The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Like the characters in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), wounded and traumatized by the Great War, the pathetic and lonely men in The Misfits are psychologically damaged and unable to adjust to ordinary life. (Courage is tested in the novel by the bullfight and in the film by the mustang hunt.) "The striking thing about these characters," Miller said, "was they were internally drifting without it being painful to them. They had a wonderful independence and at the same time they weren't tough." All the characters suffer from disappointed ambitions. Guido had wanted to be a doctor, Perce a rodeo champ and rancher, Gay a husband and father, Roslyn a serious dancer until it got "changed around into something bad." Their domestic life has been destroyed. Guido has lost his wife and baby in childbirth; Perce has lost his father in a hunting accident. Gay was betrayed by his wife, who divorced him; Perce by the step-father who stole the family ranch. Even Isabelle was divorced by her husband, who married her best friend. They all feel, like Hamlet, that the time is out of joint.

  All the men try to prove their masculinity: Perce by riding a bronco in the rodeo, Gay by lassoing mustangs from a truck, Guido by daredevil flying in his decrepit plane. But Perce is a physical wreck; and Guido's plane leaks oil, needs repairs, and like Gay's truck, is falling apart. Guido, who'd been an Army Air Force pilot, now performs a parodic reprise of his glorious exploits. Guido sees his military combat as heroic; Roslyn, unimpressed by his wartime missions, equates bombing with mustanging. Both, in her view, butcher helpless victims. Using machines – a plane and a truck – to capture the six mustangs, makes the vital animals seem helpless and tragic. Gay echoes Roslyn and voices their desperation by exclaiming, "it just got changed around, see? I'm doin' the same thing I ever did. It's just that they . . . they changed it around. . . . They smeared it all over with blood, turned it into shit and money just like everything else."4

  All three men, in Miller's tribute, keep telling Roslyn that she's beautiful, innocent and desirable. They all want to marry and protect her. She transforms all of them, and even revives Guido's neglected house. Shy, for once, instead of suave or swaggering, Gay tells the luminous Roslyn, "It's almost kind of an honor sittin' next to you. You just shine in my eyes." He can't bear the idea of losing her and "wouldn't know how to say goodbye." Even Guido, deeply moved by her, tells Roslyn, "You just walk in, a stranger out of nowhere, and for the first time it all lights up. . . . You have the gift of life." Instead of replacing Guido's dead wife, as he hoped she would, Roslyn moves into Guido's house with Gay. But Roslyn, still a lost soul despite all the adoration, is confused about what to do and how to act. Natural yet self-conscious, she asks the fundamental question:"how can you . . . just live?"5 To Gay, sometimes just living means being free; at other times, it means killing animals.

  Gay's stoical acceptance of the inevitable is directly opposed to Roslyn's desire to change the world. He explains (like the man in "Please Don't Kill Anything") that you can't live unless you kill. He promises to show her real life when they go into the desert to hunt the horses, but his idea of life is her idea of death. They may be "the last real men" but to her they all seem dead. As the conflict mounts between respect for his values and submission to her wishes, he tells her, "I don't want to lose you. You got to help me a little bit, though. Because I can't put on that this is all as bad as you make it." Guido's torn jacket, patched-up plane and derelict house suggest his blind commitment to a meaningless quest. In this contemporary Western – like Dalton Trumbo's Lonely Are the Brave, made the following year – cowboys have no place in the modern world.

  The Misfits reaches its emotional and dramatic climax in the mustang hunt, and Huston, as always, is brilliant when filming horses. Gable, Marilyn's idol and father figure, said "I didn't like the original ending of the screenplay (in which the stallion defeats Gay and leaves him lying on the lake bed, arousing Roslyn's compassion) but I didn't know the solution. I think Arthur's new ending is the answer." Like Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa (1935), the mustangers bond in male friendship and express their love for wild creatures by slaughtering them. The stallion, mares and colt (which parallel Roslyn and her three "stallions") are called a "family." When they are freed, Roslyn urges them to "Go home." At the end Gay, after being dragged across the burning desert while trying to tie up the stallion, captures him by himself to prove his manly power. He then cuts him loose to show his love for Roslyn and gain her respect. Though the horses are freed, the men, whose freedom is an illusion, are still trapped.

  At the beginning of the film, Gay refuses to become entangled with women; in the end, he commits himself to Roslyn. Roslyn, in Reno to get divorced, replaces the rich and elegant woman whom Gay first saw off at the train station. By doing so, she rescues him from his two degrading roles: decorative gigolo and supplier of dog food. Roslyn knows that she belongs with Gay and has learned how to live with him. Despite his feckless behavior and her unstable background, they decide to overcome their doubts and get married. Gay never thought about marriage "in daylight," but he decides to marry at night when they head for the big star – Venus, named after the goddess of love, the brightest in the sky – with the highway right under it. As Wallace Stevens wrote, "The lines are straight and swift between the stars."6 Gay says they'll follow the star that will take them home, though neither has a home, and "home" is the last word in the film.

