by Donald Spoto
May Reis, then fifty-four, was a highly intelligent, discreet and trustworthy assistant who had been secretary to Elia Kazan and, until 1955, to Arthur Miller. Fatherless at nine, she had cared for her sick mother and grandmother and from adolescence worked to support them and her brother Irving, who became a film director (of, among other films, the screen version of Arthur’s play All My Sons). By 1958, she had been attending to Marilyn’s secretarial needs in New York for almost three years, answering fan mail at Fifty-seventh Street, keeping her schedule, fielding phone calls and cooperating with Marilyn’s agents and publicists. According to her sister-in-law Vanessa Reis, May agreed to travel with Marilyn to Hollywood for Some Like It Hot and the next two films “because May was alone in the world and had no family—and so Marilyn became her existence, her profession, her commitment. She already knew that working for Marilyn was a handful, but May knew that stars are a handful.”
The tasks began that very afternoon, when Marilyn and May were rushed off to a press conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Billy Wilder and costars Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and George Raft. Fortunately, she would live at the hotel temporarily (for wardrobe fittings, makeup tests and ukulele lessons) and also during interior filming at the Goldwyn Studios. As they approached the first day of production, Marilyn’s customary anxieties were much alleviated by news from Washington and New York just when shooting began in early August. In the United States Court of Appeals, Joe Rauh had won a reversal of Arthur’s contempt citation, on the premise that Arthur had not been completely informed as to why he had to answer questions in the first place.
At first, good spirits prevailed with Marilyn, her director and her co-stars. For six years, all her films had been shot in Technicolor; because that was now in her contract with Fox, Marilyn naturally expected that Some Like It Hot would be a color picture, too (although this film was for United Artists). But no, Wilder explained, this picture had to be shot in black and white, otherwise the makeup of the two men in drag would be absurdly garish and not convincing. Of this Marilyn was not sure until a quick test shot made everything clear; from that point, the production began with an amiable optimism that made everybody almost deliriously happy.
Wilder also noticed that Marilyn had matured as an actress. “She has her own natural instinct for reading a line,” according to Wilder, “and an uncanny ability to bring something to it.” And Paula was helpful: “There was no question about it,” said Rupert Allan. “Paula gave Marilyn the security she needed during production—without the unfortunate complications of Natasha.”
For all that, Wilder found that Marilyn
was still not easy to work with. She was constantly late, and she demanded take after take after take—the Strasbergs, after all, had taught her to do things again and again and again until she felt she got them right. Well, now she had us doing things again and again, our nice sane budget was going up like a rocket, our cast relations were a shambles, and I was on the verge of a breakdown. To tell the truth, she was impossible—not just difficult. Yes, the final product was worth it—but at the time we were never convinced there would be a final product.
In other words, the camaraderie at the start of Some Like It Hot went cold. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, with whom Marilyn had most of her scenes, grew weary and annoyed after the tenth and fifteenth take of the same shot, for Marilyn would cut in the middle of every one, angry or exasperated because she had got a word wrong—or, more often, was convinced she could do the scene better. “Sometimes this stretched out to three days something we could have completed in an hour,” Wilder added, “because after every bad take Marilyn began to cry, and there would have to be new makeup applied.” In addition, Marilyn came to the set without having memorized her dialogue, which had to be written on cue cards or taped on props.
Marilyn was a year younger than Lemmon and Curtis, yet she was afraid of seeming much older and was paradoxically anxious that in their farcical drag they would appear like college boys. “She picked up on anything,” recalled Allan Snyder. “She’d say her eyebrows were wrong, or her lipstick—anything not to appear out there.” Perhaps even if she arrived late, they would be grateful that she was there at all. She was living in what her poet friend Norman Rosten called “Marilyn time.”
