Timebends (82 page)

But there was another reason for welcoming his arrival: Marilyn
had taken to paraphrasing speeches and omitting words and sentences. Huston, a writer himself, refused to accept her revisions, and to get the words right he had reshot sections as many as ten times. Looking on, I had assumed she was having memory lapses, but at one point she explained that the words in themselves were not important, only the emotion they expressed. In short, she was conveying Strasberg's teaching as she understood it, a crippling attitude that I had seen in other actors and that I believed contributed to her unresolved tension in acting. Regarding the words as a hurdle, she was seeking spontaneity and freshness of feeling despite them instead of through them. If this approach occasionally did free her, it most often compounded her uncertainty when the actor opposite her was working on a different principle, of fidelity to the text, as of course the director was as well. Huston saw it all as arrant self-indulgence. I had asked how she and Paula proposed to work on classic roles, as Strasberg often predicted she would one day, when everyone was familiar with the texts and would not easily tolerate their being paraphrased. But it was obvious she was simply repeating what she had been given by high authority, and the pathos of it was heartbreaking, though no longer penetrable by me or anyone else. The fact was that she had done her best work with scripts, like Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond's for
Some Like It Hot,
from which she had not been allowed the slightest deviation because the comic dialogue had to be precise or would fail to work at all. That the same precision was necessary in a dramatic role, her first ever, seemed elementary, but with the encouragement of her mentors she was losing her way in an improvisational approach that might belong in an acting class but not in an actual performance.

In any event, Lee's imminent arrival was at least something new happening, and as a onetime director himself, he would surely see that his teaching, if correctly understood, was incapacitating, and if misunderstood, must now be corrected.

With the schedule lengthening out and nothing I could do to cure things, my function on the film grew thin and more and more formal, and most of the time I spent alone. I thought of leaving, but Huston now and then wanted to talk about something in the script or make a change. One day we shot two silent scenes at Pyramid Lake, one of Gable-Langland teaching Marilyn-Roslyn to ride horseback, the other of them swimming. The two cottages where Bellow and I had lived—could it have been almost four years ago?—had once looked down across the lonesome highway upon
the rocky beach and the primordial lake, but not anymore; a marina and fast-food stand had been installed, and motorboats aimlessly dashed about blasting the unearthly silence that in the script was supposed to help restore Roslyn's hope for herself and her life. Everything seemed to symbolize; the motorboat drivers had to be asked to stop their engines while the scene was shot in this once enchanted place, observed by the chewing customers at the hot-dog stand that now stood a hundred yards away. I looked back along the highway for the phone booth where I had momentarily fainted once, but it was gone; there was probably a phone in the marina now. The booth's absence kept me staring into the distance trying to revive the empty highway and the mutual idealization that had swept through me here.

It was hard watching her walk out of the water to be embraced by Gable when I could see no joy in her. As valiantly as she tried to appear in love, I knew her too well not to notice her distraction. But to approach her was to see her stiffen incredibly. I could only look on, praying that my estimate was wrong, but the marks of a living performance are moments of surprise, and it was a painfully willed performance, it seemed to me, the wild notes too worked out and premeditated. I was almost completely out of her life by now, but from my distant view the film seemed purely a torture for her. As it was for me when I thought back to my walk along the East River with Sam Shaw, when I had first imagined it as a kind of gift.

The whole make-believe business seemed detestable now, a destroyer of people, especially of those actors unable to settle for an ounce less than the full measure of truthfulness. Whatever it was that Paula and presumably Lee had been teaching her, she seemed less than ever able to feel, as opposed to thinking
about
her feelings, and thoughts are very hard to act. To be fair, her work in the film looked far more authentic to me in later years than it did during that bad time. I now marvel at how she managed, under the circumstances, to do as well as she did.

