Marilyn Monroe (14 page)

Though Feldman had no idea why Marilyn had suddenly called now asking to see him, he was delighted to hear from her. Two years had passed since he had predicted that convincing her to sleep with him wouldn’t be a problem. Almost the same amount of time had passed since he’d begun his first tentative attempts to sign her as a client.

Since she had last been at Feldman’s house, with Kazan, he had begun to assemble a new art collection. Marilyn, standing among the rare African masks and statues, affected a quality that Joe Mankiewicz once described as her “pasted-on innocence.” She was desperate, but also shrewd enough not to let Feldman see that. She began by coyly telling Feldman that just before Johnny died, he had advised her that Charlie ought to take over as her agent. She claimed Johnny had said that Charlie was someone she could trust if she ever needed anything. After that lead-in, Marilyn told Feldman about her troubles with Natasha.

If Feldman thought, as Marilyn had just set him up to do, that this meant Marilyn had come here to join Famous Artists at long last, he was mistaken. By the time Marilyn left that night, Feldman had given up pushing her to sign a contract. He would work for her without pay now simply in the hope that someday, in her own time, she would sign. Henceforth, Famous Artists referred to Marilyn Monroe as its client, though the agency had nothing in writing and no guarantee of receiving so much as a penny for its efforts. Marilyn left Feldman’s house with his promise to take care of Natasha. He would go to Zanuck and somehow get Natasha more money—and he would do it for free.

Feldman welcomed this first opportunity to serve, however
unofficially, as Marilyn’s agent. He conferred with Henry Hathaway, who confirmed Marilyn’s dependence on Natasha. Next, Feldman met with Natasha, who stated her demands bluntly. As he told his staff later, she expected “a helluva lot of dough.” Finally, he went to Zanuck and laid out the situation in the starkest terms. Marilyn was obviously becoming a valuable property for Fox. Natasha had made it clear that she intended to carry out her threat to quit. So if Zanuck expected Marilyn to finish the Hawks film, he would have to meet Natasha’s demands. At that point, Natasha earned $175 a week. Feldman convinced Zanuck that, compared to the money
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
was going to bring in at the box office, whatever Fox agreed to pay Natasha would be “peanuts.” Zanuck agreed to offer her $500 a week. This time, however, Natasha was not as smart as she thought. She was too impatient and quickly grabbed the offer. In fact, Zanuck had been willing to go as high as $1000 a week to keep her—which would have been $250 more than Marilyn herself earned.

Emboldened by her success in extorting a raise, Natasha was soon going head to head with Hawks over his direction of Marilyn. That, as anyone could have told her, was a mistake. Hawks had a justifiably high opinion of his own merits as a director and brooked no interference. He was not amused when he saw Natasha signal Marilyn to demand retake after retake. Hawks informed Marilyn that when he shouted “Cut!”, he expected her to look at him, not at Natasha. When Natasha’s signals continued, Hawks banned her from the set. Zanuck backed Hawks fully.

Marilyn was convinced that she could not go on without Natasha, the one person on a film set whose opinion she trusted unequivocally. Directors, producers, actors, executives, all had their own agendas. Natasha’s sole purpose was to make sure that every shot displayed Marilyn to advantage. For all of Natasha’s willingness to exploit Marilyn’s dependence, Marilyn continued to believe that she could rely on her coach to look out for her interests. Hawks, however, would not relent, and Marilyn had to finish with only off-the-set coaching.

On March 6, 1953, after four months of arduous work, Marilyn completed
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Niagara
had made her a major box-office star when it opened in January, grossing more than $6 million against a cost of $1.25 million. But that film had not maximized Marilyn’s potential. Now, as the rough cut of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
was being
assembled, the Fox executives could see that Marilyn had tapped into the qualities that were uniquely hers as a performer. She had taken Anita Loos’s rather slight sketch of Lorelei Lee, and out of it she had created a rich, vivid, distinctive character that was entirely her own. In fact, it was less Lorelei Lee whom she portrayed in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
than an entirely new character named “Marilyn Monroe” or “the girl.”

