The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Despite his own exasperation with Marilyn, Miller was infuriated by Wilder's caustic comments and gallantly rushed to his wife's defense. After Wilder's remarks were published in a frank interview with the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, Miller (deadly serious) and Wilder (typically ironic) exchanged a bitter series of telegrams. Ignoring all the problems Marilyn had caused on the set, Miller portrayed her as a dedicated martyr and unfairly blamed the "cruel" and "unjust" Wilder for her miscarriage – which did not begin immediately after the picture was finished:

  Dear Billy: I cannot let your vicious attack on Marilyn go unchallenged. You were officially informed by Marilyn's physician that due to her pregnancy she was not able to work a full day. You chose to ignore this fact during the making of the picture and worse yet, assiduously avoided mentioning it in your attack on her. Fact is, she went on with the picture out of a sense of responsibility not only to herself but to you and the cast and producer. Twelve hours after the last shooting day her miscarriage began. Now that the hit for which she is so largely responsible is in your hands and its income to you assured, this attack upon her is contemptible. I will add only that she began this picture with a throat infection so serious that a specialist forbade her to work at all until it was cured. She went on nevertheless. Your jokes, Billy, are not quite hilarious enough to conceal the fact. You are an unjust man and a cruel one. My only solace is that despite you her beauty and her humanity shine through as they always have.

  Refusing to take responsibility for her miscarriage, Wilder answered with an angry blast that emphasized her unprofessional behavior and her complete indifference to the feelings of the cast and crew:

  Dear Arthur: This is a small world with very sharp ears. Ever since the early days of shooting, when rumors of Marilyn's unprofessional conduct first leaked out, I have been besieged by newspapermen from as far as London, Paris and Berlin for a statement. I have staved them off, I have avoided them, I have lied to them. As for the story in the New York Herald Tribune the conclusions reached by the columnist from his own research would have been twice as vicious had I not submitted to the interview. Of course I am deeply sorry that she lost her baby but I must reject the implication that overwork or inconsiderate treatment by me or anyone else associated with the production was in any way responsible for it. The fact is that the company pampered her, coddled her and acceded to all her whims. The only one who showed any lack of consideration was Marilyn, in her treatment of her co-stars and her co-workers. Right from the first day, before there was any hint of pregnancy, her chronic tardiness and unpreparedness cost us eighteen shooting days, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and countless heartaches. This having been my second picture with Marilyn, I understand her problems. Her biggest problem is that she doesn't understand anybody else's problems. If you took a quick poll among the cast and crew on the subject of Marilyn you would find a positively overwhelming lack of popularity. Had you, dear Arthur, been not her husband but her writer and director, and been subjected to all the indignities I was, you would have thrown her out on her can, thermos bottle [which she filled with vermouth] and all, to avoid a nervous breakdown. I did the braver thing. I had a nervous breakdown.

  Respectfully.

  Chastened, somewhat, by the ferocity of Wilder's response, Miller restrained his rage, shifted his argument and stated that Wilder should have been grateful for, rather than critical of, Marilyn's undoubtedly fine performance:

  That others would have attacked her is hardly a justification for you to have done so yourself. The simple truth is that whatever the circumstances she did her job and did it superbly, while your published remarks create the contrary impression. . . . In the light of the results you could see every day on the screen, you should have realized that her way of working was valid for her, completely serious and not a self-indulgence. . . . She has given your picture a dimension it would not have had without her and this is no small thing to be brought down with a quip. . . . The basic reason for my protest [is] at the injustice not only toward her as my wife but as the kind of artist one does not come on every day in the week, after all. She has created something extraordinary, and it is simply improper for you of all people to mock it.

