by Lois Banner
During the four months of filming, Marilyn’s menstrual issues and her colitis acted up. She saw doctors and took to her bed. There were rumors that she had a miscarriage, plunging her into further depression. Several weeks after filming began, a disturbing incident occurred. Arthur jotted down ideas to use in his writing in a journal that he kept on a desk. Looking for her script, Marilyn chanced on it. The journal happened to be open, displaying the writing on one page. She read the open page.
What she read infuriated her. In the years ahead, she never forgot it. She showed it to Paula Strasberg. Arthur had written, “I’ve done it again. I thought I was marrying an angel, and find I’ve married a whore.” He also wrote that she’d let him down badly and he didn’t know how he could continue defending her to Olivier.20 It’s unclear why he used the term “whore.” Had he learned about the purported affair with Milton Greene? Had she told him the truth about her Hollywood sex life?
Arthur left his journal open, where Marilyn might see it. Perhaps he was simply careless, but she took it as calculated behavior on his part. Arthur told Fred Guiles, the only Marilyn biographer to interview him, that the entry contained minor criticism, although Arthur often downplayed his negative actions. The incident was serious enough that Marilyn spent a week in therapy in London with Anna Freud, who later recommended New York psychiatrist Marianne Kris to her. She told Freud about her problems on the film and her deep urge to go naked. In addition, as I have noted, Freud thought she had bisexual tendencies, because of the way she tried to intercept the balls Anna rolled to her. Everyone on the set thought Freud’s intervention helped Marilyn.
Paula Strasberg persuaded Marilyn to stay with Arthur. She argued that the journal entry reflected his sense of defeat, due to the failure of his plays in New York and the British adulation of Marilyn. He was jealous of her, and he lashed out. Paula wondered if she was wise to exonerate Arthur, since she didn’t like him. To finish the film, however, Marilyn had to stay with him. Paula didn’t want to lose the large salary Marilyn was paying her for coaching.21
Arthur wasn’t a saint. Olivier called him “self-satisfied” and “argumentative.” He tried to interject his ideas into the script. Colin Clark, Olivier’s assistant, thought that Arthur treated Marilyn as though she was his property. Amy Greene thought his presence was a huge distraction; she charged that he sat around in Marilyn’s dressing room, drawing her into conversations, breaking her concentration.22 Despite Marilyn’s dependence on him, he sometimes left London, which angered her. A week after the episode with his journal, he went to New York for ten days to see his children.
Despite everything going on, Arthur and Marilyn were sometimes able to regain the lyricism of their courtship. During days off from filming they went bicycling in Windsor Great Park, and they drove to Brighton. They walked on the boardwalk and on the beach there. Relaxing on such trips, they discussed the house they wanted to build in Connecticut, and Marilyn spoke of going to school and studying history and literature. When they could put aside the intense pressures accompanying filming and were able to fantasize about their future, the marriage seemed on track.
Meantime, they were having problems with Milton Greene. Milton and Amy spent weekends at Olivier’s country home, where Vivien ran what amounted to an ongoing house party for London’s elite artists. Marilyn and Arthur were invited, but they never went. They gave no parties, and they attended almost none. Arthur began to suspect that Milton was using Marilyn for his own ends. That’s not surprising. They had never really liked each other. Like Joe DiMaggio, Arthur may have been jealous of Milton. According to Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn and a “photographer” borrowed his apartment in London to have an affair.23 Milton, Arthur charged, was trying to take over MMP. Marilyn and Arthur suspected that Milton was using MMP money to buy antiques for himself, and they became angry when he negotiated an agreement with Jack Cardiff for a production company subsidiary to MMP. They hadn’t known about it until they read an article about it in a newspaper.
In the fall Arthur began looking into Marilyn’s finances. He cut out articles about her in British newspapers and pasted them into a scrapbook. He was getting too involved with her career. But he didn’t become Marilyn’s clone, as some biographers charge. He finished a longer version of A View from the Bridge, due to be produced that fall in London, and he wrote a story that became the basis for his screenplay for The Misfits. The story was about three Montana cowboys he had met in Reno while establishing residency for his divorce from Mary. Heroic figures from the American past, they now scrounged for money, making some of their income by rounding up mustangs from the decimated herds that had once roamed the Montana grasslands to sell them to a slaughterhouse for dog food.
