The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  III

  In December 1955, on behalf of Marilyn Monroe Productions, Greene negotiated a new and infinitely better contract with Fox, and Marilyn finally got the compensation she deserved. She agreed to make four movies with the studio in the next seven years, and (most unusually) had approval of the script, director and cinematographer. She would earn $100,000 plus a percentage of the profits for each film, receive an annual retainer of an additional $100,000 and have a weekly allowance of $500 while filming. Greene would also be paid $75,000 a year as her producer.

  The studio discussed the possibility of remaking the classic German film, The Blue Angel (1930), with Marilyn playing Marlene Dietrich's role, Spencer Tracy as her co-star and George Cukor as the director. In the screen version of Heinrich Mann's novel, the nightclub singer Lola Lola teases, taunts, seduces, degrades, betrays and destroys the dignified but horribly repressed Professor Unrat. This would have been a great picture for Marilyn. But when Tracy felt Marilyn was using him to strengthen her negotiating position with the studio, he withdrew and the project collapsed.

  Marilyn, allowed to make one independent picture a year, completed Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl in partnership with Greene before their company fell apart. An absurd incident during the shooting of Bus Stop in March 1956 revealed how Greene consistently put his own interests before those of his fragile star: "Marilyn suddenly fell from a six-foot ramp. Dazed and in momentary shock before writhing in pain, she lay very near to Milton, who as usual was constantly taking still photographs of every scene. 'He just kept clicking away with his camera without moving to help her,' as [the screenwriter] George Axelrod recalled. 'I was a photographer before I was a producer,' was Milton's reply."

  Joshua Logan, the eminent director of Bus Stop, had made his name on Broadway as the director of Annie Get Your Gun, Mister Roberts and South Pacific. In 1955 he directed the screen version of Picnic, by the playwright William Inge, who also wrote Bus Stop. Logan, who'd grown up in Texas and graduated from Princeton, had two special qualifications for working with Marilyn. At the age of twenty-three he had spent a year in Moscow studying with Stanislavsky, and in 1940 he'd had a mental breakdown and spent a year in a psychiatric hospital.

  Strasberg's teaching made Marilyn passionately interested in the godfather of the Method. Logan recalled that "she talked constantly of Stanislavsky, and she wanted to know all about my studying with him in Moscow. She wanted to know all about the way actors lived and acted there. How Stanislavsky talked to them and they talked to him – intimate details." Marilyn both amused and irritated Logan by the absurdity of her half-digested psychoanalytical jargon. He wrote that "sometimes she acted as though she had discovered something that no one else knew. Words like 'Freudian slip' and 'the unconscious' and 'affective memory' would appear in her conversation at the oddest time. If they didn't fit in, she made them fit." Logan also described Marilyn's rather pretentious exchange with her co-star Don Murray: "'Don, you made a Freudian slip about a phallic symbol. You see, you were thinking unconsciously of a snake. That's why you said "scaly" [instead of "white"]. And a snake is a phallic symbol. Do you know what a phallic symbol is, Don?' 'Know what it is?' he said. 'I've got one!'"11

  Murray recalled that Marilyn was emotionally frail, and became more and more so as the movie progressed. (While making the picture she also spent a week in the hospital with bronchitis.) Everyone was always very worried about whether she'd break down in a scene and whether Logan would be able to finish the movie. The tall, youthful-looking, little known, twenty-six-year-old Murray was appearing in his first film, but he had to help Marilyn perform. Her year of studying the Method made it more difficult for her to act in a movie. After she kept missing her marks on the set, Logan told Murray, "when you're standing close to her, hold her and move her onto the marks" – and Murray had to guide the superstar throughout the picture.

  Marilyn, who had a very short concentration span and couldn't remember more than a sentence at a time, would often say the wrong word or fail to complete her lines. There were many takes for every scene (especially when Paula signaled her dissatisfaction), and Murray had the daunting task of having to be at his best for every one of them. Since Marilyn was unable to sustain an entire scene, they were shot in short pieces and had to be spliced together by the film editor, Bill Reynolds. The professionals in Hollywood, recognizing what Reynolds had achieved, nominated him for an Academy Award.

  Murray recalled that they also had problems with censorship. Marilyn showed too much cleavage in her fish-net costume and the designer had to put on a chiffon frill to cover up her bust top. And Marilyn's open-mouthed kisses had to be cut. Kissing scenes (Murray said) were never sexy for him or other actors. The technical aspects, the need to watch the lights and avoid shadows on your face, drained away all the potential excitement. In one intense scene the camera caught a trail of saliva coming out of Marilyn's mouth, but Logan couldn't bear to shoot it yet again and reluctantly allowed the drool to remain in the picture.

  Marilyn once lost her temper and got into a fight with Murray. In an emotional moment, he had to grab her and tear off a piece of her tawdry costume. After speaking the line, "Give me back my tail," she unintentionally knocked him off his mark, bounced off his chest and fell flat on her back. When Murray, dropping his cowboy accent, asked, "Are you all right, Marilyn?" she angrily replied, "Can't you improvise?" She then slapped him with a piece of spangled cloth, cut him over the eye and stormed off the set. Murray, who'd been incredibly patient with her, became furious and wanted to tell her off. But Logan, desperate to get through the film, stopped him on the way to her dressing room. Alluding to Scipio Africanus, Logan told him, "Remember the Roman general who won the war by avoiding battles." Later on, Murray was astonished when her make-up man, Whitey Snyder, said it had been her "best-behaved movie."

