JOSHUA LOGAN, THE DIRECTOR OF Bus Stop, Marilyn Monroe’s next film, couldn’t say enough on behalf of his star’s acting abilities. “When I tell people Marilyn Monroe may be one of the very finest dramatic talents of our age,” he ventured in an article for the New York Times, “they laugh in my face. But I believe it. I believe it to such an extent that I would like to direct her in every picture she wants me for, every story she can dig up.”
Based on a hit Broadway play by William Inge, Bus Stop marked the first collaborative film effort between Twentieth Century–Fox and Marilyn Monroe Productions. In accordance with her latest contract with Fox, Monroe sanctioned the project, the director, the screenwriter, and the cinematographer. She’d had approval on Fox’s selection of cast members. She likewise had the last say on the choice of costumes, though her Bus Stop outfits turned out to be as low-cut and risqué as every other film wardrobe she’d ever slithered into. She replaced Natasha Lytess with Paula Strasberg, an action which so infuriated Lytess that she threatened to write a “tell-all” exposing her former pupil for what she was: “an ungrateful monster.”
MM hired Hedda Rosten, Norman’s wife, as her personal secretary at $250 per week. The Rostens attended the University of Michigan at the same time as Arthur Miller; Hedda and Mary, Miller’s first wife, had been college roommates. Marilyn hired Hedda primarily because she’d heard that the Rostens were having money problems but also because, as a former social worker, Hedda had the capacity to be nurturing and supportive. And in February 1956 Marilyn leased a house at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles to serve as home base during the filming of Bus Stop. Marilyn shared the residence with Milton, Amy, and Joshua Greene, their two retainers, and Florence Thomas, her own housemaid.
Although Josh Logan’s glowing assessment of Marilyn’s performance in Bus Stop seems accurate enough, the movie itself, at least by contemporary standards, ranks with the most mediocre of Marilyn’s previous films. In Bus Stop a naïve and simple-minded young rodeo cowboy named Bo (played by Don Murray) falls in love with Cherie (Marilyn Monroe), a hillbilly café singer whom he meets on a bus. His intentions are honorable—he wants to marry her—but his temper and jealous side are too much for her. When she tries to run away, he finds her and forces her to board a bus bound for his Montana ranch. When the bus stops at a diner, the passengers learn that the road ahead has been closed by a snowstorm and that poor Cherie is a kidnap victim. After spending a night in the diner, waiting for the storm to abate, the passengers prepare to reboard the bus. Our rodeo cowpoke is suddenly contrite and sorrowful enough for Cherie to reconsider her options. At the end of this rather unremarkable “boy-gets-girl” melodrama, the Monroe and Murray characters clamber aboard the bus and ride off into a glorious sunrise.
So much for plot! One wonders just what Marilyn (and Milton Greene) saw in this tiresome film script and what compelled them to make it MMP’s virginal coproduction, though in fact it did well at the box office. Perhaps Monroe detected flashes of Joe DiMaggio in Bo’s demanding and controlling manner. Or maybe she simply welcomed the opportunity to be her own boss, regardless of the property.
Before filming began, she noticed that actress Hope Lange, making her film debut, had a head of hair the same color as hers. She demanded that Hope’s tresses be darkened so as not to compete with her own shade of platinum. Although Marilyn complied with Josh Logan’s request that Paula Strasberg be kept off the set, she sulked whenever the director made her reshoot a scene. And when he dared cut a scene she liked, her fangs came out. A year after the release of Bus Stop, when Logan tried to visit her in her dressing room on the London set of The Prince and the Showgirl, she lambasted him: “Why the hell did you cut out that scene in the bus? I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.” Logan told her he didn’t have final cut on the picture. Marilyn didn’t believe him. She slammed the dressing room door in his face. What Marilyn should have known was that few directors have final cut on a studio picture. It was Twentieth Century–Fox she should have blamed.
Paula Strasberg did her coaching in Marilyn’s dressing room or at the actress’s rented home. Like Natasha Lytess before her, she made herself indispensable. She knew how. She created a need and then filled it. She became Marilyn’s alter ego, patiently listening to all her laments and regrets, assuaging her anger, soothing her ruffled emotions. She talked Marilyn through her insecurities: Could she play the role? Would Arthur Miller stop loving her? She combated Marilyn’s fears and the resentments of producers, directors, and costars. When Marilyn flubbed or forgot a line, Paula shouldered the blame. In short, she held Monroe’s hand. She became Lee Strasberg’s surrogate, doing what he would have done had he been present instead of his wife. “Operation Marilyn,” as the Strasbergs called it, brought in more money than they made with the Actors Studio and conferred upon Paula a newly discovered status. Her critics called her an opportunist and a starfucker, a designation they similarly bestowed upon Lee Strasberg.
