If biographies give us a chance to learn from other people’s lives, Monroe’s is full of lessons. On seduction: notes published in ‘‘Fragments,’’ presumably from acting classes, confirm that even charisma has technical aspects. ‘‘Listen with the eyes.’’ ‘‘[Keep] a giggle inside.’’ On romance: being Monroe was no guarantee against dates ending badly (a face rubbed raw by Howard Hughes’s beard) and passion veering into farce (a tryst with Frank Sinatra in a room at the Waldorf, with one or the other of them falling into the crack between twin beds that had been put together). On love and its limitations: embarrassed by her low-cut necklines and vamping on screen, Joe DiMaggio expected her to give up her career when she became his wife, as if the invitation to sex would be addressed to him alone. After her divorce from Miller, she and DiMaggio resumed seeing each other, and he remained steadfast Coach Bags Outlet, even through her affair with Sinatra, coming to her rescue in the last years of her life. Mailer closes with a photograph of DiMaggio at Monroe’s funeral, a portrait in profound grief of a man who, unable to love Monroe on his own terms, loved her anyway.
The reader’s heart goes out to Monroe, who not long after her wedding to Miller comes upon his notebook, left open for her to read, to an entry in which he records his disappointment in her. True to form, Mailer identifies with the man who had won her, finding in Miller’s lament that he cares for her so much, even as their marriage is collapsing, ‘‘the bottomless cry of love.’’ He is, Mailer writes, ‘‘face to face with the most unendurable message of all: love by itself does not conquer hatred. Nor does it heal another heart. It can only climb the walls of its own misery.’’
Writing about himself in the third person, Mailer acknowledges that his repeated attempts to secure an invitation to meet Monroe were unsuccessful — that in fact his plan was to seduce her and steal her away from Arthur Miller. From Steinem we learn that Mailer wrote a ‘‘memory play’’ called ‘‘Strawhead’’ about Monroe and cast his daughter Kate in the starring role, which seems a particularly ingenious form of child abuse. Describing a photograph of Monroe contemplating mushrooms growing at the base of a tree, Mailer wonders, ‘‘Was she comparing them to differences she had now discovered in the penis of the husband and the lover? Did she wonder at God’s design?’’ It must take a really large mushroom for a man to write like this.
Courtesy of Abrams Lois Banner’s ‘‘MM — Personal’’
Costume, hair and makeup tests for “Something’s Got to Give.”
Where Mailer sees the ‘‘living bouncing embodiment of pulchritude,’’ Steinem enters into the mind of the woman trapped inside. Mailer dismisses Monroe’s claim that she was molested at the age of 8 and, on the basis of discrepancies in her telling over the years, discounts her narrative of childhood neglect as an orphan’s bid for attention; Steinem finds the underlying emotional damage consistent and credible. In reports that Monroe seldom had an orgasm, that her lovemaking was eager to please and, according to one friend, ‘‘unselfish,’’ Mailer finds a challenge; Steinem, a tragic irony.
Sam Shaw, courtesy of Shaw Family Archives, Ltd.Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in front of the Queensboro Bridge, New York, 1957.
Monroe was the ‘‘It’’ girl of midcentury America, and unlike ‘‘It’’ girls of other eras whose moment came and went (Clara Bow, Madonna), she has never lost ‘‘It.’’ But what is ‘‘It’’? The formula seems straightforward enough, though not one that can ever be replicated, with its singular configuration of early deprivation. Born Norma Jeane Baker, to a single mother she saw only on weekends, Monroe was shuttled between foster homes and eventually, when her mother was hospitalized with schizophrenia, consigned to an orphanage. Her father, who refused to acknowledge her, was just a picture on the wall of her mother’s apartment. Before she could speak, she learned to attract attention. Completely alive in her body, she grew into a child-woman, with a sensual innocence that others construed as wildly sexual.
