My Weekend with Marilyn
Dancing with the stardust.
Marilyn.
Norma Jeane.
What has not been said?
Ok well, I have more to say — another installment of “Mary’s Believe It or Not.”
I wrote a poem about Marilyn on her birthday a few days ago. Some people asked, why are you writing about poem about Marilyn? I suppose I’m not known as a Marilyn fan. So here’s some backstory for the poem.
It’s true — Marilyn and I are not exactly dance partners. I hardly know her story, in the way most Marilyn fans know her. I admire the countless more knowledgeable historians and bloggers, who offer much expert insight into all things Marilyn. However, I don’t read about her much.
It’s funny — as iconic as Marilyn Monroe is, she was never on my radar. She wasn’t really in the conversation in my childhood home (because that would mean talking about s-e-x). My Mom did keep this issue of Life magazine for some reason, which I found among her things after she died. Until 2019, the most I knew about Marilyn came from Michelle Williams’ absolutely wondrous portrayal of her in My Week with Marilyn.
Even though something always struck me like an arrow in the heart when I’d listen to Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, the reason I took no interest in Marilyn may be because I shelved her in the “glamour” category of my mind, which to me means superfluous, even superficial, and I didn’t look any deeper.
Glamour. That word. I admit I am pretty old school — as in “ancient school” — about it. While I revere beauty, I consider “a glamour” some kind of conjured enchantment — something designed to obscure the real. I’m generally just more into the real than the obfuscation. But this perspective is pretty ironic considering what I’m about to tell you, so bear that in mind!
The House
Marilyn entered my life, or I entered hers, in 2019 when I rented a house in LA that she once lived in. This place was just a little hidey hole built in 1905, pulled back from the street, sheltered by a scrawny old palm tree, and a thorny, towering silk floss tree. (That tree was definitely a glamour girl!) This was a sweet-nothing of a little bungalow — one you’d never imagine Marilyn dimming her brilliance to fit within.
It was a few weeks after leasing the place that I learned she’d lived there. My landlady shared that the owners she had bought from had rented it to Marilyn during the mid- to late-50s — maybe 1956-ish. The details and the lore were scant, and I didn’t inquire much, being only mildly interested. I figured she must have been living in New York then and rented it while she was on a project or something. What I remember most from what I was told is that she loved to pick plums from the little tree in the back, and hand them over the hedge to the kids next door. That made my heart grow three sizes that day.
Hollywood Magic
Let’s return to the idea of enchantments for a moment. I have to say there was something enchanting in the way this place came into my life. My daughter Ana was studying full-time at Stella Adler Academy of Acting (brilliant school situated in the old Embassy Club on Hollywood Boulevard), and she needed a place to live. I lived in Portland back then, but needed a place to work when I was in LA, so it served a dual purpose.
Ana found this cute place in Los Feliz, just a few blocks from Walt Disney’s original house. It looked perfect for our needs. She had tried to reach the landlord several times — no reply. We kept looking — Atwater Village, Silver Lake, another place in Los Feliz. All cute. But none was the One. Finally I determined that we’d have to settle on the Atwater Village duplex — it was good enough. But Ana said, “No Mom, I know this is it. Let me try one more time.”
Ana reached out again — and Angelica, the owner, actually responded! Evidently she’d had the house on the market to sell, then took it off, but was on the fence whether to re-list. She happened to be at the house, and we could see it “right now” if we wanted to. We stopped everything, drove over, and the house was perfect for us. Within the hour we’d signed the lease and the place was ours. It was a breeze. No delays, no credit check, no jumping through hoops.
We got Ana all moved in — she was deep in rehearsals for a play. I left for Europe for a few weeks, and returned from my travels the week of dress rehearsal. That was my first “stay” in the house.
The First Weekend: Altered state
I’m alone in the house while Ana is at rehearsal. I’m still getting to know the place, sensing its bones, testing its pipes. Many hours into this Saturday, I start to feel uneasy, for no obvious reason. I just have this creeping sensation of something hovering over my shoulder. To distract myself I decide to binge The Crown. Twenty minutes in, I hear “turn off the TV - open your computer” — not out loud, but in my mind’s ear. Less a command, more an invitation. I ignore the voice. It persists. Finally I mute the TV and open my computer. I wonder why I’m doing this, but I listen. What I hear is one of those loud silences that enclose you in yourself— the kind of silence you want to escape. My fingers are poised over my keyboard, my eyes are closed. Finally I hear words in my head that aren’t mine. I start to type. “It was Arthur… Arthur Schlesinger” — hmm. I don’t know him. Then I hear “John” — I hear “love.” I smell tobacco on wool, I smell a man. “It was John - the only man who understood what it was like for me. To have the world’s eyes constantly on me.” I sense these words are simply to help me to understand who I’m listening to — to substantiate. Within moments the words disappear like dandelion fluff, and dissolve into pure feeling. My whole system now feels enfolded in a luminous presence, vaporous like a cloud painted in luscious tones of pink and gold. Pearlescent. Its texture is indescribable — ineffable, but also palpable. This pink/golden pearl cloud melts into me somehow, becomes me. I can see within it, on the right, a crystalline formation, like ice mountains rising out of clouds— I understand that this is where my attention is to be directed. The merger of myself with this cloud is apparently intended to address this crystalline formation. I sense the crystalline aspect as sharp, immovable and painful — a jagged counterpoint to the pearlescence of the cloud. As I surrender into this dreamy state, I gain clearer understanding of my task: to dissolve the sharp edges of the crystals so that there is a uniformity of substance in this evanescent cloud. As this melting happens, I lose any idea of time; I am only interested in the dissolving process. When it is finally complete, I feel a release - but first, an embrace, almost a kiss. So tender it makes me weep.
Aftershock
It took me a couple of days to adjust back to myself after this experience. I was more than slightly ill. I had no idea what had happened to my system to make me feel this way. When I couldn’t shake it, I called my spiritual teacher and friend, Chris Fernie, to help me. Chris is deeply gifted and he’s spent decades studying with spiritual elders in remote areas of the world. The Marilyn Monroe angle of this would neither phase nor impress him. He also has vast experience in helping people transition from this plane into the next — aka death.
He challenged me, as he always does, “I would think she’d have moved on by now.” I explained, she has moved on! This was not a ghost. This was a soul, or a spirit — she’s not stuck here in this house. She didn’t even live here long.” He listened, and looked deeper — he could see what I saw. He helped me find my way back to Earth, because evidently I had been waltzing with her in some other dimension and I lost track of my “root” here. (I can hear my Methodist mother sighing “You were always such an ethereal child.”)
The Arthur Embarrassment
After getting my bearings back, I took those few words and tried to verify what happened. I googled up Arthur Schlesinger. The first Google hit was a 2010 CNN article about a rare photo of Marilyn, JFK and RFK, published just after Marilyn’s 84th birthday. Let me admit, I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t already know who Arthur Schlesinger is. But more relevant is that this photo gave me reassurance, a kind of confirmation that I wasn’t just dreaming this experience up. Had I known who he was, it wouldn’t have counted as confirmation.
From the CNN article:
“ ‘There is no other known photo of Bobby [Kennedy] with Marilyn or JFK with Marilyn, and it's not because they were never photographed together," said filmmaker Keya Morgan, who now owns the only original prints of it. "In fact, they were photographed together many times, but the Secret Service and the FBI confiscated every single photograph.’
“Stoughton, who sold the prints to Morgan a year before his death in 2008, told him agents missed one negative in their search, he said.
"The Secret Service came in when he was developing the negatives and basically confiscated all the ones of Jack, Bobby with Marilyn," Morgan said. "The only one that survived is the one that was in the dryer."
Here’s a link to the article:
https://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/06/01/marilyn.monroe.birthday.photo/index.html
I then found a Daily Beast article from 2013, which also blew my mind. In his piece, discussing the Letters of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ted Widmer describes Schlesinger this way:
“He was a sage and a soothsayer, a mystic who communed with the spirits of former presidents and helped divine the path forward for current and would-be occupants of the White House.”
As you can imagine —the words “a sage, a soothsayer, and a mystic who communed with spirits…” made me feel a little vindicated in the face of my own self-doubt.
