Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  This was perhaps a noble theme, but he lacked the necessary components of a good story: characters with sufficient history or “back story” to make them credible; a narrative with issues compelling and relevant for an audience; and above all a clear emotional sensibility that would engage and entertain, quite apart from exalted or academic theses. The script, as Miller and Huston continued to hammer away at page after page, was full of grand but disconnected rhetoric about rugged individualism, the contemporary lack of intimacy and communication, the decline of the West and the nature of the American conscience. But a screenplay is composed of more than ideas, and in The Misfits very little happens. People wander about, go to bars, drink too much, drive through the desert, go to a rodeo, rope and capture horses—but mostly they mumble arid aphorisms (“Maybe we’re not supposed to remember other people’s promises. . . . Nothin’ can live unless somethin’ dies. . . . I can’t get off the ground and I can’t get up to God”). There is something tediously literary about the tone of this screenplay.

  “This is an attempt at the ultimate motion picture,” said Arthur’s friend and former editor Frank Taylor, who was dragooned onto the project as producer. But with such self-consciousness surrounding everyone—and in a setting whose summer temperatures peaked at one hundred and twenty by day—the endeavor was perhaps futile from the start.

  The second issue was even more problematic. When Miller began The Misfits in 1957, he was a man in love, touched by his wife’s emotional alliance with nature, her love of children and animals, her appreciation of gardening, of flowers, and her general sensitivity to life, of which he saw her as a ripe representative. By 1960, his attitude was considerably different. The film to star the writer’s wife was now planned as a black-and-white picture that clearly reflected his bitterness and resentment. For Marilyn Monroe, this was the great betrayal of her life (thus far)—the public exposure of private grief.

  The Misfits would reveal Arthur’s feelings to all the world, and Marilyn had to convey them—and in no uncertain terms, for Arthur gave her character, Roslyn, dialogue lifted straight from the story of Marilyn Monroe, from childhood to her divorce from Joe DiMaggio and her subsequent meeting with an older man with whom there is but a tentative future. Even the house in which they talk, eat and love is unfinished: it is a replica of the unfinished Miller house in Roxbury, transplanted fictionally to Nevada for the real-life couple about to be divorced. And to play the role of the man who slaughters horses for dogmeat, Miller chose none other than Marilyn’s childhood idol, Clark Gable—“the man I thought of as my father,” as she had said since childhood. Miller even abbreviated the actor’s name for the character’s: Gable was “Gay.” At the fadeout they drive along a starlit road toward a (possibly vegetarian?) future.

  Gay / Gable’s sidekick was named Guido, for the actor chosen—Eli Wallach, Marilyn’s old friend from the Actors Studio—was famous for his portrait of the Italo-American “Alvaro” in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. As the script was rewritten each day, and as Arthur’s resentment against Marilyn increased, it was given to Wallach to read the last angry speech against Marilyn/Roslyn:

  She’s crazy. They’re all crazy. You try not to believe that because you need them. She’s crazy! You struggle, you build, you try, you turn yourself inside out for them. But it’s never enough. So they put the spurs to you. I know, I’ve got the marks. I know this racket, I just forgot what I knew for a little while.

  And the third cowboy, Perce, was to be played by Montgomery Clift, far more addicted to drugs and alcohol than Marilyn, a tortured homosexual whose face had been smashed in an auto accident and who suffered a lifelong neurotic relationship with his mother—and was given lines like “My face is fine, Mom—all healed up—good as new.” It was just as Taylor predicted (indeed, warned) at the outset: “Each of the players is the person they play.” Even the helpful, devoted masseur Ralph Roberts was handed a cameo, as an alert ambulance driver.

  So much was evident from Marilyn’s first scene, filmed on July 21 in the cramped bedroom of a Reno boardinghouse. With the director, cameraman, crew and actors wilting in the heat, Thelma Ritter played Isabelle, a landlady very like Grace’s Aunt Minnie (who sheltered Norma Jeane when she came to Reno for her divorce from Jim Dougherty). In the scene, she coaches Marilyn, the forlorn nightclub performer now late for her court appearance, nervously and hastily applying makeup as she rehearses her remarks for the judge. Marilyn’s lines in her first scene are lifted straight from the pages of the DiMaggio divorce plea:

  RITTER/ISABELLE: “ ‘;Did your husband act toward you with cruelty?’ ”

  MARILYN/ROSLYN: “ ‘Yes.’ ”

  ISABELLE: “ ‘In what way did this cruelty manifest itself?’ ”

  ROSLYN: “ ‘He persistently’—how does that go again?” (She cannot remember the lines.)

