Marilyn Monroe (52 page)

The Strasbergs had always loved to entertain. Even in their down-at-heel Hollywood days, Paula had been known to delight guests with smoked salmon flown in from a favorite Manhattan delicatessen. Friends affectionately called Paula “the Big Wet Tit.” At her Sunday open houses in New York, platters overflowed with cold cuts. Sometimes, the menu consisted of three kinds of Chinese takeout. The atmosphere was free and easy. Paula, who wore a copious black caftan, took pride in feeding as many as four hundred people at a time.

It was a rare occasion when Arthur would agree to accompany Marilyn to the Strasbergs’. By this time, he made no secret of his dislike for Lee. One evening, however, the Millers did stop by for drinks on their way to the theater. Marilyn was in a hypercritical mood. In front of the other guests, she excoriated her husband.

There had once been a time when Marilyn would never have dared to contradict Arthur. Now she seemed to disagree with everything he said. There had been a time when she gazed at Arthur adoringly. Now she seemed intent on humiliating him. If he was angry and embarrassed—and it would have been hard to imagine he wasn’t—he kept his rage within. At such moments, he refused to fight. He declined to take the bait. He withdrew into himself. That would infuriate Marilyn. She hated it when, as she would say, Arthur wasn’t there. She wanted him to pay attention. She attacked even more viciously in an effort to elicit some response, any response.

Finally, on this particular occasion, Marilyn loudly ordered Arthur to get her mink coat. The Strasbergs’ guests were theater people. In this crowd, Arthur Miller was not just any husband being belittled by a wife. He was one of the finest post-war American playwrights. He was an artist who, whatever one might have thought of him personally, commanded respect both for his life and work. When Arthur obediently went out for Marilyn’s coat, one horrified guest felt he simply had to say something.

“Marilyn, how can you talk to that man that way, like he’s a shit? It’s degrading, it’s terrible.”

Suddenly, Marilyn didn’t seem angry anymore. Her tone was cool, rational. “You think I shouldn’t have talked to him like that?” she asked. “Then why didn’t he slap me? He should have slapped me.”

The honeymoon, it was being said about town, was over. More and more, Marilyn’s idealization of Arthur seemed to have turned to contempt. The shift appeared to hinge on his efforts to write and sell a screenplay. After Twentieth failed to buy
The Misfits
, Miller submitted it to the French director René Clément. That, too, was a dead end. The excuse given was that Clément had trouble understanding the script. Miller said he had been exhausted by the prospect of having to translate the story’s specifically American nuances to the filmmaker.

Whatever the reason, the fact remained that Arthur had suffered another setback. That seemed only to confirm Marilyn’s opinion of his screenplay. If she was sometimes mercilessly cruel, that cruelty was probably nothing more than an expression of her own fear. The curtain had been wrenched aside, the Wizard of Oz revealed for who he really was. The knowledge seemed to terrify her. If Arthur was less than the god Marilyn had imagined him to be, how was he possibly going to protect her?

He discovered that he could not anticipate her moods. He was in a state of perpetual apprehension as Marilyn veered between extremes. She lashed out one moment, and wept that he was ignoring her the next. She was desperate to have his baby. She was eager to make a real home with him in Connecticut. She urged him to buy more land, though he feared being plunged into debt. She talked excitedly about adding a nursery wing to the farmhouse. At the same time, she attacked her husband precisely where he was most vulnerable. Sniffing failure and defeat, she assaulted Miller’s stature as a writer. Her initial lack of enthusiasm for
The Misfits
had festered into overt and strident criticism. It was only a matter of time before his confidence was eroded.

Marilyn did not hesitate to disparage
The Misfits
to others. Worse, more often than not her complaints were devastatingly on target. She was correct that the script desperately needed to be rewritten. It was talky. It was static. It was thin on character and action. The writing was fuzzy. The story often failed to make sense. Marilyn did not, however, appear sincerely interested in fixing the script. Her real purpose seemed to be to vent her rage at her husband.

She complained to Norman Rosten that the character Arthur wanted her to portray was passive. She was right, of course. But Marilyn had put Rosten in a most awkward position. He was one of Miller’s oldest and closest friends. At the very least, he could not be expected to take sides, Arthur having failed to show him the script. Soon after Norman and Hedda went to Long Island for the summer, a copy of
The Misfits
arrived in the mail. It came from Marilyn. A week later the phone rang. Marilyn was calling from Roxbury. She announced that Miller was listening on the other phone. She asked Rosten what he thought of the script.

Rosten, put on the spot, said he believed it would make a good picture. The remark elicited a grunt from Miller. Marilyn instructed Rosten to turn to a key speech, which she characterized as “lousy.”

“The speech is too goddamn long,” Marilyn declared. “And anyway, it isn’t right.”

Marilyn paused, obviously expecting Rosten to concur. He discreetly said nothing.

“I want this speech rewritten,” she barked. When her husband remained silent, Marilyn called, “Arthur, are you there?”

“I’m here,” said a gravelly voice.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to think about it.”

“Norman agrees with me.”

“I don’t agree, Marilyn,” Rosten interjected, the conversation getting sticky. “I agreed to read the screenplay, which I did. If Arthur asks my opinion on certain scenes or speeches, I’ll tell him. Look, it’s a draft. I’m sure there’ll be more work on it. I mean, it’s not final, is it?”

“It’s a draft,” said Miller apathetically. After two disappointments, he admitted he didn’t know what to do with the script.

“Maybe that section can be trimmed,” said Rosten in a conciliatory manner. “If Marilyn has specific objections …”

“I object to the whole stupid speech,” Marilyn insisted, “and he’s going to rewrite it!”

Meanwhile, Miller was being pressured to complete
After the Fall.
Kermit Bloomgarden had confidently announced plans to bring Arthur Miller’s new play to Broadway, and had already booked theaters for previews. He had an eye on Jason Robards, Jr. for the “Miller” role. At length, he gave the date of the premiere as December 18, 1958, ignoring
the fact that, though Miller had already filled a great many pages—at one point he counted as many as 2000—he had not yet found a way to make it all work as a play. When Marilyn went to Los Angeles on July 7, Miller, under the gun, planned to keep writing in Connecticut. She was scheduled to report to Billy Wilder on July 14 for two weeks of tests and pre-production.

As the time to go approached, Marilyn grew increasingly apprehensive. She talked about suicide. She sat on a windowsill in Willard Maas’s penthouse overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. Maas and his wife, Marie Menken—later said to be the basis for the battling married couple in Edward Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
—held a salon for avant-garde artists.

“I’m thinking it’s a quick way down from here,” Marilyn told Norman Rosten, who brought her to the gathering. “Who’d know the difference if I went?”

“I would,” said Rosten, “and all the people in this room who care.”

On the July 4 weekend, Arthur invited Frank Taylor to Roxbury to talk about
The Misfits.
Miller knew the prominent editor from the days when Mary had worked as Taylor’s secretary at a New York publishing house. “She was typing away, so he could stay at home and write plays,” recalled Taylor’s wife, Nan. Mary’s boss had published Miller’s novel,
Focus
, in 1945. When Miller completed
Death of a Salesman
, he had asked Taylor to pitch the film rights in Hollywood. Since that time, Taylor had spent four years at MGM. He was now back in publishing. That Miller would use Taylor to get a copy of
The Misfits
to John Huston suggests the degree to which Marilyn had distanced herself from the project.

Miller said that even before he finished writing, he had hoped the script might be something Huston would direct. To date, Marilyn had done nothing to make that happen. She was conscious of her power, and knew how to use it. All she needed to do was to call Huston. She could have written to him. She could even have instructed her agent or lawyer to send Huston
The Misfits
on her behalf. That she had not done so suggests she wanted no part of this. Miller’s decision to bring Taylor to Roxbury during Marilyn’s last weekend there seems almost like an act of defiance. It was as though he were telling her that if she would not provide him an entrée into the film world, he was perfectly capable of getting it himself.

