Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Marilyn had met Olivier a couple of times years before, when she was a nobody and he was already Sir Laurence, the leading actor in the English-speaking world. Now he was to be director and leading man to her leading lady, in a frothy tale about an American showgirl who falls in love with a reluctant Ruritanian prince.

  Olivier had heard stories about the perils of working with Marilyn, but thought he could cope.

  He had talked to three of her previous directors, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Joshua Logan. Logan, who was emerging bloodied but triumphant from Bus Stop, wrote repeatedly, warning Olivier. ‘Please, don’t tell her what to do,’ he told him. ‘She probably knows more about acting in films than anyone in the world. Don’t order her about, because it’ll throw her and you won’t get anything out of her.’ That aside, Logan had said cheerily, ‘It’s the best combination since black and white.’

  Olivier was irritated that Marilyn brought along her coach, Paula Strasberg. Then, remembering how ‘schizoid’ Marilyn had seemed to him in New York, he hoped that Strasberg ‘would bring out the better of those two halves.’ When Marilyn proved disappointing at rehearsals, Olivier tried to get through by cultivating Strasberg instead. Soon he concluded that ‘Paula knew nothing; she was no actress, no director, no teacher, no adviser, except in Marilyn’s eyes. For she had one talent: she could butter Marilyn up.’

  This realization came to Olivier one day as he, riding in the front of a limousine, listened to Marilyn and Strasberg talking in the back. ‘My dear,’ Paula Strasberg was saying, ‘You haven’t yet any idea of the importance of your position in the world. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time, of any time — you name it. You can’t think of anybody, I mean — no, not even Jesus — except you’re more popular.’

  Olivier swore his account is no exaggeration, that the flattery went on for a full hour, and that Marilyn lapped it up. During the filming Olivier was to exile Paula Strasberg to New York, and Marilyn was to make sure she came back again. Olivier was in for four months of professional hell.

  Olivier tried to help Marilyn with her problems of drying up in front of the camera. He suggested she sit still, count up to three, then speak the line. When this failed, he burst out, ‘Can’t you count either?’ Logan had warned that being authoritative, not to mention losing one’s temper, was to lose Monroe, and Olivier swiftly lost touch with her altogether. He despaired even when Marilyn’s system worked.

  It was hard for Olivier to watch Marilyn capture a mood only after Paula Strasberg told her, ‘Honey, just think of Coca-Cola and Frankie Sinatra!’ He concluded she was a ‘glorious amateur in show business, an untrained, probably untrainable, artist of instinct.’

  ‘I saw the differences between Larry and Marilyn grow as they became more tired and tense,’ cameraman Jack Cardiff recalled. ‘She began asking herself whether he was really the genius she had at first imagined.’ Marilyn herself said years later, ‘Sir Olivier [sic] tried to be friendly, but he came on like someone slumming … I started being bad with him, being late, and he hated it. But if you don’t respect your artists, they can’t work well. Respect is what you have to fight for.’

  It was Marilyn who failed to give respect, to Olivier and everyone else, in big and little things. She failed to thank Olivier and his wife for their kindnesses, for the roses sent to welcome her, for the exquisite, engraved watch presented to her at the end of filming.

  One day Marilyn managed to break even her record for unpunctuality, by arriving for an appointment more than nine hours late. She made Dame Sybil Thorndike, who was elderly and also acting in a stage play at night, wait all morning for her. Marilyn’s columnist friend, Louella Parsons, visiting from the United States, thought she was ‘testing to see if she was really the co-star. She behaved like a child asking to be spanked.’

  Arthur Miller, too, bore the brunt of Marilyn the child. Two weeks into the filming, traveling under the name ‘Mr Stevenson’ to avoid reporters, he flew back to the United States. His purpose was to see his daughter by his previous marriage, who was ill, but Marilyn saw it as desertion. She stayed at home for a week, claiming a ‘severe attack of colitis.’ Production ground to a halt until Miller cut short his visit and returned.

  The other partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions, photographer Milton Greene, who had bought an English Jaguar car, shuttled around from Marilyn’s home to the studio, from the studio to London, trying to mend fences between Marilyn and Olivier, and between both of them and the British press.

  It was in part thanks to Greene that the film was finished at all, yet The Prince and the Showgirl was the beginning of the end of his connection with Marilyn. Word filtered back from England that Arthur Miller wanted Greene removed. Miller retorted, ‘I have no more than the normal family interest in my wife’s business affairs. Rumors of conflict between myself and Milton Greene are space fillers for unimaginative columnists.’

  Greene said, ‘Miller and I have had no trouble. Sell my stock in Marilyn Monroe Productions? Never.’

  It was all a smokescreen. Miller, supposedly busy finishing his next play, was being drawn inexorably into his wife’s professional life. Greene saw the writing on the wall when he found Miller selecting Marilyn’s publicity photographs and organizing her scrapbook. Soon Miller was flying into rages over Greene’s press releases. Greene told me, ‘Miller would scream at me. He wanted her for himself, to do a movie and a play — for him.’

  A year later Greene was to be driven out as vice-president of Marilyn Monroe Productions, and paid off with $100,000. The new board of directors included Miller’s brother-in-law and one of his friends. It was small thanks to Greene, who wryly recalled that the two films he was involved with, Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, were the only major Monroe films to be finished within their budgets.

  Against all odds The Prince and the Showgirl was not a disaster. When it appeared, most critics would be kinder than Noel Coward, and even he noted in his diary: ‘Larry is superb. Marilyn Monroe looks very pretty and is charming at moments, but too much emphasis on tits and bottom. It is to me a charming picture.’ The miracle Olivier had been promised by previous directors had occurred. In the finished product, Marilyn was magically effective. Olivier would write wearily in his memoirs that people thought, ‘I was as good as could be, and Marilyn! Marilyn was quite wonderful, the best of all. So. What do you know?’

  Before leaving England, Marilyn managed a courteous exchange with Queen Elizabeth, at the Royal Command film performance. She had the guts to apologize, at Olivier’s insistence, to the assembled company of The Prince and the Showgirl. She said, ‘I hope you will all forgive me, as it wasn’t altogether my fault. I have been ill.’

  Marilyn would shortly be immortalized in wax at Madame Tussaud’s in London. Her effigy stood glamorously gowned, holding a glass of champagne; but for Marilyn and her husband, after five months of marriage, there was little to celebrate.

  A year before marrying Miller, Marilyn had been asked how she defined love. She replied that love was trust, that to love a man she had to trust him completely. Trust took a beating during the Miller honeymoon. The first blow came early on in the making of The Prince and the Showgirl.

  It was an incident that Marilyn would refer to time and again in years to come, though not always with quite the same details. The core of the story is that, after a party, she happened upon some of Miller’s notes lying on a table. They included comments about herself that Marilyn found deeply hurtful. Lee and Paula Strasberg, both in England at the time, were the first to hear what had happened.

  ‘It was something about how disappointed he was in me,’ Marilyn told the Strasbergs, ‘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 that he, Arthur, no longer had a decent answer to that one.’

  Marilyn told Bob Josephy, a Connect
icut friend of the Millers, that the sense of Miller’s note was, ‘My God, I’ve married the same woman’ — meaning that he saw in Marilyn some flaw identical with a trait in his first wife, Mary Slattery. The discovery plunged Marilyn into misery because, she told Josephy, Miller had ‘hated’ his first wife. Years later, Marilyn was to claim that Miller’s note described her as ‘a whore.’

  There seems no doubt a note did exist; according to one source, it remained in the possession of Paula Strasberg for many years. Miller eventually acknowledged that he might have written such a note. Less than two years after Marilyn’s death, moreover, his controversial play, After the Fall, appeared, drawing heavily on the playwright’s experiences with Marilyn. While it is dangerous to make too much of fiction, Miller did include a scene in which the female protagonist finds an upsetting note.

  In After the Fall the Marilyn character, ‘Maggie,’ angrily tells her husband not to mix her up with his former wife. Her husband replies, ‘That’s just it. That I could have brought two women so different to the same accusation — it closed 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.’

