by Adam Braver
Mid-September 1960: The Misfits Set, Pyramid Lake, NV
From a distance it doesn’t look that powerful. The nose of the train fans down on the tracks, cutting a straight edge across the desert. It hardly looks as though it’s moving at all. An almost perfect curl of smoke rises from the stack, never breaking, maintaining perfect form, keeping pace with the charging locomotive. And as you stand by the edge of the track, half looking out across the plains where, in the distance, they’re setting up the shoot, you can make out the second-unit guys talking with Huston, who is barely looking up; and the makeup boys sit in the makeup chairs, while Agnes stands over Evelyn, teasing her hair, and the gaffer gauges the light against Evelyn’s dress. The sun has barely risen. They’ve given up on makeup, most of it sweated off as soon as it’s applied. So they’re just waiting on the shoot. They don’t look like much out there, specks in a Nevada desert, but you know the expressions on the faces of every single one of them. As if they’re staring you down.
You’re on the way. That’s what they’ve been told. The driver has been instructed to tell them you are on the way. That you just wanted a little fresh air. That you are walking the rest of the way in. Walking it off, both the night and the morning. And you know Huston will say, In the fucking desert? and maybe some smart-ass will add, She thinks she’s Moses, and Gable will just shake his head, while Monty closes his eyes, thankful for the extra time, willing a hangover away.
And your husband will stand with his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on his feet. On occasion he’ll lick the sweat off his lips and push his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, holding them in place, believing they won’t slip down again. He’ll think of the pills, but won’t talk of the pills, because he doesn’t really understand—despite all that seriousness and intellect, he doesn’t understand. They’re needed for sleep? For waking up? But his biggest fear is that you won’t show up. Because he’s created The Misfits for you. Put his playwriting career on hold, in order that you can be seen as you really are. He’s thought up the plot, and the characters’ internal struggles, and the way they symbolize the modern world. He knows the way it’s supposed to go. He rewrites the lines every day. Throughout the night too. Argues with Huston about his vision being captured just right. He wants to make sure you’re taken seriously, just as you want to be, but every day and night seem to be another battle about why you won’t be seen as serious or smart. And he makes like he’s supportive, but you want to call bullshit on him because you know what he really thinks, because you went up to the hotel room for a forgotten call sheet when he wasn’t there, and you saw a bound notebook on the desk by his papers, and you opened it to find it was his diary, and though you knew it was wrong, you still turned the pages, looking at each one with half-squinting eyes like you might look at a car accident, and most of it was boring, mundane steam-blowing about issues of the filming and the script changes, but near the most recent entries you noticed your name, and you read the same passage over and over—the one he wrote about how easily you can embarrass him when you try to engage in anything intellectual. And you wanted to rip the page out and tear it up a hundred different ways, but then you figured that would be just what he’d expect from you (the subject for the follow-up entry), and so you closed the diary, carefully placed it back so it was just the way you found it, and swore to yourself that you would never forget what this felt like. This was more real than any declarations of support.
The ground starts to tremble as the train moves closer, a bit larger though still slight. It smells. The coal cooking. An oil perfume on the wood cross-tracks. And you wish you had a penny to lay down on the rail. Place it with precision, pulling your hand away quickly. You’d watch the coin tremble, dancing for balance, trying to steady itself until the train wheels rolled over it, stretching and elongating Lincoln and changing the penny from something of value into an oddity.
You really should’ve been on set by now. You’ve promised that from this day onward . . . But you like being a speck in the desert. The location hasn’t scared you the way they thought it might. In a strange way it’s made you feel more special, as if you stand apart, not by lights or sex or power or money, but by being clearly defined against the barren backdrop. It makes you feel more alive.
Your husband seems to notice you. He says something to Huston, then raises his arms up like a castaway, waving and crossing them to get your attention. Maybe if you stay perfectly still, don’t move an arm or break your stare, then he’ll think you haven’t seen him. He turns to Huston, and Huston knocks his boot into the ground and then spits into the dust cloud he’s just made. Your husband’s arms still wave, and then he walks toward you, and he seems to be moving faster than the train. You try to keep still, looking past him, so that he’s no longer in your sights. If you don’t see him, he doesn’t see you.