“I never heard such brilliant direction as Billy gave her,” said Lemmon, “but nothing worked until she felt right about it. She simply said over and over, ‘Sorry, I have to do it again.’ And if Billy said, ‘Well, I tell you, Marilyn, just possibly if you were to . . .’—then she replied, ‘Just a moment, now, Billy, don’t talk to me, I’ll forget how I want to play it.’ That took me over the edge more than once. Nobody could remind her she had a professional commitment. She couldn’t do it until she herself was ready.”
Tony Curtis was blunter: kissing her, he said, was like kissing Hitler, by which he probably meant it could not possibly appeal to anyone but Eva Braun. “Well, I think that’s his problem,” Marilyn replied airily. “If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has that feeling toward me, then my fantasy has to come into play—in other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.” But she had to do the scene dozens of times to make her fantasy convincing for herself, and by this time Curtis was glassy-eyed and hoarse with exhaustion—just when Marilyn glowed, melding “organically,” as she liked to say, into the role.
Even as loyal a friend as Rosten had to agree that at such times Marilyn was trouble itself, a difficult woman who brought along the entire baggage of her emotional insecurities. Meantime, she justified her demand for multiple takes by saying that with each one she was “relaxing a little more . . . and I’ll go a bit further on the next try.” She did not admit that at the root of the problems was not only her insecurity but also her terror at being back in Hollywood: she was afraid that everything for which she had worked was gone, that with her company now only a nominal tax shelter for her salary, she would once again revert to being misperceived and abused by the very system she had once so courageously abandoned.
By early September, the company was filming on location at a late-nineteenth-century Victorian resort called the Hotel del Coronado, a two-hour drive south of Los Angeles. After a month of strained relations with her colleagues and the unfounded conviction that she was performing poorly, Marilyn had reverted to reliance on massive amounts of barbiturates for sleep. In addition, she sometimes took pills during the afternoon as well, perhaps to anesthetize her feelings of insufficiency.
Marilyn’s gynecologist, Leon Krohn, was present for much of the production, and he was openly concerned for Marilyn’s health. “It seemed to me,” he said later,
that she was in a Pygmalion situation: Arthur Miller was trying to make a sophisticate out of her, and I believe this caused her great tension. She often told me how she longed for a child, but I cautioned her that she would kill a baby with the drink and the pills—the effects of those barbiturates accumulated, I told her, and it would be impossible to predict when just one drink will then precipitate a spontaneous abortion.
Marilyn also felt, as she later told Rupert Allan, that in playing the role of Sugar Kane she had reverted to exactly the kind of role that had driven her from Hollywood in 1954.
Marilyn now longed to have the film completed, and in September she typed a note to Norman Rosten: “I have a feeling this ship is never going to dock. We are going through the Straits of Dire, [and] it’s rough and choppy.” In a postscript she added, “Love me for my yellow hair alone. I would have written this by hand but it’s trembling.” She was referring to a favorite poem by Yeats: “. . . only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone, / And not your yellow hair.” For Marilyn, any reason to love her would suffice.
Perhaps because from afar their marriage seemed not quite so troubled, Marilyn longed for Arthur as she had during Bus Stop, and she turned to him when she had doubts about a projected photo story. Richard Avedon had photographed her in a variety of
costumes and poses for Life, in which Marilyn fancifully portrayed Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Lillian Russell and Jean Harlow. Marilyn was with Avedon, as with other photographers, virtually the reverse of herself on a movie set: “very easy to work with,” according to Avedon. “She gave more to the still camera than any actress—any woman—I’ve ever photographed, infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.”
Arthur contributed a lovingly elegiac and eulogistic tribute to accompany the Avedon pictures, praising Marilyn’s ingenuity, her sense of play, “the spontaneous joy she takes in anything a child does, [and] her quick sympathy and respect for old people. . . . The child in her catches the fun and the promise, and the old person in her the mortality.” The best of the lot, he said, was the homage to Harlow, whom Marilyn conveyed “not so much by wit as by her deep sympathy for that actress’s tragic life. . . . She has identified herself with what was naive, what was genuine lure and sexual truth.”
