Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (69 page)

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The letter of September 12, 1958, helps to correct this one-sided view. She may have been seeking an earthly savior, as he claimed, but he had been looking for a goddess. As Sidney Skolsky rightly remarked, Arthur may have been shocked to discover that Marilyn was neither his salvation nor the one he hoped could disentangle his own spiritual problems, but that she was needy in her own right. His creative inertia and his admitted emotional blockage were not her responsibility to resolve, and Norman Rosten was correct when he judged that Arthur was “more and more living with her in the third person, as an observer, [and] the shadow that had fallen between them in England was increasing, deepening.”

Their telephone conversation alone was not enough to cheer her, for that night Marilyn apparently took one too many sleeping capsules, perhaps with champagne. She was neither dying nor comatose, but, in a reaction typical for one who ingests such a combination, she vomited so violently that Paula had her admitted to a hospital for the weekend. Marilyn was back at work on Monday. Later that week, Arthur arrived to comfort her, but also, as his friend Olie Rauh believed, because he was virtually idle in New York: he had submitted the first draft of
The Misfits
to John Huston, whose response to it was favorable and who, they hoped, would direct it.

Arthur’s presence was no help at all. Embarrassed by what he considered her lack of professionalism, he was another authority figure Marilyn had to please. In addition, he distressed an already harried production crew by unwelcome interference, which doubtless he thought was part of the support he was offering Marilyn. Nor was his unwittingly superior attitude welcome. Introduced to Wilder and Diamond, Arthur held forth on the differences between classical comedy and tragedy—a professorial tactic that endeared him neither to his wife’s colleagues nor to her. At the time, Jack Lemmon realized she was “going through some kind of hell on earth—suffering and still producing that magic on film. It was a courageous performance, really courageous.” She was, he said, always giving everything she had, struggling to do better.

Behind this struggle was the judgment Marilyn felt was constantly being levied against her by Arthur. To Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg,
Marilyn confided her fear that Arthur regarded her as self-absorbed and unprofessional. In their time, actors like Spencer Tracy and Errol Flynn (among others) shut down filming for a week at a time while they skipped off for their alcoholic binges, and Judy Garland was endlessly pampered with whatever drugs she required; they were but three of countless stars whose conduct, by comparison, made Marilyn seem as alert and punctual as a cadet. In a way, decades of studio carelessness and indulgence were devolving against her: she had not only personal habits to correct but also years of corporate cosseting of stars’ whimsies, which at last—for economic reasons—were no longer so blithely tolerated.

Arthur’s resentment of Marilyn was obvious to everyone during production. “There were days I could have strangled her,” said Billy Wilder, “but there were wonderful days, too, when we all knew she was brilliant. But with Arthur it all seemed sour, and I remember saying at the time that in meeting Miller at last I met someone who resented her more than I did.” Professionally idle, dependent on his wife’s income, humiliated by what he saw as her childish caprice and contemptuous of Hollywood in any case, Arthur could no longer tolerate her or the marriage.

But there was another problem, and that autumn, the atmosphere on location in Coronado was thick with tensions. “Arthur told me he would allow Marilyn to work only in the morning,” Wilder recalled.

He said she was too exhausted to submit to outside work in the afternoon sun. “The morning? She never shows up until after twelve! Arthur, bring her to me at nine and you can have her back at eleven-thirty!” We were working with a time bomb, we were twenty days behind schedule and God knows how much over budget, and she was taking a lot of pills. But we were working with Monroe, and she was platinum—not just the hair, and not just her box-office appeal. What you saw on the screen was priceless.

The reason for Arthur’s request was simple: in late October, the Millers learned that Marilyn was pregnant again. Fortunately, her most strenuous scenes were already shot and the filming of
Some Like It Hot
was completed on November 6.

By this time, director and star were barely speaking. When
The New York Herald Tribune
sent Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams to interview Wilder, he openly discussed Marilyn’s tardiness and inability to remember lines. When Hyams asked if he would do another project with her, Wilder replied, “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.” But this was a reaction of the moment: with the passage of time and the enormous success of
Some Like It Hot
—the biggest grossing American film for the first half of 1959—Wilder praised Monroe’s unique gifts and she said it would be a privilege to work for him again. That winter, in fact, Marilyn telephoned Wilder from New York, intending (as she told the film’s musical composer Matty Malneck) to offer the olive branch but finally unable to do so. Wilder’s wife took the call:

“Audrey?”

