Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  As for Irving Stein and Joe Carr, they had no more to do with film production companies. Carr worked for years before his death as a private accountant, and Irving Stein became chairman of the Elgin Watch Company. Approaching home in his car one evening in 1966, he suffered a heart attack, crashed into a tree and was killed instantly; he was fifty-two.

  As usual, Marilyn’s few public appearances showed her as ever cheerful. Among the charity events she supported was an all-star soccer game at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, where on May 12 she opened the America-Israel match; wearing open-toed shoes, however, she kicked with such gleeful force that two toes were sprained. She remained for the game without complaining so that she could award the trophy to the victors.

  But emotional rather than physical discomfort attended her later that month, when she went with Arthur to Washington for his court appearance on the contempt of Congress citation from the previous year. The formal indictment and the trial date had been handed down in February, and at last Arthur’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, was prepared to contest the issue; were they to lose, a possible two-year imprisonment and two-thousand-dollar fine could be imposed. The trial was held from May 13 to 24, during which the Millers were houseguests of Joe and Olie Rauh.

  “She had no desire to do anything except support her husband,” recalled Olie, “and she asked questions about the case every day and every evening. She had no movie commitments and seemed not a bit conflicted about it.” Then, when Arthur and Joe left for the hearings, Marilyn “picked books off our shelves—and every one she chose had something to do with psychiatry.”

  On the last day of the trial, as Joe Rauh rested his defense on the grounds that a refusal to answer irrelevant questions was not a punishable offense, Marilyn handled a crowd of reporters brilliantly. She asked Olie Rauh for a glass of sherry, donned white gloves (“because I haven’t done my fingernails and one of those women will notice they’re unpolished”), saw that her panty-line showed through her white dress, promptly removed the undergarment and stepped out to meet the press, telling them she was in Washington to see her husband vindicated. But on May 31, after the Millers had returned to New York, Arthur was found guilty on two counts of failing to answer HUAC in 1956. The preparation of an appeal and the final disposition of the case would last another year.

  The Millers spent much of the summer in quiet indolence at a rented cottage in Amagansett, far out on Long Island. He tried to work on several projects, while Marilyn walked along the beach, read poetry, visited the Rostens in nearby Springs and made only rare appearances in New York—when, for example, she accepted an invitation to attend the ceremonial ground-breaking for the Time-Life Building.

  Marilyn’s moods that season were alternately effervescent and depressed; this Miller and Rosten took as a sign of mental instability. It was considered hypersensitive and unrealistic when a wounded sea gull reduced her to weeping, or if she stopped her car at the sight of a stray dog wandering a country road. A discussion of the deer-hunting season roused her angry denunciation of killer sports. On the other hand, she enjoyed nothing so much as time spent playing lawn tennis or parlor games with young Patty Rosten, just as she regularly welcomed Jane and Robert, Arthur’s children, when they visited their father.

  In fact few celebrities donated so much public time as Marilyn to charities benefiting youngsters: that year she sold tickets for and attended, among others, the Milk Fund for Babies and the March of Dimes. She was always relaxed and sympathetic with children, always listened, asked about their needs, wrote down their names and later sent toys and gifts. They were, after all, unaware of her fame, asked nothing of her and allowed her to be, if only for a few moments, a mother. With those she knew better, like Patricia Rosten and the Millers, no demand on her time or attention was excessive. “She loved children so much,” according to Allan Snyder. “My daughter, other people’s children—she went for them all. If she’d had one of her own to care for, to grow up with, I’m sure it would have helped her immensely.”

  Yet Marilyn often suddenly withdrew from everyone to be alone for hours that summer. She had been grievously offended over the verdict handed down in Washington and was anxious about another protracted time of examination, interrogations, meetings with lawyers—and the fees, which fell entirely to her. She then quietly announced to Arthur one day in July that a doctor had confirmed her pregnancy—news that made her happier than anyone could recall. With this, Arthur noticed “a new kind of confidence, a quietness of spirit [he] had never seen before.”

  But there was to be no term of the pregnancy. On August 1, she collapsed in extreme pain and was briefly unconscious. An ambulance and physician were summoned, and Marilyn was rushed to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, where it was determined that she had an ectopic pregnancy: the fetus was being formed in a Fallopian tube. The loss of her child that August wounded Marilyn’s confidence and sense of maturity, and to Susan Strasberg, among others, she confided feelings of incompetence and worthlessness. Even her body seemed to indict her as unfit for adulthood.

  Returning home after ten days, she was determined to prove herself in the role of Arthur’s good wife, as if every emotional and physical obstacle presented her with the challenge not merely to survive but to triumph. Concluding negotiations for their new home in Roxbury, Arthur and Marilyn devised elaborate plans for an unlikely replacement

  for the simple house. While working on the final stages of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright was living at the Plaza Hotel, and there he met with Marilyn, who had fantasized something grand: she envisioned a vast home, complete with swimming pool, projection booth and auditorium, children’s nurseries, a costume vault and a lavish study for Arthur. Wright drew plans, but the cost was enormous and the project was never realized. The Millers settled for the tasks of repairing and updating the existing house.

