Chapter Sixteen
THERE IS PERSUASIVE EVIDENCE that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,” proclaimed Time magazine on January 30, 1956, detailing the terms of her new contract with Fox, as if it had been the easy victory of a one-woman operation. Time also reported that she would soon be on her way to Hollywood to begin Bus Stop.
It was indeed a busy season. On February 5, Laurence Olivier, his agent Cecil Tennant and playwright Terence Rattigan arrived in New York to meet with Marilyn about The Sleeping Prince, which Olivier had played in London with his wife Vivien Leigh in 1953. In 1954, Hugh French had suggested to Marilyn that the role of an American chorus girl who falls in love with a Middle European royal roué was perfect for her. As she began to choose her own projects, Marilyn had kept Rattigan’s play in mind and wanted no other than Olivier for her prince—precisely, she said, because it was so wildly improbable a pairing of actors and because it might help her achieve greater respectability as an actress. For his own benefit, Olivier asked to co-produce, direct and act as co-star, a demand to which MMP finally yielded after an avalanche of cablegrams between them and Olivier that winter.
On Tuesday, February 7, Olivier, Tennant and Rattigan met Marilyn at Sutton Place, after waiting the usual hour and a half. “But then she had us all on the floor at her feet in a second,” recalled Olivier, for whom punctuality was indeed the courtesy of theatrical kings. “She was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined, apart from herself on the screen.”
Two days later at noon, a press conference was held in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel, where over one hundred fifty reporters and photographers gathered. As if this was to be the announcement of a presidential candidacy or a papal election, the event had something faintly surrealistic about it: not for this group the attitude that “it’s only a movie,” as Alfred Hitchcock so often said. No, this would be more than that: it would be an event uniting a great English classical actor with America’s (indeed, the world’s) greatest sex symbol—an unlikely alliance indeed.
At last there arrived the solemn, dark-suited Olivier; the quiet, dignified Rattigan; and Marilyn, in a low-cut, black velvet dress designed by John Moore. Only two shoulder straps, thin and frail as cooked spaghetti, kept her from sudden indecency.
The questions were typically tiresome:
“Sir Laurence, what do you think of Miss Monroe as an actress?”
Olivier: “She is a brilliant comedienne, and therefore an extremely good actress. She has the cunning gift of being able to suggest one minute that she is the naughtiest little thing, and the next minute that she is beautifully dumb and innocent.”
“Marilyn, how do you feel about working with Sir Laurence?”
“He has always been my idol.”
“Is it true you want to play The Brothers Karamazov? Do you think you can handle it?
A flash of irritation crossed her face. “I don’t want to play the brothers. I want to play Grushenka. She’s a girl.”
“Spell that name ‘Grushenka,’ Marilyn,” someone dared.
“Look it up,” she snapped.
The reporters turned back to Olivier, asking two or three more prosaic questions about Hollywood, his salary, his control over American stars.
And then it happened. As if to smile for a photographer, Marilyn leaned forward and one of the straps of her dress broke. There was a moment of silence, then the popping of enough flashbulbs to blind an army in battle. She smiled, calmly asked for a safety pin and then bent forward while the strap was re-attached to the back of her dress. “Shall I take my coat off, boys?” Olivier asked. “Does anybody care?” The strap broke twice more before the conference was disbanded.
“The strap breaking was deliberately, brilliantly pre-arranged and carefully maneuvered in advance while she was dressing,” recalled designer John Moore. Eve Arnold, photographing Marilyn that day, agreed: “Before we went downstairs, she said to me, ‘Just wait and see what’s going to happen.’ ” The result was another Monroe coup—and her picture on the front page of several New York dailies. She may never have needed publicists.
But less risky and risqué photographs were also rendered that winter. Cecil Beaton arrived from London, following her around her apartment with a camera while she romped, squealed with childish delight, leaped onto a sofa, put a flower stem in her mouth and puffed on it as though it were a cigarette. He found her “artless, high-spirited, infectiously gay.”
Otherwise, for the first two months of the new year, Marilyn continued her wintry New York retreat, touring the streets of Brooklyn Heights with Arthur Miller, visiting the old haunts of writers and artists and listening adoringly as Arthur told stories of his boyhood. That season, according to Sam Shaw (who photographically documented the lovers’ New York itineraries), “Brooklyn became Nirvana to her, a magical place, her true home.” But Nirvana is a fantasy, and magical places are generally restricted to venues like Disneyland. The Monroe-Miller association, which she deemed “heavenly,” had to be lived out firmly on earth, and from the start it was burdened with terrible disadvantages.
For one thing, Miller was entering on what would be a difficult time in his own creative life—just as Marilyn was about to re-enter her professional life with fresh and astounding success, giving that year the two great performances of her career. The situation was oddly reminiscent of her and Joe. Second, archconservative political groups, operating unchecked and at the instigation of some pressmen and under government sponsorship, were about to make their nastiest skirmishes against Miller.
“There are all sorts of police gazette stories about Marilyn and her ‘Red Friends,’ ” noted Irving Stein in his corporate notes for MMP on January 6, 1956. Indeed, there were several right-wing writers hostile to anyone like Miller who had even a vaguely liberal spirit, and in 1954 he had been denied a passport to attend a production of one of his plays in Belgium. Columnist Louis Budenz often sniped at Miller, whom he labeled a “concealed communist,” and newsman Vincent X. Flaherty was even sillier: “Teenage boys and girls worship Marilyn. When Marilyn marries a man who was connected with Communism, they can’t help but start thinking Communism can’t be so bad after all!”
But the most vituperative voice against the playwright belonged to none other than Joe’s buddy Walter Winchell—who was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s friend and eager news-gatherer and the man to whom he regularly wrote friendly notes beginning “Dear John.” On February 12, days after Miller and his wife announced they were soon to be divorced, Winchell broadcast to the nation a story planted by Hoover himself—that “America’s best known blond moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia, several of whom are listed as Red fronters.”
By this time, Arthur was among the two or three most famous Americans scrutinized (and soon to be indicted) by government subcommittees obsessed with rooting out the threat to national security, for a violent overthrow by Moscow-directed Communists was presumed imminent. Hoover’s men had kept a file on Miller since his college days, when he had liberal social interests: he then supported the American Relief Ship for Spain; he was classified as unfit for World War II military service because of an injury (which seemed unpatriotic to the Bureau); and he was a member of the American Labor party. By 1944, agents were frankly spying on Miller, and in 1947 they found most suspicious his weekly attendance at a seminar of writers organized by an editor at the venerable publishing house Simon & Schuster, where writers gathered to counterattack the extreme right-wing propaganda disseminated by the media.
Miller’s professional achievements did little to stem the FBI’s surveillance. His first Broadway success, All My Sons (1947), concerned an engine manufacturer who knowingly sells defective parts to the air force; this the FBI labeled “party line propaganda.” In 1948, a savagely Red-baiting newsletter called Counter-Attack openly called Miller a Communist, just as the FBI disapproved of his support for the new state of Israel. Even more absurdly, in 1949 the FBI became drama critics, condemning Death of a Salesmanas “a negative delineation of American life . . . and [a play that] strikes a shrewd blow against [national] values.” But most alarming of all for Hoover’s agents was Miller’s support of a Bill of Rights seminar that openly criticized “the police state methods of certain Army and FBI officials.”
When the Monroe-Miller marriage was subsequently rumored to be inevitable, Winchell went further: “the next stop [for Miller] is trouble. The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena will check into his entire inner circle, which also happens to be the inner circle of Miss Monroe—and all of them are former Communist sympathizers!”
This sort of nonsensical vilification was common—symptomatic of the paranoia that swept America in the 1950s, washed into homes in regular waves of hysteria by vicious gossips like Winchell. At once the agents of the FBI grabbed their dark glasses and notebooks and began compiling data on the travels of Marilyn and her friends the Greenes, who were for a time seen as potential subversives, too. But government snoops could report only that “Miss Monroe, after completing her next assignment in the motion picture Bus Stop, will return to New York before her scheduled journey to England to make a motion picture with Laurence Olivier.” This they might have taken from Hedda or Louella—or even from those other meticulous but very different agents, the ladies and gentlemen at Arthur P. Jacobs Company, who issued regular statements of Marilyn’s departures, arrivals and professional plans. The only exclusive revelation provided in advance to Washington was erroneous, for they believed her Los Angeles address was to be the Chateau Marmont Hotel; by coincidence, that is where she installed Paula Strasberg during the production of Bus Stop (and where Marilyn had clandestine weekends with Arthur during April and May).
But neither columnists nor government agents went so far as to see any dark significance in one event that February: on March 12, Norma Jeane Mortensen (as she usually signed herself) at last legally became Marilyn Monroe. “I am an actress and I found my name a handicap,” she testified. “I have been using the name I wish to assume, Marilyn Monroe, for many years and I am now known professionally by that name.”
There were three other important formalities to certify, and they were quickly dispatched. First, after some grumbling from Milton—delivered, as usual in such delicate matters, through the mediation of Irving Stein—Marilyn assigned to Milton not the fifty-one percent in MMP he had requested, but two percent less, reserving control for herself. Had Time’s editors known this, it would have been their best evidence that she was indeed a “shrewd businesswoman.”
