Marilyn
Page 39
Once again Marilyn was living a complex life: she was operating as the president of MMP, as a producer, as a perfect wife, and—from time to time—as a movie star. She was also in therapy and studying at the Actors Studio, again doing brilliant work in scenes in Strasberg’s classes. She played the prostitute in Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods, first produced in Paris in 1901 as Les Avariés. She also recited Molly Bloom’s soliloquoy, which ends James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Molly pours out her sexual longing and satisfaction in a burst of words. To highlight the eroticism of her performance Marilyn wore a black velvet dress that seemed painted on her body. Incredibly sensual, according to Susan Strasberg, the Molly Bloom she portrayed was an earthy, resilient woman. She was no waif when she played Molly Bloom. She was strong, “like a D. H. Lawrence heroine throbbing with life.”36
Then she became pregnant in June, and her life once again seemed fulfilled. Arthur sent her a bouquet of three dozen Lady Bountiful red roses and a bunch of baby’s breath as a token of congratulations and love. Their marriage once again seemed on track.37
One hopes that Marilyn was able to decrease her pill intake during this time of some stability in her life; Ralph Greenson, her last psychiatrist, thought she had a strong ability to kick addiction when she was determined. But drug addiction itself can produce insomnia, and Nembutal addicts experience an initial high before the calming effect of the drug kicks in. Withdrawing from it can be difficult, producing headaches, joint pains, and other symptoms. Marilyn had an addict’s knowledge of drugs, so perhaps she also knew how to take them in ways that kept her functioning and allowed her to have respites from them. She became overweight during the summer of 1957, on Amagansett, which suggests that she gave up amphetamines during that period; although she was also pregnant. Yet she still could be high one day and low the next, or cycle minute by minute. She seems to have had a chemical imbalance in her brain.
In July the judge for the contempt-of-Congress citation gave Arthur a suspended sentence and a five-hundred-dollar fine; at least he didn’t have to go to jail.
In mid-August she miscarried, plunging her into deep depression. Arthur was beside himself; he didn’t know what to do. Then Sam Shaw suggested that he turn his short story about Montana cowboys, which had been published in Esquire magazine, into a screenplay for Marilyn, a loving tribute that would give her the dramatic role she wanted. Arthur plunged into rewriting it, turning the story’s peripheral female character into the central character of the screenplay. Marilyn seemed pleased about the endeavor. Sam Shaw took pictures of Arthur and her late that summer in Amagansett and in New York, looking radiantly happy. In September, in what amounted to another healing measure, they went to Roxbury to buy a house. They found an eighteenth-century farmhouse with two hundred acres of land near the first house he had owned. This was to be their bucolic retreat, where Arthur could write his books in solitude, close to nature, and Marilyn could cook and garden. They’d fulfilled the fantasy they had constructed on their walks in England. Roxbury was a close-knit community, and New York artists and writers had second homes there. Arthur already knew everyone, and Marilyn would quickly be accepted.
One night in early September Arthur noticed that Marilyn’s breathing had become labored, which can indicate a Nembutal overdose, since a large dose of the drug relaxes the muscles of the upper body so much that it eventually shuts down lung function. He called the local emergency squad, and they revived her. When she awoke, she thanked Arthur repeatedly for having saved her; the overdose, if that’s what it was, was probably accidental. She might flirt with suicide, but she wasn’t ready to attempt it seriously.38
The negotiations with Fox over what film she would make continued. In October Lew Schreiber, now executive manager at Fox, went to New York to meet with her. Fox executives had had difficulty finding a costar to play the older professor in The Blue Angel, and they wanted her to agree to postpone the deadline for signing on the film until the end of 1958. Schreiber thought Marilyn agreed to the postponement if they secured Spencer Tracy for the role, but he made the mistake of not getting her agreement in writing.
