by Adam Braver
Maureen comes up to her. She also looks nervous. She’s shorter than Marilyn, but somehow Marilyn looks more diminutive. Maureen’s is a solid physique, one that already has cast itself as the stalwart, balanced by a contrasting vulnerability that resides in her cherublike face. “Almost ready,” Maureen says, not quite a question. Her feet dance in place.
“Almost ready.”
Over the past few weeks, they have not been able to rehearse the scene without Marilyn making a mistake. But that hasn’t been due to an inability to understand the character or the context. She’s studied the play nightly. Discussed it with her classmate, Jeannie Carmen, over coffee at corner cafés. Made it the focus of evening conversation with Arthur at the apartment on Sutton Place, where they’ve taken it apart both structurally and thematically, and even run through other scenes from the play, with him taking on the role of Old Chris. It was only when she rehearsed at the studio that she couldn’t remember her lines. Maureen suggested some old acting tricks, either writing out all the lines by hand or just leaving an open script on a table on the stage. Marilyn didn’t know what would work. In truth, when it was quiet, when she was alone and not picturing anything, she knew the script inside out. The words came into her head, rich and lyrical, as though she were listening to somebody else’s recitation. It was only when she thought about it. Pictured herself onstage. Hearing her naysayers lean over each other to whisper The stage is not the movies. That was when she lost them.
She and Maureen have done everything to keep this scene from becoming a spectacle—including changing dates, writing fake names on the schedule—but as the room begins to fill with people who typically never attend the lab workshops, it becomes clear this will be the circus they’ve been hoping to avoid. “Sometimes,” Maureen says to Marilyn, “you just get a bad case of the nerves right before you go on.” She isn’t really conversing; she’s just talking. Almost chattering. “They’re buried in your body. Deep inside. Where the bones rattle. But then it’s as if the nervousness just pops as soon as the curtain rises. Like a bubble. Gone. And then you float right through.”
Marilyn doesn’t say anything. She can only nod. Usually she just defaults to her menu of pills, any one of them made to level her anxiety. But she’s resisted the impulse; experience tells her that the necessary dosage for this level of nerves would only disorient her. She adjusts the belt of the tan raincoat she picked for the scene, tightens it, and tries to steady her breath. Maureen’s tension only makes her more nervous. Reaching into the coat pocket, Marilyn mumbles, “I brought this,” covertly pulling out a fifth of Jack Daniels. “Just in case, like me, you don’t take your coffee black.”
Almost all the seats are taken. The level of chitchat rises and echoes up with the leftover prayers into the old church rafters.
The two women stand together, sipping their coffee and whiskey. Given the chance, they would wait forever.
Strasberg’s voice cuts through the room’s din. Then the house quiets.
Maureen says, “Okay, I guess we’re just about on.”
“Then we’d better take our places.”
“Yes, we better.”
“Maureen,” Marilyn says.
“Yes?”
“I know them.”
“You know them.”
“My lines.”
It’s a relief when the scene ends. Strasberg already is calling out that it was terrific. Extending his arms. Standing up. Clapping his hands. But she doesn’t feel it. And though she knows she isn’t supposed to think of the scene as an audition or performance (just a “protected environment”), she’s aware that Lady Macbeth has slipped that much further away.
When she walked onstage, Marilyn became aware of her steps being too heavy. Her feet felt like they thudded the boards, making it almost physically impossible to reach Maureen. She worked to compensate. Tried to lighten her exterior. Bring an added delicacy to her movements. A controlled hush to her speech. By the end, though, she wasn’t sure she ever found the control. But at least no lines were dropped.
She and Maureen step into a shadowed area, away from Mr. Strasberg. Away from everybody. On the stage, it was as though they were nothing more than two people occupying a single space, jabbering alternately between pauses. Now they’re like strangers who have endured a common disaster, forever connected by the shared experience. They try to congratulate each other, laughing at how a collision of nerves can only result in an implosion. Marilyn says she’s going to return the Jack Daniels, claiming it was clearly a defective brew. They take each other’s hands and then let them drop. Turning to leave, they simultaneously wipe their palms on their respective hips.
