Marilyn: Protestant, Catholic and Jew
Marilyn Monroe was a woman of many faiths, discovers Andrew M Brown
19 June 2009

Happier times: Henry Miller and Marilyn Monroe share a joke in a London hotel room in 1956

The Genius and the Goddess
By Jeffrey Meyers
Hutchinson, £20

Marilyn Monroe wanted to be loved for herself, but didn't know who that real self was, says Jeffrey Meyers in his gracefully written, lively biography of Monroe and Arthur Miller. Not only did her name change - from Mortensen, to Baker, to Monroe, and so on - but also she adopted a different religion for each new stage in her life.

"Though a non-believer," Meyers writes, "she was evangelical with the Bolenders [Albert and Ida, fundamentalists who fostered her for her first seven years], a Christian Scientist with her mother, Catholic with DiMaggio [second husband] and Jewish with Miller [third]."

The most elaborate of these conversions was to Judaism, just before she married Miller. I confess I have read a few Marilyn Monroe books but I don't recall seeing such a detailed description of the event as the one Meyers provides. By marrying Miller, Meyers says, Marilyn embraced a Jewish identity that was familiar to her because so many of her associates were Jewish, including her manager Milton Greene, Method acting gurus Paula and Lee Strasberg and all her doctors and analysts.

"I can identify with the Jews," she told Susan Strasberg. "Everybody's always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me."

Rabbi Robert Goldberg, who also married the pair, instructed Marilyn in the mysteries of the Jewish faith and she swore fidelity to her husband's religion with this moving passage from the Book of Ruth (1:16): "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." For all that, Meyers maintains that her conversion was "perfunctory" and resembled Rex Mottram's reception into the Catholic Church in Brideshead Revisited, concerning which Mottram said: "If your Church is good enough for [my fiancée] Julia, it's good enough for me."

The bookish reference is typical, since Meyers is chiefly a literary biographer, having written on Orwell, Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield and a dozen others. This must be the most literary of Marilyn biographies, respectfully recording her "serious and sincere" highbrow reading habits and encounters with writers including Brendan Behan, Truman Capote and Dylan Thomas.

The director Joseph Manciewicz saw the luscious young actress reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet while she rehearsed the dumb blonde role in All About Eve and reflected that he would have been "less taken aback to come upon Herr Rilke studying a Marilyn Monroe nude calendar".

The witty actress Shelley Winters judged that intellectual insecurity lay behind Monroe's marriage to Miller, describing the principle: "If you don't graduate from high school - marry an intellectual." Miller, for his part, wanted to escape a marriage in which he considered himself to be unfulfilled. Added to these factors was what Meyers calls "the narcissistic magnetism of one celebrity for another".

Marilyn thought Miller was a version of Abraham Lincoln who would make her a better person. In truth, the playwright comes across in this book - which is based on new information in the form of nine long talks the author had with Miller, and is not unsympathetic to him - as inhibited and arrogant. Marilyn, on the other hand, was psychologically damaged and exploited. Unlike Miller, who was relentlessly sober, Marilyn was addicted to barbiturate sleeping pills, causing her to be dopey, confused, suicidal and bad-tempered.

Marilyn behaved appallingly towards Miller during the making of The Misfits in 1960, laying into him with cringe-making insults in front of the director John Huston and cast members.

One especially disheartening theme of this book is the incompetence and at times outright malignity of the psychiatric treatment dispensed to the traumatised star.

Meyers demonstrates that the more treatment Marilyn received, the worse her health became. Psychoanalysis is the egregious offender. Encouraged by the ego-massaging Lee and Paula Strasberg, the fragile Marilyn plunged into five-day-a-week Freudian analysis. The result? She dredged up disturbing memories of her "hideous childhood" and "years of sexual degradation in Hollywood", and had a nervous breakdown. The most dubious of the bunch was Dr Ralph Greenson, who encouraged Marilyn in a slavish dependence on him. She was under his care when she died of a Nembutal and chloral hydrate overdose.

Meyers is very good on Marilyn's death, gives short shrift to conspiracy theories, and concludes, on no firm evidence, that the cause was suicide. Marilyn fulfilled the American dream but also suffered the American tragedy: losing it all. Meyers quotes Samuel Johnson on the point: "They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall."