Page 50 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn remains undecided. She writes to her friend the poet Norman Rosten and questions, “Should I do my next picture or stay home and try to have a baby again? That’s what I want most of all, the baby, I guess, but maybe God is trying to tell me something, I mean with my pregnancy.

I’d probably make a kooky mother; I’d love my child to death.

I want it, yet I’m scared. Arthur says he wants it, but he’s losing his enthusiasm.

He thinks I should do the picture. After all, I’m a movie star, right? ”

Her contract specifies that her films must be made in color. This one won’t be. Wilder envisions the period piece in black-and-white.

Technicolor would perfectly suit Marilyn as singer and ukulele player Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk.

But Tony Curtis as Joe/Josephine and Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne—two jazz musicians fleeing the mob after accidentally witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—will play nearly every scene dressed and made up as women.

Lee Strasberg’s insight into the character relationships finally unlocks the role.

“Sugar’s like you,” he says to Marilyn. “You’ve haven’t ever had friends who were girls.

Now suddenly, here are two women, and they want to be your friend!

They like you. For the first time in your life, you have two friends who are girls! ”

Curtis and Lemmon do pass as girls—they even go in costume to the women’s restroom in the MGM commissary to reapply their lipstick, and the other actresses using the mirror recognize them only as women.

MONROE TO DO “ HOT ,” Variety announces in April 1958.

United Artists and the Mirisch Company, which will produce and distribute the film, throw Marilyn a party. Cocktails are called for 7 p.m. and dinner at 9. Most of the A-list guests are gathering their coats to leave the party when Marilyn finally arrives at 11:20.

By August, sixty pages of the script are finished.

“We’ll finish the rest while we shoot,” Wilder says. He and screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond typically collaborate on the fly. “We sit there and we try to find something,” Wilder says. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes we just sit there and wait.”

On July, 14, 1958, “Marilyn Miller” arrives at Dr. Michael Gurdin’s office at UCLA. Her appointment with the plastic surgeon is a follow-up.

Under “chief complaint,” Gurdin records “chin deformity” on her chart.

“I cannot palpate any cartilage subcutaneously,” the doctor notes, referencing the “mild flatness of chin” treated by “Gurdin and Pangman.”

Gurdin concludes that the “1950 cartilage implant has slowly been absorbed.”

All that’s left is the faded scar.

On August 4, 1958, shooting begins on the back lot of MGM. Marilyn and Wilder immediately clash. “I’m not going back into that film until Wilder reshoots my opening,” Marilyn says, incensed at what she feels is an overemphasis on Tony Curtis’s character.

Her entrance onto a railway platform is reworked. As Marilyn walks by in a black suit, the steam engine puffs two quick blasts of hot air toward her famous legs—a clever nod to the subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch.

Marilyn is understandably emotional. She’s just learned that she is once again newly pregnant.

Her husband can’t be on set with her because he is—once again—in court.

On August 8, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rules in his favor.

MILLER IS CLEARED OF HOUSE CONTEMPT , the New York Times reports.

The decision, Miller says in a statement, makes “the long struggle of the past few years fully worth while.”

The shoot for Some Like It Hot is projected to run fifty days. To Marilyn, it seems doable with Paula Strasberg by her side.

Marilyn will listen only to Paula. Wilder addresses the situation head-on, pausing each take to ask the acting coach, “How was that for you, Paula?”

The tactic helps keep the peace—for a time.

Wilder’s also heard all about Strasberg and her bag of pills. Marilyn’s pregnancy has put the pills on hold, but without them it’s impossible for her to get to sleep until 3 or 4 a.m. With call times as early as 6:30 a.m., Marilyn’s paranoid insomnia takes hold.

The shoot is already experiencing costly delays. “Marilyn Monroe was ill again yesterday and unable to report to work in ‘Some Like It Hot,’ in which she’s only appeared on set two hours so far,” Variety columnist Army Archerd reports on August 21, 1958, adding, “And she’s nixed every still taken.”

In September, the cast and crew move to the beach at Coronado, California, where the historic Hotel Del Coronado is the stand-in for the film’s fictional Florida resort. With jets from the local naval base flying overhead, takes must be carefully timed.

The first day in the new location goes smoothly, with onlookers coming to cheer on Marilyn and Tony Curtis. “Marilyn remembered her lines,” Wilder says. “Everything was fine.”

Wilder’s directing style is to work in master scenes, meaning he captures all of the action in one continuous shot, and then calls “That’s a Print!

” without running the camera for even an extra moment.

Because of that technique, Marilyn is convinced that he’s missing the best moments of her performance.

She wards off intense bouts of dizziness and stage fright by sipping from a thermos alternately filled with coffee, vermouth, and a caffeinated, alcoholic mixture of the beverages.

As a stress release, Paula coaches Marilyn to flutter her arms before delivering her lines to the camera. To cast and crew, the gesture resembles a nervous tic. They spend hours on set waiting for Marilyn to emerge from her dressing room.

“Arthur, I don’t get my first shot until three in the afternoon. What does she do in the mornings?” Wilder asks Marilyn’s husband in frustration.

Back on the MGM lot in October, tensions continue to rise.

Marilyn continues her late arrivals on set. Screenwriter Diamond attributes it to a power play. “Having reached the top she was paying back the world for all the rotten things she had had to go through,” he says.

He’s not wrong. It makes something in me happy—to be late.

People are waiting for me. People are eager to see me.

I’m wanted. And I remember the years I was unwanted, Marilyn thinks.

I feel a queer satisfaction in punishing the people who are wanting to see me now.

But it’s not them I’m really punishing. It’s the long ago people who didn’t want Norma Jeane.

“Story of my life. I always get the fuzzy end of the lollypop” is one of Sugar Kane’s lines. Marilyn contends that the part is veering too close to the dumb-blonde stereotype, that she’s playing the “straight man” to Curtis and Lemmon’s leading roles.

They play a scene where Curtis and Lemmon are in their hotel room, out of their disguises. Sugar knocks on the door and they call out in their female voices, “Just a minute.”

Her line is “It’s me, Sugar.”

But Marilyn keeps saying “Sugar, it’s me.”

“She had only one sentence, she needed eighty-three takes,” an exasperated Wilder says.

Her next big line is “Where’s that bourbon?” Wilder takes the extreme measure of writing the words in the chest of drawers where her character is searching for the bottle.

After the sixtieth take, Wilder says, “Marilyn, come on. Relax, don’t worry.”

“Worry about what?” Marilyn says.

“If she gets the line out, absolutely perfect,” Wilder says.

“Perfect in timing, the sound of her voice. She knew what a joke was. She was not a dilettante. She was born with that kind of gift. Because you can have fifty actresses. They may all be quite good. Some of them might be great technicians, but no one would be better than her.”

Yet the fifty-day filming schedule stretches to more than seventy.

As the shoot drags on, Wilder develops nerve damage to his neck that leaves him directing the film lying flat on a board.

The final scene—where Jerry and Osgood Fielding III, his unwitting fiancé, flee the mob on board Osgood’s boat—is shot last, with last-minute dialogue drafted into the script.

When Jerry admits, “I’M A MAN!” Osgood shoots back, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

The ending sticks.

Producer Harold Mirisch calls United Artists to report: “They didn’t do ‘too bad’ cost-wise although Miss Monroe is impossible to control.” They missed thirteen days, which made the costs go up by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On the other hand, Mirisch can’t stop raving about the film’s quality, boasting, “We have one of the biggest pictures of the year.”

Wilder races to get a first cut ready in a couple of weeks.

In early December 1958, the first preview is held at the Bay Theatre in upscale Pacific Palisades. The theater is full, but the reception is dire—no one laughs except comedian and variety TV show host Steve Allen. Is the audience “really that square?” Allen asks.

Mirisch tells Billy Wilder to cut twenty minutes from the Some Like It Hot two-hour running time. Wilder disagrees. He cuts only sixty seconds.

With Wilder aiming to prove it’s not the running time but the audience, the next preview takes place later that week in the younger, hipper neighborhood of Westwood Village, home to UCLA.

This time, the theater is filled with screams of laughter.

Marilyn is the one who steals the film. “It takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did,” Wilder concedes.

Yet the director does not invite her to the wrap party he throws at his home. Through some silver-screen magic, her performance on film reads as nuanced, melancholy, and sublime—but her popularity with the cast and crew is at an all-time low.

During daily rushes, there had been a moment where a frustrated Tony Curtis invoked Marilyn and Hitler in the same breath.

“After take forty, kissing Marilyn is like kissing Hitler” is what he claims to have said, though other, unkinder versions of the quote are quickly repeated.

Asked if he’d ever make another movie with Monroe, Wilder jokes, “I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they both tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.

” Marilyn is hospitalized with exhaustion—for the second time in three months.

She is placed on bed rest with a drip for four days, then leaves in an ambulance so as not to “jar the baby” and flies back to New York and to the anxious embrace of Arthur Miller.

On December 17, 1958, there’s another private showing of Some Like It Hot .

But while the audience is still laughing at the last line of the film, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” Marilyn, five months pregnant, has another miscarriage.

Neither Miller nor Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kris, nor the Strasbergs can keep her from falling into a deep depression.

On January 27, 1959, the National Institute of Arts and Letters announces that Arthur Miller will be awarded the Gold Medal for Drama for his career achievements.

As Miller is being elevated, Marilyn is spiraling downward.

That night, Marilyn’s maid, Lena Pepitone, discovers Marilyn lying unconscious in bed, her face covered in vomit. With Miller away, she calls the private doctor. Marilyn’s stomach is pumped, again.

At 3 a.m., fearful of leaving Marilyn alone, Pepitone calls Norman and Hedda Rosten, who rush to her bedside.

“It’s me, Norman, how are you my dear?” he asks, taking hold of her hand.

“Alive,” she replies, her eyelids fluttering, her voice gravelly and slowed by the effects of the drugs. “Worst luck. Cruel of them all.” She laughs a little. “All those bastards. Oh Jesus … Who’d notice if I went.”

“I would,” he says. “I would notice very much.”

Rosten sits and holds her hand for hours and lets her cry. He knows she’s done this before and will probably do it again. It’s important to make sure she’s found in time. It’s a wave of deep sadness, but no one is stuck in a wave forever. It passes. She just has to get through the wave.

On March 29, 1959, barely four months after shooting wraps, Some Like It Hot premieres at Loew’s State Theatre.

It’s been nearly four years since The Seven Year Itch debuted in this same location, but the crowds have not diminished in the slightest. Thousands of people line the street in New York City’s Times Square.

“Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Miller have arrived,” a broadcaster narrates. “Hundreds of photographers out there surround them. They can’t even move to get in. They need that police protection, believe me. She looks fantastic. And I’m only looking at her hair.”

In its review, Variety praises Marilyn as “a comedienne with sex appeal and timing that just can’t be beat.”

With Marilyn, the professional can never be separated from the personal. “If at the time of filming she was pregnant, and the tight dresses she’s asked to wear just don’t fit well, never mind,” the review continues. “This gal can take it.”

Can she?

Not long after the film is released, Marilyn sends Rosten a poem.

Help Help

Help I feel life coming closer

When all I want to do is to die.