Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Indeed, Miller was apparently not so mortified at the task as he later claimed: he attended the screening of the dailies, commenting so imperiously that Cukor abandoned the room, and generally playing the experienced playwright who was slumming in Hollywood—an attitude that had caused problems on Some Like It Hot. Nonetheless, his fee of several thousand dollars for his contributions must have alleviated whatever agony he felt.

  Most significantly, this situation was disastrous for a marriage already in tatters. Sidney Skolsky summed up the matter: “Arthur Miller, the big liberal, the man who always stood up for the underdog, ignored the Writers Guild strike and rewrote [pages of the script]. Arthur did it silently, at night,” and the result was that “his wife no longer looked up to him. . . . Any resemblance he had once possessed, in Marilyn’s eyes, to a President assassinated nearly a century ago [Lincoln, to whom she had often compared Miller] had vanished.” Violating his own ethics, Arthur forever lost Marilyn’s confidence: the man whose courage and moral outrage a few years earlier had won her admiration had betrayed his own ideals. “That was the moment I knew it was over,” she told Rupert Allan, visiting Los Angeles from Monaco. “Nothing seemed to make sense any more.”

  There was much slamming of doors in their bungalow, and the Montands, among others, heard angry voices late into the night. From that time, the production “was a terrible ordeal for everybody,” according to Jack Cole, who added, echoing Billy Wilder, that “Arthur Miller hated her.”

  “There was something terrible happening between them,” recalled Vanessa Reis, “and the marriage was obviously unraveling. This took a terrific toll on May, who was the soul of discretion and found it painful to watch. One evening, Arthur, Marilyn, May, Rupert Allan and I were about to go out for dinner, but the atmosphere was so tense I left the group.” George Cukor recognized the anxiety in Marilyn’s life, although he knew not the specific causes: he admitted later that he had “no real communication with her at all . . . and very little influence. All I could do was make a climate that was agreeable to her.”

  Some relief was provided by a new friendship as Marilyn worked through the project and tried to keep her private misery from public perception. Considerable emotional support was provided on Let’s Make Love by Marilyn’s new stand-in, the actress Evelyn Moriarty, whose height, coloring and experience earned for her one of the most taxing jobs on film sets—to walk through scenes in advance of the star’s arrival, testing and confirming the lighting cues and rehearsing with other actors. Cukor had known and liked her work for years and had recommended her for the job, and at once Evelyn—a sensible, patient and good-humored lady with a wealth of experience and a keen grasp of studio politics—won Marilyn’s confidence. From the spring of 1960, the women were good friends.

  Perhaps because of her recent, second miscarriage, Marilyn had another kind of camaraderie—with the children of colleagues, the youngsters she welcomed to a soundstage otherwise closed to visitors. Frankie Vaughan introduced his seven-year-old son David to her one day, and as she welcomed him Marilyn said, “Please come and give me a kiss.” The boy hung back shyly, and Marilyn, appearing hurt, repeated her invitation; still, the boy demurred. “Suddenly,” as Vaughan recalled, “she started crying, just sobbing on my shoulder.”

  But there were other, pleasanter occasions, as with Vanessa Reis’s children. Marilyn invited them to watch a scene being filmed, and later brought them for a weekend brunch and a swim at the hotel. Similarly, Cukor recalled a visit to the set of two young girls he knew whose sister had recently been killed in an accident. Learning of the tragedy, Marilyn asked to be introduced; she then insisted on having her picture taken with the girls, told them how beautiful they were and befriended them in no time.

  Nor was her kindness restricted to children. Maggie Banks, an assistant choreographer, recalled that the wife of a company electrician was seriously ill: “I saw Marilyn hand the man a roll of bills; he started to cry, and Marilyn just hugged him and walked away.” Likewise, Evelyn Moriarty never forgot that Marilyn anonymously donated one thousand dollars to defray the funeral expenses of a crewmember’s wife. Such acts of generosity she accomplished spontaneously and with no thought of anyone but the recipient.

