by Lois Banner
Moreover, Huston and Miller often focused on Marilyn’s body in the filming, as though they couldn’t avoid sexualizing her. What seem to be polka dots on a dress she wears are actually red cherries, adding a disconcerting sexual crudeness to her character. In one scene, Marilyn bounces a small ball on a paddle. She’d been playing the game, at which she excelled, during a break in filming. Miller put it into the film, but he had a cowboy patting her behind at the same time, making her seem like a male possession.38
Marilyn was still taking drugs—Nembutal and Seconol to sleep, amphetamines for energy during filming—her usual combination. When the studio doctor on the set refused to give her more than a few pills, she went to a doctor in Reno to get them. In 1955 Delos Smith, a friend of the Strasbergs, said she was taking five to six Nembutal a day; John Huston said she was now taking twenty a day. She was also suffering from flatulence and a pain in her side: both were caused by gallstones. Her colitis, an old problem, flared up, and she had her usual menstrual pain, which caused some of her absences. Ralph Roberts massaged her body every evening and in between takes, helping to keep her going. Whitey Snyder got her up in the morning, sometimes throwing her under a cold shower to wake her. But she was still often late to the filming, sometimes by many hours. Huston set the filming call at eleven each morning, rather than the normal nine thirty, but it didn’t help.
Marilyn’s lateness made Huston furious, although he had his own behavior issues. Reno was a national center for gambling, and Huston was addicted. He gambled most nights, sometimes all night long, steadily consuming liquor. He’d sometimes fall asleep in the director’s chair the next day. Once filming ended each day and the crew was back in Reno, many of them also went out drinking: they often welcomed Marilyn’s lateness because they were hungover. Huston chided Marilyn for her lateness in his autobiography, although he grudgingly praised her acting. “She would go deep into herself to find an emotion and bring it up.”39
Arthur and Marilyn began to argue so loudly in their suite that occupants of the rooms near them complained to the management. They quarreled over the filming, the script, and Miller’s continued emotional withdrawal. Marilyn claimed that Montand was going to leave Simone Signoret for her. She brought up her litany of complaints: Arthur was cold to his father and his children and tied to his mother. She accused him of having excised Milton Greene, the only person who hadn’t used her, from her life. Eli Wallach heard her yell at Arthur for interfering in Huston’s directing and in her acting by telling both of them what to do. “You don’t understand women,” she screamed at Arthur. “I am a film actress and I know what I’m doing.”
She thought he was eyeing other women, especially Angela Allan, the film’s continuity supervisor. That wasn’t the case, although Arthur wasn’t entirely guiltless. Inge Morath, a Magnum photographer on the set for two weeks, married Arthur a year and a half later. Both she and Miller adamantly denied there had been anything between them on the set of The Misfits. Still, other people who were there thought that Arthur had a roving eye.40 Arthur and Marilyn mostly didn’t speak to each other on the set. Arthur’s camp made much of an episode in which he was standing by the edge of the road hoping for a ride back to Reno and Paula and Marilyn drove by in a car without stopping. If Huston hadn’t shown up, Miller would have been stranded in the desert.
According to Ralph Roberts and journalist Radie Harris, Arthur left a version of After the Fall on the desk in their suite. If that was true, it was an ultimate blow, given the dark depiction of Marilyn in the play. It would also have replicated the incident in London when Arthur left his journal open on a desk to a page criticizing her and she read it.41 Neither Arthur nor Marilyn spoke of the incident, although Ralph was Marilyn’s confidant and Radie Harris was close to the Strasbergs. Paula was still coaching Marilyn. If the incident happened, it contributed to Marilyn’s anger at Miller.
She wasn’t sleeping; her nerves were on edge; she was fighting with Arthur and upset about the continual rewrites. In mid-August Frank Sinatra invited the cast and crew to the Cal Neva Lodge on Lake Tahoe, an hour from Reno, to watch his evening show. Both Marilyn and Arthur went. Sinatra was in the process of buying the lodge. His invitation wasn’t without an ulterior motive; he had heard rumors that there were problems in the filming and he wanted to see for himself how Marilyn was doing. He had taken a step toward becoming a presence in her life.
