Somewhere in her mind, I thought, she knew that all this would pass, but it still fueled something frantic and frighteningly thematic in her life that she was less and less able to control; she had idealized Greene’s ability to set up her financial life and now felt deceived; she had idealized Olivier as a grand artist without egoistic envy of her, a kind of actor-escort or father who would think only of safeguarding her; I too was crumbling because I could not smash her enemies with one magic stroke. And her frustration was agony: Greene she could not confront until they were back in the States because she needed his executive help while the picture was being made, and she could not show her full anger to Olivier when he still had to direct her. Toward me her disappointment could flow, since she probably knew that I would take it and come back, but she was testing my loyalty to her nevertheless.
As for Paula, Marilyn could tolerate her vacuousness and confusing advice primarily because Paula was her bridge to Lee, on whom she felt a nearly religious dependency, the more so, perhaps, as he was not present and his solutions—unavailable and therefore free from reality’s tests—could remain ideal. But there was more to it than that. “Paula doesn’t mean anything to me,” Marilyn would say when I dared suggest that her instructions were contradictory and confusing, but without Paula she was lost. This subtly unstable woman was the latest of a number of such matronly advisers in her life; according to Marilyn her predecessor, Natasha Lytess, an earlier coach whom I had not met, had been forced to exit, with her wild and threatening delusions. A blatant fantast who could weave soothing, if improbable, triumphant tales about herself and her legendary husband, Paula in effect was the mad mother all over again, and irresistible even when Marilyn could see through her to her overweening ambition. She was a fantasy mother who would confirm anything that Marilyn wished to hear, including what her vulnerability and lack of acting sophistication disposed her to believe—in this case, that Olivier was in fact so competitive with her that he was not above making her look ludicrous in the picture, the better to set off his own performance. Why he should risk ruining a film that carried his hopes for financial revival nobody of course could say, but to mention the contradiction was to appear to be taking the enemy’s side. The circle, as so often happens in such airless situations, was all but closed, and the real, murderously deranged mother proceeded with her work from ten thousand miles away.
It all peaked soon; one morning Paula announced that she must return for a week or so to America. At company expense, of course, much to Greene’s chagrin and my own incredulity, since her fee was already outrageous. (On a future film, Let’s Make Love, she actually cleared more than Marilyn.) But she was apparently sure enough of her hold on Marilyn to risk leaving her in Olivier’s care, something that far from distressed him.
I never really discovered what the facts were, but when Paula wanted to return a week or two later, the British authorities refused to renew her work permit on some ground or other, thus denying her entry into the country. Marilyn instantly concluded that Milton and Olivier had conspired to keep her away for the remainder of the picture—a not unreasonable view since they both, for different reasons, hated her. Outraged, Marilyn now threatened to quit unless Paula was given a work permit, a matter of her personal self-esteem, and refused to hear either Greene’s or Olivier’s pleas of innocence. She was ready to take a plane home. The permit was soon issued, Olivier claiming that he had gone to the top of the government for it. But Marilyn was unable to relax her suspicions of both men, and the event confirmed that she was among enemies. Our own relationship was also further wounded, for the truth now was that she was beyond my reassuring or anyone else’s. She had no means of preventing the complete unraveling of her belief in a person once a single thread was broken, and if her childhood made this understandable, it did not make it easier for her or anyone around her to bear.
Still, there were what the British call “fine” days when the rain fell only lightly, when we would bicycle in the misty silence of Windsor Great Park and its enormous trees, or drive to Brighton and walk the deserted streets along the sea in what to us was a quaint, old-fashioned resort. She was struggling against seeming like a patient who had to be handled carefully, and we talked about positive, active things like buying a country house to replace the one I had sold. She wanted to be a wife and at peace once this film was over with. Filming was a kind of siege during which she needed eyes in the back of her head. Nor was she the first actor to believe that betrayal was all about her. But for me this suspiciousness was tiring and fruitless, since I was inclined to throw my work like bread upon the waters, and if it sank so be it, I had done what I could. She could not imagine such yielding to fate, it seemed like inertia to her, and she struggled against it even in sleep, which still would not come without too many pills, barbiturates that were more lethal than I then realized. I had taken a few of them in the past but found myself numbed for half the day after. She had to fight for alertness through the day in that same way, I thought. But it would all end soon; we were in a holding action until the film was done and a real life could begin.
