This book is dedicated to the real Marilyn. And to the reality in us all.
—Gloria Steinem
To a gentle, fragile Marilyn who will forever be in our hearts. Thanks for your friendship.
—George Barris
About This Book
The Woman Who Will Not Die
Norma Jeane
Work and Money, Sex and Politics
Among Women
Fathers and Lovers
The Body Prison
Who Would She Be Now?
Image Gallery
Technical Data
THIS BOOK BEGAN WHEN George Barris, an American free-lance photojournalist who had been living in Paris for more than twenty years, decided to publish the many photographs he had taken of Marilyn Monroe in June and July 1962 in California. They were probably the last ever taken of her alive.
Together with a text for which he had completed only one long interview, they were to become a book, an illustrated biography that would, in Marilyn’s words, “set the record straight”; but this collaboration that she began on June 1, her thirty-sixth birthday, was never finished. Some of the photographs and quotes were used in newspaper reports after her death, but the book had been a joint project. George lost heart for it. In order to put some distance between himself and the sad sensationalism that followed her death, he moved to Paris. Once there, he met and married a French actress, Sylvie Constantine, became the father of two daughters who grew up there, and simply didn’t come back. Over the years, some individual photos from those sessions were published, but most were not. Not until the approach of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death did he revisit the original idea of a book.
I owe my part in it to Dick Seaver, president of Henry Holt and Company, who was looking for a writer to help explain Marilyn as an individual and as an icon of continuing power. Certainly, our new understanding of who women are has increased our fascination with who Marilyn might have been. The goal of this project, therefore, could and should be closer to that of feminism in general: to include the viewpoints and influence of both women and men, and thus to have a better chance of seeing one woman’s life as a whole. When Dick Seaver introduced me to George Barris, a gentle man who had been touched by Marilyn’s willingness to open a part of her life to him, as well as by the loss of her magical presence, I think we both recognized in each other an empathy for our subject.
Because this was the first time I had ever written a text to accompany photographs, I had one extra writerly hope. I wanted to find a way to give words some of the nonlinear pleasure that images have always had. After all, each photograph is complete and enjoyable in itself. It can make sense on its own, whether we look at just that one, or go through a collection back to front, or start in the middle, or just browse; yet many photos taken of one subject can still create a holograph in our mind’s eye. That’s why I have tried to write each chapter as an essay complete in itself. You may read about one aspect of Marilyn’s life that you feel connected to or curious about, or choose several, or proceed in reverse, or read straight through as in a conventional book (for there is also some chronology to the order of chapters). But hopefully, you will find a microcosm of Marilyn’s life in any one essay, and major themes will be repeated from different viewpoints in several essays, so that a factual and emotional holograph of a real person will begin to emerge.
George Barris and I shared one more idea: that this book might continue something that Marilyn herself cared about. When we discussed it, we realized that this “something” was clearly children—especially children who, like Marilyn as a child, needed more help, love, and protection than their own families could give. Almost everyone who saw Marilyn anywhere near children has remarked on the direct, emotional connection she had with them. Both at the times she did and at the times she did not want children of her own, she remained loyal and protective toward the children of her friends, and got special satisfaction from giving to an orphanage like the one where she had felt abandoned. Probably, she would have contributed more if she had paid attention to money or received a substantial percentage of the estimated $100 million that her films had earned when she died in 1962. (As a contract player, Marilyn received no more than $1,500 a week even when she was a big star, while other actresses who were her costars—for instance, Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—might receive five or six times more. The largest single sum mentioned in Marilyn’s will was only a $100,000 trust fund, part of which went to support Marilyn’s institutionalized mother.)
For many of us whose lives coincided with Marilyn’s, in reality or as a public image, her influence stretches both forward and backward.
