Marilyn Monroe (15 page)

As
The Crucible
(and later work) made clear, Miller did not stop thinking about Kazan and the woman they had shared. The play’s complex psychological dynamics attested to the enduring power of the Miller–Kazan–Monroe triangle in the playwright’s consciousness. At the same time,
The Crucible
marked a shift in the nature of that configuration, as the triangle assumed a political as well as a sexual meaning. With
The Crucible
, Miller set himself up as Kazan’s polar opposite, both politically and morally. More and more, the public would come to view Miller and Kazan as symbols of the conflict that ravaged America in the HUAC years. The vital role that Miller’s feelings about Marilyn Monroe played in shaping
The Crucible
hinted that her participation in the triangle was by no means finished. In 1953, whatever Marilyn’s current circumstances might be,
The Crucible
lent a certain inevitability to her future involvement in both men’s lives.

FOUR

I
n the beginning, Darryl Zanuck had questioned whether Marilyn would be able to handle the demands of her role in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Soon after the production began, however, he knew how wrong he had been to doubt her. And he knew how valuable a commodity she was about to become. Eager to make every penny he could, Zanuck decided to repeat the formula of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Marilyn played an adorable gold-digger in that picture, so that’s exactly what she must do again. He assigned her to
How to Marry a Millionaire
, with a script by Nunnally Johnson. Zanuck overlooked one essential ingredient that made
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
a success: Howard Hawks was one of the finest directors in the business. Jean Negulesco, who would be directing
How to Marry a Millionaire
, was mediocre at best. A gregarious Romanian with a bit of the con man about him, he was cultured and an art lover, but no artist. He had charmed his way into the movies, and Zanuck was one of his main supporters. Thus, though it seems not to have occurred to Zanuck, the question remained: Without a director of Hawks’s calibre, would Marilyn be able to pull off a second miracle? Hawks’s mastery of the formal elements of filmmaking contributed just as much to an actor’s performance as anything the actor himself did. This was something Negulesco’s direction lacked. At best, he could help with a line reading, but Negulesco’s sense of framing, composition, camera movement and editing were as weak as Hawks’s were strong.

Zanuck scheduled
How to Marry a Millionaire
to begin on March 11, four days after Marilyn completed
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
That raised a second big question, which Zanuck seems also not to have asked:
Was Marilyn in any condition to go into another picture immediately? Her eighteen weeks with Hawks had left her physically and psychologically drained. She had been consuming sleeping pills like candy in order to get even a few hours of rest after practicing her lines with Natasha late into the night. In the morning, she would take another pill to get through the day. By the time she was finished working with Hawks, she was thinner than she’d ever been in her life—and her nerves were raw. As if having a mere four days off between assignments was not bad enough, Spyros Skouras, alarmed by the damaging publicity that followed the
Photoplay
Awards, demanded that Marilyn use the time to fly to Boston to appear at a children’s charity benefit.

Several times in the last days of filming Charlie Feldman had dropped by to watch, and he’d grown alarmed at how fragile Marilyn seemed whenever the camera was not on her. He’d observed her turmoil over Natasha, and realized that the toll taken by her work seemed to go beyond mere physical exhaustion. Having lent her money to pay for Gladys’s care, he knew something of Marilyn’s terror that she might one day end up like her mother. So Marilyn was much on his mind as he witnessed the emotional crisis of another actress; it struck him as a warning of what might lie in store for Marilyn.

When Vivien Leigh came to Los Angeles to shoot the interiors for William Dieterle’s
Elephant Walk
, Feldman arranged a dinner party in her honor at the Beachcomber restaurant. Though the dinner took place as scheduled, before her arrival Vivien, who was a manic depressive, had suffered a nervous breakdown on location in Ceylon. During the seventy-two-hour flight to California, Vivien, raving and tearing at her clothes, had attempted to leap out of the plane. Her husband, Laurence Olivier, traced her condition to the miscarriage she had suffered in 1944, after which she alternated between periods of madness and normality.

On the Paramount lot, she had lucid moments, but there were numerous disturbing episodes. She drank, she hallucinated, she had screaming fits. Having previously played the tortured character Blanche Dubois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, now she recited Tennessee Williams’s lines as though they were her own thoughts. (She later said that doing Blanche on stage and screen had “tipped” her into madness.) When it became evident that Vivien was in no condition to finish
Elephant Walk
, the Los Angeles psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson was
brought in. “I will have that woman working next week,” Greenson promised, before Olivier, heeding the advice of a different psychiatrist, took his wife back to England for electroshock therapy. She was replaced in
Elephant Walk
by Elizabeth Taylor.

Henceforth, Feldman made concern for Marilyn’s physical and mental health a priority. He didn’t want her to end up like Vivien.

Nonetheless, Marilyn began
How to Marry a Millionaire
on schedule. Zanuck had by no means been alone in pushing the project for Marilyn.
How to Marry a Millionaire
was to be one of the first CinemaScope films, and the new wide-screen process was very much Spyros Skouras’s baby. Skouras, intent on winning back that portion of the film audience that had defected to television, staked his reputation on CinemaScope’s ability to “save the movies!” He, as much as his adversary Zanuck, wanted Marilyn in the film.