In the few relaxed hours when her thoughts could go outward toward society or politics or some novel she had dipped into, when she was for the moment not a competitor or even an actor, the toll of her stardom seemed terrible. It rained a little almost every day, but on a few Sundays we could sit out on the dense lawn, and in those uncustomarily purposeless moments she seemed like a creature pursued, wounded now and sore inside. She would talk of going to school in New York and studying history and literature. “I’d love to learn how things got to be how they are.” There were flashes then of some other woman inside her, a woman of cultivation, resourceful in the conventional sense, educated to fend off the lesser challenges to existence. She seemed to have a mind of immense capacity that had been assaulted by life, bludgeoned by a culture that asked only enticement of her. She had acted that role, and now she was petitioning for permission to display another dimension, but in some difficult-to-grasp way she could not get a hearing, and this was hurtful when like any actor she was almost totally defined by what was said and written about her. If on the screen and to most observers she was, except for her wit, all enticement, to herself she was this and some deeper promise besides. And the secret of her wit’s attractiveness was that she could see around it, around those who were laughing with her, or at her. Like almost all good comics, she was ruefully commenting on herself and her own pretensions to being more than a rather dumb sex kitten; like most comics, she despaired of her dignity, and her remarks and her wryness itself were self-generated oxygen that allowed her to breathe at all. Comics on the whole are deeper, are somehow closer to the crud of life and suffer more than the tragedians, who are at least accorded professional credit for seriousness as people.
But by this time, with the film in sight of completion, there was much more to deal with than her career. It was clear that she bore a guilt for her failure to be useful to me, and I felt no differently toward her for the same reason, that I had not been able to change very much for her, although at moments she claimed I had changed everything.
Our one relief was an old college friend of mine, Hedda Rosten, the wife of Norman, a poet and playwright who had also been at Michigan. She was acting as Marilyn’s secretary, and although given at times to a certain poetic vagueness, she made up for everything by her unconditional love. To Hedda, her charge was—long before feminism’s rise—the quintessential victim of the male and also of her own self-destroying perversities. Hedda had been a half-willing bride who loved her man even as she really preferred a solitary life of coffee and cigarettes and the silk of time passing across her palm as quietly as sunset and dawn. “Oh, my darling, is it all worth it?” And Marilyn would laugh sadly, lost, and they would enjoy sharing their womanly hopelessness. Alone with me, Hedda, who had been a psychiatric social worker at the Hartford Retreat, despaired of Marilyn’s being able to heal her lifelong wounds while making films. “S
he is constantly having to test what she hasn’t been able to put together yet.” We had always had one of those understandings given to people with similar traits; a solitary streak ran through both our natures, silence was space, and we could be in each other’s company without saying very much and still communicate.
“You are both very guilty,” she said one afternoon as we had our tea together in the music room.
“I can’t understand why.”
“You both have the same conscience.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“You can’t accept what you don’t think you deserve; you take exception to each other when it was supposed to be perfect. So you’re punishing yourselves.” And she sighed then, as one of life’s chief self-punishers, and shook her blonde head and laughed. She was a beautifully made woman who had held onto her innocence into her middle twenties, and I had railed against her general naiveté, which seemed to rebuke my attempts at reasoning her into a victory over failure. “Oh, God, Arthur, what unfits us all for life?” Hedda, born Hedwiga Rowinski, often sounded like a Chekhov character. She was good to have around, although one knew she could stand only so much trouble. In not too many years she would die of the smoke she was so deliciously inhaling and that she understood but refused to believe was going to kill her.