The ground shakes harder. And you hear the groan of the train. It swells inside you, almost making you sick in the stomach. Almost too sick to work.
Late September 1960: The Misfits Set, Pyramid Lake, NV
She notices the mustang bleeding, a cut across his chest. He’s bound on the desert floor, beside the pickup where he’s kept before he’s needed for filming. They’re prepping the scene in which, after being moved by Roslyn’s distress, Monty’s character hijacks the truck, drives out to the horse, jumps from the cab, and cuts the stallion free. But the horse already has a gash. And she stares at the thin strip of blood, trying to get a closer look, while Monty’s stunt double, Dick Pascoe, tells her not to get too close, that this one is a real fighter. Marilyn, in her white dress shirt and blue dungarees, stamps around the back of the truck, unsure of where to turn. Dust from the dry lake bed follows her. It’s as though nobody notices the wound. And she begins to believe she’s the only one who cares.
She catches Arthur’s eye. “He’s injured,” she says. “Right there.” She points. “Right there.”
Arthur squints, looking over at the truck. He’s wearing a Western jacket that looks out of place on him. Hanging off his frame, it makes him look boyish, costumed. He keeps a steady composure. One that has become his constant manner when talking with her. And it only enrages her; she sees it as a management technique that seems forced and modulated, as ill-fitting as his Western jacket with its dark suede and cowboy swirls. “The horse is fine, Marilyn,” he says. “He just scraped himself a little on the wire over there.” He glances at the temporary corral, where thin slats of wood stand to form a mushroom-shaped pen held together by three parallel rows of wires. At least a dozen horses crowd the open end, while the narrower mouth feeds into a large animal trailer. “It’s just a scrape,” he says. “Nothing more.”
“No.” She shakes her head. Hands opening and closing into fists. “Can’t you see he’s injured?”
“Marilyn, I’m telling you the horse is fine. It’s what they do. Sometimes animals get hurt. And then they heal. It’s what they do.”
Behind the truck, a dolly rolls on a sheet of plywood, steadying for the shot. Huston stands beside it, reviewing the sequence with Pascoe, who will rush out with the knife to cut the ropes and set the mustang free. And then he’ll shoo it away and run like hell back into the cab. The horse is just too unpredictable to send in Monty. Huston says they need to do it quickly and they need to do it right. This is a one-chance shot.
She goes over to Huston, leaving Arthur behind. She walks in a heavy patter that breaks into a jog. “John,” she says. “John. No.”
He waves her back, not turning around.
“No, John,” she says, but her voice can’t seem to rise above a whisper. “Let him go. Cut the scene. Let him go. He’s hurt. We can’t make him continue. Can we forget this take? For now?”
Huston motions to Pascoe to go. In the single take, Pascoe is able to jump out, dash around the truck, brandish his knife, and cut loose the trussed horse. The mustang squirms and twists upright, then leaps up, making straight for the corral, where it runs a series of quick circles, d
arting in and out among the other horses, in and out of the horse trailer, and then finally settles down, rubbing up against the temporary planks of the very fence that brought on the injury.
It’s hard to read Huston’s expression, between the sunglasses and his long-brimmed cap; it’s sometimes hard to tell if he has any at all. Marilyn waits, shoulders drooped, her arms hanging, as if they might pull her straight into the ground. She’s positioned almost exactly between Huston and Arthur. Huston finally looks at her. His head cocked. “Well?” he says, a yellowed smile rising. “What was it you wanted?”
She knows they’re waiting. She’s already missed the call.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, she fiddles with the wire hood from a champagne bottle, pushing her index finger in and out of the tiny cage. She’s phoned down once to the front desk to say she’s ready and to ask if the driver is there yet. They’ve assured her they’ll send him up immediately, once he arrives. She said it’s just that he might be out front idling, and the desk clerk repeated that he’d send the driver right up, his manly voice turning boylike in its irritation. She pushes her finger deeper into the opening and twists the wire, tightening it until the tip of her finger turns red, and then a puffy white.
