Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
—Macbeth. Act IV, Scene 1
Logan tried to prepare Sir Laurence Olivier. As an old friend of Olivier’s, he wrote to him shortly before Marilyn and Miller were to leave for London for The Prince and the Showgirl. “First of all,” Logan said, “be sure that you do not have Paula on the set. I’m sure she’s going to be with Marilyn on your picture, and I think it would be most disturbing for you to have anyone there in authority except you.” He described to Olivier Marilyn’s special beauty and unique talent, but added, “Please do not expect her to behave like the average actress you have worked with. For instance, don’t tell her exactly how to read a line. Let her work it out some way herself no matter how long it takes.”
Logan remembered getting a polite response to his suggestions. Olivier assured Logan he would be patient with her. “I will not get upset if I don’t get everything my way,” he stated. “I will iron myself out every morning like a shirt, hoping to get through the day without a wrinkle.”
THUNDER: Enter the three WITCHES.
Yet, was thrice a wrinkle and double trouble
Though starch like hell-broth boil and bubble.
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poisen’d starch do throw
Lizard legs and Black Bart hat,
Writer’s pen and tail of cat
Tongue of Red and toady Greene
Eyes of snake and words so mean
Gall of star with strap that falls
Peas and carrots and Matzo’s balls.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Starch gruel thicken, boil and bubble.
Exeunt WITCHES
[ALARUM:]
Enter piston plane:
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Miller arrived at London’s Heathrow airport on July 14, 1956. They were met by Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh, over three hundred photographers and reporters, seventy-five policemen, and thousands of adoring fans. Giggling with disbelief, Olivier called it “the largest reception and press conference in English history.” Describing the awesome moment when they emerged from the plane, Miller wrote, “The camera flashes formed a solid wall of white light that seemed to last for almost half a minute, a veritable aureole, and the madness of it made even the photographers burst out laughing.”
Olivier and Leigh were swamped in the hysterical mob of reporters and movie fans that forced the celebrities and police to retreat behind the protection of a ticket counter. One photographer who fell at Marilyn’s feet was trampled by the stampeding mob, and had to be rushed to the hospital.
“Are all your conferences like this?” Leigh inquired.
“Well,” Marilyn replied, “this is a little quieter than some of them.”
At this point in her life Marilyn Monroe had evolved beyond celebrity; orphan 3,463 had become the most famous woman in the world.
The Millers’ asylum from the madding crowd was to be Parkside House, at Englefield Green. Adjoining Windsor Park, the Georgian mansion had been rented for the duration of the filming. It was there that the Millers’ honeymoon, such as it was, would be eclipsed by rehearsals, wardrobe fittings, and press conferences, at which Miller again found it difficult to smile. One British journalist referred to him as “Cold as a refrigerated fish in his personal appearance. Not like a hot lover—more like a morgue keeper left with a royal cadaver.”
Costarring with Sir Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl had been Marilyn’s inspiration. In 1953 Olivier had costarred with Vivien Leigh in the London production of Terence Rattigan’s play, which was entitled The Sleeping Prince. Vivien Leigh had received less than rave notices. She was obviously miscast as the ingenue American chorus girl. But the part was perfect for the younger, more voluptuous Marilyn Monroe, a requisite that prompted Leigh’s most gracious disdain.
Terence Rattigan’s play was a stylish light comedy that floated on the buoyancy of its theatrical charm. The dated atmosphere was thick, the plot was not:
FADE IN: The very mannered and dispassionate prince regent of Carpathia (Olivier) is in London in 1911 for the crowning of King George V. Despite his rigid reserve, he falls in love with an entrancing American chorus girl, Elsie Marina (Marilyn). Duty calls the prince regent to return to Carpathia, but he promises to come back and marry the beauteous chorus girl: FADE OUT.
Such slight and boneless plots are fleshed out by the abracadabra of ingenious situation, artful staging, sparkling dialogue, and bravura performances. Joshua Logan believed that the combination of Sir Laurence Olivier, Earl of Notley, and La Monroe of Dickensiana would be magical: “The best combination since black and white and salt and pepper.” But it proved to be more like Earl and water. There was thrice a wrinkle.
