Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  By the beginning of 1956 Marilyn’s spirits were soaring. She had done well in the first scene she presented in her class at the Actors Studio in the fall of 1955, playing the prostitute Lorna Moone, in Golden Boy, who is transformed when she falls in love. She had won her fight with Fox, and MMP was functioning. Milton had persuaded Fox to cast her in Bus Stop, and Laurence Olivier had signed to do The Prince and the Showgirl. Her romance with Arthur seemed solid.

  Laurence Olivier traveled to New York in January for the final negotiations for The Prince and the Showgirl. When he met the effervescent, sexy Marilyn, he fell in love with her on the spot. He wrote in his autobiography, “She was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun.”43 He was considering leaving his wife, actress Vivien Leigh, who suffered from mood swings so severe that she was given electroshock therapy. Charmed by Marilyn, Olivier briefly thought she might be a replacement for Vivien.

  He didn’t realize how powerful Marilyn could be, even though she easily upstaged him at a large press conference at the Plaza Hotel to announce the casting of The Prince and the Showgirl. Olivier took center stage, answering all the questions, even those addressed to Marilyn. She became tired of his manner, and she seized control in typical Marilyn fashion. She’d foreseen what he might do, and so she’d loosened a strap on her dress so that she could easily pop it. As her strap fell off her dress, all eyes were riveted on her. She borrowed a safety pin from a woman journalist, pinned the strap to her dress, and the conference went on. But she’d stolen the show. Newspaper headlines the next day featured her rather than Olivier.

  In February she posed for Cecil Beaton. That month she also performed the opening scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie for the membership of the Actors Studio. It must have been difficult for her to play the role. Anna’s mother is dead, her father has abandoned her, an older brother has raped her, and she’s turned to prostitution. “Men, I hate ’em,” Anna says, “all of ’em! It was men on the farm ordering me and beating me—and giving me the wrong start.”44 In playing Anna Christie Marilyn captured the lyricism, earthy sexiness, and sadness of the character, without resorting to her Hollywood mannerisms—the sexy walk, the breathy voice. After her performance, the audience clapped. This recognition was unheard of in the Studio, which was housed in a former Greek Orthodox Church called “the temple” by studio participants, who regarded performances to be like religious rites. They never clapped. But Marilyn overwhelmed them. When she first appeared at the Studio, acclaimed actress Kim Stanley confessed, a lot of the students didn’t think she belonged there. “But then she was amazing in Anna Christie. So some of us went privately to her and apologized—even if some of us only had the [negative] attitude privately and never put her down in talking to others. She won us all—not just the Studio, but what she went out to win: the intelligentsia, all those people, she won everybody.” Marilyn thought she had failed in the performance, but that resulted from her curse, her lack of self-confidence.

  Meanwhile, Darryl Zanuck had resigned as production head of Twentieth Century–Fox. He launched his own production company and moved to Europe, where he made a series of movies, mostly art films, under a special contract with Fox. Letters in the Spyros Skouras Papers suggest that he had never wanted to make only entertainment films, but Skouras had insisted on it. Buddy Adler was hired as Fox production head, although Zanuck retained a lot of Fox stock. But he no longer had any direct control over Marilyn.45

  Magazines and newspapers now praised Marilyn for what she had done. Look magazine delivered an extraordinary encomium. “History was made by Marilyn Monroe in the year 1956,” Look stated. This history will stand as “an example of the individual versus the herd in years to come.” It is “the victory of one woman’s honest intent to improve and progress against all odds. And with all possible odds against her, she made it. Imitations will come and go,” but Marilyn Monroe, the writer concluded, “stands secure as an actress and an example of success in the eyes of the nation and the world.”46

  Bus Stop began production in Hollywood at the end of March. Joshua Logan, a renowned Broadway director, was to direct it. He was aware that difficulties might lie ahead in dealing with Marilyn, but Lee Strasberg had told him that, along with Marlon Brando, she was the most gifted actor in the United States. He accepted the assignment. He met her at a dinner at the Greenes’ home in Connecticut, and she deeply impressed him. It was the first time he realized that intelligence might have nothing to do with education. He was enchanted by her wit and her quicksilver laugh. “Perhaps someday,” she said, “someone would let me play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov.”47

