FEMINIST HISTORIAN and scholar Lois Banner has spent the better part of a decade researching the life and career of Marilyn Monroe. Some of her conclusions may be surprising, but she dug deep. Her scholarly training, combined with access to previously unexplored material, allowed her to shed new light on Monroe in this fiftieth anniversary of her death at the age of 36.
I sat down with Professor Banner at her Santa Monica home to discuss her new book, Marilyn Monroe: The Passion and the Paradox (Bloomsbury Books), which promises to be as controversial as it is fascinating.
Chris Freeman: What first drew you to Marilyn Monroe?
Lois Banner: I like to write about prominent women. They reflect society in important ways. She seemed to me a natural after I had written about some powerful political figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict.
CF: As a movie fan, you had never really taken Marilyn seriously before.
LB: Not at all. I knew that I had grown up near her and that we had participated in similar worlds growing up in Los Angeles. The more I got involved, the more interesting the research became. Marilyn turned out to be the most complex person I’ve ever worked on. She did lead a serious, mysterious life.
CF: Was there a moment when you realized you had something new to say about Marilyn?
LB: The big moment came when I was given access to the papers of Ralph Roberts. He was her best friend and her masseur. Everyone I interviewed said that he knew more about her than anyone else. His family gave me access to his papers—all of it unpublished. I read a memoir he wrote, and at that point I knew I had a new interpretation of Marilyn.
CF: If he was her masseur, that is an intimate relationship, so she obviously trusted him.
LB: Completely. He was probably gay, and Marilyn was close to many gay men. She and Clifton Webb were very good friends. He loved her wit. Many women like her had close gay friends, men who did not pursue them sexually but whose friendship they valued.
CF: You also went back to sources that have been ignored by previous biographers.
LB: Yes. I used, for example, Arthur Miller’s memoir Timebends. It’s amazing how little attention Marilyn’s biographers have paid to that book. It’s filled with material about their relationship. I realized why he loved her from that book. Also, a British journalist named W. J. Weatherby did a long series of interviews with Marilyn. There is amazing material in those conversations, and no one has used it extensively. In my work, I try to pay attention to nuance. We all have good and bad sides; we all have flaws. I try to fill in the context of someone’s life in that complexity.
CF: You also had to deal with her ambition.
LB: Almost everyone who knew Marilyn said they had never known anyone with ambition like hers. It was the ambition that brought her to the top. She understood that, but she had to learn how to become a great actress. Yet her brilliance is not recognized. What she had was a radiant ability to attract people. That was her “it” factor. Garbo had it, Dietrich had it—that mesmeric ability to attract people. That was her great gift, but she couldn’t act. She was a total failure in high school as an actor—she had a bad stutter; she was dyslexic. These were huge challenges to overcome. →
CF: How did she improve her skills?
LB: She studied acting, singing, and movement with some of the best teachers in Hollywood and New York for many years. She learned how to bring out the characters from within her. She had many selves, and she could turn them on and off. The major one was “Marilyn Monroe.” Her friends tell stories of walking down the street with her and she’d say, “I’m going to show you her now.” She’d shake her head and “Marilyn Monroe” would show up. She used those aspects of herself in her acting. She told Weatherby, “I can be many people. I can always figure out what the person I’m with wants, and I become that person.” That’s how she worked, too.
CF: Marilyn was in therapy for a long time. What did you find out about that?
LB: There is some information that she was seeing therapists very early in her career—they were basically all Freudian. I am not convinced that they were equipped to handle the issues she suffered from. Some people believe that therapy kept her going, but others think it harmed her. She had forgotten some of her very troubled childhood, and some of the work was about bringing those memories out. I have a lot of information on her work with Ralph Greenson, one of the most prominent psychiatrists on the West Coast. She also worked with Anna Freud briefly in London, and I have information about that too.
CF: Some of this was crisis management.
LB: Yes, especially with Anna Freud, who believed Marilyn was bisexual and who thought that Marilyn was trying to seduce her. Marilyn was sexually abused as a child, twice by men and once by a woman. The Freudian emphasis on the mother and father complexes might not have been very helpful for Marilyn. I used letters that Ralph Greenson wrote. I found that Marilyn’s lesbian inclinations were part of the therapy. Greenson insisted that trying to help Marilyn come to terms with her lesbianism was central. He subscribed to Sigmund Freud’s ideas that we are bisexual at birth—and of course Kinsey had repopularized that view. Greenson believed that this was normal, so he was not an alarmist about it.
CF: Where are we in Marilyn’s life when she was working with Greenson?
