SATURDAY AFTERNOON MOVIES—NO matter how poorly made or incredible the plot, they were a refuge from my neighborhood and all my teenage miseries. Serials that never ended, Doris Day, who never capitulated, cheap travelogues, sci-fi features with zippers in the monster suits: I loved them all, believed them all, and never dreamed of leaving until the screen went sickeningly blank.
But I walked out on Marilyn Monroe. I remember her on the screen, huge as a colossus doll, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into total vulnerability. Watching her, I felt angry, even humiliated, but I didn’t understand why.
After all, Jane Russell was in the movie, too (a very bad-taste version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), so it wasn’t just the vulnerability that all big-breasted women seem to share. (If women viewers prefer actresses who are smaller, neater—the Audrey Hepburns of the world—it isn’t because we’re jealous of the zoftig ones as men suppose. It’s just that we would rather identify with a woman we don’t have to worry about, someone who doesn’t seem in constant danger.) Compared to Marilyn, Jane Russell seemed in control of her body and even of the absurd situations in this movie.
Perhaps it was the uncertainty in the eyes of this big, blond child-woman; the terrible desire for approval that made her different from Jane Russell. How dare she expose the neediness that so many women feel, but try so hard to hide? How dare she, a movie star, be just as unconfident as I was?
So I disliked her and avoided her movies, as we avoid that which reflects our fears about ourselves. If there were jokes made on her name and image when I was around, I joined in. I contributed to the laughing, the ridicule, the put-downs, thus proving that I was nothing like her. Nothing at all.
I, too, got out of my neighborhood in later years, just as she had escaped from a much worse life of lovelessness, child abuse, and foster homes. I didn’t do it, as she did, through nude calendar photographs and starlet bits. (Even had there been such opportunities for mildly pretty girls in Toledo, Ohio, I would never have had the courage to make myself so vulnerable.) Yes, I was American enough to have show-business dreams. The boys in my neighborhood hoped to get out of a lifetime in the factories through sports; the girls, if we imagined anything other than marrying a few steps up in the world, always dreamed of show-business careers. But after high-school years as a dancer on the Toledo show-business circuit, or what passed for show business there, it seemed hopeless even to me. In the end, it was luck, an encouraging mother, and a facility with words that got me out; a facility that helped me fake my way through the college entrance exams for which I was totally unprepared.
But there’s not much more confidence in girls who scrape past college boards than there is in those who, like Marilyn, parade past beauty-contest judges. By the time I saw her again, I was a respectful student watching the celebrated members of the Actors Studio do scenes from what seemed to me two very impressive and highbrow plays (Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill were to be served up that day). She was a student, too, a pupil of Lee Strasberg, leader of the Actors Studio and American guru of the Stanislavski method, but her status as a movie star and sex symbol seemed to keep her from being taken seriously even there. She was allowed to observe, but not to do scenes with her colleagues.
So the two of us sat there, mutually awed, I think, in the presence of such theater people as Ben Gazzara and Rip Torn, mutually insecure in the masculine world of High Culture, mutually trying to fade into the woodwork.
I remember thinking that Strasberg and his actors seemed to take positive pleasure in their power to ignore this great and powerful movie star who had come to learn. Their greetings to her were a little too studiously casual, their whispers to each other about her being there a little too self-conscious and condescending. Though she stayed in the back of the room, her blond head swathed in a black scarf and her body hidden in a shapeless black sweater and slacks, she gradually became a presence, if only because the group was trying so hard not to look, to remain oblivious and cool.
As we filed slowly out of the shabby room after the session was over, Marilyn listened eagerly to the professional postmortem being carried on by Ben Gazzara and others who walked ahead of us, her fingers nervously tracing a face that was luminous and without makeup, as if she were trying to hide herself, to apologize for being there. I was suddenly glad she hadn’t participated and hadn’t been subjected to the criticisms of this rather vulturous group. (Perhaps it was an unschooled reaction, but I hadn’t enjoyed watching Strasberg encourage an intimate love scene between an actor and actress, and then pick them apart with humiliating authority.) Summoning my nerve, I did ask the shy, blond woman in front of me if she could imagine playing a scene for this group.
“Oh, no,” Marilyn said, her voice childish, but much less whispery than on the screen, “I admire all these people so much. I’m just not good enough.” Then, after a few beats of silence: “Lee Strasberg is a genius, you know. I plan to do what he says.”
Her marriage to Arthur Miller seemed quite understandable to me and, I think, to other women, even those who were threatened by Miller’s casting off a middle-aged wife to take a younger, far more glamorous one. If you can’t be taken seriously in your work, if you have an emotional and intellectual insecurity complex, then marry a man who has the seriousness you’ve been denied. It’s a traditional female option—far more acceptable than trying to achieve that identity on one’s own.
Of course, Marilyn’s image didn’t really gain seriousness and intellectuality. Women don’t gain serious status by sexual association any more easily than they do by hard work. (At least, not unless the serious man dies and we confine ourselves to being keepers of the flame. As Margaret Mead has pointed out, widows are almost the only women who are honored in authority.) Even Marilyn’s brave refusal to be intimidated by threats that she would never work in films again if she married Miller, who was then a “subversive” called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was considered less brave than Miller’s refusal to testify. Indeed, it was barely reported at all.
Perhaps she didn’t take her own bravery seriously either. She might be giving up her livelihood, the work that meant so much to her, but she was about to give that up for marriage anyway. As Mrs. Arthur Miller, she retired to a Connecticut farm and tried to limit her life to his solitary work habits, his friends, and his two children. Only when they badly needed money did she come out of retirement again, and that was to act in The Misfits, a film written by her husband.
