The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In The Misfits, dressed in the cowgirl's jeans she'd first worn in Clash By Night, Marilyn far surpasses the dramatic parts she'd tried to play in Don't Bother to Knock and Niagara. But she didn't fully realize that her complex and vulnerable character in The Misfits, written for her and clearly based on her own life, was very different from her previous parts as a comical dumb blonde and predatory chorus girl. Like Zelda Fitzgerald, she felt she was being exposed and exploited in her husband's work. "When I married [Miller]," she declared, "one of the fantasies in my mind was that I could get away from Marilyn Monroe through him, and here I find myself back doing the same thing, and I just couldn't take it." Her greatest opportunity and most difficult role was to play herself. The Method had taught her to explore her deepest emotions when creating a character, but this was the last thing she wished to do. She was afraid of revealing her inner self and wanted, if possible, to escape from herself. Miller had always hoped to restore Marilyn's self-confidence. In his endless revisions, he enhanced her role and made her character more and more appealing. He had the Gable, Clift and Wallach characters fall in love with her, and express their admiration for her sweetness, charm and beauty. Yet, in a terrible psychological bind, Marilyn lost all trust in Miller, hated her role and believed she was being victimized. As the shooting progressed, the marriage of Gay and Roslyn, which ran counter to the heartbreaking events in real life, seemed bitterly ironic to the actors and crew. Gable, Miller's surrogate, wins Marilyn at the very moment that Miller loses her.

  The script became the battleground between Marilyn and Miller. She found it difficult to distinguish between Roslyn's character and function in the screenplay and her own life and personality, and constantly fought with Miller about the way he portrayed her. Her publicist Rupert Allan explained that Marilyn was "desperately unhappy at having to read lines written by Miller that were so obviously documenting the real-life Marilyn. . . . She felt lonely, isolated, abandoned, worthless, that she had nothing more to offer but this naked, wounded self. And all of us who were her 'family' – well, we did what a family tried to do." Before shooting started she'd called a crucial scene "lousy" and told Norman Rosten (whom she tried to enlist as an ally against Miller), "I object to the whole stupid speech. And he's going to rewrite it!" She was rejecting Miller as she rejected his script."She was giving him the business, making him eat the Hollywood shit even as they made her eat it for so long. She was fighting the pain and humiliation of another rejection, of one more failure in love."

  Marilyn complained that in the scene when she tries to persuade the cowboys not to kill the wild mustangs, "I convince them by throwing a fit, not by explaining why it's wrong. I guess they thought I was too dumb to explain anything. So I have a fit. A screaming, crazy fit. . . . And to think, Arthur did this to me. . . . He was supposed to be writing this for me. He could have written me anything and he comes up with this. If that's what he thinks of me, well, then I'm not for him and he's not for me."14 Blinded by Paula, alienated from Huston and hostile to Miller, she did not fully understand the dramatic needs of the screenplay or Gay's reasons for freeing the horses. Though Marilyn was mentally and physically ill, looked slightly chubby in the swim scene, affectedly twitched her lips and had great trouble remembering her lines, she gave a poignant portrayal of a wounded woman who understands suffering. In an agonizing blend of reality and fiction, Marilyn – herself hypersensitive, intuitive and naïve – played a lost soul who struggles to prevent the cruel treatment of the mustangs. Her confrontation with defeat and despair had its own artistic energy. The more she suffered, the greater her performance. She never understood how good she was in The Misfits.

  As soon as one battle was over, new hostilities would break out. As Marilyn struggled with Huston and Miller about her interpretation, Paula encouraged her to dig down into her own subconscious. But the influence of Method acting now became psychologically damaging. She was so self-involved that she believed her emotions, rather than Miller's words, were paramount. Each take became torture as she tried to act out her own personal feelings instead of portraying Roslyn's character.

  Wallach described a typical emotional explosion during a crew member's birthday party. Marilyn suddenly screamed at Miller: "'You don't understand women! I am a film actress and I know what I'm doing. Stop interfering. Why don't you let John direct?' Miller lowered his head and stared at his plate as the entire room went silent. Later that evening I ran into Marilyn in a hallway of the hotel, and she lashed out at me. 'Oh, you Jewish men,' she said, walked down the hall and slammed the door to her room." Her outburst was painfully ironic. Her dependence on Paula proved that she did not know what she was doing; and it was Paula, not the scapegoat Miller, who constantly interfered with Huston's direction.

