Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (115 page)

“Oh, please,” Garbo said, as if dismissive of all this praise. “Let me finish my salmon, and quit speaking of me as if giving a eulogy at the funeral. I am still alive, still enjoying the comforts of the damned, such as they are.”

Collier’s secretary served her favorite dessert. Before tasting it, Marilyn wanted to know what it was.

“It’s junket, my dear,” Collier said. “I first discovered it in my nursery.”

“What is junket?” Marilyn asked. “I thought that was a trip you took with some man.”

“It’s a British dessert,” Collier said. “It’s made with sweetened flavored milk with rennet. Rennet, of course, is the lining membrane of a calf’s stomach used for curdling milk.”

“I’d better skip it today,” Marilyn said. “I’m watching my figure.”

“So is everybody else at this table,” Truman added, his remark meeting with stony silence. Recognizing his gaffe, he quickly changed the subject.

He turned to Garbo. “When I was a twelve-year-old boy, I got very mad at you during one long, hot summer in the South. I’d had this awful mishap when a pack of ebony-colored boys, perhaps eight in all, brutally raped me. I was incapacitated for the rest of the summer. During all that time in bed, I wrote a play called The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. I sent it to you with a fan letter, asking if you’d star in it on Broadway. You never answered me, and I nursed this grudge against you until I was nineteen. I later burned the play.”

“I’m so sorry I ignored you,” Garbo said. “Too bad I’m too old to play in it now, since I’m no longer beautiful.”

“But you
are
beautiful,” Marilyn said. “Amazingly so. People say I’m beautiful, but I don’t think so. I’m sexy-looking, but only after I’ve applied a lot of whorish makeup. Otherwise, I think I look like a milk maiden from Norway.”

“In my home country of Sweden, the young men always journeyed in summer to Norway to seduce its beautiful young women,” Garbo said.

“Miss Garbo, do you think you’ll ever return to pictures?” Marilyn asked.

“Thank God Marilyn didn’t use that awful word, ‘comeback,’” Hepburn said.

“That proves that she saw
Sunset Blvd
.,” Truman chimed in. “Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond objected to the word ‘comeback’ too.”

“Over the years, I’ve considered it,” Garbo said. “I’ve always wanted to play Dorian Gray, based on the Oscar Wilde play. If I do, I’d like you, Miss Monroe, to play one of the girls that Dorian seduces and destroys.”

“Garbo and Monroe,” Collier said, “What box office! I could see a Best Oscar for Greta, but would she be nominated as Best Actor or Best Actress?”

“I’d be terrified to appear opposite you on the screen,” Marilyn said. “But since you’d be cast as a man, I guess I might pull it off if Miss Collier coached me. There’s no way I’d appear on the screen in a woman-to-woman role with you. I’d be mocked.”

“I, too, wanted to do a film with Greta,” Hepburn said. “
Mourning Becomes Electra
, with George Cukor directing. The year was 1947. I failed to convince Louis B. Mayer.”

After the luncheon, Garbo excused herself to visit the bathroom. Marilyn was next. After emerging from the toilet, Garbo slipped Marilyn her private phone number. “Call me,” she whispered. After thanking Collier and hugging Hepburn and Truman, she departed.

Likewise, Hepburn departed fifteen minute later, but not before inviting Marilyn to visit her at her home in Connecticut. Marilyn said she’d be honored.

Out on the street again, Truman warned Marilyn, “If you accept invitations from those two regal dykes, you might have to sing for your supper.”

“What in hell do you think I’ve been doing all these years?” Marilyn said. “Call me the canary.”

“I must congratulate you. You’ve come a long way from the days when you were the teenage bride of that sailor boy—I don’t care to remember his name. Now, you’re dating from the A-list: John F. Kennedy, Katharine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo. Speaking of big name legends, who does that leave out? Let me see—Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein?”

“Been there, done that.”

Truman came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “Like me, you’re known for telling some tall tales. A whoremonger like Chaplin, I can believe. But you must admit that Einstein is a bit of a stretch.”

“Silly boy, didn’t you read in the papers that Einstein told an interviewer that I was his favorite movie star? After that, what could I do but get in touch with him? I wanted him to explain to me his theory of relativity. I simply cannot understand it.”

In the weeks leading up to the acting coach’s death, Marilyn visited Collier’s apartment two or three times a week for acting lessons. The two women became close. Marilyn later said, “She opened up doors within me that I had kept locked all my life,” without explaining to Truman exactly what she meant.

In April of 1955, Truman called to tell her of Collier’s death. Marilyn was deeply saddened.

As a keepsake, Collier had given Marilyn a playbill from her 1906 performance as Cleopatra, in which she appeared on stage crowned in silver and carrying a golden scepter ornamented with a replica of the sacred golden calf.

Truman asked Marilyn if he could be her escort at the funeral, and she gratefully accepted.

Arriving dressed all in black, with Truman on her arm, Marilyn sat through the service “gnawing an already chewed-to-the-nub thumbnail,” in Truman’s words, “periodically removing her spectacles to scoop up tears bubbling from her blue-gray eyes.”

After the service, she told Capote, “I hate funerals. I don’t want a funeral—just my ashes cast on the waves by one of my kids, if I ever have any.”

Collier’s “secretary,” Phyllis Wilbourn, whom Marilyn had come to know, was at the funeral, too. Marilyn offered her her deepest sympathy and was happy to learn that Hepburn was going to take her in. She would remain as Hepburn’s “secretary” for the next forty years—there was talk.