For George Barris, this book began even before the taking of the photographs, or his current decision to publish them. It goes back to the fall of 1954, when he was assigned to photograph Marilyn Monroe while she filmed The Seven Year Itch. He stood with New York crowds as she was directed by Billy Wilder to repeat over and over again the famous scene in which air from a subway grating blows her white skirt high over her head, with the camera’s eye inches away from her skin. (“I hope this isn’t for your private collection, to be shown in stag shows,” Barris remembered her saying to Wilder. Later, when the most provocative shots were not in the finished movie, George wondered if she might have been right.) Standing with Walter Winchell was Marilyn’s then husband, Joe DiMaggio. When he could take the scene no more, DiMaggio just left. At a thank-you party Marilyn gave several days later for the cast and friends of the movie, George sat with her as she tried to track down Joe by phone, and talked tearfully about how lonely she was. It was the beginning of a friendship that was peripheral for Marilyn, but affected the course of George’s life. Indeed, when he brought his family back to California to live, the first thing his two teenage daughters, Caroline and Stephanie, wanted to see was “where Marilyn was.” He took them on a pilgrimage to Westwood Memorial Park, where Marilyn’s body rests in a wall crypt; she did not wish to be buried.
For me, this book began when, in 1953, as a teenager who loved all movies, I still walked out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in embarrassment at seeing this whispering, simpering, big-breasted child-woman who was simply hoping her way into total vulnerability. How dare she be just as vulnerable and unconfident as I felt? Three years later, I went briefly to the Actors Studio, where confident New York actors seemed to take pleasure in ignoring this great, powerful, unconfident movie star who had dared to come to learn. She sat by herself, her body hidden in a shapeless black sweater and slacks, her skin luminescent as she put her hands up to her face, as if trying to hide herself, and she gradually became a presence in the room, if only because the rest of the group was trying so hard not to look at her. I remember feeling protective toward this famous woman who was older and more experienced than I; a protectiveness explained by the endlessly vulnerable child who looked out of Marilyn’s eyes.
Wherever possible I have used her own words in this book. In addition to her interview with George Barris, I have quoted her from many sources, including her own unfinished autobiography, My Story, published from a manuscript she gave to business partner and friend Milton Greene. The confusing facts and stories of her early life were best researched by Fred Lawrence Guiles in Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe. I owe a special thanks to Anthony Summers, whose 1985 book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, not only brought together existing research on her later life and the speculation surrounding her death, but also included many new interviews about those last months. Unless otherwise stated, the references in the latter half of “Fathers and Lovers” are largely taken from Summers’s research.
In fact, so much has been reported about Marilyn Monroe in more than forty books written over the years that details of her life become colored pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. If you read enough and turn them over enough, they fall into a pattern. (For instance, in one book, you learn that there was emerald jewelry in the toe of a slipper found in her closet by her last housekeeper. In another book, you learn that Frank Sinatra once gave her emerald earrings, and feel the joy of a detective.) The interviews I did myself served to confirm the patterns that emerged, or to add some character-revealing anecdote. I am grateful to my friend Nancy Wartik of Ms. magazine, for fact-checking the pieces of that kaleidoscope, and to Catherine Fallin at Henry Holt, for editing and orchestrating this book’s production.
There are also collectors of Monroe memorabilia who have put great time and effort into figuring out whether or not a woman in an old photograph was really Ana Lower, the woman Marilyn lived with as a teenager, or in what year a particular baby photograph must have been taken. I am especially indebted to the generosity of George Zeno, an expert who helped by giving us childhood and other photographs too early to be provided by George Barris, and so allowed us to see some of the people spoken about in Marilyn’s early life.
I also thank the many people who shared their feelings about Marilyn Monroe with me, and who helped explain why her legend lasts and keeps its power.
Now, almost twenty-five years after her death, I notice the same phenomenon that was true when I first wrote a brief essay about Marilyn Monroe fifteen years ago: many of us remember the precise moment on August 5, 1962, when we first heard of her death. We remember where we were, what the room looked like, who was there. It’s a sense memory usually reserved for the death of a president like Roosevelt or Kennedy, or a great leader like Martin Luther King, or a member of our own family. Even for those of us who are not old enough to have such a memory, her name is almost as familiar as that of the famous who are living now.
Her terrible openness made a connection with strangers. It seems never to end.
I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.
—from the unfinished autobiography of Marilyn Monroe
IT HAS BEEN NEARLY a quarter of a century since the death of a minor American actress named Marilyn Monroe. There is no reason for her to be part of my consciousness as I walk down a midtown New York street filled with color and action and life.
