The Genius and the Goddess (35 page)

Everyone wanted photos of Marilyn and Miller, but she refused to
pose with him. Yet
Inge Morath, a Magnum photographer who later
married Miller, saw them in their hotel room and captured a telling
moment in the dissolution of their marriage. Marilyn, wearing a low-cut
black dress, has pulled aside the gauzy curtains. She turns away
from Miller and looks out at the tacky town, shrouded under a smoky
sky. A huge ugly lamp stands between them. A gaunt Miller, cigarette
in his mouth and hands in his pocket, stares mournfully at her. The
dream had gone; the artistic triumph had become a personal disaster.

In
Timebends
Miller admitted that toward the end of the film he
could neither speak to nor help Monroe – who could not help herself
– and that his very presence provoked her fury: "I had no inkling of
what to do or say anymore and sensed she was in a rage against me
or herself or the kind of work she was doing. She seemed to be filling
with distrust not only for my opinions of her acting, but also for
Huston's." Miller wrote that when he came into her room as a doctor
was injecting her with Amytal, a barbiturate sedative, "She saw me
and began to scream at me to get out. . . . The screaming was too
terrible, and her distress in my presence canceled out any help I could
hope to give."
¹⁵
Paula, exacerbating the conflict for her own advantage
and achieving absolute authority over Monroe, persuaded her to
move out of Miller's hotel suite and live with her.

Rosten, noting the roles Miller had assumed, wrote that he'd once
been Marilyn's "teacher, lover, protector, father, and man of integrity
to shield her against the world's assaults, real or imagined." But he
was unable to sustain this impossible burden. He may have been too
paternal; she may have over-idealized him. As Clift observed, "All idols
fall eventually. Poor Marilyn, she can't keep anyone for long." Their
unhappiness was even greater because they could not separate.
Everyone knew they were intensely miserable and had to remain
together until the ordeal was over. Miller remarked, "I didn't even
ride home with her on the last day."
¹⁶
When they finally completed
the film in Hollywood on November 4, 1960, Marilyn appeared at
the end-of-shoot party and Miller drove back alone to the Beverly
Hills Hotel. When a journalist later asked if Marilyn was pleased with
the film, Miller replied, "I really don't know. I couldn't tell you. By
[the time the film was completed], we were hardly able to speak to
each other." Even Huston, at the end, was forced to communicate
with Marilyn through Paula.

The novelist and screenwriter
James Salter observed that with movie
stars, "their temperament and impossible behavior are part of the
appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and
frailties . . . modern deities should be no different." Miller sadly
observed, "I had written it to make Marilyn feel good. And for her,
it resulted in complete collapse. But at the same time, I am glad it
was done, because her dream was to be a serious actress. . . . I had
seen this film as a gift for her, and I came out of it without her."
¹⁷
Miller and Monroe were as mismatched as his misfit characters. The
happiest days of their marriage were the first and the last.

The Misfits
was a transitional work for Miller. He wrote it between
his early, hugely successful social plays, where the actors represent
large moral themes, and his later work, which is more personal,
more character-driven. He worked and reworked the material for
three years, combining, with considerable skill, the heroine of "Please
Don't Kill Anything" with the cowboys in his story "The Misfits" to
make the expanded film script of 1960. As he worked on the script
he developed the biographical parallels between himself and Gay,
Marilyn and Roslyn. He returned to the script again in 1961, when
he turned it into a novel, adding more description and dialogue to
deepen the connection of the characters and develop the dominant
themes.

Some details of Gay's life are based on Miller's experience. When
Saul Bellow lived next door to Miller at Pyramid Lake, he'd relieve
his tension by roaring into the wilderness. Gay and Roslyn echo this
strange habit by yelling across the prehistoric lake and calling into
the emptiness. Miller regretted the loss of his children, Robert and
Jane, after he was divorced from Mary and married Marilyn. After his
marriage breaks up, Gay regrets the loss of his children, another boy
and girl, who turn up for a moment at the rodeo and then suddenly
disappear into the crowd before he can introduce them to Roslyn.
The name of Gay's daughter, Rose-May, is close to Ros-lyn, who
replaces Rose-May, and becomes both Gay's daughter and lover.

Miller had shown his love for Monroe by devoting several years
of his life to writing the film script for her. Gay, who has never done
anything for a woman before, expresses his love for Roslyn by doing
all the chores around their house. Like the handy Miller, he cleans it
up, repairs the fireplace, windows and fence, mows the grass, plants
flowers and starts a vegetable garden. He buys the food, cooks it while
she sleeps late and serves her breakfast when she gets up. He wakes
her in the house and puts her to sleep in the desert. Gay asks in
The
Misfits
, as Miller recalls asking Monroe in
Timebends
, "What makes
you so sad? I think you're the saddest girl I ever met." Like Miller,
who hoped to rescue and rehabilitate Marilyn, Gay is completely
committed to Roslyn. He tries to teach her how to live and plans
to stay with her for ever. But Gay's bitter discovery that his best friend
was sleeping with his wife recalls Miller's humiliation over the affair
with Montand.