  During The Prince and the Showgirl Miller may have realized, as he certainly would in the future, that he could not count on Marilyn’s fidelity. There had long since been a public question mark over Marilyn’s true relationship with her partner, Milton Greene. The rumors evaporated in the excitement over the marriage to Miller, but they may have been founded on truth.

  In 1980, in his autobiography, entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr, wrote of Marilyn: ‘While 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. He was a photographer. … They met clandestinely, often at my house. She was always being followed there, and we had to get up 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.’

  Milton Greene was, of course, a photographer, and he did count Sammy Davis among his friends. It was Greene, indeed, who introduced Davis to Marilyn. Asked about Davis’s story, Greene laughed hugely and asked, ‘Did he really say that? You may be right, but I’m not saying anything. I think the best way to keep it, is that we were close friends and associates, and we loved each other. Period.’

  In After the Fall the scene over the husband’s notes occurs as he struggles to prevent his wife from suicidally swallowing a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. That, certainly, reflected a real situation during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl.

  On Marilyn’s arrival the press, all unknowing of the true situation, had asked fatuous questions about her sleeping habits. Marilyn replied, ‘Well, let’s say that now I am in England I like sleeping in just Yardley’s Lavender.’

  The truth was less romantic. Marilyn was sick from lack of sleep, and from the remedies she used to try to induce it. Author Fred Guiles, who talked to Miller, wrote: ‘Before, she had been troubled by insomnia partially relieved by pills. Now even they didn’t work. As the night deepened, she became hysterical. He was unwilling to risk the amount of barbiturates that could drop her into a sodden slumber. Nightly vigils began.’

  Milton Greene, who dealt with the wreckage of Marilyn in the mornings, added frightening detail. ‘She wanted gin with her tea at 9:00 A.M. before going on the set. I would cut it, and cut it again, to weaken it, and she would get angry. I would have to feed her the uppers she wanted. They came in a different color in London, and she’d think I was faking, changing the pills.’

  On the set Paula Strasberg acted as keeper of the pills, and doled them out during breaks in filming. Greene put it bluntly: ‘She was going out of her mind.’ As on Bus Stop, Marilyn’s New York psychiatrist was flown to London to calm her down.

  While in England Marilyn once again met the poetess Edith Sitwell, whom she had first encountered three years earlier in Hollywood. Sitwell declined to tell the press what they discussed, but she was to say when Marilyn died, ‘If anyone had asked me to compile a list of people who I thought might commit suicide, I would have put her name on it.’

  Arthur Miller and Sir Laurence Olivier found common ground in the ordeal of dealing with their women. Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, had long been subject to breakdowns and uncontrollable violent rages. During the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl, Leigh suffered a miscarriage. Marilyn began vomiting, was attended by the Queen’s obstetrician, and rumors flew around that she too was pregnant. Sources conflict as to whether she too lost a baby.

  In the course of all the dramas Olivier and Miller began to confide in each other. The British critic Kenneth Tynan learned something of what passed between them.

  ‘Larry identified with Miller,’ Tynan recalled. ‘He saw the troubles Miller was going through in his marriage to Monroe, who was not far from being a madwoman with all her psychoneurotic idiosyncrasies — whereas Miller was a stable, sober character, much like Larry. He and Miller talked about it — about the trials of being married to huge stars who, in one way or another, were round the bend.

  ‘Miller was very defensive. He went on and on trying to justify his sufferance of Marilyn. But Larry soon came to realize that it was just rationalizing. He could see Miller being consumed by the relationship with Marilyn. Miller himself was confused, paralyzed, and he couldn’t work, he couldn’t do the things he needed to do, he couldn’t concentrate.’

  Miller had said he would be using the stay in England to finish his next play. The servants at Parkside House heard the clatter of the typewriter, but there would be no major work from Miller till the screenplay of The Misfits, four years later.

  In mid-November 1956 a subdued Marilyn, wearing black under her mink, flew back to the United States with her husband. There would be no more filming for nearly two years. In that oasis of leisure, perhaps, the wounded marriage would have a chance to heal.

  23

  MARILYN’S UNION WITH ARTHUR Miller was to last four and a half years, the longest full-time relationship of her life. She would one day say ruefully, ‘I was never used to being happy, so that wasn’t something I ever took for granted. I did sort of think you know, marriage did that.’ If ever Marilyn hoped for happiness, and worked at it, it was now. As for Miller, he gave more of his life and love to Marilyn than did any other man.

  After the false start in England the couple embarked on their first real honeymoon, in Jamaica. For a week or so, undisturbed by the press, they relaxed at Moot Point, the luxurious villa of a British aristocrat. Then it was back to New York, and a new apartment at East 57th Street.

  This was to be known as ‘Marilyn’s apartment,’ just as the home in Connecticut would become ‘Arthur’s farm.’ The phone number, curiously enough, was in the telephone directory, for those who knew where to look. It was listed under ‘Marilyn, Monroe,’ as opposed to ‘Monroe, Marilyn.’ Here, once again, the color scheme was white — white walls, white curtains, pale furniture, and white piano.

  The piano, which had followed Marilyn from California, was virtually the only physical object to survive her childhood. It had once belonged to the actor Fredric March, and Marilyn’s mother had bought it, ‘a bit banged up,’ when Marilyn was eight. She could pick out a few tunes on it, light classics such as ‘To a Wild Rose,’ ‘The Spinning Wheel,’ and ‘Für Elise.’

  The apartment overflowed with books and records, and another familiar resident, Marilyn’s lithograph of Abraham Lincoln, stared down from the wall. On a chess table in the library, ivory kings and queens usually stood suspended in mid-play. Beyond Marilyn’s traditional Alaska of a living area was a well-appointed study for her husband.

  That year, in two of the rare interviews she would now offer on her private life, Marilyn made her priorities clear. If ever it became an issue, she said, she would have no hesitation in giving up her career
to preserve her marriage. ‘Movies are my business,’ she said, ‘but Arthur is my life. Wherever he is, I want to be. When we’re in New York Arthur is the boss.’ Marilyn said later that at the start of their marriage she had a ‘pupil-teacher relationship’ with Miller.

  Marilyn made other declarations of intent. She insisted, just as she had in the DiMaggio marriage, ‘I need to be here to get my husband’s breakfast and to make him a cheerful mid-morning cup of coffee occasionally. Writing’s such a lonely kind of work.’ Now, more than in the DiMaggio marriage, Marilyn actually did some of these things. ‘Marriage,’ she told one interviewer, makes me feel more womanly, more proud of myself. It also makes me feel less frantic. For the first time I have a feeling of being sheltered. It’s as if I have come in out of the cold.’

  Miller, whom Marilyn called ‘Art,’ Poppy,’ or ‘Pa,’ called her ‘Penny Dreadful,’ ‘Sugar Finney,’ and ‘Gramercy 5.’ When his collected plays were published that year, he dedicated them to Marilyn. He said he had come to terms with being recognized wherever he went with Marilyn, and he vigorously defended her taste for revealing clothes. Miller’s enthusiasm for Marilyn matched hers for him, in his serious way.

  ‘Marilyn is a perfectionist,’ he said, ‘and she makes impossible demands of herself. I do, too. You can never reach what you’re after. I try to help Marilyn accept this truth, and she helps me.’

  On the wall of his study Miller kept a photograph of a blonde, the face almost lost in shadow, not instantly recognizable. ‘That’s Marilyn,’ he would say. ‘I like the tenderness in it, the dreaming quality, and I like it because she’s relaxed. Not many people ever see her that way.’ That year Miller would proclaim himself ‘a new man at forty-one. I’ve learned about living from her.’

  Jim Proctor, a close friend of Miller, said of that spring and summer, ‘I don’t think I ever saw two people so dizzy with love for each other. …’ The ugly experience of England seemed to have been a false portent. Away from filming, Marilyn seemed to be getting herself under control.