Marilyn Monroe: A User's Manual

"Why," she asked me in 1955, "do they print things about me that aren't true?"

Marilyn Monroe was only a superstar then, not yet a legend who, almost half a century after death, is now on the cover of Vanity Fair. Three films about her are in the works, and a journalist just came from France to interview me about the week I spent reporting on her in New York.

Back then, I answered Marilyn's question: “Because pictures of you sell papers and magazines, and when there’s no excuse for running them, they’ll print rumors, gossip, anything they can get.” Something pushed me to go further. “They’re not trying to hurt you, just use you.”

Marilyn looked at me with a flinching smile that said she knew all about being used, and I recalled a story about her as a starlet: When a studio executive had sent for her to show a magazine publisher her breasts and lifted her sweater, she had never stopped smiling.

Now, in the era of Lindsay Lohan et al, Marilyn is still being used to sell books, magazines and movies, but the use was always mutual.

"She was smart enough," Maureen Dowd writes, "to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book...Men who were nervous about her erotic intensity could feel superior by making fun of her intellectually."

That week in 1955, she was at the Actors Studio to study for parts like Grushenka in “The Brothers Karamazov.” The papers dug out cliches about comedians who want to play Hamlet, underlining their ridicule with photos from “The Seven Year Itch,” Marilyn on a subway grate, an updraft billowing a white dress over her hips.

When she married Arthur Miller, a headline read "Egghead Weds Hourglass," but a few years later, after he had publicly described her as an "Earth Mother," she was devastated to discover a diary entry by Miller complaining she embarrassed him in front of his friends.

Miller used her more than anyone else. As their marriage was falling apart, he wrote "The Misfits," a movie that exploited Marilyn's psychic fragility, and after her death, wrote "After the Fall," a play that portrayed her as a shrill harridan.

In her 36 years, Marilyn Monroe lived in a world where people (including those like me) use one another ruthlessly, but there was one exception--Joe DiMaggio.

Even after their divorce, DiMaggio was always there to take care of her when she was in distress and, after her death, kept the funeral private and sent flowers to her grave three times a week. And never said a word about her publicly.

Whether she was aware of it or not, Marilyn Monroe had known true love.

Viagra Pajama Party

At 83, Hugh Hefner in his Mansion is looking more like the faded silent-movie star of "Sunset Boulevard" than the host of the most swinging venue of the past century.

As a one-time draftee to be his successor as editor of Playboy 40 years ago, I'm bemused to see him, still in his trademark pajamas, popping Viagra and putting on a brave front even as the culture passes him by.

"This is one of the very best times of my life," he tells a New York Times reporter, whose reaction is "You want to believe him, but it is hard to ignore the realities of his business. Playboy Enterprises, hobbled by a shifting media landscape, is in need of heart paddles. On Tuesday, the magazine said it would cut the circulation numbers it guarantees to advertisers to 1.5 million, from 2.6 million. The company has lost money for seven quarters in a row."

In an era when nakedness is all over cable TV, Hef's Playmates and Bunnies are as retro as corsets and girdles, but the man who built an empire on daring to publish Marilyn Monroe's nude pictures in 1953 is in as much denial as the Gloria Swanson character in "Sunset Boulevard," waiting for Mr. DeMille to film the next closeup.

Nonetheless, with "three live-in girlfriends--each young enough to be his great-granddaughter," Hef is ready to go out in style as the crypt he bought next to Marilyn in a Los Angeles cemetery waits for him.

If there is an afterlife, it would be fascinating to overhear their conversations as she has "nothing on but the radio."

Palin's Year as a Publicity Saint

When John McCain chose her as his running mate, she was virtually unknown. Now, twelve months later, Sarah Palin is sifting through more than 1070 invitations for paid appearances and speeches as well as a file her lawyer describes as an inch and a half thick folder of offers for "network and pundit gigs, documentaries and business opportunities."

This makes her one of the 21st century's first publicity saints, a status I once explained to Marilyn Monroe.

