Marilyn Monroe (38 page)

Murray, for his part, treated Marilyn good-naturedly. But things came to a boil on May 21, as they worked on Stage 14. In this scene, Cherie flees Bo in the Blue Dragon Cafe. He grabs at her, tearing off the sequined train of her gown. As Marilyn understood the action, Bo, in his anger, humiliates Cherie.

When Logan actually filmed the scene, it seemed to Marilyn that Murray tugged at the train gently rather than nastily, as if he feared the audience might not approve. Marilyn needed to feel his anger in order to react with anything like an authentic emotion of her own. Enraged that the scene had gone poorly, she grabbed the train and lashed her co-star across the face, cutting him near the eye.

Murray walked off the set, vowing not to return until Marilyn apologized. Logan, exasperated, chastised her for being vulgar. Marilyn was convinced the director hated her, and Greene refused to stand up to
Logan on her behalf. She told herself they were all simply afraid of women. Though at first Marilyn agreed to apologize, later she changed her mind.

By evening, she was despondent. It was sometime after eleven that night when Arthur Miller, asleep in his cabin at Pyramid Lake, heard someone at the door. The only immediate neighbor was Saul Bellow. For six weeks, one reached Miller by writing care of Bellow, Sutcliffe Star Route, Reno, Nevada, or calling a pay phone that stood next to a desolate, rarely traveled highway. The owner of a defunct motel nearby had to answer the phone, then drive out to the cabins in a pickup truck. By prior arrangement, when Marilyn called, which she did almost every day, she gave her name as Mrs. Leslie. It was a rare occasion, however, when Mrs. Leslie called late at night.

The road to the phone booth was dusty and bumpy. The desert air was cold, the sky thick with stars. There was a patch of soupy quicksand from which Indians had stolen the U.S. Government “Danger” signs. Several unsuspecting fishermen were rumored to have been swallowed up; their corpses were said to rise to the lake’s gray surface every few years.

Three days previously, Miller had submitted his passport application, so now there could be no turning back. For a man in his position, this step was every bit as momentous and, potentially, life-changing as coming to Nevada to seek a divorce had been. It could only be hoped that the passport application would not trigger a HUAC subpoena. Clearly, Miller was nervous. In a letter to Lloyd Garrison, he declared that he was weary of holding his breath. He jestingly pointed out that the clerk had been nice and had not attempted to arrest him. Miller looked forward to a calm year—perhaps the year after next, or the year after that.

Standing in a chilly, unlit phone booth in the middle of nowhere, Miller could barely hear Marilyn. Her voice was frightened, desperate. “Oh, Papa,” she was saying. “I can’t do it.”

She insisted that she couldn’t work this way. She complained about Logan and the others. She recounted the collision on the set that day. She spoke bitterly of the director’s having called her vulgar. She couldn’t fight for herself anymore. She just wanted to live quietly with Arthur. She was on the verge of tears. To Miller, it sounded almost as if
she were addressing herself. He had never heard such terror in her voice. He had never guessed the degree of her dependency on him. It had not previously occurred to him that he was all she had.

Though he had met Marilyn shortly after the 1950 suicide attempt, until this moment some six years later, Miller had not grasped that she might be capable of taking her own life. As he listened to her on the phone, all at once her suicide flashed before him. As her voice grew softer, he imagined that she was sinking beyond his grasp. He felt a responsibility to save her. But she was far away and he couldn’t think of anyone in Los Angeles to call for help.

Suddenly, his breathing became irregular. He felt unsteady. His stork-like legs gave way. He dropped the receiver and blacked out. When Miller regained consciousness seconds later, he found himself on the ground. Marilyn’s frantic monologue continued to pour from the receiver above. Rambling, she had apparently failed to realize that no one was listening anymore.

He reassured her. He did his best to calm her. By the time Marilyn hung up, she seemed better. She would try just to do her work tomorrow and not get so upset. Only one week of filming remained. Miller, walking home under the stars, told himself that he loved Marilyn and that her agony was his. At the same time, as so often with Miller, the world seemed to exist primarily to be part of his work. On the night he realized that Marilyn was suicidal, Miller, as he had not in months, perhaps years, felt the urge to write.

Marilyn finished shooting on May 29. She flew home on the night of June 1, her thirtieth birthday. The next day when she stepped off a plane in New York, reporters ambushed her with questions about Arthur Miller. Reporters had tracked him down at Pyramid Lake. He’d been overheard on a pay phone calling someone “darling.” A handyman at the motel had tipped off the press about frequent calls from the breathy-voiced Mrs. Leslie. Miller was said to talk to Mrs. Leslie for as long as two hours at a time.

Did Marilyn intend to meet the playwright in New York? Did she and Miller plan to marry?

“I possibly will see him,” Marilyn teased. “We’re very good friends.”

And how did Marilyn feel about turning thirty?

“Kinsey says a woman doesn’t even get started till she’s thirty,” she replied. “That’s good news.”

Marilyn, noticeably pale and heavy-lidded, smiled and waved goodbye as her limousine drove off. Though it was a warm spring day, she was bundled in her dark mink coat.

Marilyn had returned full of hope. She would not know for some time if she had managed to bring off the picture. She would just have to wait and see. On the evidence of a rough cut of her long scene on the bus, however, Marilyn sensed that she had indeed accomplished what she had set out to do. No matter what happened to the rest of the film, she believed she had proven her worth in that one complex speech. But it remained to be seen how people would react. Nothing would be certain until the audience, and the critics, had pronounced.

