In their long struggle to achieve equality of opportunity with men, women have had to make use of all the physical advantages which their sex gives them, in youth anyway. Dr. Johnson thought the balance fair: “It is right that the law should give women so little power, since nature has given them so much.” But nature’s power does not endure. Though women have now for centuries lived longer (on average) than men, their charms wane more swiftly. History is punctuated by the sad tales of beautiful women, once all conquering, who ended as destitute. Emma Hamilton was such a case. So was her contemporary Mrs. Jordan, the Regency comedy actress who enchanted Charles Lamb, and later, as the mistress of the future William IV, bore him ten children, only to be cast off into a miserable old age of want and loneliness.
Such examples are so common that they inspire pity rather than a sense of tragedy when we come across them. So we welcome the occasional lady who makes a shrewd assessment of her charms from the start, capitalizes on her strengths, keeps her weaknesses in check, and ends a long, rich life with money in the bank, men on tap and always a few jokes to the good. There are not many such—very few indeed—and therefore they deserve, and get, heroic status; certainly among women, and among the more discerning men too. The doyenne of this select group was undoubtedly Mae West. And her life and career make a neat diptych with the outstanding example of the prevailing frailty, Marilyn Monroe—though she, too, by an ironic twist of fate, occupies a heroic niche in history.
Mae West was born on August 17, 1893, in Brooklyn, then a suburban town, not incorporated as a New York City borough until five years later. She was registered as Mary Jane West. Her ancestry was English, from Long Grendon, in leafy Buckinghamshire (her mother, Tilly, had German blood). Her father was a prizefighter, “Battling Jack” West, also a private detective, taxi-cab owner and many other things. Her mother had wanted to go on the stage but had been forbidden to do so by strict parents. Now she lived vicariously through May or Mae, as she became, following the 1890s song:
Her Christian name was Mary
But she took the “R” away
She wanted to be a fairy
With the beautiful name of May.
This was the dodge adopted by West’s contemporary “May of Teck,” later Queen Mary, stiff as a poker, wife of King George V of England. Mary was formal, pious and good, May was intimate, sexy, nice. Gradually, West made it sexier, as a teenager, by spelling it “Mae.” Her debut, aged seven, was as Baby May—Song and Dance, at a Brooklyn Sunday theater. She was on the stage nearly eighty years, with a few gaps. Beginning with Hal Clarendon’s Stock Company, she trained at Ned Wayburns’s Institute of Dancing and College of Vaudeville, “the Place Where Chorus Girls Are Taught to Dance and Sing from the Raw Material, and Made Ready for the Footlights.” As a teenager she was Little Lord Fauntleroy (a photo exists), in Shakespeare and French farce, a murder victim in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and in thrillers and melodramas. She was on the same bill in 1907 as W. C. Fields, then described as a “Humorous Juggler,” and almost certainly worked with “The Astair Children,” Fred and Adèle, and “The Marx Brothers,” Julius and Milton (later renamed Groucho and Gummo). By the time she was twenty, she had toured in burlesque, danced in a Broadway production of the Folies Bergère, acted in Vera Violetta and and A Winsome Widow, also on Broadway, and made a solo spot for herself in vaudeville. She had also married, aged eighteen, and kicked out, a no-good called Frank Wallace, who made periodic reappearances in her later career, demanding handouts.
Wallace clearly helped to shape West’s views on men. She set them down in her “Ten Commandments on Men and Other Things” (actually there are fifteen), discovered under the heading “Things I’ll Never Do” by her biographer Simon Louvish (whose superb work is the prime source for this essay) in an undated paper in the Mae West archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles:
Things I’ll Never Do
Although this set out to be West’s manifesto on Men, and she remembered what it was supposed to be before she wrote her fifteenth point, this is really a glimpse into her inner life, which reveals how comparatively unimportant was the role men (as opposed to Men) played in it.
