Luckily, Marilyn wouldn’t be facing it alone. Milton rented a house in Westwood with Amy, baby Josh, Marilyn, and Kitty and Clyde Owens. “It was kinda hectic and pretty good too,” remembered Kitty. They woke at six, worked all day on the rushes, and taxied back in time for Kitty’s home-cooked dinners. Marilyn would beg for scrambled eggs rolled with capers. “Stop,” Milton would plead. “You gotta be thin, thin, thin!”
This was the kind of work Milton loved, experimenting with lighting, camerawork, and costume. As the unofficial director of photography, he took charge of Marilyn’s makeup—and as usual, the wheels in his head were already turning. Like Marilyn, Cherie slept all day—she’d have to be pale—but even in its whitest shade, Max Factor Pan-Cake wouldn’t deliver the anemic pallor Milton was looking for. So he dusted Marilyn with baby powder—not just her face but her neck, chest, and arms. Marilyn hesitated at her pasty reflection. Bus Stop was her comeback. Was this the look she wanted to show the world: dull, doughy, and dredged in flour?
Marilyn soon came to realize Milton’s “aspirin and black coffee” look was perfect for a nocturnal saloon girl like Cherie. Director Josh Logan was impressed. He knew the pressure she was under to stay pretty, the whispering that she’d alienate her male fans. “Marilyn’s attitude toward her makeup and costume was courageous,” he praised. “Incredible, really. Here you have a well-established star. She was willing to risk her position with that makeup many stars would have considered ugly. Every day we got a message from Buddy Adler or somebody else, telling us to change the chalk makeup. I kept saying trust her. And Marilyn wasn’t afraid. She is never afraid to commit herself if she believes she is right.”
Much to Marilyn’s delight, Cherie’s wardrobe was full of creative possibilities. Instead of the stiff lounge-singer gowns she’d worn in Gentlemen, or those ridiculous Show Business getups (half stripper, half tropical bird), she experimented with ripped fishnets and sleazy lame coats trimmed in monkey fur. She scoured secondhand shops for tattered and tired corsets and blouses—perfect for a honky-tonk chanteuse singing “That Old Black Magic” on a bus station tabletop. Billy Travilla designed a nightclub costume that she tore and darned hastily—just the way Cherie would. She ripped off the spangles and sewed them back on with the skill of a child. She attached scraps of black fishnet to darken the bodice. Perfect for “a ratty looking girl with a sense of direction.”
Impressed with Marilyn’s initiative, Josh encouraged her to take an active role in developing the character. He invited her to meetings with Buddy Adler and George Axelrod, and together they’d brainstorm over coffee or lunch. Soon, even the skeptical Axelrod perked up when Marilyn spoke. “We’ve got to get that in the picture,” he’d say to Josh after a meeting, or “we’ve got to get that movement of hers.”
“It’s important to realize that Marilyn conceived the conception of Cherie herself,” said Josh years later. “All I did was help her crystallize and help her get it on film. This conception of an uneducated girl with an Ozark accent and a fantastical crazy dream—well, it was in Bill Inge’s original play script, of course, and it was in George Axelrod’s movie script—but Marilyn gave it flesh and bones and heart. She put her own flesh on the character, and made the tawdriness, the pathos, the honesty of the girl so believable.”
During one early meeting, they tried the Stanislavski trick of summing up the plot in one single sentence: “Will this girl who wants respect ever get it?” That’s when Logan began to understand this wasn’t just an actress playing a part: “Her crisis with Fox, her cross-country move—even her romance with Arthur—this was the story of Marilyn’s life.”
* * *
With a sympathetic director, a meaningful role, and Milton Greene behind her, everything looked promising. But once filming began on location in Phoenix, Marilyn’s anxiety shot back up. After fourteen months looking inward in New York—books, therapy, Lee Strasberg, and Malin Studios—she was thrown back into the world of stage lights, call times, and stuffy trailers. She hadn’t faced a movie camera in fifteen months and was flooded with insecurity. Lead Don Murray was too young—would his baby face make her look like a crone? Hope Lange’s hair was too blonde—she’d have to dye it darker so she wouldn’t steal Marilyn’s thunder. All this under a media blitz in blistering Arizona heat.
But this time, Marilyn found herself surrounded by a team of supporters. Milton kept an eye on lighting and camerawork, patting her arms with baby powder between takes; Amy helped her read over her lines at night. Josh Logan was always attentive and kind. “Josh adored her,” observed Amy. “He would no sooner raise his voice to Marilyn than kick her.” Acutely aware of Marilyn’s fragility, he looked out for her on the set and kept a protective eye on her interactions with the cast. “Whenever Marilyn and I got alone together,” claimed her costar, Don Murray, “Josh would be behind the set listening to our conversations. He was very eager for us to get along, and if there was any kind of argument going to start he wanted to be there to jump in and stop it.”