  ISABELLE: “ ‘He persistently and cruelly ignored my personal wishes and my rights and resorted on several occasions to physical violence against me.’ ”

  ROSLYN: “ ‘He persistently’—oh, do I have to say that? Why can’t I just say, ‘He wasn’t there’?—I mean, you could touch him, but he wasn’t there.”

  From this point, Marilyn gave a performance remarkable for its acute yet controlled pain.

  “At least you had your mother,” remarks Isabelle to Roslyn, who replies, “How do you have somebody who disappears all the time? They both weren’t there. She’d go off with a patient for three months”—an exact summary of Gladys and her last marriage, to fellow patient John Eley. None of this could have been easy for a woman who so carefully masked her private pain; perhaps it was especially mortifying for her to enact a scene in which Clark Gable asked, “What makes you so sad? I think you’re the saddest girl I ever met,” to which she had to reply, “No one ever said that to me before.” These were, after all, the very words spoken by Arthur to Marilyn not long before they married.

  Rupert Allan, present for the shooting, recalled that Marilyn was

  desperately unhappy at having to read lines written by Miller that were so obviously documenting the real-life Marilyn. Just when she might have expected some support, she was miserable. She felt she had never had a success. She felt lonely, isolated, abandoned, worthless, that she had nothing more to offer but this naked, wounded self. And all of us who were her “family”—well, we did what a family tried to do. But we had jobs connected to the picture, and it was the picture that was her enemy.

  Had there been doubt in the minds of anyone on the production (or later in the audience), Miller and Huston made everything clear: on the inside of Gay/Gable’s closet door are taped a collection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe in earlier roles and poses: “Don’t look at those,” Roslyn tells Guido. “They’re nothing. Gay just put them up for a joke.” Which did not, to Marilyn, seem very amusing at all.

  Sam Shaw, who had been present from the genesis of the project, added that Arthur’s great love was for a script he insisted on changing and changing some more, to suit his shifting feelings about Marilyn, while her great love was for the character of Roslyn, for the integrity of the role. “But the character was just never realized, he never gave it to her. She fought and fought, but Arthur was unyielding, unbending.” Added Norman Rosten, one of Arthur’s oldest friends, “Miller’s was the triumph of intelligence over feeling. It may turn out that Miller was less the artist than she.”

  But if Arthur was asking Marilyn to relive her past, he was also requiring her to prepare for the future. During location shooting, the Millers moved from their shared suite to separate rooms, apparently because Marilyn could not bear what had happened to her role: she had for months been begging her husband at least to make Roslyn a whole character, with speeches that were not mere declamations. By early August, everyone on The Misfits knew that the star and the writer were barely speaking, that they did not ride out to the desert or lake locations together, that Paula transmitted messages from one to the other and that some kind of rel
ationship was developing between Arthur and Inge Morath, one of the photographers assigned to document the film.

  The Misfits was, then, an apt title. No one was surprised that Marilyn, who was given the privilege of a noontime first call on most days, was habitually late even for that, but she had solid, objective reason. Every night, Arthur rewrote entire scenes, handed to her as she went to bed or on awakening: for years, such last-minute changes had tossed her into panic. “I have not really helped her as an actress,” he admitted after the fact. Marilyn was confused: “I never really know exactly what’s expected of me.”

  By midsummer, she was in agony, her upper abdominal pain now severely aggravated and her ability to digest food impaired: now, before the first take of every day, she was violently ill. Her co-star was her comforter on this picture; as if filling the old father fantasy, Clark Gable was the most patient actor on the team.

