Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (68 page)

At first, the agents reported, Fox offered to produce a film of the musical play
Can-Can
for her and Maurice Chevalier; also discussed were a picture called
Some Came Running
with Frank Sinatra and one based on William Faulkner’s novel
The Sound and the Fury
. Yes, her agents said, these projects would avoid a reversion to the type of roles she had resented and said she would turn down—women like Lorelei Lee in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Pola in
How To Marry a Millionaire
and the nameless girl in
The Seven Year Itch
.

Just as they were considering these and other projects, Billy Wilder sent Marilyn a two-page outline of a film he was writing with I. A. L. Diamond, a script based on an old German farce. Titled
Some Like It Hot
, this was to be a wild comedy set in the Roaring Twenties, about two musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. To avoid the killers, the men successfully disguise themselves as women and sign up with an all-girl band, among whom is the ukulele-strumming blonde Sugar Kane. The comic possibilities were enormous, Marilyn as Sugar would have several songs and, although it was the kind of role she wanted to put behind her, she had sufficient faith in
Wilder’s judgment and previous success to negotiate. By late spring, it was agreed that Marilyn would receive $100,000 plus an historic ten percent of the film’s gross profits. This would, she reasoned, be simply an easy, lucrative interval while Arthur completed
The Misfits
.

On the evening of July 7, Marilyn left Arthur in Amagansett and arrived next morning in Los Angeles, accompanied by her secretary, May Reis and by Paula Strasberg. Reporters and photographers remarked on Marilyn’s white-blond hair, her white silk shirt, white skirt, white shoes and white gloves. Stepping into Southern California’s morning light, she practically blocked out the sun.

Paula was again present, Marilyn said with her usual piercingly honest self-assessment,

because she gives me a lot of confidence and is very helpful. You see, I’m not a quick study, but I’m very serious about my work and am not experienced enough as an actress to chat with friends and workers on the set and then go into a dramatic scene. I like to go directly from a scene into my dressing room and concentrate on the next one and keep my mind in one channel. I envy these people who can meet all comers and go from a bright quip and gay laugh into a scene before the camera. All I’m thinking of is my performance, and I try to make it as good as I know how. And Paula gives me confidence.

May Reis, then fifty-four, was a highly intelligent, discreet and trustworthy assistant who had been secretary to Elia Kazan and, until 1955, to Arthur Miller. Fatherless at nine, she had cared for her sick mother and grandmother and from adolescence worked to support them and her brother Irving, who became a film director (of, among other films, the screen version of Arthur’s play
All My Sons
). By 1958, she had been attending to Marilyn’s secretarial needs in New York for almost three years, answering fan mail at Fifty-seventh Street, keeping her schedule, fielding phone calls and cooperating with Marilyn’s agents and publicists. According to her sister-in-law Vanessa Reis, May agreed to travel with Marilyn to Hollywood for
Some Like It Hot
and the next two films “because May was alone in the world and had no family—and so Marilyn became her existence, her profession, her commitment.
She already knew that working for Marilyn was a handful, but May knew that stars are a handful.”

The tasks began that very afternoon, when Marilyn and May were rushed off to a press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Billy Wilder and costars Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and George Raft. Fortunately, she would live at the hotel temporarily (for wardrobe fittings, makeup tests and ukulele lessons) and also during interior filming at the Goldwyn Studios. As they approached the first day of production, Marilyn’s customary anxieties were much alleviated by news from Washington and New York just when shooting began in early August. In the United States Court of Appeals, Joe Rauh had won a reversal of Arthur’s contempt citation, on the premise that Arthur had not been completely informed as to why he had to answer questions in the first place.

At first, good spirits prevailed with Marilyn, her director and her co-stars. For six years, all her films had been shot in Technicolor; because that was now in her contract with Fox, Marilyn naturally expected that
Some Like It Hot
would be a color picture, too (although this film was for United Artists). But no, Wilder explained, this picture had to be shot in black and white, otherwise the makeup of the two men in drag would be absurdly garish and not convincing. Of this Marilyn was not sure until a quick test shot made everything clear; from that point, the production began with an amiable optimism that made everybody almost deliriously happy.

