“Maybe just stand pat,” I said, instantly realizing that I had never used this expression in my life before, and inevitably thinking of Groucho Marx replying, “I can’t stand Pat, never could.” And so we stood there planless, she swaying in half-sleep, while a hundred devoted voices, rising to a pitch of divine glorification, continued to float up toward us through the cool damp of the English night.
Before we could decide anything, the final major chord trailed softly to a stop, and peeking out through the drapes, I saw the chorus in totally silent deference stepping carefully over hedge and fence, vanishing into the night like the Little People returning to the shade of their mushrooms, apparently satisfied that they had infiltrated Marilyn Monroe’s dreams. But I had also feared something in them—as sweet and wholesome and worshipful as they were, they were also a crowd.
Once I dreamed of a gigantic chrome machine in a fairgrounds with a crowd around it waiting to be served hamburgers it was emitting at one end, and Marilyn was suddenly caught and drawn into the machine’s gears, and I frantically ran around to the open end to rescue her and saw a hamburger emerging as the crowd scrambled for it, and one man pulled it free and ate, blood dripping from his lips. I was forever saving her from crowds, crowds she could handle as easily and joyfully as a minister moving among his congregation. Sometimes it was as though the crowd had given her birth; I never saw her unhappy in a crowd, even some that ripped pieces of her clothes off as souvenirs.
Olivier came to visit on our first morning, a courtesy call on a fine English day that seemed full of hope, with the sun pouring through the windows and a mildness in the air. He was clearly enchanted with Marilyn and eager to show her the Edwardian costumes designed for her by Edith Head, the best in the business then, and photos of the sets. But she was leaving everything to him and wanted most of all to rest thoroughly before shooting started in a week or so. She seemed preoccupied and more deeply tired than I had realized.
He asked what plays I was interested in seeing, offering to get tickets for us, and handed me the morning paper, which he had kept folded in his jacket pocket. There must have been sixty or seventy plays listed, an amazing profusion compared to the twenty or so normally open in New York, but running my eye down the page, I could not find any I’d ever heard of, or their authors either. Many of the titles sounded rather silly.
“What’s good?” I asked.
“No, no, you pick, I don’t want to influence you.”
“But I don’t know anything about any of them,” I protested. He still declined to give advice. There was one title that purely as a title was striking. “How about this? Look Back in Anger.”
His reaction was quick and surprisingly negative, even angry. “No, no, you don’t want to bother with that, find something else.”
“Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“Oh, it’s just a travesty on England, a lot of bitter rattling on about conditions, although some people think it’s fairly good satire.” He seemed to have been offended by the play, his patriotism apparently wounded.
“It sounds interesting. Frankly, I haven’t felt any connection with British theatre since Shaw and Wilde, and they were both Irishmen.”
He gave up. “All right, I’ll have a seat there for you tomorrow evening.” Marilyn had decided to stay home and rest.
Next evening, after the hour’s drive to London with the chauffeur assigned us by the studio, I stepped out of the hired Jaguar and to my surprise found Larry Olivier facing me. “I’ve decided to see it again!” he said, laughing. Entering the lobby, I saw for the first time how admirably adept the British were in their ability to notice a star like Olivier without intruding upon him by so much as a lingering stare. By this time, people in public places, Americans anyway, had become a very ambiguous promise-threat that left me bewildered as to how to behave toward them. Something in me groaned at their approach even if, against my will, I couldn’t deny the animal fun of being noticed. The English seemed to accept Olivier with a certain prideful, looking-away warmth that did not imply that they owned him. It was a fine and gentle thing to experience for the first time, altogether different from the crowd aggressiveness back home and its humiliating assumptions.
I loved the play’s roughness and self-indulgences, its flinging high in the air so many pomposities of Britishism, its unbridled irritation with life, and its verbal energy. Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure, Alan Bates, Helena Hughes, and John Welsh moved around on the set in an abandonment of self-preoccupation that suggested a very American kind of realism and turned London inside out for me, making it seem a familiar place. And the writing reminded me of Clifford Odets in his youth, when he was so lyrically bitter at Depression New York and the life of failure it seemed to have consigned him to. Look Back in Anger gave me my first look at an England of outsiders like myself who ironed their own shirts and knew about the great only from newspapers.
At the interval Olivier asked what I thought, and I said it was wonderful. At the end of the play he asked again, and I said there were a lot of hanging threads, but who cared? It had real life, a rare achievement.
George Devine, the modest, cheerful little fanatic who ran the Royal Court Theatre, hurried over to ask if we would mind coming upstairs to meet the author, who was eagerly awaiting us. In a moment we were all seated at two tiny tables next to a bar, I facing Devine, and Olivier, the institution, confronting the rebellious Osborne, who I assumed was his artistic and ideological adversary. Devine was beloved of the then disorganized and uncertain British modernizing movement in theatre, for which he was trying to create a home in the Royal Court. He had just done The Crucible, and I was listening with pleasure as he reported on its reception by his eager young audience when a few inches to my right I overheard, with some incredulity, Olivier asking the pallid Osborne—then a young guy with a shock of uncombed hair and a look on his face of having awakened twenty minutes earlier—“Do you suppose you could write something for me?” in his most smiling tones, which could have convinced you to buy a car with no wheels for twenty thousand dollars.