  Believing that he was right and had won the argument, Wilder quoted his own script and concluded the duel with a mock apology: "Dear Arthur. In order to hasten the burial of the hatchet I hereby acknowledge that good wife Marilyn is a unique personality and I am the Beast of Belsen but in the immortal words of Joe E. Brown quote Nobody is perfect end quote." Not satisfied by the conclusion of the dispute, Marilyn called Wilder and dispensed with Miller's eloquence. When Wilder's wife picked up the phone and told her that Billy wasn't at home, Marilyn said, "Will you give him a message for me? Please tell him to go fuck himself."11

  III

  Wilder and Diamond's acid wit and black-and-white recreation of the 1920s had turned the stock figures of the dumb blonde, shady musicians and wealthy tycoon into a quartet of original characters. Marilyn's vulnerability and lush femininity were a poignant contrast to the three parodic males. But the vapid, Technicolor Let's Make Love (1960), which she made next under her new contract with Fox, put her right back into the utterly predictable role she had played and replayed in almost every movie she'd ever made. Marilyn embodied the ancient stereotype, repackaged by Hollywood, of the humble girl who captures a wealthy and often Old World gentleman. "By the mid-'50s," as one critic noted, "she stood for a brand of classless glamor, available to anyone using American cosmetics, nylons and peroxide."

  Marilyn's history of atrocious behavior on the set, no secret in Hollywood, made it difficult to find a co-star, and the leading role in Let's Make Love was turned down by Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson and James Stewart. Gregory Peck took it on, but dropped out after Marilyn's role was expanded and his own diminished. She then suggested Yves Montand, whom she'd seen singing and dancing in a triumphant one-man Broadway show, and who looked a lot like Joe DiMaggio.

  Five years older than Marilyn, Montand was born Ivo Livi into a poor anti-fascist family in a village in Tuscany. In 1922, after Mussolini seized power, they fled to Marseilles. He grew up in France, left school when he was eleven and worked in many humble jobs before starting his singing career at the age of eighteen. Montand first became famous by appearing in French nightclubs with Edith Piaf. In 1953 he emerged as a powerful actor in Wages of Fear, an exciting film about driving a truckload of nitroglycerine to an oilfield in the Central American jungle. That year he married the famous French actress Simone Signoret, whose family was also anti-fascist. Her Jewish grandfather had fled to London during the Nazi occupation of France and joined the Free French government of Charles De Gaulle. Montand and Signoret played the adulterous John Proctor and his betrayed wife Elizabeth in the French stage and film version (with a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre) of Miller's The Crucible. In the French adaptation, the Puritan judge-inquisitor stood for the Nazis and John Proctor for the wartime Resistance. Montand and Signoret were Miller's personal friends, and their roles in The Crucible foreshadowed their personal lives.

  Montand was enormously popular in France as a singer and actor, and he and Signoret were a famous and well-respected couple. Signoret was a compelling, though not conventionally beautiful actress, with an emotional depth that transformed the material she played. She had just starred with Laurence Harvey in the excellent Room at the Top, a British film version of John Braine's popular novel that made her known to English-speaking audiences. Let's Make Love, Montand's first Hollywood venture, was a mediocre movie, but his appearance with Marilyn, and the scandal that surrounded their affair, made him an international star.

  During the making of the film the Millers and Montands lived in one of the detached bungalows set among the towering palm trees, lush lawns and tropical gardens of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Each bungalow had four apartments of five rooms and two bathrooms, and the two couples lived on the second floor, across the hall from e
ach other. Shooting began in January and on the first day Marilyn signaled her intentions by toasting Montand and saying, "Next to my husband and Marlon Brando, I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I've ever met."

  Marilyn was attracted to Montand's Italian origins, shared his impoverished background and admired his political commitment. His extreme uneasiness about acting in English – a language that he (unlike Signoret) could barely speak – made him especially appealing. Though she still had to be dragged out of her dressing room, Marilyn tried to put him at his ease. As they began to work together, she warned him, "You're going to see what it means to shoot with the worst actress in the world," and he confessed, "So you're scared. . . . Think of me a little bit. I'm lost." He later noted that "In Marilyn there was without any doubt a constant and obsessive awareness of her limitations, the conviction that she was not the great actress she longed to be." In a notebook entry, made while shooting the picture, she anxiously asked herself, "What am I afraid of ? Why am I so afraid? Do I think I can't act? I know I can act but I am afraid."12 In practice she guarded her talent and stayed within her limits, but she also dreamed of transcending them.

