Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  In all these appearances, people noted, there was indeed a new Marilyn, a woman more poised, with more self-confidence and assurance than before: so much was confirmed by a number of reporters to whom she granted interviews in February and March, among them writers for McCall’s, Modern Screen, Harper’s Bazaar, The Saturday Evening Post, Movieland and The Toronto Star. “She seemed content and more serious than ever before,” according to Allan Snyder, with whom she had a happy reunion. But her manner on a movie set remained to be assessed.

  The usual personal dramatic scenarios continued. Informed of Marilyn’s return to Los Angeles, Natasha Lytess tried desperately to contact her. A dozen telephone calls and several hand-delivered letters came to Beverly Glen within the first week of Marilyn’s return, but she ignored them, having quietly replaced Natasha with Paula Strasberg just as she had dropped Famous Artists and signed on with MCA. But here there was a poignant twist, for Natasha had been stricken with cancer and was no longer able to work at Fox. Entirely dependent on her work with private students, she hoped to resume with Marilyn.

  Marilyn’s lack of response confused and hurt Natasha deeply, and then, on March 3, she received a telephone call from Irving Stein:

  I identified myself as Marilyn Monroe’s lawyer and instructed her firmly not to call Marilyn Monroe or visit or attempt to see Marilyn Monroe. These instructions must be obeyed to avoid trouble. Natasha, whom I’d never met, called me “Darling” and asked if I’d listen. The following are exact quotes: “My only protection in the world is Marilyn Monroe. I created this girl—I fought for her—I was always the heavy on the set. I was frantic when I called the house and she would not speak to me. I am her private property, she knows that. Her faith and security are mine. I’m not financially protected, but she is. Twentieth told me on Friday, ‘You don’t have your protection any more, we don’t need you.’ . . . But my job means my life. I’m not a well person. I would like very much to see her even with you if only for one half-hour.” I told her no. Marilyn wouldn’t and didn’t intercede and we didn’t want to speak to or see her. I told her she must not call Marilyn or I would have to use other means to stop her.

  “In Marilyn’s powerful position,” Natasha said a few years later, “she had only to crook her finger for me to keep my job at the studio. Had she any sense of gratitude for my contribution to her life, she could have saved my job.” With this statement it is impossible to disagree, for however thorny the relationship had been, Natasha was always available to Marilyn.

  In great emotional and physical pain, Natasha arrived unannounced at Beverly Glen on March 5. Lew Wasserman, present for a meeting with Milton, answered the bell, “barring my way, his arms stretched across the doorway. ‘Your engagement with the studio,’ he said, ‘is none of Miss Monroe’s concern.’ ” Natasha glanced up, and there at a second-story window was Marilyn, looking down at her without expression. “It was the last time I ever saw her,” Natasha said not long before her death. “Between us there was always a wall, and communication was impossible. I have wondered many times that I still care.” To everyone’s astonishment, Natasha Lytess outlived Marilyn, but after a long and bitter struggle she succumbed to cancer in 1964.

  That Marilyn ignored so humble a plea, that she could have dictated a recommendation and did not, that she turned away from one who had negated herself to cater to Marilyn—all this remains a conundrum, an uncharacteristically inclement act of her life. But Natasha was, after all, a mother figure like Grace Goddard, and once again Marilyn—even while she was trying to create an entirely new life with a new set of colleagues—was perhaps primarily motivated by the subtle desire to reject Natasha before Natasha (by dying) withdrew from her. The entire scenario recalled the term of Grace’s relationship with Marilyn. Perhaps out of guilt for her unkindness to Natasha, Marilyn at once contacted Inez Melson, who was charged with the supervision of Gladys’s care, and then she called the office manager at Rockhaven Sanitarium. Her payments for Gladys’s care were indeed arriving regularly through Inez—three hundred dollars monthly.

