The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (35 page)

WEDNESDAY, 15 August

During her sleepless nights at Parkside House, Marilyn began to believe that Olivier was deliberately trying to undermine her performance, and it occurred to her that Milton Greene had made an enormous mistake in allowing Olivier to be both star and director.

When Marilyn expressed distrust of Olivier to her husband, Arthur Miller was put in the awkward position of both pacifying his wife and at the same time alleviating her suspicions. “She came to believe that he was try
ing to compete with her like another woman, a coquette drawing the audience's attention away from herself,” Miller recalled. “Nothing could dissuade her from this perilous vision of her director and co-star…. It was simply impossible to agree that he could be the cheap scene-stealer she was talking about…. I occasionally had to defend Olivier or else reinforce the naivete of her illusions. The result was she began to question the absoluteness of my partisanship on her side of the deepening struggle.”

Could Marilyn have been correct in her assessment of Olivier? Was it possible that the legendary star of stage and screen could be trying to undermine and upstage the ingenue neophyte from Hollywood? When Marilyn and her entourage arrived on the scene, not only was Olivier's private life in crisis, but so was his career. He was turning fifty and his ham was well cured. There weren't many leading-men parts left for him, and he was very sensitive about his age. The makeup and attire he wore as the prince was so heavy that at times he was barely recognizable behind his monocle. Vanity and the fight to justify top billing went with the prince of Carpathian's territory.

Both Marilyn and Olivier had what is known to cameramen as a “good side”—the side of the face that photographs best. For both of them it was the right side. Olivier, the director, always made sure that the right side of Olivier the actor was to camera, which meant that Marilyn's “bad side” was to camera when they faced each other.

Despite the letters received from Joshua Logan, Olivier elected to ignore his advice, stating, “I refused to treat Marilyn as a special case—I had too much pride in my trade—and would at all times treat her as a grown-up artist of merit, which in a sense she was.”

If there was any doubt that Marilyn was an artist of merit, it was dispelled by the reviews of
Bus Stop
, which opened on August 31 to critical acclaim. “Hold onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in
Bus Stop
,” raved Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
, who had never been a Marilyn fan. “Effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality,” said the
Saturday Review of Literature
. The London
Times
observed, “Miss Monroe is a talented comedienne, and her sense of timing never forsakes her. She gives a complete portrait, sensitively and sometimes even brilliantly conceived. There is about her a waif-like quality, an underlying note of pathos which can be strangely moving.”

“Brilliant,” said
Variety
.

“She's a troublesome bitch!” Olivier was heard to mumble.

Arthur Miller soon discovered that the Marxist boy from Brooklyn and the Earl of Notley had something in common—difficult wives. At the end of an exhausting day at Pinewood dealing with a very difficult actress, Olivier would go home to Notley Abbey and face another very difficult actress. Vivien Leigh would often be in her manic phase, and Olivier would frequently arrive to find a house full of her animated guests and hangers-on who would party all night, when what he desperately needed was sleep and tranquillity. There were times when he would lock his door, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by Leigh pounding on it. On one occasion when he had neglected to lock the door he was awakened by Leigh beating him across the face with a wet towel at three in the morning. Few knew of his private hell. But there were days when Olivier would brace himself with a stiff drink in his Pinewood dressing room before going home, and Arthur Miller would join him for commiseration and a bracer.

One evening the two of them went to the theater together; Miller wanted to see John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
at the Royal Court Theater, and Olivier reluctantly went with him. Osborne was then a new-wave playwright—an ideological adversary who, it seemed, was out to discredit the British traditionalist world that Olivier was so much a part of. Yet that world was vanishing. Its institutions were as old hat as Rattigan's play and the gold-braided light-opera ghosts of Carpathia—as old hat, perhaps, as the aging Olivier, whose career was in a rut.

After the play Miller and Olivier went backstage to congratulate the stars, Mary Ure and Alan Bates, and were introduced to the rebellious author, the dreaded John Osborne. When they were leaving, Miller was amazed to hear Olivier hesitantly say to Osborne, “Do you suppose you could write something for me?” Osborne could. He would. He did. And out of that evening on the town with Miller was born
The Entertainer
and Archie Rice, the illegitimate child of the wooden prince of Carpathia.

Realizing that
The Prince and the Showgirl
had gotten off to a rather rotten start, Olivier suggested that Terence Rattigan throw a party at which the film's principals could socialize away from the pressures of Pinewood, and perhaps mend antagonisms in a relaxing atmosphere.

SUNDAY, 19 August

In his autobiography
Hollywood in a Suitcase
, Sammy Davis, Jr., talked about an affair Marilyn was having during the filming of
The Prince and the Showgirl
. In the summer of 1956 Davis was living in London, and he wrote, “When she was making
The Prince and the Showgirl
with Laurence Olivier, she was going through one of the most difficult periods of her life. She was having an affair with a close friend of mine…. They met clandestinely at my house…. We had to get up to all sorts of intrigues to keep the affair secret. I used to pretend we were having a party, and Marilyn would arrive and leave at different times from my pal. Once they were in the house, of course, they went off to the swimming pool, which had its own self-contained bungalow.”

Sammy Davis, Jr., was often the beard for Jack Kennedy. Was it JFK Marilyn met in the pool bungalow? According to Colin Clark's diary, Marilyn went to London incognito on Saturday, August 25. She failed to show up at all at Pinewood on the following Monday. The diary indicates that just prior to the weekend in question Marilyn and Miller had a falling-out over his behavior at the Rattigan party. Jack Kennedy was in Europe at the time. Immediately following the July 1956 Democratic Convention, in which Jack had lost the vice-presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver by thirty votes, he flew to the French Riviera with his brother Teddy—
leaving behind Jacqueline, who was pregnant. In Cannes, Jack and Teddy Kennedy connected with George Smathers and chartered a forty-foot yacht, complete with skipper, galley cook, and blondes, according to a
Washington Star
correspondent who interviewed the skipper.

On August 23, while still recuperating from the strain of the convention, Jacqueline Kennedy was rushed to Newport Hospital in Rhode Island, where an emergency cesarean was performed. The child, an unnamed girl, was stillborn. The Kennedy family tried in vain to contact Jack. He couldn't be reached on the yacht by transatlantic phone, though it had a ship-to-shore radio. His passport application indicates that he planned to travel to England, France, Italy, and Sweden.

Kennedy was finally located and flew home on Tuesday, August 28. His prolonged absence at this critical time brought about a breach with Jackie. “There was certainly talk of divorce between Jack and Jackie,” Peter Lawford acknowledged. “But it was only talk.”
Time
later reported a meeting between Jackie Kennedy and Joe Kennedy in which he purportedly offered her a million dollars not to divorce her husband.

It was on Tuesday, August 28, the day Kennedy flew back to the states, that an incident occurred marking the turning point in the Miller marriage. At a time when Marilyn desperately needed her husband's support, she discovered Arthur's notebook open on his desk to a page containing a passage so devastating to her that the fragile trust of their betrothal shattered like glass.

The notebook revealed that Arthur was having second thoughts about their marriage. Sobbing to Paula Strasberg about what Arthur had written, she said, “Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Art said he no longer had a decent answer to that one.” The notations in the notebook went on to say that she was an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman to be pitied, but that he feared his own creative life was threatened by her endless emotional demands. “Art once thought I was some kind of angel,” Marilyn cried to Strasberg, “but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse.” Arthur had referred to Marilyn as a “whore.”

Arthur Miller didn't discuss the incident in his memoirs, but it became the fulcrum of the climactic scene in
After the Fall
.

 

Q
UENTIN:
(Grasping her wrist, but not trying to take the pill bottle out of her hand.)
Throw them in the sea, no pill can make you innocent! See your own hatred…and life will come back, Maggie. Your innocence is killing you!

M
AGGIE:
(Freeing her wrist)
What about
your
hatred? You know when I wanted to die? When I read what you wrote, Kiddo. Two months after we were married, Kiddo.
(She moves front and speaks toward some invisible source of justice now, telling her injury.)
I was looking for a fountain pen to sign some autographs. And there's his desk…and there's his empty chair where he sits and thinks how to help people. And there's his handwriting. And there's some words, ‘The only one I'll ever love is my daughter. If I could only find an honorable way to die!'
(she turns to him)
Now, when you gonna face that, Judgey? Remember how I fell down, fainted? On the new rug? That's what killed me, Judgey. Right?

 

Perhaps Miller was drawing from the evening at Rattigan's party: in the play Quentin tells Maggie he made the notations, “Because when the guests had gone, and you suddenly turned on me, calling me cold, remote, it was the first time I saw your eyes that way—betrayed, screaming that I'd made you feel you didn't exist.” After she angrily tells him not to mix her up with his previous wife, Quentin says, “That's just it. That I could have brought two women so different to the same accusation—it closes a circle for me. And I wanted to face the worst thing I could imagine—that I could not love. And I wrote it down, like a letter from hell.”

The “letter from hell” in Miller's black notebook damned their marriage, left Marilyn distraught, and marked a turning point in her life. “Hope, hope, hope” seemed beyond her grasp, and she increasingly turned to barbiturates to mask the emotional pain.