Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  Arthur was putting most of his energy into writing the screen version of The Misfits, doing the revisions Huston wanted. He sent the play to Elia Kazan, perhaps hoping that Kazan might direct it. Elia’s reply was cordial, but guarded. He thought that Huston was an excellent choice as director, but he also thought the screenplay needed rewriting. It was too wordy, with too much moralizing. It suffered from the lack of a real ending. The virtue of “the girl” was overdrawn: she was too pure, too spiritual. Kazan had identified real problems with the screenplay—and Marilyn independently saw those flaws. Despite continual rewrites, Arthur never really resolved them. But the fact that Kazan replied to Miller indicated the possibility of a rapprochement between them.6

  Arthur continued writing “The Third Play”—in process since 1952—but he had yet to produce more than fragments. He began turning it into what would become After the Fall, another play about Marilyn, this one about her faults. He didn’t like it that she was turning him into her lackey, the great star’s husband who was part of her entourage. Maureen Stapleton saw him carrying her purse and her makeup case, “just doing too much for her. I had the feeling things had gone hopelessly wrong.” Actor and director Martin Ritt had the same feeling when he had dinner at their home. “He was at her beck and call, running around after her all evening.” At the same time Arthur was reaching a boil over Marilyn’s behavior when they were in Hollywood doing Some Like It Hot and went to an occasional party at which men she’d slept with in her early Hollywood days would paw her cheaply in front of him. It’s not surprising that Norman Rosten sensed that Miller was retreating from Marilyn emotionally, becoming an observer of his marriage rather than a participant.7

  In the draft of a scene from a more complete version of After the Fall, Arthur describes a telling encounter between them in the Roxbury house. They’ve been arguing in the living room for a long time. Marilyn suddenly runs upstairs to the bedroom and locks the door from the inside. Arthur remains in the living room, sitting on the couch, exhausted from their fighting. He waits. Eight o’clock and then nine o’clock pass, and the house is quiet. Dinner is waiting on the table, cold. He doesn’t know what to do. If he acts manfully, like a Hollywood hero, and breaks down the bedroom door, he might find her reading in bed. Or she might be dying from an overdose. He can’t let her die. He has to do something. He knocks on the door. In a scene from the finished play, he manages to open the door and they fight over the pills she has in her hand.8

  Yet he didn’t leave her. They still had good sex. She could be the charming, lovable Marilyn, not taking pills, for stretches of time. He kept hoping that something would happen, some experience that would snap her out of anger and despair. He thought of the unhappy woman in a poem by Rilke who looks through the window of her room and sees an immense tree that she has seen a hundred times before and suddenly recovers from her depression and knows that life is good. That had been part of his motivation for writing The Misfits in the first place; it was why he agreed to a baby; it was an outgrowth of his existential philosophy. He saw life as a series of moment-by-moment events that a single experience could transform. That philosophy was central to The Misfits screenplay, especially to its ending, as Roslyn (Marilyn) is transformed when Gay and Perce (Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift) free the horses after they and Guido (Eli Wallach) have rounded them up to sell them to the slaughter house.9

  At the same time, Marilyn was having career difficulties. After Some Like It Hot many reporters turned against her. Critics acknowledged her acting in the film as brilliant, but journalists excoriated her behavior on the set. Tony Curtis engaged in a one-man campaign of vituperation, winning over many critics by claiming she regularly held up shooting, paying no attention to his discomfort in his confining costumes. Billy Wilder, with cutting remarks, wasn’t far behind. Dealing with Marilyn on this film brought out his latent misogyny. After the filming ended and his rage against Marilyn began to dissipate he told reporter Joe Hyams, “I can look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she is a woman.”10

  Marilyn alienated even Louella Parsons for a time. In contrast to her handling of the 1953 episode involving the sexy red dress she wore in Niagara, when she told Parsons her side of the story, she didn’t defend her behavior on the set of Some Like It Hot. In October 1959, her publicist Joe Wolhandler begged her to tell him what to do to stanch the press criticism. “I have been stalling and fighting off, day after day, press that you have said you would see, going back to the release of Some Like It Hot [in March]. It is important that we mend fences with them.”11 Marilyn replied to him with a cursory note that didn’t answer his concerns.

