The Genius and the Goddess (25 page)

In February 1956, at the press conference at the Plaza Hotel in
New York that announced their surprising joint venture, Marilyn's
delicate dress strap, straining under its burden, broke right on cue.
The photographers went wild and she stole the show from Olivier.
Though she'd captured Olivier, there was still a problem with funding.
That year the Fox producer
Buddy Adler, responding to rumors, wrote
Skouras, "it is evident that she is in desperate need of this cash and
is hoping that we will advance it" and back the film. In the end,
Olivier became the producer, Milton Greene the executive producer;
Warner Bros. put up the money and became the distributor.

Olivier was then experiencing a severe personal crisis. His wife,
Vivien Leigh, had played the showgirl part on the London stage, with
Olivier as her co-star and director, and resented Marilyn taking over
her role. She'd recently had a melodramatic and well-publicized affair
with the handsome English actor Peter Finch. She announced her
pregnancy (by Olivier) on July 12, a few days before Miller and
Monroe arrived in
England; and had a miscarriage on August 12,
while Olivier was making the movie. Her miscarriage and depression
led to one of her recurrent mental breakdowns. She was declared
schizophrenic and subjected to electro-shock treatments. She finally
divorced Olivier in 1960.

Marilyn had flown to Tokyo just after her marriage to DiMaggio,
and flown to London right after her marriage to Miller. While married
to DiMaggio, she'd entertained troops in Korea and made
The Seven
Year Itch
. While married to Miller, she had a classier act. She appeared
in
Showgirl
with Olivier and was presented to Queen Elizabeth at the
Royal Command Performance of a war movie. The young Queen,
eager to meet Marilyn, had asked Rattigan about her. As Marilyn
curtsied, the Queen graciously mentioned that they were now
neighbors at Windsor.

While she was making the film, Miller and Marilyn lived in Parkside
House, in Surrey, a magnificent mansion rented from Lord Moore,
the publisher of the
Financial Times
. Rosten wrote that it was "an hour
from London and an hour's drive to the studios where Marilyn was
to begin work. It contained a dozen rooms, a staff of six or seven,
several acres of lush green lawn, inimitable English rose gardens, and
its backyard was enclosed by an iron fence and a gate that opened
on Windsor Park, the private property of Her Majesty the Queen."
Marilyn, enthusiastic about England, found it a striking contrast to
Los Angeles. She wrote to a friend that "Compared to California,
England seems tiny and quaint with its little toy trains chugging
through the miniature countryside. . . . I am dying to walk bareheaded
in the rain. I want to eat real roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. . . . I
want to buy a tweed suit. . . . I want to ride a bicycle, and I'd like
someone to explain the jokes in
Punch
– they don't seem funny to
me."
⁴
A Hungarian couple who worked for them as domestic servants
were bribed by the press to report their conversations and activities.
When they were found out the Millers forgave them, but the police
threatened them with deportation if they ever revealed another word.

With no official role in the production of the movie and nothing
much to do, Miller roamed nervously about the mansion, so different
from his own modest home. He played the piano, wrote a bit, filled
up Marilyn's scrapbooks with press cuttings and read film scripts that
had been sent to her. An unidentified London friend wrote that Miller
seemed ill at ease in his new role and was having trouble living up
to his romantic image: "Arthur makes a bad impression here.
Cold as
a refrigerated fish in his personal appearance. Not like a hot lover,
more like a morgue keeper left with a royal cadaver." The tabloids
called him "Mr. Monroe" and "Marilyn's Boy."

Miller did, by all accounts, seem to satisfy Marilyn. Colin Clark,
an assistant on the set, described them watching the daily rushes:
"When we got into the viewing theatre, to everyone's embarrassment,
they went into the back row and started snogging as if they
were on a date!" An actor in the film confirmed both Miller's awkward
manner and Marilyn's adoration: "She'd just married Arthur Miller
and this sort of tall weird man used to come onto the set just looking
on, and she would run over and jump into his arms and wrap herself
around him and they would disappear into the dressing-room for about
ten minutes – and then she would reappear again 'refreshed.'" After
attending the London premiere of
A View from the Bridge
on October
12, Miller proudly wrote Rosten that Marilyn wore a garnet-colored
velvet gown, halted traffic as far north as Liverpool and conquered
everyone. She was so worried about the play's success that she squeezed
his hand throughout the performance whenever things went well or
looked shaky.
⁵
They enjoyed
John Osborne's daring new play,
Look
Back in Anger
, at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, the first
shot in a battle that eventually drove playwrights like Rattigan off
the English stage.

