In mid-January, the Court of Appeals declared that until the Supreme Court ruled on a related case, Barenblatt v. United States, oral arguments would not be permitted in Miller’s appeal. That meant a reversal, if one were to occur, could be a long way off. Obviously, Twentieth was not about to buy Arthur’s screenplay. He announced publicly that he and Marilyn planned to do The Misfits as an independent production.
On January 27, Miller opened the second of two brown spiral notebooks in which he had written a draft of The Misfits. He turned to the last page of the script. A frugal man, he was not one to waste paper. On the very next lined page, he began to take notes. He started in pencil, later shifting to a pen. When he was finished, thirty-three pages would be covered.
Five months had passed since Arthur started The Misfits in an effort to show Marilyn how much he loved her. Back in August, he evidently still had hope, however slim, that Marilyn might yet be healed. He thought that perhaps he could help her to get better. Since that time, his notes suggest, that hope had vanished. He believed he had entered a cul de sac. Instead of saving Marilyn, he began to worry about saving himself.
After he met Marilyn in 1951, Miller’s notebook had become the repository of his guilt. Finally, in The Crucible, he had worked out a way of absolving himself; he blamed everything on his wife. Now again, in 1958, Marilyn provoked a moral crisis, but of a very different sort. Seven years previously, Arthur had felt guilty for being drawn to Marilyn. Now he felt guilty for wanting to flee. That these feelings were just beginning to rise to the surface of consciousness is suggested by the veiled manner in which Miller wrote about them in a private notebook intended for no one’s eyes but his own. It is as though the knowledge of his changing attitude to Marilyn were still too painful to be dealt with directly, as though he was fighting to repress his feelings even as he struggled to commit them to paper in order to examine them.
In the notebook are scenes and notes about characters based unmistakably on Mary Miller and Elia Kazan, material that would eventually find its way into the play After the Fall. The Mary section drew on the notes Miller had taken in 1952 for an autobiographical play about adultery. In January 1958, Miller apparently was not yet ready to write directly about Marilyn as he would in a later draft of After the Fall. But he had, however unconsciously, already reserved a place in the dramatic structure for her. And he had temporarily filled that place with a figure who elicited the same kind of guilt, fear, and tortured ambivalence.
Several years previously, when Miller was still unhappily married to his first wife, he had been accosted on the street by a Columbia University student, a visitor from Latin America. The young man turned out to be quite mad, his reason for wanting to meet Miller being his own belief in the power of witches. He assumed that the author of The Crucible would understand. The delusional young man made Miller uneasy; his problems seemed so severe as to be beyond the reach of a psychiatrist. While Miller was eager to get away, the student remained in his life for some time. He required a degree of attention and sympathy that Miller was not temperamentally inclined to offer. At the same time, Miller realized that he must not be cruel. The student was sick. It wouldn’t be right to abandon him. How could Miller accuse Mary of coldness if he himself acted coldly? To do so would be to undermine the tortuous self-justification Miller had worked out in The Crucible. Thus, Miller found himself being unnaturally kind to the student. Eventually, the young man entered a mental hospital and Miller was freed.
In his guilt-ridden dealings with the young man, Miller had been trying to live up to his own image of himself. A man of conscience, he had been struggling to do the right thing. Yet, as he wrote in the notebook, he believed that guilt was an inadequate basis for morality. He did not want to be good just because one ought to; he wanted to act properly because it was his nature to do so. Now, after his HUAC testimony, things had become more complicated still. Miller had to live up to the world’s image of him as an ethical hero. That he was wondering whether he could is suggested by the notation that even as the mad student had been making a god of Miller, Miller had been involved with Marilyn.
As Miller made these notes, a new production of The Crucible was being prepared in New York. It was to open off-Broadway at the Martinique Theater in March. The playwright attended rehearsals, so it is hardly surprising that the characters and situations would be much in his thoughts. Though he seemed to have resolved a number of personal issues in that play, his life had changed substantially since writing it. Most importantly, as he certainly had never expected to do at the time, he had left Mary for Marilyn. In light of that, Miller, in his notebook, revisited territory already explored in The Crucible.
