Marilyn always clicked easily with in-laws, grandparents, stepchildren, and pets—it was daily intimacy that she couldn’t quite handle. But here was Arthur, pushing things ahead at an alarming speed. Dressed in a black blouse and gray skirt, Marilyn was sitting in the kitchen over a bowl of borscht when she overheard Arthur announce to his father, “This is the girl I’m going to marry.”
Fourteen
Baby Doll
On the screen of pitch blackness comes/ reappears the shapes of monsters my most steadfast companions … and the world is sleeping ah peace I need you—even a peaceful monster.
MARILYN MONROE
Autumn, Greenwich Village, 1955. A Checker cab containing one driver, two actors, one bottle of Dom Pérignon, a pack of Dixie cups and a mystery woman inched down Macdougal Street. The woman in the rumpled slacks, fern-green raincoat, and Saks loafers (no socks) was Marilyn Monroe, but the driver didn’t recognize her under the black scarf and matte-black sunglasses. To her right was the journalist John Gilmore, to her left Ray Myers—one of the Studio’s youngest students and Marilyn’s babysitter for today, per Lee’s instructions. He often “hired” his youngest actors to trail Marilyn, keep her happy, (relatively) healthy, and out of trouble.
Marilyn whispered something to Ray, who leaned forward and tapped on the glass: “The lady wants to walk barefoot on the grass in Washington Square.”
It started to rain—lightly, almost a mist. The driver flipped on the windshield wipers.
“Which side of the park?”
Marilyn slipped off her loafers and passed them to Ray. John carried the champagne. Flanked by both men she walked, head bowed, hands in pockets, her bare feet in the wet grass. She chose a bench, and John popped the bottle. Ray fumbled with the Dixie cups in his coat pocket. Marilyn wished they were listening to Vivaldi.
She said that Arthur once sneered at her—what could she possibly know about Vivaldi? “I know about Vivaldi, for God’s sake,” she muttered today, fists balled up in her pockets. Tears spilled out from her sunglasses. John fought to light a Chesterfield in the rain, and Ray wrapped his arm around Marilyn’s shoulder, advising her to take deep breaths. (Method training?) “I know how to breathe,” she said with a sigh, shrugging off Ray’s hand and reaching for a cup.
The rain beat down harder, soaking their skin and their cigarettes, but they went on refilling their Dixie cups, chasing Seconals with champagne, breaking open the capsules, little beads swallowed straight to the brain.
Ray wanted to get out of the rain. Why don’t they run across the street to Rienzi’s? But Marilyn refused—someone might steal the bench—and besides, what if Rienzi’s was full?
She brought up Joe and the Seven Year Itch fiasco—how he wanted a good Catholic wife, not some starlet “showing her damn-near-bared crotch to half of New York.” Her face blanched: “I had no way to love him, because he didn’t want me to be who I have to be.”
Marilyn leaned forward, about to be sick. (“I don’t want to throw up—what if someone steps in it!”) Ray leaped up to get paper towels from Rienzi’s—finally an excuse to go to Rienzi’s!—and John sat there, drenched in his Brooks Brothers jacket, thinking that he’d fling himself under a taxi right then and there, if only Marilyn wanted him to.
* * *
Despite her general glow, Marilyn’s life in New York was still peppered by doubts, particularly involving Miller. By sleeping with a married man, she was at war with herself. “Her least favorite word was ‘homewrecker,’” remembered Amy Greene, who witnessed Marilyn’s inner torment.
Increasingly burdened by guilt, Marilyn was in need of a confidant. But who? Thanks to Arthur, the Greenes had already begun to fade from her life. Lee Strasberg was wholly uninterested in relationship talk, and Susie was only a teenager. Paula thrilled at the chance to discuss Arthur for hours, but her horoscopes and glassy-eyed talk of “fated love” left little room for substance. And Marilyn’s “brothers”—Eli Wallach, Sam Shaw, and Norman Rosten—were all married. Particularly Norman—not only had he known Arthur’s wife for years, he had a wife of his own who spoke French, cooked beef bourguignon, and hosted chic poetry readings. How could he relate to this sordid affair, safe in his warm little penumbra of Brooklyn Heights domesticity?
One night that fall, Marilyn found herself walking alone along the East River. The Monroe Six trailed her, solemn and silent as a pack of baby wolves. She stopped to look across the murky water toward Queens and its industrial skyline. A lone policeman spotted her—an incandescent kitten lost in the urban jungle. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you mind if I talk to you for a while?” she peeped, glancing up. The policeman kept her company for more than an hour, side by side on a bench, discussing, according to Jimmy, “life and what it all meant and why people did things.”
