Marilyn: A Biography (20 page)

Now she rallies. As if she has been drilled
in the metaphysical differences between two strikes and three, she
will be at her best. Marilyn is plump, close to fat, her flesh is
bursting out of every strap, her thighs look heavy, her upper arms
give a hint that she will yet be massively fat if she ever grows
old, she has a belly which protrudes like no big movie star’s belly
in many a year, and yet she is the living bouncing embodiment of
pulchritude. It is her swan song to being a sexual object — the
last fucky film she will make — and how she makes it! She proves
once again that she is as good as the actors she works with, and
she and Tom Ewell do a comic march through the movie. As The Girl
upstairs, a TV model in New York for the summer from Colorado, she
creates one last American innocent, a pristine artifact of the
mid-Eisenhower years, an American girl who
believes
in the
products she sells in TV commercials — she is as simple and healthy
as the whole middle of the country, and there to be plucked. It is
an unbelievable performance for an actress who is on the edge of
separating from her husband, has two atrocious films behind her, is
in psychoanalysis, drinking too much, and all the while thinking of
breaking her contract and beginning a new life in New York to make
movies with a photographer who has never produced a film.

It is an impossible load for an ordinary
woman. It is a next to unendurable strain for a strong woman of
firm identity, but it is natural for Marilyn. There is one grace to
possessing small identity — it is the ability to move from one kind
of life to another with more pleasure than pain. If this lack of
identity becomes a progressive burden in a static situation (for
everyone else tends to build and prosper more than oneself), a lack
of psychic density also offers quick intelligence in a new role.
This is not to say that she is heaven on the set of
The
Seven-Year Itch
. Usually she is several hours late and often
keeps the company in irons while forgetting her lines, but she is
resilient, how she is resilient in this film.

As if she has been picking the opportunity,
she has a critical fight with DiMaggio while on location in New
York. He has accompanied her after much debate, and is on the
street with several thousand New Yorkers on the night she is filmed
standing over a subway grating with Tom Ewell. As the trains go by
underneath, her skirts billow up. It is so hot in the city she
presumably loves the rush of air on her thighs. She plays it in
innocent delight, a strapping blonde with a white skirt blown out
like a spinnaker above her waist — a fifty-foot silhouette of her
in just this scene will later appear over Times Square. In
Eisenhower years, comedy resides in how close one can come to the
concept of hot pussy while still living in the cool of the
innocent. “Oh,” she says in a Betty Boop voice, “I always keep my
undies in the icebox.”

Witness DiMaggio with these thousands of
spectators crammed on hot New York night streets to get a glimpse
of Marilyn in white panties and powerhouse thighs over a wind
blower on a subway grating. The scene is more indecent to DiMaggio
than he ever conceived. The sound of New York snickers takes his
ear. It is a jargon, based on sewers, whoors, and delicatessen —
“Look at that pastrami!” Unable to endure any more, he tries to get
away. A group of newspapermen cut him off on the way to Toots
Shor’s. Toots is around the corner from where they are shooting!
The aristocracy at Shor’s will have their unsaid reaction. One of
the reporters says it instead. “What do you think of Marilyn having
to show more of herself than she’s shown before, Joe?”

A newspaperman on the street is the
existential equivalent of a surgeon who goes into cutting because
he likes to discover the route by which meat falls away before the
knife. DiMaggio gives no answer. He will have his war with Marilyn
as soon as she gets home. A monster of jealousy all these years, he
will not even trust her to smile at a bellhop. Hotel guests in
nearby rooms hear shouting, scuffling, and weeping before the dawn.
In the morning, DiMaggio is on his way to California.

Two weeks later, back in Los Angeles, she
announces to the press they are getting a divorce. She is sick and
can see no one. DiMaggio shoulders through newspapermen and leaves
to drive to San Francisco with the friend who had been best man at
his wedding, Reno Barsocchini. He takes with him “two leather
suitcases and a bag of gold-handled golf clubs.” The Associated
Press reports, “the news hit Hollywood like an A-bomb.”

