Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  In his autobiography, Huston was frank about the matter: “I spent a lot of my nights in the downstairs casino. . . . There was mostly craps, blackjack and roulette. . . . I had a marvelous time losing my ass one night and winning it back the next.” But losses prevailed, and Huston frequently fell ill from hard living. “The telltale sign that he was feeling better,” wrote one biographer, “was his return to the casino.”

  Huston’s fierce gambling was not, as some have claimed, the director’s diversion from the problems of working with a temperamental star. Before Marilyn arrived on the picture, Huston had already established a credit line at the Mapes Hotel casino and was betting hundreds each night. Within ten days, his stakes had reached to ten and twenty thousand a night: according to the production’s archivist, Huston put all of his spare cash on the dice tables, winning, risking, gaining and tossing away enormous sums of money—“losing steadily but with no apparent regard for how much.” When Marilyn saw that this happened nightly, and that her director was sleeping while she was in turmoil over her performance, the result was predictable: she retreated further. Denied the support of her husband-screenwriter and deprived of rudimentary directorial courtesy, she was a lost soul. She was neither amused nor flattered when Huston invited her to gamble one evening; trying to play the good sport, she shook the dice and turned to Huston.

  “What should I ask for, John?”

  His reply was typical. “Don’t think, honey, just throw. That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it.”

  Chaos continued to bedevil The Misfits. Paula Strasberg, who was now being paid $3,000 per week, seemed dazed, but no one knew that Paula was in the first stages of the bone marrow cancer that took six years to kill her. As Susan recalled, in 1960 Paula was already taking massive doses of narcotics, secretly stashed in her carry-all. In fact, her only concern was Marilyn’s welfare, as even Huston had to agree: “I think we’re doing Paula a disservice,” he told his secretary. “For all we know, she’s holding this picture together.” In an important way, she was, simply by being ever available to Marilyn.

  Meantime, pills for Marilyn were flown in every other day, supplied by her Los Angeles doctors.2 Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan, who shared the responsibility for soothing companionship with Marilyn, were surprised when Ralph Greenson wrote a prescription for three hundred milligrams of Nembutal (trade name for the barbiturate pentobarbital sodium) each night; the normal dose for insomnia, then as later, is one hundred milligrams for a maximum of two weeks, after which tolerance occurs and the drug’s effectiveness diminishes. Serious poisoning and even death can occur after ingesting anything more than two grams.

  In addition, local physicians provided supplements—even to the extent of injections. Nor did Miller intervene: “I was almost completely out of her life by now.” And with these drugs, Marilyn’s depression was aggravated, her confusion increased, her speech was often incoherent and her gait unsteady. She suffered dreadful nightmares, her moods vacillated unpredictably, she broke out in rashes—and still Marilyn worked each afternoon. As Rupert Allan remembered, she would step away to perforate Seconal capsules with a pin before washing them down; this method of accelerating the effect could have been lethal.

  “It took so long to get her going in the morning that usually I had to make her up while she lay in her bed,” recalled Allan Snyder.

  Girls on the crew would have to put her in the shower to wake her up. All of us who loved her knew that things were coming apart something terrible. We felt an awful despair. And still Arthur continued to make the character of Roslyn worse and worse, and Marilyn knew it.

  Yet somehow she did manage to complete her scenes, and on August 10 the film was only two days behind schedule.

  Then, on August 16, John Huston dropped $16,000 at the dice table—a loss precipitating one of the most demeaning fictions attached to the life of Marilyn Monroe. The $16,000 brought Huston’s total gambling losses to over $50,000, far beyond what the production company of The Misfits had agreed to offer as an aggregate sum for casino credit to him and the entire company. At the same time, the cash outlay for the production had been enormous, and when Max Youngstein, vice-president of United Artists, came to visit the shooting, it was clear that Huston had gone too far. At that precise moment, both the Mapes Hotel casino and Harrah’s were calling in the debt.