We do not know what Mae West really looked like. We do not know her height for sure: once she became sassy (her word) she became skillful in having herself photographed in such a way as to make it difficult to judge her height exactly. She cannot have been much over five feet since she always wore heels as high as possible, provided they were reasonably safe. She gave her measurements as “38-inch bust, 38-inch hips and 28-inch waist” and said this had never varied much. The notion that she had very large breasts—which gave rise to the nickname a Second World War aircrew gave to their inflatable life jackets—is plainly false. She was not a natural blonde and always dyed her hair. Its natural color was light brown or dark blond, not brunette, as her enemies claimed. She had very good teeth, and in 1949 when she was fifty-six, said to an interviewer, Earl Wilson of the Omaha World-Herald, “I’ve got all my own teeth,” and invited him to look into her mouth and down her throat, “an offer which I was too gallant to refuse,” he wrote, reporting the fact under the headline: “MAE STILL HAS ALL HER TEETH.” Emboldened, he asked her age. She replied: “I am over twenty-one.”
From the moment when Mae West appeared in solo spots in vaudeville she specialized in suggestive jokes and dressed to exploit her sexuality. During the 1920s she became the personification of sex to theater audiences. She associated, for publicity purposes, with prizefighters, wrestlers and athletes, musclemen of all kinds, and sometimes with those reputed to be gangsters. Her ostensible choice in men did not change, and in her seventies and even eighties she still liked to be photographed with boxers, often admiring their physiques. But was it all a stunt? There is no evidence at all that West had a particular interest in sex or wide sexual experience or knowledge, or salacious tastes. In some respects she was prudish. She never had herself photographed in the nude or topless. She never used four-letter words or crude, explicit expressions. She never kissed onstage or on film. She devoted much of her life to derisory innuendos and double entendres of great variety and ingenuity, putting them across with remarkable skill. But she never told a dirty story as such, onstage or in private. Moreover, she went out very little. In the classic age of the speakeasy, a place she made much use of in her stage material, she was hardly ever reported to be in one or photographed there. She figured rarely in the gossip columns except for obvious publicity purposes. She did not frequent nightclubs or premieres, except her own. The reason seems to be that when not actually onstage, she was working. West was a writer. In vaudeville, where she grew up professionally, she was competing not only with trained seals and other performing animals, escapologists like Houdini, trick cyclists and giant strongmen, but with her own generation of inspired comics, such as Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel. The competition was keen, and the need for fresh, first-class speaking material and funny scenarios was constant. Most of the comics had specialties, and if they could write their own jokes, did so. Chaplin always did. So did Laurel, both when he was on his own and teamed with Oliver Hardy. Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx wrote their material until they could afford to hire the best gagmen in the business. West soon discovered she could write better jokes and dialogue than what was provided for her, and she gradually took over her show entirely.
She was writing as early as 1912, when her vaudeville career really got going. In 1921 she registered a playlet, The Ruby King, as her copyright at the Library of Congress. The next year she registered a play, The Hussy. There followed two sex plays, Sex and The Drag, described as “a Homosexual Play in Three Acts.” Both were registered as by “Jane Mest,” a pseudonym for Mae West. Sex, in its first production, opened at Daly’s, April 26, 1926, and ran for 375 performances. The Drag had only two previews, in Connecticut. The Wicked Act, registered by Mae West under her own name, had nineteen performances at Daly’s in 1927. She followed this with Diamond Lil, her greatest script, with an initial run of 176 performances at the Royale Theater in 1928. Other plays by Mae West included The Pleasure Man (1928), The Constant Sinner (1931) and Frisco Kate (1930–1931), which was never produced. During this period West wrote two novels, Babe Gordon, published in 1930, and Diamond Lil, 1932. A third novel, The Pleasure Man, was not published till 1975. Further plays included Loose Women (1933), Clean Beds (1936), Havana Cruise (1939), It Takes Love (no date), Catherine Was Great (1944), Come on Up (1945) and her new versions of Diamond Lil for revivals, from 1947 into the 1960s.
Many of these scripts incorporated work by other writers or by West under pseudonyms, especially “Jane Mest.” West’s movie career, which began with Night After Night in 1932, has a more complicated scriptology. In this first movie, West took credit only for “additional dialogue.” She Done Him Wrong (1933) was adapted from West’s Diamond Lil. I’m No Angel (1933) was mainly by West, but three other writers were credited. Belle of the Nineties (1934) and Goin’ to Town (1935) were essentially by West. Klondike Annie (1936) was a movie of her unproduced play Frisco Kate. Go West, Young Man (1936) and Every Day’s a Holiday (1938) were by West. The Heat Is On (1944) appears to be her only movie in which she had no hand in the writing, though one suspects she actually supplied material during production. The most interesting case is My Little Chickadee (1940), by far her best movie—which she wrote jointly with W. C. Fields, each crafting their own lines.