As the finalization of the DiMaggio divorce drew near, Marilyn wondered if she was making a mistake, if a relationship with Miller really would lead to happiness. Yes, Arthur loved the “special warmth” Marilyn felt toward his father, which would continue long after their divorce. He loved how “she was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents as a child or had spent time in orphanages.” If he did acquire some of Marilyn’s empathy, it was only a sliver. For Miller, a level of frosty detachment was vital “for the sake of getting on with life.” Joe’s red temper had sent Marilyn running, but did Arthur’s ruthless cool pose an even greater threat?
Amy Greene disliked Arthur from the beginning, though she held her tongue for Marilyn’s sake. She worried Arthur triggered Marilyn’s deepest insecurity—her lack of formal education. Sometimes she’d call Amy or Norman with a dictionary in her hand, panicked over mispronouncing or misusing a word. Even this early into their love affair, she sensed that Arthur might be ashamed of her.
Marilyn’s unruly intelligence threatened Arthur, as did all strong emotion and chaos. He admired what he called her “perceptive naïveté.” He marveled at her ability to toss aside any book that didn’t stimulate her—but something in him winced at it, too. Arthur noticed and remembered each intellectual “flaw”—her refusal to read a book the “proper” linear way, her inability to “suspend her disbelief towards fiction.” It rattled him when Marilyn slammed a book shut, angered by a plot twist or sentence. He was even unnerved by Marilyn’s outrage toward a blasé, almost campy depiction of rape in a novel. Inexplicably, her inability to “accept literary irony about a humiliation she had once experienced” baffled Arthur. Marilyn began to see the cracks in her Abraham Lincoln, and it chilled her to the bone.
On October 27, Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio became final. It had been exactly one year since she’d been crying on the steps of a courthouse in Santa Monica, and now she had a totally new life in New York. It was irrevocably over now. All of it: That Christmas he surprised her at the Beverly Hills Hotel, stocking her fridge with champagne and stringing her suite with twinkling lights. Joe was gone—his sweet Vermouth and Bay Rum cologne, his love of ice cream and quiet warmth with children. “He loved her beyond anyone’s comprehension,” remembered Sam Shaw. “He felt, but he didn’t tell.”
* * *
Another source of stress was the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been investigating Arthur since January. In October, they started a file on Marilyn herself. Actress Diana Herbert recalls spotting her swathed in scarves and sunglasses by a subway entrance on 58th Street. They ducked into a dim little Greek bistro for coffee and cakes. Marilyn was taut-nerved and tense. She kept peering twitchily out the window, and eventually admitted she was scanning for federal agents. Diana was alarmed. Was her friend unraveling? (In fact, Marilyn was correct—the FBI had been tracking her.) Hoping to distract Marilyn, Diana changed the subject to her new diet—she was eight months pregnant and sticking to baby-nourishing food. This triggered more tears from Marilyn, who’d also spent the summer with Park Avenue gynecologists—for flare-ups of agonizing endometriosis. Racked with pain, she agonized over medical texts, imagining uterine tissue ransacking her body until her organs fused together like some gruesome horror film. What’s more, she doubted her ability to sustain a pregnancy—another blight on her precarious relationship with Arthur. Even if he divorced his wife, even if he wasn’t imprisoned or deported, even if he chose to marry Marilyn (there were so many ifs), what if he wanted more children?
Marilyn lit up around children like she did around cameras, melting into an even softer, prettier version of herself. “She metamorphosed,” remembers one friend. “The head tilted easily back, the eyelids closed down, she licked her lips, became that myth and smiled full into the child’s face and sighed, ‘Hi-iiiiiiiiii.’” That Christmas she told Kitty Owens of her dream to adopt orphans—as many as possible, from around the world.
But Marilyn was ambivalent about childbirth. She feared the loss of bodily control—sagging breasts and bulging waistlines. Endometriosis complicated pregnancies, and she’d had more than her share of harrowing surgeries. Above all, she lived under the shadow of her mother’s mental illness, an illness that she knew had genetic roots.
Physical pain and shaky relationships weren’t new to Marilyn. Vulnerability and sangfroid often coexist, and she had plenty of both in spades. She could handle anything if she felt secure in the thing that mattered most to her: her acting career. Tennessee Williams had been eyeing her for his new screenplay, Baby Doll—the story of a nineteen-year-old virgin bride who sucks her thumb, sleeps in a crib, and wields an intoxicating hold on the men around her. Marilyn was counting on the lead. She was the perfect child-woman, Persephone meets Playmate meets shantytown shepherdess.
But there were other factors at play. Director Elia Kazan had final choice, and he was still feuding with Arthur Miller. Even worse, Elia’s wife had just discovered the fling he’d had with Marilyn back in 1951. Now he was dashing off mea culpa letters nightly, frantically downplaying the affair. He couldn’t turn around and cast his former mistress in the film. Despite Marilyn’s hopes and Tennessee’s pleas, the role went to Carroll Baker.
“You’re too old for the role,” spat Kazan when he passed Baby Doll from Marilyn to Carroll. Too old—or too fat. Tennessee had wanted a curvier actress, but Kazan loudly insisted on casting “somebody who looks normal.” Carroll crowed over her victory, cruelly and not too subtly slamming Marilyn’s weight: “Tennessee Williams was there and he had to approve me. He said I wasn’t fat enough!”
