Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  Her behavior angered Lemmon and Curtis. They had to stand under the hot lights for hours wearing tight corsets, high heels, and heavy makeup to cover their facial hair. It was uncomfortable, and they wanted to get the shooting over. Neither Lemmon nor Curtis required many takes. By the time Wilder called “cut” they were exhausted, while Marilyn was just hitting her stride. They complained to Wilder, but he replied that he had to print Marilyn’s best take, not theirs, because she brought in the audiences.

  Arthur arrived on the set several weeks after shooting began. He mostly stood to one side and watched the filming. He’d become part of her entourage, the kept husband of the great star. Wilder wondered how he could be so subordinate. But Arthur felt loyal to Marilyn, as he had to his first wife. Deeply committed to The Misfits, he wanted to be certain that she would make it through this film. Many people who saw them together, even during the tumult of making Some Like It Hot, thought that their marriage was in good shape. The publicist on the film wrote that Marilyn seemed to lean on Arthur as though he was her father, while he basked in her “deep idolatry.” Was it real? Or had it become a pose they put on at will?45

  Despite their issues, Arthur was still devoted to Marilyn. Some commentators suggest that he had given up on her by the spring of 1958, but they are mistaken. In September he returned to New York to see his children, and he wrote three letters to her. In the first letter, he states he will love her forever. The bed seems a mile wide, he writes, empty as a field. Drawing from the original concept of their marriage, he envisions unity with her, that their wills are combined toward the same end. The second letter is similar. He calls her his dear baby girl and hopes that during the rest of the filming she will realize that her acting is superior to anything being done on the set. “I am your flesh, the air you breathe.”46

  In the third letter, he writes about his own faults in the marriage. He apologizes for the things he has done and those he has failed to do. He seems to refer to the upsetting journal entry in London and to his failure to support them financially. He states he is making important discoveries in his therapy, especially in understanding the blocks in his emotional life that so often make him distant. Their public face as a happy couple probably reflected at least some portion of their private life together.

  During the filming of Some Like It Hot, Marilyn became pregnant; her condition is apparent in the beach scenes. The movie wrapped in mid-November, and Marilyn miscarried a month later. Was the miscarriage caused by drinking and taking drugs? In an exchange of telegrams between Arthur and Billy Wilder after the miscarriage occurred, Arthur held Wilder responsible for it, accusing him of working Marilyn too hard.47 Arthur had a point: in the closing scenes of the film, Marilyn, wearing spike heels, runs up and down stairs and around the hotel grounds, escaping from the mobsters. Such activity could hardly have been good for her pregnancy, especially in light of her endometriosis and the drinking and drug taking.

  Leon “Red” Krohn, Marilyn’s gynecologist at the time, told her to stop taking pills and drinking because it would hurt the baby. He wanted her to stay in bed during the pregnancy. Marilyn was unhappy with this advice, and she accused him of giving it to her because Walter Mirisch, the film’s producer, was his friend.48 Once the filming ended, she did cut back on her drinking and drug taking and stayed in bed. But it wasn’t soon enough to do much good. A handwritten note from an unknown author contained in her file cabinets states that if she had gone to bed during the pregnancy and given up pills, she might have carried the baby to term. This wasn’t an ectopic pregnancy; the fetus was in the uterus, indicating normality. Such confinement to bed is still used today in the case of pregnant women when miscarriage seems possible.

  This miscarriage came after the possible one in 1956 during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl and the one in August 1957 when she was in Amagansett. It fed her fears that she couldn’t have a child, that “something was wrong inside her, a defect, an evil.” According to Norman Rosten, “It was a dagger at her ego, the love goddess, the woman supreme, unable to have a child.” She felt unloved, “cursed by the universe.” She felt that it damaged her femininity, her status as the representative of all women. Internalizing 1950s domestic values, wanting to re-mother herself by mothering a child, she saw it as an ultimate blow. Yet she kept having gynecological operations, as though by going under the knife she could refashion her internal self into the perfect woman she wanted to be. Only by having a child could she prove her femininity and blot out her fear that she was really lesbian by nature.49

  It’s hard to determine what operations she underwent. During many of them she didn’t stay in the hospital for long; thus her gynecologist probably didn’t remove endometriosis, which, by requiring the opening of the scar over her pubic hair and then sewing it up again, would have been major surgery requiring a long hospital stay. In all probability she often had dilation and curettage done to clean out her fallopian tubes—a much less intrusive vaginal procedure. That procedure, which can cause scar tissue to form, isn’t used by gynecologists much today, but it was commonly done then. Endometriosis, however, can’t be removed vaginally.

