Timebends (79 page)

Still, a few days later she could laugh about it. Soon we could drive to isolated beaches and swim together. Strangely, she had never properly learned to swim; it was the only awkward thing she ever did, and her clumsy attempts ended in laughter. Emerging from the water, her powerful body threw back the sun like Botticelli's Venus, and sometimes she even had the same saltwater-washed, sea-emergent stare.

Life
sent a helicopter to take her to be photographed at a promotional celebration in their New York headquarters; she was back in a few hours, descending past my studio window and stepping out onto the lawn. I came out and we both stood there waving to the rising pilot and an executive who had escorted her. She was wearing a full-skirted yellow cotton dress and high-heeled shoes and still carried a couple of roses someone had thrust into her hand. Her makeup seemed too artificially white in the sunlight, and when the copter was gone we looked at one another awkwardly; what a mixture of feelings! There could not have been another woman in the country they would have flown to New York and back like this for a couple of photographs; there was some madness to the desperation of their need for her. What frightening power she had! The event seemed like the intrusion of a gross iron hand into the vulnerable flesh of our existence and yet at the same time signified her triumph, a proof of the immense public importance she had won. She was distracted as we walked across the lawn back to the silent house, as though she needed time to be quiet and alone, to drive the vibrations of the helicopter out of her bones. I resolved to regard the publicity question purely as a work condition, which it was, but one had to face the inbuilt paranoid opening in the ups and downs of her standing with her public; she, the woman, could not send herself out to perform and make appearances while remaining at home to create a life. Having to look at herself with two pairs of eyes, her own and a hypothetical public's, was as inescapable as it was enervating in the end.

She would read parts of the screenplay and laugh delightedly at some of the cowboys' lines but seemed to withhold full commitment to playing Roslyn. My own interest in the project was by now as much technical as it was a matter of feeling: I was constructing a gift for her. In the end, however, it was she who would have to play the role, and this inevitably began to push the project into a different, coolly professional sphere. If my intention was as authentic
as I wished to believe it was, she had the right to decide not to play the part—after all, I was not writing it to enslave her to something she had no excitement about doing. Nevertheless, her caution had to hurt a bit.

As I neared the end of the first draft, I thought of John Huston as the film's director. He had been the first to see some potential in Marilyn when he cast her in
The Asphalt Jungle,
and she had never forgotten his brusque kindnesses to her. Huston was one of her few good Hollywood memories, which encouraged me to think that a movie production could be as happy as some of my theatre productions had been, without the dark paranoid clouds that seemed to overhang the making of every movie of hers I knew about. I sent him a script at his home in Ireland as soon as it was typed. While we waited for his response, the implication began to grow that without Huston she might well not play the role, and I wondered when she spoke this way whether she was at all aware . . .

But I had joined my life with hers and still expected her to come to believe it one day—it was inevitable. The problem was that permanence with another person was a missing part of her, but it could be planted in her and would grow until we were partners in a common life. At the same time it was difficult to deny what her nerves signaled to her: that although with
The Misfits
I was preparing to dedicate a year or more of my life to her enhancement as a performer—I would never have dreamed of writing a movie otherwise—I was sometimes apprehensive and unspontaneous with her. This she might interpret as disapproval, but it was simply that I was off balance and could no longer confidently predict her moods. It was almost as though the fracture of her original idealization of me in England had left no recognizable image at all, and if what remained was to humbly accept reality, it meant junking the ideal, a difficult thing to do when, paradoxically, her energy rose out of her idealizations of people and projects. Still, hope was by no means fading; most marriages, after all, are conspiracies to deny the dark and confirm the light.

The source of it all lay in history—ancient roots had sprung these strange blossoms. I had joyously accepted the role she had long been fashioning for someone who would save her, and so far I had not made it happen; just as she had seemed the all-forgiving and sensuous beloved that a self-denying life had been preparing me for long before she arrived. In the void that had opened up between these dreams and reality worked the immemorial worms of
guilt, the guilt each of us felt at having been naive and foolish, or even worse, having misled the other. But absolute commitment could still heal, I thought, and I was ready. That I had always looked down on screenwriting and had refused offer after offer to write pictures helped persuade me that something of importance was being sacrificed in this venture, and sacrifice is the essence of commitment. Thus
The Misfits
was loaded with a freight that needed a very strong vessel to bear; nothing else was possible, since I longed for her as much as for peace. She still blanked out the sun.

From Ireland, Huston quickly agreed to direct the picture. Casting would have to begin soon, but I wanted time to go over the screenplay carefully. He and I would meet in a few months to arrive at a shooting script.

Meanwhile, she still owed Twentieth Century Fox two pictures, at least one of which they insisted she complete before she could work independently, as she would on
The Misfits.
I welcomed the delay. Before too long, another non-Fox film would intervene, when Billy Wilder chose Marilyn for
Some Like It Hot.
But again I was in no rush, wanting the best possible cast around her, something that always took more time than anyone was willing to anticipate. While I waited, perhaps I could begin a new play.

I assumed that Huston would dictate most of the technical factors going into the film, so the producer should be someone who above all would be willing and able to gain Marilyn's complete confidence. I had known Frank Taylor since before the war when he had worked in the same publisher's office as Mary. Later, at Reynal and Hitchcock—a new firm he quickly provided with a prestigious list of authors—he had been my first editor, publishing
Situation Normal,
the book on army camps stemming from my research for the Ernie Pyle film, and my novel,
Focus.
I knew he had recently put in a couple of years as a producer for Fox, but his ideas had been too lofty to reach production—among them a script on Gauguin by James Agee and Fitzgerald's
Tender Is the Night.
A gaunt, sophisticated man of great height, he was an imaginative mixture of aggressive entrepreneur and aficionado of literature. Naturally he was delighted by my invitation, and when he came to meet Marilyn in our apartment, he quickly seemed to dispel her chronic uncertainty about a new person entering her life. I was sure I could rely on him, and she soon sensed that she could too.

