I would ask about the old movie years when he had worked for MGM. “We’d finish a picture most often on a Friday, and there’d be some parties over the weekend, and I’d come back to start a new picture on Monday—it was really like a stock company. My ‘coach’ over here”—he indicated his valet, a sixtyish man with a long doggy face who liked to sit in the trailer doorway listening to him and anticipating his need for a pack of cigarettes or a fresh filter for his holder or a cold drink, as he had been doing for decades now—“my coach would get me out of the tuxedo and under the shower, and while I was drying off he’d give me my first lines of dialogue, and on the way to the studio I’d be trying to wake up and listen to him reading to me. They’d have my costume ready, and I’d get into it and go out onto the set and say hi to the director and meet whoever was playing the girl in the picture and try to figure out where the locale was supposed to be—you know, Hawaii or Nome or Saint Louis or wherever. Then we’d have about twenty minutes to move into the shot and do it, that’s all. By the end of the week you’d have a pretty good idea of what the character was, and then you’d have two more weeks till it was finished, and by the time you really understood anything it was over. But most of the pictures didn’t have any character to speak of anyway, so you sort of just made up something as you went along, or maybe you didn’t make up anything because there was nothing to make up. This one’s altogether different, though.”
He had brought his silver Mercedes gull-wing coupe from California and kept trying to improve his time driving up the mountain road from Reno every morning. Surely his face was as well known as any in world history, he was worth millions and could possess just about anything he wished, but he was not world-weary, not lacking in curiosity, and asked about my life and how I worked, and I thought I saw something like my father’s animal simplicity in this interest. Perhaps he so existed onscreen because he was so fundamental. Great actor-personalities, I have come to think, are like trained bears in that they attract us with their discipline while their powerful claws threaten us; a great star implies he is his own person and can be mean and even dangerous, like a great leader.
I had written the rodeo scene to take place in a certain town, its name faded from memory now, far out in the desert. I had come across it one day with the two cowboy horse-hunters: a string of slatternly houses made of unpainted gray pine boards, and another string of bars, about eight or ten in all, facing an impromptu rodeo ring in front of a rough bleachers. Beyond the ring was a church atop whose steeple a wooden cross tilted over, ready to fall into the street, a reasonable symbol of what I was after in the film. The line of bars had one long dent in front where drunks had banged cars and trucks into them, men from the nearby wallboard plant who worked in clouds of white gypsum dust all day. Inside bullet holes showed in the ceilings and walls, with whole pockets dug out of some wooden bars by quick fire. It was the only town in Nevada where a man could legally carry sidearms, and a great many did, big forty-fives strapped to their thighs. During my Nevada time I had been there one Saturday night when the sheer fury of the customers was like a fever in the air, and I had to wonder if the grinding emptiness of their lives had driven them to want to kill or threaten to kill or be killed. It was never a question of robbery, just of two men starting a brainless argument that ended in shooting, a kind of mass sex, it seemed, with bloodshed as the climax of the rodeo itself.
As it turned out, we could not work in that town because there was insufficient water to supply cast and crew, and because of its distance from Reno and our hotels. We found another town, with better facilities and plenty of room for us: it had been deserted decades before by its entire population when some nearby mine gave out. Weathered signs were applied on the store windows or hung askew over the street. It was all very strange to think we were shooting where a real population had once lived, people who had doubtless had great hopes for a good life and now had vanished.
But another place where I had spent some time with my cowboy friends—a house owned by a Mrs. Styx—was used as Roslyn’s temporary Nevada residence. It overlooked one of the rare green valleys in that desiccated area, with some trees and enough good grass for a few cattle. Anticipating a need for more space in which to move the camera around, production people had sawed through the corners of the house to make them removable at a moment’s notice by turning a few bolts. In a morning a vegetable garden was set in place out front, as the story required, and shrubs planted. One quickly forgot these were all new. The oddness about it was that like demented gods, we had taken a reality and created a fake.
And I was finding it hard to remember that in reality Clark Gable was not the cowboy who had inspired the Gay Langland character. It was during this part of the shooting that the original cowboy suddenly showed up to look on for a few hours, and I could not help feeling disappointed by a certain thinness about him as compared to Gable’s more satisfying roundness and density. Of course I was part of Gable’s character, as I was not of the cowboy’s.
There was also something disturbing in the fact that the walls of the very house in which I had sat a few years before with the real cowboy and a girlfriend he had brought along could now be unbolted and simply slipped out of position to reveal an open sky. Perhaps the secret alarm in this was its echo of the willfulness of our way of constructing our lives, and deconstructing them, too.
I kept trying to rewrite the last few minutes of the film, which had never been quite right. Aware of the hopefulness with which I had conceived the story and my uncertainty about my future now, I still could not concede that the ending had to be what I considered nihilistic, people simply walking away from one another. At the same time, contrary to my story, I could not deny that a certain indeterminacy of life was really all these characters had to rely on. In fact, taking uncertainty to heart left them feeling free. Life betrayed, and that was all there was to it, but I willed it to be otherwise in this film. Besides, it could also have been true that they had found one another and stuck.
