Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Returning to New York before the end of November, Marilyn was determined to rest during the early stages of her pregnancy. But on December 16, she miscarried; it was the last time she tried to be a mother. Both for sleep and as a tranquilizer, she had been taking Amytal, a brand name of the barbiturate amobarbital, and now she guiltily recalled Leon Krohn’s warning, as she wrote to the Rostens: “Could I have killed it by taking all the Amytal on an empty stomach? I took some sherry wine also.” For weeks she was inconsolable, convinced that the drug abuse she now freely admitted had caused the spontaneous abortion.

  The Christmas–New Year holiday was a time of quiet recuperation, and Marilyn entered 1959 in a depression she tried to alleviate by taking sleeping pills as sedatives against tension and anxiety, a practice not generally discouraged by physicians at that time. But Amytal and Nembutal are themselves depressants, and so there was sometimes a vicious cycle of insomnia, drug-induced sleep, a stuporous morning and a vaguely unhappy day endured by taking more pills. Marilyn’s sessions with Dr. Kris, with whom she resumed regular visits, seemed to provide little comfort or illumination. Kris prescribed the sedation Marilyn requested and, it may be presumed, recorded and monitored the amounts.

  There was one particularly uncomfortable side effect of her drug use: chronic constipation, which she countered by increased reliance on enemas. Since 1953, she had taken one a day before special occasions if she felt bloated, so that she could fit snugly into a form-fitting gown. But by 1959, her enemas had become as casual a habit as a haircut or shampoo and far more dangerous; pharmacy receipts for that year include the purchase of several sets of the necessary paraphernalia.

  Marilyn returned to her private classes with Lee and to workshops at the Actors Studio—both of these to Arthur’s annoyance, as Susan Strasberg recalled, for there was a widening rift between him and her parents. Marilyn also dutifully read film scripts submitted by her agents—none of them, she replied, either appealing or appropriate; and she worked with Arthur on further improvements to the Roxbury house, the first home she had ever owned with anyone.

  Marilyn was no recluse, however, and she was particularly delighted to meet famous writers that year. Carson McCullers extended an invitation to her Nyack home, where Isak Dinesen joined them for a long afternoon discussion on poetry. Carl Sandburg, who had met Marilyn briefly during the filming of Some Like It Hot, was also an occasional visitor to her apartment for casual literary discussions à deux. He found her “warm and plain” and charmed her by asking for her autograph. “Marilyn was a good talker,” according to Sandburg, “and very good company. We did some mock playacting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her a lot of questions. She told me how she came up the hard way, but she would never talk about her husbands.”

  In 1959, Marilyn was not, therefore, the invariably withdrawn, darkly self-absorbed (much less suicidal) enigma of later myth. She had some days when she was (thus Susan) “restless because she wasn’t working,” and so she rightly seized every possibility of a happy occasion.

  Photographs of her at the New York preview of Some Like It Hot in February, and the premiere party at the Strasbergs’ in March, for example, show a luminous, smiling Marilyn all in white: she looked like cotton candy, someone remarked. On a promotional tour for the film, she was as ever low-keyed and generous with the press. Mervin Block, a reporter for the Chicago American, recalled that at a press luncheon at the Ambassador East on March 18 she seemed “uncomfortable in the presence of so many strangers,” but that she was “patient and cheerful. Even when a nervous photographer spilled a drink all over the front of her dress, she remained calm, showed no anger, didn’t act like the great star she was.”

  As for their long-planned film of The Misfits, John Huston was reading various drafts of the screenplay. Otherwise, Arthur’s dramatic works-in-progress were stalled and, as one friendly observer noted, he could not see how to give them a push. His own anxious inertia was ironically highlighted by his reception, on January 27, of a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In painful times, as Dante wrote, the worst agony is the remembrance of past glory.

  On such occasions, Marilyn rose to the moment. She invited Arthur’s family to dinner, livened the atmosphere with jokes and, on request, sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Of Arthur’s relatives, she especially loved his father and frequently invited the senior Millers to Fifty-seventh Street. Marilyn fussed over Isadore, devoted a day to prepare a meal he especially liked, offered him little gifts and treated him as lovingly as if he were her own father. If he dozed, she untied his shoelaces and brought a footstool; if he had a cold, she brought soup and a shawl.

