Huston flew to Los Angeles to check on Marilyn’s condition. First, he talked to Dr. Greenson. The encounter provided Greenson with an opportunity to size up the enemy. As chance would have it, the analyst had been working since 1958 to make it impossible for a film about Sigmund Freud to be shot in Hollywood. He knew all about the screenplay Huston had hired Sartre to write. And he knew that a respected director’s involvement was particularly distressing to Anna Freud, as that would lend credibility to the project. But Huston was not here to discuss Freud. He wanted to know about Marilyn. Greenson declared her ready for work, a week without barbiturates having made all the difference. Though she resembled an addict in some respects, she did not exhibit withdrawal symptoms. Marilyn’s appearance seemed to confirm the doctor’s remarks. She was vibrant. She was wide awake. She indicated that she knew what the barbiturates had done. She was embarrassed by her behavior. She was grateful Huston had intervened. She was eager to come back, if he would have her.
Marilyn returned to Reno on September 5. At midnight, when she and Arthur stepped off the plane, she heard a marching band, with cheers and applause. She saw signs proclaiming “WELCOME MARILYN.” The warm reception was not really for her benefit, however. United Artists had staged the event to give reporters something to write about other than the rumors of a drug overdose. She went before the cameras the following day.
Marilyn’s hopes of pleasing Huston were quickly dashed. Three days after she returned, she faced her most technically demanding scene. It took place in the litter-strewn rear of the bar where Roslyn and Perce have been dancing. It consisted of five minutes of dialogue between Marilyn and Montgomery Clift. Huston viewed it as a directorial challenge; he had never shot a scene that long.
Miller had begun The Misfits in an effort to provide Marilyn with her first truly serious and important role. The film, intended to make her feel good about herself, was to have been Marilyn’s chance to show the world what she was capable of as a dramatic actress. Her inability to memorize was notorious; yet somehow she had always believed that only a long dialogue scene would test her worth. So this was to have been her big opportunity.
They shot intensively beneath a black tarpaulin and ten-thousand-watt lights, the torrid air thick with flies. But Huston remained dissatisfied. The pace needed to be faster. The actors persisted in blowing their lines. At the end of two days, Marilyn sensed that she had failed.
Huston, having lost a good deal of money in the casinos, went to San Francisco, where he collected an advance of $25,000 to direct Freud for Universal. That enabled him to pay off his gambling debts. Upon his return, they reshot a bedroom scene in which Clark Gable awakens Marilyn. He is fully clothed, she is naked beneath a sheet. Gay kisses Roslyn and she sits up. Magnum photographer Eve Arnold could see that Marilyn was eager to please Huston.
In the seventh take, she did something not in the script. She had failed to impress Huston in her five-minute dialogue scene, so now she gave him the one thing that always seemed to work for her. It was as though she could hear Olivier urging, “All right, Marilyn. Be sexy.” As she sat up, she dropped the sheet, exposing her right breast. The moment was a sad one, suggesting as it did Marilyn’s sense that, despite her dreams of being an actress, this was all she really had to offer. If she thought Huston would be pleased, she miscalculated badly. After the take, Marilyn cast a hopeful glance in his direction.
“I’ve seen ’em before,” said Huston, unimpressed. He later grumbled that he had always known girls have breasts. Huston demanded two more takes, with the breast covered.
Four days later, Huston insisted on reshooting the big dialogue scene with Monroe and Clift. It was Friday, September 23. In the retakes, Marilyn surprised herself. By an act of will, she finally gave Huston the performance he wanted. She and Clift were brilliant together. Huston exulted that it was Marilyn’s best work in the film. In spite of everything, he offered her the female lead in Freud. She was to play Cecily, a patient. Clift would play Freud. Marilyn was delighted.
Still, she could not stay away from drugs. She moved in with Paula at the Holiday Inn. When Huston visited Marilyn there, he was appalled to find her in the worst shape yet. Her hair was matted, her nightgown and body filthy. She veered between euphoria and trance. It was as though she had never been detoxified. On another occasion, Miller arrived to discover a doctor probing for a vein in the back of Marilyn’s hand, preparing to inject her with Amytal. When Marilyn spotted him, she angrily ordered her husband to leave.
