Marilyn: A Biography (31 page)

At the end it is Gable who is canonized. Gay
Langland has become the apotheosis of Gable. “Where are you going?”
Wallach asks as Clark and Marilyn drive off in a truck at the
end.

Miller put in no reply. Gable knew better.
“Home,” he answers Wallach in his guttiest voice, and the movie
screen in every small-town theatre of America would give its little
jump. He had finally found his role. Being Clark Gable had also
been better than wages. As he drove along with Marilyn through the
desert and the last of the film closed down on them, he said, “Just
head for that big star. . . .” They were finally done with
The
Misfits
. Perhaps it was his best moment since Rhett Butler
smiled and said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Of course, the film company had come down
toward the end of their work in something like the bewildered
ribald state of an army that has lived off the substance of a town
for months and has forgotten the patriotic premise of its war. They
had no idea if what they had done was good or ill. It was almost as
if filming in Nevada was bound therefore to close with scenes of
dust and strife while stuntmen were struck in the head by horses’
hooves and Gable was dragged behind a truck on a rope, even as at
night social lines were obliged to be drawn to a comic nicety:
while Marilyn is losing the biggest bet of her life, Paula
Strasberg is giving a party for Marilyn whose point seems to be
that Miller and his intimates are not invited. Strasberg’s Revenge
— a Balkan
melodrame!
To which in turn Huston gave a party
for Miller and Clift to which everybody was invited. There the
cameraman, Russel Metty, delivered a valedictory. Of course, only
the Cameraman could speak in such a tongue, for he was the altar at
which actors’ prayers were laid. When the altar speaks, it is in
good voice: “Arthur writes scripts,” Metty said, “and John shoots
ducks. First Arthur screwed up the script and now his wife is
screwing it up. Why don’t you wish him a happy birthday, Marilyn?
Arthur doesn’t know whether the horse should be up or down. Marilyn
thinks we should keep the scene showing her half-naked in bed.
Monty is buying into the Del Monte grapefruit business. . . . This
is truly the biggest bunch of misfits I ever saw.” Applause.

When the company left Nevada to work in
Hollywood on final process shots, more small comedy continued.
Looking at the rough cut, an executive from United Artists was
unhappy, it did not seem a Huston film where “you put the
ingredients in, and he builds up a terrific head of steam.” The
executive said if he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have had a clue to
who the director might be. Miller agreed that he, too, was
disappointed. Huston replied, “These things are missing in the
script.” Now they played again with the idea of writing new scenes
for Wallach until Gable refused, and then over the next few weeks
of editing and adding music, went through the other predictable
drama, Huston and Miller, of coming to like each other’s work
again. They had aid. The film had become affecting after all. For
Gable had a massive heart attack the day after shooting finished,
and would die in the hospital eleven days later. Every scene in
which he now appeared could bring to mind half the history of
Hollywood’s years.

The Misfits
will be over on November
5, 1960. A half week later, Marilyn will be back in New York — to
an empty apartment — and on the 11th, Armistice Day, will announce
her separation from Miller to the press. Somewhere in the next week
she will hear that Montand is flying from Los Angeles to Paris, and
runs out to Idlewild to catch him for a few hours between planes.
Drinking champagne, they sit in the back of her limousine, and she
learns he is going back to Signoret. Simone, when her turn arrives
to talk to the press, will make the wise and utterly oppressive
French remark, “A man . . . doesn’t feel he has to confuse an
affair with eternal love and make it a crisis in his marriage” (to
which Marilyn can only reply like a programmed analysand, “I think
this is all some part of her problem, not mine”).

After these separate blows, Gable dies.
Reporters phone Marilyn at 2 a.m. with the news. She is hysterical.
The circumstances of his end are unendurable; in the middle of
filming, it had become known that Kay Gable was going to have his
baby. Gable had been exceptionally proud of this late gift. Since
he had a heart condition, he could never know when he might die,
but he wanted to see his son. Just so confident was he of a son.
But then each detail was more unhappy than the last. Kay Gable also
had a heart condition. When Clark came down with his attack, Mrs.
Gable was put in the hospital room next to his, so that she might
rest her heart and protect the pregnancy. President Eisenhower even
phoned to give Clark advice out of his own experience of heart
attacks. Then word went out that Gable was better. Then, abruptly,
he died. Kay Gable was not even with him. An hour before his death,
she felt a small attack of her own coming on and retired to her
room in order not to worry Clark. Then the doctors came to tell
her. Was nothing in the situation free of pathos?

