Either thou art most ignorant by age, or thou wert born a fool.
—A Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene 1
Shortly before Marilyn was to depart for Hollywood to do Bus Stop, word got around that she was going to do a scene from Anna Christie at the Actors Studio with Maureen Stapleton. Marilyn was playing the part of Anna, which Garbo had made famous: “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby!”
After weeks of rehearsal Maureen Stapleton recalled that Marilyn called the day before they were to do the scene and said, “Maureen, I don’t think we should rehearse tomorrow. I hear somebody is going to do a very interesting scene at the studio tomorrow morning, and I don’t want to miss it.”
“Marilyn!” Maureen said with alarm, “the important scene is Anna Christie. It’s our scene!”
“Tomorrow’s the d-day we…we do the scene?” Marilyn exclaimed. “God, I thought it was next Friday!”
It was standing room only on Friday, February 17, at the Actors Studio.
“She was so terrified,” Susan Strasberg recalled. “I didn’t know how she was going to get herself up there. She also knew as many people were there to see her fail as succeed.”
Recalling her terror before she went on stage, Marilyn said, “I couldn’t see anything before I went on stage. I couldn’t remember one line. All I wanted was to lie down and die. I was in these impossible circumstances and I suddenly thought to myself, ‘Good, God, what am I doing here?’ Then I just had to go out and do it.”
The scene was set in a bar, and when Marilyn came onstage many were under the impression she was too afraid and sick and wouldn’t be able to do it. Her hands were trembling when she picked up a glass, and she seemed to be exhausted, ill, and in despair. But the audience quickly realized that it was the character—it was Anna’s despair, exhaustion, and fear that had seemed so real.
The scene was particularly poignant for Marilyn when Anna talked about the father who’d abused and betrayed her:
It’s my old man I got to meet, honest! It’s funny, too, I ain’t seen him since I was a kid—don’t even know what he looks like…. And I was thinking maybe, seeing he ain’t done a thing for me in my life, he might be willing to stake me to a room and eats till I get rested up. But I ain’t expecting much from him. Give you a kick when you’re down, that’s all men do….
When the scene ended there was silence. Then the studio burst into applause—a rare occurrence. Actress Kim Stanley, who was among the skeptics in the audience, recalled, “We were taught never to clap at the Actors Studio—it was like we were in church—and it was the first time I’d ever heard applause there.” Kim Stanley felt some resentment toward Marilyn because it was Cherie, the role Stanley had created in Bus Stop on Broadway, that Marilyn would be doing on film in Hollywood—yet she found herself applauding with the others.
According to most of the people present, Marilyn Monroe was astonishing. Actress Anna Sten found her performance “very deep and very lovely, giving and taking at the same time—and that’s a very rare quality”
Afterward Marilyn and Maureen Stapleton went to the corner bar for a stiff drink—“and don’t be stingy, baby.” Stapleton was amazed to discover that Marilyn believed she had been terrible. But the Strasbergs were ecstatic and assured her she had been excellent. In a discussion with Joshua Logan, who was about to direct Marilyn in Bus Stop, Strasberg said, “I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of actors and actresses, and there are only two that stand out way above the rest—number one is Marlon Brando, and the second is Marilyn Monroe.”
Not long after doing the scene at the Actors Studio, Marilyn returned to Hollywood. It had been over a year since Zelda Zonk took the red-eye out of town. Her dressing room at Fox had remained empty, a dusty reminder of the lot’s missing star. Books, scripts, old memos, and call sheets littered the shelves and floor along with cartons of unopened fan mail. In her absence she had been receiving over six thousand fan letters a week. A smiling picture of Joe DiMaggio still stood on the dressing table. With the news of her impending arrival, the dressing room was cleaned and painted, and all the old debris was removed, as the studio awaited the appearance of the new Marilyn Monroe.
But it was the same old Marilyn Monroe who arrived at the airport and kept thousands of fans and hundreds of photographers waiting for her to emerge from the airplane. When she finally appeared, looking very New Yorkish in a smart black cocktail dress and gloves, she was greeted by a tumultuous reception. The ovation she received from the thousands who came to greet her was tremendous—a triumph. “Hollywood turned out to meet her as few women have been met,” Time reported. Reporters bombarded her with questions about her new production company and plans. One reporter queried, “When you left here last year you were dressed quite differently, Marilyn. Now you have a black dress and a high-necked blouse. Is this the new Marilyn?”
“No,” she replied. “I’m the same person—it’s just a new dress.”
It took her two hours to get through the crowds at the airport and off to the house the Greenes had rented in Holmby Hills at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard.
Learning of her whereabouts from the studio, Natasha Lytess tried to reach Marilyn by telephone, but her calls were refused. Many of Lytess’s letters to Marilyn when she left Hollywood had gone unanswered. Though it had been made clear to Lytess that things would be different for her when Marilyn moved to New York, she was able to keep her job at Fox during Marilyn’s absence. But when Marilyn returned Lytess unexpectedly received a dismissal notice from the studio. She desperately tried to contact Marilyn, and after dozens of phone calls and notes went unanswered, Lytess drove to the Beverly Glen address and was turned away. She was bitterly disappointed. On March 3 she received a telephone call from attorney Irving Stein, and in a legal memorandum of the call Stein stated:
I identified myself as Marilyn Monroe’s lawyer and instructed her firmly not to call Marilyn Monroe or visit or attempt to see Marilyn Monroe. These instructions must be obeyed to avoid trouble. Natasha, whom I’d never met, called me “Darling” and asked if I’d listen. The following are exact quotes:
“My only protection in the world is Marilyn Monroe. I created this girl—I fought for her—I was always the heavy on the set. I was frantic when I called the house and she would not speak to me. I am her private property, she knows that. Her faith and security are mine. I’m not financially protected, but she is. Twentieth told me on Friday, ‘You don’t have your protection any more, we don’t need you.’…But my job means my life. I’m not a well person. I would like very much to see her even with you if only for one half-hour.” I told her no. Marilyn wouldn’t and didn’t intercede and we didn’t want to speak to or see her. I told her she must not call Marilyn or I would have to use other means to stop her.
But the oracle who had divined the goddess couldn’t believe that Marilyn would refuse to help her. Lytess again appeared at the Beverly Glen house on March 5. Agent Lew Wasserman answered the door and barred her from entering. “Your engagement at the studio is none of Miss Monroe’s concern,” he stated, and threatened to obtain a restraining order if she returned or attempted to contact Marilyn again. As she was leaving, Lytess glanced up and saw Marilyn watching her impassively from a second-story window. “It was the last time I ever saw her,” she recalled. “In Marilyn’s powerful position she had only to crook her finger for me to keep my job at the studio. Had she any sense of gratitude for my contribution to her life, she could have saved my job.”
That Marilyn Monroe could have ignored “so humble a plea” has often been cited as an incident exemplifying her ruthless use of people before discarding them. But Marilyn was fiercely loyal to those few who were loyal to her. However, she couldn’t abide disloyalty, and once trust was broken she was quick to sever the relationship. Marilyn had learned through Arthur Miller’s friend Maurice Zolotow that Natasha Lytess was writing a Marilyn Monroe exposé.
When Zolotow began h
is Monroe biography, he interviewed Marilyn on three occasions at the Waldorf Towers. Zolotow’s researcher on the Monroe book was Jane Wilkie, a writer with Photoplay. After Marilyn left Hollywood, Jane Wilkie began working with Natasha Lytess on an expose of Marilyn that was originally intended for Photoplay and later planned as a book. Never completed, the unpublished manuscript remains in the Zolotow Collection at the University of Texas. When Marilyn learned from Zolotow what Natasha was doing, it ended their friendship.
After her dismissal from Fox, Lytess tried to survive on income from students she coached at her home. But she was unable to meet the mortgage payments for the house on Rexford Drive that Marilyn had helped her purchase, and it was lost in foreclosure. Robert Slatzer recalls Marilyn showing him a letter from Lytess that arrived from Rome in April of 1962. “She was begging for money and Marilyn said, ‘Natasha always writes me when she’s broke.’”
The new Marilyn had hoped that Lee Strasberg would accompany her to Hollywood and coach her through Bus Stop, but it was impossible for him to leave his students, and he suggested that Paula go in his stead. Though Greene complained and Fox fumed, Marilyn insisted that Paula Strasberg be put on the payroll at $1,500 a week—the salary Marilyn earned on The Seven Year Itch as its star.
Bus Stop is the poignant story of Cherie, a second-rate cabaret singer from the Ozarks. After a series of disappointing love affairs, Cherie meets a rodeo cowboy (Don Murray) who has come to the big city (Phoenix) in pursuit of an angelic wife to take home to his ranch. He chooses Cherie. She resists but ultimately is charmed by the cowboy’s bumbling devotion.
As the start date for Bus Stop approached, Marilyn worked long hours with Paula, going through the script scene by scene. She immersed herself in the character of Cherie, drawing on sense memory and emotional recall, analyzing dialogue and motivation, thinking out body language and gesture. She studied Cherie’s Ozarks drawl, and once she was into it seldom departed from Cherie’s dialect in her daily conversations until production ended. Strasberg urged his students to sum up a character’s central motivation in one key sentence: the key sentence Marilyn chose for Cherie was “Will this girl who wants respect ever get it?”
Marilyn felt that the dominant characteristic of the character’s appearance lay in her weariness. Seldom out in the sunlight because she works in bars until 4 A.M., Cherie wouldn’t get much sleep or sunshine, and Marilyn and Milton Greene conceived a chalky white makeup that startled the front-office staff when they saw the makeup tests. If they were going to pay her more, shouldn’t she look better?
“To me Marilyn’s attitude toward her makeup and costuming was courageous,” Joshua Logan stated. “It was incredible, really. Here you have a well-established star and she was willing to risk her position with a makeup many stars would consider ugly. She wasn’t afraid. She believed she was right in her analysis of the character, and she had the courage to commit herself to it completely.”
Logan recalled that Marilyn also plotted out Cherie’s costuming. She liked William Travilla’s design for the long gown she was to wear during her ballad number in a Phoenix bar, but to Travilla’s dismay she began yanking off spangles and tore the gown in several places. She then had the tears crudely sewn up with mismatched thread. Recalling her own days when she only had one pair of stockings, she had the net stockings worn during “That Old Black Magic” number ripped and then poorly darned back together.
“Let’s not have my clothes made to order,” she told Logan. “Let’s find them in wardrobe.” She and Logan rummaged through clothing racks and picked out the tawdry dresses and cheap clothes that a second-rate cabaret singer would wear.
Logan, who was a good friend of Lee Strasberg and the only prominent American director who had actually studied with Stanislavsky in Moscow, agreed to allow Paula Strasberg to coach Marilyn—with the understanding that Strasberg not appear on the set. But in the first week of shooting on the stage at Fox, Logan’s proviso was ignored. Despite the director’s instructions, Paula lurked in the shadows behind the camera. She wore black, hoping to be less noticeable, but her witchlike outfits only served to attract attention, and it was on the set of Bus Stop that Marilyn gave Paula the nickname that was to stay with her: “Black Bart.”
The Fox gossip centers crackled with Black Bart and Grushenka stories, and La Monroe became the favorite conversation hors d’oeuvre at Hollywood cocktail parties. It was said that the Fox star had changed and was throwing her newfound power around. Now that she was queen of the lot, it seemed that her attitude toward all the “little people” on the set had changed. She was showing her true colors. No longer friendly with the grips and electricians and the crew who waited endlessly for her to get ready, she was said to treat coworkers with an air of disdain. The new Monroe was “cold and rude.”
But the new Monroe was fighting off the demons of “indicating”—that fatal actor’s flaw of performing rather than being. It took extraordinary concentration. While Paula was supportive, she also forced Marilyn to reach for concepts in her portrayal that seemed beyond her experience. Only with determination and a focused will could she dance on the high wire and never fall despite the emotional strain and exhaustion it entailed.
