Marilyn: A Biography (29 page)

It is a bad start, and in a few days word is
out that Marilyn is taking a high count of Nembutals every night —
the film promises to move as quickly as a wounded caterpillar. If
Huston is furious, it is not in his style to give a sign. He has
the contempt of a professional for the unprofessional. Since Miller
and Monroe are obliged to make the film of their life in a state of
nervous exhaustion, then that happens to be the way they have
chosen to play their game and waste their psychic funds. He prefers
to waste his substance in other fashion. (He will spend his nights
losing a cumulative $50,000 at the crap tables.) There is the
unmistakable possibility that Huston withdraws subtly from the
film, which is certainly not to say that he does not work hard, but
that he refuses to become involved in any hysteria about making a
great film. No, he will do his best to do a good job under the dry
hot circumstances of the Reno desert in summer, and the final film
has all the tone of a dry distaste for any excess of effort,
emotion, or sentiment, as if every pipe of communication in the
world was already coated with emotional glop and it was time to
clean the pipes. If people were to be moved by
The Misfits
it would be out of a paucity of tricks. The story would deliver
what it was good enough to deliver, no more. That is an aesthetic.
It is perhaps the most classical of the film aesthetics. But it is
not the easiest way to make a major film. If Huston had a problem
as a director, it was precisely that he could not come to take his
work seriously enough to create a full resonance of atmosphere.
Finally, it was as if there was something obscene about
moviemaking, some rip-off of emotion that might spoil a finer
tissue of subtleties not even to be described. Such as good
horseflesh. Precisely because the script of
The Misfits
was
so quiet in tone, it may have needed some commitment from the
director to push the actors and crew beyond themselves. After one
look, however, at Monroe’s inability to give of herself in
dependable fashion, Huston may have decided that all-out
inspiration was going to be directly equal to a loss of face.
Dignity for some artists has more worth than art. It is also
possible Huston was bored by the miseries of Miller and Monroe. He
had been through divorce, and could do without a good seat at this
one.

The film settled upon a pattern. They shot
with Monroe when available, shot away from her when not. With
Miller, Huston worked closely. It was a script so delicate in the
drift of its emotions and so taciturn in its story that the daily
problem must have been to decide what motive they could offer the
actors for a line. It was almost as if the story were too simple: a
young divorcee, Roslyn Taber, begins to live in the desert outside
Reno with a middle-aged cowboy, Gay Langland, played by Gable,
while two other cowboys, Eli Wallach and Monty Clift, begin to find
her attractive, flirt with her, and apparently wait for her
relation to Langland to end. After a time, the men go out to hunt
for mustangs to trap and sell. It is one of the few ways left to
earn a living that is “better than wages.” Roslyn accompanies them,
but is horrified at the cruelty of the capture and the pointless
misery of the purpose. If these mustangs were once sold as riding
horses for children, now they are canned as dogmeat. “A
dog-eat-horse society,” Huston will say in comment. So Monroe has a
war with Gable which is resolved (1) by his capture of the last
mustang as a gesture to himself, plus (2) setting the horse free as
a gesture to her. The film ends in such gestures. They drive off
together to face a world in which there will be fewer and fewer
ways to make a living better than wages. There has been a curious
shift in Miller’s powers. Values are now vague.

While more can obviously be said in summary,
the point is that
The Misfits
is a film, particularly in its
first half, that will move on no more powerful hydraulic of plot
than the suggestion of one nuance laid like a feather over another
— so it is going to be closer to the nature of most emotional
relations than other films. But its virtue is also its
vulnerability. We see Roslyn and Langland come together, sleep
together, set up home together, we feel the other two cowboys
perching themselves on the edge of this relation, but no emotional
facts are given, no setting of category or foundation, for the plot
is never bolted down. We do not know exactly how Roslyn comes to
feel for each man, nor how much she feels. The film is even less
precise than biography. Unlike other movies we have no blueprint to
the emotional line of her heart. Instead she seems to shimmer on
the screen with many possibilities of reality. When she holds Monty
Clift’s head on her lap after he has been wounded in the rodeo, we
do not know whether she is maternal, or stirring for him, or both —
nor is she likely to know what she feels. In life, how would
she?