  Murray had a much more pleasant time with Hope Lange, who played Marilyn's confidante during their long bus ride and (though a natural blonde) had to have her hair dyed darker so she wouldn't outshine Marilyn. There were rumors on the set about Murray's romance with Lange. But he'd known her since she was in high school; they became engaged before the picture started and got married while the film was being made.12

  In Bus Stop Murray plays an eager, energetic and innocent cowboy; Marilyn – speaking with an unconvincing Southern accent and wearing a hideous sea-green costume – is an exhausted, petulant and sexually experienced nightclub singer. She confesses, "I've had a real wicked life. I've been going with boys since I was twelve years old." She also tells him, "I'd like to get married and have a family. . . . But maybe I don't know what love is." Murray, hoping to redeem a fallen woman with his love, declares "I like you the way you are." In the repetitive script, she keeps trying to escape and he keeps recapturing her. Following the tedious end-of-the-movie convention, she suddenly falls in love with him and agrees to get married. She doesn't seem to realize that she'll have a hard time adjusting to outdoor life on his rough and remote Montana ranch.

  Murray recalled that Logan, who also had to put up with Paula's pretentious interference, was very, very patient with Marilyn. He kept up the enthusiasm, like a football coach yelling "rah rah rah, go go go," and managed to finish the picture, with only a half-day's rehearsal, in twelve weeks. But even after Bus Stop was completed, the studio still had problems with Marilyn. In a letter to Buddy Adler, who succeeded Zanuck as head of production at Fox, Spyros Skouras, as if acting in a little Greek tragedy, complained that the picture would be delayed:"Your wire concerning Marilyn Monroe was another blow between the eyes that I received today. In my lifetime I have had many days of bitter experience, but this is one of the worst."

  When Logan saw Marilyn the following year on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, she was still furious with him for cutting part of her confessional crying scene on the bus. In this long monologue she confides to Hope Lange about her past experiences and current problems, the men she's known, her disillusionment wit
h life and her desire to go to Hollywood. "Why the hell did you cut out that scene in the bus?," she screamed at Logan. "I'll never forgive you as long as I live. I was going to show it to Arthur and I couldn't. I was never so angry in my entire life, and I'm just as angry now as I was then."13 Marilyn did not allow Logan to explain that the studio felt the scene was not essential to the story and had cut it despite all his protests. The Strasbergs had taught her to focus on herself instead of cooperating with colleagues, and she continued to believe that her performance was the only one that mattered.

  Nine

  Betrayal and Guilt

  (1950–1956)

  I

  Miller's major plays of the 1950s, The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1956), had immediate social and political impact. He created powerful situations that dramatized the moral issues and human cost of the communist witch-hunts taking place in America in the 1950s. He analyzed the psychology of the informers who betrayed their friends and the struggle of ordinary men to tell the truth. At the same time, both plays were deeply personal. They portrayed Miller's own anguish and remorse about betraying Mary and his struggle to resolve his conflict between marriage and passion. He anatomized his characters' divided loyalties and forbidden desires, their fear and guilt.

  The politics of the 1950s, and the extraordinary fear and anxiety generated by the Cold War, provide the essential context for understanding these plays. In the late 1930s Communist Party cells, which were not illegal, had been set up throughout America. Members agonized over the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the visible suffering of hungry and homeless people during the Depression, when a quarter of the work force was unemployed. A small number of the more intellectual writers, directors and actors felt that capitalism was bankrupt, that America needed a new social system, and joined the Party for brief periods. Many of them soon became disillusioned by the Party's autocratic policies, the Purge Trials in Russia and the cynical Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. Like Miller himself, many left-wing sympathizers, who were not Party members, attended political meetings to raise money and support progressive causes.

  World War II ended the Depression and swept Americans into a common cause with their wartime ally, the Soviet Union. But by the late 1940s the Soviets had become a menacing enemy who dominated the whole of Eastern Europe, from Poland on the Baltic to Bulgaria on the Black Sea. In 1949 Mao's Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek in China; Russia exploded its first atomic bomb; and rumors spread about the Soviets' international spy rings. In America, the Communist Party, once a minor political group that subscribed to poorly understood social theories, was viewed as a seditious movement that threatened to undermine America's democratic form of government and destroy its political freedom. In the atomic age, conservative politicians, eager to reverse the economic and social programs set in motion by Roosevelt's New Deal, generated and thrived in an atmosphere of fear.