Again, there is a cold, unforgiving wife. Again, there is a tormented husband—here called “Miller”—paralyzed with guilt. Again, there is a betrayer from whom Miller hopes to differentiate himself. But now, there is someone else: a fragile, emotionally needy, mentally unstable figure from whom Miller can find no excuse to extricate himself. In this embryonic version of After the Fall, that figure is the Latin American student. Later it will be a character based on Marilyn Monroe.
Miller once said he couldn’t write about anything he fully understood. If he had already come to the end of an experience, he couldn’t write it. After the Fall would not be complete until the author had worked out a justification for leaving Marilyn. In the process of writing, he would find that justification, and the search for it would produce the drama of the play. The play would be finished when Miller had reassured himself, and the audience, of his own goodness.
As Miller was starting to write about all this in his notebook, Laurence Olivier arrived in New York, having finally decided to leave Vivien Leigh. Olivier confessed to Noël Coward that he couldn’t bear to live with her anymore. According to Kenneth Tynan, it had been watching Arthur and Marilyn that had helped Olivier to clarify his own circumstances. Olivier’s choice, as he saw it, was between nursing Vivien and getting on with his own life and career. Put another way, Olivier explained his decision to ask for a divorce by saying that he just had to “get some sleep.”
The experience of working with Marilyn Monroe had not provided the personal renaissance Olivier had hoped for. As chance would have it, however, an opportunity to reinvent himself was precisely what he did get from his trip with Arthur Miller to see Look Back in Anger. As a result of Olivier’s backstage encounter with John Osborne, the playwright sent him The Entertainer. Archie Rice, a pathetic, seedy, music-hall performer, was, as Kenneth Tynan would declare, “one of the great acting parts of our age.” To achieve just the right note of lechery, Olivier pictured how Archie might look as he imagined fondling Marilyn Monroe’s breasts—not the real Marilyn, but the character she played in The Sleeping Prince.
The role was a triumph for Olivier in England. Now, he had brought the show to the United States. After previews in Boston, it was to open on Broadway at the Royale Theater on February 12. Appearing in the role of Archie’s daughter was the young actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier hoped to marry after divorcing Vivien. It was said that Plowright had not broken up the marriage; she had simply been present “at the crucial turning point in Larry’s life.”
In New York, Olivier also took care of some unfinished business. Since directing A Streetcar Named Desire in London in 1949, he had been passionately resentful of the Actors Studio and all it stood for. That resentment was intensified many times over as he endured the Strasbergs on The Sleeping Prince. Now, Olivier visited the old white brick church on West 44th Street. He wanted to see for himself what all the fuss was about.
Strasberg liked to fill the Studio with celebrities—“visiting potentates,” as Frank Corsaro called them—who dropped in once or twice to watch. The impression they carried away depended entirely on chance. Some days the exercises worked. Some days they did not. Strasberg, working as he did, could not be expected constantly to produce results. The particular day Olivier appeared turned out to be “most unfortuna
te in terms of results,” Corsaro recalled.
Olivier did not fall under Strasberg’s spell. He found his long, rambling, off-the-cuff lecture pretentious. And he found his severe criticism of one young actor misguided and cruel. After the session, Olivier confronted Strasberg and pointed out that totally undermining the young man’s confidence could only make things worse. Strasberg waved Olivier away as though he were an imbecile.
Marilyn hid in the ladies’ room when Olivier visited the Studio. His very presence was a painful reminder of a dream that had died. Appearing in a film with Olivier was supposed to have established Marilyn’s credentials as an actress. It was supposed to have proven her worth. It was supposed to have prevented her from ever having to play another dumb blonde on screen.
That would explain Marilyn’s violent reaction when Billy Wilder sent her a script he had written with I. A. L. Diamond. It had been inspired by the 1932 German film Fanfares of Love about two musicians who travel about in disguise. To Marilyn’s way of thinking, the role of Sugar Kane in Some Like It Hot asked her to return to a past she had worked very hard to escape. Marilyn grew enraged as she read the story of two musicians who have the misfortune to witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Suddenly they need to escape the mob. Disguised as women, “Josephine” and “Daphne” join an all-girl band run by Sugar Kane. Sugar is a singer and ukelele player.