Guido, the most hypocritical and self-serving of the three
cowboys, comes from a Mediterranean background, has a foreign
name and is physically unattractive. These qualities suggest Miller's
close friend and early rival for Marilyn, the Greek born in Turkey,
Elia Kazan, who managed to sleep with her before Miller did. In
the film, Guido expresses his frustration and bitterly condemns
women with words that Miller often thought and felt, but never
allowed himself to use with Marilyn. When the drunken Guido
pounds the crooked boards into the side of his unfinished house
(which looks like an open-walled stage set and suggests his unwillingness
to become domesticated), he seems deranged and doomed.
When Roslyn rejects him, he erupts with fury about his inability to
please her, despite all he's done for her: "[Women are] all crazy! . . .
You try not to believe it. Because you need them. You need them
but they're crazy! . . . You struggle, you build, you try, you turn yourself
inside out for them, but nothing's ever enough! It's never a deal,
something's always missing. It's gotta be perfect or they put the spurs
to you! I know – I got the marks!"The spur that digs into the horse
and noose that remorselessly chokes the mustangs suggest Miller's
own sense of pain, entrapment and suffocation with Marilyn.

In the earlier story Gay thinks fondly and apprehensively of the
Eastern and educated Roslyn, who never actually appears. In the film,
Miller makes her Midwestern and uneducated to have her resemble
the real life Marilyn, and she becomes the main character. There are
many biographical parallels between Ros
lyn
and Mari
lyn
, which both
disturbed her and inspired her performance. Like Marilyn, Roslyn has
never had a real father or mother, misses her mother, and has never
finished high school. Despite her charm and warmth, Marilyn couldn't
maintain a stable relationship, constantly moved from place to place and
didn't know where she belonged. She felt she had no real friends, that
everyone was trying to exploit her and that she was completely alone
in the world. Roslyn's life, like Marilyn's, is a shambles. Her room is
chaotic and she can't memorize her lines for testimony in the divorce
court. Her assertion that her previous husband "persistently and cruelly
ignored my personal rights and wishes" echoes her charge against
DiMaggio. And Roslyn desperately wants to have children.

Marilyn saw herself as a tragic victim and often complained about
her troubles. In a sly allusion to Marilyn, Roslyn, speaking of Guido's
uncomplaining wife, says that a little complaining sometimes helps.
(Gay's wife, like Guido's, had never complained about him.) Marilyn
moved into and decorated a new house with Miller in Roxbury, just
as Roslyn does with Gay. Miller once told me, as we looked over the
grounds of his house, "You know, Marilyn lived here." I asked, "Was
she happy?" and he replied, "Nothing could make Marilyn happy." At
the end of the film, furious about the imminent slaughter of the mustangs,
Roslyn screams at Gay, "
I hate you!
" which reflects Marilyn's public
anger at both Miller and his script. Instead of using a traditional close-up,
Huston filmed her in a long shot as a tiny figure, standing alone
amid the sun-charred and eroded rocks of the lunar landscape. She
rages not only against the cowboys, who need all this wilderness to
feel free, but also against the hostile universe. Emphasizing the similarities
between Marilyn and Roslyn, Miller remarked, "Off-screen she
was a lot like on-screen excepting when she got angry. She wouldn't
show that, excepting I had her do it in the last scene of
The Misfits
,
when she was furious at them for capturing the horses. Then she was
quite a different person, and she became herself: quite paranoid."
¹

J.M. Coetzee observed that Miller wrote
The Misfits
at the "end of a
long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America's western
frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche."
Miller called the film an "Eastern Western" that described the meaninglessness
of our lives. He portrays a debased rather than triumphant
version of two archetypal Western experiences: the rodeo and the
round-up. In the rodeo, where a bucking-strap with nails digs into
the horse's belly and makes him furious, Perce gets thrown and
battered, and Gay finds but immediately loses his children. In the
round-up, where the last cowboys kill the last mustangs – both are a
dying breed – the beautiful wild horses are transformed into dead
meat. The critic
Leslie Fiedler noted that Miller also reverses the
archetypal plots of
Gary Cooper's westerns, from
The Virginian
(1929)
to
High Noon
(1952). In these movies, "a conflict between a man and
a woman, representing, respectively, the chivalric code of the West and
the pacifism of Christianity, ends with the capitulation of the woman,
and the abandonment of forgiveness in favour of force."
²

Roslyn is not only modeled on Marilyn but also recalls the character
of Cherie, whom Marilyn played in
Bus Stop
. Both women live
with a lady friend in a boarding house; have worked as exotic (or
striptease) dancers in cheap nightclubs; can't bear the cruelty and
danger when watching the rodeo; inspire the love of cowboys who
are determined to marry them; and are kissed by their fully dressed
lovers while naked in bed.
The Misfits
reframes
Bus Stop
in a modern
context. Though Bo in
Bus Stop
is a real cowboy, with his own ranch
and cattle in Montana, he's a shallow and one-dimensional character.
His values are those of the western myth of hard work, limitless land
and the promise of prosperity. Gay and Perce, transcending the western
clichés of the earlier movie and showing how hard it really is to make
a living, have unusual complexity and depth.