While Marilyn waited for Arthur to complete his required stay in Nevada, she planned to shut herself away in her apartment and rest. Arthur was scheduled to remain at Pyramid Lake until June 11. On that day he would become a Nevada resident and get a divorce. Afterward, he was to join Marilyn in New York. By the time they went to England together, they would be man and wife. Three days before Arthur completed his residency, however, he was served with a HUAC subpoena. It was Friday, June 8. He was ordered to appear in Washington, D.C., the following Thursday.

As chance would have it, the timing of Miller’s passport application had been unfortunate. Five days after he applied, HUAC had opened public hearings on “the fraudulent procurement and misuse of American passports by persons in the service of the Communist conspiracy.” In some cases, it was asserted, Communist agents who applied for passports had “deliberately withheld” the purpose of the trip. Thus, Arthur Miller, author of the anti-HUAC dramas
The Crucible
and
A View from the Bridge
, was being called in to answer questions about his real reasons for wanting to go to England.

If Miller were to testify on the 14th, he would have to go to Washington immediately to confer with Joe Rauh. One didn’t just casually show up at a HUAC hearing; there was too much at stake. As it was, Miller hardly had time to prepare. But if he left Nevada before June 11, he would be ineligible to file for divorce. He would have spent nearly six weeks in isolation for nothing. He and Marilyn would not be married in
time to go to England on July 13—if he was permitted to go at all.

There was a good chance he would be denied a passport. There was also a good chance that if the committee was dissatisfied with his testimony, he could be held in contempt and jailed. Marilyn had a great deal invested, financially and psychologically, in
The Sleeping Prince
, but under the circumstances how could she bring herself to leave without him? From the moment Miller received the subpoena, his and Marilyn’s lives were thrown into chaos.

TEN

D
uring the early weeks of Arthur Miller’s stay in Nevada, he had noticed a curious habit of Saul Bellow’s. The novelist would head out to a spot behind a hill near his book-filled cabin and there, for some thirty minutes, he would scream into the vast mountainous silence.

That silence was shattered in the last days of Miller’s stay as reporters descended on Pyramid Lake. On one occasion, a truck with a camera crew and an interviewer pulled up in front of Miller’s remote quarters. Many other press people followed. Everybody wanted to know one thing: Did the playwright plan to marry Marilyn Monroe? Miller refused to say.

After Miller was served with the HUAC subpoena, Lloyd Garrison promptly asked for a postponement. Rather than say that Miller had not been given time to prepare—which was, of course, very much an issue—Garrison pointed out that his client needed to remain in Nevada another few days in order to be eligible to file for divorce. HUAC agreed to delay until Thursday, June 21. That gave Miller an additional week.

In later years, Miller was to argue that HUAC would never have “bothered” him if it hadn’t been for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Since HUAC’s inception in 1938, publicity for the politician-inquisitors had been the hearings’
raison d’être.
But it is also true that the committee had intended to call Miller before anyone knew about his relationship with a movie star. As Miller and his lawyers were aware, there had been plans to call him at the entertainment industry hearings in New York in the summer of 1955. In
The Crucible
Miller had spoken out against naming names, the very thing HUAC required people to do. Is it any wonder
they went after him? Marilyn’s presence in his life provided a most welcome publicity bonus, but she wasn’t the reason he was summoned.

Miller’s divorce hearing on June 11 took five minutes. Though it was he who had embarked on a relationship with another woman, he charged his wife, the former Mary Grace Slattery, with “extreme cruelty, entirely mental in nature.” The divorce was uncontested. As he left court, the press lay in wait.

There were more journalists waiting the next morning as Miller stepped off an airplane in New York. That, apparently, was the way it was going to be from now on. How was this intensely private man, a natural loner who prized quiet and solitude, possibly going to live and work in the incessant media swirl that engulfed anything having to do with Marilyn Monroe? As in Nevada, Miller’s having been called by HUAC seemed a mere footnote to the issue of his marriage plans. When Miller snapped that he had no comment, the reporters begged him at least to reveal whether he planned to see Marilyn now that he was back in New York.

“Oh, that may happen one of these days.”

Did Miller intend to write a play for Marilyn?

“I don’t know how to write a play for somebody,” Miller insisted. “I’d be delighted if there were a part for her in one of my plays.”

Miller went directly to Sutton Place South. Marilyn, eager to avoid saying anything that might complicate Arthur’s situation with HUAC or prevent him from getting a passport, had gone into hiding. Nobody knew better than she how dangerous the press could be. Clearly the best approach was to steer clear of reporters at least until he arrived. Though they gathered outside the building every morning around eight, she refused to talk to them.

Marilyn had six weeks before she was to join Laurence Olivier in England. In that time, a thousand tiny details needed to be taken care of. Her publicist, Arthur Jacobs, was scheduled to go to London that very week. She had demanded complete control and now she had it, along with the responsibility that went with being in charge. Everything was complicated by the fact that her company’s first independent production was being shot in another country, not in Hollywood where at least she knew how things were done. To make matters worse, with the exception of having held Marilyn’s hand during
Bus Stop
, Milton Greene lacked film production experience. He, even more than she, was finding his way.