Second, Marilyn’s agents at MCA (in this matter monitored by chief executive Lew Wasserman himself) urged Greene and Stein to “shoot for the best deal, a quality distributor” for MMP’s forthcoming productions. Wasserman suggested Warner Bros. for the Olivier film. “Be conservative,” Wasserman cautioned Milton, “for if you reach for the moon and miss you will destroy Monroe Productions.” You deal with the distributors, Milton responded to Wasserman in several notes and calls. Good idea, replied Wasserman, adding ominously, “There are already uninvited cooks in the kitchen. Be careful. MMP has the flair for public relations, so we [i.e., Greene, Monroe and Wasserman] will tell the studio what to do.” The cooks, presumably, were studio executives elsewhere offering deals disapproved by Wasserman, whose corporate and political influence at this time (not to say in the decades to come) cannot be overstated.
Third, there was the matter of Marilyn’s will, which she signed on February 18 and which, as such things do, tells much about her sentiments early that year. Presuming an Estate valued at $200,000 (an arbitrary figure based mostly on hopes for the future), her bequests were: $20,000 to Dr. Margaret Herz Hohenberg; $25,000 to Lee and Paula Strasberg; $10,000 to Mrs. Michael Chekhov; $100,000 to Arthur Miller, “to be paid however is best for him tax-wise”; sufficient cash to cover sanitarium expenses for Gladys Baker Eley for the rest of her life (but not more than a total of $25,000); $10,000 to the Actors Studio; and $10,000 for the education of Patricia Rosten, daughter of Norman and Hedda.1 The signing complete, Irving then asked Marilyn if she had an idea for her tombstone motto: “Marilyn Monroe, Blonde,” she said, tracing lines in the air with a gloved finger and adding with a laugh, “37-23-36.”
* * *
Just before she departed for Hollywood and Bus Stop, Marilyn gathered up her courage and prepared to act onstage with Maureen Stapleton in part of the barroom scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. “This was really a brave thing for her,” said Stapleton years later.
She could have chosen a role that wasn’t too well known, so that her performance could have been criticized only on its own merit. But to do Anna Christie, something that’s been done by a dozen wonderful people—Garbo included! This meant that everyone in a professional audience came with an idea of how it should be done.
Marilyn was terrifically serious while they rehearsed, added Stapleton, a Broadway leading lady then best known for her success in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo: “I found her intuitive, bright and attentive, though I could see she was absolutely terrified of this new experience.” Once, after concluding a rehearsal at the Studio, they shared a taxicab, arriving first at Marilyn’s apartment. Because they were so emotionally drained, the matter of sharing the fare took on the proportions of a scene from O’Neill himself. “Look,” Stapleton finally said, “if you don’t get out of this cab and go home and just let me pay, I’m finished with you and the scene!”
Distressed, Marilyn alighted, kept her money and watched the taxi depart. When Maureen entered her apartment soon after, her telephone was ringing. “You really don’t want to do the scene with me, do you?” Marilyn asked, her voice wavering. A few minutes were needed for the reassurance that Maureen was still a good friend and colleague and very much wanted to do the scene with Marilyn.
The night of the performance, February 17, Marilyn was nervous to the point of collapse, terrified she would stumble or forget her lines as she so often did before a camera. Maureen suggested that Marilyn put a copy of the script on a table, an acceptable custom at Studio workshops. “No, Maureen—if I do it this time I’ll do it for the rest of my life.”
Anna Christie was a good role for Marilyn, for the character is (thus the text) “a blond, fully developed girl of twenty, handsome but now run down in health and plainly showing all the outward evidences of belonging to the world’s oldest profession.” She comes to a waterfront saloon in New York, sinks wearily into a chair and utters the opening line made immortal by Garbo in the 1931 film version—but spoken that night at the Actors Studio with a breathless urgency that made Anna pathetic as well as hardboiled: “Gimme a whisky—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby.”
After a friendly exchange with tough Marthy (Stapleton), Anna speaks of her childhood in words O’Neill could have written especially for Marilyn—and which those who attended the performance thought were delivered with almost painful authenticity:
“It’s my old man I got to meet, honest! It’s funny, too. I ain’t seen him since I was a kid—don’t even know what he looks like. . . . And I was thinking, maybe, seeing he ain’t ever done a thing for me in my life, he might be willing to stake me to a room and eats till I get rested up. But I ain’t expecting much from him. Give you a kick when you’re down, that’s what all men do.”
Of that evening, Marilyn said not long after,
I couldn’t see anything before I went onstage. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t remember one line. All I wanted was to lie down and die. I was in these impossible circumstances and I suddenly thought to myself, “Good God, what am I doing here?” Then I just had to go out and do it.
The result, according to most people present, was astonishing. Anna Sten found her “very deep and very lovely, giving and taking at the same time—and that’s a very rare quality.” Kim Stanley remembered that spectators “were taught never to clap at the Actors Studio, like we were in church, but it was the first time I’d ever heard applause there.” As for Lee and Paula, they were ecstatic, and later at their apartment—while Marilyn wept over what she considered her unworthy performance—they hailed her as the greatest new talent of the decade, which she must have realized was glitteringly hyperbolic. This sort of praise she rightly rejected, but something in her wanted to believe it, and that caused damage enough, as events would soon disclose.
Robert Schneiderman, on the teaching staff at the Studio at the time, recalled that Marilyn was “often brilliant when she performed [in scene-studies], but when she finished a role she would collapse in tears, although she was told she had been right on target or sustained a character perfectly. Marilyn had low self-esteem but she was really an excellent actress and constantly strove to be better.”
On February 25, Marilyn returned to Hollywood for the first time in over a year, accompanied by Amy and Milton Greene, their two-year-old son Joshua, and Irving Stein. At Los Angeles International Airport, Marilyn calmly and wittily fielded questions about her new company and, so it seemed, her new life: “When you left here last year you were dressed differently, Marilyn,” began one reporter. “Now you have a black dress and a high-necked blouse: is this the new Marilyn?” Resting a black-gloved hand on her chin, she needed no time to think: “No, I’m the same person—it’s just a new dress.”
She and the Greenes then proceeded to a rented house at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, very near the University of California and close to Fox, where the interiors of Bus Stop were scheduled after location shooting in Phoenix, Arizona, and Sun Valley, Idaho. For leasing a nine-room home belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Lushing, MMP paid $950 per month.
Four days later, however, there was a more serious public appearance, although it, too, had its light moments. On November 21, 1954, a Los Angeles police officer had cited Marilyn for driving along Sunset Boulevard without a license, but because she was in New York she had failed to appear in court that winter. Now that the matter was to be settled, dozens of reporters, photographers and television cameramen greeted her and Irving Stein at the Beverly Hills City Hall.
“You may have the idea that this is good publicity,” rumbled Judge Charles J. Griffin, warming to his momentary place in the sun.
“I’m very sorry,” Marilyn replied in a clear voice. “It isn’t at all the kind of publicity I want.”
“Well,” continued the judge, “it isn’t the type that will win you an Oscar.” He continued somewhat loftily, making a little speech about laws being for everyone, the true nature of democracy—almost everything but an exegesis of the Gettysburg Address. At last, somewhat more gently, he concluded: “I would suggest, Miss Monroe, that in the future I would much rather pay to go and see you perform than have you pay to come and see me.” Irving paid the fifty-five-dollar fine, and they departed. Outside, she could not resist answering a few questions: “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise in there!” she said. “Apparently the judge didn’t know I’ve been away for a year. But don’t get me wrong, boys. I don’t really believe in ignoring traffic citations.”
In all these appearances, people noted, there was indeed a new Marilyn, a woman more poised, with more self-confidence and assurance than before: so much was confirmed by a number of reporters to whom she granted interviews in February and March, among them writers for McCall’s, Modern Screen, Harper’s Bazaar, The Saturday Evening Post, Movieland and The Toronto Star. “She seemed content and more serious than ever before,” according to Allan Snyder, with whom she had a happy reunion. But her manner on a movie set remained to be assessed.
The usual personal dramatic scenarios continued. Informed of Marilyn’s return to Los Angeles, Natasha Lytess tried desperately to contact her. A dozen telephone calls and several hand-delivered letters came to Beverly Glen within the first week of Marilyn’s return, but she ignored them, having quietly replaced Natasha with Paula Strasberg just as she had dropped Famous Artists and signed on with MCA. But here there was a poignant twist, for Natasha had been stricken with cancer and was no longer able to work at Fox. Entirely dependent on her work with private students, she hoped to resume with Marilyn.
Marilyn’s lack of response confused and hurt Natasha deeply, and then, on March 3, she received a telephone call from Irving Stein:
I identified myself as Marilyn Monroe’s lawyer and instructed her firmly not to call Marilyn Monroe or visit or attempt to see Marilyn Monroe. These instructions must be obeyed to avoid trouble. Natasha, whom I’d never met, called me “Darling” and asked if I’d listen. The following are exact quotes: “My only protection in the world is Marilyn Monroe. I created this girl—I fought for her—I was always the heavy on the set. I was frantic when I called the house and she would not speak to me. I am her private property, she knows that. Her faith and security are mine. I’m not financially protected, but she is. Twentieth told me on Friday, ‘You don’t have your protection any more, we don’t need you.’ . . . But my job means my life. I’m not a well person. I would like very much to see her even with you if only for one half-hour.” I told her no. Marilyn wouldn’t and didn’t intercede and we didn’t want to speak to or see her. I told her she must not call Marilyn or I would have to use other means to stop her.
“In Marilyn’s powerful position,” Natasha said a few years later, “she had only to crook her finger for me to keep my job at the studio. Had she any sense of gratitude for my contribution to her life, she could have saved my job.” With this statement it is impossible to disagree, for however thorny the relationship had been, Natasha was always available to Marilyn.
