by Adam Braver
July 27, 1962
Cal Neva Lodge, Crystal Bay, NV
In speaking of training Marilyn Monroe, Lee Strasberg said, “Her past need not destroy her; it might yet become part of the vocabulary and technique of a new art.”
3:50 PM
Set in no particular order, plastic bottles, some clear and some green, line the desktop:
* Nembutal
* Decadron phosphate
* Chloral hydrate
* Seconal
* Rx 80521
* Rx 80522
* Rx 13525
* Rx 13526 (Double quantity. She’s not sure what these are, other than that some are from the Beverly Hills Schwab’s Pharmacy and others from the Prescription Center on Wilshire.)
She replays the conversation with Frank. Turns it into a version that doesn’t end with him walking out the door, still advising her to relax, and assuring her that everything will be smooth on his watch. A version in which she isn’t so cautious and she just comes clean about her need to disappear for a while. Explaining how The Misfits had seemed as though it would be an escape from Marilyn Monroe, but just a year later here she is again, dumped back into her old self in this latest production, Something’s Got to Give, with her old life (including Joe) falling into a regular pattern as though the time away was nothing more than an adolescent girl’s sophomoric escapade. She should’ve told Frank that sometimes it feels like this is it—her last chance, because it’s become near impossible to control Marilyn Monroe the way she used to—that she’s becoming her. And how regardless of one’s family history or stature, we’re all prone to falling apart; all of us, at some moment, end up standing on an edge, unsure we can keep from toppling over, forced to deal with our fragility then and there. That’s where she is. And she’d tell him that she read something in the paper about how a major earthquake could knock the earth off its axis, and while the earth would continue to spin just fine, as a result of the disaster, each day would be shortened by a little more than a millionth of a second, and how for nearly everybody that would mean nothing except for those for whom a millionth of a second means everything. And for her that one-millionth could tip the scales. In the replayed conversation, she says that’s why she came up here, that disappearing even for a weekend might let her hold on to that millionth of a second. Riding the earth bareback, clutching the reins, trying to steer clear of even the slightest bump.
Glancing at the lake reminds her how small she is. The reminder that you’re only a sliver of something larger than you could ever be.
4:50 PM
As she steps toward the railing, the door closes on its own behind her. She walks in a side step, working her way off the porch, feet never crossing over each other, her eyes fixed on the lake at all times. It looks a little greener through her sunglasses. Even when the porch curves, changing direction toward the lodge, she still watches Lake Tahoe. It’s just a matter of twisting her body.
She’d like to go to the hill across the highway, just to the base, where the wildflowers grow. Maybe pick some poppies and bring them back to the cabin. Put them in a water glass. Bring new life into the room.
She steps off the porch onto the macadam, feeling the last wooden slat bend. The road is hard and solid. Blankets of flowers slope down to the lakeshore, sometimes hidden and shaded by manzanita and other shrubs, but mostly sharp and distinct. They look impossible to reach.
She can’t even see the hill.
“Miss Monroe?”
A big man in dark slacks and a crisp short-sleeved shirt takes off his sunglasses. He sticks them in his breast pocket, leaving one silver temple hanging out. He says he works for the Cal Neva. His face is wide and flat. He smells of cigarettes. Personal security, he tells her, for Mr. Sinatra’s guests.
“You’re charged with watching over me?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Frank’s told you to make sure I’m safe?”
He asks, “Is everything okay?”
“Yes,” she nods. “Just fine. It’s all okay.” Behind him is the lodge, the back side, where the Circle Bar comes out. She lowers her sunglasses, squinting. “I thought you could see the hill from here,” she says.
“The hill?”
“The one across the street. I saw it when I came in.”
“The hill across 28? You’d have to be around the side of the building to see it clearly. Almost in the front.”
“Really? I could swear I saw it from my porch earlier.”
He scans the grounds. On guard, almost as though anticipating something. “Nope,” he says. “Just from the side.”
She looks around, but there are no flowers that catch her interest. “Maybe you could help me up there. To the side, then. Just to look at the hill. I’d like to look at it. There’s something I’m looking for.”
“There might be people there.”
“They seem to be everywhere. People.”
He tells her okay, but in a way that seems to suggest it’s against his better judgment. Stalling, he puts his sunglasses back on. He coughs into his hand, then wipes his palm against his pant leg. His understanding, he explains, was that she wasn’t to be disturbed, but if this is what she wants . . .
She says she’s not disturbed. And it’s what she wants.
It was warm when she left Los Angeles this morning, but it’s even a little hotter here. Still, the air feels tighter, a bit more brisk, as though cutting across her instead of enveloping her. The smell of the pines takes over, and when the breeze blows from the south she can smell the lake water, pure and clear, because, oddly enough, pure and clear has its own smell.
