Marilyn: A Biography Read Free Page B

then veteran of
numerous foster homes, it is obvious she was looking for a sense of
self-importance, but we may as well assume something more
extravagant: the demand upon a biographer is to explain why she is
exceptional. So, in that part of her adolescent mind where fantasy
washes reality as the ego begins to emerge, it is possible she is
already (like Richard Nixon) searching for an imperial sense of
self-justification. Illegitimate she might be, but still selected
for a high destiny — Clark Gable was her secret father. That she
would yet come to know Gable while making The Misfits (know
him toward the end of her life down in the infernal wastes of that
psychic state where the brimstone of insomnia and barbiturates is
boiled, her marriage to Miller already lost, her lateness a disease
more debilitating than palsy), what portents she must have sensed
playing love scenes at last with the secret father, what a
cacophony of cries in the silence of her head when Gable was dead
eleven days after finishing the film. But then omens surrounded her
like the relatives she never had at a family dinner. If her
footprints fit Valentino’s about the time she became a star, so too
was a bowl of tomato sauce dropped on her groom’s white jacket the
day of her first wedding, and down she was turned, down a hall with
no exit in City Hall in San Francisco just before she married Joe
DiMaggio, little fish of intimation too small for a biographer to
fry, but remembered perhaps when a woman reporter was killed
chasing after her in a sports car the day she was getting married
to Miller. (And Marilyn was having her period that day.) What a
vision of blood! — a woman smashed and dead on the day she is
joining herself to the one man she may be convinced she does love.
It is not sedative for a young woman whose sense of her own sanity
can never be secure: she has no roots but illegitimacy on one side
and a full pedigree of insanity on the other. Her grandfather
Monroe (who would naturally claim to be descended from President
Monroe) had spent the last part of his life committed to a state
asylum. Monroe’s wife, Marilyn’s grandmother, Della Monroe
Grainger, a beauty with red hair and green-blue eyes, had insane
rages on quiet suburban semi-slum streets in environs of Los
Angeles like Hawthorne, and was also committed to a mental hospital
before she died. So was Marilyn’s mother in an asylum for most of
Marilyn’s life. And the brother of the mother killed himself. When
the wings of insanity beat thus near, one pays attention to a
feather. The most casual coincidence is obliged to seem another
warning from the deep. So must it have been like opening the door
to a secret room (and finding that it looks exactly as envisioned)
to know that the director of her first starring movie Don’t
Bother to Knock (about a girl who was mad), should have the
name of Baker.
    Still, these reinforced roots of insanity,
and this absence of clear identity, are not only a weakness but an
intense motive to become an actor. In the logic of transcendence,
every weakness presupposes the possibility of a future strength.
Great actors usually discover they have a talent by first searching
in desperation for an identity. It is no ordinary identity that
will suit them, and no ordinary desperation can drive them. The
force that propels a great actor in his youth is insane ambition.
Illegitimacy and insanity are the godparents of the great actor. A
child who is missing either parent is a study in the search for
identity and quickly becomes a candidate for actor (since the most
creative way to discover a new and possible identity is through the
close fit of a role). But then the origins of insanity can also be
glimpsed in wild and unmanageable ambition. While the appearance of
insanity is not ever simple, and two insane people are rarely alike
(except when in depression), still the root of insanity is easier
to locate than sanity, for it is frustrated ambition, no