On Monday, Marilyn was still upset when she returned to the arena. Logan was filming in the bleachers. In this shot, thousands of spectators cheer a rodeo event, while the camera pans down to disclose Cherie asleep in the sun—a night person, she isn’t used to being awake in the afternoon. The scene was charming and funny, in distinct contrast to Marilyn’s mood at the time it was filmed. Between takes, she leaned over the side of the bleachers to vomit, sick with nerves.
Marilyn struggled to regain her confidence in Logan. When the company moved on to snowy Sun Valley, Idaho, she barraged him with questions about Stanislavsky. As a student, he had spent eight months with the Russian director, whose theories loosely formed the basis of Lee Strasberg’s teachings. Logan warmed to the subject now, scarcely suspecting that Marilyn was trying to shore up her faith in him.
Nor did he guess that it was Marilyn’s crisis of confidence that led Paula suddenly to turn up during filming as she had never dared to do before. Logan was shooting a scene in which Cherie, freezing cold in a skimpy coat, is delighted by Bo’s offer of his warm, fleece-lined jacket. They completed one take, but the director wasn’t satisfied. It seemed to Logan that Marilyn had put on Bo’s jacket too quickly. He urged her to savor the experience more. He advised Marilyn to imagine that she was stepping into a bubble bath.
Logan heard Paula behind him. “That’s a good image,” she confirmed. “You’re enjoying a bubble bath.”
It was the first time Paula put her two cents in while Marilyn was working with a director. It would by no means be the last.
While Marilyn was in Sun Valley, Arthur went to Washington, D.C. to confer with the attorney Joseph Rauh, Jr. about his passport problems. Besides accompanying Marilyn to England for The Sleeping Prince, Miller wanted to be present when A View from the Bridge was staged there. Binkie Beaumont, the modern English theater’s most successful impresario, had originally planned to open View in mid-March, but when British Equity prohibited most of the Broadway cast from appearing in the West End run he postponed it until October. Miller had agreed to expand the play to two acts.
On March 27, Rauh went over Miller’s options. He was careful to point out the consequences of each. The major danger was that a passport application might trigger the long-threatened HUAC subpoena. Miller was well aware that Mrs. Scotti, the HUAC investigator, had been building a case against him. Rauh emphasized that in the end Miller must make up his own mind about which course to follow and that the decision would be difficult.
One alternative was simply to apply for a passport as if he had not had any trouble with the passport office before. Perhaps he would be lucky this time. It seemed to Rauh that, at the moment, the government’s passport policy was more liberal than it had been in 1954. There was a chance Miller would slip through without being asked about his association with the Communist Party. Still, if he was going to be questioned, it might be strategic to raise the issue himself before the government did.
Miller’s second alternative, the one Rauh clearly favored, was to submit an affidavit with his passport application. The lawyer advised Miller to declare that he was not a Communist Party member and had not been politically active for some years. He was to volunteer the information that, during a period of three months in 1947, he had indeed been present at three or four meetings of Communist writers. He was to attest that he had never had a Party card and that, as far as he could recall, he had never paid dues. But this raised the problem that the State Department might leak the affidavit to HUAC, triggering a subpoena.
Back in New York, Miller, in consultation with the attorney Lloyd Garrison, settled on a plan. He would write a short statement along the lines Rauh had suggested. Before he left for Reno, Rauh and Garrison would go over the statement and put it into final shape. About five weeks before he and Marilyn were due in England, he would apply for a passport like anyone else and hope for the best. If, however, the passport was held up, Miller would sign the affidavit and go with Rauh to submit it. Miller decided that, if necessary, he would take his chances on a leak.
By the time the cast and crew of Bus Stop returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn was ill. Part of it was due to nerves, part to the long hours working in the cold at Sun Valley wearing only light clothes. Her notes to Miller in New York suggested that she was feeling harassed. Miller, remembering the eagerness with which she had gone off to work with Logan, was mystified by his own inability to cheer her up.
