Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Louise burst into tears, and we walked her out to the ladies’ room. I felt as though I had been hit over the head by a tree. Iris said that Samantha Mathis had tried to reach me a couple of times, had left a number. Louise could not stand the thought of spending even one night in Los Angeles: another senseless death just a few miles from where her sister Dorothy had been killed in 1980. She booked a ticket to Vancouver, her hometown. She wanted to see Carrie, who she knew would be devastated.

  By the time I got home, it was getting late, but I called Sam. She sounded numb. It had all happened so fast, she said. She suspected River had taken some drugs earlier in the evening but hadn’t been sure of it. They weren’t planning to hang out at the Viper Room, only to go by, say hello, drop off Joaquin and Rain, and then go back to her house. But River had brought his guitar, knowing some friends were jamming there, and had really wanted to play with them. Reluctantly, Sam said, she conceded. After a while, she saw River with a pal of his who was a junkie—and whom River had tried several times to get into rehab—and a bouncer was opening a side door for them. She didn’t know if they were being pushed out or going of their own accord. Evidently, the junkie had given River some stuff that didn’t mix with what he might have already taken. River had complained that he wasn’t feeling well, but his addict friend told him he was just being paranoid. Worried, Sam followed River and the junkie out to the sidewalk to keep an eye on them, lit a cigarette, and walked ten feet away to give them privacy. When she turned around, River had started going into convulsions, then dropped to the sidewalk. His junkie friend said he was fine, to just leave him alone. Knowing that couldn’t be true, Sam said, she realized something was terribly wrong and tried to get River on his feet, but he seemed to have passed out. She ran into the club to get Joaquin and Rain. Joaquin called 911 while Rain and Sam tried to help River. Then Joaquin and Rain both attempted unsuccessfully to revive River; by the time the paramedics got there—although Sam, Rain and Joaquin didn’t know—it was already too late.

  How was the family? I asked. Sam said that Joaquin and his sisters were overcome with grief, and that Heart was being incredibly strong, holding everybody together. How she did it, Sam said, she didn’t know. We spoke a little while longer, as I tried to say something about the indestructibility of the spirit. I promised that first thing in the morning I would come over to the house where everyone was staying.

  When I arrived, some friends were in the kitchen making sandwiches. The kids looked devastated. Heart, as Sam had said, was amazingly in control. We embraced for a long moment. She said her main concern right now was helping the other children through this—they were all devoted to River, worshipful—and it was so terrible for them, she couldn’t really show how she felt.

  Sam and I spoke for a while alone. She cried. She and River had been talking a lot, she said, looking forward to seeing each other. He had been totally clean. The minute he got to L.A., the bad influences surfaced, the temptations reached out. Because he had been off everything for more than three months, he was far more vulnerable than if he had never stopped.

  Joaquin was having a cigarette in the living room. We hadn’t met before but Joaquin said that River had spoken well of me. As he tried to talk about his brother, Joaquin broke down; recalling the terrible last moments, he began sobbing and couldn’t go on. I embraced him. He held on to me and kept crying.

  There was a memorial for River a few days later at Paramount’s Studio Theater on the lot. Sidney Poitier was very eloquent and touching, as was Ethan Hawke, and numerous others. Jonathan Pryce sent a letter saying that he couldn’t speak more highly of River as a great talent and a great friend, and had been looking forward to a lifelong relationship. That was exactly how I felt, like someone who had lost an enduring pal. On a TV talk-show not long afterward, the host asked veteran star Tony Curtis to comment on the death of River Phoenix. Curtis said cryptically, but with considerable weight, that it was “difficult to comprehend how much envy” there was in Hollywood. The remark resonates.

  River Phoenix and Samantha Mathis, playing struggling Nashville singer-songwriters, fell in love during the filming of The Thing Called Love (1993), tragically River’s last completed film; co-starred were Dermot Mulroney and Sandra Bullock.

  Samantha had many recriminations about the horrible final night, most particularly against the junkie, but Heart would hear none of it. There was nothing that could bring River’s body back to life, Heart seemed to feel, and she focused entirely on the continuing life of River’s spirit and on helping her children to overcome the tragedy and learn to live with their brother in a different way. Her strength and selflessness were inspirational. Eventually, there were lawsuits against River’s estate because his death happened while a picture was in production. Corporate inhumanity knows no bounds. A few years later, River’s sister, Liberty, gave Heart her first grandchild—a boy; they named him Rio, Spanish for river.

  Barely a week goes by that I don’t think of River Phoenix, usually wishing I could just call him up and tell him what was happening, or hear his enthusiasm as we planned another movie or he wrote another song. He was an old soul, of course, so he’ll never really be gone, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss him an awful lot in this life: a lovely boy, a loyal friend, a poet at heart, a true artist.

  Born River Jude Bottom, August 23, 1970, Madras, OR; died October 31, 1993, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1986: Stand by Me (Rob Reiner); The Mosquito Coast (Peter Weir)

  1988: A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (William Richert); Little Nikita (Richard Benjamin); Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet)

  1989: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg)

  1990: I Love You to Death (Lawrence Kasdan)

  1991: Dogfight (Nancy Savoca); My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant)

  1992: Sneakers (Phil Alden Robinson)

  1993: The Thing Called Love (P.B.)