  As the starting date for Bus Stop approached, Milton Greene assumed the burden of details and finalized the production schedule. For a man without an hour’s experience in such matters, he learned quickly and for the most part expertly. In all his tasks he was much assisted by Irving Stein, who ran interference with Marilyn: for the moment, she was indifferent to everything except what would affect her performance. But she also felt Milton’s assumption of so much responsibility gave him control of MMP—its long-range plans as well as daily decisions—and this aroused her suspicions.

  For the present, however, Marilyn devoted her energies to working with Paula—relying on her guidance as they broke down the script of Bus Stop scene by scene, analyzing every line and preplanning every gesture. Sometimes Paula was able to encourage her with gentle reassurance; at other times, Marilyn would be drained and tearful after an hour with Paula, convinced she could never rise to expectations. Yet whereas with Natasha originality was often blocked from Marilyn’s rehearsals and performances, Paula drew out moments of real inspiration.

  First of all, Marilyn perfected a flawless Texas-Oklahoma twang for Cherie, the dance-hall “chantoosie.” This would be her chance to be taken seriously in a major film, as she knew; nothing would be left to accident, nothing improvised. Milton had worked out the look of the picture and the texture of each scene as he worked on the script; Milton, too, designed Marilyn’s makeup—an almost ghostly white pallor for a woman who sings and dances through the night, sleeps most of the day and rarely sees sunlight.

  Longing to repeat her early success in The Asphalt Jungle, she had asked for John Huston, but he was unavailable. Typically, Lew Wasserman stepped in and settled the problem quickly. He contacted Joshua Logan—a large, Falstaffian man, brilliant, imaginative, neurotic, deeply troubled by insecurity and by his lifelong efforts to suppress and then to conceal his homosexuality. Logan was one of the two or three most honored Broadway directors, famous for staging South Pacific and Mister Roberts, among other hits. More recently, he had directed the film of Picnic, which featured a memorable performance from Susan Strasberg, the daughter of his old friend Lee. “But Marilyn can’t act!” Logan objected when Wasserman offered him the job. Consult Susan’s father, Wasserman retorted.

  “I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of actors and actresses, both in class and in the Studio,” Lee intoned gravely when Logan asked, “and there are only two that stand out way above the rest. Number one is Marlon Brando and the second is Marilyn Monroe.” This opinion became virtually a Logan doctrine, lovingly repeated by him numerous times before and after Marilyn’s death.

  Logan accepted the assignment only on the condition that, although he liked Paula, he would not suffer her interference directly on the set. After all, he had a reputation for being able to work with the most vulnerable and tortured actors (Margaret Sullavan and Henry Fonda, among others). Paula could coach Marilyn to their hearts’ content in dressing room and trailer, at night and at meals, but she was not to be seen near the set or the camera. His injunctions were soon ignored—and a good thing, too, for Paula’s “interference” turned out to be inspired coaching: the differences in Marilyn Monroe’s acting, beginning with this performance, are everywhere evident.

  Yet for all her benefits to Marilyn, Paula’s contributions were sometimes undermined by her husband, who first demanded that Paula receive a fee of $1,500 per week. “Marilyn is too emotionally weak to handle this sort of thing alone,” Lee told Milton in Marilyn’s presence. “She needs Paula.” There was no quicker way to diminish Marilyn’s confidence, but there it was: Milton balked, Irving fumed and Fox complained, but Marilyn insisted and so Paula Strasberg received $1,500 each week, more than any member of the crew, any designer or the composer—and more than most American film actors. Lee Strasberg made it clear (as had Natasha) that Marilyn’s new strength derived from his tutelage, transported to her through Paula: to move out
on her own now would be unthinkable.

  This was the effect of living in the Beverly Glen commune as well, for with Marilyn there was a thin line separating the situation of a supportive extended family from that of her lifelong feeling that she was the puella aeterna. Marilyn may have been at her creative peak, but it was not to Lee’s advantage for her to believe that.

  As some might have predicted, this spelled trouble. Marilyn worked with Paula late into the night, on location and back at the studio; then, emotionally strained beyond exhaustion, she could not sleep. Milton kept her supplied with the barbiturates she felt she needed, importing them from various doctors in Los Angeles and New York in whatever quantities were necessary. The result was not surprising: often in the morning, Marilyn looked as wan as Cherie and was difficult to awaken, much less deliver on time to the set. Logan was forewarned of this and, alone among her directors, smartly arranged alternate camera shots for almost every morning.

