BIOGRAPHY:
Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn MonroeEdited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment HarperCollins, 256pp. £20
MM - Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe,By Lois Banner and Mark Anderson, Abrams, 336pp. £22.50
ONE DAY, Norma Jeane Mortenson was walking along Fifth Avenue in New York with her good friend, the writer Norman Rosten, or perhaps it was her acting guru, Lee Strasberg, discussing the phenomenon that was Marilyn Monroe. Rosten, or Strasberg, remarked how, in the surroundings of that extraordinary city, passers-by were paying no attention to the perfectly ordinary-seeming young woman by his side. Norma Jeane squeezed her companion’s arm and asked, in her mischievous, breathlessly excited way: “Do you want me to be her?” Stepping ahead, she put on her Marilyn smile and that famous walk – “like jello on springs”, as the Jack Lemmon character says of it in
Some Like it Hot
– and, within seconds, half a dozen fans were crowding round her clamouring for an autograph.
Apocryphal or not – and what, in the case of Marilyn, is the truth? – the vignette captures nicely the phenomenon of celebrity in the age of mass communication. Our need for there to be gods is as old as civilisation, but not until Hollywood were we offered the possibility of a communion with our manufactured deities seemingly so direct and intimate while remaining tantalisingly remote. It was Marilyn Monroe’s genius, and she was a kind of genius, that she could fashion out of herself with such skill and artistry a fictional creature at once earthly and divine, a goddess who would be amongst us and at the same time always beyond us, a daemon out of our dreams who yet might be encountered in the flesh some afternoon sashaying past the display windows of Saks. Thus Norma Jeane was at once Svengali and Trilby, Pygmalion and the living statue Galatea, and, at the tragic end, Frankenstein and his monster.
Even in its most puritanical phases, society must have its exceptions, the ones who present a standing affront, though perhaps not any real challenge, to the assumed norms of conventional morality, decorum and good taste but who yet are tolerated, or venerated even, some of them. American society in the 1950s was still struggling to readjust after the upheavals of the war years. While their men were away on the battlefield women had been allowed, and had eagerly seized, freedoms and possibilities of further freedoms hitherto undreamed of. Now it was time to get the men into their suits and overalls and back to work, and the women into gingham and returned firmly to the kitchen.
Hollywood was a leading force in this process of renormalisation. Doris Day was the ideal: freckled and virginal, pert and petite, a cautious heart waiting to be won by Rock Hudson or some other hunk of heterosexual American manhood. In fact, Doris, though shapely, was distinctly on the hefty side, if one looked closely, and was said to be, in her life off-screen, something of a goer, while Rock was a wildly promiscuous homosexual. None of this was allowed to interfere with the image. Doris was wholesomeness personified; Rock was the rock of normality.
Against those images Marilyn Monroe, in her apparently brash yet subtle fashion, offered an alternative that was as alluring as it was disquieting. In MM – PersonalLois Banner, who proclaims herself an author of "feminist biographies" and, mysteriously, of "a history of physical appearance", succinctly characterises the magic that was wrought:
The many Marilyns came together in her "dumb blonde" character, which was Norma Jeane's greatest creation. She perfected it as Lorelei Lee [a highly significant name if you know your German mythology and your Edgar Allan Poe] in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she continued to play variations on it throughout her career. Her "dumb blonde" was soft, sexy, and innocent, with brilliant comic timing, a zany logic, and a childlike ability to speak elemental truths that no one else perceived.
The material that Norma Jeane was given to work with at the start seemed unpromising. She was born, “out of wedlock”, as it used quaintly to be said, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital in 1926. Her mother was deeply unstable, and was to spend much of her life in a lunatic asylum, although she outlived her daughter by some four years. “I was a mistake,” Marilyn wrote. “My mother didn’t want to have me. I guess she never wanted me. I probably got in her way . . . I wish, I still wish, she had wanted me.”
She was 16 when she married Jim Dougherty, a sailor five years older than she. Dougherty seems to have been a decent fellow, but the marriage did not last. The year after she was married, Norma Jeane wrote a long, typewritten note to herself in which she confronted the circumstances of her life with impressive clarity and insight. The document, printed in facsimile in Fragments, is remarkable when one considers that it was written by a 17-year-old, ill-educated girl from a troubled background. Norma Jeane Mortenson was certainly no dumb blonde.
Fragments, as the title indicates, is a collection of notes, memoranda and scraps of poetry, mostly handwritten, made available to the editors by Lee Strasberg's widow, Anna, who is the guardian of Monroe's estate. The poems are more touching than accomplished, although at moments they reveal a tormented self-knowledge the force of which, propelling upwards from the depths, does lend a raw artistic effect. On a visit to England with her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, she chanced on Miller's diary open on a desk and read in it of his disappointment in her and of how she embarrassed him in front of his intellectual friends. Afterwards she wrote:
I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.
As Norman Rosten said: "She had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control."
MM -
Personalexerts a melancholy fascination. The book derives from the contents of two filing cabinets in which Marilyn kept "some 5,000 documents and photographs, including letters, telegrams, business cards, bills, receipts, financial records, and 400 checks, each signed by the most renowned female icon of the 20th century."
Pages of photographs of these items, taken by Mark Anderson, are interspersed with a biography of the star by Lois Banner.
The biography is concise, perceptive and sympathetic, but the photographs probably offer more information than even the hungriest of Marilyn's fans would care to have - although there is probably a grisly fascination to be derived from knowing, from a bank statement reproduced here, that Marilyn was $4,208.34 in the red at City National Bank on August 3rd, 1962, the day before she took her own life.
Marilyn was a beautiful, talented, shrewd and ultimately lost creature, a brief star across our firmament. Arthur Miller said of her: "To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes."
Or as she put it herself in the last lines of that endearingly misspelled feat of self-analysis she wrote when she was 17: "Its not to much fun to know yourself to well or think you do - everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls."
John Banville's latest novel,
A Death in Summer, writing under the pen-name Benjamin Black, was published recently by Mantle