Key Characteristics / Mozart & Guthrie / Norma Jeane

Key Characteristics is the term I’m using for those aspects of intelligence, personality, and self which turn out to eventually be essential to solving key problems of a field/ society for a given generation. In my own 10+ years of analyzing about 300 ‘greats’ (in a field and/or society) with my students (ranging from LBJ to Dylan to Che, from Nabokov to Madonna to Lennon, from Van Gogh to Ali to Brando, from Orson Welles to Malcolm to Warhol, from J Edgar to Hendrix to Orwell), we discovered that once you identify the major works (physical and/or symbolic creations) for which the person became famous, it was always possible to identify five key characteristics which were essential to these achievements. While the key characteristics involved were unique to each individual, overall they inevitably sorted themselves into two primarily related to intelligence, two primarily related to personality, and one primarily related to self or identity.

Mozart vs Guthrie

Take Mozart for example. What do you think, any chance he could have written Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads” with their simple 3 chord melodies? Did Mozart have the key characteristics it took to write and perform these ballads, and others like them, and in the process become (in John Steinbeck's words), "just a voice and a guitar, singing the songs of a people... harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim”, and before long become “that people".

Think about it, did Mozart have those characteristics?

The key characteristics which were essential in this case involved much more than the obvious two, ie Guthrie's abilities as a flat picker and a wordslinger. Clearly among the couple 100,000 "Dust Bowl refugees" of the mid 1930s, there were probably at least couple 1000 who were superior to Woody as musicians. In Woody's personal experience in Pampa alone there was, eg, his Uncle Jeff, the "finest country fiddler on the Texas panhandle", and Woody's pal, Cluster Baker, who "really could play guitar". No doubt Mozart would have easily topped the entire list.

But Woody also had three other characteristics - tied to the legacy of "family tragedies in his own childhood" - three characteristics that were essential to him not only living the life of a "Dust Bowl refugee", but thriving on it. Three characteristics which made the disaster of the Dust Bowl, in particular the massive migration to California, ideal conditions for stimulating Woody's creativity as a flat picker and wordslinger. The Dust Bowl guaranteed continual disruption and unpredictable change in people's lives. For Woody - already an experienced street hustler with a massive terror of intimacy - this meant a continual flux of intense, short-term, transient relationships - intense transient relationships with 100s, 1000s of people he fully identified as 'his own'. In short, given his ability as a flat picker and a wordslinger, the Dust Bowl was perfectly matched to Woody's three other key characteristics, ie, his abilities as a street hustler, his terror of intimacy, and his total identification with the Okies.

By way of contrast try to imagine Mozart with a ‘guitar slung over his shoulder’, a ‘cap on his head’, stubbed and scruffed worse than a ‘lost dog in a hard rain’. Mozart passing the applejack and watching the ‘coffee boil up in the can’, and singing bout them ‘hard, hard, hard ole hard times’, o’er and o’er, and o’er again.

Mozart, just like Guthrie, was of course equally yoked with his own past (eg... continues in Arrival

... As a result, whatever about his musical abilities (or capacity for writing lyrics), there is no way that Mozart who, as an adult in Vienna, “rented the most expensive apartment, kept a horse, bought many expensive clothes, and had a hairdresser come to his house every day", could have tossed off lines like "It has been my hard luck many times to choose between what I thought was the truth and a good paycheck, that's why I go around so truthfully broke, I reckon". Or more to the point in relation to writing the “Dust Bowl Ballads”, "I slept under every important bridge out there".

The creative productions of the 'great' are never about 1 or 2 key characteristics, about Woody's wordslinging or Mozart's perfect pitch. It's always much more complicated. In my experience it's always five key characteristics, the interplay of all five, that allows the person to take on and solve key problems of a generation.

Norma Jeane/Marilyn

Which brings us to Marilyn, or more precisely, Norma Jeane, and the key problem of female identity in the post World War II America of the 1950s. What key characteristics did Norma Jeane need to turn herself into Marilyn?

What did it take to turn bimbo, dumb blonde roles that varied about as much as “the heart scan of a thrombosis victim” - “exploitative, grotesque parodies of a woman’s body” - into something more than “wolfbait”, more than a “no trouble”, easy lay, a celluloid girlie calendar? What did it take to turn them into role models for a generation of teenage girls, for 100s of 1000s, millions, of girls who studied those “enormous white breasts peering from daring décolletage, that breathy little-girl voice, and those vacant stares” , to turn them eventually into a lasting iconic sex symbol? A symbol not of sex in terms of ‘good girls’ and ‘bad girls’, of virgins and whores; not of sex in terms of “guilt and innocence”, but of sex as soda pop, apple pie, and the girl next door; into a lasting iconic symbol of sex without guilt or innocence, a symbol of “sex as natural”. In short what did it take to create a Marilyn Monroe?

