Authors: Barbara Leaming
As it happened,
The Blue Angel
was not the only Marilyn Monroe project being discussed at Twentieth. On December 30, 1957, Lloyd Garrison had reported to Joe Rauh that
The Misfits
was under active consideration. It soon became clear, however, that Spyros Skouras had no intention of acquiring
The Misfits
unless Arthur’s contempt conviction was reversed. The appeal was taking considerably longer than Rauh had anticipated.
In mid-January, the Court of Appeals declared that until the Supreme Court ruled on a related case, Barenblatt v. United States, oral arguments would not be permitted in Miller’s appeal. That meant a reversal, if one were to occur, could be a long way off. Obviously, Twentieth was not about to buy Arthur’s screenplay. He announced publicly that he and Marilyn planned to do
The Misfits
as an independent production.
On January 27, Miller opened the second of two brown spiral notebooks in which he had written a draft of
The Misfits.
He turned to the last page of the script. A frugal man, he was not one to waste paper. On the very next lined page, he began to take notes. He started in pencil, later shifting to a pen. When he was finished, thirty-three pages would be covered.
Five months had passed since Arthur started
The Misfits
in an effort to show Marilyn how much he loved her. Back in August, he evidently still had hope, however slim, that Marilyn might yet be healed. He thought that perhaps he could help her to get better. Since that time, his notes suggest, that hope had vanished. He believed he had entered a cul de sac. Instead of saving Marilyn, he began to worry about saving himself.
After he met Marilyn in 1951, Miller’s notebook had become the repository of his guilt. Finally, in
The Crucible
, he had worked out a way of absolving himself; he blamed everything on his wife. Now again, in 1958, Marilyn provoked a moral crisis, but of a very different sort. Seven years previously, Arthur had felt guilty for being drawn to Marilyn. Now
he felt guilty for wanting to flee. That these feelings were just beginning to rise to the surface of consciousness is suggested by the veiled manner in which Miller wrote about them in a private notebook intended for no one’s eyes but his own. It is as though the knowledge of his changing attitude to Marilyn were still too painful to be dealt with directly, as though he was fighting to repress his feelings even as he struggled to commit them to paper in order to examine them.
In the notebook are scenes and notes about characters based unmistakably on Mary Miller and Elia Kazan, material that would eventually find its way into the play
After the Fall.
The Mary section drew on the notes Miller had taken in 1952 for an autobiographical play about adultery. In January 1958, Miller apparently was not yet ready to write directly about Marilyn as he would in a later draft of
After the Fall.
But he had, however unconsciously, already reserved a place in the dramatic structure for her. And he had temporarily filled that place with a figure who elicited the same kind of guilt, fear, and tortured ambivalence.
Several years previously, when Miller was still unhappily married to his first wife, he had been accosted on the street by a Columbia University student, a visitor from Latin America. The young man turned out to be quite mad, his reason for wanting to meet Miller being his own belief in the power of witches. He assumed that the author of
The Crucible
would understand. The delusional young man made Miller uneasy; his problems seemed so severe as to be beyond the reach of a psychiatrist. While Miller was eager to get away, the student remained in his life for some time. He required a degree of attention and sympathy that Miller was not temperamentally inclined to offer. At the same time, Miller realized that he must not be cruel. The student was sick. It wouldn’t be right to abandon him. How could Miller accuse Mary of coldness if he himself acted coldly? To do so would be to undermine the tortuous self-justification Miller had worked out in
The Crucible.
Thus, Miller found himself being unnaturally kind to the student. Eventually, the young man entered a mental hospital and Miller was freed.
In his guilt-ridden dealings with the young man, Miller had been trying to live up to his own image of himself. A man of conscience, he had been struggling to do the right thing. Yet, as he wrote in the notebook, he believed that guilt was an inadequate basis for morality. He did not want to be good just because one ought to; he wanted to act properly
because it was his nature to do so. Now, after his HUAC testimony, things had become more complicated still. Miller had to live up to the world’s image of him as an ethical hero. That he was wondering whether he could is suggested by the notation that even as the mad student had been making a god of Miller, Miller had been involved with Marilyn.
