Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Marilyn, not generally known for foul language, apparently fell into it now. She responded to early rushes with ‘I’m not going back into that fucking film until Wilder reshoots my opening. When Marilyn Monroe comes into a room, nobody’s going to be looking at Tony Curtis playing Joan Crawford. They’re going to be looking at Marilyn Monroe.’

  Some Like It Hot is the comic tale of two men on the run from gangsters, who don female clothing to join a touring dance band made up entirely of women. One of them, played by Tony Curtis, falls for the girl played by Marilyn, a ukulele player with a taste for whisky and millionaires. Advertisements for the film would describe Curtis and his co-star, Jack Lemmon, as Marilyn’s ‘bosom companions.’ On the set, things were otherwise.

  The way Marilyn drove Curtis and Lemmon to distraction with her interminable delays — and an inability to remember even the simplest dialogue — became a movie business legend. Curtis, whom she once doused with a glass of champagne, was to speak later of Marilyn’s ‘vicious arrogance’ and ‘vindictive selfishness.’ It was also Curtis, in an off-the-cuff remark while watching rushes, who inadvertently recorded for posterity his feelings about the world’s sex symbol. Kissing Marilyn, he vouchsafed, was ‘like kissing Hitler.’

  Marilyn’s preparations for performing astonished onlookers and infuriated colleagues. ‘Before each take,’ wrote Lloyd Shearer, ‘Marilyn would close her eyes and enter a deep trance. She would pull down on her creeping-up bathing suit, style 1927, then suddenly start to flail her hands violently, up and down, up and down, as if she were desperately intent upon separating her hands from her wrists.’ This was part of the technique Marilyn had picked up at the Actors Studio. Paula Strasberg, garbed in black robe, black hood, and dark glasses, was never far away.

  Director Billy Wilder was ill during the making of Some Like It Hot. When it was over, he said, ‘I am eating better. I have been able to sleep for the first time in months. I can look at my wife without wanting to hit her just because she’s a woman.’ Later, comparing the ordeal to a journey by air, Wilder said, ‘We were in mid-flight — and there was a nut on the plane.’

  ‘When you are a director,’ Wilder said in an interview for this book, ‘you try to be a psychologist to some extent. You must establish communication with your people. Normally I learn quickly how to size them up. Marilyn was so difficult because she was totally unpredictable. I never knew what kind of a day we were going to have. I used to worry: What character is she going to be today? Will she be cooperative or obstructive? Will she explode, and we won’t get one single shot? That was the problem. I can cope with anything, but I need to know what is in store. I never knew with Marilyn.’

  In hindsight, like most other directors, Wilder had no regrets. In her uncanny way, Marilyn had once again worked celluloid sorcery. The film received a chorus of critical praise and made a fortune at the box office. It became the Monroe film shown most frequently on television.

  Even before the film appeared, Wilder was saying, ‘She has a certain indefinable magic that comes across which no actress in the business has. … I have an aunt in Vienna, also an actress. Her name, I think, is Mildred Lachenfarber. She always comes to the set on time. She knows her lines perfectly. She never gives anyone the slightest trouble. At the box office she is worth fourteen cents. Do you get my point?’

  Marilyn, by contrast, Wilder said, was ‘an absolute genius as a comic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I’d start working on them and I’d think, “It’s not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.” Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.’

  On September 11, 1958, Marilyn wrote to Norman Rosten from location at Coronado, California. The hotel notepaper was decorated with a beach scene, to which Marilyn added a little female stick figure in the water, waving its arms and shouting ‘Help.’ The letter read (see page 262):

  Dear Norman,

  Don’t give up the ship while we’re sinking. I have a feeling this boat is never going to dock. We are going through the Straits of Dire. It’s rough and choppy but why should I worry I have no phallic symbol to lose.

  Marilyn

  P.S. ‘Love me for my yellow hair alone’*

  I would have written this

  by hand but its trembling

  Once again during this film Marilyn was attended by a psychiatrist and a medical doctor flown in from the East. Now, four days after writing to Rosten, she was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion.’ This time there was reason for concern about Marilyn’s physical health. She was pregnant again.

