Marilyn: A Biography (30 page)

Apparently she is not wounded crucially, for
she will be in better condition when she comes back to the film.
Perhaps she recognizes in the hospital that she can find a way to
live without Miller and without marrying again. Perhaps she can
even find a substitute for a mate by splicing the rope of her life
with the short ends of lovers and friends. In any case, she returns
to warm greetings, and for a busy week much is accomplished.
Morale, for once, is good. (Huston has just won his camel race.)
She does a five-minute non-stop scene with Monty Clift — the
longest scene either actor or Huston has ever had to film, and is
at her best in a number of crowded bar scenes at Dayton, Nevada.
All this is accomplished in one productive week. Like most addicts,
her energy is best when she is in transition from one state of
drug-life to another, from addiction to abstention, or from
abstention back to barbiturates again. It is only a constant state
that seems certain to depress her.

In turn, Miller has apparently passed through
his own kind of crisis. If their marriage is finally severed, she,
of course, will go out of her way to take a walk with him in Reno a
night or two after she gets back. In the shooting that day he had
delighted her by daring to show Monty Clift the kind of
stiff-legged polka he wanted the actor to perform in a particular
scene, Miller doing it with Marilyn before the crew. This species
of artistic gallantry has touched her. They walk “like everyday
people,” as Marilyn will say to a reporter in all the bruised
sorrow of an expiring marriage.

Of course, Miller is probably in better shape
as a result of the separation. Isolation he can bear, and loss. It
is the alternation of love and hate that wears him out. So as he
withdraws from Marilyn his working relation to Huston intensifies.
Miller may skirt the edge of a breakdown, but like some travailing
ghost of an old prospector he manages to cross these desert lands
of the West.

The film proceeds. It is weeks behind
schedule and hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than a half
million, over budget. (It will cost $4,000,000 before it is done.)
But that reckoning is later. Now the company begins to move out
each day to a dry lake perhaps fifty miles from Reno where they
will film the climax, a trapping of the wild horses. Now the
fundamental conflict of the script, the movie company, the
marriage, and even the direction of the picture comes into focus
across the years — it is precisely so banal and awe-inspiring as
the war between the men and the women, which here becomes the war
between Marilyn and her director, her male company of co-stars, and
her scriptwriter once a husband. She is at war with each of them to
become the center of the film, and if we will conceive of her
competitive instincts as equal to a great prizefighter’s, we may
begin to perceive how so much of the film had to appear to her as a
plot where she took on not one antagonist but many. (“You don’t see
the knives people hide.”) Since her orgy of attention in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and her skill in stealing
How
to Marry a Millionaire
from Betty Grable and Bacall, she has
managed to get past
No Business Like Show Business
and
River of No Return
and gone on to be the center of every
production since (except for
Let’s Make Love
, which had no
center), dominating directors and running away with each film. They
have all, in varying degree, become
her
films. Few
prizefighters could point to such a string of triumphs. But in
The Misfits
she is up against better opposition than she has
ever faced, and it will affect her performance before the film is
done. If she is more interesting and extraordinary in the first
half of
The Misfits
than she has ever been before, she will
yet find herself suffering many a new artistic uncertainty during
the long weeks of shooting still to be done after that exciting
week back from the hospital. With her suspiciousness of motive, how
little can she trust Miller now that they are apart, or for that
matter trust Huston with his lifelong absorption in male honor and
male corruption. Huston’s idea of a good woman is Hepburn in
The
African Queen
. How unlimited must be his secret contempt for
Marilyn, this converted Jewish princess. She is more spoiled than
Marjorie Morningstar! The one time Huston and Marilyn play at a
crap table in Reno, she wants to know, “What should I ask the dice
for, John?”

“Don’t think, honey,” he replies, “just
throw.”