The lip of a champagne bottle pokes out from under the bed, on its side. She rolls her heel over the curved glass, rocking it back and forth.
It’s all spiraled so quickly. She can’t remember if she told Arthur to get his own room, or if he came to that himself. She can barely remember when the conversation took place. Only that she screamed. But that was that. Again she finds herself huddled in her own room. And while it’s always been lousy being by herself, there is a comforting familiarity. She’s begun to accept that every step forward is really just a step into the past.
Negative forces exist. They’re part of the electricity that turns the world, the essential charge that comes from the polarity of the negative trying to touch the positive. And in the past, the solution has been simple: Just don’t show up. A tactic that’s always been more than basic avoidance, one that’s about survival—not having the internal wherewithal to deal with the crap being thrown at you. It’s overwhelming enough trying to battle your own complexities, but to step out the door and be assaulted by everyone else’s is a near-impossible task. Especially when you’re just trying to stay steady—keep a clear head and an even presence. So it becomes easier not to go (or at least delay going as long as you can). And, yes, it’s annoying to the others, she knows that, she’s no fool; but what they don’t understand is that it’s better for everyone in the end, because if she succumbed to pressure and expectation and showed up when she wasn’t ready, then her defenses couldn’t handle it; her state of mind would be left completely vulnerable. She’d fall apart right then and there. And, yes, maybe she is like a child, unwilling to believe that bad things in the world can’t be kept away. But she still can’t help but cling to the long-held belief that if she closes her eyes, then those bad things won’t exist in the first place.
She looks at the phone and considers calling downstairs again. The car should’ve been here already. It’s Gable she worries about, waiting under the desert sun, how the heat can burden a man his age. He’s been looking a little more peaked each day. And, as with her, it’s seemed harder and harder for him to maintain the energy; he too comes alive only when the cameras roll. She’s never meant to keep him waiting, and she thinks he knows that. He understands how hard it can be. You never mean to bring harm. You’re actually trying to keep it away. She reaches for the phone, about to turn the rotary, but the wire hood is still clamped over her finger. She tries to shake it off. And then, pinching the pointed end, she twists it just enough to slide her finger out. But it seems her twisting actually compresses the hood, and before she can stop, a thin line of blood bands under the ring. And she sits there, staring at it, her mouth as dry as can be, unsure of what to do, her foot still on the bottle, watching the blood pool and fall in small drops on the sheet, where it expands and blends like watercolor. Should she loosen or tighten the hood? What would best keep the blood in?
From the Mapes, it’s still an hour-long ride out to Pyramid Lake. She pictures the day turning cloudy, with maybe even some rain coming. And everyone waiting for her. But no matter what the sky ends up looking like, the desert will still be unbearably hot. It’s impossible to imagine being out there, lousy under that heat. But that’s not why she’s running late. Nothing’s ever as simple as the weather.
Late September 1960: The Misfits Set, Pyramid Lake, NV
She channels Lee Strasberg, hearing his instructions over and over (contact those memories of emotion, remember the emotions, keep them in storage, always be emotionally available). And she stands by herself on the dry bed of Pyramid Lake, facing a semicircled crew that’s drawn far back, setting up the long shot of Roslyn screaming against the vast plain, ringed by the snowcapped Sierras. A single boom is set behind her. She wears a denim jacket that matches her Levi’s, and she tugs on the collar of her white shirt as she thinks through her lines. She’s confused herself about how to play the scene. Caught up in the logic of the sequence, when she knows it’s really about the unconscious. Acting , she can hear Mr. Strasberg say, is not something you do. It occurs. And there she stands, preparing for what very well may be the soul of the picture, seeing Roslyn in the terms of the cultural world she’s become part of in New York, but still not sure if she can connect with the emotional world that Strasberg has taught her is so critical.