In great emotional and physical pain, Natasha arrived unannounced at Beverly Glen on March 5. Lew Wasserman, present for a meeting with Milton, answered the bell, “barring my way, his arms stretched across the doorway. ‘Your engagement with the studio,’ he said, ‘is none of Miss Monroe’s concern.’ ” Natasha glanced up, and there at a second-story window was Marilyn, looking down at her without expression. “It was the last time I ever saw her,” Natasha said not long before her death. “Between us there was always a wall, and communication was impossible. I have wondered many times that I still care.” To everyone’s astonishment, Natasha Lytess outlived Marilyn, but after a long and bitter struggle she succumbed to cancer in 1964.
That Marilyn ignored so humble a plea, that she could have dictated a recommendation and did not, that she turned away from one who had negated herself to cater to Marilyn—all this remains a conundrum, an uncharacteristically inclement act of her life. But Natasha was, after all, a mother figure like Grace Goddard, and once again Marilyn—even while she was trying to create an entirely new life with a new set of colleagues—was perhaps primarily motivated by the subtle desire to reject Natasha before Natasha (by dying) withdrew from her. The entire scenario recalled the term of Grace’s relationship with Marilyn. Perhaps out of guilt for her unkindness to Natasha, Marilyn at once contacted Inez Melson, who was charged with the supervision of Gladys’s care, and then she called the office manager at Rockhaven Sanitarium. Her payments for Gladys’s care were indeed arriving regularly through Inez—three hundred dollars monthly.
As the starting date for Bus Stop approached, Milton Greene assumed the burden of details and finalized the production schedule. For a man without an hour’s experience in such matters, he learned quickly and for the most part expertly. In all his tasks he was much assisted by Irving Stein, who ran interference with Marilyn: for the moment, she was indifferent to everything except what would affect her performance. But she also felt Milton’s assumption of so much responsibility gave him control of MMP—its long-range plans as well as daily decisions—and this aroused her suspicions.
For the present, however, Marilyn devoted her energies to working with Paula—relying on her guidance as they broke down the script of Bus Stop scene by scene, analyzing every line and preplanning every gesture. Sometimes Paula was able to encourage her with gentle reassurance; at other times, Marilyn would be drained and tearful after an hour with Paula, convinced she could never rise to expectations. Yet whereas with Natasha originality was often blocked from Marilyn’s rehearsals and performances, Paula drew out moments of real inspiration.
First of all, Marilyn perfected a flawless Texas-Oklahoma twang for Cherie, the dance-hall “chantoosie.” This would be her chance to be taken seriously in a major film, as she knew; nothing would be left to accident, nothing improvised. Milton had worked out the look of the picture and the texture of each scene as he worked on the script; Milton, too, designed Marilyn’s makeup—an almost ghostly white pallor for a woman who sings and dances through the night, sleeps most of the day and rarely sees sunlight.
Longing to repeat her early success in The Asphalt Jungle, she had asked for John Huston, but he was unavailable. Typically, Lew Wasserman stepped in and settled the problem quickly. He contacted Joshua Logan—a large, Falstaffian man, brilliant, imaginative, neurotic, deeply troubled by insecurity and by his lifelong efforts to suppress and then to conceal his homosexuality. Logan was one of the two or three most honored Broadway directors, famous for staging South Pacific and Mister Roberts, among other hits. More recently, he had directed the film of Picnic, which featured a memorable performance from Susan Strasberg, the daughter of his old friend Lee. “But Marilyn can’t act!” Logan objected when Wasserman offered him the job. Consult Susan’s father, Wasserman retorted.
“I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of actors and actresses, both in class and in the Studio,” Lee intoned gravely when Logan asked, “and there are only two that stand out way above the rest. Number one is Marlon Brando and the second is Marilyn Monroe.” This opinion became virtually a Logan doctrine, lovingly repeated by him numerous times before and after Marilyn’s death.
Logan accepted the assignment only on the condition that, although he liked Paula, he would not suffer her interference directly on the set. After all, he had a reputation for being able to work with the most vulnerable and tortured actors (Margaret Sullavan and Henry Fonda, among others). Paula could coach Marilyn to their hearts’ content in dressing room and trailer, at night and at meals, but she was not to be seen near the set or the camera. His injunctions were soon ignored—and a good thing, too, for Paula’s “interference” turned out to be inspired coaching: the differences in Marilyn Monroe’s acting, beginning with this performance, are everywhere evident.
Yet for all her benefits to Marilyn, Paula’s contributions were sometimes undermined by her husband, who first demanded that Paula receive a fee of $1,500 per week. “Marilyn is too emotionally weak to handle this sort of thing alone,” Lee told Milton in Marilyn’s presence. “She needs Paula.” There was no quicker way to diminish Marilyn’s confidence, but there it was: Milton balked, Irving fumed and Fox complained, but Marilyn insisted and so Paula Strasberg received $1,500 each week, more than any member of the crew, any designer or the composer—and more than most American film actors. Lee Strasberg made it clear (as had Natasha) that Marilyn’s new strength derived from his tutelage, transported to her through Paula: to move out on her own now would be unthinkable.
This was the effect of living in the Beverly Glen commune as well, for with Marilyn there was a thin line separating the situation of a supportive extended family from that of her lifelong feeling that she was the puella aeterna. Marilyn may have been at her creative peak, but it was not to Lee’s advantage for her to believe that.
As some might have predicted, this spelled trouble. Marilyn worked with Paula late into the night, on location and back at the studio; then, emotionally strained beyond exhaustion, she could not sleep. Milton kept her supplied with the barbiturates she felt she needed, importing them from various doctors in Los Angeles and New York in whatever quantities were necessary. The result was not surprising: often in the morning, Marilyn looked as wan as Cherie and was difficult to awaken, much less deliver on time to the set. Logan was forewarned of this and, alone among her directors, smartly arranged alternate camera shots for almost every morning.
Much of this was the strategy of the former Marilyn. But with the maturity and resourcefulness of the new came an occasional imperiousness, an attitude that, since she was president of her company, she ought so to act. It was a mask, a new way of covering her old fears, but crew members were often hurt and confused. Nor did the chemical effects of nightly dependence on sleeping pills enhance (much less stabilize) her mood.
With these strains and tensions, the company arrived in Phoenix on March 15, where the annual rodeo provided setting and action for important sequences, and where Marilyn met her leading man, a young stage actor named Don Murray who was appearing in his first film. She was not a friendly player with Murray, perhaps because she was older (though only three years) and terrified of appearing so, but also because (thus Milton in a note to Irving) “she wants to let everyone know whose show this is.” Throughout the filming, Marilyn passed notes to Joshua Logan, to George Axelrod and to Paula Strasberg, fearful that Murray would make her look foolish and that Hope Lange, a younger blonde in a supporting role, would make her look unattractive. “Like a child,” according to Murray, “she said and did things impulsively, from a self-centered viewpoint. When she thought I’d ruined a scene of hers, she continued the action as rehearsed, taking her costume and hitting me across the face with it. Some of the sequins scratched the corner of my eye and she ran off. But she wasn’t deliberately mean.”
Besides these obvious, sometimes crude ways of demonstrating her supremacy on the set, however, it was in important ways artistically Marilyn’s show, too, and here the other side of her rose magnificently to take control. When the designer showed her a showgirl’s costume that was simply too glamorous, made for Technicolor, CinemaScope and the possibility of an Oscar, she knew it was not at all in character. Marilyn insisted on something shredded, worn, at once paltry but provocative. She rummaged through the wardrobe department, found a torn and moth-eaten item, then poked holes through fishnet stockings and designed a brilliantly shabby outfit that evoked Logan’s blissful admiration.
As filming progressed, Milton’s initial strategy was to forbid access to Marilyn—which for the press and their colleagues created terrific problems. “Milton seemed to want complete control over her,” photographer William Woodfield recalled, “and we had to devise all sorts of odd means to shoot her—long focuses through a hotel window, two-hundred-millimeter lenses on cameras under bleachers and tricks like that.”
According to journalist Ezra Goodman, who was forever stymied in his attempts to reach Marilyn, she was “surrounded with intrigue and a coterie of advisors headed by Milton Greene who [ran] interference for her and [did] their best to gum up the works where a reporter is concerned. No one gets to Monroe without first clearing through him.”
On March 18 in Phoenix, Marilyn and Milton argued loudly over MMP absorbing the cost of Lee Strasberg’s visit to the production. Immediately after the discussion, she was called to film a portion of the rodeo sequence and suddenly fell from a six-foot ramp. Dazed and in momentary shock before writhing in pain, she lay very near to Milton, who as usual was constantly taking still photographs of every scene. “He just kept clicking away with his camera without moving to help her,” as George Axelrod recalled. “I was a photographer before I was a producer” was Milton’s reply to George’s query as to why he did not rush to her aid. Perhaps because of the general tensions associated with filmmaking, Marilyn and Milton also engaged in a heated debate over the upcoming presidential election, an argument which production assistant David Maysles and Irving Stein noted through March and April with decreasing patience.
From the hundred-degree desert heat of Phoenix, the company traveled to the Idaho mountains, where amid snowdrifts and subzero temperatures they managed to complete a few scenes in Sun Valley for five days beginning March 26. When they returned to Los Angeles, the leading lady and several of her supporting players (Arthur O’Connell, Betty Field and Hope Lange) were suffering from a nasty virus. On April 5, studio physician Lee Seigel ordered Marilyn home to bed, and Logan tried to work around her. But her condition worsened; by the twelfth she had a high fever and acute bronchitis, and after consultation with another doctor, Seigel ordered Marilyn to the hospital. The company shut down for a week.
