The Genius and the Goddess (32 page)

Marilyn was attracted to Montand's Italian origins, shared his impoverished
background and admired his political commitment. His
extreme uneasiness about acting in English – a language that he (unlike
Signoret) could barely speak – made him especially appealing. Though
she still had to be dragged out of her dressing room, Marilyn tried
to put him at his ease. As they began to work together, she warned
him, "You're going to see what it means to shoot with the worst
actress in the world," and he confessed, "So you're scared. . . . Think
of me a little bit. I'm lost." He later noted that "In Marilyn there was
without any doubt a constant and obsessive awareness of her limitations,
the conviction that she was not the great actress she longed to
be." In a notebook entry, made while shooting the picture, she anxiously
asked herself, "What am I afraid of ? Why am I so afraid? Do I think
I can't act? I know I can act but I am afraid."
¹²
In practice she guarded
her talent and stayed within her limits, but she also dreamed of
transcending them.

A crisis occurred in the midst of the shooting, when the Screen
Writers Guild went on strike. Despite the strike, Marilyn pressured Miller
to rewrite the final scenes of Norman Krasna's weak script. Miller later
recalled that the movie "had no story," which added to the strain
Marilyn felt. "Before production," he said, "I did some rewriting of
a couple of scenes. I tried to give some point between these two
featureless figures. When they talked, there was no character, no motivation,
so I stepped in and did what I could for the script. But we
were beating a dead horse. It was obvious that all this didn't help any.
It was an additional load to bear." In
Timebends
, Miller did not mention
either breaking the strike or the $25,000 he was paid for his work.
Despite his somewhat humiliating and ultimately useless script-doctoring,
Miller sadly wrote, "it was plain that her inner desperation
was not going to let up, and it was equally clear that literally
nothing I knew to do could slow her destructive process."

Miller then returned to New York, just as he'd done during a
similar crisis in
Showgirl
, leaving Marilyn alone with Montand. Miller
later acknowledged his motives for leaving when he said, "I guess our
marriage was deteriorating." Marilyn, he noted, continued the recurrent
pattern with many men in her life: hero-worship, followed by
disillusionment: "Marilyn was looking at Montand rather idolatrously
and she couldn't realize that he was not this tower of strength. At any
period of her life, the oncoming stranger was vitally important. He
or she was invested with immense promise, which of course was
smashed when this person was discovered to be human."

One day, after Montand had spent hours preparing for a difficult
scene and Marilyn, without notifying him, had failed to turn up for
work, he slipped an angry note under her door. Deeply upset, Marilyn
called Miller in Ireland, where he had gone to work with John Huston
on the script of
The Misfits
. Like a distant nanny, he then called the
Montands and begged them, "Please do me a favor and go knock on
Marilyn's door. She's there, she's told me all about it, she doesn't know
what to do. She's ashamed." When they confronted her, Marilyn wept
and confessed, "I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad. I won't do it again, I
promise!"
¹³

Signoret won an Oscar that year for her role in
Room at the Top
.
She stayed on in Hollywood to attend the ceremony on April 4, and
soon after returned to Europe to make her next film. The sudden
disappearance of Signoret and Miller put Montand in an enticing yet
awkward position, with Marilyn in the dominant role. As Montand
told a friend, "He's leaving me with Marilyn and our apartments are
adjoining. Do you think that Arthur doesn't know that she is beginning
to throw herself at me? After all, I'm a man and we're going to
be working together, thrown together on the set, and I don't want
the responsibility. I can't alienate her because I'm dependent upon
her good will and I want to work with her." Montand, a well-known
philanderer, also explained his feelings for Marilyn and her need for
affection as her marriage began to break up:

What contributed enormously to bringing us together was, first,
that we both came from poor backgrounds and, second, Marilyn's
behavior during the witch hunt, when she wholeheartedly
supported Miller, to the fury of the studios. But there was also
something deeper. My affection for her grew once I realized
her vulnerability, her lucidity, her true sadness at not being given
a real part to play in our movie

—though Montand's part was even worse than hers.

