The first actual footage filmed was a scene that took place at the standing train set at MGM Studios in Culver City. It is twenty-four minutes into the film and we see Sugar Kane (Marilyn) for the first time as she walks along the side of the train with the all-girl band, the Sweet Sues, to board. It went off without a glitch and Marilyn was letter perfect. During the setup prior to the shot, Wilder observed a woman hovering beneath an umbrella out of view of the action. When the scene was over, he called out to the woman, “How was that, Paula?” He recognized her as Paula Strasberg, a constant presence on every Marilyn set, just as Natasha had been before her. From that deferential moment on, Wilder controlled the set.
After getting the go-ahead from Wilder, Tony Curtis (Josephine), and Jack Lemmon (Daphne) went to couturier Orry-Kelly, Monroe’s costumer, and asked him to make their outfits. Of course, there were problems with two straight men playing transvestites that had nothing to do with how well the clothes fit. The actors had to become women, believable as such in their walk, talk, attitude, actions, the way they stood, the way they sat. But their problems paled compared to those Wilder (and the rest of the cast and crew) had with Marilyn: Her problems in her marriage and her lack of self-confidence as an actor drove the production costs up, according to Wilder, adding another $750,000 to the $2.9 million budget. He said, “Sometimes [Marilyn’s lateness, demand for constant retakes, etc.] would stretch out to three days, something that we could have completed in an hour because after every bad take, Marilyn began to cry and there would have to be new makeup applied.” In addition, she couldn’t remember her lines. They would have to write them on cards and place them where Marilyn could read them. The simple line “Where is that bourbon?” had to be shot and reshot as many as forty times.
“There were days when I could have killed her, I admit it,” Billy Wilder added. “I knew, of course, that she had serious problems. I hate to say it, but at the time, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about her problems. I was trying to make a movie and she’d been paid a good deal of money to be in it. But, that said, there were a lot of marvelous days, too, when she would do something we all knew was golden.”
Yet somehow, Marilyn got through it all with unbelievable results onscreen. Watching her magical performance, there is no hint of the nightmare making the film was for her. Maybe her friend Jeanne Martin put it best: “I treasure every moment of that film, but without Marilyn it would have been nothing.”
During the publicity blitz for the film, Curtis was asked repeatedly and relentlessly by the press what it was like to kiss Marilyn Monroe. “What was I supposed to say, ‘It was like skiing down a snow-covered mountain and being launched into the air by a ski jump and then floating to earth on gossamer wings?’ C’mon, kissing the most desirable woman in the world and then being asked repeatedly what it was like is a no-brainer and it began to annoy me. Whether the Hitler comparison came out as irony or sarcasm, which is the way I meant it, the press preferred the sound-bite and refused to print the whole story.” The following few days, Curtis was bombarded with phone calls asking him to verify the report. For forty years, he denied he ever said it—and actually became hostile when confronted about it when appearing on a Larry King show with Marilyn Monroe historian James Haspiel—but he came clean to Leonard Maltin in an interview taped for inclusion in the deluxe DVD two-disc set of Some Like It Hot, released as part of “The Marilyn Monroe Collection.” *
The number of “best” lists accorded Some Like it Hot continues to grow every year. The American Film Institute named it number one on its list of the 100 Funniest Movies of All Time. AFI has also ranked it variously as number 14 and number 22 Greatest Movie of All Time. The film’s last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” was voted number 48 on AFI’s list of Greatest Movie Quotes. Entertainment Weekly readers voted it the 9th Greatest Film of All Time and the Greatest Comedy of All Time.
During production of this movie, on Friday night, September 12, 1958, after a long and emotional telephone conversation with Arthur, Marilyn took another overdose of sleeping pills. Had it not been for Paula Strasberg coming to her rescue, she might have died. As always, she said that she hadn’t intended to commit suicide.
“She had so much to live for,” said Rupert Allan, “but she didn’t see it that way. That said, the way I heard it, it happened when Arthur arrived in Los Angeles and he was the one who took her to the hospital. Typical of Marilyn’s overdoses, no one could ever get the story straight. However, yes, she definitely overdosed. When and how she got to the hospital doesn’t matter. Arthur came in immediately from New York to be at her side,” said Allan. “I can’t say that helped, though. In fact, I think it may have made things worse.”
Once Arthur Miller arrived in Los Angeles and had a chance to take in the terrain, he realized that practically everyone connected with Some Like It Hot found his wife to be incredibly unprofessional. That she was able to eventually turn in a brilliant performance didn’t seem to matter much at the time. Miller was again embarrassed for her, and also for himself. It caused him to be angrier with her than ever. “My feeling about Arthur Miller was that he was a little too resentful of his wife,” Billy Wilder recalled. “I wasn’t married to her. I didn’t have to be patient and loving. But he was her husband and I thought he could have been more understanding. I remember saying at the time, finally, I have met someone who resents Marilyn Monroe as much if not more than I do.”
Rupert Allan recalled, “Marilyn told me and Susan [Strasberg] that [Miller] lashed out at her one day and said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. How dare you not know your lines? How dare you be late? Who do you think you are?’ Instead of being her support, he had turned into her enemy. It was very unkind of him. I can’t say I know what he was thinking. Anyway, Marilyn said, ‘He can kiss my ass, Rupert. As far as I’m concerned, he can just kiss my ass.’ So, really, things were, shall we say, a bit on the tense side.”
One might have thought that things would have taken a turn for the better when, in October, Marilyn learned that she was once again pregnant. Of course, she was overjoyed by the news. She had been scheduled to accept a film award in France, but was happy to have a good reason to decline. In a two-page Western Union telegram to the Académie du Cinéma in Paris, dated November 26, 1958, she said in part, “I had greatly looked forward to coming to Paris and receiving the honor which you so graciously awarded me (stop) However nature intervened and I am expecting a baby (stop) Because of some recent complications in regards to the pregnancy my doctor has forbidden travel of any kind.”
It’s not clear what Arthur Miller thought of the pregnancy, though he didn’t seem very happy. “At this point, I think Marilyn put Arthur out of her mind and began to think, okay, I can have this child and go on with my life without my husband, and at least I won’t be alone,” said Rupert Allan. “A big problem for her, though, with the pregnancy was all of the drugs she was taking… that was a problem.”
During this time, Marilyn was taking—among other prescriptions, such as Nembutal—a barbiturate to calm her nerves as well as allow her to sleep. Her gynecologist, Leon Krohn, was against all drugs in her system, but he realized that there was no way she would be able to function without them. He warned her against drinking on this and other medications and hoped to monitor her closely—he was on the set every day—but, truly, she was not manageable. When it came to pill-taking, Marilyn Monroe would always find a way if she felt the need.
After the movie was completed on November 6, Billy Wilder—who was not speaking to Marilyn by that time—went on record as having made a few unkind statements about her. For instance, when one New York reporter asked if he would ever make another movie with her, his response was, “I have discussed this project with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.” To another reporter he said, “She’s very good, obviously. But is she worth it? I don’t know.”
Marilyn was stung by his remarks. In her view,
yes, she had presented some problems—what else was new?—but in the end she did turn in a good performance. She felt that Billy Wilder could have shown some gratitude by having a little more tact in discussing her with the media. One afternoon, after deliberating over it for a while, she had a few drinks and then picked up the telephone to talk to Wilder, calling from New York to Los Angeles. His wife, Audrey, answered the phone. Marilyn asked if she could speak to Billy. She was told that he wasn’t at home. “That’s fine,” Marilyn said. “I wonder, Audrey, if you could give him a message for me.” Audrey said, “Of course.” Marilyn continued, “Would you please tell him that Marilyn called… and that she would like it very much if he would… go and fuck himself.” There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Oh, and Audrey,” Marilyn concluded sweetly, “my warmest personal regards to you.”
A Sign from God?