In early January 1958, Robert Montgomery, now Marilyn’s lawyer, wrote Fox a letter stating that because the studio had missed the contractual deadline Marilyn didn’t have to do the film, but Fox still had to pay her $100,000 for it. Internal Fox memos reveal their anger at her. Schreiber contended that she had morally committed herself to the role in their October meeting, but he had no proof. According to Frank Ferguson, Fox’s head lawyer, Montgomery was playing a game of poker with them, arguing over the specifics of her contract, again using her stardom as his major chip.39 Neither Schreiber nor Buddy Adler, the new head of Fox, seems to have been as astute as Darryl Zanuck in dealing with Marilyn, although he had been outfoxed in negotiations over the 1955 contract. In this instance, Fox would eventually pay the $100,000 that Marilyn demanded.
Problems developed in the Millers’ marriage. The specter of Marilyn’s drug taking was always there, as well as her mood swings. She used her drug taking to manipulate Arthur, acting like a child, but in many ways Marilyn was still a child. She pouted; she had tantrums; she cried easily. Her childish ways could be delightful, as when she ran through the house, laughing and singing, or played hide and seek with children, entering deeply into the spirit of the game. But it could be annoying, inappropriate behavior to someone like Arthur, involved in his own world.
To get his writing done, Arthur sometimes went to Roxbury, leaving Marilyn alone with May Reis, her secretary, or Hazel Washington, Marilyn’s housekeeper. But Arthur wasn’t a paragon. He inserted himself into MMP and advised Marilyn on her career, which led to friction between them. He was also devoted to his own career, which could conflict with Marilyn’s. He was setting himself up to be charged with betraying her, should he cross her. Fearful that he might abandon her, she had turned into a model loving wife, but that pose could change. She’d charged both Natasha Lytess and Milton Greene with betrayal, and not even a husband was immune from Marilyn’s belief that, given her stardom, everyone wanted to get what they could from her.
Then money problems hit—at least Arthur thought they did. His plays weren’t being produced widely, and his royalties were low. After he paid alimony and child support, his income was almost nil. Marilyn’s settlement with Fox in 1955 had included back pay, and she was receiving a generous salary from MMP. She was supporting them, even paying Arthur’s bills for therapy and for lawyers to fight the contempt-of-Congress charge. He didn’t like her being the primary family earner, and neither did she. In the 1950s the male breadwinner ethic was strong. Husbands were supposed to support their wives. Moreover, Arthur was frugal, and Marilyn wasn’t. She was going to the best designers for her clothes and spending a lot of money on cosmetics and facial treatments. The Roxbury farmhouse needed improvements. Marilyn approached famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright to build them a new house on the property, one appropriate to her stardom. The house he designed had a circular living room sixty feet in diameter with a domed ceiling, and a swimming pool seventy feet long jutting out from it. Arthur decided it would be prohibitively expensive to build. They decided on a much less expensive redesign of the original house, which still cost a lot.
The Misfits soon became an issue between them. Arthur began writing the script for the movie in August 1957, after Marilyn had the miscarriage. But Marilyn soon became ambivalent about the project, as Arthur turned the female character into a carbon copy of her, even naming his character Roslyn, which sounded similar to Marilyn. She surely knew that she had already been a model for the character Lorraine in “The Third Play,” and for Abigail in The Crucible. She didn’t like being taken over again. Arthur completed a draft by December 1957, but she agreed to do it only if John Huston directed it. He had been kind to her when he directed her in The Asphalt Jungle. He had a deeply aesthetic side, but he was a pugnacious Irishman who liked brawling and out-of-doors adventuring. Close to Ernest Hemingway,
he resembled a Hemingway hero, quiet, courageous, introspective, a masculine man. Arthur was correct in thinking Huston would like the Nevada cowboy’s world of horses, rodeos, and gambling and would see the pathos in the slow destruction of the open range and the cowboy’s world by capitalist entrepreneurship and the advent of machines. When Arthur sent him the screenplay in the early summer of 1958, he accepted almost immediately.