  The fifties began with three spectacular espionage trials which revealed that the most secret centers of scientific research and the highest echelons of government had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. These spies had damaged American national security and decisively helped the Russians to develop their own atomic bomb. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist, had worked on the bomb in America during World War II. In 1950 in Britain, he was convicted of selling nuclear secrets to Russia during and after the war, and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In America, the Ivy-League diplomat Alger Hiss, assistant secretary of state and President Roosevelt's advisor at the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill in 1945, was accused by the former communist Whittaker Chambers of giving him 200 secret state documents. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Hiss denied he was a communist. Prosecuted by the young congressman Richard Nixon, who first gained national prominence in the communist witch hunts, Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and sent to jail for five years. The following year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had access to atomic secrets through her brother, a scientist who worked at the top-secret research center in Los Alamos, New Mexico, were accused of selling vital information to the Russians during the war. They were convicted in 1951 and executed by electric chair in Sing Sing prison in 1953.1 In the early 1950s Hiss and the Rosenbergs, by working for the Soviet Union, seemed to threaten the very existence of the United States. But these convicted spies always maintained they were innocent. Their guilt is still hotly debated and remains in doubt.

  In January 1953 Eisenhower became president; in March Stalin died; and in July the Korean War, which had begun in 1950, came to an end. Korea was divided in two, and communist North Korea was allied with China. As the former colonies in Asia and Africa gained independence, communism continued to spread throughout the Third World. John Foster Dulles, the confrontational secretary of state during the volatile Cold War, seemed ready to start a hot war every week. America exploded the first Hydrogen bomb in November 1952 and Russia (again aided by espionage) followed with their own explosion in August 1953. In May 1954 the Viet Cong defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam, like Korea, was divided and North Vietnam also became Communist. In 1956 Egypt nationalized the strategically vital Suez Canal; and America broke with her traditional allies when Britain and France launched an ill-fated invasion that drove Egypt into the Soviet sphere of influence. That year, Russia brutally suppressed the Hungarian revolution. In 1957 Russia astonished America by suddenly launching Sputnik and surging ahead in the space race. In 1959 Fidel Castro's communist revolutionaries took over Cuba and, despite fanatical American opposition, have remained in power ever since.

  A historian explained that in the 1950s, "In a postwar atmosphere suffused with fear and suspicion, opportunities were rife . . . for political persecution and intimidation." After Hiss was convicted, the Republican senator Joe McCarthy, drawing on a deep vein of American philistinism, began to attack intellectuals and universities in an unremitting campaign of vicious smears and half-truths. His senate investigations accused victims, with little or no evidence, and created a paranoid sense of Red menace. He "recklessly assaulted people's integrity, destroyed careers, and used character assassination to seize control of the political process." Miller recalled McCarthy's apparently unlimited powers: "The illusion of an unstoppable force surrounded Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin at the height of his influence, in the years from 1950 to 1954. He had paralyzed the State Department, cowed President Eisenhower, and mesmerized almost the entire American press."

  Joseph Welch was one of the few people who dared to defy the ruthless and rampaging senator. In 1954 the distinguished attorney represented the U.S. Army during McCarthy's acrimonious investigation of suspected communists in the military. He elegantly put down his abrasive opponent by asking, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Eisenhower, who did very little to stop McCarthy when he was destroying the lives of so many innocent people, finally condemned him as the senator began to lose his power. The witch hunts had swept the country on a wave of hysteria and madness that was not understood at the time. "McCarthyism took its toll on many individuals and on the nation," Eisenhower said. "No one was safe from charges recklessly made from inside the walls of congressional immunity. Teachers, government employees, and even ministers became vulnerable. . . . The cost was often tragic."2

  Membership in the American Communist Party was and still is legal – though generally covert – and its political influence was extremely limited. But the members of HUAC, which had been established in 1945 to investigate and root out communist influence in the United States, believed communism was a national conspiracy. HUAC had the same aims, though less authority and power, as McCarthy's committee in the Senate. HUAC also feared artists and intellectuals, and claimed that Hollywood was filled with subversives who used the propagandistic power of movies to indoctrinate a gullible public. In their attempt to eliminate all liberal content from movies, they used the t
hreat of blackmail, imposed ideological censorship, persecuted people for their political beliefs and often convicted the accused without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

  The real aim of HUAC was not to root out communists, whom they knew all about through covert FBI investigations, but to denigrate celebrities and intimidate the Hollywood studios. The American public adored the fantasy figures on the screen, and the hearings became part of its obsession with celebrity. The attack on Hollywood, a riveting public spectacle on radio and in newsreels, captured the attention of the press, justified the committee's existence and advanced many political careers. Leading writers and directors, accused of being Reds or communist sympathizers, appeared before the cameras and blinked in the bright lights. When they tried to defend their right to free speech, they were shouted down by the chairman, who pounded his gavel to silence them. After the hearings, present and former members of the Party, who had not committed any crime, were punished, without evidence or a trial, immediately blacklisted by the studios (which caved into political pressure) and professionally ruined.

  Several of Miller's friends and associates – Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb and Clifford Odets (as well as Sterling Hayden, who'd acted with Marilyn in The Asphalt Jungle) – were desperate to save their careers and willing to compromise their integrity. They appeared before HUAC as cooperative, or "friendly," witnesses and named names of people they knew to be former communists. Notable exceptions in the rush to accuse others were the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who refused to cooperate, were labeled "unfriendly" witnesses and sent to prison. The historian David Caute explained Kazan's motives and the effect of his testimony: