The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  In the revised version Sugar is late for the train, which is about to pull out of the station. She rushes down the platform, wiggle-wobbling on her high heels. A blast of steam from the engine hits her in the fanny, and she’s impelled forward through the vapor toward the “girl” musicians. It was an artfully amusing entrance and Wilder observed, “She was absolutely right about that.”

  The problems began several days later. On the swaying Pullman headed for Florida, the jazz girls rehearse “Runnin’ Wild” with Josephine (Curtis) on sax, and Daphne (Lemmon) on string bass. As Sugar finishes her lyric, a flask of booze falls out of her garter onto the floor in front of the distaff bandleader, who has a strict “no liquor” rule. Wilder wanted Marilyn to show alarm and fear over the blunder. After several takes Wilder said, “You aren’t surprised or worried enough, Marilyn dear.”

  They rolled again and Marilyn gave a little more surprise. “Cut!” Wilder called in the middle of the take. “Let’s try it again, dear—a big surprise, this time. You’re alarmed and worried and Daphne covers for you—that’s the gag. Now, once more! Big surprise!”

  What Marilyn had feared was happening: Wilder was painting Sugar with broad strokes. But Marilyn was determined not to be the Betty Boop floozy foil for the drag gags. If she had to do a dumb blonde, it was going to be a portrayal. Sugar was going to be three-dimensional, with a heart and soul and motivation, beyond making a gag work.

  As the camera rolled once more and the flask fell, she reacted with chagrin and an embarrassed giggle.

  “Cut! You still haven’t got it, dear. The flask drops. Sue sees that it’s booze. And you’re alarmed. You’re afraid of what might happen. It’s a very simple reaction, dear.” And Wilder did a demonstration—showing her the broad reaction he wanted. Marilyn began trembling and walked out of the Pullman set to where Black Bart was waiting in the dark. It was one of those moments on a set when crew people pretend not to notice what’s happening and make themselves busy doing nothing. Marilyn and Strasberg walked off to a corner of the stage and whispered and nodded for over twenty minutes, while Wilder, the script clerk, and the assistant director, Sam Nelson, exchanged nervous glances.

  It was the beginning of the behind-the-scenes battle of Some Like It Hot—a cold war waged between star and director. It was to be a guerre à mort. The public heard battle reports from the director’s camp and those that preferred to play the Wilder card, but they never got a briefing from Marilyn. She was too discreet. The true story of Marilyn Monroe’s battle for a character never became public knowledge.

  Marilyn’s technique was quite different from Curtis’s and Lemmon’s. They could be joking on the set one moment and step before the cameras the next, giving Wilder Cary Grant or Donald Duck on take one or two. But Marilyn needed total concentration. She knew her limitations and was determined to rise above them. She relied on Paula Strasberg to help her with the character. Commenting to Hedda Hopper on Strasberg’s presence on the Wilder set, she said, “Paula gives me confidence and is very helpful. You see, I’m not a quick study, but I’m very serious about my work and am not experienced enough as an actress to chat with friends and workers on the set and then go into a dramatic scene. I like to go directly from a scene into my dressing room and concentrate on the next one and keep my mind in one channel. I envy these people who can meet all comers and go from a bright quip and gay laugh into a scene before the camera. All I’m thinking of is my performance, and I try to make it as good as I know how.”

  When Wilder realized that Marilyn was toning down Sugar Kane, he kept trying to punch up her performance. Calling “cut” when she wasn’t playing a scene the way he envisioned it, he pushed for the exaggerated gesture, the broader reaction, and the underlined dialogue. He was asking her to do things she didn’t feel were right for the character, and it broke her concentration.

  “I never heard such brilliant direction as Billy gave her,” Jack Lemmon stated, “but nothing worked until she felt right about it. She simply said over and over, ‘Sorry, I have to do it again.’ And if Billy said, ‘Well, I tell you, Marilyn, just possibly if you were to…’—then she’d reply, ‘Just a moment now, Billy, don’t talk to me, I’ll forget how I want to play it.’ That took me over the edge more than once. Nobody could remind her she had a professional commitment.”

