The notebook revealed that Arthur was having second thoughts about their marriage. Sobbing to Paula Strasberg about what Arthur had written, she said, “Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Art said he no longer had a decent answer to that one.” The notations in the notebook went on to say that she was an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman to be pitied, but that he feared his own creative life was threatened by her endless emotional demands. “Art once thought I was some kind of angel,” Marilyn cried to Strasberg, “but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse.” Arthur had referred to Marilyn as a “whore.”
Arthur Miller didn’t discuss the incident in his memoirs, but it became the fulcrum of the climactic scene in After the Fall.
QUENTIN: (Grasping her wrist, but not trying to take the pill bottle out of her hand.) Throw them in the sea, no pill can make you innocent! See your own hatred…and life will come back, Maggie. Your innocence is killing you!
MAGGIE: (Freeing her wrist) What about your hatred? You know when I wanted to die? When I read what you wrote, Kiddo. Two months after we were married, Kiddo. (She moves front and speaks toward some invisible source of justice now, telling her injury.) I was looking for a fountain pen to sign some autographs. And there’s his desk…and there’s his empty chair where he sits and thinks how to help people. And there’s his handwriting. And there’s some words, ‘The only one I’ll ever love is my daughter. If I could only find an honorable way to die!’ (she turns to him) Now, when you gonna face that, Judgey? Remember how I fell down, fainted? On the new rug? That’s what killed me, Judgey. Right?
Perhaps Miller was drawing from the evening at Rattigan’s party: in the play Quentin tells Maggie he made the notations, “Because when the guests had gone, and you suddenly turned on me, calling me cold, remote, it was the first time I saw your eyes that way—betrayed, screaming that I’d made you feel you didn’t exist.” After she angrily tells him not to mix her up with his previous wife, Quentin says, “That’s just it. That I could have brought two women so different to the same accusation—it closes a circle for me. And I wanted to face the worst thing I could imagine—that I could not love. And I wrote it down, like a letter from hell.”
The “letter from hell” in Miller’s black notebook damned their marriage, left Marilyn distraught, and marked a turning point in her life. “Hope, hope, hope” seemed beyond her grasp, and she increasingly turned to barbiturates to mask the emotional pain.
MONDAY, 27 August
No MM today. Frantic calls to Parkside were to no avail, although dark hints that AM and MM were not on such friendly terms. I thought so on Saturday at the party…. Finally AM calls to say that MM wasn’t well. A fever. Hmmm. Apparently MM and AM had a row last night, and AM could not control MM at all. She was wandering around the house in a very distressed state. There had been a lot of phone calls, many of them transatlantic. Finally Milton had gone over with extra pills…. In the end one of the doctors in New York talked to her until she was calm enough to go to sleep. (Imagine what that cost?)
Recognizing Marilyn’s deep distress and Paula’s difficulty in coping with the situation, Lee Strasberg flew to London, and Milton Greene arranged for Dr. Hohenberg to arrive for supportive therapy. Calming Marilyn, Hohenberg was successful in getting her back to work, and he introduced her to Anna Freud, who had a practice in London. Marilyn had several sessions with Anna Freud after Hohenberg returned to New York.
Marilyn found herself surrounded by people she could no longer trust. Dismayed at her husband, belittled by her director, she received little support from Milton Greene, whose priority was to mediate between her and Olivier in his efforts to get the film completed. Hedda Rosten was drinking so much she was little help to anyone. Miller couldn’t stand the Strasbergs. To him they were “poisonous and vacuous.” He resented Marilyn’s “nearly religious dependency” on them, which undermined his own influence and control. The relationship between Miller and Milton Greene was equally strained. “Greene thought he would be this big-shot producer and she would be working for him,” Miller observed. “But she saw that he had ulterior aims.” Miller accused Milton and Amy Greene of buying expensive antiques that were charged to Marilyn Monroe Productions and shipped to their home in Connecticut.
WEDNESDAY, 19 September
AM arrived at midday with MM and has been universally cast as the villain of the piece. SLO is cross because he had hoped AM would help MM turn over a new leaf, and this clearly has not happened. She arrived at the studio late and demanding.