According to Montand, their emotions reached a fever pitch when
the ubiquitous Paula Strasberg, playing the role of procurer, urged
them on. She wanted to regain complete control of Marilyn by
replacing Miller with the more amenable Montand. "'Go and say
goodnight to Marilyn,' Paula said. 'It'll make her feel better. It's bothering
her that she can't rehearse.'" As he entered Marilyn's room,
Montand wrote, the flame suddenly ignited:

I sat on the side of the bed and patted her hand. "Do you have
a fever?" "A little, but it'll be okay. I'm glad to see you." "So am
I, I'm glad to see you." "How was your day?" "Good, good."
The dullest exchange you can imagine. I still had a half-page to
work on for the next day. I bent down to put a goodnight kiss
on her cheek. And her head turned, and my lips went wild. It
was a wonderful, tender kiss. I was half stunned, stammering. I
straightened up, already flooded with guilt, wondering what was
happening to me. I didn't wonder for long.

Signoret, a woman of the world, believed that winning her Oscar had
"delighted" Marilyn. But Marilyn, who was not nominated for
Some
Like It Hot
, explained why she really fell for Montand: "I think it was
when she got the Oscar. I was so jealous. I wanted to say, 'You've got
the Oscar, but I've got Yves.'"
¹⁴

Their well-publicized affair lasted from April to late June 1960.
Miller, far more complaisant than Joe DiMaggio, lost Marilyn's respect
by refusing to fight for her, by tolerating and even passively encouraging
her affair with Montand. After the affair was reported in the
newspapers, Marilyn both accepted responsibility for her behavior and
tried to justify it: "No wonder they all feel sorry for Arthur. It makes
me look like a tramp. And Arthur looks so pitiful, too; God, I don't
blame them for hating me. I know he'd never hurt me – he'd do
anything [for me]. But we're wrong, the two of us – this marriage is
all wrong."

On August 22 the English author Christopher Isherwood, who
lived in Los Angeles, recorded that "Signoret had been visiting [the
English actress]
Mary Ure, and moaning because Yves [has had] this
affair with Monroe. Arthur Miller doesn't care, it seems. But Simone
and Mary shed tears and got drunk." Both actresses understood that
intense but shallow affairs during the staging of a play or the making
of a film were common in their profession. But if you were the injured
party, it hurt just the same. In her surprisingly generous and sympathetic
portrait of Marilyn, Signoret wrote that "she irritated me" and
"it was a bit tedious to listen to her," but "I never detested her."
¹⁵
Like Miller, Signoret was hurt more by the public humiliation than
by her spouse's infidelity.

When Marilyn, always subject to romantic delusions, told Miller
that Montand was going to leave Signoret and marry her, he gently
said, "You know that isn't true." Montand confirmed this and then,
with Gallic
savoir vivre
, speculated (like Mailer) about the dubious
prospects of life with Marilyn: "Not for a moment did I think of
breaking with my wife, not for a moment; but if she had slammed
the door on me, I would probably have made my life with Marilyn.
Or tried to. That was the direction we were moving in. Maybe it
would have lasted only two or three years. I didn't have too many
illusions. Still, what years they would have been!" Montand was caught
in the same net of pity and love that ensnared Miller, but managed
to extricate himself in time. And like Miller, Montand seemed willing
to risk everything for Marilyn.

When the filming was over, Montand left Hollywood. Unwilling
to accept reality, Marilyn (as she so often did) played the role of pursuer
and seducer. On June 30 she intercepted him, en route to Paris, at the
New York airport. She'd booked a nearby hotel room and filled it
with flowers and bottles of champagne. "[Montand] turned down the
hotel but accepted the champagne. He and Marilyn said farewell in a
rented Cadillac limousine, slumped for three or four hours in the back
of a heavy, air-conditioned vehicle, nibbling caviar and sipping champagne.
Montand kissed Marilyn and told her gently that he had no
intention of leaving Simone." Throughout that summer and fall Marilyn
– sad, lonely and
désolée
– tried to recapture him. She sent endless
letters and telegrams, made desperate phone calls summoning him to
New York and threatened to turn up in Paris. But Montand, across
the ocean, securely back with his wife and pursuing his career in
Europe, was now immune to her temptations. Marilyn's unhappy
marriages were punctuated by her unhappy love-affairs.

