Authors: Barbara Leaming
Marilyn, already tightly strung on her own account, wasn’t amused. “Well, why don’t you do it anyway?” she jeered.
He mounted a horse and did remarkably well for a beginner. Logan arranged for him to have lessons immediately. But the fact remained that the co-stars had gotten off to a rocky start. The second assistant director, alarmed, warned Logan not to allow Marilyn to get to him.
The very next day, Marilyn nearly wrecked a complicated sequence which Logan had been setting up for hours. In flight from Bo, Cherie, carrying a suitcase, was to dash through the city streets to the bus terminal. There were liver-colored mountains in the distance and neon-lit bars and pizza joints along the way. To catch the moment before the sky shaded into black, the cinematographer Milton Krasner planned to shoot at precisely 6:30 p.m., the so-called magic hour. The underexposure from the dying light would give the effect of a rich, velvety blue.
At 2:30, Marilyn went to her trailer to fix her hair and redo her makeup. Most importantly, she wanted to review the scene with Paula. Meanwhile, Logan feverishly went over the scene numerous times with the cameraman, Marilyn’s stand-in, and five extras. Three hours and thirty-five minutes passed.
“Where’s Marilyn?” Logan was heard to say.
By that time, there were fifteen minutes left. He sent an assistant
to her trailer. The assistant did not return. The cameraman’s eyes were darting between his wristwatch and his light meter.
“Where’s Marilyn?” Logan repeated.
His blood pressure rose as the orange sun descended. Finally, the cameraman announced they had only four minutes. If Marilyn failed to appear, the company would have to remain in Phoenix for an additional day, driving up the budget by as much as $50,000.
Logan propelled his massive, hulking frame in the direction of Marilyn’s trailer, some five hundred yards away. He found her gazing dreamily into a mirror while Paula, madly fanning herself, hovered nearby. Logan’s temper flared. He clutched Marilyn’s wrist and dragged her outside, a man possessed. Tallulah Bankhead once said that “if there were an Oscar for best acting by a director, Josh Logan would wrap it up.”
“I was coming,” Marilyn pleaded. “I was coming.”
By the time Logan had dragged Marilyn to her starting spot and shouted “Roll ’em!”, he had just about killed her dream of being treated with dignity and respect. Would he have done that to Bette Davis? Would he have done it to Katharine Hepburn? Logan bore Marilyn no ill will, yet to her his actions were humiliating.
The real crisis was still to come. On March 17, they shot a sequence in which Cherie, attempting to escape from Bo, panics and heads in the wrong direction. Instead of running away, she darts past as he bulldogs a steer in the center of the arena, the crowd cheering on both sides. Bo’s hands are occupied holding down the steer, so he is unable to stop Cherie.
Logan was allowed to shoot at the rodeo as long as he was careful not to interrupt the actual events. For this sequence, he chose a ten-minute intermission. Marilyn and the others rehearsed in the morning. When it was time to shoot, Logan, on the public-address system, asked the audience to behave as though they were witnessing a real event.
“Action!” he cried.
As Murray pretended to pin down the steer, Marilyn ran past. Then something happened that was not in the script. Marilyn, running to the exit, felt her shoe fly off. Immediately, she realized that the accident had been fortunate. Instead of wrecking the shot, the lost shoe made it more dramatic. But as she prepared to turn back, she perceived that her director wasn’t so quick. To her horror, she sensed that Logan
was about to yell “Cut!” Fortunately, the crowd stopped him. The sight of thousands of spectators roaring with delight persuaded Logan to let the cameras run. Marilyn returned to the center of the arena, collected her shoe and disappeared through the gate. By the time the cameras stopped, her disillusionment was complete. Marilyn had seen Logan hesitate and her faith was shattered. He was the one with the impressive list of directing credits, but he knew less about film than she. Instead of feeling better about herself, Marilyn panicked. How could she trust Logan after that? How could she put her performance in his hands?
Her initial thought was to have Lee Strasberg flown to the location immediately. But Greene wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that Marilyn Monroe Productions could not afford the ticket. Marilyn had Sunday off. For hours, she and Paula conferred with Lee by telephone and listened to tapes of his lectures.
