Declining
It's no secret that Marilyn Monroe had
problems. Reckless, guilty, depressed,
her troubling fall of the 1960s was the fun house reflection of a promising
rush to fame ten years earlier. Monroe
struggled to keep her wits about her, stumbling through three husbands and
suicide flirtations. She plagued studios
with the high salary and uncertain returns of a star in the eclipse. Consumed by the barbiturates that contributed
to her death at age 36, Monroe's last film, Something's
Got to Give, was abandoned by Twentieth Century-Fox. She couldn't go any further.
During these years of anxious living
she starred in two remarkable films, Some
Like It Hot, in 1959, and The Misfits
(1961). As her private tragedies
compounded, and directors struggled to remain patient with her tardiness,
screaming, and cursing, all the while insulating herself with attendants and
psychiatrists—even with all that, her work onscreen shone. With the tensions of life squeezing her like
a vice grip, Monroe's acting in these movies demonstrates a marked improvement
from her early efforts. Her study in Lee
Strasberg's Actors Studio certainly contributed, as did the hidden polish of
good writing and direction. Both factors
deserve credit. But they are matched in
importance by Monroe's apparent willingness to expose her soul rather than her
body. She's doing what any good actor
has to do, take risks. The reality of a
talent transcending stardom emerges in these films. Electric in surprise, with hindsight
foreboding, her beautiful gift, inspiring pathos and wonder, will survive like
nary another; hers is one of the brightest points of light in a galaxy of
Hollywood stars, years after collapse, radiant still.
Even with Monroe's profound ability,
one gets the sense that in Some Like It
Hot she is still regarded with derision.
Her role is Sugar Kane, a singer in a girl band joined by Tony Curtis
and Jack Lemmon to escape the clutches of the Chicago mob. The role seems tailor-made for her. But at first she was offended by the script,
thinking her character moronic. Sugar
has a history of difficulty with man bands, constantly falling for saxophone
players who love her and leave her.
Monroe's trusting nature and serial sexploration are thus a part of her
character, allowing her to recall past experiences to create an exceptional
performance in the flavor of the Method system promoted by the Actors
Studio. Any beautiful actress would be
appropriate for the role. Monroe is that
and much more, and the Lemmon and Curtis characters interact with her
accordingly. But in three of the first
scenes in which Monroe appears, her character is sandbagged by a derisive
trumpet with a sexpot mute. Growling at
the sight of Monroe with the equivalent effect of a wolf's whistle, this
scoring undermines the character, because she is not used as a dumb blond in
the script—she is thoughtful, and nurses deep wounds. Monroe is ill-served by Adolph Deutsch's
lecherous music, and in a sparkling film, this was director Wilder's one
glaring misstep.
Marilyn Monroe has this great way of
delivering her lines, charging through them with enthusiasm, hoping that
another sad story will work out differently in the retelling. Her face matches the tenor of her words, the
eyes becoming heavier with every sip of gin, sensuously and wearily narrowing
before springing wide in renewed enthusiasm.
Her character wrestles with alcohol,
just like Marilyn. In the beginning
she's sneaking sips from a flask, but drops it all once she's fallen in love,
declaring she'll never go back to it, only to plead for some once (she thinks)
all hope is lost.
Such lines as "Well, if they
catch me once more they're going to kick me out of the band"..."I
always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop"...and "Then one morning you
wake up, the guy's gone, the saxophone's gone, all that's left behind is a pair
of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out" testify to her
unique style (and her tortured final years).
She has an indescribable quality that might be considered exuberant,
vital or sparkling, a quality made all
the more endearing in the context of life's many disappointments.
The role affords her a nice balance
between her patented breathy-innocent sexiness and a refreshing shop-worn
fatigue. Sugar is ebullient when
relishing her new affections for Junior (Tony Curtis out of drag on a yacht),
singing "I Want to be Loved by You"; then she mourns his loss,
resigning from the human race with "I'm Through With Love." Monroe's acting is at its best when she
performs these two songs.
What emerged on screen was magical,
but tensions on the set ran high. Wilder
resorted to planting the line "Where's that bourbon?" in the drawer
Marilyn opens after she had blown dozens of takes for just that one
reading. He had been skeptical of the
benefit the Actors Studio would have on her work, fearing it would take away
her natural charm. Though it was tougher
directing her on Some Like It Hot
than The Seven Year Itch, he was
impressed with her new-found abilities.
Wilder knew what was at stake, remarking, "Before she was like a
tightrope walker who doesn't know there's a pit below she can fall into. Now she knows."