In a shop window display of white summer dresses, I see several huge photographs—a life-size cutout of Marilyn standing in a white halter dress, some close-ups of her vulnerable, please-love-me smile—but they don’t look dated. Oddly, Marilyn seems to be just as much a part of this street scene as the neighboring images of models who could now be her daughters—even her granddaughters.
I walk another block and pass a record store featuring the hit albums of a rock star named Madonna. She has imitated Marilyn Monroe’s hair, style, and clothes, but subtracted her vulnerability. Instead of using seduction to offer men whatever they want, Madonna uses it to get what she wants—a 1980s difference that has made her the idol of teenage girls. Nevertheless, her international symbols of femaleness are pure Marilyn.
A few doors away, a bookstore displays two volumes on Marilyn Monroe in its well-stocked window. The first is nothing but random photographs, one of many such collections that have been published over the years. The second is one of several recent exposes on the circumstances surrounding Monroe’s 1962 death from an accidental or purposeful overdose of sleeping pills. Could organized crime, Jimmy Hoffa in particular, have planned to use her friendship with the Kennedys and her suicide—could Hoffa or his friends even have caused that suicide—in order to embarrass or blackmail Robert Kennedy, who was definitely a Mafia enemy and probably her lover? Only a few months ago, Marilyn Monroe’s name made international headlines again when a British television documentary on this conspiracy theory was shown and a network documentary made in the United States was suppressed, with potential pressure from crime-controlled unions or from the late Robert Kennedy’s family as rumored reasons.
As I turn the corner into my neighborhood, I pass a newsstand where the face of one more young Marilyn Monroe look-alike stares up at me from a glossy magazine cover. She is Kate Mailer, Norman Mailer’s daughter, who was born the year that Marilyn Monroe died. Now she is starring in Strawhead, a “memory play” about Monroe written by Norman Mailer, who is so obsessed with this long-dead sex goddess that he had written one long biography and another work—half fact, half fiction—about her, even before casting his daughter in this part.
The next morning, I turn on the television and see a promotion for a show on film director Billy Wilder. The only clip chosen to attract viewers and represent Wilder’s entire career is one of Marilyn Monroe singing a few breathless bars in Some Like It Hot, one of two films they made together.
These are everyday signs of a unique longevity. If you add her years of movie stardom to the years since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been part of our lives and imaginations for nearly four decades. That’s a very long time for one celebrity to survive in a throwaway culture.
In the 1930s, when English critic Cyril Connolly proposed a definition of posterity to measure whether a writer’s work had stood the test of time, he suggested that posterity should be limited to ten years. The form and content of popular culture were changing too fast, he explained, to make any artist accountable for more than a decade.
Since then, the pace of change has been accelerated even more. Everything from the communications revolution to multinational entertainment has altered the form of culture. Its content has been transformed by civil rights, feminism, an end to film censorship, and much more. Nonetheless, Monroe’s personal and intimate ability to inhabit our fantasies has gone right on. As I write this, she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough to ask why that is so.
One simple reason for her life story’s endurance is the premature end of it. Personalities and narratives projected onto the screen of our imaginations are far more haunting—and far more likely to be the stuff of conspiracies and conjecture—if they have not been allowed to play themselves out to their logical or illogical ends. James Dean’s brief life is the subject of a cult, but the completed lives of such similar “outsiders” as Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda are not. Each day in the brief Camelot of John Kennedy inspires as much speculation as each year in the long New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. The few years of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s music inspire graffiti (“Bird Lives”), but the many musical years of Duke Ellington do not.
When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.
Would Marilyn Monroe have become the serious actress she aspired to be? Could she have survived the transition from sex goddess to mortal woman that aging would impose? Could she have stopped her disastrous marriages to men whose images she wanted to absorb (Beloved American DiMaggio, Serious Intellectual Miller), and found a partner who loved and understood her as she really was? Could she have kicked her life-wasting habits of addiction and procrastination? Would she have had or adopted children? Found support in the growing strength of women or been threatened by it? Entered the world of learning or continued to be ridiculed for trying? Survived and even enjoyed the age of sixty she now would be?
Most important, could she finally have escaped her lifetime combination of two parts talent, one part victim, and one part joke? Would she have been “taken seriously,” as she so badly wanted to be?
We will never know. Every question is as haunting as any of its possible answers.
But the poignancy of this incompleteness is not enough to explain Marilyn Monroe’s enduring power. Even among brief public lives, few become parables. Those that endure seem to hook into our deepest emotions of hope or fear, dream or nightmare of what our own fates might be. Successful leaders also fall into one group or the other: those who invoke a threatening future and promise disaster unless we obey, and those who conjure up a hopeful future and promise reward if we will follow. It’s this power of either fear or hope that makes a personal legend survive, from the fearsome extreme of Adolf Hider (Did he really escape? Might he have lived on in the jungles of South America?) to the hopeful myth of Zapata waiting in the hills of Mexico to rescue his people. The same is true for the enduring fictions of popular culture, from the frightening villain to the hopeful hero, each of whom is reincarnated again and again.
In an intimate way during her brief life, Marilyn Monroe hooked into both those extremes of emotions. She personified many of the secret hopes of men and many secret fears of women.
To men, wrote Norman Mailer, her image was “gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender… she would ask no price.” She was the child-woman who offered pleasure without adult challenge; a lover who neither judged nor asked anything in return. Both the roles she played and her own public image embodied a masculine hope for a woman who is innocent and sensuously experienced at the same time. “In fact,” as Marilyn said toward the end of her career, “my popularity seemed almost entirely a masculine phenomenon.”
Since most men have experienced female power only in their childhoods, they associate it with a time when they themselves were powerless. This will continue as long as children are raised almost totally by women, and rarely see women in authority outside the home. That’s why male adults, and some females too, experience the presence of a strong woman as a dangerous regression to a time of their own vulnerability and dependence. For men, especially, who are trained to measure manhood and maturity by their distance from the world of women, being forced back to that world for female companionship may be very threatening indeed. A compliant child-woman like Monroe solves this dilemma by offering sex without the power of an adult woman, much less of an equal. As a child herself, she allows men to feel both conquering and protective; to be both dominating and admirable at the same time.
For women, Monroe embodied kinds of fear that were just as basic as the hope she offered men: the fear of a sexual competitor who could take away men on whom women’s identities and even livelihoods might depend; the fear of having to meet her impossible standard of always giving—and asking nothing in return; the nagging fear that we might share her feminine fate of being vulnerable, unserious, constantly in danger of becoming a victim.
Aside from her beautiful face, which women envied, she was nothing like the female stars that women moviegoers have made popular. Those stars offered at least the illusion of being in control of their fates—and perhaps having an effect on the world. Stars of the classic “women’s movies” were actresses like Bette Davis, who made her impact by sheer force of emotion; or Katharine Hepburn, who was always intelligent and never victimized for long; or even Doris Day, who charmed the world into conforming to her own virginal standards. Their figures were admirable and neat, but without the vulnerability of the big-breasted woman in a society that regresses men and keeps them obsessed with the maternal symbols of breasts and hips.
Watching Monroe was quite different: women were forced to worry about her vulnerability—and thus their own. They might feel like a black moviegoer watching a black actor play a role that was too passive, too obedient, or a Jew watching a Jewish character who was selfish and avaricious. In spite of some extra magic, some face-saving sincerity and humor, Marilyn Monroe was still close to the humiliating stereotype of a dumb blonde: depersonalized, sexual, even a joke. Though few women yet had the self-respect to object on behalf of their sex, as one would object on behalf of a race or religion, they still might be left feeling a little humiliated—or threatened—without knowing why.
“I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen,” Marilyn wrote in her unfinished autobiography. “Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.”
But all that was before her death and the revelations surrounding it. The moment she was gone, Monroe’s vulnerability was no longer just a turn-on for many men and an embarrassment for many women. It was a tragedy. Whether that final overdose was suicide or not, both men and women were forced to recognize the insecurity and private terrors that had caused her to attempt suicide several times before.
Men who had never known her wondered if their love and protection might have saved her. Women who had never known her wondered if their empathy and friendship might have done the same. For both women and men, the ghost of Marilyn came to embody a particularly powerful form of hope: the rescue fantasy. Not only did we imagine a happier ending for the parable of Marilyn Monroe’s life, but we also fantasized ourselves as the saviors who could have brought it about.