One afternoon Marilyn, with no evident emotion, almost as though it were just another script, said, “What they really should do is break up at the end.” I instantly disagreed, so quickly, in fact, that I knew I was afraid she was right. But the irony was too sharp: the work I had created to reassure her that a woman like herself could find a home in the world had apparently proved the opposite.
Briefly I wondered if this could be a call for help, but I could detect nothing in her eyes beyond a cool, professional look. I could no longer offer what I believed she could not accept. The terrible fact was that as she moved through the shooting she seemed at one moment all inwardness, not noticing anyone around her, and at the next wonderfully social with absolutely everyone she laid eyes on—as though the stream of her emotions had shattered into a spray of anger falling endlessly through her heart; it was impossible to sense at all what she was feeling and what her mood was until she spoke.
Huston at a certain point began to stir as the hours grew longer when she simply could not get ready to work. Her lifelong wrestling with the fact of time had thrown her to the mat finally, had nearly immobilized her now; she had always been one of those people for whom time is a sticky entanglement that they don’t want to touch, perhaps in denial that a past exists.
Huston seemed to have resigned himself after the first month or so of shooting, but now he took Paula aside and asked what she proposed to do about her charge. He had begun staying up all night at the craps table, losing immense sums and winning them back and showing his mettle that way, occasionally falling asleep in his chair behind the camera and losing track of which scene he was shooting. Chaos was on us all. He was working on sheer muscle now, his control amazing.
I thought he had been simply blanking out Paula’s existence for some weeks, refusing her intercession as demeaning and unprofessional. Her control over Marilyn was now so complete that Marilyn had moved from our apartment in the hotel into hers; Paula had finally won our long undeclared
war. Still, this might clear the air, I thought, and free Marilyn to concentrate solely on the work as she now said she wanted to do. But I was under no illusions that any of us were really doing what we wanted to do; a force of pure destruction was thrashing around among us, beyond anyone’s control. I was only going through the motions of caring about the rest of the picture. It now seemed a hateful thing that had cost me too much, and I could only hope it would not turn out too badly. The one real dread I had was that Paula would accede too easily to Marilyn’s demands for more and more sleeping pills, but she promised she would not give in, and I tended to believe her because she was clearly in fear of a catastrophe herself.
One evening after dinner I walked to a small park near the hotel and sat on a bench watching eight young girls play tennis on adjoining courts. That people could still be doing something as simple as hitting a ball back and forth across a net seemed miraculous. The sheer good health of the girls drove tension out of me, just watching them take their untroubled deep breaths and wipe their wet pink upper lips and scream now and then. Longing to stretch out, I lay down on the grass propped up on one arm and soon fell fast asleep. I awoke in a silent city without traffic; the girls were gone, and it was a balmy three o’clock in the morning.
In the hotel’s casino Huston was shooting craps at a table with a glass of scotch in his hand, his bush jacket as crisply pressed as if he had put it on ten minutes before. He was behind twenty-five thousand dollars. He grinned and I grinned back. It did not seem important to him, although I knew he would find it awkward paying out that much. I went up to bed. In the morning at about seven I came down for breakfast, and he was still shooting craps, still with a glass of scotch in his hand. He had won back the twenty-five grand and was now trying to win more. His bush jacket looked as neat as it had before. Just thinking about standing up all night exhausted me all over again.
Metty’s worry that close-ups were showing Marilyn’s exhaustion finally forced matters to a head. Paula, now in control and thus unavoidably open to blame, quickly announced that Lee was at last coming out from New York. Such was Huston’s desperation that he very nearly welcomed this news. I certainly did, if only because Lee would now have to assume at least some direct responsibility for her unrelenting uncertainty as an actress in this role. Despite her utter reliance on his every word, he had managed to keep a safe distance through all her difficulties.
But there was another reason for welcoming his arrival: Marilyn had taken to paraphrasing speeches and omitting words and sentences. Huston, a writer himself, refused to accept her revisions, and to get the words right he had reshot sections as many as ten times. Looking on, I had assumed she was having memory lapses, but at one point she explained that the words in themselves were not important, only the emotion they expressed. In short, she was conveying Strasberg’s teaching as she understood it, a crippling attitude that I had seen in other actors and that I believed contributed to her unresolved tension in acting. Regarding the words as a hurdle, she was seeking spontaneity and freshness of feeling despite them instead of through them. If this approach occasionally did free her, it most often compounded her uncertainty when the actor opposite her was working on a different principle, of fidelity to the text, as of course the director was as well. Huston saw it all as arrant self-indulgence. I had asked how she and Paula proposed to work on classic roles, as Strasberg often predicted she would one day, when everyone was familiar with the texts and would not easily tolerate their being paraphrased. But it was obvious she was simply repeating what she had been given by high authority, and the pathos of it was heartbreaking, though no longer penetrable by me or anyone else. The fact was that she had done her best work with scripts, like Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s for Some Like It Hot, from which she had not been allowed the slightest deviation because the comic dialogue had to be precise or would fail to work at all. That the same precision was necessary in a dramatic role, her first ever, seemed elementary, but with the encouragement of her mentors she was losing her way in an improvisational approach that might belong in an acting class but not in an actual performance.
