‘I guess,’ she said. ‘It makes me think of love more, though. We’re all alone in our plate-glass compartments, chasing round and round after someone but never catching them. We think we’re right next to the other person but really we’re far away, deep inside ourselves. No one knows who’s leading and who’s following. Like children, we wonder where it all started. Who fell in love first, who fell out of love first.’
Marilyn arrived late at the funerary chapel, all apologies and nervous indecision about her make-up and her dress.
He understood her profound anxiety. If she was never less than an hour late wherever she went, it wasn’t vanity: it was because she was too uncertain and anxious to set off on time. It was anxiety, the tension of constantly having to please, that was responsible for her recurrent sore throats that were so severe she couldn’t speak, her chewed fingernails, damp palms and fits of giggling like a geisha; the terrible raw nerves that aroused passionate sympathy in whoever witnessed them and, if anything, only made her more radiant in their eyes. Marilyn was always late, like everyone who has appeared at the wrong moment in their parents’ lives, all the unexpected souls.
They fell out of touch. The White Angels grew further and further apart until eventually they vanished into the white blur of oblivion. She had given him the character of Holly Golightly – or, rather, he had taken it from her, from her words, her hands, her hopes, the chaos of her soul – and now she wasn’t of any use to him except to make him sad, like a worn car tyre left lying on the tarmac of a parking lot, or a lost key. He saw her for the last time in Hollywood a few weeks before her death, and said afterwards, ‘She had never looked better. She had lost a lot of weight for the picture she was going to do with George Cukor, and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly any more. If she had lived and kept her figure, I think she would still look terrific today. The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they paid one of her best friends, her press attaché Pat Newcomb, to keep quiet about her relationship with them. That friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise round the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.’
Four years later, Truman Capote threw his famous black and white ball in New York’s grandest ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. He spent months drawing up lists, covering page after page with names, underlining some, crossing out others. People thought he was working on his next novel, but it was his last party, his immolation on the funeral pyre of celebrity. He invited five hundred people: hardly any writers, lots of Hollywood types, including Sinatra, a few ghosts, such as the old diva Tallulah Bankhead, but neither John Huston, for whom he had written Beat the Devil and who had introduced him to Marilyn, nor Blake Edwards, who had massacred Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He wanted people to hide their faces and wear black or white, like pieces in a chess game. After his death, a note from 1970 was found in his papers. ‘A white bishop. That’s how she saw me. Marilyn and I were destined to find each other but not touch. It can be that way sometimes, like Holly and the narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ Truman also noted in his diary, ‘Strange. After my parents’ divorce, I was brought up in Monroeville, Alabama.’
Phoenix, Arizona
March 1956
After fourteen months in New York, Marilyn returned to Los Angeles to film Bus Stop. On 12 March 1956, Norma Jeane Mortenson, as she still signed herself, became Marilyn Monroe. ‘I am an actress and I found my name a handicap,’ she said. ‘I have been using the name I wish to assume, Marilyn Monroe, for many years and I am now known professionally by that name.’
On set, director Joshua Logan discovered just how much of a Freudian devotee the actress had become. In one scene Don Murray, who was playing a cowboy, was supposed to wake Marilyn with the words, ‘No wonder you’re so pale and white. That’s the sun out there.’ Instead he said ‘so pale and scaly’.
Logan called, ‘Cut.’
‘Don,’ Marilyn said gleefully, ‘do you realise what you just did? You made a Freudian slip . . . It’s a sexual scene and you gave a sexual symbol. You see, you said “scaly”, which means to say you were thinking of a snake. And a snake is a phallic symbol. You know what a phallic symbol is?’
‘Know what that is?’ Murray retorted. ‘I’ve got one! Do you think I’m a fairy or something?’
