Before she left New York, Marilyn had one last interview with her old friend Earl Wilson. She wanted to work in the bedroom—he could talk to her while she packed. In her black velvet toreador pants and white tennis sweater, Marilyn was vibrant, running around barefoot showing Earl new dresses, hopping up to answer the phone or look up lines in a book. She fluttered around the chaotic room, chairs strewn with minks, scripts, and slips. With nowhere else to sit, Earl stretched himself out on her pink taffeta bedspread, shoes and all.
Underneath the bubbly playfulness was a woman who knew her worth. When Earl congratulated Marilyn on her triumph over Fox, she corrected him and called it a “compromise.”
“A compromise!” Earl was stunned. “Aren’t you underestimating and understating it? Didn’t you win a big victory?”
“It was a compromise on both sides,” Marilyn said. “I do not have story approval, but I do have director approval. That’s important. I have certain directors I’ll work for and I have trust in them and will do about anything they say. I know they won’t let me do a bad story. Because, you know, you can have a wonderful story and a lousy director and hurt yourself.” She named John Huston and Billy Wilder, who’d expertly guided her through The Asphalt Jungle and The Seven Year Itch.
“And I love George Stevens and Kazan even before I make a picture with them!” She tossed her hair, grinning like a minx again.
And what next? She wanted to travel—London, Paris, Rome, even Russia. She quickly assured Earl that New York would be her real home—and she was hoping to buy a house “somewhere in the 60s … or 70s … or 80s … or somewhere.”
“That girl has fought tremendously,” Earl concluded, “and against frightening odds, to achieve her present eminence in pictures.… In her career she’s found an answer, though incomplete, to her fears.”
* * *
The night before she left for LA, Marilyn and Milton lounged around Sutton Place doing what they loved most—drinking, giggling, plotting, and playing with clothes. Marilyn tried on high-necked silk blouses, floppy black hats, and a fitted brown suit (it still had pins in it) for the flight the next day. Milton looked on, cocktail in hand, slumped in a chair, legs flung over the side.
They chatted about Bus Stop, the future of MMP, what going back to Hollywood might mean. Their year in New York was ending just the way it started—Marilyn and Milton, Milton and Marilyn.
That night, Jimmy Haspiel and Monroe Six member John Reilly stopped by to bid their Mazzie farewell. They brought seven glossy prints for her to autograph—that haunting picture John had taken on January 7, 1955, her first “official” night in New York. She’d been leaning against the wall of Marlene Dietrich’s elevator, lips closed, a barely visible tear gleaming in her eye. Marilyn disappeared into her bedroom with a pen, while Jimmy and John chatted with Milton.
“Thank you for being so loyal,” she signed one, and “thank you for your loyalty” on another, and “thank you for your loyalness”—offering six variations on a word that meant the world to her. But Jimmy’s was different: “To Jimmy, Thanks for your friendship and devotion, Marilyn.” Thrilled to be singled out, he slid the print in his coat pocket and walked the twenty blocks to East 30th Street, grinning all the way home.
At dawn, a limousine drove them both to the airport. Marilyn dressed in New York black with creamy costume pearls; Milton ready for Hollywood in shades and a light taupe suit. She was giddy, rolling down her window, leaning out to wave at Jimmy and the Monroe Six, who followed in a cab.
“At the airport,” remembered Jimmy, “I became something of a human prop for the crowd of press photographers. While I was taking a shot of Marilyn, and she was posing especially for me, the press photographers shot the whole thing.” It was plastered all over the New York Sunday News the next day: Marilyn beaming at her teenage fans, lit up with warmth and gratitude. Glowy and clear-eyed from the cold Eastern winter, she shone with self-possession. She’d charmed the implacable Sir Laurence Olivier. She’d landed her dream role as Bus Stop’s Cherie. She had the Strasbergs behind her and a year of Method training at the Actors Studio under her belt. And she had won victory over the Fox execs, who had insulted her and devalued her only ten months earlier. Somehow, she had found her center, found herself, after fourteen months in the city of her dreams.
Seventeen
The Return
Back in LA, the American Airlines terminal teemed with paparazzi and journalists, eager to capture Marilyn’s triumphant return. In her sleek new suit and black leather gloves, she strode past the cameramen with grace and poise. She left the press dazzled and reeling with questions: “What happened in New York?” Certainly, Marilyn returned strong, confident. But what was this strange alchemy—what had really changed, and was it all positive?
She’d be up against a lot—Miller-Monroe rumors had already begun to surface in gossip columns and Walter Winchell had just proclaimed her “darling of the left intelligentsia.” While Mainstream Hollywood acknowledged her success, it often did so begrudgingly, still sore over her supposed “art-house pretensions.” Even directors who loved her—like Billy Wilder and John Huston—were dismissive of the Method and the highbrow roles she planned to tackle. Had she alienated her fan base? Was she ready to start her first film since suspension, and how would Fox welcome her back?
Preproduction for Bus Stop would begin in two days, and there was plenty to be nervous about. After a year away, she’d be flung back into the world of production sets—page boys and runners dashing in and out with messages, scripts, and photo proofs. Hairdressers, masseuses, and ever-present publicity teams. Unmade beds at Chateau Marmont, costume blowups and last-minute script switches.
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!”