A sly eagle named Lew Wasserman, the head man at MCA, seconded my desire for an ideal cast and proceeded to line up Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter.

Wasserman was the only man I ever knew who offered to shake hands with the side of his hand against his flat stomach and his palm straight up, but he understood what an agent should be doing, and that was what he effortlessly did.

The first problem was that for all his interest, Gable simply did not understand the script. Face to face with him in Hollywood a few months later, I thought there could be no other actor playing Gay Langland; he was born for it. But after several readings the script still evaded him.

“It's supposed to be a Western, but it's not, is it?” he asked in his high nasal voice. He had a craftsman's seriousness. His mystification gave that mythically confident face an attractive vulnerability.

I had never been too good at explaining my own work, especially not to actors looking for bread-and-butter answers while I was doing my skywriting extrapolations. I could not think of a reply that would not sound philosophical and therefore like box-office death. “It's sort of an Eastern Western,” I said hesitantly. That got a laugh, and better yet, his quickened curiosity. “It's about our lives' meaninglessness and maybe how we got to where we are.” I had never really rationalized the story to myself, but his fascinated eyes encouraged me. “Westerns and the West have always been built on a morally balanced world where evil has a recognizable tag—the black hats—and evil always loses out in the end. This is that same world, but it's been dragged out of the nineteenth century into today, when the good guy is also part of the problem. And if you want me to keep talking I'll get both of us so mixed up I won't know what I wrote.”

He read the script again and next day agreed to be in it. Unknowingly I may have struck a chord that he himself had only lately begun to play. Many times married and a playboy for most of his life, Gable at nearly sixty had recently become a prospective father for the first time, and a fanatical one at that. He had also become more introspective, according to those who knew him.

Monty Clift was a different kind of problem. His surges of self-destructiveness had sent him driving his car into a pole one night, partly disfiguring his face. (I was of course charged by one of Monty's self-appointed entourage with exploiting that injury by casting him as Perce, whose face has been damaged in a rodeo accident, even if the original story as well as the screenplay long antedated Cliff's smashup.) The insurance companies would no longer underwrite Monty in a film. But between my vouching for him and the insistence of Huston and Wasserman on his playing Perce, the insurance came through. As a matter of fact, I never
even discussed with Monty the question of his reliability but merely offered him the part, which he enthusiastically accepted. He was so pleased to be working with me and Huston and Marilyn on this film that I couldn't believe he would betray his responsibility. And indeed he never missed an hour's work: he had his entire part memorized before shooting began and was always on time despite the long delays in finishing the picture.

A man sits down at a typewriter with some blank paper on which he types image-describing words, and at a certain point turns around and confronts some four or five hundred people, and trucks and food wagons, airplanes, horses, hotels, roads, cars, lights, all of which he has by some means, untraceable now in its complexity, evoked from nowhere and nothing. Oddly, he ends up with little power over these results of his imagination; they go their own way with not the slightest awareness that they owe their current incarnation to him.

On some days amid all this production I had to smile to myself, recalling that I had set out to create the feeling of a few isolated, lost, and lonely people on the vast mythic plain of existence. Now wherever you looked there was somebody eating a sandwich.

Right off, on our first day of shooting on a Reno street, I had trouble with the literalness of the camera, whose unacknowledged middle name is “merely.” For me the streets of Reno might be a feeling, but the camera made them a thing; even commonplace scenes that I had known from my Nevada time nearly four years earlier took on a theatrical self-consciousness as soon as the camera turned on them. In part to avoid this, Huston decided on using black and white rather than color, but to me it was still there. The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

Still naive about film, I kept comparing what we were shooting with my original image. To the eye the background context, even if not consciously noticed, is always in a tension with the focal center of what one sees. But the camera vastly emphasizes the foreground and in close-ups eliminates background completely; thus the it-ness of a person or object comes forward, and its super-detail cuts it off from the contextual life that the eye sees. The illusion of a context that is not really there must be created by editing and montage.

In her first shot Marilyn stood on a Reno bridge over the Truckee, a stream into which newly divorced women customarily
tossed their wedding rings to celebrate freedom. Thelma Ritter, her inept, tough-sounding landlady, is trying to lift her low spirits. Watching Marilyn, I couldn't help feeling her disappointment not only in her character's marriage but in her own, and probably in herself. After the finish of the second take I went to her and told her it looked good; she glanced up at me ironically, as though I were lying. When she did that, she could make you feel you were. And to a degree it was true—I had sensed something withdrawn in her, not merely in the character she was playing. But I insisted it was only her insecurity showing; surely we still had a future, and the work on this film would somehow help to make it happen. It was far from accidental that by the end of the film Roslyn does find it possible to believe in a man and in her own survival.

Huston, heartily satisfied and bubbling with congratulations, overrode her wish to shoot the scene a third time, thereby unwittingly suggesting to her that he might be intending to settle for “good enough,” and setting off an alarm bell in her mind. The miasma was threatening to swirl in again, but this time I felt as she did, that the scene lacked vitality. As simple and direct as it was, I wondered if she was not trying to give it too much meaning; already it was verging on the effortful. Huston probably sensed it would only get heavier the more times he shot it, and rather than register a backward step on the first day, he elected to push on. From her viewpoint, however, she had not been exhaustively
used.