Milton attempted to keep peace on the set by providing a distraction in the form of a presentation to Queen Elizabeth II. Marilyn, as usual, stole the show. She wore a décolleté, dazzling gown of gold lamé—“Her exuberant breasts defied Newton’s law of gravity,” remarked one British commentator. Arthur didn’t mind when she showed off her body; he’d already decided it was part of her revolutionary idealism. He defended his position: “Why shouldn’t she show off her god-given attributes; why should she have to dress like her maiden aunt?”24 Even the queen didn’t seem to mind the dress; she chatted with Marilyn for several minutes at the presentation.
When the film wrapped, Marilyn apologized to the cast and crew for any bad behavior on her part, stating that she had been ill during the filming—which was true, given her endometriosis, colitis, and a possible miscarriage. In a letter to a friend, Olivier implied that she referred to gynecological problems in her statement about being ill, even though some people on the set thought she was shamming.25 Despite her absences from filming, Milton, acting as producer, brought the film in under budget and within the projected time frame.
Marilyn is superb in the film, outacting Olivier in every scene in which they are together. She plays Elsie, a showgirl performing in a London show whom Olivier, playing the ruler of a Balkan country visiting London, invites to his hotel suite, intending to seduce her. Much of the film involves their interactions in the suite: she resists him with her usual charm, then falls asleep from the effects of too much champagne before he can complete the seduction. In the film, she raises the redemptive elements of her Lorelei Lee figure to new heights, as she solves the political problems in Olivier’s kingdom by tracing them to issues within his family. She is the ultimate wise woman, intuitively understanding how people and politics function. It’s not surprising that she won both the French and Italian equivalent of the Oscar for Best Actress for The Prince and the Showgirl.
Nonetheless, Marilyn’s insecurity was growing with every film she made, and so was her perfectionism. She demanded many retakes, even when her directors didn’t think they were necessary. She was known as the hardest-working actress in Hollywood, although her sole concern was her own performance, which was, frankly, all she could concentrate on in doing a film. She often defined herself as a great film actress on the order of Garbo, whose idiosyncrasies were humored, as were those of Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and others. Yet despite a husband who seemed to support her and a drama coach who sustained her, she couldn’t cope with her fears and insecurities, her lack of confidence in herself. She managed to hide her stuttering, her hearing difficulties, possibly caused by Meniere’s disease, and her dyslexia, but they continued to hinder her.
The filming of The Prince and the Showgirl turned out to be a devastating experience for her, one from which she never completely recovered. It was supposed to prove her ability as a dramatic actress, but it ruined her relationship with Milton Greene and damaged her marriage to Arthur, when he became her pill monitor and go-between with Olivier. As she left London for New York, she intended to take a break from films, to improve her acting by studying at the Actors Studio, and to become a model wife and homemaker, so that she and Arthur could create the perfect marriage they had fantasized about. Now she would have
the child she longed for. But with the filming over, she worried that Arthur might abandon her. Abandonment had always been one of her worst fears. It may be a truism that self-destructive individuals always court what they fear the most.
After Marilyn and Arthur arrived back in New York from London in November 1956, they went to Jamaica, in the Caribbean, for a two-week honeymoon, before setting up their new life in New York. They found a large apartment on East Fifty-third Street, on the thirteenth floor of a luxury building. Marilyn decorated the apartment in white and beige, with lots of mirrors and with silver and black accents. She adopted the art moderne look of 1930s movies, a look popular among film stars for their homes. She placed the white piano from her childhood in the living room, moving it from the Greenes’ Connecticut home.
Patricia Rosten was often in the apartment with her parents as a child, and she remembered it vividly. It was large, although not huge, with a large foyer and a long hall opening into the living room, which had a fireplace flanked by bookshelves. There was a large bedroom, a study for Arthur, a kitchen, and a maid’s room. She especially remembered the mirrored table in the dining alcove off the living room, in which “you could look at your reflection while you were eating.” She also remembered the champagne-colored quilt on Marilyn’s bed; when she flopped on it, she felt like “she was sinking in a pool.”26 Others remembered the bedroom as very dark. They also remembered dog stains on rugs throughout the apartment.
