The Genius and the Goddess (31 page)

J
ERRY
: And I have a terrible past. For three years now, I've
been living with a saxophone player.

O
SGOOD
: I forgive you.

J
ERRY
(
with growing desperation
): And I can never have children.

O
SGOOD
: We'll adopt some.

J
ERRY
: But you don't understand! (
he rips off his wig; in a male
voice
) I'm a Man!

O
SGOOD
(
oblivious
): Well – nobody's perfect.

Curtis' puzzled question, "Why would a guy want to marry a guy?"
resonates even more powerfully today.
⁷
Though Lemmon captures the
millionaire whom Marilyn had hoped to find in Florida, he can't
marry him. Even the lecherous Brown isn't at all what he seems to
be. He's unnaturally attached to his mother and, though married and
divorced seven or eight times, may actually be more interested in men
than in women.

In August, as filming began, Miller received some good news from
his lawyer. His citation for contempt of Congress had been reversed
on appeal. Rauh had successfully argued that Miller had not been
informed about why he had to answer HUAC's questions nor told
about the penalties that would be imposed if he refused to do so.
Though his legal problems were over, Miller was on the scene for a
lot of the filming and inevitably became entangled in Marilyn's professional
conflicts. Acknowledging his vital support, Marilyn wrote
Norman Rosten from San Diego, "Arthur looks well though weaker
– from holding me up." During the shooting of the film, Miller wrote
his friend James Stern that Marilyn demanded his total attention, yet
expected him to go on writing. After having been in Hollywood "for
ten days, until two weeks ago, I found it impossible. . . . All she wants
is to see work pouring out of me, so I'm back [in New York] but
I'll visit there every so often."

Perceiving Miller's repressed anger and impatience with his wife,
Wilder remarked that "in meeting Miller at last I met someone who
resented her more than I did." Zolotow wrote that Marilyn had forced
Miller into the embarrassing role of mediator between actress and
director: "It was a humiliating position for him – but he bore it gracefully
and never criticized Marilyn. He always defended her to Billy.
He found excuses for her. She put Miller through literal hell. He
knew no peaceful hours either awake or asleep. . . . Even though she
was a destroyer of those around her, she made them feel guilty."
Wilder's co-author, Izzy Diamond, realized that Marilyn had also put
Wilder into an impossible situation. But he still sympathized with
Miller: "Miller conducted himself with reasonable dignity. He did not
make suggestions as to dialogue changes. He never criticized the
rushes. He only tried to be a peace-maker. Once, he came to Wilder
– this was around November 1 – and said, 'My wife is pregnant.
Would you go easy with her, Billy, please? Could you let her go at
four-thirty every day?'"Wilder angrily said that she never arrived
until eleven-thirty and wasn't ready to work till one, and that he still
didn't have a take at four o'clock: "You get her here at nine, ready
to work, and . . . I'll let her go at noon."
⁸

As Miller feared, Marilyn suffered her second miscarriage in
December 1958, six weeks after completing the movie. An essentially
good-hearted woman, she was quite capable of spite and cruelty.
Wilder had seen her at her worst. After the film was finished he
unleashed his anger and frustration in a series of bitter but amusing
recriminations. Referring to his constant battles with Marilyn, he
declared, "There have been more books on Marilyn Monroe than
on World War II, and there's a great similarity." He savagely
condemned her total lack of consideration for her colleagues: "She
was rude, mean, discourteous and completely selfish. She wouldn't
show up on time, and she didn't know her lines. She was the most
unprofessional person I ever met."
⁹
He called her "a continuous
puzzle, without any solution" and, attempting to explain her troubled
character, added, "She never found anyone who understood
her, and she was completely incapable of normal communication.
She was a mixture of pity, love, loneliness and confusion." Asked if
he would ever make a third film with Marilyn, Wilder replied, "I
have discussed this project with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and
they tell me I am too old and too rich to go through this again."
Yet, like everyone else, Wilder was astonished that she could act so
brilliantly, relying on intuition and spontaneity, under the worst
possible conditions: "Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real
artist to come on the set and not know her lines and give the
performance she did."
¹⁰

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

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 each
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."