Huston, heartily satisfied and bubbling with congratulations, overrode her wish to shoot the scene a third time, thereby unwittingly suggesting to her that he might be intending to settle for “good enough,” and setting off an alarm bell in her mind. The miasma was threatening to swirl in again, but this time I felt as she did, that the scene lacked vitality. As simple and direct as it was, I wondered if she was not trying to give it too much meaning; already it was verging on the effortful. Huston probably sensed it would only get heavier the more times he shot it, and rather than register a backward step on the first day, he elected to push on. From her viewpoint, however, she had not been exhaustively used.
Huston seemed to be implicitly laying down his rules—let the actor do the acting while the director supplied overview and commented on the effect, but he was not going to tear her apart, remake her, transport her beyond her skin; was not going to be Lee or any other teacher. He was going to be Huston and she was going to be Marilyn, and beyond that there was no reality he was interested in entering. By the day’s second shot, in which she meets Gable and Wallach in a bar, his approach seemed correct; she was fun, flirty, while keeping her inner preoccupation with fate in play underneath. She was professional, accurate, happy; I was ready to celebrate her accepting my gift of words that she would make live.
Never far from sight stood Paula, dressed for the heat of Reno in a black sack dress; black, she insisted, was cooler than the white the laws of physics would seem to have indicated. The crew promptly named her Black Bart, or simply Bart. Between takes she would retire with Marilyn to her trailer, where, when I entered, they would usually fall silent, just as they would before Huston. But I understood that an actor in creating his role recapitulates in a specific sense what an author has gone through to conceive it, reaching out in many directions to find its bounds and shape; it was not unreasonable now that in her absorption she could not see me, or anyone else either. All I knew for certain was that she was becoming something other than I had known before; on the screen at moments she seemed bright and alive, but in life she seemed opaque to everyone, as though she had all but disappeared into herself. But I was not a stranger to this same process in myself when at work.
I knew the rumors of Huston’s sadism with actors, as well as writers, but by this time I was discounting anything I heard second-or thirdhand. Like most who are photographed and written about, I had encountered too many people who were sincerely persuaded that they were related to me, had been my classmates, had helped me write my plays, had been taken to bed by me, treated very well, very badly, ignored, pursued, and so on. A very large percentage of mankind seems to live in imaginary proximity to famous people with whom they carry on complex relationships, illusory conversations, scenes of conflict, and love affairs that even include heartbreaking partings and joyous reconciliations. The famous are balloons far up in the sky, to be envied for their quiet freedom or shot down as enemies. I had learned to take people in the business as they came and to ask nothing more than that they do their jobs faithfully. Huston, as far as I could see, was very nearly the perfect personality for this film and this cast. He quickly took to ignoring Paula’s presence by offering absurdly elaborate congratulations—on her wearing a black dress in this terrible heat, for example—and by listening to everything she had to tell him with a seriousness so profound as to be ludicrous. It took her a while to catch on, and when she did it brought on one of the many crises awaiting us down the road. From the outset he insisted on treating Marilyn not as a patient but as a professional actress who did not need any condescending encouragement from him. This seemed to show signs of fortifying her and revived the illusion with which I had begun writing the film, that it would provide us our chance to live and work in partnership. The Huston I saw, whatever his reputed faults, relied on a certain ultimate resiliency or even courage in people, probably because he saw himself as a lifelong fighter against impossible odds. He would present Marilyn with the bracing challenge of fighting her problems through to a fine performance in a role for which she had every resource.
He had to have known that in her previous film, Some Like It Hot, under Billy Wilder’s direction, she had given a marvelous comic performance that belied her agony during its production.
He was assuming that she had elected to proceed in torment through her life. He never begrudged people their temperament—the unconscious was not his business, nor could he afford to take it into directorial consideration. The job of an actor was acting, and how he managed to act was his own and no one else’s affair, least of all the director’s. It was a breath of fresh air, it seemed to me, calculated to put Marilyn on her mettle, and she responded as he hoped she would, at least for the first few days. But soon the signs of inner disquiet appeared again, except that there was no fault found with either Huston or her fellow actors.
I knew by this time that I had initially expected what she satirized as “the happy girl that all men loved” and had discovered someone diametrically opposite, a troubled woman whose desperation was deepening no matter where she turned for a way out. By the start of The Misfits it was no longer possible to deny to myself that if there was a key to Marilyn’s despair I did not possess it.
During the shooting of Let’s Make Love and Some Like It Hot I had all but given up any hope of writing; I had decided to devote myself to giving her the kind of emotional support that would convince her she was no longer alone in the world—the heart of the problem, I assumed. I went so far as to do some rewriting on Let’s Make Love to try to save her from a complete catastrophe, work I despised on a script not worth the paper it was typed on. It was a bad miscalculation, bringing us no closer to each other. She seemed to take for granted what for me had been a sacrifice of great blocks of time, and if it was plain that her inner desperation was not going to let up, it was equally clear that literally nothing I knew to do could slow its destructive progress.
As The Misfits went into production, I clung to an expectation of change, not knowing quite why. Maybe it was that the role of Roslyn, her first serious one, had the womanly dignity that part of her longed for. And Roslyn’s dilemma was hers, but in the story it was resolved. I hoped that by living through this role she too might arrive at some threshold of faith and confidence, even as I had to wonder if I could hold on to it myself after we had both been let down from expectations such as few people allow themselves in a marriage.
Yet despite everything, I felt we were still a challenge for one another, a challenge I believed we could meet. It might take a miracle, but I had not surrendered my sense of a total relation with at least one side of her being, nor had she with something in me. For each of us, in this limited sense, there was no substitute for the other, as is true for any idealized person or cause, however tarnished by time. Marilyn possessed a revolutionary idealism, regardless—or probably because—of her difficulties. We had come together at a time when America was in yet another of her reactionary phases and social consciousness was a dying memory, and that was an important element in her disillusionment with the country and herself and all she dealt with. The public knew little or nothing about what forces were manipulating their lives, and movies and plays and books were doing nothing to educate them. At moments, talking about this indifference, she seemed to have a Robespierre inside her awaiting an angry, righteous entrance. Wherever she turned she saw what she called “lallygagging,” temporizing, the absence of strong and even miraculous liberating blows. She demanded a hero, and at such times nothing material mattered to her, including herself.
By now, 1960, we had patched up an old house we had bought half a mile up the road from my former place in Roxbury, Connecticut, and she had thrown herself into its remodeling with all her immense visionary energy. That we could not really afford all of her ideas I did my best not to dramatize, but it was inevitable that some of my concern showed, as well as that her sense of her own value would get tangled up with any estimate of how far we could objectively go. Mo
ney for her—as with the extremely wealthy and the very poor—was not something to be husbanded against a problematic future but to be spent as it came in, and rather grandly at that; to me it meant liberty, the freedom to write without hiring out to studio or producer.
We had begun a year or so earlier by merely fixing up the worst faults in the old house, with the idea of building a new one on a crest of woodland within sight of it. She had contacted Frank Lloyd Wright to come up with a plan. Her impulse was royal, in part a kind of gift to me of a unique home. Thus it had to seem like ingratitude to question whether we could ever begin to finance any Wright design, since much like her, he had little interest in costs. I could only give him his day and let her judge whether it was beyond our means or not.
Wright, then near ninety, promptly curled up in the back seat of the car when we picked him up in Manhattan one gray fall morning, sleeping soundly the two hours it took to get to Roxbury. He was tall and theatrically handsome and wore a wide-brimmed Western hat and a vast broadly checked overcoat, and rather than merely speaking tended to deliver resonant declarations in a tone reminiscent of W. C. Fields’s nasal drawl. On entering he looked around at the living room and said with amused disparagement, “Ah, yes, the old house. Don’t put a nickel in it.” We shared some smoked salmon and bread, but he declined pepper. “Never eat pepper, the stuff will kill you before your time. Avoid it.”
Leaving Marilyn behind, I led him up the long, steep grade to the crest of the low mountain where the house would be sited, a walk of half a mile or more. He never asked to pause. At the top, turning toward the magnificent view with the wind at his back, he peed and said, “Yes. Yes, indeed.” Then, quickly glancing about, he struck out down the hill at a fast pace over rocks and hummocks and broken ground. When we finally reached dead level and slowed down across a field of stubble, I thought the time had come to tell him something he had never bothered to ask, that we expected to live fairly simply and were not looking for some elaborate house with which to impress the world. I saw that this news had not the slightest interest for him.
His plan, actually a rather impressionistic watercolor, was not a complete surprise: a circular living room with a dropped center surrounded by ovoid columns of fieldstone some five feet thick, and a domed ceiling, the diameter no less than sixty feet, looking out toward the view over a swimming pool seventy feet long with fieldstone sides that jutted forth from the incline of the hill. The pool’s supporting walls at the far end would have to be something like twenty feet high, and to hold water in addition to simply standing there, they would require, I judged, heavy construction on the order of the Maginot Line. When I asked what the house would cost, Wright said something about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, which, having done some building, I guessed might cover the cost of the swimming pool, if that. There were two lovely touches to his watercolor fantasy, a long 1920s-style limousine in the curved driveway with a uniformed chauffeur in the open driver’s compartment, and a pennant flying stiffly from the top of the building, no doubt to signal that the owners were at home. His pleasure-dream of Marilyn allowed him to include in this monster of a structure only a single bedroom and small guestroom, but he did provide a large “conference room” complete with a long boardroom-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs, the highest at the head, where he imagined she would sit like the reigning queen of a small country, Denmark, say. On the whole it would have been useful as a hideaway for corporate executives to plot illegal stock deals and illicit mergers.
When I went to his office in the Plaza Hotel and saw his design, I said it was far too elaborate for what we had in mind, more news that had no visible effect on him. Indeed, he proceeded to show me immense watercolor sketches of an entire new city he had designed, if I recall, for either the Shah of Iran or the ruler of some oily sheikdom, with dozens of dreamy pink towers and minarets and interconnecting roadways strung across the sky from one building to another. I naturally looked for what would support these concrete ribbons and found nothing.
As scene followed scene in the shooting of The Misfits, my main worry continued to be that the context—the immense dead spaces of Nevada in which man seems lost—too often was blanked out by close-ups. Still, I saw a point in cinematographer Russell Metty’s insistence that “they’re not going to pay to get into this movie to see scenery.” A tough old hand, he rarely used more than three lights for his shots and set them up in a matter of minutes. Contemptuous of “artistic” lighting that took expensive time, he relied on his adeptness to give the film the look of a reported event rather than a fiction, a good thing. I soon gave up trying to prime him with the thematics of the piece; between shots he was usually hovering near a phone awaiting news of an oil well he had put money into. A movie was a movie, but a gusher was real beauty. The technical people seemed isolated, each in the narrow circle of his own craft, in which he strove for perfection, nothing less. Disdaining all European theorizing, as pridefully pragmatic as a Ford or an Edison and as nonintellectual, such men had nevertheless created some of the most original films ever made.
They reminded me of a property man during the original stage production of Salesman more than ten years before, a cigar smoker named Hymie. One of his tasks was to see to it before each performance that the ashtray on the refrigerator had half-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes in it: playing Willy’s son Biff, Arthur Kennedy had to light a cigarette at the end of Act I and put it out in this ashtray, which Hymie had decided should be full so as to add to the impression of Biff smoking heavily out of deep worry for his father. Hymie watched every show and had an opinion about how good or bad each performance was. Each night he would fill the ashtray with new cigarette butts to give it realism. This was his contribution to the tragedy. Actors might kid Hymie for his henlike fussing, but when they missed a cue or a line they avoided his gaze coming off the stage.
At some point, the rhythm of our workdays began to stumble as Marilyn was unable to appear until later and later each morning. I had no inkling of what to do or say anymore and sensed she was in a rage against me or herself or the kind of work she was doing. She seemed to be filling with distrust not only for my opinions of her acting but also for Huston’s. It all gradually passed beyond anger or resentment, the way a natural calamity leaves one in a pause of powerless amazement. Still, she took an occasional drive out to country antique shops alone with Paula and bought one or two knickknacks for the house, a surprise since she seemed barely able to speak to me. We were like two people trying to occupy a single space, that of the provider who for innumerable reasons is unable to accept what the other offers; the frustration was thus mutual and was cutting a groove of its own.
Each day now brought strange events, but some surprises were hopeful, like Clift’s turning out to be so staunchly reliable. Huston and I had feared that he might begin to drink and would have to be propped up, but instead, along with Wallach, he was a pillar of the production. On his first day of work, a week or so into the film, he did his scene in the phone booth alongside the highway, a solid page of talk, without an error or a hesitation, and on the first take. Huston and I congratulated each other on our persistent confidence in him despite the insurance company’s misgivings. I chose to see it as proof that when he had something to do that he respected and knew he was not simply being exploited, Monty could pull himself together. It was as much the irrelevance and sheer stupidity of most of the work they had to do that was wilting the sanity of so many actors whose self-certainty was pretty tentative to begin with.
The heat on the salt lake sometimes touched above a merciless hundred and eight degrees. We worked as though on a glaringly lit moon. To pass the time I threw and punted a football with some of the crew. Paula would sit writing letters inside her air-conditioned Cadillac limousine. She and Marilyn would rehearse lines together in Marilyn’s limousine on the trip up from Reno every morning, but Paula insisted as a matter of face on a personal limousine and chauffeur to follow behind. Glancing
at her through the car window, I recalled The Prince and the Showgirl; her Byzantine obsession with rank and her pointlessly secretive ways seemed less comical now. She could hardly say what time it was without seeming to suggest it was secret information, and to engender awe in the innocent onlooker she wore several watches—a pendant hanging from her neck, a wristwatch, and another in her bag so she would know what time it was in London and Tokyo, Mexico City and Sydney, implying that she and Lee had important interests all over the world.
During some of the long waits I would talk with Gable, who liked to sit in the sun outside his trailer on the lake bed. He behaved as though Marilyn was a woman in physical pain, and despite his having to spend what might have been humiliating hours each day waiting for her to start working, no hint of affront ever showed on his face. Those who knew him were surprised by his uncharacteristic patience. Once or twice, however, his agent reminded us that his contract called for him to be paid twenty-five thousand dollars for each day over schedule, so he had begun well prepared for the worst. I couldn’t help feeling somehow responsible for his enforced idleness, especially when I was the one who had convinced him to do the part, but he knew everyone was helpless, including Marilyn herself, and that it was not merely a case of a star trying to show who had the supreme power. Maybe he was softened, too, by Marilyn’s having told him that he had been her girlhood idol; in fact, his framed photo stood on her equally worshipful mother’s bureau, and in her very earliest years Marilyn thought he was her father. He and I would sometimes sit beside the trailer saying nothing for a long half-hour at a time in the Nevada silence, a kind of unacknowledged mourning. I could feel his commiseration, as, I was sure, he could feel my regret.
Timebends Page 62