  Something else would be realized, however. Sam Shaw had read Arthur’s short story “The Misfits,” published in Esquire magazine that year, and he suggested it as the basis for a screenplay. The story concerned three wandering men in the wilds of Nevada who capture wild horses to be butchered for canned dog food; in the story was a woman as rootless and unsettled as they but with an innate sense that life is sacred. This, Shaw argued, could become a serious film with a role for Marilyn that could confirm her as a major dramatic actress. But Arthur had another idea: why not a rewrite of The Blue Angel, the 1930 film that had made Marlene Dietrich an international star? “Look, Arthur,” Sam countered, “you wrote a wonderful story—why not do that as a film? It’s something original, it’s strong, and it’s something for you both.”

  That autumn, Arthur began working on the scenario for a movie based on his story. As he proceeded, Marilyn read portions, laughing at the humorous moments and reflecting silently on the characters and motifs. She was not sure how the role of Roslyn Tabor, the Reno divorcée who alters men’s destinies, would finally suit her, but this hesitation she kept to herself and simply encouraged Arthur to keep writing.

  At Christmas 1957, Marilyn was as usual generous to a fault, spending a good portion of her savings on others. Arthur received a new set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Susan Strasberg unwrapped a Chagall sketch. There were books and records for Lee, and to Paula she gave a pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, a gift from the Emperor of Japan in 1954 during her honeymoon with Joe. “She knows how much I love those pearls,” said Paula, moved to tears. “Look, she gave them to me!” Most extravagant of all was her gift to John Strasberg, then eighteen and, Marilyn felt, an unhappy, often ignored outsider to his own family. To him she calmly signed over the ownership of her Thunderbird, knowing he longed for but could not afford a car.

  With her mentor and mythmaker, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky (1954).

  With Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch (1954). (From the collection of Greg Schreiner)

  At the premiere of The Seven Year Itch on Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday (1955).

  At the New York p
ress conference announcing the production of The Prince and the Showgirl (1956): revealing the broken strap she had carefully prepared.

  The Strasbergs—Lee, Paula and Susan. (UPI/Bettmann)

  With partner and co-producer Milton H. Greene, arriving in Los Angeles (1956).

  In Los Angeles, spring 1956. (Photo by Milton H. Greene)

  As Cherie in Bus Stop (1956). (Photo by Milton H. Greene)

  During production of The Prince and the Showgirl, London (1956). (Photo by Milton H. Greene)

  The Millers in California (1956). (Photo by Milton H. Greene)

  In Chicago, promoting Some Like It Hot (1959), with reporter Mervin Block (right). (From Block’s collection)

  At a surprise celebration for her thirty-fourth birthday, during filming of Let’s Make Love (1960). (From the collection of Vanessa Ries)

  With Yves Montand and Arthur Miller (1960).

  With Bunny Gardel and Sherlee Strahm, on location in Nevada for The Misfits (1960). (From the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)

  Dr. Ralph Greenson (1962). (UPI/Bettmann)

  With Clark Gable, during the final days of filming The Misfits (1960).

  With Joe at Yankee Stadium on opening day (1961). (The Bettmann Archive)

  Receiving the Golden Globe Award for Some Like It Hot from Rock Hudson (1961). (From the collection of Mickey Song)

  Entering Madison Square Garden for the gala birthday celebration of President John F. Kennedy (1962). (From the collection of Chris Basinger)

  Eunice Murray. (1962) (UPI/Bettmann)

  In her dressing room rehearsing for Something’s Got to Give, with drama coach Paula Strasberg (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios)

  With Wally Cox and Dean Martin during production of Something’s Got to Give (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios; from the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)

  The last day Marilyn Monroe worked on a film: her thirty-sixth birthday (June 1, 1962), with Henry Weinstein and Eunice Murray.

  During the filming of the nude scene in the unfinished Something’s Got to Give (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios; from the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)

  On the set of Something’s Got to Give, May 1962.

  * * *

  The first months of 1958 were a time of melancholic strain in the Miller marriage. After several false starts on The Misfits, Arthur was pitched into a nervous gloom, and his wife was not adapting to suburban idleness. “Arthur was writing, writing, writing, but it wasn’t worth a damn,” according to Olie Rauh. “Meantime, she was trying to keep a low profile: he was the important one, she felt, he should write.” Inevitably, Marilyn and Arthur exchanged angry words—sometimes in company, as the Strasbergs recalled. Marilyn knew about and tried to ameliorate the wary suspicions and discomfort preventing good relations between Lee and Arthur, but her negotiations were futile.

  More than once, as Susan recalled, Marilyn became tense and hostile when the Millers and Strasbergs visited, and the result was an explosion of anger (often for no apparent reason) directed at her husband, who would leave the room quietly instead of retaliating. Scolded for her bad manners and humiliation of Arthur, Marilyn was struck with remorse: “If I shouldn’t have talked to him like that, why didn’t he slap me? He should have slapped me!” That had been her punishment in earlier days, and she expected it now. Even with friends like the Rostens, there was merely “a façade of marital harmony,” as Norman recalled, and Arthur’s reaction was frequently to find refuge in sleep—“hiding,” as Rosten added, for he was “more unraveled than ever.”