In the beginning of
The Misfits
, at the courthouse and in the casino,
Roslyn wears a black hat, black dress and high heels; at the end, acclimatized
to the rough house and sweltering desert, she has pigtails and
western clothes. None of the men understand the naïve yet enigmatic
Roslyn, but they all fall in love with her. Anxious, frightened,
suffering, angry and in pain, she expresses simple, sometimes simpleminded,
New Age wisdom. She says that the garden seeds, though
tiny, "still know they're supposed to be lettuces!" and that "Birds must
be brave to live out here. Especially at night. . . . Whereas they're so
small, you know?" Intuitive rather than rational, sympathizing with
all hunted creatures and haunted men, she passionately undermines
the mustangers' macho beliefs.She makes the cowboys, whom Roslyn's
friend Isabelle calls the last real men left in the world, feel guilty
about expressing their primitive instincts and taking part in the exhilarating
hunt.

Roslyn's rapturous dance around the tree near Guido's house reveals
Miller's physical passion for Marilyn. It portrays, Coetzee wrote, "a
diffuse and . . . forlorn sensuality, to which neither Guido's sexual
predatoriness nor Gay's old-fashioned suave courtliness is an adequate
response." This lyrical scene, to everyone's surprise, provoked the
overzealous film censors. Marilyn's reputation (created by the studios)
as a hot, sensual woman was too much for the Catholic Church.
Miller recalled, "the gravest displeasure was expressed with a scene in
which Marilyn Monroe, in a mood of despair and frustration – fully
clothed, it should be said – walks out of a house and embraces a tree
trunk. In all seriousness this scene was declared to be masturbation."
³

The Misfits
is artfully structured and the thematic parallels are as
forceful as the biographical ones. The tender-hearted Roslyn repeatedly
pleads to save all living creatures from harm: the reckless, self-destructive
Perce, the vegetable-nibbling rabbits, Gay's dog that trembles
and snaps at her as the horses approach, and finally the captured
mustangs themselves. In the story, Gay's dog is a bitch called Margaret.
In the film, the dog is a male, ominously named Tom Dooley after a
man who's murdered his girlfriend and is hanged for the crime. In
touching scenes, Roslyn first comforts the bandaged, drunken Perce
near a garbage heap outside the bar, and then consoles the drunken
Gay after he loses his children, climbs onto a car and collapses in the
street. Her sympathetic bond with Perce seems even stronger than
her sexual union with Gay. After winning a lot of money from bets
on her dynamic paddleball performance in the bar-room (one of the
best scenes in the film), Roslyn tries to pay Perce, who's been thrown
and injured by the bucking bronco, not to ride the bull in the rodeo.
She also tries to buy the captured mustangs from Gay. Both men
proudly reject her well-intentioned but humiliating bribes. Guido and
Perce both offer to free the mustangs in order to please Roslyn and
win her love. Gay knocks Roslyn out of the way as he's trying to
rescue Perce from the wild bull and again as she pulls at the rope
he's using to tie up a wild mustang. Gay watches Perce get battered
by the bronco and the bull; Perce watches Gay get battered by the
stallion in the desert.

Like the characters in Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
(1926),
wounded and traumatized by the Great War, the pathetic and lonely
men in
The Misfits
are psychologically damaged and unable to adjust
to ordinary life. (Courage is tested in the novel by the bullfight and
in the film by the mustang hunt.) "The striking thing about these
characters," Miller said, "was they were internally drifting without it
being painful to them. They had a wonderful independence and at
the same time they weren't tough." All the characters suffer from
disappointed ambitions. Guido had wanted to be a doctor, Perce a
rodeo champ and rancher, Gay a husband and father, Roslyn a serious
dancer until it got "changed around into something bad." Their
domestic life has been destroyed. Guido has lost his wife and baby in
childbirth; Perce has lost his father in a hunting accident. Gay was
betrayed by his wife, who divorced him; Perce by the step-father who
stole the family ranch. Even Isabelle was divorced by her husband,
who married her best friend. They all feel, like Hamlet, that the time
is out of joint.

All the men try to prove their masculinity: Perce by riding a bronco
in the rodeo, Gay by lassoing mustangs from a truck, Guido by daredevil
flying in his decrepit plane. But Perce is a physical wreck; and
Guido's plane leaks oil, needs repairs, and like Gay's truck, is falling
apart. Guido, who'd been an Army Air Force pilot, now performs a
parodic reprise of his glorious exploits. Guido sees his military combat
as heroic; Roslyn, unimpressed by his wartime missions, equates
bombing with mustanging. Both, in her view, butcher helpless victims.
Using machines – a plane and a truck – to capture the six mustangs,
makes the vital animals seem helpless and tragic. Gay echoes Roslyn
and voices their desperation by exclaiming, "it just got changed around,
see? I'm doin' the same thing I ever did. It's just that they . . . they
changed it around. . . . They smeared it all over with blood, turned
it into shit and money just like everything else."
⁴