Miller and Marilyn hurried back to the house to call for an ambulance. When told that it could take up to two hours for medical help to arrive, Miller said, “I think you should know, it’s Marilyn Monroe back there on the road, and this will be on the front pages of every newspaper in the world tomorrow!” Because of this fib an ambulance was dispatched immediately. But it was still too late, Mara died on the operating table a few hours later.
Even with the gloom of this tragedy heavy in the atmosphere, the press conference had to go on. In the footage Miller is his usual somber, imperial self. Marilyn is in an emotional fog—hesitant, vague. Clearly something traumatizing had just happened.
* * *
On June 22, in a simple four-minute civil ceremony at the Westchester County Court House in White Plains, New York, a judge legally made Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe man and wife. Just a few days later, on July 1, the couple had planned a quiet wedding in the home of Miller’s agent, Kay Brown—this one a Jewish ceremony for friends and family. (Marilyn had converted when she started to become serious with Miller.)Shortly before walking out among the waiting guests, while sitting in the bedroom with Milton and Amy Greene, Marilyn expressed that she didn’t want to go through with the wedding. Greene said, “I’ll take care of the guests, just go get in the car with Amy.” At the last moment Marilyn said, “No. I better go through with it. After all, all the guests are already here.”
Trying desperately to fight off any negative emotions or bad omens, Marilyn scrawled on the back of her wedding portrait: “Hope. Hope. Hope.”
On July 6 Miller was granted his passport, which enabled him to travel to England with his new wife to start filming The Prince and the Showgirl. The movie’s name had been changed from The Sleeping Prince to add the Marilyn character to the title and help ensure its success.
FIFTEEN
INNOCENT MONSTER
It should have been the high point of her life. On paper it was. Married to a man she looked up to for his intellect, a man who admired her. She was the head of her own production company, had secured a high-profile film property for herself, and was working with the most respected classical actor in the world. In fact Laurence Olivier was actually under the employ of the former orphan girl.
But instead of being cocooned in security and self-confidence, Marilyn felt enormous pressure to live up to the monster of her image and publicity. She was under the gun to prove herself as a real actress and at the same time maintain the delectable face, figure, and persona of the pinup-queen-turned-Hollywood-goddess.
Everything possible was being done to keep Marilyn calm during the filming. The Millers would be staying at Parkside House, a rented mansion in Surrey, England. It had a dozen rooms and sat on an acre of magnificent gardens. It also had a full staff of servants. The house was about an hour’s drive from Pinewood Studios.
The Prince and the Showgirl was set in London, circa 1911. Grand Duke Charles, Prince Regent of Carpathia (Olivier), is taken to see a stage trifle, a comedy called The Coconut Girl. Smitten by the sight of her half-exposed bosom when the strap of her gown breaks, he invites Elsie to the embassy for a “late-night supper.” Thinking it’s a party, Elsie accepts the invitation. When she discovers that dinner is set only for two, she tries to flee. The movie becomes a series of encounters in which Elsie attempts to escape; the regent tries to get her into bed; she meets his approving, eccentric family; melts the prince’s frozen heart; and shows a surprising, if naive, intelligence on matters of policy.
* * *
By now Marilyn’s reputation for erratic on-set behavior was so widespread that Olivier began to worry. Indeed, things got off to a bad start on the first day of rehearsal. Olivier greeted the British cast and crew. These were Olivier’s people, with whom he had worked over the course of many years. Then he introduced Marilyn. Already fraught with nerves, she immediately felt he was condescending toward her. In an instant she perceived—and perhaps rightly—that he viewed her as simply a popular Hollywood star for whom professional allowances must be made because, after all, she was not in their league.
* * *
Shooting began on August 7. Marilyn might arrive at the studio only an hour or two late, yet it could be hours before she appeared on the set, ready to work. The Prince and the Showgirl established the greatest conflict of her career: her desire to be a great artist, and the massive anxiety that overcame her while performing, crippling her with fear.