In fact she is clearly fed up with AM and also disenchanted with Milton whom she cuts dead…. Milton blames AM for the change in MM’s attitude, both to her work and to him. Milton is in a very difficult position. He wants to control MM and her career, but has to get his film finished on time and on budget if MMP, and he, is to make money. And this means he has to cooperate with SLO and all of us, even at the risk of upsetting MM. So it is easy for someone (AM) to poison MM’s mind against him.
Paula is treated by AM with extreme disdain. I have heard him describe Paula as a charlatan to Milton in SLO’s dressing room, and I’m sure he does it in front of MM. This is hard luck on MM since she totally depends on Paula. She has no one else except the tipsy Hedda. Finally AM is not above snide remarks about Milton to Paula, which quickly get repeated.
This evening MM told Milton that she was not satisfied with her new car. She wants it replaced with a new Jaguar (a MK VII saloon)…. But Milton sees the dark hand of AM at work. “He is trying to pull a fast one. He wants us (MMP) to buy it and then he will ship it over to the USA for his own private use.” Milton was livid, but I think it’s funny that a left-wing intellectual should want to drive round in a Jaguar with Marilyn Monroe. (Although didn’t Lenin have a Rolls-Royce?)
FRIDAY, 12 October
It has been a tough week. At the end of the day I went into SLO’s dressing room with fresh whisky and cigarettes. SLO and Milton are shattered. So is AM.
‘I’ve had it,’ said SLO. ‘I think I’ll go off to China for a month.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Milton.
‘So will I,’ said AM grimly.
‘Come now, dear boy,’ said SLO, ‘Your new bride!’
‘She’s devouring me,’ I heard AM say as I left.
The golden opportunity to make a delightful film with a magnificent cast had become a hellish nightmare from which there would be no exit until the last frame of The Prince and the Showgirl passed through the narrow gate of the Technicolor camera—Marilyn’s true loyalist.
THUNDER and LIGHTNING: ENTER WITCHES
WITCH 1: When shall we witches meet again? In thunder lightning and backlit rain?
WITCH 2: When the hurly burly film flam’s done ’Neath the arc light’s merciless spurious sun.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
EXEUNT ALL.
41
Please Don’t Kill Anything
She could rise to hope like a fish swimming up through black seas to fly at the sun before falling back again. And perhaps those rallies—if one knew the sadness in her—were her glory. But England, I feared, had humbled both of us.
—Arthur Miller
Before their marriage Arthur Miller had kept a studio at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-Third Street in New York, which was a writers’ haven. Writers and intellectuals had all the modern twentieth-century conveniences at the Chelsea—Communist Party headquarters were just across the street, along with a Marxist library and bookstore. And for those disenchanted with Stalinism, a synagogue was right next door, and a Catholic church only a stone’s throw away. Taking his books and typewriter from the Chelsea, Miller moved his study to the more fashionable East Side, where the Millers leased an apartment at 444 East Fifty-Seventh Street, just around the corner from Marilyn’s old Sutton Place South address. On the thirteenth floor, it was a large and spacious
apartment with a view of the East River. Marilyn had it redone in movie star moderne—Harlow white with plenty of mirrors. Still protective of her mother’s unrealized dream, Marilyn had the Franklin baby grand hoisted from the street and placed in the living room, where it remained until Marilyn’s death.
Marilyn told Milton Greene that she “didn’t want to work for a while because she wanted to have a baby,” and she and Miller divided their time between Manhattan and a cottage they rented near the shore at Amagansett, Long Island. The Millers were going to take time to recover the understanding that had been lost in the witch’s brew of The Prince and the Showgirl.
“Soon there was a routine,” Arthur reminisced, “with Marilyn off to her analyst in the mornings and to the Strasbergs’ apartment in the afternoons for hours of private lessons with Lee. Occasionally we went out to Brooklyn to visit my parents, who would bring in the neighbors to shyly adore Marilyn. The street out front would be full of kids who cheered her when she came out of the little house. She took much pleasure in these ordinary folk and especially loved my aging father, who simply lit up at the sight of her.”
