Page 48 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

EGGHEAD WEDS HOURGLASS , Variety reports as America celebrates the marriage of its greatest playwright and its most famous film star.

In the UK, “Marilyn Mania” has been building in the months since the announcement of The Prince and the Showgirl .

Before she even arrives, she’s received invitations to cricket matches and cream teas.

To taste fish and chips on the seafront and shoot grouse in Scotland.

Ladies crochet gold and white wool into Marilyn Monroe dolls.

Newspapers crowd Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden’s speech about austerity and impending economic disaster to the lower reaches of the front pages in favor of Marilyn’s photograph.

Miller records his first impressions: “The camera flashes formed a solid wall of white light that seemed to last for almost half a minute, a veritable aureole, and the madness of it made even the photographers burst out laughing.”

Sir Laurence Oliver and his wife, Vivien Leigh, are present to greet the newlyweds—but before they can, a photographer is trampled and hospitalized.

“This must be the largest reception and press conference in English history!” Olivier proclaims.

For the duration of the film shoot, Marilyn and Miller will reside at Parkside House, a Surrey country estate covered with creeping vine and backing onto Windsor Great Park, adjacent to Windsor Castle.

The main bedroom is furnished to help ease Marilyn’s nightly battle with insomnia. It’s fitted with heavy curtains and painted entirely white, with a new white carpet much like the one in Marilyn’s New York apartment on Sutton Place.

Miller wakes to the sound of voices. Heavenly voices.

He calls Marilyn to the window. Outside, a boys’ choir is harmonizing across every octave.

“What do we do?” Marilyn asks.

“Maybe you put on a robe and just wave down to them,” Miller suggests.

“Me?”

“Well, they’re not singing to me, darling.”

At the Savoy Hotel in London, Marilyn enters in a white cape coat, which she removes to reveal a black sleeveless tea-length dress and tea-length gloves. The crowd gasps in admiration when they see her.

Daily Mirror Hollywood reporter Donald Zec gives Marilyn a once-over.

“Fits a bit tight, Mrs. Miller,” he comments.

“It fits,” she laughs. When asked how she’s feeling, she answers, “All I can say is I’ve never been happier in my life.”

Arthur Miller gives Zec a crushing handshake.

“What do you think of your new bride?” Zec asks him.

“She is the most unique person I have ever met,” Miller says.

“What is it like to be married to such a quiet man?” Marilyn is asked.

Miller’s eyes narrow. “I’m not so quiet as all that,” he replies.

The July 15 press conference for The Prince and the Showgirl features a surprise. A London newspaperman wheels in a bicycle, with an oversized tag on it labeled TO MARILYN WITH LOVE FROM THE DAILY SKETCH . It’s a gift to Marilyn so that she can explore Windsor Great Park.

A week’s rehearsal begins at Pinewood Studios, where the movie will be shot. As director, co-producer, and co-star, Sir Laurence Olivier establishes expectations.

He announces a closed set and assigns a police constable to track Marilyn’s movements. The security is to ensure her safety, Olivier insists, but Marilyn chafes at the restrictions.

The gates to Parkside House are kept locked. Still, locals line up for a glimpse inside. Marilyn isn’t much more accessible on set.

Colin Clark, a gofer on the film, writes in his diary: “I just can’t seem to see enough of her, and perhaps this is because I cannot really see her at all.

It is a feeling one could easily confuse with love.

No wonder she has so many fans, and has to be careful who she meets.

I suppose this is why she spends most of her time shut up in her house, and why she finds it hard to turn up at the studio at all, let alone on time. ”

On the first day of the shoot, August 7, Marilyn arrives two hours late with Paula Strasberg in tow.

Olivier is taken aback at their Method acting techniques. He comes from the classical school of acting, where the emotions of a character are represented externally—with facial expressions, movements, physical attitudes, even prosthetics.

He gives specific instructions, only to have Paula interject, “Think of Frank Sinatra and Coca-Cola.” What’s her motivation? Marilyn and Paula ask themselves. What is the character thinking? Where’s the vérité? They workshop the take until Olivier loses the thread entirely.

“Can’t you just pretend?” he asks from behind the camera.

“You are the greatest woman of your time,” Paula praises Marilyn, to Olivier’s annoyance, “the greatest human being of your time; of any time, you name it; you can’t think of anybody, I mean—no, not even Jesus—except you’re more popular.”

Olivier contradicts the acting coach. “All you have to be is sexy, dear Marilyn!” the director declares.

Sexy? Marilyn is deeply offended at Olivier’s condescending tone. “He came on like someone slumming,” she says. “He upset me a lot.”

She immediately retaliates. “I started being bad with him, being late, and he hated it. But if you don’t respect your artists, they can’t work well. Respect is what you have to fight for.”

Miller is on his wife’s side, though Marilyn occasionally accuses him otherwise.

“She was generally seen as a very light-headed, if not silly, human being,” he says, “some kind of a dancing bear, that she shouldn’t be able, for example, to have any interest in anything but sex, showing off or saying dopey things to the newspapers. ”

He sees her struggle. “I took her at her own evaluation, which very few people did,” he says. “I thought she was a very serious girl.”

Dame Sybil Thorndike, leading actress of the British theater who’s playing the Queen Dowager, urges patience from Olivier.

After watching early rushes, she tells him, “Larry, you did well in that scene but with Marilyn up there, nobody will be watching you. Her manner and timing are just too delicious. We need her desperately. She’s really the only one of us who knows how to act in front of a camera! ”

But the damage is done. The co-stars are soon barely on speaking terms. If Marilyn must address Olivier, she calls him “Mr. Sir.”

Hoping to ease tensions, Olivier urges The Prince and the Showgirl playwright and screenwriter Terence Rattigan to organize a party. Perhaps they can defuse matters over glasses of champagne.

