Marilyn’s orphanage days were long over, but this kind of opulence was new to her. Alone she ate simply, starkly—breakfasts of black coffee and broiled grapefruit, dinners of Roto-Broiled liver with a raw carrot on the side. Thanks to her surrogate families, Marilyn relished home-cooked meals for the first time—new potatoes and peas with the Greenes, pot roasts and pies with the Strasbergs. She shucked clams with the Rostens, grilled hot dogs with Lee. At night she’d pad around the Strasbergs’ kitchen in one of Arthur’s shirts, poking around the refrigerator for leftover chicken or vanilla ice cream.
The only person who didn’t appreciate Paula’s cooking was Johnny. “I’m trying to lose weight,” he’d screech, pushing away a stack of Danish. “It’s just baby fat” was Paula’s humiliating consolation. “I don’t think you’re fat, Johnny,” Marilyn offered. Johnny flushed red and fled.
One evening, Marilyn decided to cook everyone dinner—chicken au champagne. Beach-salty and glowing, she tied an apron over her swimsuit and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving the Strasbergs to read the paper and sip tea on the porch. They heard a bottle pop, some fizzy murmuring, and a bit of rustling cutlery. Then came the scream. Everyone raced to the kitchen. Marilyn wasn’t known for her cooking—what if she’d cut herself? Instead, they found her screaming at the chicken. It was a whole chicken—it still had eyes, black beady eyes peering up in reproach. Marilyn trembled, crying that the chicken looked like a bird, and she couldn’t cook it while it still looked like a bird because the poor bird was once alive and now it’s dead and think of the bird’s parents.
Lee praised her sensitivity and took over, leaving Marilyn to collapse on the porch with the leftover bottle. Meanwhile, Lee “chopped the hell out of that chicken till it looked like nothing that had a mother.”
* * *
On rainy days, Susie would spread the porch with newspapers and drag out her brushes and paints. Within minutes she felt two wistful eyes boring into her back. Marilyn wanted to paint, too. This was the classic Strasberg dynamic—preteen Susie acting as the older sibling, forced to share toys with baby Marilyn. Susie dutifully set her up with a brush and offered the use of her rainbow palette. (Marilyn: “I like black and white.”)
Holding her brush as if it were a pen, Marilyn quickly sketched two figures. The first was a child with one sock falling down. One eye black, one clear. Solar and pale. A bleached-out negative of herself. Ragged frock bored into her memory like a sunspot. Sad little halogen bonnet. She titled it Lonely. The other was a feline woman in bold, sexy strokes. “That one should say, ‘Life is wonderful, so what the hell,’” Marilyn said with a laugh. She wondered aloud if they were self-portraits, a Rorschach test in reverse.
By now the parents were hovering over Marilyn. Paula was hugging her; Lee was beaming and nodding and saying “Yes, darling” like he always did. “We must buy Marilyn her own set of paints!” When Susie asked if she’d like to keep her work, Marilyn demurred. “Oh, no, Susie, they’re yours; you’re the artist. Thanks for helping me,” she added sweetly. Jealousy spiked with a pang of guilt.
“Whatever I’d experienced so far in my life,” Susie wrote years later, “she’d experienced more intensely. There was a song in Annie Get Your Gun that went, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.…’ She liked painting, we both wrote poetry, we read a lot of the same books, both skipping the parts that bored us, we bought our clothes at the same store.”
Their jealousy cut both ways. Marilyn adored Susie but envied her perfect childhood. Pink birthday frocks from Tallulah Bankhead. Midnight dance lessons from Charlie Chaplin. Swan Lake on the record player, the beautiful Oona O’Neill passed out on the couch, smiling in her sleep. A Jewish mother, a genius father, and an adorable baby brother you could play jacks with and teach to spell. What did Susie know about loneliness?
Plenty. Marilyn never knew her father, but Susie’s rejected her constantly, even as a baby. Lee pushed Susie away when she tried to crawl into his lap, his neck stiffening when she tugged on his sleeve to play. In fact, Lee rejected Susie before she was even born—he’d avoided the hospital while Paula was in labor. What if Susie was an ugly baby, he reasoned later. He knew that babies were born red and bald and wrinkled, and what if Susie looked like that and he didn’t love her? That’s the kind of man Lee was.
Sometimes the rivalry pulled them closer. It was part of the sister relationship Marilyn never had, the languid, easy banter and conspiratorial vibe. But Susie didn’t understand how girls bonded—she’d never had a sister either, or even any close girlfriends. Marilyn overwhelmed Susie with her questions: Where did she get her makeup? What kind was it? Where did she buy her clothes, where did she go for facials, what music did she listen to? In her insecurity and paranoia, Susie mistook friendliness for competitiveness. She wanted to seal shut like an oyster—she didn’t want to tell Marilyn that she used Revlon mascara and Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder. Or she’d swing in the other direction, racked by guilt, awkwardly rattling off torrents of trivia Marilyn didn’t even want. “Gee, thanks, Susie,” chirped Marilyn with her wide-eyed stare. Could this blonde child-woman read her mind? Susie felt even worse.
Paula would try to soothe Susie, stroking her hair, telling her imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. But why would Marilyn Monroe—the most famous woman in the world—try to imitate a scrawny sixteen-year-old who had barely even been kissed?
* * *
One evening before dinner, Paula did astrological charts for Susie, Marilyn, and Anne Frank. Paula threw up her hands in delight—Marilyn, Susie, and Anne were all Geminis with Leo rising and Pluto in the twelfth house. She knew it. There were no accidents. It was bashert—God’s will. Lee grimaced, stomped outside, and fired up the grill.
On cloudy days, Marilyn lounged in the bedroom with Paula—hushed voices, veiled references to a mysterious “Arturo.” Lee was still oblivious, but Paula reveled in the scandal. Why shouldn’t Marilyn attach herself to a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright? Though Paula fervently believed in Marilyn’s talent, deep down she thought that the “most glorious achievement of a woman was to be a partner to an extraordinary man.” In this way Paula was Marilyn’s polar opposite. Marilyn knew what her greatest achievement would be—she was working on it now, every second, every day, engaged in the battle of her life.
At night, they’d all drink champagne, turn on the radio, and dance—or rather, they’d watch Marilyn dance. Like many girls who’ve been trained in ballet, Susie could only dance formally—she was in awe of how Marilyn danced spontaneously, like a child. “She followed her feet and didn’t look at them the way I did,” Susie said. Besides, when Marilyn danced you couldn’t look at anything else: her sinuous movements, her jingle-bell laugh, her frantic energy warming up the room.
What was Paula thinking when Lee sat there, glowing with pleasure behind his newspaper? There’s no indication that Paula was jealous—she adored Marilyn. She’d been a modern dancer herself, but her “I gain if I look at lettuce” figure embarrassed her, and there was no way she was dancing, especially next to Marilyn Monroe. “Johnny,” Paula would order, “you dance with Marilyn.” Mortified, Johnny would dash out the backdoor. And Marilyn would dance alone on those bubbly summer nights.
* * *
Despite all that family closeness and balmy calm, some black anxiety unleashed itself that summer. Marilyn was sometimes near tears in the evenings—fretting over her Fox contract or something Arthur had said. Paula would do her best, padding around the porch with the teapot and chilled bottles of Dom Pérignon. “The Geminis are restless tonight,” she’d say, urging Marilyn to alternate champagne with sips of milky tea.
During their moonlit chats, Susie would encourage Marilyn, talk about how much Lee loved her, how he thought she was a better actress than Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson. But Marilyn would change the subject, sighing with her cast-down wounded-fawn eyes. “It’s hard when you grow up an orphan,” she’d say. “It gets so you don’t expect anything good.…” Whenever Susie brought up the future, Marilyn would return to her past.
After months of heavy psychoanalysis, Marilyn had started to obsess over her childhood: the foster homes, the orphanage, the mother strapped down and stuck in an insane asylum. Tangled in memory’s toxic net, she’d obsess over flashbacks late at night. She’d lie in her twin bed, listening to the surf, the moonlight spilling on the dark floorboards of stained wood. Then she’d start talking about her foster homes and how rough they’d been. She’d go on for a while then catch herself. “Maybe it wasn’t all that bad,” she’d say, trailing off. Of course, it really had been that bad.
Susie was only half-listening. With her Broadway debut only months away, she was desperately trying to focus, to submerge herself in Anne Frank’s story and spirit. But how could she concentrate with this dazzling, vulnerable woman lying three feet away?
