The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  While The Sleeping Prince received generally good reviews, critics noted Olivier’s rather wooden performance and felt that Leigh was “strident and a shade too old for the ingenue, and Olivier was a mite too dull for the Don Juan.” Few knew of the unhappiness, bickering, and daily crises that were going on in the wings of their private life, which would later be echoed in Olivier’s brilliant performance as Archie Rice in The Entertainer. Though she appeared to be normal, if strident, onstage, Leigh was suffering from manic-depressive episodes. Between performances she would often become incoherent, partying all night with friends, only to vanish on all-day buying sprees—appearing at the theater just before curtain. During her manic phase, Leigh often hissed to Olivier onstage, sotto voce, “You shit—you absolute shit!”

  By the summer of 1956, the relationship of the fabled theatrical couple had deteriorated to feeble attempts at keeping up appearances and sustaining their professional partnership. Their lives were in crisis.

  LIGHTNING FLASH: Enter Marilyn

  Monroe with Black Bart and entourage—

  Milton and Amy Greene, Arthur Miller,

  Hedda Rosten, and “Whitey” Snyder.

  Marilyn’s entrance was late. Olivier had assembled the cast of The Prince and the Showgirl on a stage at Pinewood Studios for several days of rehearsals before filming began. Shadowed by Black Bart, Marilyn Monroe was tardy by forty-five minutes. Olivier was extremely distressed to see Paula Strasberg at Marilyn’s side. “Paula’s presence alarmed me considerably,” Olivier commented. “I had rarely thought that coaches were helpful…. Paula knew nothing. She was no actress, no director, no teacher, no adviser—except in Marilyn’s eyes. For she had one talent—she could butter Marilyn up.”

  On many occasions Olivier had voiced criticism of Lee Strasberg’s Method, which he viewed as “deliberately anti-technical.” The Method, he felt, dictated “an all-consuming passion for reality, and if you didn’t feel attuned to exactly the right images that would make you believe that you were actually IT and IT was actually going on, you might as well forget about the scene altogether.” For Olivier, acting was pretending, and after all, The Prince and the Showgirl was a fairy tale. Olivier was very good at pretending.

  The first day of rehearsals proved to be a disaster, and from there things grew steadily worse.

  Marilyn had a way of idolizing certain men—putting them on the pedestal of her high hopes until they inevitably toppled. Olivier wasted no time in shattering her illusions. Marilyn was the odd girl out. She had never worked in films beyond the perimeter of the Hollywood environment, and the London cast and crew were Olivier stalwarts—Dame Sybil Thorndike, Esmond Knight, Richard Wattis, and cameraman Jack Cardiff. They had all been Olivier’s friends and associates for many years. On the first day of rehearsals, when Olivier introduced Marilyn to the assembled cast and crew, he took her hand and in the most condescending manner suggested that everyone be patient with their guest—that it might take their Hollywood visitor some time to learn “their method,” but how pleased they were to have “such a delightful little thing” among them. His attitude toward her was strangely patronizing, and none of his demeaning subtleties escaped Marilyn Monroe’s finely tuned vibe barometer. It was a storm warning of the tempest to come.

  An icy frost hung over the rehearsals, which began on July 30, and Olivier noted Paula Strasberg’s critical glares and Marilyn’s pronounced lack of enthusiasm. “Marilyn was not used to rehearsing and obviously had no taste for it,” he observed. “She proclaimed this by wearing very dark glasses and exhibiting an overly subdued manner which I failed miserably to find the means to enliven.”

  In a daily diary kept during production, Colin Clark, the third assistant director, noted that Marilyn Monroe arrived two hours late on the first day of filming.*The call was for 6:30 A.M. She arrived at eight-thirty for makeup and wardrobe, and subsequently arrived on the set at eleven-thirty, which is when British crews normally call lunch. Colin Clark noted:

  MONDAY, 6 August

  Finally at 11:30 A.M. MM did emerge, fully dressed and looking, I am bound to say, ravishing. What a beautiful creature she is, to be sure…. Everyone is simply hypnotized when she appears, including me. Everything revolves around her, whether she likes it or not, and yet she seems weak and vulnerable. If it is deliberate, it is incredibly skillful, but I think it is a completely natural gift. All the people round her want to control her, but they do so by trying to give her what they think she wants…. Paula takes a firm grip of MM on one side and Milton Greene on the other. They hardly bother to conceal their battle for control. And not just them—Arthur Miller wants control too…. We are all really thinking of what they want underneath. “Oh, what a nice pot of gold you are. Can I help you, pot of gold?”