  Marilyn could not inspire Arthur to better or swifter writing, nor could she give him a child, which was her desire more than his, as he admitted in his memoirs. However she may have thought about it, she seemed to herself an ineffective muse and a failed partner. Her extended professional furlough also evoked a scratchy contentiousness, and this led to a period of even more excessive drinking during the first few months of 1958. At least once that March this nearly led to calamity, for at Roxbury she tripped and fell halfway down a flight of stairs, sustaining only a bruised ankle and a cut on her right palm from a broken whiskey glass.

  On another occasion, Rosten recalled her sitting alone at a party in her Manhattan apartment, sipping a drink and apparently “floating off in her own daydream, out of contact.” When he approached her, she said, “I’m going to have sleep trouble again tonight,” and she thought the drinks would narcotize her. Similarly, friends like her dress designer John Moore recalled her greeting him for a fitting at the apartment one Sunday morning with a sly grin: “The maid’s not here,” she whispered as if scheming, “so we can put more vodka in the Bloody Marys!”

  Liquor often made Marilyn ill, and she had little tolerance beyond one or two modest drinks; she preferred champagne, which did not upset her stomach. But with alcohol, her appetite increased, and with no apparent reason to look her best for Hollywood, she quickly gained even more weight—as much as eighteen pounds above her normal one hundred fifteen. By April, the few photos she approved for publication showed her in the latest style, a comfortable black chemise or “sack dress” that afforded neat camouflage. Such an outfit the international press deplored: “She shouldn’t wear it, she looks awful,” reprimanded the Associated Press. John Moore agreed, attempting diplomatically to communicate the joint opinion by showing her a clipping from a German newspaper: in a chemise, it said flatly, Marilyn Monroe looked like someone in a barrel. Her reaction was an amused avoidance of the issue by a delicious non sequitur: “But I’ve never even been to West Berlin!”

  It may also have seemed as if she had never been to Hollywood, which was changing fast and, with its short memory, almost forgetting her. By April 1958, almost two years had passed since she had made a film in America, and during the interval, studio executives were not breathlessly awaiting her return. On the contrary, they created replicas, copycat blondes in wild profusion whom they often outfitted with Marilyn Monroe’s earlier wardrobe.2

  But Marilyn’s agents made certain she was aware of the threat as well as the changes; indeed, by May she was ready to listen to offers to return to Hollywood—not only because she longed to do more than talk to Marianne Kris and listen to Lee Strasberg, but also because the Millers were short of money. She also wanted to apply in her work what she hoped she had learned since 1956. Fearing there might be no purpose in her life, she felt that therapy and acting classes suggested all sorts of avenues, but that everything was theoretical. Now Marilyn longed to “be up and at it, doing something for a change,” as she told Sam Shaw and Susan Strasberg. She had lost a child, had to abandon plans for a new home, was mired in an arid matrimonial patch and when she gazed in the mirror saw someone still lovely at thirty-two, but slightly bloated, pale and weary. She listened to the men at MCA—Lew Wasserman, Jay Kanter and another colleague, George Chasin.

  At first, the agents reported, Fox offered to produce a film of the musical play Can-Can for her and Maurice Chevalier; also discussed were a picture called Some Came Running with Frank Sinatra and one based on William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. Yes, her agents said, these projects would avoid a reversion to the type of roles she had resented and said she would turn down—women like Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Pola in How To Marry a Millionaire and the nameless girl in The Seven Year Itch.

  Just as they were considering these and other projects, Billy Wilder sent Marilyn a two-page outline of a film he was writing with I. A. L. Diamond, a script based on an old German farce. Titled Some Like It Hot, this was to be a wild comedy set in the Roaring Twenties, about two musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. To avoid the killers, the men successfully disguise themselves as women and sign up with an all-girl band, among whom is the ukulele-strumming blonde Sugar Kane. The comic possibilities were enormous, Marilyn as Sugar would have several songs and, although it was the kind of role sh
e wanted to put behind her, she had sufficient faith in Wilder’s judgment and previous success to negotiate. By late spring, it was agreed that Marilyn would receive $100,000 plus an historic ten percent of the film’s gross profits. This would, she reasoned, be simply an easy, lucrative interval while Arthur completed The Misfits.

  On the evening of July 7, Marilyn left Arthur in Amagansett and arrived next morning in Los Angeles, accompanied by her secretary, May Reis and by Paula Strasberg. Reporters and photographers remarked on Marilyn’s white-blond hair, her white silk shirt, white skirt, white shoes and white gloves. Stepping into Southern California’s morning light, she practically blocked out the sun.

  Paula was again present, Marilyn said with her usual piercingly honest self-assessment,

  because she gives me a lot of confidence and is very helpful. You see, I’m not a quick study, but I’m very serious about my work and am not experienced enough as an actress to chat with friends and workers on the set and then go into a dramatic scene. I like to go directly from a scene into my dressing room and concentrate on the next one and keep my mind in one channel. I envy these people who can meet all comers and go from a bright quip and gay laugh into a scene before the camera. All I’m thinking of is my performance, and I try to make it as good as I know how. And Paula gives me confidence.