Marilyn's Last Sessions (13 page)

After John Huston had secured an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars from Universal for his film about Freud,
The Misfits
resumed with a five-minute dialogue scene
between Marilyn and Montgomery Clift. Behind a run-down saloon, the Dayton Bar, in a back-yard littered with beer cans and junk automobiles, Roslyn and Perce were meant to tear into one another.
But no matter how many takes they did in front of the ten-thousand-watt lights, the air under the black tarpaulin thick with flies, they couldn’t say their lines the way Huston wanted,
clipped and vicious. They came out like the caresses a wounded animal might give its mate.

Three days later they shot a scene in which a fully clothed Clark Gable had to wake Marilyn, who was naked under a sheet. It didn’t go any better. On the seventh take, Marilyn seemed to
remember Laurence Olivier’s injunction, ‘Be sexy.’ Be your image, in other words; that’s all you know how to be. Departing from the script, she sat up, allowed the sheet to
drop and exposed her right breast. It was a sad moment, the Magnum photographer Eve Arnold recalled, as if the actress felt that was all she had to offer; as though she were sacrificing her craft
to justify Olivier’s contempt and in the misguided hope of pleasing Huston.

‘Cut!’ Huston called impatiently.

When Marilyn flashed him a look, he drawled, ‘I’ve seen ’em before.’

A few days later, they reshot Roslyn and Perce’s scene, and this time Marilyn gave the director the performance he was looking for. It was the high point of the film, Huston enthused. But
when he came to collect her that evening at the Holiday Inn, where she was staying with Paula Strasberg, he found her in a terrible state. Her hair was a tangle, her hands and feet were filthy and
she was wearing just a short nightgown, which wasn’t any cleaner than the rest of her. She greeted him euphorically, then went into a kind of trance. ‘You see, Marilyn, that’s
what drugs do,’ he said sadly. ‘They make you mistake your terror for ecstasy.’ As he walked out, a doctor was looking for a vein in the back of her hand to give her an injection
of Amytal.

‘When I had to stop filming,’ Huston said later, ‘I knew something terrible was going to happen to her. I had a sort of premonition. She couldn’t save
herself and no one could do it for her. Seeing her sleepwalking into the abyss, I thought, If she carries on at the rate she’s going, she’ll be in an institution in two or three years
or dead. But the thing I remember most from that time was her innocence. I like the corruption of Hollywood; I like people who know they’re rotten, who know they’ve gone off, like meat.
But that never happened to her. There was something about her that could never spoil. One day, I was talking about her to her masseur, Ralph Roberts, the “masseur to the stars”,
who’d been an actor as well, and he told me he’d never known anyone else with skin like Marilyn’s. Her flesh was incredibly soft and deep. A miracle, really. You see that on
screen . . . it’s all you see, in fact. As a director, you don’t film a body, you’re blinded by the light that streams from it, even in
The Misfits
when she was a bit
puffy. Or as Sartre said one day, “It’s not just light that comes off her, it’s heat. She burns through the screen.”’

Towards the end of 1959, Marilyn struck up closer friendships with writers she admired in New York. Carson McCullers invited her to stay at her house in Nayack, where they were
joined by the novelist Isak Dinesen, and had long talks about poetry and literature. The poet Carl Sandburg, whom she met while making
Some Like It Hot
, often came over to her apartment in
Manhattan for extended tête-à-têtes, and she would read out poetry and do impersonations of actors. She and Truman Capote also met up again.

‘I want to tell you about something I’m working on,’ he told her one day. ‘Last year I wrote a novel called
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. The girl in it –
she’s called Holly Golightly – is me. That’s something I learned from my master Flaubert, my secret friend. But she’s you too. I like to think of my novels as memories of
memories – I’d like people to remember my characters the way they remember a dream, with that same mixture of vagueness and precision. Shall I tell you the first line? “I am
always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.” The narrator is remembering a girl he used to know: a good-time party girl, who drank a bit too much
and was a bit crazy, and used to hang out in a bar on Lexington Avenue. She’s one of those girls who don’t belong anywhere or to anyone, least of all to herself. A displaced person,
always searching, moving, running away, someone who never feels at home. If anyone asks her what she does, she says, “I go away.” In the novel, she has a card with her name on it and
underneath just “Travelling”. Anyway, now it’s going to be made into a movie. Do you like the sound of it?’

