Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (42 page)

The second problem with
River of No Return
was the choice of director. Viennese-born Otto Preminger was trained as a lawyer and aspired to a judgeship; but he turned to filmmaking (most notably of
Laura
in 1944), in which he was reputed to act not only as jury but also as executioner with his casts and crews—a dictatorial man who could reduce even the hardiest actors to sobs. This turgid western was an
assignment for Preminger as for Marilyn, but for it he was culturally unfit, and this pitched him into an ill humor from the start.

At the center of the production’s problems that summer was Natasha, who was “trying to direct [the picture],” according to Marilyn’s agent, Charles Feldman. “I pleaded with [Marilyn] to relax and speak naturally,” recalled Preminger, “but she paid no attention. She listened only to Natasha . . . and rehearsed her lines with such grave ar-tic-yew-lay-shun that her violent lip movements made it impossible to photograph her. . . . Marilyn was putty in [Natasha’s] hands.”

Those hands could be tenacious, as Natasha herself unwittingly admitted: “Marilyn,” she said one day in Canada, “you don’t care about me, only my work with you. If you didn’t need me, you wouldn’t know how to spell my name.” To such desperate statements it is almost impossible to make a reply, nor could Marilyn find one satisfactory to Natasha. “Marilyn thought there was some magic in Natasha,” said Robert Mitchum years later. “She felt she needed someone other than a director, preferably a woman, to tell her when she did something right.”

The tension was not helped by the sheer physical demands placed on Marilyn, who had (both on location and in the studio) to cope with real and recreated rapids. Paul Wurtzel, chief of Fox’s special effects department, recalled that Marilyn was subjected to considerable rough treatment—gallons of water thrown at her for take after take on the raft, to mention just one difficult sequence. “We put her through a lot on that film, and there was never one complaint. She knew what the picture required, and once we got her on her marks she was a pro. The whole crew adored her.”

Dominated by her coach, longing to please her director and (thus Robert Mitchum) fearful of going before the cameras because she was terrified of being judged, Marilyn nevertheless shone in the final cut. There was something inconsonant about her as a nineteenth-century performer in the crude wilderness: her tight jeans, stylish blouse and perfect makeup were absurdly anachronous. At the same time (as in
Niagara
), she was both the startling exponent of unpredictable nature and a figure in stark contrast to it. Her best moments have the ingenuous, direct appeal springing from her amalgam of tenacity and softness: singing on a makeshift stage in a mining camp; collapsing with chills and
hunger in the forest; seeing the futility of her long affair with a handsome but nasty manipulator; realizing her love for quiet, protective Mitchum and his brave little boy.
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Her achievement was all the more remarkable because, as Mitchum, Wurtzel and Snyder recalled, Marilyn rarely had a moment to herself, either in Canada or back in the studio. Publicists arranged a constant stream of interviews; Zanuck or one of his minions telephoned her daily to recite Preminger’s complaints about Natasha; and Joe, anxious about false rumors of a flirtation between Marilyn and Mitchum, arrived with his friend George Solotaire. The threatening eddies and the chilly Canadian nights were easy to sustain by comparison with the emotional squalls swirling around her.

Snyder recalled one quiet, important moment. On a train to location shooting, he and Marilyn were admiring the spectacular scenery when he said, “Here are the Canadian Rockies, Marilyn. If you’re really in love with Joe, why don’t you get out of the movie business? The two of you could move up here, build yourselves a beautiful house, settle down and have kids.” She thought for a moment. “Whitey, I know all that,” she said sadly, “but I can’t do that—I just can’t.” She did not elaborate.

While Marilyn worked days, Joe fished, hunted and then waited at Becker’s Bungalows in Jasper, Alberta (where the cast and crew were also housed), and at the Mount Royal Hotel in Banff when the company moved there. They could live together at times like this, but whenever there was talk of marriage she was even more uncertain than just before a movie scene. As Snyder recalled, “Joe could be very hard to get along with—surly and withdrawn—and he was awfully jealous. Marilyn liked to invite a few people for coffee or a drink at the end of the day, but when Joe was around the mood was dark. He hated the movies and everything to do with them.”
⁴
Joe’s only practical purpose was the
star’s comfort, especially after she turned her ankle in Jasper National Park on August 19—a minor incident that brought a famished press back in full force, as if she were moribund, to document her hobbling about on crutches and behaving bravely.

