Authors: Barbara Leaming
Huston was horrified by his first sight of Marilyn. She reminded him of an invalid. Her hands quivered. Her eyes were glazed. Arthur had assured Huston that Marilyn was getting in shape for the great day when filming began. Huston, for his part, had serious doubts whether her physical and mental condition would permit him to finish the picture.
The first days of filming in Reno went smoothly. As he leaned forward in his director’s chair, ditch-digger hands dangling between long, bony legs, Huston seemed to calm Marilyn. Instead of being threatened or annoyed by Paula, Huston was amused. His concerns about both the script and the leading lady led Huston to distance himself emotionally from the project. It was as though the director had decided to protect himself from the inevitability of disappointment. There were moments when Huston would ignite; suddenly, he would appear to see again what all this might have been. But, particularly in the beginning, his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. In a group of exceptionally tense people, he seemed to enjoy some of the off-screen performances far more than those on-camera. For Huston’s money, Paula was the best show in town.
Paula, who wore a kind of black dunce’s cap, shooed away flies with an orange palmetto fan. Her face was covered with white powder. She wore several watches in order to know the time in different cities around the world, though why she required that information no one had any idea. She annotated Marilyn’s script with cryptic comments like “You are a bird” and “You are a tree.” Huston was reminded of the Cumaean sybil, a prophetess who guided Aeneas through the underworld. But
unlike Paula, the sybil didn’t devote her spare time to reading a book entitled
HOW AND WHY only a very few WIN AT CRAPS.
On July 27, Huston and company moved to the Stix Ranch in Quail Canyon, a forty-five-minute drive from Reno. The surrounding hills were covered with sage and wild rye. The cowboys who inspired Miller’s short story had lived in the ranch house. Miller, as he inspected the premises, realized that a number of features seemed to have been altered. Or perhaps he had misremembered. Whatever the reason for the discrepancies, he penciled changes into the screenplay.
The changes did not appear to be the problem for Marilyn so much as the psychologically loaded nature of the material. On Saturday, July 30, she was to film a sequence in which Roslyn dances with Gay. Guido walks in on them and senses that he’s lost Roslyn to his friend. The sequence echoed the pivotal moment nine years previously when Elia Kazan entered Charlie Feldman’s house to discover Marilyn dancing with Miller, and the sight of them made it clear that the trio’s dynamics had changed drastically. That moment had been a plot point in their lives, and so it was in Miller’s screenplay. Once again, Miller returned to the primordial theme of the triangle. Identifying as he did with Gay, Miller imbued Guido with characteristics that bring Kazan to mind. Guido, in order to get what he wants, is willing to change his tune. He’s complex and devious. He’s ready to become an animal lover, rather than a hunter, if that will get him the girl. In the role of Guido, Miller had cast Eli Wallach, who had played the role of Kazan’s surrogate in
Baby Doll.
But, strong as the echoes of that long-ago evening are in Miller’s fictional scene, there is one particularly striking change: the Kazan character now has never slept with Marilyn.
On Saturday morning, Marilyn called in sick. The company had Sunday off. On Monday, she stayed out again. When she returned on Tuesday, her agitation was evident. She did not approach the material as Arthur did. He had sentimentalized Roslyn. He wanted the scene to convey joy and abandon. Instead, Marilyn went deeply within herself to dredge up the terror of a woman hunted by various men. Marilyn had experienced those feelings as a starlet on the Hollywood party circuit. She recalled being chased by Charlie Feldman, Pat De Cicco, and Raymond Hakim after Johnny Hyde’s death. She recalled being held down in an upstairs bedroom as a group of men tried to rape her. And going even further back, she recalled the sexual assaults to which she had
been subjected in the foster homes she had lived in as a child. As written by Miller, Roslyn is almost too sensitive to exist in the world. Marilyn made the character darker and more complex. Instead of the innocent whom Miller depicted, Marilyn saw Roslyn as a survivor. She gave her the ugly backstory Miller had left out.
Huston also had problems with the way Roslyn’s character had been written. The director, after all, had observed Marilyn on the party circuit. He had known her as a “house girl” at Sam Spiegel’s. He knew the brutal treatment she had endured. When Marilyn tried to bring some of that experience to bear on her character, it felt right to Huston. He, too, was eager to go after a much darker story than Miller seemed willing to write. But no matter how many times he sent Miller back to revise, the sentimentality remained.
For Huston, this was strictly an artistic problem. For Marilyn, it was something much more. Some people thought she felt betrayed because Miller had taken so many of her lines and private thoughts and put them into his script. That wasn’t it at all. Marilyn felt betrayed because Arthur seemed unable to acknowledge her past. From the first, the whole point of marriage was to be accepted by such a man. She needed Arthur to love her in spite of all the shameful things she had done. Marilyn saw the script as proof that he had never really accepted her. How could he, when he seemed to refuse to acknowledge who she was in the first place? Had Arthur only married her because he thought, or pretended, that she was someone else, someone like Roslyn? Instead of a husband’s loving portrait, the script seemed to Marilyn like another rejection. Given all that she had hoped for in the marriage, this may have been the most painful rejection of them all.
In anger and frustration, Marilyn lashed out at Arthur. She quarreled with him publicly. She shouted obscenities for all to hear. At the end of a day’s filming, she and Paula disappeared into a white Cadillac, pointedly slamming the door in Arthur’s face. They drove off, leaving the husband stranded in the desert. Miller’s face remained mask-like, the expression unchanging. Huston, who witnessed the humiliation, offered him a ride back to Reno.
At one point, Miller wandered into the bar at the Mapes Hotel. One half of the hotel had been given over to the cast and crew. Huston, laughing uproariously, was seated at a table with a slim, handsome young
Austrian woman, Ingeborg Morath of Magnum Photos. The international photographers’ cooperative had exclusive rights to cover the production for newspapers and magazines around the world. Every two weeks, a new pair of photographers arrived in Reno, the first being Morath and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Morath had covered Huston’s
The Unforgiven
for
Paris-Match
and
Life.
As Miller entered the bar, she and Huston had been reminiscing about the time she saved the film’s star, the war hero Audie Murphy, from drowning in a lake in Durango. Murphy, who could not swim, had fallen out of a small boat. Morath, on shore, stripped to her underwear and dove in. She swam about half a mile. Then she pulled him to safety, Murphy holding onto her bra strap. Huston adored her. Miller, noting her bobbed hair and her blue eyes, was struck by Morath. But for the moment, other matters absorbed him.
“You’ve got to get Marilyn off the drugs,” Huston warned Miller on another occasion. “You’re her husband and the only one who can do it. If you don’t, you’ll feel guilty as long as you live. If she doesn’t stop now, she’ll be in an institution in two or three years—or dead!”
The situation deteriorated rapidly. Marilyn had built up an astonishing tolerance for medication. She took as many as twenty Nembutals a day, pricking the capsule with a pin in order to make it work more quickly. When she found a willing doctor, she had Amytal injections. Some mornings, she could barely be roused. An assistant put her in the shower. Another painstakingly constructed her makeup as she lay on the bed. She drifted between sleep and wakefulness. “Is Marilyn working today?” the cast and crew took to asking.
The long hours of waiting for Marilyn placed enormous stress on Clark Gable, who was not in the best of health. When, if at all, Marilyn finally appeared, she worked in a drugged daze. Huston grumbled that whoever allowed her to take barbiturates ought to be shot. She was mortified to be behaving this way in front of Gable. He had powerful personal associations for Marilyn, who, encouraged by her mother, had once fantasized that Gable was actually her father. Marilyn had finally met Gable on the magical night Charlie Feldman and Billy Wilder gave her a party at Romanoff’s after
The Seven Year Itch.
When she danced with him and confessed her childhood fantasy of being his daughter, he had been kind and understanding. It was almost as if Marilyn really had found her father at long last and shown him all she had achieved. So for reasons that few
people on
The Misfits
understood, it pained Marilyn greatly for Gable to see her like this. And she certainly didn’t want to do him any harm. But the truth was, she couldn’t help herself.
Her disputes with her husband were beginning to embarrass all concerned. Marilyn’s trailer rocked with their arguments, requiring the costumer Shirlee Strahm to step outside repeatedly. On one occasion, Nan Taylor entered the Millers’ hotel suite to discover Marilyn screaming furiously at Arthur. Marilyn went on and on about Yves Montand. She told Arthur she really loved Montand. She insisted Montand really loved her. She was certain he was going to leave Simone Signoret for her.
As Marilyn shrieked, Miller just stood there. “You know that isn’t true, Marilyn,” he said gently. But there was no reaching her.
Marilyn was not about to let Arthur forget what she had done. If she screamed long enough about Montand, perhaps Arthur would be forced to stop pretending she was Roslyn. Perhaps even at this late date, she could provoke him into accepting and loving her for who she really was.
For once, Miller seemed relieved when Lee Strasberg arrived. Perhaps he could help. He and Paula were staying at another hotel. Miller went to him immediately. When Strasberg came to the door, Miller was taken aback. Strasberg was not wearing his usual dark, loose-fitting, priestly clothes. He was dressed as a cowboy, in a braided shirt, rigid trousers, and ornate, pointed leather boots. He flexed his knees to show off the fit. He had even bought a cowboy hat. He might have been auditioning as one of the bronco-busters in
The Misfits.
Strasberg was eager to discuss his new clothes. He did not, however, wish to talk about Marilyn. That was not why he was in Nevada. He had come to sound off about his wife. He was indignant that Paula was not being taken seriously, enraged that Huston refused to confer with her. He vowed to take her back to New York. If that meant that
The Misfits
would have to be shut down—almost certainly Marilyn would never agree to work without her coach—so be it. As might have been expected in view of Paula’s $3,000 weekly salary, Strasberg did not carry out his threat.
Another visitor seemed to pose a more substantial danger. There was talk that Yves Montand might come to Reno on August 21 for the premiere of
Let’s Make Love.
Montand, intent on patching things up with
his wife, had been ducking Marilyn’s calls. However, the Fox executives were determined to keep the Monroe–Montand affair in the public consciousness, believing it was the best way to promote a film that almost everyone agreed was a stinker.
Soon, Huston, in addition to his other problems, was being bar-raged with communications regarding the premiere. Jerry Wald had reserved the Crest Theater in Reno. He had hired an airplane and arranged to fly in journalists from around the world. Simone Signoret was reported to have arrived in Los Angeles. Did she plan to accompany her husband to Sunday’s premiere?
Marilyn never found out. On Saturday, the Sierras burst into flame. Plumes of black smoke obscured the sun. Firefighters in emergency aircraft dumped chemicals, to no avail. The following day, fire devoured the power lines to Reno. The city went dark. Air-conditioners stopped. Elevators halted between floors. That evening, a chartered bus carried reporters through the spectral city, Wald having arranged for them to be flown back to Los Angeles. Noisy auxiliary generators powered the large casinos; otherwise, one saw only car headlights. A single white light blazed eerily on the top floor at the Mapes Hotel. Arthur, still rewriting, had requested that a line be run from the film crew’s mobile generator to his ninth-floor room. Marilyn slipped out. Down the hall, she joined some company members as they sipped champagne and watched the distant fires.
It was the calm before the storm. By the end of the week, Huston had despaired of working with Marilyn. The company physician declined to give her more drugs, but she persisted in getting them elsewhere. On Thursday evening, Huston sent word advising Marilyn to stay home the following day. The suggestion that she use the opportunity to rest triggered enormous upset.
“I said I would be there!” she sobbed. “I promised John!”
On Friday, Marilyn was up first thing. She insisted on being driven to the location. She shot a scene with Gable, but it was just no good. Russ Metty, one of the best cameramen in the business, noticed that Marilyn’s eyes weren’t focusing. During lunch with John Huston, Frank Taylor, and Arthur Miller in a little pink house in the desert that had been rented for the production, he voiced his concerns.
“I can’t photograph her,” Metty declared. “That’s it. The pills …
Her eyes are gone. She can’t be photographed. If this is going to go on day after day, we’re finished here.”
Finally, it was decided that the picture had to be shut down so Marilyn could be hospitalized. But who would tell her? Not one of the men was willing to face Marilyn. In the end, they sent the producer’s wife.
Paula Strasberg, beneath a black umbrella, sat in front of Marilyn’s trailer as Nan Taylor entered. Inside, Nan found Whitey Snyder, the makeup man. Marilyn was lying down.
“I have a message for you from Frank,” said Nan. “We’re going to shut the movie down.”