Marilyn: A Biography (28 page)

Is it with some last piece of her own
exacerbated nerves, or some place she hovers not alive nor dead and
spoiled forever for sleep? Now she spoils the air in which she
works. Wilder completes the film in near to total agony. His back
is in such misery of muscle spasms that he cannot go to bed at
night but instead must try to sleep in a chair.

She will respond by failing to inquire about
the state of his back. Since she has an interest in the film, she
thinks it is a trick to make her fear the financial consequences if
he cannot continue. But then she trusts no director alive. Even
Logan in
Bus Stop
has cut out what she feels were her best
moments. If she cannot forgive Logan, she will not be light on
Wilder. Yet as if to demonstrate that any inability to remember
lines is of her own choosing, she will also go through long scenes
without an error. Weeks after it is over, Wilder will tell an
interviewer he can eat again, sleep again, enjoy life, and finally
be able to “look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she
is a woman.”

It is comic by then, but not very, for
Marilyn will see the interview back in New York and excite Miller
to send a telegram to inform the director that Marilyn Monroe “is
the salt of the earth.” Wilder sends his reply: “The salt of the
earth told an assistant director to go fuck himself.” Soon it is
not at all comic. She has discovered she is “pregnant” during
Some Like It Hot
, and her time away from the set has been
spent resting in bed. She even takes an ambulance from her hotel to
the airport in order not to be jostled on the ride, but the fetus —
tubular again? hysterical? — is lost, something in her body or mind
is lost by her third month, lost around this time of exchange
between Miller and Wilder, and the month of November passes in deep
depression which lingers through the winter. Of course, it is her
nature to rally.
Some Like It Hot
opens to her best reviews.
She has never looked better at a premiere. Then she receives the
David di Donatello award for
The Prince and the Showgirl
,
and that is at least a small consolation to substitute for that
Academy Award for which she has never even been nominated. In June
of 1959, she goes into Lenox Hill Hospital for “corrective
surgery.” She is still trying to have a child. Guiles reports
without substantiation that “a permanent strain had come between
her and Miller before the summer advanced very far,” but we can
assume, since Guiles is careful in his statements, that Miller, or
Frank Taylor (who commissioned Guiles’ book) may have said as much,
although not for quotation.

Then there is small record of activity in the
fall of 1959. Presumably, Miller is polishing
The Misfits
.
In February, they put up at the Beverly Hills Hotel while she gets
ready to do
Let’s Make Love
as another part of her four-film
contract with Fox. The script is by Norman Krasna, who some eight
years before first suggested to Jerry Wald that they expose her
nude calendar in order to publicize
Clash by Night
. Small
surprise if Wald is the producer of
Let’s Make Love
.

Studying the script, there is trouble. She
knows the film will not play as well as it reads. It is fair
expression of Twentieth Century-Fox’s comprehension of her film
art. Since the new contract was signed, she has made
Bus
Stop
,
The Prince and the Showgirl
, and
Some Like It
Hot
, and she could also have done
Nana
,
The Brothers
Karamazov
,
Anna Christie
, or
Rain
to much profit,
but they give her
Let’s Make Love
. Her role is as empty as
the memory of an old Zanuck film. So she encourages Miller to build
up the part. Once again her talented playwright goes into the
lists, tries to add funny dialogue to a film that is not funny.
Gregory Peck, supposed to play the male lead, discovers that his
part diminishes as hers increases; he resigns the job. It is time
for her to walk off as well, but it is possible she would rather
work in anything at this point than spend time with Miller in
Connecticut or New York. Besides, they still need the money. And
then, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret are living across the hall
at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Marilyn, who has been in profound
depression for months and so deep on sleeping pills (which Miller
doles out to her each night) that her eyes will now be incorrigibly
bloodshot on color film, comes out of her most terrible moods
whenever the Montands are with them. She loves Simone and announces
to the press that Yves in his turn . . . but let us give the quote:
“Next to my husband and along with Marlon Brando, I think Yves
Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.” Miller is next
in admiration for Yves. “He and Marilyn are both very vital people.
They possess internal engines which emit indescribable rays of
energy.” Montand, in fact, is part of the perfect prescription for
Miller’s noble worker, since he comes from peasant stock in Italy,
and his father has been a political activist who hated Mussolini
enough to emigrate to Marseilles and work on the docks. Montand,
who left school in the sixth grade, has worked in his turn since he
was eleven. Such details have to rouse Miller. Besides, Montand has
played in the Paris production of
The Crucible
. Now Arthur
recommends him to replace Gregory Peck.

