Authors: Barbara Leaming
The interviewer had inquired about Wilder’s health now that he was finished working with Marilyn. “I am eating better,” said Wilder. “My back doesn’t ache anymore. I am able to sleep for the first time in months. I can look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she’s a woman.” Wilder emphasized that his physical and mental health precluded doing another picture with Marilyn.
Egged on by Marilyn, Arthur sent an angry telegram to Wilder, declaring he could not permit the attack on Marilyn to go unchallenged. He cited his wife’s ill health during the making of
Some Like It Hot
, and mentioned her pregnancy and miscarriage. He called the director’s comments contemptible, accusing him of being unjust and cruel. He claimed to take solace in the fact that, despite Wilder, Marilyn’s beauty and humanity shone through in the finished film.
Wilder’s reply enraged Marilyn all the more. He said he had actually protected her from the press. He noted that he had lied repeatedly to cover up her unprofessional behavior. The
Herald Tribune
piece, he argued, would have been twice as harsh if he had failed to cooperate. He pointed out that Marilyn’s lateness and unpreparedness had cost the studio eighteen shooting days and hundreds of thousands of dollars. He insisted that had Arthur been not Marilyn’s husband but her director, he would have “thrown her out on her can, thermos bottle and all, to avoid a nervous breakdown.”
On March 30, three weeks after
Sweet Bird of Youth
opened on Broadway, Kazan reported to Twentieth. Despite the fact that the play was a hit, Kazan had been badly wounded by criticism that, with an eye to commercial values, he had altered Tennessee Williams’s work and distorted his vision. Kazan’s influence on the playwright was widely deplored; the Williams–Kazan collaboration was said to have “reached the point of diminishing returns.” Though no one knew it at the time,
Sweet Bird of Youth
would be the last Williams play that Kazan would direct.
Marilyn was due in the studio two weeks after Kazan. She had voiced no objection to the assignment. By the time Kazan had been at the studio for ten days, however, it became evident to Buddy Adler that
things were not proceeding as he and Skouras had anticipated. Kazan, relentlessly self-critical, remained dissatisfied with the screenplay. He wanted Paul Osborn to be brought in. Osborn, who had written the script for
East of Eden
, would not be available until July 21. Kazan insisted on waiting.
Thus, four days before Marilyn planned to fly to the west coast, Lew Schreiber notified MCA that the studio was not ready for her. Marilyn was advised to wait in New York until needed. Her salary for
Time and Tide
would, however, start on April 14 as originally scheduled.
Again, it seemed, Kazan held Miller’s fate in his hands. Indeed, by accepting the assignment to direct Marilyn in the first place, Kazan appeared to be reminding Miller of the power he still had over him. Once that had been accomplished, Kazan pointedly rejected Marilyn as he had done at the time of
Baby Doll.
He told Buddy Adler that he did not want to do the picture with her. He preferred to cast Lee Remick. Had Kazan chosen to go forward with Marilyn, it is impossible to say what would have happened with
The Misfits.
Twentieth made no effort to find another project for Marilyn. From the first, the studio had viewed
Time and Tide
as a Marilyn Monroe vehicle. Astonishingly, no one at Twentieth seems to have paid attention to paragraph eight in her contract, which required principal photography to begin no later than ten weeks from the date she was ordered to work. Though Marilyn had been instructed to remain in New York, the clock had started ticking on April 14.
On June 25, Skouras and company were taken aback when a telegram announced that Marilyn was no longer obligated to appear in
Time and Tide.
It was signed Marilyn Monroe Productions. A lawyer’s letter followed. Once again, Marilyn demanded to be paid $100,000 for a picture she had not actually made. She also demanded to be paid for
The Blue Angel
, as Skouras had promised she would be. And she demanded to be released from one of the three remaining films she owed.
That last demand was the most significant, $200,000 being as nothing compared to the sums Twentieth stood to earn from a Marilyn Monroe film. The legal department determined that in view of Kazan’s refusal to proceed, Twentieth would have been within its rights to seek an extension of the ten-week period stipulated in Marilyn’s contract. But no one had bothered to do so. For now, Twentieth needed to catch its
breath and decide how to respond. One thing was certain, however. Before Paul Osborn had officially started work with Kazan, Marilyn was off
Time and Tide.
Miller, in the meantime, had been having scant success with
The Misfits.
John Huston had stopped in New York in May on his way back to Ireland after
The Unforgiven
, but Miller had had nothing to show him. Miller’s stage play also seemed to be stalled, February and March having passed without the Broadway premiere Kermit Bloomgarden had been endlessly announcing. In June, Miller finished reworking the beginning of
The Misfits
and sent it off to Huston. The pages were hardly the complete overhaul Huston had expected. Seven days later, Huston wired Miller. Consummately diplomatic, he praised the revisions and announced his own imminent arrival in New York. Whatever Huston may have assumed at the start, obviously Miller was going to need a good deal of prodding and guidance.
When Huston met with Miller that month, he made it clear that
The Misfits
needed to be substantially revised. If Miller could finish rewriting by the end of the summer, Huston hoped to shoot in April 1960. Otherwise, he might direct
Freud
, though there were problems with Sartre’s script as well.
One night at 3 a.m., Norman Rosten’s phone rang. Marilyn’s maid begged him to come immediately. Arthur, as he sometimes did, had gone up to Connecticut alone to write in peace and Marilyn was alone in New York that night. She had taken another overdose. By the time the Rostens arrived from Brooklyn, a doctor had finished pumping Marilyn’s stomach.
Norman followed Hedda into the small, softly-lit room. He could hear Marilyn crying. In a whisper, he asked how she was.
“Alive,” said Marilyn in a low, sad voice. “Bad luck.”
Her overdoses were not always intentional. Another time when Arthur had gone up to the country alone, Marilyn, frustrated by her inability to sleep, devoured a large number of pills all at once. In the morning, the maid discovered Marilyn unconscious on the white bedroom carpet. A physician pumped her stomach and Arthur was summoned from Roxbury.
As Laurence Olivier had been with Vivien Leigh, Miller was faced with a choice. He could try to take care of Marilyn, or he could get on
with his life and work. Olivier chose the latter, and it was beginning to look as though Miller would do the same. A decade had passed since
Death of a Salesman.
Miller was generally considered never to have matched the brilliance of that work. After
Salesman
, his only new full-length play seen in New York had been
The Crucible
in 1953. The expanded version of
A View from the Bridge
had only been seen in England. Recently, all of Bloomgarden’s announcements and cancellations, however well intentioned, had clearly done the playwright’s reputation no good. Miller was painfully conscious that he appeared to be idle. His priority was to get his screenplay produced. He had to finish
The Misfits
to Huston’s satisfaction. He had to complete a work he could speak of in the same breath as
Salesman.
That summer he holed up in Connecticut. He wrote seven days a week. He resisted the temptation to contact Huston. He wanted to send the director not mere promises but results. Though Marilyn accompanied Arthur to the country, by and large he retreated into himself and his work. Miller had started
The Misfits
in order to permit Marilyn to hold onto her dream. Now he seemed to be trying to do the same thing for himself. He seemed to be fighting for his own personal dignity, not hers.
Miller, in his studio, sat at an austere slab desk near a fireplace and little louvered windows. Workmen were in and out of the main house, where walls were forever being moved and wings added. Glass walls were installed in the rear to take advantage of a spectacular view. While he wrote, Marilyn was intent on making the old place entirely her own. She added dark wood ceiling beams. She added dormer windows. She added a room over the kitchen. She filled the sunroom with photographs of Arthur and posters for his plays. She never stopped buying and rearranging furniture. But as Norman Rosten perceived, a sense of having finished evaded her to the end.
Marilyn shopped in Roxbury and nearby Woodbury, sometimes twice a day. She walked in the green and yellow fields and along stone-wall-lined dirt roads. On one occasion, Marilyn paid a call on their neighbor, old Percy Beardsley. As he often did with visitors, Percy invited Marilyn to inspect his father’s famous coal cellar.
Local farmers still talked about the time, many years previously, when a motion picture company used Nate Beardsley’s red Devon cows and steers as a backdrop. One night the leading lady, Norma Talmadge—Joe
Schenck’s wife—had accompanied Nate to the coal cellar, where she left her long, white kid gloves on a cider barrel. In later years, though Nate and his son drank one barrel of cider a month, they religiously avoided disturbing the movie star’s gloves. In these parts, the Beardsley cellar was thought to be better than any museum. Even after old Nate died, his boy Percy faithfully maintained the shrine. The white gloves, thick with dust, gave the appearance of having been mummified.
After her visit, Percy tried to preserve the marks left by Marilyn Monroe’s spike heels in the dirt floor. When a drover stepped on the spot, inadvertently obliterating the marks, Percy, furious, refused to speak to him again.
Marilyn often spent hours searching for Hugo, the basset hound, who tended to wander. He moved very slowly, leading Arthur to nickname him “Flash.” He was known to appear on doorsteps miles away, or even to fall asleep in the middle of the road, forcing cars to a halt. He barked in agitation whenever a man, whether Arthur or Norman, entered the room; something about their voices distressed him. But the dog adored Marilyn. And she doted on him, going so far as to give him brandy when he seemed depressed. That caused him to run about hysterically, one droopy ear to the floor. Then he turned around sharply, running with his other ear to the floor. Suddenly, poor Hugo collapsed in a corner and fell asleep. “Maybe that’ll help,” Marilyn declared.
Much of the summer passed with no sign of how Twentieth intended to react to Marilyn’s demands. In fact, for some time studio executives seemed unable to develop a plan of attack. At length, it came to the attention of the New York office that, during the period when Marilyn was supposed to have been ready, willing, and able to report for
Time and Tide
, she had entered Lenox Hill Hospital for gynecological surgery. That in itself provided Twentieth with grounds to fight her in court.
But to the bewilderment of the New York office, their counterparts on the west coast were suddenly most eager to pay Marilyn. They wanted to avoid a lawsuit at all costs. On August 26, Twentieth officially capitulated to all of Marilyn’s demands. The studio notified her that she would be paid for both
The Blue Angel
and
Time and Tide.
More importantly, she was relieved of the obligation to do one of the three pictures she still owed.
Buddy Adler had the reputation of being a weak, indecisive production chief, who was not quite up to the job. He was anxious to settle with Marilyn because an opportunity had unexpectedly presented itself to put her in a film.
Some Like It Hot
had been a huge critical and box-office success. Marilyn was very hot right now. Adler wanted to get her in front of the studio cameras before she signed to do another outside film. Marilyn, after all, had not appeared in a picture for Twentieth since
Bus Stop
, three years previously.
As it happened, a project had been sitting under Adler’s nose all summer. For the past few months, the producer Jerry Wald had been putting together a film to star Gregory Peck. Based on a screenplay by Norman Krasna,
The Billionaire
was a comedy of mistaken identity. So far, no leading lady had been cast. In the beginning, Marilyn’s name had not even come up, because it was assumed she was to do
Time and Tide
with Kazan. In July, Wald had approached the director George Cukor. By August, Cukor definitely seemed interested. But he had reservations about the script and he wanted to know who the female lead was going to be.
Wald was also the producer of Clifford Odets’s
The Story on Page One.
Like Odets, he had very much wanted to cast Marilyn. But Odets was not on Marilyn’s list of approved directors. As chance would have it, George Cukor was. Marilyn had met Cukor several years previously when she was studying with his friend Constance Collier. According to Marilyn’s contract, if Twentieth signed Cukor she would have no choice but to report to work on
The Billionaire.
In the last days of summer, as Twentieth negotiated with Cukor, Miller was rushing to complete his second draft. On September 2, he wired Huston in Ireland that he was almost finished. Miller thanked God for that, explaining his own long silence by insisting he wanted to deliver the screenplay itself instead of merely talking about it. Yet as the fall approached, Miller clearly felt the need to give Huston some indication of progress. In contacting the director, he seemed to be giving himself a final push. Miller put further pressure on himself by talking about
The Misfits
to the
New York Times.
He announced that he had been at work on the script in Roxbury. He disclosed that they hoped to shoot in April 1960 and that the picture would star Marilyn and perhaps Jason Robards. It is possible that Miller sensed he was about to encounter difficulty with
the last three pages, which would prove the hardest part of the script to write. Contacting Huston and agreeing to talk to the press may have been a way of leaving himself no choice but to finish.