"Why," she had asked, "do they print things about me that aren't true?"

"Because," I told her, "your name and pictures of you sell newspapers and magazines and, if there isn't any news, they'll use rumors and gossip, any excuse to print them."

In this era of disposable celebrities, many have been called to media sanctity, but only a few, most notably Barack Obama and the recently departed Michael Jackson, have been chosen. Palin's uniqueness is in achieving it with no visible talent as a politician or entertainer beyond her twinkly shamelessness.

Yet it would be rash to minimize this superstar quality, which can override all other considerations (i.e., Marilyn's meager achievement as an actress as well as the Palin wrecking of McCain's campaign) and keep the public endlessly enthralled.

Even the former Alaska governor's political obituary may be premature. Next month she will be making her first post-resignation speech at a Hong Kong conference of international global investment managers, following such previously enlightening lecturers--"notable luminaries who often address topics that go beyond traditional finance such as geopolitics"--as Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Alan Greenspan.

This will be followed by publication of her book next spring with what is sure to be a tumultuous media tour.

Meanwhile, Palin keeps the publicity pot stirring with her Facebook page, injecting herself into the debate on health care reform with a perky fact-free post on death panels for the aged and disabled and who-knows-what future political gems.

In his landmark book 1962 book, "The Image," historian Daniel Boorstin documented the coming of celebrities "well-known for their well-knowness."

More recently, another sage, Mel Brooks' Max Bialystock of "The Producers," put Palin's fame into more modern perspective, "When you got it, baby, flaunt it!"

Publicity sainthood is a self-fulfilling prophecy, so Palin haters will just have to grit their teeth for a long haul.

Being Depressed

The cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine in jangled hand-printing reads "I have sat in shrinks' offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover." These words surround a small dark snapshot of a woman's face looking at the camera in utter despair.

I know that face, just as I know something about the feeling those words describe. A quarter of a century ago, the writer, Daphne Merkin, fresh out of college, worked for me at McCalls, a gifted young woman, more serious than most but glowing with ambition for the literary career that stretched ahead of her.

Now, in painful detail, she tells of a life since then in a black cloud of chronic depression punctuated by constant psychiatry and mounds of medication, ending in a hospital stay anguishing over whether or not to submit to ECT, electro-shock therapy.

Her thousands of words evoke the extreme of a condition I have lived with since childhood, suffered with in loved ones and anguished over with friends and colleagues. Her account will resonate with the afflicted and baffle those lucky enough to find it exotic, perhaps even self-indulgent.

Yet it is at the heart of modern life, as painful, debilitating and destructive as cancer. Psychiatry and pharmacology almost randomly seem to help some victims but fail those who are most directly connected to life and most vulnerable, as I once wrote about Marilyn Monroe and my best friend, the photographer Ed Feingersh, both of whom died in their thirties, unable to keep living with it.

Like them, Daphne Merkin seems to have suffered from that gift and used it to connect with other human beings as a writer, perhaps never more so than in this account of her struggles.

Even those who can't understand what she is going through may find something of themselves in her and wish her well for the future.

A DiMaggio in the Age of Ramirez

His brother's death this weekend, coming right after the suspension of Manny Ramirez for drug use, recalls Joe DiMaggio as an American hero in a different century and a different world.

Dom, who died at 92, was one of three sons of an Italian immigrant fisherman to become major league baseball players and, like Joe, an All-Star. Family fame notwithstanding, after Pearl Harbor, the elder DiMaggios had to register as enemy aliens, were not allowed to travel more than five miles from home and had their fishing boat seized by the government.

In 1949, as the dominant figure in the game, Joe was the first to earn $100,000 in a time when players were indentured to their teams by law.

Now, in the era of free agency, Manny Ramirez will forfeit $7 million of his $25 million annual salary in a 50-game suspension for failing a drug test, a loss that far exceeds the total earnings of all the DiMaggios in their careers, adjusted for inflation any way you like.

