by Tony Curtis
Arthur Miller showed up that night to pick her up. It was the same deal. He hung around the periphery of the stage, unsmiling, talking to no one. When Marilyn had made her last take, Paula and May and Ann Landers, the wardrobe woman, followed her into her dressing room. Then Marilyn and her entourage headed for the alley outside the stage, where Miller was in a car. Marilyn got in and the car rolled off into the night.
24
On Saturday my phone started ringing. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to know a certain something. Even Janet asked me. The real gasser was when she handed me the phone and Hedda Hopper was on it. I could’ve clobbered Janet for that. But she didn’t mean to aggravate me. We all had to put up with that woman.
“Tony!” came a shrill voice through the receiver. “It’s Hedda. Tell me about Marilyn. Is she expecting?”
“Hedda,” I answered as calmly as I could. “You know it’s my Janet who’s expecting. Next month.”
“Come off it, Curtis. I gave you your first publicity. Don’t forget that. Now tell me. Is Marilyn expecting?”
“Now how would I know that?”
“You kissed her yesterday.”
“I kissed her. I didn’t give her a pelvic exam.”
“Look, Tony. Winchell’s still got it in for you.”
“And?”
“You want me to throw you to the wolves?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know about the girl in Laurel Canyon.”
“Okay, okay.” I looked around. Janet had gone into the next room. “All right. Marilyn’s tits are enlarged. That’s all I can tell you. Okay?”
“Thanks, honey.” Click.
The deed was done. I hoped I wasn’t the only person she’d strong-armed for her story. But she wasn’t kidding about Walter Winchell. Sweet Smell of Success, the picture I’d done with Burt Lancaster, was a slam at Winchell’s tactics. Winchell was no longer as powerful as he’d been, but he still had the syndicated column, and he hated me. I didn’t want to antagonize him.
On Monday, October 20, we went into week twelve. Until then we’d been having a fairly good time. “I have never watched a film put together in the midst of so much hilarity,” wrote Jon Whitcomb, the famous artist. “During Billy Wilder’s rehearsals with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, electricians, scene shifters, prop men, and, in fact, the entire crew spend their time roaring with laughter.”
I was delighted to have Jack as a costar. He could be theatrical without worrying if he was making a fool of himself. He was comfortable in his own skin. That giggle he did as Daphne wasn’t just clever. It was inimitable. It was brilliant.
Jack didn’t mention his personal life at work. We both came from a certain tradition. When you were on the job, you never discussed politics, religion, family, or sex. It just wasn’t done in those days. But when I saw him at Hollywood parties, he had a glass of whiskey in his hand and he was more forthcoming. I doubt that he was ever satisfied with his performances, no matter what anyone else said about how good he was. Maybe that’s why he drank after work. Not to excess, from what I saw, but he liked his cocktails. A lot of men who are gentle need to drink because they’re embarrassed about not being cavemen. That’s my theory, anyway.
Morale was sinking. We felt like we were reporting for duty—and with psychosomatic ailments. “Billy had to have a therapist get him out of bed in the morning,” said Audrey Wilder. He was walking with a cane. “I never knew what kind of a day I was going to have,” said Billy. “What kind of a character is Monroe going to be today? Will she be cooperative or obstructive? Will she explode before we get a single shot? That was the problem. I never knew.” We were all on edge. And Marilyn, who had asked to work with Billy in the first place, was no longer calling him Billy. She was addressing him as Mr. Wilder. I wondered if she’d figure out who talked to Hedda Hopper. On Monday morning Marilyn arrived on time.
“Good morning, Marilyn,” said Jack. “How are you?”
“Yeah,” Marilyn answered blankly and walked on.
She was followed by May Reis, Paula Strasberg, Whitey Snyder, and Sydney Guilaroff, and she promptly disappeared into the makeup department. Three hours passed. What was this? Then we saw her come out of makeup. She was carrying a book I’d seen before, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Looking straight ahead, she walked not to her chair on the set, but to her dressing room. Billy nodded to John. He followed her. She slammed the door. He got to it a few seconds later. He knocked.