On the other hand, the public interpretation was very different. She was an egocentric actress forcing one of America’s most important playwrights to tailor a screenplay to her inferior talents: that was the gossip-column story here and in Europe. But her own pattern argues the case for her. In two previous marriages, to an aircraft factory worker at the age of sixteen and later to Joe DiMaggio, she had cut herself off from the world and put all her energies into being a housewife. When it didn’t work out, she blamed herself, not the role, and added one more failure to her list of insecurities. “I have too many fantasies to be a housewife,” she told a woman friend sadly. And finally, to an interviewer: “I guess I am a fantasy.”
The Misfits seemed to convey some facets of the real Marilyn: honesty, an innocence and belief that survived all experience to the contrary, kindness toward other women, a respect for the life of plants and animals. Because for the first time she wasn’t only a sex object and victim, I also was unembarrassed enough to notice her acting ability. I began to see her earlier movies—those few in which, unlike Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she wasn’t called upon to act the female impersonator.
For me as for so many people, she was a presence in the world, a life force.
Over the years, I heard other clues to her character. When Ella Fitzgerald, a black artist and perhaps the greatest singer of popular songs, hadn’t been able to get a booking at an important Los Angeles nightclub in the fifties, it was Marilyn who called the owner and promised to sit at a front table every night if he allowed Ella to sing. The owner hired Ella, Marilyn was faithful to her promise each night, the press went wild, and, as Ella remembered with gratitude, “After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”
Even more movingly, there was Marilyn’s last interview. She pleaded with the reporter to end with, “What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers. … Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.”
And then she was gone. I remember being told, in the middle of a chaotic student meeting in Europe, that she was dead. I remember that precise moment on August 5, 1962—the people around me, what the room looked like—and I’ve discovered that many other people remember that moment, too. It’s a phenomenon usually reserved for the death of family and presidents.
She was an actress, a person on whom no one’s fate depended, and yet her energy and terrible openness to life had made a connection to strangers. Within days after her body was discovered, eight young and beautiful women took their lives in individual incidents clearly patterned after Marilyn Monroe’s death. Some of them left notes to make that connection clear.
Two years later, Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play, After the Fall, brought Marilyn back to life in the character of Maggie. But somehow this Maggie didn’t seem the same. She had Marilyn’s pathetic insecurity, the same need to use her sexual self as a way of getting recognition and feeling alive. But, perhaps naturally, the play was about Miller’s suffering, not Marilyn’s. He seemed honestly to include some of his own destructive acts. (He had kept a writer’s diary of his movie-star wife, for instance, and Marilyn’s discovery of it was an emotional blow, the beginning of the end for that marriage. It made her wonder: Was her husband exploiting her, as most men had done, but in a more intellectual way?) Nonetheless, the message of the play was mostly Miller’s view of his attempts to shore up a creature of almost endless insecurities; someone doomed beyond his helping by a mysterious lack of confidence.
To women, that lack of confidence was less mysterious. Writer Diana Trilling, who had never met Marilyn, wrote an essay just after her death that some of Marilyn’s friends praised as a more accurate portrayal than Miller’s. She described the public’s “mockery of [Marilyn’s] wish to be educated”; the sexual awareness that came only from outside, from men’s reactions, “leaving a great emptiness where a true sexuality would have supplied her with a sense of herself as a person with connection and content.” She questioned whether Marilyn had really wanted to die, or only to be asleep, not to be conscious, through the loneliness of that particular Saturday night.
Trilling also recorded a feeling of connection to Marilyn’s loneliness felt by so many strangers (“especially women to whose protectiveness her extreme vulnerability spoke so directly”), so much so that we fantasized our ability to save her, if only we had been there. “But we were the friends,” as Trilling wrote sadly, “of whom she knew nothing.”
“She was an unusual woman—a little ahead of her times,” said Ella Fitzgerald. “And she didn’t know it.”
Now that women’s self-vision is changing, we are thinking again about the life of Marilyn Monroe. Might our new confidence in women’s existence with or without the approval of men have helped a thirty-six-year-old woman of talent to stand on her own? To resist the insecurity and ridicule? To stop depending on sexual attractiveness as the only proof that she was alive—and therefore to face aging with confidence? Because the ability to bear a child was denied to her, could these new ideas have helped her to know that being a woman included much more? Could she have challenged the Freudian analysts to whom she turned in her suffering?
Most of all, we wonder if the support and friendship of other women could have helped. Her early experiences of men were not good. She was the illegitimate daughter of a man who would not even contribute for her baby clothes; her mother’s earliest memory of her own father, Marilyn’s grandfather, was his smashing a pet kitten against the fireplace in a fit of anger; Marilyn herself said she was sexually attacked by a foster father while still a child; and she was married off at sixteen because another foster family could not take care of her. Yet she was forced always to depend for her security on the goodwill and recognition of men; even to be interpreted by them in writing because she feared that sexual competition would make women interviewers dislike her. Even if they had wanted to, the women in her life did not have the power to protect her. In films, photographs, and books, after her death as well as before, she has been mainly seen through men’s eyes.
We are too late. We cannot know whether we could have helped Norma Jeane Baker or the Marilyn Monroe she became. But we are not too late to do as she asked. At last, we can take her seriously.
—1972
I would like to thank Ms. cofounder and editor, Harriet Lyons, whose idea this was.