The Genius and the Goddess (26 page)

Marilyn told Lee Strasberg that Miller's diary described "how disappointed
he was in me. How he thought I was some kind of angel
but now he guessed he was wrong. That his first wife had let him
down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to
think I was a troublesome bitch and Arthur no longer had a decent
answer to that one."
⁹
She also told Susan Strasberg, more frankly and
forcefully, that Miller "was ashamed of me, ashamed to love me. . . .
Her problems with Olivier [were] her fault because she was a bitch."
Though Miller merely mentioned, and did not exaggerate, her self-destructive
faults, her reaction "was horror. You know, a woman wants
her husband to bolster her up, not magnify her flaws." In yet another
version of this incident, Miller is supposed to have written, "The only
one I will ever love is my daughter." Marilyn responded to Miller's
diary with five stark words, written on her initialed notepaper and
found after her death, "he does not love me."
¹⁰
She seems to have
lost, early on, the feeling of being sheltered in his warmth and
tenderness.

Following this crisis, which took place halfway through the shooting,
Miller flew to New York, supposedly to visit his sick daughter ("the
only one I will ever love"). When Paula also had to return to New
York, Marilyn's analyst, Dr. Hohenberg, was flown over to England
at great expense to provide psychological help, alleviate Marilyn's
depression and reduce her dependence on drugs.

On October 13, when he'd returned to London, Miller wrote
Rosten that he and Joshua Logan had seen the first fifty minutes
of the "spectacular" movie and had been "bowled over" by it. The
picture does have some amusing topical allusions. Olivier, referring
to HUAC, accuses his political enemies of "Un-Carpathian
Activities." Marilyn's dress strap breaks during her first meeting with
Olivier (the Prince Regent) just as it did during their press conference
in New York. There are references to her habitual lateness as
she dresses for a seductive midnight supper with Olivier. When she
enters the ornately furnished Carpathian embassy, she speaks personally
and declares, "All I can say is give me vulgarity." As they're
about to kiss for the first time, she notices his excessive pomade
and punctures his romantic image by observing, "There's a lot of
funny stuff in your hair." The Olivier character also hurls a dart at
Marilyn by remarking, "We are not dealing with a supervised adult,
but with a moody child."

Miller was whistling in the dark about the movie. The trivial plot
concerns Marilyn's conquest of the stiff and formal Olivier (whom
she calls "Your Grand Ducal"), who's visiting London in 1911 for the
coronation of King George V. The picture retains the verbosity and
staginess of the original play, and most of the characters enter and
exit through the main set, the salon of the embassy. Marilyn doesn't
always look her best, and her chorus-girl song comes out of nowhere.
Worst of all, Marilyn and Olivier are more an awkward couple than
a sensational match. Olivier is very cold, they have no personal
magnetism or emotional spark, and don't seem as though they could
ever fall in love with each other. They appear to be acting in two
different movies.

In his disputes with Marilyn, the English cast and crew naturally
sided with the greatly respected Olivier, and were also quite bitter
about her unprofessional behavior. Their anger erupted at the end of
the shooting when she set out her parting gifts on a trestle-table:
bottles for the gentlemen, identical purses for the ladies. One man
disgustedly threw his bottle into a huge rubbish bin and "Immediately
one of the ladies followed and threw in her purse. There was a sort
of rippling murmur of anger and assent, and then everyone followed
suit. Quite soon the bin was literally overflowing with bottles and
purses, still wrapped and labelled – 'Thank you from Marilyn Monroe.'"

After seeing the second and final version of the movie, Marilyn
(perhaps advised by Miller) sent Jack Warner a very shrewd professional
analysis of its faults, and made specific suggestions about how
to improve the pace, plot, comedy, editing and music:

It is not the same picture you saw in New York last winter, and
I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the
version all of us agreed was so fine. Especially in the first third
of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point
after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes
with flatter performances lacking the energy and brightness that
you saw in New York. Some of the jump cutting kills the points,
as in the fainting scene. The coronation is as long as before if
not longer, and the story gets lost in it. American audiences are
not as moved by stained-glass windows as the British are, and
we threaten them with boredom. I am amazed that so much of
the picture has no music at all when the idea was to make a
romantic picture. We have shot enough film to make a great
movie, if only it will be as in the earlier version. I hope you
will make every effort to save our picture.

