Marilyn Read online

  Marilyn

  The Passion and the Paradox

  Lois Banner

  Contents

  Prologue: Let Us Now Praise Famous Women

  Part I: The Matrix, 1926–1946

  Chapter 1: Mothers, 1926–1933

  Chapter 2: Trauma, 1933–1938

  Chapter 3: Transcendence: Ana and Jim, 1938–1944

  Chapter 4: Photographers and Producers, 1944–1946

  Part II: Hollywood, 1946–1955

  Chapter 5: Storming the Citadel, 1946–1951

  Chapter 6: Marilyn Ascending, 1951–1954

  Chapter 7: Breakaway, 1954–1955

  Part III: Entr’acte: A Woman for All Seasons

  Chapter 8: The Meaning of Marilyn

  Part IV: New York, 1955–1960

  Chapter 9: New York, 1955–1956

  Chapter 10: Arthur, 1956–1959

  Chapter 11: The Misfits, 1959–1960

  Part V: Return to Hollywood, 1961–1962

  Chapter 12: Denouement, 1961–1962

  Chapter 13: Defiance and Death

  Afterword

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  Manuscript Collections Consulted and List of Abbreviations

  List of Interviewees

  Notes

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  To: Stacy Eubank, Mark Anderson, and

  Greg Schreiner, with thanks and love.

  Marilyn on subway grate; photo shoot for The Seven Year Itch, September 15, 1954. Photo by Sam Shaw.

  Prologue

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Women1

  In one of the most famous photos of the twentieth century, Marilyn Monroe stands on a subway grate, trying to hold her skirt down as a gust of wind blows it up, exposing her underpants. The photo was taken in New York on September 15, 1954, in a photo shoot during the filming of The Seven Year Itch, which stars Marilyn as a model and dog-faced Tom Ewell as a middled-aged editor of raunchy books who is tired of his seven-year marriage and yearns for an affair with a sexy “girl.” In the scene being shot, they leave a movie theater after seeing The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a 1954 film about a prehistoric Gil-man on the Amazon River who kills several members of the expedition sent to capture him. It’s a hot summer night, and Marilyn stands over the grate to cool off. A subway passing underneath supposedly produces the wind, which was actually caused by a wind machine under the grate.2

  In her white dress, white underpants, white high-heel sling-backs, and white earrings, Marilyn is a vision in white, suggesting innocence and purity. Yet she exudes sexuality and transcends it; poses for the male gaze and confronts it. Her billowing skirt resembles wings. She might be a guardian angel from the Christian tradition, an Aphrodite from the classical tradition, or a Nike proclaiming victory in poetry or war, like the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre Museum, with the wind blowing back Victory’s wings and chiton. She might be an elegant ballerina on her toes or a working girl standing on the Coney Island fun house ramp, where air gusts blew up the skirts of the women on the ramp. Sam Shaw, who took the famed photo, derived Marilyn’s pose from that setting, though the effect had long been used on the burlesque stage and in pin-up photos to titillate men.3 Above all, The Seven Year Itch photo reveals Marilyn’s complexities: her passion and her paradoxical nature, central themes of this book.

  The photo shoot was a publicity stunt, one of the greatest in the history of film. Its time and location were published in New York newspapers; it attracted a crowd of over a hundred male photographers and 1,500 male spectators, even though it was held in the middle of the night to avoid daytime crowds. Klieg lights lit the scene; spectators climbed to the roofs of buildings to get a good view; photographers elbowed their way through the crowd to stake out the best locations. Sam Shaw, the stills photographer for the movie, took the famous photo, but the other photographers there shot hundreds of variations. So great was the interest in all things Marilyn that barricades were put up, and police were on hand to contain the crowd.

  Billy Wilder, the film’s director, did fourteen takes—pausing between them to let the photographers shoot. Every time Marilyn’s skirt blew up, the crowd roared, especially those up front, who could see a dark blotch of pubic hair through her underpants, even though she had put on two pairs of pants to conceal it. The draconian 1934 Motion Picture Production Code, enforced by the Production Board, forbade such a display. Any blotch of public hair in photos from the shoot had to be airbrushed out.

