Chapter Seventeen
NINETEEN FIFTY-SEVEN marked the beginning of Marilyn Monroe’s second long absence from filmmaking.
Quitting Hollywood in 1954 after The Seven Year Itch, she had not returned there until the spring of 1956, for Bus Stop; this was followed by four months in London for The Prince and the Showgirl. Following these two extraordinary performances in one year, she tried to lead a private, quiet life—and to assume a different kind of role. Now, married to a world-famous but curiously inert playwright, Marilyn tried out the part of New York Jewish spouse, but this was no more appropriate or comfortable than the previous two.
Yet somehow she seemed to have no choice. Casting about for an identity in 1957, Marilyn was again taking on the role of loyal and supportive mate. Although her repeated attempts to fill it are touching, they were also self-defeating because unrealistic and untrue to herself; such self-abasement was a reversion rather than motion forward.
This return to housewifery, so unnatural for her, was all the more problematic because it was embraced as an alternative—when MMP, her cherished hope for professional independence and control over her destiny, was in shambles. She was, therefore, desperately assuming a socially acceptable but disastrous role for herself.
With Arthur Miller, the props were sometimes chicken soup, kasha and horseradish, although by a curious irony, this wife-on-leave was supporting her husband financially. Marilyn believed in his talent, but she could see little application of it: irregularly, he worked on his writing, but there was not much to show for it. Arthur, too, recognized something was deeply wrong. “I was off balance and could no longer confidently predict her moods. It was almost as though the fracture of her original idealization of me in England had left no recognizable image at all”—a tortuous way of admitting that he had hurt her so deeply that she lost confidence in him.
Moreover, his attitude toward her was divided. “I felt an urgency about making something for her . . . constructing a gift for her” that would celebrate her beauty and complexity. But if he saw her as a kind of tragic muse, he also considered her “a mere child, an abused little girl.” Elia Kazan believed that Arthur was giving Marilyn “a rose-tinted view” of her future, that of an elite actress doing serious plays which he would provide. Such was the condescension of a man who found himself, in 1957, in a creative dry dock—an unwitting indolence in which Marilyn joined him.
In January, they found a New York apartment for rent on the thirteenth floor at 444 East Fifty-seventh Street, immediately adjacent to her former residence at 2 Sutton Place South. Marilyn, with the help of her designer John Moore, played interior decorator. She had a wall removed and made one large room of two, creating a living-dining area, several walls were mirrored and others were painted stark white, like the ceiling. Everywhere, in fact, there was white: a baby grand piano, a sofa, tub chairs and several pieces of furniture. The place had the look of a movie set from the early 1930s, something reminiscent of Jean Harlow’s bedroom in Dinner at Eight. But as friends like Norman Rosten recalled, Marilyn never thought the apartment was “right,” and she constantly remodeled, changed furniture, draperies, accessories and art objects at the country house they eventually bought in Connecticut and in the summer cottage they rented on Long Island.
Despite her tendency to hide herself under a kerchief and behind dark glasses, Marilyn was often recognized in her new neighborhood. Letter carriers and trash collectors greeted her familiarly by her first name. “I love them for it,” she said. “Somehow they know that I mean what I do, both when I’m acting on the screen and when I meet them in person.” She loved contact with strangers and neighbors, many of whom were shy of her fame. A young woman who lived nearby regularly recognized her but was afraid to express her admiration by intruding on Marilyn’s privacy. They passed one another for months until one evening, when the woman was wearing a new coat, Marilyn broke the silence: “You must excuse me for speaking to you, but you look so nice in that coat that I just can’t bear not telling you.” The young admirer almost broke into tears.
At the same time, Marilyn’s business and personal relationship with Milton Greene was rapidly failing. There were mutual resentments about the problems during production of The Prince and the Showgirl; each was suspicious about the other’s honesty and candor; they argued about forthcoming projects and over Arthur’s increasing involvement; and both partners were ingesting too many kinds of pills. But the major cause of the breakup was Marilyn’s violent shift of loyalties to Arthur, who encouraged her to wrest control of MMP away from the man he deeply disliked.
Michael Korda, then a young writer and friend of Milton, knew that Greene, on the other hand, bitterly resented Arthur’s managerial attitude over Marilyn and MMP’s future; Korda was also aware that Milton’s talents were badly affected when he began taking Dilantin, an anti-epileptic drug for which he had no medical need but which was popularly thought to augment energy by increasing the brain’s electrical impulses. Dilantin was also supposed to counteract Nembutal and other barbiturates and hypnotics, thus balancing the effect of drugged sleep with artificially induced energy the next day: the result was a cycle of catastrophic addictions.
In another, subtler angle, Arthur’s assumption of control proved that Milton could no longer control the situation as easily as he had before. Amy Greene, who had been close to Marilyn since 1954, also saw the pattern emerging in 1957. For Arthur’s sake, Marilyn felt compelled to break with everything that in Arthur’s mind represented Milton: the business of MMP, a certain social life, a choice of films. “But there was another knot in the problem,” according to Amy. “Although he didn’t mean to, Milton always put Arthur down: ‘You go away and be a good husband’ was his attitude to Arthur. ‘You go and write a play and let us take care of business.’ As for Milton himself, everyone who knew his work acknowledged that he had a streak of genius. But he was also a man of frightening excesses and eventually he destroyed himself, and almost his family, too.”
As MMP began to unravel, Marilyn took some comfort in a routine, and for much of 1957 and 1958 it was unvarying. Five mornings each week, Marilyn visited her analyst; thence she proceeded to something remarkably similar, her private sessions with Lee Strasberg. By coincidence, both mentors now lived at 135 Central Park West.
Marilyn had wanted a new psychoanalyst to replace Margaret Hohenberg, who was still counseling Milton. To that end, she telephoned Anna Freud in London, who had a ready reply: in New York was Anna’s closest friend since girlhood—Marianne Kris, a doctor whose father had been the pediatrician for Freud’s children. And so that spring, Marilyn began sessions with Dr. Kris. The relationship, which lasted four years, was crucial and finally harrowing, sometimes helpful but more often troubling rather than illuminating.
Born in Vienna in 1900, Marianne Rie grew up amid the intellectual excitement of the birth of psychoanalysis. She took a medical degree in Vienna in 1925 and did further study in Berlin, where at Freud’s recommendation she was analyzed by Franz Alexander; later, when she returned to Vienna, Freud himself completed her psychoanalysis and she married Ernst Kris, an art historian who also became an analyst (as who did not in the Freud-Kris social set). Sigmund Freud called Marianne his “adopted daughter,” and together the Freuds and the Krises fled the Nazis and went to London in 1938. Marianne and Ernst subsequently continued to New York, where she developed a private practice and a specialty: the clinical aspects of Freudian child psychoanalysis.
Ernst Kris had died on February 28, 1957, a few weeks before Marilyn began to meet regularly with Marianne, who was glad for the opportunity to work, and as she acknowledged, the more troubled and famous her patients were, the better for her notes and theories. It was, then, quite a coup to have Marilyn Monroe in her consulting room. For her part, Marilyn was pleased to have Kris, with her close connections to the seminal thinkers of psychotherapy: if anyone could help her, she reasoned, Kris could.
At this time, Kris was developing a controversial set of principles that, she believed, enabled her to predict a child’s psychological development and potential problems. A dark-haired, handsome woman, she was an intense pragmatist who took the approach that children were the key to understanding the human psyche. She held that, as a colleague wrote, “some of the most important advances in psychoanalysis have come from child psychoanalysis.” While Kris accepted adults as patients, she always emphasized that one had to see the problems of those adults as based entirely on childhood experiences. Helping adults meant in an important way treating them like children. It is worth detailing this background and viewpoint of Marianne Kris because her relationship with Marilyn Monroe was from the start ill advised.