The ante is up. Montand has been successful
in French films. He is a theatrical star of respectable measure on
Broadway, where he has done a one-man show — songs, monologues,
dances. On the other hand, he is hardly an international household
name, no Burton, Chevalier, and certainly no Sinatra, although we
can assume he is as ambitious as any Italian peasant with strength
and wit who has been working from the age of eleven and been
transplanted twice.

Marilyn Monroe is his best ticket to
notoriety since she has been famously faithful to Miller for the
three-and-a-half-year run of their marriage. Of course, Miller has
had to pay an increasing price — each year she speaks more rudely
to him in public. In private we can take a fair idea of how she
scourges him from
After the Fall
.

“All you care about is money! Don’t shit me!”
Maggie tells Quentin.

Two breaths later she will let him know his
pants are too tight. “Fags wear pants like that. They attract each
other with their asses.”

“You calling me a fag now?”

“Just I’ve known fags and some of them didn’t
even know themselves . . .” Marilyn is beginning to sound like many
another drunken blonde. She is also throwing herself at
Montand.

Yet, Miller is grateful. He notes that
Marilyn’s temper seems to be kept in balance when Yves and Simone
are about. “Anyone who could make her smile came as a blessing to
me,” he was to say later. It is the remark to etch the final lines
of marital misery.

Any affair to come seems designed by the gods
of purified plot. Signoret is abruptly called back to France for
her next film. Worried about the security of her marriage, she
induces a friend, Doris Vidor, to look after Montand while she is
gone, but in her first conversation with Simone’s mate, Mrs. Vidor
is told by Yves in all anxiety that Miller is also leaving Los
Angeles to see his children in the East. Montand will be left alone
with Monroe. “What am I going to do?” he asks. “I’m a vulnerable
man.” Witness his feelings: “I can’t alienate her because I’m
dependent upon her good will, and I want to work with her. . . .
I’m really in a spot.” It is black market talk. Whether he knows it
or not, he is trapped in a process not unlike the calendar nude.
Publicity for
Let’s Make Love
(which will need it) is going
to be obliged to let the world in on the latest hottest name wave
in Hollywood, Montand Monroe. Montand is
vulnerable
. He has
been the first to declare it. He can be found open to stimulus. He
can read reactions. Montand Monroe increases each day.

As if in revenge on Miller, Marilyn is docile
with Yves. If they are asked to be on time at a party, Montand
assures the host, “She’ll be anywhere I say on time.” He is right.
To friends he brags, “She’s got so she’ll do whatever I ask her to
do on the set. Everyone is amazed at her cooperation, and she’s
constantly looking to me for approval.” That is also true. She has
never made a movie where she is so agreeable to the director. She
has also never made a movie where she is so ordinary. A sad truth
is before us again. Art and sex are no more compatible than they
care to be. She is wan in the film and dull. Hollywood looks at
Let’s Make Love
. Hollywood offers the verdict: “Fucked-out.”
Ergo, Twentieth increases all publicity on Montand Monroe. If the
film is flat, the love affair must show up at least in the final
heats of the year.

All final heats come however to an abrupt
termination with the end of the film. The picture has been delayed
by an actors’ strike and so she is obliged to leave for New York
and three days of costume fitting for
The Misfits
without
even a day’s rest.