  Though Miller and Huston would have done anything to finish the picture, and were extraordinarily tolerant of her behavior, Marilyn felt they were her enemies. She exclaimed, "Arthur said it's his movie. I don't think he even wants me in it. It's all over. We have to stay with each other because it would be bad for the film if we split up now. I don't know how long I can put up with this. I think that Arthur's been complaining to Huston about everything he thinks is wrong with me, that I'm mental or something. And that's why Huston treats me like an idiot."

  Everyone wanted photos of Marilyn and Miller, but she refused to pose with him. Yet Inge Morath, a Magnum photographer who later married Miller, saw them in their hotel room and captured a telling moment in the dissolution of their marriage. Marilyn, wearing a low-cut black dress, has pulled aside the gauzy curtains. She turns away from Miller and looks out at the tacky town, shrouded under a smoky sky. A huge ugly lamp stands between them. A gaunt Miller, cigarette in his mouth and hands in his pocket, stares mournfully at her. The dream had gone; the artistic triumph had become a personal disaster.

  In Timebends Miller admitted that toward the end of the film he could neither speak to nor help Monroe – who could not help herself – and that his very presence provoked her fury: "I had no inkling of what to do or say anymore and sensed she was in a rage against me or herself or the kind of work she was doing. She seemed to be filling with distrust not only for my opinions of her acting, but also for Huston's." Miller wrote that when he came into her room as a doctor was injecting her with Amytal, a barbiturate sedative, "She saw me and began to scream at me to get out. . . . The screaming was too terrible, and her distress in my presence canceled out any help I could hope to give."15 Paula, exacerbating the conflict for her own advantage and achieving absolute authority over Monroe, persuaded her to move out of Miller's hotel suite and live with her.

  Rosten, noting the roles Miller had assumed, wrote that he'd once been Marilyn's "teacher, lover, protector, father, and man of integrity to shield her against the world's assaults, real or imagined." But he was unable to sustain this impossible burden. He may have been too paternal; she may have over-idealized him. As Clift observed, "All idols fall eventually. Poor Marilyn, she can't keep anyone for long." Their unhappiness was even greater because they could not separate. Everyone knew they were intensely miserable and had to remain together until the ordeal was over. Miller remarked, "I didn't even ride home with her on the last day."16 When they finally completed the film in Hollywood on November 4, 1960, Marilyn appeared at the end-of-shoot party and Miller drove back alone to the Beverly Hills Hotel. When a journalist later asked if Marilyn was pleased with the film, Miller replied, "I really don't know. I couldn't tell you. By [the time the film was completed], we were hardly able to speak to each other." Even Huston, at the end, was forced to communicate with Marilyn through Paula.

  The novelist and screenwriter James Salter observed that with movie stars, "their temperament and impossible behavior are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties . . . modern deities should be no different." Miller sadly observed, "I had written it to make Marilyn feel good. And for her, it resulted in complete collapse. But at the same time,
I am glad it was done, because her dream was to be a serious actress. . . . I had seen this film as a gift for her, and I came out of it without her."17 Miller and Monroe were as mismatched as his misfit characters. The happiest days of their marriage were the first and the last.

  Fifteen

  The Misfits: Life into Art

  (1960)

  I

  The Misfits was a transitional work for Miller. He wrote it between his early, hugely successful social plays, where the actors represent large moral themes, and his later work, which is more personal, more character-driven. He worked and reworked the material for three years, combining, with considerable skill, the heroine of "Please Don't Kill Anything" with the cowboys in his story "The Misfits" to make the expanded film script of 1960. As he worked on the script he developed the biographical parallels between himself and Gay, Marilyn and Roslyn. He returned to the script again in 1961, when he turned it into a novel, adding more description and dialogue to deepen the connection of the characters and develop the dominant themes.

  Some details of Gay's life are based on Miller's experience. When Saul Bellow lived next door to Miller at Pyramid Lake, he'd relieve his tension by roaring into the wilderness. Gay and Roslyn echo this strange habit by yelling across the prehistoric lake and calling into the emptiness. Miller regretted the loss of his children, Robert and Jane, after he was divorced from Mary and married Marilyn. After his marriage breaks up, Gay regrets the loss of his children, another boy and girl, who turn up for a moment at the rodeo and then suddenly disappear into the crowd before he can introduce them to Roslyn. The name of Gay's daughter, Rose-May, is close to Ros-lyn, who replaces Rose-May, and becomes both Gay's daughter and lover.