On the one hand, Marilyn was trying harder than ever to face her “real self,” to put aside the glamorous appurtenances that made for superstar Marilyn Monroe, to face her fears and her memories (as Lee Strasberg insisted was essential for acting) and to become someone good and respectable, which she always doubted herself to be. She wanted a clean slate: marriage to a working playwright, motherhood, then perhaps a return to her art.
But there was an obvious peril here. A devout Freudian, Kris (like Strasberg in his private sessions with Marilyn) constantly led her back to childhood. As Marilyn told her friend and publicist Rupert Allan, there was a consistent motif in this therapy: What was her relationship to her mother and father in childhood? What memories were there to be confronted? What resentments had to be faced? If one could understand the past, Kris stressed, one could be free of its tyranny. But Marilyn had never known her father’s identity and scarcely knew her mother, and her feelings about maternity (and about preparing for it herself) had been shaped by surrogates, from Ida Bolender to Grace McKee to Ethel Dougherty and even to Natasha Lytess and Paula Strasberg.
But analyzing the past did not necessarily direct one to the future. Marilyn felt blocked, stymied in her life, in a rut—and no one seemed to acknowledge that her sense of crisis was not necessarily a sign of breakdown, as it was so diagnosed; it could be, on the contrary (indeed, it was), an indication that she longed for her life to move to some new, deeper level as yet unrevealed. The Freudian school took seriously the medical model: crisis meant something was wrong and had to be fixed. This was fine so far as it went, but it simply did not go far enough. And for Marilyn, who always felt it best to put her life right by doing rather than discussing, by action rather than by talk, a weariness often set in. But these were parental authority figures, and so she stayed with the program.
Isolated and introspective in childhood, she was now asked to focus her attention almost exclusively on that unhappy period. And so she was on a kind of treadmill, repeating over and over with Kris what she had with Hohenberg, and this became self-defeating. Where were the fresh revelations, the new energies generated to move beyond the childhood? Reasoning about it did not resolve it; understanding did not necessarily lead to acceptance, nor to the alteration of the meaning of the past that contains seeds of possibility for both present and future.1
With Hohenberg, Kris and later with Marilyn’s last analyst, Marilyn felt “as if I were going around in circles,” as she told Rupert. “It was always, how did I feel about this, and why did I think my mother did that—not where was I going, but where had I been? But I knew where I had been. I wanted to know if I could use it wherever I was going!”
Notwithstanding the insights provided by Freudian principles, their wholesale application to someone like Norma Jeane Mortensen/Marilyn Monroe was futile. Excessive introspection exacerbated her lack of self-confidence. Intuition suffered at the expense of a forced, conscious intellectualism that paralyzed her and pushed her further back into herself. There was, therefore, a confusion of realms and realities here, and for Marilyn to attempt an analysis of the past led to an endless attempt first to evoke painful memories and then to find out what they meant. But the memories were vague and disconnected: no wonder Marilyn continued to tell her friend Susan Strasberg that if she couldn’t answer Kris’s questions, well, she just made up what seemed interesting. This, as Marilyn must have known, was counterproductive. Too much the vogue in the 1950s, this sort of strict Freudianism was also unhelpful because the system of five sessions weekly fed Marilyn’s condition of childlike dependence. It is also curious that Kris, like Hohenberg, seemed unable—over the course of four years—to alleviate Marilyn’s increasing reliance on sleeping pills. As for Arthur, he was, as his own family and friends acknowledged, “too stand-offish” in the matter, “amazingly thoughtless and unappreciative [of Marilyn]. Art is interested in people, but not in any particular person.”
With a husband who approached her as “a mere child” and was taking steps to control her business, an analyst who treated her as a girl who had buried her past, and surrogate parents (the Strasbergs) who fancied themselves intellectual guides, it was difficult for Marilyn to find the mechanisms to be sprung free for adulthood.
Each day after her session with Kris, Marilyn took the elevator to Lee Strasberg, who led her in a series of sense-memory exercises that required her to feel and act like a child: one day she had to play a hungry baby, another a lonely waif, a confused schoolgirl, a young bride. This was the key to unlocking her “real tragic power,” he said—and she believed him because she needed to: like Hohenberg and Kris, he made himself indispensable to her. As Kazan observed, Lee also turned her against other influences—teachers, directors, even her husband.
The result was predictable: Marilyn began to worry more about herself. Impossibly high ideals were being set before her (she might soon play Lady Macbeth, Strasberg said). “Lee makes me think,” Marilyn told Norman Rosten, her voice full of awe. “Lee says I have to begin to face my problems in my work and life—the question of how or why I can act, of which I’m not sure.” Her emotions, frustrations and angers were, Lee said, to be the equipment for her craft, and to do this he put her constantly in touch with her past. She was going nowhere very quickly—at least partly because she had not one but two therapists; in reality, she needed not to be enclosed within a prison of self-examination but freed from it.
This was almost pathetically evident in March, when for a Studio class Marilyn was asked to do a scene that included a song. She stood before the group and began to sing in a wavering voice: “I’ll get by as long as I have you . . .” And then suddenly the room was as still as a lake, for Marilyn began to weep. She kept her pitch, focused on the words and music and let the tears fall. Everyone in class felt this was great acting, but Marilyn was simply terrified. She was not performing; she was anxious about Lee’s judgment.
As for Arthur and the Strasbergs, Susan recalled the considerable mutual antipathy. “Whether it was competitiveness or that [Arthur] wanted total control over Marilyn, I couldn’t figure out. There seemed to be two kinds of people: those who went for control, like my father and Arthur, and those who went for approval, like [Paula], Marilyn and me.” For the first time, Marilyn’s friends began to observe that she was gaining weight, drinking too much and suffering frequent attacks of various viruses.
Around April 1, Marilyn saw a first print of The Prince and the Showgirl. For perhaps the only time in her life, she wrote a lengthy, detailed letter, dictating furiously to her new secretary, May Reis, who had once worked for Arthur and who now (because he had no need of her) attended Marilyn. “It is not the same picture you saw last time [in New York that winter],” she wrote to Jack Warner,
and I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine. Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the energy and brightness that you saw in New York. Some of the jump cutting kills the points, as in the fainting scene. The coronation is as long as before if not longer, and the story gets lost in it. American audiences are not as moved by stained glass windows as the British are, and we threaten them with boredom. I am amazed that so much of the picture has no music at all when the idea was to make a romantic picture. We have [shot enough] film to make a great movie, if only it will be as in the earlier version. I hope you will make every effort to save our picture.
This was clearly a sober critique by a seasoned professional, not the raving of an ignorant, mentally confused actress.
But it was also different from her reaction when she saw the rough cut in London, which was virtually the same screened for her now. Her strategy was, according to all the documents in the files of MMP and Warners, to imply that Milton had secretly recut the film—an action that owed much to Arthur’s encouragement, as the legal proceedings subsequently documented.
First, she stated that Milton ought to have obviated postproduction problems in working with Olivier and the film editor; second, she insisted that Milton’s credit as the film’s executive producer was neither contracted nor deserved. But as their MCA agent Jay Kanter recalled, and as the relevant MMP-Warner contract of 1956 clearly indicated, Milton’s credit had indeed been formally and firmly contracted before production. And Olivier himself, never one to yield credit he considered rightfully his own, had a change of heart and enthusiastically supported Milton’s claim to be listed as executive producer—a status Milton demanded not out of vanity but for his future as a film producer.
Because Marilyn was seeking to sever herself emotionally and professionally from Milton and to ally herself only with Arthur, she disingenuously took up the matter of Greene’s credit as her cudgel. As her talent for acting was being refined, her ability to make consistent and sound business judgments was not; nor was she able to admit that her desperate attempt to ingratiate herself to her husband (who was only too willing to take whatever control he could) was at odds with both her knowledge and intuition about the marriage itself.