‘If it was me,’ said Marilyn, ‘I’d say, “I come back.” My travels have always been of the same kind. No matter where I’ve gone or why I’ve gone
there, it ends up that I never see anything. Becoming a movie star is like living on a merry-go-round. When you travel you take the merry-go-round with you. You don’t see natives or new
scenery. You see chiefly the same press agent, the same sort of interviewers, and the same picture layouts of yourself. The days, the conversations, the faces – they all go by just so they
can come back again. Like in those dreams when you think, I’ve already dreamed this. That must be why I wanted to be an actress, so I could travel without going anywhere, and always end up in
the same place. Movies are like merry-go-rounds for grown-ups.’

Marilyn was very keen to play Holly Golightly. She worked up two complete scenes by herself and acted them for Truman, who thought them terrifically good. They spent whole nights rehearsing,
drinking White Angels and breaking into ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’, her song in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. But Hollywood had different plans for the novel’s
heroine and ended up choosing the brown-haired, utterly unsensual Audrey Hepburn instead. ‘Marilyn would have been absolutely marvellous in the role,’ Capote said afterwards, ‘but
Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way.’ He was disgusted by the studio’s adaptation, which changed the whole point of his novel. Instead of reminiscing about a girl
he’s lost, the film’s narrator convinces Holly to stay in New York ‘because that town and her belonged together for ever’. In the novel, Holly says the opposite, ‘I
love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it’ – the feeling
Capote had heard his double, his white angel, express.

In analysis with Greenson for eight months, Marilyn had been left by Yves Montand. She wanted to love, but didn’t know
whom
to love. She phoned André de
Dienes, and poured out a litany of complaint. Teasingly, he suggested that she come over to his place in the Hills, where he had a ‘cure for all ills’. ‘Leave all your cares
behind and come to hear about my cure,’ he told her. She did not come that day, but a few weeks later a mysterious lady got out from a taxicab at the bottom of his driveway. Marilyn was so
bundled up in a scarf, dark sunglasses, jeans and a coat that André didn’t recognise her until she walked up to the garage, where he was doing some gardening. She took off her
sunglasses when she was ten feet away and he finally recognised her. What on earth had happened to his lovely, laughing-all-the-time Norma Jeane? How could she look so unglamorous, so unhappy? She
said she had come to find out what his ‘cure for all ills’ was.

‘What’s bothering you?’

‘I didn’t sleep all night.’

‘Did you drink much coffee yesterday?’

‘No.’

‘Are you broke?’

‘No.’

‘Are you worried about many things?’

‘Yes, quite a few things! I’m being swindled.’

‘Well, that’s cause number one for sleeplessness. You’re angry because you feel used. Are you lonesome? Tell me the truth, Marilyn, the absolute truth.’

She didn’t answer.

‘When did you last make love? When did you have your last orgasm?’

‘It’s been weeks and weeks. I don’t care.’

André offered to fix her a cocktail. She was about to accept when they were interrupted by another visitor. As de Dienes later wrote, ‘A young beautiful model came to see me, sent
by the model agent. In great contrast to Marilyn’s disguise that did not show any of her sex appeal, the model wore a skin-tight pink silk dress to emphasise her sexy contour and dainty
high-heeled shoes, her long hair flowing down on her shoulders splendidly. The young lady put on her best smile and all her charms as she entered my house, and as she was walking through the long
corridor, I could see she was imitating the famous Marilyn Monroe walk! For a few seconds the entire event became like an incredibly ironical confrontation with Fate’s trickery! The model,
who was willing to pose nude for fifty dollars, was sexier than Marilyn!’

Marilyn called a cab, and disappeared into the bathroom until it arrived. As André helped her into the cab she turned to him, and asked what the ‘cure for all ills’ was. Too
embarrassed to talk about it in front of the driver, he asked her to wait for a few seconds, dashed into his office and scribbled something on a bit of paper, then gave it to her as the cab set
off. ‘Sex. With me,’ Marilyn read.

‘The idiot,’ she said. ‘The real cure is death.’

Then she crumpled up the bit of paper and threw it out of the window into the evening dust blowing across the steep hill leading down to the Sunset Strip.

The last evening in Reno had been thick with pathos. Drunk on bourbon, Marilyn had said, ‘I am trying to find myself as a person. Millions of people live their entire
lives without finding themselves. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself I am an actress.’ On 4 November, in Hollywood, Huston shot a final retake of
The
Misfits
’ happy ending, in which Marilyn and Gable’s characters head off for a life together, and with that the film was finally finished, forty days behind schedule. The following
weekend Marilyn and Arthur Miller left for New York on separate flights. She kept the apartment on East 57th Street while he moved into the Adams Hotel on East 86th.

She resumed her daily sessions with Marianne Kris and spent the rest of her time going over the black and white contact sheets of the photographs Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath and Eve
Arnold had taken during the filming of
The Misfits
. She scratched out, with a red cross, all the photos that included Arthur. Twelve days later, when she heard Clark Gable had died, Marilyn
said nothing to Kris about it. It was only a few weeks later when she got back to Los Angeles that she rushed to Greenson’s office in Beverly Hills and said: ‘You can’t believe
how shattered I’ve been since Gable died. In the kissing scenes on
The Misfits
, I kissed him with real affection. I loved his lips, the way his moustache tickled when he turned away
from the camera. I didn’t want to go to bed with him, but I wanted him to know how much I liked and appreciated him. When I came back from a day off the set, he patted my ass and told me if I
didn’t behave myself he would give me a good spanking. I looked him in the eye and said, “Don’t tempt me.” He burst out laughing so hard he was tearing up. Those bastards at
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,’ she stressed the words ironically, ‘didn’t even give him an Oscar for
Gone with the Wind
. I saw that first when I was
about thirteen. I have never seen a man who was as romantic as he was in that picture. It was different when I got to know him. Then I wanted him to be my father. I wouldn’t care if he
spanked me as long as he made up for it by hugging me and telling me I was Daddy’s little girl and he loved me. Of course you’re going to say that’s a classic Oedipal
fantasy.’ Greenson said nothing, merely stroked his moustache.

‘The weirdest thing,’ Marilyn continued, ‘is that I dreamed about him a few days ago. I was sitting on Clark Gable’s lap with his arms around me. He said, “They
want me to do a
Gone with the Wind
sequel. Maybe I will if you will be my Scarlett.” I woke up crying. They called him “King” on set. What respect and deference he had from
the actors and crew, even Huston. Some day I hope I’ll be treated like that. He was Mr Gable to everybody on the set, but he made me call him Clark. One day he told me that we had something
very important and secret in common. His mother had died when he was six months old.’

Shortly afterwards, during a very troubled session, Marilyn gazed off into the distance with dilated pupils and said in the sort of light, almost playful, voice you’d use to tell a fairy
tale to a child, ‘When I was a little girl I would pretend I was Alice in Wonderland looking into a mirror, wondering what I could see. Was that really me? Who was that staring back at me?
Could it be someone pretending to be me? I would dance around, make faces, just to see if that little girl in the mirror would do the same. I suppose every kid’s imagination takes over. The
looking glass can be magical, like acting, in a strange way. Especially when you’re pretending to be someone other than yourself. This did happen when I put on my mom’s clothes, tried
to fix my hair as she did and powder my face with her big powder puff, and, oh, yes, her red rouge and lipstick and eye shadow. I’m sure I looked like a clown, not sexy, because people
couldn’t stop laughing. I started crying.

‘I always had to be dragged out of my seat when I went to the pictures. I wondered, Are the movies a make-believe land, just an illusion? Those huge images up there on the screen in the
dark theatre were bliss – they put me in a trance. But the screen was always a mirror. Who is that looking back at me? I’d think. Which is really me? The little girl in the darkness, or
the woman up there in the silver light? Am I her reflection?’