When Olivier first met Marilyn in New York in February he observed, “By the end of the day one thing was clear to me: I was going to fall most shatteringly in love with Marilyn, and what was going to happen? There was no question about it, it was inescapable, or so I thought; she was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined. I went home like a lamb reprieved from the slaughter just for now, but next time…Wow! For the first time now it threatened to be ‘poor Vivien’!”
But the next time it was “poor Larry”: Marilyn was on her honeymoon, and Vivien had gone “round the bend.” It was not the best of times for Olivier and Leigh. Despite appearances, their marriage was all but over. In 1953, Vivien Leigh was to have starred in Paramount’s Elephant Walk with Peter Finch. On location in Ceylon, she and Finch had an affair. She suffered a nervous breakdown and was removed from the film and replaced by Elizabeth Taylor. On returning to London, Leigh was placed in the Netherne psychiatric hospital, where she underwent electroshock therapy. Diagnosed as a manic-depressive, she made a partial recovery and returned to Notley Abbey, where Olivier tried to nurse her back to health. But the shock treatments had somehow made her a stranger to her husband, who observed to friends that she seemed a changed woman. Olivier confessed with sadness that he had difficulty understanding the woman who had come back to him. He found himself viewing her increasingly distantly and dispassionately—as an observer rather than a husband. She was no longer the same woman he had loved and married.
Believing that going back to work together would be the best thing for Vivien and their troubled marriage, Olivier had their friend Terence Rattigan tailor the slight and undemanding Sleeping Prince for their appearance together at the Phoenix Theater. Designed as a courtier’s offering to Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation year, The Sleeping Prince opened on November 5, 1953, Leigh’s fortieth birthday.
While The Sleeping Prince received generally good reviews, critics noted Olivier’s rather wooden performance and felt that Leigh was “strident and a shade too old for the ingenue, and Olivier was a mite too dull for the Don Juan.” Few knew of the unhappiness, bickering, and daily crises that were going on in the wings of their private life, which would later be echoed in Olivier’s brilliant performance as Archie Rice in The Entertainer. Though she appeared to be normal, if strident, onstage, Leigh was suffering from manic-depressive episodes. Between performances she would often become incoherent, partying all night with friends, only to vanish on all-day buying sprees—appearing at the theater just before curtain. During her manic phase, Leigh often hissed to Olivier onstage, sotto voce, “You shit—you absolute shit!”
By the summer of 1956, the relationship of the fabled theatrical couple had deteriorated to feeble attempts at keeping up appearances and sustaining their professional partnership. Their lives were in crisis.
LIGHTNING FLASH: Enter Marilyn
Monroe with Black Bart and entourage—
Milton and Amy Greene, Arthur Miller,
Hedda Rosten, and “Whitey” Snyder.
Marilyn’s entrance was late. Olivier had assembled the cast of The Prince and the Showgirl on a stage at Pinewood Studios for several days of rehearsals before filming began. Shadowed by Black Bart, Marilyn Monroe was tardy by forty-five minutes. Olivier was extremely distressed to see Paula Strasberg at Marilyn’s side. “Paula’s presence alarmed me considerably,” Olivier commented. “I had rarely thought that coaches were helpful…. Paula knew nothing. She was no actress, no director, no teacher, no adviser—except in Marilyn’s eyes. For she had one talent—she could butter Marilyn up.”
On many occasions Olivier had voiced criticism of Lee Strasberg’s Method, which he viewed as “deliberately anti-technical.” The Method, he felt, dictated “an all-consuming passion for reality, and if you didn’t feel attuned to exactly the right images that would make you believe that you were actually IT and IT was actually going on, you might as well forget about the scene altogether.” For Olivier, acting was pretending, and after all, The Prince and the Showgirl was a fairy tale. Olivier was very good at pretending.
The first day of rehearsals proved to be a disaster, and from there things grew steadily worse.