On Monday, Marilyn was still upset when she returned to the arena. Logan was filming in the bleachers. In this shot, thousands of spectators cheer a rodeo event, while the camera pans down to disclose Cherie asleep in the sun—a night person, she isn’t used to being awake in the afternoon. The scene was charming and funny, in distinct contrast to Marilyn’s mood at the time it was filmed. Between takes, she leaned over the side of the bleachers to vomit, sick with nerves.
Marilyn struggled to regain her confidence in Logan. When the company moved on to snowy Sun Valley, Idaho, she barraged him with questions about Stanislavsky. As a student, he had spent eight months with the Russian director, whose theories loosely formed the basis of Lee Strasberg’s teachings. Logan warmed to the subject now, scarcely suspecting that Marilyn was trying to shore up her faith in him.
Nor did he guess that it was Marilyn’s crisis of confidence that led Paula suddenly to turn up during filming as she had never dared to do before. Logan was shooting a scene in which Cherie, freezing cold in a skimpy coat, is delighted by Bo’s offer of his warm, fleece-lined jacket. They completed one take, but the director wasn’t satisfied. It seemed to Logan that Marilyn had put on Bo’s jacket too quickly. He urged her to savor the experience more. He advised Marilyn to imagine that she was stepping into a bubble bath.
Logan heard Paula behind him. “That’s a good image,” she confirmed. “You’re enjoying a bubble bath.”
It was the first time Paula put her two cents in while Marilyn was working with a director. It would by no means be the last.
While Marilyn was in Sun Valley, Arthur went to Washington, D.C. to confer with the attorney Joseph Rauh, Jr. about his passport problems. Besides accompanying Marilyn to England for
The Sleeping Prince
, Miller wanted to be present when
A View from the Bridge
was staged there. Binkie Beaumont, the modern English theater’s most successful impresario, had originally planned to open
View
in mid-March, but when British Equity prohibited most of the Broadway cast from appearing in the West End run he postponed it until October. Miller had agreed to expand the play to two acts.
On March 27, Rauh went over Miller’s options. He was careful to point out the consequences of each. The major danger was that a passport application might trigger the long-threatened HUAC subpoena. Miller was well aware that Mrs. Scotti, the HUAC investigator, had been building a case against him. Rauh emphasized that in the end Miller must make up his own mind about which course to follow and that the decision would be difficult.
One alternative was simply to apply for a passport as if he had not had any trouble with the passport office before. Perhaps he would be lucky this time. It seemed to Rauh that, at the moment, the government’s passport policy was more liberal than it had been in 1954. There was a chance Miller would slip through without being asked about his association with the Communist Party. Still, if he was going to be questioned, it might be strategic to raise the issue himself before the government did.
Miller’s second alternative, the one Rauh clearly favored, was to submit an affidavit with his passport application. The lawyer advised Miller to declare that he was not a Communist Party member and had not been politically active for some years. He was to volunteer the information that, during a period of three months in 1947, he had indeed been present at three or four meetings of Communist writers. He was to attest that he had never had a Party card and that, as far as he could recall, he had never paid dues. But this raised the problem that the State Department might leak the affidavit to HUAC, triggering a subpoena.
Back in New York, Miller, in consultation with the attorney Lloyd Garrison, settled on a plan. He would write a short statement along the
lines Rauh had suggested. Before he left for Reno, Rauh and Garrison would go over the statement and put it into final shape. About five weeks before he and Marilyn were due in England, he would apply for a passport like anyone else and hope for the best. If, however, the passport was held up, Miller would sign the affidavit and go with Rauh to submit it. Miller decided that, if necessary, he would take his chances on a leak.
By the time the cast and crew of
Bus Stop
returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn was ill. Part of it was due to nerves, part to the long hours working in the cold at Sun Valley wearing only light clothes. Her notes to Miller in New York suggested that she was feeling harassed. Miller, remembering the eagerness with which she had gone off to work with Logan, was mystified by his own inability to cheer her up.
Back on the Fox lot, Marilyn faced what she considered the most important scene in the film, indeed in her entire career thus far. For Marilyn, the most difficult part of filmmaking had always been dialogue. She was notorious at Twentieth for her inability to remember lines. Her nerves only made the situation worse. But during the past year in New York, Marilyn, influenced by Arthur, had come to believe that the key test of whether she had become a real actress was whether she could handle long blocks of complex dialogue.
