The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (41 page)

N
o experience can be quite as ephemeral as working on a motion picture. Over a period of weeks, or months—or what can seem an eternity—a group of diversely egocentric, engaging, neurotic people are thrown together in an intense crucible of cinematic activity. Members of a film company on location live and work together for long hours in a gathering of crafts and talents—working in unison until the last shadowy image is captured on the last frame. Friendships and bonds form. Love affairs and hate affairs begin and end—end and begin. Secrets are shared, promises made, loyalties avowed, animosities affirmed. There's a sense among cast and crew that they're involved in something special—something beyond the ordinary and above the commonplace.
Important
people and
big
money are involved in something
big
and
important
. The
now
takes on special significance
above
and
beyond
and…

Suddenly it's over.

They all go their separate ways—off to other pictures, vacations, the unemployment line. Cast and crew members seldom see each other again. For Marilyn it must have been reminiscent of going from foster home to foster home, school to school. Perhaps that's why she had accumulated
her “family” of trusted friends and coworkers who went with her from picture to picture.

The Misfits
was Marilyn's twenty-ninth and final completed film in an astonishing career that spanned sixteen years. The motion picture was to be a tribute to Marilyn from her husband, one of the world's most distinguished dramatists. Not only was it to be directed by one of Marilyn's favorite directors, John Huston, but her costar would be her lifelong idol, Clark Gable, and the film was to be produced by the Millers' friend Frank Taylor. All her favorites—her family, as she called them—would be behind the camera supporting her: coach Paula Strasberg, masseur Ralph Roberts, secretary May Reis, makeup artist Allan “Whitey” Snyder, hairdressers Sidney Guilaroff and Agnes Flanagan, limousine driver Rudy Kautzky, stand-in Evelyn Moriarty, and publicist Rupert Allan. What could go wrong?

Everything.

On the afternoon of July 20, 1960, Marilyn Monroe arrived in Reno on a United DC-7 from Los Angeles. She was met by Arthur Miller, Frank Taylor, Rupert Allan, the Reno press, and hundreds of fans who waited patiently for a half-hour for her to finally emerge from the plane. It was explained that she had been changing her clothes in the ladies' room, but Sidney Guilaroff later disclosed that she was having trouble with her wig. Because the start date of
The Misfits
was delayed by the actors' and writers' strike, which had interrupted production of
Let's Make Love
, she was rushing from one production to another with only three weeks' respite between pictures. According to Guilaroff her hair had been damaged by the constant bleaching and setting during the production at Fox, and it was decided at the last minute that she would have to wear a wig during filming of
The Misfits
. She never liked the idea of the wig, which was being restyled on the plane from L.A. to Reno.

She now faced a lengthy and difficult production schedule on a very rigorous film, shooting six days a week in the intense heat of the desert. She arrived exhausted and suffering from physical and emotional pain. The three most important men in her life had deceived her: Montand had made
le grand sortie
, JFK had charmingly taken advantage of her naïveté, and Miller, she felt, had used her. She was also suffering from a persistent pain in her right side and bouts of indigestion. But the production gears of
The Misfits
had been set in motion. Any further delay, she was told, risked the danger of losing Gable and Huston, who had
other commitments. She arrived with a purse full of painkillers. But nothing would kill the pain of filming
The Misfits
.

Rupert Allan commented that Marilyn was “desperately unhappy at having to read lines written by Miller that were obviously documenting the real-life Marilyn.” Though Roslyn was supposed to be based on Marilyn, and much of the dialogue and situations had been drawn from the Millers' life together, Marilyn felt that the character of Roslyn had inconsistencies—she was too passive, voiced platitudes, and needed to be humanized. Marilyn had never been satisfied with the script, and when she arrived in Reno Miller was still making revisions on the screenplay he had been working on for over three years. When production finally started she found herself faced with playing the most difficult role of her career—a misconstrued concept of herself. Miller had begun
The Misfits
as an homage to his wife, a testimonial of his enduring love, but it ended as a painful reminder of their failed marriage.