  There was only one solution: Huston had to raise quick cash. The alternative was for the production to be indefinitely shut down, for the weekly payrolls could not otherwise be dispensed. Thus began a series of quietly frantic telephone calls from Huston to friends in San Francisco. Filming continued on a day-to-day basis, and for the moment no one was aware of the imminent crisis. Huston had boasted that “the one great lesson in gambling is that money doesn’t mean a goddamn thing,” but he was now disabused of this conviction.

  On Saturday, August 20, Marilyn flew to Los Angeles, as she often did when she had a free two-day weekend during production. She consulted Greenson and Engelberg on these visits, obtained her medications and prescriptions and, on at least two occasions, met Montand, then nearing completion of his new film. But he was required at the studio on the twentieth, and they could not meet. This Marilyn understood, and in any case she was preoccupied with the purchase of a new gown for the world premiere of Let’s Make Love, which was to be held in Reno. That mission accomplished, she slept soundly at the Beverly Hills Hotel and on Sunday morning returned to Nevada, where the premiere had to be canceled because of a power failure. Ralph Roberts and May Reis had accompanied her on the trip.

  The gossips, however, were working at full tilt, and that Sunday, Montand gave an interview to Hedda Hopper in which she pressed him for details about his relationship with Marilyn.

  I think she is an enchanting child, a simple girl without any guile. Perhaps I was too tender and thought maybe she was sophisticated, like some of the other ladies I have known. I did everything I could to make things easier for her when I realized that mine was a very small part. The only thing that could stand out in my performance was my love scenes, so naturally I did everything I could to make them realistic.

  His statement was meant for the benefit of his wife, whom he was soon to rejoin, as Marilyn knew full well; still, they were ungallant words, not to say oozing Gallic condescension.

  With the publication of Hedda Hopper’s column the following week, there were again headlines about a lurid romance gone wrong; these were imaginatively hooked up to the difficulties on The Misfits, and soon newspapers and magazines were trumpeting Marilyn’s near collapse over the end of a relationship as well as the hardships of the summer’s filming. And this would provide John Huston his net of safety.

  As the production files and published history of The Misfits make clear, Marilyn was back at work on Monday, August 22, joking with colleagues and apparently refreshed from two consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep. The next day, she worked painstakingly with still photographers, rejecting some prints for publication and approving others; and on the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth she appeared in difficult sequences (at the rodeo with crowds, and in scenes with Gable), all of which required many retakes.

  Then, on Thursday, August 25, Max Youngstein informed John Huston that The Misfits bank account was dry as the Nevada desert. The director had not come up with enough cash to cover his gambling debts, and filming would have to be suspended for a week until corporate meetings at United Artists in New York and Los Angeles approved additional payments for the production. Huston asked that no immediate announcement be made to the cast; he would, however, inform Arthur and Marilyn, who were investors.

  Marilyn took advantage of the shutdown to travel to Los Angeles for a long weekend—to see her doctors; to visit Joe Schenck, who was seriously ill and soon to die; to attend a dinner party. Huston, who drove her to the Reno airport, seized her departure for his own benefit. He contacted Greenson and Engelberg, told them of their patient’s barbiturate problem and u
nstable conduct and asked that she be admitted to a private clinic for a week’s rest. The doctors agreed to cooperate. And as an eyewitness recalled, Huston, having put Marilyn on the plane, “returned from the airport cheerfully humming ‘Venezuela,’ and repaired to the casinos where he won three thousand at craps.”

  Far from collapsing on arrival, as Huston predicted would happen (and doubtless hoped), Marilyn checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and attended the scheduled dinner party at the home of Doris Warner Vidor, recently widowed wife of the director Charles Vidor. On Sunday evening, August 28, she met with Greenson and Engelberg, who advised her about the picture’s temporary shutdown and counseled a week’s rest—but not at the hotel, they said. United Artists’ insurance company would cover her sojourn at a comfortable private hospital, and it is a measure of her willing submission to their persuasive arguments that Marilyn was that evening admitted to the Westside Hospital on La Cienega Boulevard. Huston and company now had time to barter for cash.