Long after Collier’s death, Truman published what the actress had articulated about Marilyn’s talent or lack thereof:

“Oh yes, there is something there—a beautiful child, really—I don’t think she’s an actress at all—certainly not in a traditional sense. What she has is this presence, a certain luminosity, a flickering intelligence. These marvelous traits could not be captured on stage because they are too subtle, too fragile. Her wonder can only be caused by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight. Only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever, is mad. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that’s wandering through her like a jailed spirit.”

—Tennessee’s Career Advice to MM

Marilyn did not always get along with Truman. When he learned of her secret trysts with playwright Arthur Miller, he spread the word.

One afternoon, during one of his visits with Marilyn in her new Manhattan apartment, she warned him, “I’ve got connections with Murder, Inc. I could have you bumped off if you don’t stop gossiping about Arthur Miller and me. We’renot ready to go public with our relationship yet. One call to Sam Giancana, and your wispy little voice will be heard no more.”

“Marilyn, how can you threaten me with such a thing? I’m completely loyal to you. Not a word of your affair with Arthur has escaped from my succulent mouth, which is being put to finer uses these days.”

“I bet!” she snapped, sarcastically.

Months later, in a letter to Cecil Beaton, Truman wrote: “By the time you get this, Marilyn Monroe will have married Arthur Miller. Saw them the other night, both looking suffused with a sexual glow. I can’t help feeling this little episode will be called Death of a Playwright.”

The saga of the Miller/Monroe romance became tabloid fodder, one headline citing them as THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE NAKED VENUS. Robert Levin, a magazine writer, claimed, “The upcoming marriage of the pin-up girl of the age and the nation’s foremost intellectual playwright seems preposterous.”
The New York Post
referred to the coupling as, “America’s number one representatives of the Body & the Mind.”

Marilyn told Truman, “We’re going to have the greatest kids in America. With my beauty and his brain, how can we go wrong?”

***

Although many scripts were presented to her, Marilyn did not work during the entire course of 1959. The role that interested her was that of Holly Go-lightly in Truman Capote’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, based on his best-selling novella, published that same year (1959).

“When I created the character of Holly, I had Marilyn in mind for the role,” Truman asserted.

To his friends, Truman referred to Marilyn as “unschooled, but enormously brilliant.”

At one point, he claimed that Marilyn had deliberately intended to “sabotage” Arthur Miller’s
The Misfits
through her aggressive lobbying for the role of Holly Golightly, which was eventually released as a movie in 1961. As her biographer, Barbara Leaming, put it, “She seemed eager to subvert Arthur’s plans. If he was willing to put up with anything to get his picture made, then she, apparently, was ready to do anything to stop it.”

“Meeting with Tennessee Williams and his lover, Frank Merlo, Marilyn presented her dilemma to him. “Which picture should I make? Arthur Miller’s
The Misfits
or Truman Capote’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

“It’s no contest,” Tennessee advised her. “Go for Capote’s Holly Golightly. Miller’s play is about rounding up mustangs for the slaughter house, where the meat will be canned as dog food. Is he out of his mind? Who would want to see a play about that?”

“Don’t condemn it too much,” Frank cautioned him. “After all, you wrote a play about beach hustlers cannibalizing a homosexual in Italy. I’d rather eat horse flesh that human flesh.”

“Of course, Holly is another slut role for me, but you’ve made up my mind for me,” she said.

“Slut roles can be fabulous,” Tennessee said. “I hear Elizabeth Taylor’s going to play a slut in
BUtterfield 8
.”

“Call that type casting,” Marilyn said.

Truman went on to work with Marilyn during his creation of two of the scenes from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, excerpts which she performed in front of the highly critical Actors Studio.

Later, Susan Strasberg recalled Marilyn’s performances of the scenes at the Actors Studio, but only after she’d seen the completed movie version. “It was a great moment for Marilyn and should have been captured on film. Audrey Hepburn, who eventually got the role, was wonderful, if you could believe such a delicate little creature could be a working whore. I don’t mean that Marilyn was sluttish, but she looked like she was familiar with the profession. Actually, she would have brought a dimension to
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
that Audrey didn’t. But Marilyn had earned such a bad press for all the delays on
Some Like It Hot
that Blake Edwards, the director, didn’t want to use her, fearing she’d break the bank.”

“Paramount Double-Crossed Me”
—Truman Capote

“Moon River Stays in the Picture”
—Audrey Hepburn

““I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.”

—Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The winds of autumn were blowing against the face of Truman Capote as he strolled Fifth Avenue in New York City. It was 1958, and his novella,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, had been published. He was window shopping the bookstores, all of which displayed his novella in their front windows.

His main character, a prostitute in spite of his denial, was on her way to becoming an iconic figure in American literature. Truman would later claim that of all the characters he’d created, Holly Golightly remained his favorite because of her free spirit.

Over the years, many women would be listed as the inspiration for the character of Holly, notably Marilyn Monroe. But other candidates included the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, Doris Lilly, Phoebe Pierce, Carol Marcus, and Oona Chaplin, wife of Charlie and the daughter of Eugene O’Neill. Many friends of Truman’s also felt he drew heavily upon the character of a young Nina Capote, his mother.

One woman unrelated to any aspect of Truman’s novella, Bonnie Golightly, was so angered by the use of her name that she sued for nearly a million dollars. Of course, the case was ridiculous and was thrown out of court. “I heard that the woman was fat and middle-aged,” Truman said. “That’s like Joan Crawford claiming that she was the basis for Lolita.”

Most of the novella’s reviews were favorable, and Truman felt he had a best-seller. The attacks, however, would be what he remembered. He was especially infuriated by novelist William Goyen, who reviewed
Breakfast
for
The New York Times Book Review
in an article that appeared on November 2, 1958.