In the spring and early summer of 1958 Marilyn still went to her psychiatrist, attended classes at the Actors Studio, and saw friends. Depression hit her from time to time; she could retreat to her bedroom, listening to Frank Sinatra records, not doing much of anything. Ralph Roberts called her the “bluest” person he had ever met. But the New York apartment easily became a hive of activity. When journalist Allan Seager interviewed Arthur there in the spring of 1958, it seemed to be “the home of an industry.” Marilyn was in a dressing gown, her hair in curlers. “I’ve got to run; I’ve got an appointment for a Life sitting,” she said. Arthur asked her, “Will you be home for dinner?” Marilyn replied, “I don’t know.”41 To handle the many scripts sent to her and to do secretarial work, Marilyn hired May Reis, who had worked for both Kazan and Miller, and who now turned her devotion from Miller to Marilyn, as Hedda Rosten earlier had. That switch in loyalty is telling. May, known for her radical convictions, took over the small maid’s room, and she sometimes spent the night there. Hedda Rosten still answered Marilyn’s New York fan mail, and Marilyn had a housekeeper and a cook for the apartment.
The Life sitting that Marilyn mentioned when Allan Seager was in the apartment was the one she did with Richard Avedon that spring, in which she mimicked famous temptresses of recent history: Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, and Marlene Dietrich. These photos showed her as encompassing the history of Hollywood actresses, as being a unique amalgam of them. Marilyn loved the Avedon photographs. When French actress Simone Signoret became close to her during the filming of Let’s Make Love, in the spring of 1960, she couldn’t stop talking about them. Signoret concluded that she didn’t like her performances in film roles but she exulted in the photographs taken of her. That judgment was, unfortunately, probably correct.
By that spring the Roxbury house was becoming increasingly important to her. When the weather permitted it, she gardened. To her delight she seemed to have a green thumb with plants. She rode her bicycle and walked Hugo around the property; after all, she and Arthur owned two hundred acres. She went to the nearby farm owned by the Burchall family to watch the cows being milked and to the general store to gossip with the town’s inhabitants. She became close to John Diebold, a business manager and a gentleman farmer who owned land near the Millers in Roxbury. He and his wife met Marilyn at a cocktail party. John was kind to Marilyn and she responded, treating the Diebolds as though they were her parents. They came to regard her as their daughter. She didn’t wear any makeup; she seemed like a country girl to them. Robert Josephy, a communist sympathizer in the 1930s who was in the book publishing business, also met Marilyn at community cocktail parties. She confided in him about Arthur. They occasionally had dinner in New York. Josephy commented that Arthur had no understanding of women.40
Yet domesticity was starting to bore her, and she decided she should make a movie. Then Billy Wilder sent her the script for Some Like It Hot. Walter Mirisch’s production company was to produce it, and Mirisch was connected to Fox, so the studio was willing to let her do it. She was reluctant to play the role of Sugar Kane (née Kowalczyk)—another ditzy blonde—but Arthur talked her into it. He recognized the strength of the screenplay and the excellent money she was being offered. In addition to her standard $100,000, she would be paid ten percent of the gross. Many stars worked under such percentage deals, which were often more lucrative than salaries.
Set in the 1920s, the film is a satire of the Al Capone mob and also of the day’s standards of femininity and masculinity. Once again, as in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, and Bus Stop, she would be called on to satirize herself. Two out-of-work musicians, played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, witness the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, a Capone mob killing of another mob in a public garage in Chicago. Spotted by the Capone mob, they flee. They dress in women’s clothes and join an all-girl band, for which Sugar Kane is the vocalist. Curtis takes on the persona of Josephine, and Lemmon is Daphne. Much of the action of the film takes place at a Florida resort hotel, where the all-girl band has an engagement.
The film was shot from early August to mid-November 1958, mostly in Hollywood, with several weeks of shooting at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, a Victorian resort hotel on the beach that doubled for the one in Florida. Joe E. Brown, playing a much-married millionaire, chases Jack Lemmon (Daphne) as a potential wife. In a riotous scene, Tony Curtis plays the son of another millionaire. He is supposedly impotent, and Marilyn seduces him back to potency. It’s a variation on Marilyn’s frequent stance in her films as a healer of impotent males; during a key scene she makes her usual plea for gentleness in men. At the end of the film the gangsters gun each other down; Lemmon finds that he prefers being a woman to being a man; and Brown wants to marry him no matter who he is. Thus the film upends notions about fixed gender roles and, through the ruthlessness of the gangsters, demonstrates the perils of the links between masculinity and violence. Lemmon and Brown—both of whom reject fixed gender roles—are the most sympathetic characters in the film, aside from Sugar Kane.