During one of her days off from the Bus Stop shoot, Marilyn and Inez Melson, her business manager, drove to Verdugo to visit her mother at the Rockhaven Sanitarium. Milton Greene had allocated $300 per month of MMP funds to pay for Gladys Baker’s health care. Melson took care of the finances. She frequently sent cards to Gladys, often signing Marilyn’s name. When Monroe returned from her visit with her mother, she felt so thoroughly deflated she called her analyst, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, and asked her to fly from New York to Los Angeles for a personal consultation. Hohenberg complied and evidently succeeded in helping Marilyn to recover.
Monroe also saw Joe DiMaggio Jr. during this period, inviting him to visit her on the set at the Hollywood studio. She took a taxi to Black-Foxe and brought along enough food to feed half his dorm.
The actress spent most of her spare hours running through her lines. And late at night, unable to sleep, she would talk by phone with Arthur Miller, particularly when cast and crew found themselves on location, first in Phoenix, Arizona, and then at Sun Valley, Idaho.
To avoid the red tape of a New York divorce (and probably to be nearer to Monroe), Arthur Miller temporarily moved to the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch, forty miles north of Reno, Nevada. Since the cottage he’d leased lacked telephone service, he resorted to a pay telephone booth a quarter mile away, on the edge of the property. When using a long-distance operator to connect them, Miller answered to the name Mr. Leslie, and Marilyn to Mrs. Leslie. Having been tipped off to the true identity of the Leslies, a television camera crew soon showed up at the ranch and started asking questions. The first person they queried was fiction writer Saul Bellow, Miller’s neighbor at the ranch; like Miller, Bellow had come to Nevada to seek a divorce. Bellow and Miller frequently ate dinner together, each vocalizing the strains and tensions of his last marriage. After cornering Bellow, the television crew asked if he’d seen Arthur Miller.
“Can’t say I have,” responded Bellow.
What about Marilyn Monroe—had he run into her?
“I’d certainly know if I ran into Miss Monroe, and I can assure you I haven’t.”
It wasn’t until 1959 that Saul Bellow met Monroe. They had dinner together in Chicago, after which Bellow observed that to be close to Marilyn “is like holding on to an electric wire and not being able to let go.”
Arthur Miller couldn’t let go. Besides the phone calls, he wrote to Marilyn every day, sending her long, confessional letters that she kept in a stack by the side of her bed. Disregarding Nevada’s six-week residential requirement, he drove to Los Angeles and checked into an apartment that she’d rented for them at the Chateau Marmont, again using the pseudonym Mr. Leslie. Mrs. Leslie—Marilyn—soon joined him, and the couple spent the night together.
Over the next month, they had two additional clandestine meetings at the same hotel. One evening they ventured to the Mocambo club on Sunset Boulevard to hear Ella Fitzgerald. It had been Marilyn, in 1955, who’d convinced the owner of the legendary Los Angeles nightclub to break the color code by offering Ella a singing engagement. Ella later told an interviewer, “The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. I never had to play a small jazz club again.” In fact, every year for the next five years, Fitzgerald appeared at the Mocambo, and often credited Marilyn for having helped to advance her career. “Marilyn Monroe was an unusual woman, a little ahead of her time. And she didn’t know it.”
In 1956, after attending a Beverly Hills party at which she’d met (and charmed) Achmed Sukarno, president of Indonesia, Marilyn came down with bronchitis and had to be hospitalized, interrupting production on Bus Stop for nearly a week. Having learned of her illness, Joe DiMaggio flew from New York to Los Angeles and dropped in on her at Cedars of Lebanon. He’d sent her a large bouquet of roses the day before. But it wasn’t a good visit. Arthur Miller phoned Marilyn from Nevada while DiMaggio was still in the room. Joe, who later related some of the details of his visit to George Solotaire and Paul Baer, excused himself and waited in the hospital’s sitting room for Marilyn to finish her call. When he returned, she told him outright what he’d expected to hear: that she and Arthur Miller were going to be married.
“Joe responded by telling Marilyn he’d read as much in the press but had wanted to hear it from her,” said Paul Baer. Paul accompanied George Solotaire to Los Angeles to meet up with DiMaggio. The three men then drove to Las Vegas, where Edward Bennett Williams awaited them.
“Joe wasn’t a happy warrior,” said Baer. “Of course, there wasn’t anything he could do to alter the situation. He said to us, ‘Let’s go find Arthur Miller and take care of him.’ He wasn’t serious. He had contempt for the intelligentsia, but it didn’t compare to his hatred of Hollywood bigwigs. He had nothing against Arthur Miller. He figured Miller was in the picture primarily because he—Joe—had screwed up. If he hadn’t screwed up, he’d still have been married to Marilyn Monroe. That’s not to say he wasn’t upset. That first day or so, he drank himself sick. He drank in his Vegas hotel room because he didn’t want to tarnish his public image. I had the feeling, though, that he’d already mourned the end of his marriage. A day or two later, he came downstairs and joined us in the casino. He didn’t gamble much—he never did—but he chatted it up with the gangsters, the high rollers, the hookers, and the bookmakers, swapping stories about baseball and the underworld. And then he started jawing away with some showgirls. And as luck would have it, he wound up in bed with one of them.”