  As the weeks slipped by Arthur Miller became increasingly worried. He asked Wilder to start letting Marilyn go home early in the afternoon.

  Wilder retorted, ‘But Arthur, I don’t get my first shot until three o’clock. What does she do in the mornings?’

  A puzzled Miller replied that, to his certain knowledge, Marilyn left their room for the set each morning at 7:00 A.M. The mystery of the lost mornings never was resolved.

  Marilyn’s note to Norman Rosten from the set of Some Like It Hot. Her stick figure shouting ‘help’ is at top right.

  On October 27, Marilyn wrote to Rosten:

  Dear Norman,

  Thank you for your Halloween wishes. It’s too bad we can’t be together. I might scare you.

  I haven’t been writing anyone, let alone poems — it’s so spooky here! Arthur looks well though weaker — from holding me up. … I need something to hold on to. …

  Marilyn signed her note with the name of ‘e.e.cummings,’ whose poetry she had been reading.

  The last scenes of Some Like It Hot, completed in early November, involved strenuous physical effort in high temperatures. Marilyn returned to the hospital, then took to her bed at her hotel, ‘so as not to jar the baby.’ She then traveled by ambulance to the airport, and flew back to New York. There, shortly before Christmas, she lost the baby.

  Before she had started Some Like It Hot, Marilyn asked Rosten, ‘Should I do my next picture or stay home and try to have a baby again? That’s what I want most of all, the baby, I guess, but maybe God is trying to tell me something, I mean with my pregnancy. I’d probably make a kooky mother; I’d love my child to death. I want it, yet I’m scared. Arthur says he wants it, but he’s losing his enthusiasm. He thinks I should do the picture. After all, I’m a movie star, right?’

  The movie star had made her film and lost another baby. Marilyn submitted to more surgery to improve the chances of bearing a child, but 1959 brought no new pregnancy. Close friends now had the clear impression that the marriage to Miller was foundering. Rosten, watching the couple, thought they were playing out ‘a facade of marital harmony.’

  Susan Strasberg and her parents, visiting the couple at Roxbury, felt ‘there was a heavy feeling in the house. We thought perhaps they were having a fight. We sat in the living room for well over an hour. Arthur neglected to offer us anything to eat or drink.’

  The Strasbergs had been invited to lunch, yet when Marilyn did appear, it turned out there was no food. Marilyn got drunk, Miller sat around moodily, and the guests ended up by going out to lunch.

  Marilyn was continuing to attend the Actors Studio. In the summer of 1959, driving to the country with Susan Strasberg, Marilyn exclaimed, ‘You know, if it weren’t for the work [at the Actors Studio] I’d jump out of the car.’ Miller, on the other hand, was increasingly disenchanted with the Strasbergs.

  Actress Maureen Stapleton, Marilyn’s friend from the Studio, was appalled by the imbalance she now saw in the couple. ‘Arthur was becoming a lackey. He was carrying her makeup case and her purse, just doing too much for her, and I had the feeling things had gone hopelessly wrong.’ The director Martin Ritt had the same feeling when he dined with the Millers. ‘It was a disastrous evening,’ said Ritt. ‘He was at her beck and call, running
around after her all evening, and it disturbed me.’

  At the same time, as Norman Rosten saw it, Miller was drawing away from Marilyn emotionally, becoming an observer of his own marriage rather than a participant.

  In his New York workroom Miller sat among a pile of scribbled notes, a new Encyclopaedia Britannica — a gift from Marilyn — at his elbow. Miller kept two photographs of her above the desk. Three years earlier he had been ‘finishing’ a new play, yet none had been forthcoming. None would be completed till after Marilyn’s death. In the fall of 1959 Esquire published a profile of the playwright, and called it ‘The Creative Agony of Arthur Miller.’

