Soon after that picture, she lost the little-girl quality. She was surrounded by people all telling her how to act. They worked up her dissatisfaction with her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. It’s an old pitch that sycophants make to a star: “You don’t need your studio. You’re bigger than they are. You can have your own production company.” She believed it. Basically simple women like Marilyn, who rise as fast as she did, are pushovers for this kind of mad propaganda.
A leading figure in her new circle was Milton Greene, the New York photographer who set up Marilyn as a one-woman corporation to do battle with her studio, meantime driving himself close to bankruptcy. Milton could take credit for getting her on Ed Murrow’s “Person To Person” television program. After that painful evening I asked her: “How could you possibly go on TV looking like that?”
“Everybody said I looked good.”
“Everybody lied then. You were a mess. You don’t look well in skirts and heavy sweaters because you’re too big in the bust. On that show you should have been the glamour girl you always are. But the glamorous one was Mrs. Milton Greene. This kind of thing will destroy you.”
She spent part of the time during those rebellious days living in Connecticut with the Greenes, the rest in a three-room suite at the Waldorf Towers. She told me about the joys of adventuring around New York in dark glasses and turban with built-in black curls, going off on a cops-and-robbers round of cafes, theaters, the Metropolitan Museum. Meantime stupid rumors circulated that she was being kept in fantastic luxury by one millionaire or another, but nobody bothered to deny them.
“Didn’t it occur to you,” I wrote, “that great stars pursue their careers in conventional fashion, accepting the experienced judgment of good producers?... How did you rationalize the idea that a photographer who’d had no experience in making theatrical pictures could do better by you than the men who had made you famous?”
Then along came Arthur Miller, a writer held in awe by most of Hollywood, who ended a fifteen-year-old marriage to marry her. They were deeply in love and happy at first. When that ended, she came and sipped a martini in my home. He was, she said, “a charming and wonderful man—a great writer.” And Joe DiMaggio? “A good friend.” I believe Miller loved her, though it was Joe who turned up trumps in the end when she lay dead and deserted in Westwood Village Mortuary. One other man loved her, too—Miller’s father, Isadore.
She said: “I have only married for love and happiness. Except perhaps my first one, but let’s don’t discuss that ever.... I still love everybody a little that I ever loved.” And about being the ex-Mrs. Miller? “When you put so much into a marriage and have it end, you feel something has died—and it has. But it didn’t die abruptly. ‘Died’ isn’t the right word for me,” she said when we talked. But I think she was already dying inside her heart.
She went into Let’s Make Love,—it was a terrible script, in her opinion—out of shape physically and mentally. As her leading man, she had Yves Montand, who was Lucky Pierre himself in getting the role, being choice number seven after Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, and Jimmy Stewart had all turned down the part. Montand had performed beautifully in his own one-man theater show, though three quarters of his American audiences obviously hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, since it was all in French. Opposite Marilyn, he thought he had only a small part after Arthur Miller had been asked to write additional dialogue for the heroine.
During shooting I detected that something strange was happening to Mrs. Arthur Miller, who hadn’t announced yet that she was going to get a divorce. She was falling hard for this Frenchman with the carefully polished charm. Between the end of that picture and the start of her next, The Misfits, the stories spread that he would divorce his wife, Simone Signoret. M. Montand scored high in the publicity sweepstakes. The gossip spread all over town, with some help from the Twentieth Century-Fox promotion department and no hindrance from himself.