Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem Page A

Fitzgerald remembers gratefully, “and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him—and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status—that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night… And after that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.”
    She was also generous in a spontaneous way to people like Lee and Paula Strasberg, whose work she helped support, and to Lena Pepitone, on whom she pressed lavish gifts of cash, money for a warm winter coat, and holidays for Lena’s family at Arthur Miller’s Connecticut farmhouse. She gave personal gifts to hairdressers and others who worked for her, even making sure to keep Chivas Regal on hand for the cleaning woman. She played big sister to the Rostens’ daughter, Patricia, and introduced her to looking prettier with makeup, much as the head of the orphanage had once done for Norma Jeane. Indeed, Norman Rosten’s poems for his daughter impressed Marilyn so much that she modified her earlier obsession with having a son. “Thanks the most for your book of poetry—which I spent all Sunday morning in bed with,” she wrote to Rosten. “I used to think if I had ever had a child I would have wanted only a son—but after Songs for Patricia —I know I would have loved a little girl as much—but maybe the former feeling was only Freudian anyway…” In her will, Marilyn left money to be used for Patricia’s education.
    After her marriage to Miller was over and she had returned to California, her last psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, invited Marilyn to a birthday party for his daughter, Joan, to whom Marilyn was also becoming an older sister. “Surprise for our guests: Marilyn was invited and she came!” Dr. Greenson told Norman Rosten, who recorded his story. “After an initial shock, several boys took turns dancing with her,” Greenson went on, “and soon all of them were on line. It didn’t look too promising for the local girls. And no one was dancing anymore with an especially attractive black girl who, until Marilyn arrived, had been the most popular on the floor. Marilyn noticed this, and went over to her. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you do a step I’d love to do, but don’t think I know how. Would you teach it to me?’ Then she turned to the others and called out, ‘Everybody stop for a few minutes! I’m going to learn a new step,’ Now, the point is, Marilyn knew the step, but she let this girl teach it to her. She understood the loneliness of others.”
    Norman Rosten himself remembered Marilyn’s concern when she came to pick him up at a Los Angeles hotel where he was staying on a business trip and found him “chatting with an attractive girl at the switchboard. She brought up the subject later. ‘I want you to stay away from that girl,’ she said. ‘You’re happily married.’ I glowered in my Humphrey Bogart manner: ‘So what about it?’ She said, ‘So don’t go flirting with these chicks. I’ll call your wife.’ She was serious. She had this protectiveness toward women she liked.” And Marilyn liked Rosten’s wife, Hedda, a lot.
    As Ella Fitzgerald concluded, “She was an unusual woman—a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”
    But Marilyn was also a woman of the fifties. She took women as a group no more seriously than she took herself, and only connected with the same kind of problems that many men of that era would also take seriously: race discrimination, loneliness, poverty. Her empathy with strong women, and her willingness to develop strength in herself, was blocked by her assumptions of what a woman should be. “A woman needs to… well, to support a man, emotionally I mean,” Marilyn explained often, in different ways. “And a man needs to be strong. This is partly what it means to be masculine or feminine. I think it’s terribly important to feel feminine, to act