In Logan, Marilyn found a permanent ally. Not only did he coddle her; he was completely invested in their project. He understood her weaknesses and, more importantly, her strengths. “One thing Marilyn has beyond anyone today,” he said, “is that when the camera starts to roll, she keeps on going and as long as I don’t stop her she’ll keep going. She keeps on getting better—she always stayed with the Ozark accent. What I did in Bus Stop was learn to put a camera on Marilyn when she was creating, not to cry cut, not to cut her off when she was beginning to secrete the emotion. We’d start rolling a scene and then she’d stop and it seemed like she forgot the line but we kept the camera on her and the assistant director fed her the line or I’d hand her a prop and mess up her hair and she’d keep going and I didn’t jangle her by yelling cut and starting all over. You yell cut and right away the cinematographer wants to fix her up and the mood is broken.”
Like Marilyn, Josh wasn’t afraid to break the rules. He wanted extreme emotional close-ups: an inch above the chin to show some stoked-down fear, that space between the brows to show a subtle longing. But the technology wasn’t there yet. With a regular CinemaScope six-inch lens, you couldn’t shoot closer than seven feet. So he persuaded the cinematographer to try three-inch diminishing lenses, the kind usually saved for close-ups of teacups or calling cards. It worked, and Marilyn was delighted, thrilled to be part of a cutting-edge technique. Josh didn’t care if they saw the fuzz of hair on her arms or the powder caked on her face or the veins in her eyeballs. Neither did she.
Once Josh had won her trust, Marilyn began to relax on set and even have fun. Cowboys, rodeos, pizza parlors, neon streetlights, mountains in the background—there was a dreamy, kitschy magic that lit up her sense of spontaneity. She’d leap about during the fireworks, or hop on Don’s shoulders to get through an impromptu parade. Josh looked on, beaming in paternal admiration as Marilyn raced around the set like an enthusiastic puppy. “She has a way of getting excited before I’d finished a sentence and race away,” he said, “full of enthusiasm and vitality to try the idea out and I’d have to say, ‘Hold it, Marilyn; I haven’t finished yet.’”
Always tolerant, Josh defended Marilyn’s chronic lateness, insisting she had a “different sense of time.” “It’s not conceit,” he insisted. “It’s not a desire to annoy or harass other people. She thinks about the scenes and gets lost. One day in Phoenix we were waiting for the “magic hour,” a movie phrase to denote a time of day when the sun is going down and there’s enough light in the sky to show distances and give an effect of night. It lasts about five minutes. Marilyn was in her dressing room. We sent the [assistant director] over for her seven minutes early. As the minutes ticked away, I kept calling, ‘Where’s Marilyn; where’s Marilyn?’ No sign of her. Milton Krasner, the cameraman, kept cursing, ‘We’ll miss it, we’ll miss it!’ Finally at two minutes to go, I ran up to her room, and she’s sitting in front of the mirror. I pulled her up and said, ‘Run!’ and we ran to the scene. ‘Even though my name is Joshua,’ I told her, ‘I can’t stop the sun.’ The next time we had a magic hour, I got her there an hour and a half before.”
Not everyone was entertained by Marilyn’s antics. Even Josh admitted that she was oblivious of her castmates, falling into trances, or what he called “brown studies.” When the time came to film the bedroom scene, she insisted on playing it nude and showed up in a terrycloth robe that she wriggled off under the bedsheets. She was pretending to sleep, and Don was supposed to lie next to her, shaking her awake gently. “Wake up, Cherie, its nine o’clock, no wonder you’re so pale and white!” Only he flubbed his lines to “no wonder you’re so pale and scaly.” The camera had to be reloaded, and Don lay on the bed mortified, waiting for Marilyn to react. She wiggled closer to him whispering: “Don, you made a Freudian slip. You said scaly instead of pale. That’s very good. That means you’re getting the emotion of Bo, subconsciously. You were thinking of snakes—do you know what a phallic symbol is?”
“Yeah, I do,” Don muttered. “I’ve got one!”
But even Don had to admit that Marilyn was on form. “Let me say that according to people who had worked with Marilyn, Bus Stop was her best-behaved movie,” he conceded years later. “They say she was more on time for this than for any other picture. She had Milton with her, who was very helpful. She had Josh, who was gently persuasive.… Psychologically it seemed to be a terrific period in her life.”
Instead of being bullied, Marilyn was respected and, even more important, a key part of the creative process. “Marilyn herself conceived the basic approach to Cherie,” said Josh Logan. “What I did, well, I helped her get it on film. Her approach emotionally gave us all the key to the music we played in the film. She stimulated every one of us. We were all ‘sent’ by her, inspired by her. She inspired all of us to do our jobs better.”