But much more than money and drug use have changed. After he leaves the game, no one will be writing songs about Ramirez as Simon and Garfunkel did with "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

A few years after his retirement, I saw up close the mythic figure Joe DiMaggio had become. In a small gathering of friends, he was like a matador with an adoring entourage, saying little and smiling shyly.

A pair of middle-aged businessmen were brought in to shake hands and, posing for a Polaroid with DiMaggio's arms draped around them, years fell from their faces as they were boys again in the embrace of their idol.

Joe married Marilyn Monroe and, even after their divorce and her death, was sending flowers to her grave. In today's world, Alex Rodriguez has a brief affair with Marilyn wannabe Madonna that breaks up his marriage.

Years from now, A-Rod and Ramirez will still be rich and famous, but it's not likely that anyone will be writing songs about them.

Kennedy Scandal, Low-Rent Version

He won't be running for VP again, he won't even attend the Democratic convention, but John Edwards is still in the news with reports of a Virgin Island vacation by private jet for Rielle Hunter and her baby as well as rumblings of contributor unhappiness about the $100,000-plus of campaign funds paid her to videograph their time together.

In every scandal, there are haunting questions about motives, about what prompts people to risk humiliation and invite disaster by their choices.

In the Edwards debacle, it's easy to accept his own explanation of ego and hubris, even while doubting his sanitized confession, but what teases the imagination is why the woman involved, Rielle Hunter, would go ahead and have a baby when not doing so might have kept the affair from becoming public.

A provocative clue comes from, of all places, the ESPN website by a lawyer-sports journalist who ties Ms. Hunter, nee Lisa Druck, to a decades-old criminal case in which prominent Florida "sportsmen" conspired to kill thoroughbred horses to collect on insurance.

One of them, Lester Munson reports, was the young woman's late father who arranged to have a show horse she owned and jockeyed electrocuted to cash in on a $150,000 policy rather than accept $25,000 less by selling the animal.

From this seamy background, the self-created Rielle Hunter went on to a notorious career on the Manhattan party scene, immortalized by the novelist Jay McInerney in a roman a clef as, in his words, a "cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa."

The fount of wisdom on the Edwards affair, the National Enquirer, now reports that "Hunter's own lawyer advised her to allow Edwards to take a paternity test but she refused out of misguided belief that Edwards will marry her after the death of his cancer-stricken wife."

There are echoes here, on a far tackier level, of Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. One of her last visitors the day she died was Peter Lawford, JFK's Hollywood brother-in-law, in an attempt to disentangle Marilyn from Robert Kennedy, reflecting a disordered state of mind that had led to hope there could be a future for her with a prominent married Catholic politician who was then the father of seven.

The Edwards parallel suggests that, even in the 21st century, marrying up is still a fantasy of redemption from a rotten childhood.

Paddy Chayevsky for Beginners

His name is on a Broadway marquee again this month with a musical version of "The Catered Affair," one of his lesser works, but having Paddy Chayevsky back in any form is good for our culture.

In the second half of the 20th century, he almost single-handedly invented TV drama, then went on to theater and movies, winning three Academy Awards and leaving behind classics like "Network" and "The Hospital" that tell us more about what went wrong with American media and medicine than the history books do.

On our high-school paper, I had taken over a column from Paddy nee Sidney. We were part of a generation coming of age between wars who hoped we could earn our way in the world with our brains rather than backs, as our immigrant parents were doing. We went on to a free college education at City College of New York and then into the Army, where Sidney was rechristened Paddy.

In the 1950s, he mined our lives for “kitchen sink” dramas: “Marty,” “The Bachelor Party,” “Middle of the Night.” From there, he moved on to the confusions of the larger society with savage satires, not only about TV and doctoring but wartime heroism in “The Americanization of Emily.”

But praise was not universal. At one of our occasional lunches, Paddy's characteristic wry smile was a grimace. His movie, "The Goddess," based loosely and respectfully on the life of Marilyn Monroe, had just come out to good reviews. The screenplay would soon be nominated for an Academy Award.