Back on the Fox lot, Marilyn faced what she considered the most important scene in the film, indeed in her entire career thus far. For Marilyn, the most difficult part of filmmaking had always been dialogue. She was notorious at Twentieth for her inability to remember lines. Her nerves only made the situation worse. But during the past year in New York, Marilyn, influenced by Arthur, had come to believe that the key test of whether she had become a real actress was whether she could handle long blocks of complex dialogue.
As far as Marilyn was concerned, she was about to confront the scene that would gauge whether she had really “improved” in New York. Cherie, on the bus, talks at length about her past. She speaks of the men in her life. She speaks of her hopes and dreams. She speaks of the kind of man she longs to meet. Marilyn had never done a scene requiring this much dialogue before.
Even with less challenging material, Marilyn always had a good deal of trouble propelling herself into a scene. She would do almost anything to put off the moment when she had to turn herself on. She dreaded the responsibility of having to make it all happen. With the scene on the bus looming, Marilyn called in sick day after day. Logan did his best to shoot around her. Then on April 11, Lew Schreiber received word that Marilyn had checked into a hospital with acute bronchitis. Miller called her room everyday. They never talked for less than half an hour. There was concern at Twentieth that if Marilyn stayed out too long, she might go to England before completing Bus Stop.
On April 24, after missing twelve days of a forty-five-day schedule, Marilyn finally came back to work. Logan, realizing that she was terrified of the next scene, had devised a plan to get her through the complicated speech. He faced two problems: Marilyn’s poor memory, and the time she required to work herself up for each take. It would take forever to complete her speech if it was shot in a normal fashion. He had to find a way to relieve Marilyn of the psychological pressure of repeatedly having to turn herself on, while knowing there was no way she could get through the scene in a single take.
Logan had noticed that as long as the camera rolled, Marilyn remained “on,” even if she had already made a mistake or forgotten her lines. The moment he called “Cut!” and the camera stopped, she was back at point zero again. So he filmed the scene without calling “Cut!” Each time Marilyn ruined a take, Logan kept the camera rolling. As he had expected, Marilyn was able to start the next take without her usual collapse—and the time it took to juice herself up again. When they were finished, Logan would piece her speech together out of all the tiny bits which had worked.
They shot like this for two days. They worked until 9:25 one night, 11:30 the next. Logan’s tactic was very expensive, since he had to print ten times as much film as he would have otherwise. But in the end, he probably cut days from the schedule. And he had enough flashes of Marilyn’s brilliance to assemble the deeply moving scene he was after. When Marilyn saw the rushes, she was thrilled. In her view, it was as if nothing she had done on screen before mattered. She had brought off a long, complicated speech at last. She could not wait to show the finished scene to Arthur. He perceived that Marilyn’s attitude to Logan had improved.
Miller had arrived in Reno on May 1 to establish residency for his divorce. In anticipation of his weekend visits to Los Angeles, Marilyn rented quarters at the Chateau Marmont, next door to Paula. She assigned Greene’s chauffeur to stock the hotel refrigerator with cheese and champagne, and to pick up Miller at the airport. Logan was no longer shooting on Saturdays, so Marilyn had weekends free.
Mostly she and Arthur
were alone. Now and then Paula barged in. There were calls from Lee. On one occasion while Miller was there, Paula insisted on playing a tape recording of Strasberg’s lecture on Duse. Marilyn and Paula listened solemnly for about twenty minutes. Arthur found the lecture absurd but held his tongue.
Following the weekend of May 12–13, Miller returned to Reno, intending to file his passport application at the end of the week. Contrary to plan, he had not yet completed the affidavit. A man in love, Miller considered proclaiming his “romantic motive” for wanting to go to England. Rauh and Garrison, however, discouraged Miller from alluding to his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Garrison was particularly concerned that there would be a great deal of publicity should the affidavit leak to the public, while Rauh felt that he himself could always mention the romance later in an effort to show how silly the government would look if a passport were denied.