  Much of this was the strategy of the former Marilyn. But with the maturity and resourcefulness of the new came an occasional imperiousness, an attitude that, since she was president of her company, she ought so to act. It was a mask, a new way of covering her old fears, but crew members were often hurt and confused. Nor did the chemical effects of nightly dependence on sleeping pills enhance (much less stabilize) her mood.

  With these strains and tensions, the company arrived in Phoenix on March 15, where the annual rodeo provided setting and action for important sequences, and where Marilyn met her leading man, a young stage actor named Don Murray who was appearing in his first film. She was not a friendly player with Murray, perhaps because she was older (though only three years) and terrified of appearing so, but also because (thus Milton in a note to Irving) “she wants to let everyone know whose show this is.” Throughout the filming, Marilyn passed notes to Joshua Logan, to George Axelrod and to Paula Strasberg, fearful that Murray would make her look foolish and that Hope Lange, a younger blonde in a supporting role, would make her look unattractive. “Like a child,” according to Murray, “she said and did things impulsively, from a self-centered viewpoint. When she thought I’d ruined a scene of hers, she continued the action as rehearsed, taking her costume and hitting me across the face with it. Some of the sequins scratched the corner of my eye and she ran off. But she wasn’t deliberately mean.”

  Besides these obvious, sometimes crude ways of demonstrating her supremacy on the set, however, it was in important ways artistically Marilyn’s show, too, and here the other side of her rose magnificently to take control. When the designer showed her a showgirl’s costume that was simply too glamorous, made for Technicolor, CinemaScope and the possibility of an Oscar, she knew it was not at all in character. Marilyn insisted on something shredded, worn, at once paltry but provocative. She rummaged through the wardrobe department, found a torn and moth-eaten item, then poked holes through fishnet stockings and designed a brilliantly shabby outfit that evoked Logan’s blissful admiration.

  As filming progressed, Milton’s initial strategy was to forbid access to Marilyn—which for the press and their colleagues created terrific problems. “Milton seemed to want complete control over her,” photographer William Woodfield recalled, “and we had to devise all sorts of odd means to shoot her—long focuses through a hotel window, two-hundred-millimeter lenses on cameras under bleachers and tricks like that.”

  According to journalist Ezra Goodman, who was forever stymied in his attempts to reach Marilyn, she was “surrounded with intrigue and a coterie of advisors headed by Milton Greene who [ran] interference for her and [did] their best to gum up the works where a reporter is concerned. No one gets to Monroe without first clearing through him.”

  On March 18 in Phoenix, Marilyn and Milton argued loudly over MMP absorbing the cost of Lee Strasberg’s visit to the production. Immediately after the discussion, she was called to film a portion of the rodeo sequence and suddenly fell from a six-foot ramp. Dazed and in momentary shock before writhing in pain, she lay very near to Milton, who as usual was constantly taking still photographs of every scene. “He just kept clicking away with his camera without moving to help her,” as George Axelrod recalled. “I was a photographer before I was a producer” was Milton’s reply to George’s query as to why he did not rush to her aid. Perhaps because of the general tensions associated with filmmaking, Marilyn and Milton also engaged in a heated debate over the upcoming presidential election, an argument which production assistant David Maysles and Irving Stein noted through March and April with decreasing patience.

  From the hundred-degree desert heat of Phoenix, the company traveled to the Idaho mountains, where amid snowdrifts and subzero temperatures they managed to complete a few scenes in Sun Valley for five days beginning March 26. When they returned to Los Angeles, the leading lady and several of her supporting players (Arthur O’Connell, Betty Field and Hope Lange) were suffering from a nasty virus. On April 5, studio physician Lee Seigel ordered Marilyn home to bed, and Logan tried to work around her. But her condition worsened; by the twelfth she had a high fever and acute bronchitis, and after consultation with another doctor, Seigel ordered Marilyn to the hospital. The company shut down for a week.

  The same day that Marilyn entered St. Vincent’s, Arthur Miller entered a cottage at Pyramid Lake, forty miles from Reno, where he began the two-month residency requirement necessary for a quick divorce. Several nights later, Marilyn telephoned from her hospital room, desperate and weeping. “I can’t do it, I can’t work this way. Oh, Papa, I can’t do it,” she cried. She tried to explain the difficulties she was having. “I’m no trained actor, I can’t pretend I’m doing something if I’m not. All I know is real! I can’t do it if it’s not real!” Arthur listened anxiously.

  “I want to live quietly,” Marilyn continued. “I hate it, I don’t want it anymore, I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can’t fight for myself any more.” In his memoirs, Miller added, “I saw suddenly that I was all she had.” This was not a caution to him, however: on the contrary, it seemed only to propel him closer to the resolve of marriage, confirming him in the role of healer: “We would marry and start a new and real life . . . her pain was mine.”

  Yet for all her stated dependence on Arthur, Marilyn had grave doubts from the start about any rush to the altar, and she still begged him not to break up his family to marry her. Marilyn was of divided mind: she wanted to be with Arthur in the country and she longed for a simple life. But if this seemed like a fantasy by Thornton Wilder, she knew that, too, had a dark underside: Our Town is full of compassion for lives darkened, stifled and derailed. Even while she thought she wanted to retire, Marilyn also wanted to work, to be respected as a serious adult, to transform a messy past into an ordered future.

  At the same time, she was especially needy of comfort during filming, and so she did not hinder Arthur from visiting her every weekend in Hollywood (on which journeys he technically jeopardized his divorce procedure). As Amy Greene remembered, Logan began to dread Mondays, knowing that Marilyn would be unable to work after a weekend with Arthur at the Chateau Marmont Hotel—whither (without their knowledge) the FBI tracked the lovers.

  “She was a wreck after those weekends,” according to Amy. “She couldn’t bring Arthur to see us, he couldn’t leave the hotel, and then suddenly, on Sunday night or Monday morning, he slipped back to Nevada. This left her confused, guilty, lonely—and all of that brought on a cycle of pills and sickness.” In a way, the situation was far easier for Arthur, who seemed to Marilyn always calm, composed and in control of the situation.

  Whereas George Axelrod had reworked the film of The Seven Year Itch for Marilyn and satirized her and her crowd in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, the screenplay for Bus Stop was written (thus Logan) “expressly for her, and [he] let the entire story be guided by his feelings for her. . . . The girl was half Inge and half Monroe.” And despite all the problems during production, from the core of strength that
underlay Marilyn’s fragility she created an extraordinarily rich, moving and convincing portrait.

  The story is simplicity itself: a virginal Montana cowboy (Murray) goes to Phoenix for the rodeo and meets a girl from the Ozarks (Marilyn) with whom he immediately falls in love. She resists but is eventually touched by the boy’s sweetness, naïveté and innocence—the qualities she lacks and fears he would require of her. The predictable happy ending unites them.

  From her first appearance, a tired, abused showgirl fanning herself against the heat of a summer night, Marilyn’s Cherie transcends the limitations of the character and the story. Her performance has obviously been thought out, planned with attention to every detail, but nothing seems calculated. Gone are every Lytess-inspired hesitation and every overworked mannerism. “I’ve been tryin’ to be somebody,” she says in her first moments, and we hear the person behind the role. “I can’t quit now—it took me too long to get this far!”

  Her rendition of “That Old Black Magic” in a rowdy barroom presented Marilyn with a delicate assignment, for the song had to be badly sung: this is a girl with pretensions beyond her abilities, after all. Her singing, therefore, is a small miracle—a touching combination of Cherie’s nervous energy and minor talent, her shyness and unrealistic hopes, her longing and her fear. Pulling up her long gloves, trying to be heard over men guzzling beer and playing cards, she gives a brilliantly terrible performance.