The Genius and the Goddess (36 page)

All three men, in Miller's tribute, keep telling Roslyn that she's
beautiful, innocent and desirable. They all want to marry and protect
her. She transforms all of them, and even revives Guido's neglected
house. Shy, for once, instead of suave or swaggering, Gay tells the
luminous Roslyn, "It's almost kind of an honor sittin' next to you.
You just shine in my eyes." He can't bear the idea of losing her and
"wouldn't know how to say goodbye." Even Guido, deeply moved
by her, tells Roslyn, "You just walk in, a stranger out of nowhere,
and for the first time it all lights up. . . . You have the gift of life."
Instead of replacing Guido's dead wife, as he hoped she would, Roslyn
moves into Guido's house with Gay. But Roslyn, still a lost soul despite
all the adoration, is confused about what to do and how to act. Natural
yet self-conscious, she asks the fundamental question:"how can you . . .
just live?"
⁵
To Gay, sometimes just living means being free; at other
times, it means killing animals.

Gay's stoical acceptance of the inevitable is directly opposed to
Roslyn's desire to change the world. He explains (like the man in
"Please Don't Kill Anything") that you can't live unless you kill. He
promises to show her real life when they go into the desert to hunt
the horses, but his idea of life is her idea of death. They may be "the
last real men" but to her they all seem dead. As the conflict mounts
between respect for his values and submission to her wishes, he tells
her, "I don't want to lose you. You got to help me a little bit, though.
Because I can't put on that this is all as bad as you make it." Guido's
torn jacket, patched-up plane and derelict house suggest his blind
commitment to a meaningless quest. In this contemporary Western –
like Dalton Trumbo's
Lonely Are the Brave
, made the following year –
cowboys have no place in the modern world.

The Misfits
reaches its emotional and dramatic climax in the mustang
hunt, and Huston, as always, is brilliant when filming horses. Gable,
Marilyn's idol and father figure, said "I didn't like the original ending
of the screenplay (in which the stallion defeats Gay and leaves him
lying on the lake bed, arousing Roslyn's compassion) but I didn't
know the solution. I think Arthur's new ending is the answer." Like
Hemingway in
Green Hills of Africa
(1935), the mustangers bond in
male friendship and express their love for wild creatures by slaughtering
them. The stallion, mares and colt (which parallel Roslyn and
her three "stallions") are called a "family." When they are freed, Roslyn
urges them to "Go home." At the end Gay, after being dragged across
the burning desert while trying to tie up the stallion, captures him
by himself to prove his manly power. He then cuts him loose to show
his love for Roslyn and gain her respect. Though the horses are freed,
the men, whose freedom is an illusion, are still trapped.

At the beginning of the film, Gay refuses to become entangled
with women; in the end, he commits himself to Roslyn. Roslyn, in
Reno to get divorced, replaces the rich and elegant woman whom
Gay first saw off at the train station. By doing so, she rescues him
from his two degrading roles: decorative gigolo and supplier of dog
food. Roslyn knows that she belongs with Gay and has learned how
to live with him. Despite his feckless behavior and her unstable background,
they decide to overcome their doubts and get married. Gay
never thought about marriage "in daylight," but he decides to marry
at night when they head for the big star – Venus, named after the
goddess of love, the brightest in the sky – with the highway right
under it. As Wallace Stevens wrote, "The lines are straight and swift
between the stars."
⁶
Gay says they'll follow the star that will take them
home, though neither has a home, and "home" is the last word in
the film.

Roslyn and Gay are poignant in their loneliness, and their love
becomes a forlorn poetry uniting their solitudes. When Gay chooses
love for Roslyn over a roving life and freedom with horses, he returns
to domestic and economic responsibility. This is especially difficult for
Gay, who has no way of earning a living (apart from escorting wealthy
divorcées) and will be forced into humiliating work in a supermarket,
laundromat or service station. The finale of the film, like the end of
the story, is ironic. Marriage, like mustanging, had better be "better
than wages" because Gay will need wages to provide for his wife and
the children they hope to have. Gay transforms Roslyn, who finds
herself and discovers she has the "gift of life," just as Miller had hoped
to transform Marilyn.
The Misfits
ends positively. But, like all the works
Miller wrote about Marilyn, it portrays, in Guido's blast against women
and Roslyn's desert screaming scene, his inability to satisfy her
emotional demands.