So they are making a movie which is different
in
tone
from other films, and she is altogether different
from other actresses, even different from her performances of the
past. She has no longer anything in common with Lorelei Lee. She is
not sensual here but
sensuous
, and by a meaning of the word
which can go to the root — she seems to possess no clear outline on
screen. She is not so much a woman as a mood, a cloud of drifting
senses in the form of Marilyn Monroe — no, never has she been more
luminous.

On the other hand, never has Gable been more
real. He could be leaning on the fence next door. Finally we have
an idea of what Gable is really like. He is not bad! So, scene for
scene, as the first rushes are slowly stitched together, it must
have been obvious to Huston and Miller that they had a set of
cameos which were superb in their understated taste. It was as if
some hollow had been created where one could listen for the echo.
But would these separate scenes come together into a movie that
might work? Speaking of ultimate films, no black and white movie
has ever had so high a budget before. So they might also be
striking a blow for the economic future of good films to come. But
how to know if what they were accomplishing was really good? That
was like trying to calculate the final grandeur of a palace from
two or three rooms. The question of guiding actors through this
plotless plot had therefore to put its full demand upon the
playwright and director. In the day-to-day uncertainty of shooting,
how were they to know whether an actor was ready with an emotion
too rich or too poor, too strident or too vague? In turn, how could
the actors know? The man who has become an actor to avoid that
hungry hole of the mind which asks “Who am I?” now had to ask “Who
are
you
?” of the role he was playing. It was even worse for
Miller. In such a delicate shifting script, how could any scene be
considered fixed, yet any change of dialogue in one scene might
cause its uncalculated bend in another. Poor Miller! His head had
to be overloaded with the most subtle literary equations while his
life with Monroe was reduced to one livid state: hideous tension!
If they had finally and most tragically arrived at the relation of
cellmates who have learned over the years to detest each other into
the pit of each intimate flaw, he was nonetheless obliged to work
each day on scenes that extolled the beauty of her soul.

For Miller had written a lie in
The
Misfits
. It was the half-lie that Marilyn was as lovely and
vulnerable as Roslyn Taber, and that may have been all right in the
beginning — a lie may be the only aesthetic structure available
when working up a vehicle for a great movie star (because she can
transmute the lie to magic), but Miller’s problem was that he had
to live in daily union with the lie, then refine it in his writing
each night. Each night Monroe rubbed his nose in the other truth.
If she had long been obliged when making a film to wrap herself in
the psychic greatcoat of full hatred for some man, beginning with
Don Murray in
Bus Stop
, then Olivier, then Wilder, and had
discovered the cost of having no one to hate in
Let’s Make
Love
, Miller’s suffering presence now became her real leading
man. What must have doubled all hostility was that he was there to
remind her she had not been superb enough to rise out of the bile
of the past. So if Miller was the man who had loved her most, he
would now become the man who had to pay the most, and was condemned
to be with her in three rooms on the top floor of the Hotel Mapes
while traveling down the clock through Reno night after sleepless
night. And if the wound of her infidelities with Montand was still
glowing, it could only measure the contempt she offered to his
heart. Miller suffered. He had the psychology of poverty where the
mark of a man is to suffer and endure. So he suffered. And fed her
sleeping pills and held them back, and walked the floor, and
listened to her abuse, which many another ear in the hotel would
also hear — “You can project through steel walls, honey” — and in
the pause between each squall, flopped down for a space, or stared
at the script on his desk. Guiles gives a description of the
morning after “one such all-night vigil with Marilyn finally asleep
while others were getting ready for the day.” May Reis, their
secretary, and Nan Taylor, the wife of the producer, enter the
suite.

