The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Marilyn first appears in a long violet sweater over black tights and slides down a fireman's pole onto the stage. A slightly chubby, adult Lolita, she renders "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" with bump-and-grind movements and exaggerated infantile gestures. Her character has some obvious similarities to Marilyn herself. Always eager to learn, she takes night classes, and uses Yiddish words, learned from Miller, like "mishugenah." Miller contributed an old vaudeville joke which falls terribly flat: Montand tells a doorman "Call me a taxi" and the doorman says "You're a taxi."When Marilyn is deceitful, she imitates Jack Lemmon's urgent reminder in Some Like It Hot – "I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl" – by repeating, "I'm a louse, I'm a louse, I'm a louse."

  The dialogue also reflects the stars' real life entanglement. Echoing his pleas for assistance, Montand asks Marilyn, "I hope you'll help me. I've never been on stage before" and begs her to "Give me some acting pointers. I know you can help me."The scenes in which Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly (in cameo roles) are hired to teach Montand (a great star in Europe) how to sing and dance are meant to be funny, but are merely embarrassing. In the movie Montand tells the serene and sweet young woman, "You seem 'appy. At 'ome wherever you are," whereas he is really addressing an emotionally unstable Marilyn, whose marriage to Miller he was helping to destroy. Frankie Vaughan, Marilyn's boyfriend in the movie, is finally replaced by Montand, who actually supplanted Miller.

  In contrast to his furious telegrams to Wilder, Miller praised the director George Cukor for his sympathetic treatment of Marilyn during the shooting. Miller knew the picture was important to her and to Cukor, but "the precious days and weeks of her life which your patience and skill and understanding have made humanly meaningful to her" were even more important. Miller had never known her so happy at work, so hopeful about her prospects, so prepared to forget the worst of her doubts. Cukor, he wrote, "must know now some of the reasons why she is so precious to me" and would understand Miller's sincere respect for him.16 The end result, however, had little to do with the director's treatment of the star. Despite Wilder's anger and Cukor's benevolence, Some Like It Hot is a great film and Let's Make Love is a dud.

  Let's Make Love was another stage in Miller's via dolorosa. Marilyn constantly forced him into intolerable positions: go-between with directors, non-stop worker on her behalf, script-scab, defender in telegrams, long-distance apologist, writer of thank-you notes – and public cuckold. Frequently and knowingly manipulated, he seemed willing to take almost anything – though he occasionally managed to escape to New York or Ireland. He still loved Marilyn, despite her faults, but was as obsessed with his career as she was with hers. He wanted to remain loyal to her and continued to work on his beloved script of The Misfits.

  Fourteen

  Making The Misfits

  (1960)

  I

  In the screenplay of The Misfits, Miller focused on two main elements of the story: his fascination with Marilyn's traumatized personality and his interest in the rough cowboys he had known in Nevada. He first used each subject separately in two short stories. Eventually, he found a way to unite the two elements in a screenplay and novel, relating the characters to each other and setting them in the context of Reno and the Nevada landscape.

  Miller captured an essential quality of Marilyn's character, and the hold she had on his heart, when he portrayed her as the heroine of his story, "Please Don't Kill Anything." In Timebends he described the vivid incident that inspired the tale, which took place during the summer of 1957 in Amagansett, a year after their marriage. Marilyn perplexed the local fishermen "by running along the shore to throw back the gasping 'junk' fish they had no use for and had flung from their nets. There was a touching but slightly unnerving intensity in her then, an identification that was unhealthily close to her own death fear."

  The heroine of the story – tense, startled and afraid – expresses her own vulnerability and pain by a neurotic sensitivity to the cruel treatment of the doomed yet still living fish. As she tries to throw them back, a retriever, following his natural instinct, shows the futility of her efforts by fetching them out of the water and bringing them back to the shore. The man (or husband) in the story "worshiped her fierce tenderness toward all that lived." But he also knows she must learn that "she did not die with the moths and the spiders and the fledgling birds and, now, with these fish." He tries to teach her that "victims make other victims," that fish, a part of the natural cycle, must die so that men can eat, and must be allowed to die in peace or agony. Still unconvinced by his arguments and unwilling to "make other victims," she naïvely claims that some of the fish, if thrown back into the sea, will "live as long as they can." He manages to tease her out of this notion by personifying the fish and ironically agreeing that "they'll live to a ripe old age and grow prosperous and dignified." The story, told from the man's point of view, suggests that the woman's reverence for life is hysterical and absurd, yet poignant, humane and endearing. But her failure to learn and acknowledge the principle of survival makes her dangerously neurotic and threatens the future of their marriage.

