Rosten, put on the spot, said he believed it would make a good picture. The remark elicited a grunt from Miller. Marilyn instructed Rosten to turn to a key speech, which she characterized as “lousy.”
“The speech is too goddamn long,” Marilyn declared. “And anyway, it isn’t right.”
Marilyn paused, obviously expecting Rosten to concur. He discreetly said nothing.
“I want this speech rewritten,” she barked. When her husband remained silent, Marilyn called, “Arthur, are you there?”
“I’m here,” said a gravelly voice.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to think about it.”
“Norman agrees with me.”
“I don’t agree, Marilyn,” Rosten interjected, the conversation getting sticky. “I agreed to read the screenplay, which I did. If Arthur asks my opinion on certain scenes or speeches, I’ll tell him. Look, it’s a draft. I’m sure there’ll be more work on it. I mean, it’s not final, is it?”
“It’s a draft,” said Miller apathetically. After two disappointments, he admitted he didn’t know what to do with the script.
“Maybe that section can be trimmed,” said Rosten in a conciliatory manner. “If Marilyn has specific objections …”
“I object to the whole stupid speech,” Marilyn insisted, “and he’s going to rewrite it!”
Meanwhile, Miller was being pressured to complete After the Fall. Kermit Bloomgarden had confidently announced plans to bring Arthur Miller’s new play to Broadway, and had already booked theaters for previews. He had an eye on Jason Robards, Jr. for the “Miller” role. At length, he gave the date of the premiere as December 18, 1958, ignoring the fact that, though Miller had already filled a great many pages—at one point he counted as many as 2000—he had not yet found a way to make it all work as a play. When Marilyn went to Los Angeles on July 7, Miller, under the gun, planned to keep writing in Connecticut. She was scheduled to report to Billy Wilder on July 14 for two weeks of tests and pre-production.
As the time to go approached, Marilyn grew increasingly apprehensive. She talked about suicide. She sat on a windowsill in Willard Maas’s penthouse overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. Maas and his wife, Marie Menken—later said to be the basis for the battling married couple in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—held a salon for avant-garde artists.
“I’m thinking it’s a quick way down from here,” Marilyn told Norman Rosten, who brought her to the gathering. “Who’d know the difference if I went?”
“I would,” said Rosten, “and all the people in this room who care.”
On the July 4 weekend, Arthur invited Frank Taylor to Roxbury to talk about The Misfits. Miller knew the prominent editor from the days when Mary had worked as Taylor’s secretary at a New York publishing house. “She was typing away, so he could stay at home and write plays,” recalled Taylor’s wife, Nan. Mary’s boss had published Miller’s novel, Focus, in 1945. When Miller completed Death of a Salesman, he had asked Taylor to pitch the film rights in Hollywood. Since that time, Taylor had spent four years at MGM. He was now back in publishing. That Miller would use Taylor to get a copy of The Misfits to John Huston suggests the degree to which Marilyn had distanced herself from the project.
Miller said that even before he finished writing, he had hoped the script might be something Huston would direct. To date, Marilyn had done nothing to make that happen. She was conscious of her power, and knew how to use it. All she needed to do was to call Huston. She could have written to him. She could even have instructed her agent or lawyer to send Huston The Misfits on her behalf. That she had not done so suggests she wanted no part of this. Miller’s decision to bring Taylor to Roxbury during Marilyn’s last weekend there seems almost like an act of defiance. It was as though he were telling her that if she would not provide him an entrée into the film world, he was perfectly capable of getting it himself.
The farmhouse was then being extensively remodeled, Frank Lloyd Wright’s plans having proven impractical. The old Tanner place would not be torn down after all, but it would be dramatically enlarged and renovated. There always seemed to be some structural change under way. As the Miller–Monroe marriage disintegrated, the Roxbury house slowly neared completion.
When the Taylors arrived, Miller greeted them alone. There was no sign of Marilyn. Pointedly, she did not come downstairs. A year before, when Miller had shown her his first pages, he failed to get the reaction he had hoped for. When he sent The Misfits to Twentieth and later to René Clément, he met with further disappointment. This time, he took no chances. He told the story to his guests. He acted out all the parts, modulating his voice and accent appropriately. He paused now and then to clarify the action.
