Marilyn was due in the studio two weeks after Kazan. She had voiced no objection to the assignment. By the time Kazan had been at the studio for ten days, however, it became evident to Buddy Adler that things were not proceeding as he and Skouras had anticipated. Kazan, relentlessly self-critical, remained dissatisfied with the screenplay. He wanted Paul Osborn to be brought in. Osborn, who had written the script for East of Eden, would not be available until July 21. Kazan insisted on waiting.
Thus, four days before Marilyn planned to fly to the west coast, Lew Schreiber notified MCA that the studio was not ready for her. Marilyn was advised to wait in New York until needed. Her salary for Time and Tide would, however, start on April 14 as originally scheduled.
Again, it seemed, Kazan held Miller’s fate in his hands. Indeed, by accepting the assignment to direct Marilyn in the first place, Kazan appeared to be reminding Miller of the power he still had over him. Once that had been accomplished, Kazan pointedly rejected Marilyn as he had done at the time of Baby Doll. He told Buddy Adler that he did not want to do the picture with her. He preferred to cast Lee Remick. Had Kazan chosen to go forward with Marilyn, it is impossible to say what would have happened with The Misfits.
Twentieth made no effort to find another project for Marilyn. From the first, the studio had viewed Time and Tide as a Marilyn Monroe vehicle. Astonishingly, no one at Twentieth seems to have paid attention to paragraph eight in her contract, which required principal photography to begin no later than ten weeks from the date she was ordered to work. Though Marilyn had been instructed to remain in New York, the clock had started ticking on April 14.
On June 25, Skouras and company were taken aback when a telegram announced that Marilyn was no longer obligated to appear in Time and Tide. It was signed Marilyn Monroe Productions. A lawyer’s letter followed. Once again, Marilyn demanded to be paid $100,000 for a picture she had not actually made. She also demanded to be paid for The Blue Angel, as Skouras had promised she would be. And she demanded to be released from one of the three remaining films she owed.
That last demand was the most significant, $200,000 being as nothing compared to the sums Twentieth stood to earn from a Marilyn Monroe film. The legal department determined that in view of Kazan’s refusal to proceed, Twentieth would have been within its rights to seek an extension of the ten-week period stipulated in Marilyn’s contract. But no one had bothered to do so. For now, Twentieth needed to catch its breath and decide how to respond. One thing was certain, however. Before Paul Osborn had officially started work with Kazan, Marilyn was off Time and Tide.
Miller, in the meantime, had been having scant success with The Misfits. John Huston had stopped in New York in May on his way back to Ireland after The Unforgiven, but Miller had had nothing to show him. Miller’s stage play also seemed to be stalled, February and March having passed without the Broadway premiere Kermit Bloomgarden had been endlessly announcing. In June, Miller finished reworking the beginning of The Misfits and sent it off to Huston. The pages were hardly the complete overhaul Huston had expected. Seven days later, Huston wired Miller. Consummately diplomatic, he praised the revisions and announced his own imminent arrival in New York. Whatever Huston may have assumed at the start, obviously Miller was going to need a good deal of prodding and guidance.
When Huston met with Miller that month, he made it clear that The Misfits needed to be substantially revised. If Miller could finish rewriting by the end of the summer, Huston hoped to shoot in April 1960. Otherwise, he might direct Freud, though there were problems with Sartre’s script as well.
One night at 3 a.m., Norman Rosten’s phone rang. Marilyn’s maid begged him to come immediately. Arthur, as he sometimes did, had gone up to Connecticut alone to write in peace and Marilyn was alone in New York that night. She had taken another overdose. By the time the Rostens arrived from Brooklyn, a doctor had finished pumping Marilyn’s stomach.
Norman followed Hedda into the small, softly-lit room. He could hear Marilyn crying. In a whisper, he asked how she was.
“Alive,” said Marilyn in a low, sad voice. “Bad luck.”
Her overdoses were not always intentional. Another time when Arthur had gone up to the country alone, Marilyn, frustrated by her inability to sleep, devoured a large number of pills all at once. In the morning, the maid discovered Marilyn unconscious on the white bedroom carpet. A physician pumped her stomach and Arthur was summoned from Roxbury.