‘What do I know? Let me tell you a story. You know Errol Flynn? Well, when I was about ten, I saw The Prince and the Pauper three times. And then ten years later I met him in the flesh in Hollywood. Next thing I knew, my prince had whipped out his dick and was playing the piano with it. Errol Flynn! My childhood hero! I’d just got into modelling, and I went to this half-ass party, and Errol Flynn, so pleased with himself, he was there and he took out his prick and played the piano with it. Thumped the keys. He played “You Are My Sunshine”. Christ! Everyone says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood. I wouldn’t know about that. But I’ve seen Errol’s . . . So you’ll have to do better than that!’
During the filming of Bus Stop in Sun Valley, Marilyn tried out the psychoanalytic methods of Strasberg, who was a close friend of Logan’s. She replaced the sumptuous costumes that had been designed for her with a shabby black dress and a trashy blue silk and fishnet basque, reminders, perhaps, of the porn shoots when she was starting out. She wanted her clothes to be as tattered and patched-together as she felt. She gave her character a stutter like her own, even a tendency to forget her lines that wasn’t in the script.
Reno, Nevada
Summer 1960
Her problems with filming didn’t let up after Let’s Make Love. Her next picture, based on a short story by Arthur Miller, was The Misfits, co-starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, directed by John Huston and shot on location in Reno, Nevada. Filming began behind schedule, without her. The crew took over the Mapes Hotel and used a nearby movie-house, the Crest Theater, to watch the daily rushes. Two days later, Jim Haspiel, the most devoted of Marilyn’s admirers, went to New York’s LaGuardia airport to see her off. She looked terrible, with ‘bags under the eyes and a period stain across the back of her skirt’. He couldn’t bear to see her that way.
On the tarmac at Reno, Marilyn kept everyone waiting while she changed in the lavatory of the aircraft. The sun set, the photographers readied their flashes, and finally the star emerged from the plane, like a white dream blossoming out of the darkness.
The next day the desert heat reached at least 100 degrees in the shade, and Marilyn began filming. She was like nothing human anyone had ever seen or dreamed. She was like a ghost, so pale that the people around her were like shadows picked out by the moon. As a journalist described her, ‘Disdaining all lingerie and dressed in tight, white silk emblazoned with countless red cherries, she became at once the symbol of impartial and eternal availability, who yet remained forever pure – and a potentially terrible goddess whose instinct could also deal death and whose smile, when she directed it clearly at you, was exquisitely, heartbreakingly sweet.’
When Huston had offered her the part of Roslyn a few months earlier, Marilyn hadn’t been particularly enamoured by the prospect of playing a woman torn between her need for love and her abhorrence of suffering. It all felt too close to home. ‘She’s my double,’ she told Greenson. ‘The same anxieties, the same sense of abandonment, the same problems living. I don’t want to play a woman who’s had an awful childhood and a crazed relationship with her mother and whose only refuge is innocence, you know, the wonder she feels when she looks at children and animals. Roslyn: that’s Rose, as in the Rose I played in Niagara, the cheap whore who killed her husband, and -lyn, as in Marilyn. Me basically.’
She had only taken the role in the end because she was tired of doing comedies and because Huston had assured her he would write the final version of the script, which her husband had tailored to fit her like a lethal glove. ‘Even Marilyn’s pain expressed life,’ Miller said later, ‘the struggle agai
nst the angel of death.’
‘Why do you want to film in black and white?’ Marilyn asked Huston, after agreeing to play Roslyn.
‘You’re on so many drugs,’ Huston shot back in his tough-guy way. ‘With those bloodshot eyes and veins of yours we couldn’t film in Technicolor even if we wanted to and could afford it . . . Now, don’t take that badly and go and jam down another handful of pills. I wouldn’t want you to be any deader than you are already. Suicidal neurotics get on my nerves. I mean, kill yourself if you must, be my guest, but, honey, why do you have to make everybody else’s life hell while you’re at it? . . . Why else do I want to shoot in black and white? Well, if I’m doing a psychological study, like my Freud picture’s going to be, I’m more interested in showing what’s going on behind people’s eyes than the colour of them. And nothing’s black and white in life and I only want to film what exists in the movies.’
‘Why do you want me?’ Marilyn wondered.