The Misfits
finished shooting on November 4, 1960, and the
following day Clark Gable had a heart attack. He entered a Hollywood
hospital and, after a second massive attack almost two weeks later,
died on November 16. After his death, his wife rather bitterly told
the Los Angeles
Mirror-News
: "It wasn't the physical exertion that did
it. It was the horrible tension, that eternal waiting, waiting, waiting."
But Gable himself, who was paid a fortune for working overtime,
said that he didn't mind waiting. He told Miller that
The Misfits
was
the best picture he ever made.

Marilyn had fantasized that her real, handsome, mustachioed father
looked like Gable, and as a child had kept a photo of the star in her
bedroom. After helping to kill her "secret father," she felt guilty about
it, just as she had about the fatal accident of the French journalist on
her wedding day. "I kept him waiting," she told Sidney Skolsky, "kept
him waiting for hours and hours on that picture. Was I punishing my
father? Getting even for all the years he's kept me waiting?" There
were other casualties soon after
The Misfits
was completed. Marilyn
never made another movie. Clift made three more pictures but also
died of a heart attack, at the age of forty-five, in 1966.

In the midst of making the picture, Miller told Bellow that if it
was not a success, it would be the most highly publicized failure in
history. The United Artists' publicist in New York prepared a twenty-minute
featurette,
The Making of "The Misfits"
, to promote the film
around the world, and the backstory helped sell it. The narrator emphasized
the congenial atmosphere and warm camaraderie of the writer,
director, cast, crew, cowboy riders and bush pilots. The short showed
the stars talking together – conversation was "the favorite leisure-time
activity"; Miller and Eli Wallach playing football and softball; Marilyn
riding a horse, Clift (or his double) in the rodeo, Wallach (or his pilot)
flying the plane; the actors and technicians having "a quiet meal
cooked over an open flame." The short mentioned that seventy-five
tons of equipment were transported to the Nevada desert; that the
internationally famous Magnum photographers had also publicized
the film; and that the picture, most unusually, was shot in sequence
to develop the complex characters and themes. It revealed that Robert
Mitchum had been considered for Gable's part, and that Gable had
died just after the film was completed.

When Miller had a chance to publicize the film, he focused rather
ponderously on himself and bored the audience to death. According
to the
Hollywood Reporter
of January 31, 1961, "Miller was scheduled
to discuss
The Misfits
, but though he had a wonderful captive audience
in the crowded Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf, eager to hear
his personal observations about his first exposure to movie-making,
he didn't make a single reference to the film. . . . Instead, he went
into a serious discussion of the intellectual, drugged in illusion" – as
he himself had been deluded about Marilyn.

The Misfits
, an unusually serious western, did not match the expectations
of the audience. Though respectfully received by the critics,
it was not a commercial success.
Variety
(February 1, 1961) remarked
that Marilyn's Method acting conveyed exactly the opposite effect
than she intended: "Monroe's familiar breathless, childlike mannerisms
have a way of distracting, of drawing attention away from the
inner conflicts and complexities of the character itself." But the
New
York Daily News
, in an appreciative notice, justly praised the acting of
the two stars: "Gable has never done anything better on the screen,
nor has Miss Monroe. Gable's acting is vibrant and lusty, hers true to
the character as written by Miller. . . . The screen vibrates with
emotion during the latter part of the film, as Marilyn and Gable
engage in one of those battles of the sexes that seem eternal in their
constant eruption. It is a poignant conflict between a man and a
woman in love, with each trying to maintain individual characteristics
and preserve a fundamental way of life."
⁷