Marilyn, throwing the screenplay on the floor, declared that she had played dumb characters before, but never this dumb. Would anyone really believe Sugar failed to guess that the musicians were really men? In her anger, Marilyn failed to notice that Some Like It Hot was probably the most literate and intelligent script she had ever been offered. Miller urged her to do the picture. Her agents urged her to do it.
Even Spyros Skouras appeared to like the idea, though Twentieth would make not a penny on the film, which was to be produced by the Mirisch brothers and distributed by United Artists. Where Twentieth would profit handsomely was in the immeasurable good that Some Like It Hot would do for Marilyn’s reputation. The Prince and the Showgirl had been a critical and box-office dud. If the Billy Wilder picture was the smash hit almost everyone but Marilyn predicted it would be, that could only enhance her value as a studio property.
Marilyn called the script ridiculous. She accused her husband of caring only about money. She insisted she would not accept the part. She accused her representatives of trying to trick her. To read the documents in Marilyn Monroe’s studio legal file pertaining to the negotiations between MCA and Twentieth is to sense that those talks proceeded without—almost in spite of—Marilyn herself. The opposing sides seemed to concur that it was in everyone’s interest to have Marilyn working again. The agents and the studio reached an agreement on April 15. There were major concessions on both ends. MCA backed off on its claim that Marilyn owed Twentieth two additional pictures instead of three. Twentieth relieved Marilyn of the obligation to appear in The Blue Angel.
Spyros Skouras went so far as to agree to pay $100,000 for a film Marilyn had not made. That seemed a very small price for the vast sums Twentieth stood to earn on three more Marilyn Monroe films. Skouras would never have considered forfeiting that third picture. The $100,000 may also have been Skouras’s way of making amends for his failure to buy The Misfits.
To guarantee that he saw Marilyn again, Skouras stipulated he would pay the money, in addition to her regular fee, after she had finished her next picture at Twentieth. The studio had until January 14, 1959, to put her in a film. Meanwhile, the Old Greek gave Marilyn permission to appear in Some Like It Hot. In view of past problems, Frank Ferguson urged that Marilyn be compelled to sign the papers before someone else talked to her and she changed her mind again.
In the dark bedroom on East 57th Street, Marilyn, sitting naked in bed, drank champagne and stuffed herself compulsively. The servants marveled at her ability to cram vast quantities of food down her throat. She devoured lamb chops, steaks, hamburgers, veal cutlets, and home-fried potatoes. She was particularly fond of chocolate pudding. She vowed to make herself so fat that no one would want her to appear in Some Like It Hot.
Nonetheless, on April 21, 1958, Marilyn signed a contract amendment accepting the new terms. Eight days later, MCA officially notified the studio that Marilyn had agreed to do Some Like It Hot. Shooting was to begin sometime between July 15 and August 1. Marilyn would be required to work for about sixteen weeks.
At times, she actually seemed resigned to doing the film. In bed, she taught herself to play the ukelele. As Arthur worked on After the Fall in his study, Marilyn’s baby voice wafted through the white-on-white apartment. She sang “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” one of her songs from the movie. At other times, panic seized her. Weeping, Marilyn pleaded with Arthur not to send her to Hollywood. He remained calm and sensible. He tried to reassure her. But in doing so, he inadvertently said the one thing certain to plunge her into a deeper terror. He reminded Marilyn that it was up to her to make Some Like It Hot a success.
The Strasbergs had always loved to entertain. Even in their down-at-heel Hollywood days, Paula had been known to delight guests with smoked salmon flown in from a favorite Manhattan delicatessen. Friends affectionately called Paula “the Big Wet Tit.” At her Sunday open houses in New York, platters overflowed with cold cuts. Sometimes, the menu consisted of three kinds of Chinese takeout. The atmosphere was free and easy. Paula, who wore a copious black caftan, took pride in feeding as many as four hundred people at a time.