There were startling moments when suddenly it was impossible all over again to judge how real or unreal Marilyn’s perceptions were. On the set one day, in a momentary lull in the talk and noise as a new shot was being set up, the voice of the venerable Dame Sybil Thorndike, a very great actress over many decades, was heard saying, “That little girl is the only one here who knows how to act before a camera.” In a flash, all of Marilyn’s suspicions seemed to turn true, her efforts to deepen a shallow role became praiseworthy and correct, and the trouble was simply that she was surrounded by mediocrity, petty jealousies, and maddening reassurances of “It’s good enough.” At such moments I visualized myself faced by an actor paraphrasing one of my speeches instead of speaking it accurately, and I recalled my own wild-headedness at this stupidity, my sense of being trod upon and disdained, my vision mocked by idiots. Once I made such an identification with her, I could sit and remorsefully hold her, certain once again that we could make it through to some area of peace. One could easily go mad shuffling about in this darkness, looking for something real. But the real comes like a bird lighting on a branch after a very long and wayward flight, not reasoned down out of the air.
And through it all, to make matters even more encouraging, a contingent of reporters never left the entrance gate before the house, a steady column of them traipsing to and from a lovely pub on the country corner a few hundred yards up the road. As British technological inventiveness has receded before the originality of the Americans and then the Germans and Japanese, the creativity of her journalists has correspondingly increased; in their typewriters we were two characters in a novel of manners, with little domestic dialogues popping up at least twice a week in one or more of the papers, harmless chatty bits, fairly moronic, of course, but never vicious and all totally invented. I had saved her, it seemed, from a nasty fall off her bicycle, or the Hungarian maid had burned the toast and Marilyn had patiently taught her how to do it just right in a half-column of print, advising her how to change her hairdo in the bargain.
But one morning a paper reported a conversation we had actually had a few days earlier, and pretty much word for word. It was eerie reading it, an inconsequential and meaningless verbal exchange, to be sure, but one that had happened within the house. Were we tapped? Was someone outside, in the pub perhaps, tuning in to our conversations?
A tall security man in raincoat and mustache, brogans, and burr drove up from the studio soon after I had told Larry of our problem, and promptly summoned the Hungarian couple, who appeared before him in the salon. Without even taking off his raincoat or introducing himself to them, he fixed them in a stare of ice. My heart went cold at the first sounds of his growling voice strained between clenched teeth while he kept a grin on his face that emphasized the threatening glaze of pleasure in his eyes.
With no preliminaries whatsoever: “There is a plane on Thursday to Budapest. You have nothing but temporary permits to remain in this country, so you will be on it and will not be allowed another entry again in your lives.” The couple stood wide-eyed, terrified, white with horror. Turning to the man, who had always been soft-spoken with us, if not timorous, he asked, “How much were you paid to betray Mr. and Mrs. Miller?” The ferocity in him was like a hot wind in the Hungarian’s face.
“We did not know . . .”
“Don’t lie to me, you little bastard!”
I started to interrupt, there having been no evidence, no right of rebuttal, nothing but this terror tactic, but the security man quickly got to his feet, gave me a warmly civilized smile, and said, “I don’t think there will be any further problem with these people.” And turning to the pair, “Will there?”
“No, sir,” man and wife said in unison, and looked wonderfully relieved to have made this sudden if oblique confession.
“How much was it?”
“Five pounds, sir,” the man said flatly, the cloth of his trousers shaking.
“And how much more have you told them?”
The woman tried to mitigate. “It was only . . .”
“Don’t use that word with me! Only is not a word for you to use, at all!” She looked at the carpet with bulging eyes. “How much more will there be, then?”
“Nothing more,” the man said, desperately now.
“Very good. You will go out to them at the gate and explain that if a single word more of what you have told them sees print, you are both on the plane to Budapest, have we got that straight?”
“Yes, sir. I will tell them now.”
Nothing more was ever quoted again. The instantaneous transformations of the security man from such ferocity to the most sensitive British politeness stunned me. You need a long-lived empire to create such characters to police it.