  On at least one occasion, Gable marched her back to her hotel room, for she was truly, perhaps dangerously ill. “But I promised John [Huston]!” she cried. “I said I would be there!” She returned to the crew soon after and did her scene—with Gable leading the applause afterward. He had acted in five films with Jean Harlow and compared them favorably as comediennes, adding that “Harlow was always very relaxed, but this girl is high-strung, and she worries more—about her lines, her appearance, her performance. She’s constantly trying to improve as an actress.”

  But there was not much material with which to make that improvement. As Miller rewrote Roslyn, she expressed her dismay at the capture of mustangs and their imminent slaughter not by dialogue or reasoning with the men, but “by throwing a fit,” as she said later.

  I guess they thought I was too dumb to explain anything, so I have a fit—a screaming, crazy fit. I mean nuts. And to think, Arthur did this to me. He was supposed to be writing this for me, but he says it’s his movie. I don’t think he even wanted me in it. I guess it’s all over between us. We have to stay with each other because it would be bad for the film if we split up now. Arthur’s been complaining to Huston about me, and that’s why Huston treats me like an idiot with his “dear this” and “dear that.” Why doesn’t he treat me like a normal actress? I wish he’d give me the same attention he gives those gambling machines.

  “I am supposed to work six days a week,” she told a reporter, “but it’s just too much. It takes me two days to recover and regain my strength and spirit. I used to work six days, but I was younger then.” Of this time she said later,

  I had to use my wits, or else I’d have been sunk—and nothing’s going to sink me. . . . Everyone was always pulling at me, tugging at me, as if they wanted a piece of me. It was always, “Do this, do that,” and not just on the job but off, too. . . . God, I’ve tried to stay intact, whole.

  With the external discomforts of summer in Nevada, the internal turmoil of a collapsed marriage and a diminishing sense of purpose, the inelegance of the script, the shallowness of her role, the macho posturing of John Huston and the meager reserves of courage she had every day to summon even in the best of circumstances, Marilyn’s conduct was remarkable (all protestations from Miller and Huston to the contrary notwithstanding). “She had considerable anxiety,” recalled Kevin McCarthy, who had the small role of Roslyn’s husband, “but like a wise child she used it.”

  Nor, until late August, was Marilyn robbed of her humor and alertness to others’ needs. When autograph seekers recognized her one afternoon, she quickly grabbed a player’s wig, slapped it on her head and replied to their question with a faked voice: “I’m Mitzi Gaynor!” Immediately after stand-in Evelyn Moriarty completed several rehearsals of the cues for Marilyn’s screaming scene (in which she berates the men for their inhumane treatment of animals and thus their contempt for life), Marilyn was waiting with hot tea, honey and lemon for her. And for a scene in which she was to be awakened by Gable from a night’s sleep, Marilyn allowed the sheet to drop so far as to reveal one naked breast. “Cut!” called Huston with a yawn. “I’ve seen ’em before!”

  “Oh, John,” said Marilyn, “let’s get people away from the television sets. I love to do things the censors won’t pass. After all, what are we here for, just to stand around and let it pass us by? Gradually they’ll let down the censorship—though probably not in my lifetime.”

  Huston was a hard-drinking egoist with, as his daughter Anjelica said, “a mean streak” that often led him to endanger the safety of his cast. During the filming of Moby Dick in 1955, Huston’s obsession for realism kept his players amid a perilous storm off the Welsh coast. Leo Genn fell twenty feet in a squall and was placed in a body cast for seven weeks, and Richard Basehart was severely injured when Huston kept his cameras rolling despite thunderous waves.

  Even more danger was endured by Gregory Peck, twice near death from his director’s demand that he be lashed to the side of a two-ton, ninety-foot-long rubber whale during a rolling fog: the towlines snapped, the channel waves rose to fifteen feet and Peck slipped into the sea. Only a sudden windbreak pulled him out for air—but the fog was so thick no one could spot the actor, who somehow survived. Later, the scene was recreated at the Elstree Studios near London, in an eighty-thousand-gallon tank with sixty-mile-an-hour wind machines. Bound to the sculpted beast, Peck was pummeled by streams of water. “I want you with your eyes staring open as you slowly come out of the sea on that whale’s back,” said Huston.