Marilyn on Stage
The following weekend was Ana’s opening night for The Big Knife at Stella Adler. Ana was very excited about this production. She was playing two roles, Patty Benedict, a Hedda Hopper-type character, and Dixie Evans, a starlet. Ana had high regard for her director, Rick Peters, as well as her castmates. Because I didn’t know the play, I went in thinking it would be a romp. Wow. It wasn’t a romp. But it was definitely a ride.
Odets crafted a play about the Hollywood he knew (in 1949), that spared no vitriol for the film industry’s standards and practices, which, in Odets’ view, amounted to butchery — of its artform, of its talent, of humanity in general. The play centers around a high box-office actor, Charlie Castle, who is torn about renewing his studio contract, in part because his wife has threatened to leave him if he does — which has made him realize being commodified by the studio is costing him everything. The ruthless studio head, Stanley Hoff, wants him to renew because he is gold for the studio. We learn Hoff’s blackmail files on Castle are dark and deep. Also under contract with Hoff’s studio is Hollywood starlet Dixie Evans, who is being exploited, ergo destroyed, as well. She’s got her own dirt to use against Hoff. To force the hand of Castle, Hoff uses the lovely Dixie, who unwittingly becomes both the studio’s secret weapon, and its hapless victim. Her plan backfires. She gets buried in the dirt she hoped would save her.
There’s no happily ever after in this story. Anything but.
I am happy to say that I was swept away by this production — the performances were stellar. Everyone in the cast was so impressive — Ana’s portrayal of Dixie Evans knocked my socks off, in more ways than one. I later watched the 1955 movie, starring Jack Palance as Charlie Castle, just to reminisce after seeing this production. I felt a little let down by the film, honestly. To my mind, the Stella Adler production was carefully crafted in accordance with the spirit of Odet’s play, and delivered his truth to the audience like a bombshell. It’s no wonder Odets wrote it for the stage — I’m surprised it ever made it to the screen.
That Ana’s performance “knocked my socks off” was not just about the caliber of actor she is — though she is very talented. It was seeing this production fresh off the weird vision the week before, because Ana’s portrayal of Dixie Evans utterly evoked Marilyn Monroe. I don’t know that she intended this. But Odets seemed to have had a clairvoyance for Marilyn’s fate, even if his Dixie Evans character was fashioned after someone else. I was certainly not prepared for the impact of the Marilyn allusion in this production. The convergence of invincible life force and immeasurable vulnerability that Ana evoked in this complex character was, I don’t know, Tony-worthy. But then, I’m her mom.
Marilyn as Mirror
This emotional equation of invincibility and vulnerability that Marilyn wrestled with strikes a corresponding reaction inside our collective soul, and I imagine it will do so for centuries to come. We must in some way see ourselves in her — how else can we explain her incredible “staying power”? Through history there have been countless beauties, but only one Marilyn.
If you have an affinity for Marilyn you’ve probably heard that she described Hollywood as “a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, but fifty cents for your soul.” In her book “My Story,” she describes more of her experience:
“People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”
Reading her words, learning that she could see this happening while she was alive, gave me my own moment of reflection about the way I’ve projected my own bias onto her, and assumed her to be somehow superficial because she was glamorous.
And then this…
The weekend after the play closed, Ana and I were lounging around watching TV. I had shared the “Marilyn visitation” with her, and she took it in graciously. At the time I shared it, I suspected she was really thinking, “Yeah right, Mom” — because I’m not nearly so gracious to myself. I am suspicious of myself, to be honest. Nonetheless, as we sat there on this night, probably watching Mad Men or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I felt the “presence” again, strongly. It’s like the atmospheric pressure in the room changed. I didn’t say anything to Ana, just noted it.
It was Ana who mentioned it. “Do you feel that? Is that her?” Ana may not admit it but she has sensitivities and gifts far beyond mine. I asked her to mute the TV so we could just listen — obviously this presence was back for a purpose.
What I heard, again, did not come in words. I received simply a sense that Marilyn wanted to acknowledge, from where she is now, that she still takes to heart the way she influences our world today, and also takes accountability for it. She expressed a desire to add to the common understanding of who she was — to correct it somehow, from her current perspective. She wants us to see her from the other side of the mirror — the “other side” of Marilyn.
So?
