Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (74 page)

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.