Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming Weidenfeld & Nicolson 464pp, £20 in UK
Marilyn Monroe was driven, so her latest biographer keeps dinning into us, by an obsessive need to be shown "respect", but either "power" or "revenge" could make do as a synonym. Her maternal grandparents had been mentally deranged; her mother, born Gladys Monroe, would spend years hospitalised as a paranoid schizophrenic. Her illegitimate child, Norma Jeane Baker, claimed to remember fighting for breath when Gladys attempted to smother her in her crib.
Norma Jeane grew up in a succession of foster homes, and at fifteen was married off to a marine named Jimmy Dougherty. Four years later, she went on the books of a modelling agency, divorced her husband and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Barbara Leaming does not even bother to list the five films in which Monroe played bit parts; her story properly begins when Marilyn was on the "party circuit". When such film moguls as Joseph Schenck and Sam Spiegel came to Hollywood, "house" girls served them with drinks and lit their cigars. Unless they were already spoken for, they were expected to be "available" to the guests. Orson Welles said of Spiegel's parties that they had the "best delicatessen and the best whores" in town.
Marilyn caught the eye of a well-known agent, a delicate and misshapen little man named Johnny Hyde. He fell in love with her and managed to have her cast in cameo roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. When Hyde died of a heart attack, she mourned both him and her stymied career. She swallowed the mandatory bottle of barbiturates and took up with the director Elia Kazan, who was in town with Arthur Miller. Kazan had directed Death of a Salesman, and the 33-year-old Miller was more famous on the East coast than in Hollywood. Marilyn became Kazan's girl friend. Miller was attempting to save a foundering marriage, and, although smitten by her, was too honourable to take her to bed. Marilyn was touched; one might say that it was the nicest thing that had never happened to her. When Miller returned to New York, they wrote to each other. She kept his picture above the bed in which she and Kazan made love. Meanwhile, her career moved on. She appeared in another eleven films, none of any consequence, then her career took off with a garish thriller called Niagara.
A glance through the illustrations in Ms Leaming's biography explains Monroe's appeal; once she was aware of a camera, she came to life. Every picture, whether posed or a snapshot, is stunning; she was 90 per cent sex bomb and 10 per cent self-parody.
No one ever dared suggest to Monroe that respect might be a quality which was not demanded, but earned. She was one of life's takers. As her value to her studio - Twentieth Century Fox - increased, her demands went, as the saying goes, ballistic. She became incorrigibly late on the set, if she turned up at all. She wanted script approval and almost total control of her films. She had a leech-like dramatic coach named Natasha Lytess, a kind of Svengali who virtually directed each one of Marilyn's performance while the director looked on and fumed - later, the monstrous Paula and Lee Strasberg from the New York Actors' Studio would batten on Monroe as their gravy-train.
Even to know her was a full-time job. She had a succession of agents, assistants, business partners and gofers, none of whom lasted. A hoped-for film might not happen, or a contractual clause might be disputed by the studio, whereupon Monroe would decide she had been betrayed yet again, and another loyalty would bite the dust. She could turn up to a banquet, sewn into a tissue-thin dress and obviously knickerless - Joan Crawford, herself the queen mother of schlock, almost haemorrhaged from horror - and in the next breath complain that the film bosses did not respect her. They didn't, of course. This was Hollywood, where respect existed only in the dictionary, assuming you could find one. In a promotion scene for The Seven-Year Itch, Marilyn stood over a subway grating and giggled while her skirt billowed up. Her dark pubic hair showed through her panties while onlookers whooped (the scene was later reshot in the studio); it was this that signalled the end of her marriage to the long-suffering Joe DiMaggio.
Marilyn had been captivated by the baseball hero's selfless adoration. She reasoned that if the youth of America adored him, the same respect must rub off on her. As far as she was concerned, however, devotion was a one-way street. When she returned from entertaining US troops in Korea, she said: "Joe, you never heard such cheering," and "Yes, I have," DiMaggio murmured.
There were two Marilyns: the little-girl-lost, a victim of the monstrous Zanucks and Schencks who exploited her as a commodity; and the cold-eyed ex-tart who would sell herself for an instant of fame. DiMaggio, as Arthur Miller would do later, married the former and found himself living with the ogress.
The Miller-Monroe marriage is at the nub of Ms Leaming's book, which is compulsive stuff (although not as objective as the blurb declares - such a phrase as "the poor abused child" is worthy of Dickens at his Little Nellest). EGGHEAD WEDS HOURGLASS, a headline screamed. By the time it happened, Miller was no longer a friend of Elia Kazan, who had named names to appease the HUAC witch-hunters. Kazan had made On the Waterfront, in which the hero, to his credit, informs on the dockland gangsters; and Miller had written The Crucible as a metaphor for McCarthyism and A View from the Bridge, in which informing is punished by death. Kazan had become a figure of contempt, but his film was a smash hit; Miller, on the other hand, was a hero and a martyr, but his two plays had flopped. That, as someone might have said, is show business.
For Marilyn, to be proposed to by an intellectual who was facing jail for his beliefs was respect, and then some. They bought a house, and she designed a cosy workroom where he could write masterpieces. Miller went with her to England - and her current guru, Paula Strasberg, made three - where she starred in The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. She and Olivier loathed each other. "Be sexy," he said jovially at the start of a scene, and Monroe froze. Another betrayal. The film was terrible, not so much a comedy as a piece of celluloid taxidermy. Meanwhile, Miller had written his first film script, which would become The Misfits. It was regarded as too downbeat to be a hit, but with Marilyn as the star the seesaw might tilt the other way. In the labyrinth of her unique brain, she reasoned that, as she might have suspected all along, she was more important than her husband. The next deductive step was to perceive that Miller was a failure who was using her to revive his own flagging career. She criticised his work; she demanded rewrites; she insulted her husband, privately and in public; she went from Marilyn the angel to Marilyn the virago.
(An irony was that before she was two years dead, he would stage After the Fall with which, like the despised Elia Kazan - who directed it! - he would turn informer and portray Monroe as an emasculating bitch. In America he has never been forgiven. )
The Misfits was duly made, and it flopped. While filming Let's Make Love, Marilyn had an affair with her co-star, Yves Montand, who discovered that as far as she was concerned it was easier to take his trousers off than to put them on again. She expected him to leave his wife, Simone Signoret, but with the film completed he took off for the hills, or in his case Paris. She called Arthur Miller and asked: "Aren't you coming home?" It is not recorded whether, being Jewish, after all, he used the word "Chutzpah".
By now, Monroe was out of control. She drank; she took drugs. The actor, Peter Lawford, had a sideline as a pimp for his brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy, and helped to add her to the President's list of conquests. She sang "Happy Birthday" to him at Madison Square Garden; it was enough to make the press inquisitive, and Kennedy ended the affair.
Her next picture was to be the prophetically titled Something's Got to Give, a remake of an old Irene Dunne comedy My Favourite Wife. She worked only one day out of three weeks, and her director, George Cukor, who was the most vindictive of old queens, told the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper that Monroe was washed up, adding: "Please, Hedda, this is not from me." The studio shut the film down and swallowed a loss of $2 million.
Jack Kennedy was refusing to take her calls. Her career was over. She called Peter Lawford: "Say goodbye to Pat [his wife]. Say goodbye to Jack. And say goodbye to yourself because you're a nice guy." Probably by then she had already taken the Nembutals.
Arthur Miller, who had remarried, did not go to the funeral. Joe DiMaggio did; he took over the arrangements, kissed her goodbye and gave her all the respect she could ever have wished for.
Hugh Leonard's new play, Love in the Title, will be presented at the Abbey Theatre in March