When she returns to Hollywood, they will talk and talk about her New York ways and her so-called method acting, trying to bend her back into their premade Hollywood shape, and then get furious when they discover she is not that pliable. Some will accuse her of a newfound pretension. But she’ll be focused in a way she’s never been before.
Spring 1956: Los Angeles
Arthur is afraid of what his association might do to her career. Joe McCarthy’s committee has been breathing down his neck, promising a subpoena that will compel him to name his friends in order to save his reputation and livelihood—not to mention save himself from going to jail.
He could just stay in the desert forever, he says to her over the telephone from the phone booth at Pyramid Lake. She’s in Los Angeles shooting Bus Stop, awaiting the summary divorce that will be awarded to him after the mandatory six weeks it takes to become a Nevada resident. Then they’ll marry. But maybe he just won’t come out of the desert, he says. There are cowboys he’s met who live in holes in the desert, he tells her, and unless you know exactly where those holes are, you’ll never have a chance at finding those men. All completely off the grid. They come up only when there’s a chance for work. “I could do that,” he says. “Only you’d have the map of where to find me.”
“Don’t be silly,” she replies. “You’re from Brooklyn. You’re not going to live in a hole in the Nevada desert.”
“Have you ever imagined what it would be like to live totally outside the mainstream?”
She thinks of Norwalk State Hospital, where the long white hallways feel like fault lines off which the private rooms splinter.
Ignoring his question, she tells Arthur time isn’t passing fast enough, and that she can’t wait until the Reno divorce kicks in and they can be together again. He replies that at least being out in the desert is inspiring him to write. Maybe he’ll end up writing something for her. Maybe a picture. “How about we get through the next six weeks,” she says, “without the FBI getting another new thing to dig up?”
“How about it,” he says.
“How about it.”
Because he loves her that much, he went to Nevada for the divorce, renting a cabin at Pyramid Lake sight unseen. The area, a terrain of flat valleys and low hills buttressed by dried lakes, a thousand years of geologic coincidence, is as different as possible from anything he ever knew growing up among tenement buildings that crowded the sidewalks. A desert allegedly guarded by poisonous snakes hidden in wait, ready to snap at the scent of a threat. And he had to walk vigilantly around the Pyramid Lake shoreline, keeping watch for quicksand. Apparently there were warning signs posted at one time, but they kept disappearing, and the county became weary of replacing them. Some figure the signs were just taken under by quicksand. Others accuse the Paiutes of stealing them in the night, with the idea that it would take only one or two fisherman being sucked under to ward off future poachers from this sacred area, though that seems a little far-fetched, aside from the fact that, on the rare occasion, rotted bodies have been spotted bubbling up to the surface, before being vacuumed under again just as quickly.
Because he loves her that much, he went to Nevada for the divorce.
That’s how much he loves her. And that love makes her love him back. Even more.
Going up Century Boulevard to the
studio, Marilyn senses she’s being tailed. At the gates, where the guard checks her name off the clipboard, she hears shutters clicking. She can feel binoculars zooming in on her as she scoots into her trailer on the back lot. Once inside, she draws the shades. The room changes to sepia. The sun beats down on the studio back lot while the cool Pacific air blows up Century Boulevard, creeping under the doorjamb. Being back in LA drains her. In only a matter of months, she grew used to the pace of New York, to the different expectation of craft and dedication. Even with Paula Strasberg here to coach her while she’s shooting Bus Stop, Marilyn still feels in between. Going backward and forward at the same time. She sits on a cushioned bench, then slumps, resting her head on the card table, the vinyl sticking to her cheek. She shades her face with her palm and reminds herself that if she needs to talk she’s supposed to talk in whispers. The bugging devices aren’t that good.
She calls him in Nevada at nine o’clock at night, from a pay phone on Sunset—just in case. Put on hold, she continues to drop coins into the slot, feeling shaky for the ten minutes it takes for Arthur to come to the phone. She leans against the side of the booth, her mouth practically touching the fingerprinted glass wall. When he finally gets on, her voice is trembling. She wonders what took so long. Arthur reminds her that she’s called him at a phone booth that is down the road from his cabin and that it was the landlord who answered and then went to get him. It’s a bit of a procedure, he says, going up and down the dirt road at Pyramid Lake, especially in the dark of night. But it’s what they have. She waits for him to pause, and then interjects that she can’t handle it, and before he can say handle what, she says, “This crap of a moviemaking, and all the waiting,” and she swears she won’t have it anymore, and she feels like she’s about to come crashing, and no one in her circle has the strength to keep her from shattering. He says he can come out in the morning, but then the six weeks will be broken, and they don’t give you credit. They’ve got rules, the state of Nevada. He and Marilyn will have to start the wait all over again. Another six weeks.