  A.J. Liebling's "The Mustang Buzzers," which appeared in the New Yorker of April 3 and 10, 1954, two years before Miller went to Nevada, was an unacknowledged source for the film. It described the essential background of The Misfits, which mainly takes place forty miles north of Reno, at Pyramid Lake:

  There are herds of wild horses in the mountains north of the lake, And a mustanger catches them for the horse-meat market. . . .

  [An airplane pilot] would cruise through the canyons until he spotted a band of mustangs – usually an old stallion with some mares and young horses. Then he would buzz them and start them off in the general direction of the corral, steering them from the air and firing a shotgun at their tails when they seemed disposed to dally. In the end, after a run of from fifteen to twenty-five miles, he would edge them toward the open end of the corral.1

  Liebling's cheerful title and mannered diction ("disposed to dally"), indifference to the shotgun and suggestion that there were plenty of horses to fill the corral are quite different from Miller's emphasis on the fate of the desperately galloping horses and the tragic futility of the hunt.

  In the spring of 1956, while waiting out his divorce in the Nevada desert, Miller met some real mustangers and watched their round-up. After only six weeks, the urban easterner developed an intuitive feeling for the western cowboys and wrote a story, "The Misfits," which realistically portrayed their speech, thought, work and values. This version focuses on three vulnerable, lonely men and their hunt for wild mustangs. Two of them are ordinary cowboys with rather fancy names: Gay (for Gaylord) Langland and Perce (for Percy or Percival) Howland. The similarity of their last names seems to connect them and emphasizes their relation to the wild and empty land. Their backgrounds are briefly sketched. Gay, aged forty-five and older than the others, has an ex-wife and two children living nearby, whom he hasn't seen for several years. He discovered her having sex with a man in a car, beat him up and got divorced. Perce, the youngest, is an expert bronco rider. He's deeply attached to his mother, and wants to phone her and reassure her that he's not been injured in the rodeos. Sympathetic yet lacking self-confidence, he admits, "I'm never goin' to amount to a damn thing." In the story Perce is Gay's unequal rival for Roslyn, who's merely mentioned and doesn't actually appear. Guido Racanelli, a widower who'd been a bomber pilot in Germany during the war, flies the plane that drives the wild horses out of the mountains. Though a man of action, he was unable to save his pregnant wife, who died suddenly at home, and hasn't wanted a woman since then.

  Up in the air, in a battered old plane that flies perilously close to the mountains, Guido shoots eagles (because they kill lambs), and uses a shotgun to frighten the mustangs and keep them racing toward their doom. Once the horses reach the lake, the men pursue them in an open pickup truck, with Guido driving and Gay and Perce lassoing them when they get close enough to throw the rope. The cowboys anchor them with heavy
truck tires tied to the ropes and, in a risky maneuver, bind their rearing legs. They leave the horses trussed up on the desert floor, to be collected the next morning by the butcher.

  Miller describes the setting of the hunt as "a prehistoric lake bed thirty miles long by seventeen miles wide, couched between the two mountain ranges." Echoing Genesis 1:2, "And the earth was without form, and void," he writes, "It was a flat, beige waste without grass or bush or stone." He also uses biblical diction and rhythm to suggest the archaic nature of both the lake and the hunt: "When there was something to be done in a place he stayed there, and when there was nothing to be done he went from it." Gay wrestling with the stallion to test and prove himself suggests Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord in Genesis 32:24.