“Miss Monroe. We’re ready for you.” Nothing. He knocked again. He could hear her locking the door. He knocked again. “Miss Monroe. It’s eleven thirty and the company is waiting.”
“Drop dead.”
“Miss Monroe, Mr. Wilder has asked—”
“Fuck off.”
John reported this exchange to Billy, who later described it as a turning point in the production. “We were in mid-flight,” he said, “when we discovered there was a nut on the plane.”
Part of Marilyn’s snit was due to the presence of Jon Whitcomb. He’d been on the set for about a week, but Marilyn had studiously avoided him. Now word had come from Arthur Jacobs and Tom Wood that she had to cooperate—or else. So she’d taken refuge in her dressing room. Then May told her that Jon was going to do his pastel portrait of her for the cover of Cosmo by first taking still photos of her. Well, when she heard the word photos, her ears perked up. That was different. Marilyn loved being photographed by a man. For her, this was the ultimate aphrodisiac. It was more than that. It was a way to control someone. She needed to control every man in her sphere. She was never neutral. Depending on the man, it was either “I love him” or “I hate him.” But she was incapable of ignoring a man. She had to play to each and every one.
The door of her dressing room magically opened. Jon was invited in. Then he and Marilyn emerged. She was wearing underwear and the fox stole. They headed for a hastily set-up backdrop. Floyd McCarty and a couple of grips helped with lighting, although Jon seemed to know what he wanted. He had a pleasant manner.
“Do you have a favorite pose, Marilyn?”
“Oh, no,” she cooed. “It just has to come naturally. You know, from deep inside.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “Well, how about pretending you’re Pola Negri.”
“Who’s that?”
“A silent picture star. Okay, let’s see. I know. How about pretending you’re posing for calendar art for Earl Moran.”
“That’s better,” she laughed. “But it wasn’t for Mr. Moran that I posed. It was for Tom Kelley, the photographer.” She slipped the stole off one shoulder. “And it was pretty much all of me.” She paused for effect. “But, you know, I needed the money.”
Jon was snapping away with a Rolleiflex camera. “There’s more of you now, isn’t there?”
“My husband likes me this way.”
“And your hair? What color is that? Is there a name for it?”
“I call it ‘Pillow-slip White.’ ”
Jon ran out of film. Floyd reloaded for him. “What’s the beauty spot?” Jon asked.
“Whitey painted it on,” Marilyn answered. “It’s how they wore them in the Twenties, I guess.”
The session ended, and Marilyn’s hair had to be reset so that she could join Jack and me in the hotel set. Jon followed her into her dressing room. The conversation turned to Arthur Miller.
“My husband says he never writes plays for any particular actor or actress,” said Marilyn. “But he says if a part I can do turns up in one, I can be in it. Arthur and I bought a house in Roxbury, Connecticut. It was built around 1800, and has three hundred acres of land. About one hundred acres are in forest. I’ve learned how to transplant nasturtiums. He says I have a green thumb.”
In about half an hour Marilyn came to the set, followed by Jon and Paula. She launched into her hand-shaking ritual. “I do it to get started,” she told Jon. “An actress has to do something to get wound up. Some do one thing, some another. I shake my hands.” Bi
lly said to me that she looked like she was in a public washroom that had run out of paper towels. A few feet away, May walked up. She was carrying the Los Angeles Times. She sat down next to Paula and began reading it. I remembered Hedda Hopper’s column.
Jon went over to Billy. “Contrary to what you may have heard,” Billy said to him, “Marilyn is absolutely tireless. She always thinks she can do a scene better than before. Her face will light up and she’ll say, ‘Can we do it again?’ ”
May folded the Times and handed it to Paula, who stared at it, looked around the set, and rose to her feet. Tom Wood was standing nearby. Paula walked over to him and handed him the newspaper. There was a short exchange. Billy was still talking with Jon. “It’s silly to speak of this film as a comeback,” said Billy. “Will Mount Kilimanjaro make a comeback?”