Well, it has been 5 years since this weekend with Marilyn, and up to now, I have not shared this, nor have I done what she asked. This may be because I am still skeptical of myself — both about the illusory nature of the experience, and also my sense of worthiness to convey it. Who am I, a little preacher’s kid from Montana, to speak for Marilyn Monroe? There is nothing that special about me other than the willingness, or openness, to listen to what I can’t see. And for those who don’t know me, I’ll share that I feel quite sure that I am of sound mind — lol —I drink rarely, and think twice before I even take an ibuprofen! Anyway, the longer I live, the more I want to listen — I care less about my big mouth and more about being one big ear. But I do want to fulfill whatever Marilyn asked of me. I feel this was a sacred moment, and I have a sacred obligation.
I’m developing a television series that may in some way fulfill what Marilyn is asking. Of course the odds of it getting picked up, like any television series, are not that great. So this writing is where I “come out of the closet” about this experience. Despite the aspersions that might be cast about my experience, I can at least give her this.
Whether you, or I, believe this was Marilyn’s spirit visiting me, matters not. What I would like you to take to heart is that Marilyn is still speaking to all of us collectively — in a new way. Especially now, as we seem to be re-evaluating as a society what’s great about America, and the value of dignity, diversity, accountability, accessibility, integrity, and femininity in every sector.
Femininity - the F word
We obviously still consider Marilyn an icon of femininity. But what does that mean? We speak of “the feminine” differently than we speak of “femininity.” Why is that? Is it different to consider Marilyn an icon of the feminine, than an icon of femininity?
All my life, I’ve disparaged Marilyn’s brand of femininity. I am a feminist. For some reason, I feel an aversion to the concept of “femininity.” But I also bow to the power of the “feminine.” I find that strange in myself.
So how is femininity distinguished from the feminine? To me, there is a diminutive sense to the word “femininity.” It denotes a kind of demure — but a seductive demure, in which I sense a kind of guile or manipulation — a glamour if you will. Maybe the word “femininity” acts as a kind of glamour for the actuality of the “feminine.”
As I look at my experience and its larger message, I sense Marilyn was molded into this idea of “femininity” to reduce her power as a feminine force — to package it for capital and personal gain. But it didn’t work. She may have been shrink-wrapped by the studio system and society— but the force of her feminine nature could not be diminished, even by her death.
It is certainly more than her packaging that has stayed with us. Of course she’s still being packaged, but that packaging could not have made her a legend. Something else, very special, survived her demise. I believe she’s asking us now to allow her out of the packaging she was reduced to — and to rewrite the ending of her story through the way we live out our own. Her “feminine” qualities of beauty, grace, nurturance, compassion, shakti, fierceness, resilience are still shining through her countenance. Those are the qualities that engender and sustain life. Those are the qualities that do not die, and that we can all share in. Those are how she wants us to know her and celebrate her now.
I think Marilyn wants to rebrand Femininity, not just herself — but she also encourages us to use her story and her image to do this.
The Fruits of Marilyn
My five-year acquaintance with Marilyn helps me understand how she just melted people. Yes, her aura had the power to enchant, to make particularly men weaken to her charms. I’ve asked male friends what they’d do if she came up and come hithered them. What is it about her? Outside the obvious notion of conquest or short-lived carnal pleasure, most guys don’t seem to know how to articulate the power she has over them.
After my own “melting” experience, I now have a thought that I want to proffer. This may be the correction or addendum that she’d like to provide from her expanded perspective — which she wasn’t able to do in her human persona.
Marilyn, in her way, is just over the hedge, still handing us plums from her tree. And maybe she’s giving us another mirror to see by. When she was on Earth, she gave us a taste of the stars — and she still offers us a sense that we deserve to mingle with the gods. I’m sure many would use the word “heavenly” to describe an encounter with her. Now her “come hither” offers even more.
If we can sense beyond the physical, beyond the packaging, to the way she still shines on us today, that luminous soul may reveal something that all of us humans crave: a reflection of our own radiance — and a chance to experience more of heaven on Earth.
Thanks for the dance, Marilyn. Keep shining on us.
Crap, yeah, I am there with you on the difference between the feminine and femininity, except this: I never thought femininity to be minimal. It was power, and could be resented by male and female alike. So, thank you for giving me something on which to cogitate.
👍🏼😍😍😍