  Marilyn’s fundamental courage and lack of self-pity at this time was most evident in the way she dealt with a marriage in swift decline. As the year and her inactivity progressed, she lost interest in the plans for expansion at Roxbury. “Empty hours oppressed her,” according to Susan, “and she seemed bored with the part-time role of country housewife.” Marilyn had hoped to find a literary mentor, father and protector in Arthur, but this was an ideal no man could fulfill; for his part, he had wanted her for his tragic muse, his occupation, and he used her fragility as the excuse for his own literary setbacks. She was his artwork faute de mieux. Here, then, were two people once in love but now vainly dependent on Marilyn’s public persona and the iconography of fame to keep them together. “I guess I am a fantasy,” she said sadly of this time.

  But all was not gloomy. On May 13, Marilyn received Italy’s Oscar, the “David di Donatello,” as best actress for The Prince and the Showgirl. Four hundred people jammed into the Italian consulate on Park Avenue where Filipo Donini, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, presented the award. Ten days later, an interesting offer came from her old friend Jerry Wald, who had produced Clash by Night. He had another script from Clifford Odets and thought they might revive a successful moment of history with a new Wald-Odets-Monroe project called The Story on Page One.

  Producer and writer wasted no time in outlining the story for her. The role of Jo Morris, as they described it, was that of an attractive, lonely and disconnected woman, raised by foster parents, unprotected and open to all kinds of abuse. Dependent on men, she nevertheless believes that she has more to offer the world than beauty, and her shrewdness enables her to survive. Intelligent and charming, she longs for love at any cost and, hoping to find a safe harbor from her past, she marries an older man and even tries to have children. But her husband becomes unreasonably jealous and brutal.

  The story outline had proceeded only so far when Marilyn replied that she was interested in something from Clifford Odets, but that she would await a completed script; she was also doubtful about the news that Odets was to direct. Most important, as she told Paula, Marilyn recognized that The Story on Page One read like an outline of her own life. From the end of May though mid-June, letters, telephone calls and occasional telegrams augured well for The Story on Page One. But then Marilyn fell ill. On June 23 at Lenox Hill Hospital, her New York gynecologist, Dr. Mortimer Rodgers, operated to relieve again the condition of chronic endometriosis and her abnormally painful menstrual periods, her unusually severe bleeding and her infertility.4

  After she spent a quiet summer, Marilyn heard again from Jerry Wald, who was back on the wire with another subject, at first called The Billionaire and eventually Let’s Make Love. This seemed an idea full of promise, planned by Wald and Twentieth Century–Fox as a Technicolor, CinemaScope musical comedy with a script by Norman Krasna, who had written comedies for Carole Lombard and Marlene Dietrich; most recently, he had revised his play Kind Sir into the successful comedy Indiscreet for Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. At first, The Billionaire was to have been directed by Billy Wilder, whom Marilyn approved but feared would not work again with her; in fact, Wilder told Rupert Allan he would be delighted to do just that—but he was already at work on his next script (The Apartment). She then agreed with Wald’s suggest
ion of George Cukor, who had directed Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman, among other important Hollywood ladies. “He told me not to be nervous,” Marilyn said of her first meeting with Cukor. “I told him I was born nervous.”

  Marilyn was to play an actress named Amanda Dell who performs in an Off-Broadway musical satire also called Let’s Make Love. This show-within-the-show satirizes the fabulously wealthy French-born, New York businessman Jean-Marc Clément. He decides to visit a rehearsal and, without revealing his true identity, he is hired as an actor—to play himself. Clément falls in love with Amanda, who until the last minute refuses to believe the truth that her co-star is really a tycoon.

  Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck turned down the male lead—either because of the song-and-dance routines or because they were unwilling to serve as mere acolytes in a Monroe picture. Wald and Cukor then had the idea that an authentic French musical star would be the perfect choice and Marilyn, on their recommendation and Arthur’s, yielded. Her leading man, appearing in his first American picture, would be none other than Yves Montand, who had played in the Paris production of The Crucible and recently had a great success with his one-man show on Broadway. “I’m sure he accepted for one good reason,” Arthur Miller said years later. “It meant he was breaking into movies as a leading man opposite Marilyn Monroe” (neither an unwise nor unworthy motive). On September 30, Marilyn signed to do the picture; negotiations for Montand, which included a paid trip to Hollywood for him and his wife, Simone Signoret, were completed before Christmas.

  Meantime, Fox employed Marilyn as a good will ambassador. Nikita Khrushchev’s historic tour of America was at its peak that September, and the film industry’s banquet in his honor was held on September 19 in the most lavish commissary of them all, Fox’s Café de Paris. From her table (where she chatted amiably with Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Joshua Logan and others), Marilyn was summoned to meet the Soviet premier: he smiled, gazed unblinkingly into her blue eyes and shook her hand so earnestly and so long it hurt for days. “He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman—that’s how he looked at me,” she reported proudly. An interpreter conveyed some small talk about The Brothers Karamazov, which by then had been filmed with Maria Schell as Grushenka, and Marilyn had only warm words for Schell’s performance. Yes, she would like very much to visit Russia, she replied to Khrushchev’s invitation. For perhaps two minutes, the Cold War thawed slightly.

  In October and November, there were preproduction details: wardrobe fittings, color tests, meetings with Cukor and scene-study with Paula Strasberg, who was included on the team as usual. This time there were also rehearsals and prerecordings for several songs. According to Frankie Vaughan, the British pop star who played a supporting role, “She was always on time for rehearsals. There were none of those notorious late starts. When she arrived, everybody smartened up, as if her presence was the light that fell on everyone. Certainly she seemed to me very professional.” These numbers required some basic choreography, and because dancing on-camera made Marilyn more nervous than anything else in a movie, she demanded the help of her old friend Jack Cole, who had trained her throughout the rigors of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and There’s No Business Like Show Business.

  At the same time, an even deeper friendship was established. An actor known as “masseur to the stars,” Ralph Roberts had earned high esteem among theater and movie folk because of his sophisticated knowledge of physiotherapy and of the special muscular problems often afflicting actors and dancers. He had met Marilyn at the Strasberg home in 1955 when he, too, was both student and close friend of the family. Roberts had acted on Broadway in The Lark with Julie Harris and Boris Karloff, and he had trained the actor who played the masseur (a surrogate Ralph Roberts) in the opening scene of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

  Over six feet tall and ruggedly handsome, Ralph had a solid reputation as a Southern gentleman in the classic mold, soft-spoken, compassionate and courtly. He was also widely read and had refined, multicultural interests. That season, he was in Los Angeles, and when Marilyn heard that he had greatly helped Judy Holliday during the filming of Bells Are Ringing, Marilyn rang him at once. From the day of their reunion, he was “Rafe” to her: she preferred the British pronunciation. More important, he quickly became her closest friend and most intimate confidant for the rest of her life.

  Very soon, Marilyn needed Ralph’s support. With the holidays there arrived her co-star, the formidable, smoothly romantic Yves Montand. Under Cukor’s supervision, Montand and Marilyn began to rehearse the early scenes of Let’s Make Love, a movie which bore, as Simone Signoret said, un titre prémonitoire—a threatening title.

  1. In this regard, one likes to recall a fascinating moment in 1922, when British archaeologists were unearthing the pharaohs’ tombs. In one mummy case dating from the eighteenth century before Christ, there was found among the usual artifacts a seedling. A member of the team planted and nurtured it, and soon there was a flourishing little mustard tree.