It was a rare occasion when Arthur would agree to accompany Marilyn to the Strasbergs’. By this time, he made no secret of his dislike for Lee. One evening, however, the Millers did stop by for drinks on their way to the theater. Marilyn was in a hypercritical mood. In front of the other guests, she excoriated her husband.
There had once been a time when Marilyn would never have dared to contradict Arthur. Now she seemed to disagree with everything he said. There had been a time when she gazed at Arthur adoringly. Now she seemed intent on humiliating him. If he was angry and embarrassed—and it would have been hard to imagine he wasn’t—he kept his rage within. At such moments, he refused to fight. He declined to take the bait. He withdrew into himself. That would infuriate Marilyn. She hated it when, as she would say, Arthur wasn’t there. She wanted him to pay attention. She attacked even more viciously in an effort to elicit some response, any response.
Finally, on this particular occasion, Marilyn loudly ordered Arthur to get her mink coat. The Strasbergs’ guests were theater people. In this crowd, Arthur Miller was not just any husband being belittled by a wife. He was one of the finest post-war American playwrights. He was an artist who, whatever one might have thought of him personally, commanded respect both for his life and work. When Arthur obediently went out for Marilyn’s coat, one horrified guest felt he simply had to say something.
“Marilyn, how can you talk to that man that way, like he’s a shit? It’s degrading, it’s terrible.”
Suddenly, Marilyn didn’t seem angry anymore. Her tone was cool, rational. “You think I shouldn’t have talked to him like that?” she asked. “Then why didn’t he slap me? He should have slapped me.”
The honeymoon, it was being said about town, was over. More and more, Marilyn’s idealization of Arthur seemed to have turned to contempt. The shift appeared to hinge on his efforts to write and sell a screenplay. After Twentieth failed to buy The Misfits, Miller submitted it to the French director René Clément. That, too, was a dead end. The excuse given was that Clément had trouble understanding the script. Miller said he had been exhausted by the prospect of having to translate the story’s specifically American nuances to the filmmaker.
Whatever the reason, the fact remained that Arthur had suffered another setback. That seemed only to confirm Marilyn’s opinion of his screenplay. If she was sometimes mercilessly cruel, that cruelty was probably nothing more than an expression of her own fear. The curtain had been wrenched aside, the Wizard of Oz revealed for who
he really was. The knowledge seemed to terrify her. If Arthur was less than the god Marilyn had imagined him to be, how was he possibly going to protect her?
He discovered that he could not anticipate her moods. He was in a state of perpetual apprehension as Marilyn veered between extremes. She lashed out one moment, and wept that he was ignoring her the next. She was desperate to have his baby. She was eager to make a real home with him in Connecticut. She urged him to buy more land, though he feared being plunged into debt. She talked excitedly about adding a nursery wing to the farmhouse. At the same time, she attacked her husband precisely where he was most vulnerable. Sniffing failure and defeat, she assaulted Miller’s stature as a writer. Her initial lack of enthusiasm for The Misfits had festered into overt and strident criticism. It was only a matter of time before his confidence was eroded.
Marilyn did not hesitate to disparage The Misfits to others. Worse, more often than not her complaints were devastatingly on target. She was correct that the script desperately needed to be rewritten. It was talky. It was static. It was thin on character and action. The writing was fuzzy. The story often failed to make sense. Marilyn did not, however, appear sincerely interested in fixing the script. Her real purpose seemed to be to vent her rage at her husband.
She complained to Norman Rosten that the character Arthur wanted her to portray was passive. She was right, of course. But Marilyn had put Rosten in a most awkward position. He was one of Miller’s oldest and closest friends. At the very least, he could not be expected to take sides, Arthur having failed to show him the script. Soon after Norman and Hedda went to Long Island for the summer, a copy of The Misfits arrived in the mail. It came from Marilyn. A week later the phone rang. Marilyn was calling from Roxbury. She announced that Miller was listening on the other phone. She asked Rosten what he thought of the script.
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