Relationships on the set during the making of Some Like It Hot were cordial at first. Billy Wilder was pleased to be directing Marilyn again after her success in The Seven Year Itch. He and Marilyn hadn’t clashed much during its filming, and Natasha Lytess had been helpful. He expected Paula Strasberg, serving as Marilyn’s coach, to do the same. Both Lemmon and Curtis praised Marilyn at the start of shooting. Curtis was especially solicitous, dropping by her dressing room daily to compliment her. He had briefly dated her in 1949, when they were both contract players, and he worried that she might be resentful because he hadn’t called her after a few dates. But her only comment about it was to ask him if he still had the green convertible they had parked and necked in. According to Marilyn, they never had an affair. When he made his infamous remark that kissing her in the film was like kissing Hitler, she was surprised and then furious. He actually said that kissing her after fifty takes was like kissing Hitler. She noted that there was only one way he could comment on her sexuality, “and I’m afraid he has never had the opportunity.”42
Jack Lemmon also appreciated her at first. When he first met her, he was amazed and flattered by her detailed knowledge of his film roles. He praised her for having left Hollywood to study at the Actors Studio; that action, he thought, had shown great courage. Like Joseph Cotten, her costar in Niagara, and Joshua Logan, her director in Bus Stop, Lemmon realized that whatever she did to create a character worked. He noticed that when her acting wasn’t right, a built-in alarm would “go off” in her head. She would abruptly halt and stand with her eyes closed, sorting out the issue without consulting the director or the other actors. She would then figure out what she had done wrong and correct it. She frequently consulted with Paula, but Paula didn’t direct her every movement, as Natasha had.43
Marilyn had problems with the script when she realized that Sugar Kane was mostly a foil for the two male characters. She didn’t like it that Sugar was so dense that she didn’t realize that the two new women in the band—Josephine and Daphne—were actually men. She fought with Wilder to allow her to make her character more distinctive. She persuaded him to reshoot her first two scenes in the film the way she wanted them. Having a blast of exhaust from the train hit Sugar’s backside in her first scene in the film as she runs alongside the train gives the character a sexy panache from the outset and refers back to the subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch. Wilder became stubborn after that, wanting his own way. In his defense, he had slipped a disk in his back and he was in terrible pain
during the filming. But he was another director who wanted control, and dealing with Marilyn’s stubborness made him furious.
Jack Cole was on the set, and he thought Wilder was exceptionally nasty to Marilyn; according to Cole, Wilder constantly made rude remarks to her. Barbara Diamond, whose husband worked on the script, was also present. She thought that Wilder, Lemmon, and Curtis were all hard on Marilyn, making her nervous and unable to perform. As Wilder ordered take after take, it was as though he was trying to show her who was boss. Marilyn wrote Norman Rosten in September that their “ship was sinking,” but at least she didn’t have “a phallic symbol” to lose, the way the men did. The reference was to their self-pride as men who were playing women in the film.44
As had become her habit, Marilyn dealt with the terror she felt at speaking lines in front of a movie camera by medicating herself. She drank coffee from a Thermos after each take, but most people on the set thought the Thermos contained vodka. She flubbed lines, required multiple retakes, and was late to the set either out of terror, as a result of being high, or to rattle Wilder to get her way. As a great star, she felt she had the right to appear when she wanted to, say what she wanted, and have her suggestions incorporated into the film. She made sure people on the set knew how she felt. During one day of filming she stayed in her dressing room reading Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, clearly indicating her feeling of being oppressed. Much was made of her saying “Fuck you” to an assistant director who was sent to bring her to the set.