A few days later, Marilyn is back at work on
The Seven-Year Itch
. Her work is faster and more
concentrated than before. Sometimes Wilder, to his surprise, can
cut and print on a first or second take. New identity. Good film.
“Rachmaninoff,” says The Girl upstairs in the honeyed happy-doll
voice.

* * *

She continues to see DiMaggio from time to
time. He will even months later be her escort to the premiere of
The Seven-Year Itch
, although they are reported to fight
before the evening is out. It is like a calculus of partial
derivatives. The lack of complete commitment to the marriage
creates a lack of finality in the separation. It is as if they
cannot excise what was never finished, and the conclusion returns
that they were locked like sweethearts, egoistic, narcissistic,
petulant, pained, unwillingly attracted, and finally together for
sex. If Marilyn almost never gives a hint of this, and will
indicate to many a friend that she was bored with him, poor Joe, it
is hard to explain why when they saw each other again in 1961 she
was quick to explain he was a companion. Nothing was happening with
DiMaggio, she assured her friends, because she was “cured.” It is
not the way a woman speaks of a man to whom she was sexually
indifferent, and indeed her affair with Yves Montand, which will
effectively break up her marriage to Miller, and can hardly be
concealed as not directly sexual, offered curious similarities.
Montand like DiMaggio was Italian, of peasant stock, and they even
shared a general physical resemblance.

But then it is characteristic of her to play
leapfrog in love and work. She will start with Miller, then go to
DiMaggio, come back to Miller, and pick up again with DiMaggio,
just as she will alternate from Lytess to Chekhov back to Lytess
and then on to the Strasbergs and the Method again, just as she
leaves Hollywood to live in New York to return to Hollywood to
leave again and return to die. She is entering a period of her life
when the weight of the past will make her as sluggish as a
dinosaur’s tail. She might as well be feeding a family within
herself – those separate personalities of her past – and if her
general lack of identity has enabled her to be an angel of nuance
in one hour, and a public relations monster in the next (with the
moronic glee of the emptiest ambition in her eye), if she has been
mercurially quick and will be as quick again when need arises,
still she is approaching the years of crisis that come to all men
and women who have managed to survive with little sense of inner
identity, a time when the psychic energies of early success begin
to exhaust themselves, and the ability to change over radically for
each new situation diminishes at the same time one’s reputation for
unreliability begins to grow – it is then that the backwater of
foul and exaggerated bad legends begins to enter the reactions of
strangers at the sound of the name.

So she is at a moment in her life when events
do not force her decision – she is in the rare situation of being
able to wait and choose, the worst of times for someone like
herself, for the tendency (since she cannot concentrate long enough
to clarify her thoughts) is to find all projects becoming polluted
with ambivalence. If she is at a crossroads, she can be certain
that the longer she waits, the muddier it will get. Yet what a
choice to make! Her need for security is probably greater than
ever, doubled by her divorce from DiMaggio. As she will read in a
few weeks she has worn out her welcome mat with Ed Sullivan, which
is equal to having exhausted the tolerance of the New York
Archdiocese. DiMaggio was her precise welcome mat, and so pressure
will soon be building on the studios if she remains. And now she
will also be open to attacks as a sex star twice divorced which
will be different from being the zany lady married to DiMag. No,
the New York
Daily News
won’t be on her side no more.
Needless to say, the best blow of the gossip columnist is a quick
kick to the ear once your head is on the ground, and this is still
the age of Kilgallen and Winchell. Alone, she has to be more
vulnerable, for gossip columnists have a continuing political
relation with the studios that restrains them from attacking movie
stars on contract, yet a good column still depends on a minimal
quota of murderous remarks. (We read a gossip column to keep up
after all on which celebrities are being killed this day – it lifts
our depression.) Unattached to DiMaggio, or the studio, she would
be on every columnist’s free list. Nobody would have to explain
this to her.

