Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  According to Amy, Marilyn had considered Mara Scherbatoff’s death a bad omen for her wedding. “But she also knew that, omens or not, she had made a terrible mistake in agreeing to this marriage.”

  But the cast and crew awaited, and as Marilyn said, she felt sorry for Arthur. The show went on. Moments later, Rabbi Robert Goldberg presided, with Arthur’s brother Kermit and Hedda Rosten as attendants. That afternoon, Marilyn performed beautifully, greeting all twenty-five guests, working the party tidily, assuring that everyone had enough roast beef, sliced turkey and champagne. “Well,” said George Axelrod, congratulating the Millers and wittily reversing Shaw’s famous reply to Isadora Duncan’s proposal, “I hope your children have Arthur’s looks and Marilyn’s brains.” She laughed heartily, Axelrod recalled, but Arthur was unamused. From the bride’s gaiety, no one would have guessed her tortured hesitation.

  Before the Millers prepared to depart for London and the production of The Prince and the Showgirl (as the film of The Sleeping Prince was eventually rechristened by Warner Bros.), Arthur put up for sale his Roxbury house, reasoning, with Marilyn’s agreement, that later they could begin a new life together in a new home. On July 2, the Herald Tribune carried the notice:

  Playwright and screen star’s hideout, 7 rooms, 3 baths, swimming pool, tennis court, terrace, two-car garage, small studio. 4 acres. $29,500 ($38,500 with 26 acres).

  A quick sale was made for $27,500, and after a small mortgage and fees were paid, the balance was put in escrow for another property nearby.

  That first week of July was full of hard negotiations, all of them Milton’s responsibility. There were many legal and commercial matters for him and Stein to settle—among them disputes with Olivier regarding the deal between MMP and Olivier’s production company; discussions involving MCA and Jack Warner, who was insisting on control of the film’s final cut; and bargaining with British employment authorities, who were balking at the unusual number of Americans to be imported for this cooperative venture. Also, the Millers asked Hedda Rosten, Arthur’s old friend and Marilyn’s new one, to join the company as Marilyn’s personal secretary, at a generous fee of two hundred dollars weekly. Amy Greene, foreseeing trouble because of Hedda’s increasing problems with alcohol, advised Milton that here was a perfect example of Marilyn’s excessive generosity—not to say her need to surround herself with a battalion of support as she prepared for the challenge of Olivier and an English cast.

  But the most outrageous and time-consuming demand of all came from none other than Lee Strasberg, who appeared at Milton’s office, asked that Irving be summoned, and announced the condition for Paula’s participation as Marilyn’s coach on Prince. He would accept nothing less than a guarantee of $25,000 for ten weeks’ work, plus expenses and double for overtime. This, Stein quickly figured, would come to about $38,000—again, much more than most actors were receiving in New York or Hollywood. But as Stein noted in his corporate memorandum,

  Lee doesn’t care that this money would really come from Marilyn’s pocket. Joe [Carr, MMP’s accountant] and Milton carefully explained the shaky finances, but Lee was adamant. He kept emphasizing Marilyn’s emotional weakness—and then he said he would be willing to settle for a percentage of the picture! He also wanted George Cukor to direct, not Larry. Paula, he said, is more than a coach—therefore he doesn’t care what other coaches get. He absolutely rejects Paula’s Bus Stop salary.

  Lee Strasberg might have been as good an agent as a teacher; in any case, what amounted to his Method-acting portrayal of Sammy Glick threw Milton and the company into mild panic. Marilyn simply said that she would yield some of her own weekly income, for Paula must be there. She was—although tricky checkbook maneuvers were necessary for the remainder of the year so that Paula Strasberg received the salary that paid her, after Monroe and Olivier, more than anyone connected with The Prince and the Showgirl. A curious coda to this is the fact that the ubiquitous Dr. Hohenberg, to whom Milton and Marilyn were still attached, involved herself in the negotiations on behalf of Paula, whom she did not know.