As Miller made these notes, a new production of
The Crucible
was being prepared in New York. It was to open off-Broadway at the Martinique Theater in March. The playwright attended rehearsals, so it is hardly surprising that the characters and situations would be much in his thoughts. Though he seemed to have resolved a number of personal issues in that play, his life had changed substantially since writing it. Most importantly, as he certainly had never expected to do at the time, he had left Mary for Marilyn. In light of that, Miller, in his notebook, revisited territory already explored in
The Crucible.
Again, there is a cold, unforgiving wife. Again, there is a tormented husband—here called “Miller”—paralyzed with guilt. Again, there is a betrayer from whom Miller hopes to differentiate himself. But now, there is someone else: a fragile, emotionally needy, mentally unstable figure from whom Miller can find no excuse to extricate himself. In this embryonic version of
After the Fall
, that figure is the Latin American student. Later it will be a character based on Marilyn Monroe.
Miller once said he couldn’t write about anything he fully understood. If he had already come to the end of an experience, he couldn’t write it.
After the Fall
would not be complete until the author had worked out a justification for leaving Marilyn. In the process of writing, he would find that justification, and the search for it would produce the drama of the play. The play would be finished when Miller had reassured himself, and the audience, of his own goodness.
As Miller was starting to write about all this in his notebook, Laurence Olivier arrived in New York, having finally decided to leave Vivien Leigh. Olivier confessed to Noël Coward that he couldn’t bear to live with her anymore. According to Kenneth Tynan, it had been watching Arthur and Marilyn that had helped Olivier to clarify his own circumstances. Olivier’s choice, as he saw it, was between nursing Vivien and getting on with his own life and career. Put another way, Olivier explained his decision to ask for a divorce by saying that he just had to “get some sleep.”
The experience of working with Marilyn Monroe had not
provided the personal renaissance Olivier had hoped for. As chance would have it, however, an opportunity to reinvent himself was precisely what he did get from his trip with Arthur Miller to see
Look Back in Anger.
As a result of Olivier’s backstage encounter with John Osborne, the playwright sent him
The Entertainer.
Archie Rice, a pathetic, seedy, music-hall performer, was, as Kenneth Tynan would declare, “one of the great acting parts of our age.” To achieve just the right note of lechery, Olivier pictured how Archie might look as he imagined fondling Marilyn Monroe’s breasts—not the real Marilyn, but the character she played in
The Sleeping Prince.
The role was a triumph for Olivier in England. Now, he had brought the show to the United States. After previews in Boston, it was to open on Broadway at the Royale Theater on February 12. Appearing in the role of Archie’s daughter was the young actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier hoped to marry after divorcing Vivien. It was said that Plowright had not broken up the marriage; she had simply been present “at the crucial turning point in Larry’s life.”
In New York, Olivier also took care of some unfinished business. Since directing
A Streetcar Named Desire
in London in 1949, he had been passionately resentful of the Actors Studio and all it stood for. That resentment was intensified many times over as he endured the Strasbergs on
The Sleeping Prince.
Now, Olivier visited the old white brick church on West 44th Street. He wanted to see for himself what all the fuss was about.
Strasberg liked to fill the Studio with celebrities—“visiting potentates,” as Frank Corsaro called them—who dropped in once or twice to watch. The impression they carried away depended entirely on chance. Some days the exercises worked. Some days they did not. Strasberg, working as he did, could not be expected constantly to produce results. The particular day Olivier appeared turned out to be “most unfortunate in terms of results,” Corsaro recalled.
Olivier did not fall under Strasberg’s spell. He found his long, rambling, off-the-cuff lecture pretentious. And he found his severe criticism of one young actor misguided and cruel. After the session, Olivier confronted Strasberg and pointed out that totally undermining the young man’s confidence could only make things worse. Strasberg waved Olivier away as though he were an imbecile.
Marilyn hid in the ladies’ room when Olivier visited the Studio. His very presence was a painful reminder of a dream that had died. Appearing in a film with Olivier was supposed to have established Marilyn’s credentials as an actress. It was supposed to have proven her worth. It was supposed to have prevented her from ever having to play another dumb blonde on screen.
