Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  From July to November, then, life was a constant web of intrigue. At various times, all sorts of misadventures occurred: Lee arrived (at the expense of MMP, of course), conferred with Olivier and was tossed out. Paula—on a restricted work visa—eventually went back to New York in the autumn, along with Hedda Rosten, who drank so much she was little help to anyone. Their departures left Marilyn depressed and lonely, and soon Milton summoned Dr. Hohenberg to London, which meant much expense with little result, for the doctor summarily announced that Milton “had been wrong to form MMP with Marilyn, and that she did not know how much longer the two partners could work together in an atmosphere of such emotional strain.” Marilyn, of course, saw this as a complete rejection of her professional life by her own psychiatrist.

  But Hohenberg had a suggestion for Marilyn, and forthwith whisked her off to meet her old friend Anna Freud, an analyst with a thriving London practice. Marilyn had several therapy sessions with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.

  Things continued to happen quickly and unpredictably. Arthur decided to visit the actors Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, in Paris, to discuss a production of The Crucible there; he then went on to New York to visit his children. At the same time, Marilyn was convinced that Milton was buying English antiques, charging them to MMP and shipping them to his home in Connecticut. It seemed as if everyone was spending her money—most of all Lee Strasberg, who put through daily reverse-charge telephone calls to Marilyn, reminding her that her only chance of finishing the picture successfully was with Paula. Forcing Olivier’s hand with the British authorities, Marilyn got her wish, and her coach returned with a renewed visa.

  All during this time, an expensive and complicated color film was in process—of all things, a drawing room comedy in which Marilyn Monroe, by some miracle of grace, gave one of the two finest performances of her life. As the production files indicate, she regularly sat in to watch the rough prints of the previous day’s work, and both Olivier and Milton had to agree that “she had some criticisms that were very good, and [she] overtly conveyed her appreciation to Larry.”

  While she was performing some of her best scenes in late August, Marilyn learned she was expecting a baby. Later, the pregnancy was always doubted even by those close to the situation like Amy and Allan, but Irving Stein’s daily memoranda of telephone calls from London indicate that as of August 31, Marilyn’s condition was confirmed by two London doctors. “Milton told me [by telephone] that she was pregnant but she is afraid she will lose the baby,” noted Irving. He understood Milton’s concern, for Irving too had seen, before his departure from London, that “Hedda and Marilyn were drinking a lot. Hedda is not a good influence on Marilyn, encourages her unreasonableness and evasiveness of truth . . . and says she and Arthur are neither of them ready for children. . . . Marilyn weeps, saying that all she wants is to finish the picture.” Marilyn lost the baby during the first week of September.

  This event was kept secret even from Olivier, who was allowed to believe that Marilyn was simply being moody and intransigent in the absence of Arthur, on whom she still depended for approval. This ignorance of fact was no doubt the cause of his resentment of her as a “thoroughly ill-mannered and rude girl. . . . I was never so glad to have a film over and done.” Nor, indeed, was she; but her public statements were invariably generous and deferential: “It was a wonderful experience to work with Olivier. I learned a lot.”

  Contrariwise, at least two eminent ladies claimed to have learned from her. Edith Sitwell, that empress of all eccentrics, made good on her earlier promise and welcomed Marilyn to her home in October. Wearing her usual array of rings on each finger, a medieval gown, a Plantagenet headdress and a mink stole, Dame Edith sat grandly, pouring hefty beakers of gin and grapefruit juice for herself and her guest. During several hours one afternoon, they sat discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, whose poems Marilyn was reading during sleepless nights that season. For Dame Edith, Marilyn recited lines from one of Hopkins’s Terrible Sonnets—“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”—saying that she understood perfectly the poet’s mood of despair. “She’s quite remarkable!” pronounced Sitwell soon after.