‘Because you’re more like a hooker than an actress. Like real hookers, the good ones, you don’t pretend to an emotion, you give your whole self, body and soul. But you do know she’s not you, this woman, don’t you? I can’t stand that whole Actors Studio Method – thank God Strasberg hasn’t managed to ruin you with it yet. That fucking technique where you have to go deep into yourself to find an emotion from your past and then smear it all over the screen. I’ve got a lot of respect for psychoanalysis and a lot of respect for the job of an actor, but put the two of them together and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. The great thing about you, Marilyn, even if you don’t realise it, is that you’ve broken free from Strasberg’s Method. You won’t act Roslyn. You’ll give the viewer what he wants to feel and see and love, like a hooker who wants the customer to get his money’s worth. If you do the exact opposite of what Strasberg has taught you, I’m telling you, everything’ll be fine. Forget all that “go inside yourself” crap. Go outside – that’s where you are, that’s where the audience is. And as for your anxieties, hang on to them. They’re a precious resource for an actor. Don’t think your analyst is going to free you from them. No one can and, anyway, they shouldn’t. If you don’t feel anxiety in this business, you might as well give up.’
‘So why are you making a film about Freud?’ Marilyn asked. ‘Is it instead of going into analysis yourself?’
Huston didn’t reply straight away. At fifty-four, he found himself confronted by the same anxieties, conflicts and deep-seated problems that had plagued him throughout his childhood and adolescence. Fascinated and terrified in equal measure by the unconscious, his investigations into ‘depth psychology’ – they didn’t call it ‘psychoanalysis’ in Hollywood in those days – dated from his first film.
‘It’s true, I’m very interested in psychoanalysis,’ Huston said, after a while. ‘Traumas and buried memories were the subject of a documentary I made about soldiers returning from the front, Let There Be Light. Is that how you think of analysis, as something that will let the light into your darkened soul so you can bear the sun coming up, the glare of a new day? I know it’ll never do that for me. I’ll make do without it. I’m going to set my anxieties in motion, put everything I’ve repressed up on screen, and then face my demons twenty-four frames a second. I’ll get them out in a movie, not on the couch – a movie about Freud, why not? Play it again, Sigmund.’
‘I don’t understand why you’re so hard on Monty,’ she said.
‘I’m a man’s director. I loathe passivity. Initiative, action: that’s what I like. Filming should hurt. Hurt my actors, my crew, my producers. I’ll tell you a secret: the movies are made to hurt the spectator. Monty and I have a relationship he likes. He gets off on it. I treat him like the alcoholic, masochistic, drug-addicted fairy he is. Devastated and lost. That’s why I’m thinking of getting him to play Freud. I’d like my Freud to be like Perce in The Misfits in lots of ways. One of those men who’s out of true, a bit cracked deep down.’
One evening in Reno at the crap tables, Huston asked Marilyn to throw the dice.
‘What should I ask the dice for, John?’
‘Don’t think, honey, just throw,’ Huston told her. ‘That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it.’
But she needed to think about her role as much as ever. Once on set, Marilyn stopped talking to her husband and the director. If they wanted to communicate with her, they had to go through Paula Strasberg, a perennial presence in her black dress and little black veil. Marilyn secretly called her ‘the witch’ or ‘the vulture’, but she made sure Paula was on a higher salary than she was. The crew nicknamed her ‘the Black Baroness’. ‘How many directors are there on this film?’ Huston occasionally yelled, to no one in particular.
Progress was painfully slow and, in his version of grinning and bearing it, Huston took to losing chunks of the budget in Reno’s casinos. Marilyn started refusing to come out of her trailer, retreating further and further inside herself. The Method was her sole article of faith. Fox decided to call on Greenson.
Los Angeles, Bel Air
August 1960
On the second to last weekend in August, Marilyn took advantage of a break in filming to fly to Los Angeles. She saw her analyst repeatedly, their sessions sometimes running on for hours, but also found time to go to Joe Schenck’s bedside. Schenck, a movie mogul and producer, one of the founders of 20th Century Fox, was seriously ill and would die shortly afterwards.