Marilyn had a way of idolizing certain men—putting them on the pedestal of her high hopes until they inevitably toppled. Olivier wasted no time in shattering her illusions. Marilyn was the odd girl out. She had never worked in films beyond the perimeter of the Hollywood environment, and the London cast and crew were Olivier stalwarts—Dame Sybil Thorndike, Esmond Knight, Richard Wattis, and cameraman Jack Cardiff. They had all been Olivier’s friends and associates for many years. On the first day of rehearsals, when Olivier introduced Marilyn to the assembled cast and crew, he took her hand and in the most condescending manner suggested that everyone be patient with their guest—that it might take their Hollywood visitor some time to learn “their method,” but how pleased they were to have “such a delightful little thing” among them. His attitude toward her was strangely patronizing, and none of his demeaning subtleties escaped Marilyn Monroe’s finely tuned vibe barometer. It was a storm warning of the tempest to come.
An icy frost hung over the rehearsals, which began on July 30, and Olivier noted Paula Strasberg’s critical glares and Marilyn’s pronounced lack of enthusiasm. “Marilyn was not used to rehearsing and obviously had no taste for it,” he observed. “She proclaimed this by wearing very dark glasses and exhibiting an overly subdued manner which I failed miserably to find the means to enliven.”
In a daily diary kept during production, Colin Clark, the third assistant director, noted that Marilyn Monroe arrived two hours late on the first day of filming.*The call was for 6:30 A.M. She arrived at eight-thirty for makeup and wardrobe, and subsequently arrived on the set at eleven-thirty, which is when British crews normally call lunch. Colin Clark noted:
MONDAY, 6 August
Finally at 11:30 A.M. MM did emerge, fully dressed and looking, I am bound to say, ravishing. What a beautiful creature she is, to be sure…. Everyone is simply hypnotized when she appears, including me. Everything revolves around her, whether she likes it or not, and yet she seems weak and vulnerable. If it is deliberate, it is incredibly skillful, but I think it is a completely natural gift. All the people round her want to control her, but they do so by trying to give her what they think she wants…. Paula takes a firm grip of MM on one side and Milton Greene on the other. They hardly bother to conceal their battle for control. And not just them—Arthur Miller wants control too…. We are all really thinking of what they want underneath. “Oh, what a nice pot of gold you are. Can I help you, pot of gold?”
In his first days of directing the film Olivier said to her, “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn.” She was devastated. The demeaning remark indicated that he had no intention of recognizing her sensibilities as an actress and no interest in her method of making contact with her role. Her disappointment with Olivier turned to a burning resentment, and the asbestos fell between the star and the director, never to rise again. She avoided him whenever possible. Directions had to be given circuitously through Paula Strasberg; and whenever Olivier spoke to Marilyn directly, she would stare at him with indifferent eyes, suddenly turning away in midconversation and walking off to discuss the scene with Paula or to telephone Lee Strasberg in New York.
Olivier recalled, “Her manner to me got steadily ruder and more insolent; whenever I patiently labored to make her understand an indication for some reading, business or timing she would listen with ill-disguised impatience, and when I had finished would turn to Paula and petulantly demand, ‘Wassee mean?’ A very short way into filming, my humiliation had reached depths I would not have believed possible.”
When she was to begin filming a scene with Dame Sybil Thorndike, one of the legendary actresses of the British theater, Marilyn arrived an hour late. Regarding it as a great discourtesy, Olivier became livid. Upon her arrival, he strode over to Marilyn, took her by the hand, led her over to Dame Sybil like a naughty schoolgirl, and through clenched teeth demanded that the president of Marilyn Monroe Productions apologize for her tardiness. Having no comprehension that she was late, Marilyn began an abject apology. Much to Olivier’s displeasure, Dame Sybil interrupted and said, “My dear, you mustn’t concern yourself. A great actress like you has other things than time on her mind, doesn’t she?”
Marilyn realized that she had at least one friend on the set, and she and Thorndike became quite close during the production. While watching dailies in the projection room, Thorndike turned to her old friend Olivier and said, “You did well in that scene, Larry, but with Marilyn up there nobody will be watching you. Her manner and timing are just too delicious. And don’t be too hard about her tardiness, dear boy. We need her desperately. She’s really the only one of us who knows how to act in front of the camera.”
WEDNESDAY, 15 August
I suppose you could say that today was a red-letter day. This morning I definitely saw more of MM that I ever expected to, and she went up in my estimation in more ways than one. She arrived really early for her, and nearly caught us on the hop at 7:30 A.M. She was in a jolly mood.
As lunchtime drew near the A.D. caught me in the corridor, and told me to look for MM’s marked script which was missing. I assumed this meant that MM was on the set, so I just barged into her dressing room…There she stood—MM completely nude, with only a towel around her head.
I stopped dead. All I could see were beautiful white and pink curves. I must have gone as red as a beetroot. I couldn’t even turn and rush out, so I just stood there and stared and stammered. MM gave me her most innocent smile. “Oh, Colin,” she said. “And you an old Etonian!” How did she stay so cool? And how did she know my name and which school I had gone to and what it meant?
When I managed to get out of the room and pull myself together, I realized MM could be a bit brighter than we think…. What fun it might have been to make a movie with MM when she felt everyone around her was her friend.
Dream on Colin…
During her sleepless nights at Parkside House, Marilyn began to believe that Olivier was deliberately trying to undermine her performance, and it occurred to her that Milton Greene had made an enormous mistake in allowing Olivier to be both star and director.
When Marilyn expressed distrust of Olivier to her husband, Arthur Miller was put in the awkward position of both pacifying his wife and at the same time alleviating her suspicions. “She came to believe that he was trying to compete with her like another woman, a coquette drawing the audience’s attention away from herself,” Miller recalled. “Nothing could dissuade her from this perilous vision of her director and co-star…. It was simply impossible to agree that he could be the cheap scene-stealer she was talking about…. I occasionally had to defend Olivier or else reinforce the naivete of her illusions. The result was she began to question the absoluteness of my partisanship on her side of the deepening struggle.”
Could Marilyn have been correct in her assessment of Olivier? Was it possible that the legendary star of stage and screen could be trying to undermine and upstage the ingenue neophyte from Hollywood? When Marilyn and her entourage arrived on the scene, not only was Olivier’s private life in crisis, but so was his career. He was turning fifty and his ham was well cured. There weren’t many leading-men parts left for him, and he was very sensitive about his age. The makeup and attire he wore as the prince was so heavy that at times he was barely recognizable behind his monocle. Vanity and the fight to justify top billing went with the prince of Carpathian’s territory.
Both Marilyn and Olivier had what is known to cameramen as a “good side”—the side of the face that photographs best. For both of them it was the right side. Olivier, the director, always made sure that the right side of Olivier the actor was to camera, which meant that Marilyn’s “bad side” was to camera when they faced each other.
Despite the letters received from Joshua Logan, Olivier elected to ignore his advice, stating, “I refused to treat Marilyn as a special case—I had too much pride in my trade—and would at all times treat her as a grown-up artist of merit, which in a sense she was.”
If there was any doubt that Marilyn was an artist of merit, it was dispelled by the reviews of Bus Stop, which opened on August 31 to critical acclaim. “Hold onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in Bus Stop,” raved Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who had never been a Marilyn fan. “Effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality,” said the Saturday Review of Literature. The London Times observed, “Miss Monroe is a talented comedienne, and her sense of timing never forsakes her. She gives a complete portrait, sensitively and sometimes even brilliantly conceived. There is about her a waif-like quality, an underlying note of pathos which can be strangely moving.”
“Brilliant,” said Variety.
“She’s a troublesome bitch!” Olivier was heard to mumble.
Arthur Miller soon discovered that the Marxist boy from Brooklyn and the Earl of Notley had something in common—difficult wives. At the end of an exhausting day at Pinewood dealing with a very difficult actress, Olivier would go home to Notley Abbey and face another very difficult actress. Vivien Leigh would often be in her manic phase, and Olivier would frequently arrive to find a house full of her animated guests and hangers-on who would party all night, when what he desperately needed was sleep and tranquillity. There were times when he would lock his door, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by Leigh pounding on it. On one occasion when he had neglected to lock the door he was awakened by Leigh beating him across the face with a wet towel at three in the morning. Few knew of his private hell. But there were days when Olivier would brace himself with a stiff drink in his Pinewood dressing room before going home, and Arthur Miller would join him for commiseration and a bracer.
One evening the two of them went to the theater together; Miller wanted to see John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theater, and Olivier reluctantly went with him. Osborne was then a new-wave playwright—an ideological adversary who, it seemed, was out to discredit the British traditionalist world that Olivier was so much a part of. Yet that world was vanishing. Its institutions were as old hat as Rattigan’s play and the gold-braided light-opera ghosts of Carpathia—as old hat, perhaps, as the aging Olivier, whose career was in a rut.
After the play Miller and Olivier went backstage to congratulate the stars, Mary Ure and Alan Bates, and were introduced to the rebellious author, the dreaded John Osborne. When they were leaving, Miller was amazed to hear Olivier hesitantly say to Osborne, “Do you suppose you could write something for me?” Osborne could. He would. He did. And out of that evening on the town with Miller was born The Entertainer and Archie Rice, the illegitimate child of the wooden prince of Carpathia.
Realizing that The Prince and the Showgirl had gotten off to a rather rotten start, Olivier suggested that Terence Rattigan throw a party at which the film’s principals could socialize away from the pressures of Pinewood, and perhaps mend antagonisms in a relaxing atmosphere.
SUNDAY, 19 August
Terry Rattigan’s party last night was as formal and artificial as his plays. He has a typical expensive show-business house on Wentworth golf course—1920’s classical, and very nouveau riche; thick carpets, crystal chandeliers, flowers. I got there early and alone…. Terry Rattigan was in a white dinner jacket beaming urbanely at everyone (though not at me, the 3rd A.D.)
Milton was there with Amy—small and attractive, both of them…. Milton’s boyish, very slight, dark brown eyes always smiling. He must be extremely shrewd to have got control of the most famous film star in the world. SLO was brimming over with bonhomie—always a bad sign. When he is irascible is when he’s sincere.
Finally Arthur Miller and MM. A. Miller looked very dashing, also in a white dinner jacket—strong jaw, intense gaze, the perfect he-man intellectual. I fancy he is very vain indeed. MM looked a bit straggly. She had done her hair herself and she had not been made up by Whitey. She even seemed a bit scared, not of us, but of AM. He really is unpleasant. He struts around as if MM were his property. He seems to think his superior intelligence puts him on a higher plane, and treats her as if she is just an accessory. Poor MM. Another insensitive male in her life is the last thing she needs. I can’t see the romance lasting long. She’s the one who could be forgiven a little vanity, but, strangely enough, that’s not in her make-up at all.
The party just never gelled…Sir Laurence surrounded by people of great assured self importance…Viv is discretely [sic] catty…Hedda Rosten drinks too much…Arthur raids the Hors D’oeuvre platters…Milton plays the ugly American—no one really friendly. A bit stiff. I bet it would have been another matter if we were all queer. (Gaiety, everyone!)
In his autobiography Hollywood in a Suitcase, Sammy Davis, Jr., talked about an affair Marilyn was having during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl. In the summer of 1956 Davis was living in London, and he wrote, “When she was making The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, she was going through one of the most difficult periods of her life. She was having an affair with a close friend of mine…. They met clandestinely at my house…. We had to get up to all sorts of intrigues to keep the affair secret. I used to pretend we were having a party, and Marilyn would arrive and leave at different times from my pal. Once they were in the house, of course, they went off to the swimming pool, which had its own self-contained bungalow.”
