The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  17. Miller and Marilyn on their wedding day, with his parents, June 1956

  18. Miller and Marilyn, July 1956

  19. Miller and Marilyn in English garden, July 1956

  20. Marilyn and Billy Wilder making Some Like It Hot, 1958

  21. Marilyn with Isak Dinesen and Carson McCullers, February 1959

  22. Miller and Marilyn with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, January 1960

  23. Marilyn with President Sukarno, 1956

  24. Dr Ralph Greenson, c.1960

  25. John Huston, Marilyn and Miller on the set of The Misfits, 1960

  26. Frank Taylor, Miller, Eli Wallach, Huston, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn and Clark Gable on the set of The Misfits, 1960

  27. Gable and Marilyn in The Misfits, 1960

  28. Miller and Marilyn estranged in Reno hotel room, 1960

  29. Marilyn's crypt, Westwood Memorial Park, 1962

  30. Miller and Elia Kazan, c.1963

  31. Barbara Loden and Jason Robards in After the Fall, 1964

  Thirteen

  Billy Wilder and Yves Montand

  (1958–1960)

  I

  In August 1958, as she started work on Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), Marilyn's status in Hollywood, where you're only as good as your last picture, had taken a downward turn. The Prince and the Showgirl had been a failure and she no longer had her own production company. Once again she was working for a big studio, with almost no say in the script or the part. In fact, she was playing yet another dumb blonde. Her physical and psychological condition was deteriorating, and her behavior on the set was maddening. Yet Some Like It Hot turned out to be enduringly funny, a perfect vehicle for her comic talent, one of the finest pictures she ever made. Marilyn's high-wire act seemed best when she was standing over a precipice, even if she tortured everyone else.

  Wilder's scripts have irony, wit and an inventive use of his third language (he'd learned English as an adult, after German and French). Back in 1957, Wilder had sent Marilyn a two-page outline of Some Like It Hot, whose title refers to the hot jazz of the 1920s as well as the two desperate jazz musicians, in danger and on the run. The fast-paced plot takes off when the impulsive Joe (Tony Curtis), who plays the saxophone, and the more cautious Jerry (Jack Lemmon), on the bass fiddle, accidentally witness a real event: the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of February 14, 1929. During a gang war in the Prohibition era, six members of Bugs Moran's gang and a car mechanic who happened to be on the scene were lined up inside a garage on Chicago's North Side and gunned down by Al Capone's men.

  The comic essence of the movie is disguise and mistaken identities, where almost everyone pretends to be different than he really is. To escape the gangsters, Curtis and Lemmon dress up as "Josephine" and "Daphne" and get jobs with an all-girls' orchestra that's about to leave for Florida. On the train going south, Curtis falls in love with Marilyn, or Sugar Cane, the band's ukulele-playing singer.1 Though frustrated by his own disguise, Curtis manages to get Marilyn to confide in him. He learns that she's had a series of affairs with penniless sax players and now hopes to land a rich husband. In Miami, Curtis intermittently drops his female persona. Posing as an oil baron, he lures Marilyn onto a yacht and challenges her powers of seduction by pretending that he's both extremely rich and mysteriously unresponsive to the female sex. Curtis becomes more masculine and Lemmon more feminine as the yacht's real owner, Osgood Fielding (played by Joe E. Brown), zealously courts the irresistible "Daphne." When Lemmon announces his engagement and Curtis asks, "Who's the lucky girl?", he delightedly replies, "I am." After the gangsters arrive for their convention, the musicians' cover is blown and they all escape in the yacht. The movie transforms the clichéd situation of the gold-digger in search of a rich man (and the rich man hoodwinked by a girl), satirizes the mobsters and combines hot music with true love.

