The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Marilyn told Lee Strasberg that Miller's diary described "how disappointed he was in me. How he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. That his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch and Arthur no longer had a decent answer to that one."9 She also told Susan Strasberg, more frankly and forcefully, that Miller "was ashamed of me, ashamed to love me. . . . Her problems with Olivier [were] her fault because she was a bitch." Though Miller merely mentioned, and did not exaggerate, her self-destructive faults, her reaction "was horror. You know, a woman wants her husband to bolster her up, not magnify her flaws." In yet another version of this incident, Miller is supposed to have written, "The only one I will ever love is my daughter." Marilyn responded to Miller's diary with five stark words, written on her initialed notepaper and found after her death, "he does not love me."10 She seems to have lost, early on, the feeling of being sheltered in his warmth and tenderness.

  Following this crisis, which took place halfway through the shooting, Miller flew to New York, supposedly to visit his sick daughter ("the only one I will ever love"). When Paula also had to return to New York, Marilyn's analyst, Dr. Hohenberg, was flown over to England at great expense to provide psychological help, alleviate Marilyn's depression and reduce her dependence on drugs.

  On October 13, when he'd returned to London, Miller wrote Rosten that he and Joshua Logan had seen the first fifty minutes of the "spectacular" movie and had been "bowled over" by it. The picture does have some amusing topical allusions. Olivier, referring to HUAC, accuses his political enemies of "Un-Carpathian Activities." Marilyn's dress strap breaks during her first meeting with Olivier (the Prince Regent) just as it did during their press conference in New York. There are references to her habitual lateness as she dresses for a seductive midnight supper with Olivier. When she enters the ornately furnished Carpathian embassy, she speaks personally and declares, "All I can say is give me vulgarity." As they're about to kiss for the first time, she notices his excessive pomade and punctures his romantic image by observing, "There's a lot of funny stuff in your hair." The Olivier character also hurls a dart at Marilyn by remarking, "We are not dealing with a supervised adult, but with a moody child."

  Miller was whistling in the dark about the movie. The trivial plot concerns Marilyn's conquest of the stiff and formal Olivier (whom she calls "Your Grand Ducal"), who's visiting London in 1911 for the coronation of King George V. The picture retains the verbosity and staginess of the original play, and most of the characters enter and exit through the main set, the salon of the embassy. Marilyn doesn't always look her best, and her chorus-girl song comes out of nowhere. Worst of all, Marilyn and Olivier are more an awkward couple than a sensational match. Olivier is very cold, they have no personal magnetism or emotional spark, and don't seem as though they could ever fall in love with each other. They appear to be acting in two different movies.

  In his disputes with Marilyn, the English cast and crew naturally sided with the greatly respected Olivier, and were also quite bitter about her unprofessional behavior. Their anger erupted at the end of the shooting when she set out her parting gifts on a trestle-table: bottles for the gentlemen, identical purses for the ladies. One man disgustedly threw his bottle into a huge rubbish bin and "Immediately one of the ladies followed and threw in her purse. There was a sort of rippling murmur of anger and assent, and then everyone followed suit. Quite soon the bin was literally overflowing with bottles and purses, still wrapped and labelled – 'Thank you from Marilyn Monroe.'"

  After seeing the second and final version of the movie, Marilyn (perhaps advised by Miller) sent Jack Warner a very shrewd professional analysis of its faults, and made specific suggestions about how to improve the pace, plot, comedy, editing and music:

  It is not the same picture you saw in New York last winter, and I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine. Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the energy and brightness that you saw in New York. Some of the jump cutting kills the points, as in the fainting scene. The coronation is as long as before if not longer, and the story gets lost in it. American audiences are not as moved by stained-glass windows as the British are, and we threaten them with boredom. I am amazed that so much of the picture has no music at all when the idea was to make a romantic picture. We have shot enough film to make a great movie, if only it will be as in the earlier version. I hope you will make every effort to save our picture.

  Marilyn was as angry with Olivier after Showgirl as she'd been with Joshua Logan after Bus Stop. When the picture was released, Olivier visited the Actors Studio and Marilyn took refuge in the ladies' room until she was sure he had left. Shelley Winters "asked her if the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl had been that rough. She blinked and smiled and said, 'English actors are ashamed of their feelings and hate the idea of expressing themselves with our Method work. They prefer to act with technique.'"11

  The acrimony over Showgirl, the second and last picture made with Milton Greene for Marilyn Monroe Productions, destroyed her friendship with her partner. Miller, believing her contract with Greene was extraordinarily disadvantageous, was eager to get Marilyn out of it. But he realized, since Greene had not always separated his own purchases from company expenses, that dividing company assets would be complicated. Miller declared that Milton and Amy "bought antiques in London and charged them to the company. . . . The financial affairs of the company were in a mess." Greene had, however, financed her luxurious lifestyle in New York. "It would be hard to say how much was owed Milton at the time. He was paying for nearly everything for Marilyn" from the time she left Hollywood until she went to work on Bus Stop and Showgirl. "I think this period when he was giving her money began in 1955. It continued when she was living in the Waldorf."