LB: In 1959. She was in L.A. working on a film called Let’s Make Love. She broke down, and Dr. [of psychiatry Marianne]Kris, her New York analyst, recommended Greenson. There was a fair amount of transference in their relationship. He was a powerful man, but Marilyn masterfully gained a lot of control over him. Also, she was taking a lot of pills in those days. She was addicted, though she could occasionally stop. She was taking drugs for the pain of endometriosis as well as uppers and downers to control her manic depression—amphetamines, Phenobarbital. Later, Greenson claimed she had conquered her drug problem—he was seeing her for two months for about four hours a day. If she fooled him, she must have been a great actress.
CF: There were always rumors about Marilyn’s sex life, with women and with men. What have you found and how have you interpreted those stories?
LB: I believe she felt that she was a lesbian—and that it really bothered her. It is very complicated with her. She knew she was the world’s greatest heterosexual icon, and yet she desired women. At one point, she told a friend that because she was a lesbian, she was being punished by not being able to have a child. This comes from her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Obviously, she desired men, but she was very conflicted. In 1953 and 1954, she dictated an autobiography to the screenwriter Ben Hecht, which was published as My Story in 1974. Most people have dismissed that book as phony. My research shows that, in fact, it is an authentic document. I found notes from his conversations with Marilyn, a manuscript. In it, she says that in high school boys wanted her, but she was not attracted to them. She was drawn more to women.
CF: Her long connection with Natasha Lytess, her acting coach, has been seen as potentially lesbian, but most Marilyn biographers have not said that it was a physical relationship.
LB: An interview with Natasha was published in London the month Marilyn died. She talks, in detail, about her sexual relationship with Marilyn. At first, I didn’t trust the material, but then I found many letters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library which, for me, authenticated it. A press agent in London helped Natasha get $25,000 to publish the interview. This is very convincing documentation of their six-year relationship. Marilyn was terrified that she was going to be exposed, which would destroy her career. One reason she married Joe DiMaggio was to take the focus off the rumors about her relationship with Natasha.
CF: Scotty Bowers has recently published his tell-all Full Service about this kind of secret sexual life in Hollywood. Marilyn doesn’t appear in that book, but she clearly was part of that world.
LB: Marilyn was in the middle of that world. Producer Sam Spiegel ran a sort of upscale brothel—she was part of it. Talent agent Charles Feldman was a regular there, and he conducted his own sex parties. She met both John Kennedy and Arthur Miller at Feldman’s. In later years, Peter Lawford brought Marilyn to sex parties at his beach house, at which John and Robert Kennedy were present. I found an amazing book from 1950 called
Hollywood: The Dream Factory, by an esteemed anthropologist named Hortense
Powdermaker. She argues that sex fueled
Hollywood.
CF: By the early 60’s, Marilyn’s life was a real mess.
LB: Yes, when her marriage with Arthur Miller fell apart, she took it very hard. That’s when she got more deeply involved with the Kennedys. By 1961, she was also involved with Frank Sinatra. She was bicoastal in those days. Her financial life was a mess; her lawyer was embezzling from her.
CF: What about the Kennedys—and the end of her life?
LB: The Kennedys were outrageous. They were sexually aggressive. Marilyn thought one of the Kennedys would marry her. The “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” moment is when Marilyn went too far—Jack Kennedy dropped her after that. But she preferred Bobby anyway. Two different sources who don’t know each other told me that she had sex with Bobby in her dressing room before she sang that song to JFK. I’m amazed at how the Kennedys have kept so much of this quiet.
CF: Did they have her killed? What do you think happened?
LB: I have a couple of ideas. The Kennedys may have formed an alliance with J. Edgar Hoover, who hated Marilyn because she had allegedly converted to Communism. Or perhaps the Mafia were the ones who killed her, trying to frame Bobby Kennedy for it. I had a long interview with Phyllis McGuire, the mobster Sam Giancana’s girlfriend, who tried to convince me that he had nothing to do with Marilyn’s death. I am skeptical about her story. Giancana hated the Kennedys because Bobby tried to destroy him. It’s also possible that it was suicide. There’s another narrative going on—the tabloids had the lesbian story. I found a document in her agent’s files where she is clearly worried that the story was going to come out. She felt betrayed by Natasha.
CF: What do you hope people will understand about Marilyn after reading your book?
LB: I want people to understand her genius, her complexity. I want people to see that she had to deal with all the contradictions of modern women and that she dealt with the tensions between hetero- and homosexuality, which she never successfully resolved. Marilyn made herself into the greatest icon of the 20th century. Also, the fact that she talked openly about the sexual abuse she suffered was very much ahead of her time. She was not a “dumb blonde”—she operated on the edge of comedy and tragedy. She made herself into a sexual icon to get to the top—that was the only way she saw that would work. And it did.
Chris Freeman teaches English and gender studies at USC in Los Angeles.