"Got a call from Arthur Miller this morning," he sighed heavily," and he said 'I want to tell you that what you've done is despicable.'" Years later, I would recall Paddy's pain as I sat through "After the Fall," Miller's nasty portrayal of Marilyn after her death.

Now, Paddy Chayevsky is best remembered for "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more," the mantra of the crazed anchorman in "Network."

A few years after the movie came out, I was in the grill of the Four Seasons, a clubby gathering place for media moguls and their hirelings, having lunch with a literary agent as Paddy passed by and said hello on his way to the next table to be introduced to William Paley, founder of CBS, avatar of the TV executives in the movie who exploit a madman for ratings and then, when they fall, have him killed on camera.

“I must admit,” we overheard Paddy telling Paley, “I’m nervous about meeting you.”

The agent leaned toward my ear. “He should be. They showed ‘Network’ on CBS the other night, and it got lousy ratings.”

Now new generations can discover Paddy Chayevsky's work on videos and Turner Classic Movies. Start with "Emily," "Network" and "The Hospital," and work back to "Marty" in the 1950s. The trip is worth taking.

Teaching Tony Curtis to Be Suave

At 82, he's still a star but not in the grand style, which never did fit Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, as he goes down memory lane for the Guardian:

"He's rounder in the face than he was, his once-magnificent hair is now a pale white fuzz and he's a little more rotund than you'd expect, but once you get him rolling, he's all bada-bing, whatcha lookin' at me for! He's still a kid in all the best ways, and glimpses of the star of masterpieces such as Sweet Smell of Success and Some Like It Hot are still readily available."

In "Some Like It Hot," Tony Curtis did a Cary Grant impression to woo Marilyn Monroe. The year before, in 1958, I had given him a little lesson in how to be suave.

As the new editor of Redbook, I had met his then-wife Janet Leigh, who was not happy with a cover story about Tony we had just run under the title, "I Grew Up Stealing." But she relented to the point of an invitation to visit them on a trip to Hollywood the following month.

My wife, new baby and I arrived at their Beverly Hills mansion with a circular driveway full of antique cars. Inside, we met the children, a sweet little girl named Kelly and a baby sister, Jamie Lee. As Janet took my wife on a tour of the house, Tony took me aside.

He gave me an abashed Bernie Schwartz smile and admitted he didn't know to make the martini my wife had asked for. I gave him a demonstration of the fine art of handling gin, vermouth and lemon peel, a social skill he would put to good use in the following decades as an international movie star.

Being handsome, he tells his Guardian interviewer, took him out of Depression poverty into the good life. But along the way, he learned a thing or two about acting and enough about paintings to impress the Museum of Modern Art. Those Bronx kids knew how to make the most of their opportunities.

Mischanneling Marilyn

Between them, Lindsay Lohan (21) and Bert Stern (79) have inhabited planet Earth for a century, but all those years have not produced an iota of the good judgment it would have taken for them not to recreate "Marilyn Monroe's Last Sitting" for New York Magazine this week.

Grave-robbing is rife in the celebrity world, but the desperation of a troubled young woman and an aging once-talented photographer plumbs new depths of exploitation. Lohan has none of Marilyn's magic, and Stern is parodying the artist he was 46 years ago.

My revulsion is not objective. As someone who spent a week in 1955 working with Marilyn and the gifted Ed Feingersh, both of whom died in their thirties, as he created classic photographs of her, I am prejudiced in the extreme.

But for anyone who wants to get a sense of what Marilyn Monroe was really like, there is the YouTube presentation of some of Feingersh's pictures here and, for the truly patient, the story of how they were taken here.

Marilyn was no Lindsay Lohan.

A Wedding Anniversary

One of those "This Day in History" items recalls that Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married on January 14, 1954 and brings back a flood of memories.

I met DiMaggio soon after their divorce the next year, when Marilyn came to New York and Joe, still in love with her as he would always be, confided how happy he was that she was getting away from "that Hollywood crowd."

Five years after Marilyn’s death, the story I wanted as a magazine editor was Joe’s. He had arranged her funeral, kept it private and was still sending flowers to her grave three times a week but had not said a word about her.

He invited me to his New York suite at cocktail time and poured a drink. There were half a dozen men there, and it became clear he wanted me to sit at the edge of his circle, listening to locker—room banter, while he eyed me once in a while, freshened my drink and made up his mind about talking to me.

He was a matador surrounded by his entourage. Two men in business suits came in for a Polaroid picture. With DiMaggio’s arms draped over them, years fell from their middle-aged faces. They were boys in the embrace of their boyhood hero. It recalled Gay Talese’s Esquire piece about Joe’s honeymoon with Marilyn. She went to Korea to entertain American troops. He stayed in Japan, and when she came back, Marilyn told him about her reception by 100,000 servicemen: “Joe, you never heard such cheering.” “Yes, I have,” he said.

The evening ground on, the friends chattered, Joe said little. Finally I asked, “Could we talk?“ “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Come up about ten.”

When I arrived, he was packing his bags. I talked as he kept putting shirts, socks and underwear into a suitcase. He never looked up.

I told him I didn’t want to intrude, but it was my job to ask if he would ever say anything about Marilyn. If he did, he could trust me to make sure it came out right.

He was still staring into the suitcase, but I could see his eyes clouding. His jaw muscles tightened. For a long minute, he was silent.

“I could never talk about her,” he finally said in a choked voice. “Never.”

He never did.

Mailer

He wanted to write The Great American Novel but changed the face of journalism instead. He died today at 84, leaving behind a torrent of words and an outsized public persona.

Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the printed page, he poured out opinions and indelible impressions for half a century. An early collection of essays was aptly titled, "Advertisements for Myself."

His World War II novel, "The Naked and the Dead," made him famous but he will be remembered, along with Tom Wolfe, for the New Journalism of the 1960s. Coming to it from opposite directions, Wolfe, a reporter by trade, and Mailer the novelist created something as different from traditional journalism as "Moby Dick" is from a tract on whaling.

In 1968, Harper's turned over a full issue to Mailer's account of the Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon, which later as a book titled "Armies of the Dead" won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The next year, after a beery lunch and boozy dinner with a few New Journalist friends, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York and, in a put-on campaign, drew over 40,000 votes.

A decade later, he won another Pulitzer for "The Executioner's Song," about the last year in the life of Gary Gilmore, a remorseless killer. In between and afterward, he wrote ambitious novels, feuded with Feminists, stabbed one of his wives and fathered nine children.

A contemporary of mine, he was the ultimate opposite in temperament. A year ago, on a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, I was interviewed about my experiences in working with and getting to know her in the 1950s, but much more of PBS' time was devoted to Mailer who never met her but whose fantasies had filled a book and were vividly fascinating.

He never wrote The Great American Novel, but he did change the way several generations of us see the world.

All Eyes on Idaho

Electors of the state’s Hall of Fame were prescient last spring when they chose Sen. Larry Craig to be one of this year’s new inductees.

At the ceremonies this weekend to honor his “great contribution to Idaho over the period of 20-some years,” the state should be getting more media attention than it has had for half a century since Marilyn Monroe posed for the cameras wearing an Idaho potato sack.

It’s heartening to see one of less populous states getting some national attention.

A Golden Age in Black and White

In the 1950s, we began to see the world differently. A new generation of photographers was transforming frozen posed pictures into available-light images of people and places as they really were.

Those golden days of black-and-white photography are recalled in a new web site by one of the best of them, my friend George Zimbel. A few clicks will take you to a Bourbon Street bar, an Irish dance hall, a Vermont quarry of that time.

A few more will show you the unguarded famous--Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow, Richard Nixon.

“Photographs,” Susan Sontag wrote, “alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”

Now that we are flooded with pictures, it’s good to be reminded there once was not only an aesthetic but an ethics of seeing, when everyone did not feel entitled to observe everything. What photographers who were artists did show us was well worth seeing.