  For public consumption Marilyn continued to make cheerful statements, but they sounded more and more like rehashed versions of an analyst’s advice. That summer she told a British interviewer, ‘I’ve been scared all my life, really, until now. Scared about so many things, even picking up the phone to make a call. That is the sort of thing I’m getting over at last. My philosophy now is “Enjoy the day.” I don’t fear the future any more.’

  The immediate future included a visit to Hollywood. In September 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to Hollywood during a visit to the United States. Various stars, including Marilyn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Debbie Reynolds, were asked to attend a welcome luncheon at Twentieth Century-Fox. Miller, wary after his battles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, did not go.

  Marilyn flew to California alone, spent five hours beautifying herself, and actually arrived early for the lunch. Khrushchev stopped to speak to her, and she offered him greetings from Arthur Miller. Marilyn would later pound her chest with pride, recalling with delight how ‘Khrushchev looked at me like a man looks at a woman.’

  That episode probably added one more report to the FBI file on Marilyn.

  There had reportedly been CIA interest in making use of Marilyn’s acquaintance with another visiting political leader. During the shooting of Bus Stop, in 1956, Marilyn had met the Indonesian president, Achmed Sukarno. At first she had no idea who he was — she called him ‘Prince’ Sukarno — but she turned up for a diplomats’ party at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Marilyn and the Indonesian took a shine to one another. ‘They kept disappearing to the edges of the party,’ Bus Stop director Joshua Logan recalls. ‘The atmosphere was all S-E-X. I think they made a date to meet afterwards.’

  Years later Sukarno told his biographer that Marilyn, who was also staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, telephoned to suggest a private meeting. A man who loved bragging about his conquests, he uncharacteristically failed to do so about Marilyn.

  Marilyn, for her part, was to react with remarkable passion, a year or so after the Hollywood meeting, to news of an attempted coup against Sukarno. She amazed Arthur Miller by announcing her desire to ‘rescue’ the Indonesian by offering him a home in the United States. She would tell her friend Robert Slatzer that she and Sukarno had ‘spent an evening together.’

  Whatever occurred at the original meeting, it had not gone unnoticed at the Central Intelligence Agency. In those years Indonesia loomed as large as Vietnam in Washington’s view of Asian priorities. In 1957 and 1958, the record shows, the CIA had engaged in all sorts of skullduggery aimed at dislodging Sukarno, who was seen as responsible for his country’s drift toward communism.

  Part of the CIA effort involved a scheme to produce a phoney pornographic film, supposedly showing a blonde Soviet agent in bed with Sukarno. The intention was to use the film to discredit the Indonesian president, but the project was aborted. Later, however, when the United States needed to curry favor with Sukarno, the CIA dreamed of using sex — in the shape of Marilyn Monroe — to make the dictator feel honored.

  According to Joseph Smith, a former CIA career officer in Asia, ‘There was an attempt to get Sukarno together with Monroe. In mid-1958 I heard of a plan to get them in bed together. I remember someone from Washington coming through and talking about “some crazy business with Marilyn Monroe that didn’t work out right.”’

  There is no knowing how far the CIA went in its foolishness involving Marilyn. Applications for relevant documents were unsuccessful.

  There was little secrecy, however, about the marital folly that Marilyn committed in 1960. At nearly thirty-four, after an unhappy idle year, she began to tear apart the faltering marriage to Arthur Miller. The final phase began when she returned to Hollywood for the filming of Let’s Make Love, opposite the French actor Yves Montand.

  *Marilyn was misquoting a Yeats poem in her postscript. The actual lines read:

  … only God, my dear,

  Could love you for yourself alone

  And not your yellow hair.

  25

  IN SEPTEMBER 1959, MR AND Mrs Arthur Miller, M and Mme Montand, and Mr and Mrs Rosten stood in a Broadway dressing room, laughing uproariously about M Montand’s fly buttons. It was the Frenchman’s American debut, and his theater audience had been laughing at improbable moments. The guffaws, Montand learned from his New York friends, were because his fly buttons gleamed in the spotlight whenever he put his hands in his pockets. Thus began, in jollity, a relationship that would end in national scandal and private misery.

