WEIRDLAND: A Pure Heart and Endless Regression: Marilyn Monroe and Jerry Lewis

Thursday, October 12, 2017

A Pure Heart and Endless Regression: Marilyn Monroe and Jerry Lewis

The Film of Her Life (July 1960–January 1961): The Misfits (1961) would nearly rip away Marilyn Monroe's mask by coming very close to a literal presentation of the offcamera Monroe, who had no one to mimic but herself. The filming of Roslyn’s unreconciled state was Monroe’s most arduous assignment. Elia Kazan wrote to Arthur Miller about the film’s unresolved ending, which did not work. In Timebends, Miller virtually concedes that Kazan and Monroe were right. But he confesses that he could not change his approach to Roslyn, because his vision of her emanated from his futile effort to save his marriage. In other words, to expose Roslyn’s shortcomings would mean the end of his effort to repair his rapport with Monroe. Only after Monroe’s death, with the production of Miller’s play, After the Fall, could he reveal the dark side of the Marilyn myth that had enveloped him. In the film, as Roslyn's cowboy companions get to know her, she virtually becomes their source of light, their point of reference, as when Gay tells her, “Honey, when you smile it’s like the sun comin’ up.” The metaphors arising out of seemingly casual speech render the men’s growing sense of discovery that Roslyn has, in Guido’s words, “the big connection.”

Most of these metaphors shift from the concrete impression the males have of her person to rather abstract, even mystical, yearnings, because she does not know where she belongs. She seeks guidance from Gay but cannot reconcile herself to his gentle, paradoxical insistence—so like Sam’s in “Please Don’t Kill Anything” and probably like Miller’s as well—that, “Honey, a kind man can kill.” There are Edenic moments in The Misfits when the characters try to make the desert bloom, when Roslyn goes “all out” and seems equal to enjoying life in its fullness, when Gay blesses her for making him feel as if he has “touched the whole world.”

Enthusiastic and sentimental, Marilyn tended to exaggerate her stories to the point of lying, almost like a swindler, although she was “sensitive, perceptive, and empathic.” In fact, like Dr. Greenson’s other screen patients, she was “psychologically minded” and could spontaneously arrive at important insights, but had “great difficulty in integrating those new insights effectively.” Marilyn tensely recalled her early encounters with studio executives and producers: “I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes – a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”

“I think Marilyn was a very sick woman, a classic schizophrenic,” said Johnny Strasberg, son of Lee and Paula Strasberg: “She was dedicated to love. It’s a thing schizophrenics talk about, love. They’ll do anything for love and, additionally, they are totally infantile; they have no boundaries, as the rest of us have. The amazing thing about her is that she survived as long as she did. There was enough capacity for life had she been lucky enough to find a therapist who could treat her problems. That’s the tragedy. People loved her. But nobody could say no to her. No one would or could take responsibility for her. With Marilyn, you’re dealing with an abandoned infant who’s not an infant anymore.” Science journalist Claudia Kalb explains: 'What is clear is that Monroe suffered from severe mental distress. Her symptoms included a feeling of emptiness, a split or confused identity, extreme emotional volatility, unstable relationships, and an impulsivity that drove her to drug addiction and suicide -- all textbook characteristics of a condition called borderline personality disorder.'

Like other screen patients, Marilyn was not able to assimilate or clearly comprehend her past: “Almost all the important people of their past lives are remembered as essentially black or white figures.” This “rather disturbed relationship to time” promotes a blurring of past and present, with the past remaining so alive in patients’ minds that they project “a youthful quality and their self picture is many years younger than their chronological age.” In movies, Marilyn Monroe was screened in precisely this way; that is, she was literally screened or blocked off from her true age, from a character who should have been maturing. Just like other screen patients, Monroe’s characters had to be created anew. At home, where nobody could see her, the actress “might not be able to put herself together very well,” Greenson wrote to a colleague. Monroe, he pointed out, thrived on the public perception of her as a beautiful woman, “perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Cukor claimed that she could not be directed: “You couldn’t reach her, she was like underwater.” But Monroe had acted this way with other directors she deemed unsympathetic. Dean Martin refused to do the picture with Lee Remick as replacement. Sociologist S. Paige Baty observes that Marilyn Monroe assumes the “traces of the decades.” Marilyn is a “poster girl for the 1950s,” evoking nostalgia for a bygone and seemingly innocent era, representing somehow a safer world that was destroyed by President Kennedy’s assassination. But she is also ‘shorthand’ for the confusion, mourning, nostalgia, and loss—the marks of a common contemporary condition.” —"Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, revised and updated"  (2014) by Carl Rollyson

