Timebends (81 page)

Each day now brought strange events, but some surprises were hopeful, like Clift's turning out to be so staunchly reliable. Huston and I had feared that he might begin to drink and would have to be propped up, but instead, along with Wallach, he was a pillar of the production. On his first day of work, a week or so into the film, he did his scene in the phone booth alongside the highway, a solid page of talk, without an error or a hesitation, and on the first take. Huston and I congratulated each other on our persistent confidence in him despite the insurance company's misgivings. I chose to see it as proof that when he had something to do that he respected and knew he was not simply being exploited, Monty could pull himself together. It was as much the irrelevance and sheer stupidity of most of the work they had to do that was wilting the sanity of so many actors whose self-certainty was pretty tentative to begin with.

The heat on the salt lake sometimes touched above a merciless hundred and eight degrees. We worked as though on a glaringly lit moon. To pass the time I threw and punted a football with some of the crew. Paula would sit writing letters inside her air-conditioned Cadillac limousine. She and Marilyn would rehearse lines together in Marilyn's limousine on the trip up from Reno every morning, but Paula insisted as a matter of face on a personal limousine and chauffeur to follow behind. Glancing at her through the car window, I recalled
The Prince and the Showgirl;
her Byzantine obsession with rank and her pointlessly secretive ways seemed less
comical now. She could hardly say what time it was without seeming to suggest it was secret information, and to engender awe in the innocent onlooker she wore several watches—a pendant hanging from her neck, a wristwatch, and another in her bag so she would know what time it was in London and Tokyo, Mexico City and Sydney, implying that she and Lee had important interests all over the world.

During some of the long waits I would talk with Gable, who liked to sit in the sun outside his trailer on the lake bed. He behaved as though Marilyn was a woman in physical pain, and despite his having to spend what might have been humiliating hours each day waiting for her to start working, no hint of affront ever showed on his face. Those who knew him were surprised by his uncharacteristic patience. Once or twice, however, his agent reminded us that his contract called for him to be paid twenty-five thousand dollars for each day over schedule, so he had begun well prepared for the worst. I couldn't help feeling somehow responsible for his enforced idleness, especially when I was the one who had convinced him to do the part, but he knew everyone was helpless, including Marilyn herself, and that it was not merely a case of a star trying to show who had the supreme power. Maybe he was softened, too, by Marilyn's having told him that he had been her girlhood idol; in fact, his framed photo stood on her equally worshipful mother's bureau, and in her very earliest years Marilyn thought he was her father. He and I would sometimes sit beside the trailer saying nothing for a long half-hour at a time in the Nevada silence, a kind of unacknowledged mourning. I could feel his commiseration, as, I was sure, he could feel my regret.

I would ask about the old movie years when he had worked for MGM. “We'd finish a picture most often on a Friday, and there'd be some parties over the weekend, and I'd come back to start a new picture on Monday—it was really like a stock company. My ‘coach' over here”—he indicated his valet, a sixtyish man with a long doggy face who liked to sit in the trailer doorway listening to him and anticipating his need for a pack of cigarettes or a fresh filter for his holder or a cold drink, as he had been doing for decades now—“my coach would get me out of the tuxedo and under the shower, and while I was drying off he'd give me my first lines of dialogue, and on the way to the studio I'd be trying to wake up and listen to him reading to me. They'd have my costume ready, and I'd get into it and go out onto the set and say hi to the director and meet whoever was playing the girl in the picture and try to
figure out where the locale was supposed to be—you know, Hawaii or Nome or Saint Louis or wherever. Then we'd have about twenty minutes to move into the shot and do it, that's all. By the end of the week you'd have a pretty good idea of what the character was, and then you'd have two more weeks till it was finished, and by the time you really understood anything it was over. But most of the pictures didn't have any character to speak of anyway, so you sort of just made up something as you went along, or maybe you didn't make up anything because there was nothing
to
make up. This one's altogether different, though.”

He had brought his silver Mercedes gull-wing coupe from California and kept trying to improve his time driving up the mountain road from Reno every morning. Surely his face was as well known as any in world history, he was worth millions and could possess just about anything he wished, but he was not world-weary, not lacking in curiosity, and asked about my life and how I worked, and I thought I saw something like my father's animal simplicity in this interest. Perhaps he so
existed
onscreen because he was so fundamental. Great actor-personalities, I have come to think, are like trained bears in that they attract us with their discipline while their powerful claws threaten us; a great star implies he is his own person and can be mean and even dangerous, like a great leader.

I had written the rodeo scene to take place in a certain town, its name faded from memory now, far out in the desert. I had come across it one day with the two cowboy horse-hunters: a string of slatternly houses made of unpainted gray pine boards, and another string of bars, about eight or ten in all, facing an impromptu rodeo ring in front of a rough bleachers. Beyond the ring was a church atop whose steeple a wooden cross tilted over, ready to fall into the street, a reasonable symbol of what I was after in the film. The line of bars had one long dent in front where drunks had banged cars and trucks into them, men from the nearby wallboard plant who worked in clouds of white gypsum dust all day. Inside bullet holes showed in the ceilings and walls, with whole pockets dug out of some wooden bars by quick fire. It was the only town in Nevada where a man could legally carry sidearms, and a great many did, big forty-fives strapped to their thighs. During my Nevada time I had been there one Saturday night when the sheer fury of the customers was like a fever in the air, and I had to wonder if the grinding emptiness of their lives had driven them to want to kill
or threaten to kill or be killed. It was never a question of robbery, just of two men starting a brainless argument that ended in shooting, a kind of mass sex, it seemed, with bloodshed as the climax of the rodeo itself.

