Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (62 page)

To establish his primacy on the set, to counter the enormous influence he feared from Paula (and against which he had been warned by Billy Wilder and Joshua Logan), Olivier took the most patronizing attitude: his co-star he regarded as merely a Hollywood product from whom he would have to exact obedience and obeisance. “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn,” Olivier said, and the die was cast. From that moment, as Hedda Rosten reported to Norman, Marilyn became “suspicious, sullen, defensive.” Even Arthur, who usually sided with Olivier to encourage Marilyn’s cooperation, had to admit that the director’s arch tongue was too quick with the cutting joke, and that Marilyn felt intimidated by him from the start.

This unfortunate atmosphere was exacerbated by a calamitous event from which her marriage never recovered and which further shook Marilyn’s confidence just when she needed it most. Marilyn found Arthur’s notebook open on the dining table at Parkside House and casually glanced at the page. There she read that her husband had second thoughts about their marriage, that he thought she was an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman he pitied, but that he feared his own creative life would be threatened by her relentless emotional demands. “It was something about how disappointed he was in me,” she told the Strasbergs,

how he thought 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 Arthur said he no longer had a decent answer to that one.

Arthur never admitted he had made such personal observations, but his published memoirs and every interview he granted after her death expressed those sentiments. In a matter of a moment, Marilyn’s life with her third husband commenced its slow, tragic declivity—within three weeks of the vows, as if justifying her worst prenuptial anxieties.

Marilyn was devastated, according to Susan Strasberg, who was with Paula in London: the shock influenced Marilyn’s work and placed on her coach an additional burden of motherly nurturing. Even from the first weeks of filming, Allan Snyder added, the marriage seemed strained, the newlyweds distant from each other. “I think Arthur really likes dumb blondes,” Marilyn said later to Rupert Allan, trying to lighten the pain of this memory. “He never had one before me. Some help he was.” Sidney Skolsky later summed up the issue: “Miller looked on Marilyn strictly as an ideal and was shocked to discover that she is a human being, a person, even as you and I and maybe Miller.”

*    *    *

Marilyn and Paula had to endure a rehearsal period, beginning July 30—exercises to which Marilyn was unaccustomed; filming finally began on August 7. As might have been expected after Olivier’s introduction of her to the cast, there was a frostiness between Marilyn and Olivier, who leaped from behind the camera to act before it. In both stars, anxiety clashed with pride, and there were often dozens of takes for each scene. Olivier, exasperated, gave a direction, only to watch Marilyn walk off to discuss it with Paula and frequently to telephone Lee in New York.

The Strasberg interference very nearly sabotaged
The Prince and the Showgirl
, and Paula was soon sucked into something she did not want, as Susan recalled. But there was a relevant history:

My mother had once been tested for a movie role—that of a pretty blonde—but she was passed over in favor of Joan Blondell, and in a way I think she was now trying to regain her lost acting career through Marilyn. She was always blamed for Marilyn’s lateness, but this infuriated my mother—and what could she do about it? She really wanted Marilyn to succeed. On the other hand, Marilyn used my mother as a kind of whipping girl, someone to take the blame for her own faults.

At the same time, Arthur made no secret of his resentment of the Strasbergs: to him Lee and Paula were “poisonous and vacuous,” and he detested Marilyn’s “nearly religious dependency” on them—perhaps, among better reasons, because he felt his own primacy and influence were thereby compromised. “She didn’t know any more about acting than the cleaning woman” was Arthur’s assessment of Paula; she was “a hoax, but so successful in making herself necessary to people like Marilyn [that] she created this tremendous reputation.” But Arthur perhaps failed to see that Marilyn simply had no women friends in her life, and Paula’s unalloyed maternal attention to her was quite simply the best she could get.

Equally, relations between Arthur and Milton became strained. “Greene thought he would be this big-shot producer and she would be working for him,” Arthur said later. “But she saw that he had ulterior
aims,” by which, presumably, he meant money and prestige. But those aims may indeed have been shared.

Nor was Milton an innocent. Even his MCA agent and friend Jay Kanter allowed that “it was important for Milton to control her, just as it was for Strasberg and for Miller to control her.” One of the mechanisms for such maneuvering was for Milton continually to provide Marilyn with whatever drugs she needed (or thought she needed) to get from one day to the next with Olivier. At the time, production assistant David Maysles felt he was “getting involved in things way above his ability to sustain,” as he told his brother Albert: David was referring to the generous allotment of pills that often kept Marilyn in a state near oblivion. These drugs, as everyone knew, were “wrecking her,” as Allan Snyder put it, “and by this time Milton really wasn’t as good for her as he wanted to be. He was a great manipulator, and there were gallon bottles of pills being flown in for her,” from none other than Amy and Marilyn’s New York doctor, Mortimer Weinstein; on September 27, for example, Milton wrote to Irving asking that Weinstein send “two months supply of Dexamyl—
not
spansules—for MM, a dozen or so at a time in small envelopes or parcels, and commence as soon as possible.” As Cardiff said, Milton was brilliant and exhausted with responsibility, but he could be “a dark, somewhat sinister character who felt he had to keep the show on the road however he could.”
³

As if all this were not enough, there occurred a fight over credits: Milton’s agreement with Olivier called for “Executive Producer” status for Milton H. Greene, but by late October, Olivier felt this was inappropriate and took the argument directly to Jack Warner himself. In the first released prints of the picture, Milton was so credited, but later his name was mysteriously and unjustly removed.

None of the many problems could have been much alleviated when Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, arrived—Marilyn’s predecessor who had created onstage the role of the American showgirl Elsie Marina. With uncharacteristic lack of consideration (but perhaps with Olivier’s tacit or expressed approval), Vivien came to Pinewood to watch a few days of shooting, making no secret of her low estimate of Marilyn.

Not entirely unreasonably, Marilyn was miserable wherever she turned. She felt condescension from her director, betrayal by her husband and a lack of support from Milton, who had to cooperate with Olivier and his staff. All these were people she respected and no one, she felt, treated her as an equal. In this environment of complete dependence, she lost her ability to make any concrete decision and constantly second-guessed herself. The result was that Marilyn was pitched back to the conditions of her childhood and adolescence, when every relationship was transitory.

In this regard, her fundamental emotional needs could perhaps never be met by so unreal a career as film acting, for the obvious reason that she had so long assumed a false identity with a false name, hair and image; she invented a new character for each film; and her habitual suspicions about others’ loyalties had compelled her to change agents, coaches and advisers—not to say husbands. Nothing was permanent, nothing rooted, and now there was no one on whom she could rely without question.

In an odd way, her lifelong condition of dependence—the one thing from which no one was willing to free her—was also one of the strongest elements in her appeal to the public. She begged to be embraced; no man or woman could fail to be moved by someone so patently needy and to all appearances inviolable. One reporter who managed a private interview at Parkside House recalled a parade of her courtiers drifting in and out, inserting comments and informing her of their presence. As he departed, Marilyn touched his arm lightly and said with unutterable weariness, “Too many people, too many people.”

From July to November, then, life was a constant web of intrigue. At various times, all sorts of misadventures occurred: Lee arrived (at the expense of MMP, of course), conferred with Olivier and was tossed out. Paula—on a restricted work visa—eventually went back to New York in the autumn, along with Hedda Rosten, who drank so much she was little help to anyone. Their departures left Marilyn depressed and lonely, and soon Milton summoned Dr. Hohenberg to London, which meant much expense with little result, for the doctor summarily announced that Milton “had been wrong to form MMP with Marilyn, and that she did not know how much longer the two partners could work together in an atmosphere of such emotional strain.” Marilyn, of
course, saw this as a complete rejection of her professional life by her own psychiatrist.

But Hohenberg had a suggestion for Marilyn, and forthwith whisked her off to meet her old friend Anna Freud, an analyst with a thriving London practice. Marilyn had several therapy sessions with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.