Dr. Ralph Greenson was not alone in his belief that Marilyn Monroe was probably suffering from borderline paranoid schizophrenia. Rather than work in a vacuum, Dr. Greenson obtained a second opinion by consulting psychologist Dr. Milton Wexler. After taking a doctorate at Columbia University, studying under Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud, he became one of the country’s first nonphysicians to set up in practice as a psychoanalyst. Also a member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, Dr. Wexler would go on to become a pioneer in the study and treatment of Huntington’s disease, forming the Hereditary Disease Foundation. Wexler also felt strongly that Marilyn Monroe suffered at least from borderline paranoid schizophrenia after sitting in on three sessions with her in Dr. Greenson’s home. “Yes, I treated her,” he said in 1999. “I won’t discuss that treatment but will say that I agreed with Dr. Greenson that she presented borderline symptoms of the disease that had run in her family. I found her to be very proactive in wanting to treat those borderline symptoms, as well. One misconception about her treatment is that it was Dr. Greenson’s idea that she move in with his family. She never moved in with the Greensons. Instead, it was my suggestion that she spend as much time there as possible in order to create the environment that she lacked as a child. That was my theory at the time and Dr. Greenson agreed.” All of these many years later, to ignore the findings of these two doctors makes no sense. 

Donald Spoto wrote, "No serious biographer can maintain the existence of an affair between Marilyn and the Kennedys. All we can say for sure is that the actress and the President have met four times, between October 1961 and August 1962, and it was during one of those meetings, that they called to a friendly relation of Marilyn from a bedroom. Shortly after, Marilyn confided this sexual relation to her close relatives, insisting about the fact that their affair ended there." The late actress Susan Strasberg, whose father Lee was Marilyn's acting coach and who considered Marilyn to be "a surrogate sister," wrote in an unfinished memoir that Marilyn did spend that night with the president, but denied any sort of ongoing affair. "It was OK to sleep with a charismatic president," Strasberg said, adding that "Marilyn loved the secrecy and the drama of it, but Kennedy was not the kind of man she wanted to spend her life with, and she made that very clear."

Marilyn often embellished the truth, and not just to the press, which would have been an acceptable form of public relations, but to her friends as well. Her publicist Pat Newcomb put it this way: “Marilyn told several people a lot of things, but she never told anybody everything.” Indeed, just as recently as a few months earlier she had told many of her friends that she and Bobby Kennedy were about to go on “a date.” It turned out, of course, that it was a dinner party attended by many others, not a date. Susan Strasberg said of Marilyn that night. “From what she’d told me, each time she caricatured herself, she chipped a piece out of her own dream.”

In September 1961, Marilyn joined Frank Sinatra in entertaining guests on his yacht for a four-day cruise to Catalina Island. “By now I would have cut any other dame loose. But this one—I just can’t do it,” admitted Sinatra. “They were definitely a couple,” said one of the partygoers. “She was acting as if she was the hostess, not a guest. She seemed in good spirits, but definitely not quite right. I had heard that there’d been some trouble getting her there. Everyone knew she was not well, that she was under the care of doctors.” Mickey Rudin—who was both Marilyn’s and Frank’s attorney—said in 1996, “Frank is a very, very compassionate person. He brought Marilyn to Cal-Neva to give her a little fun, a little relief from her problems. If she was upset during the time, well, she could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung. She could have had an imagined crisis, in fact.”