She can then hardly fail to be relieved when
the studio, delighted with her latest work, starts to woo her with
attentions she has never received before. There is talk (at last!)
of tearing up her contract and giving her a better one — if it is,
one may be certain, vastly inferior to what other stars are
getting, still it is an improvement. To celebrate the finish of
The Seven-Year Itch
, her agent, Charles Feldman (who has
also been her co-producer) throws a party for her at Romanoff’s.
Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, Jack Warner, and Darryl Zanuck come
as well as Claudette Colbert, Doris Day, Susan Hayward, William
Holden, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, even Clark
Gable, who compliments her on
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. Joan
Crawford is not invited. It is Hollywood’s way of welcoming her to
the Establishment. Two days later, DiMaggio accompanies her to
Cedars of Lebanon Hospital where she will have a minor
“gynecological operation,” which may make it possible to have
children. Louella Parsons writes that Marilyn’s “glad the divorce
won’t be final for a year because it leaves the door wide open . .
. about a reconciliation.” It is a good move in a complex publicity
game, and probably contributes to bringing Milton Greene out to
Hollywood to talk to her about the plan they have already discussed
to start her own film company. Again the risk appeals to her, but
it is such a risk! Greene has no real money, although he is
confident of raising money when the time comes, a fair assumption.
In the meantime, he will support her in New York from what his
photography brings in. He has even worked out a way for her to
break her contract with Twentieth. There has been a threatening
letter written to Marilyn by a studio executive when she would not
do
Pink Tights
, and this can be used as a legal pretext that
her option was not taken up. Greene’s lawyer has also charted a
high road for the case, which will be to claim Twentieth was
enforcing degrading roles upon her and “every person has a basic
right to stay decent.” It is just enough law to worry Twentieth.
With a senile judge and an out-of-phase moon, Twentieth could even
lose the case, for contractual law staggers under a library of
precedents that are closer to mutations than clarifications. At
bottom, the law is being used in the way it is usually employed, as
a wrestler’s grip for advantage in the future against mutual
torture in the present. The gamble was that Twentieth would suffer
more than Greene. “As soon as the bills started coming in,” Greene
told Zolotow, “I knew it would cost me about fifty thousand dollars
a year for the three years that remained on the Twentieth contract.
. . . At the very minimum they would lose a million dollars a year
without Marilyn. . . . I figured the odds were favorable, and the
stockholders would start screaming.” They did. In the year Marilyn
was in New York before a new contract was negotiated with
Twentieth, Greene was to be presented many offers, each superior to
the one before (and in private was offered bribes). The final
contract was a victory. She would be paid $100,000 a picture for
four pictures over seven years, and could make other films with her
own company, yes, a perfect move when completed, but she could not
know that in advance when Greene came out to Hollywood after her
operation. So the move to slip back to New York with him was bold,
for she took the less secure of two possibilities and took it in
the face of what might be stubborn and vindictive opposition from
the studio and a debacle in the papers — she could not know. As the
less predictable and more elegant move, it must have come out of
the same voice in herself which would not agree to marry Johnny
Hyde. She had a talent rather than an identity, and if there was a
logic in her life it was to rip up the roots — Do It Again! — and
follow her talent to New York. In an artist that is the exercise of
saintliness, for it is saintly to follow the best thing one has
discovered in one’s life no matter the cost, and there is no way to
comprehend Monroe unless we assume that her deepest experience in
life was the act of playing in a superb role.

That she has also a dream of love with Arthur
Miller which will be as large in her mind as the love of Eleanor
Roosevelt for Abraham Lincoln is also part of her vision, but at
least it is a vision. Not every girl from an orphanage becomes a
star and then dares to desert Hollywood. Since she is also one of
the toughest blondes ever to come down the pike (there in the
concentrated center of her misty blonde helplessness) we can also
assume that the bad reviews on
No Business Like Show
Business
give her a push. She is a traveling omnibus of motives
and moves most quickly when a variety of reasons coincide best with
the multiplicity of herself. Holding Milton H. Greene by the hand,
and endowing herself with the name of Zelda Zonk, she takes flight
with him for New York in December 1954, and disappears from
view.