* * *
After Phoenix, they left for their next location—the Idaho mountains with their snowdrifts and subzero temperatures. Several cast members caught the flu, including Marilyn, whose acute bronchitis landed her in the hospital, shutting down production for a week. By now Arthur was in Reno to begin the mandatory two-month residency that would expedite his divorce. “I can’t do it,” Marilyn phoned from her hospital room. “I can’t work this way. Oh, Papa, I can’t do it.” She wept into the phone, lamenting her lack of training as an actress, her inability to “pretend.” “All I know is real! I can’t do it if it’s not real!”
But the Stanislavski-trained Logan knew all about the real. He knew that Marilyn had to maintain constant contact with her character, a delicate current that could be broken while she waited for electricians to relight the set or wardrobe girls to fix her costume. Sometimes she’d wander away from him while he gave her instructions or direction on a scene. Instead of being annoyed, he recognized that an idea had been triggered, and she needed the silence and space to explore it. So when Marilyn announced in the midst of a scene, “Can I have a moment to think?” he let her “seek the reality behind the lines.”
Her most difficult scene was the one with Hope Lange, whispering in the dusk about her fears and tawdry past. Josh saw her struggling through the big blocks of speech, pausing, her face screwing up as if she were about to vomit. “Every technician on the set thought she was fluffing her lines, blowing up,” he said, “when she was feeling her way through the emotions of the lines. She knew her lines verbatim—she goes along as an actress but has the extra mind of the critic, a censor—and if she doesn’t measure up, she’ll stop and make a face of nausea, but this means she’s on the verge of being good. It didn’t mean she’d forgotten her lines or blew a scene and [that I’d have to say], ‘Let’s do it again.’ I never stopped the camera—we had to print ten times as much film as we’d have done otherwise but we got her going that way.”
Huddled up next to Hope on that rickety bus, she shivered in her cheap coat, hands red with cold. She spoke of the Ozarks’ quieter horrors, of her menacing Pappy, and “going with boys” since she’d been twelve years old. She said Bo was the first boy who ever wanted to marry her—aside from her cousin Malcom, who “turned out real bad.” She wasn’t sure what love really was, but she longed for a man to look up to and admire. “I’ve just gotta feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me,” she said with a sigh, a melancholy haze falling over her face, “aside from all the love stuff.” She could have been talking about Joe or Arthur.
Marilyn threw herself into Cherie with all the weight of the Method behind her. “She was pathetic, tawdry, pitiful, bedraggled,” remarked Josh, “yet you never felt sorry for her. She was all these things with a subtle comic accent—and yet you didn’t laugh at her. And she got across the tiredness, the weariness of it all—the weariness of her life as a small-time singer, the pathos of it when she sings her poor little song, ‘That Old Black Magic,’ and nobody listens to her.”
In the last scene of Bus Stop, Cherie slumps over the bar, her face resting sideways on the counter. Bo hovers over her, his chin cradled in the crook of her neck. “Cherie, I like you so much the way you are, it doesn’t matter how you got that way.” As Marilyn sits up, some flecks of saliva pull away from her mouth—just the sort of thing retouched during edits. Josh insisted on keeping them: “I said her saliva was from her emotion, mouth open, hand on mouth. To me this was one of the great acting moments of intimacy and feeling in all filmic history.” Marilyn agreed.
Bus Stop was Marilyn’s first film under her new contract with Fox, her first after learning the Method with Lee, and possibly the most rewarding role of her life. It wasn’t easy, with the intimidating script, the fluctuating weather, both leads’ battling bronchitis and bouts of pleurisy. Yet somehow they pulled it off, ahead of time, and even more astonishingly, under budget. Marilyn and Milton were perfectly in sync—no pills this time, not even booze. “At that point in their lives those two human beings were so clean,” explained Amy, “because they loved what they were doing. They would wake up and couldn’t wait to get to the studio. It was a happy time.”
Josh Logan would later call this time Marilyn’s Golden Period, and it was. “With her declaration of independence in 1955, she became a different person,” Zolotow noted. “She played Cherie in a tender area that lies between comedy and tragedy. It is the most difficult thing to do. Very few motion picture stars can do it. Chaplin achieves it. Garbo achieves it. And you know … I believe she has something of each of them in her—she is the most completely realized and authentic film actress since Garbo. She is pure cinema.”
* * *
At last, Hollywood agreed. “Hold onto your chairs, everybody,” wrote the critic Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself in ‘Bus Stop.’”
“Speaking of artists,” wrote Arthur Knight in The Saturday Review, “it is beginning to appear that we have a very real one right in our midst … Marilyn Monroe effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality, a shapely body with tremulous lips and come hither blue eyes.… For Miss Monroe has accomplished what is unquestionably the most difficult feat for any film personality. She has submerged herself so completely in the role that one searches in vain for glimpses of the former calendar girl.”
Josh took vicarious pleasure in Marilyn’s success: “To some extent she was getting even with the sadistic half-wits who had humiliated her during her early years in pictures.” Even the harshest critics couldn’t help admiring Marilyn’s stellar performance. When Fox execs brushed this kind of praise off, accrediting her obvious talents to a man, Josh wouldn’t have it. “People would tell me, ‘Well Josh, you got something out of her nobody else did.’ I told them I didn’t get anything out of her that wasn’t already there.”
Her time in New York had paid off. Marilyn had delivered the performance of her life.
Eighteen
Mazzie
“I’m bored with people who go around offering psychological explanations for everything.”
ELSA MAXWELL
On June 3, Marilyn returned to New York to marry Arthur. But the relationships she formed in Manhattan were complicated. Were the Strasbergs using her fame? Was the constant psychoanalysis dredging up too many sinister memories? Did Laurence Olivier consider her an equal, or did he want to sleep with her? (He wanted to sleep with her.) Would her relationship with the Greenes ever sour, and would MMP continue to flourish? Who was Arthur, this lanky, reticent writer, and would his saintly support and quiet protectiveness last?
* * *
Marilyn married Arthur on July 1, 1956, in the Katonah hamlet of Westchester County. “Arthur didn’t have a black suit,” recalled Amy, who guided Marilyn through the wedding preparations. “I don’t think he owned a suit. So Milton made a call, brought six suits over to the studio, and outfitted Arthur head to toe. Marilyn, of course, had wanted to wear white and carry calla lilies and a long white train. I convinced her to wear beige—I mean this was her third time—the jig was up. I got her the Dalco shoes that I always got her—very high heel with pointed toe, parchment hose. Bendel’s was the only one that had parchment hose at the time, and I sent her on her way.”
Kitty baked an elaborate cake with swags of white icing, topped with the wedding ornament Amy and Milton had used three years earlier. Amy wore a beige lace top with white organza overlay, Hedda wore an A-line dress the color of sugared sand. Marilyn’s dress of champagne chiffon was designed by Norell, with Amy’s wedding veil dipped in tea to match. Lee Strasberg stood ready to give her away.
“Lee and Milton and I were sitting on the bed with her,” revealed Amy years later, “and she turned to Milton and said, ‘Tell me I’m making a mistake, and tell me you don’t want me to do it, and I won’t do it.’ And Milton of course said, ‘I can’t do it for you, Marilyn. You have to make the choice yourself.’”
“Would you please close the door,” she begged. “I need to speak to Milton alone.”
“I was in there for a good fifteen minutes or more,” remembered Milton, “and I was walking around by the window, and she was sitting on the bed and had tears in her eyes, and said ‘Milton, should I marry him?’ I didn’t know what to say. If I say no it’s wrong, if I say yes it’s wrong. I was there for her—I promised I’d always take care of her. When she called me in that room, that was a very important moment in both our lives. She had a stronger feeling than I did—‘Yes, I’ll marry you. I’ll say no to him and marry you.’ Yes, she would have, I think so. That I think would have happened.”
Finally the door opened. “Lee and I just stood there very quietly,” said Amy. “Finally Lee said, ‘Yes or no?’ And then she looked at the three of us and shrugged her shoulders, and smiled very cynically and said, ‘Oh, what the hell, we can’t disappoint the guests.’ And she took my hand and said go out and light the candles and tell everyone out there I’m coming.”
Milton put the glass under Arthur’s foot, everyone yelled, “Mazel tov!” and Arthur lifted the veil and kissed the bride.
It was Milton, not Arthur, who stepped on the glass and crushed it. “Doomed,” Amy whispered to a shell-shocked Lee, “before they even take the vow.”
* * *
Twelve days after her wedding, Marilyn boarded a London-bound plane to begin filming The Prince and the Showgirl. With Laurence Olivier as director and costar, this would be the first film that MMP produced, and Marilyn and Milton’s ultimate coup. Olivier’s hopes were just as high. He’d hitched his wagon to Marilyn and had quite vocally planned to fall “shatteringly” in love with her.
But potential issues loomed—not the least of which was Olivier’s negative attitude toward Method acting. (“All this talk about the Method, the Method!” he’d groan. “WHAT Method? I thought each of us had our own method.”) He was utterly unequipped to deal with this new, intuitive style. Meanwhile, Lee Strasberg had been prepping Marilyn to distrust Olivier, to question his directing and to rely on Paula for help.