On August 27, Marilyn left Reno to go to Los Angeles. Once there, she consulted Hyman Engelberg, Ralph Greenson’s associate and her internist, and he admitted her to the Westside Hospital for rest and to dry out from drugs. Stories circulated that she was wrapped in a wet sheet and rushed to Los Angeles by airplane, but the newspapers reported that she took a plane with Paula Strasberg by way of San Francisco and went to a Hollywood party the night before being admitted to the hospital.42
According to Rupert Allan, she ran out of sleeping pills several weeks before she flew to Los Angeles, and the doctor she consulted in Reno put her on a new, highly addictive medication. When she ran out of it she suffered withdrawal pains, and she went to Los Angeles to see her doctors and get new pills. Greenson and Engelberg put her in the hospital and on less potent drugs, including chloral hydrate, a sedative given to soldiers during World War Two. It is an opiate rather than a barbiturate; thus in a different class of drugs. Greenson was trying to wean her from Nembutal. She recovered in ten days and returned to Reno. If she hadn’t completed the film her career would have been over, since no insurance company would have insured her on any future film.43
John Huston maintained that she reverted to heavy drug usage after her return from Los Angeles, but Ralph Roberts stated that Greenson gave the pills to him, with instructions on how to dole them out to her. Indeed, there were no overdoses during the last months of filming, from early September to early November. Ralph noted that Marilyn began sleeping in a hot room, with black curtains over the windows to shut out the light: she had created a womb—or a tomb—for herself. She seemed to him like a caged animal, afraid of both the day and the night. The bedroom arrangement somehow made her feel safe. Arthur Miller was obviously no longer sharing her suite.44
In the diary that journalist James Goode kept during the filming, Marilyn seems in good humor during the last several months. Paula was now central to keeping her going; even John Huston later said that they couldn’t have finished the film without Paula. Yet Paula was suffering from the bone marrow cancer that would eventually kill her, and she was taking a lot of pain medication. Lee Strasberg went to the filming to chastise Huston and to give Marilyn energy, but Paula sent him back to New York after a brief stay.
The irony of The Misfits is that, as Arthur had intended from the beginning, the finished movie is a tribute to Marilyn. She is a pantheistic force of nature, never more radiant, never more wise. No matter her intake of drugs and alcohol, the sickly pallor of her face in Let’s Make Love is gone. It’s easy to believe that all three cowboys would desire her. Her acting is multifaceted, soaring over the script, as her emotions cycle from high to low and from one moment to the next.
The Misfits is a morality tale about the meaning of masculinity and femininity, set against a frontier being destroyed by suburbanization, technological progress, and a consumer culture. In the film masculine adventuring and pugnacity—flying airplanes, overcoming bulls in rodeos, roping wild mustangs—are contrasted to female generativity and domesticity, which Roslyn both embraces and rejects. She arrives in Reno to divorce a husband; there are hints that she had worked as a stripper. But she takes up housekeeping for Gay, the cowboy played by Clark Gable. The three cowboys aren’t beyond redemption: all are critical of capitalist wage slavery. Riding the range represents freedom, an old theme in American life. The three men bond around drinking, going to rodeos, and chasing horses and women. Gay lives for the out-of-doors and on the money he makes from providing sex to wealthy women waiting for their divorces. Clift plays Perce, a sensitive rodeo contestant; Wallac
h plays Guido, a mechanic who pilots a Piper Cub and works only when he needs money. All three have been betrayed by wives or mothers. All are misfits in a middle-class culture. The cowboys, denizens of a dying world, are like the mustangs, once the proud inhabitants of a natural wilderness free from humans.45
Roslyn tries to stop them from rounding up the horses, thus playing the role of a civilizer of men that Marilyn often played in her films. Once again, as in so many of those films, Marilyn takes a stand against aggressive masculinity, although this time she screams at the men for their brutality against the horses.
Killers! Murderers! You liars, all of you. Liars! You’re only happy when you can see something die! Why don’t you kill yourselves and be happy? You and your God’s country. Freedom! I pity you. You’re three dear, sweet dead men.
The roundup of the horses occurs, and Roslyn can’t stop it. Then Perce and Gay let the horses go, but not before Guido attacks women as powerfully as Roslyn has attacked men.
