Marilyn Monroe

by Barbara Leaming

  Whether motivated by love, a desire to retreat, or most likely a mixture of both, Miller wrote The Misfits at a feverish pace. He seemed to be writing against death, as though his words were capable of saving Marilyn. It was as though once he finished the screenplay, by an act of sympathetic magic the shattered vase would be whole again. But the idealized portrait of her he was writing—a picture of the woman he’d fallen in love with—was also clearly an attempt to hold onto his own image of Marilyn. After the horror of England, he seemed to be trying to reassure himself that she really was the beautiful innocent he thought he’d married. On a conscious level, The Misfits may have been intended to show Marilyn he loved her; but in a deeper sense, Miller also seemed to be trying to convince himself.

  Soon he had pages to show her. As she read, he watched and listened. Marilyn laughed out loud reading about the cowboys. But her reaction to Roslyn was hardly what Arthur expected. Suddenly, she was cautious, reserved, unenthusiastic. Arthur sincerely believed that in creating the character of Roslyn he had done something wonderful for Marilyn, but she certainly didn’t act as though he had. She wouldn’t even commit to appearing in The Misfits. No wonder he later admitted to having been hurt.

  What accounts for her response? Marilyn believed that for Arthur to love her, he also had to accept the monster in her. The extent to which he idealized Marilyn in his script suggested that, far from accepting the monster, he wanted to pretend that it didn’t exist.

  There was also the fact that Marilyn was vastly more experienced in film than Arthur. She had read a great many scripts over the years. Did she immediately perceive flaws in her husband’s screenplay? That would certainly constitute a change in the relationship, a shift in the balance of power. Had Miller written a stage play for her, it would have been different. The stage was his domain. But film was something she actually knew a great deal about. In this area, he was no longer the teacher, she no longer the pupil. Suddenly Marilyn was in a position to judge, to criticize, even to reject what Arthur had written. Until this point, Marilyn had regarded Arthur as the great writer, the man of principle, the idol. It had always been a question of whether she was worthy of him.

  In writing a screenplay, Arthur made it possible for Marilyn to suspect his motives. When they met in 1951, Miller had been in Hollywood trying to sell a script. For one reason or another, he never managed to get The Hook made. Back then, Marilyn had been an obscure starlet, a nothing. Since that time, she had become a star. Her name attached to a script could mean the difference between it being produced and it languishing in a desk drawer. It could mean an important director and co-stars. And of course, it could mean a great deal of money.

  Had Arthur offered Marilyn a stage play, there could have been no doubt that he was doing it for her. He would have been providing her an entrée into his world, the world of the theater. He would have been conferring his prestige as a playwright upon her. As it was, he needed Marilyn’s prestige to get The Misfits made. Whatever his intentions, there was at least the appearance that an ambitious husband was using a movie-star wife to cash in.

  Marilyn had checked out of Doctors Hospital convinced that she was about to lose Arthur. Now, by writing The Misfits he permitted Marilyn, in her paranoia, to construct a self-loathing explanation for why he remained after her failure to give him a child—he wanted to jump-start his film career. Marilyn had a history of suspecting people of using her. With the best will in the world, Joe DiMaggio, by example, had encouraged her to be wary of others’ motives. Arthur’s screenplay, begun as an attempt to make Marilyn feel better about herself, soon appeared to have very much the opposite effect. It seemed only to confirm that, childless, she was no longer of interest as a wife. From then on, the only way Marilyn would be able to believe that Arthur still loved her was if he stopped trying to get The Misfits made.

  PART THREE

  THIRTEEN

  Back in Manhattan that fall, Marilyn, knocked out by too many sleeping pills, tended to stay in bed late. Sometimes she did not stir until lunchtime. She required as many as five to doze off; seven were known to be lethal. Wearing a black eye-mask, she slept naked amid a tangle of white sheets. Her pubic hair was bleached blonde. The large bed had a powder-gray satin quilt and no headboard. A small lamp and a framed photograph of Gladys Baker, with sunken cheeks and a prominent widow’s peak, sat on Marilyn’s night table. On the dog-stained, deep white carpet were a portable record player, a stack of records, and a black telephone. Mirrors covered two walls. The blackout curtains remained tightly shut. The small, close, squarish room lacked a clock, so Marilyn never knew the time.

