paula Strasberg. The
acting coach Flora Fassinger is dressed entirely in black and hangs
several watches around her neck. Egotistical, foolish and inept, she's
mainly interested in the size of her hotel suite and her chauffeured
limousine. A Tartuffian hypocrite and perfect fraud, she's not only
failed to help Kitty, but also confused and depressed her. Flora's husband
Jerome, Kitty's New York acting guru, wears a comical cowboy outfit
(as Lee actually did) for his cameo appearance in Nevada. He agrees,
for a first-class airplane ticket and an exorbitant per diem fee, to try
to encourage Kitty. But he repeatedly says he will not take responsibility
for her failure to perform. Realizing disaster is imminent, he
immediately flies back to New York. Like Flora, Jerome has hurt rather
than helped Kitty by cultivating her pathological reliance on him and
by making her intensely self-conscious. As Terry Case says, "You had
a bird here who naturally sang. Then they started to teach her how
to sing, and so naturally she can't sing anymore." By making the
Strasbergs absurd, Miller missed the chance to portray their malign
influence on Marilyn.

As Phil Ochsner searches for a solution to their problem, each
character suggests a different way to help Kitty. Edna Meyers believes
she needs consideration and kindness, Paul thinks she needs love,
Derek Clemson appeals to her sense of honor, Terry Case urges
toughness and threats, Flora Fassinger wants her to rest, Jerome
encourages her with the inspiring example of the great Italian
actress Eleanora Duse. (In
Timebends
, Miller records Marilyn ordering
him "to sit down right now and listen to a tape of Lee's lecture
on Eleanora Duse.") Ochsner has three choices: rousing Kitty so
she can immediately return to work (the entire crew has been
summoned and is waiting in the lobby), letting her rest in the
hospital for a week or shutting down the picture. Saving the film
means saving Kitty–Marilyn. If they shut down the picture she
won't be able to get insurance and will never again be able to work.
As Paul tells Derek, it might even drive her to suicide:"That would
devastate her. It could kill her."

Miller subjects Kitty's haunted character to intense scrutiny. Derek
Clemson says, "She is a case of terminal disappointment. With herself,
her husband, the movies, the United States, the world." Alluding to
the title of his play of 1994, Miller writes:"She's had a frightful life . . .
she's been stepping on broken glass since she could walk." Kitty can
never recover from her childhood fears of being exploited, mocked
and abandoned: "She has ghosts sitting on her chest; ghosts of things
she's done, or [have] been done to her; she can't breathe, can't sleep,
can't wake [without] fleeing the hounds of hell."
¹⁹
Life has Kitty by
the throat. She thinks she's a fake, wonders if she really exists, and
feels as if somebody has got inside her and stolen her identity. Fearful,
resentful and angry, she has no one to depend on. She's tormented
by a sense of "spiritual outrage" and by the "condition of her soul."
Propelled by a monstrous but well justified mistrust of people and
taking some kind of "power trip," she tries to humiliate everyone.