At Amagansett their lives took on more normal rhythms. They would go for long walks on the shore, and Marilyn tried cooking the recipes passed on by Arthur’s mother. Deciding to make homemade noodles, she would hang them on chair backs and dry them with a hair dryer. The Rostens were frequent visitors and Norman observed, “Upon their return to the States toward the end of the year, a change was discernible in Marilyn. The tone of the marriage had changed. Something new and mysterious had arisen between them, which close friends would recognize: the honeymoon cruise was over, the real voyage had begun. Storm and heartbreak ahead.”
It was during the spring of 1957 that Marilyn’s longing to have children intensified. A number of her friends recalled how she yearned to be a mother, even if it meant temporarily putting films aside. She desperately wanted fulfillment. Having a child would increase her sense of a place in the world and provide stability and the promise of continuity. In a sense, motherhood was an extension of her childlike mystical reverence for life, and it was the same life force, so intense within her, that she projected into all living things. As Norman Rosten observed of her, “The survival of an unprotected shrub on a windy hillside, through rain and frost, is to her a source of trembling joy. She knew her own battle to survive and could appreciate the triumph in nature.”
Miller’s short story “Please Don’t Kill Anything” is based on Marilyn’s sensitivity to the life-and-death struggle of all living creatures. The story concerns a husband and wife walking along a beach who observe fishermen hauling in a net through the surf. The wife becomes distressed at the thought of the fishes’ doom. As the net is pulled ashore she exclaims, “Oh, dear, they’re going to be caught now! Each one is wondering what happened!” She convinces her husband they must toss back into the water all the discarded smaller fish flopping on the beach struggling to breathe. In Timebends Miller recounts the incident that inspired the story:
We walked the empty Amagansett beach in peace, chatting with the occasional commercial fishermen who worked their nets from winches on their rusting trucks. These local men, Bonackers, so-called, greeted her with warmth and respect, even though she perplexed them by running along the shore to throw back the gasping “junk” fish they had no use for and had flung from their nets. There was a touching but slightly unnerving intensity in her then, an identification that was unhealthily close to her own death fear. One day, after throwing a couple of dozen fish one by one back into the water, she was losing her breath, and I finally had to distract her and draw her away to keep her from working the shoreline until she dropped.
Jimmy Haspiel mentions her concern over the pigeons in a small New York City park at the end of Fifty-Seventh Street, where Marilyn often went to sit on a bench incognito. “Marilyn went over there one night and came upon two young boys who were capturing pigeons, trapping the birds in nets, then caging them. Marilyn asked the lads why they were doing this, and they informed her that they made money by catching pigeons and selling them to a meat market as squab for fifty cents apiece. Marilyn asked the boys, ‘If I give you the money, will you free the birds?’ They agreed, the cage was opened, and the pigeons were freed. Marilyn then arranged to meet the kids on the nights they worked catching pigeons, and at the end of the evenings she could pay them for the birds, then ecstatically watch as they were released back into the air over the East River.”
According to her New York driver, Peter Leonardi, Marilyn didn’t limit her concern for God’s creatures. He remembered that she often went down to the Bowery as Zelda Zonk and handed out money to the sad humanity who had neither fins nor wings to carry them from misfortune.
One person who failed to be a recipient of Marilyn’s benevolence, however, was Milton Greene. In April the Millers viewed a temp-dub version of The Prince and the Showgirl. Having viewed a rough cut of the film in New York in December, which she liked, Marilyn was bitterly disappointed by the changes that had been made. She blamed Milton Greene for allowing the film to be ineptly reedited.
In a bid to gain full control over MMP, and further his own position, Miller encouraged Marilyn to sever her ties with Greene, and on April 11, a statement was issued through Arthur Miller’s attorney, Robert H. Montgomery, Jr., accusing Greene of mismanagement. Several days later it was announced by Marilyn Monroe Productions that Milton Greene’s attorney, Irving Stein, had been replaced by Miller’s attorney, Robert Montgomery, and that the treasurer would be Miller’s brother-in-law, George Kupchik.