  Long before she had awakened, Arthur would already be at work on his screenplay at the other end of the apartment. He rarely slept past seven. A visitor compared Arthur’s tiny, book-filled study to “the stoke hold below the first-class lounge.” Arthur tended to remain there from morning until night, emerging only to walk their basset hound, Hugo, or to order food. When the cook brought in Miller’s tray, she usually found him at the desk gazing into space. It was his habit to chew a cigarette, rolling it thoughtfully from one tooth to another. The servants chattered among themselves, wondering what he did in there all day.

  By the time Arthur and Marilyn had come home from the country, the nature of his project had changed. Marilyn had not responded to the script as he had hoped. Yet he kept writing. Perhaps she would agree to play Roslyn, perhaps not. He wasn’t going to force her. The Misfits was no longer entirely, or even primarily, a gift for Marilyn. Even if she didn’t want it, Miller was going to finish it—for himself. Kermit Bloomgarden would have to be disappointed. There would be no new Arthur Miller play on Broadway this year.

  Arthur tried unsuccessfully to hide Marilyn’s drug and alcohol problem from his family. Still, even his young nephew Ross, Kermit’s son, could see that something was going on. Marilyn often absented herself when she was drinking. Arthur, embarrassed, appeared willing to hurt others rather than disclose the trouble with his wife. On one occasion, at the last minute, he announced that he and Marilyn could not attend a family gathering. Later, rather than call his brother to smooth things over, Arthur composed an awkward letter, giving the impression that he had an important life now and that family matters were secondary. He couldn’t admit the real reason for his failure to appear—he couldn’t produce Marilyn.

  In late September, Twentieth Century–Fox’s executive manager, Lew Schreiber, flew to New York to talk to Marilyn about The Blue Angel. The studio knew Marilyn had lost her baby in August, and there were disturbing reports from New York that she wasn’t well, whatever that might mean. Because of fuzzy wording in her new contract, it was open to question whether Twentieth needed to collect its four pictures in four years or seven, so they would have to proceed soon. Besides, there was concern about Marilyn’s age. She was thirty-one. An entire year that should have been immensely profitable to Twentieth had already been lost in the dispute over her contract. So it seemed advisable to start filming The Blue Angel as soon as possible. Technically, as studio executives nervously reminded each other, they didn’t need Marilyn’s approval to replace Spencer Tracy, who had signed to appear in John Ford’s The Last Hurrah and might not be available until the following summer. By contract, on this picture the director had to be one of the men on Marilyn’s list. Her co-star, however, was strictly for Twentieth to select.

  As they knew, even in the best of times, Marilyn was volatile. In the interest of averting a crisis, Schreiber came east to propose Curt Jurgens—the studio’s first choice for the role of Professor Unrat—or Fredric March. Schreiber, who had tangled with Marilyn before, hoped to communicate in person rather than through a battery of agents. He also wanted Marilyn to accept Charles Vidor, though Vidor was not on her list of approved directors. Both Vidor and Jurgens were ready to begin The Blue Angel immediately.

  There remained those at Twentieth, notably studio counsel Frank Ferguson, who were convinced they had made a drastic mistake in cap
itulating after Marilyn walked out in 1954. According to this school of thought, Twentieth had shown a fatal weakness in falling for her “bluff.” To have done so, it was believed, was to make Marilyn even more of a loose cannon than before. In late September 1957, it certainly did not bode well that every time Lew Schreiber talked to MCA, the agency reported having been unable to reach Marilyn. When at last MCA did get through, Marilyn insisted she could not see Schreiber until the following week. On the day of the appointment, she called to cancel at the last minute.

  In this period, Marilyn’s day began with a Bloody Mary. Upon hearing that she was awake, the cook prepared eggs and toast in the small, old-fashioned kitchen. Another assistant served Marilyn’s morning cocktail. There were times when Marilyn, still wearing the black eye-mask, flailed about in the bed linens, seemingly unable to get up.

  Intolerant of the sun, Marilyn insisted that the blackout curtains remain closed, preferring to gulp her red drink in gentle lamplight. She thought nothing of washing down her poached eggs with a champagne split. Soon, Frank Sinatra might be heard singing softly on the portable record player. The trip across the room to Marilyn’s large but overcrowded closet—Arthur had a separate closet of his own in the hall—was known to be a huge production.

  Somehow, on Tuesday, October 2, Marilyn put herself together in order to give the illusion that nothing was wrong. She bathed and washed her hair. She had herself beautifully dressed and made up. A hearse-like black Cadillac limousine carried her crosstown to Twentieth Century–Fox’s offices on West 56th Street. As she swept into the conference room, she was all smiles. She was friendly, cooperative, agreeable. She gave no sign of the despondency to which she had succumbed after losing her baby. If Lew Schreiber had been apprehensive, she instantly put his mind at rest.

  Schreiber got right down to business. He asked when Marilyn was prepared to start. She indicated that she was ready, no, eager to do The Blue Angel. But she still preferred to wait for Spencer Tracy. Though Marilyn certainly did not mention it, even more than previously she welcomed the opportunity to put off having to return to a film set.

  Schreiber announced that Charles Vidor was most enthusiastic about working with her. He pointed out that Vidor had a reputation as a fine “women’s director”. Marilyn said she knew Vidor’s work. She liked his films with Rita Hayworth: Cover Girl, Gilda, and The Loves of Carmen. Marilyn declared that she was less worried about her director—she didn’t say that in any case she would insist on having Paula Strasberg—than about who her co-star would be. In the interest of expediting matters, Schreiber proposed Curt Jurgens or Fredric March. Though Marilyn cheerfully agreed to come in for a screening of Jurgens’s new picture, she made it clear that her heart was set on Tracy. Schreiber wanted to be absolutely sure Marilyn understood that if she insisted on waiting, they probably would not be able to start before next summer. Unmentioned was the worrisome ambiguity in Marilyn’s contract about whether Twentieth needed to collect its second film before the end of the year.

  Marilyn emphasized that Twentieth need not concern itself about the late starting date. Shooting the picture next year was fine with her. This wasn’t quite what Schreiber had hoped for. The studio wanted to start right away. But he seemed relieved that at least Marilyn was set on the project, and that apparently she had no problem with doing it in 1958. Schreiber planned to begin work on signing Tracy as soon as he returned to Los Angeles.

  Afterward, Schreiber sat and talked to Marilyn for a long time. Then he took her over to see Spyros Skouras. It cannot have been an easy encounter, Skouras having pointedly refused Joe Rauh’s request that he intervene with Representative Donald Jackson on Arthur’s behalf. Still, it was very much in Marilyn’s interest to make peace with Skouras at a moment when her husband was about to submit a first-draft screenplay to Twentieth.

  The beige club chairs in Skouras’s office were as soft and inviting as quicksand. Marilyn, laughing deeply and licking her lips, perched on the cold marble desktop in front of the huge world map. After the meeting, Skouras alone escorted Marilyn to her hired limousine. As Marilyn was driven off, he blew her a kiss and urged her to give serious consideration to Curt Jurgens.

  Arthur, as anticipated, completed The Misfits in October. There was every reason to assume that Twentieth would be delighted with The Misfits as a vehicle for Marilyn. The satisfaction of finishing something he liked in a matter of months seems to have impelled Miller to tackle other literary projects with new fervor. He began a novel based on The Misfits. He returned to his autobiographical play. He exulted to Joe Rauh that his life was filled with action. Rauh, for his part, was nervous about their not having heard yet from the Court of Appeals. But the lawyer remained confident that even if the court rejected his motion for a summary reversal, he would be able to overturn Miller’s conviction by December at the latest.

  Arthur secured a mortgage to buy an old dairy farm in Roxbury, Connecticut. It was on Tophet Road, a short walk from the smaller house he had once shared with Mary and the children. The property, just past the stony fields of the old Coyle farm, had been in the Tanner family for 175 years. The white farmhouse, built in 1783, had high ceilings and thick beams made from ships’ timbers. In the attic were shoeboxes containing old family photographs and picture postcards. In the milking room, elsewhere on the property, was a stack of nineteenth-century portraits in gilded frames. Marilyn and Arthur, intent on making a home, planned to drive up on weekends until the dirt roads became icy.