Paula Strasberg, who disliked Miller, noted their physical attraction
and emphasized his devotion: "I have never seen such tenderness and
love as Arthur and Marilyn feel for each other. How he values her!
I don't think any woman I've ever known has been so
valued
by a
man." Even Olivier – sophisticated, emotionally remote and married
to the porcelain beauty Vivien Leigh – could not resist (at first)
Marilyn's overpowering allure. After meeting her in New York, he
gushed (while puffing their picture) that "she was so adorable, so
witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone
I could have imagined, apart from herself on the screen." In London
he could scarcely contain his enthusiasm as he described her essential
skill as an actress: "She has the extraordinarily cunning gift of
being able to suggest one minute that she is the naughtiest little thing,
and the next minute that she is beautifully dumb and innocent."

Olivier's enthusiasm disappeared once they began shooting and he
realized that Marilyn was not only adorable but also impossibly difficult.
On the first day she appeared at Pinewood Studios (west of
London, near Heathrow airport) with her full palace guard: hairdresser
and make-up man, secretary and cook, two publicists and bodyguards,
as well as the inevitable Paula who would, as always, cause a great
deal of trouble. Colin Clark was shocked to discover that Marilyn,
the famous beauty, "looked absolutely frightful. No make-up, just a
skirt, a tight blouse, head scarf and dark glasses. Nasty complexion,
a lot of facial hair, shapeless figure and, when the glasses came off, a
very vague look in her eye. No wonder she is so insecure." The dazed
look would trouble cameramen for the rest of her career. But when
she appeared on the screen, there was "an incredible transformation.
Now MM looked like an angel – smooth, glowing, eyes shining with
joy . . . perfect lips slightly parted, irresistible."
⁶

Marilyn and Olivier were worlds apart intellectually and immediately
clashed over their very different approaches to acting. The Method
emphasized psychological realism. British actors, trained in more classical
and impersonal speech and movement, were more oriented to
the stage than to film. Olivier emphasized the contrast by stating,
"My own way is an extremely external one: starting with the image
of the person and working inwards. This is against the modern trend
which works the other way round." Using the Method for the frivolous
Showgirl
seemed like taking a deep dive into a shallow pool.
When Olivier, as director, urged Marilyn to "be sexy," she took this
as an insult. The caviar-eating scene required no less than two whole
days, thirty-four takes and twenty jars of the costly sturgeon roe.

The cameraman, Jack Cardiff, noted that Paula's instructions
confused Marilyn and interfered with her work:

There was something unreal about it all. The great Olivier,
magnificently costumed in heavy military felt, cumbersome
medals, epaulettes, belts, riding boots and thick make-up, with
his hair plastered down and a monocle wedged in his eye, would
be all ready to shoot a scene. Having wearily rehearsed Marilyn
for ages, he would be about to say "Roll the camera" when
Marilyn would go over to Paula in the shadows and talk again,
while Larry waited – in sweat and silent fury.

Paula would then tell Marilyn, '"Now remember, darling, think of
Frank Sinatra and Coca-Cola.' At last Marilyn entered into the scene
– and forgot her lines." When Olivier inevitably contradicted Paula's
instructions, Marilyn immediately sent for Greene, and he complicated
matters by calling Lee Strasberg in New York.