With the amount of stress she was under—a good deal of it self-inflicted—there was no way for her to get a decent amount of sleep without fairly massive doses of pills. Milton Greene found various ways of getting drugs sent over from America to England. He also rooted out doctors in Europe to supply them with pills. After being knocked out, she would awake depressed and sluggish. Amphetamines came into play to give her energy. Nothing in the scenario was new or shocking to Greene, who was deeply involved with pills to deal with his own demons. It was yet another area in which the movie star and her partner were soulmates.
Each shooting day Beatrice “Bumble” Dawson, a well-respected and much-loved dresser, had a very difficult time getting Marilyn into her costume. Depending on how much she had been eating or drinking, Marilyn’s weight fluctuated wildly. (One of her Parkside House maids noted: “There were always empty champagne bottles around.”) The costume she wears in the movie had to be made in three different sizes. Marilyn drove Dawson crazy. One day she would come in and her bust would be a size 36, the next day a size 40. To make matters more difficult, Marilyn refused to wear undergarments that could have contained her expanding breasts, belly, and hips. Eventually Dawson would grouse: “I have two ulcers: one is named ‘Marilyn’ and the other ‘Monroe.’”
Even after she was dressed and made up, there were always long gaps before she’d arrive on the set. As the cast and crew waited, Marilyn lingered in the dressing room. There she felt safe and was usually sweet and accommodating. It was on the soundstage that the terrors gripped her and she became difficult. “Sometimes I feel a doom set over me,” Marilyn said. “Just as I’m walking on the stage. I don’t know why, but I get over it … sometimes. Sometimes it lasts all day.”
When Marilyn finally did appear on the set, she might appear confused and vague—hungover from barbiturates and another night without sleep. While working, she was unable to follow the actions and lines of the other actors in the scene with her, and she had great difficulty saying her lines on cue.
Olivier claimed that he couldn’t understand why Marilyn suddenly turned from the seductive creature he met in New York to this difficult, resentful, spoiled brat of a performer. Although he did concede, “Whenever those cameras rolled you couldn’t look at anything else but Marilyn.” Perhaps this was another reason for the tension between them. The British actor Robert Stephens once said of Olivier: “His one great fault was a paranoid jealousy of anyone who he thought was a rival.”
One morning on the set, Olivier delivered the ultimate insult to Marilyn when, at a loss how to motivate her for a scene, he advised her to “be sexy.” As far as she was concerned “sexy” was not something you could switch on or off. It was something you either were or weren’t. If the scene called for her to feel sexual, that was one thing. But you couldn’t command a performer to “be sexy.”
* * *
From Marilyn’s point of view it was Olivier who was approaching his role wrong—playing the prince too stoic, overly severe, giving the audience no indication that her character could ever break through and make him fall in love with her. She suspected that Olivier’s motives were to have the audience focus on him. Arthur Miller wrote that Marilyn felt Olivier was “trying to compete with her like another woman, a coquette drawing the audience’s sexual attention away from herself.” There may have been just cause for Marilyn’s suspicions.
The magic of movies—the magic of Marilyn—was that through all the frustrating waiting, through her anguish, paranoia, and fears, she was absolutely sma
shing in the rushes. When the cast and crew watched the dailies from the previous day’s work, they were collectively astonished at the radiance and joy she projected—along with her expert comic timing.
This also played into Olivier’s frustration with her.
Olivier wanted Marilyn to be good. Just not that good. “I don’t think Laurence Olivier ever forgave Marilyn for being better than him in that movie,” Susan Strasberg remarked.
“My hatred for her was one of the strongest emotions I had ever felt,” Olivier said years after Marilyn’s death.
It was in England that Arthur Miller for the first time got a glimpse into just how damaged and troubled Marilyn was. He was appalled at her unprofessional behavior on the set and how unreasonable she could be. He knew she was vulnerable and sensitive. Those were the reasons he fell in love with her. But now she seemed to be an unpleasant mixture of desperation, insecurity, and irrationality.