So bottomless and vast is our presumed hunger for every iota of information pertaining to Marilyn Monroe that ‘‘MM — Personal’’ (Abrams), a volume of ephemera edited by Lois Banner, with photographs by Mark Anderson, opens with a full-page color picture of the two file cabinets — one tan, one gray — in which the book’s contents were housed for more than 40 years. The gray one’s third drawer has been replaced with a combination safe — the tantalizing repository of a sex goddess’s most closely guarded secrets.
The monopoly on insight still belongs to two writers whose points of view stake out the far ends of the spectrum: Norman Mailer’s ‘‘Marilyn’’ (Grosset & Dunlap), published in 1973, and Gloria Steinem’s ‘‘Marilyn: Norma Jeane’’ (Victor Gollanncz Ltd.), in 1987, tell us more about Monroe than she ultimately proves capable of telling us about herself.
It’s not Norma Jeane but the apparition of femininity that she becomes that is Mailer’s subject, and his sympathies lie with the men in her orbit. About Jim Dougherty, Monroe’s first husband Coach Bags Outlet, five years older, whom she wed in an arranged marriage a few weeks after her 16th birthday, Mailer writes: ‘‘He has never been near such luxury of mood, such emoluments of future sex and such longing in a girl for the strength he can offer. His relations with other girls have been more even. She, however, is hopeless and incommensurate. To kiss her is to drift in a canoe. . . . He has passed unwittingly into the drug of female sex.’’
Mailer’s is a bellowing rant and outburst of obsessive lust, bringing together his two great loves: Monroe and the sound of his own voice. Her death put an end to the prospect of conquering her, satisfying her, healing her, in ways that a home run hitter, an award-winning playwright and a top-of-the-charts singer clearly failed. What was left for him was to parse her siren powers, to make sense of the terrible subjugation brought on by his own desire.
Nearly 50 years after her death, Monroe continues to tug at our imaginations. There has been a cottage industry in biographies and recollections, of which ‘‘MM — Personal’’ —with its receipts from department stores, beauty salons and drugstores, signed copy of a lease on a house in Beverly Hills, and photograph of the typewriter used by her secretaries — is the most recent byproduct, a postscript to last year’s ‘‘Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe,’’ edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which bestowed on the waiting world Monroe’s recipe for stuffing. As it turns out, the object of more men’s fantasies than any other woman in history left a paper trail that is utterly mundane. Banner calls the final chapter ‘‘an unparalleled record of Monroe’s finances from 1953 until her death,’’ and indeed it is a trove only tax accountants will be fitted to appreciate.
See more from the Women’s Spring Fashion issue
Monroe’s own jottings from that time, published in ‘‘Fragments,’’ include this admission: ‘‘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.’’ ‘‘MM — Personal’’ reproduces a letter to Inez Melson, her business manager, in which Monroe has handwritten ‘‘Mrs.’’ in front of Miller’s name at the top of his stationery. As if engraving ‘‘Mrs. Arthur Miller’’ on a sheet of paper were too permanent a gesture for a condition she knew would never last.
Mailer calls Monroe’s refusal to marry Johnny Hyde, a Hollywood agent 30 years her senior who was her mentor and her lover early on, ‘‘one of the mysteries of motivation in her life.’’ With a rapidly worsening heart condition and no more than a few months to live, he wanted to pass his million-dollar estate to Monroe as his widow. Why would a still up-and-coming starlet turn her back on financial security when she had taken money for sex with men she never had to see again? (Mailer neglects to mention this detail — how to reconcile ‘‘the angel of sex’’ with the blonde for hire chatting up some random conventioneer in a hotel bar?) To Steinem, however Coach Bags Outlet, Monroe’s romantic idealism, her refusal to marry for any reason other than love, makes perfect sense. ‘‘From families that owned little but their own good names, she had inherited the fierce pride of the poor,’’ she writes. ‘‘Because she was sometimes forced to give in, to sell herself partially, she was all the more fearful of being bought totally.’’
Related：
没有评论:
发表评论