Kurt Lamprecht, a German-born writer living in New York, contacted Marilyn Monroe through Arthur Jacobs, her new PR agent, requesting an interview for the German press. Back in her Sutton Place apartment in early June, having completed work on Bus Stop, Marilyn agreed to the interview.
“She was enormously popular all over Europe, arguably the best known and most popular American actress,” said Lamprecht. “I found her to be an utter delight. Full of vitality and wonder, she also had an unquenchable desire to learn, to pick up knowledge and process it. She asked all sorts of questions about what my life had been like in Germany before I came to the States. Somehow we began talking about poetry. She showed me a letter she’d received from T. S. Eliot. ‘We’re pen pals,’ she giggled. She had an intense interest in politics and regularly wrote to the national affairs editor at the New York Times. We discussed the Actors Studio. She said she had grave doubts concerning her acting skills but felt the Strasbergs were helping her. In her eyes, Lee Strasberg could do no wrong. She called him ‘the Great White Father.’ She revealed that before performing a scene for the Actors Studio with Maureen Stapleton from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, she became so nervous she peed in her panties. ‘And I don’t usually wear panties,’ she added.”
Lamprecht, an acquaintance of Arthur Miller’s, felt that Marilyn wanted to marry the playwright in order to validate her intellect. Not that there wasn’t also a sexual component to their relationship. Several days after his first interview with Monroe, Lamprecht accompanied the couple to lunch at Sardi’s. “They both looked suffused with a glow,” he remarked, “that could only come from a highly charged sexual relationship. To me it seemed obvious that sexuality represented an important factor for both. But evidently not everyone realized they were involved. Joan Copeland, Arthur’s younger sister, joined us for coffee and dessert that day, and it was clear she didn’t have the faintest idea they were anything other than good buddies. Joan, like Marilyn, took courses at the Actors Studio. But she seemed unaware that Marilyn would soon become her sister-in-law. I’d spoken to Truman Capote concerning Arthur and Marilyn, and he suggested that Miller was all but addicted to her—he was not merely besotted with her, he was smitten. Like Joe DiMaggio, Miller was in love, seriously, completely, with the full force of a man trapped in quicksand. Capote said to me, ‘If you ever write a book about the two of them, you ought to call it Death of a Playwright.’ ”
After lunch, Lamprecht returned to Marilyn’s apartment to complete the interview he’d begun with her a few days before. “She suddenly became very serious and at the same time sarcastic,” said Lamprecht. “She began talking about Arthur Miller’s problems with the government, how they’d unconstitutionally canceled his passport because maybe he’d once read a book by Karl Marx. She talked about his pending June 21 appointment to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which she referred to as ‘an agency dedicated to the destruction of morality, creativity, and intelligence as we know it in this country.’ She was on her soapbox. She said that in August 1955 she, herself, wrote to the Soviet embassy, requesting an application for a visa to visit the USSR. It had nothing to do with politics. She’d hoped to see Russia because she wanted to look into the possibility of producing (and appearing in) a film version of The Brothers Karamazov. After she contacted the Russian embassy, all hell broke loose. The Daily Worker, an American Communist Party newspaper, ran an article reporting on her request to visit Russia. The FBI began tracking her every move, as if she were selling state secrets to the KGB. She surmised that by now her FBI file bulged with reports documenting all her ‘subversive’ activities, including her romantic involvement with, as she called him, ‘Comrade Miller.’ Marilyn insisted it was all part of the same whole-cloth plot: Congress wanted to implicate anyone and everyone they considered even remotely controversial. An amusing side note to all this is that whenever Marilyn got angry at Arthur, she called him ‘that Communist.’ ”
As scheduled, on June 21, ten days after Arthur Miller secured his divorce from Mary Slattery, he traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Having been implicated by his relationship to Elia Kazan, who infamously named names for the HUAC, Miller was adamant that he was innocent and that he would provide no names for its witchhunt.
Marilyn Monroe remained in her New York apartment and watched the proceedings on television. Before the hearing began, ABC-TV aired a brief interview conducted several days earlier with Monroe, in which she vigorously defended Miller, proclaiming him “the only man I ever loved.” During the hearing, Miller, who purportedly attended a half dozen meetings of the Communist Party in the late 1940s, stated he was not and never had been a party member, and to the best of his knowledge had never attended a Communist Party meeting. He requested that his passport be returned to him. He wanted to go to England because for one thing, A View from the Bridge was opening in London in October, and for another, because “I want to be with the woman who will be my wife.” He went on to say that he and Marilyn Monroe planned to be married, and she, too, had to be in England to begin work on a new movie.
Edward Bennett Williams told sportswriter Maury Allen that the hearing broadcast, including the opening interview with Monroe, had “hit Joe DiMaggio like a brick wall. I figured he would cancel a dinner date we’d made for later that evening. He didn’t. He went straight ahead with it and never said a word about Marilyn all night. Joe has a way of blocking unpleasant things out of his mind like that. If he doesn’t want to discuss something that would hurt him, he just forgets about it.”
Once the HUAC hearing was over and had gone reasonably well, Miller and Monroe held an impromptu press conference at Marilyn’s apartment, the purpose of which was to formally announce their forthcoming nuptials. “Because of Miller’s HUAC hearing, half the country already knew of their plan, so I suppose the announcement was directed at the other half,” said Kurt Lamprecht, who attended the event. “One of the more notable incidents that afternoon took place when Marilyn hugged Miller. She embraced him with such force that he told her to stop, ‘or I’ll fall over.’ I didn’t know him personally, but I had difficulty imagining Joe DiMaggio making such a comment.”
Just as notable were the remarks Marilyn offered concerning the institution of marriage, a portion of which seemed directed specifically at DiMaggio as well as at the foster families the actress had experienced during her formative years: “I guess I was soured on marriage because all I knew were men who swore at their wives and others who never played with their kids. The husbands I remember from my childhood got drunk regularly, and the wives were always drab women who never had a chance to dress or make up or be taken anywhere to have fun. I grew up thinking, ‘If this is marriage, who needs it?’ ”
Regarding her feelings for Arthur Miller, she said: “For the first time I have the feeling I’m going to be with somebody who’ll shelter me. It’s as if I’ve come in out of the cold. There’s a feeling of being together—a warmth and tenderness. I don’t mean a display of affection or anything like that. I mean just being together.”
On June 29, the day of their planned civil marriage ceremony, Arthur and Marilyn were being driven along a winding country road by Morton Miller, Arthur’s cousin, when it became evident that they were being closely followed by another car. Morton sped up, as did the other vehicle. They were in Roxbury, Connecticut, where the playwright owned a small house he would soon sell, reinvesting the money in another Roxbury property, a 1783 two-story colonial farmhouse on 325 acres. Just as Morton rounded a bend, the driver of the second car lost control and careened off the road, crashing into a row of trees. Morton stepped on the brake. Marilyn jumped out and started running in the direction of the wrecked car. The driver looked dazed and badly injured. His passenger had been thrown through the windshield and lay unconscious by the side of the road in an ever-widening pool of blood. The driver eventually recovered. The less fortunate passenger died later that day. Her name was Mara Scherbatoff. She was a forty-eight-year-old New York bureau chief for the French magazine Paris Match. By chance, she’d attended the Sutton Place press conference and since then had been following Monroe and Miller for additional news on their imminent marriage. Marilyn took the tragic accident to heart. When asked by the Associated Press for a comment, she remarked: “It’s more than sad that Miss Scherbatoff should have perished in pursuit of a news story as trivial as my third marriage. It once again demonstrates the very arbitrary and futile nature of existence.”
The civil wedding ceremony uniting Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe took place on Friday, June 29, 1956, at the Westchester County Court House in White Plains, New York. Conducted by Judge Seymour Rabinowitz and organized by Sam Slavitt, a lawyer friend of Arthur’s, the ceremony started at 7:21 p.m. and ended ten minutes later. Marilyn wore a casual sweater-and-skirt combination. Present for the occasion were Morton Miller and his wife, Florence; Lee and Paula Strasberg; Milton Greene; and Marilyn’s new friend, interior decorator/fashion designer John Moore.
To satisfy Arthur Miller’s Orthodox parents and because she “yearned to belong,” Marilyn eagerly agreed to convert to Judaism and to participate in a religious wedding ceremony. Her conversion consisted of little more than a sixty-minute chat with a rabbi friend of the playwright, in the course of which they discussed the current political plight of Israel rather than anything to do with religion. The official double-ring, Jewish wedding took place on Sunday, July 3, two days after the civil ceremony. Rabbi Robert Goldburg of Congregation Mishkan Israel, in Hamden, Connecticut, conducted the wedding in the Waccabuc, New York, home of Kay Brown, Miller’s literary agent. Marilyn wore a beige satin and chiffon wedding dress and a matching veil. Miller wore one of the two suits he owned. (His total lack of sartorial splendor represented a radical departure for Marilyn from the always fashionably attired Joe DiMaggio.) Thirty friends and relatives attended the Miller-Monroe nuptials. Lee Strasberg gave away the bride, and Morton Miller served as Arthur’s best man.