Rattigan agrees and throws a soiree in Marilyn’s honor at his home, hiring a small orchestra to play hits from American musicals.

But even this feels rather double-handed. At the party, Arthur Miller finds himself talking to gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who declares, “We all love Marilyn.”

Miller nods, all the while thinking, Her columns have never been free of a sneering contempt for Marilyn’s ambitions to escape the starlet’s fate.

“It’s so wonderful to know that she’s happy at last. And she does look really and truly happy,” Parsons continues.

Is she truly happy?

What Miller doesn’t know is that as Marilyn was getting ready for the party, she came across her husband’s notebook, left open on his desk. She didn’t go looking, she just read what was in front her.

It’s a litany of regrets. To Lee and Paula Strasberg, Marilyn distills the essence of Miller’s marital complaints. “How he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. That his first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse.”

“Today is forever,” her new husband had promised her less than a month ago.

Forever is apparently fleeting.

But the grudges Marilyn holds when she senses betrayal are not.

Marilyn is further upset by Miller’s decision to return to New York after only a month, to tend to his daughter Jane, who’s been ill.

The following Monday morning, she fails to turn up on set. She sends word she’s feeling poorly. Colitis is cited, but she is nowhere to be seen at Parkside House. She’s apparently left Surrey and gone to London. And then on to somewhere else.

In the south of France, Senator Jack Kennedy has chartered a forty-foot yacht. Its ship-shore communications are down and that suits him fine. He’s licking fresh political wounds.

The 1956 Democratic National Convention wrapped in Chicago on August 17. It was a wild one. Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, abandoned protocols and left the choice of his vice-presidential running mate to the delegates.

At the end of the vote, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver was ahead, though he failed to secure the nomination over Kennedy.

The delegates voted again. Kennedy surged ahead, but not enough to convince delegates who valued Kefauver’s experience more than Kennedy’s relative youth. Kennedy graciously conceded.

After the convention, Jack Kennedy left for Europe.

For days, he’s completely out of contact.

On board, it’s just the senator, the skipper, the cook and, according to the Washington Star, “blondes.” No one—especially not Kennedy’s heavily pregnant wife, Jackie—knows if the world’s most famous blonde is among them.

On August 23, Jackie Kennedy has an emergency caesarean. The child, a baby girl, is stillborn. Her name is kept private.

Once Kennedy finally gets word, he races to his wife’s bedside. Some say Kennedy, or his father, offers Jackie $1 million to stay married to him. “But it was just talk,” insists British actor Peter Lawford, who’s married to Jack’s sister Pat Kennedy Lawford.

Marilyn returns to Pinewood Studios to continue filming, and Miller returns to England.

Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, is present on the closed set. Marilyn has stepped into the role Leigh originated on stage, forcing a rivalry between them.

“Marilyn could play this role with her eyes closed,” Susan Strasberg says, “but Olivier seemed to feel that she should play it like Miss Leigh and he was infuriating her with his exacting and specific direction.”

But Leigh and Marilyn share a tragic common bond.

In early August, forty-two-year-old Leigh had announced a pregnancy to the press, but sadly miscarried soon thereafter. The child would have been her and Olivier’s first.

Marilyn suffers a similar trajectory. In early September, not long after joyfully discovering she’s pregnant, she loses her and Miller’s longed-for baby.

“I’m just Mrs. Miller tonight,” Marilyn says on October 11, 1956, at the London premiere of Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge.

While technically banned from performance in England due to themes of homosexuality, A View from the Bridge is instead being staged inside The Comedy Theatre to skirt censorship issues and foil the Lord Chamberlain’s “pious attempt … to spare London the shock of this play—a play New Yorkers withstood without pain for some months.”

Despite ongoing tension on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, Olivier and Leigh are seated front and center beside Marilyn and Miller.

Reviews are largely positive. The Evening Standard praises the play, though describing it as “so bulging with dramatic muscles that it is constantly on the verge of bursting its seams”—not unlike the Daily Mail ’s comments on Marilyn and her scarlet satin mermaid-tail dress at the premiere.

“How could she walk?” asks the Daily Mail, describing the gown as “so tight around the knees that walking was an achievement.”

Of the play itself, however, the paper’s review says it “will shake you to the core, and should end, once and for all, all that talk of ‘Mr. Marilyn Monroe.’”

Throughout her months in England, Marilyn’s dreamed of having tea at Buckingham Palace. Her publicist is unable to secure her an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II—until the Royal Command Performance on October 29.

The Battle of the River Plate, a film dramatizing Britain’s first major naval engagement in World War II, is playing at the Empire, Leicester Square. Before the showing, a select few are invited to meet the queen.

Though the actors and notables have been briefed on protocol—women are to avoid showing cleavage—Marilyn arrives sheathed in a floor-length gold lamé cape. Shrugging off the elegant draping, she reveals a gown of the same fabric, its front cut daringly low.

As the queen makes her way down the receiving line, Marilyn buzzes with nervousness until it’s finally her turn to take Her Majesty’s gloved hand and drop into the curtsy she’s practiced for hours.

The two women are the same age, both thirty years old, and are neighbors across Windsor Great Park.

“We love it,” Marilyn tells the queen. “My husband and I go for bicycle rides in the Great Park.”

After the Royal Command Performance, Queen Elizabeth seeks out Marilyn’s other films.

“I thought Miss Monroe was a very sweet person,” the fascinated queen tells a friend. “But I felt sorry for her, because she was so nervous that she had licked all of her lipstick off.”

In November 1956, The Prince and the Showgirl wraps under budget and a few days ahead of schedule. It’s time to go home.

“England?” Marilyn muses. “It seemed to be raining the whole time … or maybe it was me.”

Privately, Arthur Miller fears the place “had humbled both of us.”