The trick, of course, was concentration—a transference by immersion into character, and she was often so into her character and prepped for the moment when the director said “Action” that all else around her was oblivion. Conversation was distraction. To those on the set who had known the old Marilyn, she seemed “cold and aloof.” But the truth was that Cherie didn’t know they were there.
Billy Wilder had said that Marilyn was one of the few stars who possessed “flesh impact,” that there was an immediacy to her image on the screen that made the audience look at Marilyn no matter who she was playing a scene with—whether it be Tom Ewell, Jane Russell, Cary Grant, dogs, babies, or the Marx Brothers. It was Marilyn who commanded the frame. But it wasn’t just “flesh impact,” it was “body and soul impact.” It was the totality of her being that projected its curious immediacy.
This magic trick of transference, however, went beyond will and concentration. Her performance was drawn intuitively from the well of her secret depths. It has often been said that her concentration was poor, that she frequently forgot her lines or missed her marks. Her concentration was, in fact, extraordinary, but born in the realm of intuition and emotion rather than deliberation. Paula was often mystified that Marilyn would forget her lines during a take, when Paula knew she had known the lines cold for days. Actors would fulminate in their dressing rooms that she hadn’t arrived prepared. But it wasn’t the lines she forgot—it was the character. She’d lose touch with Cherie, and just stop. The immersion had to be total to get through a take, and with each take she got closer to Cherie. In Bus Stop she was Cherie.
Joshua Logan said, “Marilyn is as near a genius as any actress I ever knew. She is an artist beyond artistry…. From the start, she visualized playing Cherie in a tender area that lies between comedy and tragedy. This is the most difficult thing for an actor to do well. Very few motion picture stars can do it. Chaplin achieved it. Garbo, too, at times, in Cam-ille and Ninotchka. And you know, I believe Marilyn has something of each of them in her. She is the most completely realized and authentic film actress since Garbo. Monroe is pure cinema.”
It had been a bumpy ten-year ride from blond Betty’s “Hi, Rad!” in front of the church in Paducah to Cherie’s memorable soliloquy on the bus to Phoenix:
I’ve been goin’ with boys since I was twelve—them Ozarks don’t waste much time—and I’ve been losin’ my head about some guy ever since…. Of course I’d like to get married and have a family and all them things…. Maybe I don’t know what love is. I want a guy I can look up to and admire. But I don’t want him to browbeat me. I want a guy who’ll be sweet with me. But I don’t want him to baby me, either. I just gotta feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me—aside from all that lovin’ stuff. You know what I mean?<
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38
Tempus Fugit
One should make haste slowly.
—Marilyn Monroe
According to Arthur Miller, there came a juncture when Marilyn became interested in time as a concept—or perhaps a curiosity. She began wearing a watch as a locket around her neck as well as two wristwatches—one set for West Coast time, the other for New York time. But this was like collecting encyclopedias in the hope that their voluminous presence would impart knowledge: the watches didn’t improve her ability to cope with time. On March 12, she missed the plane by twenty minutes when the Bus Stop company flew from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Arizona, where the annual rodeo was to be held on March 15. She did manage to arrive on time, however, for Logan to shoot the location sequences amid the crowd of twenty-five thousand people who attended the street parade and rodeo.
As a rule it is more difficult for actors to work on location than in the studio, but directors found that Marilyn worked better al fresco. Like a flower, she did better in the sunshine and fresh air than in the artificial light of Hollywood’s soundstage hothouses. In the sunshine her energy and concentration were always up. She’d usually appear on the set on time and things went smoothly. Logan could get his print on the first or second take when she was working in the sunlight.
The press was kept at bay during the filming of Bus Stop, and few interviews or photos were allowed. Only Milton Greene seemed to have free access to Marilyn with a camera. When she accidentally fell from a rodeo-stadium ramp, Milton Greene, who was standing nearby with his Rollie, took pictures of her writhing in pain on the ground rather than rushing to her aid. When Logan asked why he hadn’t helped her, Greene said, “Look, I was a photographer before I was a producer!”
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 31