The matrons of honor were Amy Greene, Hedda Rosten, and Judy Kantor (a friend of the Rostens’). Reporting on the event, the New York Herald-Tribune noted that Marilyn “was said to look fabulously beautiful and completely content.” Conspicuously absent from the ceremony were all of Marilyn’s Hollywood friends and the usual array of photographers and reporters one would expect to find at a celebrity wedding. Because the wedding band he’d ordered wasn’t ready, Miller had to borrow his mother’s ring. The wedding band he finally gave Marilyn bore an inscription: “A to M. June 1956. Now is forever.” On the back of a wedding picture taken by Paula Strasberg, Marilyn wrote: “Hope, Hope, Hope.” In one of her notebooks, she penned the thought “A good marriage is a very delicate balance of many forces, but there is much more to it than that.”
A week after the wedding, the US State Department notified Joseph Rauh, Arthur Miller’s lawyer (whose legal fees nearly bankrupted his client), that they were going to renew Miller’s previously suspended passport. Marilyn applauded the action by jovially offering it as final proof of what she had always contended: “Arthur Miller is more American than un-American.” As to her religious conversion, she would henceforth describe herself as a “Jewish atheist.” The term said it all. Following her marriage to Miller, Marilyn rarely discussed Judaism and never attended services. For that matter, she had little use for any form of organized or traditional religion.
• • •
In Marilyn Monroe’s eternal quest to be part of a family, she did her utmost to demonstrate to Arthur Miller’s parents that she could be a dutiful and loving spouse. Once in a while when she and Arthur were in the New York area, they would drive to Brooklyn to eat dinner at Isidore and Augusta Miller’s home. Except for a Knabe grand piano (which Arthur had played as a child), the small house had seen better days. The most inviting room was the kitchen. Just as the DiMaggio clan had tried to instill in Marilyn a desire to cook Italian food, Augusta Miller, Arthur’s mother, taught her new daughter-in-law how to prepare borscht, chicken soup, matzoh balls, and other Jewish delicacies. To better communicate with the elderly but proud Brooklyn hausfrau, Marilyn attempted to speak Yiddish and even managed a phrase or two. In truth, the two most important women in the dramatist’s life had nothing in common other than the dramatist himself. Interviewed by the press, Augusta said, “Marilyn is very sweet and obviously very beautiful. She opened her heart to me.” Marilyn offered the press a similarly perfunctory comment regarding Augusta, calling her “a wonderful cook and a caring person.”
Marilyn’s relationship with Isidore, Arthur’s father, was far different. Formerly a manufacturer of ladies’ coats and a successful store owner until the Depression, Isidore had intense feelings for the actress, and she for him. “He simply lit up at the sight of her,” his son would write. She called him Dad, wrote him letters, sent him poems and sketches, and frequently spoke with him by phone. She also flirted with him, on one occasion placing his hand on her hip, which didn’t exactly please his wife. Marilyn told Lotte Goslar that where previously she had only Joe DiMaggio, she presently had no less than three “father figures” on whom to rely: Lee Strasberg, Arthur, and Arthur’s dad.
Lotte Goslar visited the newlyweds at Marilyn’s Sutton Place apartment. “I gave them a lace tablecloth as a wedding present,” she said. “A year later Marilyn told me Arthur’s dog had chewed it to shreds. ‘Hugo likes lace,’ she said, ‘what can I tell you?’ But she didn’t say it in a nasty way. I think she felt lousy about it but didn’t know quite how to phrase it. She sort of made light of it.”
Goslar’s sense of Arthur Miller at this stage was that he appeared to be conflicted. He seemed to retain a degree of guilt over his recent divorce on the one hand, but on the other he obviously took a great deal of satisfaction in “knowing he possessed a woman whom millions of men longed for. Joe DiMaggio had given off the same vibe when they were together. And like DiMaggio, Miller evidently felt he needed to protect and even save Marilyn, though from what I’m not sure—maybe from herself. Miller and DiMaggio were both a good deal older than Marilyn, and both were famous, though not as famous as Marilyn. They represented both sides of the Greek ideal: body and mind. Marilyn told me Arthur Miller had a brilliant mind, and one of the reasons she married him was that through him she hoped to get out of being Marilyn Monroe, by which she meant she could begin playing legitimate roles. Presumably people would start taking her seriously. Other than that, Arthur and Marilyn were totally preoccupied. They were preparing to go to England so Marilyn could begin working with Sir Laurence Olivier and a predominantly British cast on The Prince and the Showgirl. She’d met Olivier earlier that year when he came to New York to discuss the project. I didn’t communicate my feelings to Marilyn, but in all honesty I couldn’t fathom the two of them appearing side by side in a film. I knew Olivier somewhat. In terms of temperament and personality, he and Marilyn were like oil and water. I couldn’t see it.”