  But Marilyn’s commitment was to Sugar Kane. Her instincts told her that Wilder’s broader approach was wrong, not only for her, but for the picture. She fought for the character with the only weapon at her disposal—attrition. If Wilder was going to call “cut” on what she brought to the character, she was going to wear him down. If he was going to break her concentration, he’d have to pay for it. When Wilder tried to change her portrayal, she’d flub the scene and never give him enough to use. The constant flubbing, and drying up, and forgetting lines was the exhaustive process Marilyn went through until Wilder gave up. By take twenty-nine, Marilyn’s way began looking good to the frustrated director.

  Wilder publicly complained, “Marilyn was constantly late, and she demanded take after take—the Strasbergs, after all, had taught her to do things again and again and again until she felt she got them right. Well, now she had us doing things again and again and again. Our nice sane budget was going up like a rocket, our cast relations were a shambles, and I was on the verge of a breakdown. To tell the truth she was impossible—not just difficult.”

  Another thorn in his side was Paula Strasberg. Black Bart stood in the dark behind the camera making gestures and signals to Marilyn, and after each take Marilyn would look to her rather than Wilder for approval. The stress of the battle led to muscle spasms in Wilder’s neck and back, and he was often forced to direct from a reclining board next to the camera. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were among the casualties. Walking around in high-heeled shoes in take after take gave them blisters along with battle fatigue. They grew resentful. In their scenes with Marilyn they were worn out and dry by take twelve, and Marilyn was just getting started. In a moment of pique, Tony Curtis made the widely publicized statement, “Kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler.”

  “Well, I think that’s his problem,” Marilyn responded. “If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has that feeling toward me, then my fantasy has to come into play—in other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.”

  Many years later Tony Curtis stated that the “Hitler” remark was taken out of context. They were on take forty-seven of the kissing scene before Wilder gave up and let Marilyn do it her way. When the company was watching the dailies in the projection room, Curtis made the remark, “You know, after take forty, kissing Marilyn is like kissing Hitler.”

  For many working on the set of Some Like It Hot, it seemed that there was no rational basis for Marilyn to constantly blow her lines. In one scene she enters the “girls’” hotel room in quest of some booze. As she opens and closes bureau drawers in search of a hot-water bottle filled with booze, her line was “Where’s the bourbon?” Wilder wanted her to play it frantic. But frantic wasn’t the way she felt it should be played. He kept calling “cut!” and insisting on a wacka-doo urgency. She gave him twenty-seven frantic takes, but never got the line right—“Where’s the whiskey?” “Where’s the bureau?” “Where’s the booze?” “Where’s the bonbons?” “Where’s the bottle?” “Where’s the bromo?” Wilder resorted to posting the line “Where’s the bourbon?” on the back of the door and inside each of the bureau drawers. Still she went up on the line. Finally, when everyone was exhausted and Wilder was getting spasms, she did the scene her way, got the line right, and Wilder said, “Good—that’s a print.” The scene is on the screen for perhaps fifteen seconds and took half a day to shoot.

  Wilder, of course, knew what she was doing, but didn’t believe she was right. She knew she was right and believed that a star of her stature had the prerogative of playing a scene the way she felt it. There was a method to her madness, but unfortunately cinema mythology
preferred to repeat the myriad stories of Marilyn Monroe’s inability to remember a simple line—a myth that was unearthed once again during the debacle of Something’s Got to Give.