I have described West’s writing in detail for two reasons. First, it enables us to picture the showbiz world in which she matured and flourished. It had more in common with the London stage in Shakespeare’s day, or perhaps the early Victorian provincial theater as described by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby than the financially sophisticated entertainment industry of the early twenty-first century. West had no authorial amour propre or artistic pretensions. Everything was done ad hoc, much of it at the last minute. The only criteria were applause and box office. Second, and more important, West’s role as author and gag writer enabled her to keep complete control of her showbiz personality and to present it entirely as she wanted. Between the wars she created “Mae West,” an overwhelming showbiz image, one of the most famous and enduring in the world, by devising her situations and writing her lines. No other female star of her time, probably of any time, was so completely her own creation. Just as Garrick was Garrick, so Mae West was all her own work.
The results justified the effort that went into the creation. When West shifted from stage to screen early in the 1930s, taking full advantage of the new talkie process, she became not just a New York star but world famous. And she was paid accordingly. In 1934 she became the highest-paid entertainer in America, with an income of $399,166.00. The next highest was W. C. Fields, with $155,083.33. The only other woman performer in West’s league was Marlene Dietrich, with an estimated $145,000. In 1935 West earned more than any other female in the world, with $480,833. Only one man exceeded her take-home pay, William Randolph Hearst, with an estimated $500,000. The next three in the list of top earners were Alfred P. Sloane, president of General Motors, with $374,505, Marlene Dietrich with $368,000, and Bing Crosby with $318,000.
West made her fortune by working outside the Hollywood studio system, which kept actors in gilded slavery under long, exclusive contracts giving them no share in profits. By making herself her own boss, she won both freedom and affluence. She invested her earnings in sound stocks and bonds at a time in the 1930s when you could get in at the bottom of the market. But above all she bought high-quality diamonds, which served as her chief stage prop. By the end of the 1930s, West was probably the most celebrated owner of precious stones outside India. She wore them too, as often as possible, leading to her best spontaneous one-liner when an usherette at the Hollywood Roxy exclaimed at a premiere in December 1936, “Goodness, what diamonds!”—“Goodness has nothing to do with it.”
The only effective restraint upon West’s artistic freedom, both during her twenties Broadway career and her thirties Hollywood epoch, was censorship. In New York West was targeted by the city authorities and by Aimee Semple McPherson, then leading a moral crusade there. In April 1927 West was convicted of corrupting public morals for writing, putting on and acting in Sex, and sentenced to ten days in jail plus a fine of $500. She served her sentence, actually eight days, since she got two days off for good behavior, on Welfare Island, a former insane asylum. The New York Daily News carried a report on her experiences every day, and she herself wrote a full account in Liberty magazine (August 1927). She wove her prison term skillfully into her public image, adding an extra dimension by arguing that her plays, by informing ignorant women about the dangers of sex, kept down the rate of illegitimacy and venereal disease. She gave her public-interest dimension a proto-feminist twist by emphasizing that all the lawyers in the case were men, that the jury was all male and that no women witnesses were called. She said: “This was a case of Men versus One Woman.” She took the same line during her movie career in the 1930s when she ran into constant trouble with the Hays Production Code.
West staged an elaborate comeback in her seventies, based on a film version of Gore Vidal’s story Myra Breckinridge (1970), which has since settled down to a long career as a cult movie particularly favored by homosexuals. There was also a 1976 movie, Sextette, based upon a play she wrote in the 1950s. In the same decade there were nightclub acts and appearances in Las Vegas, for which West wrote the scripts, and radio and TV appearances, of which Simon Louvish gives a list in an appendix to his biography, though he says it is certainly incomplete. Her last live appearance, at the San Francisco premiere of Sextette, was in 1978, when she was eighty-five. She died two years later, on November 12, 1980, and was buried in the family vault in Brooklyn.
Over the three-quarters of a century during which West was a professional comedienne, she built up one of the most consistent and indestructible personas in the history of show business. It was all her work and remained throughout under her control. It was punctuated by songs and wisecracks that reinforced the consistency. The songs, partly and sometimes wholly written by her, tell their own story: “They Call Me Sister Honkey Tonk,” “Willie of the Valley,” “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone?,” “He Was Her Man, But He Came to See Me Sometimes,” “A Man Who Takes His Time,” “He’s a Bad Man, But He Treats Me Good,” “What Do You Have to Do to Get It” and many more. West also gave unusual, and characteristic, renderings of classic songs, such as “Silver Threads Amidst the Gold.”