William Styron, a Roxbury neighbor, once called Miller an “actor of intuitive panache.” His excruciating reserve would vanish as he lost himself in telling a story. He was consummately theatrical. His eyes sparkled. His timing was perfect. His laughter was infectious. He had a flair for comedy. He knew how to draw listeners in. His pleasure in connecting with an audience—when he found the right audience—was palpable.
Arthur was by no means the only one to put on a show that day. As the author performed his work, the sound of a vacuum cleaner could be heard. Marilyn, a one-woman Greek chorus, ceaselessly pushed the vacuum cleaner back and forth on the creaky old floor upstairs. Ostensibly, she was ridding the house of plaster dust. But the noise was also Marilyn’s sardonic comment on her husband and his goddamn screenplay.
Later, Taylor said he would call Miller from home with John Huston’s address in Ireland. When Marilyn learned that Arthur was going to offer Huston The Misfits, the obvious thing to say was that she would send it herself. But Marilyn did not intercede, though she must have known that her husband would soon find himself in the awkward position of having to explain her silence. To make matters worse, she indicated that Huston was Miller’s last chance. If Miller failed to attach Huston, she intended to pull out of the film. So a great deal depended on Miller’s letter asking Huston to read the script. At one point, Arthur had seemed to think he could get the picture made without Marilyn. By now, however, it was increasingly obvious that her withdrawal would be fatal to the project. If Marilyn refused to play Roslyn, The Misfits would end up like The Hook. Almost certainly, it would never be produced.
Miller drove Marilyn and an assistant to the airport on Monday evening. Just before seven the next morning, Marilyn emerged in Los Angeles, dressed in shades of vanilla. Her hair was platinum. The Hollywood press corps had not seen her in two years, and there were a good many jokes about the new, “definitely chubby” Marilyn. All that eating and drinking in bed had taken its toll.
Barraged with questions about her weight, Marilyn admitted that she might have put on a few pounds.
“It’s still in the right places, isn’t it?” she teased.
The pressmen weren’t certain.
“My weight goes up and down like everyone else’s,” said Marilyn, a bit nervously, “but I’ll be in good shape in two weeks because I intend to do lots of walking and exercising.”
Arthur, she explained, had remained in Connecticut to finish a new play.
Would there be a role for her?
“Who knows?” Marilyn laughed.
One week after Arthur saw Marilyn off at the airport, he wrote to John Huston. When Miller finished a new work, his pride was known to border on arrogance. True to form, upon completing The Misfits nine months previously, Miller had been cocky. Since that time, however, Marilyn had done her best to cut him down to size. The experiences of recent months formed the subtext of Miller’s letter. His posture was uncharacteristically defensive. He wrote as though he could still hear Marilyn barking on the phone, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”—as though he half-expected John Huston to ask the same thing. He emphasized that his screenplay was an early draft. Before Huston had even agreed to read it, Miller said he hoped to
tell him his ideas for revisions. He welcomed any suggestions the director might offer. Clearly, he was hoping to forestall rejection.
By way of explanation for why he was approaching Huston through Taylor, Miller alluded to the bad feeling over Huston’s having failed to be hired to direct The Sleeping Prince in 1955. The implication was that Marilyn would have liked to contact Huston herself about The Misfits, but that she was too nervous and frightened. Even as Miller seemed to distance himself from her girlish silliness, he made it clear that Marilyn was attached to the project.
Huston was then in Paris finishing The Roots of Heaven. He had recently hired Jean-Paul Sartre to write a script on the life of Sigmund Freud. Fascinated by Marilyn Monroe (had he sensed her presence in The Crucible when adapting it for the screen?), Sartre very much wanted her to play the female lead in Freud. Huston wrote to Miller that he was delighted to be offered The Misfits. He promised to read it and get back to him right away. Meanwhile, Huston asked him to reassure Marilyn and to give her his love. Huston, of course, was well acquainted with Marilyn, having directed her in The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 when she was Johnny Hyde’s protégée. Though The Asphalt Jungle was not her first film, Howard Hawks credited Huston with having discovered Marilyn.
As promised, Huston wasted no time in getting back to Miller. Yes, he very much wanted to do the picture. He would come to America in a few months to meet Miller. Characteristically ebullient, Huston declared the script perfect. He said he would not presume to make any suggestions. At this point, Huston gave no clue of his intention to require a complete overhaul. He would have assumed that as a working professional Miller was sincerely prepared to rewrite extensively. Huston expected film scripts to need revision.
A gifted writer himself, Huston was famous for his ability to work with screenwriters. If Miller was having trouble writing for the cinema, Huston would cheerfully tutor him. Flaws in a first draft did not bother Huston. So long as he was drawn to the material, problems could be ironed out later. Huston loved the idea of making a picture about the hunt for the last of the mustangs up in the Nevada mountains. Curiously, the subject matter seemed closer to the sort of thing Huston tended to do than Miller. And Huston loved the idea of collaborating with the author of Death of a Salesman. Miller, unaccustomed to Hollywood hyperbole, was mistaken if he believed Huston really thought the script was already perfect. He would discover the director’s real plans soon enough.
On August 7, the local workmen who were renovating the Roxbury farmhouse surprised Miller with a case of beer and a bottle of whisky to celebrate the news from Washington. Miller’s contempt conviction had finally been overturned. He proceeded to get drunk in the company of the mason, the back hoe operator, the steamfitter, and the carpenters. Spyros Skouras wasted no time dictating a letter warmly congratulating Miller. Insisting he was delighted with the outcome, Skouras commended Miller on his courage and perseverance. Three years after he had implied that Marilyn’s career would be destroyed if her husband declined to name names, he conceded that his advice had been wrong. Skouras prided himself on having what he called a “jungle instinct” for survival. More than any public event, perhaps, Skouras’s gesture to Miller quietly marked the end of HUAC’s power and influence.
Marilyn, at the Bel Air Hotel, called Arthur as soon as she heard about the decision. They talked for over half an hour. Afterward, Marilyn celebrated alone with a bottle of champagne. Reporters caught up with her in her dressing room at the Samuel Goldwyn studio.
“Neither I nor my husband ever had any doubt about the outcome of the case,” said Marilyn as she shifted poses for photographers. She wore a flimsy, beige chemise dress and strummed a white ukelele. When Marilyn disclosed that she had talked to Arthur on the phone, one newsman asked whether Miller planned to join her in Hollywood.
“He said he would probably be out before the picture ends,” Marilyn replied. “I never know when to expect him. He’s always surprising me. Maybe he’ll even be coming this week.”
The Strasbergs, to be sure, had already arrived. Their rented beach house in Santa Monica was soon filled with certain indispensable books and records transported from Central Park West. Film actors and actresses who had passed through the Actors Studio at one time or another arrived to pay their respects. There was often a group of acolytes at Lee’s feet.
Eleven years previously, Strasberg had been fired as a director of screen tests at Twentieth Century–Fox. He had never actually directed a film. He had left Hollywood a beaten man. Now he returned as counselor to one of the industry’s great stars. In a town where he had once failed miserably, Strasberg’s connection with Marilyn Monroe made him a force to be reckoned with—or so he seemed to think. Paula accompanied Marilyn to Billy Wilder’s set every day. Lee, who had pasty, dark-stubbled skin, sat on the beach staring serenely at the ocean.
When Billy Wilder had first heard that Marilyn Monroe was studying at the Actors Studio in New York, he was horrified. Wilder would pace back and forth as he talked, slapping his thigh with a riding crop. “Here you have this poor girl and all of a sudden she becomes a famous star,” Wilder declared. “So now these people tell her she has to be a great actress.” He said it was as if the author of “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window” suddenly aspired to compose a classical symphony. He predicted that if she took such talk seriously it would be the end of Monroe. Having once warned her to stick to the great character she’d created, Wilder feared that Marilyn would lose her audience, and worse, lose everything that was uniquely her own. He worried that the general public would hate her. He insisted the last thing in the world Marilyn needed was acting lessons. Why would anyone want to spoil a good thing?