In 1995, Dean Martin recalled, “I met Marilyn in 1953, before she met Frank, before she met Peter, before she knew any of us. I met her before she was all screwed up, so I knew what she was like then and what she had become, and I felt badly for the kid. At the same time, I was a little tired of all the bullshit. In fact, no one had an easy life. We were all screwed up in our own ways. We all had problems. I was no saint, either. But I showed up for work. That was the priority. I’m not saying she wasn’t sick all of those days. Who knows? I wasn’t following her around like the FBI, I was just sitting on my ass waiting for her to show up at the studio. However, the few scenes we did, I enjoyed, but getting to them… oh my God, I mean, the takes, one after the other, it would drive any man crazy. But… look… I liked her. She was a good kid. But when you looked into her eyes, there was nothing there. No warmth. No life. It was all illusion. She looked great on film, yeah. But in person… she was a ghost.” —"The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe" (2009)  by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Jerry Lewis: "When I talk about him (my screen character) in the third person, people look at you askance. Are you fuckin’ schizophrenic? Yes, in the creative, yes. I can talk to you much better about Jerry, being the creator of him, and we’re talking about the nine-year-old within me."

The Stooge (1952) is reportedly Jerry Lewis's favorite Martin & Lewis picture. In one sense, this isn't surprising. It has the heavily lacquered sentiment Lewis seems to prefer, and his character is beloved by audiences, his family, and his girlfriend. His character Ted Rogers is also fiercely loyal and protective of Bill, and completely modest about his own abilities. Rogers doesn’t even know he’s supposed to be part of the act, but he steals it with his purity of spirit—just like the character Chaplin played in The Circus, who had no idea the audience was enjoying his unintentionally funny antics. It’s a philosophy of comedy that helped Jerry reconcile life and art throughout his career—his comedy, the argument ran, came from some genuine store of humanity within him. According to “The Colgate Comedy Hour” writers Simmons and Lear: “Jerry accented some of the things that were most irritating. He hasn’t welcomed collaboration in his life. He would pay no attention. It isn’t that Jerry changed. It’s that he should’ve changed but didn’t. Because he is still the Kid. And Jerry did not grow, in my estimation. His nightclub act is the same. Everybody who does an impersonation of Jerry Lewis does Jerry from the Fifties.” 

Dean Martin moved Jeanne Biegger (Jeanne Martin, the gourgeous Orange Bowl Queen blonde he had met at Beachcomber Club in 1948) to a rented house in West Hollywood in early 1949. They got married in Herman Hover's mansion, on September 1, 1949. It was quite an affair, small and private but lavish. Jerry Lewis was best man. "As it turned out, Jeannie was the best thing that ever happened to Dean," asserted Jerry: "They had a loving, strong, and enduring relationship. A complicated relationship, yes—it was impossible to have any other kind with Dean. Though he and Jeannie would eventually divorce (in 1973), I always felt that was just legal paperwork. They never stopped caring for each other. I guess I loved her, too, in my own way. Someday I may tell her." Jerry seemed to have the good sense—borne, perhaps, of insecurity—to see his affair with Gloria DeHaven as the crazy fling it was. “What we were doing was playing our little fantasyland,” he confessed. “I never had fifty bucks in my pocket at one time; now I’m walking around with thirty-five hundred in hundred-dollar bills, and I got a starlet on my arm. It’s fantasyland.” He was also smart—or scared—enough to be discreet, keeping well away from DeHaven when his wife Patti joined him in New York. 