Before departing for London, Marilyn called Joe DiMaggio Jr. in Los Angeles. “I knew she and Arthur Miller were dating, and then I read about their marriage, and I thought perhaps I wouldn’t hear from her for a while,” he said. “So I was a pleasantly surprised when I did. She called me at my mother’s house because I was on summer break from school. I only attended camp for a month that summer, having fallen off a horse and broken my arm. She sounded pretty much as she always did. She didn’t say much about her marriage, only that she’d be in England for several months making a new movie. She asked me how things were going. I told her about my arm, and she said, ‘Well, now you can relax and read a few good books.’ Then she asked whether I’d heard from my father. I said, ‘He calls me all the time these days because he knows you and I speak. I’m suddenly very popular with him. I have clout. I’m no longer in the shadows.’ She laughed, told me she loved me—as she always did when we spoke—and that she’d write from England as soon as she could. She only wrote to me once during her stay in Britain. She evidently had problems. But one thing she did was to send me a whole slew of magazine subscriptions. When I got back to school that fall, I started receiving National Geographic, Time, Life, and so forth. She even took out a subscription for me to the New York Times. I guess she figured I should be more up on current events. I remember her saying once that the California papers, including the Los Angeles Times, were full of it. I don’t know why she thought the New York Times was any better. I guess given her liberal Democratic political point of view, she had more faith in the New York Times.”
Milton Greene and Irving Stein, an attorney involved with Marilyn Monroe Productions, left for England on July 9. Marilyn had several last sessions with Dr. Hohenberg and arranged to continue her therapy by long-distance telephone two or three times a week. She and Miller departed for London on July 13. Paula Strasberg, Hedda Rosten, and Amy Greene (with little Joshua) followed ten days later.
Matters began to go awry almost from the start. The newlyweds were given the run of Parkside House, a luxurious Georgian mansion that belonged to the owner and publisher of the Financial Times. Situated on ten lush acres in Egham, an hour from London and even less from Pinewood Studios, where The Prince and the Showgirl was to be shot, the residence came with a full staff of household retainers. The moment the British press learned of the couple’s arrival, they camped out on the periphery of the estate and never left. Despite their presence and that of the household help, a pair of burglars gained access to the mansion and made off with a cache of Monroe’s jewelry, including several items that Joe DiMaggio had given her.
Another early problem was the enmity that existed between Monroe and Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier’s British-born wife. A two-time Oscar winner, Leigh had played Marilyn’s role in the original stage version of the film. Titled The Sleeping Prince, the play, written by Terence Rattigan, had won wide critical acclaim. Milton Greene had purchased the film rights for Marilyn and MMP/United Artists. Laurence Olivier (wearing a monocle and adopting an austere Eastern European accent) would not only perform opposite Marilyn in this supposedly comedic film but also produce and direct. Vivien Leigh clearly resented Monroe for having taken over her role. She treated the American actress with such utter disdain that Marilyn soon stopped talking to her. One of Leigh’s statements to the press represented nothing short of a personal attack on Monroe. “That girl,” she said, “has the audacity to give herself top billing in the film, even over my husband, Lord Olivier. What hubris! What a laugh! I mean, what does that little tart think? She’s popular for two reasons, and it’s pretty obvious what they are.”
Marilyn responded to the criticism by reminding the press that having purchased the project she was, after all, “Olivier’s boss.” The comment served only to further anger Olivier’s wife.
As production on The Prince and the Showgirl began, Leigh announced publicly that, after years of marriage and at age forty-two, she was pregnant with Laurence Olivier’s child. The news placed Leigh on the front pages of England’s Fleet Street tabloids, knocking Monroe off. “She replaced me in the film, and I replaced her in the press,” said Leigh, whose fragile nature and ego-related uncertainties were as well documented as Monroe’s. In mid-August Leigh supposedly suffered a miscarriage, though rumors persisted that she’d never been pregnant and had confabulated the entire story only to annoy Monroe and perhaps to demonstrate that her marriage, long said to be troubled, had magically repaired itself.
On the whole, Lotte Goslar had accurately surmised that the chemistry between Laurence Olivier and Marilyn would be lethal. Not long into the production, Monroe began showing up on the set hours late or not at all. When she did appear, she looked and sounded hung over from alcohol and sleeping pills. Her insomnia hadn’t ended with her marriage to Arthur Miller. If anything, it had intensified, though she insisted on hanging yards of black fabric over her bedroom windows to block out even the slightest hint of light. Moreover, she insisted on bringing Paula Strasberg along to the set, overruling Olivier, who didn’t want her anywhere near the set. Olivier couldn’t abide Paula, particularly since she repeatedly usurped Olivier’s directorial authority. As director, he felt if he cracked the whip, the actors were expected to jump. Furthermore, he totally rejected the Method style of acting. When Lee Strasberg arrived on the set during a three-day visit to England, Olivier asked him to leave. Laurence Olivier wasn’t Lee Strasberg’s sole detractor. Arthur Miller had nothing against him personally but criticized his professorial demeanor. He ridiculed Lee for his “endless lectures completely devoid of content,” and Marilyn’s quiet devotion to him—how awestruck she was when she whispered his name.