Miller was slumped in a heap on the sofa
lapsing at moments into fits of trembling from nervous exhaustion.
Nan Taylor . . . had heard that Marilyn had spent an especially bad
night, but she was even more distressed to see what it had done to
Miller. His hands half covering his face, Miller agonized over his
situation. He confessed that he was obviously no help to Marilyn in
seeing her through these terrible nights. He wondered if he
shouldn’t take a room in another hotel. “She needs care at night,”
he said, and then he seemed to defeat any hope of salvation by
crying out, “But I care for her so much.”

“I care for her so much.” It is the
bottomless cry of love. He is face to face with the most
unendurable message of all: love by itself does not conquer hatred.
Nor does it heal another heart. It can only climb the walls of its
own misery. For love without courage is an insult to those who
hate. So he is taken care of in his pain by the two women. “Perhaps
we can’t solve Marilyn’s problem this morning,” Nan Taylor will
say, “but we can do something about you,” and leaves the room, sees
someone in the hotel management, and comes back with a key to a
spare room on the same floor where he can work and conceivably
sleep.

* * *

Each day the picture falls further behind
schedule. With Miller a little more removed from her scene, Marilyn
begins to firm up future guidelines — she will live with a chosen
entourage of technician-friends and social helpers. Paula is always
there, and Marilyn can also count on her publicity man, her hair
stylist, her makeup man Whitey Snyder, her driver, and Ralph
Roberts, an actor big as a professional football player who has
been her masseur for many months and will yet be her confidant and
come to know her as well as anyone in the remaining two years of
her life. She will soon be very sick and go through a crisis that
almost ends her participation in the film, but for a few weeks it
is almost as if she manages to continue by deriving some strength
out of her hatred of Miller. She actually slams a car door in his
face one day on location in the desert and tells her driver to
leave him behind. (Miller will not share a car with her again.) And
then there is the record of an evening when she sat and drank with
Roberts and Agnes Flanagan, her hair stylist, while watching brush
fires on the horizon of the desert. Power lines have come down in
this blaze, and Reno is in blackout. Since Miller’s room has a
separate generator to provide him illumination by which to write,
she asks Roberts to get a little ice from a portable refrigerator
in that room, and when Roberts returns — as Guiles reports the
dialogue — Marilyn speaks of Miller in the following manner: “I can
tell by your face,” she says to Roberts, “you saw old Grouchy
Grumps. Did you speak to him? I mean did he say
hello
?”

He was lying on the sofa, Roberts tells
her.

“He’ll go that way until he’s too exhausted
to move,” she remarks without compassion. “From the desk to the
sofa and back again.” She drops a cube in her glass. “Klunk!” she
cries. “At least we got a little ice out of that room.” Boom!
Next!

Is it possible she is brooding over Montand?
A few days later she is in complete collapse. Suffering agonies
from a particularly bad menstrual period, she arrives on location
at noon with the temperature over 110 degrees, has to be helped out
of the car, and, unable to coordinate by herself, is led over to
the set. Metty, the cameraman, tells Huston it is hopeless. “Her
eyes won’t focus.”

Huston shuts down. They have to gamble. She
is flown to Los Angeles and put in a clinic where it is hoped she
will be able to go on with the picture after ten days (by doctor’s
estimate) of rest and “medication,” which is to say a new poison
will perhaps be found to overcome a few effects of the old poison.
At her first opportunity, she gets up, sneaks out of the hospital,
and looks for Montand at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but he is neither
there when she calls nor does he phone back to answer her note. He
merely tells friends in Hollywood that she has left a number where
she can be reached. Soon a gossip columnist reports that Montand
has told her how Marilyn has “a schoolgirl crush on him.” It
creates bad publicity for Montand and he is obliged to explain
himself in more detail: “I think she is an enchanting child and I
would like to see her to say good-bye, but I won’t.” Then he adds,
“She has been so kind to me, but she is a simple girl without any
guile. Perhaps I was too tender and thought that maybe she was as
sophisticated as some of the other ladies I have known. . . .”
Mon Dieu!
“Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did,
I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”