Marilyn Monroe
Also reviewed here: How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, by William J. Mann
No matter the laws of physics, not all stars follow the same arc. Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were more or less contemporaries, and rivals on the screen. Taylor was only six years younger than Monroe, though that strikes us oddly because Taylor always seemed senior, classier and more in control of herself. At just about the same time, and from the same studio, Fox, Marilyn was given $100,000 to make Something's Got to Give (it remained unfinished) while Taylor was receiving $1-million to be Cleopatra (the epic that helped destroy the system). Where did that vast difference come from?
Marilyn's picture foundered because of her illnesses, her lateness, her inability to be there to be photographed, and on Aug. 5, 1962, she was found in her own bed, alone and dead. That was one shock. Another was that her will produced only a few thousand dollars - there was not enough to continue the hospital care for her deranged mother. But 50 years later, the estate of Marilyn Monroe raises revenue of about $8-million a year from the use of her name and image.
Elizabeth Taylor is not dead (quickly - did you know that without having to ponder the question?). She is more or less rich, because she always was and because she has taken care of herself. That's how she beat death and disaster so often. But is the public aware of her, or interested, as it manages to be still in the dysfunctional ghostliness of Marilyn? Survival and longevity are admirable things, and Taylor now is 77, the burier of several husbands, the hope of charities, the light of jewellers' dreams. But she is no longer "Liz," while Marilyn is exactly that one-word melodious refrain.
Approaching this task, I found it hard to believe we really need more books about these far-fetched lives. At the outset, I was more interested in the Taylor book because William Mann's previous work was Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, a masterly piece of research and writing that cut through some white lies and half-truths to make a plausible and touching portrait of a very tricky life. On the other hand, Randy Taraborrelli has the track record of a hack biographer so full of chutzpah that he can consider delivering the "secret" life of a wretched woman whose life and death have already been ground down to make so much stale bread.
So I should admit straightaway that I was wrong. The Mann book is a disappointment, even if it is the more intelligent and the better written. Something has disconcerted Mann in making a complete survey of Taylor's life. His real problem, I think, is that Taylor has been quiet for too long. She hasn't made a movie for more than 15 years. She lives (with difficulty maybe - but her health was always volatile, just as her will to live was awesome) in a retirement no more interesting than the pensioned years of a great sportsman. (Incidentally, that's why Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio had no chemistry - Joe's career was over and he didn't have it in him to be Marilyn's sour spectator. He wanted her to retire too!)
For some reason, Mann has elected to drop Taylor's childhood - in London, in an awkward but privileged family situation - to balance the lack of her final years. But then you find out that he omits some of the working life as well. I can see why. You need patience to go with Miss Taylor every day of every year as she makes one bad film after another while buying a series of outrageous diamonds.
Still, there's a worrying feeling in How to Be a Movie Star of the author abdicating from his assignment. I should add that Mann is as good as anyone I've read on Mike Todd (husband #3) and he makes a real character out of gossip-writer Hedda Hopper (because he has had access to her papers).
But Elizabeth Taylor herself is an elusive figure - and Taylor is one of the most amusing, practical and down-to-earth toughies who ever got through Hollywood. Her handicap, of course, is her survival. If she had been in the car with James Dean in 1955, or with Monty Clift a few years later. If she had died in the London Clinic on the way to Cleopatra, her every image would be edged in black satin now. She'd be Liz for ever.
So what do we do with Marilyn? Yes, of course there have been too many books about her already for a sane society: But what led us to believe that's where we were living? Monroe has a small fraction of the screen coherence of Taylor: Put Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot together (her best work, I think) and you have the wreckage of a half-exploited, half-cunning cutie, whereas Taylor's Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a wrestling match and her Angela, years earlier, in A Place in the Sun, is a marvel of teenage poise and an uncanny imprint of wealth and privilege.
Taylor could act if she had the chance, while Monroe could never get past the incoherent rant of wanting the chance. But Monroe reigns in stills, while Taylor looks like a smart mind impatient with the glamorization. Marilyn loved herself in stills - it may have been the only place she felt that way.
On the other hand, Monroe's life is a natural melodrama. We know the conclusion. We know the details. We understand the dire mix of mental disturbance and uncontrolled medication. Or we think we know it. The truth is that Taraborrelli has researched his socks off and on the grim life of Monroe's mother and the impact on Marilyn, this book does break ground not covered before.
So this Secret Life is judicious: It is confident that Marilyn slept with JFK, very dubious about RFK, and far more drawn to the idea that Monroe's death was the misadventure of a wreck who couldn't count the pills she had taken. Taraborrelli composes his book in short, heightened sequences - very much like the pacing of a movie - and he writes with an unashamed over-excitement. But the reader is hooked by the horror of it all. Like so many people who knew her, you go through the process of wanting to help and then of seeing that help can never reach this victim.
I'll be candid: You can survive without either of these books, but the Monroe is the better read and that's a sign that there will be more Monroe books - many of them outlandish and closer to fiction. Whereas I'm not sure if the public cares any more about Elizabeth Taylor. For a few years - the late fifties and through the Richard Burton years - she defined celebrity just as her career gave impetus to so many magazines. But there was too much about Taylor that was grown-up, sensible and in charge.
Whereas Marilyn Monroe is like some faerie beauty who has escaped the institution and is running wild in the light for just a few years. Her tragedy or her disaster is a measure of that deep-seated disquiet we all feel sometimes, that the movies may have deluded us - they're fun but such a surrender to fantasy. No one has ever played the role of sacrificial victim more helplessly than Marilyn Monroe.
So she sang Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but had none to show at the end. Whereas Elizabeth Taylor had the knowing eye and the calculating mind that knew pretty well how rich she was. Mann claims she was a great star, but maybe she was always a supreme money-raiser. And we are the kind of sentimental people who respect our richies but tell stories about waifs and wrecks. Marilyn had legend and fable in her - and they have worked again.
David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and Have You Seen? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.