Jerry Lewis incorporated self-referential notations, lines and situations that resonate with his own biography. In The Big Mouth, the joy of Thor (Harold J. Stone) at learning of the supposed death of Valentine (the gangster played by Lewis) can be heard as a comment on the animus against Lewis expressed by many critics. In the same film, the hotel manager and other characters harbor an irrational, excessive hatred of Lewis. The San Diego resort area in The Big Mouth really exists and is filmed accordingly, but it becomes a fantasy of itself. As early as The Bellboy, Lewis shows his consciousness of the difficulty of his position in American popular culture: standing with his boss in front of the hotel, waiting for the arrival of a famous star, a hotel employee apologizes for his initial outburst of enthusiasm (“And it’s Jerry Lewis!”) by saying deprecatingly, “Our mother used to take me to see him when I was a kid.” The most extreme reversal in Lewis’s work is the ending of The Patsy, in which the reverse field of every film shot—the field containing the camera and the crew—is finally revealed. The tossed-off quality of the ending (parrying Ina Balin’s calling him “a complete nut,” Lewis remembers that he’s having “nuts and whipped cream for lunch” and leads the cast and crew off the set, as his remarks trail off rather than reaching a neat period) perhaps acknowledges the impossibility of ending: the subject of this implicitly autobiographical film being still alive, the film cannot close (as Lewis says, “I couldn’t die”—the latter is also a statement of the endlessness of art). Jerry Lewis chose the fantasy over reality, love over madness. Lewis’s America belongs partly to fantasy and partly to documentary.


Editor Johannes Binotto explores Jerry Lewis’s breaching of the fourth wall specifically through his industrial details. He loves pointing out the way movies work, the way comedy works, and somehow none of that stops his humor from landing.

The most interesting motif in The Stooge, and one that became a theme throughout Jerry’s work, is the notion that an untrained, unrehearsed neophyte can somehow perform before a live audience and score a hit merely on the basis of having a funny personality and a sincere heart. (This alone may account for the fact that decades later Jerry would declare The Stooge his favorite Martin and Lewis film.) Bill, Dean Martin's character, is the extreme opposite: a mean, petty drunk, who forces his wife into unhappy retirement, who refuses even modest billing to his wildly popular stooge, and so completely unfunny on his own you can almost hear crickets chirping in the audience when he goes at it alone. Curiously, no one ever discusses his talents as a singer, but the implication is that even this aspect of his talent would go nowhere without Ted's comic genius to support it, to give the act, as Bill finally admits, its "spark."

The Stooge operates from several faulty conceits about the nature of comedy, one that Lewis would return to time and again. Ted is no professional clown. He's funny because he's a dimwit, but also because of a natural ability and, most importantly, because he has a pure heart. Like his character in The Patsy, Ted magically ad-libs a polished routine complete with costumes and props. Hal Wallis was right to be nervous about the The Stooge; Dean Martin has a meaty role and sings a lot of swell old songs, but he’s an outright creep. 

The Disorderly Orderly (1964) was the last movie Jerry Lewis would make with Frank Tashlin. It wasn’t that he and Tashlin were weary of one another. The truth was that Paramount was learning the same lesson that ABC had learned, although not at a similar cost or to a similar degree of public ridicule: Jerry’s commercial potential had leveled out, if it hadn’t actually begun to drop. Even before The Patsy went into production, Barney Balaban told a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post that Cinderfella and The Ladies’ Man “did not necessarily show a profit.” When The Patsy (1964) was released, it made for yet one more blemish on Jerry’s record. The critics weren’t enthusiastic about it. Hook, Line, and Sinker would be the final film of George Marshall’s career, and Jerry’s last film for Columbia. In February 1969, Jerry finally broke off relations with Columbia Pictures. He was frustrated with the studio’s insistence that he not take on so many diverse responsibilities on his films; they wanted him just as an actor. But he still felt he could do it all, and he was beginning to prefer directing. Variety reported that Columbia didn’t mind seeing Jerry go, “in view of some recent softening of Lewis’ box office performance.” Three years earlier, Paramount had suggested he was “unprofitable.”

