Page 45 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

MARILYN’S PLANE LANDS at Los Angeles International. She’s dressed in a smart black suit for the airport press conference.

“How do you feel about coming back to Hollywood?” a reporter asks. “Is it a happy time?”

“Yes, it’s a very happy time,” she says. “I’m happy to be back. It is my hometown.”

Others have questions about what Marilyn’s accomplished in New York.

“You said you wanted to grow. Do you feel you’ve grown?”

“Well, I hardly know how to answer that, since they misinterpret that, meaning, in inches or something.”

At that, Marilyn laughs along with the press corps.

It takes two hours to make her way through the throng of photographers, fans, and autograph hunters and on to 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard. For $950 a month, Milton and Amy Greene have rented the nine-room house near the Fox lot, where the outdoor scenes of Bus Stop will be filmed.

Marilyn’s longtime acting coach Natasha Lytess telephones right away. She’s been dismissed by the studio. Surely that’s an error. Isn’t she needed to work on the new picture with Marilyn?

What Lytess doesn’t know is that she’s been replaced.

Paula Strasberg is Marilyn’s new coach, and already has the final screenplay for Bus Stop bound in a blue cover and dated February 27, 1956.

She’s circled every mention of Marilyn’s character, Cherie, in red ink and marked up the dialogue with her notes.

Marilyn Monroe Productions lawyer Irving Stein informs Lytess that her contract with Marilyn, and therefore Fox, is terminated. “All legal means necessary” will be taken to prevent her from contacting Marilyn in any way.

Stein is a tough lawyer, but his client is the one requesting this treatment.

The exact reasoning behind Marilyn’s decision to abruptly end the association with her former mentor is opaque, but rumors about Lytess cooperating with an exposé of their professional and personal relationship surely don’t help.

“My only protection in the world is Marilyn Monroe,” a dismayed Lytess tells friends. “I created this girl—I fought for her—I was always the heavy on set … I am her private property, she knows that. Her faith and security are mine.”

The drama coach can’t accept that this is Marilyn’s doing.

Ignoring Stein’s stern warnings, Lytess shows up at the Greenes’ house on North Beverly Glen Boulevard, only to have the door slammed in her face and to be threatened with a restraining order.

As she staggers back onto the street, in tears, she sees a movement inside the house.

She is shocked to see Marilyn between the curtains in an upstairs window, her face impassive as she draws the curtains closed.

Though Natasha Lytess continues to reach out, especially “when she’s broke,” Marilyn never replies.

In March, filming begins on Bus Stop. Now it’s Paula Strasberg to whom Marilyn defers on every take.

Consistent with the philosophy of the Actors Studio, her technique is pure Method.

If a scene calls for Marilyn to cry, Strasberg instructs her to reflect on a moment in her own life that brought her to tears.

There are plenty. Marilyn also draws from a deep well of fear. Fox’s biggest box-office draw is still terrified of making mistakes. She’s haunted by the feeling she described in a recent interview: Hollywood will never forgive me—not for leaving, not for fighting the system—but for winning.

Bus Stop is Broadway veteran Don Murray’s first film.

She’s such a big star, Murray observes of his co-star Marilyn Monroe, but he’s surprised to see that she behaves like an insecure actress. She has done so many films, and yet, she is so frightened to act in front of the camera.

She stays in her dressing room until ten or eleven o’clock every morning, when she’s finally ready to perform. Even after hours of rehearsal with Paula Strasberg, Marilyn struggles through take after take, barely able to remember her lines.

All too often, Josh Logan appeals to the cast to help move Marilyn’s scenes forward.

“Persuade her, humor her,” the director pleads with the cast after Marilyn jumbles her line twenty-seven times.

“Outside of saying her own line, what the hell do you want me to do?” demands one of the supporting actresses, who nevertheless steels her nerves to approach Marilyn and grip her by the shoulders.

“Look, either we get it right this time or I’m walking out of the picture,” the actress says.

A startled Marilyn perfectly executes her line.

When Murray and Marilyn play a love scene, her body breaks out in a red rash. Makeup artists rush on set with creams and brushes and work to cover up the evidence of her nervousness.

Logan patiently films her scenes in fragments. When the script calls for Marilyn’s character, Cherie, to fight for Murray’s character, Bo Decker, she amazes the director with the fiery intensity of her performance.