Sammy Davis, Jr., was often the beard for Jack Kennedy. Was it JFK Marilyn met in the pool bungalow? According to Colin Clark’s diary, Marilyn went to London incognito on Saturday, August 25. She failed to show up at all at Pinewood on the following Monday. The diary indicates that just prior to the weekend in question Marilyn and Miller had a falling-out over his behavior at the Rattigan party. Jack Kennedy was in Europe at the time. Immediately following the July 1956 Democratic Convention, in which Jack had lost the vice-presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver by thirty votes, he flew to the French Riviera with his brother Teddy—leaving behind Jacqueline, who was pregnant. In Cannes, Jack and Teddy Kennedy connected with George Smathers and chartered a forty-foot yacht, complete with skipper, galley cook, and blondes, according to a Washington Star correspondent who interviewed the skipper.
On August 23, while still recuperating from the strain of the convention, Jacqueline Kennedy was rushed to Newport Hospital in Rhode Island, where an emergency cesarean was performed. The child, an unnamed girl, was stillborn. The Kennedy family tried in vain to contact Jack. He couldn’t be reached on the yacht by transatlantic phone, though it had a ship-to-shore radio. His passport application indicates that he planned to travel to England, France, Italy, and Sweden.
Kennedy was finally located and flew home on Tuesday, August 28. His prolonged absence at this critical time brought about a breach with Jackie. “There was certainly talk of divorce between Jack and Jackie,” Peter Lawford acknowledged. “But it was only talk.” Time later reported a meeting between Jackie Kennedy and Joe Kennedy in which he purportedly offered her a million dollars not to divorce her husband.
It was on Tuesday, August 28, the day Kennedy flew back to the states, that an incident occurred marking the turning point in the Miller marriage. At a time when Marilyn desperately needed her husband’s support, she discovered Arthur’s notebook open on his desk to a page containing a passage so devastating to her that the fragile trust of their betrothal shattered like glass.
The notebook revealed that Arthur was having second thoughts about their marriage. Sobbing to Paula Strasberg about what Arthur had written, she said, “Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Art said he no longer had a decent answer to that one.” The notations in the notebook went on to say that she was an unpredictable, forlorn child-woman to be pitied, but that he feared his own creative life was threatened by her endless emotional demands. “Art once thought I was some kind of angel,” Marilyn cried to Strasberg, “but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse.” Arthur had referred to Marilyn as a “whore.”
Arthur Miller didn’t discuss the incident in his memoirs, but it became the fulcrum of the climactic scene in After the Fall.
QUENTIN: (Grasping her wrist, but not trying to take the pill bottle out of her hand.) Throw them in the sea, no pill can make you innocent! See your own hatred…and life will come back, Maggie. Your innocence is killing you!
MAGGIE: (Freeing her wrist) What about your hatred? You know when I wanted to die? When I read what you wrote, Kiddo. Two months after we were married, Kiddo. (She moves front and speaks toward some invisible source of justice now, telling her injury.) I was looking for a fountain pen to sign some autographs. And there’s his desk…and there’s his empty chair where he sits and thinks how to help people. And there’s his handwriting. And there’s some words, ‘The only one I’ll ever love is my daughter. If I could only find an honorable way to die!’ (she turns to him) Now, when you gonna face that, Judgey? Remember how I fell down, fainted? On the new rug? That’s what killed me, Judgey. Right?
Perhaps Miller was drawing from the evening at Rattigan’s party: in the play Quentin tells Maggie he made the notations, “Because when the guests had gone, and you suddenly turned on me, calling me cold, remote, it was the first time I saw your eyes that way—betrayed, screaming that I’d made you feel you didn’t exist.” After she angrily tells him not to mix her up with his previous wife, Quentin says, “That’s just it. That I could have brought two women so different to the same accusation—it closes a circle for me. And I wanted to face the worst thing I could imagine—that I could not love. And I wrote it down, like a letter from hell.”
The “letter from hell” in Miller’s black notebook damned their marriage, left Marilyn distraught, and marked a turning point in her life. “Hope, hope, hope” seemed beyond her grasp, and she increasingly turned to barbiturates to mask the emotional pain.