Inquiring about the disposition of the dice
is the measure of her muddling with magic. No. Huston will have
small traffic with such female mystique. Besides, there is talent
in this movie that for once is equal to hers. Clift gives what is
possibly the best performance of his life. A recluse from the
company, and attached to his thermos of grapefruit juice and vodka
(which comes into his veins as regularly as a rubber tube and jar
of hospital glucose), he nonetheless impresses Gable altogether
with his rushes. “In that scene at the table when he said, ‘What
was that they put on my arm?’ he had a wild look in his eye that
could only have come,” Gable says, “from morphine . . .
and
booze . . .
and
the steers.”

Huston nods. “You can believe Perce has had
it all.”

When Marilyn, however, did a breakfast scene
with Gable that pleased Huston sufficiently for him to embrace her
spontaneously (and then hug her again for the photographers) she
told one of her staff to save the picture. “I want to have it to
show around,” she said, “when he begins saying mean things about
me.” This is hardly uncharacteristic of her distrust of all
directors, but there is a difference. Someone like Billy Wilder
might hate her, but in that hatred was helpless adoration. She
senses that she is not Huston’s favorite, that he does not
react
to her. She has then no secret leverage upon the heart
of the director. Pure perfidy of Miller, she begins to discover
that the film can always go back to what it was from the beginning,
a fine story about three good men whose way of living is almost
ready to disappear. It was supposed to be her vehicle and yet she
is in danger of being incidental to it. Finally she will have to
act her utmost in order not to be left in the others’ wake. Perhaps
she even resorts to a trick. There had been a scene on which she
counted much (indeed, she needed every one of her scenes to keep up
with the men) and this was the moment when Gay Langland came back
to the bed in the morning after their first night together and
embraced her. In the script she must have seen it as some high
moment of romance, an unforgettable fifty feet of film history —
Gable Kisses Monroe. But Huston preferred to maintain his reserve
with love scenes — why slide around in the muck after every other
director had gone through the old town pipe? So he keeps their
lovemaking dry. A middle-aged cowboy and a nice blonde offer a
near-documentary style of hello, let’s have some eggs, it’s
morning, wasn’t last night fine?

Since she had succeeded, however, in playing
the scene with only a sheet to cover her nakedness (which was also
fair documentary — how else under such chaste circumstance could
the audience know they had slept together?), and since there were
two cameras on her, purposefully or inadvertently she let enough of
the sheet slip to expose a breast on Take Seven to one of the two
cameras, thereby creating a dilemma that would not be settled until
the hour of distribution. Should they release the film with the
shot of Monroe’s nude breast? Monroe, no surprise, is for it. “I
love to do the things the censors won’t pass. After all, what are
we all here for, just to stand around and let it pass us by?”
Huston replies, “I’ve always known that girls have breasts.” No, he
will not want the aesthetic slant of his film to be nudged by her
competitive tit. And the picture, when it finally comes out, has a
clear view only of her back. The episode, however, offers its clue
to her idea of cinematic balance. She would yet have to compete
with Gable the King and Clift the Genius, plus Eli Wallach with his
complete set of actor’s skills, and she is even convinced that
Wallach has formed a conspiracy with Miller to build up his part by
giving Roslyn an affair with him. Conspiracy between Miller and
Wallach or no, it is true Miller wants to rewrite. Wallach is too
good an actor to have nothing to do at the end of the film but rant
at Gable and Monroe. If he has even a fair little scene of doing
the Lindy with Marilyn, she will accuse Wallach of trying to
upstage her, since most of the dance takes place with her back to
the camera, but then, sharpening the barb, will add, “The audience
is going to find my ass more interesting than Eli’s face.” (She is
reported to say “rear,” but we know better.) She has been friends
with Wallach for five years. Now it is as if in breaking with
Miller she is moving from one land to another, for in private she
even says to Eli, “You Jewish men don’t understand anything.”