For the spring and summer of 1957, Marilyn and Arthur rented a weekend and summer home in Amagansett, Long Island, close to the beach and near the summer homes of the Rostens and Shaws. They now were living the life of well-to-do New Yorkers, with an apartment on the Upper East Side, easy access to theaters and boutiques, and a weekend and summer home on Long Island, only several hours by car from New York. It should have been idyllic—and it was for a time.
Marilyn described her life in New York to Georges Belmont of Marie Claire magazine. It revolved around Arthur, she said, although she continued studying at the Actors Studio and seeing her psychiatrist, now Marianne Kris. Arthur was up by seven, and she sometimes got up and fixed his breakfast. She said she didn’t think a man should have to fix his own meals: “I’m very old-fashioned that way.” After breakfast, Arthur retreated to his study, and he wrote for much of the day. Marilyn often returned home to have lunch with him, and they had dinner together. After dinner they went to the theater or a movie, or they saw friends. Often they stayed at home, listened to music, read books, or walked in Central Park. Marilyn sometimes had classmates from the Actors Studio over to practice scenes they were studying. She said nothing to Belmont about her up-and-down moods and her drug taking. She kept that behavior secret from journalists.
Marilyn and Arthur had many friends. She wasn’t alone and lost to drugs during these years, as some biographers maintain. In New York she and Arthur socialized with people from the Actors Studio—Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Kevin McCarthy, and Maureen Stapleton, in particular. She spent time with the Shaws and the Rostens. Sam photographed her; she and Norman wrote poetry to each other; Hedda answered fan mail and went shopping with her. Marilyn became friends with Lester Markel, a New York Times editor who lived in the same apartment building as the Strasbergs and Marianne Kris. She read Markel’s columns, wrote him a letter about his political views, and happened to meet him in the building’s elevator. She flirted with him, and he was smitten. After a session with Kris or Strasberg, she sometimes had dinner with Markel and his family. They talked politics, and Markel, a radical sympathetic to communism, influenced her to move farther to the left. She soon became more radical than Arthur.27
In Amagansett, Willem de Kooning, a leading abstract expressionist painter, was a next-door neighbor. Becoming acquainted with her, he painted her for his series titled Women. Totally abstract, his Marilyn looks like a cross between a grinning child and a screaming fury, not like the soft and gentle Marilyn. Yet he captured part of her essence—childlike, but angry when crossed. The portrait was hung in the Museum of Modern Art, and it produced a stir. Arthur detested it, but Marilyn didn’t mind: she thought artists had the right to their own vision of the subject they painted. It led the way to the many pop art portraits of her.28
In interviews with journalists between 1957 and 1960, Marilyn praised Arthur and her marriage with such enthusiasm that it appears she was trying to convince herself as well as everyone else that it was working. She threw herself into the role of domestic goddess. She took up cooking. In her inimitable fashion, she consulted experts and became friendly with Mary Bass, editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, who sent her recipes and cooking tips. Bass even asked Marilyn to do a cookbook under the imprimatur of the Journal, and Marilyn was interested. Arthur said she made the best leg of lamb he’d ever eaten and he liked her chicken with wine; Norman Rosten liked her bouillabaisse.29
She was a generous stepmother to Arthur’s children. Marilyn loved children; she easily connected to them, probably because she sometimes seemed a child herself. Joe DiMaggio Jr. loved her, and so did Patricia Rosten and the Shaws’ daughters, Meta and Edith. When the young Edie met Marilyn, she thought she was an angel, not a human being. Patricia Rosten’s favorite memory of Marilyn was when, at the age of ten, she wandered into Marilyn’s bedroom and began playing with her makeup. Marilyn discovered her, but rather than scolding her she made up her face.30
Marilyn became close to Arthur’s father, Isidore Miller. A grumpy old man before Marilyn entered his family, he gained new vitality and pride under her attention. He remembered attending dinner parties that Marilyn and Arthur gave, with theater people present and talk about books and plays. Everyone sat on the floor. Marilyn talked about Marie Dressler, whom she remembered from her youth and who became a Hollywood star in her later years after a long career in vaudeville. Marilyn hoped to age into an actress like Dressler, cherished by her public. Norman Rosten remembered parties in Marilyn’s apartment, with champagne and dancing. Designer Herbert Kahn went there to adjust a dress he had made for her. He observed great affection between Marilyn and Arthur. Many journalists made the same observation.31
Marilyn now indulged her love for animals. She and Arthur owned a basset hound named Hugo, which Arthur had given her. She also had parakeets, Butch and Bobo, a gift from Sidney Guilaroff, and a cat they named Sugar Finney. In his short story “Please Don’t Kill Any Living Thing,” Arthur wrote about her spiritual approach to the world of living things. In the story a woman walking with a man on a beach throws back into the sea the fish that fishermen have caught and left, still alive and flopping around. Like the woman in the story, Marilyn couldn’t stand it if any living creature were hurt. She wasn’t a vegetarian, but had she lived longer she might have become one.