But when Marilyn read the draft of his comments, she felt not encouraged but depressed. Why the emphasis on naïveté, on “lure and sexual truth”? Was that all she had to offer? In this she reacted neurotically, for Arthur’s essay is one of the most appreciative and laudatory ever written of her. But ignoring the praise, she seized on the comparison with Harlow. In her own net of insecurities, the reminders of her predecessor’s difficult life, her struggle in Hollywood and her untimely death overwhelmed Marilyn, and on Friday, September 12, she telephoned Arthur in New York.
Of their conversation nothing can be known. But that evening Arthur wrote to Marilyn of his own emotional problems, and the letter has survived. Addressing her as his “Darling Girl,” he wrote that she was his ideal, and he then apologized for the things he had not done (perhaps a reference to his lack of material support in their marriage) and for those he had (a possible allusion to the infamous notebook entry). He added that he believed he was making important discoveries in the regular psychotherapeutic sessions he had resumed with a Dr. Loewenstein, which he believed was illuminating the blockage in his emotional life. He justified the reservations she had about the Life article (which they evidently discussed on the telephone) by stating his belief that his points were good and interesting. The letter concluded with a plea for her love and her understanding of his mental confusion.
The letter is crucial, for it contradicts the general tone and content of Arthur Miller’s published memoirs, in which he portrayed himself as the healthy-minded, long-suffering partner of a woman he saw as occasionally sweet and talented, but ever on the edge of madness. In this regard, Timebends is a book whose sections on Marilyn are full of condescension for a “dear girl” and a “mere child,” a disturbed, distracted person mired in a past of her own invention, and a woman from whom he barely escaped with sanity and life intact. Although no autobiography can be expected to provide an objective account of the author’s intimacies, this one is remarkably incomplete, selective of the facts in their marriage, and singularly clouded with self-defense; it could have been written only by one rooted in his own guilt and remorse.3
* * *
The letter of September 12, 1958, helps to correct this one-sided view. She may have been seeking an earthly savior, as he claimed, but he had been looking for a goddess. As Sidney Skolsky rightly remarked, Arthur may have been shocked to discover that Marilyn was neither his salvation nor the one he hoped could disentangle his own spiritual problems, but that she was needy in her own right. His creative inertia and his admitted emotional blockage were not her responsibility to resolve, and Norman Rosten was correct when he judged that Arthur was “more and more living with her in the third person, as an observer, [and] the shadow that had fallen between them in England was increasing, deepening.”
Their telephone conversation alone was not enough to cheer her, for that night Marilyn apparently took one too many sleeping capsules, perhaps with champagne. She was neither dying nor comatose, but, in a reaction typical for one who ingests such a combination, she vomited so violently that Paula had her admitted to a hospital for the weekend. Marilyn was back at work on Monday. Later that week, Arthur arrived to comfort her, but also, as his friend Olie Rauh believed, because he was virtually idle in New York: he had submitted the first draft of The Misfits to John Huston, whose response to it was favorable and who, they hoped, would direct it.
Arthur’s presence was no help at all. Embarrassed by what he considered her lack of professionalism, he was another authority figure Marilyn had to please. In addition, he distressed an already harried production crew by unwelcome interference, which doubtless he thought was part of the support he was offering Marilyn. Nor was his unwittingly superior attitude welcome. Introduced to Wilder and Diamond, Arthur held forth on the differences between classical comedy and tragedy—a professorial tactic that endeared him neither to his wife’s colleagues nor to her. At the time, Jack Lemmon realized she was “going through some kind of hell on earth—suffering and still producing that magic on film. It was a courageous performance, really courageous.” She was, he said, always giving everything she had, struggling to do better.
