Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (70 page)

After she spent a quiet summer, Marilyn heard again from Jerry Wald, who was back on the wire with another subject, at first called
The Billionaire
and eventually
Let’s Make Love
. This seemed an idea full of promise, planned by Wald and Twentieth Century–Fox as a Technicolor, CinemaScope musical comedy with a script by Norman Krasna, who had written comedies for Carole Lombard and Marlene Dietrich; most recently, he had revised his play
Kind Sir
into the successful comedy
Indiscreet
for Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. At first,
The Billionaire
was to have been directed by Billy Wilder, whom Marilyn approved but feared would not work again with her; in fact, Wilder told Rupert Allan he would be delighted to do just that—but he was already at work on his next script (
The Apartment
). She then agreed with Wald’s suggestion of George Cukor, who had directed Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman, among other important Hollywood ladies. “He told me not to be nervous,” Marilyn said of her first meeting with Cukor. “I told him I was born nervous.”

Marilyn was to play an actress named Amanda Dell who performs in an Off-Broadway musical satire also called
Let’s Make Love
. This show-within-the-show satirizes the fabulously wealthy French-born, New York businessman Jean-Marc Clément. He decides to visit a rehearsal and, without revealing his true identity, he is hired as an actor—to play himself. Clément falls in love with Amanda, who until the last minute refuses to believe the truth that her co-star is really a tycoon.

Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck turned down the male lead—either because of the song-and-dance routines or because they were unwilling to serve as mere acolytes in a Monroe picture. Wald and Cukor then had the idea that an authentic French musical star would be the perfect choice and Marilyn, on their recommendation and Arthur’s, yielded. Her leading man, appearing in his first American picture, would be none other than Yves Montand, who had played in the Paris production of
The Crucible
and recently had a great success with his one-man show on Broadway. “I’m sure he accepted for one good reason,” Arthur Miller said years later. “It meant he was breaking into movies as a leading man opposite Marilyn Monroe” (neither an unwise nor unworthy motive). On September 30, Marilyn signed to do the picture; negotiations for Montand, which included a paid trip to Hollywood for him and his wife, Simone Signoret, were completed before Christmas.

Meantime, Fox employed Marilyn as a good will ambassador. Nikita Khrushchev’s historic tour of America was at its peak that September, and the film industry’s banquet in his honor was held on September 19 in the most lavish commissary of them all, Fox’s Café de Paris. From her table (where she chatted amiably with Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Joshua Logan and others), Marilyn was summoned to meet the Soviet premier: he smiled, gazed unblinkingly into her blue eyes and shook her hand so earnestly and so long it hurt for days. “He looked at me the way a man looks on a woman—that’s how he looked at me,” she reported proudly. An interpreter conveyed some small talk about
The Brothers Karamazov
, which by then had been filmed with Maria Schell as Grushenka, and Marilyn had only warm words for Schell’s performance. Yes, she would like very much to visit Russia, she replied to Khrushchev’s invitation. For perhaps two minutes, the Cold War thawed slightly.

In October and November, there were preproduction details: wardrobe fittings, color tests, meetings with Cukor and scene-study with Paula Strasberg, who was included on the team as usual. This time there were also rehearsals and prerecordings for several songs. According to Frankie Vaughan, the British pop star who played a supporting role, “She was always on time for rehearsals. There were none of those notorious late starts. When she arrived, everybody smartened up, as if her presence was the light that fell on everyone. Certainly she seemed
to me very professional.” These numbers required some basic choreography, and because dancing on-camera made Marilyn more nervous than anything else in a movie, she demanded the help of her old friend Jack Cole, who had trained her throughout the rigors of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
There’s No Business Like Show Business
.

At the same time, an even deeper friendship was established. An actor known as “masseur to the stars,” Ralph Roberts had earned high esteem among theater and movie folk because of his sophisticated knowledge of physiotherapy and of the special muscular problems often afflicting actors and dancers. He had met Marilyn at the Strasberg home in 1955 when he, too, was both student and close friend of the family. Roberts had acted on Broadway in
The Lark
with Julie Harris and Boris Karloff, and he had trained the actor who played the masseur (a surrogate Ralph Roberts) in the opening scene of
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

Over six feet tall and ruggedly handsome, Ralph had a solid reputation as a Southern gentleman in the classic mold, soft-spoken, compassionate and courtly. He was also widely read and had refined, multicultural interests. That season, he was in Los Angeles, and when Marilyn heard that he had greatly helped Judy Holliday during the filming of
Bells Are Ringing
, Marilyn rang him at once. From the day of their reunion, he was “Rafe” to her: she preferred the British pronunciation. More important, he quickly became her closest friend and most intimate confidant for the rest of her life.

Very soon, Marilyn needed Ralph’s support. With the holidays there arrived her co-star, the formidable, smoothly romantic Yves Montand. Under Cukor’s supervision, Montand and Marilyn began to rehearse the early scenes of
Let’s Make Love
, a movie which bore, as Simone Signoret said,
un titre prémonitoire
—a threatening title.

1
. In this regard, one likes to recall a fascinating moment in 1922, when British archaeologists were unearthing the pharaohs’ tombs. In one mummy case dating from the eighteenth century before Christ, there was found among the usual artifacts a seedling. A member of the team planted and nurtured it, and soon there was a flourishing little mustard tree.

2
. At Fox, for example, the market on peroxide was cornered by Jayne Mansfield, who wore Marilyn’s notorious gold lamé dress from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, while Sheree North inherited Marilyn’s red beaded gown from the same movie. At Universal-International, her tight bodices from two pictures were loaned out for Mamie Van Doren; her form-fitting corset from
River of No Return
was handed over to Corinne Calvet for
Powder River;
Marilyn’s white pleated dress from
The Seven Year Itch
swirled round Rosanne Arlen in
Bachelor Flat;
and outfits from several Monroe films were worn by Barbara Nichols in hers. At Columbia, Cleo Moore was taught how to walk like Marilyn, while at MGM, RKO and elsewhere, Barbara Lang, Joi Lansing, Diana Dors and Beverly Michaels had to sit through hours of excerpts from Marilyn’s pictures, studying her. Even Sidney Skolsky championed a substitute Marilyn. Most of these women never had a chance to discover if they could do anything other than imitate someone inimitable.

3
. Notwithstanding any objective valuation of their merit, the playwright’s entire corpus of plays and screenplays following his marriage to Marilyn—from
The Misfits
(1960) through
After the Fall
(1964) and up to
The Last Yankee
(1993)—comprises an encoded guide to the network of conflicted feelings about his life with Marilyn Monroe, a complex he seems never to have completely resolved.

4
.
The Story on Page One
was eventually completed by Odets and filmed with Rita Hayworth in the leading role.

Chapter Eighteen

1960

M
ARILYN WAS A
smiling, bubbling, beautiful hostess. She still has the old glamour, the magic.” So wrote her friend Sidney Skolsky, inspired by a reception Marilyn hosted for Yves Montand at Fox’s commissary during the second week of January.

“Next to my husband and Marlon Brando,” she said, offering a toast, “I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.”

This remark brought polite applause, and heads turned toward the guest of honor, whose English vocabulary was poor and heavily accented. “Everything she do is original, even when she stand and talk to you,” he read haltingly from a card. “I never see anybody who concentrate so hard. She work hard, she do scene over and over and over but is not happy until perfect. She help me, I try to help her.”

At first, this kind of warm collegiality prevailed as well at the Beverly Hills Hotel, that sprawling pink complex of Mediterranean revival buildings on Sunset Boulevard, where the studio installed the Montands in bungalow number twenty and the Millers a few steps away in number twenty-one. After the tensions of the previous year, an uneasy truce seemed to prevail between the Millers: they hoped, Marilyn told friends, that
The Misfits
—his Valentine for her, she called it—might restore their marriage.

