Thrilled with Guilt

Despite the grandeur of its funereal appetites, Hollywood is always graceless and uneasy inside its mourning clothes. Its undertakers are suntanned. Its dead lie listening to Muzak in poets' nooks. Its grief requires CinemaScope--so big, so awful, so thrilled with guilt. When Marilyn Monroe was buried last week in Los Angeles, Hollywood's heavy embrace was forcefully restrained, but there was little mercy in its absence. Here and there, film stars nudged past the line of true mourners to bear their terrible tributes into print. At the mortuary, Marilyn's coiffeur set her bone-white hair in the Marienbad manner while her studio makeup man (another somber volunteer) worked over her. In the words of one mourner, they made her look "like a child in slumber."

The Glory of Blame. Away from her small circle, taste ran to still deeper reaches of the macabre. Newspapers approached the frontiers of necrophilia with old cheesecake photos of her, then turned sly cameras to the inside of her coffin, the shambles of her home, the sad wealth of her sleeping-pill collection. Using a hidden camera, one photographer stole a shot of her toes as she was placed in a steel drawer at the morgue. Reporters took grave delight in noting that her temporary address was Crypt 33, where a cold description of "the fabulous figure" could be read on tags tied to her toes.

Eager as the world's press was to help Hollywood to the glory of blame ("Sodom!" cried Liberation from Paris), it could not match Hollywood's own enthusiasm for its role as the guilty one.

Grips and bit-players who a month ago talked of taking ads in the Hollywood Reporter to scold Marilyn for costing them their jobs in Something's Got to Give suddenly realized that the something was Marilyn. They joined bigger stars and gossip columnists in an orgy of self-incrimination--a morbid way of boasting that to have helped kill her was, after all, proof of having known her intimately. "In a way we're all guilty," Hedda Hopper concluded. "We built her up to the skies, we loved her, but left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most."

The Price of the Image. But guilt became a bitter pout when Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn's second husband once removed, arrived in town to bar Hollywood from the funeral. His quiet, classic plea for privacy extended even to Mrs. Pat Lawford, sister of President Kennedy and one of Marilyn's last close friends. When Marilyn's attorney complained that DiMaggio was keeping all her friends away, DiMaggio coldly answered: "If it weren't for those friends, she would still be alive." Only Peter Lawford publicly complained ("I'm shocked"), but Marilyn's movie friends, smarting from exclusion, made their voices heard in the mounting chorus of vague epitaphs.

Their apologies only masked a darker, more important failure--the cloying, pervasive inability to understand her--or any other complicated soul--the lie of grabbing belated responsibility where none had ever existed. Marilyn was never more than Hollywood's plaything, when she might have been its lesson and its guide. What things she had to say were never heard because her voice was a dog whistle in a town accustomed to brass bands. Her misery was less the price of living up to an image too big for her than living down the reflections of her own abysmal past and her inability to share the lessons it taught her. In a sense, Marilyn Monroe never existed, as Lee Strasberg, her drama coach, noted in his eulogy: "I have no words to describe the myth and the legend. I did not know this Marilyn Monroe."

Merciful Silence. Under DiMaggio's hand, the funeral was sober, orderly and brief. But even burial did not bring the long wake to an end. The temptation of mystery was too strong to ignore, and gossipists busied themselves with its narrow questions. Mexican Film Writer Jose Bolanos was suggested as Marilyn's tragic Lothario, and a friend in Mexico City announced breathlessly that Marilyn and he had intended to marry in September. Writers even troubled themselves with the identity of the anonymous mourner who sent $50 worth of roses to the funeral--together with a love sonnet from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Marilyn's troubled financial state was suggested as meaningful: apart from her $77,500 house, which carried a $35,000 mortgage, her property consisted of some $4,000 in cash plus clothing, furs and jewelry. For the past two years she had restricted herself to $20 a week pocket money.

Some kept mercifully silent. Joe DiMaggio was one. Arthur Miller, her last husband and only interpreter, said simply: "She could have made it with a little luck." He could not believe her death was suicide. She had, he once said, "the gift of life"--a classic pantheism. "Please Don't Kill Anything" was his title for a short story he once wrote about her and the litany he had her speak in The Misfits. Her gift, he had said, was a response "to the most elemental part of the human being near her, his propensity for hurting or helping, and he is immediately stimulated by the fact that he is really being looked at." On the screen, her genius for humanity was transparent yet obscure; at the funeral, Strasberg called it "wistfulness, radiance and yearning."

The Unique Force. Yet the final mood of Marilyn Monroe is embarrassment. First taken by the world only as a vapid comedienne, she strove to become both an actress and an intellectual, and in death somehow became something more. As the London Daily Mail noted, her death has "impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." The arid, senseless argument that follows it--suicide or accident?--only heightens the general shame in a quibble over whether a token of death amounts to death itself. To say that she died while trying to live (the hand on the telephone) only avoids the issue of her unhappiness, turning despair into a mechanical event measured in milligrams of sleeping potion.

Marilyn Monroe's unique charisma was the force that caused distant men to think that if only a well-intentioned, understanding person like me could have known her, she would have been all right. In death, it has caused women who before resented her frolicsome sexuality to join in the unspoken plea she leaves behind--the simple, noble wish to be taken seriously and soulfully. It had also caused a desperate Turk to slash his wrists after seeing How To Marry a Millionaire, caused lonely men to offer her marriage proposals a dozen times a week for the past ten years, caused doleful girls to attempt the impossible in pathetic imitations of her. Just as her life kept hopeless plans alive, her death was the trigger of suicides in half a dozen cities. Vague, troubled, shy, unsure of her beauty, unsure of her sex, she was honest, frightened, weak and baffled. All the same she was a star; it hardly matters that she never quite became an actress.

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