She worked hard on her gags throughout her life, and her enormous gag book was, next to her diamonds, her most precious possession. “Come up and see me sometime,” she never uttered until it was world famous. Like other classic movie lines—“You dirty rat,” “Play it again, Sam,” “I want to be alone”—it was invented, or, rather, polished, by the public. West was in the great American tradition of one-liners, which goes back to Benjamin Franklin. “A hard man is good to find.” “It ain’t the men in my life; it’s the life in my men.” “A man in the house is worth two in the street.” “What good is alimony on a cold night?” “A girl climbs the ladder of success rung by rung.” “Beulah, peel me a grape.” “When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.”
West began her gag collection, now in her archive, in the early 1920s (perhaps based on notebooks going back to 1907), and it eventually numbered two thousand pages, contained in over forty folders. There were twenty thousand jokes altogether. Much is typed, but five hundred pages are in her own handwriting, leaning backward precariously. She used stock publications written for the use of stand-up comedians, such as Madison’s Budget, McNally’s Bulletin and Digest of Humour, some of them going back well into the nineteenth century. But the vast majority were originals or versions of her own. An enormous amount of work went into this project, and there is something touching about the way this self-disciplined and industrious woman spent her life looking for the perfect joke, while making do with imperfect ones. If she set out to prove that a woman can outdo the men in the grand and grim task of show business, she certainly succeeded.
West’s appreciation of the fact that women see sex as intrinsically linked to jokes, whereas men tend to take it with intense seriousness, helps to explain why she was so popular with women. More than two-thirds of her fan mail was from women. She was a heroine to the younger generation of actresses who followed her, chiefly because of her success in controlling her own career, and her ability to orbit fame for so long outside the star system. This admiration built up long before the opening of her archives revealed the full extent of her writing activities and her robust creative vitality. One movie actress who admired her (she told me so) was Shelley Winters. “I came from Brooklyn too. I was taller than Mae and didn’t have to wear two-inch heels. But I had no natural assets. At Woolworth’s, my first job, I was put in hardware because I wasn’t pretty enough for candy. My figure grew voluptuous by eating. In my early movies I was a victim, always. I was drowned by Montgomery Clift, run over by Alan Ladd and James Mason, knifed by Robert Mitchum and strangled by Ronald Coleman.” Her first movie was in 1943, and after the war, when she was getting known, she had an encounter with Dylan Thomas, which has gotten into the literary anecdote books in various versions. Winters’s own was: “He told me he had come to Los Angeles to touch the titties of a starlet, as he put it. I said, OK, but only one finger, and dip it in champagne first.”
As a starlet, Winters shared an apartment for a time with Marilyn Monroe, who was six years her junior. They had two “good” outfits which they shared: a swimsuit for photo shoots and a mink for dates. She taught Monroe how to “look pretty” by tilting her head back, lowering her eyes and parting her lips. They listed the men they would like to sleep with or marry. Monroe’s list included Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller and other intellectuals. “I said, stick to movie actors, it’s safer.” She followed her own advice, and bedded Marlon Brando, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Errol Flynn and many others, made over 150 movies, died comfortably rich, in her own bed, at eighty-five, having won two Oscars and survived three marriages.
Winters provides a bridge between the two contrasting lives of West and Monroe. She saw both as heroines, West the boss-heroine, Monroe the victim-heroine: “I admired West but I wanted to be Marilyn—she had all the assets.” West agreed. She said of Monroe: “She was the only girl who ever came close to me in the sex department. All the others had were big boobs.” It is probably true that, by the standards of commercial display (an economist’s name for showbiz), Monroe had the finest body ever recorded, from top to toe. But she was lucky to have been born in the 1920s—at least she had a life, or thirty-six years of it. If she had been conceived in the twenty-first century, she would, without much doubt, have been aborted, and that remarkable body would never have come into existence.