The plot of
Let's Make Love
, a heavy-handed romantic comedy,
stuffed with tedious song-and-dance numbers that seemed antiquated
the day they were choreographed, is absurd even by Hollywood standards.
Marilyn plays an aspiring actress in an off-Broadway musical
that satirizes Montand, a French-born New York business tycoon.
Distressed about the bad publicity in the show, he attends the rehearsal
incognito and is hired as an actor to play himself. He falls in love
with Marilyn, who at first refuses to believe he's really a billionaire,
but finally succumbs to his irresistible mixture of charm and cash.

The movie begins with a long prologue, spoken by a narrator and
illustrated by cartoon drawings, about the history of Montand's family's
fortunes. In a double entendre, his ancestor (like Montand) "was interested
in balloons of every kind." Montand appears wearing an
incongruous derby hat, has a strong French accent and – though he
supposedly speaks six languages – seems uneasy in English. Like
William Powell in
How to Marry a Millionaire
, he owns a skyscraper
with his name on the façade.

Marilyn first appears in a long violet sweater over black tights and
slides down a fireman's pole onto the stage. A slightly chubby, adult
Lolita, she renders "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" with bump-and-grind
movements and exaggerated infantile gestures. Her character
has some obvious similarities to Marilyn herself. Always eager to learn,
she takes night classes, and uses Yiddish words, learned from Miller,
like "
mishugenah
." Miller contributed an old vaudeville joke which
falls terribly flat: Montand tells a doorman "Call me a taxi" and the
doorman says "You're a taxi."When Marilyn is deceitful, she imitates
Jack Lemmon's urgent reminder in
Some Like It Hot
– "I'm a girl,
I'm a girl, I'm a girl" – by repeating, "I'm a louse, I'm a louse, I'm
a louse."

The dialogue also reflects the stars' real life entanglement. Echoing
his pleas for assistance, Montand asks Marilyn, "I hope you'll help
me. I've never been on stage before" and begs her to "Give me some
acting pointers. I know you can help me."The scenes in which
Bing
Crosby and
Gene Kelly (in cameo roles) are hired to teach Montand
(a great star in Europe) how to sing and dance are meant to be funny,
but are merely embarrassing. In the movie Montand tells the serene
and sweet young woman, "You seem 'appy. At 'ome wherever you
are," whereas he is really addressing an emotionally unstable Marilyn,
whose marriage to Miller he was helping to destroy. Frankie Vaughan,
Marilyn's boyfriend in the movie, is finally replaced by Montand, who
actually supplanted Miller.

In contrast to his furious telegrams to Wilder, Miller praised the
director George Cukor for his sympathetic treatment of Marilyn
during the shooting. Miller knew the picture was important to her
and to Cukor, but "the precious days and weeks of her life which
your patience and skill and understanding have made humanly meaningful
to her" were even more important. Miller had never known
her so happy at work, so hopeful about her prospects, so prepared to
forget the worst of her doubts. Cukor, he wrote, "must know now
some of the reasons why she is so precious to me" and would understand
Miller's sincere respect for him.
¹⁶
The end result, however, had
little to do with the director's treatment of the star. Despite Wilder's
anger and Cukor's benevolence,
Some Like It Hot
is a great film and
Let's Make Love
is a dud.

Let's Make Love
was another stage in Miller's
via dolorosa
. Marilyn
constantly forced him into intolerable positions: go-between with
directors, non-stop worker on her behalf, script-scab, defender in
telegrams, long-distance apologist, writer of thank-you notes – and
public cuckold. Frequently and knowingly manipulated, he seemed
willing to take almost anything – though he occasionally managed
to escape to New York or Ireland. He still loved Marilyn, despite her
faults, but was as obsessed with his career as she was with hers. He
wanted to remain loyal to her and continued to work on his beloved
script of
The Misfits
.

