As for Montand, he succumbed to Marilyn’s compelling sexuality—a desire that had been building up in him for weeks. She had been out ill again, and Montand dropped by her room to see how she was feeling. He sat on the edge of her bed and patted her hand tenderly. “I bent over to kiss her goodnight, but suddenly it was a wild kiss, a fire, a hurricane. I couldn’t stop,” he admitted.
When Marilyn knocked on his door the following night, wearing a fur coat with nothing underneath, the one-night stand evolved into a full-fledged affair. In each other they found a kindred spirit. Marilyn began behaving more professionally.
Instead of conducting a clandestine affair, Montand and Marilyn seemed to be reveling in the attention. With their spouses away, they did nothing to hide their involvement. Marilyn, more social than usual, was seen all over town with Montand. The gossip columns went wild with the Monroe-Montand affair.
As the chaotic production progressed, Marilyn may have seemed more functional on the outside, but emotionally she was a mess. Long-distance conversations with her New York psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris, weren’t helping her much either. She made another suicide attempt—which may have been a cry for help. It had happened many times before.
Dr. Kris recommended that she start seeing her colleague in Los Angles, Dr. Ralph Greenson—known as a psychiatrist to the stars (his patients included Frank Sinatra and Vivien Leigh). He would become a central figure in Marilyn’s life and a key player on the night of her death.
At first he would describe her as “a woman married to an academic man; sexually frigid; history of promiscuous behavior prior to her marriage to an austere academician.” According to one of Dr. Greenson’s essays, in which he often used Marilyn as a case study, when the doctor asked her to feel free to talk about herself, she said: “Well, I always get depressed. I think I have been depressed most of my life. At times I do feel good—in fact too good. I know it comes from hating myself or loving myself; the therapist told me so. But knowing this does not seem to be of any help to me.”
In subsequent visits she described to the doctor that her latest suicide attempt had been brought on by an affair with a married man, who she felt couldn’t give her the attention she craved because of his devotion to his wife.
Dr. Greenson found her unable to stay focused because she “interrupted herself with free association to her childhood miseries, and to other men who had taken advantage of her sexually and otherwise.” Greenson began to make arrangements for future visits. They decided to start with sessions three times a week.
* * *
When the picture was completed at last in mid-June, the catty columnist Hedda Hopper had summoned Montand for an interview and quoted him saying: “Had Marilyn been more sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened.… Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”
This “schoolgirl crush” comment was quoted repeatedly, much to Marilyn’s embarrassment. Montand denied he ever said it.
Marilyn didn’t talk about the affair in the press. It wasn’t in her character to kiss and tell. But she felt as ardently toward him as ever, and spoke to friends of plans to vacation with Montand in Italy. Apparently he had rhapsodized about the beauty of Florence during pillow talk. Deeply in love with Montand, Marilyn was determined to lure him into her arms.
Back in Europe, Simone Signoret had to deal with the affair by reading about it in front-page headlines. Signoret attempted to put on a stoic facade for the public. To reporters she conveyed a worldly, some might say “French,” attitude when defending her husband’s dalliance. “Tell me, do you know who could resist if they took Marilyn Monroe into their arms?” At the same time she graciously let Marilyn off the hook: “If Marilyn is in love with my husband, it proves she has good taste, for I am in love with him too.”
In actuality Signoret was shattered by the affair, yet for her remaining twenty-five years, she never publicly uttered a negative word about Marilyn. The French actress Catherine Deneuve, a close friend, commented, “She bore Marilyn etched on her face like a permanent scar.”*
Montand was aware of his wife’s pain and wanted to get back to her as soon as possible to explain and console. He scheduled a flight to Paris immediately after his duties on Let’s Make Love were complete.
Marilyn intended to keep the relationship alive. But since she was scheduled to go directly into shooting The Misfits, she didn’t have a plan, or the time to devise one, to complete the seduction. She flew back to New York on June 26 for a brief recuperation period before beginning The Misfits.
When she learned that Montand was scheduled to fly back to Europe to patch things up with Signoret—with a stopover and plane switch in New York—Marilyn hatched a scheme. She rented a hotel room near Idlewild Airport and hired a limousine stocked with champagne and caviar. Secure in the knowledge that, using a mixture of her allure and their shared experiences, she could tempt him away from his wife. She headed for the airport. Michael Selsman was sent by Marilyn’s press agency to do damage control in case things got out of hand.
Legend has it that Marilyn waited in the limo naked under a fur coat, a trick that had worked for her before. When his flight was delayed because of a bomb threat, Montand did take refuge in the limo with Marilyn. But she was unable to persuade him to leave Simone and stay with her.
* * *
As for the finished film, Let’s Make Love has some moments of charm, but the story really revolves around Yves Montand, and because at this point his English is very bad, he is difficult to understand. The chemistry they conveyed so strongly at the initial press conference did not materialize on screen.
Because of the lackluster box office and her fluctuating weight and appearance in the movie, many in the media began to mark this movie as the start of Marilyn’s decline. Although she was still considered one of the world’s great love goddesses, the premiere of Let’s Make Love in 1960 marked a turning point in the way Marilyn would be covered by the press. “Marilyn offers her famous curves, not a little on the fleshy side. Diet anyone?” one review cattily joked.