  In his first days of directing the film Olivier said to her, “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn.” She was devastated. The demeaning remark indicated that he had no intention of recognizing her sensibilities as an actress and no interest in her method of making contact with her role. Her disappointment with Olivier turned to a burning resentment, and the asbestos fell between the star and the director, never to rise again. She avoided him whenever possible. Directions had to be given circuitously through Paula Strasberg; and whenever Olivier spoke to Marilyn directly, she would stare at him with indifferent eyes, suddenly turning away in midconversation and walking off to discuss the scene with Paula or to telephone Lee Strasberg in New York.

  Olivier recalled, “Her manner to me got steadily ruder and more insolent; whenever I patiently labored to make her understand an indication for some reading, business or timing she would listen with ill-disguised impatience, and when I had finished would turn to Paula and petulantly demand, ‘Wassee mean?’ A very short way into filming, my humiliation had reached depths I would not have believed possible.”

  When she was to begin filming a scene with Dame Sybil Thorndike, one of the legendary actresses of the British theater, Marilyn arrived an hour late. Regarding it as a great discourtesy, Olivier became livid. Upon her arrival, he strode over to Marilyn, took her by the hand, led her over to Dame Sybil like a naughty schoolgirl, and through clenched teeth demanded that the president of Marilyn Monroe Productions apologize for her tardiness. Having no comprehension that she was late, Marilyn began an abject apology. Much to Olivier’s displeasure, Dame Sybil interrupted and said, “My dear, you mustn’t concern yourself. A great actress like you has other things than time on her mind, doesn’t she?”

  Marilyn realized that she had at least one friend on the set, and she and Thorndike became quite close during the production. While watching dailies in the projection room, Thorndike turned to her old friend Olivier and said, “You did well in that scene, Larry, but with Marilyn up there nobody will be watching you. Her manner and timing are just too delicious. And don’t be too hard about her tardiness, dear boy. We need her desperately. She’s really the only one of us who knows how to act in front of the camera.”

  WEDNESDAY, 15 August

  I suppose you could say that today was a red-letter day. This morning I definitely saw more of MM that I ever expected to, and she went up in my estimation in more ways than one. She arrived really early for her, and nearly caught us on the hop at 7:30 A.M. She was in a jolly mood.

  As lunchtime drew near the A.D. caught me in the corridor, and told me to look for MM’s marked script which was missing. I assumed this meant that MM was on the set, so I just barged into her dressing room…There she stood—MM completely nude, with only a towel around her head.

  I stopped dead. All I could see were beautiful white and pink curves. I must have gone as red as a beetroot. I couldn’t even turn and rush out, so I just stood there and stared and stammered. MM gave me her most innocent smile. “Oh, Colin,” she said. “And you an old Etonian!” How did she stay so cool? And how did she know my name and which school I had gone to and what it meant?

  When I managed to get out of the room and pull myself
together, I realized MM could be a bit brighter than we think…. What fun it might have been to make a movie with MM when she felt everyone around her was her friend.

  Dream on Colin…

  During her sleepless nights at Parkside House, Marilyn began to believe that Olivier was deliberately trying to undermine her performance, and it occurred to her that Milton Greene had made an enormous mistake in allowing Olivier to be both star and director.