As far as Marilyn was concerned, she was about to confront the scene that would gauge whether she had really “improved” in New York. Cherie, on the bus, talks at length about her past. She speaks of the men in her life. She speaks of her hopes and dreams. She speaks of the kind of man she longs to meet. Marilyn had never done a scene requiring this much dialogue before.
Even with less challenging material, Marilyn always had a good deal of trouble propelling herself into a scene. She would do almost anything to put off the moment when she had to turn herself on. She dreaded the responsibility of having to make it all happen. With the scene on the bus looming, Marilyn called in sick day after day. Logan did his best to shoot around her. Then on April 11, Lew Schreiber received word that Marilyn had checked into a hospital with acute bronchitis. Miller called her room everyday. They never talked for less than half an hour. There was concern at Twentieth that if Marilyn stayed out too long, she might go to England before completing
Bus Stop.
On April 24, after missing twelve days of a forty-five-day
schedule, Marilyn finally came back to work. Logan, realizing that she was terrified of the next scene, had devised a plan to get her through the complicated speech. He faced two problems: Marilyn’s poor memory, and the time she required to work herself up for each take. It would take forever to complete her speech if it was shot in a normal fashion. He had to find a way to relieve Marilyn of the psychological pressure of repeatedly having to turn herself on, while knowing there was no way she could get through the scene in a single take.
Logan had noticed that as long as the camera rolled, Marilyn remained “on,” even if she had already made a mistake or forgotten her lines. The moment he called “Cut!” and the camera stopped, she was back at point zero again. So he filmed the scene without calling “Cut!” Each time Marilyn ruined a take, Logan kept the camera rolling. As he had expected, Marilyn was able to start the next take without her usual collapse—and the time it took to juice herself up again. When they were finished, Logan would piece her speech together out of all the tiny bits which had worked.
They shot like this for two days. They worked until 9:25 one night, 11:30 the next. Logan’s tactic was very expensive, since he had to print ten times as much film as he would have otherwise. But in the end, he probably cut days from the schedule. And he had enough flashes of Marilyn’s brilliance to assemble the deeply moving scene he was after. When Marilyn saw the rushes, she was thrilled. In her view, it was as if nothing she had done on screen before mattered. She had brought off a long, complicated speech at last. She could not wait to show the finished scene to Arthur. He perceived that Marilyn’s attitude to Logan had improved.
Miller had arrived in Reno on May 1 to establish residency for his divorce. In anticipation of his weekend visits to Los Angeles, Marilyn rented quarters at the Chateau Marmont, next door to Paula. She assigned Greene’s chauffeur to stock the hotel refrigerator with cheese and champagne, and to pick up Miller at the airport. Logan was no longer shooting on Saturdays, so Marilyn had weekends free.
Mostly she and Arthur were alone. Now and then Paula barged in. There were calls from Lee. On one occasion while Miller was there, Paula insisted on playing a tape recording of Strasberg’s lecture on Duse. Marilyn and Paula listened solemnly for about twenty minutes. Arthur found the lecture absurd but held his tongue.
Following the weekend of May 12–13, Miller returned to Reno, intending to file his passport application at the end of the week. Contrary to plan, he had not yet completed the affidavit. A man in love, Miller considered proclaiming his “romantic motive” for wanting to go to England. Rauh and Garrison, however, discouraged Miller from alluding to his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Garrison was particularly concerned that there would be a great deal of publicity should the affidavit leak to the public, while Rauh felt that he himself could always mention the romance later in an effort to show how silly the government would look if a passport were denied.
Even with Miller in worshipful attendance, Marilyn became increasingly annoyed by Don Murray’s evident lack of interest in her. He had eyes only for the actress Hope Lange, whom he’d known in New York and later married. But this was more than just a case of a bruised ego. Marilyn hadn’t made a film in a while. She was getting older. There was concern at Twentieth that her deliberately tattered image in
Bus Stop
might drive away her audience. Though she and Logan stuck to their concept of Cherie, there was always a chance that Marilyn could be making a terrible mistake. Her determination to signal the audience that she was a serious actress was a major risk, and Marilyn knew that. Her tense relations with her poor, unsuspecting co-star seem to have been a way of acting out her fear of failure. If Murray did not respond to Marilyn, was the audience about to do the same?