She says, “We’ll keep it quiet. We can meet somewhere in the valley. What are the chances? It’s worth the risk.”
He says it’s a risk, but he’ll think about it.
“That means you won’t come, doesn’t it?”
“No,” he says. “It means I need to think about it. Figure it out.”
“So you’re coming?” She doesn’t try to hide the excitement in her voice.
“I’m thinking on it.”
The following afternoon he’s in LA. It’s safe for only an evening; he’ll have to be gone by the following morning. Arthur tells her he decided to come because he’s concerned about her, unable to admit that coming was also for him. But she lets him have that. They don’t talk about committees or divorces or movie sets, and hardly of marriage. They mostly stay silent. A sense of surveillance still hovers. Together, she and Arthur sit in her room, number 41 at the Chateau Marmont, listening to a reel-to-reel tape of Mr. Strasberg that Paula dropped off, saying it had to be heard. On the recording, Mr. Strasberg lectures on the acting techniques of Eleanora Duse. His voice comes through the machine’s speaker, clear and distinct; anybody eavesdropping through the walls would think it was he who lived there. Mr. Strasberg doesn’t so much talk about Duse as pose questions about why she was so revered. There is authority in his tone, yet still Mr. Strasberg speaks with wonder; in a way it’s like religion, the very sense of structure Marilyn sometimes craves. She rubs Arthur’s thigh, occasionally glances over to him, looking for his reactions. She suspects that were she to stop the tape and ask him what Mr. Strasberg just said, Arthur wouldn’t be able to answer. His expression never changes. And when she does stop the tape, and Mr. Strasberg’s voice slows down and trails off, she senses Arthur snap awake. She says she’s hungry. She suggests a café she knows up the street, as old-world European a place as one can find on the Sunset Strip, where the walls are papered in thick browns, and the lightbulbs glow a dingy yellow, and the air moves only when the front door opens. She asks, “Should we go now? Or did you want to hear the end of the lecture?” And the way in which he offers the choice back to her, despite his blatant lack of interest in Lee Strasberg’s opinion about Eleanora Duse, makes her love him just a little bit more.
A moist evening air blows off a horizon that’s starting to wilt into the haze. For the first time all week she doesn’t think about being watched. They move up the strip without speaking, until they reach the European restaurant and are greeted at the door by a host named Henri who speaks to them only in French. The European restaurant is even more ridiculous than she made it sound, with its piped-in cabaret music and an interior meant to replicate a street café. But she doesn’t say anything, other than how safe she feels to be there with him.
The restlessness returns the next morning, once he’s gone. The car will be arriving shortly at the Chateau Marmont to take her to the set. She’s already dressed, her hair tied back under a scarf. For once ahead of schedule. Paula Strasberg waits in the room next door. They agreed to meet out front when the car arrived.
She sits on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in the bedspread. Then turns on the radio, adjusting the volume to a whisper. And she faces the wall and tries to breathe in. Hoping to fill her chest. When he left, Arthur told her he would see about returning next week; meanwhile, they both need to focus on their work to get through this phase. She promised she would try to save her pills for when she really needs them.
They talk that night. She tells Arthur they don’t need to worry. They’ll make it through this waiting period. And then they can move into a whole new life. It’s not hard to start over, she assures him. Trust me. She says it into the phone, a hand cupped over the receiver, with her voice lowered and hushed, but speaking so quickly she can barely keep the words in order.
Midsummer 1956: New York City & Washington, D.C.
Although she didn’t want him to go to jail, she always encouraged Arthur not to cooperate with the committee, even if it meant contempt of Congress charges. The night before they left for Arthur’s testimony in Washington, Spyros Skouras, the president of Twentieth Century-Fox, came by their apartment, hoping to convince Arthur to cooperate. He offered Arthur a way out, saying he could persuade some of the congressmen he had relationships with to relent if Arthur compromised by making a statement that thanked the committee for giving him the opportunity to realize he’d made mistakes, and to testify before Chairman Walter that he was glad for the chance to reconstitute his love for America, and was now fearful of people he’d once admired. She’d watched the whole thing from their bar, drinking scotch and running cognac out to Skouras.