  On July 9, Milton and Irving departed for London as an advance team, and on the rainy afternoon of July 13, Marilyn and Arthur followed. The rest of the team—Paula, Hedda, Amy and Joshua—arrived ten days later. When the Millers arrived on the morning of the fourteenth, Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier were at the airport to greet them—along with over seventy policemen necessary to control a squad of two hundred shouting photographers and reporters. As Arthur recalled, England could have been towed into the ocean without anyone taking notice. Whenever Marilyn appeared in public during the next four months, she was invariably mobbed, and it was soon decided that if she went to stores, they would have to be cleared in advance. Just so, if she made a remotely interesting statement it received front-page coverage in the London papers next day. On Saturday, August 25, for example, Marilyn decided to shop on busy Regent Street, but she was so overwhelmed by adoring crowds that she fainted, police cordons were set up and she was unable to work next day due to nervous exhaustion and a transient attack of agoraphobia.

  As if Milton had not enough budgetary problems, Arthur confided to him that first evening his own precarious financial situation. He was obliged to pay $16,000 a year for the support of his two children; his ex-wife was receiving forty percent of his income; he had tax problems and attorneys’ fees. Would there be any possibility of integrating his income, which was not much in any case, with Marilyn’s? Could he file a joint tax return with Marilyn and MMP? “Perhaps later on we can deal with this question of [buying rights] to his writings,” replied Irving with some exasperation when Milton took up with him the issue of Arthur’s finances. “That could help him.”

  For the rest of the year, MMP tried to find a way that would (thus Irving) “result in capital gain to [Arthur] and defer income. . . . We can also try to get financing and distribution for an Arthur Miller picture, although it will be very difficult. . . . He is willing to write a screenplay for The Brothers Karamazov for Marilyn, [because] of late he has been extremely conscious of expenses and how they can be charged against MMP as business expenses.” Miller wanted the financial help of MMP, but as Irving concluded, “he might not agree that he needs help in bringing his name before the public.” These discussions proceeded despite the repeated counsel of Miller’s friend and agent Kay Brown that “he ought to stay out of [Marilyn’s] career, as she ought to stay out of his.” A complicated scenario was therefore in process concerning control of Marilyn’s money, career and corporation. The various players—none of them friendly toward one another—included Arthur, Milton and Lee.

  The Greenes were installed at Tibbs Farm, Ascot; the Millers had grander quarters at Parkside House at Englefield Green, Egham, near Windsor Park. An hour’s drive from London and a bit less to Pinewood Studios, Parkside House was a Georgian mansion owned by Lord North (publisher of the Financial Times) and his wife, pianist and actress Joan Carr. Situated on ten lush acres with gardens and convenient bicycle paths, the house featured an oak-beamed living room, five bedrooms, two baths and quarters for the resident servants. Marilyn was delighted that Milton had arranged for the master suite to be repainted white in her honor.

  But during four months, there was not much time for Marilyn to enjoy the house, London or the English countryside. The day after their arrival, she was hauled off to a press conference at the Savoy Hotel, where two inspectors, a sergeant, six constables and four teams of police had to restrain four thousand fans along the Strand. Marilyn arrived an hour late, wearing a tight, two-piece black dress joined at the midriff with a diaphanous inset. The usual tiresome question-and-answer session followed. Yes, she said, she was delighted to be working with Sir Laurence; and yes, she would like to do classical roles. Lady Macbeth, perhaps? asked a reporter from the provinces. “Yes, but at present that is just a dream for me. I know how much work I have to do before I could undertake a role like that.” With such grace and modesty, she won over the British pres
s in a single afternoon. According to Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer for her film, Marilyn was everywhere surrounded by such a blaze of publicity that to everyone working at Pinewood a special pass was issued for admittance to the lot.

  Cardiff, who photographed such color films as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and The African Queen, came to know and befriend Marilyn during the difficult production of Prince. He found her alternately terrified and strong, afraid of facing the public and her fellow actors but eager to make a hit in this picture.

  Unlike many other leading ladies I’d known and worked with, Marilyn was never bitchy, never used foul language even when the going was rough. Of course there was a kind of psychological dichotomy about her that everyone found somewhat difficult: on the one hand her stated desire to be a serious actress, on the other her lack of discipline, her lateness. I think all this arose from her fear of being rejected, of failing. But behind this vulnerability there was a lot of iron and steel.