In her more lucid moments Marilyn acknowledged that she was not an easy person. “I can be a monster,” she said matter-of-factly years later. “When we were first married, he saw me as so beautiful and innocent among the Hollywood wolves that I tried to be like that. I almost became his student in life and literature the way I’m Lee’s student for acting. But when the monster showed, Arthur couldn’t believe it. I disappointed him when that happened. But I felt he knew and loved all of me. I wasn’t sweet all through. He should love the monster too.”
Miller never knew when she might change into the accusing, vengeful Marilyn. Marilyn suspected Miller agreed with Olivier that she was an irrational bitch. He wasn’t standing up for her. He was just like all the rest. Then she would collapse in despair, her anger replaced by the sorrowful self-lacerating woman. Miller never knew who he was dealing with or if he was dealing with her in the right way.
Fed up with her erratic behavior, negative attitude, and pleas for help, Miller needed to let his feelings be known. Not wanting to confront Marilyn face-to-face, he wrote about her in his diary. Then he left the diary out in the open on a desk, next to her script—a place she was sure to see it.
Exactly what Miller wrote in the notebook has never been revealed, but reading her new husband’s opinion of her was one of the most devastating, catastrophic moments in Marilyn’s life. In After the Fall, his autobiographical play about their marriage, Miller says she read it in astonishment and then fainted.
Marilyn told friends that it described what a disappointment she had turned out to be. How Miller was embarrassed and ashamed of her in front of his friends. Distraught, she told Lee Strasberg that it had something to do with how at first he thought of her as some kind of an angel, and now he viewed her as a troublesome bitch. (Later she would claim he’d called her a “whore.”)
In his play Miller claimed that he had written that the only person he could ever love was his daughter. He goes on to describe how, when they were at their first party as man and wife, he felt ashamed of Marilyn because he didn’t know if his new wife had slept with any of the men there. “I swear to you,” he reveals, “I did get to where I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever been ashamed of. But it was too late. I had written that, and I was like all the others that had betrayed you, and I could never be trusted again.”
The diary entry smashed any hope of him saving her from her continuous torment of unworthiness—or of them finding a happy life together. Miller became the embodiment of all the men in her life who took advantage and then looked down on her. He had judged her and found her to be a disappointment.
Although the marriage was shattered, they would spend the next three years trying to put the pieces together again. They tried to put the diary incident aside, and limped forward like wounded animals.
Dressed in formfitting scarlet, Marilyn caused a sensation at the UK premiere of Miller’s play A View from the Bridge. She was practically mobbed at intermission, and took refuge with a bartender in a small room where refreshments were prepared. She had grown frightened of people staring at her.
Somewhere lost in all of this was Milton Greene. Marilyn was married to Arthur now, and that was putting up a wall between them. They were grappling with how they would fit into each other’s lives—and the future of the company. Arthur Miller and Milton Greene had never really liked each other. Each tolerated the other because the common link was Marilyn. Now that Marilyn was married to Arthur, he started to subtly and negatively influence Marilyn’s feelings about Milton.
Miller began telling Marilyn that Greene was in over his head with producing her films. In hindsight, this claim seems unfair. Yes, Greene was new, but he had done very well by Marilyn. Spending a lot of time alone with Marilyn, Miller started planting the seeds in her head that Greene was cheating her. Miller writes in his autobiography that Marilyn began to suspect that Greene was buying British antiques and charging them to Marilyn Monroe Productions.*
Still, she couldn’t deny that the Greenes had supported her and promoted her in the way she wanted to be perceived for a year—when she was basically penniless. Sure they expected to get something from being associated with the phenomenon of the Monroe name—but Milton also seemed genuinely to have the good of her career at heart. Yet Marilyn, always sensitive to people betraying her, began to take on Miller’s attitude toward Milton. She started to feel that Greene had been using her all along.