  2. At Fox, for example, the market on peroxide was cornered by Jayne Mansfield, who wore Marilyn’s notorious gold lamé dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while Sheree North inherited Marilyn’s red beaded gown from the same movie. At Universal-International, her tight bodices from two pictures were loaned out for Mamie Van Doren; her form-fitting corset from River of No Return was handed over to Corinne Calvet for Powder River; Marilyn’s white pleated dress from The Seven Year Itch swirled round Rosanne Arlen in Bachelor Flat; and outfits from several Monroe films were worn by Barbara Nichols in hers. At Columbia, Cleo Moore was taught how to walk like Marilyn, while at MGM, RKO and elsewhere, Barbara Lang, Joi Lansing, Diana Dors and Beverly Michaels had to sit through hours of excerpts from Marilyn’s pictures, studying her. Even Sidney Skolsky championed a substitute Marilyn. Most of these women never had a chance to discover if they could do anything other than imitate someone inimitable.

  3. Notwithstanding any objective valuation of their merit, the playwright’s entire corpus of plays and screenplays following his marriage to Marilyn—from The Misfits (1960) through After the Fall (1964) and up to The Last Yankee (1993)—comprises an encoded guide to the network of conflicted feelings about his life with Marilyn Monroe, a complex he seems never to have completely resolved.

  4. The Story on Page One was eventually completed by Odets and filmed with Rita Hayworth in the leading role.

  Chapter Eighteen

  1960

  MARILYN WAS A smiling, bubbling, beautiful hostess. She still has the old glamour, the magic.” So wrote her friend Sidney Skolsky, inspired by a reception Marilyn hosted for Yves Montand at Fox’s commissary during the second week of January.

  “Next to my husband and Marlon Brando,” she said, offering a toast, “I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.”

  This remark brought polite applause, and heads turned toward the guest of honor, whose English vocabulary was poor and heavily accented. “Everything she do is original, even when she stand and talk to you,” he read haltingly from a card. “I never see anybody who concentrate so hard. She work hard, she do scene over and over and over but is not happy until perfect. She help me, I try to help her.”

  At first, this kind of warm collegiality prevailed as well at the Beverly Hills Hotel, that sprawling pink complex of Mediterranean revival buildings on Sunset Boulevard, where the studio installed the Montands in bungalow number twenty and the Millers a few steps away in number twenty-one. After the tensions of the previous year, an uneasy truce seemed to prevail between the Millers: they hoped, Marilyn told friends, that The Misfits—his Valentine for her, she called it—might restore their marriage.

  Arthur had known the Montands since 1956, and the couples had had several pleasant evenings together in New York the previous September, when Yves was the toast of Broadway. Now they dined together each evening when Yves and Marilyn returned from rehearsals. Over spaghetti in
one suite or lamb stew in another, Montand practiced his English, asking Arthur and Marilyn for help and trying to understand a humorless and badly structured script. Simone, a bit more fluent and then between film assignments, described her leisurely days of shopping and her walking tours of Beverly Hills. Marilyn complained about Let’s Make Love, which was turning out to have more holes than the wheel of Swiss cheese the Montands kept in their kitchenette: “There was no script, really,” she said later. “There was nothing for the girl to do!” And Arthur, puffing on his pipe, had to agree that, yes, the script pages he read were abysmally unfunny and riddled with clichés.

  By the end of January, Arthur was in Ireland, working at John Huston’s home on his own revisions for The Misfits. Although that script was far from camera-ready, he returned in mid-March for an astonishing reason—to write some scenes for Let’s Make Love.

  In his memoirs, Miller wrote with lofty bitterness that his work on this picture meant “a sacrifice of great blocks of time . . . [for] a script not worth the paper it was typed on”—a task, he said, that he undertook only to give his wife emotional support. His assessment of the screenplay is astute, but the circumstances of his involvement were somewhat different, not to say determinative for the course of the Millers’ marriage.

  On March 7, the Screen Actors Guild joined the Writers Guild, already on strike against producers and studios, and from that day, every Hollywood production shut down—just when Let’s Make Love had some of its most pressing script and production problems. The major issue at stake for these unions was additional payments to actors and writers for the television broadcast of their earlier films, for which studios were now realizing huge new profits, and no playwright or screenwriter would dishonor the strike to work on the problematic sequences of this film. But to everyone’s astonishment—Marilyn’s most of all—Jerry Wald prevailed on Arthur Miller to break ranks. According to Yves Montand, Miller “came running [back from Ireland] to rewrite some scenes, pocketed a check [from Fox] and complained about prostituting his art.”