Location shooting in Canada was completed at the end of August, and on September 1, Marilyn, Joe and the company returned to Hollywood for interior scenes at Fox. When the airplane landed in Los Angeles, a throng of over one hundred reporters and photographers pushed forward, shouting questions, jostling for pictures and—rare for newsmen—applauding her wildly. Robert Mitchum had to exert all his considerable brawn to protect her from injury. “She thought they were cheering for someone else,” he recalled.

By fascinating coincidence, that week an historic book was published: Dr. Alfred R. Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, which was even more controversial than his earlier companion volume,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
.

There was important news in the world that summer: the armistice ending the Korean War and the first return of American troops in early September; the controversy surrounding the execution of alleged spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; the rantings of Senator Joseph McCarthy (who madly accused former President Truman of deliberately supporting communism); the bloody Soviet crackdown against anti-Communist demonstrations in East Berlin and Russia’s announcement that it had the hydrogen bomb.

But of equal importance to both the media and to the American people was Dr. Kinsey’s published research, the first serious scientific studies of sexual activity in the United States. The mere fact of its contents and its availability virtually divided a country still mired in Puritanism, still in a kind of perpetual adolescence, incapable of confronting its collective id. Marilyn Monroe and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, which had opened nationwide in July, were popular manifestations of exactly what Dr. Kinsey was exploring and exactly what movie audiences both longed for and deeply feared.

From 1942 to his death in 1956, Kinsey was a zoologist and director of the Institute for Sex Research at the University of Indiana. In 1948, he published
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, the first academic study of sex in America and a surprise bestseller. Kinsey and his staff had interviewed more than five thousand American males, of whom they asked detailed questions about their frequency of marital and extramarital intercourse, petting, masturbation, homosexual experiences and incidents of bestiality. When the book appeared in stores (and only a few public libraries), many municipal police departments tried to confiscate copies—just as women’s groups and church societies had tried to interfere with interviews and suppress the publication. As shocking as the inquiry was, it was equaled by the news that the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation had provided funding for the study. Millions claimed it was a filthy book and many shrugged it off as unnecessary and really quite boring; there is no count available on how many copies were borrowed, loaned, stolen and smuggled into schoolbags.

Then, more than twelve thousand interviews and five years later, came
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, just when Marilyn Monroe was appearing daily in newspapers, weekly in magazines and constantly (or so it seemed) on the neighborhood movie screens. Many civic and religious leaders attacked both Kinsey and Monroe as if they were directly, commercially linked, but neither could be controlled or contained. Marilyn puckishly cavorted her way through “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” while the Institute for Sex Research organized and interpreted questionnaires, films, literature and art, thus attempting an interdisciplinary study of sex and sexual practices. In 1952, just when the scandal had broken over Marilyn’s calendar poses, the United States Customs Office was suing the Institute for importing foreign erotica. Such works, after all, were carefully controlled by authorities, lest the purity of the American mind be contaminated by unseemly considerations of matters sexual.

The Kinsey reports were designed to be read: although they extended to eight hundred pages, the format and contents were simple. After detailing their methodology, they gave dispassionate, clinical lists of results. No consideration was allowed for either bravado or false humility, but the essential veracity of the reports was supported
by the anonymous nature of the interviews and the frankness of the subject matter.

The 1948 study of men focused on the variety and frequency of heterosexual and homosexual activity, while in 1953 the women’s study calmly dwelt—to the horror of millions in America—on the female orgasm. Equally appalling to many was Kinsey’s sober insistence that no particular type of sexual activity could be called “more normal” than any other type; to the contrary, he said, sexual activity runs a gamut of procedures and “outlets.” Normality, in other words, is the province of legislatures and social customs.