In April 1957 Marilyn broke decisively with Milton Greene. She suspected he had embezzled funds from the company, and she was furious when he wanted to be listed as the producer in the credits of The Prince and the Showgirl. In a blistering telegram she stated the only money MMP had coming in was her salary, and she didn’t want to pay it to someone else.32 The MMP board of directors, now composed of friends and relatives of Arthur’s, ousted Milton from the company. Marilyn had fifty-one percent of the company’s stock; Milton couldn’t stop the action. Despite the Millers’ belief that he had embezzled funds, he asked only for repayment of his expenses during the year he had supported Marilyn, but not for any profit. He wanted Marilyn to realize that he hadn’t exploited her.
Amy Greene was also out of Marilyn’s life. They’d become estranged in London, and even before the break occurred they hadn’t been seeing each other in New York. After Milton’s dismissal, he didn’t photograph Marilyn again, and they didn’t see each other. Their brilliant collaboration as photographer and model was over. But Marilyn had been placed in an impossible position. She had to choose between her husband and her partner.
With Milton gone, Marilyn assumed the producer role. She fired off numerous telegrams to Jack W
arner of Warner Brothers, the studio doing the film’s final cut and its distribution. She argued with Warner and his assistants over who was responsible for paying her expenses on the film, especially for the many transatlantic phone calls she had made. She didn’t like the final cut made under Olivier’s direction, and she wanted a new cut made from the outtakes for the final distribution into theaters. When Warner Brothers destroyed all the outtakes by mistake, the issue was moot. But she was convinced that Olivier had used takes of her in the final cut in which she looked ill or as though she were under the influence of drugs.33
Marilyn was ecstatic that spring when Arthur dedicated the first edition of his collected plays to her. She played the loyal wife to the hilt when she went with him to Washington, D.C., for his hearing before a judge on the 1956 contempt-of-Congress charge. Trying to avoid fan mania, they stayed at the house of his lawyer, Joseph Rauh Jr., and his wife, Olie. Marilyn seemed deeply in love with Arthur; she was attentive to his every mood. One day they took a break and drove to Charlottesville, Virginia, to see Monticello, Jefferson’s home. When Arthur went to the courthouse, Marilyn remained at the Rauh house. She picked books off their shelves to read, mostly about psychiatry. When she was scheduled to do a press conference one day, she looked in the mirror to see if her underpants were causing any ridges in the line of her dress. They were; and she took them off.34
That spring Marilyn also oversaw negotiations with lawyers from Twentieth Century–Fox over what film she would make for them. She still owed the studio three films under her 1955 contract, and Fox executives were pressing her to do one, since by her contract terms it had to be made by the end of 1957. (Bus Stop had been a Fox film; MMP had done The Prince and the Showgirl.) With Milton Greene out of MMP, she had replaced Milton’s lawyer Frank Delaney with Robert Montgomery, Arthur’s lawyer, as the lawyer both for herself and for MMP. Montgomery, like Delaney, proved to be a skilled negotiator on Marilyn’s contract obligations, although it’s not clear that Marilyn wanted to go back to screen acting. Her main interest was in having a child. So she stalled, rejecting the scripts Fox sent her. She finally expressed interest in playing the Marlene Dietrich role in a remake of the 1930 film The Blue Angel. Set in post–World War One Berlin, a center of postwar decadence, it’s the story of a seductive dance hall performer who destroys the aging professor obsessed with her. Before the studio could sign Marilyn, they had to find a director and a costar. So the negotiations dragged.35