The same day that Marilyn entered St. Vincent’s, Arthur Miller entered a cottage at Pyramid Lake, forty miles from Reno, where he began the two-month residency requirement necessary for a quick divorce. Several nights later, Marilyn telephoned from her hospital room, desperate and weeping. “I can’t do it, I can’t work this way. Oh, Papa, I can’t do it,” she cried. She tried to explain the difficulties she was having. “I’m no trained actor, I can’t pretend I’m doing something if I’m not. All I know is real! I can’t do it if it’s not real!” Arthur listened anxiously.
“I want to live quietly,” Marilyn continued. “I hate it, I don’t want it anymore, I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can’t fight for myself any more.” In his memoirs, Miller added, “I saw suddenly that I was all she had.” This was not a caution to him, however: on the contrary, it seemed only to propel him closer to the resolve of marriage, confirming him in the role of healer: “We would marry and start a new and real life . . . her pain was mine.”
Yet for all her stated dependence on Arthur, Marilyn had grave doubts from the start about any rush to the altar, and she still begged him not to break up his family to marry her. Marilyn was of divided mind: she wanted to be with Arthur in the country and she longed for a simple life. But if this seemed like a fantasy by Thornton Wilder, she knew that, too, had a dark underside: Our Town is full of compassion for lives darkened, stifled and derailed. Even while she thought she wanted to retire, Marilyn also wanted to work, to be respected as a serious adult, to transform a messy past into an ordered future.
At the same time, she was especially needy of comfort during filming, and so she did not hinder Arthur from visiting her every weekend in Hollywood (on which journeys he technically jeopardized his divorce procedure). As Amy Greene remembered, Logan began to dread Mondays, knowing that Marilyn would be unable to work after a weekend with Arthur at the Chateau Marmont Hotel—whither (without their knowledge) the FBI tracked the lovers.
“She was a wreck after those weekends,” according to Amy. “She couldn’t bring Arthur to see us, he couldn’t leave the hotel, and then suddenly, on Sunday night or Monday morning, he slipped back to Nevada. This left her confused, guilty, lonely—and all of that brought on a cycle of pills and sickness.” In a way, the situation was far easier for Arthur, who seemed to Marilyn always calm, composed and in control of the situation.
Whereas George Axelrod had reworked the film of The Seven Year Itch for Marilyn and satirized her and her crowd in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, the screenplay for Bus Stop was written (thus Logan) “expressly for her, and [he] let the entire story be guided by his feelings for her. . . . The girl was half Inge and half Monroe.” And despite all the problems during production, from the core of strength that underlay Marilyn’s fragility she created an extraordinarily rich, moving and convincing portrait.
The story is simplicity itself: a virginal Montana cowboy (Murray) goes to Phoenix for the rodeo and meets a girl from the Ozarks (Marilyn) with whom he immediately falls in love. She resists but is eventually touched by the boy’s sweetness, naïveté and innocence—the qualities she lacks and fears he would require of her. The predictable happy ending unites them.
From her first appearance, a tired, abused showgirl fanning herself against the heat of a summer night, Marilyn’s Cherie transcends the limitations of the character and the story. Her performance has obviously been thought out, planned with attention to every detail, but nothing seems calculated. Gone are every Lytess-inspired hesitation and every overworked mannerism. “I’ve been tryin’ to be somebody,” she says in her first moments, and we hear the person behind the role. “I can’t quit now—it took me too long to get this far!”
Her rendition of “That Old Black Magic” in a rowdy barroom presented Marilyn with a delicate assignment, for the song had to be badly sung: this is a girl with pretensions beyond her abilities, after all. Her singing, therefore, is a small miracle—a touching combination of Cherie’s nervous energy and minor talent, her shyness and unrealistic hopes, her longing and her fear. Pulling up her long gloves, trying to be heard over men guzzling beer and playing cards, she gives a brilliantly terrible performance.
But it is in her long speech on the bus that Marilyn gave shape and substance to the character, somehow reaching into herself with a wistfulness that never seems self-indulgent: the character’s hopes collide with her fragility in one of the great performances of the decade. In a voice poised between tremulous confession and a great ache of longing, she spoke of Marilyn as well as of Cherie, and this gave her the truth she so immediately conveyed:
I’ve been goin’ with boys since I was twelve—them Ozarks don’t waste much time—and I’ve been losin’ my head about some guy ever since. . . . Of course I’d like to get married and have a family and all them things. . . . Maybe I don’t know what love is. I want a guy I can look up to and admire. But I don’t want him to browbeat me. I want a guy who’ll be sweet with me. But I don’t want him to baby me, either. I just gotta feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me—aside from all that lovin’ stuff. You know what I mean?
She assures that we do.
When the picture opened on August 31, the critics were reaching for superlatives. Typical was the New York Times review: “Hold onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in Bus Stop. . . . [She is] the beat-up B-girl of the [Inge] play, down to the Ozark accent and the look of pellagra about her skin, and [there is] the small flame of dignity that sputters and makes of her a rather moving sort.” The Saturday Review of Literature added that in this film Marilyn “effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality.”
Logan—who quickly became her adoring director—proclaimed Marilyn
one of the great talents of all time, and the most talented motion picture actress of her day—warm, witty, extremely bright and totally involved in her work. I’d say she was the greatest artist I ever worked with in my entire career. . . . Hollywood shamefully wasted her, hasn’t given the girl a chance. She has immense subtlety, but she is a frightened girl, terrified of the whole filmmaking process and self-critical to the point of an inferiority complex.
At the end of May, Bus Stop was complete and Marilyn prepared to return to New York, where Arthur was soon due to return from Nevada. Her departure from Hollywood was delayed, however, when President Sukarno of Indonesia requested an introduction to her. Almost fanatically devoted to American movies and American actors—“I go to three or four Hollywood movies a week!” he boasted—Sukarno was in Los Angeles touring movie studios and addressing the Association of Motion Picture Producers. To make his journey really memorable, he told the press, he would like to meet Miss Marilyn Monroe. There was much scurrying to telephone booths, and hours later Miss Marilyn Monroe was dragooned for a diplomatic command appearance. She later recalled Sukarno’s charm and courtesy, adding that “he kept looking down my dress, although you’d think with five wives he’d have enough.” By this time, she had enough of just about everything, and after the presidential introduction Marilyn collapsed into bed. It was her thirtieth birthday.
Finally, Marilyn departed on June 2; the Greenes remained to pack and close up the house on Beverly Glen. This was no easy task, for the renters had been a messy and careless lot during their three-month stay, and it looked as if the house had been taken over by an unusually high-spirited and reckless fraternity.
“The Greenes have lost or misplaced the inventory,” wrote Al Delgado of MCA to his colleague Jay Kanter.
This is quite serious because this is an expensive house with expensive furnishings and the inventory is probably over forty pages long. When the owners of the house return, I feel that Milton will have trouble and may possibly have a lawsuit on his hands. . . . I will do everything in my power to rectify the condition of some of the furnishings and feel very badly about the whole thing, as the house was in perfect condition when they moved in.
For months, there followed an angry exchange of letters, invoices and threats of legal action. The matter was still being adjudicated that autumn, when Irving Stein had to deal with the owners, who were due reimbursement for many damaged and destroyed items in their home: two electric blankets; six pillows; eight sheets; five wool blankets; ten chair slipcovers; a three-hundred-dollar invoice for carpet and furniture cleaning; an unpaid telephone bill for the same amount; more than a dozen smashed cups, saucers, glasses and antique crystal goblets; three broken lamps; three sets of curtains; and two pieces of outdoor furniture. In addition, workmen had to remove the heavy black fabric Marilyn had nailed against the windows of her bedroom, for the slightest exterior light roused her from sleep, pills or no.
The causes of such exceptional ruin are not easy to explain (nor did anyone attempt a justification), but surely one puppy and two-year-old Joshua could not have accomplished so much unaided. But the house was also Milton’s studio, and he and Marilyn were, as Amy conceded, “intense and excessive. When they loved and hated, it was with all their being. When they drank and drugged, they did so with great passion.” The demolition job seems to have been the combined result of wild parties, an overburdened photographer trying to cope with multiple new responsibilities, an occasionally unstable movie star and an atmosphere in which there was a prodigal consumption of alcohol and drugs.
On June 11, Arthur Miller was granted a Reno divorce, and the next day he joined Marilyn in New York. At once, the press camped outside 2 Sutton Place South, following the couple when they went to dinner at the home of Arthur’s parents in Brooklyn.
A week later, Marilyn telephoned Irving Stein to announce that she wanted to redraft her will, leaving everything she owned to Arthur. “I told her about the possibility of a pre-nuptial agreement, but she said she didn’t want one,” Irving noted in a memorandum dated June 19. “She also asked about obtaining film rights to Miller’s literary properties.” Marilyn did not, however, forget her mother: the revised will left seven-eighths of her property to Arthur, the balance for Gladys’s care.