Things continued to happen quickly and unpredictably. Arthur decided to visit the actors Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, in Paris, to discuss a production of
The Crucible
there; he then went on to New York to visit his children. At the same time, Marilyn was convinced that Milton was buying English antiques, charging them to MMP and shipping them to his home in Connecticut. It seemed as if everyone was spending her money—most of all Lee Strasberg, who put through daily reverse-charge telephone calls to Marilyn, reminding her that her only chance of finishing the picture successfully was with Paula. Forcing Olivier’s hand with the British authorities, Marilyn got her wish, and her coach returned with a renewed visa.

All during this time, an expensive and complicated color film was in process—of all things, a drawing room comedy in which Marilyn Monroe, by some miracle of grace, gave one of the two finest performances of her life. As the production files indicate, she regularly sat in to watch the rough prints of the previous day’s work, and both Olivier and Milton had to agree that “she had some criticisms that were very good, and [she] overtly conveyed her appreciation to Larry.”

While she was performing some of her best scenes in late August, Marilyn learned she was expecting a baby. Later, the pregnancy was always doubted even by those close to the situation like Amy and Allan, but Irving Stein’s daily memoranda of telephone calls from London indicate that as of August 31, Marilyn’s condition was confirmed by two London doctors. “Milton told me [by telephone] that she was pregnant but she is afraid she will lose the baby,” noted Irving. He understood Milton’s concern, for Irving too had seen, before his departure from London, that “Hedda and Marilyn were drinking a lot. Hedda is not a good influence on Marilyn, encourages her unreasonableness and evasiveness of truth . . . and says she and Arthur are neither of them ready for children. . . . Marilyn weeps, saying that all she wants
is to finish the picture.” Marilyn lost the baby during the first week of September.

This event was kept secret even from Olivier, who was allowed to believe that Marilyn was simply being moody and intransigent in the absence of Arthur, on whom she still depended for approval. This ignorance of fact was no doubt the cause of his resentment of her as a “thoroughly ill-mannered and rude girl. . . . I was never so glad to have a film over and done.” Nor, indeed, was she; but her public statements were invariably generous and deferential: “It was a wonderful experience to work with Olivier. I learned a lot.”

Contrariwise, at least two eminent ladies claimed to have learned from her. Edith Sitwell, that empress of all eccentrics, made good on her earlier promise and welcomed Marilyn to her home in October. Wearing her usual array of rings on each finger, a medieval gown, a Plantagenet headdress and a mink stole, Dame Edith sat grandly, pouring hefty beakers of gin and grapefruit juice for herself and her guest. During several hours one afternoon, they sat discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, whose poems Marilyn was reading during sleepless nights that season. For Dame Edith, Marilyn recited lines from one of Hopkins’s
Terrible Sonnets
—“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”—saying that she understood perfectly the poet’s mood of despair. “She’s quite remarkable!” pronounced Sitwell soon after.

To her pleasant surprise, Marilyn won the appreciation of one of the supporting players, the elderly Dame Sybil Thorndike, one of the legendary actresses of the English stage and the woman for whom Shaw had written
St. Joan
decades earlier. After less than a week on the set with Marilyn, she tapped her old friend Olivier on the shoulder: “You did well in that scene, Larry, but with Marilyn up there, nobody will be watching you. Her manner and timing are just too delicious. And don’t be too hard about her tardiness, dear boy. We need her desperately. She’s really the only one of us who knows how to act in front of a camera!” Even from Dame Sybil, these remarks did not go down well with Olivier.

Whatever Marilyn’s insecurities about her marriage, she publicly defended Arthur against the Lord Chamberlain’s initial prohibition of
A View from the Bridge
, which was at first banned for its allusion to homosexuality.
Outraged by the censorship, Marilyn was among the first to join something called The Watergate Theater Club, which protested all forms of interference against the arts. This turned out to be somewhat amusing to the English sense of irony, for at the premiere of
View
at the Comedy Theatre on October 11, Marilyn’s low-cut scarlet gown caused an appreciative riot and almost prevented the curtain from going up. Arthur calmly accepted this, but he began to exert pressure in graver business matters.