Joshua Logan, who’d directed Marilyn in Bus Stop, also showed up on the Prince set. “Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be like this, what with that beast Paula Strasberg?” a chagrined Olivier asked him. “What did you do when you were explaining how the line should be read, and Monroe walked away from you before you were finished because Strasberg had told her otherwise?”
To add to the professional differences that existed between Olivier and Monroe, there was a growing rift between Arthur Miller and Milton Greene. Miller accused Greene of “looting MMP,” buying English antique furniture for his home with corporate funds, whereas Greene accused Miller of essentially the same “crime,” namely “living off” Marilyn and basking in her fame and glamour. Miller and Greene argued incessantly. And just as Joe DiMaggio had lamented the existence of Natasha Lytess, Miller felt the same way when it came to Paula Strasberg. He told Marilyn that between “Larry Olivier and Paula Strasberg, there’s no question which one knows better how to deliver a line.” Paula, he ventured, “knows nothing about acting—you’re paying her all that money, and for what?” As to Hedda Rosten, her sole function aside from opening the five thousand fan letters MM received each week was simply that of a drinking companion. Although he generally liked the Rostens, he didn’t know why his wife should have to support them financially.
Then, in the midst of the tumult, a potentially disastrous situation developed. Marilyn spotted her husband’s journal on top of the kitchen table. It had been opened to a passage relating to Marilyn. In a moment of doubt, with tension and strife engulfing the production of the film, the playwright expressed his dismay with Marilyn, asking himself how he could have made the same marital mistake twice, further pointing out that he could think of no “legitimate response” to Laurence Olivier’s burgeoning “anger and resentment” toward the actress. The passage went on to say that he found Marilyn difficult to deal with, unpredictable, at times “out of control,” a forlorn “child-woman” whose endless emotional demands were more than he could handle. He feared his own creative efforts would be thwarted in the process of looking after her. He brought up one particularly painful incident: a recent suicidal threat Marilyn had made one night while inebriated and high on drugs—drugs that Milton Greene made available to her by the bucket-load. And when Greene couldn’t produce the desired pharmaceuticals, she could always count on Paula Strasberg, to whom Miller referred as “a walking apothecary.”
Arthur’s journal entry came as a shock to Marilyn. She felt betrayed, stabbed in the back by one of the few people she thought she could trust. Lee Strasberg recalled a sobbing Marilyn calling him at three in the morning to report what she’d read. “It was something about how disappointed he was with me, how he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something wrong. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Arthur no longer had a decent answer to that one.”
The following day, after Laurence Olivier viewed rushes of the film to date, he told Marilyn her teeth looked yellow and advised her to brighten them by brushing with lemon and baking soda. Marilyn fumed and walked off the set. Olivier called her “a professional amateur.” She mockingly referred to him as “Mr. Sir” and told Paula Strasberg she wouldn’t continue filming until he offered her an apology. She told Hedda Rosten she wouldn’t continue her marriage unless Arthur Miller gave her a suitable explanation for the comments he’d written about her. When Marilyn left Parkside House, she checked into the London Hilton, where she proceeded to wash down half a bottle of tranquilizers with a half dozen glasses of champagne. She returned to the Georgian mansion the following day and confronted her husband. Unable to respond, he withdrew. Marilyn asked Milton Greene to call Dr. Hohenberg. Greene not only phoned Hohenberg, he coaxed her into boarding the next flight for London. It marked the second time in as many films that Marilyn’s psychoanalyst had been summoned to restore Monroe’s equilibrium. The difference on this occasion was that Hohenberg had to return to London a second time. Two round-trip cross-Atlantic journeys—Arthur Miller termed it “mail-order psychoanalysis”; he might just as well have called it “checkbook psychoanalysis”—the two visits combined cost MMP in excess of $20,000.
On her first visit, Hohenberg found Marilyn in a state of deep depression. As she told Iselin Simon, Marilyn hadn’t slept in days. She’d been threatening to walk out on the film as well as on her husband. She’d removed Arthur Miller’s photo from her dressing room and replaced it with a snapshot of Joe DiMaggio. Hohenberg managed to calm the patient, but after the therapist returned to New York, she again heard from Milton Greene. Arthur and Marilyn had argued, and Marilyn had suffered a setback. Could the good doctor kindly return?