The Misfits proved even more
difficult. The screenplay was the work
of Monroe's third husband, Arthur Miller, the playwright of Death of a Salesman. Their marriage was tormented from the
beginning, and the screenplay was a major factor. Monroe suspected that her husband was
developing the script to launch a Hollywood career, using his wife as the
vehicle. He began the project as a means
for Marilyn to show her true gift for acting.
But she did not think her character, Roslyn, should be portrayed as
innocent and hypnotic, as the script called for.
Instead, Monroe wanted a multi-layered
character with a heavy history like her own; she felt Miller, instead of loving
her despite herself, ignored the parts he didn't like, particularly her sordid
past. This just heightened the feelings
of rejection she'd battled since childhood.
John Huston of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre directed. He alternated, like Billy Wilder, between
fits of anger and awestruck admiration.
Marilyn Monroe was unpredictable, and Huston made the decision to
hospitalize her less she destroy the film, die, or both. Co-star Clark Gable died soon after shooting
finally finished, and Monroe was racked with guilt at having made him wait for
hours on end in the hot Nevada desert.
The film, boasting an excellent cast
of Gable, Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach, concerns
the changing times of mustang herders in the wilds outside Reno. The dialogue is thick with talk of life and
death, the difficulty of change, the nature of freedom, and the inability to
trust. It's as sad a movie as Some Like It Hot is hilarious.
Monroe's unease translates well, for
in many scenes she broods and stares, despondent. A trance-like dance her character falls into
after drinking too much, stumbling around in the moonlight as her dress is
about to slip off her body, is uncomfortable to watch (and greatly enhanced by
Alex North's hypnotic scoring). Her
character, regardless of screenwriter Miller's capacity for self-delusion, is
as close to the real Monroe as we have on film.
Roslyn is willing to be pulled along, making quick decisions, but
leaving matters of substance to the men controlling her. She's transfixed by pain, focused on
death. Her desperation to love and be
loved, to be protected, is tempered by a fear of the very man she entrusts her
salvation to. And she is scared, easily
frightened, one minute vibrant and alive, another withdrawn and despondent...or
screaming.
One aspect of Roslyn's past hits
harder than anything else in the movie.
The story is briefly told by Roslyn, but then amplified and interpreted
with great insight by Guido, played by Eli Wallach. In her younger days, Roslyn took up dancing
as a way of expressing her inner vitality and love for music. 
She ended up performing in a night club. But what she offered as innocent was perverted
by lusting men who didn't understand beauty, even as they beheld a prime
example of it.
Perhaps audiences did take Monroe the
wrong way. She wanted, desperately, to
be taken seriously, to escape the burden of being a sex goddess. But when she finally set up her own
production company and won a sparkling contract from Twentieth Century-Fox,
depression overtook her and she gave the public little opportunity to observe
her gifts in those last five years. Just
like Some Like It Hot, in The Misfits, Monroe's character teeters
between extremes. In the first film she
is ebullient or mournful, in the second, luminous or numb. Listening to the people who knew her well,
this is just as she was. They were drawn
to one aspect of her character, frightened or repulsed by the other. But there were always men trying to use her,
to the very end, men who did not care about her but wanted control and wanted
to exploit, men like those referenced in both films. Hers was a difficult road that with poor
choices she made impassable. But she was
always the center. In both films she
plays the pivotal role as men, transfixed and bewildered and aroused, compete
for 
her. In The Misfits they even take to telling
her directly, from one end of the picture to the other, having known her but a
few hours, how extraordinary she really is.
People can see that more readily than
they did then. A reputation as the very
incarnation of sexuality has abated as the belief that she was misused and
under-appreciated gains adherents. But
their confusion found root in her behavior.
In Some Like It Hot¸ Sugar
lies about being a high-society girl to appeal to a millionaire. In The
Misfits one discussion touches on the observation that Roslyn is the
saddest girl around. She mildly protests
that she has been told she is the happiest.
Gay, the Clark Gable character, has an answer for that: She makes men feel happy, and they project
that feeling back on to her. In real
life, Marilyn did not habitually lie with her mouth, but she did put on a
charade that all was well, determined to show the world that their icon (a
figure she had more difficulty ignoring as her death approached) was alive and
well, still sexy and ready for the next
adventure. Nothing could have been further from the
truth. Marilyn rehearsed herself before
meeting someone important, stashing insightful questions in her purse, and the
like. Even if it was not a business
meeting, she was always eager to please, eager to impress, determined to make
of herself more than others would allow her to be. But the problem wasn't that others didn't
like her; she never liked herself.
With all the trouble she had making films, cinema fans can be glad for at least we have, in these movies, two examples of Marilyn Monroe approaching perfection. But her perfection would never match our ideal, and that was her curse. She died young, preserving for all a portrait of youth, unchanging, lost in a time far gone.