  A crisis occurred in the midst of the shooting, when the Screen Writers Guild went on strike. Despite the strike, Marilyn pressured Miller to rewrite the final scenes of Norman Krasna's weak script. Miller later recalled that the movie "had no story," which added to the strain Marilyn felt. "Before production," he said, "I did some rewriting of a couple of scenes. I tried to give some point between these two featureless figures. When they talked, there was no character, no motivation, so I stepped in and did what I could for the script. But we were beating a dead horse. It was obvious that all this didn't help any. It was an additional load to bear." In Timebends, Miller did not mention either breaking the strike or the $25,000 he was paid for his work. Despite his somewhat humiliating and ultimately useless script-doctoring, Miller sadly wrote, "it was plain that her inner desperation was not going to let up, and it was equally clear that literally nothing I knew to do could slow her destructive process."

  Miller then returned to New York, just as he'd done during a similar crisis in Showgirl, leaving Marilyn alone with Montand. Miller later acknowledged his motives for leaving when he said, "I guess our marriage was deteriorating." Marilyn, he noted, continued the recurrent pattern with many men in her life: hero-worship, followed by disillusionment: "Marilyn was looking at Montand rather idolatrously and she couldn't realize that he was not this tower of strength. At any period of her life, the oncoming stranger was vitally important. He or she was invested with immense promise, which of course was smashed when this person was discovered to be human."

  One day, after Montand had spent hours preparing for a difficult scene and Marilyn, without notifying him, had failed to turn up for work, he slipped an angry note under her door. Deeply upset, Marilyn called Miller in Ireland, where he had gone to work with John Huston on the script of The Misfits. Like a distant nanny, he then called the Montands and begged them, "Please do me a favor and go knock on Marilyn's door. She's there, she's told me all about it, she doesn't know what to do. She's ashamed." When they confronted her, Marilyn wept and confessed, "I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad. I won't do it again, I promise!"13

  Signoret won an Oscar that year for her role in Room at the Top. She stayed on in Hollywood to attend the ceremony on April 4, and soon after returned to Europe to make her next film. The sudden disappearance of Signoret and Miller put Montand in an enticing yet awkward position, with Marilyn in the dominant role. As Montand told a friend, "He's leaving me with Marilyn and our apartments are adjoining. Do you think that Arthur doesn't know that she is beginning to throw herself at me? After all, I'm a man and we're going to be working together, thrown together on the set, and I don't want the responsibility. I can't alienate her because I'm dependent upon her good will and I want to work with her." Montand, a well-known philanderer, also explained his feelings for Marilyn and her need for affection as her marriage began to break up:

  What contributed enormously to bringing us together was, first, that we both came from poor backgrounds and, second, Marilyn's behavior during the witch hunt, when she wholeheartedly supported Miller, to the fury of the studios. But there was also something deeper. My affection for her grew once I realized her vulnerability, her lucidity, her true sadness at not being given a real part to play in our movie

  —though Montand's part was even worse than hers.

  According to Montand, their emotions reached a fever pitch when the ubiquitous Paula Strasberg, playing the role of procurer, urged them on. She wanted to regain complete control of Marilyn by replacing Miller with the more amenable Montand. "'Go and say goodnight to Marilyn,' Paula said. 'It'll make her feel better. It's bothering her that she can't rehearse.'" As he entered Marilyn's room, Montand wrote, the flame suddenly ignited:

  I sat on the side of the bed and patted her hand. "Do you have a fever?" "A little, but it'll be okay. I'm glad to see you." "So am I, I'm glad to see you." "How was your day?" "Good, good." The dullest exchange you can imagine. I still had a half-page to work on for the next day. I bent down to put a goodnight kiss on her cheek. And her head turned, and my lips went wild. It was a wonderful, tender kiss. I was half stunned, stammering. I straightened up, already flooded with guilt, wondering what was happening to me. I didn't wonder for long.

  Signoret, a woman of the world, believed that winning her Oscar had "delighted" Marilyn. But Marilyn, who was not nominated for Some Like It Hot, explained why she really fell for Montand: "I think it was when she got the Oscar. I was so jealous. I wanted to say, 'You've got the Oscar, but I've got Yves.'"14

  Their well-publicized affair lasted from April to late June 1960. Miller, far more complaisant than Joe DiMaggio, lost Marilyn's respect by refusing to fight for her, by tolerating and even passively encouraging her affair with Montand. After the affair was reported in the newspapers, Marilyn both accepted responsibility for her behavior and tried to justify it: "No wonder they all feel sorry for Arthur. It makes me look like a tramp. And Arthur looks so pitiful, too; God, I don't blame them for hating me. I know he'd never hurt me – he'd do anything [for me]. But we're wrong, the two of us – this marriage is all wrong."

  On August 22 the English author Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Los Angeles, recorded that "Signoret had been visiting [the English actress] Mary Ure, and moaning because Yves [has had] this affair with Monroe. Arthur Miller doesn't care, it seems. But Simone and Mary shed tears and got drunk." Both actresses understood that intense but shallow affairs during the staging of a play or the making of a film were common in their profession. But if you were the injured party, it hurt just the same. In her surprisingly generous and sympathetic portrait of Marilyn, Signoret wrote that "she irritated me" and "it was a bit tedious to listen to her," but "I never detested her."15 Like Miller, Signoret was hurt more by the public humiliation than by her spouse's infidelity.

  When Marilyn, always subject to romantic delusions, told Miller that Montand was going to leave Signoret and marry her, he gently said, "You know that isn't true." Montand confirmed this and then, with Gallic savoir vivre, speculated (like Mailer) about the dubious prospects of life with Marilyn: "Not for a moment did I think of breaking with my wife, not for a moment; but if she had slammed the door on me, I would probably have made my life with Marilyn. Or tried to. That was the direction we were moving in. Maybe it would have lasted only two or three years. I didn't have too many illusions. Still, what years they would have been!" Montand was caught in the same net of pity and love that ensnared Miller, but managed to extricate himself in time. And like Miller, Montand seemed willing to risk everything for Marilyn.

  When the filming was over, Montand left Hollywood. Unwilling to accept reality, Marilyn (as she so often did) played the role of pursuer and seducer. On June 30 she intercepted him, en route to Paris, at the New York airport. She'd booked a nearby hotel room and filled it with flowers and bottles of c
hampagne. "[Montand] turned down the hotel but accepted the champagne. He and Marilyn said farewell in a rented Cadillac limousine, slumped for three or four hours in the back of a heavy, air-conditioned vehicle, nibbling caviar and sipping champagne. Montand kissed Marilyn and told her gently that he had no intention of leaving Simone." Throughout that summer and fall Marilyn – sad, lonely and désolée – tried to recapture him. She sent endless letters and telegrams, made desperate phone calls summoning him to New York and threatened to turn up in Paris. But Montand, across the ocean, securely back with his wife and pursuing his career in Europe, was now immune to her temptations. Marilyn's unhappy marriages were punctuated by her unhappy love-affairs.

  The plot of Let's Make Love, a heavy-handed romantic comedy, stuffed with tedious song-and-dance numbers that seemed antiquated the day they were choreographed, is absurd even by Hollywood standards. Marilyn plays an aspiring actress in an off-Broadway musical that satirizes Montand, a French-born New York business tycoon. Distressed about the bad publicity in the show, he attends the rehearsal incognito and is hired as an actor to play himself. He falls in love with Marilyn, who at first refuses to believe he's really a billionaire, but finally succumbs to his irresistible mixture of charm and cash.

  The movie begins with a long prologue, spoken by a narrator and illustrated by cartoon drawings, about the history of Montand's family's fortunes. In a double entendre, his ancestor (like Montand) "was interested in balloons of every kind." Montand appears wearing an incongruous derby hat, has a strong French accent and – though he supposedly speaks six languages – seems uneasy in English. Like William Powell in How to Marry a Millionaire, he owns a skyscraper with his name on the façade.