On her second visit, Dr. Hohenberg listened as Marilyn read excerpts from her notebooks. Monroe’s written musings reflected the depth of her despair. Arthur Miller’s “betrayal,” she noted, what she’d “always been deeply terrified of, to really be someone’s wife, since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.” From another page, she read: “And I in merciless pain . . . but we must endure, I more sadly because I can feel no joy.” She read Hohenberg a letter she’d written to Lee Strasberg in which she said: “I’m embarrassed to start this, but thank you for understanding and having changed my life—even though you changed it I still am lost. I mean I can’t get myself together.”
Before leaving London following her second visit, Hohenberg contacted Anna Freud, whom she’d known in Vienna, and asked the eminent psychiatrist to meet with Marilyn during her absence. An appointment was arranged. High on the sedative Dexamyl, Marilyn drove to Dr. Freud’s home office at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Paula Fichtl, Anna Freud’s housekeeper, recalled Monroe “arriving in a black Rolls-Royce, wearing white slacks and a plain blue gabardine jacket with its collar up. No makeup. A soft white hat covered her platinum blonde hair, and her large, dark sunglasses rendered her almost unrecognizable.
“Before their session, Dr. Freud took Miss Monroe next door to the nursery school she helped run and where she conducted much of her research, children being a key [according to Sigmund Freud] to an understanding of the development of the adult psyche. Marilyn played with the children for nearly an hour. She then returned with Dr. Freud to her office. She came every day for more than a week.”
Anna Freud’s diagnosis, as recorded in her clinical files, indicated a far more serious condition than that which Hohenberg had previously rendered. Freud described Monroe as “emotionally unstable, highly impulsive, and needing continuous approval from the outside world. She cannot bear solitude and gets profoundly depressed when faced with rejection. She is paranoid with schizophrenic undertones, in other words a paranoid schizophrenic.”
Schizophrenia: the term terrified Marilyn. Her mother suffered from schizophrenia. Other forebears on her mother’s side of the family had been similarly afflicted. Thankfully, Freud didn’t disclose her diagnosis to Marilyn, though she sent a copy of her report to Dr. Hohenberg in New York. After receiving the report, Hohenberg phoned Milton Greene, her other “celebrity” patient, and advised him that he’d made a mistake to go into business with Monroe. Hohenberg said she didn’t know how long the arrangement could continue under the present circumstances. Eventually learning of the conversation, Marilyn used it to terminate her treatment with Hohenberg, citing it as an example of unprofessional conduct, a violation of her right to privacy. Hohenberg’s harsh words following the breakup with Monroe turned out to be prophetic. “When she left me,” she said, “I knew sooner or later she would kill herself.”
For the moment, matters grew worse before they got better. In mid-August, after she’d returned to work on the film, Marilyn learned from a British gynecologist that she was pregnant. Above all, Milton Greene thought it necessary to keep the pregnancy from Laurence Olivier. Greene needn’t have concerned himself. On Saturday, September 8, Marilyn miscarried, enduring the same fate purportedly suffered by Vivien Leigh. Monroe later told Lotte Goslar she was extremely disappointed because she’d hoped, despite her earlier sense of betrayal, to show Arthur she could be a devoted wife and a good mother. Starting a family, having a baby, would rectify everything that wasn’t right in their marriage.
Somehow The Prince and the Showgirl neared completion but not before Hedda Rosten and Paula Strasberg returned to New York, and Marilyn spent additional time with Anna Freud. When filming finally ended, Monroe distributed a letter of apology to the entire cast and crew, including Laurence Olivier: “I hope you will all forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very sick all through the picture. Please, please don’t hold it against me.”
There was a light moment, one of the few, when Marilyn Monroe met Queen Elizabeth. In October the Queen walked down a reception line of twenty international actors at the Empire Theatre in London, greeting each in turn as they performed the usual bow or curtsy. Included in the group were Brigitte Bardot, Victor Mature, and Joan Crawford. Arriving late, Marilyn stood at the end of the line. When the Queen reached Marilyn, she stopped and stared. Wearing an off-the-shoulder gown that left little to the imagination, Monroe once again became the talk of the town.
That same month, Monroe accompanied her husband to the London premiere of A View from the Bridge. Following the performance, Miller proudly wrote Norman Rosten that Marilyn had worn “a garnet-colored velvet gown, halting traffic as far north as Liverpool, and had conquered everyone.”
Five weeks later, the Millers were back in the United States. Browsing through a stack of back-issue magazines, Marilyn came across a Newsmaker item in a three-month-old issue of Time that caught her attention. Joe had been spotted playing in the annual Old Timers’ Day game at Yankee Stadium, which amused Marilyn. She sent a handwritten note to George Solotaire: “George, sweetie—Please tell Joe congratulations on his gargantuan homer this past August at Yankee Stadium. Also please tell him that as far as I’m concerned, he’s no Old Timer! Love, Marilyn.”
Solotaire gave DiMaggio the letter and advised him to contact Marilyn. DiMaggio decided against it. “She’s impulsive,” he told Solotaire, “and often does things she later regrets. I’ll wait.”