* * *
Marilyn was one of them by now, and the Strasbergs grew used to her disheveled night terrors—wrapped in a ratty bathrobe, face glazed in coats of Vaseline and lanolin.
One night close to four, Susie woke to a whimpering. She crept down the hallway and saw her father holding Marilyn, rocking her gently and singing a Brahms lullaby—the same song he sang to her as a baby. Hit by a wave of jealousy, a lump rose in Susie’s throat: “I can’t sleep; he’s not holding me and singing to me.”
Yet, here he is with Marilyn—a grown, gorgeous woman with the world at her feet—rocking her to sleep as if she were his own flesh. Before long, Susie’s envy softened into compassion. Even at sixteen, she could see that Marilyn’s “need was so great.”
The catbirds meowed in the early pink chill. It was six in the morning before Marilyn fell asleep.
* * *
Despite her support system and her love of New York, Marilyn was starting to take more pills than ever. Her suite at the Waldorf cost Milton $1,000 a week, and their negotiations with Fox were going nowhere. She wasn’t even an official member of the Actors Studio. On a personal level, she had alienated Joe—her knight and protector—for good. She had embarrassed him and (somewhat brattily) rejected him, and he wasn’t coming back. Her connection with Arthur was tentative at best—he was still married, with no plans at this point to get a divorce.
Seeds of insecurity had taken root, and she began to question all her relationships—even with the Greenes. Amy intimidated Marilyn—so cool and slim in her sleek sheaths from Anne Klein. She barely even drank. But everyone else took downers: Doctors up and down Manhattan were doling out Miltowns like lollipops at a bank. Milton took as many pills as Marilyn did. He had them stockpiled, thanks to his physician brother—yet somehow he functioned when she could not. And why weren’t things coming together? Perhaps the press was right. Maybe she had been arrogant, foolish to leave Hollywood. Marilyn was beginning to realize that she was extremely vulnerable.
In March, everything had been pink elephants, pillow fights, and cocktails at the Copa. The initial buzz of her Great Escape, her defiance of Hollywood and her fresh start in New York hadn’t yet worn off. Marilyn had leaped into the abyss, intoxicated by the giddy, glamorous unknown, only to realize she was in free fall.
Still, what was the alternative? Numbing out in LA by the pool at Chateau Marmont? Now she was living authentically—with a shot at freedom, success, respect, creative fulfillment, even the promise of love. All these riches come at a price. If Hollywood was death by pancake makeup, New York was a daily date with the magnifying mirror. Marilyn wouldn’t have it any other way.
Twelve
In the Bulrushes
“I’m trying to become an artist, and to be true, and sometimes feel I’m on the verge of craziness. I’m just trying to get the truest part of myself out, and it’s very hard.”
MARILYN MONROE
Firmly ensconced with the Strasbergs, Marilyn was seeing less and less of the Greenes. “Now she comes out from New York only occasionally. I do believe Josh misses Marilyn,” Amy admitted in an interview for Photoplay. “I miss it, too.”
When Milton and Amy returned from Italy, Marilyn caught up with them in Richard Rodgers’s Connecticut pool. Almost tomboyish, her hair cropped shorter than ever before, she posed for Milton—toasting the camera with her clear plastic cup, playing with a red-and-white inner tube, hugging an inflatable yellow pony, cradling a black puppy, kissing its nose, caressing its tiny white paws.
Sun cream. Pool toys. Chlorine on warm skin. Plastic tumblers of whiskey and ginger ale, the steady thrum of midsummer wasps. Dark foliage in the background, trees hemlock black against the blaze-pink lowering sun. Milton and Marilyn splashed with childlike glee. That sad, fluttery choke in the throat when you should be fizzy with light. Their friendship was about to change, and they both knew it.
Thanks to Arthur Miller, Marilyn’s relationship with Milton was already under strain. He dismissed the Greenes as fashionable socialites; they found him pedantic and humorless. When Milton made efforts to connect over drinks, Arthur would respond in contemptuous monosyllables or, even worse, lecture him on social theory. Milton was exasperated with Miller’s ego and “dreary long-hairiness.”