  Marilyn pinned her hopes for the future on the idea of building a modern house on top of a hill. She might not be eager to return to work, but she was full of plans for the property. The site had sweeping views in all directions. Marilyn wanted to hire Frank Lloyd Wright, whose design for the Guggenheim Museum was then under construction in New York. Meanwhile, they fixed up the old farmhouse as a temporary residence.

  It did not go unnoticed at Twentieth that Marilyn had dropped out of sight again. She broke three appointments to see Curt Jurgens’s new picture. She claimed to be ill. On two occasions, Schreiber had almost had a deal with Tracy, but both times the actor changed his mind about terms. Schreiber carefully documented the negotiations, and kept Marilyn’s agents apprised of his efforts to get Tracy.

  As the year drew to a close, there was much nervousness at the studio about their having permitted 1957 to pass without collecting the second of Marilyn’s four films. In light of the ambiguity in her contract, the studio’s legal department was particularly wary. Some consideration was given to refusing to pay the third $75,000 installment due on the film rights to Horns of the Devil until Marilyn actually started her next picture. At the time she signed her new contract, there had been talk behind closed doors at Twentieth of using the payments on Horns of the Devil as leverage in the event that she made any more trouble.

  Schreiber, however, reviewed the notes of his October meeting with Marilyn and ordered the New York office to release the check. A meeting with MCA on January 2 shored up Schreiber’s confidence that Marilyn intended to make The Blue Angel so long as Twentieth was able to get Tracy. The next day, Tracy’s agent indicated that the actor was ready to make a deal. One problem remained. Before Tracy signed, he wanted to be certain of top billing. In other words, Tracy insisted that his name precede Marilyn’s. If she agreed to that, he’d do the picture.

  Schreiber asked Marilyn’s agents to talk to her. Seven days later, MCA got back to him. It seemed that Marilyn was sick and her agents hadn’t seen her yet; but they were sure she had no objection to her name being listed below Tracy’s. Twentieth drew up Tracy’s contract. Talks were simultaneously under way with George Cukor, who had often directed Tracy and was a close friend. Thus, as 1958 began, Twentieth appeared to have successfully concluded its dealings with Marilyn. Tracy had agreed, they looked likely to sign a director on her list, and The Blue Angel was set to go into production in June.

  On January 9, Marilyn canceled a meeting at MCA in New York to approve Tracy�
��s billing. For the moment, even Marilyn’s agents seemed to be in the dark about her intentions. When she did come in on Monday the 13th, it wasn’t to say yes to Tracy. Suddenly, as far as Marilyn was concerned The Blue Angel was off, and there was doubt as to whether she had ever really intended to make the picture in the first place. Marilyn declared that her attorneys in New York had reviewed her contract. It was their opinion that Twentieth’s failure to put Marilyn to work in 1957 meant that she was owed $100,000 for the unmade picture.

  Two days later, the second shoe dropped. Robert H. Montgomery sent a letter reminding Twentieth of its contractual obligation to have used Marilyn in a film in 1957. As it turned out, the attorney was claiming something more than just the $100,000 Marilyn’s agents had demanded. He argued that Twentieth had sacrificed one of the pictures to which the studio was entitled under the 1955 agreement. In other words, it was now being asserted that Marilyn owed Twentieth two pictures instead of three. Considering how much revenue a Marilyn Monroe picture was likely to bring in, that was a very substantial claim. Studio vice-president Joseph Moskowitz shot back that Twentieth had postponed The Blue Angel at Marilyn’s request. Should she pull out now, Twentieth would sustain major losses for which Marilyn would be held responsible.

  As it happened, The Blue Angel was not the only Marilyn Monroe project being discussed at Twentieth. On December 30, 1957, Lloyd Garrison had reported to Joe Rauh that The Misfits was under active consideration. It soon became clear, however, that Spyros Skouras had no intention of acquiring The Misfits unless Arthur’s contempt conviction was reversed. The appeal was taking considerably longer than Rauh had anticipated.