  Marilyn hesitated at first about playing a blonde who's dumb enough to believe that two guys are really girls. But their disguise is transparent and obvious; and their absurd wigs, cloche hats and clownish make-up, their mincing walk, falsetto voices and coy gestures are all part of the comedy. When the designer John Orry-Kelly teased Marilyn by saying, "You know, Tony's ass is better-looking than yours," she replied: "Oh yeah? Well, he doesn't have tits like these!" Her doubts about taking the part were assuaged by a fee of $100,000 and 10 percent of the gross earnings. Her share eventually came to $1.5 million; Curtis and Lemmon got $100,000 each. Curtis later recalled a pompous moment when Miller and Marilyn met the two screenwriters to finalize the deal: "Miller put one arm around Wilder, the other around [I.A.L.] Diamond, and began, in a pedantic tone: 'The difference between comedy and tragedy is . . .' Everybody rolled their eyes."

  After all the difficulty Marilyn had in making the film, her glowing performance is extraordinary. Her fear and insecurity prevented her from learning her lines and every scene needed costly retakes. She would start to cry after each bad take, and caused yet another expensive delay when they had to apply a new coating of make-up. She drank and took drugs to ease her pain, constantly came late, and was often rude and snappy. When an assistant director was sent to her dressing room to fetch her to the set, she told him that she'd just decided to wash her hair. On another occasion, though she wanted to maintain good relations with the crew, she dismissed him, while reading Tom Paine's The Rights of Man, with a curt "Fuck You!" Mocking her egregious fault, the exasperated Wilder declared that "if she has to go to school, why doesn't she go to Patek Philippe in Switzerland and learn to run on time?"2

  Once on the set, she blew the simplest lines and, Wilder said, seemed completely unaware of the problems she created: "We spent quite a few takes getting 'It's me, Sugar!' I had signs painted on the door: IT'S. ME. SUGAR. 'Action' would come and she would say, 'It's Sugar, me! [or even 'Sugar, it's me!']. I took her to the side after about take fifty, and I said, 'Don't worry about it.' And she said, 'Worry about what?'"

  Jack Lemmon emphasized her absolute selfishness: "Marilyn didn't give a damn about the director, the other actors, or anything else. . . . She knew she was limited and goddamned well knew what was right for Marilyn; and she wasn't about to do anything else." Lemmon also told the producer Walter Mirisch about the worst nightmare he ever had. In his dream he was shooting a scene with Marilyn and had gone through fifty-five takes. She finally got it right – and he blew his lines. After Marilyn's death, when Lemmon had a greater understanding of her inner torments, he became more tactful, more sympathetic and more impressed by her transformation on screen. He said, "She was a sweet lady who was clearly going through some kind of hell on earth. I don't know all the reasons, but I saw she was suffering – suffering and still producing that magic on film. It was a courageous performance. . . . It was infuriating for us, at times, but I was really fascinated to watch her work."3

  Some Like It Hot was shot in San Diego at the grand Hotel del Coronado. It was built in 1888, and its Victorian turrets and cupolas effectively replicated a Miami hotel in the late 1920s. The picture is laced with delightful allusions to classic films. It opens with police cars chasing a black hearse filled with bootleg liquor, which recalls the racing police car, with sirens wailing, in the opening scene of Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950). The car chase signals the astonishing pace and speed of the film. Curtis and Lemmon race to escape a raid in a speakeasy, the massacre in the garage and the gangsters who recognize them in Miami. Curtis and Marilyn both race to the yacht on bicycles. Sugar Cane, whose real name is Kowalczyk,4 first appears on the railroad platform in Chicago and seems to parody the dramatic appearance of Anna Karenina in her railway station. A cloud of steam shoots out of a locomotive and recalls the rush of hot air from the subway that lifted Marilyn's skirt in The Seven Year Itch.

  The girls in the band, who squeeze into one berth of the sleeping car for a late-night drinking party, recall the mass of people comically crammed into a small closet in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935). Edward G. Robinson, Jr., with a toot
hpick in his mouth, imitates George Raft's signature mannerism in Scarface (1932) by flipping a coin. Raft (playing Spats Colombo, the gangsters' boss) asks him, "Where did you pick up that cheap trick?" Raft threatens to shove a grapefruit into his henchman's face just as James Cagney actually does to his girlfriend in White Heat (1949).