  Marilyn raged at Leon Krohn, who made her feel guilty, as though she had killed the baby. Given her capacity for guilt and self-punishment, she no doubt felt that way without Krohn reminding her. Yet the rage that she directed against him was so great that he refused to see her again. Still, as she often did in a traumatic situation, she managed to rally. She had her lawyer write a letter to Fox stating that she would do another movie for them as soon as they wanted her. Life published Avedon’s photos, along with Arthur’s encomium, in the December 1958 issue. “These pictures,” Arthur wrote, “are a kind of history of our mass fantasy so far as seductresses are concerned … Marilyn has identified herself with what surely was naive in these women, what to them in their moment was genuine allure and sexual truth.” Her spirit, he stated, is dominated by two qualities: “One is the spontaneous joy she takes in anything a child does; the other is her quick sympathy and respect for old people, for whatever has endured.”

  When Marilyn read the tribute, however, she didn’t like it. She felt that Arthur’s encomium was too simple, that it captured only a part of her. She wanted to be seen as mature and complex, not as a naive simpleton.50 In her opinion, Arthur was avoiding the real Marilyn, just as he was avoiding who she was in his screenplay for The Misfits.

  Still, The Misfits loomed ahead, with Marilyn still ambivalent about doing it. Huston had agreed to direct it. In December, just after Marilyn’s miscarriage, he traveled to New York to talk to Miller about it. He demanded extensive revisions; it was too long, too talky, with too many speeches. Arthur accepted his criticisms and set to work on it again. Thus was put in motion a series of moves that would result in Marilyn’s first dramatic role in a long time, the kind of role she’d said for years that she wanted to do, a role that might end her typecasting as a dumb blonde. Perhaps Arthur would be her savior, after all.

  In the spring of 1958, several months before she left New York for Hollywood to film Some Like It Hot, Marilyn met Ralph Roberts at the Strasbergs’ apartment. An actor and a masseur, he became a major figure in her life. Roberts had a modest career on Broadway, and he attended classes at the Actors Studio. To supplement his income, he worked as a massage therapist. Trained at the Swedish Massage Institute in New York, he was good at his job. A giant of a man, he had strong, soft hands. Many Broadway actors went to him to relax their bodies. They also liked talking to him: he was a good listener, quiet and gentle, a courtly gentleman from the South.

  He was standing in the Strasbergs’ kitchen when Marilyn walked in. She was one of the most radiantly beautiful creatures he’d ever seen. It wasn’t so much her physical attributes as the inner glow “that penetrated every inch of that high-ceiling kitchen,” he wrote in “Mimosa,” his unpublished memoir. “And, when I say creature—that was it. An animal. The blue-whiteness one sees sometimes in the stars of a
desert night. White-blonde hair, clear-white complexion framing violet-blue eyes.”51

  Ralph didn’t become Marilyn’s official masseur until she went to Hollywood to do Let’s Make Love in November 1959. Feeling stressed, she called him to give her a massage. She arranged for a nightly one; massage can moderate the pain from endometriosis and shrink scar tissue. Marilyn and Ralph developed a bond. Both had speech issues—Ralph had suffered from a tied tongue as a child; both were spiritual; both were strong and shy at the same time. They didn’t have an affair; Marilyn called him her “brother.” Everyone I interviewed who knew Marilyn told me that Ralph (whom Marilyn nicknamed Rafe) was closer to her than anyone else. In “Mimosa,” he reveals much of their relationship, which he characterized as emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. Marilyn revealed sides of herself to Ralph that she didn’t show to others. During their first massage, Ralph mentioned a book he’d been reading, Willa Cather’s Professor’s House. She exclaimed that she’d just been reading it, that Willa Cather was her favorite author. Among her favorite books, Marilyn said, was Cather’s A Lost Lady. What seemed like a telepathetic communication between them occurred.52