But at the time I wondered if acting had merely become a socially acceptable excuse for narcissism, an unholy absorption in the self rather than a joyous celebratory observation of mankind, which is all that can ever ennoble it. In my too many hours spent alone, the whole country seemed to be devolving into a mania for the distraction it called entertainment, a day-and-night mimicry of art that menaced nothing, redeemed nothing, and meant nothing but forgetfulness.

One evening I switched on the TV in my hotel room and found Nixon and Kennedy about to begin one of their presidential election debates. For some reason the country seemed to be continuing despite
The Misfits.
I ordered dinner and a bottle of whiskey and sat down to watch. There they stood, two more actors, but looking as uncomfortable as high school argufiers, Nixon apparently wearing his brother's suit with the collar riding up his neck. How patently ambition-driven they were, these performers, each putting on a self-assured authority that he could not possibly have. Next to the TV the window showed blue night spreading over the everlasting mountains toward California, far easier to look at than the two on the screen. Weeks before, an arsonist's forest fire out there had blackened the skies of two states and cut off Reno's power, and our electricians had rigged a single cable six stories up to our room from a truck generator parked below in the street—the only lighted bulb in the city for Marilyn's comfort. That had been good of them. Movie crews love the impossible, it makes them feel real.

Alone with the screen now, I caught something stale and prearranged about this debate. I could not get myself out of the movies, out of the theatre, out of the fake of this unbelievably important TV casting session by which the American people were to pick the star of their unending feature movie, trying to sense which scenes each would play well and which not so well, since there was no substantive difference between the candidates beyond a few cult words addressed to their partisans. Nixon seemed the foxy self-pitier who could also be tough, though Kennedy could probably threaten other countries better with that square Irish jaw and that good suit. But much of their performance depended on the script, which was always being rewritten. I hoped for Kennedy, of course, but mainly, I suppose, because we had read some of the same books.

The phone in the morning. “Lee is here. He wants to see you right away.”

At last. Now we could at least get straight the line Marilyn ought to follow to complete the film.

“Has he spoken to John yet?”

“Oh, no.”

It was the “oh” that troubled me. Why
“oh,
no”? Was Lee already positioning himself against Huston when they would surely have to cooperate if things were to change?

In the elevator to the Strasbergs' apartment I rehearsed my complaints. Lee answered my ring. The absurdity of his costume blew all my plans out of my head; in this hundred-degree weather he was dressed in a stiff brand-new cowboy outfit—shiny boots, creased pants, ironed shirt with braided pockets and cuffs—but with the same whitish intellectual face and unexercised body.

“That's quite a getup,” I said.

He grinned adventurously. “Yes, it's very comfortable.”

“The boots too?” I doubted that pointy Western boots could be comfortable on first wearing.

“Oh, they're wonderful,” he said, bending his knees.

Paula had not risen from the couch, where she lay on her side in a dragoned kimono with her head propped up on her hand, a smile of proud assurance on her face now that her champion had come to take up her burden, her hair let down intriguingly over her shoulder, an odalisque in the round.

Lee's expression turned to a frown. “We have to have a serious talk, Arthur.”

“Yes, I've been hoping to do that for some time.”

“Yes, the situation has become impossible.”

“I know.” He must already have worked out a new approach that would save the day, such was the impacted drive I sensed moving within him. For an instant I happily thought I had had him wrong and that he indeed possessed a secret that could restore a Marilyn whose soul was falling through space even as we spoke.

“Yes. If something isn't done immediately I will have to take Paula off the picture.” He looked directly at me, as though demanding a statement.

Paula? Was this about Paula? I glanced over to her on the couch, where she was grinning contentedly as though she had at last ceased to be ignored.

“I don't get you, Lee.”

“Huston has been refusing to talk to her. This is insulting! I won't permit her to go on unless it is agreed that he show her respect. I will not tolerate this kind of treatment of her. She is an artist! She has worked with the greatest stars! I simply will not allow her to be treated this way!”