Tom came over to Billy, took him aside, and whispered something. Billy came back and shook Jon’s hand. Jon got the point. Then, as quickly as Jon had appeared, Tom made him disappear. Billy did not want him to see what was about to happen.
25
I knew what would happen when Marilyn read Hedda Hopper’s column in the Los Angeles Times. “Marilyn Monroe’s closest friends believe she’s pregnant,” wrote Hedda. “If true, I hope she’ll be able to carry this baby. She’s been out of the picture several times, but Billy Wilder says she’s so great he can forgive her anything, especially when she’s not well. Jack Lemmon will be delighted to hear that Wilder thinks he has a touch of genius and that Tony Curtis is tops.”
Gee, thanks, Billy, I thought to myself. And thanks, Hedda, you insufferable bitch.
The door to Marilyn’s dressing room was shut. Billy, Paula, May, and Tom were inside with her. I could hear her voice, muffled though it was. “That fucking old bitch! Those cocksuckers!” Good, I thought. She’s not talking about me. After a few minutes, the fulminations ceased. I heard the door open and close. I waited a decent interval and went back to the set. I had my wig on. And slippers. My feet hurt.
We were supposed to shoot two scenes where Sugar bursts into Daphne and Josephine’s room. In the first, she tells them about her date with Mr. Shell Oil Jr. In the second, she tells them he’s going away to South America. In movies, when there’s a scene on the same set with a similar setup, it’s customary to shoot them at the same time, regardless of where they occur in the story.
In 1958 a day of shooting cost $10,000. Marilyn had cost the production thirteen days, so Some Like It Hot was over budget. If it went too far over budget, the Mirisch Company would be in trouble. There were only so many theater seats in America. Spend too much on a movie, and even if it filled all those seats for two weeks, you wouldn’t make a profit. This was the Mirisches’ third movie under their new United Artists contract, and it was a crucial one. They had to prove themselves to UA. So we were doubling up.
It was almost three when we saw the slate boy getting ready. We were lit, and Marilyn had been called. Twice. Billy asked Paula to coax her into the scene. “Paula sympathized with me,” Billy said later. “She was most cooperative in trying to pull the girl together.” At the same time he wondered if Paula wasn’t the source of the problem.
“Here you have this poor girl and all of a sudden she becomes a fabulous star,” Billy observed. “So now she has all these people around her, telling her she has to be a great actress. It’s too much.” Marilyn finally took her position outside the hotel room door. Paula was talking to her. With all that he’d gone through since the first week of August, Billy had not lost his temper, but he did not like Paula. None of us did. In fact, I think most of us hated her. “I’m not convinced Marilyn needed training,” Billy said later. “God gave her everything. Before going to the Actors Studio she was like a tightrope walker who doesn’t know there was a pit she could fall into. After the Strasbergs got to her, she thought of nothing but the pit.”
In this scene, Marilyn was supposed to call through the door: “It’s me, Sugar.” The camera was shooting past us. I was in bed, hiding my street clothes under the covers, and Jack was standing. Billy was shooting the inside of the door first. Then he would shoot an angle of Marilyn in the hallway, saying her line. He called “Action,” and Jack and I said our lines. We came to Marilyn’s cue. Nothing happened. “Cut.” Where was she? There was an expectant silence. “We could hear Marilyn snapping her fingers nervously,” Billy recalled. “She couldn’t bring herself to walk through the door. She was paralyzed.” We tried again. Same thing. And again.
“When you call ‘Action,’ ” said Billy, “an actor will invariably do something. Anything. Even if it’s the wrong thing. But not Marilyn. It took her twenty seconds to say a line or make a move. So to get her to come in at the right time, which is after the others are through speaking, I pressed the light button (her cue to come in) before they said their first line.” She came in on cue. But she forgot to say “It’s me, Sugar.”
“Cut.” Next take. “Action.”
“Uh, it’s Sugar. Me.”
“Cut.” Next take. “Action.”
“Sugar. Me.”
“Cut.”
