Timebends (73 page)

Discovering that he was only to be allowed to direct Marilyn through the humiliating intercessions of an acting coach, Olivier was soon prepared to murder Paula outright, and from time to time I would not have minded joining him, for Marilyn, a natural comedienne, seemed distracted by half-digested, spitballed imagery and pseudo-Stanislavskian parallelisms that left her unable to free her own native joyousness. She was being doused by a spurious intellection that was thoroughly useless to her as an acting tool, like a born jazz player being taught to rationalize what he instinctively knows how to do. Paula understood that what Marilyn needed to play this showgirl was what she already had when she arrived at Croydon airport; but between Marilyn's belief in a magical key, a flash of insight that would dispel all doubts, and Paula's inability to supply it, Paula had to keep talking, and the more she talked the more impervious the role became. At the same time, like most English actors, Olivier had little patience with acting systems—although he prepared himself for his roles not really very differently from Stanislavsky actors. But to him such preparation was simple common sense, the imitation of life, and something that did not bear all this portentous introspective palavering.

Applied to Marilyn, Paula's “method”—and Lee's—was beginning to seem sinister, a dangerously closed circle of reasoning; if you had not studied with Strasberg and were not one of his adepts, you were not in a position to criticize, and since neither Olivier nor I was in this category, we were barred from applying experience and common sense to a steadily degenerating situation whose arcane depths were by definition beyond us. If Paula could not help her, no one else must be allowed to. To add another complication, Marilyn's trust in Paula was by no means complete: she regarded her merely as Lee's stand-in who was indeed capable, however unintentionally, of misleading her. But Paula at least was hip to the Method and knew when to nod sagely as though she understood. In Paula's repeated refrain—“I'm only Lee's representative”—I also heard the coded warning that she was not to be held directly
responsible for Marilyn's confusion. And neither was Lee, who after all was not even present. Who then was responsible? I gradually began injecting myself into this vacuum—a mistake when I had no power to change anything.

Only Lee could set Marilyn right; without him she had no certainty about anything she was doing. But her long daily transatlantic conversations with him seemed to help little. Inevitably I began feeling locked out, a helpless observer. Thus, candor became more and more difficult. She wanted a magical reassurance that was not of this world.

What was real? I was ready to believe that wittingly or not Olivier might be victimizing her, but she had had similar crises with Josh Logan, another accomplished director. One could dismiss it all as her way of energizing herself for work, but the pain she felt was real and debilitating. The worst of it was that any attempt to reduce the problem to reason implied that she was following a fantasy. And so the great wobbling wheel of emotions was setting itself into place, turning around the axial question of good faith. Truth-telling, all that could rescue us both, could also be dangerous when she needed every shred of reassurance to get through a working day.

Where to get a handhold when I could hardly deny my resentment at her clinging to Paula's fruitless instructions and turning against Olivier as some kind of competitor or enemy? Olivier too seemed to be growing more and more resentful. Only Paula showed no resentment, and why should she? She had become the ultimate authority by more and more openly lamenting Olivier's perfidy while privately assuring everyone but Marilyn that she did not believe it but was forced to pretend lest she lose Marilyn's trust and leave the poor girl with no allies at all, something none of us could bear to contemplate.

As for Olivier, with all his limitations in directing Marilyn—an arch tongue too quick with the cutting joke, an irritating mechanistic exactitude in positioning her and imposing his preconceived notions upon her—he could still have helped her far more than Paula with her puddings of acting philosophy and her stock of odds and ends of theatrical inside stories, always about the greatest names in the business coming in desperation to Lee or herself for help in acting a role under this or that totally incompetent director. Nevertheless, Marilyn's fate and the picture's were finally in Paula's hands, and this unacknowledged power made her an uncanny force for Olivier to deal with.

There was a genuine conflict, it seemed to me, between two
different styles not merely of acting but of life. The comedy of the script came from the timeworn dilemma of the powerful representative of society, the prince, reduced to helplessness in the hands of the innocent prole ignorant of all but sex and ending with all the power. Marilyn knew more than most about such circumstances. But her want of training, as she saw it, in high comedy, not to mention her unrelenting uncertainty, pressed her to try to delve too deeply into a character that was essentially a series of lines crafted to address a situation, an outside with no inside. Olivier, who had mastered most of the great roles, knew how little there was in this one, but to say outright that all she needed for it was herself would be demeaning. And for Paula this admission would mean that the Method had no application here. So the heart of the matter was that nobody could tell the truth, and Marilyn was finally in no position to hear it if it was told.

I did not know how to help her, not least because in the rushes she seemed so perfectly delectable, despite all her anxiety, even lending the film a depth of pathos it did not really have. Mistakenly, I thought that in the end it would all even out into a great success for her, although the movie itself could not be more than a trivial entertainment.

On top of everything else, Marilyn believed that Milton Greene was buying English antique furniture, shipping it home, and charging it to Marilyn Monroe Productions—this at a time when her salary was still the sole income of their company. It was yet another betrayal, and all the more infuriating to her because he was not facing Olivier down as she thought he should.

Somewhere in her mind, I thought, she knew that all this would pass, but it still fueled something frantic and frighteningly thematic in her life that she was less and less able to control; she had idealized Greene's ability to set up her financial life and now felt deceived; she had idealized Olivier as a grand artist without egoistic envy of her, a kind of actor-escort or father who would think only of safeguarding her; I too was crumbling because I could not smash her enemies with one magic stroke. And her frustration was agony: Greene she could not confront until they were back in the States because she needed his executive help while the picture was being made, and she could not show her full anger to Olivier when he still had to direct her. Toward me her disappointment could flow, since she probably knew that I would take it and come back, but she was testing my loyalty to her nevertheless.

As for Paula, Marilyn could tolerate her vacuousness and confusing
advice primarily because Paula was her bridge to Lee, on whom she felt a nearly religious dependency, the more so, perhaps, as he was not present and his solutions—unavailable and therefore free from reality's tests—could remain ideal. But there was more to it than that. “Paula doesn't mean anything to me,” Marilyn would say when I dared suggest that her instructions were contradictory and confusing, but without Paula she was lost. This subtly unstable woman was the latest of a number of such matronly advisers in her life; according to Marilyn her predecessor, Natasha Lytess, an earlier coach whom I had not met, had been forced to exit, with her wild and threatening delusions. A blatant fantast who could weave soothing, if improbable, triumphant tales about herself and her legendary husband, Paula in effect was the mad mother all over again, and irresistible even when Marilyn could see through her to her overweening ambition. She was a fantasy mother who would confirm anything that Marilyn wished to hear, including what her vulnerability and lack of acting sophistication disposed her to believe—in this case, that Olivier was in fact so competitive with her that he was not above making her look ludicrous in the picture, the better to set off his own performance. Why he should risk ruining a film that carried his hopes for financial revival nobody of course could say, but to mention the contradiction was to appear to be taking the enemy's side. The circle, as so often happens in such airless situations, was all but closed, and the real, murderously deranged mother proceeded with her work from ten thousand miles away.

It all peaked soon; one morning Paula announced that she must return for a week or so to America. At company expense, of course, much to Greene's chagrin and my own incredulity, since her fee was already outrageous. (On a future film,
Let's Make Love,
she actually cleared more than Marilyn.) But she was apparently sure enough of her hold on Marilyn to risk leaving her in Olivier's care, something that far from distressed him.

I never really discovered what the facts were, but when Paula wanted to return a week or two later, the British authorities refused to renew her work permit on some ground or other, thus denying her entry into the country. Marilyn instantly concluded that Milton and Olivier had conspired to keep her away for the remainder of the picture—a not unreasonable view since they both, for different reasons, hated her. Outraged, Marilyn now threatened to quit unless Paula was given a work permit, a matter of her personal self-esteem, and refused to hear either Greene's or
Olivier's pleas of innocence. She was ready to take a plane home. The permit was soon issued, Olivier claiming that he had gone to the top of the government for it. But Marilyn was unable to relax her suspicions of both men, and the event confirmed that she was among enemies. Our own relationship was also further wounded, for the truth now was that she was beyond my reassuring or anyone else's. She had no means of preventing the complete unraveling of her belief in a person once a single thread was broken, and if her childhood made this understandable, it did not make it easier for her or anyone around her to bear.