  Miller had shown his love for Monroe by devoting several years of his life to writing the film script for her. Gay, who has never done anything for a woman before, expresses his love for Roslyn by doing all the chores around their house. Like the handy Miller, he cleans it up, repairs the fireplace, windows and fence, mows the grass, plants flowers and starts a vegetable garden. He buys the food, cooks it while she sleeps late and serves her breakfast when she gets up. He wakes her in the house and puts her to sleep in the desert. Gay asks in The Misfits, as Miller recalls asking Monroe in Timebends, "What makes you so sad? I think you're the saddest girl I ever met." Like Miller, who hoped to rescue and rehabilitate Marilyn, Gay is completely committed to Roslyn. He tries to teach her how to live and plans to stay with her for ever. But Gay's bitter discovery that his best friend was sleeping with his wife recalls Miller's humiliation over the affair with Montand.

  Guido, the most hypocritical and self-serving of the three cowboys, comes from a Mediterranean background, has a foreign name and is physically unattractive. These qualities suggest Miller's close friend and early rival for Marilyn, the Greek born in Turkey, Elia Kazan, who managed to sleep with her before Miller did. In the film, Guido expresses his frustration and bitterly condemns women with words that Miller often thought and felt, but never allowed himself to use with Marilyn. When the drunken Guido pounds the crooked boards into the side of his unfinished house (which looks like an open-walled stage set and suggests his unwillingness to become domesticated), he seems deranged and doomed. When Roslyn rejects him, he erupts with fury about his inability to please her, despite all he's done for her: "[Women are] all crazy! . . . You try not to believe it. Because you need them. You need them but they're crazy! . . . You struggle, you build, you try, you turn yourself inside out for them, but nothing's ever enough! It's never a deal, something's always missing. It's gotta be perfect or they put the spurs to you! I know – I got the marks!"The spur that digs into the horse and noose that remorselessly chokes the mustangs suggest Miller's own sense of pain, entrapment and suffocation with Marilyn.

  In the earlier story Gay thinks fondly and apprehensively of the Eastern and educated Roslyn, who never actually appears. In the film, Miller makes her Midwestern and uneducated to have her resemble the real life Marilyn, and she becomes the main character. There are many biographical parallels between Roslyn and Marilyn, which both disturbed her and inspired her performance. Like Marilyn, Roslyn has never had a real father or mother, misses her mother, and has never finished high school. Despite her charm and warmth, Marilyn couldn't maintain a stable relationship, constantly moved from place to place and didn't know where she belonged. She felt she had no real friends, that everyone was trying to exploit her and that she was completely alone in the world. Roslyn's life, like Marilyn's, is a shambles. Her room is chaotic and she can't memorize her lines for testimony in the divorce court. Her assertion that her previous husband "persistently and cruelly ignored my personal rights and wishes" echoes her charge against DiMaggio. And Roslyn desperately wants to have children.

  Marilyn saw herself as a tragic victim and often complained about her troubles. In a sly allusion to Marilyn, Roslyn, speaking of Guido's uncomplaining wife, says that a little complaining sometimes helps. (Gay's wife, like Guido's, had never complained about him.) Marilyn moved into and decorated a new house with Miller in Roxbury, just as Roslyn does with Gay. Miller once told me, as we looked over the grounds of his house, "You know, Marilyn lived here." I asked, "Was she happy?" and he replied, "Nothing could make Marilyn happy." At the end of the film, furious about the imminent slaughter of the mustangs, Roslyn screams at Gay, "I hate you!" which reflects Marilyn's public anger at both Miller and his script. Instead of using a traditional close-up, Huston filmed her in a long shot as a tiny figure, standing alone amid the sun-charred and eroded rocks of the lunar landscape. She rages not only against the cowboys, who need all this wilderness to feel free, but also against the hostile universe. Emphasizing the similarities between Marilyn and Roslyn, Miller remarked, "Off-screen she was a lot like on-screen excepting when she got angry. She wouldn't show that, excepting I had her do it in the last scene of The Misfits, when she was furious at them for capturing the horses. Then she was quite a different person, and she became herself: quite paranoid."1