Billy calmly walked from behind the camera, over to the door, and spoke with Marilyn for a moment. He returned to his place, called for another take, and Marilyn blew it again. After twenty-six more takes, he called the prop master over. A cue card was prepared and taped to the outside door jamb. In big letters: “It’s me, Sugar.” On the next take, Marilyn still got it wrong.
At take forty-two, Billy walked her away from the door. He took a breath and said, “Don’t worry, Marilyn.”
She looked at him with a blank expression. “Don’t worry about what?”
“We’ll piece it together.”
“I’m not worried.”
“That’s good. Very good.” He walked back to the camera. “Okay! That’s all for today.”
We came back in the morning. It started again. “Sugar. Me. Sugar.” After fifteen takes, she finally got it. The next setup was outside the door. It wasn’t as bad. It only took twenty-three takes. And I wasn’t standing and waiting for her. I had my feet in a bucket of ice water.
In the afternoon we came back to do the other scene that takes place inside the door. We’d have done both of those in one afternoon if it wasn’t for Marilyn. This scene required her to come through the door, stop, look at the chest of drawers, and say “Where’s that bourbon?” Then she had to go through a couple of drawers and not find it. Then she was to walk over to where we were standing, by the end of a bed. It was a simple shot. Three words: “Where’s that bourbon?”
“Action.”
“Where’s the bottle?”
“Cut.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“The line is ‘Where’s that bourbon?’ Once more, please. Action.”
“Where’s the bourbon?”
“Cut. It’s ‘that’ bourbon.”
“Sorry.”
“Action.”
“Where’s that whiskey?”
“Cut.”
“It’s ‘bourbon,’ not ‘whiskey,’” sighed Billy.
“Sorry.”
“Action.”
“Where’s that bonbon.”
“Cut. It’s not candy. It’s liquor. Bourbon whiskey.”
“Action.”
“Where’s the bourbon whiskey?”
“Cut.”
Three words. Three little words, as the song goes, and they were not “I love you.”
“She could not get them out,” remembered Jack. “Billy was going bananas. I have never seen a director come up with so many different ways to tell her how to play it after each of these takes. She’d say, ‘Sorry,’ and walk out the door, shaking her hands to relax her fingers.”
“We’ve got one hundred fifty thousand feet of film of Monroe shaking her fingers,” Billy told me later. I remember that they had to change the film magazine twice, just for this stupid shot. It was crazy.
“Action.”
“Where’s the
—oh, sorry. I’ll do it again.”
Jack and I looked at each other and then at the slate. It said take thirty-four. I looked at his legs.
“Cramping?”
“No, thank God. Not yet. What do you think it’s gonna go to?”
“Fifty,” I answered.”
“Ten bucks she does it in forty.”
“You’re on.”
Billy walked over to Marilyn again and chatted with her. Paula brought her some water. Not the thermos. “All right, Marilyn. Action. ‘Where’s the bourbon?’ ”
“Where’s that—wait. You said ‘Where’s the bourbon?’ I thought it was that—”
“My mistake. Once more. Action.”
“I can’t,” said Marilyn. “It wasn’t my mistake.”
“Don’t mind me. I’m only the director,” Billy said in a low voice.
I was in agony. My calves were crying out for mercy. Billy may have been the soul of patience. I wasn’t.
“Billy,” I asked, “how many fuckin’ takes are we gonna do?”
“When Marilyn gets it right, that’s the take I’m stopping at.” If Billy was learning a lesson in patience, I was learning a lesson in humility. It wasn’t an easy one.
Marilyn started to cry. Billy called Whitey to fix her makeup. And the process started again. It produced the same results. “Billy started giving her direction between takes that was incredible,” Jack said later. “I never heard such brilliant direction. He dreamed up every imaginable thing to get those words out. To have her play the scene in any conceivable, legitimate way. None of it worked.”
By take fifty Marilyn just came through the door and stopped. “Sorry, I have to do it again.” After the next take, the bet I’d made was immaterial. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. Everybody did—except Marilyn. “Sorry. I’ll do it again.”