  To her pleasant surprise, Marilyn won the appreciation of one of the supporting players, the elderly Dame Sybil Thorndike, one of the legendary actresses of the English stage and the woman for whom Shaw had written St. Joan decades earlier. After less than a week on the set with Marilyn, she tapped her old friend Olivier on the shoulder: “You did well in that scene, Larry, but with Marilyn up there, nobody will be watching you. Her manner and timing are just too delicious. And don’t be too hard about her tardiness, dear boy. We need her desperately. She’s really the only one of us who knows how to act in front of a camera!” Even from Dame Sybil, these remarks did not go down well with Olivier.

  Whatever Marilyn’s insecurities about her marriage, she publicly defended Arthur against the Lord Chamberlain’s initial prohibition of A View from the Bridge, which was at first banned for its allusion to homosexuality. Outraged by the censorship, Marilyn was among the first to join something called The Watergate Theater Club, which protested all forms of interference against the arts. This turned out to be somewhat amusing to the English sense of irony, for at the premiere of View at the Comedy Theatre on October 11, Marilyn’s low-cut scarlet gown caused an appreciative riot and almost prevented the curtain from going up. Arthur calmly accepted this, but he began to exert pressure in graver business matters.

  The Milton Greene side of Marilyn Monroe Productions was not enthusiastically supporting Arthur’s desire to become involved in productions with her, and so Arthur took advantage of a strain in the Marilyn-Milton relationship to attempt greater control of MMP. This he did with some good reason, for things were in a generally chaotic condition. But Marilyn did not appreciate this, and for much of October—not knowing whom she could turn to—she was uncooperative, ornery and even uncordial to her colleagues at Pinewood. She had never been one who could leave her anxieties at the studio gate.

  None of this tension was evident to the public; in fact, Marilyn was the golden girl of London that season. Bus Stop opened in London a few days after View, and the general attitude of the press was summarized in The Times on October 17: “Miss Monroe is a talented comedienne, and her sense of timing never forsakes her. She gives a complete portrait, sensitively and sometimes even brilliantly conceived. There is about her a waif-like quality, an underlying note of pathos which can be strangely moving.”

  And so, with British favor ringing in her ears, Marilyn Monroe was invited to meet the Queen. The last to arrive even for this prestigious event, Marilyn finally appeared just before the doors were closed at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, on the evening of October 29. Before a screening of the British film The Battle of the River Platte, twenty film stars were presented to Her Majesty, among them Brigitte Bardot, Joan Crawford, Anita Ekberg and Victor Mature, but only Marilyn stopped the monarch in her glide down the receiving line. Wearing a dangerously off-the-shoulder gown, Marilyn made a perfect curtsy and clasped the Queen’s outstretched hand. Film of the event has survived, showing both women (who were exactly the same age) with somewhat astonished smiles. While Marilyn was in breathless awe at this signal moment, Her Majesty’s gaze was fixed in astonishment on the famous Monroe breasts, which for the occasion had been taped and pushed forward to even greater prominence.

  Even on this occasion, the press reflected the public’s adoration: “Marilyn Monroe, the sleek, the pink and the beautiful, captured Britain,” proclaimed The Daily Mirror. The Daily Mail marveled at her “diplomacy, mischief and bubbling sense of fun.” She was, announced The Spectator, “as intelligent as she was pleasant as she was pretty,” and The Observer remarked stoutly that she had earned a “place in the social history of our time.”

  Late in his life, even the formidable Laurence Olivier softened his harsh assessment of the time with Marilyn, whom he never again met. Years after her d
eath, he reflected: “No one had such a look of unconscious wisdom, and her personality was strong on the screen. She gave a star performance. Maybe I was tetchy with Marilyn and with myself, because I felt my career was in a rut. . . . I was fifty. What a happy memory it would have been if Marilyn had made me feel twenty years younger. . . . She was quite wonderful, the best of all.”

  And so she was. As Elsie Marina, an American showgirl performing with a traveling troupe in London, she catches the wandering eye of the Grand Duke Charles, Regent of Carpathia (Olivier), who has come to England for the coronation of George V in 1911. With him are his teenage son, King Nicholas VIII (Jeremy Spenser) and the Queen Dowager (Sybil Thorndike), mother of Charles’s late wife. Very little happens in The Prince and the Showgirl: the Regent fails in a rather blunt seduction scene, realizes Elsie is a pushover for gypsy violins and romantic sweet-talk, and soon finds to his chagrin that they are, contrary to his reputation and intentions, in love. But Elsie is no witless performer. She learns of the young king’s plot to overthrow his father and foils both that and a possible catastrophe with the Austro-Hungarian government. At the fadeout, the Regent and the showgirl promise to meet again eighteen months hence, but she knows this exceeds even her romantic expectations.

  On first or twentieth viewing, it is astonishing to realize how troubled was the production of The Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn’s Elsie is from first frame to last a marvelous portrait—alternately feisty and independent, not to be had for the price of caviar and champagne, wise in the ways of monocled playboys and entirely capable of mediating an international crisis. Absent are the distracting, trembling exertions of her lips and chin, and her performance is one of absolute control. In the early supper sequence, for example, while Olivier ignores her to conduct state business, Marilyn munches a midnight supper and downs several glasses of wine, easily stealing the scene right under Olivier’s patrician nose. Bored with the Duke, she slowly becomes drunk; the entire sequence is a masterpiece of improvisation, revealing a comic talent in Marilyn Monroe reminiscent of Billie Burke (in Dinner at Eight), or of Miriam Hopkins (in Trouble in Paradise).

  Scurrying to avoid embassy footmen, Marilyn showed an antic agility never exaggerated; awakening to the realization she is in love, a half-dozen feelings pass over her face; practicing a few steps of her vaudeville routine while waiting for the pompous Regent, she is amused by her own amusement—a girl so joyously alive that dancing is as natural as walking. One looks to Giulietta Masina’s Gelsomina and Cabiria in Fellini’s La Strada and Nights of Cabiria to find so perfect a melding of actress with character in a radiant affirmation of life.

  There are as well the gentle nods to offscreen history. The last scene filmed that November was Marilyn’s second sequence in the picture, her introduction to Olivier in a lineup of showgirls. Elsie was to bow courteously, and Marilyn and Olivier together—as if to reconcile their differences on the final day of production—devised a moment straight from their first meeting: the thin strap of her dress breaks and she cries, “Oh, don’t trouble—I can fix it with a pin.”

  From this moment, Marilyn’s performance never falters, and her final scene is quietly affecting as she bids him farewell—a wistful, wise Cinderella who has been to the coronation ball but now knows the man of her dreams was only that. It is the gentlest, bittersweet coda, disclosing at last the significance of the long liturgical sequence at Westminster Abbey. Here Olivier had wisely kept Jack Cardiff’s camera not on the details of ritual but on the reverent reactions of a showgirl with a wondrous purity of heart. The “unconscious wisdom” is as patent as the light splashing through stained glass, the presence of grace evident in her eyes as the choir exults. Here the best instinct of director and star finally conquered every obstacle, every painful difference separating them over four months. They were, after all, equally dedicated to achieving a fine finished product. That year, Marilyn’s Elsie and her Cherie in Bus Stop mark the highlight of her professional life, her achievements brightening an otherwise tangled and confusing year.

  On November 22, the Millers arrived in New York. According to the ledgers at Warner Bros., Marilyn had worked fifty-four days, Olivier only twelve more, but such were the rumors then and in later years that the general impression was of an irresponsible, drugged actress who could scarcely function. The Prince and the Showgirl belies such judgments, and not much publicity was devoted to the fact that the film was completed under budget and required only two days of reshooting.

  By year’s end, weary, restless, uncertain of her marriage, her company, her friendships and her future, Marilyn asked Arthur if they might escape for a sunny winter holiday—and so they did, clocking in the new year at a place aptly called Mootpoint, a seaside villa on the north coast of the isle of Jamaica.

  1. This will was twice rewritten.

  2. In a letter to Milton from London dated April 12, Olivier had referred to Marilyn as “a clever little thing” and “a dear girl.”

  3. For the nature and effects of Dexamyl, see below, chapter 20.

  Chapter Seventeen

  1957–1959

  NINETEEN FIFTY-SEVEN marked the beginning of Marilyn Monroe’s second long absence from filmmaking.

  Quitting Hollywood in 1954 after The Seven Year Itch, she had not returned there until the spring of 1956, for Bus Stop; this was followed by four months in London for The Prince and the Showgirl. Following these two extraordinary performances in one year, she tried to lead a private, quiet life—and to assume a different kind of role. Now, married to a world-famous but curiously inert playwright, Marilyn tried out the part of New York Jewish spouse, but this was no more appropriate or comfortable than the previous two.

  Yet somehow she seemed to have no choice. Casting about for an identity in 1957, Marilyn was again taking on the role of loyal and supportive mate. Although her repeated attempts to fill it are touching, they were also self-defeating because unrealistic and untrue to herself; such self-abasement was a reversion rather than motion forward.

  This return to housewifery, so unnatural for her, was all the more problematic because it was embraced as an alternative—when MMP, her cherished hope for professional independence and control over her destiny, was in shambles. She was, therefore, desperately assuming a socially acceptable but disastrous role for herself.

  With Arthur Miller, the props were sometimes chicken soup, kasha and horseradish, although by a curious irony, this wife-on-leave was supporting her husband financially. Marilyn believed in his talent, but she could see little application of it: irregularly, he worked on his writing, but there was not much to show for it. Arthur, too, recognized something was deeply wrong. “I was off balance and could no longer confidently predict her moods. It was almost as though the fracture of her original idealization of me in England had left no recognizable image at all”—a tortuous way of admitting that he had hurt her so deeply that she lost confidence in him.

  Moreover, his attitude toward her was divided. “I felt an urgency about making something for her . . . constructing a gift for her” that would celebrate her beauty and complexity. But if he saw her as a kind of tragic muse, he also considered her “a mere child, an abused little girl.” Elia Kazan believed that Arthur was giving Marilyn “a rose-tinted view” of her future, that of an elite actress doing serious plays which he would provide. Such was the condescension of a man who found himself, in 1957, in a creative dry dock—an unwitting indolence in which Marilyn joined him.

  In January, they found a New York apartment for rent on the thirteenth floor at 444 East Fifty-seventh Street, immediately adjacent to her former residence at 2 Sutton Place South. Marilyn, with the help of her designer John Moore, played interior decorator. She had a wall removed and made one large room of two, creating a living-dining area, several walls were mirrored and others were painted stark white, like the ceiling. Everywhere, in fact, there was white: a baby grand piano, a sofa, tub chairs and several pieces of furniture. The place had the look of a
movie set from the early 1930s, something reminiscent of Jean Harlow’s bedroom in Dinner at Eight. But as friends like Norman Rosten recalled, Marilyn never thought the apartment was “right,” and she constantly remodeled, changed furniture, draperies, accessories and art objects at the country house they eventually bought in Connecticut and in the summer cottage they rented on Long Island.

  Despite her tendency to hide herself under a kerchief and behind dark glasses, Marilyn was often recognized in her new neighborhood. Letter carriers and trash collectors greeted her familiarly by her first name. “I love them for it,” she said. “Somehow they know that I mean what I do, both when I’m acting on the screen and when I meet them in person.” She loved contact with strangers and neighbors, many of whom were shy of her fame. A young woman who lived nearby regularly recognized her but was afraid to express her admiration by intruding on Marilyn’s privacy. They passed one another for months until one evening, when the woman was wearing a new coat, Marilyn broke the silence: “You must excuse me for speaking to you, but you look so nice in that coat that I just can’t bear not telling you.” The young admirer almost broke into tears.

  At the same time, Marilyn’s business and personal relationship with Milton Greene was rapidly failing. There were mutual resentments about the problems during production of The Prince and the Showgirl; each was suspicious about the other’s honesty and candor; they argued about forthcoming projects and over Arthur’s increasing involvement; and both partners were ingesting too many kinds of pills. But the major cause of the breakup was Marilyn’s violent shift of loyalties to Arthur, who encouraged her to wrest control of MMP away from the man he deeply disliked.