Two key characteristics are obvious. First off, It took the physicality of a Betty Grable, a Lana Turner, a Jayne Mansfield, the physicality of a Playboy centerfold. And it required the ability to present herself as the next Jean Harlow, as a '50s update of the original early '30s version. It required presenting herself as the Jean Harlow of Platinum Blonde and Red-Headed Women, with – in Marjorie Rosen’s words - that "marshmallow hair", that "uncompromising presence", that "star quality"; as that "funny, sexy tart" whose "sensuality heightened crude humor"; as the Harlow of Red-Headed Women whose "gold digger's ruthlessness is toned down by comic lines", allowing her to... continues in Arrival

...It required being able to present herself as the "hoi-polloi socialite" of Platinum Blonde, who (with "nothing even remotely suggesting class... continues in Arrival

... makes "the socialite fantasy accessible". It required being able to present herself as the Harlow with "her wonderful vulnerability/ resiliency", "her lack of pretension or position", her "basically appealing cheapness". It required the ability to present herself as a Harlow for the 1950s – the ability to present herself as the next Jean Harlow.

And it required some modifications of the original. The ‘50s were not the ‘30s. They weren’t about The Depression with its “deafening poverty” inviting escapist fantasies of “brash, wisecracking, gold diggers” living “by their wit”; of "brazen, amoral dynamos emasculating” men and “exposing them as chumps” with "crude man-baiting techniques".

The early post war years required something different. Rosie the Riveter was gone and falsies were in – falsies and corsets and bras and girdles, propping up hourglass figures, figures stitched up in sheath dresses and cinch belts, in nylons and crinoline. In the aftermath of World War II women were being “pressured out of the employment market and into conjugal bliss”. For millions of teens and young American women the early ‘50s were about one thing – getting your man and getting him quick.

Marilyn had to fit the fantasies of that era. She needed, in Richard Dyer’s words, to "sum up female desirability in the fifties, to look like she's no trouble… vulnerable… she (needed to) offer herself to the viewer, to be available". She needed to "embody what 'Every Husband Needs' in a wife, namely good sex uncomplicated by worry about satisfying her". She needed to be vulnerable, accessible, offering herself to the camera in poses and roles that were belittling, exploitative, idiotic; in roles that offered little more than sex. She needed to come alive as “a daffy, Magooishly myopic husband hunter”; as a “comically stupid secretary, whose special skill is swinging her hips and behind”. She needed to light up for the camera while... continues in Arrival

...with “nothing but the radio on”. She needed to come alive to the camera as if she were genuinely thrilled to be there, to light up so “something flashed from her an instant before the shutter winked”. She needed to light up for the camera as if it were a thousand, a million, loving adoring eyes. She needed to have an almost insatiable hunger for love.

And beyond this creating a Marilyn required another characteristic. The Norma Jeane who was to become this sexual icon needed a fourth key characteristic. She needed to invest herself in these roles, in these "idiotic", "Betty Boop cartoon characters", as if they were her own, as if they were her self, her identity.

And that is exactly what she did in her first sensational cameo role, a role explicitly created to "capitalize on Marilyn's natural sexiness": "Slinking" into Groucho's office in a "tight, low-cut, strapless, iridescent gown, she rests her right hand seductively on the detective's upper chest and leans against him, her fingers moving slowly up his shoulders, as she purrs, 'Mr Grunion, I want you to help me'". Then in response to his "What seems to be the problem?”... continues in Arrival

...'Some men are following me'".

And in "her first major film" Marilyn again becomes her role. "Arriving at a tourists' party wearing a tight red dress, she reclines languidly and hums a few measures of the song, 'Kiss', which she has requested". Framed in the "lurid" technicolor of a "comic book sex siren", she... continues in Arrival

... makes the stereotypical 1950 love lyrics (come alive), credible and enticing". She is "at once the incarnation of every male fantasy of available sex". "Isolated in her singing… dreamily, moodily and so suggestively… she seems to be caressing herself", to be "consigned to her own peculiar realm of being", to have retreated into the deepest recesses of her private fantasy life".