MONDAY, 27 August
No MM today. Frantic calls to Parkside were to no avail, although dark hints that AM and MM were not on such friendly terms. I thought so on Saturday at the party…. Finally AM calls to say that MM wasn’t well. A fever. Hmmm. Apparently MM and AM had a row last night, and AM could not control MM at all. She was wandering around the house in a very distressed state. There had been a lot of phone calls, many of them transatlantic. Finally Milton had gone over with extra pills…. In the end one of the doctors in New York talked to her until she was calm enough to go to sleep. (Imagine what that cost?)
Recognizing Marilyn’s deep distress and Paula’s difficulty in coping with the situation, Lee Strasberg flew to London, and Milton Greene arranged for Dr. Hohenberg to arrive for supportive therapy. Calming Marilyn, Hohenberg was successful in getting her back to work, and he introduced her to Anna Freud, who had a practice in London. Marilyn had several sessions with Anna Freud after Hohenberg returned to New York.
Marilyn found herself surrounded by people she could no longer trust. Dismayed at her husband, belittled by her director, she received little support from Milton Greene, whose priority was to mediate between her and Olivier in his efforts to get the film completed. Hedda Rosten was drinking so much she was little help to anyone. Miller couldn’t stand the Strasbergs. To him they were “poisonous and vacuous.” He resented Marilyn’s “nearly religious dependency” on them, which undermined his own influence and control. The relationship between Miller and Milton Greene was equally strained. “Greene thought he would be this big-shot producer and she would be working for him,” Miller observed. “But she saw that he had ulterior aims.” Miller accused Milton and Amy Greene of buying expensive antiques that were charged to Marilyn Monroe Productions and shipped to their home in Connecticut.
WEDNESDAY, 19 September
AM arrived at midday with MM and has been universally cast as the villain of the piece. SLO is cross because he had hoped AM would help MM turn over a new leaf, and this clearly has not happened. She arrived at the studio late and demanding.
In fact she is clearly fed up with AM and also disenchanted with Milton whom she cuts dead…. Milton blames AM for the change in MM’s attitude, both to her work and to him. Milton is in a very difficult position. He wants to control MM and her career, but has to get his film finished on time and on budget if MMP, and he, is to make money. And this means he has to cooperate with SLO and all of us, even at the risk of upsetting MM. So it is easy for someone (AM) to poison MM’s mind against him.
Paula is treated by AM with extreme disdain. I have heard him describe Paula as a charlatan to Milton in SLO’s dressing room, and I’m sure he does it in front of MM. This is hard luck on MM since she totally depends on Paula. She has no one else except the tipsy Hedda. Finally AM is not above snide remarks about Milton to Paula, which quickly get repeated.
This evening MM told Milton that she was not satisfied with her new car. She wants it replaced with a new Jaguar (a MK VII saloon)…. But Milton sees the dark hand of AM at work. “He is trying to pull a fast one. He wants us (MMP) to buy it and then he will ship it over to the USA for his own private use.” Milton was livid, but I think it’s funny that a left-wing intellectual should want to drive round in a Jaguar with Marilyn Monroe. (Although didn’t Lenin have a Rolls-Royce?)
FRIDAY, 12 October
It has been a tough week. At the end of the day I went into SLO’s dressing room with fresh whisky and cigarettes. SLO and Milton are shattered. So is AM.
‘I’ve had it,’ said SLO. ‘I think I’ll go off to China for a month.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Milton.
‘So will I,’ said AM grimly.
‘Come now, dear boy,’ said SLO, ‘Your new bride!’
‘She’s devouring me,’ I heard AM say as I left.
The golden opportunity to make a delightful film with a magnificent cast had become a hellish nightmare from which there would be no exit until the last frame of The Prince and the Showgirl passed through the narrow gate of the Technicolor camera—Marilyn’s true loyalist.
THUNDER and LIGHTNING: ENTER WITCHES
WITCH 1: When shall we witches meet again? In thunder lightning and backlit rain?
WITCH 2: When the hurly burly film flam’s done ’Neath the arc light’s merciless spurious sun.
ALL: Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
EXEUNT ALL.