  1994: Silent Tongue (Sam Shepard)

  25

  MARILYN MONROE

  Only one time was I in Marilyn Monroe’s presence, and she never would have known it. During the winter of 1955, I was sitting a row in front of her at a Manhattan acting class being conducted by Lee Strasberg. Marilyn was twenty-nine, just about at the peak of her success and fame—with seven years left to live—wearing a thick bulky-knit black woolen sweater, and no makeup on her pale lovely face. The two or three times I allowed myself to casually glance back at her, she was absolutely enthralled, mesmerized with Strasberg’s every word and breath. In his autobiography, Arthur Miller, who would marry her the following year, wrote that he felt Strasberg, though worshipped by Monroe, was a heavy contributor to his breakup with the actress, and that the acting guru’s domination was self-serving and exploitative of her. From the glimpses I had of Marilyn, Strasberg certainly had her complete attention and support, but in a strangely desperate way. She didn’t look contented or studious; she looked quite anxious and passionately devoted to Strasberg as somehow the answer to all of her troubles.

  Miller has described her most sensitively both in his 1987 autobiography (Timebends) and in his 1962 drama After the Fall, in which he fictionalized her. Of that play’s character, Arthur told me in 2001, “The idea was that if you cannot see your own handprint on your fate, you’ll be destroyed.” He went on: “Marilyn lived at the edge of a grave all her life. But it’s understandable. I’m sure that’s not an unusual situation when you’re given the kind of terrible upbringing she had.” (Born an illegitimate child; father dead when she was three; mother in mental hospitals all through her childhood; raised in a series of foster homes, in an orphanage, with friends of her mother; neglected, unloved, humiliated, raped; first married at sixteen, suicide first attempted the following year.) I told Miller that I felt very strongly from reading his autobiography that he was madly in love with Marilyn and he answered, simply, “I was.” And, I continued, that this love was on some profound level ver
y beneficial to him and that he understood it at the time as a kind of truth. He replied, “It was.”

  Marilyn Monroe in the title role of her first comedy success, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), a gaudy musical directed by the master-of-all-genres himself, Howard Hawks; Jane Russell was the brunette.

  Then he added, with regret, “I, quite candidly, had to realize, as many have before me, that that [motion picture] business makes human relations almost impossible—especially if you’re a woman—it scars the soul.” When he said that, I recalled Orson Welles telling me about being at a Hollywood party which Marilyn attended (circa 1946 or ’47) while she was still a lowly starlet, and seeing someone casually pull down the top of her dress in front of people and fondle her. She had laughed. Welles said that “just about everyone in town” had slept with her. Yet, Miller had gone on to say that the kind of mythological figure Marilyn created on the screen was all her own and a great achievement for her. But that it also helped to kill her—this movie-star disease: “They’re not looking out,” Arthur said, “they’re looking at what other people see. And that’s a crippling burden.”

  More than forty years have passed since Marilyn’s mysterious death, but her legend and persona have survived. This is all the more remarkable because she actually made very few films, and even fewer that were any good. But there was a reality to her artifice—she believed in the characters she played, even if they were inherently unbelievable. “Everything she did,” Miller said to me, “she played realistically. I don’t think she knew any other way to play anything—only to tell you the truth. She was always psychologically committed to that person as a person, no matter what the hell it was, rather than as a stock figure. Because the parts she got could easily have been stock figures, which had no other dimension. But she wouldn’t have known how to do that. In other words, she did not have the usual technique for doing something as a stock figure…. She was even that way when [director John] Huston used her the first time [in a memorable walk-on bit] in The Asphalt Jungle [1950].”

  This went for every picture she did in her surprisingly, painfully short career as a star, barely a decade, little more than a dozen pictures. Though she managed to work with quite a number of major directors, it was not necessarily always in their best efforts; but still they were Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks (twice), Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder (twice), George Cukor (twice, if you count her last unfinished one), John Huston (twice), Laurence Olivier, Joshua Logan, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (bit part in 1950’s classic All About Eve). In my conversation with Miller, he said, “I thought she had the potential for being a great performer if she were given the right stuff to do. And if you look at the stuff she did do, it’s amazing that she created any impression at all because most of it was very primitive. And the fact that people remember these parts from these films is amazing…. She was committed to these parts as though they were real people, not cardboard cutouts. Even though the director and author and the rest might have thought they were cutouts and would deal with them that way. The way the two men [Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon] in Some Like It Hot [1959] felt with their parts; or George Raft with his part. She was real. And therefore she had the potential of being a great comedienne.” (Norman Mailer, in his book on Monroe—he never met her—wrote that starting with 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she was a great comedienne.) When I said I felt she was better than Olivier himself in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), Miller told me, “With him she had trouble, there’s no question. He saw it in the British fashion—they play high style. She couldn’t be more ignorant of high style. Just nothing of that sort connected with her. She detected in him a certain snobbery toward her; that was absolutely accurate.”

  The year before her much-speculated-over death at thirty-six (rumors of presidential involvement, etc.), playwright Clifford Odets told me that she used to come over to his house and talk, but that the only times she seemed to him really comfortable were when she was with his two young children and their large poodle. She relaxed with them, felt no threat. With everyone else, Odets said, she seemed nervous, intimidated, frightened. When I repeated to Miller this remark about her with children and animals, he said, “Well, they didn’t sneer at her.” I said that there seemed to be a general feeling at the time that people didn’t really have a clue where Marilyn was coming from. “Right,” Arthur responded. “They just thought that she was cute and sexy and that’s it. And she was. But she was also very real. There’s a blindness to it, her beauty blinded many people.”

  So they basically refused to see her humanity, I said, and he nodded, “Exactly.” Therefore, despite the success she created in the face of these multiple obstacles, it also did kill her, I repeated, and Miller looked sad. “Well,” he said, “she was never given the dignity—put it that way—that she required. That anybody would want as a result of their performances. They’re treated like they’re some odd animal that knows how to do some tricks.”

  Miller paused for a moment, reflectively. “I rather think that had she endured,” he speculated, “had she come ten years later, maybe it would have been different. But at that time—I mean, she came in at the height of the Hollywood system—and she was not alone feeling debased by the whole thing. It was a common complaint. Like [the way] John Garfield was a terrific actor—yet he did nothing but scream and howl. There was some demeaning aspect to the whole thing. So most of them went with it. They simply adopted the contempt with which they were treated. I think that’s what happened. Pretty hard to withstand—a culture of contempt. I think it helped destroy her. Somebody like John Barrymore, he died a drunk. There are many ways of reacting to that contempt. Mitchum, who was ready to kill you at the drop of a coin. Brando is a better example.”

  I remembered what Tennessee Williams had called “the catastrophe of success,” and said that success in America really was a killer, to which Arthur nodded, saying, “Second only to failure.” He smiled slightly at the irony. “The more talent they had, the more sensitive to the lost opportunity of using their ability for some worthy purpose.”

  It remains amazing that Marilyn, despite her terrors and demons, managed to project her essential qualities against all odds. Fritz Lang talked to me about her only three years after her death: “It was not easy to work with Marilyn Monroe; this [Clash by Night, 1952] was practically her first big picture. She was a very peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty and—I wouldn’t say ‘star allure’—but let me say, she knew exactly her impact on men. And that’s all. Now, just at that time, the famous calendar story came up …” (Marilyn had posed naked for some anonymous calendar photos in the late forties that surfaced suddenly during the shooting of Lang’s picture and created a scandal that, in fact, helped make her a star. These were reprinted a couple of years later in Playboy’s first issue, when Marilyn was already being starred, thus fostering the mistaken notion that Monroe had been the first Playmate.) Lang went on: “I didn’t mind—what a woman does with herself is nobody’s business—but the thing was, because of her shyness, she was scared as hell to come to the studio—she was always late. I don’t know why she couldn’t remember her lines, but I can very well understand all the directors who worked with her getting angry, because she was certainly responsible for slowing down the work. But she was very responsive.”

  Lang hesitated a moment, then added: “One very bad thing: she asked me would I mind if her female coach was there during shooting in the studio. I said, ‘No, under one condition—that you don’t let her coach you.’ Because when an actress has learned her lines and thinks she has caught the feeling of the part, got under the skin of the character, it’s very hard to change it. At the beginning I had trouble—until I found out that behind the camera, unseen by me, this coach was standing and gesturing with her hands. I said to Marilyn, ‘Look—either/or …’ and told her the coach could not come on the set anymore.” (Later in her career, she would insist on having her new coach, Paula Strasberg—Lee’s first wife—perform the exact sa
me function, much to other directors’ now frustrated displeasure. It had become part of her deal.)

  Marilyn Monroe in the climactic sequence of her last completed movie, The Misfits (1961), written for her as a present by then-husband Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, co-starring Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach.

  Howard Hawks, who directed her first big success, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (co-starring established, top-billed sex goddess Jane Russell), had initially directed her a year earlier, in a major supporting role, with Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, in Monkey Business (1952), which actually featured the first great Marilyn Monroe performance. In fact, her scenes with Cary are the highlights of the picture and make you wish they could have done an entire romantic screwball comedy together. The same year Marilyn died, Hawks told me, “Monroe was frightened to come on the stage—she had such an inferiority complex—and I felt sorry for her. I’ve seen other people like that. I did the best I could and I wasn’t bothered by it too much. In Monkey Business, she only had a small part—that didn’t frighten her so much—but when she got into a big part … For instance, when we started her singing [for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes], she tried to run out of the recording studio two or three times. We had to grab her and hold her to keep her there. She sang quite well, actually. I got a great deal of help from Jane Russell. Without her I couldn’t have made the picture. Jane gave Marilyn that ‘You-can-do-it’ pep talk to get her out there. She was just frightened, that’s all—frightened she couldn’t do it.”