  At some point that spring she took an overdose of pills, engaging in a serious suicide attempt. Arthur wasn’t present in the apartment; he had probably gone to Roxbury to write. Her housekeeper found her and called a doctor, who went to the apartment to pump out her stomach, thus keeping her action from the press. The Rostens, called by the housekeeper, went to console Marilyn. Norman entered her bedroom, and he heard her softly crying. He leaned over the bed and asked her how she was. “Alive,” she said. “Bad luck.” Her voice was raspy and drugged. “Cruel, all of them, all those bastards,” she said. “Oh Jesus …” This time she wanted to die. We don’t know to what “bastards” she was referring. It could have been Arthur, Elia Kazan, or the Fox executives. She might have meant her father, her childhood abuser, or the men who had taken advantage of her in her career.12

  In late spring David Lewin of the London Daily Express interviewed her about how she’d changed since she made The Prince and the Showgirl. She replied that she was more mature. I’ve been scared all my life, she said, but I’m getting over it at last. “It’s getting used to happiness that is hard. What I’d like is a little more freedom in myself.” She was hinting at the monsters in her dreams and the anger and despair she couldn’t control. She was still in therapy with Marianne Kris, who did what she could to help her. Diana Trilling, a writer and a patient of Kris’s, described Kris as “a most remarkable woman, warm-hearted, large-minded, sensitive, sensible, imaginative, a great unraveler of emotional knots. She looked wise and she was wise. Her very calm was therapeutic.” Trilling wasn’t surprised that Marilyn had chosen Kris as her therapist.13

  During the spring and summer of 1959, Marilyn had happy times with Jane and Robert Miller, the Shaws and Rostens, Arthur’s parents, and her friends in Roxbury. As always, she played with the animals, read, gardened, and supervised construction on the house. She expressed discontent to Susan Strasberg at being a housewife, but she told Dorothy Kilgallen that she loved gardening. (She made similar statements to journalists during the filming of The Misfits.) Lotte Goslar visited Marilyn in Roxbury and found her with a mangy looking plant in her hand, with a flower growing out of it. She was ecstatic. She told Lotte she had replanted the dying plant, and it was now growing. She was excited by her success at reviving a dying plant.14 When in New York at the end of the summer, she went to see Yves Montand in his smash-hit one-man cabaret show, and she liked it so much that she took Arthur to see it the next night. Thus, unwittingly, she set in motion the series of events that would destroy her marriage.

  Was Marilyn faithful to Arthur during their time of troubles? She stated that she didn’t stray when a marriage was working, but this one wasn’t. Dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld was still in her life, and Marlon Brando occasionally appeared. Norman Rosten told both Anthony Summers and Donald Wolfe that she was seeing other men when the Miller marriage went sour. “She had this terrible neediness,” Rosten said. “When she felt insecure she went with other men simply for something to hold on to.” Marilyn told W. J. Weatherby that when she was tired or upset, she “ran for cover” and went out with “party people” who laughed and joked and gave her a good time, chasing her worries away for a while. Was she referring to the Kennedys? Lem Billings, who had been close to Jack Kennedy since college, claimed that Marilyn and Jack saw each other for years. “She visited on him
a variety of moods and sexual attitudes that excited his craving for variety,” Billings stated. Earl Wilson also stated that her relationship with Jack was long-term, as did James Bacon and Arthur James. Marilyn’s gynecologist Arthur Steinberg said that she had fallen for Kennedy while she was still with Miller.15

  Fascinated by Hollywood glamour and its beautiful women, Jack had been visiting Hollywood since the mid-1940s, and he had bedded both stars and starlets. He’d grown up around the movie industry, since his father, Joe Kennedy, had owned studios, made movies, and had been involved with Gloria Swanson, a major Hollywood star. When Jack went to Hollywood, he stayed with the high-flying Charles Feldman, a member of the Wolf Pack, who had provided Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller with party girls in 1951. Grace Dobish, Feldman’s longtime secretary, stated that Jack and Marilyn met at Feldman’s house in the early 1950s. In 1954 Jack’s sister Patricia married film star Peter Lawford, whom Marilyn had dated several times, strengthening the connection. That same year Jack had serious back surgery; on a wall of his hospital room he had a pinup poster of Marilyn turned upside down, with her legs in the air. By 1958 Peter and Pat were at the center of a trendy Hollywood group that met at their mansion on the Santa Monica beach, located on a private road, among a row of mansions called the Gold Coast. The other Kennedys, especially the three brothers, visited there. Dave Heiser, a surfing buddy of Lawford’s, remembered trying to teach a teenage Teddy Kennedy how to surf.16