Still, women didn’t seem quite as comfortable about going public with their rescue fantasies as men did. It meant admitting an identity with a woman who always had been a little embarrassing, and who had now turned out to be doomed as well. Nearly all of the journalistic eulogies that followed Monroe’s death were written by men. So are almost all of the more than forty books that have been published about Monroe.
Bias in the minds of editors played a role, too. Consciously or not, they seemed to assume that only male journalists should write about a sex goddess. Margaret Parton, a reporter for the Ladies’ Home Journal and one of the few women assigned to profile Marilyn during her lifetime, wrote an article that was rejected because it was too favorable. She had reported Marilyn’s ambitious hope of playing Sadie Thompson, under the guidance of Lee Strasberg, in a television version of “Rain,” based on a short story by Somerset Maugham. (Sadie Thompson was “a girl who knew how to be gay, even when she was sad,” a fragile Marilyn had explained, “and that’s important—you know?”) Parton also reported her own “sense of having met a sick little canary instead of a peacock. Only when you pick it up in your hand to comfort it… beneath the sickness, the weakness and the innocence, you find a strong bone structure, and a heart beating. You recognize sickness, and you find strength.”
Bruce and Beatrice Gould, editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, told Parton she must have been “mesmerized” to write something so uncritical. “If you were a man,” Mr. Gould told her, “I’d wonder what went on that afternoon in Marilyn’s apartment.” Fred Guiles, one of Marilyn Monroe’s more fair-minded biographers, counted the suppression of this sensitive article as one proof that many editors were interested in portraying Monroe, at least in those later years, as “crazy, a home wrecker.”
Just after Monroe’s death, one of the few women to write with empathy was Diana Trilling, an author confident enough not to worry about being trivialized by association—and respected enough to get published. Trilling regretted the public’s “mockery of [Marilyn’s] wish to be educated,” and her dependence on sexual artifice that must have left “a great emptiness where a true sexuality would have supplied her with a sense of herself as a person.” She mourned Marilyn’s lack of friends, “especially women, to whose protectiveness her extreme vulnerability spoke so directly.”
“But we were the friends,” as Trilling said sadly, “of whom she knew nothing.”
In fact, the contagion of feminism that followed Monroe’s death by less than a decade may be the newest and most powerful reason for the continuing strength of her legend. As women began to be honest in public, and to discover that many of our experiences were more societal than individual, we also realized that we could benefit more by acting together than by deserting each other. We were less likely to blame or be the victim, whether Marilyn or ourselves, and more likely to rescue ourselves and each other.
In 1972, the tenth anniversary of her death and the birth year of Ms., the first magazine to be published by and for women, Harriet Lyons, one of its early editors, suggested that Ms. do a cover story about Marilyn called “The Woman Who Died Too Soon.” As the writer of this brief essay about women’s new hope of reclaiming Marilyn, I was astounded by the response to the article. It was like tapping an underground river of interest. For instance:
Marilyn had talked about being sexually assaulted as a child, though many of her biographers had not believed her. Women wrote in to tell their similar stories. It was my first intimation of what since has become a documented statistic: One in six adult women has been sexually assaulted in childhood by a family member. The long-lasting effects—for instance, feeling one has no value except a sexual one—seemed shared by these women and by Marilyn. Yet most were made to feel guilty and alone, and many were as disbelieved by the grown-ups around them as Marilyn had been.
Physicians had been more likely to prescribe sleeping pills and tranquilizers than to look for the cause of Monroe’s sleeplessness and anxiety. They had continued to do so even after she had attempted suicide several times. Women responded with their own stories of being overmedicated, and of doctors who assumed women’s physical symptoms were “all in their minds.” It was my first understanding that women are more likely to be given chemical and other arm’s-length treatment, and to suffer from the assumption that they can be chemically calmed or sedated with less penalty because they are doing only “women’s work.” Then, ads in medical journals blatantly recommended tranquilizers for depressed housewives, and even now, the majority of all tranquilizer prescriptions are written for women.