I was sure that Olivier represented for Osborne the bourgeois decadence of the British theatre, but his eyes were shining now, and he would indeed write something for Olivier soon— The Entertainer. As Olivier later said, that evening marked the end of a long and painfully sterile chapter of his career. It was then that he began to turn away from a trivial, voguish theatre slanted to please the upper middle class, and entered the mainstream of his country’s theatrical evolution. Later, heading the new National Theatre, he strove to make it a reflection not of a comfortable society but of the alienation and fumbling search for a future that were beginning to find voice in Britain. Olivier had many reincarnations, and this was perhaps his most significant one; at the point of vanishing as an artist, he drew himself up and miraculously fought for his maturity.
The Prince and the Showgirl, however, was still part of his past, and Marilyn soon verged on the belief that he had cast her only because he needed the money her presence would bring. I wanted to believe that this was only half the truth; I was sure he saw the legitimate dramatic contrast between their social and cultural types, and if his motives were indeed partly cynical, that did not cancel his valid artistic judgment in casting her. The theatre is always part beast. But as she had done with so many people, she had idealized Olivier, who as the great and serious artist must be above mortal considerations of the kind so common among the Hollywood fleshmongers she thought she had escaped with this, her own company’s first filmmaking partnership. The Hollywood she knew was so vile that the legitimate theatre had to be sublimely pure. Inevitably, the time soon came when in order to keep reality from slipping away I occasionally had to defend Olivier or else reinforce the naiveté of her illusions; the result was that she began to question the absoluteness of my partisanship on her side of the deepening struggle.
Paula Strasberg was with her on the set every day and in the early weeks of shooting tried, I thought, to
reassure Marilyn, who increasingly perceived a menace in Olivier. Finally she came to believe that he was trying to compete with her like another woman, a coquette drawing the audience’s sexual attention away from herself. Nothing could dissuade her from this perilous vision of her director and co-star. How much of it was true I could not know, since everybody was on his best behavior during my visits to the set at Shepperton. And I had to admit that I couldn’t set aside Olivier’s greatness; in New York I had seen his Oedipus Rex, which he had played on the same bill with Sheridan’s The Critic, as inspiring a theatrical experience as I could conceive of. It was simply impossible to agree that he could be the cheap scene-stealer she was talking about.
I had to face the fact that she was right in one respect—I did feel a cultural bond with him—but she was mistaken in imagining that she was being condescended to from some high aesthetic altitude. What gradually began to dawn on me through all this friction was her expectation of abandonment all over again; it was the blood of this terror that engorged what might have been a mere conflict of opinions. We were trying to hear each other through the echoes between two arguments—one about Olivier, and the deeper subterranean struggle against what she saw as her fate. I did not understand at first. She could not bear contradiction in any detail on this question of Olivier’s knowing betrayal of her expectations, but far worse than that, she was laboring with how I fit into the pattern of disappointment. I could hardly help my alarmed protests for my own sake and the truth as I saw it. She was felled by my stubbornness, everything was over; if she was so opposed she could not be loved. I was unable to grasp until much too late the imminence of humiliation in the very position of the actor vis-á-vis director, author, cameraman. Unlike them, he had no métier with which to armor himself; he stood naked and easily mocked, if not in reality, then in his own imagination, and Marilyn was by no means alone in viewing herself this way.
Still, on the afternoons when I showed up at the studio, her face lit up as it always had; so it was all a challenge, I thought, to both of us. We had to learn how to live very close to our real feelings without burning up. Too much truth can kill. But what more exhilarating way to risk one’s life when to win out meant, as I visualized it, a nearly miraculous joining of body and mind and feeling. In a matter of days we were closer than ever and also more cautious. And there were times when quite suddenly she seemed to have healed toward Olivier, her suspicions downed. Perhaps my insistence had opened an eye. For periods she worked more easily and dared to take satisfaction from some moment here or there that she could not deny having done brilliantly. Seizing on anything positive, I probably overdid my praise, sending new uncertainty stealing across her gaze like a thief. Absolute truthfulness, pure as light—nothing less was the aim. But underneath yawned the old terror of abandonment, the deafness in the stranger’s stare . . .
Meanwhile, I had to get on with my work and was sure things would straighten themselves out with a director as experienced as Olivier. As I had promised Peter Brook, I was revising A View from the Bridge, making it into a full-length play principally by opening up the viewpoint of Beatrice, Eddie Carbone’s wife, toward his gathering tragedy. It was also necessary to spend days in London looking at actors for the secondary parts, and I had all I could handle.
But the situation worsened. Paula, no doubt without design, was forced into a double game, having to maintain her authority with Marilyn by not contradicting her too openly or often, while keeping her hand in with Olivier. Thus she became a go-between, the interpreter to him of Marilyn’s acting intentions, and to Marilyn of his direction. At best this would have been an almost impossible task even for a selfless person, but for one as vain and ambitious as Paula it quickly curdled into a nightmare, like a marriage of three people; at what point are two of them to be left alone, and will the one who is left out resent it? Bad faith was inevitable, and it began to spread its rot everywhere.