  As always Miller is interested in how his male characters struggle, and often fail, to make a living. These men, misfits who have no families and can't fit into conventional society, prefer this highly skilled but low-paying work to tamely slaving away in a grocery store or gas station. "Anything," they repeat, "is better than wages." The skinny horses are also misfits. They're too small for adults to ride, can't run cattle and cost more to ship than they're worth. Even the spooky desert landscape is a geographical misfit, good for nothing but capturing and killing.

  Guido is fully committed to the hunt, but Perce and Gay realize the futility, even absurdity of their quest. Perce, who belongs nowhere, voices the fundamental objections by remarking, "These mountains must be cleaned out by now. . . . I never feel comfortable takin' these horses for chicken feed. . . . Just seems to me they belong up there." Gay tries to answer him, but evades the real issue. He rather weakly asserts that someone else will capture the horses if they don't, that they're eating good grazing grass and that they'll be shot if the cattle ranchers find them.

  After the horses are finally captured, Gay echoes Perce's objections, anticipates Roslyn's sympathy for the captured colt and admits that they've worked three days for only thirty-five dollars each. Even Gay's dog, like the retriever in "Please Don't Kill Anything," senses a violation of the natural order. She quivers nervously, as if the ground were filled with hidden explosives, when the horses approach the dried-out lake. The snarling dog has eaten horse meat and will eat it again. Perce, compressing the whole ghastly process of turning vital mustangs into dog food, and stressing moral over monetary values, regretfully says, "There's wild horses in the can." Despite all his doubts and his inability to explain his own feelings, Gay still believes the hunt has gone "the way it ought to be even if he could never explain it to her or anyone else."2 He drives home feeling content and with his values intact. The great irony of the story is that the apparently free men, subjected to economic pressures, are forced to work like slaves for whatever low price the dog-meat canners will pay. Miller's story is characteristically framed in social and economic terms, but his love for Marilyn had stimulated his interest in the moral dimensions of hunting wild creatures and killing them for profit.

  II

  Miller worked intensely and created most of his plays in a rush of inspiration. He wrote Death of a Salesman in five weeks, The Crucible in seven weeks, A View from the Bridge in three weeks, After the Fall in a year and The Creation of the World and Other Business in six weeks. Though he had written an earlier screenplay, The Hook, he had a great deal of trouble with The Misfits (his first script to be made into a film), and worked on it for three years. Miller lost a lot of time because he was no longer in total control of his work. In this collaborative effort he had to defer to the director, John Huston, who was nine years older and infinitely more experienced in making movies. Huston knew, far better than he, how to transform words and ideas into images and action. Miller also had difficulty writing a script especially for Marilyn. She craved his attention and knew she'd inspired him, but objected to playing a role that seemed to analyze and expose her real self. Alternately encouraging and berating him, she was never satisfied with the finished product, and constantly criticized his portrayal of the character as they were filming.

  On July 14, 1958, Miller sent a description of his story to Huston at his Irish country home, St. Clerans, in Galway:"I'm writing to you to offer you an original screenplay I've written. . . . The setting is the Nevada back country, concerns two cowboys, a bush pilot, a girl, and the last of the mustangs up in the mountains. . . . The script is an early draft. If you are interested I'd want to sit and talk over my notions of further developments and of course would like to hear yours." Miller also mentioned that Marilyn would star in the film and, in a rather muddled apology, blamed Milton Greene for hurting her relations with Huston, who'd directed her first significant picture, The Asphalt Jungle: "Marilyn is available for the girl and since her break-up with one Milton Greene she has sometimes wanted somehow to let you know she was put in a position vis-à-vis you which was not of her doing and for which she felt and still feels badly. Tell you the truth I can't recall what it was all about but it probably no longer matters anyway."

  Huston was drawn to the rough life of the competitive but closely bonded male characters and to the challenge of shooting the exciting scenes with wild horses. He read the script and, eager to direct the film, cabled back a single word: "Magnificent." On October 5, Miller, with a bit of forced enthusiasm and an unrealistic view of the future, told Huston: "Not since Salesman have I felt such eagerness to see something of mine performed. . . . I have a sense that we are all moving into one of those rare productions when everything touched becomes alive. . . . What started as a revision [of an earlier work] became a door opening into what was for me a strange and quite exhilarating new world. . . . Marilyn asks to be remembered to you, as always; she is slowly getting onto tiptoe for the great day."