Her mother, maiden name Monroe, generally known as Gladys Baker, was a pathetic creature who hovered most of her life on the brink of sanity and spent more than half of it in institutions, in one of which she died. Her mother had also died in an asylum, in a straitjacket. The males of the family were alcoholics, when they were on the scene at all. Monroe was registered at birth as Norma Jean Mortenson, though Mr. Mortenson was almost certainly not her father. Her mother, when not institutionalized, worked in a film lab and her daughter always recognized her “because she smelled of glue.” The father may have been a man in the same lab, name now unknown. Monroe never met him, or knew who he was for sure. Her mother’s role in her life was fleeting and blurred. The nearest Monroe got to a parent was her mother’s friend Grace McKee, who also worked in the film lab and was known as “Aunt Grace.” But she could not, as a rule, look after the child, who was farmed out to a series of semiprofessional foster parents, eleven in all. On September 13, 1935, McKee, having run out of foster homes (in at least two of which the pretty child was sexually abused), deposited Monroe, aged nine, at the Los Angeles Orphans Home on North El Centro Avenue. Monroe had to be dragged inside, protesting she was not an orphan. She slept on a small metal bed in a big dormitory with twenty-six other girls. In the dark she could see through the uncurtained window at the bottom of the room the floodlit and illuminated water tower of the RKO Studios on Gower Street.
After that experience, Monroe, thanks to much pleading, was taken in by “Aunt Grace,” who gave her her first lipstick and rouge, and taught her to use it, aged ten. Aunt Grace had just married her fourth husband. He drank, and tried to rape the child. So it was back to foster parents again. When abused, as she repeatedly was, she was blamed for being “provocative.” At fifteen, a young man called James Dougherty, then twenty-one, showed an interest in her and offered to marry her to take her off Aunt Grace’s hands. She was told she could either marry him or go back to the orphanage. So on June 19, 1942, three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Norma Jean Baker was married. He joined the U.S. armed forces and left, and she lived with his parents. Monroe got jobs in war factories, as a chute packer, paint sprayer, and so on, and in one of them was spotted by an army magazine photographer, who advised her to take up modeling. He said something interesting: “You were born to be married to the camera.” There followed the Blue Book Modeling Agency, a screen test at 20th Century Fox, her first brush with the fierce producer Darryl Zanuck, who cast an angry shadow over her life, and work as a film actress.
It would be hard to imagine a more depressing and hostile background than the one which encompassed Monroe, composed as it was (I have left out many of the horrible details) of severe mental illness, syphilis, alcoholism, divorce, illegitimacy and desertion. She was also left-handed (as were Betty Grable, Judy Garland and Olivia de Havilland) at a time when to be a sinistral at school, as I know from experience, was much more of a burden than it is now. On the other hand, she had beauty and health. Moreover, she had a species of magic of the rarest kind, an ability to interlace herself with the process of photography, whether still or motional, to a degree no other actress has ever possessed. The camera is an extraordinary machine. It is like the printing press. We think of it as a mere human contrivance to make the telling of truth easier, simpler and cheaper. But it is not by nature a truth teller. It is a transformer, a self-generating art form on its own, often escaping from human control and pursuing its own aims; or taking possession of human beings and using them. The camera is more dangerous and deceptive than the press, because less well understood. We all know, and have known since the 1450s, that the press can not only reproduce lies but enlarge them. But the camera has posed since its inception in the 1830s as the antipode to the pen and brush because of its mechanical inability to reproduce anything except what it sees. Hence the phrase, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, “The camera cannot lie.” No greater untruth ever came into popular usage. The camera lies all the time, through an infinite spectrum of mendacity. It is a mechanical monarch, with its favorites and its enemies list that stretches to the crack of doom. Its favors are distributed by the system of rules but in the most capricious and arbitrary manner, which is usually as incomprehensible to its recipients as it is to those who operate the mechanism. It belongs to the world not so much of pleasure but of metaphysics.
Marilyn Monroe was the spoiled princess of celluloid, but she never recognized or understood the birthright. On the contrary: her life was a constant struggle not to be possessed and raped by the camera, punctuated by rare moments of submission when she engaged in lovemaking with the merciless machine. She never understood that it loved her, let alone why; and throughout her professional life she felt that it was not just pursuing but persecuting her. She was shy to the point of mania. She appears to have been one of those rarities who suffers from both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, sometimes at the same time. For her, appearing in the morning on time to begin filming required an effort of courage akin to that demanded of a soldier in the First World War who had gone “over the top” too many times, whose reserves of courage had been exhausted, and who was now asked to do it again with nothing but fear in his belly. Each time, it required an act of valor physical, mental, even spiritual, and each time it became more difficult.