With good cause, Milton was alarmed: what did these issues portend for the future of Marilyn Monroe Productions? To what extent did she intend to bring Arthur into the corporation? To what extent might Arthur desire or even demand association with MMP? That year, his only professional prospect was a forthcoming London production of A View from the Bridge, which he was expanding from one act to two. Jealous though he might have been, Milton suspected that Arthur’s love might be alloyed with financial self-interest: Miller had, after all, considerable alimony to pay and very little income. But these were not matters Marilyn would discuss with Milton, and from this month a net of suspicion surrounded them all, with Marilyn at the center of a fierce battle for control.
There were other concerns, too, for Arthur was summoned to appear in Washington before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer questions about his Communist party affiliation. But this committee had a problem of which Arthur was then unaware, and which they were scrambling to resolve. They had no proof of any treasonous activities by Arthur Miller—much less could they come up with “a live witness that can put him in the Party, [or even] a photostat of Miller’s Communist Party card.” Ironically, when HUAC staff director Richard Arens turned for help to J. Edgar Hoover (working through the mediation of Hoover’s aide Clyde Tolson), he was told that the FBI had no such data—this despite the efforts of Hoover’s friend Walter Winchell, who had tried to summon anti-Miller support by proclaiming that “Marilyn Monroe’s new romance [is] a long-time pro-lefto.” With further irony, this would have exactly the opposite effect.
And so on June 21, Arthur left Marilyn and his parents, went to Washington, sat before the HUAC and made several important statements. He admitted that although he had attended Communist party writers’ meetings four or five times in the 1940s and signed many protests in the last decade, he was never “under Communist discipline.” Calmly and articulately, he also said: that he had indeed denounced HUAC when it was investigating the “Hollywood Ten” (a group of writers blacklisted for what were considered dangerous political beliefs); that he had opposed the Smith Act, which outlawed advocating the overthrow of the government, for “if there is a penalty on advocacy, if it becomes a crime even without overt action, then I cannot operate and neither can literature: a man should be able to write a poem or a play about anything”; and that he would not provide HUAC with the names of those he saw at meetings a decade earlier. “The life of a writer is pretty tough,” he said, “and I don’t want to make it tougher on anyone. I’ll tell you anything about myself, but my conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person.” He concluded that he believed it would be “a disaster and a calamity if the Reds ever took over this country,” and that he had long since abandoned any connection with Communists or belief in their principles.
Arthur’s statements appeared in print all around the country and—much to Marilyn’s delight—he became something of a maverick hero in the fight against censorship and repression. But immediately there was the threat of a contempt citation, spearheaded by Congressman Francis E. Walter, who claimed that “moral scruples do not constitute legal grounds for refusing to answer a Congressional investigator.” Walter’s cronies were quick to agree: “No question about it,” said Congressman Gordon H. Scherer flatly. “Miller is clearly in legal contempt.”
During these fantastic proceedings, there was a recess during which two things occurred, each of them more surprising and more welcome to newsmen than what had just transpired within chambers.
First, Representative Walter had an idea. He informed Arthur’s lawyer, Joseph Rauh, that the entire hearing and the possibility of a contempt citation would be dropped “provided Marilyn agreed to be photographed shaking hands” with Walter. This condition Arthur at once rejected and denounced, and so on July 10 a contempt citation against him was issued in Congress by a vote of 373 to 9.
Arthur himself had something to say. During the hearing, he had asked for his passport to be returned to him so that he could travel to England that summer for a production of his play—“and to be with the woman who will then be my wife.” Reporters shouted the obvious question, and then Marilyn Monroe, who was seated before a television set in New York, heard Arthur say, “I will marry Marilyn Monroe before July 13, when she is scheduled to go to London to make a picture. When she goes to London, she will go as Mrs. Miller.”
The announcement surprised her more than the country. “Have you heard?” she asked Norman and Hedda Rosten, whom she telephoned almost hysterically. “He announced it before the whole world! Can you believe it? You know, he never really asked me. We talked about it, but it was all very vague.” To Amy Greene, Rupert Allan and others she added with unveiled sarcasm, “It was awfully nice of him to let me know his plans.”
The contempt citation would take a year to adjudicate, but meantime Arthur Miller’s passport was granted (not for the then normal term of two years, but for six months only, beginning July 6). A lover—especially the fiancé of America’s favorite beauty—simply could not be dangerous to the United States, for Communists were not romantics, now, were they? On the contrary, a serious man affianced to Marilyn Monroe legitimized the public’s adoration of her, just as her acceptance of him made Arthur Miller somehow less threatening and toned down his role as a controversial figure. His announcement had made him—well, simply a man in love wishing to take his bride on a honeymoon. Just as in a Marilyn Monroe movie, love was conquering all. For the moment it could be forgotten that in the committee hearings he was raised to almost heroic status among liberal-thinking Americans confronting the Orwellian spirit of the times.
“Arthur was learning from Marilyn,” as Susan Strasberg noted. “In one day, he was already a master of the media.” Cameras, microphones and reporters—not to say his presumption of Marilyn’s response—would counteract anything a crew of Washington zanies could do to him. For his courageous stand in Washington, “she admired him from that day,” according to Rupert Allan, “although his tactic for the wedding announcement greatly distressed her. And in Marilyn’s case, admiration was always linked to love. She thought he was a great writer. But I’m sorry to say that at that moment I think he used her.”
Dr. Hohenberg, still wielding enormous influence over every aspect of her client’s public and private life, approved the marriage (thus Irving Stein noted, perhaps with some astonishment, in a corporate memorandum dated June 22) and then Hohenberg advised Marilyn to go right ahead and meet the press. Of course she would marry Mr. Miller, Marilyn announced, putting aside her reservations. But from June 22 until the marriage date (which they would not divulge), Marilyn pondered. Her imminent departure for London to make a film with the formidable Olivier was one challenge, the wedding another.
Life was, therefore, suddenly filled with another set of claims on Marilyn’s courage, talents and self-awareness. No one permitted her to go just a bit more slowly, to think things out for herself over an arc of time. Certainly she was eager to prove herself, to feel she had passed from childish dependencies to adulthood. But there was no one who encouraged the necessary apartness and reflection. The fortunes of many—their self-interest, careers, future and fame—were allied to that of a talented, sensitive, highly strung thirty-year-old.
Marilyn was poised to marry a man who very much appealed to her desire for self-improvement. But his tendency to lecture her and to be the wisdom figure fed her sense of inferiority. Many who knew them realized that try though he might, and love her though he surely did at the outset, Arthur Miller was soon wandering into the dangerous territory of suppressed disdain, effected (however subtly) by his assumption of moral and intellectual superiority.
In this regard, Marilyn was again replicating the life of Jean Harlow, whose second marriage was to cameraman Harold Rosson, sixteen years her senior. They were soon divorced, and Harlow took up with actor William Powell, nineteen years older. “[Jean] was always anxious to increase her knowledge,” said her friend Maureen O’Sullivan, “and she felt she could learn a lot from Powell.” Marilyn and Jean each contracted three marriages, and each longed to be a serious actress, to transcend the common presumption that they were only sexpots. That Marilyn was at least generally aware of these parallels is clear from her continued discussions with Milton Greene, throughout 1955 and 1956, of how they might somehow produce a film about Harlow’s life—with or without her old ally Sidney Skolsky, with whom she had originally discussed the project and whom she had now replaced with Milton.
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller promised to meet the press at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, at four o’clock on Friday, June 29. But first they were to have a quiet lunch with Miller’s parents at the home of his cousin Morton, a few miles distant. A crew of reporters and photographers was gathering at Miller’s home on Old Tophet Road meanwhile, supervised by Milton.
But one team heard of the family lunch at Morton’s and decided to get the jump on their colleagues. Mara Scherbatoff, a Russian princess in exile who was New York bureau chief for Paris Match, asked her companion to drive her over to Morton’s for some advance pictures and perhaps even a preemptive statement. Just before one o’clock, Marilyn, Arthur and Morton emerged from Morton’s house, said nothing, leaped into Arthur’s car and sped along the narrow, winding route toward Tophet Road, with Scherbatoff and her driver in hot pursuit. But on a blind curve near Arthur’s house, the photographer’s car hurtled from the road and smashed into a tree. The Princess Mara was thrown through the windshield and hideously injured.
Hearing the crash, Miller stopped his car, and the three ran back to the accident; the sight was so dreadful that Arthur would not let Marilyn come near. They then drove home to telephone for help, Marilyn trembling and pale, leaning on Arthur for support. They had seen enough to know that no one could help, and in fact the aristocrat-reporter died at New Milford Hospital less than three hours later.
But the press conference, held outdoors under a luxuriant tree, was not delayed. Extant film footage, in which Arthur mumbles banal replies to questions and Marilyn seems distracted and less than joyful, must take into account the tragic prelude. In fact, neither of them said much at all, making a hasty retreat to the house after less than ten minutes.
When the last reporter had departed, the casually dressed couple departed with Morton and his wife for the Westchester County Court House in White Plains, New York. Just before seven-thirty that evening (Friday, June 29), Judge Seymour Rabinowitz pronounced them husband and wife in a four-minute, single-ring ceremony. Not one member of the press knew, and the newlyweds were able to return to Roxbury without hearing the pop of one flashbulb.
On Sunday, July 1, a second ceremony was held at the home of Arthur’s agent, Kay Brown, near Katonah, New York. But while friends and relatives gathered for the traditional Jewish marriage rite and a buzz of happy conversation prevailed downstairs and on the lawn, the Greenes were busily attending a nervous Marilyn in an upstairs guest room. She had in fact been withdrawn since Friday, and although Milton and Amy could but privately speculate, he had already put through a call to Irving Stein, advising the lawyer to “stand by in case of immediate difficulty about Marilyn’s marriage.”