  Jack Kennedy was charming and charismatic. Hollywood people who knew him said that he could have been a movie star. He also had a body riddled with pain—from a bad back, Addison’s disease, and osteoporosis. Whether by nature or because of the steroids and testosterone he took for his ailments, he seemed driven to bed beautiful women he met, while singling out several for special attention. Marilyn was one of them, although her relationship with him was episodic, not frequent.

  In New York the Kennedys had a penthouse suite at the Carlyle Hotel on East Seventy-sixth Street, eighteen blocks from Marilyn’s apartment. Marilyn often wore disguises to mask her appearance. Even disguised, however, she could be recognized. Jane Shalam, the daughter of a New York family prominent in politics, who lived across from the hotel, saw Marilyn entering and exiting. Sheilah Graham heard Jack Kennedy make a date with Marilyn by phone on the set of The Seven Year Itch in New York in the fall of 1954. There was also her secret apartment on New York’s East side. Senator George Smathers stated that she went on cruises on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., with Jack and some of his close male friends. Jack took his friends along as “beards” to conceal that Marilyn was with him. Kennedy family friend Charles Spalding said she visited Hyannisport.17

  Marilyn was as much a friend of the Kennedys as a lover. Norman Rosten referred to Marilyn’s friendship with them, as did Pat Newcomb, who told journalist Seymour Hersh that they loved her sense of humor. Pete Summers, a Democratic political advisor, stated that he saw Jack and Marilyn together at the Lawford mansion during the spring of 1960, before the Democratic National Convention in July. Sidney Skolsky said that she participated in conclaves there that spring planning Kennedy’s campaign. At that point she was in Hollywood making Let’s Make Love. Marilyn was the world’s major sex icon, but she also had a special gift for friendship—with men as well as with women.18

  Marilyn lived her life in differing worlds and kept her relationships separate. She didn’t want to destroy her marriage to Arthur. Like him, she continued hoping that something—perhaps a child—would revive it. But that hope doesn’t mean that she didn’t take breaks from it. She couldn’t stand being controlled or being taken advantage of, and Arthur, it might be said, was doing both. He wasn’t listening to her criticisms of The Misfits, although he was advising her on her career. He would continue to try to control her during her next two films, Let’s Make Love and The Misfits, and she would fight back, both openly and subtly.

  In September 1959 Twentieth Century–Fox assigned Marilyn to “The Billionaire,” a fluffy romantic comedy about a wealthy man who falls in love with a showgirl and then disguises himself as a song-and-dance man to win her when she makes it clear that she doesn’t like wealthy men. (It was renamed Let’s Make Love.) Marilyn liked doing musicals, which allowed her to sing and dance. George Cukor was assigned to direct it. He was known as a women’s director, able to deal with difficult female stars, but the designation was a code word for a homosexual. Renowned actor Gregory Peck was to play the billionaire. Marilyn successfully demanded that Jack Cole choreograph and provide instruction to her on her song-and-dance numbers.19

  When Marilyn read the script carefully, she realized her role wasn’t that large. Norman Krasna, the original screenwriter, refused to rewrite the script, so Marilyn persuaded the studio to hire Arthur to do it—a strange choice, since he had no experience writing romantic comedy. Nonetheless, he wanted the money, plus he wanted Marilyn to fulfill her responsibility to Fox so that they could get The Misfits into production. He rewrote Let’s Make Love three times. But when Gregory Peck found that in the new script his role was reduced and Marilyn’s increased, he pulled out of the project. Arthur came up with Yves Montand as the new leading man. Miller knew him because he and his wife, actress Simone Signoret, had starred in a production of The Crucible in Paris. It was a major career opportunity for Montand, since he wasn’t known in Hollywood and Marilyn was a great star.