  Marilyn was frequently late in arriving at the studio. Sometimes very late. If she had a 9 A.M. set call, it meant getting up at 5 A.M. to get to the studio by six-thirty and go through hairdressing, makeup, and wardrobe by nine. But she couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t want to take sedatives during her pregnancy. Sometimes it would be 2 or 3 A.M. before she fell asleep, and if she got up at five she’d be no good on camera. So she would sleep the sleep of exhaustion. And she would be late. Quite late. I. A. L. Diamond, who cowrote the screenplay with Billy Wilder, ascribed Marilyn’s lateness to an attempt by the star to throw around the power she had gained following her Fox walkout. “Having reached the top she was paying back the world for all the rotten things she had had to go through,” said Diamond. “There were mornings when nine A.M. rolled around and Marilyn was not on the set or anywhere near it. Ten A.M. comes—no Marilyn. She is now in makeup. She is now in hairdressing. Ten forty-five A.M. and she walks in. Everybody has been waiting all morning. Not a word of greeting. Not a word of apology. She’s carrying a copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, personally given to her by Arthur to read while she’s keeping us waiting. Billy waits some more and finally sends the assistant director to her dressing room to knock on the door, and she yells out, “Fuck you!”

  Not everybody who worked with Marilyn knew the private ordeal she went through to make the metamorphosis from Norma Jeane to Marilyn Monroe to Sugar Kane. It was a transcendental trick that didn’t happen instantaneously. Not only did the Marilyn Monroe image depend on the meticulous way she looked—her makeup, her hair, her wardrobe—but she also had to make up her inner psyche and steel her concentration to fend off the director.

  Twenty-nine days over schedule, Some Like It Hot completed filming on November 6, 1958. Marilyn got the “fuzzy end of the lollipop” and wasn’t invited to the wrap party Wilder gave for the cast and crew. But Marilyn had won the battle. Sugar Kane was etched in silver, and there was nothing Wilder could do about it. The animosity and bitterness would one day be forgotten, but what was on film would endure. The heartfelt and seamless performance of Marilyn Monroe was the substance that glued the film together and kept it from falling into the kinetic mayhem of Wilder’s subsequent farce One, Two, Three.

  She had paid a price. She was suffering from exhaustion and checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital. A week later she traveled by ambulance to the airport, “so as not to jar the baby,” and flew back to New York with Miller.

  Some Like It Hot was sneak-previewed at the Village Theater in Westwood on December 17, 1958, and the audience started laughing in the first scene and didn’t stop until the fade-out gag when Joe E. Brown discovers that the girl he wants to marry (Jack Lemmon) is not, after all, a girl. He shrugs off the dilemma with the remark, “Nobody’s perfect.” Audiences have continued laughing ever since, and to date Some Like It Hot has grossed over $47 million and earned over $4,500,000 for Marilyn Monroe’s heirs—the majority of it going to Ana Strasberg, a woman Marilyn never knew.

  We watched and bought her anguish with our coins.

  On the day of the hilariously successful preview, December 17, Marilyn had a miscarriage. She went into a period of deep mourning. Her sessions with Dr. Kris offered little comfort, and over the Christmas holidays she lapsed into a depression which she tried to alleviate with sedatives. She blamed losing the baby on Some Like It Hot, on Billy Wilder, and on Miller. She felt she never would have made the movie if Miller hadn’t encouraged her. According to her maid, Lena Pepitone, she was terribly upset.

  It was shortly after the miscarriage, while she was trying to recuperate, that an interview with Billy Wilder written by Joe Hyams appeared in newspapers across the country. Criticizing Marilyn’s lateness and lack of professionalism, Wilder stated, “I’m the only director who ever made two pictures with Monroe. It behooves the Screen Director’s Guild to award me a purple heart.” Complaining that her behavior had made him ill, Hyams inquired whether Wilder’s health had improved after completing Some Like It Hot. “I’m eating better,” Wilder replied, “My back doesn’t ache any more. I am able to sleep for the first time in months, and I can look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she’s a woman.” Asked if he would like to do another picture with Marilyn Monroe, Wilder replied, “Well, I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.”

  When Marilyn read the syndicated interview, she was furious. She couldn’t believe that Wilder would publicly joke about her in the press. Lena Pepitone recalled her shouting, “I made him sick?” as she shredded the newspaper into tiny pieces. “I made him sick!!” She leapt out of bed and ran into Miller’s study screaming, “It’s your fault! It’s your damn fault!” Pepitone could hear her shouting at Miller from the far end of the apartment, “You damn well better do something about it, you bleeding-heart bastard! Now everybody in the world’ll take me as a fool—a joke! You’ve got to say something! People’ll listen to you. You’ve got respect!”