As Marilyn predicted, her marriage ended with the completion of
the film. She had overcome formidable obstacles to become a great
star, but like many self-made people she could not fully realize her
ambitions. She wanted to be so much more than she could be, yet
did not believe she deserved her astonishing success. Miller loved her
wit and humor, her warmth and beauty. He wanted to cherish her,
comfort her, help her achieve her dreams. She believed he would be
her salvation, and when he failed her, she turned on him. Sentimental
yet tough, she loved and hated with equal intensity. Miller believed
she was responsible for her own destruction by seeing herself – despite
years of intensive psychoanalysis – as the helpless victim of her unfortunate
background, her friends and colleagues, her lovers and
husbands. "She needed a miracle," he said, "and none [was] available.
She was a basically serious person who had hopes for herself [as a
dramatic actress] but did not have time to develop." Her wounds, he
thought, "were self-inflicted, mostly. She had very little confidence in
herself. She had been exposing herself as an actress . . . and this brought
to a head all her sense of unworthiness. She felt she was being a faker."

Miller tried hard to save her. "All of my energy and attention," he
said, "were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems.
Unfortunately, I didn't have much success. . . . I represented betrayals
and misplaced trust. And there was no possibility of erasing that from
her mind." Finally, he was faced with the conflict – which he portrayed
in his early novel
Focus
and his play
After the Fall
– between responsibility
to another person and the need for self-preservation:"She was
beyond help. There was simply nothing but destruction that could
have come, my own destruction as well as hers. A person's got to save
himself." He felt responsible for her and was afraid she might break
down and commit suicide if he left her. But, as he once wrote to me
about Katherine Mansfield, with Marilyn and himself in mind, "I'd
only question whether any husband or anyone else could have saved
her. . . . She is one of those tragic persons launched on a short trajectory,
the self-consuming rocket."
⁸

Thinking no doubt of Marilyn and wondering why he ever married
her, Miller poignantly observed that "love is difficult to explain after
it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion
as it disappears." But his illusions were certainly dispelled when she
unleashed her pitiless anger and vengeance. Her psychiatrist believed
that Marilyn harbored a "venomous resentment" toward Miller. In a
series of unjust accusations, she claimed that he was "attracted to other
women, And dominated by his mother. She accused Miller of neglecting
his father and not being 'nice' to his children." While Miller pondered
the reasons for their lost love, Marilyn blamed him for the collapse
of their marriage.

In several extraordinarily honest and perceptive confessions, Marilyn
acknowledged the conflict between her different selves and the confusion
about her real identity. She told the English cinematographer
Jack Cardiff that "Arthur saw the demon in me. . . . A lot of people
like to think of me as innocent, so that's the way I behave to them. . . .

If they saw the demon in me they would hate me. . . . I'm more than
one person, and I act differently each time. . . . Most of the time I'm
not the person I'd like to be – certainly not a dumb blonde like they
say I am; a sex freak with big boobs."
⁹

If she was a self-confessed demon with Cardiff, she became a
monster with the English journalist W.J. Weatherby. Repeating what
Miller had said about
her
, she remarked that he'd also shifted from
idealization to disillusionment as she adopted the false roles he expected
her to play. She wanted the journalist to pity the monster as well as
the victim:

When we were first married, he saw me as so beautiful and
innocent among Hollywood wolves that I tried to be like that.
I almost became his student in life and literature. . . . But when
the monster showed, Arthur couldn't believe it. I disappointed
him when that happened. But I felt he knew and loved all of
me. I wasn't sweet all through. He should love the monster, too.
But maybe I'm too demanding. Maybe there's no man who
could put up with all of me. I put Arthur through a lot, I know.
But he also put me through a lot."

Beneath Marilyn's glowing persona, Norma Jeane Baker was still
wondering who she really was. In yet another revelation, Marilyn
specified Miller's faults:"He's a cold fish. . . . I thought he was Lincoln,
but Lincoln had a great sense of humor. Arthur's got no sense of
humor. I'm living with a dead man. You know the most frightening
part? He reminds me now of a Nazi."
¹⁰
It was cruelly ironic that
Marilyn began by likening her idealized husband to Lincoln and (as
a Jewish convert) ended by comparing her Jewish husband to a Nazi.