The hunt for the wild mustangs remained to be shot. Gay takes Roslyn along because he senses he’s losing her, but the adventure does not have the hoped-for effect. Instead of Gay’s power, Roslyn sees what he’s become. He’s so much less than she thought. Gay, once a heroic cowboy, has been reduced to selling wild horses for dog food. Something similar happened when Marilyn observed Arthur at work on The Misfits. He talked of Death of a Salesman. He mentioned Hamlet, King Lear, and Oedipus Rex. In fact, the playwright had devoted the better part of three years to a mediocre screenplay.
Never was that more evident than during the calamitous final days of filming. By then, Miller should have been able to connect the story’s two dominant lines, that of Roslyn and that of the wild horses. He should have shown that Roslyn seeks to stop Gay from hunting the mustangs because of the pain she’s experienced in being hunted herself. Instead, Miller has Roslyn protest at the hunt because she cannot bear to see anything killed. Miller gives her a heart of gold. In sentimentalizing Roslyn, he fails to provide a convincing explanation for her behavior. That explanation had been under his nose all along. It lay in the conflict between Gay and Guido, a conflict that Miller mysteriously never develops. We never see the men struggle over Roslyn. At a moment when, in life, Miller was moving back in Kazan’s direction, perhaps that was a conflict he preferred not to probe. In the end, Roslyn’s emotions during the hunt are not as moving as they ought to be, because they seem disconnected from the story.
Location shooting concluded on Tuesday, October 18. The company moved to Los Angeles. Process shots were to be done the following week. The Millers took up residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Marilyn, in atrocious condition, was treated by Dr. Greenson. As the end drew near, she had reason to believe that her questions were finally about to be answered. Had Arthur been using her? Had he endured betrayal and humiliation in order to get his film made? Would he abandon her once The Misfits was finished? As though Marilyn could not bear to learn the truth, she threw him out first. His things were carted away in a station wagon. He moved to another hotel.
On Friday, November 4, Huston shot a retake of the happy ending that showed Gay and Roslyn starting a life together. Forty days behind schedule, The Misfits was finished. Before Marilyn left, she approached the director. She had waited until the very last minute to say this. She was in awe of Huston, so it cannot have been easy to announce that she had decided to turn down a role in Freud. Anna Freud, she declared, did not want the picture made. Clearly, Dr. Greenson had gotten to Marilyn. Perhaps because Marilyn herself wanted to do the film so very badly, she disappeared quickly, giving Huston no chance to reply.
That weekend, she and Arthur flew back to New York separately. Marilyn returned to their apartment. Arthur moved to the Adams Hotel on East 86th Street. Despite everything, she called him there to ask gently, “Aren’t you coming home?”
He did. But it was only to collect his possessions. Their marriage was over.
SIXTEEN
Marilyn studied the black-and-white contact sheets of The Misfits through a watchmaker’s loupe. She wore a white bathrobe and her feet were bare, the nails painted silver. As though the filming itself had not been painful enough, now she had to relive it in excruciating detail. She was particularly distressed by some of the photographs taken when Henri Cartier-Bresson and Inge Morath were on duty. Again and again, Marilyn scratched a red X over the tiny images that showed the Millers together. At the time, she had been intent on hiding
the truth that the marriage was finished; now she thought the pictures dishonest. The world would probably think so too, since the Millers’ decision to divorce had been widely reported.
“MILLER WALKS OUT ON MARILYN,” the New York Daily News had blasted on November 12, 1960. Journalists didn’t know where to find Arthur, but they all knew Marilyn’s address. They staked out the front of her building near the East River, lining up on both sides of the awning, requiring her to run a gauntlet of flashing cameras and shouted questions when she left to see Dr. Kris. They were usually still there when she came home. Marilyn felt like a prisoner. Almost certainly, it was rage that caused her, bent over the contact sheets with grease pencil in hand, repeatedly to cross out images of Arthur alone or with others. She ignored Eve Arnold’s patient reminders that she had the right to approve only pictures in which she was present.