  At the convention of the Friends of Italian Opera (a cover for the gangsters' meeting) their leader Little Bonaparte – with bald head, jutting jaw (and hearing aid) – looks and acts like Benito Mussolini, just as Jack Oakie does in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940).5 Marilyn's pretentious claim that she spent three years at the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music alludes to the remark in All About Eve that she was a graduate of the equally absurd Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts. Her midnight supper in luxurious surroundings, where she's the seducer, recalls a similar scene in The Prince and the Showgirl, where Olivier tries to seduce her.

  Wilder originally wanted Cary Grant to play Tony Curtis' part. When he pretends to be a wealthy oilman Curtis, wearing glasses and a yachting outfit, imitates Grant's accent and mannerisms as both he and Marilyn fake their background, social position and wealth. (When he saw the film, Grant missed Curtis' exaggerated tour de force and stiffly insisted, "I don't talk like that!") Like Horner in William Wycherley's Restoration comedy The Country Wife (1675), Curtis beguiles Marilyn by pretending to be impotent. Despite his notorious remark that making love to Marilyn was like "kissing Hitler," their seduction scene is superb. He regretfully tells her: "My family did everything they could – hired the most beautiful French upstairs maids – got a special tutor to read me all the books that were banned in Boston – imported a whole troupe of Balinese dancers with bells on their ankles and those long fingernails." He even, to no avail, "spent six months in Vienna with Professor Freud – flat on my back." Marilyn then innocently asks, "Have you ever tried American girls? . . . I may not be Dr. Freud or a Mayo brother or one of those French upstairs girls but could I take another crack at it." Curtis replies, "All right – if you insist."

  Though Marilyn (playing Sugar) calls herself "not very bright, I guess . . . just dumb" and Lemmon compares her to "Jello on springs," her character has surprising depth. In contrast to all the deception around her, Marilyn's Sugar is genuine and sincere, naïve and trusting. After being badly wounded by a number of men, she's retreated to the protection of an all-girls' band. Her songs – "Running Wild," "I Want To Be Loved By You" and "I'm Through With Love" – are (for once) well integrated into the story and beautifully sung. They suggest the three stages of her love-life – promiscuity, romance and renunciation – as well as her difficulty in finding the right man. She alludes to Miller and longingly notes, "Men who wear glasses are so much more gentle and sweet and helpless."6 She has a thing about saxophone players and always falls for the wrong man. As she laments in a famous line, "That's the story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop." But the fuzzy and the sweet end are the same, since the fuzz always adheres to the sweet and no one ever licks the end of the stick.

  In her longest, poignant speech, Marilyn gives a brief history of her involvement with a series of parasitic and unfaithful men:

  You fall for them and you love 'em – you think it's going to be the biggest thing since the Graf Zeppelin – and the next thing you know they're borrowing money from you and spending it on other dames and betting the horses. . . . Then one morning you wake up and the saxophone is gone and the guy is gone, and all that's left behind is a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out. . . . So you pull yourself together and you go on to the next job, and the next saxophone player, and it's the same thing all over again. See what I mean? – not very bright. . . . I can tell you one thing – it's not going to happen to me again. Ever.

  Marilyn's reference to the Graf Zeppelin suggests the depths of her disappointment. The German dirigible, built in 1928 and the biggest airship of the time, was suddenly retired in 1937 after another dirigible, the Hindenburg, crashed in New Jersey, burst into flames and killed thirty-five people.

  Before they escape together on the yacht, Marilyn begins to weep about her past disappointments with men and Curtis, still dressed as Josephine, consoles her by saying, "None of that, Sugar – no guy is worth it."Yet Curtis himself, a hardened gambler who loses his money on the dogs, seems just the sort of unreliable guy she's been trying to avoid. Sugar, like Marilyn, is emotionally battered but still dreamily romantic. At the end of the film, the musicians have lost their cover and their jobs and are still being hunted by the surviving gangsters. Though Marilyn and Curtis are both poor, and he's not yet revealed that he's a complete fraud, they fall for each other and plan to get married. Though everything in the film is a fake, love (even with the deceitful Curtis) is still real.

  The final scene, still making fun of fakery and self-deception, ends with a brilliant non sequitur. Lemmon tries to squirm out of his engagement with a series of absolutely honest excuses while Brown is unrelenting in his forgiveness:

  JERRY (firmly): We can't get married at all.