  Yet the scene in the shoot is naughty, with the phallic subway train, its blast of air, and Marilyn’s erotic stance. Yet she is in control. She is the “woman on top,” drawing from the metaphor for women’s power that runs through Euro-American history. She poses for the male gaze, but she is an unruly woman—the Mere Folle of medieval Carnivale; the white witch with supernatural powers; the burlesque star in “an upside-down world of enormous, powerful women and powerless, victimized men.” In the photo Marilyn is so gorgeous, so glamorous, so incandescent—as her third husband, the writer Arthur Miller, described her—that she seems every inch a star, glorying in her success.4 She can now defy the people who had mistreated her: her father and mother, who abandoned her; foster parents who abused her; Hollywood patriarchs who regarded her as their toy; even Joe DiMaggio, then her husband, who physically abused her. Present at the shoot, he stalked off in a fury when her skirt billowed up and revealed her underpants. She had, indeed, dramatized her childhood dream of walking naked over a church congregation, lying on their backs, eyes wide open, looking up at her. It’s a powerful dream of exposure—and of a Marilyn in control.

  But she holds down her skirt in the photo, suggesting modesty. In her only discussion of the shoot—in a 1962 interview—she stated that she wasn’t thinking about sex when she posed, only about having a good time. It was the spectators, she claimed, who sexualized her. “At first it was all innocent and fun,” Marilyn said, “but when Billy Wilder kept shooting the scene over and over again the crowd of men kept on applauding and shouting, ‘More, more Marilyn—let’s see more.” Then Billy bought the camera in close, focusing on her crotch. “What was supposed to be a fun scene turned into a sex scene.” “With her wry humor, Marilyn added “I hope all those extra takes are not for your Hollywood friends to enjoy at a private party.”5

  We are not accustomed to seeing Marilyn Monroe as being on top in any but the most superficial way. We view her as irreparably damaged, too victimized to have played much of a role either in launching her career or reinventing herself on the silver screen. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Marilyn that emerges in Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox is a woman who made herself into a star, conquering numerous disabilities in the process, creating a life more dramatic than any role she played in films. Her disabilities were many. She suffered from dyslexia and from a stutter more severe than anyone has realized. She was plagued throughout her life by dreams of monsters and witches, horrible dreams that contributed to her constant insomnia and that I am the first to describe. She was bipolar and often disassociated from reality. She endured terrible pain during menstruation because she had endometriosis, a hormonal condition that causes tissue like growths throughout the abdominal cavity. She broke out in rashes and hives and eventually came down with chronic colitis, enduring abdominal pain and nausea.

  She surmounted all this, in addition to the wellknown problems of her childhood—a mother in a mental institution, a father she never knew, and moving between foster homes and an orphanage. Playwright Clifford Odets stated that “she always traveled with a dark companion.” People who saw “the gorgeous substrata of her life could not even imagine on what subsoil her roots were feeding.”6 Then there were the drugs she took to cope, on
ce she entered Hollywood and had to endure its pressures: she especially took barbiturates to calm her down; amphetamines to give her energy.

  Significant among my discoveries about Marilyn are her lesbian inclinations. She had affairs with many eminent men—baseball great Joe DiMaggio, playwright Arthur Miller, director Elia Kazan, actor Marlon Brando, singer Frank Sinatra, the Kennedy brothers—and she married DiMaggio and Miller. Yet she desired women, had affairs with them, and worried that she might be lesbian by nature. How could she be the world’s heterosexual sex goddess and desire women? How could she have the world’s most perfect body on the outside and have such internal imperfections as endometriosis and colitis? Why was she unable to bear a child? The adult Marilyn was haunted by these questions.

  Yet in her career she exhibited a rare genius. Publicists marveled at her ability to generate publicity; makeup artists saluted her skill at their craft; photographers rated her one of the greatest models of their age. She studied with top acting, singing, and movement teachers to create her era’s greatest dumb-blonde clown. Voluptuous and soft-voiced, the Marilyn we know exemplified 1950s femininity. Yet she mocked it with her wiggling walk, jiggling breasts, and puckered mouth. She could tone her blonde bombshell image down, project sadness in her eyes, and, like all great clowns, play her figure on the edge between comedy and tragedy.

  There were many Marilyns, not just one. Revealing and analyzing her multiple personas is a major contribution of mine to Marilyn scholarship. As a pin-up model early in her career she posed for her era’s most famous pin-up photo—a nude that became the centerfold for the first issue of Playboy in December 1953. By mid-career she created a new glamour look that combined the allure of the pin-up with the aloof, mature sensuality of a glamour star of the 1930s like Greta Garbo. Another Marilyn had a talent for drama, evident in films like Clash by Night (1952) and Bus Stop (1956) and in her poses for celebrity photographers like Milton Greene and Eve Arnold. “Marilyn Monroe,” her most famous alter ego, was one among many.

  Marilyn was nothing if not complicated and in ways that has never been revealed. She was shy and insecure, lacking self-confidence. But she was tough and determined. She had an ironic and sometimes ribald wit, engaging in puns and wordplay. She could swear like a trooper. She loved to play practical jokes. I have discovered that she could be an eccentric who followed her own irrational logic. She sometimes was a party girl who did “crazy, naughty, sexy things,” including engaging in promiscuous sex, displaying what we now call “sex addiction.”7 In her paradoxical manner, however, she covered untoward behavior with a mask of good intentions, justifying her promiscuity through advocating a free-love philosophy, which connected friendship to sex. That philosophy circulated sub rosa among the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century. In another guise she was a trickster who assumed aliases, wore disguises, and lived her life as though it was a spy story, with secret friends and a secret apartment in New York. “I’m so many people,” she told British journalist W. J. Weatherby, “I used to think I was going crazy, until I discovered some people I admired were like that, too.”8

  A spiritual Marilyn, never before revealed, studied mystical texts. A radical Marilyn pioneered the sexual revolution that erupted in the 1960s, appreciated her roots in the working class, and honored the men who made her a star through their fan mail—“the ordinary people, the working class, those who struggled through wars and the Depression.” She opposed McCarthyite oppression and supported racial equality. In a play on the term “black face,” Bruno Bernhard wrote that the intellectual, radical Marilyn was hiding under “black lace.”9

  Unlike all Marilyn biographers, except Gloria Steinem, I argue that the sexual abuse she endured as a child was formative in molding her adult character. We now know that such abuse can produce lesbianism, sex addiction, exhibitionism, and an angry, frightened adult. It can fragment a personality, producing, in Marilyn’s case, multiple alters, of which she was aware. However dominant, “Marilyn Monroe” was only one persona among many that emerged from and were created by the original Norma Jeane Baker before her name was changed to Marilyn Monroe. That happened when Norma Jeane signed a contract with Twentieth Century–Fox in August 1946 and began her ascent to stardom.

  The 1950s was a paradoxical era. Americans were exuberant over victory in World War Two and the booming consumer economy, while they were frightened by the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear destruction, and paranoid about homosexuality and internal communism in the United States. Marilyn’s comic style soothed the nation’s fears, while reflecting the 1950s “populuxe” style in design, which spoofed consumption and laughed at fears through a populist version of luxury. When she put on her Betty Boop character, whom I call Lorelei Lee, she was populuxe to the hilt.

  Her innocent eroticism and joy made her the ultimate playmate for men in a postwar age worried about male feminization, as warriors became husbands with the end of the war. Beyond feminization lay homosexuality, demonized in the 1950s as a perversion that threatened everyone. In her films Marilyn often plays against an impotent man whom she restores to potency by praising his gentleness as necessary to true masculinity, as she does for Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch. In real life she often chose powerful older men as partners, overlooking their domineering ways in her quest for a father, falling into sadomasochistic behavior patterns again and again.

  As an exemplar of her age, she relates to 1950s rock ‘n’ roll musicians and beat poets that were forerunners to 1960s rebels, as did actors like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, who were both identified with new, rebellious acting styles. From that perspective, joined with her support for sexual freedom, she was a rebel pointing to the radicalism and sexual rebellion of the 1960s.