  Marilyn told Ralph about the demons that populated her dreams. He would find images of them in Rossell Hope Robbins’s Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. To resist them, she said, she used the tools outlined in Meditation, by Friedrich Rittelmeyer. Rittelmeyer was a follower of Rudolph Steiner and a leader of Anthroposophy in Germany. His Meditation includes exercises to help one think about rest, purity, and peace in order to become like Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Saint John is his guide, and his goal is to overcome the darkness of depression with the light of the Gospel. Demons were as real to Rittelmeyer as they were to Marilyn.

  Ralph was born and raised in the city of Salisbury, North Carolina, and he remained loyal to it and to the South throughout his life. During his nightly massages with Marilyn, he told her about the city, turning it into the site of a fairy tale. Like a parent putting a child to sleep, he told her his fairy story to soothe her.

  Salisbury is impressive, having grown as a shipping entrepôt. Farm products were taken there before the Civil War to be sent north. Greek Revival mansions were built. After the war it went through the process of industrialization, generating small factories in the city and considerable wealth. Victorian mansions were built and they still stand, along with the antebellum Greek Revival counterparts. A large cemetery contains the graves of Confederate soldiers. In the center of the city is a statue of a woman—a reproduction of the Winged Victory of Samothrace that stands in the Louvre. She is dressed in a chiton, with her wings and her dress blowing backward as though ruffled by a strong wind. She is reminiscent of Marilyn in the Seven Year Itch photo.

  As the massage progressed, Ralph took Marilyn through the Salisbury of his memory, as though she had arrived there for a visit and was walking through the city, looking at its buildings and meeting its residents. Arriving by train, she walks on West Council Street past the Yadkin Hotel, stopping at the Lash general store to buy a bag of roasted peanuts. Turning onto Main Street, she blows a kiss to the building where Ralph made his acting debut in a local production. Then past Al Berban’s bookstore and a right turn at the square, to reach her favorite sight in Salisbury, the Winged Victory statue in the center of the city. That was a Nike figure of the ancient world that recognized victory in poetry, in athletic contests, and in war. It was a symbol of a triumphant woman that she could think about in times of despair, to soothe her depression and encourage her to believe in herself.53

  Chapter 11

  The Misfits, 1959–1960

  In My Story Marilyn described herself as a Hollywood misfit—someone who didn’t follow the rules and was critical of the system. In Nevada horse culture a “misfit” was a horse too small to work in a rodeo, fit only to be sold for dog food. People who challenged conventional culture, who were heroic or foolish, had long been characters in Arthur’s work. In The Misfits Roslyn, a former dance hall girl, and the cowboys, who are roustabouts, are aliens in a middle-class world. So are the various hangers-on in Reno, many of whom are waiting out the six-week period to get a Nevada divorce. Arthur had these images in his head as he wrote the screenplay for The Misfits.

  Before Marilyn could do the film, to be produced by MMP, she had to do another film for Fox to fulfill her contract obligations. Under pressure from Arthur and the studio, she accepted Let’s Make Love in the fall of 1959. That probably wasn’t a smart decision, given its weak screenplay. Its filming turned into a disaster. It drove a wedge between Marilyn and Arthur that widened considerably during the filming of The Misfits, which finally went before the camera in July 1960.

