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.
As a director, Olivier was the stark opposite of the warm, receptive Josh Logan, who let Marilyn’s imagination run wild, allowing for retake after expensive retake. Best of all, Josh listened to Marilyn and continued to champion her after Bus Stop wrapped. For months he’d been writing to Olivier, warning him that Marilyn marched to the beat of her own drummer: “She’s not a domesticated animal. She’s a wild, untamed animal.” But Olivier wouldn’t accept feral behavior, no matter how talented. He expected Marilyn to adapt to his brisk, no-nonsense, and very English production set.
“From the first,” remembers set photographer Jack Cardiff, “it was evident that Marilyn was going to be a problem for Larry on the film.… Marilyn had this ghastly obsession with Method acting and was always searching for some inner meaning with everything, but Larry would only explain the simple facts of the scene.”
Marilyn liked to connect with a character, inching toward it then walking away like a lioness circling her prey. But Oliver didn’t believe in digging deep, in finding the inner motivations and secrets of a character. He could be witheringly dismissive, patting her on the head like a child one day or sneering, “Just be sexy, Marilyn” the next.
“She went through so many agonizing times with Larry because he was, to her, a pain in the arse,” said Jack Cardiff. “She never forgave him for saying to her, ‘Try and be sexy.’ I think she resented him. She used to call him ‘Mr. Sir,’ because he had been knighted.”
As she shrank from Olivier, Marilyn hid more and more behind her buffer, Paula. Olivier was baffled by the cryptic prompts from Paula (“Think of Frank Sinatra and Coca-Cola!”) or “More like a bird, Marilyn, more like bird!” Paula would spend hours getting Marilyn ready, only to find she’d prepared her for the wrong scene. When she wasn’t monopolizing Marilyn, Paula was harassing Olivier, helpfully informing him that his performance was “artificial.” Eventually, he had two security guards pick up Paula and carry her off the set.
Oddly enough, Milton began to admire the Strasbergs in their own strange way: “Paula had a way out, like Lee had a way out: ‘It’s not an oil painting; it’s a watercolor.’ There are ten different ways you could take that.”
Like the Strasbergs, Milton had his own way of working with Marilyn, such as cranking up the music to coax genuine tears. “She wouldn’t take any glycerin in her eyes; it was always real tears. It’s the vibrations of the music that made her tears stronger. So I walked over to Larry and said, ‘Make the Bach louder.’ Larry was ready to kill me. ‘There’s only one director,’ he said.”
By the end of filming, director and actress were in full-fledged war. Olivier was fed up with it all, fed up with the crazy hand-shaking warm-up moves, the tranquilizers and the meltdowns, the blank stares when she missed her lines, the trembling lips whenever he criticized her. He was exasperated that Marilyn demanded real caviar and champagne during the dinner-party scene, rather than making do with the apple juice and dyed-black bread balls they always used. After two days of retakes she ended up costing him several bottles of champagne and masses of Fortnum and Mason beluga at $12 a jar. He refused to attribute this to her commitment to authenticity, concluding instead that Marilyn was simply trying to torture him. Even her stomach troubles, he claimed, were “psychological warfare.”
Equally troubling was Arthur. He and Marilyn had never really lived together, and now they were thrown into a chaotic pressure cooker, causing the cracks in their marriage to become painfully visible. From the very beginning, he isolated Marilyn from the rest of the set, urging her to refuse invitations, and was quoted in the Daily Mail as having said, “Thanks, England, thanks for leaving us alone.”
“Arthur began to show up every day in the dressing room and he was disruptive,” fumed Amy Greene. “No matter what Larry told Marilyn to do, Arthur had an opinion about it. Finally one day Larry told him to get the fuck off the set or he’d have him thrown off.… I mean, what was he doing there? I went antiquing, I went to museums, anything to stay out of Milton’s hair. He went back to her dressing room, closed the door, and sulked for the rest of the day.”