Is she thinking of the Reform rabbi who told
her there is no afterlife? Or of the duplicities in Miller’s plot?
The concept of this movie is by now three years old. For three
years she has lived with the beautiful idea that some day she and
Arthur would make a film that would bestow upon her public identity
a soul. Her existence as a sex queen will be reincarnated in a
woman. It is not that her sex will disappear so much as that the
sex queen will become an angel of sex. While she had accomplished
something like this already in
Some Like It Hot
, Sugar Kane
was a flawed angel – she had no mind. Whereas Marilyn wanted to
present herself at her best. Or at least as Miller’s early and
enraptured idea of her (which we can assume she must alternately
have been delighted with and disbelieved), a woman so sensitive and
alive, so nubile as flesh and so evanescent as a wisp of vapor,
that to present herself in such a way to the world might wipe away
all the old killing publicity of the past. It was as if she wanted
to become the angel of American life; as if, beneath every
remaining timidity and infirmity, she felt that she deserved it.
Perhaps she did. Are there ten women’s lives so Napoleonic as her
own? So she had to hope (with the part of herself not without hope)
that the final version of
The Misfits
would be her
temple.

Of course, her power to comprehend the
relation of the part to the whole was never superb. Actors rarely
have such power. When they do, they become directors. Perhaps she
never recognized how completely
The Misfits
was a narrative
about men. In its original form, it was certainly one of the best
short stories about men ever written in a Hemingway tradition.
Indeed, much of the prose could pass for Hemingway writing in his
quietest manner. It is possibly the best piece of prose Miller ever
wrote, and since the subject was a departure for him — he had known
next to nothing about cowboys — and he did it in that bold time
when he was getting a divorce and embarking on the adventure of his
life, a sense of male optimism lives better in that short story
than in the film. Miller’s strength had always been to write about
men. It was just that in
The Misfits
the men were stronger
than they had ever been before. And cleaner. (As he may have been
in the weeks he wrote it.)

Difficulties were then implicit in bringing
Marilyn into the film — not any actress, but Marilyn in a portrait
of consummate loveliness. While Roslyn already existed in the short
story, she was offstage and merely talked about, an agreeable and
attractive middle-aged eastern woman living with Gay Langland (and
supporting him). His friends, the other two cowboys, were also
attracted to her, powerfully attracted, and Langland did not even
know if she was faithful or not. Every movie possibility obviously
existed for conflict and drama. But that was opposed to what
Marilyn desired. She had no wish to be sleeping with two or three
men in
her
film; she wanted respect! It was the cry of her
life. Unhappily, she had come to decide no audience would give that
accolade to an actress who has carnal knowledge of two or more
characters in one film. It is still 1960. So Miller’s dramatic
choices become limited. She can have a dalliance with Monty Clift
and/or Eli Wallach, but only as in a mist. Marilyn wanted her film
affair with Gable to be idyllic (exposed breast and all!), and
Gable doubtless wanted no less. He was too old and too grand to be
seen in some demeaning jealous state — his dignity had been the
fuel of his own performances for the last fifteen years. How then
is the script to move from celebration of its splendid stars to
some obligatory minimum of conflict and plot? Miller is obliged to
make the character of Roslyn so tender that the capture of a few
wild horses is all of disaster for her, a dramatic bubble that
cannot help but burst, since she also, as Miller himself points out
in the short story, loves her dog, while neglecting to recognize
that the meat in the can out of which she feeds that dog has come
precisely from a wild horse. So Roslyn becomes a role that sits in
the most hypocritical part of Monroe’s nature — where she bleeds
for the death of little fish and tries to kill her mate. It is also
possible, however, that Marilyn does not begin to assess how
unplayable will be her part by the end of
The Misfits
until
she is deep into the film, or even done with it — then, too late,
she will recognize that her share of the last reel is shrill — a
liberal version of “we must stop the locomotive at the pass.” So
she has to stop Gable, Clift, and Wallach from bringing in the
horses, but cinematically what we see is Gable, Clift, and Wallach
taking chances, being knocked to the ground under rearing animals
or dragged along by runaways, while she screams on the sidelines or
dashes in hysteria from one to the other until the movie audience
is ready to yell, “Shut that bitch up!” Since her life is full of
paradox, it is natural that the film by which she hopes to attain
dignity will be the one that finally gives her the least.