In short, Monroe’s fifteen-year career as a film actress was the saga of a fight to the death over her magical body. On the one hand there was the camera, which lusted after it and deified it. On the other was the fragile, terrified woman who saw it as a devouring monster, and tried to escape it. If she had understood the nature of the struggle, all might have been well. But all she grasped was her fear. There is no doubt about the camera’s lust for her. It propelled her upward throughout her career. She started as an extra. So did Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Merle Oberon and Sophia Loren. These actresses had to work their way upward. In Monroe’s work as an extra she tended, involuntarily and unconsciously, to upstage those with speaking parts. Given a small speaking part, as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she upstaged the principals. She was, unknown to herself, a movie witch. There was something unfathomable about her magic. She could look horrible: hair greasy and lank, eyes dull, skin unhealthy, figure recalcitrant, movements uncoordinated. Then the camera poured its love on, and transformed, her. When she first appeared before Laurence Olivier to begin work on what became The Prince and the Showgirl, he thought her so awful that he mentally decided to abandon the project there and then. Then he saw the rushes of her test, and embraced the movie with enthusiasm. (A huge mistake, as it turned out.) Many of the most beautiful stills of Monroe were taken at a time when she was described as “hideous.” The photographers themselves could not believe their eyes when they saw the prints. The famous nude camera shot of her earned $500; within ten years the company that owned the rights had netted $1,000,000, though nude shots of starlets were common enough. The famous skirt-blowing scene over a hot-air grating, filmed for The Seven Year Itch on September 15, 1954, on the spot and witnessed by over two thousand people, causing traffic jams and great hilarity and anger, became one of the most notorious episodes in the entire history of the movies. In fact it had been tried countless times before, with actresses of all kinds, and always ended up in bad taste if not downright awkward vulgarity. With Monroe it worked perfectly, becoming not only graceful but even moving.
Monroe’s fear of the camera, on the other hand, probably sucked up and regurgitated all the horrors of her miserable childhood and adolescence. Anyone writing about her is tempted to indulge in amateur psychiatry, a temptation which will be resisted here. She had little effective education but enough to make her yearn for more. There was an aching hole in her which needed to be filled. Religion might have served her well. But she was God resistant. When she and Jane Russell were working together, Russell, who was a Christian fundamentalist (of a sort), suggested to her: “Why don’t you come with me after work to a Bible reading?” The answer was: “I’m having a reading to myself, with Freud.” Monroe brings to mind G. K. Chesterton’s reputed saying: “If people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” Monroe had a hunger for the cerebral mysteries, as her conversation with Shelley Winters suggests. She had no wish to get close to male movie actors, though she occasionally did so, faute de mieux. It is significant that the two greatest Hollywood predators of the age failed to make her. George Raft, so successful and insatiable that he once made love to seven chorus girls in a single night, was rebuffed. So was Zanuck, who never forgave Monroe for giving him the brush-off, and did his best to derail her career. He had himself quoted as denying hotly that he had made a pass at her: “I hated her! I would not have slept with her if she’d paid me.” On the other hand, any absentminded professor was always in with a chance. Monroe grew up a genuine pseudointellectual looking for a tutor. It is a thousand pities she never met Wittgenstein.
What she did meet were Method actors and the people who manipulated them. That was disastrous. Though Monroe had terrible fears and anxieties, she was by nature a natural actress, up to a point. A sensitive and sensible director would have gotten her to perform adequately and that, combined with her camera genius, would have been enough. Unfortunately, the Method people persuaded her that, if she learned from them, she could become one of the greatest actresses who had ever lived. She believed this as an article of faith. Indeed, Method became her religion. This was complicated by her emotional life. Loving celebrities, as she loved intellectuals—as a Platonic ideal—she chose as her second husband the sports star Joe DiMaggio. The marriage was unsatisfactory, as any marriage with her was likely to be. But at least he did not do her positive harm. Her next marriage, to the left-wing intellectual playwright Arthur Miller, enormously complicated her professional problems, and pushed her further into the grip of the Method people. Living up to the genius of Miller, and living up to the impossibly high ideals of the Method—as she saw them—redoubled her terror at facing the cameras, and the agony of acting in front of them. She retrogressed. From being occasionally late in the morning, she became habitually late. From being thirty minutes late, she became an hour late; then two, three, four hours late. From forgetting the odd line, she forgot them all. Her dependence on medication and alcohol increased pari passu.