Miller felt that Olivier's dual roles as co-star and director had put
the actor in an impossible position, and that the picture would have
been much better with a different English director. Marilyn felt Olivier
had become a fallen idol, and she never recovered her faith in him:
"She was terribly disappointed in Olivier. Olivier turns out to be an
actor instead of a great person – in Marilyn's mind – the collapse of
the great God image. To her, they didn't use creativity but seemed to
work by the numbers, by the book. It was a big letdown. This collapse
of her respect for Olivier was the most direct reason for her inability
to sleep at night."
⁷
Marilyn's support group – Miller, Greene, Paula
and
Hedda Rosten (who'd been a psychiatric social worker and had
been brought to England as a secretary and companion) – attempted
to encourage her performance and control her conflict with Olivier.
But they all made the mistake of trying to provide what she wanted
instead of giving her the discipline she needed.

Olivier despised Marilyn's pretentiousness and lack of professionalism,
her "lateness, her stupidity, her aggravating behaviour, her lack of respect
for him and her complete unconcern for studio-time and studio
money." Maliciously condemning her performance, he said, "teaching
her to act was like teaching Urdu to a marmoset." Clark added that
she "doesn't really forget her lines. It is more as if she had never quite
learnt them." She, in turn, loathed Olivier's hypocrisy and disdain. She
angrily told her maid that "he gave me the dirtiest looks, even when
he was smiling. I was sick half the time, but he didn't believe me, or
else he didn't care. . . . He looked at me as if he had just smelled a
pile of dead fish. Like I was a leper, or something awful. He'd say
something like, 'Oh, how simply ravishing, my dear.' But he really
wanted to throw up."
⁸

Marilyn could not tolerate any disagreement with her own point
of view. Speaking of Hedda Rosten, but also alluding to his own difficulty
in dealing with Marilyn, Miller said, "by declining to support
everything Marilyn believed, she risked the charge of unfaithfulness,
and yet she could not in principle reinforce her friend's unhealthy
illusions." Speaking of his own problems with Marilyn, Miller (like
Jack Cardiff) again emphasized the illusory aspect of her already unreal
life as an actress. He suggested that she'd lost confidence in him, as
well as in Olivier, when they were forced to oppose Paula and Greene:
"in order to keep reality from slipping away, I occasionally had to
defend Olivier or else reinforce the naïveté of her illusions; the result
was that she began to question the absoluteness of my partisanship
on her side of the deepening struggle." When Olivier disappointed
her and Miller tried to present a more realistic view of the situation,
Miller became another god that failed.

Marilyn, a limited actress, came under intense pressure when acting
with the high-powered Olivier. The more controlled and icy his
behavior, the more upset she became. Despite Miller's love and
emotional support, she gave in to her addiction to alcohol and drugs,
and established a destructive pattern that would plague her for the
rest of her life. She started to drink in the morning and, Miller
explained, the barbiturates intensified her distortion of reality, her
insecurity and her guilt:

[She was] bedeviled by feelings she couldn't name. Just a generalized
feeling of threat. She was trying to immunize herself
against feeling too much by taking
pills during the day. She was
like a smashed vase. It is a beautiful thing when it is intact, but
the broken pieces are murderous and they can cut you. . . .

The management on the film called me and the pressure was
on me to help her get [to the studio]. She couldn't sleep and
began taking the pills and when she got up, she was very depressed
and, of course, it was difficult to get her on her feet. She began
to identify me with the management.

My regret was enormous. I had the illusion that I could help
her, could work something out. I made her feel guilty that she
had made me feel this way. She wanted to be of help to
me
really, to be a "good wife."

Though Miller tried to keep the production from collapsing, she
resented his paternal interference. As they fought fiercely on the set,
he was caught in the crossfire between Marilyn and Olivier, and felt
that she was "devouring" him.

The crisis deepened, whether by accident or by intent, when
Marilyn found her husband's private diary and read what he had
written about her (an episode Miller omitted from
Timebends
). Despite
his awareness of her years of failure and guilt, her frail ego and fears
of being abandoned, her extreme sensitivity to criticism, Miller probably
left his diary out on purpose. It was a way of telling her how
he felt, of confessing that he couldn't take much more emotional
punishment. In any case, she read the fatal entry which, Miller said,
"had to do with Olivier and her. She was aware of a grinding frustration
in me and in that note there was an allusion to the fact that
I was unable to help her and I was not of any use to her or myself."
Miller must have wondered how he had ceased to be a playwright
and become the diva's servant.