Arthur fumed.
She understood full well that the only reason Skouras cared was because of her impending marriage to Arthur and the effect his political stance might have on the salability of Marilyn and her movies. Maybe Skouras understood he wasn’t going to succeed, because he suddenly stopped talking, grabbed his coat, and let Arthur see him to the elevator. Alone, Marilyn poured herself another scotch. She sipped it quickly before Arthur returned. It burned all the way down. She poured another. Hoping for the same.
After his hearing, Arthur didn’t say much to her. He and his lawyer, Joe Rauh, came back to the Rauhs’ apartment, where Marilyn had spent the day with Joe’s wife, Olie, sequestered, out of sight of the Washington, D.C., media, and away from what Arthur perceived as unnecessary pressure. Once they walked in, it was as though the hearing had never happened, as if it had been only an inconvenience preceding her and Arthur’s upcoming trip to England at the end of the week. What Marilyn did glean of the committee hearing was indirect—interrogations about petitions Arthur had signed, the rights of Ezra Pound to write his poetry, and his invocation of the Fifth Amendment when asked to confirm the Communist leanings of fellow writers. The only thing concrete was when Joe Rauh laughed, saying how this all could’ve been avoided if Arthur had just allowed Marilyn into the Capitol
to pose for photos with Chairman Walter. But she was glad Arthur wasn’t laughing. Even more glad he would never concede the fight. He burned so much energy trying to protect her from his battles, was so busy looking out for her that he hadn’t stopped to notice how hard she’d been cheering. Like a fanatic sitting ringside, yelling, Hit him again, put him down for good.
Midsummer 1956: 2 Sutton Place, New York City
Rabbi Goldburg wants to meet with you on his own, commuting from Congregation Mishkan Israel in New Haven down to your Sutton Place apartment. At your front door, on the eighth floor, he stands, slightly winded, a satchel in one hand and a stack of books cradled under his arm—What Is a Jew?, History of the Jews, A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem, and the Conversion Manual of the CCAR—the texts, you’ll learn, that he requires anybody who wants to convert to read. You bring him tea, then settle in the living room, the rabbi on the couch and you in the brown armchair. The window is cracked open; the apartment gets stuffy in summer. He’s looking at you, nodding with a faint smile, and it’s impossible to guess how he sees you. It feels a bit like an audition, one for which you haven’t been given a script, and it’s not exactly clear how you’re being measured. You’ve never sat one-on-one with a rabbi before, and your first impression is that his demeanor is more like that of a professional man than you might have imagined, all business. You shift, uncrossing your legs, then crossing them again. Finally, you break the quiet. “Well,” you say, “welcome.” “Yes,” he says, “welcome.” And you say, “Shall we get started?” He leans back, spreading his arms along the top of the couch back; they span almost the entire length. He says he wants you to be comfortable, that we’re just going to have a little initial chat. “So let’s start with the most basic of questions,” he begins. “Why do you want to convert?” You straighten yourself up, this one you know, and you explain it’s because you’re going to marry Arthur, and he’s, well, you know. Rabbi Goldburg considers, then tells you that, traditionally, marriage can never be considered as the sole reason for a conversion; the true reason needs to be a compelling desire to have a Jewish identity and to be part of a shared future, and he wants to know what you understand of that desire. Now you’re nodding, sirens screaming as they round the corner on East Fifty-Seventh Street, not quite sure of how to answer, because you haven’t really thought about it in those terms. The rabbi must see your confusion, because he walks back his question and says, “Allow me to ask you this, Miss Monroe. What are you converting from?” and you say, “From?” and he says, “If you’re converting, then you have to be going from something to something.” And you remember your great-aunt Mrs. Martin taking you to her fundamentalist church in Compton, but you were only a child, and it was something forced upon you, something you never even accepted enough to reject. So you look at Rabbi Goldburg, patiently waiting for your response, and all you can do is answer with another question: “Can nothing be something?”