In Reno, Miller is waiting for her. What
horrors of the sleeping pill to take up again. Ejected from a love
affair of two months’ duration (which may or may not be the love of
her life — not to mention that she adores Signoret the wife) she is
now in the 110-degree July heat of Reno with the remains of an
ice-cold marriage: on hand is that husband she will never forgive
for giving her away. They are there to stay together to make the
film, but she does not know by whom she has been used the most, nor
what is the curious state of her womb, awakened again, then left to
molder. She is ill as she has never been ill before. Her blessing
is that the film will not be made in color and so won’t show every
wash of bloodshot in the lost white of her eyes.

* * *

The world comes to watch the filming. Before
they are done, there will be hundreds of press. The word is out.
Frank Taylor, the producer, has said to
Time
: “This is an
attempt at the ultimate motion picture. . . . Not only the first
original screenplay by a major American writer but the best
screenplay I have ever read, and we have the best director, John
Huston, for it.” In turn, Clark Gable thinks it will be the best
role he has ever had, and is right if everything else he has done,
including Rhett Butler, has suggested a manner rather than a man.
It has been perhaps the most successful manner in the history of
cinema, but no one has ever seen the actor. Since he has a bad
heart and can die in any season of any year, the film is no
ordinary venture to him. Nor can it be to Montgomery Clift, who has
often been considered the most talented actor in Hollywood but has
not had a picture in years to measure this talent. As for Marilyn,
she has never had anything written directly for her before. The
picture, as we will see, must become nothing less than her
canonization. In his turn, Miller has committed everything. He has
not had a new play in half a decade, and has written only a few
short magazine pieces since their marriage, of which one, published
in
Life
, has been nothing more nor less than tribute: “Her
beauty shines because her spirit is forever showing itself.”
The
Misfits
has to be his justification. Five years of drought is
next to the loss of limb for a writer.

Only the actors Eli Wallach and Thelma
Ritter, ready as always to do their best work, and the director
John Huston, are principals who do not find themselves laying their
careers on the line. Huston is, of course, the only celebrated film
artist to bear comparison to Hemingway. His life celebrates a style
more important to him than film. His movies do not embody his life
so much as they seem to emerge out of a pocket of his mind. He will
take horses seriously and hunting, gambling, and serious drinking,
he will be famous for a few of the most elaborate practical jokes
in the well-documented Hollywood annals — by implication he does
his picture work with disdain. It is as if film is an activity good
men must not take upon themselves too solemnly. Yet he has made
The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The
Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage, Moulin Rouge, Beat the
Devil
, and
The African Queen
. During the making of
The Misfits
, it is possible he will have no hour of greater
absorption than the day on which he wins a camel race against Billy
Pearson, the ex-jockey, or an occasion where he will take more
aesthetic pleasure than at the birthday party for Eddie Parone, age
thirty-five, assistant to the producer. There, Huston reads a poem
he has written in celebration. Who would bet his life that
Hemingway, incorrect spelling and all, could not have written
it?

Eddie Perrone

sits all alone

Aug. 29 in sixty

Yesterday’s score

was thirty four

Tonight one more wound

licks he.

Bind them up, Ed

Take heart, arise

lift up your bloody

head.

“
Farewell” say you to Fauntle-

roy tie

And toy balloon & Esquimo Pie

And hurl this challenge

to the sky

“
I Edward P

Remindeth thee

That I am infinitely I”

Huston has been living in Saint Clerans,
County Galway, Ireland, where Miller has visited him, and they have
had a fund of talk about the script over Irish whisky and a fire.
Since Huston has a social life that thinks a great deal of horses
and very little about intimate movie gossip, he has not heard too
much of Marilyn’s problem of getting to the set on time; he has
next to no idea of how sick she is. Miller will hardly tell him.
Huston remembers Marilyn from
The Asphalt Jungle
, when she
was somewhat unresponsive to direction, but then where is the film
without an actor’s quirks? On her first morning of shooting,
however, which Huston has scheduled for ten o’clock rather than
nine (out of deference to Miller’s suggestion that she can use the
sleep), he waits until eleven and there is no leading lady. His
crew has its own relation to him. Incompetence is the hard stuff of
mockery on a Huston set. As eleven o’clock strikes, so does the
crew toll the hour. Miller, trying to camouflage the delay, looks
to confer with Huston over the script.