The choreography requires her to spin and to turn and to fall apart while calling out the men who’ve captured the horses, telling them they’re murderers. Her final monologue is a plea to keep things from falling apart. There will be no close-ups. Just a body trying to keep upright and balanced on a world spinning too fast.
Arthur paces, almost nervously, jabbering at Huston, scribbling notes and changes, then leaning over to show Huston the clipboard. Gable slumps in a director’s chair, the one with her name written in script. He pulls his jacket closed; his ten-gallon hat shades his eyes. He’ll be dragged around the lake bed shortly—he insists on doing his own stunts—and for the first time in the past three months he looks truly exhausted. Earlier in the day, he announced that his wife, Kay, is expecting. That thought alone must have drained him, maybe even scared him. But he took the handshakes and the hugs with a joyfully honest reception. Since then, he’s barely moved from the chair. Just stared down at his feet.
Everyone huddles around the cameras, waiting for instructions. She stays put on her mark, trying to keep her character until Huston calls action. Then Huston slips behind a curtain in the back of a truck, coughing his way in like a sputtering engine. He probably needs to review the second-unit footage to make sure all the values match before they do anything else.
Arthur continues to pace, inching toward Paula. Marilyn has hardly talked with him since they’ve taken separate rooms. It isn’t because she’s angry or resentful. She just has nothing to say. He’s been keeping his distance. Trying not to incite anything. He looks so prepared for the movie to fall apart. So nervous. Afraid that in these final days she’ll fail before the camera. He says something to Paula, and she nods slowly, as she always does, and then gives Marilyn a hand signal, pushing her open palms up and down as a reminder to keep calm. What strange bedfellows: Arthur, who’s detested Paula all along, who thinks of the Strasbergs as cultish, now seeks camaraderie with her. Is he that worried? Has he not noticed that the least likely place she’ll fall apart is before the camera?
Wind rises. Shadows creep along with the dust. But she keeps moving. Dancing in place. Shaking her arms out. Rolling her neck. Mouthing her lines over and over. Just holding out for the clapboard. A rag doll waiting to come to life.
Huston pushes back out through the black curtain and climbs down off the flatbed. He claps his hands, and stamps his boot, and, as though it’s a staged illusion, momentarily disappears amid a cloud of alkali dust. The crew gath
ers around him. He swats away the dirt. Turns his head to cough behind his back. Paula motions for Marilyn to come in. Shooting is suspended, Huston declares. He explains that full daylight is needed to match the scenes, and the overcast sky and late-afternoon shadows make that impossible. They’ll resume tomorrow. Marilyn senses some people looking at her, as if the weather too is her fault.
Gable jumps up and dusts off his jeans. “Well, then,” he says. “I’ll gladly be taking the afternoon off.” He’s going to go look at Bill Harrah’s car collection, he says. It’s the one thing in Reno he actually wants to do. Someone asks if arrangements should be made for Kay to go along—have her picked up at the Mapes. Gable shakes his head, saying the only old things she likes are actors. Others follow with their own plans, laughing about how the whole picture is so over budget that it hardly makes a difference.
Marilyn isn’t paying attention. She watches the sky, willing the clouds to move, to blow on by. But they stretch as far as she can see. Covering the blue. Hiding the mountain peaks. She doesn’t want Huston to strike the set. She’s fixed to shoot the scene. It isn’t about knowing her lines, or about being prepared with her blocking. It’s about that unexpected moment when the character completely overwhelms you, and is ready to come out. Sometimes it just strikes. Like that. And she would use all her remaining breath to blow away the clouds if she could, saving just enough life to release before the camera.
Forgetting the people around her, Marilyn walks back out across the lake bed, almost wandering, and ends up returning to the spot for Roslyn’s soliloquy. The desert light turns yellow, almost opaque, with the smell of a sky about to change, a fragrance somewhere between sweet and stale. The boom has been collapsed and taken down. The horse trailers are driving away. The spots are already in their crates. Gable has left, followed by much of the crew. Alone, she forces herself to inventory the exact emotion of what it feels like to be Roslyn in this moment, but she tells herself not to think about it, and hates herself when she does.