Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (73 page)

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:

R
ITTER
/I
SABELLE
: “ ‘;Did your husband act toward you with cruelty?’ ”

M
ARILYN
/R
OSLYN
: “ ‘Yes.’ ”

I
SABELLE
: “ ‘In what way did this cruelty manifest itself?’ ”

R
OSLYN
: “ ‘He persistently’—how does that go again?”
(She cannot remember the lines.)

I
SABELLE
: “ ‘He persistently and cruelly ignored my personal wishes and my rights and resorted on several occasions to physical violence against me.’ ”

R
OSLYN
: “ ‘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.