As Laurence Olivier had been with Vivien Leigh, Miller was faced with a choice. He could try to take care of Marilyn, or he could get on with his life and work. Olivier chose the latter, and it was beginning to look as though Miller would do the same. A decade had passed since Death of a Salesman. Miller was generally considered never to have matched the brilliance of that work. After Salesman, his only new full-length play seen in New York had been The Crucible in 1953. The expanded version of A View from the Bridge had only been seen in England. Recently, all of Bloomgarden’s announcements and cancellations, however well intentioned, had clearly done the playwright’s reputation no good. Miller was painfully conscious that he appeared to be idle. His priority was to get his screenplay produced. He had to finish The Misfits to Huston’s satisfaction. He had to complete a work he could speak of in the same breath as Salesman.
That summer he holed up in Connecticut. He wrote seven days a week. He resisted the temptation to contact Huston. He wanted to send the director not mere promises but results. Though Marilyn accompanied Arthur to the country, by and large he retreated into himself and his work. Miller had started The Misfits in order to permit Marilyn to hold onto her dream. Now he seemed to be trying to do the same thing for himself. He seemed to be fighting for his own personal dignity, not hers.
Miller, in his studio, sat at an austere slab desk near a fireplace and little louvered windows. Workmen were in and out of the main house, where walls were forever being moved and wings added. Glass walls were installed in the rear to take advantage of a spectacular view. While he wrote, Marilyn was intent on making the old place entirely her own. She added dark wood ceiling beams. She added dormer windows. She added a room over the kitchen. She filled the sunroom with photographs of Arthur and posters for his plays. She never stopped buying and rearranging furniture. But as Norman Rosten perceived, a sense of having finished evaded her to the end.
Marilyn shopped in Roxbury and nearby Woodbury, sometimes twice a day. She walked in the green and yellow fields and along stone-wall-lined dirt roads. On one occasion, Marilyn paid a call on their neighbor, old Percy Beardsley. As he often did with visitors, Percy invited Marilyn to inspect his father’s famous coal cellar.
Local farmers still talked about the time, many years previously, when a motion picture company used Nate Beardsley’s red Devon cows and steers as a backdrop. One night the leading lady, Norma Talmadge—Joe Schenck’s wife—had accompanied Nate to the coal cellar, where she left her long, white kid gloves on a cider barrel. In later years, though Nate and his son drank one barrel of cider a month, they religiously avoided disturbing the movie star’s gloves. In these parts, the Beardsley cellar was thought to be better than any museum. Even after old Nate died, his boy Percy faithfully maintained the shrine. The white gloves, thick with dust, gave the appearance of having been mummified.
After her visit, Percy tried to preserve the marks left by Marilyn Monroe’s spike heels in the dirt floor. When a drover stepped on the spot, inadvertently obliterating the marks, Percy, furious, refused to speak to him again.
Marilyn often spent hours searching for Hugo, the basset hound, who tended to wander. He moved very slowly, leading Arthur to nickname him “Flash.” He was known to appear on doorsteps miles away, or even to fall asleep in the middle of the road, forcing cars to a halt. He barked in agitation whenever a man, whether Arthur or Norman, entered the room; something about their voices distressed him. But the dog adored Marilyn. And she doted on him, going so far as to give him brandy when he seemed depressed. That cau
sed him to run about hysterically, one droopy ear to the floor. Then he turned around sharply, running with his other ear to the floor. Suddenly, poor Hugo collapsed in a corner and fell asleep. “Maybe that’ll help,” Marilyn declared.
Much of the summer passed with no sign of how Twentieth intended to react to Marilyn’s demands. In fact, for some time studio executives seemed unable to develop a plan of attack. At length, it came to the attention of the New York office that, during the period when Marilyn was supposed to have been ready, willing, and able to report for Time and Tide, she had entered Lenox Hill Hospital for gynecological surgery. That in itself provided Twentieth with grounds to fight her in court.
But to the bewilderment of the New York office, their counterparts on the west coast were suddenly most eager to pay Marilyn. They wanted to avoid a lawsuit at all costs. On August 26, Twentieth officially capitulated to all of Marilyn’s demands. The studio notified her that she would be paid for both The Blue Angel and Time and Tide. More importantly, she was relieved of the obligation to do one of the three pictures she still owed.
Buddy Adler had the reputation of being a weak, indecisive production chief, who was not quite up to the job. He was anxious to settle with Marilyn because an opportunity had unexpectedly presented itself to put her in a film. Some Like It Hot had been a huge critical and box-office success. Marilyn was very hot right now. Adler wanted to get her in front of the studio cameras before she signed to do another outside film. Marilyn, after all, had not appeared in a picture for Twentieth since Bus Stop, three years previously.
As it happened, a project had been sitting under Adler’s nose all summer. For the past few months, the producer Jerry Wald had been putting together a film to star Gregory Peck. Based on a screenplay by Norman Krasna, The Billionaire was a comedy of mistaken identity. So far, no leading lady had been cast. In the beginning, Marilyn’s name had not even come up, because it was assumed she was to do Time and Tide with Kazan. In July, Wald had approached the director George Cukor. By August, Cukor definitely seemed interested. But he had reservations about the script and he wanted to know who the female lead was going to be.
Wald was also the producer of Clifford Odets’s The Story on Page One. Like Odets, he had very much wanted to cast Marilyn. But Odets was not on Marilyn’s list of approved directors. As chance would have it, George Cukor was. Marilyn had met Cukor several years previously when she was studying with his friend Constance Collier. According to Marilyn’s contract, if Twentieth signed Cukor she would have no choice but to report to work on The Billionaire.
In the last days of summer, as Twentieth negotiated with Cukor, Miller was rushing to complete his second draft. On September 2, he wired Huston in Ireland that he was almost finished. Miller thanked God for that, explaining his own long silence by insisting he wanted to deliver the screenplay itself instead of merely talking about it. Yet as the fall approached, Miller clearly felt the need to give Huston some indication of progress. In contacting the director, he seemed to be giving himself a final push. Miller put further pressure on himself by talking about The Misfits to the New York Times. He announced that he had been at work on the script in Roxbury. He disclosed that they hoped to shoot in April 1960 and that the picture would star Marilyn and perhaps Jason Robards. It is possible that Miller sensed he was about to encounter difficulty with the last three pages, which would prove the hardest part of the script to write. Contacting Huston and agreeing to talk to the press may have been a way of leaving himself no choice but to finish.
On September 16, Twentieth made a deal with Cukor, and the next day a letter went out notifying Marilyn that she was to report for pre-production on November 2. Filming was scheduled to start the following week. Thus, before Marilyn could even think about appearing in Arthur’s picture, she would be required to fulfill her obligation to Twentieth.
Gregory Peck needed to be finished by February 1. So, though it would be a tight fit, if all went well Marilyn would be available in time for The Misfits. Still, the last-minute commotion over The Billionaire—would Marilyn accept? would she be finished in time? would she agree to come out right away to meet with Jerry Wald?—was hardly what Miller needed as he struggled with two very different versions of the ending.
He did not accompany Marilyn when, at Skouras’s behest, she flew to Los Angeles to attend a lunch in honor of Nikita Khrushchev at Twentieth Century–Fox. Though it was rumored that Miller had stayed away for political reasons, the truth was he remained in Connecticut to work.
The Khrushchev lunch, hosted by Frank Sinatra, was billed tongue-in-cheek as “the greatest spectacle ever staged in a motion picture studio.” Many stars, studio executives, and journalists attended. In the crowd were Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Judy Garland, and Kim Novak. To publicize her upcoming picture, Marilyn appeared on George Cukor’s arm. She actually arrived early, prompting Billy Wilder to remark that Twentieth ought to hire Khrushchev to direct The Billionaire. Skouras, though he hosted the event, seemed eager to challenge the Communist leader to a public “sparring session.”
“I was just a poor boy,” Skouras began in a thick accent, “and now I’m head of a studio.”
“I was just a poor boy,” Khrushchev replied through a translator, “and now I’m head of Russia.”
And so it went. Afterward, the consensus was that Khrushchev had “clobbered” the Old Greek.
The real reason for Marilyn’s trip was a four-hour meeting the next day with Wald, Krasna, and Cukor. It was Sunday, September 20. Marilyn was due to fly back to New York afterward. Yves Montand, who had played John Proctor in the French stage and screen versions of The Crucible, was to appear in concert on Broadway, opening the following evening. Since Arthur was busy putting the finishing touches on The Misfits, Marilyn was to attend the premiere in his place. He had arranged for her escort to be Montgomery Clift, who was about to leave for Tennessee to film Wild River, as Time and Tide had been renamed.