  By late spring, the emotional and professional complications surrounding the filming of Let’s Make Love seemed insurmountable. Yves Montand realized that he had agreed to play a bumbling, graceless foil to Marilyn. This disappointment he could sustain for the sake of his American movie debut, but the thankless role made him more than ever concerned for his English dialogue, which Cukor had to rerecord entirely. Each day of filming, Montand confided to Marilyn that he was terrified of speaking and acting poorly, of seeming as doltish as his character, and this at once established a bond between them. For perhaps the first time in her career, a leading man had revealed fears identical to her own. Marilyn was right, Yves said: Arthur did not understand her panic about performing—only another actor could. They discussed their shared terror of being mocked and rejected by colleagues, for each had worked hard for a few good roles, and each was married to a more respected artist. A warm bond grew between them, not a sudden rush of adolescent passion. Even Simone Signoret, soon to be immersed in a sordid discharge of tabloid venom, recognized that there had been in Marilyn’s life (and were even then) “a whole succession of people who had taken pains to explain to her that she was anything but an actress. . . . They thought the starlet Marilyn was cute, but they detested her for becoming the actress Monroe.”

  Nevertheless, the burden of the film’s success was as usual Marilyn’s. According to Jack Cole, Marilyn was well aware of this—and of her limitations. Insecure, afraid of failing herself and her husband, she was as usual late and often absent for scheduled musical numbers, which took half the production time and which, as Cole admitted, he had to improvise for her each day—a task not made easier by her frequent hangovers from sleeping pills. But she was “never bitchy,” he added, agreeing with Jerry Wald that the star was “not malicious, not temperamental.” She simply regarded her task as overwhelmingly significant for herself and others, and she hesitated to do something for which she felt inadequate. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she often whispered to Frank Radcliffe, one of the dancers assigned to lift her in the film’s musical numbers. “Am I doing anything wrong?”

  The filming of this unfortunate picture aggravated every aspect of Marilyn’s insecurity, for she found no support from Cukor’s perfunctory direction or Miller’s condescending manner. Nor was there any encouragement from the nervous atmosphere on the set, where virtually everyone knew they very likely had a disaster in Let’s Make Love. The situation evoked all her feelings of inadequacy, further sharpened by the kind of psychological imperative that her therapy had not alleviated, and that is so futile: “What am I afraid of?” she scribbled one day on a piece of notepaper, while awaiting a call to the set. “Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be.” In March, she was pleased, but not infused with fresh confidence, when she received the Golden Globe Award from the Foreign Press Association as best actress in a 1959 comedy or musical, for Some Like It Hot.

  Marilyn found time to improve her political literacy that year. After reading a sheaf of papers sent to her from Connecticut, she accepted the mostly honorific position of alternate delegate to the Fifth Congressional District. To Lester Markle, a New York Times editor she had met in 1959, Marilyn wrote a letter on March 29 that revealed the seriousness of her social concerns that election year. “What about [Nelson] Rockefeller?” she asked.

  He’s more liberal than many of the Democrats. Maybe he could be developed? At this time, however, [Hubert] Humphrey might be the only one. But who knows, since it’s rather hard to find out anything about him . . . Of course, [Adlai] Stevenson might have made it if he had been able to talk to people instead of professors . . . and there hasn’t been anyone like Nixon before, because the rest o
f them at least had souls! Ideally, Justice William O. Douglas would be the best President . . . and how about Kennedy for Vice President? But they couldn’t win, because Douglas is divorced. I don’t know anything about Kennedy. Maybe this ticket is hopeless, too. But it would be nice to see Stevenson as Secretary of State.

  Now, Lester, on Castro. I was brought up to believe in democracy, and when the Cubans finally threw out Battista with so much bloodshed, the United States [didn’t] stand behind them and give them help or support even to develop democracy. The New York Times’s responsibility to keep its readers informed means in an unbiased way. I don’t know—somehow I have always counted on The Times, and not [just] because you’re there.