Stunned, I floundered trying to grasp his meaning. Had Paula not told him that Marilyn was
in extremis,
that perhaps her very life was in danger, and certainly her ability to finish the film in question? How else could he stand here complaining about his wife's not getting respect from a director? Or was it possible that Paula
was so insanely self-obsessed as not even to have noticed that Marilyn was in very bad trouble? And had Lee finally agreed to come out here simply to assert his authority on the pointless problem of his wife and thus distract from his being totally at sea as to how to help Marilyn?

It was too terrible to think that. Seeing him here in his crazy costume, like a jolly tourist on vacation, I suddenly wondered if maybe I was taking everything far too seriously, had reacted too personally to Marilyn's anger, which might simply be her normal frustration as an actress creating a role. Total confusion.

On he went … how Paula had been feeling abandoned and insulted, how she had put a life into coaching great performers, how he himself had not wanted to interfere but now had to “for Marilyn's good as well.” It was impossible to address him, it was demeaning to speak seriously to him, infatuated as he was by his own importance and his wife's. Marilyn's suffering was a distant star that might occasionally be glimpsed as it dimmed out far, far away, but not more.

“I must get this settled before I can do anything else, Arthur.”

“You can't expect me to settle it. It's between her and John.”

“It's your picture, you must act.”

“My script, not my picture. There's nothing I can do about it, Lee. John is not used to dealing with an actor through a third party, and I doubt he'll change. Are you going to be talking to Marilyn?”

“Then I will have to take Paula home with me.”

“It will probably mean the end of the picture”—and of Marilyn, I needn't have added, if she failed to finish it—“but I guess you have to do what you have to do. But I hope you get to talk to Marilyn, she needs help now. Will you?”

“I'll talk to her, yes,” he conceded. I understood the rules he was laying down—he would do what he could but was not going to take responsibility for her under any circumstances, most especially not when she was on the ropes. And he was the only person she trusted. Such was the perfection of her fate.

Shooting had ground to a complete halt. There was no point transporting scores of crew members across the mountains to the salt lake when there was so much uncertainty about getting any work done. The crisis was upon us. Whatever Lee said to her, it had apparently left her unchanged as far as her ability to work was concerned, and now he had gone back to New York. I went up to
Paula's apartment, afraid that in her opaque, absentminded way she might be failing to at least keep watch. It was still unclear whether Paula understood how sick Marilyn was. I was never sure that she was truly listening.

She let me into the living room with her finger against her lips, then walked into the bedroom, and I followed. Marilyn was sitting up in bed. A doctor was feeling the back of her hand, searching for a vein into which to inject Amytal. My stomach turned over. She saw me and began to scream at me to get out. I managed to ask the doctor if he knew how much barbiturate or other medicine she had already taken, and he looked at me helplessly, a young scared fellow wanting to give the shot and get out and not come back. Paula was standing beside the bed in her black shift, hair freshly brushed and pinned up, looking healthy and powdered and maternal, and vaguely guilty, I thought; yes, now she must know that she had made a bad bargain and was not in control anymore, and she wanted help and she wanted credit for her mothering love even as something in her could not care less because it was all hopelessly disconnected. I thought to move the doctor away from the bed to stall off the injection, but the screaming was too terrible, and her distress in my presence canceled out any help I could hope to give, so I left and stood in the living room and waited until the doctor came out. He was astonished that she could remain awake, having given her enough for a major operation, but she was still sitting up and talking. He believed he was the last doctor in the area to be called in, but he would not agree to any more shots of anything, fearing for her life now that he had seen what he had seen. I went back into the bedroom and she looked at me, ravaged but slowing down at last, merely repeating, “Get out,” as in a dream.

Paula was warm to me now. “I'd like to get some dinner …” I felt a rush of warmth toward her, too, I suppose because I was so desperate for help and because in the corners of her eyes I saw fear, and if she was afraid she must be sane, and if she was sane and was still hanging in here she must have some feeling left for someone other than herself. I said thanks to her apropos of nothing in particular, and she touched me with her hand and left for dinner with one of the cast.