  Roslyn and Gay are poignant in their loneliness, and their love becomes a forlorn poetry uniting their solitudes. When Gay chooses love for Roslyn over a roving life and freedom with horses, he returns to domestic and economic responsibility. This is especially difficult for Gay, who has no way of earning a living (apart from escorting wealthy divorcées) and will be forced into humiliating work in a supermarket, laundromat or service station. The finale of the film, like the end of the story, is ironic. Marriage, like mustanging, had better be "better than wages" because Gay will need wages to provide for his wife and the children they hope to have. Gay transforms Roslyn, who finds herself and discovers she has the "gift of life," just as Miller had hoped to transform Marilyn. The Misfits ends positively. But, like all the works Miller wrote about Marilyn, it portrays, in Guido's blast against women and Roslyn's desert screaming scene, his inability to satisfy her emotional demands.

  The Misfits finished shooting on November 4, 1960, and the following day Clark Gable had a heart attack. He entered a Hollywood hospital and, after a second massive attack almost two weeks later, died on November 16. After his death, his wife rather bitterly told the Los Angeles Mirror-News: "It wasn't the physical exertion that did it. It was the horrible tension, that eternal waiting, waiting, waiting." But Gable himself, who was paid a fortune for working overtime, said that he didn't mind waiting. He told Miller that The Misfits was the best picture he ever made.

  Marilyn had fantasized that her real, handsome, mustachioed father looked like Gable, and as a child had kept a photo of the star in her bedroom. After helping to kill her "secret father," she felt guilty about it, just as she had about the fatal accident of the French journalist on her wedding day. "I kept him waiting," she told Sidney Skolsky, "kept him waiting for hours and hours on that picture. Was I punishing my father? Getting even for all the years he's kept me waiting?" There were other casualties soon after The Misfits was completed. Marilyn never made another movie. Clift made three more pictures but also died of a heart attack, at the age of forty-five, in 1966.

  In the midst of making the picture, Miller told Bellow that if it was not a success, it would be the most highly publicized failure in history. The United Artists' publicist in New York prepared a twenty-minute featurette, The Making of "The Misfits", to promote the film around the world, and the backstory helped sell it. The narrator emphasized the congenial atmosphere and warm camaraderie of the writer, director, cast, crew, cowboy riders and bush pilots. The short showed the stars talking together – conversation was "the favorite leisure-time activity"; Miller and Eli Wallach playing football and softball; Marilyn riding a horse, Cli
ft (or his double) in the rodeo, Wallach (or his pilot) flying the plane; the actors and technicians having "a quiet meal cooked over an open flame." The short mentioned that seventy-five tons of equipment were transported to the Nevada desert; that the internationally famous Magnum photographers had also publicized the film; and that the picture, most unusually, was shot in sequence to develop the complex characters and themes. It revealed that Robert Mitchum had been considered for Gable's part, and that Gable had died just after the film was completed.

  When Miller had a chance to publicize the film, he focused rather ponderously on himself and bored the audience to death. According to the Hollywood Reporter of January 31, 1961, "Miller was scheduled to discuss The Misfits, but though he had a wonderful captive audience in the crowded Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf, eager to hear his personal observations about his first exposure to movie-making, he didn't make a single reference to the film. . . . Instead, he went into a serious discussion of the intellectual, drugged in illusion" – as he himself had been deluded about Marilyn.

  The Misfits, an unusually serious western, did not match the expectations of the audience. Though respectfully received by the critics, it was not a commercial success. Variety (February 1, 1961) remarked that Marilyn's Method acting conveyed exactly the opposite effect than she intended: "Monroe's familiar breathless, childlike mannerisms have a way of distracting, of drawing attention away from the inner conflicts and complexities of the character itself." But the New York Daily News, in an appreciative notice, justly praised the acting of the two stars: "Gable has never done anything better on the screen, nor has Miss Monroe. Gable's acting is vibrant and lusty, hers true to the character as written by Miller. . . . The screen vibrates with emotion during the latter part of the film, as Marilyn and Gable engage in one of those battles of the sexes that seem eternal in their constant eruption. It is a poignant conflict between a man and a woman in love, with each trying to maintain individual characteristics and preserve a fundamental way of life."7

  III

  As Marilyn predicted, her marriage ended with the completion of the film. She had overcome formidable obstacles to become a great star, but like many self-made people she could not fully realize her ambitions. She wanted to be so much more than she could be, yet did not believe she deserved her astonishing success. Miller loved her wit and humor, her warmth and beauty. He wanted to cherish her, comfort her, help her achieve her dreams. She believed he would be her salvation, and when he failed her, she turned on him. Sentimental yet tough, she loved and hated with equal intensity. Miller believed she was responsible for her own destruction by seeing herself – despite years of intensive psychoanalysis – as the helpless victim of her unfortunate background, her friends and colleagues, her lovers and husbands. "She needed a miracle," he said, "and none [was] available. She was a basically serious person who had hopes for herself [as a dramatic actress] but did not have time to develop." Her wounds, he thought, "were self-inflicted, mostly. She had very little confidence in herself. She had been exposing herself as an actress . . . and this brought to a head all her sense of unworthiness. She felt she was being a faker."

  Miller tried hard to save her. "All of my energy and attention," he said, "were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn't have much success. . . . I represented betrayals and misplaced trust. And there was no possibility of erasing that from her mind." Finally, he was faced with the conflict – which he portrayed in his early novel Focus and his play After the Fall – between responsibility to another person and the need for self-preservation:"She was beyond help. There was simply nothing but destruction that could have come, my own destruction as well as hers. A person's got to save himself." He felt responsible for her and was afraid she might break down and commit suicide if he left her. But, as he once wrote to me about Katherine Mansfield, with Marilyn and himself in mind, "I'd only question whether any husband or anyone else could have saved her. . . . She is one of those tragic persons launched on a short trajectory, the self-consuming rocket."8

  Thinking no doubt of Marilyn and wondering why he ever married her, Miller poignantly observed that "love is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears." But his illusions were certainly dispelled when she unleashed her pitiless anger and vengeance. Her psychiatrist believed that Marilyn harbored a "venomous resentment" toward Miller. In a series of unjust accusations, she claimed that he was "attracted to other women, And dominated by his mother. She accused Miller of neglecting his father and not being 'nice' to his children." While Miller pondered the reasons for their lost love, Marilyn blamed him for the collapse of their marriage.

  In several extraordinarily honest and perceptive confessions, Marilyn acknowledged the conflict between her different selves and the confusion about her real identity. She told the English cinematographer Jack Cardiff that "Arthur saw the demon in me. . . . A lot of people like to think of me as innocent, so that's the way I behave to them. . . .

  If they saw the demon in me they would hate me. . . . I'm more than one person, and I act differently each time. . . . Most of the time I'm not the person I'd like to be – certainly not a dumb blonde like they say I am; a sex freak with big boobs."9

  If she was a self-confessed demon with Cardiff, she became a monster with the English journalist W.J. Weatherby. Repeating what Miller had said about her, she remarked that he'd also shifted from idealization to disillusionment as she adopted the false roles he expected her to play. She wanted the journalist to pity the monster as well as the victim:

  When we were first married, he saw me as so beautiful and innocent among Hollywood wolves that I tried to be like that. I almost became his student in life and literature. . . . But when the monster showed, Arthur couldn't believe it. I disappointed him when that happened. But I felt he knew and loved all of me. I wasn't sweet all through. He should love the monster, too. But maybe I'm too demanding. Maybe there's no man who could put up with all of me. I put Arthur through a lot, I know. But he also put me through a lot."

  Beneath Marilyn's glowing persona, Norma Jeane Baker was still wondering who she really was. In yet another revelation, Marilyn specified Miller's faults:"He's a cold fish. . . . I thought he was Lincoln, but Lincoln had a great sense of humor. Arthur's got no sense of humor. I'm living with a dead man. You know the most frightening part? He reminds me now of a Nazi."10 It was cruelly ironic that Marilyn began by likening her idealized husband to Lincoln and (as a Jewish convert) ended by comparing her Jewish husband to a Nazi.

  Miller, who lasted longer than any of Marilyn's lovers or husbands, called their marriage "a calamity – to me. It was for her, too, I suppose, but she was more accustomed to it. Her life as a whole was full of calamity." Explaining why the marriage failed, he said:

  I really could not manage that kind of life, finally. I live a very quiet existence, despite appearances, and that whole show business thing was more than I could take. And she was on her way. She wanted to do other things. She could not quite be happy settling down into a domestic kind of situation – nor should she have. But I think it was also that her attitudes toward herself were ripening, so to speak. There was a very destructive thing going on in her.

  In the end, he had to decide whether to save Marilyn or save himself, and he felt she was beyond help: "There was simply nothing but destruction that could come, my own destruction, as well as hers. The point comes when you cannot continue anymore. There is no virtue in it, there is nothing positive, and your hope is that she can find some other means of saving herself."11

  Like many couples, Marilyn and Miller seemed happier in their secret courtship than in their marriage, which brought very little joy and a great deal of pain. It's easier to note the reasons for failure than to explain why they married in the first place. They suffered the intense glare of publicity, the ill-omened death of the French reporter on their wedding day and their inability to lead a normal life.
Marilyn's disillusionment after reading his private diary in England was the first nail in their coffin, the first acid of suspicion that corroded their life. She fell under the spell of the Strasbergs, was frustrated by appearing in many mediocre movies and hurt by her bitter break with Milton Greene. Miller hated her drama teachers and business partner, was frustrated by his inability to write and could not meet her impossible demands. Sexually frigid and unable to match her lover's expectations, she was tormented by gynecological illness and could not have a child. Tortured by psychological problems and drug addiction, she had (while with Miller) three mental breakdowns and three suicide attempts. Despite her aspirations to fidelity, she was unfaithful to all three husbands. She humiliated Miller, and despised him when he passively accepted her intolerable behavior. He tried to save her; she nearly destroyed him. He had to escape from her alluring scalpel, lick his wounds and start a new life.