Rumors quickly spread on the set that the president of Marilyn Monroe Productions wasn't so lovey-dovey with the vice president—that they were headed for divorce. Though the Millers shared a suite at the Mapes Hotel, where the rest of the cast and crew were also staying, they were rarely seen together and drove to locations in separate cars.

John Huston wasn't fully prepared for the problems he encountered with Marilyn. “I first noticed her condition when we started production,” Huston recalled. “She was very late, and apparently she had been on narcotics for some time…. Her eyes had a strange look, and as time went on her condition worsened.”

Huston had met with Marilyn only once, briefly, since filming
The Asphalt Jungle
, and neither person was exactly the same. Huston's cynicism had blossomed into flowers of artful sadism, and Marilyn had blossomed into a consummate actress, while the sadness of her private life had reached the lower depths. She looked different in
The Misfits
. The wig subtly subtracted from her vibrancy, and her heavily mascaraed eyes, which hid some of the “strange look,” may have worked for the character of Roslyn the Reno divorcee, but it wasn't exactly the same Marilyn—not the Marilyn of
The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop
, and
Some Like It Hot
. Exhaustion, pain, and disappointment were taking their toll. The lumens had imperceptibly dimmed, though it wasn't apparent to the constant flow of reporters and photographers who visited the set.

Alice McIntyre of
Esquire
described Marilyn as “astonishingly beautiful.
Like nothing human you have ever seen or dreamed!” Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson saw her radiant beauty as “a certain myth of what we call in France
la femme eternelle
.” One of the photographers who may have noted a less than eternal
femme
was Inge Morath of Magnum, who arrived in Reno with Cartier-Bresson and stayed on to become the next Mrs. Arthur Miller.

Marilyn looked forward to working with Gable, who had arrived in Reno with his wife Kay. Gable had a special understanding of and feeling for Marilyn. Always a gentleman, he treated her with paternal concern throughout the production, though privately he complained about her lateness. A thorough professional, he couldn't comprehend what took Marilyn so long to get onto the set. Gable said to his agent George Chasin that he appreciated Marilyn's work as an actress but wondered, “What the hell is that girl's problem? I like her, but I damn near go nuts waiting for her to show.”

He never showed his impatience on the set, however. When she was late, he was heard to remark jokingly, “Why is it that sexy women are never on time?” Or sometimes he would pinch her, wink, and say, “Get to work, beautiful.” Sensing her distress and exhaustion, Gable always made sure she had a chair, and often they would sit side by side on the set talking about his vast experience in the film business. But she soon learned that her fantasy father had a flaw—Gable drank up to two quarts of whiskey a day, and he occasionally got the shakes. Though he had a heart condition, and his doctor had told him to stop smoking and drinking, they were lifelong habits that continued during the strenuous filming in the hot Nevada desert. Several of his close-ups had to be reshot because Gable could be seen trembling in the hundred-degree heat.

John Huston was a perfectionist who was known to lose interest in a film when he discovered that the formula for his cinematic chemistry was flawed. He soon perceived that no sorcerer could divine a magic solution for
The Misfits
, and early on he mentally walked off the picture and into the Reno casinos, where he turned to his old reliable solution—booze. He spent his nights at the craps table, drinking and losing money and sleep. During the day he walked through the picture on the quicksand of benzedrine, not always successfully managing to direct the bizarre traffic of characters assembled on the set.

Alcohol was only one of Montgomery Clift's myriad problems. He had been such a heavy drinker that by May of 1960 he had developed alcoholic hepatitis and had been institutionalized at Mount Sinai Hospital in New
York City, where a resident recalled, “He didn't seem to know who or what he was. He seemed to be subject to free-floating anxiety. He was afraid of sex, and he was afraid of authority.” Marilyn had made the comment to a friend that Clift was the only person she knew who was in greater trouble than she was. On the set of
The Misfits
he kept very much to himself, systematically drinking vodka and grapefruit juice from a thermos; and in the role of Perce, the thump-drunk bronco buster, he proved once again that he was one of the most brilliant actors in American films.

According to Whitey Snyder, no teetotaler himself, most of the cast and crew made a beeline to the bars after the horrors and heat of filming during the day. “They'd wake up in the morning with screaming headaches, hoping to God Marilyn would be late again.”

During production the film company became polarized into two disparate factions by the seeds of discord sown by the Miller camp. Early on, Frank Taylor, John Huston, and Arthur Miller planned a strategic ambush on Black Bart. Prior to Paula Strasberg's arrival in Reno, Frank Taylor, who had been briefed by Miller, held a meeting of key production personnel. “I told them that Paula's previous tactics of divide and conquer—such as she had done with George Cukor on
Let's Make Love
—would not work if we would band together against it,” Taylor recalled. “We were to be civil to her, say good morning and good night, but no conversation with her. She was to be frozen out.”

When Miller's camp began freezing Strasberg out, and it became evident what they were doing, Marilyn was livid. It was the final betrayal, and what was left of the Millers' cordial professional relationship disintegrated into outright and open contempt. On one occasion, when Miller missed his ride back to the Mapes Hotel from location and attempted to get into Marilyn's limousine, she slammed the door in his face—leaving him stranded in the desert. They didn't speak for days afterward.

Screenwriter Arnold Schulman, who visited the set of
The Misfits
, observed, “I went to Reno and it was just awful. The tension. And Miller was sulking around like a two-year-old, glowering at everybody, particularly at Paula. If he'd looked at me like that, I would have withered and died on the spot. I don't know how Paula got through those days. Everybody hated her. Here she was trying to hold this whole thing together, and everybody kept saying ‘what a pain in the ass' and making jokes about her.”

The strategy of the Miller camp reduced Paula Strasberg to tears, and when it became apparent what she was going through, Marilyn called Lee Strasberg in New York. Lee and Susan Strasberg made an unexpected
journey to Reno, where Lee appeared in cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat for a showdown with Arthur Miller at Quail Canyon.

“I can't tolerate this behavior toward Paula,” Lee snarled up to the lanky Miller. “She's an artist. She's worked with many stars and never been treated like this. If something doesn't change, I'm afraid I'll have to pull her off the picture. She has to be shown some respect!”

Faced with the inevitable repercussion of their ill-conceived tactics, Miller's camp became more conciliatory. Sidney Guilaroff observed that Huston would occasionally flash one of his “snake-eye smiles at Paula.” A candlelight champagne victory celebration of sorts was held by Marilyn's camp. Ralph Roberts, Susan Strasberg, Agnes Flanagan, May Reis, and Whitey Snyder circled the flagons and drank to success, while brush fires ringed Reno. Ralph Roberts remembered, “The brush fires had caused a power failure, and we were in darkness except for candles. We were sitting in a wardrobe department we had set up on the ninth floor of the Mapes Hotel, and Marilyn slipped out of the suite she shared with Arthur and had a split of champagne with us.”

Recalling the evening, Susan Strasberg said, “Marilyn sat on a wardrobe trunk and was having a drink in the dark with her friends. Grabbing a wig, she got up and did a razor sharp imitation of Mitzi Gaynor—singing and dancing in the dark, faceless, anonymous, she gave off blue sparks of lifelight.”

Using Estelle Winwood's wig as a prop, she sang “I'm Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” and everyone knew which man she was referring to.

 

Shortly after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Frank Sinatra opened at the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe and invited Marilyn along with the other
Misfits
stars to see his show on Saturday, August 13. Gable said he wouldn't go unless the entire company was invited—and everyone was. The entire cast, production staff, and crew were transported to Cal-Neva to be wined and dined and see Sinatra's show—including Arthur Miller.

Marilyn was struck by the kindness and generosity of Sinatra's offer, but there were contingencies to the invitation. According to FBI Agent Bill Roemer, who had Sam Giancana under surveillance, among the guests at Cal-Neva that weekend were Joe and Jack Kennedy, Sam Giancana, and Johnny Rosselli.