The fact that Marilyn had not yet read The Billionaire seemed to bother no one at the meeting, especially since Cukor had already demanded a rewrite. Norman Krasna used the opportunity to tell Marilyn the story in detail. To everyone’s relief, when he finished, Marilyn seemed pleased.
“It’s wonderful,” she cooed. “I’m so enthusiastic. I can’t wait to get started.”
She promised not to peek at the script until the revisions were completed. She did, however, have certain requests of her own. Though Marilyn’s contract gave her no say about the cameraman for this film, she made it clear that she preferred Harry Stradling, who had shot A Streetcar Named Desire for Kazan. And she wanted Jack Cole for her song-and-dance numbers.
Wald, said to be the model for Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run?, promised to try to “pin down” the people she wanted. Marilyn reiterated that she was thrilled with the package. She adored the idea of working with George Cukor and Gregory Peck. She emphasized that she had been discussing Norman Krasna with her husband. She wanted the screenwriter to know that Arthur had great faith in Krasna’s ability to produce a script that would be good for her. The tensions in the marriage notwithstanding, Marilyn appeared to love quoting Arthur. She used every opportunity to throw his name around.
On Thursday, September 24, Miller finally sent off a second draft of The Misfits. He still planned to do some work on the ending. Nearly two years had passed since he had completed the 149-page first draft. The new version was nineteen pages longer. He was very excited about the rewrite, but of course it was Huston’s reaction that counted. On Sunday, Miller could not resist wiring Huston to confirm that he had received the screenplay. The response he had been hoping for came two days later. “SCRIPT MAGNIFICENT,” Huston wired from Ireland. Miller read the message with delight.
It is enormously revealing that before Miller replied to Huston, he dashed off a letter to Brooks Atkinson, the critic who had dubbed the postwar years on Broadway the Williams–Miller era. That, of course, was no l
onger the case. At the time of The Crucible, Eric Bentley had argued that Miller needed a Kazan. Whether or not one agreed, there could be no denying that Williams had been remarkably prolific in recent years while Miller, more and more, seemed to be devoid of inspiration. Eager to counter that impression, Miller wasted no time in contacting Atkinson, who had continued to warmly support the playwright and his work. On October 1, Miller declared that he hoped soon to repay Atkinson’s faith with a new stage play. In the meantime, he informed Atkinson that, appearances to the contrary, he had hardly been inactive. In fact, he had been exploring a broader universe than he had known previously. Miller announced that, as a first leap into that new world, he had just finished The Misfits. Bursting with pride, he called it the most fully realized work he had written.
Did Miller really mean to suggest that The Misfits was superior to Death of a Salesman? Apparently so. At this point, he seemed very much to need to believe that to be true. Miller’s exaggerated sense of what he had just accomplished sounds like a reaction to months of self-doubt, and to years of having repeatedly disappointed people’s expectations.
Four days later, when Miller wrote to John Huston, he crowed that not since Death of a Salesman had he been so eager to see his work acted. He assumed the director would see why he had taken such a long time. In revising the screenplay, Miller had discovered an exciting new realm that he had needed time to explore. He felt certain that together they would be able to create something entirely new. He predicted that The Misfits was going to be one of those unique creative undertakings in which every aspect would instantly come to life. He assured Huston that Marilyn was getting in shape for the day when they began.
Even as Miller wrote this, however, Marilyn was launching a campaign for the lead in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. If it turned out to be successful, she would probably be unavailable for The Misfits. Truman Capote had put a good deal of Marilyn into the original novel. When Marilyn had first arrived in New York, she had been bright and hopeful, with everything seemingly ahead of her. In portraying Holly Golightly, perhaps she sought to recapture something of that earlier, more innocent period. At the same time, she seemed eager to subvert Arthur’s plans. If he was willing to put up with anything to get his picture made, then Marilyn, apparently, was ready to do anything to stop it. She prepared two scenes from Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Lee Strasberg’s private class. She also performed the scenes for Capote. He insisted she was perfect for the part. But all the bad publicity about the trouble she had given Billy Wilder on Some Like It Hot made her persona non grata at Paramount. At length, over Capote’s objections, the role went to Audrey Hepburn.
Marilyn Monroe Page 40