The reason for this warning was soon clear to Amy and Milton.
“Do you really want to go ahead with this marriage?” Milton asked Marilyn. “You don’t have to, you know.” Her eyes were glazed with tears, and Amy tried to comfort her: “We can put you in a car and we’ll deal with the guests.” The civil marriage, they guessed, could somehow be annulled before the religious rite solemnized the union.
“No,” Marilyn said quietly. “I don’t want to go through with it.”
But as Milton prepared to attend to this awkward task, Marilyn called him back.
“No, Milton!” she cried. “We’ve already invited all these people. We can’t disappoint them.”
According to Amy, Marilyn had considered Mara Scherbatoff’s death a bad omen for her wedding. “But she also knew that, omens or not, she had made a terrible mistake in agreeing to this marriage.”
But the cast and crew awaited, and as Marilyn said, she felt sorry for Arthur. The show went on. Moments later, Rabbi Robert Goldberg presided, with Arthur’s brother Kermit and Hedda Rosten as attendants. That afternoon, Marilyn performed beautifully, greeting all twenty-five guests, working the party tidily, assuring that everyone had enough roast beef, sliced turkey and champagne. “Well,” said George Axelrod, congratulating the Millers and wittily reversing Shaw’s famous reply to Isadora Duncan’s proposal, “I hope your children have Arthur’s looks and Marilyn’s brains.” She laughed heartily, Axelrod recalled, but Arthur was unamused. From the bride’s gaiety, no one would have guessed her tortured hesitation.
Before the Millers prepared to depart for London and the production of The Prince and the Showgirl (as the film of The Sleeping Prince was eventually rechristened by Warner Bros.), Arthur put up for sale his Roxbury house, reasoning, with Marilyn’s agreement, that later they could begin a new life together in a new home. On July 2, the Herald Tribune carried the notice:
Playwright and screen star’s hideout, 7 rooms, 3 baths, swimming pool, tennis court, terrace, two-car garage, small studio. 4 acres. $29,500 ($38,500 with 26 acres).
A quick sale was made for $27,500, and after a small mortgage and fees were paid, the balance was put in escrow for another property nearby.
That first week of July was full of hard negotiations, all of them Milton’s responsibility. There were many legal and commercial matters for him and Stein to settle—among them disputes with Olivier regarding the deal between MMP and Olivier’s production company; discussions involving MCA and Jack Warner, who was insisting on control of the film’s final cut; and bargaining with British employment authorities, who were balking at the unusual number of Americans to be imported for this cooperative venture. Also, the Millers asked Hedda Rosten, Arthur’s old friend and Marilyn’s new one, to join the company as Marilyn’s personal secretary, at a generous fee of two hundred dollars weekly. Amy Greene, foreseeing trouble because of Hedda’s increasing problems with alcohol, advised Milton that here was a perfect example of Marilyn’s excessive generosity—not to say her need to surround herself with a battalion of support as she prepared for the challenge of Olivier and an English cast.
But the most outrageous and time-consuming demand of all came from none other than Lee Strasberg, who appeared at Milton’s office, asked that Irving be summoned, and announced the condition for Paula’s participation as Marilyn’s coach on Prince. He would accept nothing less than a guarantee of $25,000 for ten weeks’ work, plus expenses and double for overtime. This, Stein quickly figured, would come to about $38,000—again, much more than most actors were receiving in New York or Hollywood. But as Stein noted in his corporate memorandum,
Lee doesn’t care that this money would really come from Marilyn’s pocket. Joe [Carr, MMP’s accountant] and Milton carefully explained the shaky finances, but Lee was adamant. He kept emphasizing Marilyn’s emotional weakness—and then he said he would be willing to settle for a percentage of the picture! He also wanted George Cukor to direct, not Larry. Paula, he said, is more than a coach—therefore he doesn’t care what other coaches get. He absolutely rejects Paula’s Bus Stop salary.
Lee Strasberg might have been as good an agent as a teacher; in any case, what amounted to his Method-acting portrayal of Sammy Glick threw Milton and the company into mild panic. Marilyn simply said that she would yield some of her own weekly income, for Paula must be there. She was—although tricky checkbook maneuvers were necessary for the remainder of the year so that Paula Strasberg received the salary that paid her, after Monroe and Olivier, more than anyone connected with The Prince and the Showgirl. A curious coda to this is the fact that the ubiquitous Dr. Hohenberg, to whom Milton and Marilyn were still attached, involved herself in the negotiations on behalf of Paula, whom she did not know.
On July 9, Milton and Irving departed for London as an advance team, and on the rainy afternoon of July 13, Marilyn and Arthur followed. The rest of the team—Paula, Hedda, Amy and Joshua—arrived ten days later. When the Millers arrived on the morning of the fourteenth, Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier were at the airport to greet them—along with over seventy policemen necessary to control a squad of two hundred shouting photographers and reporters. As Arthur recalled, England could have been towed into the ocean without anyone taking notice. Whenever Marilyn appeared in public during the next four months, she was invariably mobbed, and it was soon decided that if she went to stores, they would have to be cleared in advance. Just so, if she made a remotely interesting statement it received front-page coverage in the London papers next day. On Saturday, August 25, for example, Marilyn decided to shop on busy Regent Street, but she was so overwhelmed by adoring crowds that she fainted, police cordons were set up and she was unable to work next day due to nervous exhaustion and a transient attack of agoraphobia.
As if Milton had not enough budgetary problems, Arthur confided to him that first evening his own precarious financial situation. He was obliged to pay $16,000 a year for the support of his two children; his ex-wife was receiving forty percent of his income; he had tax problems and attorneys’ fees. Would there be any possibility of integrating his income, which was not much in any case, with Marilyn’s? Could he file a joint tax return with Marilyn and MMP? “Perhaps later on we can deal with this question of [buying rights] to his writings,” replied Irving with some exasperation when Milton took up with him the issue of Arthur’s finances. “That could help him.”
For the rest of the year, MMP tried to find a way that would (thus Irving) “result in capital gain to [Arthur] and defer income. . . . We can also try to get financing and distribution for an Arthur Miller picture, although it will be very difficult. . . . He is willing to write a screenplay for The Brothers Karamazov for Marilyn, [because] of late he has been extremely conscious of expenses and how they can be charged against MMP as business expenses.” Miller wanted the financial help of MMP, but as Irving concluded, “he might not agree that he needs help in bringing his name before the public.” These discussions proceeded despite the repeated counsel of Miller’s friend and agent Kay Brown that “he ought to stay out of [Marilyn’s] career, as she ought to stay out of his.” A complicated scenario was therefore in process concerning control of Marilyn’s money, career and corporation. The various players—none of them friendly toward one another—included Arthur, Milton and Lee.
The Greenes were installed at Tibbs Farm, Ascot; the Millers had grander quarters at Parkside House at Englefield Green, Egham, near Windsor Park. An hour’s drive from London and a bit less to Pinewood Studios, Parkside House was a Georgian mansion owned by Lord North (publisher of the Financial Times) and his wife, pianist and actress Joan Carr. Situated on ten lush acres with gardens and convenient bicycle paths, the house featured an oak-beamed living room, five bedrooms, two baths and quarters for the resident servants. Marilyn was delighted that Milton had arranged for the master suite to be repainted white in her honor.
But during four months, there was not much time for Marilyn to enjoy the house, London or the English countryside. The day after their arrival, she was hauled off to a press conference at the Savoy Hotel, where two inspectors, a sergeant, six constables and four teams of police had to restrain four thousand fans along the Strand. Marilyn arrived an hour late, wearing a tight, two-piece black dress joined at the midriff with a diaphanous inset. The usual tiresome question-and-answer session followed. Yes, she said, she was delighted to be working with Sir Laurence; and yes, she would like to do classical roles. Lady Macbeth, perhaps? asked a reporter from the provinces. “Yes, but at present that is just a dream for me. I know how much work I have to do before I could undertake a role like that.” With such grace and modesty, she won over the British press in a single afternoon. According to Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer for her film, Marilyn was everywhere surrounded by such a blaze of publicity that to everyone working at Pinewood a special pass was issued for admittance to the lot.
Cardiff, who photographed such color films as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and The African Queen, came to know and befriend Marilyn during the difficult production of Prince. He found her alternately terrified and strong, afraid of facing the public and her fellow actors but eager to make a hit in this picture.
Unlike many other leading ladies I’d known and worked with, Marilyn was never bitchy, never used foul language even when the going was rough. Of course there was a kind of psychological dichotomy about her that everyone found somewhat difficult: on the one hand her stated desire to be a serious actress, on the other her lack of discipline, her lateness. I think all this arose from her fear of being rejected, of failing. But behind this vulnerability there was a lot of iron and steel.
On July 18, 19 and 20, Marilyn submitted to the usual wardrobe and makeup tests for Technicolor, every aspect supervised by Milton, to whose keen eye Olivier begrudgingly deferred. The major reason he arranged this deal, Milton told Olivier, was “to take her out of the sexpot category—to put her in something that required her greatest comedic gifts.” Marilyn’s appearance in the film was to him an important factor in her success as a sophisticated comedienne.
But Olivier had his doubts. When he introduced Marilyn to the English cast, he said he was delighted to be working with his old friends Sybil Thorndike and Esmond Knight, whom he had known for decades. Then, in his most charmingly condescending manner, he took Marilyn’s hand and said that everyone would be patient with her, that their methods (nothing like The Method, it was implied) would perhaps require some time for her to learn, but they were pleased to have “such a delightful little thing” among them.2 “He tried to be friendly, but he came on like someone slumming,” Marilyn said later, and in this she was stating only the obvious truth.