  Once on the set of Bus Stop, they became confederates: they vetoed the elegant costumes Fox designers had designed and found tatty saloon-girl getups in the Fox wardrobe department, since Cherie was a hillbilly singer without much of a voice who sang in saloons. Milton decided that her makeup should be white, since Cherie stayed up all night and slept all day, but Whitey Snyder put a hint of color in it, so that she wouldn’t look like a clown. The studio executives didn’t like it, but Milton and Logan prevailed.

  She engaged in difficult, but not extreme, behavior. She was sometimes late, irritating the other actors, and she spent a week in the hospital with bronchitis, though it may have been a simple case of exhaustion. From May 1 for the next six weeks Arthur was in Reno getting a divorce, and he secretly spent weekends at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood with Marilyn. After a weekend with Arthur, she was worn out and depressed by his absence.48 At one point she slipped into her trance behavior in her dressing room and Logan had to drag her out of it. As president of MMP, she was technically in charge of filming, and she sometimes asserted herself in blocking scenes and deciding on camera angles. Logan didn’t mind; he found, as others did, that she had become an expert on filmmaking during her years in Hollywood. Before she made Bus Stop, she had done twenty-four films.

  But she had a lot to remember, especially given her new Method technique. She had to “take a minute” to get into character. As an actress she had a feverish concentration, and if the action was stopped before she was ready she had difficulty getting back into character. So Logan ran the camera continuously, never cutting in the middle of a scene. If she faltered he would have someone off camera give her a cue. Thus he shot a lot of film that couldn’t be used. He later edited what he had into a final cut. He suspected that she was inherently a stage actress, no matter how much she loved the camera. One day, Logan remembered, she danced around like a child, overwhelmed with glee when she found out she was going to have “as big a head closeup as Garbo had had.”49

  Don Murray, playing opposite Marilyn, found her difficult to work with, given her continual lateness and her short concentration spans. Logan had Murray place his hands on her hips to keep her on her marks, which she often missed. In a scene in which Cherie is in bed, Marilyn was nude under the covers, and Murray kept tucking in the sheets because she kept exposing herself. Murray found these assignments perplexing, since she was a star and he had never before acted in films. Moreover, she broke out in a rash in front of the camera so often that they continually had to stop filming to put makeup on her to cover the rash.50

  When I interviewed Murray, I asked him if he thought Marilyn was on drugs during the filming, as some have speculated; but he said no. On the other hand, Murray was involved with Hope Lange, a blonde actress who played a supporting role, and Marilyn felt threatened by their relationship. She told Milton Greene that Murray didn’t give her sufficiently strong reactions for her to work with in creating her character. Logan stated he didn’t allow Paula Strasberg on the set, but Murray contended she was there and she masterminded Marilyn’s excellent performance. She and Paula practiced after hours every day and talked to Lee Strasberg for several hours every evening on the phone.

  Did Marilyn need a coach? Biographer Fred Guiles, who interviewed Lee Strasberg extensively, thinks she did. According to Guiles, she often spoke poetically, in metaphors t
hat someone had to interpret because they were incomprehensible to the ordinary person. That comment sounds like what others described as her illogical thinking. Lee described to Marilyn how to play her roles, and Paula helped her fill in the details. According to Logan, “Strasberg opened a locked part of her head, gave her confidence in herself, in her ability to think out and create character.” Susan Strasberg maintained Marilyn and her mother had developed a special language to communicate with each other.51

  Logan was one of the few theater people in the United States who had studied with Stanislavsky, and Marilyn plied him with questions about the Russian teacher. Logan knew Stanislavsky had rejected the affective memory technique a long time earlier, but Marilyn was too dedicated to it to give it up. Logan remained firm in his judgment that Marilyn was a great actress—a combination of Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. “She was the most constantly exciting actress I had ever worked with, and that excitement was not related to her celebrity but to her humanness, to the way she saw life around her.” Criticized for his stance, Logan replied that the problem was not Marilyn but rather that most people didn’t think that beautiful women had any brains.52