She feels as though she is a stalk, and her petals are waiting to fall.
She tilts her chin up, trying to gauge the wind. The right gust could take her down.
The giant Cal Neva parking lot extends to the road. And from there she can make out the crest of the hill. The bodyguard was wrong. Nobody is out. She takes a few steps, thinking she sees flowers dotting the hill. She considers going forward, but then stops. “Do you see anyone up there?” she asks.
“On the hill?”
“Yes, in line with us.”
He fingers the sunglasses down to the tip of his nose. Peers over the top. Scans. “No,” he says. “I don’t see anything. But even if there was something to see, I’m not sure I could. It’s pretty far away.”
“I saw something earlier. When I first arrived.”
“The wind blows the trees around, bending them into funny positions. It can make you do a double take out the corner of your eye.”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I saw someone. A person.” She stops herself. After what Frank said earlier, she doesn’t want to let on that it was Joe.
“I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe some gawker or photographer. I don’t know. We’ve heard of people sometimes trying to take pictures from up there. But you don’t have to worry. Even if there was someone there, you were too far away to be anything but a speck.”
Joe is not there. But she did see him when she arrived. She’s sure of it.
The man says he can send someone to take a look if she’s worried or feels threatened, but really, he says, it looks all clear.
She tells him it’s okay. Really she just wants to pick flowers. To make a bouquet, she tells him. She says she’d like California poppies, that it must be legal to pick them on the Nevada side. “Maybe you can just help me find some here on the grounds,” she says.
“I can have some sent to your room.”
“No,” she says, “I prefer to pick them myself.”
As they walk the perimeter of the parking lot looking under bushes at the ground cover, she glances back once, at the last possible point to see the hill. She senses movement behind a tree, near the crest where the pines curve naturally into a half smile. Maybe it’s Joe. Maybe he’s peering out momentarily, before darting back and hiding behind the tall, lumbering pine.
She’s bent down on one
knee. Leaned forward, crouching, and pulling back the branches of a manzanita tree, its red bark peeling and curling with each tug. The bodyguard waits behind, standing sideways. He’s not paying attention to her. A hummingbird appears over the patch she’s reaching for, buzzing and hovering in place for a moment. Its wings are beating, and its heart thumps, and it looks suspended in place, as though held up by an electric current. As soon as it notices her, the bird darts away.
One hand keeps hold of the manzanita branch while she reaches the other in, grabbing several poppy stalks near the roots and pulling until they snap. A scent releases, and though initially it’s acrid, there’s a cleanliness to it, not quite sweet, but not like something risen from dirt.
She pulls the flowers in close, pressing the full bouquet against her chest. She glances back at the bodyguard. A stem brushes against her cheek. She takes in only a slight whiff, getting mostly the soil, but it’s as though she’s inhaled the whole plant. And she can feel it filling her, washing through her veins, being pumped in and out of her heart, and it feels so right in her body, as though she’s made of glass, but not fragile, instead delicately structured and clear and clean and transparent, and this is the feeling, this is the one she wants to hold forever.
Clear. Transparent. And without form.
Nothing but a speck in the crowd.
1957–1960
Excerpts from the United Artists Pressbook for The Misfits
“I want to survive,” the actress earnestly says about herself. “I’m looking to the future. I want to be around for a long, long time, which means I mustn’t stand still professionally. They want to label talent in Hollywood. You’re this, or you’re that! If I can possibly avoid it, I’m not going to allow whatever talent I have to be labeled like that.”
EXPLOITATION CAMPAIGN
Horseback Bally:
Have a couple (the girl should be an attractive blonde) ride around town on a horseback. They carry a sign which reads: “WE’RE
GOING TO SEE THE PICTURE THAT EXPLODES WITH LOVE. IT’S ‘THE MISFITS’—NOW AT THE BIJOU!”
EXPLOITATION CAMPAIGN
Find MM’s Double
There are many girls who think they resemble Marilyn Monroe, this decade’s most outstanding screen personality. Stage a search for Marilyn Monroe’s local “double” with announcement of contest in your lobby and newspaper. Winner and runner up to get the full treatment consisting of possible appearance in local TV show, picture and story in newspaper, dinner at a top restaurant, hair-do at beauty parlor and orchids from florist.
August 1957: 444 East Fifty-Seventh Street, New York City
He tells her he’s been thinking about his short story “The Misfits,” the one he wrote in the Nevada desert. They’re sitting on the couch in the New York apartment. Marilyn holds a pillow against her stomach. The doctors assured her the meds have stanched any potential pain and that whatever she feels are imaginary symptoms; the explanations sounded logical, but still it feels as though a knife is jabbing through her uterus. She looks over to a lit candle. She thinks she smells something burning. But it’s just part of the match gone to ember, that piece she dropped when she thought her fingers were going to be burned.