In a statement that avoided rancor, Milton Greene was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “It seems that Marilyn doesn’t want to go ahead with the program we planned. I’m getting lawyers to represent me. But I don’t want to do anything now to hurt her career. I did devote about a year and a half exclusively to her. I practically gave up photography.” After a lengthy legal battle, MMP bought out Milton Greene’s stock for $100,000, and he abandoned his career as a movie producer. Arthur Miller took his place as vice president of MMP.
Defying circumstance, The Prince and the Showgirl proved to be vastly entertaining, giving no hint of its hellish origins. It received mixed reviews, but high praise for Marilyn’s radiant performance, and even Olivier was forced to admit, “She gave a star performance. Maybe I was tetchy with Marilyn and with myself, because I felt my career was in a rut…. She was quite wonderful—the best of all.” Indeed, the film was flawed by Olivier’s sodden performance. He was the same wooden prince in reel ten as he had been in reel one, and the delight of seeing the transition from the staid prince of Carpathia to the impassioned romantic who had fallen hopelessly in love with the showgirl was denied.
Despite their differences, Milton Greene’s instincts for Marilyn were certainly correct. He had an insight into what was right for her as an actress, and two of Marilyn Monroe’s best films were made under his guidance. After he was removed from MMP, Greene and Marilyn never met again. He attempted to return to photography but became increasingly addicted to alcohol and drugs. Later, Marilyn was to admit to Amy Greene, “Arthur took away the only person I ever trusted—Milton.”
Shortly before he succumbed to cancer in 1989, Milton Greene reminisced, “She was ultrasensitive, and very dedicated to her work, whether people realize this or not. She came through magnificently in Prince and she was great in Bus Stop. All I did was believe in her. She was a marvelous, loving, wonderful person who I don’t think many people understood.”
Because Marilyn’s psychoanalyst, Margaret Hohenberg, had been recommended by Milton Greene, Arthur advised Marilyn to change analysts. Arthur’s analyst, Rudolph Loewenstein, recommended Marianne Kris, as did Anna Freud in a telephone call from London.*
Marianne Rie Kris was born and raised in Vienna, where she had been a childhood friend of Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. Kris studied and practiced in Vienna, and later Berlin, where she became an associate of th
e Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute along with the Freudian-Marxists Franz Alexander, Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel, and Rudolph Loewenstein. It was in Berlin that she married Ernst Kris, a prominent psychoanalyst and art historian who published many of Otto Fenichel’s papers.
Simmel and Fenichel fled to Hollywood to escape the Nazis, and Ernst and Marianne Kris escaped to London in 1938 with Sigmund and Anna Freud. While Anna remained in London after her father’s death, Ernst and Marianne Kris were among the exiles who immigrated to America, where they continued their practice in New York.
Dispersed by the Nazi terror, the close-knit group of Freudian-Marxist exiles kept in touch through letters and reunions at psychoanalytic seminars. Many were on the mailing list of Otto Fenichel’s Rundbriefe, which kept them up to date on current activities and theory. Ernst Kris died in New York a few weeks before Marilyn began her sessions with Marianne Kris, whose office/residence was conveniently located down the hall from the residence of Lee Strasberg at the Langham, 135 Central Park West.
Marilyn initially liked Kris and was pleased to be a patient of someone so closely allied with the Freud family. More than ever, Marilyn wanted to understand herself and her donative relationships with men. She wanted to be “a good wife,” and she wanted her marriage with Arthur Miller to succeed. Both Marilyn and Kris saw motherhood as her salvation.
For Marilyn to have a child of her own would have been “a crown with a thousand diamonds,” Miller said, and in June of 1957 their doctor confirmed that she was pregnant. Marilyn was so elated that she was deaf to the warning that it could be an ectopic pregnancy. Privately, the doctor told Miller of that danger. “But the very idea of her as a mother ultimately swept me along with her,” Miller stated, “for already there were moments of a new kind of confidence, a quietness of spirit that I had never seen in her. She was beginning to feel a safe place around herself, or so it seemed. If a child might intensify anxieties, it would also give her, and hence myself, a new hope for the future.”
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 35