Where to calculate the measure of Marilyn’s
woe? She has met her surrogate father and embraced him on film, she
has shown her breast, and now the surrogate is dead. Is it because
of knowing her? She has to be in some new depth of insecurity. In
the past, no matter what indignities might come to others because
they worked with her, she had always one justification — she lived
closer to death. Now, Gable had shown she was wrong.

If she had a hundred thoughts on the event,
few could offer her life. She was on a slide into the longest
depression of her existence. The days of dwindling are at hand. If
she has held to a monumental ambition — she will be as great as
Garbo — we can wonder if even the ambition is beginning to leave.
How near she is to a burned-out case. She is living in her
apartment in New York with Miller’s goods and papers all gone. In
his empty study he has left her portrait on the wall. It has been
his favorite picture of her. Now in a couple of months they will
get divorced. Carefully, she picks the day of Jack Kennedy’s
inauguration, January 20, 1961, and flies to Juárez. The date has
been selected by Pat Newcomb, her new publicity woman and new
intimate. Happily, Marilyn will receive less publicity on this day
than on any other.

But then she will hardly want to make
headlines about the shattering of the Hourglass and the Egghead.
Quietly, she sits in a cocktail lounge at the airport in Dallas for
a two-hour layover on the way to Juárez and carefully follows on
television the first of Jack Kennedy’s thousand days. Pale witch of
the lonely American wind, there in Dallas she watches. In Dallas!
Where else? The most electric of the nations must naturally provide
the boldest circuits of coincidence. Indeed, if occult histories of
the future wish to look for karma that leads from Napoleon to
Monroe, let us recognize that she will die in a house on Fifth
Helena Drive.

After the divorce, she puts herself together
long enough to go up for a visit to the Roxbury farm, and collects
her things from Miller, goes with her newfound half sister, Bernice
Miracle, discovered to be living in Florida, a bona fide half
sister by way of Gladys and the long-forgotten Baker, yes, the last
search for identity proceeds along the lines of the flesh, and
Marilyn drives up with her to a “difficult meeting,” by Miller’s
description “trying to put a face on things and make me believe she
was happy, carefree, the way she wanted to be.” She leaves with
some books, sculpture, a set of bone china and cocktail glasses,
leaves behind some washed-out jelly glasses for Miller to drink out
of. (Does she also leave her investment in the property?) She
certainly deserts Hugo the basset hound, but mourns him when back
in the city. Soon Sinatra will give her a white poodle which she
calls “Maf,” for she is forever teasing Sinatra about his
connections. Somewhere in this time she also apparently has a small
and reasonably friendly affair with him, for an intimate tells of
driving her to the Waldorf where Sinatra is staying while she keeps
taking nips of vodka, which “doesn’t help much.” Next day there is
huge curiosity, but she indicates there was something wrong with
the way the twin beds had been put together, some crack between the
mattresses into which one or the other kept falling. (There is a
flaw in the service at the Waldorf!)

“Was Sinatra good?” asks the intimate.

“He was no DiMaggio.” Of course, she is
wicked in most of her remarks about new lovers these days and will
yet proceed to have a continuing affair with Sinatra. Perhaps her
loyalties are confused, for she is back with DiMaggio again,
although in no regular form. Still, they have had a resumption of
romance. In late December, about a month before her divorce, there
has been a phone call from Reno Barsocchini. “Can,” he inquires, “a
certain person call?” Tell your friend I’m waiting, is Marilyn’s
reply. On Christmas Day, DiMaggio arrives at her apartment with the
largest poinsettia she has ever seen. So they recommence. Indeed,
it may be the knowledge that she is unfaithful to DiMaggio which
makes her nervous with Sinatra. In these days when she speaks of
Joe to her closest friends it is in sentimental terms of the
perfection of his body and unhappy accounts of the guilt of his
mind once love is done.