That would explain Marilyn’s violent reaction when Billy Wilder sent her a script he had written with I. A. L. Diamond. It had been inspired by the 1932 German film
Fanfares of Love
about two musicians who travel about in disguise. To Marilyn’s way of thinking, the role of Sugar Kane in
Some Like It Hot
asked her to return to a past she had worked very hard to escape. Marilyn grew enraged as she read the story of two musicians who have the misfortune to witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Suddenly they need to escape the mob. Disguised as women, “Josephine” and “Daphne” join an all-girl band run by Sugar Kane. Sugar is a singer and ukelele player.
Marilyn, throwing the screenplay on the floor, declared that she had played dumb characters before, but never this dumb. Would anyone really believe Sugar failed to guess that the musicians were really men? In her anger, Marilyn failed to notice that
Some Like It Hot
was probably the most literate and intelligent script she had ever been offered. Miller urged her to do the picture. Her agents urged her to do it.
Even Spyros Skouras appeared to like the idea, though Twentieth would make not a penny on the film, which was to be produced by the Mirisch brothers and distributed by United Artists. Where Twentieth would profit handsomely was in the immeasurable good that
Some Like It Hot
would do for Marilyn’s reputation.
The Prince and the Showgirl
had been a critical and box-office dud. If the Billy Wilder picture was the smash hit almost everyone but Marilyn predicted it would be, that could only enhance her value as a studio property.
Marilyn called the script ridiculous. She accused her husband of caring only about money. She insisted she would not accept the part. She accused her representatives of trying to trick her. To read the documents in Marilyn Monroe’s studio legal file pertaining to the negotiations between MCA and Twentieth is to sense that those talks proceeded without—almost in spite of—Marilyn herself. The opposing sides seemed to concur that it was in everyone’s interest to have Marilyn working again.
The agents and the studio reached an agreement on April 15. There were major concessions on both ends. MCA backed off on its claim that Marilyn owed Twentieth two additional pictures instead of three. Twentieth relieved Marilyn of the obligation to appear in
The Blue Angel.
Spyros Skouras went so far as to agree to pay $100,000 for a film Marilyn had not made. That seemed a very small price for the vast sums Twentieth stood to earn on three more Marilyn Monroe films. Skouras would never have considered forfeiting that third picture. The $100,000 may also have been Skouras’s way of making amends for his failure to buy
The Misfits.
To guarantee that he saw Marilyn again, Skouras stipulated he would pay the money, in addition to her regular fee, after she had finished her next picture at Twentieth. The studio had until January 14, 1959, to put her in a film. Meanwhile, the Old Greek gave Marilyn permission to appear in
Some Like It Hot.
In view of past problems, Frank Ferguson urged that Marilyn be compelled to sign the papers before someone else talked to her and she changed her mind again.
In the dark bedroom on East 57th Street, Marilyn, sitting naked in bed, drank champagne and stuffed herself compulsively. The servants marveled at her ability to cram vast quantities of food down her throat. She devoured lamb chops, steaks, hamburgers, veal cutlets, and home-fried potatoes. She was particularly fond of chocolate pudding. She vowed to make herself so fat that no one would want her to appear in
Some Like It Hot.
Nonetheless, on April 21, 1958, Marilyn signed a contract amendment accepting the new terms. Eight days later, MCA officially notified the studio that Marilyn had agreed to do
Some Like It Hot.
Shooting was to begin sometime between July 15 and August 1. Marilyn would be required to work for about sixteen weeks.
At times, she actually seemed resigned to doing the film. In bed, she taught herself to play the ukelele. As Arthur worked on
After the Fall
in his study, Marilyn’s baby voice wafted through the white-on-white apartment. She sang “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” one of her songs from the movie. At other times, panic seized her. Weeping, Marilyn pleaded with Arthur not to send her to Hollywood. He remained calm and sensible. He tried to reassure her. But in doing so, he inadvertently said the
one thing certain to plunge her into a deeper terror. He reminded Marilyn that it was up to her to make
Some Like It Hot
a success.