  Improbable though it seemed at the time, Twentieth Century-Fox had to struggle to find a leading man for Marilyn’s next film, Let’s Make Love. For one reason or another Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston, and Gregory Peck all sent regrets. In the moment of crisis George Cukor saw Yves Montand doing his song-and-dance routine on television, and suggested his name to Marilyn. The call came just weeks after the meeting in New York. Marilyn’s opinion, soon to be written in headlines, was that ‘Next to my husband, and along with Brando, Yves is the most attractive man I’ve met.’ Montand was hired.

  Let’s Make Love is the story of a billionaire (Yves Montand), the target of a satirical revue, who finds himself falling in love with one of its girl singers (Marilyn). The film was to prove disappointing, inane, an exception in the run of fine films that ended Marilyn’s career. She distinguished herself, nevertheless, with her song-and-dance routines, not least in a sensual rendering of Cole Porter’s ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ Long before the film was finished, however, Marilyn’s heart belonged to Yves Montand.

  Arthur Miller knew and liked Montand. Montand had starred in the French production of The Crucible, and he shared some of Miller’s political convictions. With his wife, Simone Signoret, who had received an Oscar for her performance in Room at the Top, Montand had long avoided the United States rather than sign a declaration that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He and Signoret regularly lent their names to liberal causes in France.

  Montand was one inhabitant of the universe who had never seen a Monroe movie, and he spoke little English. Yet Miller’s judgment was that ‘He fits the role splendidly. He and Marilyn are both very vital people. They possess internal engines which emit indescribable rays of energy. Yves will be one of the big stars of the American screen.’

  So it was, in January 1960, that the Montands and the Millers moved into Bungalows 20 and 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a cozy arrangement. The two couples joined each other for home-cooked meals, and sat around talking into the night.

  Simone Signoret befriended Marilyn and humored her eccentricities. She was amused by the ritual each Saturday, when a little old lady arrived to peroxide Marilyn’s hair. The old lady had been Jean Harlow’s hairdresser, and Marilyn had her specially flown to Los Angeles every weekend.

  Signoret thought Marilyn looked like ‘the most beautiful peasant girl imaginable from the Île-de-France, as the type has been celebrated for centuries.’ Late at night Signoret told Marilyn acting anecdotes, and felt like a mother telling bedtime stories. As a woman, Marilyn did not seem to be any sort of threat.

  As for Montand, he was soon bemoaning the irritations of working with Marilyn. Sometimes, without warning, she would leave the studio for an entire afternoon, and filming woul
d grind to a halt. Montand would pace up and down mumbling, ‘Where is she? I cannot wait and wait. I am not an automobile.’

  Within weeks Miller had to go to Europe on business, and Marilyn promptly went into a decline. She told her doctors she could not continue working on the film because, according to her, one of the camera crew was homosexual.

  One morning Montand telephoned his wife from the studio to say Marilyn had failed to arrive and did not answer her telephone. Simone Signoret hammered on Marilyn’s door in vain. Then the switchboard operator revealed that, though Marilyn was failing to answer the phone, she had recently made an outgoing call. The actress was simply malingering.

  A furious Montand came storming back to the hotel. He wrote a note reading, in essence:

  Next time you decide to hang around too late listening to my wife tell you stories instead of going to bed, because you’ve already decided not to get up the next morning and go to the studio, please tell me. I’m not the enemy. I’m your pal. And capricious little girls have never amused me.

  Best,

  Yves

  Montand and his wife slipped the note under Marilyn’s door, leaving one end protruding into the corridor, then watched as it was slowly pulled inside. Marilyn had the message, but still she did nothing. Montand then shouted through the door that the day’s work was canceled ‘because of absentees,’ and went out till evening.

  At eleven that night there was still no word from Marilyn. Then Miller called the Montands long-distance from Europe to say Marilyn had telephoned him. He asked the Montands to go to her room.

  ‘Suddenly,’ Signoret recalled later, ‘I had in my arms a weeping girl, who kept saying, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad. I won’t do it again, I promise.”’ Montand patted her on the head, and told her to be on time the next day.