“Hi, Marilyn!”

“Is Billy there?”

“No, he’s not home yet.”

“Well, when you see him, will you give him a message for me?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Marilyn said, and then paused. “Would you please tell him”—she was putting her words together slowly, thoughtfully—“would you please tell him to go and fuck himself?” A slight pause again, and in a gentler voice Marilyn concluded: “And my warmest personal regards to you, Audrey.”

But Wilder was not bitter. “Anyone can remember lines,” he said, “but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!”

Some Like It Hot
is essentially a one-joke chase movie stretched on the frame of a story as classical as Shakespeare or the Da Ponte libretti for Mozart, or as Victorian as
Charley’s Aunt:
men forced to dress like women cannot disclose their true identities to the women with whom they fall in love. As a variation of boy (as girl) meets girl but cannot woo girl,
Some Like It Hot
might have been little more than a glossy college romp. But Wilder and Diamond, taking full advantage of Marilyn’s voluptuous charm, added all the elements of Prohibition-era wildness: forbidden liquor, the sudden leap toward free love and even, in the closing line, an implicit nod toward tolerance of homosexuality. When Joe E. Brown learns that his beloved Jack Lemmon is not, after all, a woman, he smiles and shrugs off the objection: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
But somehow Marilyn’s performance was. For all the problems, what survives is a radiantly funny portrait of a ukulele-strumming girl aglow with expectations for the right kind of man to love.

Returning to New York before the end of November, Marilyn was determined to rest during the early stages of her pregnancy. But on December 16, she miscarried; it was the last time she tried to be a mother. Both for sleep and as a tranquilizer, she had been taking Amytal, a brand name of the barbiturate amobarbital, and now she guiltily recalled Leon Krohn’s warning, as she wrote to the Rostens: “Could I have killed it by taking all the Amytal on an empty stomach? I took some sherry wine also.” For weeks she was inconsolable, convinced that the drug abuse she now freely admitted had caused the spontaneous abortion.

The Christmas–New Year holiday was a time of quiet recuperation, and Marilyn entered 1959 in a depression she tried to alleviate by taking sleeping pills as sedatives against tension and anxiety, a practice not generally discouraged by physicians at that time. But Amytal and Nembutal are themselves depressants, and so there was sometimes a vicious cycle of insomnia, drug-induced sleep, a stuporous morning and a vaguely unhappy day endured by taking more pills. Marilyn’s sessions with Dr. Kris, with whom she resumed regular visits, seemed to provide little comfort or illumination. Kris prescribed the sedation Marilyn requested and, it may be presumed, recorded and monitored the amounts.

There was one particularly uncomfortable side effect of her drug use: chronic constipation, which she countered by increased reliance on enemas. Since 1953, she had taken one a day before special occasions if she felt bloated, so that she could fit snugly into a form-fitting gown. But by 1959, her enemas had become as casual a habit as a haircut or shampoo and far more dangerous; pharmacy receipts for that year include the purchase of several sets of the necessary paraphernalia.

Marilyn returned to her private classes with Lee and to workshops at the Actors Studio—both of these to Arthur’s annoyance, as Susan Strasberg recalled, for there was a widening rift between him and her parents. Marilyn also dutifully read film scripts submitted by her agents—none of them, she replied, either appealing or appropriate; and she worked with Arthur on further improvements to the Roxbury house, the first home she had ever owned with anyone.

Marilyn was no recluse, however, and she was particularly delighted to meet famous writers that year. Carson McCullers extended an invitation to her Nyack home, where Isak Dinesen joined them for a long afternoon discussion on poetry. Carl Sandburg, who had met Marilyn briefly during the filming of
Some Like It Hot
, was also an occasional visitor to her apartment for casual literary discussions
à deux
. He found her “warm and plain” and charmed her by asking for her autograph. “Marilyn was a good talker,” according to Sandburg, “and very good company. We did some mock playacting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her a lot of questions. She told me how she came up the hard way, but she would never talk about her husbands.”