  OSGOOD: Why not?

  JERRY: Well, to begin with, I'm not a natural blonde.

  OSGOOD (tolerantly): It doesn't matter.

  JERRY: And I smoke. I smoke all the time.

  OSGOOD: I don't care.

  JERRY: And I have a terrible past. For three years now, I've been living with a saxophone player.

  OSGOOD: I forgive you.

  JERRY (with growing desperation): And I can never have children.

  OSGOOD: We'll adopt some.

  JERRY: But you don't understand! (he rips off his wig; in a male voice) I'm a Man!

  OSGOOD (oblivious): Well – nobody's perfect.

  Curtis' puzzled question, "Why would a guy want to marry a guy?" resonates even more powerfully today.7 Though Lemmon captures the millionaire whom Marilyn had hoped to find in Florida, he can't marry him. Even the lecherous Brown isn't at all what he seems to be. He's unnaturally attached to his mother and, though married and divorced seven or eight times, may actually be more interested in men than in women.

  II

  In August, as filming began, Miller received some good news from his lawyer. His citation for contempt of Congress had been reversed on appeal. Rauh had successfully argued that Miller had not been informed about why he had to answer HUAC's questions nor told about the penalties that would be imposed if he refused to do so. Though his legal problems were over, Miller was on the scene for a lot of the filming and inevitably became entangled in Marilyn's professional conflicts. Acknowledging his vital support, Marilyn wrote Norman Rosten from San Diego, "Arthur looks well though weaker – from holding me up." During the shooting of the film, Miller wrote his friend James Stern that Marilyn demanded his total attention, yet expected him to go on writing. After having been in Hollywood "for ten days, until two weeks ago, I found it impossible. . . . All she wants is to see work pouring out of me, so I'm back [in New York] but I'll visit there every so often."

  Perceiving Miller's repressed anger and impatience with his wife, Wilder remarked that "in meeting Miller at last I met someone who resented her more than I did." Zolotow wrote that Marilyn had forced Miller into the embarrassing role of mediator between actress and director: "It was a humiliating position for him – but he bore it gracefully and never criticized Marilyn. He always defended her to Billy. He found excuses for her. She put Miller through literal hell. He knew no peaceful hours either awake or asleep. . . . Even though she was a destroyer of those around her, she made them feel guilty." Wilder's co-author, Izzy Diamond, realized that Marilyn had also put Wilder into an impossible situation. But he still sympathized with Miller: "Miller conducted himself with reasonable dignity. He did not make suggestions as to dialogue changes. He never criticized the rushes. He only tried to be a peace-maker. Once, he came to Wilder – this was around November 1 – and said, 'My wife is pregnant. Would you go easy with her, Billy, please? Could you let her go at four-thirty every day?'
"Wilder angrily said that she never arrived until eleven-thirty and wasn't ready to work till one, and that he still didn't have a take at four o'clock: "You get her here at nine, ready to work, and . . . I'll let her go at noon."8

  As Miller feared, Marilyn suffered her second miscarriage in December 1958, six weeks after completing the movie. An essentially good-hearted woman, she was quite capable of spite and cruelty. Wilder had seen her at her worst. After the film was finished he unleashed his anger and frustration in a series of bitter but amusing recriminations. Referring to his constant battles with Marilyn, he declared, "There have been more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II, and there's a great similarity." He savagely condemned her total lack of consideration for her colleagues: "She was rude, mean, discourteous and completely selfish. She wouldn't show up on time, and she didn't know her lines. She was the most unprofessional person I ever met."9 He called her "a continuous puzzle, without any solution" and, attempting to explain her troubled character, added, "She never found anyone who understood her, and she was completely incapable of normal communication. She was a mixture of pity, love, loneliness and confusion." Asked if he would ever make a third film with Marilyn, Wilder replied, "I have discussed this project with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they tell me I am too old and too rich to go through this again." Yet, like everyone else, Wilder was astonished that she could act so brilliantly, relying on intuition and spontaneity, under the worst possible conditions: "Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and give the performance she did."10