On December 16, 1958, Marilyn suffered a miscarriage. She would say that she felt more alone than ever before. She also felt a tremendous sense of guilt about the drugs she had been taking during the pregnancy and was afraid that she was responsible for the baby’s death. “Could I have killed it?” she asked one friend. “I felt she was slipping away,” her half sister, Berniece, would say of this time. Indeed, on December 24, Marilyn received a letter from her mother, Gladys, whom she had not seen in some time. “Have I pushed you away, dear daughter?” she wrote, probably knowing the answer. “I would love a visit from you.” Then, in a heartrending understatement, she concluded, “The holidays are so sad. So very sad.” Later in the letter, she added, “I have tried to reach you so often but it is very difficult. Please do me the favor of a telephone call or a return letter. May God bless you.” She signed it, “Mrs. Gladys Eley.”
As it happened, Marilyn wouldn’t work in 1959. She was too sad and never really able to recover emotionally from the miscarriage. In April, she received a note from Berniece, addressed to “Mrs. Marilyn Miller.” She wanted to visit. “Please phone or write me as to when you will be home, and the best time to come. Give my regards to Arthur.” Marilyn didn’t respond. Now was not a good time for a visit.
In June, she had to undergo a series of operations to determine if it were possible for her to have children. It was decided that, no, it could never happen for her. Melissa Steinberg, the daughter of Dr. Oscar Steinberg, who performed one of the surgeries, recalled, “I’m afraid it didn’t work out at all. He had to tell her, which was terrible for him, that she could not have children. The way I heard it, he walked into her room to give her the bad news and she looked at him and said, ‘I already know. I already know.’ He then said he would name his firstborn daughter after her, which he did. She was very, very sad. I know he was worried about her. She took it very badly.”
She didn’t give up hope, though. Later that year, she would go to see singer Diahann Carroll at the Mocambo in Los Angeles and, recalled the singer, “I was pregnant with my daughter, Suzanne. Marilyn, so sad and so beautiful, came backstage to say hello. ‘May I touch your tummy?’ she asked me. I was delighted, of course. I took her hand and put it on my stomach and said, ‘You pat right here, sweetheart, and say a prayer and a wish, and I’ll hope with all my heart that your dream comes true.’ She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘Oh, I do, too. I do, too.’ ”
There seemed to be no end to her melancholy at this time in her life as one terrible moment seemed inevitably to give way to another. Though she signed on to begin filming a new movie in 1960, a musical comedy called Let’s Make Love, Marilyn was feeling anything but lighthearted. Her marriage would most certainly not last another year, and she knew it. She refused Berniece’s telephone calls that holiday season—the first time that had ever happened. Throughout all of the vicissitudes of her life, she had never felt so low. Indeed, as Marilyn told one close friend, “As hard as I tried, the amount of time and energy I spent on this thing… I think now that it must be a sign. God must not want me to have children. Of course. Why should he allow me to have children? I can barely handle my own life.”
One evening after Marilyn got home from the hospital, she and that friend went through Marilyn’s closet, looking for something she might be able to wear to dinner. “I don’t like to wear fancy clothes,” she told her friend. “They take away from me, from who I am. I don’t want people to be distracted when I walk into the room. So let’s find something very simple.” As she was talking and thumbing through a row of blouses, she came across a maternity top. She stopped for a moment. Then she took it off the hanger and handed it to her friend. “Please get rid of this for me,” she said. Then, a few moments later, she came across another. “Oh, no.” Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she decided to just take the time to get rid of all of the maternity clothes in the closet. “This isn’t even what I set out to do,” she said, very upset. “I just wanted to wear something pretty for dinner.” After cleaning out the closet, she and her friend put all of the maternity outfits in a large box. The next day, Marilyn had her secretary send them all to her half sister. “Maybe Mona [Berniece’s daughter] will have better luck than me,” she concluded sadly.
