Marilyn: A Biography (25 page)

Still, for a honeymoon they will all go over
to England to work on
The Prince and the Showgirl
, Millers,
Greenes, and Strasbergs. A troika! Strasberg is no happier with
Greene. A half year earlier, consulted by Milton as to the
advisability of taking on Olivier to be director of the film as
well as its leading man, Strasberg committed himself to no more
than a mild opinion that the possibility “was a good idea.” Greene
immediately took this speech as his opportunity to cable Olivier a
firm offer as director. A misunderstanding, they might agree, but
who could be certain, including Greene himself, that the secret
motive may not have been to cut off flirtation with any possibility
that Strasberg might direct his first film — or did Greene wish to
ingratiate himself with Olivier for future films? Who could know?
In business, ambiguity poisons several more relations than
betrayal.

* * *

Marilyn travels as her own kind of queen.
Shades of Zelda! The Millers fly to England with twenty-seven
pieces of luggage (of which three are Arthur’s — like Barry
Goldwater, he is ready to hold on to his socks!). There is $1,500
in overweight luggage, of which $1,333.33 is her share, and they
are deluged by hundreds of press at the airports in New York and
London. Guiles reports Miller in a near state of shock as they are
conducted from terminal to plane, “strange arms under their elbows
. . . no air to breathe . . . voices become a muffled roar . . . a
little like drowning.” Miller shows just such torture in his
expression for photographers. The corners of his mouth have become
the creases in the smile of a stone dragon. Given the dragon’s
stern principles, this wrack of publicity will never end. Perhaps
he will suffer most when he finds himself trying to enjoy it. There
seems a will to torture himself reminiscent of Richard Nixon being
jovial on command.

At London Airport they are met by Sir
Laurence Olivier and wife Vivien Leigh. A photographer is trampled
in the crush. Off they go with a thirty-car caravan to a “large
rented estate” at Egham in the royal grounds of Windsor Park. They
have been expecting a “cottage” but find an English country
mansion. All one-family homes in England, they are assured, are
cottages.

Ga-ga is the prose of the English press. One
London weekly prints a special Marilyn Monroe edition. That is an
honor given to no human since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. “She is
here,” says the London
Evening News
. “She walks. She talks.
She really is as luscious as strawberries and cream.”
The
Seven-Year Itch
has had exactly the kind of success one would
expect in England, where many an Englishman can identify with Tom
Ewell. Miller is naturally expected to be clever, superb,
well-spoken, and romantic — a tall knight who has been ready to go
to war with bloody McCarthy. England offers its oyster.

She was invited to be the patroness of a
cricket match for charity at Tichborne Park and to taste the
rockbound solitude of the island of Aran; the Scottish knit goods
industry was preparing for her a life-time collection of hand-knit
cashmere twin-set sweaters; a group of teddy boys invited her to
join them for a bit of fish and chips in Penge, a London
suburb.

But it is comedy. For the Millers are tied in
class knots. English accents, Olivier’s in particular, have to
certainly remind them that she is a girl from a semi-slum street
and he is a boy from Brooklyn. She says the wrong things at her
first press conference. The British do not care if she is witty, or
refreshingly dumb, but she must choose to be one, or be the other —
instead, she is pretentious.

“Do you still sleep in Chanel No. 5?”

“Considering I’m in England now, let’s say I
am now sleeping in Yardley’s Lavender.” That will waft no balm to
English noses. It is like coming out four-square for Catholicism at
Notre Dame — they have heard that already.

“Can you give us your tastes in music?”

“I like, well, jazz, like Louis Armstrong,
you know, and Beethoven.”

“Oh,
Bee
thoven?” We hear the nasal
flush of Anglican tides in the Bay of Beethoven. “What
Bee
thoven numbers in
particular
,
Miss
Monroe?”

She gives a hopelessly American reply. “I
have a terrible time with numbers.” Now the recovery. “But I know
it when I hear it.” No worse mistake! You do not offer something to
the English unless you deliver it altogether. They are not tolerant
of conversations that belly-flop from one unfinished line to
another.

In turn, Miller is hopelessly stiff. No more
do the English need his chill. They have their own castles for
chill. Miller is described to Zolotow by a London friend as “cold
as a refrigerated fish.” They turn down invitations to fashionable
parties, and invite no one in return. Off to a very bad start.

Soon they begin to recognize new trouble.
Olivier
hates
the Method. Where is Milton Greene, who had
the genius to make him the director? It is possible Olivier is the
foremost representative in all the world of the school of Coquelin.
An actor does well to do his homework, and come to the set with
characterization superbly in hand. One does not wallow in depths.
One delivers the paint. Eli Wallach can speak of taking Olivier to
Actor’s Studio to watch the Method in operation. The reactions of
Sir Laurence then are to show that he is not to be party to this
revolution.

It can be said with no great strain that most
of the male and female population of England are good amateur
actors, well schooled in Coquelin. One lives in the creation of
one’s manner; one delivers the manner on call. None of your crude
American fumbling toward the point while gorging on the charity of
all. Can we conceive of a worse situation for Marilyn? She is an
extermination camp to millions of cells in each of the brains of
her co-workers as she gasses their patience — yes, Tony Curtis will
speak of kissing Hitler, and Olivier will tell Milton Greene he is
ready to “squeak!” What makes it even worse is that her troika is
pulling next to no chariot for her. Milton Greene is smooth as rum
and butter with Olivier, and Miller has been lumbered by English
upmanship and secretly respects Sir Laurence much too much.
Strasberg delivers Big Bertha pronunciamentos from safe London,
miles away from the studio. “Why does Olivier say he had difficulty
with her,” he remarks in later years. “I would say she had
difficulty with him,” but he is an outmoded gun for wars like
this.

While Olivier has been warned in many a note
from Logan to be patient with Marilyn and not to raise his voice,
nor expect “disciplined stage deportment,” and Olivier has promised
to iron himself out “nice and smooth,” it is likely Olivier is
contemptuous of the situation even before the film begins. He has
already done
The Sleeping Prince
as a play with Vivien Leigh
and so is conceivably in this for the profit rather than the glory
of Marilyn Monroe’s profession. Monroe, on the other hand, carrying
all the secret snobbery that has led her to consider becoming
Princess of Monaco, has to quicken to the thought she is playing
with the monarchical actor of them all — her own secret coronation!
We can measure the great and royal hollow of the orphanage by the
size of her noble ambition now — yet there is Olivier brimming with
hostility he cannot even begin to swallow at Logan-like injunctions
to take care of darling little spoiled
lèse-majesté
wild
animal actresses and Method madness and American money, upstart
Millers and ogre Strasbergs, goes out, does Sir Laurence, and roils
Miss Monroe’s ego royally on the first week of work by saying, “All
right, Marilyn, be sexy!” One might as well ask a nun to have
carnal relations for Christ. Olivier has exposed that little gulf,
wider than the Atlantic, between Method and Coquelin. In
commonsensical Coquelin it don’t take long to get sexy. If God was
good enough to give it, throw it, babe! Indeed, the more unheralded
English actors on the set have been looking at her with giggles.
They have been waiting for the sex machine to start.

But in the Method, one does not get sexy. She
calls Strasberg in London. Her voice burns wire. “Lee, how do you
become sexy? What do you do to be sexy?” She cannot be soothed.
Olivier has jammed into the tender roots of ontology and revealed
his secret contempt for her. “The naughtiest little thing. . . .”
Balzac, describing a bourgeois who purchased a false title, could
do justice to her wrath. Now Olivier will get her treatment. He
will learn, naughty little English boy, that sexiness is not a
shiver in the pickle but the whole evocation of the whole woman in
relation to the whole role: Marilyn proceeds to get ill. Quickly
the cast is instructed by Greene not to giggle when she appears,
and indeed, in reaction, are now funereal at the sight of her.

Soon they are in the familiar clutch of not
knowing whether she will show up two hours late, four hours late,
or not at all. Morning after morning, Miller phones that she is
sick. In fact, she is back on quantities of sleeping pills. Arthur
is beginning to discover the maelstrom. (“I have a terrible time
with numbers.”) Nights go by when she cannot sleep at all. The
unnumbered count of pills goes up. Then the gamble. Does she
splurge for a few more and get a couple of hours sleep, thereby to
stagger forth in drastic stupor for a working day, or should she
pass into morning without sleep and try the job on stimulants? And
red-rimmed eyes? Or does she skip the job and miss another day? He
is on vigil. Already there are intimations that the bucket by which
she lowers herself into the well is tied to a frayed rope. It is
fair to wonder if Miller is still full of love, or whether rage at
her habits is now begun with him as well. He is a most ambitious
man. In his own way, he is as ambitious as she is, and if she had
only been an actor in the school of Coquelin — small detail! — and
could get the work out on time, they could go far together. During
those days in Washington when he fought for his passport he must
have thought once or twice that no national office was necessarily
too small for him. The public loved them so! Instead, after years
of cramped work, he is now doing less writing than ever. He is her
god, her guard, her attendant, and her flunky. Old friends, much
impressed with his importance in the past, are now horrified to see
Miller pasting up news clippings of Marilyn in a scrapbook, or
standing around to approve her stills. Greene, who reads the
situation better, senses that Miller is immersing himself in all
the corners of movie business by way of preparing to replace
him.

Still, how she must irritate Miller with her
endless journeys to the simplest point. He is becoming all too
aware of her capacity to inflict damage in secret wars. He cannot
help it — he has sympathy for Olivier. Honest Jewish lover, he must
write “a letter from hell” and leave it for her to see. (Perhaps he
thinks it will give the proper reorientation to her heart.) When
she reads these few lines (left on his desk open) she phones
Strasberg again. Guiles gives the recollection:

She was so overwrought in telling the story
it was not easy to determine precisely what the notebook entry had
said, but Strasberg remembers there was indignation in her voice.
“It was something about how disappointed he was in me. I was some
kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. That his first wife
had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was
beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch and that he [Arthur]
no longer had a decent answer to that one.”

The Strasbergs naturally would believe in
later years that the episode was “the seed of her later
destruction.” Miller as naturally would see it as one episode among
many. Marilyn, always ready to shift the burial ground of each
corpse in her past, would say after she broke with Miller that he
had called her a “whore.” In
After the Fall
, Miller will
recreate the episode and give this language to the note: “The only
one I will ever love is my daughter. If I could only find an
honorable way to die.” What a nightmare is beginning for him. It is
the cauldron in which Marilyn has spent her life, but he has no
habits for it.

The movie progresses with absences,
breakdowns, crises. Olivier is close to collapse himself. The irony
is that when one sees
The Prince and the Showgirl
, it is
better than anyone has a right to expect from the history of its
making, but that is because Monroe is superb — will wonders never
cease?

Dame Sybil Thorndike, who plays the Dowager
Queen, is even going to say after the film is done, “I thought,
surely she won’t come over, she’s so small scale, but when I saw
her on the screen, my goodness how it came over. She was a
revelation. We theatre people tend to be so outgoing. She was the
reverse. The perfect film actress, I thought. I have seen a lot of
her films since then, and it’s always there — that perfect
quality.”

She is also lovely. Milton H. Greene is
indeed a genius with makeup. Never will Marilyn exhibit so
marvelous a female palette, her colors living in the shades of an
English garden. A hue cannot appear on her face without bearing the
tone of a flower petal. Her lips are rose, cheeks have every
softened flush. Lavender shadows are lost in her hair. Once again
she inhabits every frame of the film.

Of course, Olivier in his turn cannot fail to
be excellent. He is too great an actor not to offer some final
delineation of a Balkan Archduke. If there are a thousand
virtuosities in his accent, it is because his virtuosities are
always installed within other virtuosities — a consummate house of
cards. It is just that he is out there playing by himself. So one
can never get to believe he is attracted to Monroe. (Indeed, he is
most believable when he snorts, “She has as much
comme il
faut
as a rhinoceros!”) Willy-nilly, he is therefore
emphasizing the high level of contrivance in the plot.