  I hope Mrs. Markle is well. It’s true I have been in your building quite frequently, mostly to see my wonderful doctor [Kris], as your spies have already reported. I didn’t want you to get a glimpse of me, though, until I was wearing my Somali leopard coat. I want you to think of me as a predatory animal.

  She concluded with “slogans for late 1960”:

  Nix on Nixon

  Over the hump with Humphrey

  Stymied with Symington

  Back to Boston by Xmas—Kennedy.

  Her essential affability, her desire to enlarge her capacities and to escape her unhappiness, was evident elsewhere, too. Joe Hyams, Hollywood correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, recalled that “she was bubbly and fun for several interviews that season. Her fear and depression were never apparent, although she must have prepared painstakingly for these meetings, the way she prepared makeup for a scene.” And although Marilyn hated surprise parties, she was grateful when the cast and crew of Let’s Make Love celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday at lunch on June 1. That evening, Rupert Allan was host for a casual dinner in her honor at his home on Seabright Place. Marilyn spent most of the evening discussing American drama with Tennessee Williams and his mother, Edwina, the legendary lady who had inspired The Glass Menagerie.

  That spring, Simone Signoret was awarded an Oscar as best actress (for a modest British picture called Room at the Top) and within days left for her next film assignment in Europe. Shortly thereafter, Marilyn and Arthur departed for a weekend with John Huston, to scout Nevada locations for The Misfits, now scheduled for late summer. “I’ll miss you,” Marilyn said to Yves, bidding farewell as she climbed into a car. “What will be, will be,” Arthur muttered. If his remark betokened suspicion of the growing intimacy between Marilyn and Yves, Arthur was dead right.

  Marilyn returned to Los Angeles alone, while Arthur remained to work with Huston. One evening in late April, she returned from Fox with a cold and a slight fever. Yves went to her bungalow to ask if he could bring her a drink or supper and, as he recounted in his memoirs, he sat on the edge of her bed, patting her hand tenderly. “I bent over to kiss her good night, but suddenly it was a wild kiss, a fire, a hurricane I couldn’t stop.”

  The affair (the effect of her broken union, not the cause of it) began in late April and ended quietly in June. The press learned of the romance in the usual ways, with reporters lurking round the shrubbery of the Beverly Hills Hotel and shamelessly bribing maids and messengers for exaggerated accounts of the lovers’ comings and goings; by mid-June, columnists were alluding to divorces and remarriage. As for Marilyn, during the time of the affair she enjoyed Montand’s ardor and his company, but most of all she was grateful for the warm attention. Ever the realist, however, she expected nothing more, and there is no evidence for the legend that when the affair was over she was so grief-stricken that she came perilously close to a breakdown. Quite the contrary: she accepted the finale with great dignity, telling the press that although some of her acting partners had said unpleasant things about working with her, Yves had not—“but is that any reason for me to marry him?” She met the absurd rumors of marriage head-on, effectively deflating them.

  Arthur Miller never regarded the affair as significant, for it did not merit so much as a veiled allusion or a footnote in his autobiography. This omission is noteworthy: even a passing reference to it would have strengthened his case as he catalogued the reasons why his marriage collapsed (as he believed) under the weight of Marilyn’s emotional illnesses. Given the lovelessness of the marriage by this time, he may indeed have felt no jealousy at all.

  Let’s Make Love concluded in June. Only Marilyn’s efforts on the production leavened the film, and even they could not redeem it: the film finally sinks under the weight of its own tedium, not to say the egregious lack of imagination in its construction and design.