Wilder also noticed that Marilyn had matured as an actress. “She has her own natural instinct for reading a line,” according to Wilder, “and an uncanny ability to bring something to it.” And Paula was helpful: “There was no question about it,” said Rupert Allan. “Paula gave Marilyn the security she needed during production—without the unfortunate complications of Natasha.”

For all that, Wilder found that Marilyn

was still not easy to work with. She was constantly late, and she demanded take after take after take—the Strasbergs, after all, had taught her to do things again and again and again until she felt she got them right. Well, now she had us doing things again and again, our nice sane budget was going up like a rocket, our cast relations were a shambles, and I was on the verge of a breakdown. To tell the truth, she was impossible—not just difficult. Yes, the final product was worth it—but at the time we were never convinced there would
be
a final product.

In other words, the camaraderie at the start of
Some Like It Hot
went cold. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, with whom Marilyn had most of her scenes, grew weary and annoyed after the tenth and fifteenth take of the same shot, for Marilyn would cut in the middle of every one, angry or exasperated because she had got a word wrong—or, more often, was convinced she could do the scene better. “Sometimes this stretched out to three days something we could have completed in an hour,” Wilder added, “because after every bad take Marilyn began to cry, and there would have to be new makeup applied.” In addition, Marilyn came to the set without having memorized her dialogue, which had to be written on cue cards or taped on props.

Marilyn was a year younger than Lemmon and Curtis, yet she was afraid of seeming much older and was paradoxically anxious that in their farcical drag they would appear like college boys. “She picked up on anything,” recalled Allan Snyder. “She’d say her eyebrows were wrong, or her lipstick—anything not to appear out there.” Perhaps even if she arrived late, they would be grateful that she was there at all. She was living in what her poet friend Norman Rosten called “Marilyn time.”

“I never heard such brilliant direction as Billy gave her,” said Lemmon, “but nothing worked until she felt right about it. She simply said over and over, ‘Sorry, I have to do it again.’ And if Billy said, ‘Well, I tell you, Marilyn, just possibly if you were to . . .’—then she replied, ‘Just a moment, now, Billy, don’t talk to me, I’ll forget how I want to play it.’ That took me over the edge more than once. Nobody could remind her she had a professional commitment. She couldn’t do it until she herself was ready.”

Tony Curtis was blunter: kissing her, he said, was like kissing Hitler, by which he probably meant it could not possibly appeal to anyone but Eva Braun. “Well, I think that’s his problem,” Marilyn replied
airily. “If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has that feeling toward me, then my fantasy has to come into play—in other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.” But she had to do the scene dozens of times to make her fantasy convincing for herself, and by this time Curtis was glassy-eyed and hoarse with exhaustion—just when Marilyn glowed, melding “organically,” as she liked to say, into the role.

Even as loyal a friend as Rosten had to agree that at such times Marilyn was trouble itself, a difficult woman who brought along the entire baggage of her emotional insecurities. Meantime, she justified her demand for multiple takes by saying that with each one she was “relaxing a little more . . . and I’ll go a bit further on the next try.” She did not admit that at the root of the problems was not only her insecurity but also her terror at being back in Hollywood: she was afraid that everything for which she had worked was gone, that with her company now only a nominal tax shelter for her salary, she would once again revert to being misperceived and abused by the very system she had once so courageously abandoned.

By early September, the company was filming on location at a late-nineteenth-century Victorian resort called the Hotel del Coronado, a two-hour drive south of Los Angeles. After a month of strained relations with her colleagues and the unfounded conviction that she was performing poorly, Marilyn had reverted to reliance on massive amounts of barbiturates for sleep. In addition, she sometimes took pills during the afternoon as well, perhaps to anesthetize her feelings of insufficiency.