Jerry was, in fact, beginning to talk about the movie business in the sort of contemptuous terms he usually reserved for television. He continued to decry the increase of profanity, nudity, and violence that had characterized the American cinema since the film industry had eased its production code. After more than a decade of struggling to find a voice and an audience on television, he sounded serious about washing his hands of it forever. “Television destroys dreams,” he told The New York Times. “Television has been one of the most destructive forces in our society. Ask me about violence, and I’ll tell you television has caused it. Sirhan Sirhan would never have carried a gun if he had not seen the way Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in a crowded corridor.” As for his own experience in the medium, he was grateful it was over: “I knew I was going to be part of twenty hours of trash that would never be seen again. Psychologically I couldn’t put very much into it. The temporary nature of television destroyed me. Essentially, I always have in mind that my great-great-great-grandchildren will see me in my pictures, that I have to be impeccable for them. And I hated the endless hypocrisy and lying, the crap, the stopwatch. My funny bone has no time for statistics. I couldn’t bear the clock dictating when I would start and finish a joke. And the network censors are stupid, anticreative men. What those stupid morons don’t understand is that when you’re given freedom, you don’t abuse it.”

In 1969, Richard Zanuck, Darryl’s son, had, tried to interest Jerry in appearing in a film adaptation of a hot novel by a Jewish writer from Newark—the naughty best-seller Portnoy’s Complaint. Jerry absolutely refused to do it. “The picture business was not doing what I believed they should be doing,” he recalled. “I got a whole moral code about that. I turned down discussions with Zanuck at Fox about Portnoy’s Complaint. I told him he’s a fucking lecher. Ha! I said not only wouldn’t I participate in Portnoy’s Complaint, I wouldn’t know how to participate in it. I read it because it was the thing to do in Hollywood. I wouldn’t know how to fucking make that movie, nor would I know how to appear in it. And Zanuck says to my attorney, ‘He can’t turn down this kind of money.’ And my attorney said, ‘You’d be amazed at what he can do. The first thing he can do is tell you that you can’t buy him for that project. Not for any money.’ Zanuck said, ‘Everyone’s got a price.’ My attorney said to him, ‘You ain’t getting this kid. Try.’ Zanuck tried everything he knew. Everything. He was going to donate five hundred thousand dollars to Muscular Dystrophy. I said, ‘My kids don’t want your fucking money for what you want me to do for it.’ He said, ‘This is above and beyond the deal. This is a bonus.’ And my attorney said, ‘He doesn’t want your fucking money.’” 

In 1976, however, Jerry was desperate. He had an unreleased film (The day the clown cried) on his hands, he had no offers of any sort for film or TV work ahead of him, his father sat addled in an apartment in a city he detested, his oldest son Gary couldn’t shake his drug use or find a way back to a productive civilian life, he himself was taking as many as fifteen Percodans a day and now he was facing a legal cost he couldn’t possibly survive if the time ever came. The addiction had more than just physical and emotional costs. Although his income had greatly diminished in recent years, he was spending more and more money on drugs. He paid a thousand dollars for ten Percodans one night and he was buying uppers. Yet even though he was in the throes of addiction, he recognized that his drug abuse had been instigated by the need to relieve pain. He visited neurosurgeons throughout Europe and Asia in hope that something could be done to repair or relieve the damage in his spine. One physician suggested an operation that could as easily leave him paralyzed as cure him. He demurred. And as his quest for a remedy continued, so did his Percodan habit.

The boys weren’t aware of just how severe the problem had become. But they noticed undeniable changes in his behavior. “The results of Dad’s addiction were mostly passive,” his son Antony said, “such as his sleeping on the couch all day.” He was no longer the heroic father whose return to the house marked a highlight of the day. Indeed, he carried himself like a stranger. Patti knew more than her sons about the side effects of her husband’s spinal injury and drug abuse: impotence, disequilibrium, numbness, blurred vision. To her, though, the onset of Jerry’s drug abuse was related not only to the physical pain he was suffering but to the state of his career. “I felt he was going in circles of diminishing size,” she remembered, knowing how desperately he had worked in the past and how desperately he desired to keep on working. She came to see that his loss of himself in drugs had supplanted his former loss of himself in work: “I believe Jerry’s work symptoms were precursors to his chemical addictions.” Throughout the mid-1970s, Jerry toured Vegas, the Catskills, the Poconos, Reno and Tahoe, Miami, Europe, and the summer amphitheater circuit. —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

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