  When Marilyn expressed distrust of Olivier to her husband, Arthur Miller was put in the awkward position of both pacifying his wife and at the same time alleviating her suspicions. “She came to believe that he was trying to compete with her like another woman, a coquette drawing the audience’s attention away from herself,” Miller recalled. “Nothing could dissuade her from this perilous vision of her director and co-star…. It was simply impossible to agree that he could be the cheap scene-stealer she was talking about…. I occasionally had to defend Olivier or else reinforce the naivete of her illusions. The result was she began to question the absoluteness of my partisanship on her side of the deepening struggle.”

  Could Marilyn have been correct in her assessment of Olivier? Was it possible that the legendary star of stage and screen could be trying to undermine and upstage the ingenue neophyte from Hollywood? When Marilyn and her entourage arrived on the scene, not only was Olivier’s private life in crisis, but so was his career. He was turning fifty and his ham was well cured. There weren’t many leading-men parts left for him, and he was very sensitive about his age. The makeup and attire he wore as the prince was so heavy that at times he was barely recognizable behind his monocle. Vanity and the fight to justify top billing went with the prince of Carpathian’s territory.

  Both Marilyn and Olivier had what is known to cameramen as a “good side”—the side of the face that photographs best. For both of them it was the right side. Olivier, the director, always made sure that the right side of Olivier the actor was to camera, which meant that Marilyn’s “bad side” was to camera when they faced each other.

  Despite the letters received from Joshua Logan, Olivier elected to ignore his advice, stating, “I refused to treat Marilyn as a special case—I had too much pride in my trade—and would at all times treat her as a grown-up artist of merit, which in a sense she was.”

  If there was any doubt that Marilyn was an artist of merit, it was dispelled by the reviews of Bus Stop, which opened on August 31 to critical acclaim. “Hold onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in Bus Stop,” raved Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who had never been a Marilyn fan. “Effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality,” said the Saturday Review of Literature. The London Times observed, “Miss Monroe is a talented comedienne, and her sense of timing never forsakes her. She gives a complete portrait, sensitively and sometimes even brilliantly conceived. There is about her a waif-like quality, an underlying note of pathos which can be strangely moving.”

  “Brilliant,” said Variety.

  “She’s a troublesome bitch!” Olivier was heard to mumble.

  Arthur Miller soon discovered that the Marxist boy from Brooklyn and the Earl of Notley had something in common—difficult wives. At the end of an exhausting day at Pinewood dealing with a very difficult actress, Olivier would go home to Notley Abbey and face another very difficult actress. Vivien Leigh would often be in her manic phase, and Olivier would frequently arrive to find a house full of her animated guests and hangers-on who would party all night, when what he desperately needed was sleep and tranquillity. There were times when he would lock his door, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by Leigh pounding on it. On one occasion when he had neglected to lock the door he was awakened by Leigh beating him across the face with a wet towel at three in the morning. Few knew of his private hell. But there were days when Olivier would brace himself with a stiff drink in his Pinewood dressing room before going home, and Arthur Miller would join him for commiseration and a bracer.

  One evening the two of them went to the theater together; Miller wanted to see John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theater, and Olivier reluctantly went with him. Osborne was then a new-wave playwright—an ideological adversary who, it seemed, was out to discredit the British traditionalist world that Olivier was so much a part of. Yet that world was vanishing. Its institutions were as old hat as Rattigan’s play and the gold-braided light-opera ghosts of Carpathia—as old hat, perhaps, as the aging Olivier, whose career was in a rut.

  After the play Miller and Olivier went backstage to congratulate the stars, Mary Ure and Alan Bates, and were introduced to the rebellious author, the dreaded John Osborne. When they were leaving, Miller was amazed to hear Olivier hesitantly say to Osborne, “Do you suppose you could write something for me?” Osborne could. He would. He did. And out of that evening on the town with Miller was born The Entertainer and Archie Rice, the illegitimate child of the wooden prince of Carpathia.

  Realizing that The Prince and the Showgirl had gotten off to a rather rotten start, Olivier suggested that Terence Rattigan throw a party at which the film’s principals could socialize away from the pressures of Pinewood, and perhaps mend antagonisms in a relaxing atmosphere.