She had to choose quickly. United Artists had decided to move up the premiere of The Misfits after Clark Gable died on November 16. From then on, among the questions regularly shouted at Marilyn was whether she felt guilty. Gable’s frustration over Marilyn’s constant lateness was rumored to have led to his heart attack. Marilyn, for her part, wondered whether it might be true. Gladys had hinted that Norma Jeane was Gable’s child. Though Marilyn certainly did not believe that now, she was tortured by the possibility that on some unconscious level she had harmed Gable in order to punish her absent father. Each time she spotted Gable in the contact sheets, Marilyn, desperate to do something for him, advised Eve Arnold at length on how the photograph ought to be retouched.
“I will not discuss my personal life,” Marilyn whispered to reporters as she rushed to a waiting black Cadillac limousine. She wore a black coat, the collar pulled up to her chin. The white-gloved doorman helped her in. The hired car carried her to 135 Central Park West.
Her analyst’s office-apartment had the air of a museum. Dr. Kris’s husband, in addition to being a psychoanalyst himself, had been a renowned art historian and curator, a collector of ancient cameos, intaglios, and cut stones. He had advised Sigmund Freud on the purchase of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Asian antiquities. Marianne Kris was motherly and deeply caring. It was said that when her husband died, her first concern, typically, was for other people. Dr. Kris, in her dealings with Marilyn, was utterly without self-interest.
Because Marianne Kris and Lee Strasberg lived in the same building, and because Strasberg focused so intensely on matters of psychology, it was easy for Marilyn’s sessions with her analyst to blur into her sessions with the acting teacher. She often saw him directly after therapy. The process of pouring out her pain, her fears, and her anger in Dr. Kris’s office would continue upstairs in Strasberg’s study. At best this was confusing. At worst it was destructive.
Strasberg’s efforts were tainted with self-interest. When Marilyn returned from The Misfits, she was sick, depressed, and extremely upset about the end of her marriage. She was haunted by the possibility that she had killed Gable. She needed to rest, having made two difficult films without a break. Yet Strasberg wasted no time in pushing a project of his own. As far as he was concerned, Marilyn mustn’t let the studio force her into doing another light comedy. Strasberg wanted to direct her in a television production of Somerset Maugham’s Rain. He lacked credits, so her participation was vital. She accompanied him to meetings with executives at NBC.
Marilyn had been notified to report to George Cukor on April 14, 196l. Suddenly, on December 13, to the apparent bewilderment of everyone but Lee Strasberg, Marilyn informed Twentieth that she would not appear in Goodbye, Charlie. She offered no reason. The studio replied that her contract obliged her to make this picture. As long as Twentieth had Cukor, one of her approved directors, Marilyn could not legally refuse.
She lay cloistered in her dark bedroom, refusing most calls. Lee and Paula, however, were always able to get through. When Hedda Rosten finally talked to her, Marilyn’s voice had an indistinct, faraway quality. As the holidays approached, her depression deepened. On Christmas night, the kitchen door opened and a mountain of poinsettias was brought in. Marilyn, who had resumed her desperate calls to Yves Montand, may have thought that he, or Arthur, had had a change of heart. If she did, she was disappointed. A helper had already opened the card. It said, “Best, Joe.”
“Well, there’s only one Joe,” Marilyn declared.
Unlike Montand, DiMaggio was waiting for her call. She asked why he had sent the poinsettias.
“First of all, because I thought you would call me to thank me,” Joe replied. “Besides, who in the hell else do you have in the world?”
What could she possibly say to that? Joe asked what Marilyn was doing tonight. When she admitted she was free on Christmas, he asked if he could stop by. Marilyn later told Dr. Greenson that, though she had been tired and depressed, she was happy to see Joe.
From then on, Joe appeared regularly. Sometimes he was accompanied by George Solotaire. In order to avoid the press, he would arrive late. He used the service elevator, entered by the kitchen door and left at dawn. Yet her staff knew that he had come back into her life. The milk in the refrigerator was for Joe; his ulcer prevented him from drinking coffee. His visits persisted until he was required to go out of town on business.