Her age—thirty-four—was emphasized in almost every article, along with the ticking clock and view that her reign as the leading sex symbol of the day must inevitably come to an end. Some of the more vicious journalists kept a vigilant eye out for any signs of aging.
TWENTY
AN UNFIT MISFIT
It is often said that Arthur Miller wrote The Misfits as a “Valentine” for his wife.
It’s unfortunate and sad that The Misfits is Marilyn Monroe’s last completed movie. She had reached a mastery of her craft of acting, and her physical appearance in the film, for the most part, is modern and lovely. Miller’s basic idea is a good one: three cowboys—all very different personality types—vying for the attention of Roslyn, a beautiful, lost soul in the empty, transitory wilderness of Nevada. The three cowboys make a living by rounding up wild horses in the mountains and selling them for dog food. They reject the idea of having a steady job and the lack of freedom that comes with working for “wages.” These cowboys become enamored of Roslyn, who is in town to finalize her divorce. She flirts with all of them but becomes involved with Gay Langland, to be played by Clark Gable.
In the final script the dialogue for these characters is sometimes pretentious and often clumsy. The characters are paper thin—symbols rather than believable people. Whitey Snyder, Marilyn’s makeup man, remembered Marilyn’s opinion of the script: “She felt that Arthur had written dialogue for her that was totally insignificant and extraneous to the film. She complained that the movie had to do with the cowboys and their horses and had nothing to do with her character.”
Despite her dislike of the screenplay, Marilyn hoped that John Huston’s vision and direction could transform the material into something exceptional and exciting, while the talent of her costars Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach might somehow bring the characters to life. When Marilyn arri
ved in Reno to start shooting The Misfits, she was ill and dependent on pills.
Though nursing a broken heart and a public humiliation, she was still hoping to continue the affair with Yves Montand. The marriage in which she had put so much hope was over. To make matters worse, most of the shooting would take place during the summer months in the scorching Nevada desert. At the airport on July 21 a throng of fans awaited her arrival. Marilyn was bleary and weary but still game. Determined to live up to her image, she emerged from the plane doing her very best to call up the white goddess. Her beauty is apparent, but—wearing a skintight white blouse, white skirt, and holding a white chiffon scarf—she looks exhausted and slightly bloated.
* * *
Regardless of their current feelings for each other, in an attempt to maintain the front of a contently married couple, the Millers took a suite together at the Mapes Hotel—where most of the cast and crew were staying. But it soon became apparent that their union was anything but harmonious. Their violent arguments could be heard through the walls, and other guests began to complain. Eventually they would move to separate rooms.
Very soon after the production began on July 21, the troubles started. “I first noticed her condition when we started production,” director John Huston said. “She was very late, and as time went on her condition worsened. Often she would not even know where she was. Her eyes had a strange look. She was definitely under the influence. She had apparently been on narcotics for a very long time. I spoke to Arthur about it … it seemed so hopeless.”
By now everyone expected there to be delays on a Marilyn Monroe movie, yet shortly into filming it became clear that shooting The Misfits was going to be a complete nightmare. “Marilyn didn’t show up for hours, sometimes days, while the cast and crew sweated it out in the scorching Nevada desert with temperatures reaching as high as 120 degrees,” said Edward Parone, the assistant to the producer. “Some of the luckier crew members could wait in their cars with the air-conditioning running. Others sat around in the dry, dusty heat, waiting and waiting.”
Fifty-nine-year-old Clark Gable had it specified in his contract that he wouldn’t have to work after 5:00 p.m. because he wanted to spend time with his pregnant wife and stepchildren. His wife, Kay, was pregnant with his first child. But because of Marilyn’s continuous tardiness, the producer, Frank Taylor, had to push the time in the morning they’d start shooting to later and later. First he made it 10:00 a.m., then 11:00. Soon the call time for the actors was noon. And Marilyn still didn’t show up on time. “When Marilyn finally arrived on the set the work day was almost over—most of the crew was in a state of controlled fury,” Parone recalled. “They didn’t dare outwardly show their anger, but it turned them against her.”
Gable liked Marilyn. He was sympathetic toward her. When they actually did get a scene on film, he was proud of the work they were doing. No matter how late she had shown up on a particular day, often he went against the clause in his contract and worked well beyond 5:00 p.m. If Marilyn was in good shape and the scene was going well, he would stay until 6:00 or 7:30, and sometimes even later if need be.
Some days Marilyn showed up dazed, stumbling around and really out of it, and Huston was lucky if he got a usable take out of her. To counteract her lethargy she would take amphetamines in an attempt to work up the energy to shoot.
* * *
It soon became apparent that this was no longer a temperamental perfectionist determined to appear on the set only when she was ready to give her very best. Nor did her lateness stem exclusively from being a self-critical narcissist in fear of disappointing herself and her public: Marilyn had become a woman dangerously close to the edge—psychologically damaged, drug addicted—with pills being flown to her by various doctors. There was no longer an illusion that she was able to sustain the schedule of a normal, functioning, professional movie actress.
The dangerous cocktail of drugs she was taking, combined with the pressure of filming, started unleashing uncharacteristic bitchiness in Marilyn. Crew members like Angela Allen became disgusted with her behavior. Allen was shocked when Marilyn aggressively confronted her on the set. “I hear you’re Arthur’s new girlfriend,” Marilyn accused the younger woman. “Are you enjoying it?” Allen was incensed. It was known on the set—having been widely reported in the press—that Marilyn had had an affair with Yves Montand and was still pursuing him. She was the one committing adultery. There was certainly nothing going on between Miller and Allen. “But she could never be the one doing wrong, you see,” Allen explained. “She had to believe that Arthur was the one having an affair to make herself the victim.”
Marilyn waited for Allen’s response.
“If you have so much inside information then you must know if I’m enjoying it or not,” Allen shot back. “Because I certainly don’t know what you’re talking about. And I think you’re being very rude with your accusations.” Marilyn sauntered off to the safe haven of her entourage.
Later Huston took Allen aside. “Don’t feel bad about that,” he advised her. “She’s not normally like that. That’s not Marilyn talking. It’s the pills.”
At other times Marilyn was the consummate actress, letter perfect to the script and ready to work. Gable said of her admiringly, “When she’s there, she’s there. All of her is there! She’s there to work.”
Dawn Wells, who later went on to fame as Mary Ann in TV’s Gilligan’s Island, was then a Nevada high school student cast as an extra in a crowd scene. She happened to witness Marilyn working at her best. On a scorching day, Wells watched Marilyn do take after take with the cast. “What struck me was her fragility,’ Wells remembers. “I didn’t get a sense of the sex symbol I had seen in previous movies. She was beautiful, yes. Glowing. But I got the feeling that men would like to put their arms around her and protect her rather than take her to bed.” Indeed, Wells noticed that both Gable and Clift were very attentive, very gentle with Marilyn between takes. She also noticed Arthur Miller, dour and passive, observing on the sidelines. Wells did not see a disoriented, difficult actress. “On the one day that I was on the set, Marilyn was working. She knew her lines and was working like a true professional.”
Huston continued to demand rewrites of a script he intuitively knew was not working. Marilyn and Gable were each handed difficult new scenes to learn the night before shooting. Never a quick study, Marilyn disliked the rewrites even more than the originals. Miller was still grappling with mixed feelings of enchantment and repulsion toward Marilyn—his weird combination of lust and disgust: He couldn’t get past her past. He was ashamed of and fascinated by Marilyn’s humble beginnings, her lack of education, her childlike neediness, and most of all her sexual history—all of which he kept working into the lines.*
* * *
It has been suggested that Marilyn found the script painful to perform because it was based on her life, and the character was too close to her “true self.” This is not the case. Marilyn wanted nothing more than a good dramatic role. She resented that Miller could not bring Roslyn—a one-dimensional character—to compelling life.
Miller would have been better served writing a character with qualities he knew Marilyn to possess—vulnerability, naïveté, sensitivity, even suppressed anger—but also changing her character into a totally different woman rather than his caricature of Marilyn. Roslyn is a cardboard cutout of Marilyn plopped down in Nevada. He simply used lines that Marilyn had actually spoken and bits of biographical information, with only the slightest alterations attempting to disguise her. But it’s not done in any kind of creative or transformative way.
Any number of excellent writers would be moved by Marilyn’s unsettled personality—her vulnerability, her hazy sensuality, her paranoid outbursts—to write a complex and compelling character with Monroe’s qualities.**
But Miller continued to grind out scenes that never conveyed a deep exploration of Roslyn. The rewrites made Marilyn more hostile. Continuously now, she felt Miller was using her, j
ust like almost everyone else. Yet Marilyn was trapped in the movie, and she worked hard in an attempt to bring nuances and shading to a character that lacked depth, using the Method style of acting—often painfully searching through her past to bring realism to her character.
* * *
Marilyn’s physical presence on the set caused contradictory feelings. The script supervisor, Angela Allen, asked some of the male crew members if they really thought Monroe was the ultimate standard of feminine beauty and sexuality. Fed up, grumpy, and exhausted, a number of the men shouted out “No!” in unison. Perhaps they were put off by her inconsiderate lateness, but some of them insisted they found her zonked-out, Rubensian presence unappealing.
Others thought her preternaturally beautiful. The pills, the lack of sleep, the unstoppable anxiety did nothing to diminish Marilyn’s astonishing radiance. While visiting the set for Esquire magazine, journalist Alice McIntyre marveled: “She is like nothing human you have ever seen or dreamed of.… She is astonishingly white, so radically pale that in her presence you can look at others about as easily as you explore the darkness around the moon.”
After seeing the first screening of rushes, Angela Allen suddenly understood the fantastic hoopla surrounding the legend. “On the set she was exasperating. But the mythology surrounding her, the legend, all made sense when you saw her up there on the screen … she had an absolute luminous, magical quality.”
* * *
Marilyn, well aware that half of the production crew had turned against her, wanted to show them her celebrated body. It was something important she could add to the movie, she felt. As always, her nudity was the most valuable thing she thought she had to offer.
Marilyn Monroe Page 18