  Miller suggested she forget about it.

  “Forget it? Forget it!” she shrieked. “I’ll never forget it! How could I ever forget my baby?…My baby!”

  Marilyn began crying hysterically, and Pepitone recalled that Miller helped her back to her room. He couldn’t deal with noise and arguments, and he hoped she would take a sedative and go to sleep and forget the whole thing. But several times that day she became hysterical once again and ran to his study screaming, crying hysterically, and pulling at her hair. Miller retreated to the farm. Several nights later Norman and Hedda Rosten received a phone call from May Reis at 3 A.M. Marilyn had overdosed.

  Pepitone found her unconscious on the bedroom floor, her face caked with vomit. Unable to awaken her, Pepitone called the doctor whose number was on the emergency list in May Reis’s office. The doctor rushed to the apartment, pumped Marilyn’s stomach, and put her in bed. When May Reis arrived, she called Miller and then the Rostens.

  It had been another close call. Norman Rosten recalled that toward dawn she regained consciousness and began weeping quietly in her bed. As Rosten leaned over in the half-light, he asked, “How are you, dear?”

  “Alive…bad luck,” she weakly replied. “Cruel, all of them cruel, all those bastards. Oh, Jesus…”

  44

  On the Ledge

  Never give all the heart

  For everything that’s lovely is

  But a brief, dreamy, kind delight

  O never give the heart outright….*

  —W. B. Yeats

  Though he hadn’t completed a play in five years, on January 27, 1959, Arthur Miller was awarded one of the nation’s most prestigious literary awards, the gold medal for drama of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand, thought some of his writing on The Misfits was “dreck.”

  Norman Rosten observed, “The pupil/student had now become a critic. The shadow that had fallen between them in England was increasing, deepening. Their evenings with friends were often played out in a facade of marital harmony. Miller was more and more living with her in the third person, as it were, an observer.”

  Miller looked down on screenwriting, and he insisted that writing The Misfits was a sacrifice on his part, made for Marilyn. Yet Marilyn wasn’t at all sure she wanted to appear in The Misfits. “She would read parts of the screenplay and laugh delightedly at some of the cowboy’s lines,” Miller stated, “but seemed to withhold full commitment to playing Roslyn…. I was constructing a gift for her. In the end, however, it was she who would have to play the role, and this inevitably began to push the project into a different coolly professional sphere. If my intention was as authentic as I wished to believe it was, she had a right to decide not to play the part—after all I was not writing it to enslave her to something sh
e had no excitement about doing. Nevertheless, her caution had to hurt a bit.”

  Arthur Miller was to receive $250,000 from Marilyn Monroe Productions in compensation for the “gift” of The Misfits, which he wrapped in bright ribbons: Arthur brought in John Huston as the director, the part of Gay was written especially for Clark Gable, and Marilyn’s friends Montgomery Clift, Kevin McCarthy, and Eli Wallach would be included in the cast.

  Lena Pepitone reported, “Marilyn was getting a terrible chip on her shoulder against her husband and she said, ‘All he cares about is himself, his own writing…and money—that’s all!’” According to Lena, it never occurred to Marilyn just how much money was necessary to keep the two households going: the staff, the rent, the attorneys, the clothes, the beauticians, and the doctors—Miller was undergoing psychotherapy with Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, while Marilyn was having almost daily sessions with Marianne Kris. “Marilyn assumed that plenty of money was there,” Lena recalled. “If she was so famous how could she be poor, she thought. ‘I worried about money for too long,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of it. I’m never going to worry about it again.’” When Arthur, or Mr. Montgomery, or May Reis tried to discuss finances with Marilyn, she would put her hands over her ears and turn away. “I don’t want anything. Not money! Not things! I’ve got things,” she said. “I just want to act. I want friends. I want to be happy! I want some respect! I don’t want to be laughed at. Doesn’t anyone understand?”