Marilyn was as angry with Olivier after
Showgirl
as she'd been with
Joshua Logan after
Bus Stop
. When the picture was released, Olivier
visited the Actors Studio and Marilyn took refuge in the ladies' room
until she was sure he had left. Shelley Winters "asked her if the
shooting of
The Prince and the Showgirl
had been that rough. She
blinked and smiled and said, 'English actors are ashamed of their
feelings and hate the idea of expressing themselves with our Method
work. They prefer to act with technique.'"
¹¹

The acrimony over
Showgirl
, the second and last picture made with
Milton Greene for Marilyn Monroe Productions, destroyed her friendship
with her partner. Miller, believing her contract with Greene was
extraordinarily disadvantageous, was eager to get Marilyn out of it.
But he realized, since Greene had not always separated his own
purchases from company expenses, that dividing company assets would
be complicated. Miller declared that Milton and Amy "bought antiques
in London and charged them to the company. . . . The financial affairs
of the company were in a mess." Greene had, however, financed her
luxurious lifestyle in New York. "It would be hard to say how much
was owed Milton at the time. He was paying for nearly everything
for Marilyn" from the time she left Hollywood until she went to
work on
Bus Stop
and
Showgirl
. "I think this period when he was
giving her money began in 1955. It continued when she was living
in the Waldorf."

In April 1957, after a series of angry legal conferences, Greene was
forced to sell his stock to Marilyn for $100,000. This was his payment
for establishing the profitable company, working for her during their
partnership and paying most of her expenses for more than a year.
Marilyn, relieved to break their agreement, said, "my company had
not been organized to parcel out 49 percent of my earnings to Mr.
Greene for seven years." Miller maintained that Greene "swindled"
Marilyn and "did nothing but live off her work. She prevented him
from getting majority control, and then had to pay $100,000 to get
rid of him." Greene's son saw things rather differently and declared,
"Miller fucked my family."
¹²

While married to Mary and before he met Marilyn, Miller had
led a structured and productive life. For Marilyn's sake he gave
up a great deal – not only his long-term marriage and children, but
the privacy, peace and secure way of life that had sustained his greatest
work. Like Orpheus, he descended into a troubled underworld to
rescue his Eurydice, and he, too, was doomed to fail. Miller thought
he'd been unhappy with Mary, but now found himself far worse off.
Exposed to the glare of publicity and scrutiny of the media, swept
into Marilyn's chaotic life and tormented by a woman who was
impossible to please, he became what Norman Mailer called "the
most talented slave in the world."

After returning from England in November 1956, Miller took
Marilyn back to his country house in Roxbury, Connecticut, where
he hoped they could lead a normal life. The two-story house, built
in 1783 during the colonial period, had huge ceiling beams. It was
surrounded by 325 acres of land and planted with fruit trees. There
was no other house in sight, and a cool breeze blew through a row
of maples. The back veranda, with its view of endless hills, led to a
swimming pond with water so clean you could drink it.

It soon became clear that they would have trouble combining their
habits, tastes and interests. The contrast between Marilyn's lofty dreams
and reckless indifference to money and Miller's down-to-earth realism
and notorious frugality became obvious that autumn when she asked
Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new house. Though Miller told Wright
that they wanted to live rather simply, Wright's grandiose plan included,
Miller wrote, "a circular living room with a dropped center surrounded
by ovoid columns of fieldstone some five feet thick, and a domed
ceiling, the diameter no less than sixty feet, looking out toward the
view over a swimming pool seventy feet long with fieldstone sides
that jutted forth from the incline of the hill." This gigantic pleasuredome,
suitable for an oriental potentate, fulfilled Wright's own fantasies
but ignored his clients' needs. It had "only a single bedroom and a
small guestroom, but did provide a large 'conference room' complete
with a long boardroom-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed
chairs." In the end they rejected his concept as far too impractical
and outrageously expensive and decided to preserve the old house.
They modernized the rear part, put in sliding doors, and built a garage
and a separate one-room study for Miller.

For Marilyn the housewife's routine had no charms. Life in a rundown
house with a husband who spent the mornings reading and
writing in his study and the afternoons replacing rotten timber and
putting in plumbing must have come as a shock. Mailer satirized the
homespun Miller as "the complacent country squire, boring people with
his accounts of clearing fields, gardening, the joys of plumbing ('Nothing
like taking a bath in water that comes through pipes you threaded yourself')."
Miller was self-sufficient, fully occupied and used to solitude.
Marilyn – who'd been taught almost nothing as a child – had no useful
skills or diverting pastimes, and focused entirely on her own appearance.
She had nothing to occupy her empty hours in the country, and
soon got tired of rearranging the furniture and playing with Hugo,
Miller's sluggish and incontinent basset hound. She wanted her husband's
absolute attention but, as Miller observed, "physical admiration threatened
to devalue her person, yet she became anxious if her appearance
was ignored." The screenwriter Nunnally Johnson noted the abyss that
had opened between them: "I think she bored the hell out of everybody.
She just didn't have the intelligence, but she was aware she didn't
have it. . . . My guess is she just wasn't enough for Arthur Miller. After
you've married the sex goddess – nobody finds it very difficult to talk
before you get into the hay, but what do you say afterwards? Marilyn
was like a child, she thought a lay was the answer to everything."