* * *
Marilyn was invited to meet Queen Elizabeth at a royal command performance of The Battle of the River Plate on October 29. It was to be a glittering event that would combine Hollywood royalty with literal royalty. At a royal command film performance various stars were invited to attend the premiere of a movie chosen by the palace. Whether they were connected to the film or just invited for the viewing, it was a tremendous honor. There was strict protocol with the queen involving “how to curtsey” and specific instructions like “no low cut gowns, no wearing black—because only the Queen can wear black.”
Jack Cardiff—the cinematographer of The Prince and the Showgirl (among many other films)—attempted to give Marilyn some advice before the historic meeting. He explained that Queen Elizabeth had a difficult job—she must remain poised and pleasant without displaying emotion. Cardiff cautioned: “You’re so beautiful, so attractive. Everyone will be saying, ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ So please don’t bare your breasts to her. If you have those boobs out they’ll all laugh at you.” Marilyn listened intently and replied, with a perfectly straight face, “You’re so right.”
That night, shortly before leaving for the royal meeting, Cardiff witnessed Marilyn coming down the stairs in a formfitting gold lamé gown with her breasts taped up so that they pointed straight forward, almost popping out of the gown—a jaw-droppingly revealing décolletage.*
Just before the assembled celebrities were to be presented to the queen, twenty-two-year-old Brigitte Bardot rushed into one of the powder rooms for a last-minute makeup check. “There we were powdering our noses,” Bardot recalled. Staring at each other’s reflection, they greeted each other. “She was ravishing,” Bardot said. “I will never forget it. She was incredibly lovely … like a baby. Fresh, beautiful, and pure.”
As for Marilyn, who rarely acknowledged other blondes, she relented for Bardot. When asked about her French rival, Marilyn commented, “I think she is so charming.”
The queen regally made her way down the line of guests; when she reached Marilyn they shook hands. While Marilyn curtsied, her bosom was revealed as if it were a serving tray displaying pastries. The queen’s eyes flashed for only a moment on Marilyn’s exposed breasts before she looked smilingly into her face as the two exchanged pleasantries.
Despite all the tensions, illnesses, hostilities, competiveness, no-shows, lateness, and retakes, The Prince and The Showgirl finally wrapped on November 16, 1956. It was eleven days over schedule—but, as Milton Greene liked to point out, under budget. On the last day of filming Marilyn was actually contrite about her behavior on the film. She addressed the entire cast and cre
w and begged them to forgive her. She said that she had been ill throughout the filming. Four days later, lovely but windblown and sleepy looking, she flew back to the United States to attempt a happy life with Miller.
SIXTEEN
MARRIAGE
Their marriage hit the iceberg in England, but neither was ready to admit defeat. They sailed deeper into their partnership—somewhat wary and disillusioned but game for an attempt to make it work. Marilyn decided to try to overlook what she read in his diary—life was filled with disappointments anyway. Miller was her current father figure, savior, and lover, and she clung to that, throwing all her emotional resources into it to make it legitimate.
It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other—it was more that they discovered that they were passionately in love with specific aspects of the other, not the full person. Yet there was so much riding on the marriage that they would take the time to nurture the parts of each other that they fell in love with, and try to embrace the various other parts.
As Marilyn turned thirty-one she was very intent on creating something solid to hold on to as she aged. Already she was worrying about her beauty fading. Would that make Miller turn away from her? She feared it was the only thing that had hooked him in the first place. She wrote: “Alas how will I cope when I am/even less youthful—”
In her gratitude to him for loving her, she put her own identity aside and made being Mrs. Arthur Miller her top priority. She adopted a very traditional 1950s housewife’s attitude—her husband’s career was more important than her own, and her major role was to support him emotionally. “I’ll tell you my definition of a good wife: Somebody who feels needed as a wife,” she said. “You have to contribute to feel needed. Too many women underrate the responsibilities of marriage. They think once they have the wedding ring they can just sit back and relax.”
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