On Feldman’s advice, Jean Negulesco did everything possible to make Marilyn feel happy and relaxed at their first meeting. He had been told to turn on the full voltage of his charm to calm the highly-strung young woman. Sensing that she longed to be taken seriously and loved to learn, he won her over by talking about art. He showed her his own paintings and drawings, teaching her about Chagall, Gauguin, Matisse, and Miró. He drew her portrait in brown ink. When she protested, as she sat for him, that she could not understand modern art, Negulesco replied that art is like sex; it isn’t something one understands but something one feels.

When they began to shoot, Negulesco continued his campaign to put Marilyn at ease. He could be of little real help to her as a director, but he went out of his way to eliminate the usual sources of tension. On the set, Negulesco cheerfully accepted Natasha’s hawk-eyed presence behind his director’s chair. When Marilyn demanded another take, he didn’t have to turn around to know that Natasha had shaken her head. He seemed less annoyed than amused. He smiled, shrugged, and did as Marilyn asked. Sometimes she demanded fifteen takes or more. Other actors, irritated, knew they had to be good in every take because there was no telling which one Negulesco would select.

Marilyn and the director, whom she affectionately called “Johnny,” developed a rapport. But they had not been shooting long when Marilyn collapsed and had to be hospitalized with near bronchial
pneumonia. She had gone directly from one film to another, and had been pushing herself relentlessly. Feldman, already nervous about her fragility, began to be really frightened.

The studio was mainly concerned about the cost of the lost days, and someone came up with the bright idea that maybe they could compensate for the expense with some extra publicity. The studio called Marilyn at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to tell her that photographers were on their way over. It was a mark of how sick Marilyn was that she exploded with rage; usually, she would have done anything she could to accommodate them. Feldman warned the studio’s executive manager, Lew Schreiber, that Twentieth was pushing Marilyn too hard. Now that she was everyone’s investment, Feldman argued, they would all be wise to protect her. Marilyn came back to work in a few days, but though she put on a good show in public, it was months before she fully regained her strength.

It was not her physical condition, however, or even her constant fear of not being good enough that bothered Marilyn during this time. Her co-stars in
How to Marry a Millionaire
were Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, who had been the leading box-office star during World War II as well as the U.S. military’s favorite pin-up girl. For more than a decade, the peachy-skinned Grable remained on the top-ten list of box-office personalities. In her day, she’d earned some five million dollars yearly for Fox. Now, at thirty-six, she was considered by studio executives to be “used up,” and it was no secret that
How to Marry a Millionaire
would probably be her last film under contract. She accepted her lot with dignity. “Honey, I’ve had it,” Grable told Marilyn when Negulesco introduced them on the set. “Go get yours. It’s your turn now.” It was not long before the idea that Grable had passed the torch to her became a focus for Marilyn’s anxieties.

At 1 a.m. on Thursday, July 25, Marilyn was woken by the phone as she slept beneath a satin comforter. She had a party line in the three-room garden apartment she had recently rented on North Doheny Drive, but the call was for her—a drawling voice saying “wonderful” over and over again. Feldman never called in the middle of the night, but he had just been to a screening of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and could not wait to tell her.

Niagara
had broken box-office records, but it was
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
that introduced the funny, sexy, innocent, appealing Marilyn
Monroe that audiences around the world would fall in love with. Feldman was certain that after
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, the public was going to demand to see “the girl” again and again. He talked to Marilyn for a long time about what the Hawks film meant for her future. He assumed she’d be excited that they’d finally hit upon a crowd-pleasing, money-making formula, but Marilyn wasn’t responding in quite the way Feldman had expected. Though she was pleased by his compliments and enthusiasm, at the same time she seemed confused, uncertain, almost wary.

Life had taught Marilyn to be suspicious. Now and then, some of her mother’s and grandmother’s clinical paranoia may also have kicked in. Marilyn was always on the alert for the moment when things would go wrong. It wasn’t a question of worrying that she might be hurt or abandoned; she expected that to happen, it was only a matter of when. The experience of working with Betty Grable had set off alarm bells in Marilyn’s head. She knew she had replaced Grable in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
And she knew it was widely anticipated that from this point on she’d take over Grable’s position at Twentieth. Filmgoers had evidently wearied of seeing Grable in the same sort of role. Even if they hadn’t, Grable was too old to keep doing those roles.

So even before
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
had been released, Marilyn was worried about losing all she’d won. Before she had actually tasted success, she was thinking about how to protect herself. Instinctively, she assumed a defensive posture. Accustomed to being used and abandoned, she was already seeking ways to avoid suffering that fate again. Marilyn was smart. She didn’t want audiences to tire of her. She had been rushed into a second film where she had to repeat the character she’d just played in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
And here was Charlie telling her that the idea was to have her do “the girl” many times more.

With an eye on the future when she would no longer be able to play “the girl,” Marilyn was already preoccupied with convincing the studio to let her try different kinds of roles. At a moment when Twentieth seemed to be very happy with her indeed, she was already viewing the studio in adversarial terms. Whatever Zanuck might have in mind, she didn’t want to re-enact the Betty Grable story: endlessly repeating the same tired formula until the studio decided that she was “used up.” Betty Grable was thirty-six; what age would Marilyn Monroe be when Twentieth no longer wanted her?