She’s crazy. They’re all crazy. You try not to believe it. Because you need them. She’s crazy. You struggle, you build, you try, you turn yourself inside out for them, but it’s never enough! So they put the spurs on you. I know—I got the marks!
In the end Roslyn goes off with Gay, the masculine man who frees the mustangs at her insistence, but not before he points out to her that she eats meat and feeds their dog canned dog food made from horse meat, perhaps from the mustangs. Thus she violates her beliefs against violence and killing animals every day. She needs to be more realistic about life.
The film’s moral seems to be that men and women can live together successfully only if they compromise on a number of issues. Just as Gay cooks Roslyn breakfast, men must incorporate a measure of domesticity into their lives. At the same time women must recognize that male adventuring, even violence, is a necessary part of their natures. Even more important than this moral is the transformation produced from their experience with the mustang roundup, which is one of the lengthiest scenes in the film. The existential moment occurs when Gay and Perce free the horses. Gay and Roslyn realize their need for each other. Now they can have the child that will symbolize their love. Arthur described this existential moment in much greater detail in the novel he wrote from the film than in the film itself. Roslyn gives voice to that moment in the novel:
For a minute, when those horses galloped away, it was almost like I gave them back their life. And all of a sudden I got a feeling—it’s crazy!—I suddenly thought, “He must love me, or how would I dare do this?” Because I always just ran away when I couldn’t stand it. Gay—for a minute you made me not afraid. And it was like my life flew into my body. For the first time.46
Before the filming was finished, a final breakdown in communication occurred between Arthur and Marilyn, due to another rewrite Arthur made on the script. According to Ralph Roberts, Arthur became so angry with Marilyn as the filming progressed that he rewrote scenes to make Roslyn into a prostitute and Gay into a bum, with Guido the man Roslyn chooses in the end. When Marilyn read the rewritten scenes, she became hysterical, and Gable intervened. He had contract approval over the script, and he refused to accept any ending other than the one he’d already approved, in which Roslyn and Gay go off together and Guido and Perce are left behind.
With Gable’s intervention the film was over. Arthur’s last rewriting was the final straw for Marilyn, and she ordered him out of her life. Indeed, Arthur may have engaged in a devious maneuver at the end of the filming. James Goode noted in his diary that “frantic” rewriting was going on, which Clark Gable stopped. Sidney Skolsky, who was present, agreed with Roberts that Arthur was rewriting the script to make Roslyn a prostitute and Guido the hero. Thus Arthur may have attempted to get at Marilyn with these last-minute rewrites.
During the last days of filming, the picture was wrapped up at Universal Studios in Hollywood. Rupert Allan informed Marilyn that he was resigning as her publicist to become the press attaché for Princess Grace of Monaco. The Jacobs agency assigned Patricia Newcomb to take over from him. Marilyn and Pat had fallen out during the filming of Bus Stop, but Marilyn was told that Pat had undergone analysis and was more stable. Marilyn accepted her, giving her the nickname Sib, for sibling rivalry. Rupert later stated that he had had nothing to do with Pat’s taking over the publicity job and that he wouldn’t have recommended her. She was a “pill pusher,” he told Donald Spoto, and she couldn’t be trusted.47
We do know that Pat Newcomb was close to the Kennedys. She knew Ethel Skakel Kennedy, Robert’s wife, through her father, who had been West Coast representative of the Skakel family real estate holdings in Southern California. A Catholic, she knew the rest of the family through Ethel. Pat had become close to Pierre Salinger when she was a student of his at Mills College in Oakland. Later, as press secretary for John F. Kennedy, Salinger was close to the president and he continued to mentor Pat. Others have speculated that Frank Sinatra got Pat the position as Marilyn’s publicist because the Kennedys wanted someone to watch over Marilyn for them.
On November 4, 1960, after nearly four months of filming and a month past the scheduled finish date, The Misfits was done. The next day Marilyn flew back to New York. Pat Newcomb, not Arthur, was with her. That same day Clark Gable had a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley.