On April 11, Marilyn issued a statement through Arthur’s attorney, Robert H. Montgomery, Jr., stating that Marilyn Monroe Productions had been mismanaged by Milton, that he had misinformed her of certain contractual agreements and entered into secret negotiations for new deals without her knowledge or consent. She would, therefore, soon announce a new board of directors. As Arthur had pointed out, she had the controlling 50.4 percent of the company’s stock, against Milton’s 49.6 percent.
Five days later, in a meeting at Montgomery’s law offices, she calmly announced that MMP’s vice-president Milton Greene, attorney Irving Stein and accountant Joseph Carr were forthwith dismissed from her company and replaced by Robert Montgomery, George Kupchik (Arthur’s brother-in-law) and George Levine, a friend of Arthur who was a city sanitation worker and carpet salesman. As for the matter of Milton’s producer status, even Robert Montgomery admitted to his colleague John Wharton that Marilyn was “absolutely irrational on the subject of Milton’s credit.”
Greene’s public response was suitably dignified, with a tone of mild hurt and shock:
It seems that Marilyn doesn’t want to go ahead with the program we planned. I’m getting lawyers to represent me, [but] I don’t want to do anything now to hurt her career. I did devote about a year and a half exclusively to her. I practically gave up photography.
Marilyn was not at a loss for an equally public reply, although the comments, drafted by Miller and Montgomery, were not at all typical of her, nor were the facts accurately represented.
He knows perfectly well that we have been at odds for a year and a half and he knows why. As president of the corporation and its only source of income, I was never informed that he had elected himself to the position of executive producer of The Prince and the Showgirl. My company was not formed to provide false credits for its officers and I will not become party to this. My company was not formed merely to parcel out 49.6% of all my earnings to Mr. Greene, but to make better pictures, improve my work and secure my income.
The stakes were clear. Because of her expectation of a new life and new career with Arthur Miller, Marilyn had been persuaded that her need for Milton Greene no longer existed. The result was that he was suddenly badly treated by the woman to whom he had devoted his considerable talents. It was true that he had shared and perhaps even encouraged some of her most perilous weaknesses. But he had also enabled her to free herself from studio servitude and form a company in which she had succeeded magnificently by selecting and delivering arguably the best roles of her career. They had discussed plans for the future—among them a film with Charles Chaplin, who was indeed interested. Now everything was sabotaged.
“The truth is,” said Jay Kanter, “that suddenly Milton was left out in the cold.” And Amy, who was not blind to Milton’s mistakes and weaknesses, recalled that Marilyn admitted to her that “Arthur was taking away the only person I ever trusted, Milton,” but that she felt powerless to withstand him. At the root of it all was the frustration and sadness Marilyn felt over her marriage to Arthur, and much of that feeling she directed against Milton. It was ironic that Marilyn now found herself in the same situation as previously. Just as she had once allowed Milton to appoint his friends as corporate officers of MMP, so now she was allowing Arthur to do the same, but with men far less qualified. Despite her anger and protests, she was exerting no more professional control over her destiny in 1957 than she had in 1954.
That anger was fierce in April. At a social gathering, the Millers met Arthur Jacobs, and Marilyn (thus Jacobs) “screamed about me and Jay [Kanter], calling us ‘shitty friends of that shitty Mr. Greene, who got me a psychiatrist who tried to work against me and for Mr. Greene!’ ”
Marilyn Monroe and Milton Greene never met again. Lawyers battled for a year until she finally bought out his stock for $100,000—his entire remuneration for over two years of work. He returned to work as a photographer, but a bitter disillusionment afflicted him, and in ensuing years he became increasingly addicted to alcohol and drugs. But Milton was forever courteous in his public statements about Marilyn:
She was ultrasensitive, and very dedicated to her work, whether people realize this or not. She came through magnificently in Prince and she was great in Bus Stop. All I did was believe in her. She was a marvelous, loving, wonderful person I don’t think many people understood.
As for Irving Stein and Joe Carr, they had no more to do with film production companies. Carr worked for years before his death as a private accountant, and Irving Stein became chairman of the Elgin Watch Company. Approaching home in his car one evening in 1966, he suffered a heart attack, crashed into a tree and was killed instantly; he was fifty-two.
As usual, Marilyn’s few public appearances showed her as ever cheerful. Among the charity events she supported was an all-star soccer game at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, where on May 12 she opened the America-Israel match; wearing open-toed shoes, however, she kicked with such gleeful force that two toes were sprained. She remained for the game without complaining so that she could award the trophy to the victors.
But emotional rather than physical discomfort attended her later that month, when she went with Arthur to Washington for his court appearance on the contempt of Congress citation from the previous year. The formal indictment and the trial date had been handed down in February, and at last Arthur’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, was prepared to contest the issue; were they to lose, a possible two-year imprisonment and two-thousand-dollar fine could be imposed. The trial was held from May 13 to 24, during which the Millers were houseguests of Joe and Olie Rauh.
“She had no desire to do anything except support her husband,” recalled Olie, “and she asked questions about the case every day and every evening. She had no movie commitments and seemed not a bit conflicted about it.” Then, when Arthur and Joe left for the hearings, Marilyn “picked books off our shelves—and every one she chose had something to do with psychiatry.”
On the last day of the trial, as Joe Rauh rested his defense on the grounds that a refusal to answer irrelevant questions was not a punishable offense, Marilyn handled a crowd of reporters brilliantly. She asked Olie Rauh for a glass of sherry, donned white gloves (“because I haven’t done my fingernails and one of those women will notice they’re unpolished”), saw that her panty-line showed through her white dress, promptly removed the undergarment and stepped out to meet the press, telling them she was in Washington to see her husband vindicated. But on May 31, after the Millers had returned to New York, Arthur was found guilty on two counts of failing to answer HUAC in 1956. The preparation of an appeal and the final disposition of the case would last another year.
The Millers spent much of the summer in quiet indolence at a rented cottage in Amagansett, far out on Long Island. He tried to work on several projects, while Marilyn walked along the beach, read poetry, visited the Rostens in nearby Springs and made only rare appearances in New York—when, for example, she accepted an invitation to attend the ceremonial ground-breaking for the Time-Life Building.
Marilyn’s moods that season were alternately effervescent and depressed; this Miller and Rosten took as a sign of mental instability. It was considered hypersensitive and unrealistic when a wounded sea gull reduced her to weeping, or if she stopped her car at the sight of a stray dog wandering a country road. A discussion of the deer-hunting season roused her angry denunciation of killer sports. On the other hand, she enjoyed nothing so much as time spent playing lawn tennis or parlor games with young Patty Rosten, just as she regularly welcomed Jane and Robert, Arthur’s children, when they visited their father.
In fact few celebrities donated so much public time as Marilyn to charities benefiting youngsters: that year she sold tickets for and attended, among others, the Milk Fund for Babies and the March of Dimes. She was always relaxed and sympathetic with children, always listened, asked about their needs, wrote down their names and later sent toys and gifts. They were, after all, unaware of her fame, asked nothing of her and allowed her to be, if only for a few moments, a mother. With those she knew better, like Patricia Rosten and the Millers, no demand on her time or attention was excessive. “She loved children so much,” according to Allan Snyder. “My daughter, other people’s children—she went for them all. If she’d had one of her own to care for, to grow up with, I’m sure it would have helped her immensely.”
Yet Marilyn often suddenly withdrew from everyone to be alone for hours that summer. She had been grievously offended over the verdict handed down in Washington and was anxious about another protracted time of examination, interrogations, meetings with lawyers—and the fees, which fell entirely to her. She then quietly announced to Arthur one day in July that a doctor had confirmed her pregnancy—news that made her happier than anyone could recall. With this, Arthur noticed “a new kind of confidence, a quietness of spirit [he] had never seen before.”
But there was to be no term of the pregnancy. On August 1, she collapsed in extreme pain and was briefly unconscious. An ambulance and physician were summoned, and Marilyn was rushed to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, where it was determined that she had an ectopic pregnancy: the fetus was being formed in a Fallopian tube. The loss of her child that August wounded Marilyn’s confidence and sense of maturity, and to Susan Strasberg, among others, she confided feelings of incompetence and worthlessness. Even her body seemed to indict her as unfit for adulthood.
Returning home after ten days, she was determined to prove herself in the role of Arthur’s good wife, as if every emotional and physical obstacle presented her with the challenge not merely to survive but to triumph. Concluding negotiations for their new home in Roxbury, Arthur and Marilyn devised elaborate plans for an unlikely replacement for the simple house. While working on the final stages of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright was living at the Plaza Hotel, and there he met with Marilyn, who had fantasized something grand: she envisioned a vast home, complete with swimming pool, projection booth and auditorium, children’s nurseries, a costume vault and a lavish study for Arthur. Wright drew plans, but the cost was enormous and the project was never realized. The Millers settled for the tasks of repairing and updating the existing house.
Something else would be realized, however. Sam Shaw had read Arthur’s short story “The Misfits,” published in Esquire magazine that year, and he suggested it as the basis for a screenplay. The story concerned three wandering men in the wilds of Nevada who capture wild horses to be butchered for canned dog food; in the story was a woman as rootless and unsettled as they but with an innate sense that life is sacred. This, Shaw argued, could become a serious film with a role for Marilyn that could confirm her as a major dramatic actress. But Arthur had another idea: why not a rewrite of The Blue Angel, the 1930 film that had made Marlene Dietrich an international star? “Look, Arthur,” Sam countered, “you wrote a wonderful story—why not do that as a film? It’s something original, it’s strong, and it’s something for you both.”
That autumn, Arthur began working on the scenario for a movie based on his story. As he proceeded, Marilyn read portions, laughing at the humorous moments and reflecting silently on the characters and motifs. She was not sure how the role of Roslyn Tabor, the Reno divorcée who alters men’s destinies, would finally suit her, but this hesitation she kept to herself and simply encouraged Arthur to keep writing.
At Christmas 1957, Marilyn was as usual generous to a fault, spending a good portion of her savings on others. Arthur received a new set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Susan Strasberg unwrapped a Chagall sketch. There were books and records for Lee, and to Paula she gave a pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, a gift from the Emperor of Japan in 1954 during her honeymoon with Joe. “She knows how much I love those pearls,” said Paula, moved to tears. “Look, she gave them to me!” Most extravagant of all was her gift to John Strasberg, then eighteen and, Marilyn felt, an unhappy, often ignored outsider to his own family. To him she calmly signed over the ownership of her Thunderbird, knowing he longed for but could not afford a car.
With her mentor and mythmaker, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky (1954).
With Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch (1954). (From the collection of Greg Schreiner)
At the premiere of The Seven Year Itch on Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday (1955).
At the New York press conference announcing the production of The Prince and the Showgirl (1956): revealing the broken strap she had carefully prepared.
The Strasbergs—Lee, Paula and Susan. (UPI/Bettmann)
With partner and co-producer Milton H. Greene, arriving in Los Angeles (1956).
In Los Angeles, spring 1956. (Photo by Milton H. Greene)
As Cherie in Bus Stop (1956). (Photo by Milton H. Greene)
During production of The Prince and the Showgirl, London (1956). (Photo by Milton H. Greene)
The Millers in California (1956). (Photo by Milton H. Greene)
In Chicago, promoting Some Like It Hot (1959), with reporter Mervin Block (right). (From Block’s collection)
At a surprise celebration for her thirty-fourth birthday, during filming of Let’s Make Love (1960). (From the collection of Vanessa Ries)
With Yves Montand and Arthur Miller (1960).
With Bunny Gardel and Sherlee Strahm, on location in Nevada for The Misfits (1960). (From the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)
Dr. Ralph Greenson (1962). (UPI/Bettmann)
With Clark Gable, during the final days of filming The Misfits (1960).
With Joe at Yankee Stadium on opening day (1961). (The Bettmann Archive)
Receiving the Golden Globe Award for Some Like It Hot from Rock Hudson (1961). (From the collection of Mickey Song)
Entering Madison Square Garden for the gala birthday celebration of President John F. Kennedy (1962). (From the collection of Chris Basinger)
Eunice Murray. (1962) (UPI/Bettmann)
In her dressing room rehearsing for Something’s Got to Give, with drama coach Paula Strasberg (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios)
With Wally Cox and Dean Martin during production of Something’s Got to Give (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios; from the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)
The last day Marilyn Monroe worked on a film: her thirty-sixth birthday (June 1, 1962), with Henry Weinstein and Eunice Murray.
During the filming of the nude scene in the unfinished Something’s Got to Give (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios; from the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)
On the set of Something’s Got to Give, May 1962.
* * *
The first months of 1958 were a time of melancholic strain in the Miller marriage. After several false starts on The Misfits, Arthur was pitched into a nervous gloom, and his wife was not adapting to suburban idleness. “Arthur was writing, writing, writing, but it wasn’t worth a damn,” according to Olie Rauh. “Meantime, she was trying to keep a low profile: he was the important one, she felt, he should write.” Inevitably, Marilyn and Arthur exchanged angry words—sometimes in company, as the Strasbergs recalled. Marilyn knew about and tried to ameliorate the wary suspicions and discomfort preventing good relations between Lee and Arthur, but her negotiations were futile.
More than once, as Susan recalled, Marilyn became tense and hostile when the Millers and Strasbergs visited, and the result was an explosion of anger (often for no apparent reason) directed at her husband, who would leave the room quietly instead of retaliating. Scolded for her bad manners and humiliation of Arthur, Marilyn was struck with remorse: “If I shouldn’t have talked to him like that, why didn’t he slap me? He should have slapped me!” That had been her punishment in earlier days, and she expected it now. Even with friends like the Rostens, there was merely “a façade of marital harmony,” as Norman recalled, and Arthur’s reaction was frequently to find refuge in sleep—“hiding,” as Rosten added, for he was “more unraveled than ever.”
Marilyn could not inspire Arthur to better or swifter writing, nor could she give him a child, which was her desire more than his, as he admitted in his memoirs. However she may have thought about it, she seemed to herself an ineffective muse and a failed partner. Her extended professional furlough also evoked a scratchy contentiousness, and this led to a period of even more excessive drinking during the first few months of 1958. At least once that March this nearly led to calamity, for at Roxbury she tripped and fell halfway down a flight of stairs, sustaining only a bruised ankle and a cut on her right palm from a broken whiskey glass.
On another occasion, Rosten recalled her sitting alone at a party in her Manhattan apartment, sipping a drink and apparently “floating off in her own daydream, out of contact.” When he approached her, she said, “I’m going to have sleep trouble again tonight,” and she thought the drinks would narcotize her. Similarly, friends like her dress designer John Moore recalled her greeting him for a fitting at the apartment one Sunday morning with a sly grin: “The maid’s not here,” she whispered as if scheming, “so we can put more vodka in the Bloody Marys!”
Liquor often made Marilyn ill, and she had little tolerance beyond one or two modest drinks; she preferred champagne, which did not upset her stomach. But with alcohol, her appetite increased, and with no apparent reason to look her best for Hollywood, she quickly gained even more weight—as much as eighteen pounds above her normal one hundred fifteen. By April, the few photos she approved for publication showed her in the latest style, a comfortable black chemise or “sack dress” that afforded neat camouflage. Such an outfit the international press deplored: “She shouldn’t wear it, she looks awful,” reprimanded the Associated Press. John Moore agreed, attempting diplomatically to communicate the joint opinion by showing her a clipping from a German newspaper: in a chemise, it said flatly, Marilyn Monroe looked like someone in a barrel. Her reaction was an amused avoidance of the issue by a delicious non sequitur: “But I’ve never even been to West Berlin!”
It may also have seemed as if she had never been to Hollywood, which was changing fast and, with its short memory, almost forgetting her. By April 1958, almost two years had passed since she had made a film in America, and during the interval, studio executives were not breathlessly awaiting her return. On the contrary, they created replicas, copycat blondes in wild profusion whom they often outfitted with Marilyn Monroe’s earlier wardrobe.2
But Marilyn’s agents made certain she was aware of the threat as well as the changes; indeed, by May she was ready to listen to offers to return to Hollywood—not only because she longed to do more than talk to Marianne Kris and listen to Lee Strasberg, but also because the Millers were short of money. She also wanted to apply in her work what she hoped she had learned since 1956. Fearing there might be no purpose in her life, she felt that therapy and acting classes suggested all sorts of avenues, but that everything was theoretical. Now Marilyn longed to “be up and at it, doing something for a change,” as she told Sam Shaw and Susan Strasberg. She had lost a child, had to abandon plans for a new home, was mired in an arid matrimonial patch and when she gazed in the mirror saw someone still lovely at thirty-two, but slightly bloated, pale and weary. She listened to the men at MCA—Lew Wasserman, Jay Kanter and another colleague, George Chasin.
At first, the agents reported, Fox offered to produce a film of the musical play Can-Can for her and Maurice Chevalier; also discussed were a picture called Some Came Running with Frank Sinatra and one based on William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. Yes, her agents said, these projects would avoid a reversion to the type of roles she had resented and said she would turn down—women like Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Pola in How To Marry a Millionaire and the nameless girl in The Seven Year Itch.
Just as they were considering these and other projects, Billy Wilder sent Marilyn a two-page outline of a film he was writing with I. A. L. Diamond, a script based on an old German farce. Titled Some Like It Hot, this was to be a wild comedy set in the Roaring Twenties, about two musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. To avoid the killers, the men successfully disguise themselves as women and sign up with an all-girl band, among whom is the ukulele-strumming blonde Sugar Kane. The comic possibilities were enormous, Marilyn as Sugar would have several songs and, although it was the kind of role she wanted to put behind her, she had sufficient faith in Wilder’s judgment and previous success to negotiate. By late spring, it was agreed that Marilyn would receive $100,000 plus an historic ten percent of the film’s gross profits. This would, she reasoned, be simply an easy, lucrative interval while Arthur completed The Misfits.
On the evening of July 7, Marilyn left Arthur in Amagansett and arrived next morning in Los Angeles, accompanied by her secretary, May Reis and by Paula Strasberg. Reporters and photographers remarked on Marilyn’s white-blond hair, her white silk shirt, white skirt, white shoes and white gloves. Stepping into Southern California’s morning light, she practically blocked out the sun.
Paula was again present, Marilyn said with her usual piercingly honest self-assessment,
because she gives me a lot of confidence and is very helpful. You see, I’m not a quick study, but I’m very serious about my work and am not experienced enough as an actress to chat with friends and workers on the set and then go into a dramatic scene. I like to go directly from a scene into my dressing room and concentrate on the next one and keep my mind in one channel. I envy these people who can meet all comers and go from a bright quip and gay laugh into a scene before the camera. All I’m thinking of is my performance, and I try to make it as good as I know how. And Paula gives me confidence.
May Reis, then fifty-four, was a highly intelligent, discreet and trustworthy assistant who had been secretary to Elia Kazan and, until 1955, to Arthur Miller. Fatherless at nine, she had cared for her sick mother and grandmother and from adolescence worked to support them and her brother Irving, who became a film director (of, among other films, the screen version of Arthur’s play All My Sons). By 1958, she had been attending to Marilyn’s secretarial needs in New York for almost three years, answering fan mail at Fifty-seventh Street, keeping her schedule, fielding phone calls and cooperating with Marilyn’s agents and publicists. According to her sister-in-law Vanessa Reis, May agreed to travel with Marilyn to Hollywood for Some Like It Hot and the next two films “because May was alone in the world and had no family—and so Marilyn became her existence, her profession, her commitment. She already knew that working for Marilyn was a handful, but May knew that stars are a handful.”
The tasks began that very afternoon, when Marilyn and May were rushed off to a press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Billy Wilder and costars Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and George Raft. Fortunately, she would live at the hotel temporarily (for wardrobe fittings, makeup tests and ukulele lessons) and also during interior filming at the Goldwyn Studios. As they approached the first day of production, Marilyn’s customary anxieties were much alleviated by news from Washington and New York just when shooting began in early August. In the United States Court of Appeals, Joe Rauh had won a reversal of Arthur’s contempt citation, on the premise that Arthur had not been completely informed as to why he had to answer questions in the first place.
At first, good spirits prevailed with Marilyn, her director and her co-stars. For six years, all her films had been shot in Technicolor; because that was now in her contract with Fox, Marilyn naturally expected that Some Like It Hot would be a color picture, too (although this film was for United Artists). But no, Wilder explained, this picture had to be shot in black and white, otherwise the makeup of the two men in drag would be absurdly garish and not convincing. Of this Marilyn was not sure until a quick test shot made everything clear; from that point, the production began with an amiable optimism that made everybody almost deliriously happy.
Wilder also noticed that Marilyn had matured as an actress. “She has her own natural instinct for reading a line,” according to Wilder, “and an uncanny ability to bring something to it.” And Paula was helpful: “There was no question about it,” said Rupert Allan. “Paula gave Marilyn the security she needed during production—without the unfortunate complications of Natasha.”
For all that, Wilder found that Marilyn
was still not easy to work with. She was constantly late, and she demanded take after take after take—the Strasbergs, after all, had taught her to do things again and again and again until she felt she got them right. Well, now she had us doing things again and again, our nice sane budget was going up like a rocket, our cast relations were a shambles, and I was on the verge of a breakdown. To tell the truth, she was impossible—not just difficult. Yes, the final product was worth it—but at the time we were never convinced there would be a final product.
In other words, the camaraderie at the start of Some Like It Hot went cold. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, with whom Marilyn had most of her scenes, grew weary and annoyed after the tenth and fifteenth take of the same shot, for Marilyn would cut in the middle of every one, angry or exasperated because she had got a word wrong—or, more often, was convinced she could do the scene better. “Sometimes this stretched out to three days something we could have completed in an hour,” Wilder added, “because after every bad take Marilyn began to cry, and there would have to be new makeup applied.” In addition, Marilyn came to the set without having memorized her dialogue, which had to be written on cue cards or taped on props.
Marilyn was a year younger than Lemmon and Curtis, yet she was afraid of seeming much older and was paradoxically anxious that in their farcical drag they would appear like college boys. “She picked up on anything,” recalled Allan Snyder. “She’d say her eyebrows were wrong, or her lipstick—anything not to appear out there.” Perhaps even if she arrived late, they would be grateful that she was there at all. She was living in what her poet friend Norman Rosten called “Marilyn time.”
“I never heard such brilliant direction as Billy gave her,” said Lemmon, “but nothing worked until she felt right about it. She simply said over and over, ‘Sorry, I have to do it again.’ And if Billy said, ‘Well, I tell you, Marilyn, just possibly if you were to . . .’—then she replied, ‘Just a moment, now, Billy, don’t talk to me, I’ll forget how I want to play it.’ That took me over the edge more than once. Nobody could remind her she had a professional commitment. She couldn’t do it until she herself was ready.”
Tony Curtis was blunter: kissing her, he said, was like kissing Hitler, by which he probably meant it could not possibly appeal to anyone but Eva Braun. “Well, I think that’s his problem,” Marilyn replied airily. “If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has that feeling toward me, then my fantasy has to come into play—in other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.” But she had to do the scene dozens of times to make her fantasy convincing for herself, and by this time Curtis was glassy-eyed and hoarse with exhaustion—just when Marilyn glowed, melding “organically,” as she liked to say, into the role.
Even as loyal a friend as Rosten had to agree that at such times Marilyn was trouble itself, a difficult woman who brought along the entire baggage of her emotional insecurities. Meantime, she justified her demand for multiple takes by saying that with each one she was “relaxing a little more . . . and I’ll go a bit further on the next try.” She did not admit that at the root of the problems was not only her insecurity but also her terror at being back in Hollywood: she was afraid that everything for which she had worked was gone, that with her company now only a nominal tax shelter for her salary, she would once again revert to being misperceived and abused by the very system she had once so courageously abandoned.
By early September, the company was filming on location at a late-nineteenth-century Victorian resort called the Hotel del Coronado, a two-hour drive south of Los Angeles. After a month of strained relations with her colleagues and the unfounded conviction that she was performing poorly, Marilyn had reverted to reliance on massive amounts of barbiturates for sleep. In addition, she sometimes took pills during the afternoon as well, perhaps to anesthetize her feelings of insufficiency.
Marilyn’s gynecologist, Leon Krohn, was present for much of the production, and he was openly concerned for Marilyn’s health. “It seemed to me,” he said later,
that she was in a Pygmalion situation: Arthur Miller was trying to make a sophisticate out of her, and I believe this caused her great tension. She often told me how she longed for a child, but I cautioned her that she would kill a baby with the drink and the pills—the effects of those barbiturates accumulated, I told her, and it would be impossible to predict when just one drink will then precipitate a spontaneous abortion.
Marilyn also felt, as she later told Rupert Allan, that in playing the role of Sugar Kane she had reverted to exactly the kind of role that had driven her from Hollywood in 1954.
Marilyn now longed to have the film completed, and in September she typed a note to Norman Rosten: “I have a feeling this ship is never going to dock. We are going through the Straits of Dire, [and] it’s rough and choppy.” In a postscript she added, “Love me for my yellow hair alone. I would have written this by hand but it’s trembling.” She was referring to a favorite poem by Yeats: “. . . only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone, / And not your yellow hair.” For Marilyn, any reason to love her would suffice.
Perhaps because from afar their marriage seemed not quite so troubled, Marilyn longed for Arthur as she had during Bus Stop, and she turned to him when she had doubts about a projected photo story. Richard Avedon had photographed her in a variety of costumes and poses for Life, in which Marilyn fancifully portrayed Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Russell and Jean Harlow. Marilyn was with Avedon, as with other photographers, virtually the reverse of herself on a movie set: “very easy to work with,” according to Avedon. “She gave more to the still camera than any actress—any woman—I’ve ever photographed, infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.”
Arthur contributed a lovingly elegiac and eulogistic tribute to accompany the Avedon pictures, praising Marilyn’s ingenuity, her sense of play, “the spontaneous joy she takes in anything a child does, [and] her quick sympathy and respect for old people. . . . The child in her catches the fun and the promise, and the old person in her the mortality.” The best of the lot, he said, was the homage to Harlow, whom Marilyn conveyed “not so much by wit as by her deep sympathy for that actress’s tragic life. . . . She has identified herself with what was naive, what was genuine lure and sexual truth.”
But when Marilyn read the draft of his comments, she felt not encouraged but depressed. Why the emphasis on naïveté, on “lure and sexual truth”? Was that all she had to offer? In this she reacted neurotically, for Arthur’s essay is one of the most appreciative and laudatory ever written of her. But ignoring the praise, she seized on the comparison with Harlow. In her own net of insecurities, the reminders of her predecessor’s difficult life, her struggle in Hollywood and her untimely death overwhelmed Marilyn, and on Friday, September 12, she telephoned Arthur in New York.
Of their conversation nothing can be known. But that evening Arthur wrote to Marilyn of his own emotional problems, and the letter has survived. Addressing her as his “Darling Girl,” he wrote that she was his ideal, and he then apologized for the things he had not done (perhaps a reference to his lack of material support in their marriage) and for those he had (a possible allusion to the infamous notebook entry). He added that he believed he was making important discoveries in the regular psychotherapeutic sessions he had resumed with a Dr. Loewenstein, which he believed was illuminating the blockage in his emotional life. He justified the reservations she had about the Life article (which they evidently discussed on the telephone) by stating his belief that his points were good and interesting. The letter concluded with a plea for her love and her understanding of his mental confusion.
The letter is crucial, for it contradicts the general tone and content of Arthur Miller’s published memoirs, in which he portrayed himself as the healthy-minded, long-suffering partner of a woman he saw as occasionally sweet and talented, but ever on the edge of madness. In this regard, Timebends is a book whose sections on Marilyn are full of condescension for a “dear girl” and a “mere child,” a disturbed, distracted person mired in a past of her own invention, and a woman from whom he barely escaped with sanity and life intact. Although no autobiography can be expected to provide an objective account of the author’s intimacies, this one is remarkably incomplete, selective of the facts in their marriage, and singularly clouded with self-defense; it could have been written only by one rooted in his own guilt and remorse.3
* * *
The letter of September 12, 1958, helps to correct this one-sided view. She may have been seeking an earthly savior, as he claimed, but he had been looking for a goddess. As Sidney Skolsky rightly remarked, Arthur may have been shocked to discover that Marilyn was neither his salvation nor the one he hoped could disentangle his own spiritual problems, but that she was needy in her own right. His creative inertia and his admitted emotional blockage were not her responsibility to resolve, and Norman Rosten was correct when he judged that Arthur was “more and more living with her in the third person, as an observer, [and] the shadow that had fallen between them in England was increasing, deepening.”
Their telephone conversation alone was not enough to cheer her, for that night Marilyn apparently took one too many sleeping capsules, perhaps with champagne. She was neither dying nor comatose, but, in a reaction typical for one who ingests such a combination, she vomited so violently that Paula had her admitted to a hospital for the weekend. Marilyn was back at work on Monday. Later that week, Arthur arrived to comfort her, but also, as his friend Olie Rauh believed, because he was virtually idle in New York: he had submitted the first draft of The Misfits to John Huston, whose response to it was favorable and who, they hoped, would direct it.
Arthur’s presence was no help at all. Embarrassed by what he considered her lack of professionalism, he was another authority figure Marilyn had to please. In addition, he distressed an already harried production crew by unwelcome interference, which doubtless he thought was part of the support he was offering Marilyn. Nor was his unwittingly superior attitude welcome. Introduced to Wilder and Diamond, Arthur held forth on the differences between classical comedy and tragedy—a professorial tactic that endeared him neither to his wife’s colleagues nor to her. At the time, Jack Lemmon realized she was “going through some kind of hell on earth—suffering and still producing that magic on film. It was a courageous performance, really courageous.” She was, he said, always giving everything she had, struggling to do better.
Behind this struggle was the judgment Marilyn felt was constantly being levied against her by Arthur. To Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg, Marilyn confided her fear that Arthur regarded her as self-absorbed and unprofessional. In their time, actors like Spencer Tracy and Errol Flynn (among others) shut down filming for a week at a time while they skipped off for their alcoholic binges, and Judy Garland was endlessly pampered with whatever drugs she required; they were but three of countless stars whose conduct, by comparison, made Marilyn seem as alert and punctual as a cadet. In a way, decades of studio carelessness and indulgence were devolving against her: she had not only personal habits to correct but also years of corporate cosseting of stars’ whimsies, which at last—for economic reasons—were no longer so blithely tolerated.
Arthur’s resentment of Marilyn was obvious to everyone during production. “There were days I could have strangled her,” said Billy Wilder, “but there were wonderful days, too, when we all knew she was brilliant. But with Arthur it all seemed sour, and I remember saying at the time that in meeting Miller at last I met someone who resented her more than I did.” Professionally idle, dependent on his wife’s income, humiliated by what he saw as her childish caprice and contemptuous of Hollywood in any case, Arthur could no longer tolerate her or the marriage.
But there was another problem, and that autumn, the atmosphere on location in Coronado was thick with tensions. “Arthur told me he would allow Marilyn to work only in the morning,” Wilder recalled.
He said she was too exhausted to submit to outside work in the afternoon sun. “The morning? She never shows up until after twelve! Arthur, bring her to me at nine and you can have her back at eleven-thirty!” We were working with a time bomb, we were twenty days behind schedule and God knows how much over budget, and she was taking a lot of pills. But we were working with Monroe, and she was platinum—not just the hair, and not just her box-office appeal. What you saw on the screen was priceless.
The reason for Arthur’s request was simple: in late October, the Millers learned that Marilyn was pregnant again. Fortunately, her most strenuous scenes were already shot and the filming of Some Like It Hot was completed on November 6.
By this time, director and star were barely speaking. When The New York Herald Tribune sent Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams to interview Wilder, he openly discussed Marilyn’s tardiness and inability to remember lines. When Hyams asked if he would do another project with her, Wilder replied, “I have discussed this project with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.” But this was a reaction of the moment: with the passage of time and the enormous success of Some Like It Hot—the biggest grossing American film for the first half of 1959—Wilder praised Monroe’s unique gifts and she said it would be a privilege to work for him again. That winter, in fact, Marilyn telephoned Wilder from New York, intending (as she told the film’s musical composer Matty Malneck) to offer the olive branch but finally unable to do so. Wilder’s wife took the call:
“Audrey?”
“Hi, Marilyn!”
“Is Billy there?”
“No, he’s not home yet.”
“Well, when you see him, will you give him a message for me?”
“Of course.”
“Well,” Marilyn said, and then paused. “Would you please tell him”—she was putting her words together slowly, thoughtfully—“would you please tell him to go and fuck himself?” A slight pause again, and in a gentler voice Marilyn concluded: “And my warmest personal regards to you, Audrey.”
But Wilder was not bitter. “Anyone can remember lines,” he said, “but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!”
Some Like It Hot is essentially a one-joke chase movie stretched on the frame of a story as classical as Shakespeare or the Da Ponte libretti for Mozart, or as Victorian as Charley’s Aunt: men forced to dress like women cannot disclose their true identities to the women with whom they fall in love. As a variation of boy (as girl) meets girl but cannot woo girl, Some Like It Hot might have been little more than a glossy college romp. But Wilder and Diamond, taking full advantage of Marilyn’s voluptuous charm, added all the elements of Prohibition-era wildness: forbidden liquor, the sudden leap toward free love and even, in the closing line, an implicit nod toward tolerance of homosexuality. When Joe E. Brown learns that his beloved Jack Lemmon is not, after all, a woman, he smiles and shrugs off the objection: “Well, nobody’s perfect.” But somehow Marilyn’s performance was. For all the problems, what survives is a radiantly funny portrait of a ukulele-strumming girl aglow with expectations for the right kind of man to love.
Returning to New York before the end of November, Marilyn was determined to rest during the early stages of her pregnancy. But on December 16, she miscarried; it was the last time she tried to be a mother. Both for sleep and as a tranquilizer, she had been taking Amytal, a brand name of the barbiturate amobarbital, and now she guiltily recalled Leon Krohn’s warning, as she wrote to the Rostens: “Could I have killed it by taking all the Amytal on an empty stomach? I took some sherry wine also.” For weeks she was inconsolable, convinced that the drug abuse she now freely admitted had caused the spontaneous abortion.
The Christmas–New Year holiday was a time of quiet recuperation, and Marilyn entered 1959 in a depression she tried to alleviate by taking sleeping pills as sedatives against tension and anxiety, a practice not generally discouraged by physicians at that time. But Amytal and Nembutal are themselves depressants, and so there was sometimes a vicious cycle of insomnia, drug-induced sleep, a stuporous morning and a vaguely unhappy day endured by taking more pills. Marilyn’s sessions with Dr. Kris, with whom she resumed regular visits, seemed to provide little comfort or illumination. Kris prescribed the sedation Marilyn requested and, it may be presumed, recorded and monitored the amounts.
There was one particularly uncomfortable side effect of her drug use: chronic constipation, which she countered by increased reliance on enemas. Since 1953, she had taken one a day before special occasions if she felt bloated, so that she could fit snugly into a form-fitting gown. But by 1959, her enemas had become as casual a habit as a haircut or shampoo and far more dangerous; pharmacy receipts for that year include the purchase of several sets of the necessary paraphernalia.
Marilyn returned to her private classes with Lee and to workshops at the Actors Studio—both of these to Arthur’s annoyance, as Susan Strasberg recalled, for there was a widening rift between him and her parents. Marilyn also dutifully read film scripts submitted by her agents—none of them, she replied, either appealing or appropriate; and she worked with Arthur on further improvements to the Roxbury house, the first home she had ever owned with anyone.
Marilyn was no recluse, however, and she was particularly delighted to meet famous writers that year. Carson McCullers extended an invitation to her Nyack home, where Isak Dinesen joined them for a long afternoon discussion on poetry. Carl Sandburg, who had met Marilyn briefly during the filming of Some Like It Hot, was also an occasional visitor to her apartment for casual literary discussions à deux. He found her “warm and plain” and charmed her by asking for her autograph. “Marilyn was a good talker,” according to Sandburg, “and very good company. We did some mock playacting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her a lot of questions. She told me how she came up the hard way, but she would never talk about her husbands.”
In 1959, Marilyn was not, therefore, the invariably withdrawn, darkly self-absorbed (much less suicidal) enigma of later myth. She had some days when she was (thus Susan) “restless because she wasn’t working,” and so she rightly seized every possibility of a happy occasion.
Photographs of her at the New York preview of Some Like It Hot in February, and the premiere party at the Strasbergs’ in March, for example, show a luminous, smiling Marilyn all in white: she looked like cotton candy, someone remarked. On a promotional tour for the film, she was as ever low-keyed and generous with the press. Mervin Block, a reporter for the Chicago American, recalled that at a press luncheon at the Ambassador East on March 18 she seemed “uncomfortable in the presence of so many strangers,” but that she was “patient and cheerful. Even when a nervous photographer spilled a drink all over the front of her dress, she remained calm, showed no anger, didn’t act like the great star she was.”
As for their long-planned film of The Misfits, John Huston was reading various drafts of the screenplay. Otherwise, Arthur’s dramatic works-in-progress were stalled and, as one friendly observer noted, he could not see how to give them a push. His own anxious inertia was ironically highlighted by his reception, on January 27, of a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In painful times, as Dante wrote, the worst agony is the remembrance of past glory.
On such occasions, Marilyn rose to the moment. She invited Arthur’s family to dinner, livened the atmosphere with jokes and, on request, sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Of Arthur’s relatives, she especially loved his father and frequently invited the senior Millers to Fifty-seventh Street. Marilyn fussed over Isadore, devoted a day to prepare a meal he especially liked, offered him little gifts and treated him as lovingly as if he were her own father. If he dozed, she untied his shoelaces and brought a footstool; if he had a cold, she brought soup and a shawl.
Marilyn’s fundamental courage and lack of self-pity at this time was most evident in the way she dealt with a marriage in swift decline. As the year and her inactivity progressed, she lost interest in the plans for expansion at Roxbury. “Empty hours oppressed her,” according to Susan, “and she seemed bored with the part-time role of country housewife.” Marilyn had hoped to find a literary mentor, father and protector in Arthur, but this was an ideal no man could fulfill; for his part, he had wanted her for his tragic muse, his occupation, and he used her fragility as the excuse for his own literary setbacks. She was his artwork faute de mieux. Here, then, were two people once in love but now vainly dependent on Marilyn’s public persona and the iconography of fame to keep them together. “I guess I am a fantasy,” she said sadly of this time.