The story, he says, is something of a response, a way to find meaning in the landscape and the people who surrounded him. And he recalls Pyramid Lake, almost like a mirage amid the lunarscape. And then there was Reno, and the Mapes Hotel, and the main room of the Nevada Club, filled with fresh smoke and the slight lilt of booze, and slots lining the rows evenly, chest high, blocked off by men whose jackets were slung over stools, and women in sleeveless blouses, carefree and quietly pulling on the machines’ arms—the whole dreary scene oddly miscast against the bright patterns of the carpet and the velvet saloon-era wallpaper.
He holds a hand out to her. She keeps her arms around the pillow on her belly but stretches her feet across his lap.
Arthur keeps talking. He says it was mostly the people he needed to write out of his system. The old, mangled rodeo riders whose broken bodies left them useless, living in holes in abandoned silver mines, who craved Hollywood magazines with Hollywood movie cowboys on the cover, never quite accepting that they themselves were the real thing; and career ranch hands trying to find a place in a modernizing world, refusing to give up the life and vowing to work only for pay, never for wages; and the six-week divorcées, who’d arrived looking for something they weren’t sure of and were living out their lives expecting that something better must be around the next corner. It was a place where people struggled with all their will to fit in, but only found themselves more alienated.
“A little like Hollywood,” she says.
“A little.”
She knows this is leading toward something, and she hopes that he’s not going to break his silence about the operation. After all, it could barely be characterized as a miscarriage, since the tubal pregnancy was discovered almost immediately. She hasn’t said anything about it to him since, and he looks away when he must sense she’s thinking about it. Most of his days are spent in his studio. When he comes out they always stay on the surface, as though they can walk on it forever. A regular pair of Jesus Christs.
Arthur says what he’s getting at is that he’s been drafting “The Misfits” into a screenplay. He’s really trying to write it with her in mind. In fact, after the story ran in Esquire, several people told him that they could picture Marilyn playing Roslyn. That it suited her. An ideal role to free her from the typecasting, one that would showcase her interior and really bust up the empty-blonde image that people have refused to let go of.
And later, when she thinks back on that evening, she won’t recall the sincerity in his voice, the way it shook as if he were presenting an uncertain gift, and how his neck muscles clenched tightly to keep him from looking away. Instead she’ll remember the spider in the corner of the wall they were facing, and how they both noticed the movement at the same time, and how Arthur pulled a tissue out of the box on the end table, and how when he stood her feet fell to the floor, and how he walked over to the corner, perched on his tiptoes, and covered the spider with the crumpled tissue, and how just as he was about to smash the spider, instead he picked it up and stood there in the middle of the room, holding the spider trapped in the Kleenex, looking at her, unsure of what to do with it.
October 1959: Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles
She’s nervous with anticipation, waiting for Arthur to return, to hear if Arthur’s convinced him to take the part. They’re staying at a hotel on the coast, and she hasn’t left the living room all day, limiting herself to one pill that’s done nothing. Once Arthur finally comes through the door, she says, Tell me everything. Demands it. She wants to know what Clark Gable said. Did he say he’ll do the picture? After Huston signed on to the movie, Arthur was brought out to Los Angeles to try to close the deal with Gable. She paces across the hotel room. Takes hold of the curtains. The light is bringing on a headache. She takes one last look in the direction of the Pacific—she’s watched those waves her whole life, drifting out and then roaring right back. But the beach is almost eight miles away; it can’t deliver any solace. She yanks the curtains shut with unexpected force.
Arthur tells her it went well. “Actually,” he says, “better than well.”
She says you wouldn’t know by his face.
“It was just a lot,” Arthur says. “In a way I’m not accustomed to.”
“But he said yes?”
“It took a lot of convincing.”
“So he agreed?”
“He said he thought it was supposed to be a Western, but that he realized it wasn’t, and that he was confused and really didn’t know what to make of it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I got tongue-tied. I just kept looking at him, thinking that this man is Gay Langland, and wondering how I could make him understand that, Western or not.”
She sits down on the sofa
, then springs back up. She just wants the end of the story.
He continues, “I told him it was an Eastern Western, and he kind of laughed, and I got more flustered, saying it wasn’t about good guys and bad guys, or the evil within the good guys, and all those various genre conventions, but that it was existential, about how the so-called meaninglessness in our lives takes us to where we end up. And to tell you the truth, Marilyn, I had to stop talking after a while, because I wasn’t quite sure what I was talking about anymore.”