The coincidence of the Kinsey reports with Marilyn Monroe’s rise to stardom and her firm entrenchment within it was mutually reinforcing: for the first time, academic inquiry was taking seriously the most delicate aspect of popular awareness and that which required the most stringent regulations. Like Marilyn, Kinsey punctured the pretenses of Puritan-Victorian moralism about desire (not to say female aggressiveness) that still persisted—in Hollywood through the Motion Picture Production Code and the Legion of Decency, and throughout the country in civic, school and church groups.

Of particular relevance to American life in general, and to the beginning of a widespread backlash against the sexual openness of characters represented by Marilyn Monroe, was the discovery that women’s sex lives had changed dramatically since World War I. By 1950, Kinsey reported, more than half of the country’s women were not virgins at the time of marriage; fully a quarter of married women had extramarital affairs; and most astonishing of all, women were indeed
enjoying
sex. The American female, then, was leading a life quite different from the presumptions of American men. This claim was so sensational that Kinsey’s publisher, who printed a first run of five thousand copies, soon sold more than a quarter million.

The week Marilyn’s plane touched down in Los Angeles,
Time
magazine was trumpeting news of “K-Day” and detailing the contradictory reactions to Kinsey’s publication by both press and public, for the book was dividing people as much as the morality of Marilyn’s costumes and Lorelei’s motives in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. The
New York Times
buried the story of the Kinsey controversy in a remote inside page, while the
Philadelphia Bulletin
prepared a thirty-three-hundred-word report that it finally killed, fearful (as it said in an explanation to
its readers) of giving “unnecessary offense to many in [our] large family of readers.” The
Chicago Tribune
was less confused, dismissing the report as “a real menace to society,” while the
Raleigh Times
offered free copies. Perhaps predictably, Europe yawned: Italian newspapers mentioned Kinsey only briefly or ignored him altogether, while Paris expressed surprise that anyone could be surprised. Meantime, in American nightclubs, where any word connoting sexual intercourse was forbidden, the word “Kinsey” was used as a code substitute to avoid obscenity charges. In 1953, straightforward discussion of sex could perhaps be found only in Kinsey’s books, medical and psychiatric seminars and high school locker rooms.
⁵

In fascinating ways, then, Marilyn Monroe’s rise to the height of stardom coincided with the Kinsey report on women and an era when America itself was in the throes of a kind of adolescent confusion about sex. She replaced the bawdy, wisecracking Mae West and the sparkling allure of Jean Harlow (both phenomena of the 1930s) with something at once adult and childlike. Although in herself she transcended America’s fantasies by a constant effort at self-perfection, Marilyn simultaneously represented those fantasies. She was the postwar ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently needy, worshipful of men, naïve, offering sex without demands.

But there was also something quietly aggressive in her self-presentation as a frankly carnal creature; thus by a curious congruence, her sexual impact both matched and resisted the cultural expectations of 1953. Vulnerable and frightened though she was (and often appeared to be onscreen), there was yet something tenacious and independent
about her. And perhaps most disturbing of all to a culture in such turmoil, she made overt sexuality seem respectable. The ladylike Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly received the Academy Awards, but Marilyn was everywhere mobbed and constantly heard the cheers of thousands.

At the same time, this unwitting pioneer had to be presented by the studio mostly as one of life’s contingencies—little more than a dumb blonde (and thought so by the country) in order that she could charm without challenge. Men could appreciate her without feeling she had triumphed over them, and women could sense that she was no threat at all. Her admirers yielded to her without handing her a victory—or even, finally, any respect at all.

But because she seemed to be a woman with a strong sense of her body’s power, she was an exponent, a summary of the postwar American woman Kinsey reported—and like Kinsey’s woman, she could not yet be taken seriously. In this regard, it is perhaps easier to understand America’s obsession with her during her life and since her death, for in considering Marilyn Monroe, the culture had somehow to confront both the reality of a responsive yet independent woman as well as the threat she posed to both sexes, the unfulfilled dreams and the personal (not merely sexual) maturity both longed for and feared in the American woman.