PART SEVEN
Slow Death
Giving Voice to the Voices
The second week of January 1960 found Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Miller in Los Angeles, ensconced in bungalow number 21 of the plush Beverly Hills Hotel, next door to the French actor Yves Montand and his wife, actress Simone Signoret. Montand had been cast to star opposite Marilyn in Let’s Make Love, replacing Gregory Peck, who had decided—wisely, as it would turn out—that making this film was a very bad idea. It was a new year and Marilyn seemed determined not only to make the movie an enjoyable experience, but also to somehow save her marriage in the process. Diane Stevens, an assistant to John Springer, who worked for Marilyn as a publicist at this time (through the Arthur Jacobs agency), recalled, “I remember thinking, no, she is not in shape to do a movie. Unlike Elizabeth Taylor—whom John also worked for and with whom I had a great deal of contact—Marilyn was not able to bounce back after personal tragedy. Rather, she seemed to lose herself in the personal chaos. It was as if she had no coping skills or, at the very least, it was as if she had exhausted her supply. I thought she should have been in a hospital by this time, not on a soundstage.”
In fact, Marilyn was primed to make this film a big success. How could it fail with the legendary “woman’s” director George Cukor at the helm, a script by the Oscar-honored writer Norman Krasna, songs by the triple-Oscar-winning tunesmiths Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, and with Gregory Peck as her leading man? But Peck left the project early on because he felt the script was terrible. Other big male stars who turned down the role were Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Yul Brynner, and James Stewart. French actor/singer Yves Montand had no such misgivings, though. He had recently made a big success in a French-language film version of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Married to Simone Signoret, an Academy Award Best Actress winner in 1960, he signed on to join Marilyn as her leading man in Let’s Make Love.
A strange thing occurred during the early part of rehearsals for the film, something that greatly impacted Marilyn’s marriage to Arthur. A Writers Guild strike had broken out, causing a problem for the film, the script of which was already such a mess Marilyn barely wanted to appear in it. There was some hope from her that the strike might cause the cancellation of the film as no union writer would be available to work on it. The film’s producer, Jerry Wald, asked Arthur Miller if he would mind doing some rewrites on the script. Miller agreed. In effect, he not only consented to rewriting the movie—an endeavor that, to most observers, seemed far below his station as a Pulitzer Prize winner—but also to break ranks with the guild. Marilyn was surprised. “She had always thought of Arthur as someone who championed the rights of the underdog,” said Rupert Allan, who was in Los Angeles visiting the Millers at the time. “For him to snub his nose at the strike first confused her and then made her lose respect for him. She had
thought of him as a principled person, an Abraham Lincoln. And he suddenly turned on her. He became much hated, too, on the set. He would lord his wisdom and knowledge over everyone involved in the movie, to the point where people didn’t want to be around him. Suddenly Marilyn was ashamed of him. My, how the tables had turned.”
Actually, there was somewhat more to Marilyn being upset with Arthur than met the eye. She wasn’t upset with him just because he had betrayed his own ideals, though that was part of it. She also suspected from the start that he had taken the writing job just to put her in her proverbial “place.” After all, she signed on to do the movie at least partly because no one in the household was making any money. Arthur Miller may have been at least a little embarrassed by this situation. Then, suddenly an opportunity presented itself to him to not only bring in a paycheck but perhaps also to be the person responsible for the words his wife had no choice but to recite on camera. It may have seemed as if he were getting back at her. According to people who knew him best, that was his intention. Or, as one person put it, “It was an in-your-face ‘screw you’ to her.” It’s no wonder she was beginning to resent him as much as he seemed to resent her.
Of course, there were the usual problems with Marilyn during production of Let’s Make Love, having to do with her tardiness and pill-taking. Often, she seemed stabilized and well-balanced—her medication probably working—but other times she looked dazed and loopy. Tony Randall, also in the film, recalled, “You have to understand, we would all be in makeup and ready to roll in the morning and here she would come strolling in sometime in the early evening. It got to be tiring after a while. There were days when she seemed barely able to function. Still, she somehow managed to get through it, just as always, I suppose.” It should be noted that Marilyn was acutely aware of her constant disruptions on the set. After the film was over, for instance, she sent choreographer Jack Cole $1,500 with a note telling him she realized she had been “awful.” She suggested he take the money and use it for a vacation, “and act like it all never happened.” A couple of days later, she sent him another $500 and the suggestion that he “stay three more days.”
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 33