  But Marilyn’s rendition of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was a triumph, her platinum hair shimmering against a black background as she seems to breeze through a number that required two weeks of rehearsal. As in the previous trio of films since 1956, her speech is natural, her gestures unmannered and credible, and in another musical number, “Specialization,” her timing is never less than perfect, her phrasing and pauses now instinctively controlled. As Amanda Dell, she was often quizzical, but Marilyn knew how different were confusion and stupidity. “I liked her very much, whatever our difficulties,” George Cukor said, adding accurately that Marilyn was, after all, “quite dazzling on the screen, and at the end of the picture very generous to everyone she had worked with.” To Jack Cole especially, Marilyn felt enormously grateful:

  She gave me a little card . . . and inside was a check for $1500, and a note that said, “I really was awful, it must have been a difficult experience, please go someplace nice for a couple of weeks and act like it all never happened.” It was all very dear. Then two days later I got another card with another check for $500, and the card said, “Stay three more days.”. . . That was her way to say she loved you and didn’t want you to feel mad.

  By the end of June, Marilyn found herself very much alone, with every variety of sustaining relationship terminated, imperiled or interrupted. Yves returned to his wife in Paris, Arthur to his work with John Huston in Reno, Paula to visit her daughter at work on a film in Europe. At this time, according to Inez Melson, “there was a childishness about her that made you feel she should be protected from anything that could be harmful to her.”

  It was not surprising, therefore, that during her last month in Los Angeles Marilyn turned more frequently to one she believed would offer the fatherly, salvific protection she required. On the advice of Marianne Kris, she visited five or six times weekly the Los Angeles psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson, whom she had been seeing irregularly since January.

  Like many Hollywood stars with whom he was so popular, whose problems fascinated him and whom he treated in remarkable numbers, Ralph Greenson had changed his name. Born in Brooklyn on September 20, 1910, Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon was one of twins and the first of four children; his father, then a medical student, insisted that the twin sister be named Juliet. One of the most unlikely of Ralph Greenson’s later statements was his assertion that their father loved Shakespeare and romantic stories but was unaware that Romeo and Juliet were lovers who killed themselves. It is hard to believe that an educated medical student who loved Shakespeare and romantic stories was unaware of the fate of the lovers; howsoever that may be, his son was firmly convinced that being a premature Romeo with a twin sister Juliet was decisive for Romeo’s subsequent development.

  From childhood, Juliet demonstrated a keen talent for music and became a concert pianist, an achievement Romeo both admired and resented. Her applause, recognition, public acclaim and admiration created an acute sibling rivalry and weighed heavily on him; throughout his life, he attempted (without much success) to excel on the violin. Instead of a musical career, Romeo followed his father, attending college at Columbia University and then the University of Berne, Switzerland, where he took a medical degree in 1934. There he met Hildegard Troesch, whom he married the following year; subsequently they had two children, Daniel (later also a psychiatrist) and Joan. While an intern at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles from 1934 to 1936, he was kno
wn as Ralph R. Greenschpoon and then in 1937 legally became Ralph R. Greenson. In 1938, he returned to Europe and underwent Freudian analysis under Otto Fenichel.

  After his return to America, Greenson began his military service in November 1942 and was assigned to serve in the medical corps at a veterans’ hospital in Canandaigua, New York, until November 1944. The discharge report on Greenson (filed from the Army Air Force Regional Hospital in Scott Field, Illinois, on January 21, 1946) contains an important, detailed clinical summary of a serious incident that occurred in Canandaigua on December 13, 1943. Greenson claimed that while riding in an army ambulance, he suffered a head injury (presumably in a collision), was briefly unconscious and suffered mild amnesia. For several days afterward he exhibited signs of euphoric mania, and when he traveled to Chicago to visit his brother it was determined that Greenson was dragging his left foot and that there was facial nerve damage.

  “A private physician was called in,” according to the report. “The physician advised bed rest and conservatism; however, due to the fact that officer’s situation was such as it was, taking American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry [licensing examinations], and due to officer’s euphoria, this was not fulfilled.” A Chicago neurologist named Pollack was then summoned, and he found all the classic symptoms of a fractured skull—severe bruising beneath the ear, unequal reflexes in the arms and legs and inability to focus both eyes simultaneously. From the time of the accident, noted the 1946 report, Greenson had completely lost his sense of smell, suffered occasional fits and seizures, exhibited left facial weakness (“quite pronounced at times”), loss of right arm reflexes and faulty coordination.