  Always patient and cooperative, Peck took the challenge. “What I didn’t know,” he later recalled, “was that the winch they were using to rotate the section I was tied to was hand-operated and had once jammed. I could have come up dead, which I think would have secretly pleased John—providing the last touch of realism he was after.” Similar episodes occurred throughout the making of John Huston’s films: he was a director often praised for his realism and ability to dramatize literary properties. Gable was aware of these methods when he signed to do The Misfits, and over $800,000 of the film’s three-and-a-half-million-dollar budget was for this actor’s salary.

  During a career spanning three decades and dozens of films, Clark Gable was proud of rejecting stunt doubles and performing his own heavy-action sequences. His antics in China Seas (1935) were typical: in a scene where a steamroller comes loose and threatens the lives of several bystanders, the decision was made to have Gable’s stand-in rush forward to secure the machine. But the star announced to his startled director, “I’m doing this one myself.” And so he did, earning the cheers of cast and crew.

  Gable was, then, ready to be dragged four hundred feet by a truck moving at thirty-five miles an hour, to simulate being dragged by a horse. His stunt double could easily have been summoned, but Gable was insistent, ignoring the welts, bruises and cuts that resulted despite his heavy padding. He also repeated several takes in which he was asked to sprint a hundred yards, and his friend Ernie Dunlevie recalled his complete exhaustion for a scene in which he lifted two cement blocks for Marilyn to use as porch steps: “They must’ve shot that scene twelve to fifteen times, and it wasn’t a fake block.” Montgomery Clift fared ill, too: his hands were lacerated and bleeding after he was forced to throw a mare bare-handed with a rope.

  And so Gable was at first patient—but not for the frank sadism that seemed to prevail during a scene in which a stallion was to attack his double. The director and representatives of both the producers’ insurance companies and the Humane Society required a trained roper, and a man named Jim Palen was submitted to the hazardous ordeal of lying on the salt flats in front of a camera while the stallion reared back, hooves smashing down for the take in which Gay was to be battered by the raging animal. For two takes, Palen barely escaped serious injury—and on the third, the horse smashed his face. The man reeled, spitting blood—but when it was clear that he had suffered no broken bones, Huston called for another take. The hardy Gable, hitherto the director’s macho sidekick, left the scene in disgust: “You can all go to hell,” he announced. “I’ve got news for you�
��I ain’t no friend of you boys.” Later, Gable told his wife, Kay, “They don’t care if they live or die. What surprised me is that no one gave a damn if I got killed or not. We were never allowed to take chances when the studios had us under contract. I was curious if Huston would try to stop me. Hell, no—he was delighted!”

  In the most appalling heat (even hardy local cowboys were fainting), Huston asked Marilyn for dozens of takes even when she was satisfied after merely several: she was soon convinced that he and Arthur were punishing her for her lateness, for her displeasure with the script, for her open criticism of its structure and characterization—not to say the humiliation she felt at having to play Roslyn. Arthur continued to hand her new pages of script each night to memorize by morning; she was awake through the small hours trying to learn them and no one was surprised when—nervous and exhausted—she increased her dosages of sleeping pills and could be awakened only after the considerable efforts of Paula Strasberg, Rupert Allan or Allan Snyder.

  As The Misfits careened toward disaster, it was not Marilyn’s intransigence or chemical dependence that imperiled the production: the decisive sabotage was effected by John Huston himself, who was in the grip of serious addictions that endangered everyone on the project. For one thing, he would not stop the chain-smoking that gave him a hacking cough, or the drinking that clouded his judgment, and filming was shut down on at least three occasions when he collapsed with bronchitis or the emphysema that compromised his breathing and, years later, eventually killed him.

  But another grave matter was neatly summed up by Arthur, his staunchest ally: the director “had begun staying up all night at the craps table, losing immense sums and winning them back and showing his mettle that way”—and then falling asleep in his chair during filming, unaware, when he awoke, what scene was being played out. “Chaos was on us all,” according to Arthur. “But I like to gamble,” said Huston in defense of his habit, as if he were saying, “I like to go fishing on weekends.” Even to reporters he was similarly blasé: “Well, I ran into trouble last night. Went downstairs and dropped a thousand.” (His schedule, according to one journalist, had him at the dice tables from eleven at night to five in the morning.)