  II

  J.M. Coetzee observed that Miller wrote The Misfits at the "end of a long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America's western frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche." Miller called the film an "Eastern Western" that described the meaninglessness of our lives. He portrays a debased rather than triumphant version of two archetypal Western experiences: the rodeo and the round-up. In the rodeo, where a bucking-strap with nails digs into the horse's belly and makes him furious, Perce gets thrown and battered, and Gay finds but immediately loses his children. In the round-up, where the last cowboys kill the last mustangs – both are a dying breed – the beautiful wild horses are transformed into dead meat. The critic Leslie Fiedler noted that Miller also reverses the archetypal plots of Gary Cooper's westerns, from The Virginian (1929) to High Noon (1952). In these movies, "a conflict between a man and a woman, representing, respectively, the chivalric code of the West and the pacifism of Christianity, ends with the capitulation of the woman, and the abandonment of forgiveness in favour of force."2

  Roslyn is not only modeled on Marilyn but also recalls the character of Cherie, whom Marilyn played in Bus Stop. Both women live with a lady friend in a boarding house; have worked as exotic (or striptease) dancers in cheap nightclubs; can't bear the cruelty and danger when watching the rodeo; inspire the love of cowboys who are determined to marry them; and are kissed by their fully dressed lovers while naked in bed. The Misfits reframes Bus Stop in a modern context. Though Bo in Bus Stop is a real cowboy, with his own ranch and cattle in Montana, he's a shallow and one-dimensional character. His values are those of the western myth of hard work, limitless land and the promise of prosperity. Gay and Perce, transcending the western clichés of the earlier movie and showing how hard it really is to make a living, have unusual complexity and depth.

  In the beginning of The Misfits, at the courthouse and in the casino, Roslyn wears a black hat, black dress and high heels; at the end, accli
matized to the rough house and sweltering desert, she has pigtails and western clothes. None of the men understand the naïve yet enigmatic Roslyn, but they all fall in love with her. Anxious, frightened, suffering, angry and in pain, she expresses simple, sometimes simpleminded, New Age wisdom. She says that the garden seeds, though tiny, "still know they're supposed to be lettuces!" and that "Birds must be brave to live out here. Especially at night. . . . Whereas they're so small, you know?" Intuitive rather than rational, sympathizing with all hunted creatures and haunted men, she passionately undermines the mustangers' macho beliefs.She makes the cowboys, whom Roslyn's friend Isabelle calls the last real men left in the world, feel guilty about expressing their primitive instincts and taking part in the exhilarating hunt.

  Roslyn's rapturous dance around the tree near Guido's house reveals Miller's physical passion for Marilyn. It portrays, Coetzee wrote, "a diffuse and . . . forlorn sensuality, to which neither Guido's sexual predatoriness nor Gay's old-fashioned suave courtliness is an adequate response." This lyrical scene, to everyone's surprise, provoked the overzealous film censors. Marilyn's reputation (created by the studios) as a hot, sensual woman was too much for the Catholic Church. Miller recalled, "the gravest displeasure was expressed with a scene in which Marilyn Monroe, in a mood of despair and frustration – fully clothed, it should be said – walks out of a house and embraces a tree trunk. In all seriousness this scene was declared to be masturbation."3

  The Misfits is artfully structured and the thematic parallels are as forceful as the biographical ones. The tender-hearted Roslyn repeatedly pleads to save all living creatures from harm: the reckless, self-destructive Perce, the vegetable-nibbling rabbits, Gay's dog that trembles and snaps at her as the horses approach, and finally the captured mustangs themselves. In the story, Gay's dog is a bitch called Margaret. In the film, the dog is a male, ominously named Tom Dooley after a man who's murdered his girlfriend and is hanged for the crime. In touching scenes, Roslyn first comforts the bandaged, drunken Perce near a garbage heap outside the bar, and then consoles the drunken Gay after he loses his children, climbs onto a car and collapses in the street. Her sympathetic bond with Perce seems even stronger than her sexual union with Gay. After winning a lot of money from bets on her dynamic paddleball performance in the bar-room (one of the best scenes in the film), Roslyn tries to pay Perce, who's been thrown and injured by the bucking bronco, not to ride the bull in the rodeo. She also tries to buy the captured mustangs from Gay. Both men proudly reject her well-intentioned but humiliating bribes. Guido and Perce both offer to free the mustangs in order to please Roslyn and win her love. Gay knocks Roslyn out of the way as he's trying to rescue Perce from the wild bull and again as she pulls at the rope he's using to tie up a wild mustang. Gay watches Perce get battered by the bronco and the bull; Perce watches Gay get battered by the stallion in the desert.