  Given her miscarriage in December 1958, Marilyn was depressed during the spring of 1959, but she didn’t spend all her time in bed, as has been charged.1 She was with Arthur when he was given the Gold Medal for Drama on January 27 by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a considerable honor. She attended a dinner party given by Gloria Vanderbilt for visiting novelist Isak Dinesen. She had, she said, been deeply impressed by Dinesen’s Out of Africa. She and Arthur went to several Metropolitan Opera productions: Verdi’s Macbeth in February and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in March. But when Laurence Olivier visited the Actors Studio, she hid in a back room, afraid to meet with him after their conflicts in filming The Prince and the Showgirl. She was a vision in white at the premiere of Some Like It Hot in New York in March, but she stammered in interviews at the event. Several weeks later she went to the Italian Cultural Institute in New York to receive the David di Donatello Award, Italy’s most prestigious acting award, given for her performance in The Prince and the Showgirl.2

  That same month she went to Chicago to publicize Some Like It Hot. She was the sexy and witty Marilyn in interviews there, but she was also a dumb blonde. She tarted up her appearance and wore no underwear, playing Sugar Kane to the hilt. The height of her visit occurred, at least to the press, when a publicist accidentally spilled a drink on her thin dress at a reception and her pubic hair was revealed. Hairdresser Kenneth Battelle was there with her, and he chided her for not having bleached the hair with peroxide so that it wouldn’t show. She had lunch with writer Saul Bellow, whom Arthur knew from Reno when both had been there seeking a divorce. In June she had another operation “cleaning out her fallopian tubes” to ensure that she could become pregnant. It appears that Arthur was willing to try for a baby again.

  She did excellent work at the Actors Studio that spring. She played Blanche DuBois in the scene from A Streetcar Named Desire in which Blanche vamps a delivery boy who has come to the door. An aging Southern belle, Blanche is self-centered, manipulative, vulnerable, and sensual—and one of the great female roles in American theater. Marilyn also played a scene opposite Ralph Roberts adapted from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Roberts played Lennie; Marilyn was Curley’s wife, a beautiful woman desperate to get the attention of men in a dull environment. She played Holly Golightly in scenes adapted from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He loved her in them and wanted her for the film version, which Paramount was producing. But the studio didn’t want to deal with her, and Audrey Hepburn got the part. Capote was outraged.3

  Yet she still didn’t have the nerve to take her success to the stage. She doubted that she could do a play night after night, which would require getting to the theater on time and remembering her lines. She didn’t have enough self-confidence even to audition for Lee Strasberg to become a regular Studio member. Still, she was flourishing under Lee; his Method approach was working for her. Her acting was becoming richer, more complex.

  During the first months of 1959, Marilyn’s agent and lawyers negotiated with Twentieth Century–Fox for her next film. Some Like It Hot had been a major success, although it had been done under Walter Mirisch’s production company. Technically Marilyn had done only Bus Stop for Fox. Buddy Adler, the studio head, assigned her to the female romantic lead in “Time and Tide,”
later renamed Wild River, and she accepted the role. Four days before Marilyn was to appear on the set in mid-April, Elia Kazan, the film’s director, decided that he didn’t want her. To all intents and purposes, she was fired. In his autobiography, Kazan refers to “an absurd casting conference with Buddy Adler,” during which Adler pressured him to accept Marilyn.4

  Somewhere on the way to making this film, communication had broken down. Lee Remick got the role. Marilyn’s lawyers riposted to the insult by demanding immediate payment of the $100,000 for The Blue Angel and another $100,000 for the dismissal from Wild River, as well as counting them as two of her required movies for Fox. Fox executives agreed to their demands. Nonetheless, the rejection was hard on Marilyn. Even The Brothers Karamazov had passed her by. Breaking her connection with Milton had ended the possibility of MMP doing it. Sidney Guilaroff lobbied Richard Brooks, who directed the version finally made, to cast Marilyn in the role of Grushenka, but Brooks was another tough male who didn’t want to deal with her. German actress Maria Schell played the role.5

  At the same time, her marriage to Arthur was spiraling downward. He wasn’t finishing his projects, and she was becoming increasingly resentful at having to support him. His Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters was an ironic honor, given his lack of productivity. Although his plays were acclaimed in Europe, his last really successful Broadway play had been Death of a Salesman in 1949. Both The Crucible and A View from the Bridge received mixed reviews and attracted small audiences. Their popularity came later, when Miller’s plays became standard productions nationwide for small theaters and high schools.