  In April 1957, after a series of angry legal conferences, Greene was forced to sell his stock to Marilyn for $100,000. This was his payment for establishing the profitable company, working for her during their partnership and paying most of her expenses for more than a year. Marilyn, relieved to break their agreement, said, "my company had not been organized to parcel out 49 percent of my earnings to Mr. Greene for seven years." Miller maintained that Greene "swindled" Marilyn and "did nothing but live off her work. She prevented him from getting majority control, and then had to pay $100,000 to get rid of him." Greene's son saw things rather differently and declared, "Miller fucked my family."12

  Twelve

  Heading for Disaster

  (1957–1960)

  I

  While married to Mary and before he met Marilyn, Miller had led a structured and productive life. For Marilyn's sake he gave up a great deal – not only his long-term marriage and children, but the privacy, peace and secure way of life that had sustained his greatest work. Like Orpheus, he descended into a troubled underworld to rescue his Eurydice, and he, too, was doomed to fail. Miller thought he'd been unhappy with Mary, but now found himself far worse off. Exposed to the glare of publicity and scrutiny of the media, swept into Marilyn's chaotic life and tormented by a woman who was impossible to please, he became what Norman Mailer called "the most talented slave in the world."

  After returning from England in November 1956, Miller took Marilyn back to his country house in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he hoped they could lead a normal life. The two-story house, built in 1783 during the colonial period, had huge ceiling beams. It was surrounded by 325 acres of land and planted with fruit trees. There was no other house in sight, and a cool breeze blew through a row of maples. The back veranda, with its view of endless hills, led to a swimming pond with water so clean you could drink it.

  It soon became clear that they would have trouble combining their habits, tastes and interests. The contrast between Marilyn's
lofty dreams and reckless indifference to money and Miller's down-to-earth realism and notorious frugality became obvious that autumn when she asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new house. Though Miller told Wright that they wanted to live rather simply, Wright's grandiose plan included, Miller wrote, "a circular living room with a dropped center surrounded by ovoid columns of fieldstone some five feet thick, and a domed ceiling, the diameter no less than sixty feet, looking out toward the view over a swimming pool seventy feet long with fieldstone sides that jutted forth from the incline of the hill." This gigantic pleasuredome, suitable for an oriental potentate, fulfilled Wright's own fantasies but ignored his clients' needs. It had "only a single bedroom and a small guestroom, but did provide a large 'conference room' complete with a long boardroom-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs." In the end they rejected his concept as far too impractical and outrageously expensive and decided to preserve the old house. They modernized the rear part, put in sliding doors, and built a garage and a separate one-room study for Miller.

  For Marilyn the housewife's routine had no charms. Life in a rundown house with a husband who spent the mornings reading and writing in his study and the afternoons replacing rotten timber and putting in plumbing must have come as a shock. Mailer satirized the homespun Miller as "the complacent country squire, boring people with his accounts of clearing fields, gardening, the joys of plumbing ('Nothing like taking a bath in water that comes through pipes you threaded yourself')." Miller was self-sufficient, fully occupied and used to solitude. Marilyn – who'd been taught almost nothing as a child – had no useful skills or diverting pastimes, and focused entirely on her own appearance. She had nothing to occupy her empty hours in the country, and soon got tired of rearranging the furniture and playing with Hugo, Miller's sluggish and incontinent basset hound. She wanted her husband's absolute attention but, as Miller observed, "physical admiration threatened to devalue her person, yet she became anxious if her appearance was ignored." The screenwriter Nunnally Johnson noted the abyss that had opened between them: "I think she bored the hell out of everybody. She just didn't have the intelligence, but she was aware she didn't have it. . . . My guess is she just wasn't enough for Arthur Miller. After you've married the sex goddess – nobody finds it very difficult to talk before you get into the hay, but what do you say afterwards? Marilyn was like a child, she thought a lay was the answer to everything."

  Soon after their wedding Marilyn invited the Strasbergs for a country brunch, and their strange visit revealed the anxiety and chaos that reigned in Roxbury. The Strasbergs arrived punctually at 11 a.m. Marilyn and Miller seemed to have quarreled and he'd left all the preparations to her. She was unprepared for her guests and he was indifferent, even hostile. No one had done any shopping. "In her terrycloth housecoat, Marilyn appeared to have just awakened. Nobody else was there, not even a maid. Nobody made moves toward the kitchen. Tension floated in the air. It was apparent something was awry. Miller didn't . . . offer even a glass of water. An hour and a half went by." When the uneasy guests said they were hungry after the long drive from New York, Marilyn "panicked. 'Come inside.' She ran into the kitchen. She pulled open the freezer, put her hands on a frozen steak and stammered nervously, 'I'll g-get you s-something to eat right away.'"

  The friend who'd driven them up from New York tried to ease the tension by bringing hostilities into the open and rather awkwardly saying:

  "Hey, try to relax. We all know Arthur doesn't like Lee, but even if Lee doesn't like Arthur he respects him, so relax, willya? Nothing's going to happen. Take it easy."

  Marilyn didn't answer. She opened the refrigerator. Nothing was there except a bottle of milk. Back at the freezer she pulled out the frozen steak. "Here," she said.

  "This won't work. What else do you have?"

  Marilyn began to claw at the trays. She pulled out frozen strawberries, frozen peas.1

  Finally, the guests escaped to a nearby restaurant.

  A few years later, Frank Taylor, Miller's friend and publisher, was invited to Roxbury with his family to hear Miller read the script of The Misfits. Always seductive, Marilyn asked Taylor's four boys, aged seven to seventeen, "Who wants to lie on the hammock with me?" They all raced to cuddle up with her – all together, if possible; serially, if not. Curtice Taylor recalled how, as a self-styled "weird pre-adolescent," he wanted to see Marilyn on his own. Later on he got permission to visit his horse, Ebony, which the Taylors had not been able to keep and had given to the Millers. As he hung around the house, the Millers must have thought, "what the hell is this kid doing here?" Though Curtice felt awkward with Marilyn, she lavished affection on him. Curious about her sexual life, he was strangely disturbed when he looked through the door and saw the twisted sheets in the bedroom.

  Curtice also recalled another tense and sad incident, involving Marilyn's love of animals (except the minks in her coat), which seemed straight out of The Misfits:

  On another weekend, when we Taylors were visiting the Millers, my brother Mark and I were playing around in the pastures when we came upon a newborn calf being tended to by its mother. We knew Marilyn would love this, so we went and got her. Indeed, she did love it, and cooed about the mother licking it clean as it struggled to get up. We were all laughing and having a fine time when we saw the farmer who rented the pasture coming across the field. He gruffly greeted us, went over to the calf and unceremoniously opened its legs. Getting the information he needed, he strode away, only to return a few minutes later with a large gunny sack. When he picked up the struggling creature and started to stuff it into the bag, Marilyn went ballistic! "How could you take it away from its mother? It was just born and is innocent." Then, just like in The Misfits, she said, "I'll buy it from you. How much do you want for it?" She was on the border of hysteria. After stuffing the calf into the bag, the farmer proceeded with his task, despite her protestations, and said to Marilyn: "Mrs. Miller, I will not sell you this calf. It's a male calf and I run a dairy. I will now raise him for veal. This is what I do. This is how it works." He put the squirming sack over his shoulder and walked away. Arthur was waiting for us as we brought a sobbing Marilyn back to the porch. The day was ruined and she withdrew into seclusion.

  The Millers' life in New York was equally unreal. At first they lived in Marilyn's apartment at 2 Sutton Place, a posh street not far from the United Nations, with views of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Its décor looked like an albino stage set. Her maid condescendingly wrote, "It seemed half-finished, half-furnished, and reminded me of a hotel. There was a white piano, some nondescript white sofas, and wall-to-wall white carpeting marred by many stains. The view of the buildings across the street was gloomy. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors were everywhere."

  The larger, 13th-floor flat at 444 East 57th Street, where they moved in 1957, had a living room with bookcases, a fireplace and a piano; dining alcove with a mirrored table; kitchen and study; main bedroom and bathroom; guest bedroom, with floral designs on the white porcelain doorknobs. An interviewer, satirizing the overdone décor, called the place "unexpectedly MGMish: white sofas and spreading ice-cap expanses of white fitted carpet. There is, in fact, a sharp division when you enter Mr. Miller's work-room. . . . The stokehole below the first-class lounge" revealed his different taste and symbolized his humble status.2

  As she tried to adjust to her third marriage, Marilyn projected an image of a successful union, of shared interests and mutual support. She told the press that they talked, read and listened to music at home; went to movies, saw friends and walked in Central Park. The young poet Sylvia Plath, married to the English poet Ted Hughes and trying to be a writer, a wife and a mother, identified with Marilyn's apparently ideal life. Plath also suffered from depression, had mental breakdowns and committed suicide five months after Marilyn's death. Conned by Hollywood publicity, she had no idea of Marilyn's troubles. She imagined Marilyn as a model of married perfection, an intimate and optimistic companion. In a journal entry of October
1959 Plath recorded how she dreamed about being groomed and encouraged by the actress, who fulfilled her youthful fantasies: "Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. . . . I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life."

  In reality, Marilyn was restless and unhappy. When she was not preparing for a public appearance or playing Marilyn Monroe in the movies, she retreated into her protective cave and wondered what to do with all her energy and talent. She often spent her hours and days doing absolutely nothing – wandering around her flat, peering into the kitchen, stumbling pointlessly from room to room. In movies she'd seen sophisticated stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, feasting on caviar and drinking champagne. When Marilyn became a star she imitated these movie fantasies and tried to live a luxurious life. She acquired cases of her favorite drink, Dom Pérignon champagne – named for the seventeenth-century Benedictine monk who discovered how to put sparkle into still wine – to prove she had achieved success and could have anything she wanted in the world.

  Miller spent all day in his study. The maid noted that "Bobby and Jane would come by to see their father after school in the afternoons. But [unlike the Taylor boys] they seemed far less interested in their father's famous new wife than in the hamburgers, Cokes, candy, and other goodies Hattie [the cook] stocked for them." Meanwhile, as the observant maid wrote, Marilyn led a rather narcissistic and lonely life: