Marilyn: A Biography (27 page)

“She never wore a diaphragm?”

“She hated them,” said the woman friend.
“What people don’t understand is that Marilyn loved sex.” (We are
in
Rashomon
once more!) “I don’t think she went a week in
her life without having some man around. She took sex with men the
way men used to take sex with women.”

“Still, she needed sleeping pills.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

Now, with Miller, faithful to Miller, she
will have an operation and then another to make a child possible,
and will claim to have other pregnancies — what stays constant is
the depth of depression each time the pregnancy, real, tubular or
hysterical, is over. It is as if Zanuck’s verdict upon her as a
sexual freak is being confirmed. If few women are without
depression after a miscarriage – they are dealing, finally, with a
mystery, which for whatever reason, has chosen not to be born –
then what an avalanche of depression for Marilyn. The unspoken
logic of suicide insists that an early death is better for the soul
than slow extinction through a misery of deteriorating years.

This depression lies so heavy upon her that
Miller crosses his Rubicon. He has never written before with an
actor or actress in mind. He derives from the high literary
tradition that true theatre depends upon the play, and the script
is inviolate. Great playwrights live with themes, not actors. But
he will write a movie script for her. He will adapt his short
story, “The Misfits,” into her vehicle. It is, from Marilyn’s point
of view, either the highest offering of his love or the first
aggressive calculation of a mean and ambitious brain. Her mood
rises and she is gay for a few days, but on their return from the
hospital she slides back into depression and begins to increase her
count of Nembutals. One day he sees her stumble into a chair and go
immediately into a heavy doze. Her breathing is labored. Then for
the first time he hears what will become the unmistakable sounds of
a half-paralyzed diaphragm — her breath is coming with an eerie
continuing sigh. The wind of death is in the winding sheet. He does
not try to brew coffee or walk her around, slap her face, or pinch
the back of her knees. Instead, he seeks “immediate medical help.”
It is in his character not to look for amateur solutions. Apparatus
and technicians from a nearby clinic come
quickly
— can this
be medical assistance with which any of us is familiar? — and they
resuscitate her. He has saved her life. He will have to save it
more than once again. In the days after this incident she will,
according to Guiles, be endlessly affectionate to Miller, kiss his
hands over and over.

What do we witness? Has she actually supposed
(with her abominable facility for living in the unconscious of
others) that he might let her die? Or has her hatred been put to
rest by the look of relief in his eyes that she is still alive?

They begin to put down roots. He finds
another farm in Connecticut, and they buy it. She is busy and happy
with the details of alteration and studies the daily work of the
carpenters, while he begins to work on
The Misfits
. It is a
happy time, but will end he knows so soon as the alterations are
finished. He is right. She is bored with the country, and begins to
talk of their own apartment in New York. They move from the
Greenes’ apartment on Sutton Place to another at 444 East
Fifty-seventh Street. Her love of Brooklyn is obviously not as
intense now as it used to be. If there will be a view across the
East River, it is from Manhattan that they will look at unhappy
squats on the skyline of Queens. Now she picks up her classes with
Strasberg again, and spends many an evening talking to other actors
at the Strasberg home. Miller does not often accompany her, but he
does not oppose her either. It is as if he senses that she must be
forever engaged in feathering the nest of some future identity.
Being among actors offers a culture she can finally acquire the way
others pick up a foreign language — she is at least absorbing the
milieu of the New York Method actor, his gossip, his prospects, his
sophistication, his cynicism, and his sharp horizons. To live at
last in a milieu must be the equivalent of oxygen to her. Yet, she
is also most respectful of Miller during this time. When guests
visit the New York apartment, she takes them on tiptoe past the
important room of the house — it is the place where her husband
writes. We must conceive of him sitting there, unable to put down a
word for dint of listening to her caution the guests. Of course,
during this time Milton Greene is also being sued for control of
Marilyn Monroe Productions, a sordid episode. At Miller’s urging,
she even attempts through her lawyers to have Greene’s name removed
as executive producer of
The Prince and the Showgirl
: like
Natasha Lytess, Milton has heard nothing from her in the interval.
Since he has just turned down a $2,000,000 offer from television
because “she isn’t up to the strain of a series,” he can feel he
has legitimately been protecting her interests. Half of that
$2,000,000 would after all have gone to him. While Greene threatens
a lawsuit in which he will claim huge amounts, he feels small heart
for the project and finally accepts $100,000, far less than
Monroe’s lawyers were prepared to pay. “My interest in Marilyn’s
career,” he says with sad dignity, “was not for gain,” and after
three years of activity that has telescoped the focus of his life
inside out, he goes back to his profession.

Whether this victory for Miller contributes a
bit to the excellence of
The Misfits
is hardly knowable, but
the script in any case proceeds well. He is out of his literary
doldrums. Some time after a first draft of the movie is finished,
he invites his old friend and neighbor, Frank Taylor, who has been
a book editor
and
a Hollywood producer, to listen to the
script. On an afternoon in July of 1958, Miller reads it to him,
and Taylor is obviously impressed, for he suggests sending the work
to John Huston in Paris, at once! and Huston wires back within the
week that it is “magnificent.” He will be happy to direct it. Clark
Gable is given a copy and is also anxious to do it. Taylor agrees
to take a leave from publishing and be the producer. United Artists
is interested in financing. Now they have not only a major
production, well launched, but a sudden sense of all-surrounding
excitement. And promises at last of fulfillment. They seem to have
emerged onto the good-working married ground that they have an
exciting job they will do together. It is a long time since so much
talent and celebrity have come together on a film.

* * *

Yet they cannot get free of entanglements.
One may as well suppose a law: if the past is full of old
complications, the future will grow new ones. They need money. So
she is obliged to do another movie before
The Misfits
, and
then complications in Gable’s schedule force her to begin another.
By the time she will finish
Some Like It Hot
, their marriage
is in jeopardy; by the end of
Let’s Make Love
, they are
obliged to hang together like addicts.

What dismantling of hopes! She had believed
he would open the life of the mind to her, and came to suspect that
her own mind was more interesting than his. “You’re like a little
boy,” says Maggie, “you don’t see the knives people hide.” Of
course, if her unvoiced resentment of him is, after all this,
secretly sexual, then who can not think she might have known
better? At no time, certainly, will she live so much on sleeping
pills as in her years with Miller, and an insight into the distance
between their bodies comes from a story Miller tells of one
miserable day when he discovers that the inside of her mouth is
covered with open sores. Investigation of the medicine cabinet
discloses another horror: she has several dozen bottles of
sedatives of all variety; he introduces the cache to a chemist, who
informs Miller that the reactions of some pills upon others can be
literally poisonous. She is lucky to have gotten away with no more
than a sore mouth. Poor pill-taking child. Her chemistry is on this
occasion cleared up, that is, Miller succeeds in narrowing her
addiction to a few compatible barbiturates, but what a misery of
marriage is suggested if he “discovers” her mouth is sore. Is it a
week, two weeks, or a month since they have shared a kiss? The
episode takes place in Los Angeles and probably occurs in the
period just before
Let’s Make Love
, when their marriage is
again at its worst. But then they are never well suited for one
another when she works. We have to attempt to penetrate into her
condition at such times. As she begins
Some Like It Hot
, she
appears as a monster of will. She is also a fragile shell. If we
know her well enough to suspect fragility is her crudest weapon,
and she cannot possibly be as weak as she pretends, in fact we are
witness to a debased portion of her strength, still she is in the
unendurable position of protecting an exquisite sensitivity which
has been pricked, tickled, twisted, squashed and tortured for
nearly all of her life. The amount of animal rage in her by these
years of her artistic prominence is almost impossible to control by
human or chemical means. Yet she has to surmount such tension in
order to present herself to the world as that figure of immaculate
tenderness, utter bewilderment, and goofy dipsomaniacal sweetness
which is Sugar Kane in
Some Like It Hot
. It will yet be her
greatest creation and her greatest film. She will take an
improbable farce and somehow offer some indefinable sense of
promise to every absurd logic in the dumb scheme of things until
the movie becomes that rarest of modern art objects, an
affirmation
— the audience is more attracted to the idea of
life by the end of two hours. For all of Wilder’s skill, and the
director may never have been better, for all of first-rate
performances by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, and an exhibition of
late-mastery by Joe E. Brown, it would have been no more than a
very funny film, no more, and gone from the mind so soon as one
stepped out of the lobby, if not for Monroe. She brought so good
and rare an evocation it seemed to fit into the very disposition of
things, much as if God — having put a few just men on earth in
order to hold the universe together — was now also binding the
cosmos with a few dim-witted angels as well.