Soon after their wedding Marilyn invited the Strasbergs for a country
brunch, and their strange visit revealed the anxiety and chaos that
reigned in Roxbury. The Strasbergs arrived punctually at 11 a.m.
Marilyn and Miller seemed to have quarreled and he'd left all the
preparations to her. She was unprepared for her guests and he was
indifferent, even hostile. No one had done any shopping. "In her
terrycloth housecoat, Marilyn appeared to have just awakened. Nobody
else was there, not even a maid. Nobody made moves toward the
kitchen. Tension floated in the air. It was apparent something was
awry. Miller didn't . . . offer even a glass of water. An hour and a half
went by." When the uneasy guests said they were hungry after the
long drive from New York, Marilyn "panicked. 'Come inside.' She ran
into the kitchen. She pulled open the freezer, put her hands on a
frozen steak and stammered nervously, 'I'll g-get you s-something to
eat right away.'"

The friend who'd driven them up from New York tried to ease
the tension by bringing hostilities into the open and rather awkwardly
saying:

"Hey, try to relax. We all know Arthur doesn't like Lee, but even
if Lee doesn't like Arthur he respects him, so relax, willya?
Nothing's going to happen. Take it easy."

Marilyn didn't answer. She opened the refrigerator. Nothing
was there except a bottle of milk. Back at the freezer she pulled
out the frozen steak. "Here," she said.

"This won't work. What else do you have?"

Marilyn began to claw at the trays. She pulled out frozen
strawberries, frozen peas.
¹

Finally, the guests escaped to a nearby restaurant.

A few years later, Frank Taylor, Miller's friend and publisher, was
invited to Roxbury with his family to hear Miller read the script
of
The Misfits
. Always seductive, Marilyn asked Taylor's four boys,
aged seven to seventeen, "Who wants to lie on the hammock with
me?" They all raced to cuddle up with her – all together, if possible;
serially, if not.
Curtice Taylor recalled how, as a self-styled "weird
pre-adolescent," he wanted to see Marilyn on his own. Later on he
got permission to visit his horse, Ebony, which the Taylors had not
been able to keep and had given to the Millers. As he hung around
the house, the Millers must have thought, "what the hell is this kid
doing here?" Though Curtice felt awkward with Marilyn, she lavished
affection on him. Curious about her sexual life, he was strangely
disturbed when he looked through the door and saw the twisted
sheets in the bedroom.

Curtice also recalled another tense and sad incident, involving
Marilyn's love of animals (except the minks in her coat), which seemed
straight out of
The Misfits
:

On another weekend, when we Taylors were visiting the Millers,
my brother Mark and I were playing around in the pastures
when we came upon a newborn calf being tended to by its
mother. We knew Marilyn would love this, so we went and got
her. Indeed, she did love it, and cooed about the mother licking
it clean as it struggled to get up. We were all laughing and
having a fine time when we saw the farmer who rented the
pasture coming across the field. He gruffly greeted us, went
over to the calf and unceremoniously opened its legs. Getting
the information he needed, he strode away, only to return a
few minutes later with a large gunny sack. When he picked up
the struggling creature and started to stuff it into the bag,
Marilyn went ballistic! "How could you take it away from its
mother? It was just born and is innocent." Then, just like in
The Misfits
, she said, "I'll buy it from you. How much do you
want for it?" She was on the border of hysteria. After stuffing
the calf into the bag, the farmer proceeded with his task, despite
her protestations, and said to Marilyn: "Mrs. Miller, I will not
sell you this calf. It's a male calf and I run a dairy. I will now
raise him for veal. This is what I do. This is how it works." He
put the squirming sack over his shoulder and walked away.
Arthur was waiting for us as we brought a sobbing Marilyn
back to the porch. The day was ruined and she withdrew into
seclusion.

The Millers' life in New York was equally unreal. At first they lived
in Marilyn's apartment at 2 Sutton Place, a posh street not far from
the United Nations, with views of the East River and the Queensboro
Bridge. Its décor looked like an albino stage set. Her maid condescendingly
wrote, "It seemed half-finished, half-furnished, and reminded
me of a hotel. There was a white piano, some nondescript white sofas,
and wall-to-wall white carpeting marred by many stains. The view
of the buildings across the street was gloomy. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors
were everywhere."