Discovering that he was only to be allowed to direct Marilyn through the humiliating intercessions of an acting coach, Olivier was soon prepared to murder Paula outright, and from time to time I would not have minded joining him, for Marilyn, a natural comedienne, seemed distracted by half-digested, spitballed imagery and pseudo-Stanislavskian parallelisms that left her unable to free her own native joyousness. She was being doused by a spurious intellection that was thoroughly useless to her as an acting tool, like a born jazz player being taught to rationalize what he instinctively knows how to do. Paula understood that what Marilyn needed to play this showgirl was what she already had when she arrived at Croydon airport; but between Marilyn’s belief in a magical key, a flash of insight that would dispel all doubts, and Paula’s inability to supply it, Paula had to keep talking, and the more she talked the more impervious the role became. At the same time, like most English actors, Olivier had little patience with acting systems—although he prepared himself for his roles not really very differently from Stanislavsky actors. But to him such preparation was simple common sense, the imitation of life, and something that did not bear all this portentous introspective palavering.
Applied to Marilyn, Paula’s “method”—and Lee’s—was beginning to seem sinister, a dangerously closed circle of reasoning; if you had not studied with Strasberg and were not one of his adepts, you were not in a position to criticize, and since neither Olivier nor I was in this category, we were barred from applying experience and common sense to a steadily degenerating situation whose arcane depths were by definition beyond us. If Paula could not help her, no one else must be allowed to. To add another complication, Marilyn’s trust in Paula was by no means complete: she regarded her merely as Lee’s stand-in who was indeed capable, however unintentionally, of misleading her. But Paula at least was hip to the Method and knew when to nod sagely as though she understood. In Paula’s repeated refrain—“I’m only Lee’s representative”—I also heard the coded warning that she was not to be held directly responsible for Marilyn’s confusion. And neither was Lee, who after all was not even present. Who then was responsible? I gradually began injecting myself into this vacuum—a mistake when I had no power to change anything.
Only Lee could set Marilyn right; without him she had no certainty about anything she was doing. But her long daily transatlantic conversations with him seemed to help little. Inevitably I began feeling locked out, a helpless observer. Thus, candor became more and more difficult. She wanted a magical reassurance that was not of this world.
What was real? I was ready to believe that wittingly or not Olivier might be victimizing her, but she had had similar crises with Josh Logan, another accomplished director. One could dismiss it all as her way of energizing herself for work, but the pain she felt was real and debilitating. The worst of it was that any attempt to reduce the problem to reason implied that she was following a fantasy. And so the great wobbling wheel of emotions was setting itself into place, turning around the axial question of good faith. Truth-telling, all that could rescue us both, could also be dangerous when she needed every shred of reassurance to get through a working day.
Where to get a handhold when I could hardly deny my resentment at her clinging to Paula’s fruitless instructions and turning against Olivier as some kind of competitor or enemy? Olivier too seemed to be growing more and more resentful. Only Paula showed no resentment, and why should she? She had become the ultimate authority by more and more openly lamenting Olivier’s perfidy while privately assuring everyone but Marilyn that she did not believe it but was forced to pretend lest she lose Marilyn’s trust and leave the poor girl with no allies at all, something none of us could bear to contemplate.
As for Olivier, with all his limitations in directing Marilyn—an arch tongue too quick with the cutting joke, an irritating mechanistic exactitude in positioning her and imposing his preconceived notions upon her—he could still have helped her far more than Paula with her puddings of acting philosophy and her stock of odds and ends of theatrical inside stories, always about the greate
st names in the business coming in desperation to Lee or herself for help in acting a role under this or that totally incompetent director. Nevertheless, Marilyn’s fate and the picture’s were finally in Paula’s hands, and this unacknowledged power made her an uncanny force for Olivier to deal with.
There was a genuine conflict, it seemed to me, between two different styles not merely of acting but of life. The comedy of the script came from the timeworn dilemma of the powerful representative of society, the prince, reduced to helplessness in the hands of the innocent prole ignorant of all but sex and ending with all the power. Marilyn knew more than most about such circumstances. But her want of training, as she saw it, in high comedy, not to mention her unrelenting uncertainty, pressed her to try to delve too deeply into a character that was essentially a series of lines crafted to address a situation, an outside with no inside. Olivier, who had mastered most of the great roles, knew how little there was in this one, but to say outright that all she needed for it was herself would be demeaning. And for Paula this admission would mean that the Method had no application here. So the heart of the matter was that nobody could tell the truth, and Marilyn was finally in no position to hear it if it was told.
I did not know how to help her, not least because in the rushes she seemed so perfectly delectable, despite all her anxiety, even lending the film a depth of pathos it did not really have. Mistakenly, I thought that in the end it would all even out into a great success for her, although the movie itself could not be more than a trivial entertainment.
On top of everything else, Marilyn believed that Milton Greene was buying English antique furniture, shipping it home, and charging it to Marilyn Monroe Productions—this at a time when her salary was still the sole income of their company. It was yet another betrayal, and all the more infuriating to her because he was not facing Olivier down as she thought he should.
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