Marilyn’s gynecologist, Leon Krohn, was present for much of the production, and he was openly concerned for Marilyn’s health. “It seemed to me,” he said later,

that she was in a Pygmalion situation: Arthur Miller was trying to make a sophisticate out of her, and I believe this caused her great tension. She often told me how she longed for a child, but I cautioned her that she would kill a baby with the drink and the pills—the effects of those barbiturates accumulated, I told her, and it would be impossible to predict when just one drink will then precipitate a spontaneous abortion.

Marilyn also felt, as she later told Rupert Allan, that in playing the role of Sugar Kane she had reverted to exactly the kind of role that had driven her from Hollywood in 1954.

Marilyn now longed to have the film completed, and in September she typed a note to Norman Rosten: “I have a feeling this ship is never going to dock. We are going through the Straits of Dire, [and] it’s rough and choppy.” In a postscript she added, “Love me for my yellow hair alone. I would have written this by hand but it’s trembling.” She was referring to a favorite poem by Yeats: “. . . only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone, / And not your yellow hair.” For Marilyn, any reason to love her would suffice.

Perhaps because from afar their marriage seemed not quite so troubled, Marilyn longed for Arthur as she had during
Bus Stop
, and she turned to him when she had doubts about a projected photo story. Richard Avedon had photographed her in a variety of costumes and poses for
Life
, in which Marilyn fancifully portrayed Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Russell and Jean Harlow. Marilyn was with Avedon, as with other photographers, virtually the reverse of herself on a movie set: “very easy to work with,” according to Avedon. “She gave more to the still camera than any actress—any woman—I’ve ever photographed, infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.”

Arthur contributed a lovingly elegiac and eulogistic tribute to accompany the Avedon pictures, praising Marilyn’s ingenuity, her sense of play, “the spontaneous joy she takes in anything a child does, [and] her quick sympathy and respect for old people. . . . The child in her catches the fun and the promise, and the old person in her the mortality.” The best of the lot, he said, was the homage to Harlow, whom Marilyn conveyed “not so much by wit as by her deep sympathy for that actress’s tragic life. . . . She has identified herself with what was naive, what was genuine lure and sexual truth.”

But when Marilyn read the draft of his comments, she felt not encouraged but depressed. Why the emphasis on naïveté, on “lure and sexual truth”? Was that all she had to offer? In this she reacted neurotically, for Arthur’s essay is one of the most appreciative and laudatory ever written of her. But ignoring the praise, she seized on the comparison with Harlow. In her own net of insecurities, the reminders of her
predecessor’s difficult life, her struggle in Hollywood and her untimely death overwhelmed Marilyn, and on Friday, September 12, she telephoned Arthur in New York.

Of their conversation nothing can be known. But that evening Arthur wrote to Marilyn of his own emotional problems, and the letter has survived. Addressing her as his “Darling Girl,” he wrote that she was his ideal, and he then apologized for the things he had not done (perhaps a reference to his lack of material support in their marriage) and for those he had (a possible allusion to the infamous notebook entry). He added that he believed he was making important discoveries in the regular psychotherapeutic sessions he had resumed with a Dr. Loewenstein, which he believed was illuminating the blockage in his emotional life. He justified the reservations she had about the
Life
article (which they evidently discussed on the telephone) by stating his belief that his points were good and interesting. The letter concluded with a plea for her love and her understanding of his mental confusion.

The letter is crucial, for it contradicts the general tone and content of Arthur Miller’s published memoirs, in which he portrayed himself as the healthy-minded, long-suffering partner of a woman he saw as occasionally sweet and talented, but ever on the edge of madness. In this regard,
Timebends
is a book whose sections on Marilyn are full of condescension for a “dear girl” and a “mere child,” a disturbed, distracted person mired in a past of her own invention, and a woman from whom he barely escaped with sanity and life intact. Although no autobiography can be expected to provide an objective account of the author’s intimacies, this one is remarkably incomplete, selective of the facts in their marriage, and singularly clouded with self-defense; it could have been written only by one rooted in his own guilt and remorse.
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