Timebends (83 page)

Marilyn lay down and shut her eyes. I watched for signs of labored breathing, but she seemed at peace. She was a flower of iron to survive this onslaught. I despaired at my presumption, the stupidity of thinking that I alone could keep her from harm, and I cast about for someone else whom she might permit to take responsibility.
I was exhausted and without hope that I could reach her anymore; I had doubtless stayed too long, had nothing left but a stubborn holding on to responsibility when what she wanted was to ride the next wave thundering toward the shore, a mystic goddess out of the sea. Scoffing at magic, she still wanted her subjects to glow joyously at her touch, a sacred sort of artistry and power that was as much part of her as her eyes. I thought of her Los Angeles doctor, but he could hardly leave his practice to come here—and stopped myself again; why could she not take responsibility herself? Of course she could, and in fact it was her only hope … and yet she could not, not when she was still so dependent on sleeping drugs, chemicals I had been very slow to realize had removed her from me altogether … and the circle turned again, and I found myself believing that no one else would really stick with her. But I was worse than useless to her now, a bag of nails thrown in her face, a reminder of her failure to pull herself out of her old life even when she had at last truly loved someone.

It was the first quiet time we had had together in so long, and in the silence the idea of her trying to work in this condition was plainly monstrous—we were all crazy, what could possibly justify it? I must find some way to halt the picture. But I could see her indignant fury at what she would interpret as an accusation that she had caused the picture to be canceled, something that might break her career besides.

I found myself straining to imagine miracles. What if she were to wake and I were able to say, “God loves you, darling,” and she were able to believe it! How I wished I still had my religion and she hers. It was suddenly quite simple—we had invented God to keep from dying of reality, yet love was the realest reality of all. I summoned a vision of her harsh, suffering eyes turning to their old thrilling softness, for this was the look of hers that to me would always be her very self, her unique sign; on the other side of love, everything else about her, about people, in fact, was appetite and frightening.

What, I wondered, if she no longer had to be this star, could we live an ordinary decompressed life down on the plain, far away from this rarefied peak where there was no air? For an instant the thought of it was like a crutch pulled from under me; she seemed to lose her whole identity. An ordinary person and hardly able to spell—what would she do with herself? But pressing into that vision, I began to imagine a wonderfully quieted Marilyn no longer backed into a terrifying corner, a young and natively intelligent woman piecing her way through each day to evening and then
going unremarkably to bed. Was it possible? Surely she had been most dear to me when she was hardly known.

And then the shocking egotism of my thought stared me in the face—her stardom was her triumph, nothing less; it was her life's achievement. How would I feel if the condition of my marriage was tractability, the surrendering of my art? The simple fact, terrible and lethal, was that no space whatever existed between herself and this star.
She was “Marilyn Monroe,” and that was what was killing her.
And it could not be otherwise for her; she lived on film and with that glory forsworn would in some real sense vanish. If she loved to fool in a flower garden and endlessly move furniture around the house and buy a lamp or a coffee pot, these were pleasing preparations for a life she could not live for long without a new flight to the moon in a new part and a new film. Since her teens she had been creating a relationship with the public, first imaginary and then real, and it could not be torn from her without tearing flesh.

I realized now, as I longed for a miracle, that I had come to believe no analysis could reach into her. Perhaps only a shock of recognition, a quick but convincing sight of her own death, could rouse her to a desperate attempt to trust again. Somewhere in her she seemed to know this, inviting these drugged temporary deaths whose threat would deliver her at last.

I had no saving mystery to offer her; nor could her hand be taken if she would not hold it out. I had lost my faith in a lasting cure coming from me, and I wondered if indeed it could come from any human agency at all.

One thing only was sure; she must finish the picture. To fail would confirm her worst terror of losing control of her life, of going under the pulverizing wave of the terrible past. She went on sleeping. I wished again that I knew how to pray and invoke for her the image of that which only knows love. But it was too late for that too.

A year or so earlier, in Hollywood during the shooting of
Let's Make Love,
a stupefying comedy that Fox had forced upon her, Walter Wanger had come to our bungalow to discuss my writing a screenplay for him based on
The Fall,
the novella by Albert Camus. I had reread it at his bidding, but I had no desire to write a film, and so we just chatted for a while about the book. I had heard of Wanger as the producer who had filmed
Blockade,
with Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll, during the Spanish Civil War; one of the few attempts by Hollywood to deal with that catastrophe for democracy, it had been picketed by the patriots despite its
equivocal support of the Republican side. He seemed serious and well educated. But he was a movie producer above all, a man of the older Hollywood scene, who some years before had shot his wife's lover, as I vaguely recalled reading.

Apart from its philosophical conundrum,
The Fall
is about trouble with women, although this theme is overshadowed by the male narrator's concentration on ethics, particularly the dilemma of how one can ever judge another person once one has committed the iniquitous act of indifference to a stranger's call for help. The antihero, a self-described “judge-penitent,” has on his conscience his failure to come to the aid of a girl he saw jump off a bridge into a river.

It was a beautifully carved story whose conclusion, however, had left me in doubt of its willingness to face something perhaps worse than mere indifference to a call for help. What if the man, at risk to himself, had attempted her rescue and then discovered that the key to her salvation lay not in him, whatever his caring, but in her? And perhaps even worse, that strands of his own vanity as well as his love were entwined in the act of trying to save her? Did disguised self-love nullify the ethical act? Could anyone, in all truth, really save another unless the other wished to be saved? Was not the real question how to evoke that wish? And if it refused evocation, when did one confess failure? And how was failure justified, or could it be?
The Fall,
I thought, ended too soon, before the worst of the pain began.

Finally, suicide might not simply express disappointment with oneself but hatred for someone else. The Chinese custom was for the suicide to hang himself in the doorway of the person who had offended him, clearly a form of retaliation against others as well as an act of self-destruction. In Christian custom it is forbidden to bury the suicide in sanctified ground; is this because he has died in hatred not only of himself but of God and God's gift of life?

Her sleep was not sleep but the pulsation of an exhausted creature wrestling some demon. What was its name? She seemed able to see only that she had been victimized and betrayed by others, as though she were a mere passenger in her life. But like everyone else, she was also the driver, and how could it be otherwise? I suspected that she knew this but could not bring herself to admit it to me. And that was why I was useless to her now, an irritant at best. The terrible irony was that I had reinforced the idea of her innocent victimization because I could not bear to accept her life as it was, because I had wanted to heal her of it rather than acknowledge it as hers. I had rejected the horrors she had lived,
denied their power over her, but she saw herself rejected. Only some sublime act of grace could transcend this. And there was none. All that was left was for her to go on defending her innocence, in which, at the bottom of her heart, she did not believe. Innocence kills.

Huston took the bull by the horns, the unfinished film being now at the point of abandonment, and arranged to have Marilyn flown to a private hospital in Los Angeles where she could go off barbiturates under the care of her analyst. In some ten days she was back—her incredible resilience was almost heroic to me now—and looking wonderfully self-possessed if not yet bright-eyed. But perhaps that would come if she remained clean of the sleeping drugs. Days of concentrated work sped by now, and we could talk again. If she regarded me remotely, it was at least no longer with open rancor. Without discussion we both knew we had effectively parted, and I thought a pressure had been removed from her, and for that much I was glad.

The final shot was also the closing scene of the picture. Langland stops his truck so Roslyn can untie his dog, which was left behind while the mustangs were being rounded up. It was a studio process shot done in Los Angeles; a filmed track in the desert rolled away through the truck's back window, coming to a stop when Marilyn jumped out to go to the dog. Gable was supposed to watch her with a mounting look of love in his eyes, but I noticed only a very slight change in his expression from where I stood beside the camera, hardly ten feet away.