Talking about acting in her last
Life
interview, she says at one point, “You’re trying to find the
nailhead, not just strike a blow.” But what a journey down each
day, down to the nailhead. What old emotional mine fields to pass
through as she navigates by stimulants out of her chemical stupor
into her consciousness. And what bile she must dispense, what
poison to her tricks. On the set of
Some Like It Hot
she
will drive fellow actors into horrors of repetition. Through
forty-two takes, Tony Curtis has to nibble on forty-two chicken
legs because Monroe keeps blowing her lines. Repetition kills the
soul — Curtis will not touch chicken for many a month. Jack Lemmon
and he will stand around in high heels and breast padding, in silk
stockings and false hips, for all of a long day’s shooting all the
while Marilyn is unable to say, “It’s me, Sugar.” “There were
forty-seven takes,” as Wilder describes it. “After take thirty, I
had the line put on a blackboard. She would say things like, ‘It’s
Sugar, me.’”

Maybe she is searching into nuances of
identity. “It’s Sugar — the name you know me by, which by my own
reference is —
me
.” Splendid. She is working out a problem
in psychic knots worthy of R. D. Laing. But actors are going mad.
When she cannot remember one line, “Where is the bourbon?” as she
goes searching through a chest, Wilder finally pastes the line on
the inside of the drawer: WHERE IS THE BOURBON? Soon he is pasting
the line on every drawer. If she is trying to hit the nail on the
head, and get down into that core of herself where the nail meets
the nerve, she is also voiding her near to infinite anger at life,
men, and the movie-working world. How she exhausts the talents
around her. “When I come to cut the film,” Wilder says, “I look at
the early takes. Curtis looks good on those and Monroe is weak. On
the later takes, she is wonderful and he is weak. As a director, I
must disregard his best takes . . . and go with Monroe . . .
because when Monroe is on the screen, the audience cannot keep
their eyes off her.”

“Yes,” Curtis will tell Paula Strasberg when
she weeps after he has said kissing Marilyn is “like kissing
Hitler,” yes, he will say, “You try acting with her, Paula, and see
how you feel.” She will be hours late to the set. On a good day she
is two hours late; on a bad day, six. The slightest suggestion by
Wilder on how to do a scene puts her in a state. She must do it her
own way, and once again we learn later that her instinct is right,
but she chooses to do it her own way by walking off from him to
consult with Paula Strasberg. Shades of Sir Laurence and Ms.
Monroe. She is ten years ahead of her time.

Of course, she knows what she protects, knows
film is not life or the stage but exists somewhere else. In film,
to quote from an essay on Maidstone, the actor can

disobey the director or appear incapable
of reacting to his direction, leave the other actors isolated from
him and with nothing to react to, he can even get his lines wrong,
but if he has film technique, he will look sensational in the
rushes, he will bring life to the scene even if he was death on the
set. It is not surprising. There is something sinister about
film.
Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been
ignored too long.

And we can wonder at the depth to which she
must return each day to be again in contact with Sugar Kane; we can
think again of grandmother Della and the hour in which she may have
tried to strangle the year-old child. With what, we can wonder,
does Monroe finally make contact?