In the screenplay of
The Misfits
, Miller focused on two main elements
of the story: his fascination with
Marilyn's traumatized personality
and his interest in the rough cowboys he had known in Nevada. He
first used each subject separately in two short stories. Eventually, he
found a way to unite the two elements in a screenplay and novel,
relating the characters to each other and setting them in the context
of Reno and the Nevada landscape.

Miller captured an essential quality of Marilyn's character, and the
hold she had on his heart, when he portrayed her as the heroine of
his story,
"Please Don't Kill Anything." In
Timebends
he described the
vivid incident that inspired the tale, which took place during the
summer of 1957 in Amagansett, a year after their marriage. Marilyn
perplexed the local fishermen "by running along the shore to throw
back the gasping 'junk' fish they had no use for and had flung from
their nets. There was a touching but slightly unnerving intensity in
her then, an identification that was unhealthily close to her own death
fear."

The heroine of the story – tense, startled and afraid – expresses
her own vulnerability and pain by a neurotic sensitivity to the cruel
treatment of the doomed yet still living fish. As she tries to throw
them back, a retriever, following his natural instinct, shows the futility
of her efforts by fetching them out of the water and bringing them
back to the shore. The man (or husband) in the story "worshiped her
fierce tenderness toward all that lived." But he also knows she must
learn that "she did not die with the moths and the spiders and the
fledgling birds and, now, with these fish." He tries to teach her that
"victims make other victims," that fish, a part of the natural cycle,
must die so that men can eat, and must be allowed to die in peace
or agony. Still unconvinced by his arguments and unwilling to "make
other victims," she naïvely claims that some of the fish, if thrown back
into the sea, will "live as long as they can." He manages to tease her
out of this notion by personifying the fish and ironically agreeing
that "they'll live to a ripe old age and grow prosperous and dignified."
The story, told from the man's point of view, suggests that the
woman's reverence for life is hysterical and absurd, yet poignant,
humane and endearing. But her failure to learn and acknowledge the
principle of survival makes her dangerously neurotic and threatens
the future of their marriage.

A.J. Liebling's "The Mustang Buzzers," which appeared in the
New
Yorker
of April 3 and 10, 1954, two years before Miller went to Nevada,
was an unacknowledged source for the film. It described the essential
background of
The Misfits
, which mainly takes place forty miles
north of Reno, at Pyramid Lake:

There are herds of wild horses in the mountains north of the
lake, And a mustanger catches them for the horse-meat market. . . .

[An airplane pilot] would cruise through the canyons until
he spotted a band of mustangs – usually an old stallion with
some mares and young horses. Then he would buzz them and
start them off in the general direction of the corral, steering
them from the air and firing a shotgun at their tails when they
seemed disposed to dally. In the end, after a run of from fifteen
to twenty-five miles, he would edge them toward the open end
of the corral.
¹

Liebling's cheerful title and mannered diction ("disposed to dally"),
indifference to the shotgun and suggestion that there were plenty of
horses to fill the corral are quite different from Miller's emphasis on
the fate of the desperately galloping horses and the tragic futility of the
hunt.

