Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem

roommate for a brief period, her extreme insecurity was both an appeal for help and a burden. “When you went to the John,” Shelley explained, “she’d think you’d disappeared and she’d been left alone. She’d open up the door to see if you were still there. She was a little child.”
    Natasha Lytess, Marilyn’s acting coach in her early Hollywood years, was a mentor and mother figure. She regarded Marilyn as a piece of clay to be molded, and even took her to live in her home with her young daughter, but she pinned her own professional hopes so firmly to Marilyn that her pupil’s independence didn’t seem to be her goal. According to rumors of the time as well as Lena Pepitone’s memory of a confession by Marilyn, Lytess may have loved and tried to possess her sexually as well. “Marilyn had looked up to her,” Lena explained in her own memoirs, “and when she made her advances, Marilyn simply accepted them as part of her training… Marilyn needed to be loved—by anyone who was sincere.” As Lena remembered Marilyn saying, “I let Natasha, but that was wrong. She wasn’t like a guy. You know, just have a good time and that’s that. She got really jealous about the men I saw, everything. She thought she was my husband. She was a great teacher, but that part of it ruined things for us. I got scared of her, had to get away.”
    Even as a star, Marilyn appealed to the protective instincts of women as well as men. Jane Russell, Marilyn’s costar in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, described her as “a dreamy girl. She’s the kind liable to show up with one red shoe and one black shoe… I’d find out when we’d take a break at eleven that she hadn’t had any breakfast and forgot she was hungry until I reminded her. She once got her life so balled up that the studio hired a full-time secretary-maid for her. So Marilyn soon got the secretary as balled up as she was and she ended up waiting on the secretary instead of vice versa.”
    This difficulty in exerting authority over her own life, much less over others, is one that many women have experienced. A lack of self-confidence, a feeling of being unsuited to power, is the emotional training that helps to keep any less-than-equal group in its place. Because Marilyn was disorganized and vulnerable in the extreme, she exaggerated a “femininity” that appealed to men’s sexuality and women’s protectiveness. Natalie Wood said of Marilyn as an actress, “When you look at Marilyn on the screen, you don’t want anything bad to happen to her. You really care that she should be all right… happy.” As Dame Sybil Thorndike, who acted with Marilyn and Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, said, “She has an innocence which is so extraordinary, whatever she plays, however brazen a hussy, it always comes out as an innocent girl. I remember Sir Laurence saying one day during the filming: ‘Look at that face—she could be five years old.’”
    That very childlike quality gave her the license to upset marriages. Her focus on Yves Montand at the expense of his wife, Simone Signoret, was not the first time Marilyn had decided that a particular woman was not “worthy” of a man, and thus had gone after him with no guilt.
    But Marilyn had a protective side, too. She tried to keep others, especially women who were not sexual competitors, from feeling as hurt or abandoned as she had been. When she was asked to pose for photographs in front of Betty Grable’s dressing-room door in a publicity effort to present her as the successor to Grable, she refused. Marilyn didn’t want to be hurtful by making Grable feel that she was finished. When the press tried to drum up a feud between Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as rival sex goddesses, they both remained friendly and supportive of each other. When the Mocambo, an important Los Angeles nightclub, was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn “personally called the owner,” as Ella