“It just wells up from some deep place,” Logan says. “She’s a natural.”

On a good day.

Despite her issues, Marilyn takes her part seriously. She rehearses with Strasberg until all hours and listens to director Logan, striving to create a character that meets her increasingly exacting standards.

Logan is impressed. “I was beginning to feel that she had always been brilliant. No one seemed to have listened to her before,” he says of Marilyn, lamenting, “I nearly missed one of the high spots of my directing life because I had fallen for the popular Hollywood prejudice about Marilyn Monroe.”

Time magazine chooses Marilyn for a prestigious cover profile, assigning Hollywood reporter Ezra Goodman to travel with her as Bus Stop continues filming on location in Phoenix, Arizona, and Ketchum, Idaho.

Though the six-week project is an in-depth undertaking informed by more than one hundred interviews by Los Angeles bureau staffers, journalist Walter Winchell dismisses it entirely. He writes in his column: “I can’t imagine them digging up anything people haven’t read before.”

On the chartered flight to Idaho’s Sun Valley, Marilyn immediately proves Winchell wrong by demonstrating that, even in close quarters, she’s a master of disguise.

A person wearing dark glasses and a straw hat in the style of a Venetian gondolier, gray and black menswear pieces, and a floor-length mink coat steps through the cabin in high heels and takes a seat.

When she shows her face, without a trace of makeup, Ezra Goodman is astonished to discover that it’s Marilyn. And that she’s watching him.

“You look like a writer,” she says later, during a sit-down interview in her dressing room.

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” the Time reporter hedges.

But Marilyn is decisive. “Writers, when you’re talking to them, look like they’re listening to you.”

On another flight from Los Angeles to Arizona, where she’ll be filming rodeo scenes for the film, Marilyn is seated alongside English journalist Donald Zec of the Daily Mirror .

When a meal is served, Marilyn pushes it aside, saying, “I have to watch my figure.”

“You eat, Marilyn, I’ll watch your figure,” Zec quips suggestively, earning himself a teasing slap on the arm.

Zec has known Marilyn since Niagara in 1953, long enough to be allowed a few liberties.

Things soon take a serious turn.

Alarm bells sound as one of the plane’s engines fails.

Through the window, they can see dark clouds of smoke billowing out.

Despite assurances from the pilots, things look dire—bad enough, Zec says, that he and Marilyn “discussed the unthinkable. I soothed her with the thought that if we crashed her name would be on every news bulletin and front page in the western world.”

He asks Marilyn how she’d like to be remembered, and she thinks on it for a while.

“Then she scribbled a note: ‘Here Lies Marilyn Monroe, 38-23-36,’” Zec relates.

He’s unsure whether to consider her self-penned epitaph clever, sad—or both. Marilyn often wavers between the two. Zec’s asked her on more than one occasion if she’s happy.

Marilyn’s reply is always the same: a shrug and a dismissive “Who’s happy?”

Director Josh Logan agrees, saying of his leading lady, “I doubt if she had two consecutive days’ happiness in her entire life.”

“Broadway’s biggest becomes Marilyn’s best,” teases 20th Century-Fox in its trailer for Bus Stop.

Ahead of the film’s premiere, the cast gathers for a preview. Cast members Bill Murray, Hope Lange, Arthur O’Connell, and Eileen Heckart aren’t sure what to expect. As Broadway veterans, they’re all used to running their lines straight through, but that wasn’t what happened on the set of Bus Stop .

“We would see all these little pieces, and we thought the film was going to be a disaster,” Murray says.

Daily rushes never captured a complete scene with Marilyn.

As the preview rolls, they’re amazed and astonished. “All of a sudden we realized what the magic of films was, with the editing and cutting it all together; she was magnificent!”

Critics agree. The New York Times praises Murray as “a wondrous new actor” who “sets up a mighty force to be curbed by Miss Monroe. And the fact that she fitfully but firmly summons the will and the strength to humble him—to make him say ‘please,’ which is the point of the whole thing—attests to her new acting skill.”

Miller writes Marilyn a letter as one creative force acknowledging another. “The whole Bus Stop reception is a personal triumph for you of a magnitude which I don’t think you yet realize. You have done what you set out to do. You are an actress and an artist.”