Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag

Female Icons

Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag

Copyright © 2005 by Carl Rollyson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-35726-0 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-80203-6 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-35726-1 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-80203-6 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Female Icons The Biographer’s Challenge

Writing About Women

Abiding Our Question

The Replicated Life Of Marilyn Monroe

The Impact Of Marilyn Monroe On American Audiences And Contemporary Popular Culture

Marilyn: Mailer’s Novel Biography

Fiction Doubles As Fact: How To Read Marilyn And Of Women And Their Elegance

More Than A Popcorn Venus: Contemporary Women Reshape The Myth Of Marilyn Monroe

Caretaker Of A Myth; Arthur Miller’s Metaphoric Transformations Of Marilyn Monroe

The Many Lives Of Marilyn Monroe By Sarah Churchwell

Marilyn Monroe And The Idea Of Biography

Bio-Pop: The Legitimacy Of Popular Culture Biography

Susan Sontag: The Making Of A Biography Carl Rollyson Lisa Paddock

Susan Sontag: The Writer As Icon

Susan Sontag: Sui Generis

Susan Sontag Encounters And Sightings

Sontag Bloody Sontag:camille Paglia Takes Down A Popular Culture Queen

Susan Sontag Watches The Simpsons

Reviews Of Icons

The Brontes

Madame Curie

Zelda Fitzgerald

Martha Gellhorn

The Mitfords

Sylvia Plath

Mary Stuart

Harriet Tubman

Mary Wollstonecraft

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following publications have generously granted me permission to reprint the following essays: "Marilyn: Mailer’s Novel Biography" (Biography)-, More Than A Popcorn Venus: Contemporary Women Reshape the Myth of Marilyn Monroe (Journal of American Culture); The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (The New York Sun); Susan Sontag: The Making of a Biography (Biography and Source Studies). All reviews in the Reviews of Icons section were published in The New York Sun and are reprinted with permission from that publication.

I am also deeply indebted to Katharine Lee for foraging in my uncatalogued papers in the Special Collections department of McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. She found a number of items I could not otherwise locate.

INTRODUCTION

This volume represents more than twenty-five years of writing about female icons and biography. For the most part, I have not altered the original pieces, which appeared in academic journals and newspapers or were given as talks. I have, however, included updated passages in italics to serve as introductions, postscripts, and footnotes to my original papers. The footnotes in particular point to how the individual articles are related to each other.

My first biography, Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (1986), was done in the wilderness, so to speak. Although biographies of film stars were common enough, no scholar I knew had embarked on a book addressed to both a popular audience and the intelligentsia. Academics did studies of film directors, not of actors. Yet writers as various as Diana Trilling, Norman Mailer, and Edith Sitwell had all taken Monroe seriously. I wanted to know why.

The feminist agenda further complicated my work. Feminists tended to dismiss Monroe as a male fantasy and not much more. After reading Norman Mailer’s Marilyn, I could not agree. He called her Napoleonic, and she seemed to me like one of Hegel’s world historical individuals. And then after reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography, I had the intellectual underpinnings of a book I originally titled The Replicated Life of Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, I worked out the concept for the book, delivering it as a paper at the Popular Culture of the South meeting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It seemed to me that Sontag’s dazzling investigation of how photographs portray and shape human identity had to have a keen relevance to the way Monroe had constructed her own identity. The process not merely of acting but of posing, the importance of still photography and not just of motion pictures, had not yet been explored in any of the Monroe biographies.

But how to write a narrative biography and a scholarly study baffled me. In the end, I chose narrative over analysis, hoping that the implications of the narrative would convey what I mean by saying her life was a replicated one. Now, with this book, I have, in a sense, inverted my career. I lay bare the bits and pieces that resulted not only in the Monroe biography but also in much of the work I have subsequently done on Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, and Susan Sontag, and on the nature of biography itself.

Indeed this book is about the epistemology of biography, which is why I have also included a section of book reviews dealing with female icons. What I have learned in writing about icons has provoked me to question the process by which selves are defined. Discovering the shaping mechanisms of the self is simultaneously a way of understanding how biographies are built. The tension between theory and practice is most notable, I think, in pieces such as The Replicated Life of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe and the Idea of Biography, and Susan Sontag: The Making of a Biography. In the end, this book should be of interest not merely to devotees of Monroe or Sontag but to anyone curious about the nature of biography and the biographer.

I gave this talk in Honolulu on January 9, 1997 at the Pacific International Conference on Popular Culture. I had just completed my biography of Rebecca West and was embarking on a biography of Susan Sontag with my wife, Lisa Paddock.