  During the filming, the fans and the press wouldn’t let Marilyn alone, so Milton Greene barred them from the set and from nearby locations. Shooting took place in Hollywood; Phoenix; and Sun Valley, Idaho. Traveling between these locations was hard enough on the cast and crew without fans and the press in pursuit. No matter the difficulties, Marilyn was superb in Bus Stop as the Ozark hillbilly “chanteuse” traveling from Missouri to Hollywood to seek fame who is pursued by Don Murray as a naive rancher looking for an “angel” as a wife. Murray respected Marilyn’s acting, but he found her to be more an adolescent than an adult. Still, when I interviewed him fifty years after the film was made, he was mellow about it, filled with praise for everyone involved.

  During the making of Bus Stop, the Arthur Jacobs agency, Marilyn’s publicity firm, assigned Patricia Newcomb to handle her publicity. She and Marilyn had a dispute during the filming, and Pat was dismissed. The official story was that Pat, an attractive blonde, passed herself off as Marilyn to a man interested in dating the star. Given Marilyn’s involvement with Arthur and the difficulties of filming Bus Stop, it seems unlikely that she had time for other men. Some say she was too affectionate toward Marilyn. Whatever the truth, Pat reentered Marilyn’s life four years later, during the filming of The Misfits, and she played a crucial role in her last two years.53

  Meantime, Arthur wrote Marilyn about his disapproval of Milton, about his huckster mentality. He praised Marilyn’s progress toward independence and high art. But he worried that Milton acted as though he had control over her, that he was taking her over. Arthur was upset by the expensive diamond bracelet Henry Rosenfeld gave her. Arthur had competitors for Marilyn, and he didn’t like it.

  By the time Marilyn returned to New York in late May, Arthur was back from Reno with his divorce, but he was involved in his own difficulties. The House Un-American Activities Committee had subpoened him to appear for questioning. He had been named as a Communist years earlier, but the committee knew the charge was inaccurate. He had never belonged to the Communist Party, although he had signed leftist petitions. The committee’s interest was aroused when he applied for a passport to go to London for the opening of A View from the Bridge. By 1954 the power of the congressional committees investigating internal Communism was declining. Concluding they needed to prosecute someone important to shore up their power, the committee decided to go after Arthur. They hoped to frighten him into naming names of friends who had been members of the Communist Party, thus acknowledging their power. The tactic had worked many times before.

  Marilyn’s name became tangled in the matter. At his hearing on June 21, the committee asked Miller why he wanted to go to England. He mentioned A View from the Bridge and also stated he wanted to go there with his wife. At a recess in the hearings, reporters asked him who he meant by “his wife.” He answer was bold: he told them that at some point before Marilyn left for England to begin production on The Prince and the Showgirl, he and she would marry. Marilyn was watching the news on television when she heard Arthur’s statement, and she was surprised, since he hadn’t proposed to her. Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan thought Arthur had used her, hoping that the committee wouldn’t jail someone married to the world’s preeminent film star. In one fell swoop he had turned himself from a dangerous subversive into a man in love. When he refused to name names to the committee, he became the darling of the left, even though he was firm in his statement to the committee that he considered communism to be dangerous and subversive.

  Arthur’s refusal to name names may have moved Marilyn to admire him even more; she wasn’t angry at him for announcing their engagement without asking her. There was also her sense of justice; she felt the attack on him was unmerited. “She was like Saint Joan urging the dauphin to fight,” wrote Susan Strasberg. “She was a warrior goddess, awakened and full of piss and vinegar.”54 In news footage of them together after his announcement, they look very much in love.

  Throughout Arthur’s difficulties, Marilyn stayed true to her sense of right and wrong. When a committee member offered to have the charges dropped if Marilyn would pose with him in a photo for his next election campaign, she refused. When Spyros Skouras put pressure on her to persuade Arthur to name some names and get off the hook, she refused, even though Skouras threatened to destroy her film career. She told him if he did that she and Arthur would move to Denmark.55 That was the country where the king had worn a yellow star in protest against Hitler’s discriminatory policies against the Jews. Checking the studio grosses, Skouras backed down. He couldn’t stop the hearing, but he arranged for a passport for Arthur to go to England.

  With the marriage proposal—perhaps even sooner—Marilyn decided to convert to Judaism. She studied with Rabbi Robert Goldburg, a leftist involved with the civil rights movement. It wasn’t important to Arthur that she convert, but Arthur’s mother had been estranged from his first wife because she hadn’t converted. Marilyn wanted to make the Millers into a real family. This family, unlike others she had joined, would be her own. Gussie told the Jewish Daily Forward they hadn’t attended their son’s first wedding because it wasn’t Jewish and they had never been able to be real in-laws to their son’s first wife. But Marilyn was more loving to them than their own children. She told Gussie stories of her terrible childhood, and Gussie became a staunch ally.

  Goldburg’s papers, recently opened, show that Marilyn was sincere, not calculating, in converting. In an unpublished memoir about the conversion, Goldburg wrote that Marilyn had rejected the Protestant fundamentalism of her childhood years earlier. She was impressed by the many Jewish people she knew, and one of her heroes was Albert Einstein, whom she thought of as the great scientist-humanist-Jew-Socialist dissenter. She liked the ethical and prophetic sides of Judaism and its devotion to close family life. Marilyn often met with Rabbi Goldburg to discuss the books he assigned her to read. They became friends; he went to the Millers’ Hanukkah and Passover celebrations. She liked his civil rights credentials. He supported the movement, and he led marches and demonstrations.56

  Once Marilyn and Arthur announced their wedding, they tried to hold the press at bay, but it was impossible. They agreed to hold a press conference on June 29, at Miller’s house in Roxbury. On the way there, a female reporter chased their car on the narrow Connecticut roads. Her driver swerved on a sharp turn and crashed into a tree, badly injuring her. She died in the hospital several hours later. Marilyn was shaken; it was a terrible omen for their marriage. They held a brief press conference in Roxbury, with four hundred reporters present. Then, driving to the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, New York, they were married that evening.

  They followed this civil ceremony with a religious one two days later, held at the home of Arthur’s agent, Kay Brown, in nearby Katonah, New York. (Rabbi Goldburg stated that they held t
he civil ceremony before the religious one to conceal the private ceremony from the press.) Amy Greene planned the second wedding. It seems that Milton and Arthur had reconciled their differences for a time. Marilyn wore Amy’s wedding veil, dyed in tea so that it matched the wedding’s beige color scheme. Norman Norell and John Moore designed the wedding dress. Amy got special beige panty hose made. Wearing beige shoes, Marilyn achieved Amy’s “fashion line”: one color, carried throughout the wedding. The beige orchids she carried came from the hothouse of musical producer Arthur Freed. Arthur Miller didn’t own a dark suit, and Milton grudgingly bought him one.57

  Lee Strasberg gave Marilyn away, and Hedda Rosten and Amy Greene were bridesmaids. Kitty Owens made the wedding cake. Marilyn recited the passage from the Old Testament in which Ruth states her loyalty to her motherin-law, Naomi: “Wherever you go I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall by my people, and your God, my God.” Marilyn addressed the sentiments to Arthur, but they certainly pleased his mother. Everyone shouted “mazel tov,” and Arthur kissed Marilyn. The union was accomplished. Engraved on Marilyn’s ring: TO MM FROM AM; NOW IS FOREVER. An ambiguous statement, it could mean eternal love or, ominously, momentary love that might not last. It was in line with Miller’s existentialist convictions.

  Then came the next step: the trip to London two weeks later so that Marilyn could make The Prince and the Showgirl. Amy, Milton, Arthur, and Paula would be traveling with her. Did she realize that she was in the process of creating a maelstrom that would come close to destroying her? In 1956 she was thirty years old. She had never been outside the United States. She had close friends around her, and she thought she had everything under control. But once again disaster loomed.

  Chapter 10

  Arthur, 1956–1959