Of course, she is not nearly this kind to
others. Her tongue is probably never so sharp as now. Gone are the
days when Amy Greene could remark to her, “Tell me, Goody
Two-Shoes, is there anyone you don’t like?” Marilyn now delights
her friends with accounts of men and the advances they have made.
The stories are scandalous and often improbable, but the characters
are famous. Is it all too likely that she is making most of them up
for the amusement of her friends? Often they seem to be aimed at
those who have at some time in Hollywood or elsewhere been reported
as being hardly flattering of her talents and her new mood brings
with it a sharp word of retribution. It is all spice and sting,
malice and new gaiety. Marilyn is conceivably trying out a few
first readings on a future middle-aged role. Should she settle for
successor to Tallulah?

She is sitting in the exhausted air of a
career, and her sleeping pills are not far from cocktail party
peanuts as she opens a capsule to speed up the effect and swallows
it while speaking. She is like an invalid whose prospects of health
do not quite equal the organs he has given to surgery — she draws
up a will. It must be like returning on a midnight swim to pools of
old depression. She assigns money to Bernice Miracle — the family
comes first! — and then gives bequests to her secretary, May Reis,
and to a few friends. Her personal belongings she leaves to
Strasberg — he is the true curator of her art. For whatever reason,
she does not mention Paula Strasberg. Of course, she has already
lent her much money and given her stocks, and provided studio jobs
for her at $3,000 a week. In January, just a little before
Kennedy’s inauguration, she has the will read aloud, and lawyers
explain her finances. She is not nearly so rich as she hopes. In
fact, she is living on a share of profits from
Some Like It
Hot
and in the hopes of what
The Misfits
will do. But
that film is off to a smudged start with mixed reviews.

In late winter, further depressed by her
divorce and the lack of real excitement about
The Misfits
,
she sinks into depression so severe her analyst is worried. Perhaps
she makes a suicide attempt. We do not know, for her publicity
agency now looks not to advertise but withdraw her life from
examination. Still, she is admitted to Payne Whitney, a hospital
for mental disorders. The press descends, and does not get to see
Marilyn. She has gone through one iron door after another, and the
doors close behind her. Until now, she has not been told anything
about the hospital. “What are you doing to me?” she cries out. The
gate to the orphanage closes again.
“What kind of a place is
this?”

She spends three days in a room with barred
windows and a glass door through which doctors can peer in. There
is no partition to the john. Which nurse, intern, resident,
visiting doctor, or hospital attendant will fail to take a good
look? Soon gossip is blazing like brush fire. She has whipped off
her clothes, goes the gossip, she has . . . one can fill in any
obscene gesture if one wants to hear the gossip. The press keeps
vigil outside Payne Whitney’s walls.

Later, Marilyn will indicate to Pat Newcomb,
her publicity woman, that she did offer a show. “If they were going
to treat her like a nut,” goes Guiles’ description, then “she would
behave like one.”

Of course, the desire to take off clothes may
even relieve the impulse that pushes one through an open window.
She has always been working toward nudity. Certainly, she has not
been a model for nothing, nor “wanted desperately to stand up naked
for God and everyone else to see,” nor had her nude calendar, nor
the nude sessions she will still go through with a few
photographers, nor a breast in
The Misfits
— not all for
nothing. Perhaps as one drifts toward a state near-insane, there is
some impulse to turn inside out, reverse habits, fling off clothes,
morals, and one’s relation to time. Does psychosis, like death,
move back into the past?

Nonetheless, she is out of whatever state she
is in quick enough to know she wants to be out of Payne Whitney.
They allow her one phone call. She makes it to DiMaggio, and he is
up from Florida to New York by the evening plane and on the phone
to politicians and powers who would know how to open doors at this
hospital. “Early the next morning, Marilyn emerged secretly from
the Clinic clutching tenaciously to DiMaggio. . . . She went at
once to a private room in the Neurological Institute of
Columbia-Presbyterian,” and so quickly was it done “that reporters
overran the Payne Whitney Clinic in confusion.”