FEMALE ICONS

FROM MARILYN MONROE TO SUSAN SONTAG

The Biographer’s Challenge

During work on my biography of Marilyn Monroe in the early 1980s, I became obsessed with a characterization pronounced by her acting teacher, Lee Strasberg: Marilyn Monroe was a dream of Marilyn Monroe. The circularity of the statement—not to mention all those mnemonic m’s—was a kind of mantra. And I found—no surprise—that even among her friends, Monroe was a kind of cult item, a sacred object. This was no mere sentimentality, for like most mythic figures, she had a strength and contradictoriness that made her particularly suitable to be an icon. Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, and Susan Sontag—the figures I have written about since that first biography—have achieved some of that same iconic power.¹ Explaining why this transformation takes place is the challenge I have set myself as a biographer.

When I speak of icons, I’m thinking of a modern, aggressive self-imaging process: a Marilyn Monroe who projects herself into the world’s consciousness. Norman Mailer was the first writer to understand what he called her Napoleonic mentality.² She was no mere victim of Hollywood exploitation, but rather an ambitious and shrewd campaigner for stardom. Mailer, himself no mean practitioner of self-promotion, realized that Monroe made up the narrative of her life as she went along, very much like his existential heroes of the late 50s and early 60s. Whereas previous biographers had presented Monroe as a passive and pathetic prey, bewildered in her last days by career disappointments and a failed love life, Mailer resurrected an angry, active actress, staging her comeback, but also brooding, self-destructive and tragic. Perhaps at the end, she realized that she had become a prisoner of her own dream, and like the Lady of Shalott,³ could find no way out of her self-imposed and—in Monroe’s case—megalomaniacal fantasy.

There is plenty of evidence to support Mailer’s interpretation. The Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, one of Monroe’s closest confidants in her early Hollywood years, insisted that no one knew more about making a Marilyn Monroe movie than Marilyn Monroe. She was the icon. The rest—the studios, directors, other actors, and the flacks—provided the perfume, or rather, the incense. Of course it seemed, especially in the 50s, to be just the opposite; that is, Monroe appeared to be surrounded and overwhelmed by the machinery of Hollywood stardom. Yet when those who thought they were in charge tried to budge her, the production shut down because Monroe shut down. When her acting coach, Natasha Lytess, tried to goad Monroe into action, Lytess was met with a hooded cobra look. Monroe had her child-like, naive side, but she used it with incredible guile. The essence of her appeal—as so many commentators have shown—was to appear to be a little girl while at the same time exuding sexual maturity and seductiveness.

Monroe as icon was self-invented. She studied herself and her replications as carefully as any artist reviewing his or her body of work.⁴ In her case, her body was her work, and she used it far more subtly than even Mailer knew how to credit. In my biography, I study her pattern of gestures—particularly in Bus Stop (1956) and The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)—to reveal an actress with genius, moving from an enactment of introversion to extroversion to a synthesis of the two that became a Marilyn Monroe apotheosis in Some Like It Hot (1959). In this culminating film, she had the perfect collaborator in Billy Wilder, who had directed her in The Seven Year Itch and knew precisely how to fuse the Monroe icon with the character he and I. A. L. Diamond had scripted. When she sings, I want to be loved by you, by you, nobody else but you, all of her innocence, passion, guile—everything that Marilyn Monroe stands for—is revealed. And it is revealed in a performance, a knowing, and articulate rendition of her iconic power. Monroe as icon evokes a sense of worship—as Audrey Flack shows in her great Marilyn paintings, a part of her Vanitas series,⁵ and as Ken Russell dramatizes in his wonderfully campy church scene in Tommy, in which a skirt-blowing statue of Monroe is accompanied by censor-swinging acolytes and cripples who have come to be healed by touching her effigy.⁶

It is difficult to see how any popular culture figure will ever surpass Marilyn Monroe as icon. But Monroe’s clutching after fame, at what Leo Braudy calls the frenzy of renown, is the very thread that has tied all of my biographies together. Although she once told biographer Jeffrey Meyers that she would get a stomachache if she had to talk about her third husband, Martha Gellhorn proceeded to talk about him for three hours. She patterned herself on the man whose work she once took as her code to live by, quoting as her motto the line from A Farewell to Arms that nothing ever happens to the brave.⁷ She used Hemingway’s breezy, manly mode of attack to demolish another one of my subjects, Lillian Hellman. Gellhorn’s Paris Review assault on Hellman’s veracity reads like the ghost of Ernest Hemingway spooking his opposition. Hellman seemed almost spoiling for a fall when she claimed to be a Hemingway confidant and posed for the fur ad with the caption, What Becomes a Legend Most?

Rebecca West, came to America in 1923 to transform herself into a literary icon. She accomplished her purpose in a way that few, if any, literary figures could achieve today. Susan Sontag came close to achieving West’s feat, but a word more about West, who is not remembered as well as she should be. If you are reading the biography of virtually any significant British or American writer—from, say, 1910 to 1980—you may find a reference to Rebecca West. The biographer will probably be quoting from one of her book reviews or reminiscences, for she was among the finest critics and raconteurs of her age—indeed of any age. Virginia Woolf once wrote to her as an admirer who actually drove 8 miles the other day to buy a copy of the Daily Telegraph in order not to miss your article. This is not an effort I am in the habit of making, but a proof of the great admiration with which I hold your work.