  SUNDAY, 19 August

  Terry Rattigan’s party last night was as formal and artificial as his plays. He has a typical expensive show-business house on Wentworth golf course—1920’s classical, and very nouveau riche; thick carpets, crystal chandeliers, flowers. I got there early and alone…. Terry Rattigan was in a white dinner jacket beaming urbanely at everyone (though not at me, the 3rd A.D.)

  Milton was there with Amy—small and attractive, both of them…. Milton’s boyish, very slight, dark brown eyes always smiling. He must be extremely shrewd to have got control of the most famous film star in the world. SLO was brimming over with bonhomie—always a bad sign. When he is irascible is when he’s sincere.

  Finally Arthur Miller and MM. A. Miller looked very dashing, also in a white dinner jacket—strong jaw, intense gaze, the perfect he-man intellectual. I fancy he is very vain indeed. MM looked a bit straggly. She had done her hair herself and she had not been made up by Whitey. She even seemed a bit scared, not of us, but of AM. He really is unpleasant. He struts around as if MM were his property. He seems to think his superior intelligence puts him on a higher plane, and treats her as if she is just an accessory. Poor MM. Another insensitive male in her life is the last thing she needs. I can’t see the romance lasting long. She’s the one who could be forgiven a little vanity, but, strangely enough, that’s not in her make-up at all.

  The party just never gelled…Sir Laurence surrounded by people of great assured self importance…Viv is discretely [sic] catty…Hedda Rosten drinks too much…Arthur raids the Hors D’oeuvre platters…Milton plays the ugly American—no one really friendly. A bit stiff. I bet it would have been another matter if we were all queer. (Gaiety, everyone!)

  In his autobiography Hollywood in a Suitcase, Sammy Davis, Jr., talked about an affair Marilyn was having during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl. In the summer of 1956 Davis was living in London, and he wrote, “When she was making The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, she was going through one of the most difficult periods of her life. She was having an affair with a close friend of mine…. They met clandestinely at my house…. We had to get up to all sorts of intrigues to keep the affair secret. I used to pretend we were having a party, and Marilyn would arrive and leave at different times from my pal. Once they were in the house, of course, they went off to the swimming pool, which had its own self-contained bungalow.”

  Sammy Davis, Jr., was often the beard for Jack Kennedy. Was it JFK Marilyn met in the pool bungalow? According to Colin Clark’s diary, Marilyn went to London incognito on Saturday, August 25. She failed to show up at all at Pinewood on the following Monday. The diary indicates that just prior to t
he weekend in question Marilyn and Miller had a falling-out over his behavior at the Rattigan party. Jack Kennedy was in Europe at the time. Immediately following the July 1956 Democratic Convention, in which Jack had lost the vice-presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver by thirty votes, he flew to the French Riviera with his brother Teddy—leaving behind Jacqueline, who was pregnant. In Cannes, Jack and Teddy Kennedy connected with George Smathers and chartered a forty-foot yacht, complete with skipper, galley cook, and blondes, according to a Washington Star correspondent who interviewed the skipper.

  On August 23, while still recuperating from the strain of the convention, Jacqueline Kennedy was rushed to Newport Hospital in Rhode Island, where an emergency cesarean was performed. The child, an unnamed girl, was stillborn. The Kennedy family tried in vain to contact Jack. He couldn’t be reached on the yacht by transatlantic phone, though it had a ship-to-shore radio. His passport application indicates that he planned to travel to England, France, Italy, and Sweden.

  Kennedy was finally located and flew home on Tuesday, August 28. His prolonged absence at this critical time brought about a breach with Jackie. “There was certainly talk of divorce between Jack and Jackie,” Peter Lawford acknowledged. “But it was only talk.” Time later reported a meeting between Jackie Kennedy and Joe Kennedy in which he purportedly offered her a million dollars not to divorce her husband.

  It was on Tuesday, August 28, the day Kennedy flew back to the states, that an incident occurred marking the turning point in the Miller marriage. At a time when Marilyn desperately needed her husband’s support, she discovered Arthur’s notebook open on his desk to a page containing a passage so devastating to her that the fragile trust of their betrothal shattered like glass.