  On June 16, 1959, after a year of revisions, Miller – in another rather strained letter – tried to reassure Huston about the value of the script. He said he was newly enamored with the story and, after making it more personal, no longer approached it from a telescopic distance. He felt his characters had come alive and that the movie would break the heart of the audience. He was continuing to revise and was now very keen to do the work.3 In the spring of 1960, when Marilyn was shooting Let's Make Love and about to become involved with Montand, Miller flew from New York to Ireland to work on the script with Huston. A French journalist on the scene optimistically wrote, "Miraculously and all at once, these two completely different and often opposed characters are marvelously in agreement in the clear, quiet and hard-working atmosphere of St. Clerans."

  Angela Allen, Huston's script supervisor, recalled that he had a far stronger personality than Miller and knew much more about films. Though Huston had called the screenplay "magnificent," he always prodded and pushed his writers to revise the script. Huston himself was a superb screenwriter, but he wouldn't rewrite an author he respected and made Miller do the work himself. Driven by Huston and exhausted by Marilyn, whenever he reached an impasse Miller would exclaim, "I can't think of anything else." But they went on and on, month after month, year after year, trying out many different endings but not improving the script. During the shooting Huston insisted that Miller revise the dialogue every day and late into the night (which made it much more difficult for Marilyn to memorize the constantly changing lines). Miller even continued to revise some scenes that had to be reshot after the film was finished.

  Once Marilyn was secured and Huston agreed to direct, the other pieces fell into place. Lew Wasserman, the powerful head of the MCA agency that represented both Miller and Marilyn, launched the project with United Artists. The budget was $3.5 million, but overwhelming problems made the picture run forty days over the ninety-day schedule and half a million dollars over budget. It was, at the time, the most expensive black-and-white film ever made. Miller was paid $225,000; Marilyn and Huston got $300,000 each. Clark Gable was fifty-nine, had a heart condition and hadn't made a good movie since his military service in World War Two. But he got a great deal: top billing and a spectacular $750,000,
plus $48,000 a week overtime.

  The writers' strike had delayed the completion of Let's Make Love, so the cast and crew arrived in the desert at the hottest time of the year. They stayed at the Mapes Hotel on North Virginia Street in Reno, and began the first stage of shooting on July 20. As sand blew into their eyes and into the cameras, they worked in Nevada until September 21 in temperatures of 110º Fahrenheit. There was a lot of dusty driving, in real life and in the film, from Reno to the distant locations. They piled into cars, trucks and busses, and drove through the desert for the mustang hunt at Pyramid Lake. The scenes in the unfinished house were shot in Quail Canyon, about twenty miles from the lake, and the rodeo scenes were filmed in Dayton, about twenty miles southeast of the city. The rest of the film was completed in the Hollywood studio.

  In those days Reno was still a frontier town pushing into the edge of the desert, and the film reflects the crude atmosphere of the city, the fierce emptiness of the land and the harsh rigors of the climate. The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, working on the scene for Magnum, noted the contrast between the lively activity in Reno and the empty, barren hills surrounding it.4 Reno was famous for its waves of well-heeled women visitors, who gambled in the casinos and slept with the local studs during their six-week wait for a divorce. The town fathers, always on the make, seeded the Truckee River under the Virginia Street bridge with old wedding rings, encouraging the new divorcées to cast off the symbols of their bondage and contribute their gold to the city. At the beginning of the film Gable (Gay) bids a hasty farewell at the train station to a stylish divorcée (played by Huston's former mistress Marietta Tree) with whom he's had a brief fling. After getting her divorce, Marilyn (Roslyn) hesitates and then decides not to throw her ring into the river. On August 20 the dry heat of the summer intensified when a natural disaster hit Reno, and the sky was blackened with smoke from two huge forest fires in the western mountains. The flames cut the only power lines and the town went dark – except for the big gambling casinos, lit by auxiliary systems – for three days. The film crew ran special electric lines to Miller's room so he could continue to turn out the words.