Chapter Eighteen
MARILYN WAS A smiling, bubbling, beautiful hostess. She still has the old glamour, the magic.” So wrote her friend Sidney Skolsky, inspired by a reception Marilyn hosted for Yves Montand at Fox’s commissary during the second week of January.
“Next to my husband and Marlon Brando,” she said, offering a toast, “I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.”
This remark brought polite applause, and heads turned toward the guest of honor, whose English vocabulary was poor and heavily accented. “Everything she do is original, even when she stand and talk to you,” he read haltingly from a card. “I never see anybody who concentrate so hard. She work hard, she do scene over and over and over but is not happy until perfect. She help me, I try to help her.”
At first, this kind of warm collegiality prevailed as well at the Beverly Hills Hotel, that sprawling pink complex of Mediterranean revival buildings on Sunset Boulevard, where the studio installed the Montands in bungalow number twenty and the Millers a few steps away in number twenty-one. After the tensions of the previous year, an uneasy truce seemed to prevail between the Millers: they hoped, Marilyn told friends, that The Misfits—his Valentine for her, she called it—might restore their marriage.
Arthur had known the Montands since 1956, and the couples had had several pleasant evenings together in New York the previous September, when Yves was the toast of Broadway. Now they dined together each evening when Yves and Marilyn returned from rehearsals. Over spaghetti in one suite or lamb stew in another, Montand practiced his English, asking Arthur and Marilyn for help and trying to understand a humorless and badly structured script. Simone, a bit more fluent and then between film assignments, described her leisurely days of shopping and her walking tours of Beverly Hills. Marilyn complained about Let’s Make Love, which was turning out to have more holes than the wheel of Swiss cheese the Montands kept in their kitchenette: “There was no script, really,” she said later. “There was nothing for the girl to do!” And Arthur, puffing on his pipe, had to agree that, yes, the script pages he read were abysmally unfunny and riddled with clichés.
By the end of January, Arthur was in Ireland, working at John Huston’s home on his own revisions for The Misfits. Although that script was far from camera-ready, he returned in mid-March for an astonishing reason—to write some scenes for Let’s Make Love.
In his memoirs, Miller wrote with lofty bitterness that his work on this picture meant “a sacrifice of great blocks of time . . . [for] a script not worth the paper it was typed on”—a task, he said, that he undertook only to give his wife emotional support. His assessment of the screenplay is astute, but the circumstances of his involvement were somewhat different, not to say determinative for the course of the Millers’ marriage.
On March 7, the Screen Actors Guild joined the Writers Guild, already on strike against producers and studios, and from that day, every Hollywood production shut down—just when Let’s Make Love had some of its most pressing script and production problems. The major issue at stake for these unions was additional payments to actors and writers for the television broadcast of their earlier films, for which studios were now realizing huge new profits, and no playwright or screenwriter would dishonor the strike to work on the problematic sequences of this film. But to everyone’s astonishment—Marilyn’s most of all—Jerry Wald prevailed on Arthur Miller to break ranks. According to Yves Montand, Miller “came running [back from Ireland] to rewrite some scenes, pocketed a check [from Fox] and complained about prostituting his art.”
Indeed, Miller was apparently not so mortified at the task as he later claimed: he attended the screening of the dailies, commenting so imperiously that Cukor abandoned the room, and generally playing the experienced playwright who was slumming in Hollywood—an attitude that had caused problems on Some Like It Hot. Nonetheless, his fee of several thousand dollars for his contributions must have alleviated whatever agony he felt.
Most significantly, this situation was disastrous for a marriage already in tatters. Sidney Skolsky summed up the matter: “Arthur Miller, the big liberal, the man who always stood up for the underdog, ignored the Writers Guild strike and rewrote [pages of the script]. Arthur did it silently, at night,” and the result was that “his wife no longer looked up to him. . . . Any resemblance he had once possessed, in Marilyn’s eyes, to a President assassinated nearly a century ago [Lincoln, to whom she had often compared Miller] had vanished.” Violating his own ethics, Arthur forever lost Marilyn’s confidence: the man whose courage and moral outrage a few years earlier had won her admiration had betrayed his own ideals. “That was the moment I knew it was over,” she told Rupert Allan, visiting Los Angeles from Monaco. “Nothing seemed to make sense any more.”
There was much slamming of doors in their bungalow, and the Montands, among others, heard angry voices late into the night. From that time, the production “was a terrible ordeal for everybody,” according to Jack Cole, who added, echoing Billy Wilder, that “Arthur Miller hated her.”
“There was something terrible happening between them,” recalled Vanessa Reis, “and the marriage was obviously unraveling. This took a terrific toll on May, who was the soul of discretion and found it painful to watch. One evening, Arthur, Marilyn, May, Rupert Allan and I were about to go out for dinner, but the atmosphere was so tense I left the group.” George Cukor recognized the anxiety in Marilyn’s life, although he knew not the specific causes: he admitted later that he had “no real communication with her at all . . . and very little influence. All I could do was make a climate that was agreeable to her.”
Some relief was provided by a new friendship as Marilyn worked through the project and tried to keep her private misery from public perception. Considerable emotional support was provided on Let’s Make Love by Marilyn’s new stand-in, the actress Evelyn Moriarty, whose height, coloring and experience earned for her one of the most taxing jobs on film sets—to walk through scenes in advance of the star’s arrival, testing and confirming the lighting cues and rehearsing with other actors. Cukor had known and liked her work for years and had recommended her for the job, and at once Evelyn—a sensible, patient and good-humored lady with a wealth of experience and a keen grasp of studio politics—won Marilyn’s confidence. From the spring of 1960, the women were good friends.
Perhaps because of her recent, second miscarriage, Marilyn had another kind of camaraderie—with the children of colleagues, the youngsters she welcomed to a soundstage otherwise closed to visitors. Frankie Vaughan introduced his seven-year-old son David to her one day, and as she welcomed him Marilyn said, “Please come and give me a kiss.” The boy hung back shyly, and Marilyn, appearing hurt, repeated her invitation; still, the boy demurred. “Suddenly,” as Vaughan recalled, “she started crying, just sobbing on my shoulder.”
But there were other, pleasanter occasions, as with Vanessa Reis’s children. Marilyn invited them to watch a scene being filmed, and later brought them for a weekend brunch and a swim at the hotel. Similarly, Cukor recalled a visit to the set of two young girls he knew whose sister had recently been killed in an accident. Learning of the tragedy, Marilyn asked to be introduced; she then insisted on having her picture taken with the girls, told them how beautiful they were and befriended them in no time.
Nor was her kindness restricted to children. Maggie Banks, an assistant choreographer, recalled that the wife of a company electrician was seriously ill: “I saw Marilyn hand the man a roll of bills; he started to cry, and Marilyn just hugged him and walked away.” Likewise, Evelyn Moriarty never forgot that Marilyn anonymously donated one thousand dollars to defray the funeral expenses of a crewmember’s wife. Such acts of generosity she accomplished spontaneously and with no thought of anyone but the recipient.
By late spring, the emotional and professional complications surrounding the filming of Let’s Make Love seemed insurmountable. Yves Montand realized that he had agreed to play a bumbling, graceless foil to Marilyn. This disappointment he could sustain for the sake of his American movie debut, but the thankless role made him more than ever concerned for his English dialogue, which Cukor had to rerecord entirely. Each day of filming, Montand confided to Marilyn that he was terrified of speaking and acting poorly, of seeming as doltish as his character, and this at once established a bond between them. For perhaps the first time in her career, a leading man had revealed fears identical to her own. Marilyn was right, Yves said: Arthur did not understand her panic about performing—only another actor could. They discussed their shared terror of being mocked and rejected by colleagues, for each had worked hard for a few good roles, and each was married to a more respected artist. A warm bond grew between them, not a sudden rush of adolescent passion. Even Simone Signoret, soon to be immersed in a sordid discharge of tabloid venom, recognized that there had been in Marilyn’s life (and were even then) “a whole succession of people who had taken pains to explain to her that she was anything but an actress. . . . They thought the starlet Marilyn was cute, but they detested her for becoming the actress Monroe.”
Nevertheless, the burden of the film’s success was as usual Marilyn’s. According to Jack Cole, Marilyn was well aware of this—and of her limitations. Insecure, afraid of failing herself and her husband, she was as usual late and often absent for scheduled musical numbers, which took half the production time and which, as Cole admitted, he had to improvise for her each day—a task not made easier by her frequent hangovers from sleeping pills. But she was “never bitchy,” he added, agreeing with Jerry Wald that the star was “not malicious, not temperamental.” She simply regarded her task as overwhelmingly significant for herself and others, and she hesitated to do something for which she felt inadequate. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she often whispered to Frank Radcliffe, one of the dancers assigned to lift her in the film’s musical numbers. “Am I doing anything wrong?”
The filming of this unfortunate picture aggravated every aspect of Marilyn’s insecurity, for she found no support from Cukor’s perfunctory direction or Miller’s condescending manner. Nor was there any encouragement from the nervous atmosphere on the set, where virtually everyone knew they very likely had a disaster in Let’s Make Love. The situation evoked all her feelings of inadequacy, further sharpened by the kind of psychological imperative that her therapy had not alleviated, and that is so futile: “What am I afraid of?” she scribbled one day on a piece of notepaper, while awaiting a call to the set. “Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be.” In March, she was pleased, but not infused with fresh confidence, when she received the Golden Globe Award from the Foreign Press Association as best actress in a 1959 comedy or musical, for Some Like It Hot.
Marilyn found time to improve her political literacy that year. After reading a sheaf of papers sent to her from Connecticut, she accepted the mostly honorific position of alternate delegate to the Fifth Congressional District. To Lester Markle, a New York Timeseditor she had met in 1959, Marilyn wrote a letter on March 29 that revealed the seriousness of her social concerns that election year. “What about [Nelson] Rockefeller?” she asked.
He’s more liberal than many of the Democrats. Maybe he could be developed? At this time, however, [Hubert] Humphrey might be the only one. But who knows, since it’s rather hard to find out anything about him . . . Of course, [Adlai] Stevenson might have made it if he had been able to talk to people instead of professors . . . and there hasn’t been anyone like Nixon before, because the rest of them at least had souls! Ideally, Justice William O. Douglas would be the best President . . . and how about Kennedy for Vice President? But they couldn’t win, because Douglas is divorced. I don’t know anything about Kennedy. Maybe this ticket is hopeless, too. But it would be nice to see Stevenson as Secretary of State.
Now, Lester, on Castro. I was brought up to believe in democracy, and when the Cubans finally threw out Battista with so much bloodshed, the United States [didn’t] stand behind them and give them help or support even to develop democracy. The New York Times’s responsibility to keep its readers informed means in an unbiased way. I don’t know—somehow I have always counted on The Times, and not [just] because you’re there.
I hope Mrs. Markle is well. It’s true I have been in your building quite frequently, mostly to see my wonderful doctor [Kris], as your spies have already reported. I didn’t want you to get a glimpse of me, though, until I was wearing my Somali leopard coat. I want you to think of me as a predatory animal.
She concluded with “slogans for late 1960”:
Nix on Nixon
Over the hump with Humphrey
Stymied with Symington
Back to Boston by Xmas—Kennedy.
Her essential affability, her desire to enlarge her capacities and to escape her unhappiness, was evident elsewhere, too. Joe Hyams, Hollywood correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, recalled that “she was bubbly and fun for several interviews that season. Her fear and depression were never apparent, although she must have prepared painstakingly for these meetings, the way she prepared makeup for a scene.” And although Marilyn hated surprise parties, she was grateful when the cast and crew of Let’s Make Love celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday at lunch on June 1. That evening, Rupert Allan was host for a casual dinner in her honor at his home on Seabright Place. Marilyn spent most of the evening discussing American drama with Tennessee Williams and his mother, Edwina, the legendary lady who had inspired The Glass Menagerie.
That spring, Simone Signoret was awarded an Oscar as best actress (for a modest British picture called Room at the Top) and within days left for her next film assignment in Europe. Shortly thereafter, Marilyn and Arthur departed for a weekend with John Huston, to scout Nevada locations for The Misfits, now scheduled for late summer. “I’ll miss you,” Marilyn said to Yves, bidding farewell as she climbed into a car. “What will be, will be,” Arthur muttered. If his remark betokened suspicion of the growing intimacy between Marilyn and Yves, Arthur was dead right.
Marilyn returned to Los Angeles alone, while Arthur remained to work with Huston. One evening in late April, she returned from Fox with a cold and a slight fever. Yves went to her bungalow to ask if he could bring her a drink or supper and, as he recounted in his memoirs, he sat on the edge of her bed, patting her hand tenderly. “I bent over to kiss her good night, but suddenly it was a wild kiss, a fire, a hurricane I couldn’t stop.”
The affair (the effect of her broken union, not the cause of it) began in late April and ended quietly in June. The press learned of the romance in the usual ways, with reporters lurking round the shrubbery of the Beverly Hills Hotel and shamelessly bribing maids and messengers for exaggerated accounts of the lovers’ comings and goings; by mid-June, columnists were alluding to divorces and remarriage. As for Marilyn, during the time of the affair she enjoyed Montand’s ardor and his company, but most of all she was grateful for the warm attention. Ever the realist, however, she expected nothing more, and there is no evidence for the legend that when the affair was over she was so grief-stricken that she came perilously close to a breakdown. Quite the contrary: she accepted the finale with great dignity, telling the press that although some of her acting partners had said unpleasant things about working with her, Yves had not—“but is that any reason for me to marry him?” She met the absurd rumors of marriage head-on, effectively deflating them.
Arthur Miller never regarded the affair as significant, for it did not merit so much as a veiled allusion or a footnote in his autobiography. This omission is noteworthy: even a passing reference to it would have strengthened his case as he catalogued the reasons why his marriage collapsed (as he believed) under the weight of Marilyn’s emotional illnesses. Given the lovelessness of the marriage by this time, he may indeed have felt no jealousy at all.
Let’s Make Love concluded in June. Only Marilyn’s efforts on the production leavened the film, and even they could not redeem it: the film finally sinks under the weight of its own tedium, not to say the egregious lack of imagination in its construction and design.
But Marilyn’s rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was a triumph, her platinum hair shimmering against a black background as she seems to breeze through a number that required two weeks of rehearsal. As in the previous trio of films since 1956, her speech is natural, her gestures unmannered and credible, and in another musical number, “Specialization,” her timing is never less than perfect, her phrasing and pauses now instinctively controlled. As Amanda Dell, she was often quizzical, but Marilyn knew how different were confusion and stupidity. “I liked her very much, whatever our difficulties,” George Cukor said, adding accurately that Marilyn was, after all, “quite dazzling on the screen, and at the end of the picture very generous to everyone she had worked with.” To Jack Cole especially, Marilyn felt enormously grateful:
She gave me a little card . . . and inside was a check for $1500, and a note that said, “I really was awful, it must have been a difficult experience, please go someplace nice for a couple of weeks and act like it all never happened.” It was all very dear. Then two days later I got another card with another check for $500, and the card said, “Stay three more days.”. . . That was her way to say she loved you and didn’t want you to feel mad.
By the end of June, Marilyn found herself very much alone, with every variety of sustaining relationship terminated, imperiled or interrupted. Yves returned to his wife in Paris, Arthur to his work with John Huston in Reno, Paula to visit her daughter at work on a film in Europe. At this time, according to Inez Melson, “there was a childishness about her that made you feel she should be protected from anything that could be harmful to her.”
It was not surprising, therefore, that during her last month in Los Angeles Marilyn turned more frequently to one she believed would offer the fatherly, salvific protection she required. On the advice of Marianne Kris, she visited five or six times weekly the Los Angeles psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson, whom she had been seeing irregularly since January.
Like many Hollywood stars with whom he was so popular, whose problems fascinated him and whom he treated in remarkable numbers, Ralph Greenson had changed his name. Born in Brooklyn on September 20, 1910, Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon was one of twins and the first of four children; his father, then a medical student, insisted that the twin sister be named Juliet. One of the most unlikely of Ralph Greenson’s later statements was his assertion that their father loved Shakespeare and romantic stories but was unaware that Romeo and Juliet were lovers who killed themselves. It is hard to believe that an educated medical student who loved Shakespeare and romantic stories was unaware of the fate of the lovers; howsoever that may be, his son was firmly convinced that being a premature Romeo with a twin sister Juliet was decisive for Romeo’s subsequent development.
From childhood, Juliet demonstrated a keen talent for music and became a concert pianist, an achievement Romeo both admired and resented. Her applause, recognition, public acclaim and admiration created an acute sibling rivalry and weighed heavily on him; throughout his life, he attempted (without much success) to excel on the violin. Instead of a musical career, Romeo followed his father, attending college at Columbia University and then the University of Berne, Switzerland, where he took a medical degree in 1934. There he met Hildegard Troesch, whom he married the following year; subsequently they had two children, Daniel (later also a psychiatrist) and Joan. While an intern at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles from 1934 to 1936, he was known as Ralph R. Greenschpoon and then in 1937 legally became Ralph R. Greenson. In 1938, he returned to Europe and underwent Freudian analysis under Otto Fenichel.
After his return to America, Greenson began his military service in November 1942 and was assigned to serve in the medical corps at a veterans’ hospital in Canandaigua, New York, until November 1944. The discharge report on Greenson (filed from the Army Air Force Regional Hospital in Scott Field, Illinois, on January 21, 1946) contains an important, detailed clinical summary of a serious incident that occurred in Canandaigua on December 13, 1943. Greenson claimed that while riding in an army ambulance, he suffered a head injury (presumably in a collision), was briefly unconscious and suffered mild amnesia. For several days afterward he exhibited signs of euphoric mania, and when he traveled to Chicago to visit his brother it was determined that Greenson was dragging his left foot and that there was facial nerve damage.
“A private physician was called in,” according to the report. “The physician advised bed rest and conservatism; however, due to the fact that officer’s situation was such as it was, taking American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry [licensing examinations], and due to officer’s euphoria, this was not fulfilled.” A Chicago neurologist named Pollack was then summoned, and he found all the classic symptoms of a fractured skull—severe bruising beneath the ear, unequal reflexes in the arms and legs and inability to focus both eyes simultaneously. From the time of the accident, noted the 1946 report, Greenson had completely lost his sense of smell, suffered occasional fits and seizures, exhibited left facial weakness (“quite pronounced at times”), loss of right arm reflexes and faulty coordination.
The conclusion of the report was unambiguous: the attending diagnostician hesitated to make any “definite prognosis as to the future, as often in these cases, very peculiar and unforeseen complications can develop at a later date. . . . Other diseases of the nervous system [were observed], manifested by occasional fits secondary to CNS [central nervous system] trauma.”
Disqualified for overseas service, Greenson served as chief of the neuropsychiatric service at the Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado, beginning in November 1944. Promoted to the rank of captain, he then headed the Operational Fatigue Section at the same hospital. Here, he gained the experience he later shared with his friend, the writer Leo Rosten (no relation to Norman), who used the material as the basis for a novel called Captain Newman, M.D. In 1945, Greenson petitioned for release from service in order to enter private psychiatric practice in Los Angeles, where (thus he claimed in a letter dated December 5, 1945, to military authorities in Washington), there was a community of civilian and veteran psychiatric cases desiring private psychiatric treatment. This request was denied.
Following his discharge in 1946, Greenson (with financial help from a brother-in-law) set up his psychiatric practice in Los Angeles and, in 1947, purchased a home at 902 Franklin Street in Santa Monica, just at the cusp of West Los Angeles. The house had recently been completed after a long construction period by the owners, John and Eunice Murray, who found they could not afford the mortgage; Greenson paid $16,500 for the Mexican-colonial house. Not long after, the Murrays separated (they were divorced in 1950) and Eunice moved to a rented cottage not far from the ocean. The loss of what she called her dream house pitched Eunice Murray into a sense of bereavement so acute that over the years she regularly visited it.
In postwar America, psychoanalysis and psychiatric sessions were very much the vogue—not merely for adults in genuine mental or emotional crisis, but also for those who felt drastic action was needed to resolve life’s ordinary demands, and often for those who were merely bored or lonely or self-absorbed and could afford to pay a sympathetic listener. (Children who were simply rambunctious, annoying or precocious were often subjected to long-term therapy, sometimes with disastrous results.) In many large cities across the country, and especially in wealthier communities, daily sessions with one’s analyst were a commonplace for those who could afford them.1
Among the board-certified psychoanalysts with medical degrees in Los Angeles County in 1950 was Ralph Greenson, a founding member of the Freudian group known as the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, which had strong personal ties with Anna Freud in London, and with her colleagues in Europe and New York; among his good friends was Marianne Kris, who recommended him to Marilyn Monroe.
All during the 1950s, Greenson’s Los Angeles practice thrived: to his office in Beverly Hills came many celebrities as well as the merely rich of the county’s west side, and he cultivated a reputation as a popular lecturer to professionals and layfolk. Greenson was, as his wife Hildi wrote in an introduction to his collected lectures, “a charismatic speaker who loved teaching, enjoyed his audience and rarely missed an opportunity to engage a group in dialogue.” His manner at such events was perfectly attuned to the entertainment capital of the world: Hildi recalled that
Romi [short for Romeo] always mounted the platform or approached the lectern with quick, bouncy steps and obvious pleasure. . . . When I once marveled that he never seemed nervous, his characteristic reply was, “Why should I be nervous? Just think, these lucky people get to hear me.”. . . His gestures were dynamic and his voice would rise to a passionate pitch or break into a helpless chuckle over his own joke. He gave full vent to his own emotions . . . [and] his audience was never bored.
He was, in other words, as much a showman as anything else, in a way (as some colleagues believed) eager for the applause and notoriety once accorded only to Juliet. This at least partly accounts for his increasingly direct involvement in the business of Hollywood. Represented by his brother-in-law, the noted lawyer Milton Rudin (who was married to the younger Greenschpoon sister, Elizabeth), Greenson received a healthy twelve and a half percent of the gross receipts of the film version of Captain Newman, M.D.—whose title character, as Greenson wrote to Leo Rosten in September 1961, was himself, just as ninety percent of the patients were based on his own during the war. Greenson was also closely connected to a number of film studios, where he met several executives and producers who became patients; similarly, for his articles and interviews in magazines, he sometimes engaged Leo Rosten as “producer.”
The catalogue of Greenson’s articles and lectures reveals the extent to which he sought more than professional endorsement: he longed to reach the widest possible lay audience, too, and this encouraged him to popularize and even sometimes to trivialize serious issues. Among the titles of his collected lectures were “Emotional Involvement,” “Why Men Like War,” “Sex Without Passion,” “Sophie Portnoy Finally Answers Back,” “The Devil Made Me Do It, Dr. Freud,” and “People in Search of a Family,” which (as his wife rightly noted) “concerned a need Romi found in his patients which echoed his own partly unconscious desire to make people he cared about a member of his family. It was his foster-home fantasy of a haven where all hurts are mended.” Sterner critics believed that many of the papers he wrote were delivered for the purpose of getting attention (and therefore new clients)—appeals for applause rather than serious creative work.
Greenson was for years clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Medical School and a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. It is not an exaggeration to say that throughout his career—apart from whatever benefits he may have offered his private patients—Greenson was known in Southern California as a beguiling performer who kept audiences nicely entertained.
Dr. Benson Schaeffer, who was working with autistic children at the Neuropsychiatric Institute during Greenson’s tenure at UCLA, expressed the common impression of Greenson after attending a seminar and hearing a public lecture: “He wanted to amuse and to be thought clever. Frankly, I saw no overwhelming depth in the man. He seemed more shrewd and canny than profound.”
“Only later,” said another local colleague, “was it clear to many of us just how shallow he was”—a judgment readily confirmed by reference to his papers and articles. These are too often popular to the point of frivolity; a cursory reading of the material is sufficient to reveal how much “pop psychology” this physician generated. Indeed, he might not have won so many ardent disciples or such fervent respect anywhere but in Hollywood, where to challenge is too often to court disfavor, and to coddle is to secure virtually undying devotion. Anna Freud’s biographer, who liked and respected Greenson, nevertheless described him accurately as “a hard-living man of passionate enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis was—as Anna Freud thought it should be, and as it was for her entire friendship circle—a way of life.”
This way of life did not preclude presentations of issues that were frequently sprinkled with appalling generalities unworthy of a serious therapist and more suited to talk shows:
From “People in Search of a Family,” 1978:
• “People who search for families try to undo the effects of a bad family life. It is an acting out to replace the unhappy past with a happy future. Family life is good for your health.”
From “Misunderstandings of Psychoanalysis,” 1955:
• “Children are complicated and people are complicated. But I don’t feel it is hopeless at all.”
From “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” 1978:
• “The movie actor or actress is not a star until he is instantly recognizable not only by his peers but by the world at large . . . I have found the impatience of the budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work.”
But perhaps most surprising of all was Greenson’s contradiction of a fundamental tenet of psychiatry, not to say all medical ethics and practice: “Psychiatrists and physicians,” he said (in a lecture called “Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation” at the UCLA Center for the Health Sciences in 1964), “must be willing to become emotionally involved with their patients if they hope to establish a reliable therapeutic relationship.” This universally condemned position would be crucial, not to say downright harmful, in the case of Marilyn Monroe.
Like many in his field at that time, Greenson relied heavily on drug therapy as an adjunct to psychotherapy, routinely prescribing (or asking his patients’ internists to prescribe) barbiturates or popular tranquilizers of the day (Librium, for example) in an effort to ease patients’ crises or to please them. In this regard, Anna Freud’s biographer documented Greenson’s treatment of Ernst Freud, Sigmund’s son, who suffered severe migraine headaches: he prescribed massive doses of tranquilizers, even at that time too facile a response to a condition whose causes are poorly understood.
Whatever his private crises and difficulties, Ralph Greenson was the soul of serenity in public. At a UCLA symposium called “The Good Life,” he sat debating with three clergymen when a sudden storm brought a thunderclap and a power failure. Electricity was restored after a moment, and Greenson’s colleagues were seen standing. “Please note,” he announced triumphantly, “that I am the only speaker still sitting down.” His wife, touchingly loyal, incongruously wrote that “his self-assurance had scored a point for psychoanalysis.” Or for egotism.
But of all Greenson’s interests, it was the nature and burden of fame that seems to have most intrigued him and celebrities to whom he was most attracted. This was a recurring theme in his life’s work, and in “Special Problems In Psychotherapy With The Rich and Famous,” he described his experiences with Marilyn Monroe—a period of his professional and personal life that became an obsession. In this paper, Greenson did not mention by name her or anyone else: with so many details, that was hardly necessary.
Greenson wrote of a famous and beautiful thirty-four-year-old actress lacking self-esteem who was already being treated by an East Coast colleague. For her first appointment with him, she arrived a half-hour late, with the excuse that she was typically tardy for appointments. In response to his inquiry, she then described her early life, giving special emphasis to Grace’s passion for her to be a movie star. Although she had not completed high school, Greenson found her intelligent, with a love of poetry, theater and classical music. Her husband had undertaken to educate her, she said; for this she was grateful, but the life of the housewife bored her. He then said he would meet with her regularly at his office or at his home, which, he said, would not attract public attention.
This was an astonishingly illogical suggestion. Access to Greenson’s consulting room at his Santa Monica home was through the front door; his family lived there with him, and his young daughter at once noticed the new, famous patient and was subsequently asked to befriend her—hardly a mechanism to deflect attention. In fact, Greenson was pleased and proud to have so celebrated a client, and from late 1960 to the end of her life, one of the terrible miscalculations in his treatment of Marilyn Monroe was the extent to which he brought her into his home and made her a member of his family. Any vigilant psychiatric community or university department would have instantly called him on this and threatened professional censure.
His tactic was disastrous: instead of leading his patient to independence, he did exactly the opposite and effectively made her entirely contingent on himself. He was not a Svengali, he told Marilyn’s studio colleagues not long before her death, but he was certain he could prevail on her to do anything he wished. His disclaimer notwithstanding, Greenson’s words could indeed have been uttered by poor Trilby’s mesmeric teacher.
And so, from early 1960, Marilyn Monroe consulted Ralph Greenson five times a week when she was in Los Angeles. “I was going to be her one and only therapist,” he wrote proudly in a letter to Marianne Kris, describing her as “so pathetic, such a perpetual orphan that I felt even sorrier and she tried so hard and failed so often, which also made her pathetic.” These sentiments are remarkable, for they betray Greenson’s complete lack of professional distance and his dangerous emotional involvement: finding a patient “pathetic,” “feeling sorry” for her and judging her to have “failed so often” are phrases more characteristic of a wounded parent or a smug teacher than a sensible counselor committed to the mental health of his patient.
Even his diction became fractured when Greenson tried to write of Marilyn Monroe, and in time he lost all discretion with her. Nevertheless, in addition to five and eventually seven meetings weekly (“mainly because she was lonely and had no one to see her, nothing to do if I didn’t see her”), he encouraged her to telephone each day—a strategy he undertook, he said in his essay, so that she would understand his values and translate them into the things she needed to survive in the world of film acting.
As summer began, Marilyn described herself tersely: “I’m thirty-four years old, I’ve been dancing for six months [in Let’s Make Love], I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?”
In fact, she already had the answer: to New York for meetings and wardrobe tests for The Misfits, which was at last being rushed into production in July after several delays. This she undertook despite a persistent pain in her right side and frequent bouts of severe indigestion that interrupted her uneasily achieved sleep, to which she could return only by taking more sleeping pills. These were easily obtained through one of several internists, especially her Los Angeles physician, Hyman Engelberg. He had been recommended to Marilyn by Ralph Greenson, who told him, “You’re both narcissists, and I think you’ll get along fine together.” Very quickly, Engelberg fulfilled a specific function for Greenson, who persuaded the internist to “prescribe medication for her . . . so that I had nothing to do with the actual handling of medication. I only talked about it with her and he kept me informed.” Here, someone might have observed, lay dragons.
On July 18, en route to Nevada, Marilyn arrived in Los Angeles for a session with Greenson, an appointment with Engelberg and a date with Yves Montand, who was working on a second American film and with whom her relationship was still occasionally intimate.
Two days later, clutching a purseful of medication for pain and insomnia, she arrived in Nevada. There already was her “family,” as she called them—her coach (Paula Strasberg), her masseur (Ralph Roberts), her secretary (May Reis), her personal makeup artist (Allan Snyder), her hairdresser (Agnes Flanagan), an expert at full body makeup (Bunny Gardel), her wardrobe supervisor (Sherlee Strahm) and her driver (Rudy Kautzky, borrowed from the Carey Limousine Company). She would need all this support and more: whereas the making of Let’s Make Love had been described as an ordeal, the making of The Misfits would be an undiluted horror, not even remotely justified by the final product.
Perhaps no motion picture in history was ever realized without complications: production files are usually chronicles of delays, illnesses, unforeseen difficulties due to weather, sudden changes in the schedules of cast and crew, budget problems, the often uneasy relations between actors and directors, the legendary temperaments of stars and the countless details dependent on a successful interplay of many arts and crafts. The meticulous Alfred Hitchcock foresaw almost every eventuality of the process, enjoyed as much control as any director and suffered no fools gladly: toward the end of his life, he expressed his amazement that any movie was ever made at all, by anyone: “I have lived, he said, “in a constant state of astonishment that we ever completed even one picture. So much can go wrong, and it usually does.”
The films of Marilyn Monroe were no exception, and from 1953 her co-workers had to deal with her chronic fears that led to habitual lateness. They put up with her tardiness because she brought so much effort to her work, because the result was invariably rewarding and because she was, paradoxically, among the least temperamental actresses: there is no record of a public display of anger against an actor or director, no outburst of pride or contempt. Demanding of producers and technicians only a measure of the expertise she required of herself, she knew what was at stake with each picture; and because, like all performing artists, she knew how much she needed acclaim, she worked ceaselessly to merit public loyalty. This résumé deserves emphasis for a consideration of her twenty-ninth and final film, which asked everything of her except what she was most equipped to give—her unique, highly imaginative talent and a special gift for subtle and sophisticated comedy.
As shooting began, the screenplay of The Misfits was far from complete, despite three years of work, several drafts and redrafts and a detailed outline. Two things were soon clear.
First, the film was based on Miller’s own experience when he came to Nevada to fulfill a residency requirement for his divorce from Mary Grace Slattery. During those months of 1956, he had met a crew of cowboys who captured mustangs—wild horses once trained to be used as children’s ponies but now sold for butchering as dog food. For Miller, these men were as much misfits as the animals they considered useless. “Westerns and the West,” according to Miller, “have always been built on a morally balanced world where evil has a recognizable tag—the black hats—and evil always loses out in the end. This is that same world, but it’s been dragged out of the nineteenth century into today, when the good guy is also part of the problem.” His story and scenario would be, he said, “about our lives’ meaninglessness and maybe how we got to where we are.”
This was perhaps a noble theme, but he lacked the necessary components of a good story: characters with sufficient history or “back story” to make them credible; a narrative with issues compelling and relevant for an audience; and above all a clear emotional sensibility that would engage and entertain, quite apart from exalted or academic theses. The script, as Miller and Huston continued to hammer away at page after page, was full of grand but disconnected rhetoric about rugged individualism, the contemporary lack of intimacy and communication, the decline of the West and the nature of the American conscience. But a screenplay is composed of more than ideas, and in The Misfits very little happens. People wander about, go to bars, drink too much, drive through the desert, go to a rodeo, rope and capture horses—but mostly they mumble arid aphorisms (“Maybe we’re not supposed to remember other people’s promises. . . . Nothin’ can live unless somethin’ dies. . . . I can’t get off the ground and I can’t get up to God”). There is something tediously literary about the tone of this screenplay.
“This is an attempt at the ultimate motion picture,” said Arthur’s friend and former editor Frank Taylor, who was dragooned onto the project as producer. But with such self-consciousness surrounding everyone—and in a setting whose summer temperatures peaked at one hundred and twenty by day—the endeavor was perhaps futile from the start.
The second issue was even more problematic. When Miller began The Misfits in 1957, he was a man in love, touched by his wife’s emotional alliance with nature, her love of children and animals, her appreciation of gardening, of flowers, and her general sensitivity to life, of which he saw her as a ripe representative. By 1960, his attitude was considerably different. The film to star the writer’s wife was now planned as a black-and-white picture that clearly reflected his bitterness and resentment. For Marilyn Monroe, this was the great betrayal of her life (thus far)—the public exposure of private grief.
The Misfits would reveal Arthur’s feelings to all the world, and Marilyn had to convey them—and in no uncertain terms, for Arthur gave her character, Roslyn, dialogue lifted straight from the story of Marilyn Monroe, from childhood to her divorce from Joe DiMaggio and her subsequent meeting with an older man with whom there is but a tentative future. Even the house in which they talk, eat and love is unfinished: it is a replica of the unfinished Miller house in Roxbury, transplanted fictionally to Nevada for the real-life couple about to be divorced. And to play the role of the man who slaughters horses for dogmeat, Miller chose none other than Marilyn’s childhood idol, Clark Gable—“the man I thought of as my father,” as she had said since childhood. Miller even abbreviated the actor’s name for the character’s: Gable was “Gay.” At the fadeout they drive along a starlit road toward a (possibly vegetarian?) future.
Gay / Gable’s sidekick was named Guido, for the actor chosen—Eli Wallach, Marilyn’s old friend from the Actors Studio—was famous for his portrait of the Italo-American “Alvaro” in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. As the script was rewritten each day, and as Arthur’s resentment against Marilyn increased, it was given to Wallach to read the last angry speech against Marilyn/Roslyn:
She’s crazy. They’re all crazy. You try not to believe that because you need them. She’s crazy! You struggle, you build, you try, you turn yourself inside out for them. But it’s never enough. So they put the spurs to you. I know, I’ve got the marks. I know this racket, I just forgot what I knew for a little while.
And the third cowboy, Perce, was to be played by Montgomery Clift, far more addicted to drugs and alcohol than Marilyn, a tortured homosexual whose face had been smashed in an auto accident and who suffered a lifelong neurotic relationship with his mother—and was given lines like “My face is fine, Mom—all healed up—good as new.” It was just as Taylor predicted (indeed, warned) at the outset: “Each of the players is the person they play.” Even the helpful, devoted masseur Ralph Roberts was handed a cameo, as an alert ambulance driver.
So much was evident from Marilyn’s first scene, filmed on July 21 in the cramped bedroom of a Reno boardinghouse. With the director, cameraman, crew and actors wilting in the heat, Thelma Ritter played Isabelle, a landlady very like Grace’s Aunt Minnie (who sheltered Norma Jeane when she came to Reno for her divorce from Jim Dougherty). In the scene, she coaches Marilyn, the forlorn nightclub performer now late for her court appearance, nervously and hastily applying makeup as she rehearses her remarks for the judge. Marilyn’s lines in her first scene are lifted straight from the pages of the DiMaggio divorce plea:
RITTER/ISABELLE: “ ‘;Did your husband act toward you with cruelty?’ ”
MARILYN/ROSLYN: “ ‘Yes.’ ”
ISABELLE: “ ‘In what way did this cruelty manifest itself?’ ”
ROSLYN: “ ‘He persistently’—how does that go again?” (She cannot remember the lines.)
ISABELLE: “ ‘He persistently and cruelly ignored my personal wishes and my rights and resorted on several occasions to physical violence against me.’ ”
ROSLYN: “ ‘He persistently’—oh, do I have to say that? Why can’t I just say, ‘He wasn’t there’?—I mean, you could touch him, but he wasn’t there.”
From this point, Marilyn gave a performance remarkable for its acute yet controlled pain.
“At least you had your mother,” remarks Isabelle to Roslyn, who replies, “How do you have somebody who disappears all the time? They both weren’t there. She’d go off with a patient for three months”—an exact summary of Gladys and her last marriage, to fellow patient John Eley. None of this could have been easy for a woman who so carefully masked her private pain; perhaps it was especially mortifying for her to enact a scene in which Clark Gable asked, “What makes you so sad? I think you’re the saddest girl I ever met,” to which she had to reply, “No one ever said that to me before.” These were, after all, the very words spoken by Arthur to Marilyn not long before they married.
Rupert Allan, present for the shooting, recalled that Marilyn was
desperately unhappy at having to read lines written by Miller that were so obviously documenting the real-life Marilyn. Just when she might have expected some support, she was miserable. She felt she had never had a success. She felt lonely, isolated, abandoned, worthless, that she had nothing more to offer but this naked, wounded self. And all of us who were her “family”—well, we did what a family tried to do. But we had jobs connected to the picture, and it was the picture that was her enemy.
Had there been doubt in the minds of anyone on the production (or later in the audience), Miller and Huston made everything clear: on the inside of Gay/Gable’s closet door are taped a collection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe in earlier roles and poses: “Don’t look at those,” Roslyn tells Guido. “They’re nothing. Gay just put them up for a joke.” Which did not, to Marilyn, seem very amusing at all.
Sam Shaw, who had been present from the genesis of the project, added that Arthur’s great love was for a script he insisted on changing and changing some more, to suit his shifting feelings about Marilyn, while her great love was for the character of Roslyn, for the integrity of the role. “But the character was just never realized, he never gave it to her. She fought and fought, but Arthur was unyielding, unbending.” Added Norman Rosten, one of Arthur’s oldest friends, “Miller’s was the triumph of intelligence over feeling. It may turn out that Miller was less the artist than she.”
But if Arthur was asking Marilyn to relive her past, he was also requiring her to prepare for the future. During location shooting, the Millers moved from their shared suite to separate rooms, apparently because Marilyn could not bear what had happened to her role: she had for months been begging her husband at least to make Roslyn a whole character, with speeches that were not mere declamations. By early August, everyone on The Misfits knew that the star and the writer were barely speaking, that they did not ride out to the desert or lake locations together, that Paula transmitted messages from one to the other and that some kind of relationship was developing between Arthur and Inge Morath, one of the photographers assigned to document the film.
The Misfits was, then, an apt title. No one was surprised that Marilyn, who was given the privilege of a noontime first call on most days, was habitually late even for that, but she had solid, objective reason. Every night, Arthur rewrote entire scenes, handed to her as she went to bed or on awakening: for years, such last-minute changes had tossed her into panic. “I have not really helped her as an actress,” he admitted after the fact. Marilyn was confused: “I never really know exactly what’s expected of me.”
By midsummer, she was in agony, her upper abdominal pain now severely aggravated and her ability to digest food impaired: now, before the first take of every day, she was violently ill. Her co-star was her comforter on this picture; as if filling the old father fantasy, Clark Gable was the most patient actor on the team.
On at least one occasion, Gable marched her back to her hotel room, for she was truly, perhaps dangerously ill. “But I promised John [Huston]!” she cried. “I said I would be there!” She returned to the crew soon after and did her scene—with Gable leading the applause afterward. He had acted in five films with Jean Harlow and compared them favorably as comediennes, adding that “Harlow was always very relaxed, but this girl is high-strung, and she worries more—about her lines, her appearance, her performance. She’s constantly trying to improve as an actress.”
But there was not much material with which to make that improvement. As Miller rewrote Roslyn, she expressed her dismay at the capture of mustangs and their imminent slaughter not by dialogue or reasoning with the men, but “by throwing a fit,” as she said later.
I guess they thought I was too dumb to explain anything, so I have a fit—a screaming, crazy fit. I mean nuts. And to think, Arthur did this to me. He was supposed to be writing this for me, but he says it’s his movie. I don’t think he even wanted me in it. I guess it’s all over between us. We have to stay with each other because it would be bad for the film if we split up now. Arthur’s been complaining to Huston about me, and that’s why Huston treats me like an idiot with his “dear this” and “dear that.” Why doesn’t he treat me like a normal actress? I wish he’d give me the same attention he gives those gambling machines.
“I am supposed to work six days a week,” she told a reporter, “but it’s just too much. It takes me two days to recover and regain my strength and spirit. I used to work six days, but I was younger then.” Of this time she said later,
I had to use my wits, or else I’d have been sunk—and nothing’s going to sink me. . . . Everyone was always pulling at me, tugging at me, as if they wanted a piece of me. It was always, “Do this, do that,” and not just on the job but off, too. . . . God, I’ve tried to stay intact, whole.
With the external discomforts of summer in Nevada, the internal turmoil of a collapsed marriage and a diminishing sense of purpose, the inelegance of the script, the shallowness of her role, the macho posturing of John Huston and the meager reserves of courage she had every day to summon even in the best of circumstances, Marilyn’s conduct was remarkable (all protestations from Miller and Huston to the contrary notwithstanding). “She had considerable anxiety,” recalled Kevin McCarthy, who had the small role of Roslyn’s husband, “but like a wise child she used it.”
Nor, until late August, was Marilyn robbed of her humor and alertness to others’ needs. When autograph seekers recognized her one afternoon, she quickly grabbed a player’s wig, slapped it on her head and replied to their question with a faked voice: “I’m Mitzi Gaynor!” Immediately after stand-in Evelyn Moriarty completed several rehearsals of the cues for Marilyn’s screaming scene (in which she berates the men for their inhumane treatment of animals and thus their contempt for life), Marilyn was waiting with hot tea, honey and lemon for her. And for a scene in which she was to be awakened by Gable from a night’s sleep, Marilyn allowed the sheet to drop so far as to reveal one naked breast. “Cut!” called Huston with a yawn. “I’ve seen ’em before!”
“Oh, John,” said Marilyn, “let’s get people away from the television sets. I love to do things the censors won’t pass. After all, what are we here for, just to stand around and let it pass us by? Gradually they’ll let down the censorship—though probably not in my lifetime.”
Huston was a hard-drinking egoist with, as his daughter Anjelica said, “a mean streak” that often led him to endanger the safety of his cast. During the filming of Moby Dick in 1955, Huston’s obsession for realism kept his players amid a perilous storm off the Welsh coast. Leo Genn fell twenty feet in a squall and was placed in a body cast for seven weeks, and Richard Basehart was severely injured when Huston kept his cameras rolling despite thunderous waves.
Even more danger was endured by Gregory Peck, twice near death from his director’s demand that he be lashed to the side of a two-ton, ninety-foot-long rubber whale during a rolling fog: the towlines snapped, the channel waves rose to fifteen feet and Peck slipped into the sea. Only a sudden windbreak pulled him out for air—but the fog was so thick no one could spot the actor, who somehow survived. Later, the scene was recreated at the Elstree Studios near London, in an eighty-thousand-gallon tank with sixty-mile-an-hour wind machines. Bound to the sculpted beast, Peck was pummeled by streams of water. “I want you with your eyes staring open as you slowly come out of the sea on that whale’s back,” said Huston.
Always patient and cooperative, Peck took the challenge. “What I didn’t know,” he later recalled, “was that the winch they were using to rotate the section I was tied to was hand-operated and had once jammed. I could have come up dead, which I think would have secretly pleased John—providing the last touch of realism he was after.” Similar episodes occurred throughout the making of John Huston’s films: he was a director often praised for his realism and ability to dramatize literary properties. Gable was aware of these methods when he signed to do The Misfits, and over $800,000 of the film’s three-and-a-half-million-dollar budget was for this actor’s salary.
During a career spanning three decades and dozens of films, Clark Gable was proud of rejecting stunt doubles and performing his own heavy-action sequences. His antics in China Seas (1935) were typical: in a scene where a steamroller comes loose and threatens the lives of several bystanders, the decision was made to have Gable’s stand-in rush forward to secure the machine. But the star announced to his startled director, “I’m doing this one myself.” And so he did, earning the cheers of cast and crew.
Gable was, then, ready to be dragged four hundred feet by a truck moving at thirty-five miles an hour, to simulate being dragged by a horse. His stunt double could easily have been summoned, but Gable was insistent, ignoring the welts, bruises and cuts that resulted despite his heavy padding. He also repeated several takes in which he was asked to sprint a hundred yards, and his friend Ernie Dunlevie recalled his complete exhaustion for a scene in which he lifted two cement blocks for Marilyn to use as porch steps: “They must’ve shot that scene twelve to fifteen times, and it wasn’t a fake block.” Montgomery Clift fared ill, too: his hands were lacerated and bleeding after he was forced to throw a mare bare-handed with a rope.
And so Gable was at first patient—but not for the frank sadism that seemed to prevail during a scene in which a stallion was to attack his double. The director and representatives of both the producers’ insurance companies and the Humane Society required a trained roper, and a man named Jim Palen was submitted to the hazardous ordeal of lying on the salt flats in front of a camera while the stallion reared back, hooves smashing down for the take in which Gay was to be battered by the raging animal. For two takes, Palen barely escaped serious injury—and on the third, the horse smashed his face. The man reeled, spitting blood—but when it was clear that he had suffered no broken bones, Huston called for another take. The hardy Gable, hitherto the director’s macho sidekick, left the scene in disgust: “You can all go to hell,” he announced. “I’ve got news for you—I ain’t no friend of you boys.” Later, Gable told his wife, Kay, “They don’t care if they live or die. What surprised me is that no one gave a damn if I got killed or not. We were never allowed to take chances when the studios had us under contract. I was curious if Huston would try to stop me. Hell, no—he was delighted!”
In the most appalling heat (even hardy local cowboys were fainting), Huston asked Marilyn for dozens of takes even when she was satisfied after merely several: she was soon convinced that he and Arthur were punishing her for her lateness, for her displeasure with the script, for her open criticism of its structure and characterization—not to say the humiliation she felt at having to play Roslyn. Arthur continued to hand her new pages of script each night to memorize by morning; she was awake through the small hours trying to learn them and no one was surprised when—nervous and exhausted—she increased her dosages of sleeping pills and could be awakened only after the considerable efforts of Paula Strasberg, Rupert Allan or Allan Snyder.
As The Misfits careened toward disaster, it was not Marilyn’s intransigence or chemical dependence that imperiled the production: the decisive sabotage was effected by John Huston himself, who was in the grip of serious addictions that endangered everyone on the project. For one thing, he would not stop the chain-smoking that gave him a hacking cough, or the drinking that clouded his judgment, and filming was shut down on at least three occasions when he collapsed with bronchitis or the emphysema that compromised his breathing and, years later, eventually killed him.
But another grave matter was neatly summed up by Arthur, his staunchest ally: the director “had begun staying up all night at the craps table, losing immense sums and winning them back and showing his mettle that way”—and then falling asleep in his chair during filming, unaware, when he awoke, what scene was being played out. “Chaos was on us all,” according to Arthur. “But I like to gamble,” said Huston in defense of his habit, as if he were saying, “I like to go fishing on weekends.” Even to reporters he was similarly blasé: “Well, I ran into trouble last night. Went downstairs and dropped a thousand.” (His schedule, according to one journalist, had him at the dice tables from eleven at night to five in the morning.)
In his autobiography, Huston was frank about the matter: “I spent a lot of my nights in the downstairs casino. . . . There was mostly craps, blackjack and roulette. . . . I had a marvelous time losing my ass one night and winning it back the next.” But losses prevailed, and Huston frequently fell ill from hard living. “The telltale sign that he was feeling better,” wrote one biographer, “was his return to the casino.”
Huston’s fierce gambling was not, as some have claimed, the director’s diversion from the problems of working with a temperamental star. Before Marilyn arrived on the picture, Huston had already established a credit line at the Mapes Hotel casino and was betting hundreds each night. Within ten days, his stakes had reached to ten and twenty thousand a night: according to the production’s archivist, Huston put all of his spare cash on the dice tables, winning, risking, gaining and tossing away enormous sums of money—“losing steadily but with no apparent regard for how much.” When Marilyn saw that this happened nightly, and that her director was sleeping while she was in turmoil over her performance, the result was predictable: she retreated further. Denied the support of her husband-screenwriter and deprived of rudimentary directorial courtesy, she was a lost soul. She was neither amused nor flattered when Huston invited her to gamble one evening; trying to play the good sport, she shook the dice and turned to Huston.
“What should I ask for, John?”
His reply was typical. “Don’t think, honey, just throw. That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it.”
Chaos continued to bedevil The Misfits. Paula Strasberg, who was now being paid $3,000 per week, seemed dazed, but no one knew that Paula was in the first stages of the bone marrow cancer that took six years to kill her. As Susan recalled, in 1960 Paula was already taking massive doses of narcotics, secretly stashed in her carry-all. In fact, her only concern was Marilyn’s welfare, as even Huston had to agree: “I think we’re doing Paula a disservice,” he told his secretary. “For all we know, she’s holding this picture together.” In an important way, she was, simply by being ever available to Marilyn.
Meantime, pills for Marilyn were flown in every other day, supplied by her Los Angeles doctors.2 Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan, who shared the responsibility for soothing companionship with Marilyn, were surprised when Ralph Greenson wrote a prescription for three hundred milligrams of Nembutal (trade name for the barbiturate pentobarbital sodium) each night; the normal dose for insomnia, then as later, is one hundred milligrams for a maximum of two weeks, after which tolerance occurs and the drug’s effectiveness diminishes. Serious poisoning and even death can occur after ingesting anything more than two grams.
In addition, local physicians provided supplements—even to the extent of injections. Nor did Miller intervene: “I was almost completely out of her life by now.” And with these drugs, Marilyn’s depression was aggravated, her confusion increased, her speech was often incoherent and her gait unsteady. She suffered dreadful nightmares, her moods vacillated unpredictably, she broke out in rashes—and still Marilyn worked each afternoon. As Rupert Allan remembered, she would step away to perforate Seconal capsules with a pin before washing them down; this method of accelerating the effect could have been lethal.
“It took so long to get her going in the morning that usually I had to make her up while she lay in her bed,” recalled Allan Snyder.
Girls on the crew would have to put her in the shower to wake her up. All of us who loved her knew that things were coming apart something terrible. We felt an awful despair. And still Arthur continued to make the character of Roslyn worse and worse, and Marilyn knew it.
Yet somehow she did manage to complete her scenes, and on August 10 the film was only two days behind schedule.
Then, on August 16, John Huston dropped $16,000 at the dice table—a loss precipitating one of the most demeaning fictions attached to the life of Marilyn Monroe. The $16,000 brought Huston’s total gambling losses to over $50,000, far beyond what the production company of The Misfits had agreed to offer as an aggregate sum for casino credit to him and the entire company. At the same time, the cash outlay for the production had been enormous, and when Max Youngstein, vice-president of United Artists, came to visit the shooting, it was clear that Huston had gone too far. At that precise moment, both the Mapes Hotel casino and Harrah’s were calling in the debt.
There was only one solution: Huston had to raise quick cash. The alternative was for the production to be indefinitely shut down, for the weekly payrolls could not otherwise be dispensed. Thus began a series of quietly frantic telephone calls from Huston to friends in San Francisco. Filming continued on a day-to-day basis, and for the moment no one was aware of the imminent crisis. Huston had boasted that “the one great lesson in gambling is that money doesn’t mean a goddamn thing,” but he was now disabused of this conviction.
On Saturday, August 20, Marilyn flew to Los Angeles, as she often did when she had a free two-day weekend during production. She consulted Greenson and Engelberg on these visits, obtained her medications and prescriptions and, on at least two occasions, met Montand, then nearing completion of his new film. But he was required at the studio on the twentieth, and they could not meet. This Marilyn understood, and in any case she was preoccupied with the purchase of a new gown for the world premiere of Let’s Make Love, which was to be held in Reno. That mission accomplished, she slept soundly at the Beverly Hills Hotel and on Sunday morning returned to Nevada, where the premiere had to be canceled because of a power failure. Ralph Roberts and May Reis had accompanied her on the trip.
The gossips, however, were working at full tilt, and that Sunday, Montand gave an interview to Hedda Hopper in which she pressed him for details about his relationship with Marilyn.
I think she is an enchanting child, a simple girl without any guile. Perhaps I was too tender and thought maybe she was sophisticated, like some of the other ladies I have known. I did everything I could to make things easier for her when I realized that mine was a very small part. The only thing that could stand out in my performance was my love scenes, so naturally I did everything I could to make them realistic.
His statement was meant for the benefit of his wife, whom he was soon to rejoin, as Marilyn knew full well; still, they were ungallant words, not to say oozing Gallic condescension.
With the publication of Hedda Hopper’s column the following week, there were again headlines about a lurid romance gone wrong; these were imaginatively hooked up to the difficulties on The Misfits, and soon newspapers and magazines were trumpeting Marilyn’s near collapse over the end of a relationship as well as the hardships of the summer’s filming. And this would provide John Huston his net of safety.
As the production files and published history of The Misfits make clear, Marilyn was back at work on Monday, August 22, joking with colleagues and apparently refreshed from two consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep. The next day, she worked painstakingly with still photographers, rejecting some prints for publication and approving others; and on the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth she appeared in difficult sequences (at the rodeo with crowds, and in scenes with Gable), all of which required many retakes.
Then, on Thursday, August 25, Max Youngstein informed John Huston that The Misfits bank account was dry as the Nevada desert. The director had not come up with enough cash to cover his gambling debts, and filming would have to be suspended for a week until corporate meetings at United Artists in New York and Los Angeles approved additional payments for the production. Huston asked that no immediate announcement be made to the cast; he would, however, inform Arthur and Marilyn, who were investors.
Marilyn took advantage of the shutdown to travel to Los Angeles for a long weekend—to see her doctors; to visit Joe Schenck, who was seriously ill and soon to die; to attend a dinner party. Huston, who drove her to the Reno airport, seized her departure for his own benefit. He contacted Greenson and Engelberg, told them of their patient’s barbiturate problem and unstable conduct and asked that she be admitted to a private clinic for a week’s rest. The doctors agreed to cooperate. And as an eyewitness recalled, Huston, having put Marilyn on the plane, “returned from the airport cheerfully humming ‘Venezuela,’ and repaired to the casinos where he won three thousand at craps.”
Far from collapsing on arrival, as Huston predicted would happen (and doubtless hoped), Marilyn checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and attended the scheduled dinner party at the home of Doris Warner Vidor, recently widowed wife of the director Charles Vidor. On Sunday evening, August 28, she met with Greenson and Engelberg, who advised her about the picture’s temporary shutdown and counseled a week’s rest—but not at the hotel, they said. United Artists’ insurance company would cover her sojourn at a comfortable private hospital, and it is a measure of her willing submission to their persuasive arguments that Marilyn was that evening admitted to the Westside Hospital on La Cienega Boulevard. Huston and company now had time to barter for cash.
Meanwhile, Arthur and The Misfits crew in Nevada were unaware of Marilyn’s whereabouts.3 On Monday morning, the entire company was summoned to a meeting, at which producer Frank Taylor announced that Marilyn had suffered a breakdown and the film was suspended for a week. “And with that,” as Evelyn Moriarty remembered,
Arthur Miller got up and stormed out—he knew, as we all did, that this was a ruse. Of course she had troubles, we knew that, too. But Marilyn was being blamed for everything. All of her problems were exaggerated to cover up for Huston’s gambling and the terrible waste of money on that production. It was so easy for her to be made the scapegoat.
“When the press learned of Marilyn’s ‘breakdown,’ they created a sensation,” as Ralph Roberts recalled. On Monday, after a call from a lonely Marilyn, he drove to Los Angeles with Lee and Susan Strasberg; May Reis and Rupert Allan were already in attendance there. “We all went to visit her,” according to Ralph, who remembered that Rupert wished to buy a stack of magazines for Marilyn but did not because her face was on most of them, with lurid stories about her and Yves.
Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts agreed. Marilyn’s confinement to a hospital had been accomplished with the cooperation of physicians who danced to Huston’s tune and also saw the personal and financial value in attending their famous patient for a week. To be sure, she had an underlying barbiturate habit that deserved attention, but these same doctors were keeping her well supplied with the drugs—actions that even in 1960 were at least careless and at worst downright unethical.
So it was that John Huston’s secretary said to Evelyn Moriarty on Monday, “Don’t worry, we’ll all be back at work next week”—which they were, on Monday, September 5. Two conflicting realities thus prevailed. On the one hand, Marilyn frequently delayed filming, as did the horses in the film, and the uncertain weather and Nevada’s cloudy skies. But on the other hand is the fact that her pill-taking habits were not so critical that she singlehandedly shut down The Misfits; in any case, she was for years made to bear the burden of the film’s runaway budget, which by then topped four million dollars. Had she in fact been desperately ill, as Huston gave out to the press, how could it be announced on the first day in hospital that she would return promptly in time for filming a week later? Hyman Engelberg himself confirmed that on August 29: “My guess is that she will probably be able to go back to work in a week,” he told the press. “She is just tuckered out.”
As often happens, the enforced rest enabled her to make certain hard decisions. “She was very brave,” according to Ralph, “but she didn’t want us to do anything for her. She wanted the security of knowing we were with her, but she could do for herself, and she wanted to be well. Under all that frailty was a will of steel.” But at the same time, she was entirely submissive to her therapist, as was soon clear to her closest friends. As Rupert Allan put it, “Greenson had an amazing amount of control over her life. When she checked into the clinic, he announced in my presence that she would be allowed only one incoming and one outgoing call a day.”
To his credit, Arthur arrived within hours in Los Angeles and attended Marilyn daily until September 4, when she returned with him to Reno—“looking wonderfully self-possessed,” as he wrote years later; “her incredible resilience was heroic to me,” but by this time “we both knew we had effectively parted.”
Until October 18, she was in Nevada completing The Misfits. Miller continually rewrote script pages, Huston gambled and after a warm welcome by the cast and crew Marilyn was working with renewed energy. According to the production diary, “when she was told [about late script changes], she stayed up the entire night preparing the [new] scenes.”
From October 24 to November 4, the final interior scenes and process photography for the film were completed at the Paramount Studios, Hollywood. There, Marilyn and Clark made a private pact: they would agree to no more last-minute revisions: “I knowArthur’s a good writer,” she said plaintively to Huston one evening, “but I don’t want to see another new word he’s written. Not for a while, please.” Gable was adamant: exhausted from the months of location work, he flatly refused multiple takes and new pages of dialogue.
On Monday afternoon, October 31, Henry Hathaway (who had directed her in Niagara) saw Marilyn standing alone outside the Paramount soundstage. Approaching her, he noticed that she was crying. “All my life,” she said between sobs,
I’ve played Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe. I’ve tried to do a little better and find myself doing an imitation of myself. I so want to do something different. That was one of the things that attracted me to Arthur when he said he was attracted to me. When I married him, one of the fantasies in my mind was that I could get away from Marilyn Monroe through him, and here I find myself back doing the same thing, and I just couldn’t take it, I had to get out of there. I just couldn’t face having to do another scene with Marilyn Monroe.
Herein lies one of the most poignant elements in Marilyn’s life—and particularly in her life with Arthur Miller.
The teenage wife, the model and starlet had worked tirelessly to become accepted, to be the star Grace McKee Goddard had proposed as her destiny. And so she was, in her twenties, the lacquered blonde of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How To Marry a Millionaire and The Seven Year Itch. But she had finally resented and rejected the artifice of the manufactured Marilyn Monroe, realizing that was itself a role she could assume and put off; that although Hollywood’s Marilyn Monroe was indeed a part of her real self, there was—so she hoped and for it she worked—a deeper self, however unformed.
She had coveted the vocation of a serious actress, and to that she gave herself fully by leaving Hollywood at the height of her fame, by exchanging the image of the wife of the sports hero for that of the earnest playwright’s wife. Except for her performance inBus Stop in the spring of 1956, which brought her back to Los Angeles for three months, she had stayed away from the studios for four years—from the conclusion of The Seven Year Itch to the beginning of Some Like It Hot. There was then another absence, over a year, until she returned for the unhappiness of Let’s Make Love.
To The Misfits, so long in preparation, she had attached the greatest hope of her life: that Arthur would fulfill his promise to her. He provided, we must assume, only what he could, but brought forth, alas, only the image of a forlorn and dejected Marilyn Monroe—not the maturing person who had completely altered her acting style, not the performer of increasing range and depth whom Hollywood continued to misperceive and underrate. She was in The Misfits only a pale, wan, frightened remnant of the image she had hoped to abandon. “I couldn’t face having to do another scene with Marilyn Monroe,” she had said, because she knew she was capable of more, and that the standard-issue “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed herself changing.
Perhaps only in this context can her performance in The Misfits be assessed. In this, her last completed film, she had her most disappointing major role: Roslyn disallowed her to be anything other than a biased caricature of herself, minus the humor, absent the liveliness. There are moments of admirable command—her cries of resentment against the capture of animals, the shadings of confusion and dismay that flicker across her face as she rides across the desert. Audiences and critics then as later generally found the film arid and static, although Marilyn was praised by a few veteran admirers for her “serious, accurate performance . . . Miss Monroe is magic, and not merely a living pin-up dangled in satin before our eyes.” Once again, she gave an exceptional performance in a mediocre film, and in this regard The Misfits synthesizes and summarizes her entire movie career. It had been only thirteen years since Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!, and in twenty-nine films she had had less than a dozen leading roles. Neither the films nor the roles were ever as fine as her performances in them, and she knew it.
None of Marilyn’s self-awareness, none of her gifts, her courage, her impatience with herself and her patience with others, was inconsistent with personal problems and reliance on sleeping pills. Arthur Miller was right: she was something of the life force.
But that, too, is richer than anything so vague and vain as beauty. The medieval mystics would have described her weeping on the studio lot that October day as “the gift of tears”—a moment of epiphany, the crisis in the life of a woman hitherto stymied by a nation’s shallow popular image of a merely sexy, pretty girl. Blocked by stereotypes she yearned to forget, she longed to sleep; even this was in a way a desire to annihilate the “Marilyn Monroe” who had already died in her.
So far, psychiatry had not been much help at all—not only because she was so unclear about her past and future but because she believed she had to give right answers, to please therapists who seemed to know so much, or at least who asked so many intimate questions. When practiced without respect for the client’s spiritual autonomy, psychotherapy can be counterproductive, especially for those who live double and triple lives as performers, as role-players. In their cases, as Freud himself admitted, life itself can be the superb therapist. Here she was, at thirty-four, the age when very many people reach a crossroad: she had the courage and the inner means to make choices, she had the native intelligence to recognize possibilities beyond the past. The tears that day were not just for the false self—they were a farewell, a kind of death to everything she wanted to abandon.
In fact, therapy was endorsing her dependencies, not freeing her from them. John Huston’s next film was to be about Sigmund Freud, a project in which Marilyn expressed keen interest, and in which Huston was willing to cast her. A few days later, however, she reported to Huston, “I can’t do it because Anna Freud doesn’t want a picture made. My analyst told me this.”
There were more serious dependencies. As Ralph Roberts, Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg ruefully recalled, Drs. Greenson and Engelberg made no efforts to wean Marilyn from barbiturates that autumn: “in fact they provided them,” as Ralph said.
When we came to Los Angeles for the final work on The Misfits, there was an understanding that Marilyn would call me, and I went over to May Reis to collect the Nembutal pills the doctors gave her to dole out to Marilyn. These I delivered from May to Marilyn. But soon I said this was silly, and I simply collected them from the doctor directly and brought them to Marilyn. So far as I could see, there was no thought about how harmful all this might be.
That autumn, while completing the studio work on her last picture, Marilyn consulted Greenson seven days a week at his home. His son and daughter knew their father had famous clients; they knew, too, that he canceled patients at his office to rush home to see one or two of the most celebrated, and that Marilyn was prime among them.
It is astonishing to realize how quickly a mutual dependence was established, and how rapidly Ralph Greenson betrayed every ethic and responsibility to his family, his profession and to Marilyn Monroe, for reasons that would take more than a year to become clear.
The first indication of trouble was Greenson’s request that his daughter Joan deliver drugs from a pharmacy to the Miller bungalow at Beverly Hills Hotel, where he would be treating her: Arthur Miller himself would probably answer the door, Greenson told his daughter. The delivery was made, and the doctor’s daughter, then twenty, met Miller and, through the open bedroom door, saw Marilyn in bed, being treated by her father and accepting the medication she had delivered.
Greenson’s action constituted a terrible breach of patient confidentiality, a disclosure of patient identity to the physician’s own family, and Greenson’s subtle but clear first attempt to join that family to the client. In addition, there can be no defense or justification for this overt involvement of the psychiatrist’s daughter: pharmacies have delivery services, hotels have messengers. Such a cavalier lack of basic professional discretion was only the first instance of Greenson’s egregious mishandling of his most famous patient.
From this point to the end of his life he developed a keen interest in “countertransference,” the reversal of dependency from patient to therapist; eventually he used this term to describe his own feelings for Marilyn. In a sense, as this increasingly proprietary and grotesque control of patient by therapist continued, Ralph Greenson substituted the ultimate celebrity, Marilyn Monroe, for his celebrated sister Juliet, whom he loved, admired, protected, applauded and bitterly resented. As for his contention that Marilyn would be less known at his home than at his office, that was patently absurd: automobiles crawled past his house each day, waiting for a glimpse of the black limousine Marilyn engaged to transport her around town. More dogs were walked on Franklin Street, more strollers passed by, more tourists pointed and chattered: the Greenson home was becoming a star’s stopping place. But the doctor went further, asking his daughter to meet Marilyn when he was delayed, suggesting that Joan take a walk with the star and befriend her.
“I was her therapist,” Greenson said of Marilyn, “the good father who would not disappoint her and who would bring her insights, and if not insights, just kindness. I had become the most important person in her life, [but] I also felt guilty that I put a burden on my own family. But there was something very lovable about this girl and we all cared about her and she could be delightful.”
Painful as it was, Marilyn knew that autumn of 1960 where she had to begin to make changes. During the last week of October, she told a few friends she had asked Arthur Miller to leave their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel; they would presently make a joint announcement of their decision to divorce. Not long before they married, Arthur had said that “the sad fact of her life is that she has calculated wrong every time she’s made a decision.” The implication was unmistakable: in marrying him, she was doing right. But now, in the early days of an unseasonably damp and chilly California autumn, she had revised the calculation.
On November 5, the day after The Misfits was complete, Marilyn heard the news: Clark Gable had suffered a serious heart attack. He had been a calm, unselfconscious friend during the production, her childhood fantasy father sprung wonderfully to life. “I kept him waiting—kept him waiting for hours and hours on that picture,” Marilyn said guiltily to Sidney Skolsky. “Was I punishing my father? Getting even for all the years he’s kept me waiting?” Her words had the ring of a psychoanalyst’s judgment or suggestion.
By November 11, she was back in New York, alone in her apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street; Arthur was living pseudonymously at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third. On that date, their representatives announced an imminent divorce to the press. Five days later, apparently recovering in the hospital, Gable had a second massive attack and died. He was fifty-nine, and his fifth wife was pregnant with his first child. Marilyn was inconsolable when she read gossip column reports: the party line broadcast that it was her antics during The Misfits that had killed him. No one bothered to report the terrible exertions to which Huston had subjected Gable; no one mentioned the actor’s habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes daily for thirty years.
There were other changes in Marilyn’s life, too. May Reis, who had served her and Arthur for years, resigned: the job was, as her sister-in-law Vanessa recalled, simply too demanding for her. Rupert Allan, perhaps the oldest and dearest friend of his one-time client Grace Kelly, had been invited to assist her now that she was Princess of Monaco, and Rupert was spending many months each year abroad. His place as Marilyn’s personal press representative was taken by Pat Newcomb.
Margot Patricia Newcomb, the daughter of a judge and a social worker, was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Mills College in Northern California, she went to work as a publicist for the Arthur P. Jacobs company. By 1960, she had gained the confidence of her colleagues and clients and was widely respected for her discretion, intelligence and wit. Newcomb also had a keen interest in politics—especially those issues relevant to the problems of the poor and disenfranchised; these concerns, she soon found, were shared by her new client and friend Marilyn.
By December, Marilyn had resumed daily sessions with Marianne Kris and classes at the Actors Studio, to which she donated a thousand dollars. As always, she shared her good fortunes, and this had been, after all, a banner year: another payment of almost $50,000 for Some Like It Hot had just arrived, and twice that, the partial fee for her salary of $300,000 for The Misfits (the salary included acting and an uncredited co-producer’s fee). This landed her in the ninety-percent tax bracket, and in fact at year’s end she was surprised to find herself with very little savings. Her New York attorney, Aaron Frosch, took no fee for preparing her divorce papers.
At Christmas 1960, spent quietly with the Strasbergs listening to music and sipping champagne, she was a picture of weariness, as Ralph and Susan recalled. Nor were the children of her former husbands forgotten. “I take a lot of pride in them,” she said of Joe DiMaggio, Jr., and of Robert and Jane Ellen Miller, who received Christmas gifts and cards with loving notes from Marilyn. “They’re from broken homes, too,” she told a writer visiting from England, “and I think I can understand them. I’ve always said to them that I didn’t want to be their mother or stepmother as such—after all their mothers are still alive. I just wanted to be their friend. Only time could prove that to them, and they had to give me time. Their lives are very precious to me.” And hers to them, for they never changed their warm feelings toward Marilyn. Joe’s sister and Arthur’s father also remained on the friendliest terms with their ex-in-law.
The holidays temporarily lifted Marilyn’s spirits—just as the entire country seemed alive with optimism at the end of 1960. A new freshness and vitality prevailed, a sense of youth and humor, of energy and strength of purpose. Marilyn and America were taking their cue, basing their mood, on the brightness, wit and enthusiasm that radiated from President-elect John F. Kennedy.
1. The Swedish psychoanalyst Nils Haak wrote extensively on the necessity of high fees, which he (and thousands of colleagues) saw as an integral part of the psychoanalytic process because of the sacrifice involved. The belief that what is cheap is of little value is deeply rooted in human society, Haak argued, adding that large sums prevent the patient from feeling infantile and the analyst from feeling merely kind and undercompensated for all the sufferings he is asked to attend.
2. As Arthur Miller knew, “doctors had gone along with her demands for new and stronger sleeping pills even though they knew perfectly well how dangerous this was . . . there were always new doctors willing to help her into oblivion.”
3. Two days later, James Goode wrote in his production diary: “August 27—No shooting. Marilyn is ill and has flown to Los Angeles for medical treatment. No one has said why.”