by Jackie Ganiy
Marilyn did one more film before she decided to play hardball with the studio, going on strike for something non-dumb-blondish. River of No Return was a trying, demanding shoot, that required her to spend hours drenched from head to toe. She and the director, Otto Preminger, were constantly butting heads. He had the balls to ban Natasha from the set for her meddling, infuriating Marilyn, but making him a hero to everyone else. She responded by making his life a living hell on the set with her signature chronic tardiness and production delays. Preminger later said, “I would not direct her again, ever. Not for a million dollars, tax-free. “
Marilyn grew frustrated with the measly fifteen hundred dollars a week that had been negotiated before she was a star, and grew increasingly displeased with the roles she was offered. She finally just didn’t show up for her next silly movie, The Girl in Pink Tights, and the studio suspended her. She responded by marrying Joe DiMaggio in his hometown, San Francisco. The studio was forced to lift the suspension because on this happy news, which was widely reported in every major newspaper from coast to coast.
They sent her the script for The Girl in Pink Tights, and she refused it again. They suspended her again. She held firm, went to Korea, and made more history entertaining the troops wearing that beaded, purple spaghetti strap number in sub-zero temperatures. Finally, she got a new contract, and was promised a role in The Seven Year Itch, but she first had to make another so-so film, There’s No Business Like Show Business. The movie was an epic tribute to Irving Berlin’s music, featuring an all-star cast of the best musical stars in the business. Monroe held her own against the likes of Ethel Merman, Donald O’Conner and Mitzi Gaynor—three of Hollywood’s greatest musical stars—and decades later Mitzi even said that she probably stole the show.
Then she was off to New York, to film what would be the most infamous Marilyn Monroe scene ever: the subway skirt-blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch. The now-famous white dress had been bought at a secondhand shop, and altered to fit her. She wore shear underwear that was even more transparent in the glare of the set lights. A huge crowd gathered to watch, including Joe. Things were not going well for the newlyweds. Joe wanted her to give up movies, and just be his wife.
He was intensely possessive, controlling, jealous, and they quarreled often. He didn’t like the way she dressed, the way men fell all over her, and he really didn’t like feeling humiliated by what he saw that day—in full public view—on the streets of Manhattan: his wife standing over a subway vent with her skirt blown up over her head, as she cooed and oohed with delight in front of thousands of people. They reshot that scene over and over, all day long. When it was finally over, so was their marriage, sealed with a violent argument back at the hotel, where an enraged Joe allegedly hit her. Seriously, who marries the biggest sex bomb on the planet, and then gets angry when she acts like a sex bomb? Pathetic video of a distraught Marilyn, cowering in tears outside her lawyer’s house during a press conference about the divorce, followed. Again, the public just wanting to give her a big hug.
Marilyn felt it was time to turn over a new leaf, so she gave Fox the finger, moved to New York, enrolling at the Actors Studio. That’s right, this girl was serious about her craft. Tired of being typecast and disrespected, she was out to be taken seriously as an actress, or die trying. She wanted to distance herself from Hollywood types, and immerse herself in a more intellectual, literary culture full of method actors, writers and theater. Living at first in a tiny Manhattan apartment, she next moved to the Connecticut home of photographer Milton Greene and his wife, Amy, spending her days studying acting and her evenings hobnobbing with the New York intellectual elite. She met Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and, of course, Arthur Miller.
She must have felt like a human being for the first time since she locked herself into that plastic image of a mindless blonde goddess, ten years earlier. She went out in public in bulky sweaters, dark glasses, and a scarf tied around her hair, and absolutely no one cared! She dated celebrated dramatist, Arthur Miller, who had just received the Pulitzer Prize writing one of the greatest American plays of all time, Death of a Salesman. Emboldened by her new sense of independence, she held a news conference at her Connecticut retreat, with Milton and Amy Greene by her side, and announced plans to go into partnership with Greene to form her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions. “I’m tired of sex roles. I don’t want to play sex roles anymore. I would like to play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov,” she stated. Fox was not amused, but others had a hard time keeping a straight face.
Fox lured Marilyn back with a new contract that allowed her to make an independent film once a year. They also dangled the role of Cherie, the gentle saloon singer who captures the heart of a simple cowboy, in a movie version of the play, Bus Stop. Marilyn jumped at the chance to sink her new method acting chops into the role.
Some felt that power and studio concessions had begun to go to Marilyn’s head. She was unreasonably difficult during the filming of Bus Stop, insisting that Hope Lange dye her hair a darker shade, so as not to compete with her own hair, and her chronic lateness continued to frustrate everyone on the set. She had a hard time remembering her lines, something that had been an issue for most of her career, but had steadily grown worse as her drinking and pill-popping increased. She wanted so badly to be taken seriously, but her unprofessional behavior was at odds with that desire.
Arthur Miller, having finally obtained a Reno divorce, was now openly courting Marilyn, and the public was intrigued at the juxtaposition of the brain and the bimbo. On the day they planned to announce their engagement, something so terrible occurred that it could have easily been interpreted as a foreshadowing of the awfulness to come. A press car containing Paris Match reporters Ira and Paul Slade, along with Mara Scherbatoff, failed to negotiate a hairpin curve along a narrow country road, slamming into a tree. They had been trying to follow Arthur Miller and Marilyn, but Miller cut his teeth driving that road, and accelerated to daredevil speeds in order to shake the reporters (sort of a reversed version of the Diana vs. the paparazzi catastrophe). His plan worked nicely. Mara, who did not fasten her seat belt, was thrown through the windshield and impaled on the hood of the car. Her face was sliced open from the center of her upper lip to the top of her forehead. Miller and Monroe pulled over, running back to find an awful scene they could not have imagined. They pulled Scherbatoff off the car and laid her on the ground. She was alive, but not for much longer, suffering for three hours—most of that time spent lying on the ground while photographers took pictures of her. Less than an hour later, Monroe and Miller stood on the front lawn of Miller’s parents home, trying to act happy, announcing their engagement, and failing miserably. Marilyn looked lovely in a simple blouse and black skirt, but was clearly distraught and said very little. Looking like a frightened bird, she clung to Miller and avoided eye contact with the media. They eloped that night. Marilyn said that the accident was a bad omen, and she was right.
Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl
Marilyn Monroe Productions sole production, The Prince and the Showgirl, was filmed in the UK, with the esteemed Lawrence Olivier serving as both costar and director. Marilyn wasn’t doing well on a day-to-day basis. Plagued by chronic insomnia, handfuls of Nembutal were needed to get her to sleep. Champagne and Vodka flowed through her all day. She replaced Natasha with Susan Strasberg, Lee Strasberg’s daughter, so it was Susan who was required on the set at all times. Her punctuality worsened from an hour or two late to four, five, and six hours late. When she did show up, she didn’t know her lines, requiring multiple takes. It was as if she hadn’t tried to prepare at all, and just rolled on the set, half-drunk, expecting things to go her way.
She didn’t like it when Olivier told her to be “sexy", yet at the joint news conference to promote the film, a spaghetti strap snapped, flashing her boob to a sea of flashbulbs, and she didn’t seem to mind. She whined about wanting to be taken seriously, but still acted
the dumb blonde she claimed to hate, and still played in all her films. After the film wrapped, she had a miscarriage. That’s what happens when you pump your body full of barbiturates and booze and get pregnant. Her marriage got worse, as Miller didn’t like being Mr. Monroe any more than the others had, but the difference was that—being a writer—he wrote this shit down. She read his notes—his regrets about marrying her, how her constant need for attention and reassurance was stifling his creativity. Things were never the same after that.
Despite all of this, the Marilyn magic shone through in The Prince and the Showgirl, and she scored some of the best write-ups of her life. Even Olivier, who was very disenchanted with her during filming, grudgingly admitted that the final product had been worth the torment. How long would people keep saying that? How long would the magic be worth the inhuman effort it took to extract it, and the terrible physical and psychological toll it took on those involved? The clock was already ticking.
A year passed before Marilyn began another film, and that time was spent having another miscarriage—this time the result of an ectopic pregnancy—and supporting her husband as he was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to name names during Joseph Stalin’s—oops—I meant Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch-hunt hearings. Monroe was depressed. Her marriage was failing, she’d had two miscarriages, and her husband was staring down jail time. She took an overdose of sleeping pills—her second suicide attempt (in case anyone is counting)—but Miller discovered her in time, and rushed her to the hospital. Miller’s legal problems worked themselves out, but his other problem, his marriage, only got worse.
Miller encouraged her to take the role of Sugar Kane in the Billy Wilder directed film, Some Like It Hot, another dumb blonde role that she would play to perfection. Wilder and Marilyn worked together four years earlier on The Seven Year Itch. Apparently that movie went relatively well, so Wilder had no qualms working with her again. He soon regretted this decision. On the very first day of wardrobe fitting, Marilyn showed up four-and-a-half hours late, spent another two hours in makeup, then skipped onto the set at 6:10 PM, where she was met with a deserted building. Wilder and the entire cast and crew had gone home at 6 PM, after waiting for princess to show her face for six hours. That’s pretty much how the entire shoot of the movie went. She would be hours late every single day, and she would not be prepared when she was on the set. She fancied herself a method actress, and forced Wilder to redo the simplest scenes, take after take after take, until she felt she had done it just right. Other times, she couldn’t remember the simplest line. Wilder recalled one scene in which she was simply required to ask “Where’s the bourbon?” but she kept flubbing this simple line over and over again. Bet if it had been “Where’s the champagne?” she’d have nailed it.
She drove Wilder to drink, and made an enemy of former friend and lover, Tony Curtis, who quipped kissing her was like kissing Hitler. She caused the film to run five hundred thousand dollars over-budget, and delayed its completion by several weeks. Wilder threw a lavish wrap party at his Beverly Hills home for the cast and crew. Guess who wasn’t invited? Aubrey Wilder, Billy’s wife, who had feared for her husband’s health during the making of the picture, conspicuously left the Millers off the guest list. Wilder would later acknowledge that while she was hell to work with, the end result was some of the finest work he’d ever produced on film. He told a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune at the time “I’m the only director who ever made two pictures with Monroe. It behooves the Screen Directors Guild to award me a Purple Heart.”