  I was drawn to writing about Marilyn because no one like me—an academic scholar, feminist biographer, and historian of gender—had studied her. I was also intrigued by similarities between my childhood and hers. I grew up in the 1940s in Inglewood, California, a Los Angeles satellite city only a few miles from Hawthorne, where Marilyn spent her first seven years. Her Hawthorne family was fundamentalist Christian; so was my childhood family. Blonde and blue-eyed, I had her body dimensions and won beauty contests. Like her, I had relatives in the film industry who encouraged me to aim for stardom. But I loved learning. After graduating from UCLA, I moved to New York to achieve a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Becoming a college professor, I remained in and near New York for the next twenty years. I married a Princeton professor and travelled in New York intellectual circle; I spent summers in rural Connecticut, as Marilyn had.

  During those years I became a founder of “second wave feminism” and the new women’s history. I dismissed Marilyn as a sex object for men. By the 1990s, however, a generation of “third wave feminists” contended that sexualizing women was liberating, not demeaning, for it gave them self-knowledge and power. The students I taught were swayed by this argument. Had I dismissed Marilyn too easily? Was she a precursor of 1960s feminism? Was there power in her stance as a sex object? To answer these questions, I decided to explore her life.

  I began by joining Marilyn Remembered, the Los Angeles Marilyn fan club. Members shared their collections with me. Branching out, I interviewed nearly one hundred Marilyn friends and associates. I researched archives in the United States and Europe. I gained access to never-before-seen collections—including Marilyn’s personal file cabinets and the papers of Ralph Roberts, Stacy Eubank, Norman Mailer, Greg Schreiner, Antonio Villani, Peter Lawford, James Spada, Lotte Goslar, and many new collections in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and elsewhere. I collected several hundred fan magazines with articles on Marilyn, buying many on eBay. I bought Marilyn items at auctions. In an act of great generosity, Anthony Summers allowed me access to his over three hundred interviews for his biography of Marilyn, published in 1985. I found rich materials in those interviews that he hadn’t used.

  I sa
lute Marilyn for a major—and unacknowledged—feminist act. Sexually abused as a child, she named that abuse as an adult. She refused to keep quiet in an age that believed such abuse rarely happened and when it did, the victimized girl was responsible. Such self-disclosure would become important to the feminist movement in the 1970s. Neither Ruth Benedict nor Margaret Mead, eminent American anthropologists and public intellectuals, whose lives I chronicled in a dual biography, disclosed the episodes of sexual abuse in their childhoods. I didn’t expect to find such episodes in any of these lives, but the rates of such abuse have been high throughout our history. In an act of great bravery, Marilyn named the abuse she endured.

  As a biographer, I follow the school of “new biography.” I analyze Marilyn in her historical context and in terms of her interactions with the men and women in her life, what I call the “geography of gender.” Throughout my book I present a new Marilyn, different from any previous portrayal of her, including my own, in my brief overview of her in MM—Personal. I probe her interior self and see her life as a process of self-formation. I have identified all eleven families she lived with in her childhood—providing new information on them. I analyze the gender themes of her films and explore the gendered personas of Hollywood producers and photographers, pointing out the homoeroticism endemic to many of them.

  I have done deep readings of unexplored texts, like Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, Ralph Greenson’s psychiatric writings, and the themes in the poetry and works of literature Marilyn read. I figured out why she extolled Eleanora Duse. I discovered Anna Freud’s findings when she analyzed Marilyn during a week in London in 1956. According to Anna, Marilyn was bisexual. Her childhood dream of naked exposure to a church congregation was a product of the sexual abuse she endured as a child.

  I follow the chronological format standard in biography as a genre, although I innovate in adding a section I call “entre’acte.” I pause there to delve into her psyche and her historical resonance before proceeding on. Like many world historical figures, Marilyn stood astride her age. She reflected its mores and helped to create them. Her glittering position partly explains why she has become an icon for our age. And I am amazed by what she accomplished in her brief lifespan of thirty-six years. When she died she was hardly more than a child by our contemporary lexicon of the stages of life.