In the spring of 1956, while waiting out his divorce in the Nevada
desert, Miller met some real mustangers and watched their round-up.
After only six weeks, the urban easterner developed an intuitive feeling
for the western cowboys and wrote a story,
"The Misfits," which realistically
portrayed their speech, thought, work and values. This version
focuses on three vulnerable, lonely men and their hunt for wild
mustangs. Two of them are ordinary cowboys with rather fancy names:
Gay (for Gaylord) Langland and Perce (for Percy or Percival) Howland.
The similarity of their last names seems to connect them and emphasizes
their relation to the wild and empty land. Their backgrounds
are briefly sketched. Gay, aged forty-five and older than the others,
has an ex-wife and two children living nearby, whom he hasn't seen
for several years. He discovered her having sex with a man in a car,
beat him up and got divorced. Perce, the youngest, is an expert bronco
rider. He's deeply attached to his mother, and wants to phone her
and reassure her that he's not been injured in the rodeos. Sympathetic
yet lacking self-confidence, he admits, "I'm never goin' to amount to
a damn thing." In the story Perce is Gay's unequal rival for Roslyn,
who's merely mentioned and doesn't actually appear. Guido Racanelli,
a widower who'd been a bomber pilot in Germany during the war,
flies the plane that drives the wild horses out of the mountains.
Though a man of action, he was unable to save his pregnant wife,
who died suddenly at home, and hasn't wanted a woman since then.

Up in the air, in a battered old plane that flies perilously close to
the mountains, Guido shoots eagles (because they kill lambs), and uses
a shotgun to frighten the mustangs and keep them racing toward their
doom. Once the horses reach the lake, the men pursue them in an
open pickup truck, with Guido driving and Gay and Perce lassoing
them when they get close enough to throw the rope. The cowboys
anchor them with heavy truck tires tied to the ropes and, in a risky
maneuver, bind their rearing legs. They leave the horses trussed up
on the desert floor, to be collected the next morning by the butcher.

Miller describes the setting of the hunt as "a prehistoric lake bed
thirty miles long by seventeen miles wide, couched between the two
mountain ranges." Echoing Genesis 1:2, "And the earth was without
form, and void," he writes, "It was a flat, beige waste without grass
or bush or stone." He also uses biblical diction and rhythm to suggest
the archaic nature of both the lake and the hunt: "When there was
something to be done in a place he stayed there, and when there
was nothing to be done he went from it." Gay wrestling with the
stallion to test and prove himself suggests Jacob wrestling with the angel
of the Lord in Genesis 32:24.

As always Miller is interested in how his male characters struggle,
and often fail, to make a living. These men, misfits who have no families
and can't fit into conventional society, prefer this highly skilled
but low-paying work to tamely slaving away in a grocery store or
gas station. "Anything," they repeat, "is better than wages." The skinny
horses are also misfits. They're too small for adults to ride, can't run
cattle and cost more to ship than they're worth. Even the spooky
desert landscape is a geographical misfit, good for nothing but capturing
and killing.

Guido is fully committed to the hunt, but Perce and Gay realize
the futility, even absurdity of their quest. Perce, who belongs nowhere,
voices the fundamental objections by remarking, "These mountains
must be cleaned out by now. . . . I never feel comfortable takin' these
horses for chicken feed. . . . Just seems to me they belong up there."
Gay tries to answer him, but evades the real issue. He rather weakly
asserts that someone else will capture the horses if they don't, that
they're eating good grazing grass and that they'll be shot if the cattle
ranchers find them.

After the horses are finally captured, Gay echoes Perce's objections,
anticipates Roslyn's sympathy for the captured colt and admits
that they've worked three days for only thirty-five dollars each. Even
Gay's dog, like the retriever in "Please Don't Kill Anything," senses
a violation of the natural order. She quivers nervously, as if the
ground were filled with hidden explosives, when the horses approach
the dried-out lake. The snarling dog has eaten horse meat and will
eat it again. Perce, compressing the whole ghastly process of turning
vital mustangs into dog food, and stressing moral over monetary
values, regretfully says, "There's wild horses in the can." Despite all
his doubts and his inability to explain his own feelings, Gay still
believes the hunt has gone "the way it ought to be even if he could
never explain it to her or anyone else."
²
He drives home feeling
content and with his values intact. The great irony of the story is
that the apparently free men, subjected to economic pressures, are
forced to work like slaves for whatever low price the dog-meat
canners will pay. Miller's story is characteristically framed in social
and economic terms, but his love for Marilyn had stimulated his
interest in the moral dimensions of hunting wild creatures and killing
them for profit.