Still, there were what the British call “fine” days when the rain fell only lightly, when we would bicycle in the misty silence of Windsor Great Park and its enormous trees, or drive to Brighton and walk the deserted streets along the sea in what to us was a quaint, old-fashioned resort. She was struggling against seeming like a patient who had to be handled carefully, and we talked about positive, active things like buying a country house to replace the one I had sold. She wanted to be a wife and at peace once this film was over with. Filming was a kind of siege during which she needed eyes in the back of her head. Nor was she the first actor to believe that betrayal was all about her. But for me this suspiciousness was tiring and fruitless, since I was inclined to throw my work like bread upon the waters, and if it sank so be it, I had done what I could. She could not imagine such yielding to fate, it seemed like inertia to her, and she struggled against it even in sleep, which still would not come without too many pills, barbiturates that were more lethal than I then realized. I had taken a few of them in the past but found myself numbed for half the day after. She had to fight for alertness through the day in that same way, I thought. But it would all end soon; we were in a holding action until the film was done and a real life could begin.

In the few relaxed hours when her thoughts could go outward toward society or politics or some novel she had dipped into, when she was for the moment not a competitor or even an actor, the toll of her stardom seemed terrible. It rained a little almost every day, but on a few Sundays we could sit out on the dense lawn, and in those uncustomarily purposeless moments she seemed like a creature pursued, wounded now and sore inside. She would talk of going to school in New York and studying history and literature. “I'd love to learn how things got to be how they are.” There were flashes then of some other woman inside her, a woman of cultivation, resourceful in the conventional sense, educated to fend off the
lesser challenges to existence. She seemed to have a mind of immense capacity that had been assaulted by life, bludgeoned by a culture that asked only enticement of her. She had acted that role, and now she was petitioning for permission to display another dimension, but in some difficult-to-grasp way she could not get a hearing, and this was hurtful when like any actor she was almost totally defined by what was said and written about her. If on the screen and to most observers she was, except for her wit, all enticement, to herself she was this and some deeper promise besides. And the secret of her wit's attractiveness was that she could see around it, around those who were laughing with her, or at her. Like almost all good comics, she was ruefully commenting on herself and her own pretensions to being more than a rather dumb sex kitten; like most comics, she despaired of her dignity, and her remarks and her wryness itself were self-generated oxygen that allowed her to breathe at all. Comics on the whole are deeper, are somehow closer to the crud of life and suffer more than the tragedians, who are at least accorded professional credit for seriousness as people.

But by this time, with the film in sight of completion, there was much more to deal with than her career. It was clear that she bore a guilt for her failure to be useful to me, and I felt no differently toward her for the same reason, that I had not been able to change very much for her, although at moments she claimed I had changed everything.

Our one relief was an old college friend of mine, Hedda Rosten, the wife of Norman, a poet and playwright who had also been at Michigan. She was acting as Marilyn's secretary, and although given at times to a certain poetic vagueness, she made up for everything by her unconditional love. To Hedda, her charge was—long before feminism's rise—the quintessential victim of the male and also of her own self-destroying perversities. Hedda had been a half-willing bride who loved her man even as she really preferred a solitary life of coffee and cigarettes and the silk of time passing across her palm as quietly as sunset and dawn. “Oh, my darling, is it all worth it?” And Marilyn would laugh sadly, lost, and they would enjoy sharing their womanly hopelessness. Alone with me, Hedda, who had been a psychiatric social worker at the Hartford Retreat, despaired of Marilyn's being able to heal her lifelong wounds while making films. “She is constantly having to test what she hasn't been able to put together yet.” We had always had one of those understandings given to people with similar traits; a solitary
streak ran through both our natures, silence was space, and we could be in each other's company without saying very much and still communicate.