They had met in 1948 at a party at his lavish mansion on South Carolwood Drive. An extravagant medley of Spanish-Italian renaissance and Moorish architecture, it was an appropriate backdrop for the gargantuan poker evenings Schenck liked to throw. His friends would roll up with an attractive woman on each arm – models and starlets, hoping for advancement in their careers, and if that meant providing something a little more personal, well, who were they to refuse an executive’s wishes? Schenck was a well-established producer, and Marilyn, by her own admission, a willing lamb to the slaughter – but she wasn’t to succumb that first evening.
As she looked at the wretched octogenarian hooked up to every sort of machine on his hospital bed, she could no longer remember when it was she had finally submitted to him. At the time she had wanted desperately to work, to be a star, and afterwards she spoke openly of her affair with Schenck, who had immediately given her what she was looking for. He had put her in touch with his poker buddy Harry Cohn, then head of Columbia Studios and the man who had transformed a dancer named Margarita Consino into Rita Hayworth.
Cohn’s offer of a contract came with one condition: after a week of electrolysis, hydrogen peroxide and ammonia treatments, the mirror reflected her new image – like her beloved Jean Harlow, her dirty-blonde hair had vanished under a haze of platinum.
After approving her new look, Cohn sent her to take classes from Natasha Lytess, who would later say, ‘I made Marilyn. I made everything about her: how she read, her voice, her acting, her pronunciation of her ts and ds, her walk, heel to toe, the way she swung those hips like no one had done before.’
Gazing at Los Angeles’ leaden sky through the window of the hospital waiting room, Marilyn thought about coincidences; about the distance between the hospital block where Schenck now lay, fighting for breath, and his mansion, where they’d first met; about the way his hair looked almost blond against his pillow, as if it had been bleached. She caught sight of her reflection in a mirror and was startled by her excessive, almost unbearable blondeness, the magnet for The Misfits’ spots that were intended to bathe every shot in a sphere of ethereal light. She’d wanted to be a different shade of blonde in every film she appeared in: ash, unbleached dark, golden, silver, amber, honey, smoky, topaz, platinum – anything except natural blonde. Seven years earlier, she remembered, Howard Hawks had given her a part in his movie opposite Jane Russell, who was playing the brunette and, try as she might, Marilyn hadn’t been able to get a dressing room. She’d finally had to descend to their level by saying, ‘Look, after all, I am the blo
nde, and it is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.’
‘Remember, you’re not a star!’ the production team repeated.
‘Well, whatever I am, I’m the blonde!’
Dyeing hair, dying hair, Marilyn thought, as she turned away from the mirror. How many hours have I spent in waiting rooms, front offices and foyers since starting out? Maybe it’s not men I’ve been trying to keep waiting by showing up late, maybe it’s Death. OK, mister, you can have the last dance, but not this very moment. She stifled a laugh. I’ll talk about it to the words doctor. As she went back into Schenck’s room, tears welled at the memory of a Chihuahua he had given her, which she’d called Josepha, after him. She’d been very fond of Schenck. He had really cared about her in the early, hard days; she had always been able to go to him if she’d needed a meal or a shoulder to cry on. Schenck heard someone approaching his bedside but couldn’t make out who it was.
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
August 1960
During an afternoon session on her break from The Misfits, Greenson commented on how rarely she talked about her sex life.
‘You know, Doctor,’ she said, ‘I think of my sex life – my life, period, in fact – as a series of jump cuts. A man comes in, gets all excited, has me, loses me . . . And then in the next shot you see the same man – or maybe another one – come in again, but this time his smile’s different, he’s got a new set of mannerisms, the lighting’s changed. He was holding an empty glass a minute ago and now it’s half full. We look at each other through different eyes. Time’s passed but we’re still caught up in an image we have of ourselves, we still think we’re meeting for the first time. Does that make any sense to you? I don’t know if it does me either, but I wonder whether that’s what relationships between men and women are really like. We try to touch as we pass each other but we’re not separated just by space, time is against us too.’
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 7
