Page 53 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
The plot centers on billionaire Jean-Marc Clément somehow landing an unlikely off-Broadway role playing himself in a musical about his own life.
Clement uses his wealth to hire Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, and Milton Berle—all making cameos as themselves—to polish his singing and dancing enough to impress Marilyn’s character, Amanda Dell, a performer who prefers talent to wealth.
In real life, Marilyn is also polishing her skills in a dance studio with Jack Cole, the exacting choreographer who directed the song-and-dance numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes .
After they’ve worked together on six pictures, most recently Some Like It Hot, Cole’s cues are familiar to Marilyn.
“No, wait. Sharp, I want it sharp!” Cole demands.
“But Jack, I’m supposed to be a sex queen,” Marilyn says.
“That’s not sexy. That’s like a limp fish. Put that arm out there, strong! That’s sexy! That’s life, that’s alive, that’s energy!”
Marilyn is not a natural dancer, but Cole maximizes her abilities by teaching her to make small gestures with her head or her hip, trusting her to connect with her instinctual sensuality—and sexuality.
They’ve become good friends, but Marilyn hasn’t been acting like one during this shoot.
She’s been late to set, distracted, distant.
There’s much to rehearse, especially on the Cole Porter number “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” where Marilyn will dance among an ensemble in an elaborately choreographed piece Jack Cole envisions rivaling the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number he created for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes .
Cukor shares the same frustrations most directors have with Marilyn, but he has more sympathy.
“I knew that she was reckless. I knew that she was willful. She was very sweet, but I had no real communication with her at all,” he says.
“You couldn’t get at her … As a director I really had very little influence on her.
All I could do was make a climate that was agreeable for her.
Every day was an agony of struggle for her, just to get there. ”
Despite her film-star status, Marilyn still has an odd phobia of the camera—and an inability to remember her lines—but somehow, none of that matters.
“She’d do three lines and then forget everything again.
You had to shoot it piecemeal. But curiously enough, when you strung everything together, it was complete. ”
For the duration of the shoot, the studio has booked the costars and their spouses into bungalows 20 and 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Yves Montand’s wife, Simone Signoret, is amused by Marilyn, who looks like “the most beautiful peasant girl imaginable from the ?le-de-France.”
Montand is learning English phonetically from the script, but it’s a challenge. To spare him the stress of potentially embarrassing himself in front of director George Cukor and the crew, Marilyn suggests that they work on their lines together at the hotel.
Miller is no fan of the script, but he has agreed to do some script doctoring, “to try to save her from a complete catastrophe.” Though his marriage to Marilyn is under severe strain, he wants to be a devoted spouse, “giving her the kind of emotional support that would convince her that she was no longer alone in the world—the heart of the problem, I assumed.”
But helping with the script doesn’t have the effect Miller hoped, leaving him feeling unappreciated. “It was a bad miscalculation, bringing us no closer to each other.”
Hollywood awards season opens with the Golden Globe Awards, held at the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel on March 10, 1960. Some Like It Hot wins Best Picture–Comedy, Jack Lemmon wins Best Actor in a Comedy, and Marilyn wins Best Actress in a Comedy.
Tony Randall, who’s co-starring in Let’s Make Love, helps Marilyn to the stage to accept the award. Marilyn, a white fur stole over a strapless white dress, beams and holds her trophy high. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she purrs.
It’s a vindicating moment.
Simone Signoret is also nominated for a Golden Globe, for Best Actress in a Drama for Room at the Top , but she doesn’t win—yet less than a month later, she beats out Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor to win the Oscar statuette for Best Actress.
After a brief acceptance speech, she’s off to France to film another picture. Meanwhile, Miller travels to Galway, Ireland, for script meetings with John Huston, who directed Marilyn in The Asphalt Jungle and is soon to direct her next film, The Misfits .
MARILYN ’ S HUSBAND IN GALWAY , the newspapers announce.
With their spouses away, Marilyn and her leading man grow closer.
“Tell me,” Signoret asks hypothetically, “do you know who could resist if they took Marilyn Monroe into their arms?”
Not Yves Montand.
After missing a day of filming on Sound Stage 11, Marilyn asks Montand back to her room to rehearse. She’s been ill, she says, lying in bed with a bottle of cold champagne and a small bucket of caviar, dressed in a transparent night dress. She asks him to give her a kiss goodnight.
Montand moves as if in a reverie. I bent down to put a goodnight kiss on her cheek.
And her head turned and my lips went wild.
It was a wonderful, tender kiss. A kiss of fire.
A hurricane, I could not stop. I was half-stunned, stammering, I straightened up, already flooded with guilt, wondering what was happening to me. I didn’t wonder for long.
Soon it’s Montand—not Paula Strasberg on the Fox payroll for $2,000 a week—to whom Marilyn turns for affirmation at the end of each take. Another night, she knocks on his bedroom door, naked but for a mink coat.
Soon the bellboys at the Beverly Hills Hotel, along with Fox hair, makeup, and wardrobe, start to talk. Back from Ireland, Arthur Miller is said to have caught them in bed together.
“An actress whose name came up at this year’s Oscars is having marital problems,” one gossip columnist reports. Others advise Marilyn to stop sleeping with other people’s husbands.
“If Marilyn is in love with my husband, it proves she has good taste,” Signoret declares. “For I am in love with him too.”
Dr. Greenson’s office is nearly equidistant between the Fox lot and the Beverly Hills Hotel, but psychoanalysis can’t fill the void that Marilyn feels.
“Marilyn had this terrible neediness,” Norman Rosten observes.
“When she felt insecure, she went with other men simply for something to hold on to, however short-lived.”
When the shoot wraps in June, the set lights go dark. Film stops spooling through the cameras. Without the attentions of the director, choreographer, and crew, there is nothing. Silence.
Marilyn and Montand meet once more, this time in New York.
The night Montand is to fly back to France, she hires a Cadillac, reserves a hotel room, then drives out to Idlewild Airport with a bottle of champagne chilling in the back seat.
His one-hour stopover extends to five, as they sit in the back of the hired car.
She begs him to stay in New York. They can leave their spouses and marry each other.
Montand’s answer is no, but he’s moved by the depths of her feeling.
“I was touched,” he says. “Touched because it was beautiful, and it was impossible. Not for a moment did I think of breaking with my wife.”
In France, Paris Match reports: “The Montands have survived Hurricane Marilyn.”
But the eye of the storm is often the most dangerous place to be.
In July, filming begins on The Misfits . It’s said that Arthur Miller is struggling to finish the script. He doesn’t know how the story ends.