  Meanwhile, Arthur and The Misfits crew in Nevada were unaware of Marilyn’s whereabouts.3 On Monday morning, the entire company was summoned to a meeting, at which producer Frank Taylor announced that Marilyn had suffered a breakdown and the film was suspended for a week. “And with that,” as Evelyn Moriarty remembered,

  Arthur Miller got up and stormed out—he knew, as we all did, that this was a ruse. Of course she had troubles, we knew that, too. But Marilyn was being blamed for everything. All of her problems were exaggerated to cover up for Huston’s gambling and the terrible waste of money on that production. It was so easy for her to be made the scapegoat.

  “When the press learned of Marilyn’s ‘breakdown,’ they created a sensation,” as Ralph Roberts recalled. On Monday, after a call from a lonely Marilyn, he drove to Los Angeles with Lee and Susan Strasberg; May Reis and Rupert Allan were already in attendance there. “We all went to visit her,” according to Ralph, who remembered that Rupert wished to buy a stack of magazines for Marilyn but did not because her face was on most of them, with lurid stories about her and Yves.

  Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts agreed. Marilyn’s confinement to a hospital had been accomplished with the cooperation of physicians who danced to Huston’s tune and also saw the personal and financial value in attending their famous patient for a week. To be sure, she had an underlying barbiturate habit that deserved attention, but these same doctors were keeping her well supplied with the drugs—actions that even in 1960 were at least careless and at worst downright unethical.

  So it was that John Huston’s secretary said to Evelyn Moriarty on Monday, “Don’t worry, we’ll all be back at work next week”—which they were, on Monday, September 5. Two conflicting realities thus prevailed. On the one hand, Marilyn frequently delayed filming, as did the horses in the film, and the uncertain weather and Nevada’s cloudy skies. But on the other hand is the fact that her pill-taking habits were not so critical that she singlehandedly shut down The Misfits; in any case, she was for years made to bear the burden of the film’s runaway budget, which by then topped four million dollars. Had she in fact been desperately ill, as Huston gave out to the press, how could it be announced on the first day in hospital that she would return promptly in time for filming a week later? Hyman Engelberg himself confirmed that on August 29: “My guess is that she will probably be able to go back to work in a week,” he told the press. “She is just tuckered out.”

  As often happens, the enforced rest enabled her to make certain hard decisions. “She was very brave,” according to Ralph, “but she didn’t want us to do anything for her. She wanted the security of knowing we were with her, but she could do for herself, and she wanted to be well. Under all that frailty was a will of steel.” But at the same time, she was entirely submissive to her therapist, as was soon clear to her closest friends. As Rupert Allan put it, “Greenson had an amazing amount of control over her life. When she checked into the clinic, he announced in my presence that she would be allowed only one incoming and one outgoing call a day.”

  To his credit, Arthur arrived within hours in Los Angeles and attended Marilyn daily until September 4, when she returned with him to Reno—“looking wonderfully self-possessed,” as he wrote years later; “her incredible resilience was heroic to me,” but by this time “we both knew we had effectively parted.”

  Until October 18, she was in Nevada completing The Misfits. Miller continually rewrote script pages, Huston gambled and after a warm welcome by the cast and crew Marilyn was working with renewed energy. According to the production diary, “when she was told [about late script changes], she stayed up the entire night preparing the [new] scenes.”

  From October 24 to November 4, the final interior scenes and process photography for the film were completed at the Paramount Studios, Hollywood. There, Marilyn and Clark made a private pact: they would agree to no more last-minute revisions: “I know Arthur’s a good writer,” she said plaintively to Huston one evening, “but I don’t want to see another new word he’s written. Not for a while, please.” Gable was adamant: exhausted from the months of location work, he flatly refused multiple takes and new pages of dialogue.

  On Monday afternoon, October 31, Henry Hathaway (who had directed her in Niagara) saw Marilyn standing alone outside the Paramount soundstage. Approaching her, he noticed that she was crying. “All my life,” she said between sobs,

  I’ve played Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe. I’ve tried to do a little better and find myself doing an imitation of myself. I so want to do something different. That was one of the things that attracted me to Arthur when he said he was attracted to me. When I married him, one of the fantasies in my mind was that I could get away from Marilyn Monroe through him, and here I find myself back doing the same thing, and I just couldn’t take it, I had to get out of there. I just couldn’t face having to do another scene with Marilyn Monroe.

  Herein lies one of the most poignant elements in Marilyn’s life—and particularly in her life with Arthur Miller.

  The teenage wife, the model and starlet had worked tirelessly to become accepted, to be the star Grace McKee Goddard had proposed as her destiny. And so she was, in her twenties, the lacquered blonde of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How To Marry a Millionaire and The Seven Year Itch. But she had finally resented and rejected the artifice of the manufactured Marilyn Monroe, realizing that was itself a role she could assume and put off; that although Hollywood’s Marilyn Monroe was indeed a part of her real self, there was—so she hoped and for it she worked—a deeper self, however unformed.

  She had coveted the vocation of a serious actress, and to that she gave herself fully by leaving Hollywood at the height of her fame, by exchanging the image of the wife of the sports hero for that of the earnest playwright’s wife. Except for her performance in Bus Stop in the spring of 1956, which brought her back to Los Angeles for three months, she had stayed away from the studios for four years—from the conclusion of The Seven Year Itch to the beginning of Some Like It Hot. There was then another absence, over a year, until she returned for the unhappiness of Let’s Make Love.

  To The Misfits, so long in preparation, she had attached the greatest hope of her life: that Arthur would fulfill his promise to her. He provided, we must assume, only what he could, but brought forth, alas, only the image of a forlorn and dejected Marilyn Monroe—not the maturing person who had completely altered her acting style, not the performer of increasing range and depth whom Hollywood continued to misperceive and underrate. She was in The Misfits only a pale, wan, frightened remnant of the image she had hoped to abandon. “I couldn’t face having to do another scene with Marilyn Monroe,” she had said, because she knew she was capable of more, and that the standard-issue “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed herself changing.

  Perhaps only in this context can her performance in The Misfits be assessed. In this, her last completed film, she had her most disappointing major role: Roslyn disallowed her to be anything other than a biased caricatu
re of herself, minus the humor, absent the liveliness. There are moments of admirable command—her cries of resentment against the capture of animals, the shadings of confusion and dismay that flicker across her face as she rides across the desert. Audiences and critics then as later generally found the film arid and static, although Marilyn was praised by a few veteran admirers for her “serious, accurate performance . . . Miss Monroe is magic, and not merely a living pin-up dangled in satin before our eyes.” Once again, she gave an exceptional performance in a mediocre film, and in this regard The Misfits synthesizes and summarizes her entire movie career. It had been only thirteen years since Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!, and in twenty-nine films she had had less than a dozen leading roles. Neither the films nor the roles were ever as fine as her performances in them, and she knew it.

  None of Marilyn’s self-awareness, none of her gifts, her courage, her impatience with herself and her patience with others, was inconsistent with personal problems and reliance on sleeping pills. Arthur Miller was right: she was something of the life force.

  But that, too, is richer than anything so vague and vain as beauty. The medieval mystics would have described her weeping on the studio lot that October day as “the gift of tears”—a moment of epiphany, the crisis in the life of a woman hitherto stymied by a nation’s shallow popular image of a merely sexy, pretty girl. Blocked by stereotypes she yearned to forget, she longed to sleep; even this was in a way a desire to annihilate the “Marilyn Monroe” who had already died in her.