After the loss of Baby Doll, Marilyn spiraled into insecurity. She developed a habit of cupping her hands and coughing whenever she stepped out of a building. Her summery tan had faded, and she looked pale, puffy, and worn. Despite the mild weather she wore a fleecy coat of black wool paired with white bobby socks, polka-dot headscarves, and black patent pocketbooks—giving her a forlorn, frumpy look that was oddly babyish at the same time. Sometimes Jimmy saw her wandering through Saks wearing sunglasses and baggy black slacks, her face slathered with hormone cream. Without makeup, her nose looked as red and rabbity as a raw baby animal’s. Or he’d find her at Whelan’s slumped over a stool, coat thrown over whatever slip she woke up in, staring listlessly into her coffee. She’d be spotted leaving Dr. Hohenberg’s, hailing a cab on the corner of 93rd and Lex, or ducking into the liquor store to write a $40 check for a $10 bottle of wine. (She was still subsisting on Milton’s allowance of $40 dollars a week and needed spending money.)
She wore the wool coat on rainy days, drifting through midtown like a sodden black lamb. “One evening she trekked twenty-eight blocks in the rain,” wrote Jimmy Haspiel, “and she was wearing that same woolen coat. By the time she arrived home, coat dragging along the sparkling sidewalk, under the weight of its water-logged wool; and Marilyn was all but drenched through to her alabaster skin, the back of her woolen coat looking not unlike the train of an ominous wedding dress.”
Jimmy once caught her on the corner of Lexington and East 53rd, dragging plastic grocery bags, tired and pasty in her “teddy bear” coat and black pumps. A packed city bus happened to pass by, the whole crowd gaping down at her. The next day he cornered her at Whelan’s: How dare that busload of gawkers stare her down. And besides, she looked “really terrible yesterday.” “Well, Jimmy, don’t let it bother you!” cried an exasperated Marilyn, flinging the copy of the Times he’d brought her.
But it did bother her. Milton used to catch her staring in the mirror for hours, slowly turning around, examining her jawline, her eyelids, her hips, and chin. “I never did ask her ‘What do you see, what are you looking for, what are you worried about?’ Only once did I ask her, ‘What could happen in five years?’” Marilyn looked stricken. “You shouldn’t think that way,” she cried, whirling around. “That’s not the way to think!” Milton cursed himself for being so stupid. “Hollywood used to figure once a woman is really in, they’ve got five years. Five years if they really take care of themselves. Those were her five years.”
Like most mid-century American actresses, Marilyn fretted over aging. After forty, the only respectful options were to retire or become a character actress. Witchy spinsters, stately matrons, and deluded Miss Havisham types. Either feared like Joan Crawford or pitied like Blanche DuBois. Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn were permitted to hold on to their looks. Their tough talk and angular scaffolding seemed built to last decades, but Marilyn’s ripe skin and glistening lips were frighteningly youth-dependent. As of now her value was still straight-up sex appeal—it always had been. Sexy Marilyn had pulled little Norma Jean out of poverty and won the love of millions of fans, the only love she truly trusted. They wanted the icon they knew and loved, not some pseudo-intellectual bumming around in Levi’s. They wanted their hologram goddess, and Marilyn felt she owed it to them.
So she arched her back and waved, turning on what Capote called the inner light of true celebrity. “Want to see me be her?” she’d say to Susie Strasberg, walking down Ninth Avenue in sneakers and jeans. “Want to see me be her?” she’d say to Amy Greene, whipping off her headscarf on Broadway. Or she’d do the opposite. “No, I’m Sheree North,” she might say, shaking her head when strangers stopped her on the way walking back from the Strasbergs. Or “No, I’m Mamie Van Doren.” Jimmy—who’d often be hot on her heels—hated this. “Don’t you realize that these people will go around for the rest of their lives saying, ‘I saw Mamie Van Doren in person—and she’s got Marilyn Monroe beat by a mile!’”
Truman Capote once spent a boozy afternoon with Marilyn at their favorite Chinese spot on Second Avenue. As usual, there was little food on the table—just bottles of unchilled Mumm’s wine and water glasses stacked with ice. Marilyn looked sickly. She was drinking more than usual. Panic flickered across her pale face.
If Marilyn looked frazzled, she had good reason to be. Along with the stress of MMP, she was juggling too many identities: angelic lover for Arthur, star pupil for Lee, creative renegade for Milton, pinup goddess for her fans, and respected actress to the press and brutes back at Fox. Where was there room for Marilyn the avid learner, reader, caring friend, and committed artist?
Truman was ordering their third bottle of Mumm’s when Marilyn retreated to the powder room—face powder, compact, lipstick in hand. She locked herself in the tiny room and stood still, staring into the dingy mirror.
