Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem Page B
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: Humor & Entertainment, Biographies, Biographies & Memoirs, Women, History & Criticism, Movies, Movies & Video, Specific Groups, Arts & Literature, Actors & Entertainers, Actors & Actresses
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feminine… Men need women to be feminine.” This belief gave her a dangerous permission to remain dependent that even her various psychiatrists may have reinforced. Apparently they did not challenge Freudian assumptions of female passivity, penis envy, and the like. “I will not discuss psychoanalysis, except to say that I believe in the Freudian interpretation,” Marilyn explained. She added, with an irony she couldn’t have known, “I hope at some future time to make a glowing report on the wonders that psychiatrists can do for you.”
When she did accept authority in women, especially on “unfeminine” matters, she seemed to do so with pleasure and surprise. Marilyn once enrolled in an art and literature course at UCLA in her despair over being uneducated. “The teacher was a woman,” she noted. “I was depressed by this at first because I didn’t think a woman could teach me anything. But in a few days I knew differently. She was one of the most exciting human beings I had ever met. She talked about the Renaissance and made it sound ten times more important than the Studio’s biggest epic. I drank in everything she said.” But when her association with such women was longer, they ran the risk of becoming mother figures who were objects of nearly impossible hunger and expectation. Paula Strasberg, the wife of acting teacher Lee Strasberg, was her on-set acting coach during Marilyn’s later movies. For better or worse, she seems to have tried to supply undiluted and even uncritical support. Olivier, who also directed The Prince and the Showgirl, insisted that he personally heard Paula telling Marilyn, “You haven’t yet any idea of the importance of your position in the world. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time, of any time—you name it. You can’t think of anybody, I mean—no, not even Jesus—except you’re more popular.” Olivier concluded that “Paula knew nothing; she was no actress, no director, no teacher, no adviser, except in Marilyn’s eyes. For she had one talent: she could butter Marilyn up.” If he was right, Marilyn’s need for a champion on the set may have deprived her of real teaching. Nonetheless, Dame Sybil Thorndike defended Marilyn’s talent and ability: “We need her desperately. She’s the only one of us who really knows how to act in front of a camera.”
Whatever the professional worth of the support Paula supplied, she was finally banished when she was unable to negotiate Marilyn back into her role in Something’s Got to Give, the last and unfinished film, from which Marilyn was humiliatingly fired.
From the beginning to the end of her life, Marilyn also had a defensive fear of women who were jealous of her: classmates who had snubbed her for being more attractive to boys, Hollywood matrons who jealously guarded their husbands, or actresses like Joan Crawford who first offered Marilyn condescending advice on deportment and clothes, then criticized her publicly as unladylike when she didn’t take it. Even Berneice Miracle, Gladys’s daughter by her first marriage and Marilyn’s lost half sister, was seen as competitive in a different way. Though Marilyn was ecstatic over meeting this unknown relative when they finally found each other in the 1950s, she also felt Berneice had had the advantage of being raised with her real father. “At least you lived with relatives,” Marilyn said to her when Berneice talked of difficulties in her childhood.
By the very end of Marilyn’s life, there were only two women she was close to and saw regularly: Patricia Newcomb, her press assistant who was also a friend and surrogate younger sister, and Jeanne Carmen, an actress neighbor to whom Marilyn confessed her troubles with insomnia, with work, with men. Even now, Patricia Newcomb continues to guard Marilyn’s privacy, and Jeanne Carmen, interviewed recently for a British television special on Marilyn’s death, still wondered with
When she did accept authority in women, especially on “unfeminine” matters, she seemed to do so with pleasure and surprise. Marilyn once enrolled in an art and literature course at UCLA in her despair over being uneducated. “The teacher was a woman,” she noted. “I was depressed by this at first because I didn’t think a woman could teach me anything. But in a few days I knew differently. She was one of the most exciting human beings I had ever met. She talked about the Renaissance and made it sound ten times more important than the Studio’s biggest epic. I drank in everything she said.” But when her association with such women was longer, they ran the risk of becoming mother figures who were objects of nearly impossible hunger and expectation. Paula Strasberg, the wife of acting teacher Lee Strasberg, was her on-set acting coach during Marilyn’s later movies. For better or worse, she seems to have tried to supply undiluted and even uncritical support. Olivier, who also directed The Prince and the Showgirl, insisted that he personally heard Paula telling Marilyn, “You haven’t yet any idea of the importance of your position in the world. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time, of any time—you name it. You can’t think of anybody, I mean—no, not even Jesus—except you’re more popular.” Olivier concluded that “Paula knew nothing; she was no actress, no director, no teacher, no adviser, except in Marilyn’s eyes. For she had one talent: she could butter Marilyn up.” If he was right, Marilyn’s need for a champion on the set may have deprived her of real teaching. Nonetheless, Dame Sybil Thorndike defended Marilyn’s talent and ability: “We need her desperately. She’s the only one of us who really knows how to act in front of a camera.”
Whatever the professional worth of the support Paula supplied, she was finally banished when she was unable to negotiate Marilyn back into her role in Something’s Got to Give, the last and unfinished film, from which Marilyn was humiliatingly fired.
From the beginning to the end of her life, Marilyn also had a defensive fear of women who were jealous of her: classmates who had snubbed her for being more attractive to boys, Hollywood matrons who jealously guarded their husbands, or actresses like Joan Crawford who first offered Marilyn condescending advice on deportment and clothes, then criticized her publicly as unladylike when she didn’t take it. Even Berneice Miracle, Gladys’s daughter by her first marriage and Marilyn’s lost half sister, was seen as competitive in a different way. Though Marilyn was ecstatic over meeting this unknown relative when they finally found each other in the 1950s, she also felt Berneice had had the advantage of being raised with her real father. “At least you lived with relatives,” Marilyn said to her when Berneice talked of difficulties in her childhood.
By the very end of Marilyn’s life, there were only two women she was close to and saw regularly: Patricia Newcomb, her press assistant who was also a friend and surrogate younger sister, and Jeanne Carmen, an actress neighbor to whom Marilyn confessed her troubles with insomnia, with work, with men. Even now, Patricia Newcomb continues to guard Marilyn’s privacy, and Jeanne Carmen, interviewed recently for a British television special on Marilyn’s death, still wondered with