When Marilyn returned to New York, she reentered the world she’d left a year earlier when she had gone to Hollywood to make Let’s Make Love. In the intervening year, she’d lost her husband and a lover (Montand) and had struggled, physically and emotionally, during the making of two films. Her depression worsened as the year came to an end. On November 11, Pat Newcomb announced to the press that Arthur and Marilyn were separating. Then, a week later, Clark Gable died. He had been recovering from the first heart attack, but his intake of liquor and cigarettes, plus the grueling stunt work he had done in the scenes with the mustangs, had taken a toll.
Marilyn seemed all right at first, although she was too upset to attend Gable’s funeral. She went with Ralph Roberts to the Strasbergs’ apartment for a day of talking and listening to music. Pouring out her grief and love for Clark in a safe setting helped to assuage her deep mourning. Later that month she met with Arthur and they divided up their possessions: she kept the New York apartment, he the house in Connecticut. Marilyn wrote off the money she had spent repairing it. She didn’t ask him to repay any of the other money she’d advanced him. They left Hugo at the Roxbury farm because he loved the open space there.
She spent Thanksgiving at the Strasbergs’ and had drinks with Lester Markel that evening. Pat Newcomb claimed that Simone Signoret called Marilyn and begged her not to see Yves Montand when he went through New York on his way to Hollywood. The meeting didn’t occur, but it seems that the romance with Montand didn’t end so easily as is usually assumed. Joe DiMaggio now reappeared in her life. On Christmas Eve he took her masses of poinsettias, just as he had taken a Christmas tree to her on Christmas 1952, during the filming of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Several days later she excitedly told Ralph Roberts that Joe had agreed to the arrangement that she had long wanted: they would remain devoted to each other, while being free to date other people, in a classic free love arrangement. She even got Joe to attend a play with her in early January, a performance of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage.48
She told Ralph of other changes in her life. Now that she had separated from Arthur, men were calling her for dates and sending her flowers, letters, and cards. In New York, she said, the availability of a desirable woman brought a rush of interest. Two men attracted her: Frank Sinatra and John Kennedy. Frank had a reputation for being attentive to friends in crisis, and he was being good to her. He wanted her to fly to Los Angeles and take the train with him to Florida, where he had a singing engagement. She was attracted to John Kennedy, but apprehensive. In early January 1961 she told her friend Gordon Heaver, a story editor at Paramount, that she had recently had a date with him.49
The attentio
n from Sinatra and Kennedy didn’t lift her depression. When W. J. Weatherby interviewed her in December 1960 she seemed sad. “She gave me the impression of a child whistling in the dark. The more she tried to cheer herself up, the more she seemed aware of the dark around her.” She told him that she was trying to control her temper, but she was also sitting in front of her mirror, looking at her face, worrying about aging. She spoke about suicide. “It’s a person’s privilege,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s a sin or a crime.” Then she added, “It doesn’t get you anywhere.”50 She saw Marianne Kris forty-seven times in two months.
She was thirty-four years old, with neither a husband nor the child that she had thought would fulfill her. Given her drive for perfection, divorce was hard for her, since it was a major failure. She worried that the friends she had made through Arthur would drop her, but she didn’t contact them. Losing Arthur’s family hurt, for she considered Arthur’s children as her children. But they didn’t desert her, and she remained close to Arthur’s father. She must have learned that Arthur was dating Inge Morath; some say he took Inge to the Kennedy inauguration on January 20, 1961, the day Marilyn went to Mexico for a divorce.
She decided she had caused Clark Gable’s death because she had kept him waiting in the hot Nevada sun during filming The Misfits. She wondered if she had been late to the set so much because she had confused him with her father and had been punishing him for having abandoned her. The press had a field day, writing outrageous articles about her divorce, her romance with Montand, and her possible responsibility for Clark’s death. Hedda Hopper led the pack when she alleged that Marilyn had killed the child she miscarried in December 1958 with her drinking and pill taking and had engaged in bad behavior throughout her career, from drinking vodka while filming, to having no discipline as an actress, to marrying Joe DiMaggio, with whom she had nothing in common. Stars have responsibilities, she exclaimed, and Marilyn had no sense of responsibility. She even attacked Marilyn for weight gain. As a star, she said, you must keep yourself thin. Underneath these complaints lay the fact that Marilyn had not given Hedda an interview for two years, and Hedda was smarting.51