Bits and pieces of “the girl” may have emerged in previous films, but this was the first time Marilyn had put them all together. Thanks to Hawks, her look in the film was blonder, sleeker, cleaner-lined than in the past. Thanks to Hawks, her performance was supported by a beautifully-made film. But the essence of Marilyn’s own creation was a perfect balance of sex and humor. In
Niagara
, Marilyn’s over-the-top sexuality had been cast as deeply threatening. Rose Loomis confirmed the fears of a puritanical 1950s America that sex was perilous. In
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Marilyn’s self-deprecating humor and wonderful silvery giggle made sex seem innocent, safe, and, above all, fun. Far from minimizing the sex, a leavening of humor allowed Marilyn to use her sexuality more effectively than she had ever managed to do before. In an important twist, “the girl” has wit but—unlike the tougher, more knowing character Mae West once created—she doesn’t use her wit as a weapon. The character Marilyn created is totally unthreatening to men. Also, unlike West, “the girl” seems completely unaware that she is being funny. That made the character difficult to play, but Marilyn brought it off to perfection.

Still, this was something considerably more than just a well-crafted and deftly performed character. Hawks’s technical virtuosity—his masterful framing and editing, his impeccable comic timing—certainly helped Marilyn to create an enduring comic type, but in ways he probably didn’t understand, her portrait of “the girl” was driven by her own life experience. For all of her intense sexuality, Marilyn communicated that on some level she, too, was as uncertain about sex, and as vulnerable to being hurt by it, as anyone else. The rantings of her mother and of the Bolenders—the Bible-pounding religious family with whom she’d spent her early childhood—had inculcated in her a core belief that sex was dirty and bad. Marilyn’s discovery of “the girl” was fueled by her own need to contend with that past and all it had taught her. It allowed her to proclaim that, far from being the doomed sinner Gladys branded her as, she was actually a sweet, innocent, good girl whom everyone should love.
Audiences were thrilled and relieved to discover that it was all right to laugh at sex; but so, in her own, very touching way, was Marilyn. That personal element infused her performance with special power. In
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Marilyn, drawing on her own private needs and conflicts, transformed herself into a star of the first magnitude.

Even as Marilyn had been working out the character of “the girl” in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Arthur Miller’s new play, featuring a character based in part on Marilyn, opened on Broadway. Two years after he met Marilyn, the play he had been trying to write out of his moral crisis finally came to fruition. Ironically, at a moment when Marilyn was poised to demonstrate to a repressive, puritanical America that sex could be innocent and carefree, Miller, in his new play, put out a counter-argument. In the troubles that befall John Proctor as a result of his infidelity, Miller warned that sex, far from being without consequences, is very dangerous indeed. Significantly, Miller set the drama in America’s Puritan past, the source of so much of the country’s enduring guilt and anguish about sex.

The Crucible
was Miller’s first original stage play since
Death of a Salesman
, and expectations on Broadway ran high. Instead of Elia Kazan, with whom Miller and Kermit Bloomgarden had broken, Jed Harris directed the production. (Kazan was then at work on Tennessee Williams’s
Camino Real
, due to open in March.) As an indictment of HUAC and McCarthyism,
The Crucible
was a brave and timely political drama. But in a way that audiences had no means of gauging, the play’s motor was deeply personal. Whatever its flaws,
The Crucible
drew power from the playwright’s own guilt in the aftermath of his encounter with Marilyn.

The Crucible
reworked the autobiographical play Miller had been sketching before he went to Salem. Like the character of Quentin in that earlier effort, John Proctor has had an extramarital affair but is intent on saving his marriage. Miller, in his notebook, described Proctor as paralyzed by guilt. Proctor has diverged from his own ideal of decent conduct. Respected as forthright and principled, he secretly thinks himself a fraud. Like Quentin’s wife, Elizabeth Proctor is judgmental and unforgiving.
John complains that, though he ended his affair with Abby months ago, Elizabeth has turned their home into a courtroom. Elizabeth knows that her husband wants to make amends, yet she is forever accusing and condemning.

In short, the Proctor household in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, resembled the Miller household in Brooklyn, New York. At least, it resembled the household Miller had once described to Kazan. There was the same striving by the husband to repair the marriage, the same refusal by the wife to forgive or to believe in him. Abby, the dismissed servant girl, refuses to abandon hope of a more lasting relationship with Proctor. He in turn remains strongly attracted to Abby, yet he pointedly discourages her from waiting for him, much as Miller had warned Marilyn that he was not the man to make her life work out as she hoped. Still, Marilyn dreamed of supplanting the wife, and so does Abby.

In obvious ways Abby stands for Marilyn, but as Abby is the character who names names—that is, identifies people as witches—she also brings Kazan to mind. Given all that had happened, it is not surprising that Marilyn and Kazan would be inextricably tangled in Miller’s thoughts. Both were important people in Miller’s life, whom he had given up in order to sustain his sense of himself. He used the connection to link the personal subplot, the betrayal of one’s wife through adultery, and the political main plot, the betrayal of one’s friends and associates by naming names.
The Crucible
posed the question: If I have committed one form of betrayal, how can I feel morally superior to someone who commits another? Proctor didn’t think he could. Like Proctor, Miller was trying to figure out how to persist as a voice of moral authority when he knew that, in private, he had violated his own ethical code. Could Miller really condemn Kazan when he, too, was guilty of betrayal?

Miller, in his notebook, dug more deeply into the sources of Proctor’s guilt than he dared in the finished play. Early on, Miller contemplated allowing Proctor to realize that he actually wants his wife dead. It would appall a principled man to discover that about himself. Unfortunately, ideas like that did not find their way into
The Crucible.
If they had—if Miller had permitted John Proctor to be darker, edgier, and more complex—he might have written a better play.

As it is, Miller allows Proctor to emerge from his moral crisis too easily and, worse, undramatically. In Act Four, Proctor is absolved from
his crippling guilt not by anything he does, but by something Elizabeth says. Proctor has just told Elizabeth there is no reason to refuse to save his own life by confessing he has consorted with the devil. He cannot mount the gibbet like a saint, he insists, for that would be a fraud. “Nothing’s spoiled by giving them this lie that were not rotten long before.” Elizabeth, aware that he is referring to his relationship with Abby, makes a confession of her own. She accepts responsibility for having driven him away. “I have sins of my own to count,” Elizabeth declares. “It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery … John, I counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to me! Suspicion kissed you when I did … It were a cold house I kept!”

So, after two years of struggle with the moral questions provoked by desire and infidelity, Miller had concluded that it must have been the cold wife’s fault after all. His reasoning was tortuous, to say the least. Ironically, in a play about forced confessions, Miller put the words in the wife’s own mouth. Proctor, emboldened, defies his tormentors. He refuses to name names and dies a hero.

Reviews of
The Crucible
were mixed. Inevitably, the question arose whether it was a worthy successor to
Death of a Salesman.
“There is a terrible inertness about the play,” said Eric Bentley in the
New Republic.
“The individual characters, like the individual lines, lack fluidity and grace. There is an O’Neill-like striving after a poetry and an eloquence which the author does not achieve. ’From Aeschylus to Arthur Miller,’ say the textbooks. The world has made this author important before he has made himself great; perhaps the reversal of the natural order of things weighs heavily upon him.”

Bentley raised a question that would gnaw at Miller for years to come: Would
The Crucible
have been a success had it been directed by Kazan? Had the triumph of
Death of a Salesman
been attributable, in part, to Kazan’s collaboration? Indeed, on another occasion Bentley would go so far as to describe Kazan as “virtually co-author of
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Death of a Salesman.”
Not surprisingly, Miller blamed the failure of
The Crucible
on Jed Harris. In light of all this, one can understand Miller’s persistent longing, so evident in the notebooks, to discover some way to justify working with Kazan again. And in a writer who valued his own work above all else, one can appreciate the strength required to stay away from Kazan for so long, when the cost to Miller’s own career
seemed evident. Despite his desire for another triumph on the scale of
Death of a Salesman
, and despite his and others’ awareness of the price that was to be paid, he cut off his collaboration with Kazan in the belief that it was the right thing to do.