The larger, 13th-floor flat at 444 East 57th Street, where they moved
in 1957, had a living room with bookcases, a fireplace and a piano;
dining alcove with a mirrored table; kitchen and study; main bedroom
and bathroom; guest bedroom, with floral designs on the white porcelain
doorknobs. An interviewer, satirizing the overdone décor, called the
place "unexpectedly MGMish: white sofas and spreading ice-cap expanses
of white fitted carpet. There is, in fact, a sharp division when you enter
Mr. Miller's work-room. . . . The stokehole below the first-class lounge"
revealed his different taste and symbolized his humble status.
²

As she tried to adjust to her third marriage, Marilyn projected an
image of a successful union, of shared interests and mutual support. She
told the press that they talked, read and listened to music at home; went
to movies, saw friends and walked in Central Park. The young poet
Sylvia Plath, married to the English poet Ted Hughes and trying to be
a writer, a wife and a mother, identified with Marilyn's apparently ideal
life. Plath also suffered from depression, had mental breakdowns and
committed suicide five months after Marilyn's death. Conned by
Hollywood publicity, she had no idea of Marilyn's troubles. She
imagined Marilyn as a model of married perfection, an intimate and
optimistic companion. In a journal entry of October 1959 Plath recorded
how she dreamed about being groomed and encouraged by the actress,
who fulfilled her youthful fantasies: "Marilyn Monroe appeared to me
last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. . . . I spoke, almost
in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they
could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure.
I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no
matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She
invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new,
flowering life."

In reality, Marilyn was restless and unhappy. When she was not
preparing for a public appearance or playing Marilyn Monroe in the
movies, she retreated into her protective cave and wondered what to
do with all her energy and talent. She often spent her hours and days
doing absolutely nothing – wandering around her flat, peering into
the kitchen, stumbling pointlessly from room to room. In movies she'd
seen sophisticated stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Cary
Grant and Katharine Hepburn, feasting on caviar and drinking champagne.
When Marilyn became a star she imitated these movie fantasies
and tried to live a luxurious life. She acquired cases of her favorite
drink, Dom Pérignon champagne – named for the seventeenth-century
Benedictine monk who discovered how to put sparkle into still wine
– to prove she had achieved success and could have anything she
wanted in the world.

Miller spent all day in his study. The maid noted that "Bobby and
Jane would come by to see their father after school in the afternoons.
But [unlike the Taylor boys] they seemed far less interested in their
father's famous new wife than in the hamburgers, Cokes, candy, and
other goodies Hattie [the cook] stocked for them." Meanwhile, as the
observant maid wrote, Marilyn led a rather narcissistic and lonely life:

Her doctors' appointments . . . and her acting lessons were virtually
all she had to look forward to. She spent most of her time
in her little bedroom, sleeping, looking at herself in the mirrors,
drinking Bloody Marys or champagne, talking on the phone,
which seemed to be her greatest pleasure. . . .

I never saw her read a book or a newspaper. Once in a while
she would thumb through the pictures of high-fashion models in
Vogue
. She didn't own a television [which had obsessed DiMaggio],
never listened to the radio. Marilyn did seem to enjoy playing
jazz and blues records on the small hi-fi set next to her bed.

The Millers seemed happier in the summer of 1957 in Amagansett,
renting a house on the Atlantic shore at the eastern end of Long
Island. They spent time riding in a dune-buggy, fishing and swimming,
running on the beach and leaning lovingly against each other.
Like Paula Strasberg, a friend noticed that "Arthur was so attentive,
so concerned. He hung upon her every word. . . . He seemed so
concerned for her that, if he could have, he would have physically
merged with her
and taken on her sadness."
³

In New York, as in England and Hollywood, Marilyn, often accompanied
by Miller, continued to meet distinguished writers, heads of
state and even royalty. In February 1959, when the seventy-four-year-old
Danish author
Isak Dinesen – wasted, skeletal and ravaged by
syphilis – expressed a desire to meet them, Carson McCullers invited
the actress and playwright to lunch at her house in Nyack, New York.
Dinesen, keen to secure the Nobel Prize, wanted all the exposure
and publicity she could get while in America and felt that Marilyn
could easily be exploited for this purpose. McCullers recalled that
"Marilyn was very timid and called me three or four times about the
dress she was going to wear, and wanting to know if it should be
low-cut or not. I said that anything she wore would be beautiful on
her. She actually wore a dress cut very low that showed her lovely
bosoms. Marilyn sat and listened while [Dinesen] talked."