In any event, Lee’s imminent arrival was at least something new happening, and as a onetime director himself, he would surely see that his teaching, if correctly understood, was incapacitating, and if misunderstood, must now be corrected.
With the schedule lengthening out and nothing I could do to cure things, my function on the film grew thin and more and more formal, and most of the time I spent alone. I thought of leaving, but Huston now and then wanted to talk about something in the script or make a change. One day we shot two silent scenes at Pyramid Lake, one of Gable-Langland teaching Marilyn-Roslyn to ride horseback, the other of them swimming. The two cottages where Bellow and I had lived—could it have been almost four years ago?—had once looked down across the lonesome highway upon the rocky beach and the primordial lake, but not anymore; a marina and fast-food stand had been installed, and motorboats aimlessly dashed about blasting the unearthly silence that in the script was supposed to help restore Roslyn’s hope for herself and her life. Everything seemed to symbolize; the motorboat drivers had to be asked to stop their engines while the scene was shot in this once enchanted place, observed by the chewing customers at the hot-dog stand that now stood a hundred yards away. I looked back along the highway for the phone booth where I had momentarily fainted once, but it was gone; there was probably a phone in the marina now. The booth’s absence kept me staring into the distance trying to revive the empty highway and the mutual idealization that had swept through me here.
It was hard watching her walk out of the water to be embraced by Gable when I could see no joy in her. As valiantly as she tried to appear in love, I knew her too well not to notice her distraction. But to approach her was to see her stiffen incredibly. I could only look on, praying that my estimate was wrong, but the marks of a living performance are moments of surprise, and it was a painfully willed performance, it seemed to me, the wild notes too worked out and premeditated. I was almost completely out of her life by now, but from my distant view the film seemed purely a torture for her. As it was for me when I thought back to my walk along the East River with Sam Shaw, when I had first imagined it as a kind of gift.
The whole make-believe business seemed detestable now, a destroyer of people, especially of those actors unable to settle for an ounce less than the full measure of truthfulness. Whatever it was that Paula and presumably Lee had been teaching her, she seemed less than ever able to feel, as opposed to thinking about her feelings, and thoughts are very hard to act. To be fair, her work in the film looked far more authentic to me in later years than it did during that bad time. I now marvel at how she managed, under the circumstances, to do as well as she did.
But at the time I wondered if acting had merely become a socially acceptable excuse for narcissism, an unholy absorption in the self rather than a joyous celebratory observation of mankind, which is all that can ever ennoble it. In my too many hours spent alone, the whole country seemed to be devolving into a mania for the distraction it called entertainment, a day-and-night mimicry of art that menaced nothing, redeemed nothing, and meant nothing but forgetfulness.
One evening I switched on the TV in my hotel room and found Nixon and Kennedy about to begin one of their presidential election debates. For some reason the country seemed to be continuing despite The Misfits. I ordered dinner and a bottle of whiskey and sat down to watch. There they stood, two more actors, but looking as uncomfortable as high school argufiers, Nixon apparently wearing his brother’s suit with the collar riding up his neck. How patently ambition-driven they were, these performers, each putting on a self-assured authority that he could not possibly have. Next to the TV the window showed blue night spreading over the everlasting mountains toward California, far easier to look at than the two on the screen. Weeks before, an arsonist’s forest fire out there had blackened the skies of two states and cut off Reno’s power, and our electri
cians had rigged a single cable six stories up to our room from a truck generator parked below in the street—the only lighted bulb in the city for Marilyn’s comfort. That had been good of them. Movie crews love the impossible, it makes them feel real.
Alone with the screen now, I caught something stale and prearranged about this debate. I could not get myself out of the movies, out of the theatre, out of the fake of this unbelievably important TV casting session by which the American people were to pick the star of their unending feature movie, trying to sense which scenes each would play well and which not so well, since there was no substantive difference between the candidates beyond a few cult words addressed to their partisans. Nixon seemed the foxy self-pitier who could also be tough, though Kennedy could probably threaten other countries better with that square Irish jaw and that good suit. But much of their performance depended on the script, which was always being rewritten. I hoped for Kennedy, of course, but mainly, I suppose, because we had read some of the same books.
The phone in the morning. “Lee is here. He wants to see you right away.”
At last. Now we could at least get straight the line Marilyn ought to follow to complete the film.
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