In 1959, Marilyn was not, therefore, the invariably withdrawn, darkly self-absorbed (much less suicidal) enigma of later myth. She had some days when she was (thus Susan) “restless because she wasn’t working,” and so she rightly seized every possibility of a happy occasion.

Photographs of her at the New York preview of
Some Like It Hot
in February, and the premiere party at the Strasbergs’ in March, for example, show a luminous, smiling Marilyn all in white: she looked like cotton candy, someone remarked. On a promotional tour for the film, she was as ever low-keyed and generous with the press. Mervin Block, a reporter for the
Chicago American
, recalled that at a press luncheon at the Ambassador East on March 18 she seemed “uncomfortable in the presence of so many strangers,” but that she was “patient and cheerful. Even when a nervous photographer spilled a drink all over the front of her dress, she remained calm, showed no anger, didn’t act like the great star she was.”

As for their long-planned film of
The Misfits
, John Huston was reading various drafts of the screenplay. Otherwise, Arthur’s dramatic works-in-progress were stalled and, as one friendly observer noted, he could not see how to give them a push. His own anxious inertia was ironically highlighted by his reception, on January 27, of a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In painful times, as Dante wrote, the worst agony is the remembrance of past glory.

On such occasions, Marilyn rose to the moment. She invited Arthur’s family to dinner, livened the atmosphere with jokes and, on request, sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Of Arthur’s relatives, she especially loved his father and frequently invited the senior
Millers to Fifty-seventh Street. Marilyn fussed over Isadore, devoted a day to prepare a meal he especially liked, offered him little gifts and treated him as lovingly as if he were her own father. If he dozed, she untied his shoelaces and brought a footstool; if he had a cold, she brought soup and a shawl.

Marilyn’s fundamental courage and lack of self-pity at this time was most evident in the way she dealt with a marriage in swift decline. As the year and her inactivity progressed, she lost interest in the plans for expansion at Roxbury. “Empty hours oppressed her,” according to Susan, “and she seemed bored with the part-time role of country housewife.” Marilyn had hoped to find a literary mentor, father and protector in Arthur, but this was an ideal no man could fulfill; for his part, he had wanted her for his tragic muse, his occupation, and he used her fragility as the excuse for his own literary setbacks. She was his artwork
faute de mieux
. Here, then, were two people once in love but now vainly dependent on Marilyn’s public persona and the iconography of fame to keep them together. “I guess I
am
a fantasy,” she said sadly of this time.

But all was not gloomy. On May 13, Marilyn received Italy’s Oscar, the “David di Donatello,” as best actress for
The Prince and the Showgirl
. Four hundred people jammed into the Italian consulate on Park Avenue where Filipo Donini, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, presented the award. Ten days later, an interesting offer came from her old friend Jerry Wald, who had produced
Clash by Night
. He had another script from Clifford Odets and thought they might revive a successful moment of history with a new Wald-Odets-Monroe project called
The Story on Page One
.

Producer and writer wasted no time in outlining the story for her. The role of Jo Morris, as they described it, was that of an attractive, lonely and disconnected woman, raised by foster parents, unprotected and open to all kinds of abuse. Dependent on men, she nevertheless believes that she has more to offer the world than beauty, and her shrewdness enables her to survive. Intelligent and charming, she longs for love at any cost and, hoping to find a safe harbor from her past, she marries an older man and even tries to have children. But her husband becomes unreasonably jealous and brutal.

The story outline had proceeded only so far when Marilyn replied
that she was interested in something from Clifford Odets, but that she would await a completed script; she was also doubtful about the news that Odets was to direct. Most important, as she told Paula, Marilyn recognized that
The Story on Page One
read like an outline of her own life. From the end of May though mid-June, letters, telephone calls and occasional telegrams augured well for
The Story on Page One
. But then Marilyn fell ill. On June 23 at Lenox Hill Hospital, her New York gynecologist, Dr. Mortimer Rodgers, operated to relieve again the condition of chronic endometriosis and her abnormally painful menstrual periods, her unusually severe bleeding and her infertility.
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