  With Montand on board and a completed script that had Marilyn’s approval, Marilyn and Arthur’s problems seemed solved; but they were only beginning. The weak script continued to create difficulties during filming, even though Arthur kept rewriting it. Montand spoke little English, and his accent is thick throughout the movie. He wasn’t a comedian; he was a sultry cabaret singer, and his attempts to do comedy seem absurd. When the screen tests for makeup and costume were done before the start of filming, Marilyn looked awful, and her appearance didn’t improve during the filming. Her hair is limp, her skin mottled, and she’s overweight. She was obviously taking too many drugs. In fact, the problem increased to the point that psychiatrist Ralph Greenson was called in to help her get off them. Still, Simone Signoret described her as “the most beautiful peasant girl imaginable.”20

  When the Millers and the Montands arrived in Hollywood in early November for preproduction work, they moved into adjoining bungalows in the Beverly Hills Hotel and quickly became friendly. Signoret, a sophisticated but down-to-earth French film actress, had just triumphed in Room at the Top as an older woman involved with a younger man. Maternal and caring, she was drawn to Marilyn. Both she and Yves were radicals; their politics were attractive to Arthur and Marilyn. The two men took long walks around Beverly Hills; the two women went shopping and sunned themselves by the pool; and the couples ate dinner together. The fan magazines loved to report their camaraderie, which continued for several months. Simone was fascinated when Marilyn found Pearl Porterfield living in Redondo Beach and had her travel to Hollywood each week to dye her hair. She was the hairdresser who had created the dye for Jean Harlow’s hair—a combination of peroxide and bluing. Still obsessed with Harlow, Marilyn wanted her hair to be as white as possible, to create a halo around her head. Perhaps what Marilyn really wanted was to hear the many stories Porterfield told about Harlow.

  Arthur and Marilyn could still act like a happily married couple. In late January 1960, soon after filming began on Let’s Make Love, they were interviewed in their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times, who was writing a series of articles from conversations he held with important Americans. Marilyn and Arthur’s topic was “Sex, Theatre, and the Intellectual.” Brandon found Arthur intense, intellectual, and bitter about the charges made against him by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Marilyn sat by his side on the sofa, with her head against his shoulder. She seemed to Brandon “a little kitten.” When she became apprehensive, Miller took her hand, “affectionately and protectively.” As her shyness dissipated, her c
ommon sense and happy outlook appeared. In the published interview Miller answered Brandon’s questions, even the ones addressed to Marilyn. He was in control.21

  The next day Brandon visited the set of Let’s Make Love. Marilyn was bubbly and confident. Now she was in control and Miller was on the sidelines, looking shy and uneasy. Her puckish sense of fun was intoxicating to everyone. “That is her real gift—her ability to turn boredom into bliss, misery into joy,” wrote Brandon.

  Sidney Skolsky now reappeared in Marilyn’s life. With Marilyn in Hollywood, they renewed their friendship. When Arthur wasn’t there, Marilyn invited Sidney to dinner. Remaining loyal to Marilyn, he held Arthur responsible for their marital difficulties because he had become too involved in her career.22 Between January 30 and February 4, Arthur returned to New York to work on The Misfits, since Marilyn’s state of mind had improved and Simone and Yves were there to watch over her. On February 10 he went to Ireland for two weeks to consult with John Huston.

  Despite support from Yves and Simone, Marilyn broke down. Even Yves, usually patient, became annoyed with her one day when she kept him waiting on the set all day and didn’t appear. He knocked on her door that evening, but there was no answer. Then he slid a note under the door saying that she was behaving like a little girl and he didn’t like it. Marilyn called Arthur in Ireland; Arthur called Yves and suggested that Simone join him at the door, since Marilyn felt especially close to her. Now sobbing, Marilyn opened the door and threw herself into Simone’s arms and said she wouldn’t do it again.

  Of course, she did it again. Marianne Kris was finally contacted in New York, and she recommended bringing in psychiatrist Ralph Greenson to see Marilyn on a temporary basis. Greenson had a practice in Beverly Hills with many star patients. Between February 11 and March 12, he had fifteen sessions with Marilyn. He was appalled by the drugs she was taking, and he tried to get her off them. They included Phenobarbital, Amytal, and sodium pentathol. She was also taking Demerol—a narcotic similar to morphine which is highly addictive—and she was injecting it intravenously. Unlike the other three drugs, Demerol is a strong medication for pain; her endometriosis must have flared up. She justified her drug taking by citing her insomnia, and Greenson tried to get her to understand that she was making the insomnia worse by taking so many drugs.23