Some Like It Hot was one of the highest-grossing comedies of all time, proving once again that Ms. Monroe still had it going on. She was luminous, like a glowing butterfly flitting from scene to scene as the brokenhearted Sugar Kane, who played with the emotions of two men in drag, hiding out from the mob. When she sang, “I’m Through With Love,” her inner turmoil spilled over into the song, making that scene one of the most poignant she had ever filmed. It’s a good thing she was damn near poetry on film, and the picture such a resounding success, or she might have found people were tired of her shit and too afraid to work with her anymore. She sacrificed a lot for Some Like It Hot, including another miscarriage that occurred right in the middle of everything, which destabilized her marriage even further. After it was all over, everyone went to their separate corners and licked their wounds. No one associated with the movie could have foreseen that it would later become a Marilyn Monroe masterpiece that has stood for of six decades as one of the greatest comedies of all time, and sealing her legacy as an icon for the ages.
She was next cast in the trite musical comedy, Let’s Make Love, costarring French heartthrob, Yves Montand. Showing up for the first day of filming looking distinctively chubby and bloated, creative camera angles and costumes had to be designed to camouflage these irregularities. In addition to her usual chronic lateness and line amnesia, she also had a passionate affair with her costar, while Arthur retreated to New York to finish a screenplay he had written especially for her: The Misfits. She and Montand carried on right under the nose of his wife, French actress Simone Signoret, who seemed to just accept her husband’s transgression with true French laissez-faire. Ah, to be French! The movie was not a success. For once, the Marilyn magic fizzled. She looked fat, and she seemed to be going through the motions.
Marilyn did not have a break between Let’s Make Love and The Misfits, and she sure needed one. Now completely dependent on drugs to get her through the day and night, as well as an alcoholic, she had a very hard time just getting it together on a daily basis, much less getting to a movie set and putting in a full day of work. Her marriage was completely demolished, they only stayed together to finish the picture they started together. She had this fantasy that he, by creating The Misfits, was simply using her just like everyone else did, for his own personal gain, when in fact he had begun the project to prove his love for her. This was typical. In her mind, everyone was using her, but she never used anyone else. Today they call this a persecution complex, back then, they called it paranoid.
Considering all the adversity The Misfits faced, it really is a miracle that it was ever completed. It’s hard to imagine a more dysfunctional group of individuals trying to come together to make a movie, and actually succeeding. John Huston, the legendary director, was a notorious alcoholic and compulsive gambler who spent most of the time either drunk, or severely hungover, while losing all his money in the casinos. Montgomery Clift had been slowly trying to kill himself with booze and pills for years, ever since his near fatal car accident, and was notoriously hard to work with. Marilyn famously remarked that Clift was the only person she ever met who was in worse shape than her (and that pretty much says it all). Gable was in his late 50s with a heart condition, and found himself staring down the monster that was his costar. She kept him and everyone else waiting for hours in the one hundred and ten degree desert heat, then couldn’t remember her lines when she did show, if she showed. Marilyn was in very bad shape. Her marriage was over, her addictions were consuming her, and her mental state was deteriorating. She suffered a complete breakdown during the middle of filming, and had to be confined to a hospital for ten days.
Seriously, how did this thing ever happen? It should have been finished before it even got started. Instead, it’s this beautiful vignette, a moving and breathtaking tribute to the troubled stars who made it, and to the brilliant man who directed it. Monroe’s character, Roslyn, is about as close to being the real her as it gets. No other actress in a major motion picture had ever played it so close to the bone. She was painfully vulnerable and lovely, even though she was slightly overweight and puffy from the booze and pills. It just didn’t matter. In the stills as well as the film itself, she looks ethereal, like a heavenly body, a tragic caricature of herself. Huston fully exploited in her what other directors were only able to touch on: the magic of childish innocence, extreme vulnerability and sublime sensuality, a combination that has not been
seen to the extent Monroe possessed it ever again.
The film got a mixed reception upon its release, mostly due to its stark, avant-garde style, and the fact that audiences were not used to seeing Clark Gable in such a morally ambiguous role. He dropped dead of a heart attack just days after filming wrapped, and many in Hollywood, including his wife, blamed Monroe for creating the intolerably stressful environment that led to his death. Of course, that three pack a day habit of his couldn’t have had anything to do with it.
Marilyn received glowing praise in the film’s reviews, even though she detested the role, and no longer had use for the writer. She felt her husband had betrayed her most intimate feelings by weaving them into the screenplay, on display for the whole world to see, while failing to reveal her inner depth. Miller had been reduced to playing errand boy and pill counter, a demeaning role for one of the country’s greatest dramatists. They separated soon after, divorcing within the year. Marilyn, at thirty-six, was a three time loser, and alone again.
She grew ever more dependent on her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who had been treating her since the Lets Make Love days. He had tried to get control over her pill addiction, without success. She would make a little progress, then slip back when she couldn’t cope with a new crisis. She could not fall asleep naturally at all anymore, and needed the Nembutal just to function.