A first step toward the truth

At least 600 books have been written about Marilyn Monroe. Considering that she was an authentic movie star for only a decade, that most of her films were trivial when they were not downright awful, this is an astounding total. It far exceeds the number of volumes written about figures whose effect on movie (and cultural) history was infinitely more telling.

Yet for all this writerly effort, we do not have, 43 years after her death, a reliable biography of her. We don’t know, for example, the truth about her death. Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Was she murdered? We don’t know whether, as some have claimed, she was sexually abused as a child or, if she was, what long-term effect it had on her. We don’t know how many abortions she had. (The estimates range up to a dozen.) We don’t even know whether she enjoyed the thing she supposedly symbolized -- sex -- or regarded it as a chore that was sometimes useful in her pursuit of larger ambitions. We don’t know whether she was a tragic feminist victim or a manipulative slut.

In other words, she was the perfect dream girl, by which I mean she was treated as an essentially empty vessel who could accommodate any theory, need or fantasy imposed upon her. So out of the woodwork they have scuttled, the famous (Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, Joyce Carol Oates), the journalistic (Barbara Leaming, Fred Lawrence Guiles, Donald Spoto) and a bunch of dank conspiracy mongers I’m not going to name -- all intent on imposing some sort of order on this disorderly life. They have combined to make sensible Sarah Churchwell very tired.

A professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, Churchwell has, in “The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” written an extremely useful deconstruction of the piffle that has accreted around her subject over the years. She wants to return Monroe from the land of legend to the land of the living, to see her not as an exceptional human being but as a relatively unexceptional one. She understands, of course, that, at best, only one in a thousand attractive, modestly talented, immodestly ambitious young women make it out of fringe Hollywood -- modeling for the skin books, playing small movie roles, making friends with putatively useful men -- to stardom. But she also understands that such stories are not unique either. Or necessarily supportive of tragedy or moral instruction, either high-toned or breathless.

For instance, some of her biographers make much of the fact that Monroe was born (illegitimately) Norma Jean (or Jeane) Mortenson and that if, in fact, she committed suicide, she must have been doing so to kill her false self, the famous actress-commodity she became to reclaim, ye gods, her “lost inner child.”

But in making this fatuous argument, Monroe’s “biographers,” Churchwell says, ignore a couple of salient points. One is that Monroe was never nostalgic or romantic about a harsh childhood in which she was cruelly bounced from foster homes to orphanage to arranged marriage when she was 16. All the evidence suggests that she was more than happy to reinvent herself because it was impossible to imagine anything more miserable than her early years.

Beyond that, particularly in her day, literally hundreds of movie actors cheerfully changed their names to something catchier or more euphonious. It was not a sexist imposition -- just ask Spangler Arlington Brugh (Robert Taylor) or Roy Harold Scherer Jr. (Rock Hudson) -- it was generally a way of saying, “Out with the old, in with the new.” What can be more typically or, in its way, more healthily American than that? This frenzy of overinterpretation extends to every aspect of Monroe’s life. There is, for example, her notorious affair with Jack Kennedy and, possibly, another one with his brother Bobby. Most who believe she was murdered base their case on the assumption that she felt ill-used by the Kennedys and was about to go public with the stories of those relationships. But Churchwell sensibly wonders whether Monroe got a simple girlish kick out of sleeping with such powerful men, “using” them as surely as they were using her. Such things are not unknown among celebrities.

Then there’s gynecology. If there is one thing all her biographers agree upon, it is that she was painfully prone to “female trouble.” She suffered agonizing menstrual periods and endured a number of miscarriages. Instantly, the cry goes up: This is a desperate denial of her feminine nature. Or perhaps it is the price she paid for all those (undocumented) abortions. To which Churchwell murmurs back, “endometriosis,” a condition that causes the lining of the uterus to grow on its exterior and causes the kind of gynecological miseries that plagued poor Marilyn. To put this point another way: She was not dealing with a deep, dark psychological issue here; she was dealing with a morally neutral medical problem.

So it goes with Churchwell, chipping away at overheated myth, offering realistic alternatives to spiraling fantasies. I do not wish to deny, and neither does Churchwell, that Marilyn Monroe was a difficult case. Her ambition surely exceeded her talent: Her street smarts did not include the subtle intelligence required to manage for very long a career at the level to which her looks and her luck brought her by 1955. She was careless in the men she loved and in the people she trusted with significant aspects of her professional and personal life.

In short, she never fully grasped her destabilizing destiny. It accounts for so much in her life that went wrong -- her chronic lateness on the set, her inability to remember lines, her growing dependence on booze and pills, her disastrous ventures into the study of “serious” acting (which threatened to dull her natural gift for comic vulnerability) and, above all, the swings in mood from tigress to kitten. She was, at her life’s end, in confused retreat from the image she had helped create but could no longer control.

But Churchwell argues that Monroe was not yet at the end of her rope. She was in the process of making peace with the studio that had fired her from her latest picture. It is possible to imagine that she was also attempting to assert her best interests in the romantic aspects of her life. It is impossible to imagine that, as some have stated, she killed herself because she was alone and dateless on a Saturday night. It’s more likely that a woman who was always careless about ingesting medications inadvertently overdosed -- forget all the men in black some scriveners imagine lurking in the Brentwood bushes.

Churchwell persuasively leans toward that simple explanation of Monroe’s end. But, of course, it is a narrative bummer. What’s the point of investing this life with so much symbolic and cautionary weight only to conclude it with a stupid accident? Poor Marilyn. In life, she never fully possessed herself, her fate. In death, it is even worse, for biography is one of the ways strangers impose themselves, their lunatic ideas and agendas, on the defenseless -- though possibly grateful -- dead. Sarah Churchwell’s humane and skeptical book is a first repayment on the debt we owe to the real, often quite engaging woman who, as the author puts it, wore her heart on her sleeve and talked salty. *