To establish his primacy on the set, to counter the enormous influence he feared from Paula (and against which he had been warned by Billy Wilder and Joshua Logan), Olivier took the most patronizing attitude: his co-star he regarded as merely a Hollywood product from whom he would have to exact obedience and obeisance. “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn,” Olivier said, and the die was cast. From that moment, as Hedda Rosten reported to Norman, Marilyn became “suspicious, sullen, defensive.” Even Arthur, who usually sided with Olivier to encourage Marilyn’s cooperation, had to admit that the director’s arch tongue was too quick with the cutting joke, and that Marilyn felt intimidated by him from the start.
This unfortunate atmosphere was exacerbated by a calamitous event from which her marriage never recovered and which further shook Marilyn’s confidence just when she needed it most. Marilyn found Arthur’s notebook open on the dining table at Parkside House and casually glanced at the page. There she read that her husband had second thoughts about their marriage, that he thought she was an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman he pitied, but that he feared his own creative life would be threatened by her relentless emotional demands. “It was something about how disappointed he was in me,” she told the Strasbergs,
how he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Arthur said he no longer had a decent answer to that one.
Arthur never admitted he had made such personal observations, but his published memoirs and every interview he granted after her death expressed those sentiments. In a matter of a moment, Marilyn’s life with her third husband commenced its slow, tragic declivity—within three weeks of the vows, as if justifying her worst prenuptial anxieties.
Marilyn was devastated, according to Susan Strasberg, who was with Paula in London: the shock influenced Marilyn’s work and placed on her coach an additional burden of motherly nurturing. Even from the first weeks of filming, Allan Snyder added, the marriage seemed strained, the newlyweds distant from each other. “I think Arthur really likes dumb blondes,” Marilyn said later to Rupert Allan, trying to lighten the pain of this memory. “He never had one before me. Some help he was.” Sidney Skolsky later summed up the issue: “Miller looked on Marilyn strictly as an ideal and was shocked to discover that she is a human being, a person, even as you and I and maybe Miller.”
* * *
Marilyn and Paula had to endure a rehearsal period, beginning July 30—exercises to which Marilyn was unaccustomed; filming finally began on August 7. As might have been expected after Olivier’s introduction of her to the cast, there was a frostiness between Marilyn and Olivier, who leaped from behind the camera to act before it. In both stars, anxiety clashed with pride, and there were often dozens of takes for each scene. Olivier, exasperated, gave a direction, only to watch Marilyn walk off to discuss it with Paula and frequently to telephone Lee in New York.
The Strasberg interference very nearly sabotaged The Prince and the Showgirl, and Paula was soon sucked into something she did not want, as Susan recalled. But there was a relevant history:
My mother had once been tested for a movie role—that of a pretty blonde—but she was passed over in favor of Joan Blondell, and in a way I think she was now trying to regain her lost acting career through Marilyn. She was always blamed for Marilyn’s lateness, but this infuriated my mother—and what could she do about it? She really wanted Marilyn to succeed. On the other hand, Marilyn used my mother as a kind of whipping girl, someone to take the blame for her own faults.
At the same time, Arthur made no secret of his resentment of the Strasbergs: to him Lee and Paula were “poisonous and vacuous,” and he detested Marilyn’s “nearly religious dependency” on them—perhaps, among better reasons, because he felt his own primacy and influence were thereby compromised. “She didn’t know any more about acting than the cleaning woman” was Arthur’s assessment of Paula; she was “a hoax, but so successful in making herself necessary to people like Marilyn [that] she created this tremendous reputation.” But Arthur perhaps failed to see that Marilyn simply had no women friends in her life, and Paula’s unalloyed maternal attention to her was quite simply the best she could get.
Equally, relations between Arthur and Milton became strained. “Greene thought he would be this big-shot producer and she would be working for him,” Arthur said later. “But she saw that he had ulterior aims,” by which, presumably, he meant money and prestige. But those aims may indeed have been shared.
Nor was Milton an innocent. Even his MCA agent and friend Jay Kanter allowed that “it was important for Milton to control her, just as it was for Strasberg and for Miller to control her.” One of the mechanisms for such maneuvering was for Milton continually to provide Marilyn with whatever drugs she needed (or thought she needed) to get from one day to the next with Olivier. At the time, production assistant David Maysles felt he was “getting involved in things way above his ability to sustain,” as he told his brother Albert: David was referring to the generous allotment of pills that often kept Marilyn in a state near oblivion. These drugs, as everyone knew, were “wrecking her,” as Allan Snyder put it, “and by this time Milton really wasn’t as good for her as he wanted to be. He was a great manipulator, and there were gallon bottles of pills being flown in for her,” from none other than Amy and Marilyn’s New York doctor, Mortimer Weinstein; on September 27, for example, Milton wrote to Irving asking that Weinstein send “two months supply of Dexamyl—not spansules—for MM, a dozen or so at a time in small envelopes or parcels, and commence as soon as possible.” As Cardiff said, Milton was brilliant and exhausted with responsibility, but he could be “a dark, somewhat sinister character who felt he had to keep the show on the road however he could.”3
As if all this were not enough, there occurred a fight over credits: Milton’s agreement with Olivier called for “Executive Producer” status for Milton H. Greene, but by late October, Olivier felt this was inappropriate and took the argument directly to Jack Warner himself. In the first released prints of the picture, Milton was so credited, but later his name was mysteriously and unjustly removed.
None of the many problems could have been much alleviated when Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, arrived—Marilyn’s predecessor who had created onstage the role of the American showgirl Elsie Marina. With uncharacteristic lack of consideration (but perhaps with Olivier’s tacit or expressed approval), Vivien came to Pinewood to watch a few days of shooting, making no secret of her low estimate of Marilyn.
Not entirely unreasonably, Marilyn was miserable wherever she turned. She felt condescension from her director, betrayal by her husband and a lack of support from Milton, who had to cooperate with Olivier and his staff. All these were people she respected and no one, she felt, treated her as an equal. In this environment of complete dependence, she lost her ability to make any concrete decision and constantly second-guessed herself. The result was that Marilyn was pitched back to the conditions of her childhood and adolescence, when every relationship was transitory.
In this regard, her fundamental emotional needs could perhaps never be met by so unreal a career as film acting, for the obvious reason that she had so long assumed a false identity with a false name, hair and image; she invented a new character for each film; and her habitual suspicions about others’ loyalties had compelled her to change agents, coaches and advisers—not to say husbands. Nothing was permanent, nothing rooted, and now there was no one on whom she could rely without question.
In an odd way, her lifelong condition of dependence—the one thing from which no one was willing to free her—was also one of the strongest elements in her appeal to the public. She begged to be embraced; no man or woman could fail to be moved by someone so patently needy and to all appearances inviolable. One reporter who managed a private interview at Parkside House recalled a parade of her courtiers drifting in and out, inserting comments and informing her of their presence. As he departed, Marilyn touched his arm lightly and said with unutterable weariness, “Too many people, too many people.”
From July to November, then, life was a constant web of intrigue. At various times, all sorts of misadventures occurred: Lee arrived (at the expense of MMP, of course), conferred with Olivier and was tossed out. Paula—on a restricted work visa—eventually went back to New York in the autumn, along with Hedda Rosten, who drank so much she was little help to anyone. Their departures left Marilyn depressed and lonely, and soon Milton summoned Dr. Hohenberg to London, which meant much expense with little result, for the doctor summarily announced that Milton “had been wrong to form MMP with Marilyn, and that she did not know how much longer the two partners could work together in an atmosphere of such emotional strain.” Marilyn, of course, saw this as a complete rejection of her professional life by her own psychiatrist.
But Hohenberg had a suggestion for Marilyn, and forthwith whisked her off to meet her old friend Anna Freud, an analyst with a thriving London practice. Marilyn had several therapy sessions with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.
Things continued to happen quickly and unpredictably. Arthur decided to visit the actors Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, in Paris, to discuss a production of The Crucible there; he then went on to New York to visit his children. At the same time, Marilyn was convinced that Milton was buying English antiques, charging them to MMP and shipping them to his home in Connecticut. It seemed as if everyone was spending her money—most of all Lee Strasberg, who put through daily reverse-charge telephone calls to Marilyn, reminding her that her only chance of finishing the picture successfully was with Paula. Forcing Olivier’s hand with the British authorities, Marilyn got her wish, and her coach returned with a renewed visa.
All during this time, an expensive and complicated color film was in process—of all things, a drawing room comedy in which Marilyn Monroe, by some miracle of grace, gave one of the two finest performances of her life. As the production files indicate, she regularly sat in to watch the rough prints of the previous day’s work, and both Olivier and Milton had to agree that “she had some criticisms that were very good, and [she] overtly conveyed her appreciation to Larry.”
While she was performing some of her best scenes in late August, Marilyn learned she was expecting a baby. Later, the pregnancy was always doubted even by those close to the situation like Amy and Allan, but Irving Stein’s daily memoranda of telephone calls from London indicate that as of August 31, Marilyn’s condition was confirmed by two London doctors. “Milton told me [by telephone] that she was pregnant but she is afraid she will lose the baby,” noted Irving. He understood Milton’s concern, for Irving too had seen, before his departure from London, that “Hedda and Marilyn were drinking a lot. Hedda is not a good influence on Marilyn, encourages her unreasonableness and evasiveness of truth . . . and says she and Arthur are neither of them ready for children. . . . Marilyn weeps, saying that all she wants is to finish the picture.” Marilyn lost the baby during the first week of September.