On her publicists’ advice, Marilyn chose January 20, 1961, to file for divorce, hoping that the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as president would overshadow the news. She flew to El Paso, Texas, where a car was waiting to take her to Mexico. Arthur had signed a waiver, so he did not have to appear in person.
As it happened, that day Miller was in Washington, D.C., attending the inauguration with Joe and Olie Rauh. Joe Rauh, a prominent backer of Hubert Humphrey, had played a pivotal role at the Democratic convention, helping to persuade Humphrey to withdraw when it became clear he could not win. Rauh’s only regret, expressed privately to Miller, was that Kennedy had double-crossed the liberals by choosing a conservative vice-presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson. Olie, when she saw Arthur in Washington, told him how sorry she and Joe were about the divorce.
“I am, too,” Arthur replied, “and I know Marilyn is. But if I hadn’t done this, I would be dead.”
A question lingered. What did a man who had been married to Marilyn Monroe do next? Watching Miller with the Kennedys gave Joe Rauh an idea. After the inaugural festivities, he and Olie agreed that Arthur was going to make a play for Jacqueline Kennedy. The Rauhs were jesting, of course. But the idea bears thinking about. The First Lady was one of the few women alive capable of topping Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn returned from Mexico in a state of utter despair. This was more than just the end of a marriage. For Marilyn, it was the end of all hope that she would ever be able to see herself as worthy of being loved. For a short time, Arthur had given her that hope. For a short time, Marilyn had believed that she might actually find happiness. Now, Arthur was gone from her life forever, and his departure felt like a verdict.
On January 31, 1961, she attended a preview of The Misfits at the Capitol Theater on Broadway. Escorted by Montgomery Clift, Marilyn looked completely ravaged, aged beyond her years. Miller was there with his two children. He and Marilyn conspicuously avoided one another. This was the first time Marilyn saw the film that had once been intended to prove Arthur’s love for her. For three years, this project had been the force that simultaneously held their marriage together and tore it apart. Watching The Misfits was a painful experience for Marilyn. The moment the film was over, she fled the theater. The next day, The Misfits opened to mixed reviews. Arthur had not brought off the Great American Film after all.
Marilyn blamed herself for the failure of the marriage. She blamed herself for having come so close to realizing her dream, then losing it. Finally, in her anguish, she came up with an excuse to call Arthur. She asked if she could drive to Roxbury to collect some of her possessions. The Connecticut property, the home where Marilyn had dreamed of a family and a future, had gone to him, while she kept the apartment in
Manhattan. He told her to come up any time, adding that if he was not there when she arrived, she knew where the key was. If that was a warning, Marilyn did not register it as such. She told herself Arthur would be there. Maybe he would ask her to have coffee with him. When she arrived, the house was empty. Obviously, he did not want to see her. He had fled the cul de sac he had written about in his notebook, and now he was all too clearly wary of being drawn back in.
Nor, as Joe Rauh had presumed, was he inclined to try to top Marilyn. Like Olivier after Vivien Leigh, Miller entered a relationship with a sane, sensible, self-sufficient woman, who was the antithesis of the mad, devouring second wife. It was said that Joan Plowright had not broken up Olivier’s marriage; she had simply been present “at the crucial turning point” in his life. The same could be said of Inge Morath with Miller. The Magnum photographer had been in Nevada as Miller’s marriage was coming apart. He had run into her again in New York after it was over. The contrast between Inge and Marilyn could hardly have been stronger. One had saved a man’s life; the other needed to be saved. At Inge’s suggestion, Arthur moved downtown to the Chelsea Hotel, where she preferred to stay.
He had his typewriter. He had his notebooks. He had his autobiographical work-in-progress. But he was blocked. After The Misfits, he could not seem to shake his own embarrassment. Only recently he had crowed about his new work to Brooks Atkinson, so he was uneasy when Atkinson paid a call in Roxbury. Miller felt he had disappointed the critic. But Atkinson was there to show support for an artist he valued. He was there to convey the hope that Miller, having had his fill of Hollywood, would soon emerge with a new Broadway play.
Marilyn Monroe Page 46