Behind this struggle was the judgment Marilyn felt was constantly being levied against her by Arthur. To Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg, Marilyn confided her fear that Arthur regarded her as self-absorbed and unprofessional. In their time, actors like Spencer Tracy and Errol Flynn (among others) shut down filming for a week at a time while they skipped off for their alcoholic binges, and Judy Garland was endlessly pampered with whatever drugs she required; they were but three of countless stars whose conduct, by comparison, made Marilyn seem as alert and punctual as a cadet. In a way, decades of studio carelessness and indulgence were devolving against her: she had not only personal habits to correct but also years of corporate cosseting of stars’ whimsies, which at last—for economic reasons—were no longer so blithely tolerated.
Arthur’s resentment of Marilyn was obvious to everyone during production. “There were days I could have strangled her,” said Billy Wilder, “but there were wonderful days, too, when we all knew she was brilliant. But with Arthur it all seemed sour, and I remember saying at the time that in meeting Miller at last I met someone who resented her more than I did.” Professionally idle, dependent on his wife’s income, humiliated by what he saw as her childish caprice and contemptuous of Hollywood in any case, Arthur could no longer tolerate her or the marriage.
But there was another problem, and that autumn, the atmosphere on location in Coronado was thick with tensions. “Arthur told me he would allow Marilyn to work only in the morning,” Wilder recalled.
He said she was too exhausted to submit to outside work in the afternoon sun. “The morning? She never shows up until after twelve! Arthur, bring her to me at nine and you can have her back at eleven-thirty!” We were working with a time bomb, we were twenty days behind schedule and God knows how much over budget, and she was taking a lot of pills. But we were working with Monroe, and she was platinum—not just the hair, and not just her box-office appeal. What you saw on the screen was priceless.
The reason for Arthur’s request was simple: in late October, the Millers learned that Marilyn was pregnant again. Fortunately, her most strenuous scenes were already shot and the filming of Some Like It Hot was completed on November 6.
By this time, director and star were barely speaking. When The New York Herald Tribune sent Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams to interview Wilder, he openly discussed Marilyn’s tardiness and inability to remember lines. When Hyams asked if he would do another project with her, Wilder replied, “I have discussed this project with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.” But this was a reaction of the moment: with the passage of time and the enormous success of Some Like It Hot—the biggest grossing American film for the first half of 1959—Wilder praised Monroe’s unique gifts and she said it would be a privilege to work for
him again. That winter, in fact, Marilyn telephoned Wilder from New York, intending (as she told the film’s musical composer Matty Malneck) to offer the olive branch but finally unable to do so. Wilder’s wife took the call:
“Audrey?”
“Hi, Marilyn!”
“Is Billy there?”
“No, he’s not home yet.”
“Well, when you see him, will you give him a message for me?”
“Of course.”
“Well,” Marilyn said, and then paused. “Would you please tell him”—she was putting her words together slowly, thoughtfully—“would you please tell him to go and fuck himself?” A slight pause again, and in a gentler voice Marilyn concluded: “And my warmest personal regards to you, Audrey.”
But Wilder was not bitter. “Anyone can remember lines,” he said, “but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!”
Some Like It Hot is essentially a one-joke chase movie stretched on the frame of a story as classical as Shakespeare or the Da Ponte libretti for Mozart, or as Victorian as Charley’s Aunt: men forced to dress like women cannot disclose their true identities to the women with whom they fall in love. As a variation of boy (as girl) meets girl but cannot woo girl, Some Like It Hot might have been little more than a glossy college romp. But Wilder and Diamond, taking full advantage of Marilyn’s voluptuous charm, added all the elements of Prohibition-era wildness: forbidden liquor, the sudden leap toward free love and even, in the closing line, an implicit nod toward tolerance of homosexuality. When Joe E. Brown learns that his beloved Jack Lemmon is not, after all, a woman, he smiles and shrugs off the objection: “Well, nobody’s perfect.” But somehow Marilyn’s performance was. For all the problems, what survives is a radiantly funny portrait of a ukulele-strumming girl aglow with expectations for the right kind of man to love.