This event was kept secret even from Olivier, who was allowed to believe that Marilyn was simply being moody and intransigent in the absence of Arthur, on whom she still depended for approval. This ignorance of fact was no doubt the cause of his resentment of her as a “thoroughly ill-mannered and rude girl. . . . I was never so glad to have a film over and done.” Nor, indeed, was she; but her public statements were invariably generous and deferential: “It was a wonderful experience to work with Olivier. I learned a lot.”
Contrariwise, at least two eminent ladies claimed to have learned from her. Edith Sitwell, that empress of all eccentrics, made good on her earlier promise and welcomed Marilyn to her home in October. Wearing her usual array of rings on each finger, a medieval gown, a Plantagenet headdress and a mink stole, Dame Edith sat grandly, pouring hefty beakers of gin and grapefruit juice for herself and her guest. During several hours one afternoon, they sat discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, whose poems Marilyn was reading during sleepless nights that season. For Dame Edith, Marilyn recited lines from one of Hopkins’s Terrible Sonnets—“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”—saying that she understood perfectly the poet’s mood of despair. “She’s quite remarkable!” pronounced Sitwell soon after.
To her pleasant surprise, Marilyn won the appreciation of one of the supporting players, the elderly Dame Sybil Thorndike, one of the legendary actresses of the English stage and the woman for whom Shaw had written St. Joan decades earlier. After less than a week on the set with Marilyn, she tapped her old friend Olivier on the shoulder: “You did well in that scene, Larry, but with Marilyn up there, nobody will be watching you. Her manner and timing are just too delicious. And don’t be too hard about her tardiness, dear boy. We need her desperately. She’s really the only one of us who knows how to act in front of a camera!” Even from Dame Sybil, these remarks did not go down well with Olivier.
Whatever Marilyn’s insecurities about her marriage, she publicly defended Arthur against the Lord Chamberlain’s initial prohibition of A View from the Bridge, which was at first banned for its allusion to homosexuality. Outraged by the censorship, Marilyn was among the first to join something called The Watergate Theater Club, which protested all forms of interference against the arts. This turned out to be somewhat amusing to the English sense of irony, for at the premiere of View at the Comedy Theatre on October 11, Marilyn’s low-cut scarlet gown caused an appreciative riot and almost prevented the curtain from going up. Arthur calmly accepted this, but he began to exert pressure in graver business matters.
The Milton Greene side of Marilyn Monroe Productions was not enthusiastically supporting Arthur’s desire to become involved in productions with her, and so Arthur took advantage of a strain in the Marilyn-Milton relationship to attempt greater control of MMP. This he did with some good reason, for things were in a generally chaotic condition. But Marilyn did not appreciate this, and for much of October—not knowing whom she could turn to—she was uncooperative, ornery and even uncordial to her colleagues at Pinewood. She had never been one who could leave her anxieties at the studio gate.
None of this tension was evident to the public; in fact, Marilyn was the golden girl of London that season. Bus Stop opened in London a few days after View, and the general attitude of the press was summarized in The Times on October 17: “Miss Monroe is a talented comedienne, and her sense of timing never forsakes her. She gives a complete portrait, sensitively and sometimes even brilliantly conceived. There is about her a waif-like quality, an underlying note of pathos which can be strangely moving.”
And so, with British favor ringing in her ears, Marilyn Monroe was invited to meet the Queen. The last to arrive even for this prestigious event, Marilyn finally appeared just before the doors were closed at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, on the evening of October 29. Before a screening of the British film The Battle of the River Platte, twenty film stars were presented to Her Majesty, among them Brigitte Bardot, Joan Crawford, Anita Ekberg and Victor Mature, but only Marilyn stopped the monarch in her glide down the receiving line. Wearing a dangerously off-the-shoulder gown, Marilyn made a perfect curtsy and clasped the Queen’s outstretched hand. Film of the event has survived, showing both women (who were exactly the same age) with somewhat astonished smiles. While Marilyn was in breathless awe at this signal moment, Her Majesty’s gaze was fixed in astonishment on the famous Monroe breasts, which for the occasion had been taped and pushed forward to even greater prominence.
Even on this occasion, the press reflected the public’s adoration: “Marilyn Monroe, the sleek, the pink and the beautiful, captured Britain,” proclaimed The Daily Mirror. The Daily Mail marveled at her “diplomacy, mischief and bubbling sense of fun.” She was, announced The Spectator, “as intelligent as she was pleasant as she was pretty,” and The Observer remarked stoutly that she had earned a “place in the social history of our time.”
Late in his life, even the formidable Laurence Olivier softened his harsh assessment of the time with Marilyn, whom he never again met. Years after her death, he reflected: “No one had such a look of unconscious wisdom, and her personality was strong on the screen. She gave a star performance. Maybe I was tetchy with Marilyn and with myself, because I felt my career was in a rut. . . . I was fifty. What a happy memory it would have been if Marilyn had made me feel twenty years younger. . . . She was quite wonderful, the best of all.”
And so she was. As Elsie Marina, an American showgirl performing with a traveling troupe in London, she catches the wandering eye of the Grand Duke Charles, Regent of Carpathia (Olivier), who has come to England for the coronation of George V in 1911. With him are his teenage son, King Nicholas VIII (Jeremy Spenser) and the Queen Dowager (Sybil Thorndike), mother of Charles’s late wife. Very little happens in The Prince and the Showgirl: the Regent fails in a rather blunt seduction scene, realizes Elsie is a pushover for gypsy violins and romantic sweet-talk, and soon finds to his chagrin that they are, contrary to his reputation and intentions, in love. But Elsie is no witless performer. She learns of the young king’s plot to overthrow his father and foils both that and a possible catastrophe with the Austro-Hungarian government. At the fadeout, the Regent and the showgirl promise to meet again eighteen months hence, but she knows this exceeds even her romantic expectations.
On first or twentieth viewing, it is astonishing to realize how troubled was the production of The Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn’s Elsie is from first frame to last a marvelous portrait—alternately feisty and independent, not to be had for the price of caviar and champagne, wise in the ways of monocled playboys and entirely capable of mediating an international crisis. Absent are the distracting, trembling exertions of her lips and chin, and her performance is one of absolute control. In the early supper sequence, for example, while Olivier ignores her to conduct state business, Marilyn munches a midnight supper and downs several glasses of wine, easily stealing the scene right under Olivier’s patrician nose. Bored with the Duke, she slowly becomes drunk; the entire sequence is a masterpiece of improvisation, revealing a comic talent in Marilyn Monroe reminiscent of Billie Burke (in Dinner at Eight), or of Miriam Hopkins (in Trouble in Paradise).
Scurrying to avoid embassy footmen, Marilyn showed an antic agility never exaggerated; awakening to the realization she is in love, a half-dozen feelings pass over her face; practicing a few steps of her vaudeville routine while waiting for the pompous Regent, she is amused by her own amusement—a girl so joyously alive that dancing is as natural as walking. One looks to Giulietta Masina’s Gelsomina and Cabiria in Fellini’s La Strada and Nights of Cabiria to find so perfect a melding of actress with character in a radiant affirmation of life.
There are as well the gentle nods to offscreen history. The last scene filmed that November was Marilyn’s second sequence in the picture, her introduction to Olivier in a lineup of showgirls. Elsie was to bow courteously, and Marilyn and Olivier together—as if to reconcile their differences on the final day of production—devised a moment straight from their first meeting: the thin strap of her dress breaks and she cries, “Oh, don’t trouble—I can fix it with a pin.”
From this moment, Marilyn’s performance never falters, and her final scene is quietly affecting as she bids him farewell—a wistful, wise Cinderella who has been to the coronation ball but now knows the man of her dreams was only that. It is the gentlest, bittersweet coda, disclosing at last the significance of the long liturgical sequence at Westminster Abbey. Here Olivier had wisely kept Jack Cardiff’s camera not on the details of ritual but on the reverent reactions of a showgirl with a wondrous purity of heart. The “unconscious wisdom” is as patent as the light splashing through stained glass, the presence of grace evident in her eyes as the choir exults. Here the best instinct of director and star finally conquered every obstacle, every painful difference separating them over four months. They were, after all, equally dedicated to achieving a fine finished product. That year, Marilyn’s Elsie and her Cherie in Bus Stop mark the highlight of her professional life, her achievements brightening an otherwise tangled and confusing year.
On November 22, the Millers arrived in New York. According to the ledgers at Warner Bros., Marilyn had worked fifty-four days, Olivier only twelve more, but such were the rumors then and in later years that the general impression was of an irresponsible, drugged actress who could scarcely function. The Prince and the Showgirl belies such judgments, and not much publicity was devoted to the fact that the film was completed under budget and required only two days of reshooting.
By year’s end, weary, restless, uncertain of her marriage, her company, her friendships and her future, Marilyn asked Arthur if they might escape for a sunny winter holiday—and so they did, clocking in the new year at a place aptly called Mootpoint, a seaside villa on the north coast of the isle of Jamaica.
1. This will was twice rewritten.
2. In a letter to Milton from London dated April 12, Olivier had referred to Marilyn as “a clever little thing” and “a dear girl.”
3. For the nature and effects of Dexamyl, see below, chapter 20.