Arthur had known the Montands since 1956, and the couples had
had several pleasant evenings together in New York the previous September, when Yves was the toast of Broadway. Now they dined together each evening when Yves and Marilyn returned from rehearsals. Over spaghetti in one suite or lamb stew in another, Montand practiced his English, asking Arthur and Marilyn for help and trying to understand a humorless and badly structured script. Simone, a bit more fluent and then between film assignments, described her leisurely days of shopping and her walking tours of Beverly Hills. Marilyn complained about
Let’s Make Love
, which was turning out to have more holes than the wheel of Swiss cheese the Montands kept in their kitchenette: “There was no script, really,” she said later. “There was nothing for the girl to
do!”
And Arthur, puffing on his pipe, had to agree that, yes, the script pages he read were abysmally unfunny and riddled with clichés.

By the end of January, Arthur was in Ireland, working at John Huston’s home on his own revisions for
The Misfits
. Although that script was far from camera-ready, he returned in mid-March for an astonishing reason—to write some scenes for
Let’s Make Love
.

In his memoirs, Miller wrote with lofty bitterness that his work on this picture meant “a sacrifice of great blocks of time . . . [for] a script not worth the paper it was typed on”—a task, he said, that he undertook only to give his wife emotional support. His assessment of the screenplay is astute, but the circumstances of his involvement were somewhat different, not to say determinative for the course of the Millers’ marriage.

On March 7, the Screen Actors Guild joined the Writers Guild, already on strike against producers and studios, and from that day, every Hollywood production shut down—just when
Let’s Make Love
had some of its most pressing script and production problems. The major issue at stake for these unions was additional payments to actors and writers for the television broadcast of their earlier films, for which studios were now realizing huge new profits, and no playwright or screenwriter would dishonor the strike to work on the problematic sequences of this film. But to everyone’s astonishment—Marilyn’s most of all—Jerry Wald prevailed on Arthur Miller to break ranks. According to Yves Montand, Miller “came running [back from Ireland] to rewrite some scenes, pocketed a check [from Fox] and complained about prostituting his art.”

Indeed, Miller was apparently not so mortified at the task as he
later claimed: he attended the screening of the dailies, commenting so imperiously that Cukor abandoned the room, and generally playing the experienced playwright who was slumming in Hollywood—an attitude that had caused problems on
Some Like It Hot
. Nonetheless, his fee of several thousand dollars for his contributions must have alleviated whatever agony he felt.

Most significantly, this situation was disastrous for a marriage already in tatters. Sidney Skolsky summed up the matter: “Arthur Miller, the big liberal, the man who always stood up for the underdog, ignored the Writers Guild strike and rewrote [pages of the script]. Arthur did it silently, at night,” and the result was that “his wife no longer looked up to him. . . . Any resemblance he had once possessed, in Marilyn’s eyes, to a President assassinated nearly a century ago [Lincoln, to whom she had often compared Miller] had vanished.” Violating his own ethics, Arthur forever lost Marilyn’s confidence: the man whose courage and moral outrage a few years earlier had won her admiration had betrayed his own ideals. “That was the moment I knew it was over,” she told Rupert Allan, visiting Los Angeles from Monaco. “Nothing seemed to make sense any more.”

There was much slamming of doors in their bungalow, and the Montands, among others, heard angry voices late into the night. From that time, the production “was a terrible ordeal for everybody,” according to Jack Cole, who added, echoing Billy Wilder, that “Arthur Miller hated her.”

“There was something terrible happening between them,” recalled Vanessa Reis, “and the marriage was obviously unraveling. This took a terrific toll on May, who was the soul of discretion and found it painful to watch. One evening, Arthur, Marilyn, May, Rupert Allan and I were about to go out for dinner, but the atmosphere was so tense I left the group.” George Cukor recognized the anxiety in Marilyn’s life, although he knew not the specific causes: he admitted later that he had “no real communication with her at all . . . and very little influence. All I could do was make a climate that was agreeable to her.”