Even with Miller in worshipful attendance, Marilyn became increasingly annoyed by Don Murray’s evident lack of interest in her. He had eyes only for the actress Hope Lange, whom he’d known in New York and later married. But this was more than just a case of a bruised ego. Marilyn hadn’t made a film in a while. She was getting older. There was concern at Twentieth that her deliberately tattered image in Bus Stop might drive away her audience. Though she and Logan stuck to their concept of Cherie, there was always a chance that Marilyn could be making a terrible mistake. Her determination to signal the audience that she was a serious actress was a major risk, and Marilyn knew that. Her tense relations with her poor, unsuspecting co-star seem to have been a way of acting out her fear of failure. If Murray did not respond to Marilyn, was the audience about to do the same?
Murray, for his part, treated Marilyn good-naturedly. But things came to a boil on May 21, as they worked on Stage 14. In this scene, Cherie flees Bo in the Blue Dragon Cafe. He grabs at her, tearing off the sequined train of her gown. As Marilyn understood the action, Bo, in his anger, humiliates Cherie.
When Logan actually filmed the scene, it seemed to Marilyn that Murray tugged at the train gently rather than nastily, as if he feared the audience might not approve. Marilyn needed to feel his anger in order to react with anything like an authentic emotion of her own. Enraged that the scene had gone poorly, she grabbed the train and lashed her co-star across the face, cutting him near the eye.
Murray walked off the set, vowing not to return until Marilyn apologized. Logan, exasperated, chastised her for being vulgar. Marilyn was convinced the director hated her, and Greene refused to stand up to Logan on her behalf. She told herself they were all simply afraid of women. Though at first Marilyn agreed to apologize, later she changed her mind.
By evening, she was despondent. It was sometime after eleven that night when Arthur Miller, asleep in his cabin at Pyramid Lake, heard someone at the door. The only immediate neighbor was Saul Bellow. For six weeks, one reached Miller by writing care of Bellow, Sutcliffe Star Route, Reno, Nevada, or calling a pay phone that stood next to a desolate, rarely traveled highway. The owner of a defunct motel nearby had to answer the phone, then drive out to the cabins in a pickup truck. By prior arrangement, when Marilyn called, which she did almost every day, she gave her name as Mrs. Leslie. It was a rare occasion, however, when Mrs. Leslie called late at night.
The road to the phone booth was dusty and bumpy. The desert air was cold, the sky thick with stars. There was a patch of soupy quicksand from which Indians had stolen the U.S. Government “Danger” signs. Several unsuspecting fishermen were rumored to have been swallowed up; their corpses were said to rise to the lake’s gray surface every few years.
Three days previously, Miller had submitted his passport application, so now there could be no turning back. For a man in his position, this step was every bit as momentous and, potentially, life-changing as coming to Nevada to seek a divorce had been. It could only be hoped that the passport application would not trigger a HUAC subpoena. Clearly, Miller was nervous. In a letter to Lloyd Garrison, he declared that he was weary of holding his breath. He jestingly pointed out that the clerk had been nice and had not attempted to arrest him. Miller looked forward to a calm year—perhaps the year after next, or the year after that.
Standing in a chilly, unlit phone booth in the middle of nowhere, Miller could barely hear Marilyn. Her voice was frightened, desperate. “Oh, Papa,” she was saying. “I can’t do it.”
She insisted that she couldn’t work this way. She complained about Logan and the others. She recounted the collision on the set that day. She spoke bitterly of the director’s having called her vulgar. She couldn’t fight for herself anymore. She just wanted to live quietly with Arthur. She was on the verge of tears. To Miller, it sounded almost as if she were addressing herself. He had never heard such terror in her voice. He had never guessed the degree of her dependency on him. It had not previously occurred to him that he was all she had.
Though he had met Marilyn shortly after the 1950 suicide attempt, until this moment some six years later, Miller had not grasped that she might be capable of taking her own life. As he listened to her on the phone, all at once her suicide flashed before him. As her voice grew softer, he imagined that she was sinking beyond his grasp. He felt a responsibility to save her. But she was far away and he couldn’t think of anyone in Los Angeles to call for help.
Suddenly, his breathing became irregular. He felt unsteady. His stork-like legs gave way. He dropped the receiver and blacked out. When Miller regained consciousness seconds later, he found himself on the ground. Marilyn’s frantic monologue continued to pour from the receiver above. Rambling, she had apparently failed to realize that no one was listening anymore.
He reassured her. He did his best to calm her. By the time Marilyn hung up, she seemed better. She would try just to do her work tomorrow and not get so upset. Only one week of filming remained. Miller, walking home under the stars, told himself that he loved Marilyn and that her agony was his. At the same time, as so often with Miller, the world seemed to exist primarily to be part of his work. On the night he realized that Marilyn was suicidal, Miller, as he had not in months, perhaps years, felt the urge to write.
Marilyn finished shooting on May 29. She flew home on the night of June 1, her thirtieth birthday. The next day when she stepped off a plane in New York, reporters ambushed her with questions about Arthur Miller. Reporters had tracked him down at Pyramid Lake. He’d been overheard on a pay phone calling someone “darling.” A handyman at the motel had tipped off the press about frequent calls from the breathy-voiced Mrs. Leslie. Miller was said to talk to Mrs. Leslie for as long as two hours at a time.
Did Marilyn intend to meet the playwright in New York? Did she and Miller plan to marry?
“I possibly will see him,” Marilyn teased. “We’re very good friends.”
And how did Marilyn feel about turning thirty?
“Kinsey says a woman doesn’t even get started till she’s thirty,” she replied. “That’s good news.”
Marilyn, noticeably pale and heavy-lidded, smiled and waved goodbye as her limousine drove off. Though it was a warm spring day, she was bundled in her dark mink coat.
Marilyn had returned full of hope. She would not know for some time if she had managed to bring off the picture. She would just have to wait and see. On the evidence of a rough cut of her long scene on the bus, however, Marilyn sensed that she had indeed accomplished what she had set out to do. No matter what happened to the rest of the film, she believed she had proven her worth in that one complex speech. But it remained to be seen how people would react. Nothing would be certain until the audience, and the critics, had pronounced.
While Marilyn waited for Arthur to complete his required stay in Nevada, she planned to shut herself away in her apartment and rest. Arthur was scheduled to remain at Pyramid Lake until June 11. On that day he would become a Nevada resident and get a divorce. Afterward, he was to join Marilyn in New York. By the time they went to England together, they would be man and wife.
Three days before Arthur completed his residency, however, he was served with a HUAC subpoena. It was Friday, June 8. He was ordered to appear in Washington, D.C., the following Thursday.
As chance would have it, the timing of Miller’s passport application had been unfortunate. Five days after he applied, HUAC had opened public hearings on “the fraudulent procurement and misuse of American passports by persons in the service of the Communist conspiracy.” In some cases, it was asserted, Communist agents who applied for passports had “deliberately withheld” the purpose of the trip. Thus, Arthur Miller, author of the anti-HUAC dramas The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, was being called in to answer questions about his real reasons for wanting to go to England.
If Miller were to testify on the 14th, he would have to go to Washington immediately to confer with Joe Rauh. One didn’t just casually show up at a HUAC hearing; there was too much at stake. As it was, Miller hardly had time to prepare. But if he left Nevada before June 11, he would be ineligible to file for divorce. He would have spent nearly six weeks in isolation for nothing. He and Marilyn would not be married in time to go to England on July 13—if he was permitted to go at all.
There was a good chance he would be denied a passport. There was also a good chance that if the committee was dissatisfied with his testimony, he could be held in contempt and jailed. Marilyn had a great deal invested, financially and psychologically, in The Sleeping Prince, but under the circumstances how could she bring herself to leave without him? From the moment Miller received the subpoena, his and Marilyn’s lives were thrown into chaos.
TEN
During the early weeks of Arthur Miller’s stay in Nevada, he had noticed a curious habit of Saul Bellow’s. The novelist would head out to a spot behind a hill near his book-filled cabin and there, for some thirty minutes, he would scream into the vast mountainous silence.
Marilyn Monroe Page 27