And in the role which "fixed Marilyn in the world's consciousness as the exaggeratedly, dishily seductive blonde", she transforms a "silly, Kewpie doll, buxom cartoon" role into a private fantasy. In Carl Rollyson's terms, throughout the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Lorelei "as a person is forever elusive". She "stands apart from, divisible from reality". She has no past, needs no past". She is a "self-generating phenomenon, a perpetual mobile of desire". Throughout the film "Lorelei polishes her role, not her person". She is "distinguished by her ability to hold on to a role, to retain nothing of herself for other times, other settings".

The "famous 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend’ musical number elevates and consecrates the glamorous child-woman myth that envelops Lorelei-Marilyn throughout the film". Even as she sings and dances for the "worshipful audience" of "gentlemen in tuxedos who adore her", Marilyn’s focus is ever on her self. With ... continues in Arrival

...she "luxuriates in self-love".

And by "the very end of the film"... continues in Arrival

...it's obvious "that Lorelei-Marilyn may not be clear about the limits of her role, that she might just go on playing it because the role is not a means to an end (marriage) but just a means, a way of being… in which she has fully invested herself."

Or as Marilyn herself put it afterwards, "everybody else was talking about how convincing, how much of me must have been in this role, or how much of the role was in me… I began to believe this was all I could do – all I was – all any woman was".

By this point in her career -- having become the top female star in Hollywood, “the biggest thing that’s happened to Hollywood in years”, having created the definitive, iconic "person/symbol Marilyn Monroe" – she was ready to move on, to expand herself beyond the "dishily seductive, all body, no thought, blonde" that was Marilyn. She was eager to play the likes of Dostoevsky’s ‘Grushenka’ and Ibsen’s 'Nora’, to play ‘Gretchen’ in Faust , eager to be appreciated for her "fine dramatic performances". Like any developing person who's achieved a level of accomplishment, a level of development of her skills, her performance, and hence of her self, her identity, Marilyn was feeling the need to expand, to explore, to move to new levels. But creating the Marilyn Monroe of the early '50s, the definitive iconic sexual symbol she became, did not require such development. It required something else. It required the self Norma Jeane brought to Hollywood in the mid '40s, the self Norma Jeane sought so desperately to move beyond in her early roles and in those definitive roles which created the iconic Marilyn Monroe. It required the self Norma Jeane so desperately sought to find as she struggled to become Marilyn, the self she glimpsed for the first time in Ladies of The Chorus, in “two song-and-dance routines”, in the “brightness of her own image” lighting up the screen. Marilyn, driving back and forth past the theatre, reading and rereading her new name up on the marquee, as if she were “watching the announcement of her new identity”. Creating Marilyn Monroe required Norma Jeane’s fourth key characteristic -- the one that drove her to find a new self, a new identity, in the creation of Marilyn. It required Norma Jeane’s perfect self doubt.

And creating Marilyn Monroe required one final key characteristic... continues in Arrival

The information and quotes above re Guthrie come mostly from Klein, 1980, and Guthrie, 1970; re Mozart, from Till, 1993, and Lenneberg, 1983.

The information and quotes above re Norma Jeane/ Marilyn come mostly from Rosen, 1974; Spoto, 1993; Rollyson, 1986; Dyer, 1993; Guiles, 1992; and Haskell, 1975.

The concept of Key Characteristics was developed during the researching and writing of Arrival. While it is obviously related to extensive prior research on intelligence (eg Gardner, 1985), personality (eg Halverston et al, 1994), and self (eg Pervin, 1996) (see Simonton, 1994, re all three in relation to ‘greatness’), to my knowledge two aspects of this concept are unique to Arrival. One of these is the argument that it requires 5 key characteristics to take on and solve key problems in a field/society. The other is that these 5 key characteristics while unique to the individual involved inevitably include two which are primarily related to intelligence, two primarily related to personality, and one primarily related to self or identity.

In addition to the material presented above Arrival contains three massive case studies identifying the key characteristics that Hitchcock, Guthrie, and Norma Jeane/Marilyn needed to eventually solve key problems of their fields/society, and then showing how they were able to develop these characteristics over the course of 20+ years. Excerpts from these are available on this website at Hitch excerpt, Woody excerpt, and NormaJeane/Marilyn excerpt.

References cited above are available in Arrival. see Sources.