As it turned out, we could not work in that town because there was insufficient water to supply cast and crew, and because of its distance from Reno and our hotels. We found another town, with better facilities and plenty of room for us: it had been deserted decades before by its entire population when some nearby mine gave out. Weathered signs were applied on the store windows or hung askew over the street. It was all very strange to think we were shooting where a real population had once lived, people who had doubtless had great hopes for a good life and now had vanished.

But another place where I had spent some time with my cowboy friends—a house owned by a Mrs. Styx—was used as Roslyn's temporary Nevada residence. It overlooked one of the rare green valleys in that desiccated area, with some trees and enough good grass for a few cattle. Anticipating a need for more space in which to move the camera around, production people had sawed through the corners of the house to make them removable at a moment's notice by turning a few bolts. In a morning a vegetable garden was set in place out front, as the story required, and shrubs planted. One quickly forgot these were all new. The oddness about it was that like demented gods, we had taken a reality and created a fake.

And I was finding it hard to remember that in reality Clark Gable was not the cowboy who had inspired the Gay Langland character. It was during this part of the shooting that the original cowboy suddenly showed up to look on for a few hours, and I could not help feeling disappointed by a certain thinness about him as compared to Gable's more satisfying roundness and density. Of course I was part of Gable's character, as I was not of the cowboy's.

There was also something disturbing in the fact that the walls of the very house in which I had sat a few years before with the real cowboy and a girlfriend he had brought along could now be unbolted and simply slipped out of position to reveal an open sky. Perhaps the secret alarm in this was its echo of the willfulness of our way of constructing our lives, and deconstructing them, too.

I kept trying to rewrite the last few minutes of the film, which had never been quite right. Aware of the hopefulness with which I had conceived the story and my uncertainty about my future now, I still could not concede that the ending had to be what I considered nihilistic, people simply walking away from one another.
At the same time, contrary to my story, I could not deny that a certain indeterminacy of life was really all these characters had to rely on. In fact, taking uncertainty to heart left them feeling free. Life betrayed, and that was all there was to it, but I willed it to be otherwise in this film. Besides, it could also have been true that they had found one another and stuck.

One afternoon Marilyn, with no evident emotion, almost as though it were just another script, said, “What they really should do is break up at the end.” I instantly disagreed, so quickly, in fact, that I knew I was afraid she was right. But the irony was too sharp: the work I had created to reassure her that a woman like herself could find a home in the world had apparently proved the opposite.

Briefly I wondered if this could be a call for help, but I could detect nothing in her eyes beyond a cool, professional look. I could no longer offer what I believed she could not accept. The terrible fact was that as she moved through the shooting she seemed at one moment all inwardness, not noticing anyone around her, and at the next wonderfully social with absolutely everyone she laid eyes on—as though the stream of her emotions had shattered into a spray of anger falling endlessly through her heart; it was impossible to sense at all what she was feeling and what her mood was until she spoke.

Huston at a certain point began to stir as the hours grew longer when she simply could not get ready to work. Her lifelong wrestling with the fact of time had thrown her to the mat finally, had nearly immobilized her now; she had always been one of those people for whom time is a sticky entanglement that they don't want to touch, perhaps in denial that a past exists.

Huston seemed to have resigned himself after the first month or so of shooting, but now he took Paula aside and asked what she proposed to do about her charge. He had begun staying up all night at the craps table, losing immense sums and winning them back and showing his mettle that way, occasionally falling asleep in his chair behind the camera and losing track of which scene he was shooting. Chaos was on us all. He was working on sheer muscle now, his control amazing.

I thought he had been simply blanking out Paula's existence for some weeks, refusing her intercession as demeaning and unprofessional. Her control over Marilyn was now so complete that Marilyn had moved from our apartment in the hotel into hers; Paula had finally won our long undeclared war. Still, this might clear the air, I thought, and free Marilyn to concentrate solely on the work as she
now said she wanted to do. But I was under no illusions that any of us were really doing what we wanted to do; a force of pure destruction was thrashing around among us, beyond anyone's control. I was only going through the motions of caring about the rest of the picture. It now seemed a hateful thing that had cost me too much, and I could only hope it would not turn out too badly. The one real dread I had was that Paula would accede too easily to Marilyn's demands for more and more sleeping pills, but she promised she would not give in, and I tended to believe her because she was clearly in fear of a catastrophe herself.

One evening after dinner I walked to a small park near the hotel and sat on a bench watching eight young girls play tennis on adjoining courts. That people could still be doing something as simple as hitting a ball back and forth across a net seemed miraculous. The sheer good health of the girls drove tension out of me, just watching them take their untroubled deep breaths and wipe their wet pink upper lips and scream now and then. Longing to stretch out, I lay down on the grass propped up on one arm and soon fell fast asleep. I awoke in a silent city without traffic; the girls were gone, and it was a balmy three o'clock in the morning.

In the hotel's casino Huston was shooting craps at a table with a glass of scotch in his hand, his bush jacket as crisply pressed as if he had put it on ten minutes before. He was behind twenty-five thousand dollars. He grinned and I grinned back. It did not seem important to him, although I knew he would find it awkward paying out that much. I went up to bed. In the morning at about seven I came down for breakfast, and he was still shooting craps, still with a glass of scotch in his hand. He had won back the twenty-five grand and was now trying to win more. His bush jacket looked as neat as it had before. Just thinking about standing up all night exhausted me all over again.

Metty's worry that close-ups were showing Marilyn's exhaustion finally forced matters to a head. Paula, now in control and thus unavoidably open to blame, quickly announced that Lee was at last coming out from New York. Such was Huston's desperation that he very nearly welcomed this news. I certainly did, if only because Lee would now have to assume at least some direct responsibility for her unrelenting uncertainty as an actress in this role. Despite her utter reliance on his every word, he had managed to keep a safe distance through all her difficulties.