“Cut! Fine! Thanks, Clark; thanks, Marilyn.” Huston was brisk and businesslike now, in effect refusing any sentimental backward look; hardly lingering, he said he had to be off to work with the film editor. I asked Gable if he thought he had shown sufficient expression in the final shot. He was surprised. “You have to watch the eyes. Movie acting is all up here”—he drew a rectangle around his eyes with his finger. “You can't overdo because it's being magnified hundreds of times on the theatre screen.” He turned out to be right, as I was relieved to see in the rushes of the scene; he had simply intensified an affectionate look that was undetectable a few feet away in the studio.

Now, about to say goodbye, he told me that he had seen a rough cut the night before and that he thought
The Misfits
was the best picture he had made in his life. He was grinning like a boy and gripping my hand and warmly touching my shoulder, with an
excitement in his eyes I had never seen before. A friend of his was standing by to drive him up north for a week of fishing and hunting. We looked at one another for a moment more with a sense of relief and perhaps of accomplishment, then he turned and got into a big Chrysler station wagon and was off. He was dead in four days of a sudden heart attack.

As his car pulled away, I glanced about for Marilyn and spotted a brown limo with Paula sitting inside looking straight ahead and, I thought, avoiding me. A healing indifference was moving into me very fast, a numbed cutting of losses. For all I knew, maybe Paula had been doing her damndest to prevent things from getting any worse than they were.

Marilyn came out of the building as I was opening the door of my car, moving so well and with such an alertness in her face and manner that I wondered again whether I had made too much of her difficulties. After all, she had suffered in much the same way in each of her last three or four pictures. Maybe I had let myself feel guilty about her necessary travail and anger, and in that way had failed her. “Men like happy girls.” Anyway, we were leaving in separate cars, which struck me as very nearly funny.

Except that I believed she could not be done with her mother's curse. Now that she was serious about acting, she was asserting her value through her art, and that was forbidden, sinful. No less a conflict could have been the cause of such torture in this role through which she was, in a word, proclaiming herself a dignified woman.

I drove down Sunset Boulevard in my clunky rented green American Motors mess, which I liked because no heads ever turned to see who was in it. A restaurant slipped by, and I recalled that we had suddenly decided to go there for dinner around the time of
Let's Make Love,
rather than eat the boring food in the hotel apartment again. We went in disguise, she wearing dark sunglasses and a bandanna and I removing my glasses, and without a reservation we were refused a table. I thought somewhat indignantly of putting my glasses back on and having her take hers off. We laughed about it a moment later, but something about the incident was not amusing to her. Driving past the place now, I remembered my own feeling of affront as we backed out into the street, and the chastening realization that I had subtly come to depend on the power conferred by publicity to go to the head of any line. It was a relief now to be driving this wretched little anonymous car.

In a few blocks I stopped for a light, and the brown limo pulled up beside me. Both women were facing front, Paula talking animatedly, as always, and it crossed my mind that my old tendency to form team allegiances had distorted my vision again. I had always felt a twinge when one of my productions came to its inevitable end and the actors went their separate ways.

A long shoot like
The Misfits
is a daily marching around in a courtyard with high walls. Sometimes it was hard to remember whether it had been two years or three since I began the screenplay. Suddenly the big gate opens and there is a delightful, well-lighted world outside. I went up to San Francisco, where I knew no one—a good feeling, a new start. But disorienting. The sixties were beginning. In the hungry i, the first political cabaret I had seen since Café Society in the late thirties, Mort Sahl's mordant cool was out of a world I had never known, the young audience a well-washed happenstance gathering of detached individuals; I seemed to recall a sort of community of strangers in the old days, probably because we were unified against Hitler's approach while they were only waiting for Godot. But I now suspected all such generational positionings as myths invented to comfort us in our time, like the octopus blackening his surrounding water with his ink.