Miller worked intensely and created most of his plays in a rush of
inspiration. He wrote
Death of a Salesman
in five weeks,
The Crucible
in seven weeks,
A View from the Bridge
in three weeks,
After the Fall
in a year and
The
Creation of the World and Other Business
in six weeks.
Though he had written an earlier screenplay,
The Hook
, he had a
great deal of trouble with
The Misfits
(his first script to be made into
a film), and worked on it for three years. Miller lost a lot of time
because he was no longer in total control of his work. In this collaborative
effort he had to defer to the director, John Huston, who was
nine years older and infinitely more experienced in making movies.
Huston knew, far better than he, how to transform words and ideas
into images and action. Miller also had difficulty writing a script especially
for Marilyn. She craved his attention and knew she'd inspired
him, but objected to playing a role that seemed to analyze and expose
her real self. Alternately encouraging and berating him, she was never
satisfied with the finished product, and constantly criticized his portrayal
of the character as they were filming.

On July 14, 1958, Miller sent a description of his story to Huston
at his Irish country home, St. Clerans, in Galway:"I'm writing to you
to offer you an original screenplay I've written. . . . The setting is the
Nevada back country, concerns two cowboys, a bush pilot, a girl, and
the last of the mustangs up in the mountains. . . . The script is an
early draft. If you are interested I'd want to sit and talk over my
notions of further developments and of course would like to hear
yours." Miller also mentioned that Marilyn would star in the film
and, in a rather muddled apology, blamed Milton Greene for hurting
her relations with Huston, who'd directed her first significant picture,
The Asphalt Jungle
: "Marilyn is available for the girl and since her
break-up with one Milton Greene she has sometimes wanted somehow
to let you know she was put in a position vis-à-vis you which was
not of her doing and for which she felt and still feels badly. Tell you
the truth I can't recall what it was all about but it probably no longer
matters anyway."

Huston was drawn to the rough life of the competitive but closely
bonded male characters and to the challenge of shooting the exciting
scenes with wild horses. He read the script and, eager to direct the
film, cabled back a single word: "Magnificent." On October 5, Miller,
with a bit of forced enthusiasm and an unrealistic view of the future,
told Huston: "Not since
Salesman
have I felt such eagerness to see
something of mine performed. . . . I have a sense that we are all
moving into one of those rare productions when everything touched
becomes alive. . . . What started as a revision [of an earlier work]
became a door opening into what was for me a strange and quite
exhilarating new world. . . . Marilyn asks to be remembered to you,
as always; she is slowly getting onto tiptoe for the great day."

On June 16, 1959, after a year of revisions, Miller – in another
rather strained letter – tried to reassure Huston about the value of
the script. He said he was newly enamored with the story and, after
making it more personal, no longer approached it from a telescopic
distance. He felt his characters had come alive and that the movie
would break the heart of the audience. He was continuing to revise
and was now very keen to do the work.
³
In the spring of 1960, when
Marilyn was shooting
Let's Make Love
and about to become involved
with Montand, Miller flew from New York to Ireland to work on
the script with Huston. A French journalist on the scene optimistically
wrote, "Miraculously and all at once, these two completely
different and often opposed characters are marvelously in agreement
in the clear, quiet and hard-working atmosphere of St. Clerans."

Angela Allen, Huston's script supervisor, recalled that he had a far
stronger personality than Miller and knew much more about films.
Though Huston had called the screenplay "magnificent," he always
prodded and pushed his writers to revise the script. Huston himself
was a superb screenwriter, but he wouldn't rewrite an author he
respected and made Miller do the work himself. Driven by Huston
and exhausted by Marilyn, whenever he reached an impasse Miller
would exclaim, "I can't think of anything else." But they went on
and on, month after month, year after year, trying out many different
endings but not improving the script. During the shooting Huston
insisted that Miller revise the dialogue every day and late into the
night (which made it much more difficult for Marilyn to memorize
the constantly changing lines). Miller even continued to revise some
scenes that had to be reshot
after
the film was finished.