“I believe in gloomy things, not pink tights,” Arthur wrote to Marilyn, as if that were a good thing. Marilyn believed in pink tights. She believed in the Copa and pink elephants and the circus and Dean Martin at the Friars Club and dancing at the Elmo with Truman Capote. But she couldn’t have that giddy fun with Arthur. Their relationship was heavier, missing the natural joy she shared with Milton—giggling like teenagers, speeding down the highway with a backseat piled with boas and bras. Would Arthur get drunk and put a barrette on Sammy Davis Jr.’s dog? No, he wouldn’t.
When they would bike together through Brooklyn Heights, it wasn’t with a child’s gleeful abandon. There was always something weighty, a gravity to it. After all, Arthur had called her “the saddest girl in the world” and meant it as a compliment. “I thought she was a very serious girl—that’s because I loved her,” he said. Being a “serious girl” was key to keeping Arthur’s love. No wonder she rarely laughed around him.
“We used to play out in the country,” said Milton, recalling happier times. “Her laugh—it was happy; it was like a little girl’s. But when she got involved with Miller—that was a whole other story. Then you had to act differently. You had to be different, you know?”
Amy noticed with alarm how close they were getting. She couldn’t imagine Marilyn marrying a snob who proudly announced that he “believed in gloomy things” and didn’t own a suit. She watched with increasing alarm as Marilyn began to defer to Arthur as some sage or teacher. “Every time that they would meet, Arthur would come in with one or two books that he wanted Marilyn to read. She would say ‘What did you bring me, Arthur?’ There was a lot of Dostoyevsky going around—Crime and Punishment. There was a lot of Karl Marx, and a lot of Arthur’s own work. There was a lot of Saroyan, too. Then all of the sudden we started having these big deep discussions about communism. And being a naturalized citizen. To me this whole country is bigger than John Wayne—I love it. And Arthur immediately started attacking it, which put me on the defensive. I was also younger, and let’s say after reading one book on Marx I realized that what they wanted was total fantasy, it was completely nonsensical, so why are we devoting so much time to it? That was my first resentment of him. And also I found that he was force-feeding her, and she could not back away from it and say, ‘Just a minute, what is it that you are telling me?’ Arthur would keep looking at Marilyn, like ‘What is this dummy doing?’ I was beginning to see that God had clay feet.”
Amy bristled when she heard Marilyn parroting Arthur’s ideas as if they were her own: “Two days later she would mouth something Arthur said two nights before. I’d say, ‘What was that? Why are you saying that?’ She’d say, ‘Arthur said it.’ I finally had to tell her I don’t give a shit what Arthur says. Then I all of the sudden was becoming very patriotic, and I was giving her the Bill of Rights.” Even the perpetually good-natured Milton was ruffled by Arthur’s disruptive presence. “It wasn’t easy,” he said with a sigh, “because Marilyn was sort of matching him—matching Arthur Miller.”
Milton knew firsthand what it was like to live with Marilyn’s chaos. Back in Connecticut she’d reined herself in, but her suite at the Waldorf was an explosion. “It was always a mess,” he groaned. “Even if you cleaned up after her, five minutes later it was a mess.” A soggy copy of Swann’s Way under the tub, slick with bath oil, uncapped bottles of Lustre-Creme shampoo spilling out on the tiles like yellow cake batter. She was a glittering tornado, clothes cascading from the closet, suitcases never fully unpacked, bed unmade, and sheets balled on the floor. “It’s the way she takes her clothes off,” Milton rationalized. “Instead of hanging them up and letting them air out or putting them in the hamper, she’d throw them on the floor. The makeup table was the same way—powder everywhere.”
Milton wasn’t fazed by this in the least, and even the tidy Amy could take it in stride. But could Arthur handle a life with Marilyn—the phone ringing and lawyers calling and burning dinner then throwing it out and ordering in (“Oh, what the heck”) then dinner at Gino’s and drinks with Sinatra at the Subway Inn then frantic phone calls at 4 a.m. because she’d lost a script or plane ticket or was nervous about her shoot tomorrow.
Arthur was protective, which Marilyn always loved in a man. But he always had that solemn sense of destiny—he was there to rescue her. From what, the horror of Hollywood? She’d already freed herself from that. She was studying, improving; she was happy. What dark shape did he see in her future?