But all was not gloomy. On May 13, Marilyn received Italy’s Oscar, the “David di Donatello,” as best actress for The Prince and the Showgirl. Four hundred people jammed into the Italian consulate on Park Avenue where Filipo Donini, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, presented the award. Ten days later, an interesting offer came from her old friend Jerry Wald, who had produced Clash by Night. He had another script from Clifford Odets and thought they might revive a successful moment of history with a new Wald-Odets-Monroe project called The Story on Page One.
Producer and writer wasted no time in outlining the story for her. The role of Jo Morris, as they described it, was that of an attractive, lonely and disconnected woman, raised by foster parents, unprotected and open to all kinds of abuse. Dependent on men, she nevertheless believes that she has more to offer the world than beauty, and her shrewdness enables her to survive. Intelligent and charming, she longs for love at any cost and, hoping to find a safe harbor from her past, she marries an older man and even tries to have children. But her husband becomes unreasonably jealous and brutal.
The story outline had proceeded only so far when Marilyn replied that she was interested in something from Clifford Odets, but that she would await a completed script; she was also doubtful about the news that Odets was to direct. Most important, as she told Paula, Marilyn recognized that The Story on Page One read like an outline of her own life. From the end of May though mid-June, letters, telephone calls and occasional telegrams augured well for The Story on Page One. But then Marilyn fell ill. On June 23 at Lenox Hill Hospital, her New York gynecologist, Dr. Mortimer Rodgers, operated to relieve again the condition of chronic endometriosis and her abnormally painful menstrual periods, her unusually severe bleeding and her infertility.4
After she spent a quiet summer, Marilyn heard again from Jerry Wald, who was back on the wire with another subject, at first called The Billionaire and eventually Let’s Make Love. This seemed an idea full of promise, planned by Wald and Twentieth Century–Fox as a Technicolor, CinemaScope musical comedy with a script by Norman Krasna, who had written comedies for Carole Lombard and Marlene Dietrich; most recently, he had revised his play Kind Sir into the successful comedy Indiscreet for Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. At first, The Billionaire was to have been directed by Billy Wilder, whom Marilyn approved but feared would not work again with her; in fact, Wilder told Rupert Allan he would be delighted to do just that—but he was already at work on his next script (The Apartment). She then agreed with Wald’s suggestion of George Cukor, who had directed Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman, among other important Hollywood ladies. “He told me not to be nervous,” Marilyn said of her first meeting with Cukor. “I told him I was born nervous.”
Marilyn was to play an actress named Amanda Dell who performs in an Off-Broadway musical satire also called Let’s Make Love. This show-within-the-show satirizes the fabulously wealthy French-born, New York businessman Jean-Marc Clément. He decides to visit a rehearsal and, without revealing his true identity, he is hired as an actor—to play himself. Clément falls in love with Amanda, who until the last minute refuses to believe the truth that her co-star is really a tycoon.
Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck turned down the male lead—either because of the song-and-dance routines or because they were unwilling to serve as mere acolytes in a Monroe picture. Wald and Cukor then had the idea that an authentic French musical star would be the perfect choice and Marilyn, on their recommendation and Arthur’s, yielded. Her leading man, appearing in his first American picture, would be none other than Yves Montand, who had played in the Paris production ofThe Crucible and recently had a great success with his one-man show on Broadway. “I’m sure he accepted for one good reason,” Arthur Miller said years later. “It meant he was breaking into movies as a leading man opposite Marilyn Monroe” (neither an unwise nor unworthy motive). On September 30, Marilyn signed to do the picture; negotiations for Montand, which included a paid trip to Hollywood for him and his wife, Simone Signoret, were completed before Christmas.
Meantime, Fox employed Marilyn as a good will ambassador. Nikita Khrushchev’s historic tour of America was at its peak that September, and the film industry’s banquet in his honor was held on September 19 in the most lavish commissary of them all, Fox’s Café de Paris. From her table (where she chatted amiably with Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Joshua Logan and others), Marilyn was summoned to meet the Soviet premier: he smiled, gazed unblinkingly into her blue eyes and shook her hand so earnestly and so long it hurt for days. “He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman—that’s how he looked at me,” she reported proudly. An interpreter conveyed some small talk about The Brothers Karamazov, which by then had been filmed with Maria Schell as Grushenka, and Marilyn had only warm words for Schell’s performance. Yes, she would like very much to visit Russia, she replied to Khrushchev’s invitation. For perhaps two minutes, the Cold War thawed slightly.
In October and November, there were preproduction details: wardrobe fittings, color tests, meetings with Cukor and scene-study with Paula Strasberg, who was included on the team as usual. This time there were also rehearsals and prerecordings for several songs. According to Frankie Vaughan, the British pop star who played a supporting role, “She was always on time for rehearsals. There were none of those notorious late starts. When she arrived, everybody smartened up, as if her presence was the light that fell on everyone. Certainly she seemed to me very professional.” These numbers required some basic choreography, and because dancing on-camera made Marilyn more nervous than anything else in a movie, she demanded the help of her old friend Jack Cole, who had trained her throughout the rigors of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and There’s No Business Like Show Business.
At the same time, an even deeper friendship was established. An actor known as “masseur to the stars,” Ralph Roberts had earned high esteem among theater and movie folk because of his sophisticated knowledge of physiotherapy and of the special muscular problems often afflicting actors and dancers. He had met Marilyn at the Strasberg home in 1955 when he, too, was both student and close friend of the family. Roberts had acted on Broadway in The Lark with Julie Harris and Boris Karloff, and he had trained the actor who played the masseur (a surrogate Ralph Roberts) in the opening scene of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Over six feet tall and ruggedly handsome, Ralph had a solid reputation as a Southern gentleman in the classic mold, soft-spoken, compassionate and courtly. He was also widely read and had refined, multicultural interests. That season, he was in Los Angeles, and when Marilyn heard that he had greatly helped Judy Holliday during the filming of Bells Are Ringing, Marilyn rang him at once. From the day of their reunion, he was “Rafe” to her: she preferred the British pronunciation. More important, he quickly became her closest friend and most intimate confidant for the rest of her life.
Very soon, Marilyn needed Ralph’s support. With the holidays there arrived her co-star, the formidable, smoothly romantic Yves Montand. Under Cukor’s supervision, Montand and Marilyn began to rehearse the early scenes of Let’s Make Love, a movie which bore, as Simone Signoret said, un titre prémonitoire—a threatening title.
1. In this regard, one likes to recall a fascinating moment in 1922, when British archaeologists were unearthing the pharaohs’ tombs. In one mummy case dating from the eighteenth century before Christ, there was found among the usual artifacts a seedling. A member of the team planted and nurtured it, and soon there was a flourishing little mustard tree.
2. At Fox, for example, the market on peroxide was cornered by Jayne Mansfield, who wore Marilyn’s notorious gold lamé dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while Sheree North inherited Marilyn’s red beaded gown from the same movie. At Universal-International, her tight bodices from two pictures were loaned out for Mamie Van Doren; her form-fitting corset from River of No Return was handed over to Corinne Calvet for Powder River; Marilyn’s white pleated dress from The Seven Year Itch swirled round Rosanne Arlen in Bachelor Flat; and outfits from several Monroe films were worn by Barbara Nichols in hers. At Columbia, Cleo Moore was taught how to walk like Marilyn, while at MGM, RKO and elsewhere, Barbara Lang, Joi Lansing, Diana Dors and Beverly Michaels had to sit through hours of excerpts from Marilyn’s pictures, studying her. Even Sidney Skolsky championed a substitute Marilyn. Most of these women never had a chance to discover if they could do anything other than imitate someone inimitable.
3. Notwithstanding any objective valuation of their merit, the playwright’s entire corpus of plays and screenplays following his marriage to Marilyn—from The Misfits (1960) through After the Fall (1964) and up to The Last Yankee (1993)—comprises an encoded guide to the network of conflicted feelings about his life with Marilyn Monroe, a complex he seems never to have completely resolved.
4. The Story on Page One was eventually completed by Odets and filmed with Rita Hayworth in the leading role.