Because West could speak as brilliantly as she wrote, her words made the rounds in the Anglo-American literary community—a much more cohesive world than can be imagined in the midst of today’s multi-national culture. England and America served as her platform in a way not available to literary figures today. Via television, a contemporary writer reaches more people than she ever did, but not with the alternately seductive and astringent prose of a brilliant mind working at the top of her form as a journalist and biographer, possessed of a flamboyant imagination that made her a formidable novelist as well. The entry on her in the Columbia Encyclopedia contains the succinct verdict: one of the finest writers of prose in 20 th century Britain.

In 1923, West was on the verge of greatness, having produced a fine war novel, The Return of the Soldier, and some of her best critical essays. She had just turned thirty and was escaping her involvement with H. G. Wells (himself an icon of his age) and fretting over her relationship with their illegitimate young son, Anthony West.

West’s trip to America seems to have been the dividing point in her life with Anthony. As far as he was concerned, she returned home a different person. She had become a celebrity and was turning her whole life into a performance. Anthony felt estranged, watching his mother consort with well groomed, expensively dressed people, who had not intruded on their early days. Now they were received as though they held the key to life.

West kept a scrapbook of the enormous press she received between 1923 and 1929, reports of her lectures and interviews in American and British newspapers, some of which Anthony saw and mentioned in his letters to her from school. She subscribed to a clipping service that sent her hundreds of items. On a single day (6 May 1925), for example, there were articles in three newspapers headlined: Lady Novelist’s Attack on Mr Churchill, Lady Novelist on Man’s Failure, and Miss Rebecca West Opposes Duff Cooper. Radio Times called her Bernard Shaw in Skirts! announcing a radio interview with the most brilliant literary critic of her sex now before the public. She is also one of the most scintillating conversationalists of our time. Many of these newspaper articles contained flattering photographs of her, and for Anthony they had the affect of taking her away from him.

After West returned home in the spring of 1924, Anthony gave her a good looking over. He snuck glimpses of her standing in front of a mirror appraising herself carefully. She inhaled, raised her chin and dropped her shoulders slightly, straightening her back. These subtle adjustments seemed to lengthen her neck and arms. She had achieved the pose he had studied in her photographs. When he protested this transformation, she replied, It’s just a game…It’s all such fun, being a success, becoming a new person, being worshiped. But she reassured him: The game of being Somebody is to do with my career—it won’t change anything between us. But the game troubled Anthony. He wanted it to stop so that they could start living as we really are. He wanted to whisper the "forbidden words, Mother, Mamma, Mummy into her ear. But he did not, realizing that the word mother would evoke her dark, complicated, unhappy past, and she would become inexplicably uneasy and evasive."

Rebecca West was a dream of Rebecca West. Like Marilyn Monroe she was not born with the name by which the world knew her. She took her name from the character Rebecca West in Ibsen’s play, Rosmersholm. Neither was Susan Sontag born Susan Sontag; she was, rather, Susan Rosenblatt. She took the name of her stepfather (a man she despised) when her mother remarried, surely grasping the virtues of euphony. Susan was only twelve at the time, but it is clear that this precocious pre-adolescent, who started formal schooling in the third grade at the age of six, dreamed of a career as a writer, steeping herself in Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, Jack London and Herman Melville before she graduated high school at age fifteen.

Sontag admitted that she thought of herself as a self-invented person and that she admired like-minded literary figures. Like Gellhorn, she has modeled her life on mottoes borrowed from books. Virtually no move in Sontag’s life has been made without her making the finest of calculations about her image. No one who has read her can doubt her obsession with the photographed image, and that includes, of course, images of herself: the carefully designed book jackets which read like a chart of her evolving career. She burst upon the New York scene as the next dark lady of American letters—to use Norman Podhoretz’s memorable phrase for Sontag. She was the next Mary McCarthy. Even the acerbic McCarthy said so: So you’re the next me, she remarked to Sontag.

Sontag’s lover Annie Leibovitz is famous for her celebrity photographs. Sontag also befriended Robert Mapplethorpe, and her early novel, Death Kit, has a whole sequence based on Peter Hujar’s photographs of catacombs. Sontag’s dark silhouette is a consciously fashioned icon—so much so that although she was chary of revealing much about her private life to interviewers, she did admit that her famous silver streak, now that she was in her sixties, was maintained by dying the rest of her hair black. When she started to go grey, she said to herself, that’s not Susan Sontag. Like Marilyn Monroe, in other words, Sontag is a platonic figure.