Marilyn Monroe (61 page)

On Monday, as Marilyn was being driven to the studio, John Huston arrived in New York. He was to conduct four days of meetings with Miller, then fly to Reno to inspect the locations. He intended to start filming
The Misfits
on July 18. At this point, Huston had no idea of the situation with Marilyn. In Europe, he hadn’t heard about the affair with Montand. He was oblivious to the Millers’ marital difficulties. He knew nothing of her drug problem. Miller gave no indication that anything was wrong. Huston had no reason to guess that if Marilyn’s current, rather confused plans regarding Montand came to fruition, she might not show up in Nevada at all.

On Monday evening, Marilyn completed her last shot. Principal photography on
Let’s Make Love
ended twenty-eight days behind schedule, not counting the strike. Buddy Adler had been dismayed by her appearance, but there were to be no retakes. That was a mark of how bad Twentieth considered the picture to be, and how eager everyone was to finish. For Marilyn, all that remained were two or three days of dubbing.
If she gave Twentieth that, at least there would be something to release.

On Tuesday, she appeared at the studio with laryngitis. Obviously, dubbing was out of the question. On Wednesday, she failed to show up at all and refused to answer the phone. When Marilyn remained incommunicado on Thursday, Twentieth resorted to sending a wire to the Beverly Hills Hotel. The studio implored her to come in before she left town.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, Wald called Frank Taylor and explained that they had been trying to reach Marilyn. Taylor said he was under the impression that Marilyn planned to return to New York on Saturday night. Wald pointed out that
Let’s Make Love
was not finished. The implication was clear: Marilyn would not be free to start Huston’s picture until she had fulfilled her commitment.

That same day, Miller went into action. He may have been powerless to stop Marilyn from sleeping with Montand, but he was not prepared to stand by while she brought down his film. Like Montand, Miller seemed to regard her as dangerously unpredictable. He took steps to get her back to New York immediately. She had betrayed him, and she had humiliated him. Still, it would be safer to have Marilyn close by, where she could be watched until Huston was ready for her.

Miller instructed George Chasin to notify Twentieth that Marilyn should be sent home to recuperate. He wanted the studio to permit her to dub in New York. Miller’s intervention struck an awkward note. Did Marilyn’s husband really speak for her anymore? Or did he simply represent his own interests with regard to
The Misfits?
Miller may not have known the answer to those questions himself.

Unexpectedly, Marilyn appeared at the studio on Friday afternoon. She watched the film with Montand. By the time she left the screening room, she was saying that perhaps she would not go home after all. Perhaps she could recuperate in Los Angeles. She hoped to come in next Thursday, June 30, to dub. Not by chance, that was the day Montand was scheduled to return to Paris. Signoret had sent him a hurt letter and some newspaper cuttings about the affair. Montand needed to explain, and he had to do it in person. But if Marilyn insisted on coming in next week, he would not be able to go. Suddenly, the lover was as eager for Marilyn to be on that Saturday night flight to New York as the husband was.

On Sunday morning, Marilyn arrived in New York. Huston had left town two days previously. She focused on Thursday. That’s when
Montand would be changing planes in New York. Somehow, between now and then, Marilyn had to convince him not to go back to Signoret.

Marilyn reserved a hotel suite near the airport. She ordered champagne and flowers. She hired a limousine. When Montand’s plane touched down, she was waiting. His layover was extended, someone having phoned in a bomb threat. Montand had not expected to find Marilyn, and he certainly had not anticipated that his plane would have to be searched for explosives. He refused to accompany her to a hotel, but he did welcome the shelter of her black Cadillac.

They drank champagne and ate caviar. He did his best to be diplomatic. He did not want to provoke her. The last thing Montand needed was for Marilyn to sound off to reporters before he had smoothed things over at home. He kissed Marilyn and said he had enjoyed himself, but he made it absolutely clear that he did not plan to divorce. He was returning to Simone. He assumed Marilyn would go back to Arthur. He looked forward to a day when the couples could be friends again. He even invited the Millers to visit the Montands in France.

Later, Marilyn cried that she had been a fool. She pictured Montand and Signoret having a good laugh at her expense. But that did not stop her from wanting to speak to Montand. She worked the phone, desperately trying to reach him.

There had been a time when Marilyn had lovingly set up a cozy writing room for her husband, when she tiptoed about, warning the servants not to make noise while Mr. Miller was at work. Now, she banged her fists on his office door, demanding he come out. He was known to hide from her in there. Pretending to work, he would nap on the sofa. When he didn’t stir, she marched to the bedroom, knocking over furniture along the way. She hurled a liquor bottle at a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Glass shattered all over the queen-sized bed. Repeatedly, Marilyn threw herself against a closet door until a maid restrained her.

By the time Huston returned on July 4 to shoot some tests, he had heard all about the Montand business. But as the husband was ready to proceed, it was fine with Huston. Marilyn’s peaky appearance was attributed to the fact that she had recently been ill and was resting between films. Meanwhile, since Twentieth had refused to permit Marilyn to dub in New York, Miller arranged for her to stop in Los Angeles en route to Nevada. Initially, Twentieth protested that July 14 was too late. In the
end, however, Lew Schreiber reluctantly said yes. Cukor, who had completed all of his other chores on July 1, agreed to stand by until then. On July 11, Miller called MCA to report that Marilyn was not feeling well again.

Montand was to stop in New York in three days’ time on his way back to Hollywood. Having made peace with Signoret, he had agreed to appear in the film
Sanctuary
with Lee Remick—who had eventually played the part in
Wild River
that Marilyn had thought was hers
.
Marilyn hoped to see him between planes.

Cukor refused Miller’s request that he come in on Saturday the 16th to do the dubbing. As far as he was concerned, he had indulged Marilyn at every turn. Despite all the trouble she had given him, he had signed up to work with her again. (Twentieth was eager to collect Marilyn’s last film before it was too late. On July 1, the studio assigned her to
Goodbye, Charlie
, to be shot after
The Misfits.)
But on one matter, Cukor would not bend. Vivien Leigh had arrived in Los Angeles with the play
Duel of Angels.
It was her first visit since the announcement that Olivier wanted a divorce to marry Joan Plowright, and she worried that her Hollywood friends would take Larry’s side and abandon her. Cukor, intent on proving her fears groundless, had planned numerous parties and poolside lunches in Vivien’s honor. So this was a very busy time for him. Marilyn would just have to wait until Monday. Cukor offered to pick her up and escort her to the studio. He promised to have her finished in time to start
The Misfits
on the 20th.

Montand arrived in Los Angeles on Friday, July 15. The city was at a pitch of excitement, the Democratic convention having been going on all week at the Sports Arena Center. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been nominated for president two days previously. His acceptance speech was being broadcast on television the night Montand checked in at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Marilyn boarded a plane for Los Angeles on Sunday, July 17. She had missed Montand in New York but planned to call him on the coast. She looked utterly exhausted. There were pouches under her eyes, bloodstains on the rear of her beige skirt. Arthur went to Nevada alone, expecting that Marilyn would join him there as soon as Cukor had the fifty dubbed lines he needed. But would she actually show up for
The Misfits?

In recent weeks, Arthur had done everything to guarantee that she appeared. He had kept her in New York until the last minute. He had dealt with her agents. He had haggled with the studio. He had endured her rages. But the next few days were in Marilyn’s hands. Arthur had no way of controlling what happened once she was back in Los Angeles with Montand.

The cabin where Arthur had spent six weeks in 1956 was still standing near Pyramid Lake. But the windows no longer gave out on the gray water, a marina and a hot dog concession having been erected since he was here last. Four years previously, he had been waiting to divorce Mary. He had been soaking in the atmosphere that would form the basis of
The Misfits.
He had been looking forward to a calm year, perhaps the year after next, or the year after that.

Pyramid Lake, once serene, was awhirr with motorboats. The chilly, unlit phone booth, to which Arthur had often been summoned when the breathy-voiced Mrs. Leslie called, had vanished. Temperatures soared over one hundred degrees. John Huston went shirtless beneath his well-cut bush jacket.

Some things did seem to be the same, however. Yet again, Arthur waited in Nevada while Marilyn worked in Los Angeles. Yet again, she was terrified that she would not be able to do what was expected of her. Yet again, she was despondent. But this time it was not Arthur whom Marilyn persisted in trying to reach by phone; it was Yves Montand.

Principal photography was scheduled to begin in Reno on Monday, July 18. First, Huston, tall and thin, with a pugilist’s shattered face, insisted that nearly two-thirds of the screenplay be revised. Miller may have called
The Misfits
his most complete work, but at the last minute he found himself prodded by Huston to rewrite extensively. If, as Arthur seemed to think, his work was already complete, why was Huston demanding it be redone now?

At this point, the script certainly had its champions. Not a foot of film had been shot, and already phrases like “the ultimate motion picture” and “the great American movie” were being used—though not by Huston. Frank Taylor informed
Time
magazine that
The Misfits
was the
best screenplay he had read. United Artists vice-president Max Youngstein predicted that it would turn out to be one of the great films. But it was Arthur himself who seems to have set the bar the highest. In speaking of his screenplay, he casually referred to
King Lear, Hamlet
, and
Oedipus Rex.
Miller’s eagerness to believe that his script was a master-work, and Huston’s cool awareness that it was in fact deeply flawed, would lead to repeated clashes in the weeks to come. Huston pressed for more revisions, and Miller delivered rewrites of lines and scenes without ever undertaking the fundamental reappraisal of the material which might, even then, have given him the great film he wanted.

Marilyn, scheduled to arrive two days after Huston started filming, was another source of pressure on Miller. Would she appear on time? Would she appear at all? And in what condition? Even if Marilyn did show up in Nevada, there was no guarantee she would get through the picture. Still, Miller suggested that Paula Strasberg was the most significant difficulty Huston faced. After a meeting, everybody agreed to freeze Paula out.

Paula was hardly the problem anymore. A good deal had changed since
The Sleeping Prince.
Marilyn’s intake of barbiturates had escalated dangerously. It was no longer the Method that was at stake; it was Marilyn’s life. One has to wonder whether in focusing on Paula, Miller was denying a horror he had no way of coping with emotionally. The bumptious Mrs. Strasberg made an easy scapegoat. Were Miller to face the real problem—the fact that Marilyn was in no condition, physically or emotionally, to be appearing in his picture—he might have to shut down
The Misfits.
And that, apparently, he was not prepared to do. But, as sometimes seemed to be the case, was he merely doing everything necessary to get his picture made? Or were his motives more complicated?

Perhaps the answer lay in the screenplay. “He fears he’s losing her,” Miller told an interviewer, in an effort to explain why it’s important to Gay that Roslyn be present during the hunt for the wild horses. “He asserts his identity. He wants to call up his powers. When he’s doing his work he feels most himself. He wants her to see the power within himself.” Miller might have been talking about his own situation with Marilyn.

On July 20, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, he waited at Reno airport as a DC-7 flight from Los Angeles landed. He wasn’t alone. A United Artists publicist waited. Local newsmen waited. The governor’s wife and daughter waited. And some two hundred fans waited.
Marilyn and her helpers lingered on the plane a good half hour after the other passengers left.

When Marilyn finally did appear, she looked as though she were coming home at the end of an arduous location shoot. She wore a platinum wig she planned to use in
The Misfits.
She had a white silk blouse and a snug white skirt with a bulging zipper in back. She clutched a white leather purse. Arthur hovered protectively as she signed some autographs. She accepted a bouquet from the governor’s family. She posed for pictures. She was determined not to let the press see her real feelings about her husband. She was determined to hide her sense that the marriage was over. She might not have shown up here at all but for the fact that in Los Angeles, Montand had refused to take her calls.