  On July 18, 19 and 20, Marilyn submitted to the usual wardrobe and makeup tests for Technicolor, every aspect supervised by Milton, to whose keen eye Olivier begrudgingly deferred. The major reason he arranged this deal, Milton told Olivier, was “to take her out of the sexpot category—to put her in something that required her greatest comedic gifts.” Marilyn’s appearance in the film was to him an important factor in her success as a sophisticated comedienne.

  But Olivier had his doubts. When he introduced Marilyn to the English cast, he said he was delighted to be working with his old friends Sybil Thorndike and Esmond Knight, whom he had known for decades. Then, in his most charmingly condescending manner, he took Marilyn’s hand and said that everyone would be patient with her, that their methods (nothing like The Method, it was implied) would perhaps require some time for her to learn, but they were pleased to have “such a delightful little thing” among them.2 “He tried to be friendly, but he came on like someone slumming,” Marilyn said later, and in this she was stating only the obvious truth.

  To establish his primacy on the set, to counter the enormous influence he feared from Paula (and against which he had been warned by Billy Wilder and Joshua Logan), Olivier took the most patronizing attitude: his co-star he regarded as merely a Hollywood product from whom he would have to exact obedience and obeisance. “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn,” Olivier said, and the die was cast. From that moment, as Hedda Rosten reported to Norman, Marilyn became “suspicious, sullen, defensive.” Even Arthur, who usually sided with Olivier to encourage Marilyn’s cooperation, had to admit that the director’s arch tongue was too quick with the cutting joke, and that Marilyn felt intimidated by him from the start.

  This unfortunate atmosphere was exacerbated by a calamitous event from which her marriage never recovered and which further shook Marilyn’s confidence just when she needed it most. Marilyn found Arthur’s notebook open on the dining table at Parkside House and casually glanced at the page. There she read that her husband had second thoughts about their marriage, that he thought she was an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman he pitied, but that he feared his own creative life would be threatened by her relentless emotional demands. “It was something about how disappointed he was in me,” she told the Strasbergs,

  how he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Arthur said he no longer had a decent answer to that one.

  Arthur never admitted he had made such personal observations, but his published memoirs and every interview he granted after her death expressed those sentiments. In a matter of a moment, Marilyn’s life with her third husband commenced its slow, tragic declivity—within three weeks of the vows, as if justifying her worst prenuptial anxieties.

  Marilyn was devastated, according to Susan Strasberg, who was with Paula in London: the shock influenced Marilyn’s work and placed on her coach an additional burden of motherly nurturing. Even from the first weeks of filming, Allan Snyder added, the marriage seemed strained, the newlyweds distant from each other. “I think Arthur really likes dumb blondes,” Marilyn said later to Rupert Allan, trying to lighten the pain of this memory. “He never had one before me. Some help he was.” Sidney Skolsky later summed up the issue: “Miller looked on Marilyn strictly as an ideal and was shocked to discover that she is a human being, a person, even as you and I and maybe Miller.”

  * * *

  Marilyn and Paula had to endure a rehearsal period, beginning July 30—exercises to which Marilyn was unaccustomed; filming finally began on August 7. As might have been expected after Olivier’s introduction of her to the cast, there was a frostiness between Marilyn and Olivier, who leaped from behind the camera to act before it. In both stars, anxiety clashed with pride, and there were often dozens of takes for each scene. Olivier, exasperated, gave a direction, only to watch Marilyn walk off to discuss it with Paula and frequently to telephone Lee in New York.

  The Strasberg interference very nearly sabotaged The Prince and the Showgirl, and Paula was soon sucked into something she did not want, as Susan recalled. But there was a relevant history:

  My mother had once been tested for a movie role—that of a pretty blonde—but she was passed over in favor of Joan Blondell, and in a way I think she was now trying to regain her lost acting career through Marilyn. She was always blamed for Marilyn’s lateness, but this infuriated my mother—and what could she do about it? She really wanted Marilyn to succeed. On the other hand, Marilyn used my mother as a kind of whipping girl, someone to take the blame for her own faults.

  At the same time, Arthur made no secret of his resentment of the Strasbergs: to him Lee and Paula were “poisonous and vacuous,” and he detested Marilyn’s “nearly religious dependency” on them—perhaps, among better reasons, because he felt his own primacy and influence were thereby compromised. “She didn’t know any more about acting than the cleaning woman” was Arthur’s assessment of Paula; she was “a hoax, but so successful in making herself necessary to people like Marilyn [that] she created this tremendous reputation.” But Arthur perhaps failed to see that Marilyn simply had no women friends in her life, and Paula’s unalloyed maternal attention to her was quite simply the best she could get.

  Equally, relations between Arthur and Milton became strained. “Greene thought he would be this big-shot producer and she would be working for him,” Arthur said later. “But she saw that he had ulterior aims,” by which, presumably, he meant money and prestige. But those aims may indeed have been shared.

  Nor was Milton an innocent. Even his MCA agent and friend Jay Kanter allowed that “it was important for Milton to control her, just as it was for Strasberg and for Miller to control her.” One of the mechanisms for such maneuvering was for Milton continually to provide Marilyn with whatever drugs she needed (or thought she needed) to get from one day to the next with Olivier. At the time, production assistant David Maysles felt he was “getting involved in things way above his ability to sustain,” as he told his brother Albert: David was referring to the generous allotment of pills that often kept Marilyn in a state near oblivion. These drugs, as everyone knew, were “wrecking her,” as Allan Snyder put it, “and by this time Milton really wasn’t as good for her as he wanted to be. He was a great manipulator, and there were gallon bottles of pills being flown in for her,” from none other than Amy and Marilyn’s New York doctor, Mortimer Weinstein; on September 27, for example, Milton wrote to Irving asking that Weinstein send “two months supply of Dexamyl—not spansules—for MM, a dozen or so at a time in small envelopes or parcels, and commence as soon as possible.” As Cardiff said, Milton was brilliant and exhausted with responsibility, but he could be “a dark, somewhat sinister character who felt he had to keep the show on the road however he could.”3

  As if all this were not enough, there occurred a fight over credits: Milton’s agreement with Olivier called for “Executive Producer” status
for Milton H. Greene, but by late October, Olivier felt this was inappropriate and took the argument directly to Jack Warner himself. In the first released prints of the picture, Milton was so credited, but later his name was mysteriously and unjustly removed.

  None of the many problems could have been much alleviated when Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, arrived—Marilyn’s predecessor who had created onstage the role of the American showgirl Elsie Marina. With uncharacteristic lack of consideration (but perhaps with Olivier’s tacit or expressed approval), Vivien came to Pinewood to watch a few days of shooting, making no secret of her low estimate of Marilyn.

  Not entirely unreasonably, Marilyn was miserable wherever she turned. She felt condescension from her director, betrayal by her husband and a lack of support from Milton, who had to cooperate with Olivier and his staff. All these were people she respected and no one, she felt, treated her as an equal. In this environment of complete dependence, she lost her ability to make any concrete decision and constantly second-guessed herself. The result was that Marilyn was pitched back to the conditions of her childhood and adolescence, when every relationship was transitory.

  In this regard, her fundamental emotional needs could perhaps never be met by so unreal a career as film acting, for the obvious reason that she had so long assumed a false identity with a false name, hair and image; she invented a new character for each film; and her habitual suspicions about others’ loyalties had compelled her to change agents, coaches and advisers—not to say husbands. Nothing was permanent, nothing rooted, and now there was no one on whom she could rely without question.

  In an odd way, her lifelong condition of dependence—the one thing from which no one was willing to free her—was also one of the strongest elements in her appeal to the public. She begged to be embraced; no man or woman could fail to be moved by someone so patently needy and to all appearances inviolable. One reporter who managed a private interview at Parkside House recalled a parade of her courtiers drifting in and out, inserting comments and informing her of their presence. As he departed, Marilyn touched his arm lightly and said with unutterable weariness, “Too many people, too many people.”