The farmhouse was then being extensively remodeled, Frank Lloyd Wright’s plans having proven impractical. The old Tanner place would not be torn down after all, but it would be dramatically enlarged and renovated. There always seemed to be some structural change under way. As the Miller–Monroe marriage disintegrated, the Roxbury house slowly neared completion.

When the Taylors arrived, Miller greeted them alone. There was no sign of Marilyn. Pointedly, she did not come downstairs. A year before, when Miller had shown her his first pages, he failed to get the reaction he had hoped for. When he sent
The Misfits
to Twentieth and later to René Clément, he met with further disappointment. This time, he took no chances. He told the story to his guests. He acted out all the parts, modulating his voice and accent appropriately. He paused now and then to clarify the action.

William Styron, a Roxbury neighbor, once called Miller an “actor of intuitive panache.” His excruciating reserve would vanish as he lost himself in telling a story. He was consummately theatrical. His eyes sparkled. His timing was perfect. His laughter was infectious. He had a flair for comedy. He knew how to draw listeners in. His pleasure in connecting with an audience—when he found the right audience—was palpable.

Arthur was by no means the only one to put on a show that day. As the author performed his work, the sound of a vacuum cleaner could be heard. Marilyn, a one-woman Greek chorus, ceaselessly pushed the vacuum cleaner back and forth on the creaky old floor upstairs. Ostensibly, she was ridding the house of plaster dust. But the noise was also Marilyn’s sardonic comment on her husband and his goddamn screenplay.

Later, Taylor said he would call Miller from home with John Huston’s address in Ireland. When Marilyn learned that Arthur was going to offer Huston
The Misfits
, the obvious thing to say was that she would send it herself. But Marilyn did not intercede, though she must have known that her husband would soon find himself in the awkward position of having to explain her silence. To make matters worse, she indicated that Huston was Miller’s last chance. If Miller failed to attach Huston, she intended to pull out of the film. So a great deal depended on Miller’s letter asking Huston to read the script. At one point, Arthur had
seemed to think he could get the picture made without Marilyn. By now, however, it was increasingly obvious that her withdrawal would be fatal to the project. If Marilyn refused to play Roslyn,
The Misfits
would end up like
The Hook.
Almost certainly, it would never be produced.

Miller drove Marilyn and an assistant to the airport on Monday evening. Just before seven the next morning, Marilyn emerged in Los Angeles, dressed in shades of vanilla. Her hair was platinum. The Hollywood press corps had not seen her in two years, and there were a good many jokes about the new, “definitely chubby” Marilyn. All that eating and drinking in bed had taken its toll.

Barraged with questions about her weight, Marilyn admitted that she might have put on a few pounds.

“It’s still in the right places, isn’t it?” she teased.

The pressmen weren’t certain.

“My weight goes up and down like everyone else’s,” said Marilyn, a bit nervously, “but I’ll be in good shape in two weeks because I intend to do lots of walking and exercising.”

Arthur, she explained, had remained in Connecticut to finish a new play.

Would there be a role for her?

“Who knows?” Marilyn laughed.

One week after Arthur saw Marilyn off at the airport, he wrote to John Huston. When Miller finished a new work, his pride was known to border on arrogance. True to form, upon completing
The Misfits
nine months previously, Miller had been cocky. Since that time, however, Marilyn had done her best to cut him down to size. The experiences of recent months formed the subtext of Miller’s letter. His posture was uncharacteristically defensive. He wrote as though he could still hear Marilyn barking on the phone, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”—as though he half-expected John Huston to ask the same thing. He emphasized that his screenplay was an early draft. Before Huston had even agreed to read it, Miller said he hoped to tell him his ideas for revisions. He welcomed any suggestions the director might offer. Clearly, he was hoping to forestall rejection.