Daily the bags of mail arrived, affording a view of English society that was probably unique. A movie star of Marilyn’s magnitude is obviously no longer human, but what she is instead is hard to define without calling up the supernatural; she is a form of longing in the public’s imagination, and in that sense godlike. The public holds her up before the sun to collect its rays to a burning point that will somehow stop time for them and make them feel her life on their flesh. Some of the letters addressed her as an institution, quite confidently asking for money for an operation, a mortgage payment, an education. But occasionally a container of feces would arrive, or a worn gardener’s hat offered her as a keepsake now that the old rose fancier was dying. And always the bewildered queries about sex and marriage. Something like fifteen percent were quite insane; several offered to put her out of her misery, free of charge in some cases, for a fee in others. One man invited her to meet him “with the boys” in a coal mine, another to go fishing in a Scottish lake. Perhaps the most pathetic were from baffled women wanting to know how they could become wonderful “like you,” as though she were a fairy who might touch them with the tip of her wand, all sparkly and nice, like Billie Burke in The Wizard of Oz. Though Marilyn rarely had the peace of mind to look at the bags of letters, Hedda handed her the ones she knew would move and encourage her, and invented replies that Marilyn insisted on signing herself.
But gradually Hedda was wearing down, as much because she found it too painful to witness her friend’s seemingly endless anguish as because Marilyn was slowly becoming impatient with her; Hedda seemed to be withholding the total support she had formerly given and would blurt out, referring to some slight Marilyn was angry about, “But are you sure Larry meant that?” Hedda felt a trap closing; by declining to support everything Marilyn believed, she risked the charge of unfaithfulness, and yet she could not in principle reinforce her friend’s unhealthy illusions. She returned home before the film was finished, b
ut Marilyn would always remain her poetic girl, the golden feminine whose power over the male imagination Hedda joyfully celebrated as a kind of revenge on life’s injustices to all women. “Oh, my dear,” she would wistfully say as she looked at Marilyn in a new dress or momentarily caught in a pose of perfect, flaring beauty, “you have everything!”—leaving unsaid her question as to why she could not be happy. But Marilyn understood, and they would end in laughter, helplessly shaking their blonde heads as they fell into each other’s arms.
I seemed unable to take a step without running into governments; now the lord chamberlain’s office announced that A View from the Bridge could not play in a British theatre because Eddie Carbone accuses his wife’s cousin Rodolpho of homosexuality and to prove it grabs him and kisses him on the lips. No doubt because it was so widespread, if not yet accepted as commonplace, homosexuality in 1956 could not be referred to directly on the stage.
Binkie Beaumont, head of H. M. Tennent, the venerable and still the most active theatrical producing firm in London, almost instantly conceived a solution that was not only elegant but characteristically profitable, at least for him. Under the law a private theatre club was permitted almost complete freedom. The Comedy Theatre, in all respects a normal commercial enterprise, he forthwith transformed into the Comedy Theatre Club, and the equivalent of about forty cents was added to the ticket price for a club membership, which one had to buy to get in. Even Bob Whitehead, one of the play’s American co-producers, never thought until it was too late to demand a cut of this added price. And when he did, Binkie produced one of his smiles—what I called “English impish,” of which he had a stock in hand—wearing down with it not only Bob but also my agent in his demands for my percentage. I liked Beaumont because he was uncomplicatedly ambitious for a hit even if the show was literary or artistic. There was only one audience for him, not several of varying sensibilities, and as in Elizabethan times, the challenge was to conquer it. A tough negotiator, he seemed to love the theatre and good plays and knew what good acting was and wanted that too. There were long months when he put another new play into rehearsal every Monday morning, and he had casts rehearsing all over the city. When I complimented him on his beautiful Rolls, in which we were all driven to my play’s opening, he had a one-word response, “Rented” (no doubt to sidetrack any further discussion of percentages). He was a producer who could simply say yes and proceed to put a play into production without consulting anyone else, one of the last of a breed that had not only money but also faith in its own judgment. But of course the English were probably the best audience in the world, and that helped a lot.
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