Whether Monroe would have been a more professional performer without her Method obsessions is a hypothetical question which cannot now be answered. The camera remained faithful to her to the end, and her appeal to the public continued to increase. But her rating within the industry fell. Producers began to dislike her because her antics increased costs. Directors found she added an extra dimension of difficulty to making a movie, and they resented her insistence that a Method coach be on the set and give her advice between takes. Other actors thought her selfish even by theatrical standards, and damaging to their interests.
One victim was Laurence Olivier, with whom Monroe filmed The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. He was then regarded as the world’s greatest living actor and was at the height of his fame as a director. Monroe might have learned a lot from him but her Method coach came first and Olivier was offended and paralyzed by this alien presence during filming. An intelligent, even cunning, theatrical operator, he made a fundamental mistake early on in the production, which wrecked his relationship with her. Just before a key take, he whispered: “Be sexy.” This was otiose advice since, on form, Monroe was incapable of being anything else, but it was a vulgar insult to an actress aspiring to be a combination of Eleonora Duse and Ellen Terry. She flounced off to her dressing room in tears, and thereafter it was all downhill. At the wrap-up, she apologized in front of all the cast for being “so beastly. I hope you will all forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very, very sick all through the picture—please—don’t hold it against me.” But they did of course. The movie was a flop and no one emerged with credit, except Monroe, who made some blissful epiphanies.
Even more disastrous for those involved was the 1960 movie The Misfits, which Monroe made with Clark Gable, king of the stars in Hollywood’s golden age, and still capable of radiating a sex appeal on film akin to her own. Her marriage to Miller, who wrote the script, was breaking up, and she was at her worst. An on-the-set book, The Making of the Misfits, gives a blow-by-blow account of the horrors, which made the movie the most expensive black-and-white picture ever made at that date. Clark Gable complained bitterly at her unprofessionalism, though he admitted he liked her. There is a charming still of them hugging each other at wrap-up time, which says everything about the photogeneity of both. But Gable said to a friend a few moments later: “I’m glad the picture’s finished. She damn nearly gave me a heart attack.” He spoke too soon. The next day he had one on a massive scale, and ten days later he was dead.
Before this tragedy, Monroe had made her masterpiece, Some Like It Hot, under Billy Wilder, the only director who ever agreed to work with Monroe twice. The screenplay is superb and Wilder got the best out of perhaps the most brilliant cast ever assembled in Hollywood. But it is Monroe and her beauty which casts a magic glow over the picture, and has made it perhaps the most loved of all movies. Like that other subtle masterpiece, Jane Austen’s Emma, it reveals new merits each time it is enjoyed, not least in Monroe’s projection of herself. It was a case of all’s well that ends well with this picture, and Wilder, to the end of his days, used to delight listeners with anecdotes of how he contrived to get Monroe to appear on the set and remember her lines. One, “Hello, it’s Sugar,” required forty-one takes. But one actor, Tony Curtis, remembered the filming with bitterness. He said that when he and Monroe played a scene together, Wilder was never content until he got a perfect take from Monroe, and went on and on, while her takes got better, and his own worse. The printed take was always her best and often his worst. He got his revenge by claiming they had had a brief affair during the filming: “And kissing her was like kissing Hitler.”
Monroe’s last period in the early 1960s ended with her being sacked from the movie Something’s Got to Give, and her overdose. It was complicated by her involvement with the tawdry “Camelot” circus of President John F. Kennedy and his vulpine brother Robert, then the attorney general. She seems to have had affairs with both men, though not, happily, with the third brother, Edward, so did not share the pathetic fate of Mary Jo Kopechne. Her relationship with the Kennedys is memorable if only for her appearance to sing “Happy Birthday” at a celebration rally for the president, then at the height of his ephemeral celebrity. This was the last epiphany of the star the camera worshiped. But it is impossible to write adequately of this tragic heroine, raised from nothing to sublimity and then dashed into dust. Perhaps heroine is the wrong word. But then what is the right one?