Once Wilder was reunited with Marilyn for Some Like It Hot, he freely admitted he had been wrong. To his astonishment, Marilyn, under Strasberg’s tutelage, had indeed become a stronger actress. She was deeper. She had a better grasp of what she was doing. But in Marilyn’s new, intense self-consciousness, Wilder perceived a potential problem. “Before she was like a tightrope walker who doesn’t know there’s a pit below she can fall into,” Wilder said. “Now she knows.”
Paula, clutching a huge black silk umbrella, accompanied Marilyn to the MGM back lot on the first day of filming. It was Monday, August 4. Wilder was to shoot the train sequence in which Marilyn makes her entrance at the station.
“Relax, relax,” Paula whispered in Marilyn’s ear.
Marilyn closed her eyes. She appeared to slip into a trance. She threw her neck forward and let her arms dangle. She violently flicked her fingers up and down. She flapped her arms and rotated her head, reminding Jack Lemmon of a chicken on a block. Marilyn, in her fury, seemed almost to be trying to detach her hands from her wrists. One might have thought she was having a fit. In fact, she was performing Paula’s relaxation exercise.
During the rehearsal, Paula watched from the sidelines. She said not a word. But according to Tony Curtis, Paula somehow communicated the message, “I am King Shit here.” Not for long.
As was Marilyn’s custom, after the rehearsal she glanced over at Paula, as though the director didn’t matter or exist. For Laurence Olivier, Paula’s presence had been psychologically loaded. Olivier went mano a mano with Paula, but he had been wrestling with ghosts. Billy Wilder didn’t have that problem. He seemed to regard Paula as nothing more than an annoyance. After all, he had endured Natasha Lytess on The Seven Year Itch.
Wilder was famous for his corrosive wit. He was said to have a brain “full of Gillette blue blades.” He was known to have a cruel, nasty, sour cast of mind. He actually seemed to prefer to be hated. He waited for precisely the right moment to establish who was going to be King Shit on this set.
Wilder got what he needed in a single take.
“Cut!” cried the director.
Marilyn turned to Paula, and Wilder rose from his director’s chair. “How was that for you, Paula?” he inquired. His voice could be heard throughout the set.
The eff
ect was devastating. Laurence Olivier, in the identical situation, had often worked himself into a lather, to no avail. With Billy Wilder, six words and a deadpan delivery were all it took. He had instantly punctured any authority Paula might have hoped to exert.
At the same time, Wilder, an artist at the peak of his powers, gave every sign of planning to treat Marilyn with dignity and respect. He made his intentions clear the following day as they all watched the rushes together. Wilder was delighted by what he saw on screen. Marilyn was not. She believed her entrance in the picture should have been sharper, funnier. Wilder listened carefully, but it wasn’t a matter of courtesy. He sincerely admired Marilyn’s comic sense. In this particular instance, he treated Marilyn as someone who knew what she was talking about. Wilder and his co-writer, Iz Diamond, rewrote in the light of Marilyn’s criticism.
One might have expected things to go well from then on. Wilder had adroitly established his authority, as Olivier had never managed to do. More importantly, he had displayed an eagerness to have Marilyn’s creative input, as Olivier had never deigned to do. Marilyn had once longed for a time when her opinions would be taken seriously by a director of Wilder’s caliber. Unfortunately, however, the moment may have come too late. She seemed not to notice that Wilder was genuinely interested in what she had to say. Perhaps she just didn’t care anymore. In any case, she continued to regard Wilder as an adversary.
It soon became evident that she was up to her old tricks, only worse. She came to work late. Indeed, she seemed to have lost all sense of time. She hadn’t learned her lines. Her tendency to botch the simplest dialogue irritated the other actors. As Jack Lemmon noted, sometimes Marilyn required forty takes; sometimes she needed only one.
“Billy, how many fuckin’ takes are we gonna do?” Tony Curtis inquired on one occasion.
“When Marilyn gets it right, that’s the take I’m going to use,” Wilder replied.
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